skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This! I wouldn't want to hear my doctor complain that surgery is icky or that listening to people talk about their aches and pains is tedious. Managers complaining about management tasks is not good. All of the managers I've had were once engineers. For a couple of them it was all too obvious that they still much preferred engineering work over management work, and they were not the best managers I've had, to say the least.
RIM Analysts React: 'Aggressively Driving Down the Road to Nowhere'
Mine are Ruby 1.9.3-p0, irb 0.9.6 http://cl.ly/2p1F1Z1Q1N1a38000f1s
He was talking about managers and meetings, not nurses and blood.
What I really want, and would pay for, is a TextMate or IDE-like interface wrapped around Vim. The current plugins - e.g. NERDTree - are appreciated, but they lack the features, ease-of-use, and consistency of a purpose-built IDE.

I've used various Vim emulators inside IDEs and they're just not the same as the real thing. If you know Vim well, you end up "typing on eggshells", where every keystroke might cause some unexpected chaos. So it needs to be the real thing.
SalesForce enters HR software biz with acquisition of Toronto-based Rypple.com
I don't get it. If your models grow too large and do too much, then you refactor them into models that each have a single responsibility.

DCI could still be a good idea if the abstraction it provided is good. I'm not convinced that is the case. The main problem I have with it is that it doesn't scale down as well as MVC do, meaning that if you start out with it you will have a lot of mostly empty classes. No gain at all in that case.

In the other scenario when you have some really big models, then you should refactor them anyhow. Will the DCI pattern be a good fit then? Perhaps, perhaps not.
I second-thirded-n'ed this recommendation...the closing chapter in which Gawande describes how a checklist prevented a patient from dying on him in surgery is just gripping.

There's also excellent sections on construction...such as how project managers make and disseminate decisions at a breakneck pace in skyscraper construction.
This was one of many reasons why I had to quit my last job:

ME: According to the newsletter stats, more people have opted out than actually clicked on any links last week.

BOSS: We need to increase subscribers to the newsletter.
I think the intention is for the primary to be your email provider. So if they become compromised to that extent, then I wouldn't feel very safe about my email account in the first place. Pretty much all of my credentials everywhere depend on that.

Until secondaries go away, Mozilla seems like a very competent and trustworthy organization to have in charge of browserid.org, IMHO. Much better than even Google. It's great to see that even the branding on browserid.org is minimal.

My guess is that, concerning nonces and revocation, they didn't consider the current situation (OpenID, OAuth for login, etc.) any better. BrowserID doesn't seem to do away with the strong advice to run HTTPS for such sites.
>"It will not be possible to logically determine which day the exam is on"

Once that becomes a premise, the efforts of the students are of the sort who should be logically classed with:

persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors as to cause them pertinaciously to assert that they are monarchs when they are in the greatest poverty; or clothed [in gold] and purple when destitute of any covering; or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass, or that they are gourds...

[Descartes]
I couldn't disagree more. In day-to-day programming life, having people want to invite your boss to a meeting instead of you is practically the only upside of having a boss at all.
Yeah, I know a lot of these hit close to home, but on the emails - you've never been a boss.

1 - Get 1300 emails a day (not an exaggeration) - 8 am

2 - Get 50 emails from executives who basically want to fire you OR someone who works for you and you have to act fast to stop the bleeding. - 10 am

3 - Get another 400 emails that are related to an ongoing discussion with managers on your level who are trying to stick your department with more work/blame/responsibility without letting you in on it. React at lightning speed to ward off evil. 2 pm.

4 - Attend many, many meetings in which executives will try to blame you, other managers will try to blame other managers, and long, tedious initiatives are discussed in hushed tones. Fight urge to nod off/strangle people/demand clarity. Pay attention because in six months one of these hapless bastards will claim everyone agreed to something preposterous in the meeting. - takes place: Every available minute. Including lunch, because "that was the only time everyone had available for some reason."

5 - Developer says he CC'd you on several emails related to the XYZ system and is baffled as to why you aren't completely up to date. Don't tell him that at 10 am the CEO was demanding he be fired (from a cannon). 6 pm.
I wish I could say this was a dark time in my country's history but it was this decade. It was my generation.

It wasn't slavery 6 generations ago (which is not really that long), or the trail of tears nearly 200 years ago.

It was freedom loving Americans in an enlightened age torturing prisoners out of fear and spite.

And more than half the nation thought this torture was justified and should not be investigated.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/118006/slim-majority-wants-bush-e...
Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard: why we'll pay for Internet plumbing
I also am not a lawyer, but it would be a big stretch for this to constitute tortious interference. Tortious interference requires that someone force (or at least strongly persuade) one of the parties involved to breach a contract.

Here it is hard to argue that Google has breached a contract with anyone. Its use agreements tend to give it the right to remove a video for any reason or no reason at all.
The warning "Stall! Push stick forward!" would therefore have saved the day...the other two would realise he was contravening normal response.

They already got this warning through a "DUAL INPUT" alarm, among all the other alarms that went off. When the pilots panic, adding warning after warning is useless, they won't hear them anyway, let alone the nuance in the stall warning. See for example:
http://msquair.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/pilots-in-the-loop-a...

"it turns out that in the circumstances identified as triggering instinctive responses the value of such alerts is degraded due to the inevitable attentional tunnelling that operators experience in high stress situations."

Hell, to put it in a software perspective: popping up warning dialogs for your users is pointless, as they click them away anyway without reading.

Tactile feedback, such as the stick itself moving or resisting input, is not possible to ignore, so it's not surprising the pilots would have preferred this.

Note that even in alternate law the plane actually attempts to correct the stall by itself, so its hard to see how giving an audible warning would have gotten him to realize he was doing things the wrong way around. He was already actively working against the correction.
http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm

"System introduces a progressive nose down command which attempts to prevent the speed from decaying further. This command CAN be overridden by sidestick input."
I think that you also have to specify whether it "will not be possible" from now, at the outset, or at a given running moment during that week. I found that to be a source of ambiguity in the problem specification as well.
The answer to that sort of situation is to do some work awesome and splashy enough to get the attention of [VP three layers up the chain].

Of course, if you're capable and driven enough to do that, you may as well do it for your own company instead.
Autocomplete = on (Chrome extension)
Boss (via email): Email me the results as soon as this thing is finished.

Me (replying to email within less than a minute): It's already done. Here you go.

[Hours pass.]

Boss (via telephone): You're still not done with this?

Me: I finished hours ago. I replied to your email right away.

Boss: Oh, I didn't read your response. I thought the results would come via a separate email with a different subject line.

Me: ...
Some of these are like Yogi Berra's sayings - they're both stupid and brilliant at the same time. Compare

""You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and f that isn't enough in the second half you give what's left."

with

"No, I meant, 'How do we fix this with software?'"
A random sidenote (because I can't be bothered to write a blog post about it).

I wonder if I am the only person who feels 'vim shame' (and the closely related 'emacs shame').

'vim shame' - the feeling that you would be a better, more productive coder if only you could master this mysterious editor, but every time you try (about once every couple of years), somewhere between two days and two weeks you find you have drifted back to textmate / sublime editor / eclipse.
This is generally true, but not always.

- - - Quote [1]

Shopping malls are an exception to the rule. In California, the courts recognize big malls as the modern-day "functional equivalent" of a traditional public gathering place, because they have "common areas that would invite the public to meet, congregate, or engage in other activities typical of a public forum. . . ."

The California Constitution does protect your free-speech rights in privately owned shopping centers—as long as your activity doesn’t interfere with the primary commercial purpose of the mall.

- - - End Quote

I don't think it's crazy to imagine that a web space that's universally used for people to sound off, and to post comments on others' contributions, could become recognized as a public space for First Amendment purposes. (IANAL)

[1] http://www.aclunc.org/issues/freedom_of_press_and_speech/rig...
It was only banned by Obama just under 3 years ago, and this is one of those things where it wouldn't suprise me if it had been used since as well.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but it's not hard to imagine either a group of interogators, or even a couple of rogues, thinking "screw this new rule from that weak president" and going ahead with it, sans paperwork.
Interesting that the current example is Skyrim. Which is really just the classical D+D game with great graphics.

Personally I found the more impressive growth of games to be the widespread acceptance of gaming with Wii/Kinect and mobile gaming.
Hitchens was perhaps the greatest master of the English language of our time. If that doesn't make him of intellectual interest, maybe the fault lies with the intellect.

What's a pity is that the discussion here is of such low quality, picking nits about heaven and the like.

Hitchens as a writer was a force of nature. Who else could produce such exquisitely wrought pieces at such a rate? In this respect he reminds me a little of Dickens.

Edit: here's a marvelous remembrance by Christopher Buckley: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/posts...
heh, awesome.
Data informed, not Data driven: On Elite Schools, and Soft vs. Hard Skills
Memorize the Concepts Not the APIs
As a former Mormon missionary, I can assure you he was not the first person to think of that particular comeback.
Cute. But unless a boss describes himself as technically capable, why should I expect him to understand about 3 SELECT statements inside a loop?
Isn't this kind of a confused presentation? (I'm talking about the popular article, of course; I have no doubt the researchers know their stuff.) The cells of multi-cellular organisms like whales and humans aren't just cooperative, they are genetically identical, which means their evolutionary prospects are tied together. The DNA in a pancreas cell is the same DNA as in a sperm cell, so it's "in the pancreas cell's interest" to help out the body. (Really, the key idea is the evolution is a competition between the bits stored in DNA, not the physical DNA itself.) And the root reason the cells of multi-cellular organisms like whales and humans are identical is because of sexual reproduction. So the key bottleneck isn't the one-ness of the one cell, it's the genetic identical-ness.

Now, yes, once you say all that I guess you can say that the mutations in animal cells leading to non-cooperative behavior (i.e. cancer) are evidence of this 100-division limit. But the amoebae are qualitatively very different since they aren't all genetically identical. It's really closer to the cooperation between human * families* than human cells, isn't it?
I don't know about that. The main point I got from the article is that when doctors are more empowered they disdain the checklist and mess up more.
Me: This vendor software you purchased is not going to scale well on EC2, it needs physical hardware to work well.
Boss: Well, we don't have time to go purchase physical hardware and get it racked. That'll take 3 months.

...3 months later...

Boss: This stuff isn't scaling, we need to all come in over the weekend to work out the kinks with the production servers.
Me: Purchase some hardware and get it racked. EC2 just isn't working out.
Boss: I can't. I already sold our executive team on the cloud and we don't have room in our budget for hardware.

...Another 3 months go by...
Boss is gone.
This happened yesterday. The hearing seems to be in recess now:

http://www.keepthewebopen.com/sopa
I use my own: Ludus

It's coded in Amber Smalltalk, you can see the source here: https://github.com/bromagosa/amber/tree/ludus

And some examples:

http://reggaeperxics.com/pong.html
http://reggaeperxics.com/sokoban.html
http://reggaeperxics.com/cave.html
I think entrepreneurs get distracted by all that marketing, development, sales, and operations, so I just start with profits.

Someone call Captain Obvious - he's got some competition.
There are possible formal interpretations of that problem that are interesting, so people are arguing about them, instead of arguing about the proffesor intention, which is obviously what you wrote.

One possible interpretation:

"There will be exam this week" means

(1) X is a random variable from the set {1,2,3,4,5}, with unknown distribution.

"you won't know the day till the start of the exam" means, that

(2) P( X=x | P(X=x | X>x-1) = 1 ) = 0

Since X <= 5 we know that P(X=5 | X>5-1) = 1. So we know that P(X=5) = 0.
From this we know that P(X=4 | X>3) = 1. So P(X=4) = 0.
From this we know that P(X=3 | X>2) = 1. So P(X=3) = 0.
From this we know that P(X=2 | X>1) = 1. So P(X=2) = 0.
From this we know that P(X=1 | X>0) = 1. So P(X=1) = 0.

Contradiction.

From this students could deduce that (1) or (2) assumption is wrong (logical "or").

Further implications are based on students assuming there won't be an exam, which makes the exam surprising in the end, and removes contradiction, or assuming that (2) is false, which makes all days possible, which removes contradiction.

For me it's dubious reasoning - if we had contradiction once, it can't be removed by forgetting it for a while. At least that's my intuition.

If I've made errors, please, correct me.
You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.
Be a Great Product Leader
Ask HN: Startup name conflict
I'm working on a startup with 3 of my friends on our spare time during school, and we're getting ready to launch within a couple months. We own the .net for our name, and we have the guy who owns the .com willing to sell that us (he's parking it with ads). However, he wants literally two orders of magnitude what we've spent on the company in total, so right now it seems like a waste of money we don't have (student budget) seeing as people just Google everything these days. My buddies want to buy the .com domain now but to me it seems unnecessary. Opinions?

Also, there is another group using the .fm of our name to make a somewhat similar product. We're not worried about them as a competitor, but I personally am wary that they might try to screw us out of the name legally, by registering for a trademark. I honestly don't know how trademarks work. Is an unregistered trademark that was used in commerce legally defensible? Could they even register the trademark with the government if we are also using the name? Honestly their product probably won't last but I'm afraid of getting legally trolled by them.

I don't want to say what the name is but we're not changing it, it's absolutely perfect.
Well, Google wouldn't replace their login process because they are the BrowserID primary. If you have a gmail account, BrowserID expects you to be logged in with it, which essentially means you're logged in to Google. (They could add it for non-gmail Google accounts, I guess.)

But Facebook could benefit from this. Maybe not at this early stage, but the way you log into Facebook is using your email account. That's exactly the step BrowserID wants to make easier.
Writing the Perfect Job Description
Every Action Has a Motivation
I wanted something like the TextMate project drawer wrapped around VIM for a long time, until I started using Command-T + ctags. I can't think of the last time I've really wanted IDE features wrapped around VIM since then (except for special cases, like visually building Android UIs in Eclipse - but even then, I don't really want that to be part of VIM).
I feel 'vim shame' too. But in some opposite way. I am ashamed of people discovering I use vim as primary editor and not some GUI-IDE. Therefore I mostly pretend like I am making quick fixes using vim when someone is hanging around.
Coy doesn't mean to imply not being serious or joking.
'document ordering' is mostly gathering and organising PDFs, web links, and snippets of text.

One of these days I might give emacs another go. Last time I had a look for 'quick start' emacs setups (about 3 months ago), the most recent ones I found seemed to be telling me to install the development version of emacs 24, which I couldn't even get to compile.
I was once a victim of emacs shame. A few months after first succumbing to the shame, I got ill for two days. I couldn't lie in bed all time, so I gave Emacs all I got. It took around 20 hours in total, then I never switched back.

Disclaimer: I am still conf:ing my .emacs file. :'D
Zynga Stock Drops Below IPO Price Within Minutes Of Breaking
Had to do this recently. Reminded me of writing my college essays. So much to say, but it all sounds so cheesy when you write it out.
So, does anyone here honestly believe we owe these clowns anything?

How many of you in meetings with a VC tweet about being bored and surfing for cats with cheeseburgers?

How many of you would keep an employee who did this during an engineering meeting?

How many of you would keep working at a job when your boss ignores you so they can check their fantasy football teams?

The only funny (morbidly, blackly funny) part of this is that that wasn't what stopped the debate--it was a finicky rule about choice of language, some pieces of which date back over a century and a half.

Folks, these are the people running the US. These are the people who have a monopoly on force, and who claim the moral highground to do with you what they will for the nation.

Why the fuck aren't you doing something?
Yes, most of the apps I so now, the UI is completely client side, with the app getting data via REST services, one of the last areas that can be a pain, is in content templating, what tiles and velocity do in the JSP world. What I would like to see is a CMS that provides that kind of templating for people who do not use server side frameworks anymore. I would like to see it publish to flat files because I think CDN's could then be used to bring in scalability on demand at inexpensive costs.
Latest USPTO's Peer to Patent program's patents for public review
For those of you not familiar with the project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-Patent

TDLR: Companies that submit through this project to have their patent apps discussed and debated publicly will have their patent apps fast tracked.

Anyways here is Peer to Patent's latest post of the latest patents for public review. For some strange reason, even after years after formation; Peer to Patent doesn't have blog posts which makes this a lot harder to share. This was only shared via email.

"Calling all Reviewers!

The final Peer To Patent applications are posted and ready for review. It has been a long and winding road to prove that open collaboration can effect positive change and patent reform. Please help us complete this monumental pilot by contributing prior art for these applications:

20110185366- Load-balancing of processes based on inertia

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110185366/activity

20110212701- Terminal, chip and method for receiving an emergency broadcast message

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110212701/activity

20110213801- Efficient computation of top-k aggregation over graph and network data

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110213801/activity

20110216756- Synchronization scheduling method

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110216756/activity

20110218988- Determination of applicable time zone of a web browser

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110218988/activity

20110219068- Flexible delegation of management function for self-managing resources

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110219068/activity

20110222690- Method and system for deriving keys

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110222690/activity

20110212727- Method for processing handoff confirm messages

http://peertopatent.org/patent/20110212727/activity
"
Yeah, only someone with enough klout / swag as Jake Lodwick can do this haha
Birbal - Node routing in 60 LOC
Check out Tiny Core (http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html). It's a full X desktop in 10 MB. You can install it to the hard disk and use their rather decent package manager to grab more applications. Very convenient to keep on a USB stick as well, because it leaves you plenty of space for storing data!
The trick is that "being surprised", or more accurately "not knowing on which day the exam will take place", is changing over time.

"D" being the day at which the exam takes place, "not knowing D on Monday" is not the same proposition as "not knowing D on Thursday". If you change the proposition tested at each inductive step, your induction is invalid.
New idea for funding strategy: Rent a name-brand entrepreneur for your idea. Or maybe it's an old one.
I assume Skyrim is the example because of how huge it is. Not counting some procedurally-generated games, I can't think of any bigger single-player games.
Yeah, in the formal definition of the problem those kind of concerns do not matter...
I'm not taking away from the checklists, which sound like a great improvement :) .

It was an observation about the executives.
Gamification is definitely not a fad, Badgeville saw 400% growth in 2011
Running Erlang Webmachine on Heroku
There is a guessing strategy that the students can use to guarantee that the exam will not be a surprise. Each day, before class begins, the students declare "We conclude that the exam will be today with probability 1. Therefore, we have advance knowledge of the date of the exam." They might be wrong a few times, but they will be right on the day of the exam, so the exam will not be a surprise.

This means that the professor cannot guarantee a surprise exam, so his original claim is false. But note that the students' strategy requires them to always assume that the exam will be on the earliest possible date and to plan their study time accordingly, which is probably the behavior that the professor was trying to encourage anyway. It just so happens that he has to lie about the surprise exam in order to do so.