skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you think this is ever going to change if programmers, some of the most sought after professionals in this economy, keep taking orders from these people?

For a team with mature, responsible and professional developers, it shouldn't be such a big deal to have a non-technical manager anyway. Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around. A good manager, technical background or not, will be glad to get out of the way of a good team.

I myself am a manager with a technical background. I consider myself no more than mediocre as a manager. There are a lot of non-technical managers out there who could probably do a way better job managing , but they would have to be told by the programmers what they need from them.

But most programmers don't speak up. Most programmers don't say no. Most programmers don't explain why interruptions are so costly, let alone outright refuse to let that ruin their work. Most programmers have never read pg's essay about maker time and manager time.

A professional chef will walk out if his boss told him to burn every steak to a crisp, but most programmers will grumble a bit, get on with it and then (but only if they really care) bitch about it online. This despite the fact that chefs have way more to lose given the job market.

With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea...

It's not exclusively a senior management problem. Senior management doesn't know there is a problem unless they happen to have a technical background themselves, which is an unrealistic expectation, given that software is everywhere these days.

It is first and foremost our problem. We're the ones that know what is wrong and how to fix it. We are the professionals this business relies on.

Only assigning managers with a technical background isn't going to work anyway, because there are not enough of them to go round.

As a programmer, you have to be a bit of masochist to put the peter principle to the test on yourself while your technical knowledge is still relevant, and people are willing to pay you good money just to code.
This is what git submodules are for, but when they can't use them they don't have clear module boundaries.
Mozilla wants to do it for free with BrowserID[1].

[1] https://browserid.org/
We need to talk about binary search
Eh? There was a ticket filed. Finding it is what took up part of the 3 hours.
Well, that's a bad example because there've been dozens of papers regarding strategic bombing in WWII, and almost all of them concluded it was a failure as far as affecting production capability of the bombee, and a worse failure as far as morale.

So on the efficacy front, it didn't make sense, and on the honor front it's on some pretty shaky ground. Of course, it happened, so there's that.
Like other's I'd definitely recommend a Thinkpad. I've had my current Thinkpad (an x61) for almost four years now. I'm in college ATM so as you can imagine it gets dragged around everywhere. Haven't had any issues with it other than having to replace the battery but that's standard. I'd recommend staying away from the Thinkpad Edge though; not a huge fan of them personally.
What I particularly like about Cascalog is: 1) Composability 2) Unit testing 3) No installation as it is embedded in your jar.
Odd article title. They never made a claim on content. This version of the EULA is more clearly written, but the previous was sufficient.
I am sorry, but as a happy female graduate of what is quite possibly the least 'feminine' major (metallurgical engineering) I couldn't disagree with you more.

You seem to be purportaing the very issue you are trying to avoid. Sure, I had professors who mumbled complicated concepts into their beards and professors whose language could not necessarily be classified as English, but my white and Asian male classmates could not understand them any better than I could.

You cannot hinge on your love for science in high school and blame the school for not making it touchy-feely enough for you to succeed in STEM majors. Sure I had classes I couldn't hack in university, but I came to terms with the fact that it was a limit of my ability and did not blame it on a professor or the way the subject was taught.

Yes, I believe that we do need more women in STEM majors, but it can only be achieved by encouraging women to stick with it and persist, alongside her white and Asian male peers, not by making excuses for her shortcomings, bailing out and then appealing to the university to make STEM major lectures into vagina monologues.

I am sure that your mother can confirm that her college career was not a walk in a park and she is actually in the discinpline that nowadays has the highest number of women.

STEM majors are like the plains of the Serengeti. It's the survival of the fittest. And those of us that survived wouldn't have it any other way.
I disagree.

The FBI, DHS, TSA and so on /can/ be defeated through humiliation - you just have to keep at it until enough voters get the message for a few politicians to use "regulate XYZ" and "abolish the ABC" as mechanisms for political gain.
The original idea wasn't too far from that... but obviously the amount of distance between you and another player drastically changes the game. The 'ah-ha' moment was automatically targeting the other player's last known location. Doing this means you don't need a level of abstraction for targeting, and it nuetralizes distance. It's the same game if someone is in the same building as you, or 3000 miles away. Granted timezones do factor in at some point. :)
Dear programmer, when your boss says 'can you spare 10 minutes for me' he probably means 'can you help me take care of this exceptional situation'. The bug was probably severe and the boss wanted a dev to confirm that it was live before taking it to the steering commitee. The only slight wtf is how the boss worded that request. But taking something to the steering committe is a pretty big deal, so I understand that he would want to confirm it!
I'm not sure this would work - if an operation needs you to stat() a file for every file in the repo (for example), whether it is 10k files in 1 repo or 1k files each in 10 repos will probably just as bad?
All rightie then.. I think I need to step away from the keyboard and pay attention to real-life for a bit... :-|
Large repos bring their own problems, and results in some design decisions accordingly. For example, Visual Studio itself is 5M+ files and this affected some of the the initial design decisions (Server side workspaces, for this example) when developing TFS 2005 (the first version) [1]. That decision suits MS but not the small to medium clients well. So they're now alternating that design with client side workspaces.

It's not wise to offer Facebook to split the repository. Looks like it's time to improve the tool.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/08/02/version-co...
Wow, this is a classic. It's been ages since I first read it.

Awesome to see the author has published it under a creative commons license.

Wonder how many great short SF stories people will never get to read because they are locked up under copyright without ever getting reprinted.
What Cleveland Incubator? It's not obvious from the linked site.
The Stock Market – A Brief History
Online Stock Trading Put Options vs Stop Loss Orders
I know Metalab Designs is looking for designers, though not sure if they are looking for local ones in Victoria: http://metalabdesign.com/
Nyan cat did Not file a DMCA takedown
It does mention the bacteria's anaerobic metabolism as an advantage, allowing it to live deep in landfills.
Somewhat off-topic, could somebody explain why

echo 3 | tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

rather than just

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Is it because the output to stdout lets you be extra sure that the right data was sent to the kernel?

I'm just wondering if this is an idiom with a deeper meaning that I'm not aware of.

EDIT: I'm guessing that when you run it in a script (without set -x), rather than on the command line, you can see in the log what it is you sent?
> The music does not demand attention to itself.

Interesting that the reasons given here mostly also apply to game soundtracks as well, which is mostly what I listen to while coding. (Overclocked Remix has some great compilations if you are looking.)

I suspect game soundtracks differ from film soundtracks in that they're the backdrop to something that's still interactive, but I'm not sure how that comes into play.
With regard to getting changes made: Both V8 and the ECMAScript committee have development mailing lists and issue trackers where you can submit and discuss suggestions. AFAIK, this is basically the same way Ruby operates. They aren't likely to make vast, crazy changes, but I don't think, say, a PEP for static typing would get very far either.

And I think it's kind of a basic misconception that V8 is made just with web browsers in mind. If you look on the V8 developer site, nowhere does it say anything close to that. Their stated objective is "fast execution of large JavaScript applications." They go out of their way to draw a distinction between the browser and the engine, explaining what is and isn't part of JavaScript (e.g. the DOM is just an interface that browsers choose to expose). Is Chrome the original client for V8? Sure. And shell scripts were the original use case for Python. It seems to me that "V8 is just a browser language" is the new "Python is just a scripting language."

And I wouldn't describe the language-level ability to write asynchronous code in a synchronous fashion a fundamental feature. It's really cool and allows a lot of expressiveness, but so would a lot of potential changes in, say, Ruby. If you don't want the language feature, there are really nice libraries that get you most of the way there. (And I don't really see how the existence of CoffeeScript or ICS is any more an indictment of V8 than the existence of Scala is of the JVM. Choice is a good thing. Lots of people prefer vanilla JavaScript.)
Has some bugs.

So I was wowed by your maps and signed up to try the free account. I uploaded my world (I had to do it twice because the upload timed out once, and the second time it took several minutes). After logging in to pluto.minefold.com, it didn't put me in my world (My world's seed: -6543031652815246039 vs what the seed on pluto is: 1328309103 if you want to follow up)

Also, I'm hesitant to play on anything that doesn't have bukkit/WorldGuard. I'm not sure what your access control/griefing rollback mechanisms are. That should probably go in your FAQ.
I think the message is to change your environment such that you're not getting this sort of interruption.

I interviewed, three times (and turned down, three times) with a firm that apparently really wanted me. Why?

1: They were a very small vendor working for a very large client. The client is a household (swear) word, and behaves in a gratuitously overbearing manner to its customers and other vendors.

2: Everyone I spoke with admitted that this relationship lead to many, many last-minute changes in spec requiring much overtime and pain to make things just so. All while praying that things wouldn't change yet again at the next last minute.

I said "thanks, but no".
I think A/B testing would take too long to show the effect of the design change. Design helps your users like your app a little bit more and I think it would show in retention, but not in sign up conversion.

What metric would you measure?
I found this interesting, as I recently had an interview with a company where the guy doing the interview said "so, ... work us pretty hard. Are you OK with working 60h/week?" Pointing out that this seems like a systemic flaw didn't seem like the best option at the time, so I just said something about "I'm fine with cranking if it's a short-term emergency, but over the long term, work load has to be sustainable otherwise it's neither efficient nor good for my health". Should I just drop them?
Tumblr's previous paid promotion system was massively effective. I'm glad they've brought it back in this new form.
That's the problem. It's NOT an easy problem to solve.

A lot of posts on hn describing some problem elicit "Why, that's no problem at all!" responses or "That's the wrong problem to think about" responses.

Honestly that mindset is often really useful in programming, but when we get a problem that doesn't have a shortcut and is relevent, conversation goes to shit. Because I guess that's when programmers normally go into a hole and brute-force brain it out.

How to use mass comms to talk about a difficult open problem is, I suppose, itself an open problem.
I think there are four recurring mistakes that cause these comical situations. Two are technical and two are social.

The first technical mistake is using communications tools with built-in latency: e-mail instead of IM/IRC, conference call that everyone must dial into at a specific time instead of starting with at least two people on a call and calling others to join in real time. E-mail and scheduled dial-in conference calls must be just about the least efficient methods of professional communication ever invented.

The other technical mistake is not having software for remote communications, particularly desktop sharing/presentations, that is readily available at the click of a mouse and familiar enough for all participants to set it up in moments. (A related mistake is using a dial-in conference service that isn't actually reliable. If you can't find one that works as it's supposed to -- and a lot of them don't, IME -- then you can at least ask someone to spend a bit of time and money installing an in-house solution if you need this facility often.)

The first social mistake is allowing one person's lack of preparation to waste time for everyone in the group. There is no excuse for coming to multiple people and asking them to set up a call to discuss a bug when you don't know the bug number, nor for them not to have the details in front of them when joining the call. It's basic good practice for any meeting that everyone know in advance who will be attending, why, and what the goals of the meeting are, that someone lead the meeting efficiently, and that the results be circulated promptly afterwards. If you get to the scale where you have to involve multiple people at the same time, failing to do these things will almost inevitably waste time, and again it will often be the whole group's time while one individual sorts out something they should have done earlier.

The second social mistake is being accepting of people who are late when a large meeting has been scheduled. Whenever possible, the meeting should start precisely on-time, and should not deviate from the published agenda to bring latecomers up to speed. If they miss out, it's their job to catch up afterwards, not the entire group's job to spin its wheels while someone recaps. If key people are consistently late and wasting others' time in this way, that is a serious management issue and someone needs to address why it is happening. Otherwise, you get to having a dozen people on the call, and if one key person is 10 minutes late because they were "just finishing an e-mail" then you've found another way to turn 10 minutes into two hours...
Surely some changes can be bad.

Facebook Beacon was removed after some time for example.

I'd like to know how to figure out what is the fastest to know if a change is for the better or the worse.

In the case of design change, I wouldn't expect a direct change in the metrics, it would impact on a longer term though.
Also, it doesn't only include the current file set - they include files that have been deleted, been split into modular files, been merged, been wholesale rewritten, put into a new hierarchy (some VCS systems handle this better than others).

The follow-up email still mentions a working directory of 9.5gb. I cannot fathom working on a code repository consisting of 9.5gb of text. There must be something else going on here, even considering any peripheral projects like the iOS and android apps, etc.

(edit: if there are huge generated files intermingled with code, shouldn't those be hosted on a "pre-generated cache" web server instead of git, for example?)
Just wanted to thank all the commenters and those who are signing up to Hackful!
What data would you look at for a in-app design change?
Once I was invited to a conference at the MIT in Boston. My travel agency got me a room in the nearby Marriott in Cambridge and told me I just had to get a subway to the square nearby to the hotel.

That was not enough information for the border guard at the airport in Boston. He just wouldn't let me go through. I was arguing 15 minutes until someone offered me his mobile to call the Hotel to ask for the address and street number.

Not again. Never.
These times are for spinning-platter hard drives. I wonder what the numbers look like on a modern SSD?
Groove Salad has always been one of my favorite streams for coding. Lots of down-tempo stuff, tasteful choices:
http://somafm.com/groovesalad/
There's no such thing as "cheating" when it comes to subverting security measures. If you have gained access to something that is supposed to be secure then you've compromised its security measures. It doesn't matter if you bribed someone, found the password in the trash, duplicated a key via a cell phone picture from across the street, or got conference call info from a compromised email account. In the end the result is the same. The weakest link in a chain determines its strength.

You better believe that this is how spycraft works with the big boys too. You attack security measures at the weakest point, period. Doing it any other way is just making a hobby of it.
The example is synthetic, so don't worry too much about the implications.

It is useful to keep in mind that Facebook isn't just the front-end (and isn't just code, also images, configuration, and so forth).

Just talking about open source stuff, Facebook also generates code like Cassandra, Hive (data warehousing application), Phabricator (a code review and lifecycle tool), HipHop for PHP (the translator/compiler, the interpreter, and the virtual machine), FlashCache (a kernel driver), Thrift, Scribe, and so forth.

We also have had to build applications to support our operations, so think about what sort of effort goes into building scalable monitoring, configuration management, automatic remediation, logging infrastructure, and so forth.

I don't know the actual lines of code across it all, and wouldn't mention it if I did, but people often underestimate the scale here.
Listing of Three Enterprises From the Mainland Will Be to
My story with a start-up (equity blues)
Me: worked in mktg/biz dev for a number of successful European web start-ups.

I meet the founder of a very promising start-up. He tells me salary will be low. I say: great, I'm more interested in equity. Salary is low, but the path to equity is unclear (promised shares in the local company, but with no indication at all of how to judge the value of the local company respective to the total value of the mother company in case of a sale or IPO).

I make a counter-offer: I'll work and get only equity in the mother company. Each month for the first year, I'll get 1/12th (one twelfth) of what each business angel got for the 50,000 Euros they invested in the company just one month before, plus maybe a bonus of some kind. From year-2, only dividends on profits. His reply: no way, I can't treat you like an investor. I though one ought to be delighted to have a country manager who belives in your company so much and wants only equity. I drop out of negotiations.

What do you think?
Are You Forgetting Something? Don't overlook community.
It's a web app, it already has a server. It must be possible to design this in a way that you use only your own server in the process, and not mozilla's.
What about from an email?
I guess I am hopelessly naive, but why is a ticket accepted without a short screencast of the issue? There are a number of free/cheap screen capture programs these days. There was no need for Ed's involvement (or his manager's involvement) until the problem had been captured. If submitting a ticket ends up meaning the developer sits there live as the user reproduces the problem (again), then the support department has much bigger scalability issues.
Which School Has Better Programmers? UCLA or USC?
How to work the press
Auditresourcecenter.com/massprcheck.php
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. If you're being paid below your market value, you're an investor.
I think this is a great answer.

Option 1: Compare old and new design with new users.
Posting the designs in Mturk could get some unbiaised answers.

Option 2: Gradual design.
Don't shock your users. Change things gradually.

Thanks Chris!
It's one thing to say that it's ineffective to bomb residential neighborhoods. It's another thing to say that it's always illegitimate. Also, what about factories staffed by civilians producing ball bearings or tires?
Ben Kaplan, who has been on Oprah and done quite the PR circuit, outlined 5 practical steps to getting noticed by the press last night in Santiago. This is the summary.
Share Trading Games
It seems to me that you could have a daemon that uses inotify to make operations O(changed) vs O(size).
Well, that was a language inconsistency, not an issue with the DOM.

I like working with JS but I don't know why the two operands aren't commutative in my example.

The DOM is a headache but luckily smart people have made plenty of libraries to abstract that away. What we're left with is a language with a very expressive and powerful core like you said, but there are still some oddities.
Is this his only post? Or is there someway to browse this site that I'm missing?
Do you mean Digg has pushed a big design change and Reddit just does small changes (if any)?
At Google, everything is in Perforce, but since I personally need only four or five projects from Perforce for my work, I mirror that to git and interact with git on a day-to-day basis.

At MS we also use Perforce (aka Source Depot), and I've toyed with the idea of doing something similar. Have you found any guides for "gotchas" or care to share what you've learned going this route?
In my experience no, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were better managers.

The specific problem with programming is it's pretty much invisible - the end result, when well done, hides the enormous levels of complexity it takes to create it. It's just 'another website' or whatever.

That's compounded by the problem that, in the U.S. at least, managers seem to think their job is having influence/power over people, and telling them/making do things. In fact, management is supposed to be a support role. Managers should be creating an environment that enable their employees to do their job as best as possible.

In my experience -many- managers exist to please the person above them, and think very little (or, at best, simply are unable to see) how their actions effect their employees happiness and productivity.
Was offered 30% of what I think the position was worth in cash.
Git was not designed for this.

It comes out of the Linux kernel, where you need a secure hash of a segment to prevent compromise. For big projects you have submodules, you can only get a level higher later.

In a company, you trust the sources. With Perforce you check out files and work with the part you want.

It is a design decision and they could have known before.
I find that music with no lyrics is most helpful.

Stuff like a lot of post rock, such as Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Another option is Math Rock like Battles (I am actually listening to Gloss Drop right now).