skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: When a developer leaves a project, how do the project survive?
Dear $Community

What do software projects do when its key developer(s) leave a company or project, Is there any blogs or interesting write-ups about the problem and what solutions there to addressing the problem?

Also how important is it that the lead/key developer like the technology the software is written in, and can someone that does not no the platform or technology pick-up the project and maintain it?

---

I'm aware the above two question is easily influenced by the scenario of the project and company but I'm sure this is a general theme in big and small companies so any links or references would be appreciated, even keywords I must google for(Seeing I already tried and failed).

To help you to answer my question I will try to explain my scenario as follow:

I work for a small to medium sized company of about 150 people. A internal software project was started three years ago by two key people a Developer and Architect. After a year of development the business started to use it, and I joined the team six months later.

A Niche Software Development platform was chosen and in the beginning it gave the company a lot flexibility but after a year and a half we started to run into performance and maintenance problems large due to incorrect usage of the platform.

Recently the key developer left the company on good terms, but we are now left with only 50% of the mind share of the current system.

So we have a complex business system with more then 160 database tables, a really big hairy code base and the original person that developed the system is not available any more.

If I get carte blanche my first reaction is that we need to rewrite the system, but what will change when I leave the company in two years time?
I don't think they really care to know whether you are lying or not. People ask this question because they want to put you in a tricky situation and see how you react.
I think the "need" comes from the content owners, who refuse to license their material to services that don't implement a form of DRM that they approve of.

Poppycock.

If I were unwilling to come to work unless I was to get €1,000,000 per day and the system wasn't set up to do that, then I would have to stay at home all day. I would have no right to insist that just because I find the current system unsuitable that it should be changed.
>This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.

There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096.
Interesting solution to an age-old problem. I wonder if this type of simple solution has come about from a reduction in technology costs, the understanding that not everyone is shooting to be a big-box store or both.
Build your polyglot app with JRuby and Rake.
To my fellow developers, please don't develop anything else for Flash. Thanks! (Within the next year Google will have you go full screen in GTK inside Chrome/Debian ... then that's your desktop ... Adobe is hedging this decent bet .... BARF!)
(Why) Should I learn a new programming language?
Use Zuvvu Plastic Points to get early adopters for your Start Up
Googlighting
>To use science, reason, and logic to try to convince or correct a person who has based their view on emotion, fellowship or intuition is a huge mistake.

On the other hand, if you're a professional comedian (as Tim Minchin is), telling a story that helps your core audience laugh about a common situation that normally stresses them (as Tim Minchin did) is simply doing your job (and Tim did it well).
> don't use agent forwarding ever. If you know better, be damn sure you are right

I am curious. Why do you say this? My use case for agent forwarding is during automated deployment. Without agent forwarding, when pulling from SVN, I either need to enter password every time or have my private keys uploaded to the server where I want to deploy.
> which you conveniently have to have for this course

No you don't.
Really good idea to sell one off tshirts, stickers on the even registration pages etc.
And why not? It's a fair question. A seasoned manager will be able to answer that without blinking. "Some people think cubicles suck". "Open environment does not work for all". "This is not the place for someone that does not want to be under pressure to deliver". Easy to answer.

Why would it be uncomfortable to ask? It's dangerous to ask, though. If you ask it in a way that you come through as a smug, wanna-be-clever son of a bitch then the job interview is over.

So it's more of a danger to the one doing the asking unless he/she has good emotional intelligence. It's a fair question to ask.
Reasons to install Sublime Text 2 (1p1e1.tumblr.com)

35 points by 1p1e1 69 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356413
Caveat emptor, especially when buying tax software.
After doing what EFF recommended, the Web History is "paused" indefinitely. If you want to opt out of the service completely, you can use the following URL:

https://www.google.com/accounts/DeleteService?service=hist
There is very relevant post on a webcomic for people who things that privacy is only for people who have something to hide: http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/missing_the_point.png and sometims images is worh thousand words, right?
Videos from the HTML5.tx Conference
I looked carefully at MailChimp but I didnt see anything about being able to set up "Drip Campaigns" where people will get messaged using a predefined set of emails at given intervals after an event (such as a signup on a website). That's the secret sauce that I'm looking for - being able to add people to predefined workflows using an API and ideally push them down different paths, such as "Purchased" or "Didnt purchase after 60 days", so I can market to them more specifically and in an automatic way. This is what I meant by "Drip Campaign"
I don't see how your post could be "also" to the parent post: It's saying to be skeptical of the claims due to lack of evidence, while your post contrarily implies that this is already established knowledge.
I think I know why. It's not the service that it offered, it's the silicon valley celebrities using the service. As soon as average everyday people joined Quora, the whole hype just died down. Overnight we all just stopped caring because we realized Quara is just a better designed Reddit with tech celebrities.
I see a lot of key bindings for buffers, but few for tabs.

Am I the only one who uses tabs in vim? They're great.
PHP inception brain explode
"I get irritated when people ask me stupid questions."
Microsoft sues Motorola Mobility, claims patent abuse
It is even more weird than that. From my and some friend's experience: if you sleep more then 9 hours straight, instead of usual 6-8 (this happens on weekends usually), I feel really terrible in the morning - not being able to get out of bed, but in the same time not being able to sleep. Finally when I get out of bed - I feel really trashed for next several hours.

So it is not just less than 8 hours makes things worse, same applies to more then 8 hours. So it is either I have to sleep 6-8 hours only, or I have adapted to this schedule so well, that anything else makes me feel terrible.

On the other hand, I have handful examples of me traveling with few flight changes, timezones changes, more than 30 hours in flights/airports, and after getting to my destination I spent full 16 hours day working or meeting with friends just fine. May be a little dizzy. And after consequent 8 hours sleep night - feel great next day.

This suggest, that it (8 hours sleep requirement) is more than just a something "hardwired" in to human's body...

Yes, sleep is weird.
Your often response is what I think mine is for real. Until I am challenged, I have blind-spots. All the ones that I think would be truthful come off as a canned response, and all the thoughtful responses I think of would be considered long-winded babbling.

I wish the article would go into how to shift the question/answer to make it meaningful. I don't think I will read a book on the off-chance it satisfies this.
Wolrd's most massive supercomputer needed for colossal space telescope
Neither is Aston Martin, but they're a profitable and successful UK based auto manufacturer.

There are many successful companies that never achieve the kind of brand awareness that you are identifying. It's generally not a condition for success.

I am an auto enthusiast and Tesla is very well known among enthusiasts. Appealing to enthusiasts (Early Adopters) is an acceptable business strategy. Tesla doesn't need to market to a wider audience yet.

I fail to see the issues that others are claiming here. Assuming they can meet demand (last I heard there is significant demand for the Model S, I don't have data to cite at the moment) and are profitable with at that volume their risks seem to me to be more of the typical manufacturer's risk. Quality and warranty issues, aftermarket support, production costs, etc. Not so much from weak market demand.

EDIT: HN won't let me reply to your comment yet so I'll do it here.

I'm disagreeing with what I feel you're implying with this:

I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.

But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.

I read that as "This is Tesla's market, they're not known in this market, this is a risk to their business". I disagree with that. That is not their market and that market (general public, 10s of thousands of electric car buyers in Japan) is unimportant at this time because they're very well known within their target market.
I'll rephrase that:

F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.

I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over.

I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.
Reading code is almost always (much) harder then writing it. Learning you way around the existing code base, and refactoring it if necessary is (almost) always a better option then rewriting it.

In a rewrite you'll find your self relearning about edge cases already solved, you'll lose features and business requirements you didn't even know about. You'll end up with a more maintainable (for you) but worse product in most cases.

Going forward you should have good documentation for key things regarding your system. If its not part of someone's job now, you should explain to your boss(es) why it needs to be someone's job in the future. Documentation is not time poorly spent.
Komodo Edit/IDE is a good choice also.
Authorities shutter another popular file-sharing site, arrest founder for piracy
"In five years, I see myself celebrating having worked 5 years for your company."
I think performance is far too often used as a reason to add cogs, others are far better. If you often replace parts, more cogs are great. We have a really low-yield setup at one of our clients that is nevertheless splitted: ane process imports media data from a huge number of content providers and is split into 3 parts - an importer that normalizes all data, a queue as a binding and a reencoding process. The reason why we did this is easy: the queue is running for two years straight now, the encoding process was deployed once last year (we changed our logging strategy) and the importer process is deployed around 4-5 times each week. Not having to bring the whole machine to a grinding halt on each of those occurences is a major benefit.
I agree its a stupid question. Someone that has 30 years experience as CTO being asked that question I think it would be an insult. But it happens.

If I really like the job and this may be a problematic question, I usually say this (which in most part is true): "I think my weakness is my personal attention to all possible details at work. Yes, I have to admit I am a workaholic. I don't look at clock when working even if its very late evening I need to make sure my projects are top notch buttoned up!"

I know employers love that answers. They dont really care how screwed up your personal life or family relations are, whether you see your kids or not. They care if you are willing to let them squeeze last inch out of you for a paycheck or not. And my answer always work.
I tried this for one semester in college, and never went back to an alarm clock. I decided to face the risk of missing classes, exams, meetings, etc. The result? I got up 1-2 hours earlier most days than I did with an alarm clock. I have been living without an alarm clock for 20 years now; in that time I have overslept maybe 5 times, and on those occasions it was pretty clear that my body was fighting off sickness and really needed the sleep. The only time I use an alarm is if I need to get up at 3:45 am to catch a 6am flight.

Alarm clocks are a terrible habit. They wake us up with no regard to where we are in our sleep cycles. When I used an alarm, I used to wake up and go back to sleep until the alarm went off. Then I would hit the snooze button forever. With no alarm, I just get up the first time I wake up in the morning. I almost always wake up at the end of a good sleep cycle.

Getting rid of my alarm clock decreased my overall amount of sleep but greatly increased the quality of my sleep.
\\\/// WaTcH Man City vs FC Porto Live St~r~e am - Soccer - Zimbio
A Pivot for the Post Office
A timepiece set fast by a random amount
Worked with Ryan in my first real job out of college. Looking forward to reading!
Saving images and files in localStorage
Bottom line – to get your ideas to spread you have to connect with people in a way that is meaningful and useful to them. If you can’t do this, it’s your fault, not theirs.

Don't blame your customer.
That functionality -- especially in regard to the news tab -- drives me nuts. Over and over I click the top news tab forgetting I have to click the link on the side and lose the current context of my search.

At first I just assumed it was a bug since the other tabs kept the context of the search. Then after a week of the same, I looked into how to flag the issue so it could be fixed and low and behold I found it was a product feature (or non-feature).

Its such a strange UX decision that I have to assume that it is driven by revenue generation or some other metric rather than good user experience.
Streamline your git workflow with aliases
Dude, not cool at all.

There's a massive difference between highlighting your USP and insulting your competitors.
Really? I think this is BS... I don't care about statistics or a 1595 painting or whatever.

What I know is if I sleep less than seven hours I feel like crap during the day.
If you read the responses from Chrome engineers on that thread you'll see why a new API was necessary. The requirements and guarantees of your API fundamentally change when you move it out of process for sandboxing and stability. Naive approaches lead to awful performance, deadlocks, or the need to poke massive holes in your security architecture. After a few engineering years of trying to make NPAPI work, it became clear that the result was so different and banned so much of NPAPI that a clean break was the only correct approach.
I think he's saying that the conclusion from the historical study (people used to have bi-modal sleep patterns) isn't exactly revolutionary either. So it's in line with the parent post in that there's not really anything noteworthy in the article.
PHP_CodeSniffer - as you already say - works with the source code at a token level. This is necessary, because it looks at the precise formatting of the code (like whitespace usage).

The parser is more for analyzers that are not interested in the precise formatting of the code, but want to look at the code from a higher level perspective.

For example, if you want to do control flow analysis and type inference working directly on the tokens would be really hard. An Abstract Syntax Tree makes this kind of work much easier, as you don't have to think about the tiny details of the language.
Isn't this the proverbial midnight? You went to sleep for about four hours, then woke to have a midnight snack.
I use three browsers. Firefox for general browsing (technology and theology), Chromium for Gmail and Facebook, and Opera for blogs.

I figure that keeping Google and Facebook in their own little prison should help greatly with privacy.

I use DDG for searching whenever possible.

Not so much to hide things (as a pastor I got used to being watched 24x7 years ago), but just to preserve what little privacy I have left.
I'm fine with the new icon, but it really does look like a rush job. IconFactory has done better.
Of course it's always whatever works best for you. But it's interesting to see what you win and what you lose before adopting cool things you hear from hero programmers in a podcast. ;-)

Although I don't see me using nothing more than a tmux session exclusively in the future, I already adopted some things for my server work and I'm looking forward to the pragprog tmux book.
The Hard Drive Shortage
So the hypothesis is that the reason cardio exercise every other day makes you smarter is because the astrocytes next to your neurons in your frontal cortex and hippocampus become 60% more capable of meeting needs to fuel your neurons with glycogen during periods of glycogen shortage, increasing the brains ability to keep glycogen levels at optimal levels at all times during the day.

I would like to see a study done seeing how 5 hour powers, caffeine, sugary treats, no-doz and other performance altering drugs affect this astrocyte supercompensation process.
Btw, really? Downvote me but you've got nothing to say?

To weigh in on the pro flash side: say you're developing applications for large enterprises, many of which still run ie7 or 8 (mind you, not websites, but applications that run in a browser and are delivered over the Internet). Since HTML5 (by which, none of you actually mean html5 in that case, it's mostly some kind of JavaScript front end with frameworks far from mature (though I like both backbone and ember/sproutcore, they've got a ways to go before being comparable to flex w/ robot legs, and js will never be as3)) will not work well in this situation, what do you propose?

For Adobe's part, I wish they'd be a bit more transparent, but regardless, I think I'm good to go with a pretty wide and stable cross-browser feature set today and will be that way for a while while JS frameworks play catch up. And meanwhile, good luck getting an IT dept at a fortune 500 to upgrade all their browsers to the latest version of firefox or chrome and to make that a requirement to use your software. And what would you gain by doing that today exactly if that's your target market?

What can HTML5/JS do today for RIA's that flash can't do better, faster, and cheaper?
25 Creative Keep Calm and Carry On Posters
It's official, our startup is bada$$
I wrote something a few days ago that was inspired by this:
http://zacharymaril.com/blog/2012/02/17/who-will-regress-the...
Interesting. So there will be another 3 version with the following features:

Keyboard input support in full-screen mode

Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio

Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content

LZMA compression support for ByteArray

Frame label events

ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)

Support for advanced profiling

Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content

Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS (What the??? iOS???)

Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment

Release outside mouse event API

Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base

Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine

Updates to the ActionScript language

--

Doesn't seem like there will be anything new that can not be currently albeit less efficiently.
Nanorobots made out of DNA seek and kill cancer cells
Katherine here (ShopLocket founder). I'm not sure if its the reduction in technology costs, something like ShopLocket has been possible for years. But what I do think has changed is that its no longer a leap for the average person to consider selling online. They have the social networks and distribution channels to do it on their own.

Not to mention, with solutions like Shopify and services like Pinterest rising in popularity, expectations for what product should look like online have risen. eBay and Craigslist just won't cut it anymore.
I don't see how they would associate that with you. Only the exit node for the google queries would be suspect, and I'm pretty sure most don't keep logs.
Funny you say that, because what you are describing is already implemented and called the Smarty template system[1], one of the worst examples of the Inner-platform effect[2] the world has ever seen.

1: http://www.smarty.net/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
And they link to the source of the article. I feel like ticking this day in my calendar to mark a good day of journalism.
The issue there is probably VFP support required by some 3D engines.

See for example: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/73598-Before-you-buy-Androi....
I've often wondered how many people, outside of the tech realm, actually use Quora. I don't know anyone that has even heard of it. But plenty of non-tech categories seem full of questions and answers- is it just techies talking about their other areas of interest or has it actually spread?
How is that different from some binary-only browser plugin (with limited availability on platforms that the DRM vendor doesn't want to support)?

All it does is giving credibility to DRM ("but the W3C has a standard for that!")
Link to relevant article for people who are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta.
Using up all our fossil fuels and leaving the world a crisp wasteland is one thing, but using the word "impactful" is another. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=impactful
I've never understood how any company could let this happen and yet we see it constantly. Perhaps it's because Wordpress or TypePad or Posterous don't let them change the link at the top, but I doubt it.

It definitely ranks as one of the most common Web 101 mistakes out there.
When they described it as being like Pompeii my imagination might have gotten the best of me and expected too much :) Very cool photos nonetheless
This is why, I find that getting up at the same time on the weekend as I do during the work week actually helps keep my sleep patterns somewhat regular. So, although the idea of an occasional Saturday morning sleep-in sounds good, in practic, I'm better off getting up at my usual 4:45am every day and supplementing with a short nap after lunch if necessary.
Interesting. So there will be another 3 version with the following features:

Keyboard input support in full-screen mode

Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio

Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content

LZMA compression support for ByteArray

Frame label events

ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)

Support for advanced profiling

Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content

Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS (What the??? iOS???)

Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment

Release outside mouse event API

Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base

Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine

Updates to the ActionScript language

Doesn't seem like there will be anything new that can not be currently albeit less efficiently.