skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are arguing from a social/holistic point of view.Yes with more competition society benefits as a whole and we get better products since the bar is set higher.

If you are arguing from the point of view of huge companies like IBM or Apple then Yes - being in a more competitive market makes sense as larger markets are inherently competitive.

But from the point of view someone without money,resources and who wants to start a business from scratch, it seems obvious to me that avoiding competition is a good strategy.

For example, read the story about competing pizza shops in Manhattan.Although they work hard and are doing their best, they aren't making much money.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3779423
I license code under the GPL. If I write something and release it open source, I'm doing you a favour by letting you use it for free. If you make changes and distribute them, the least you can do is return the favour and give them back. If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code.

I wouldn't be happy if I spent a lot of time writing some open source software and then a company came along, improved on it, and distributed it in their closed, proprietary software. That's why I prefer the GPL over the MIT license.
same here, also Chrome on Ubuntu, different screen resolution.

Text in columns is a really bad idea.
Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani Movie - Ranbir Kapoor & Deepika Padukone On the Sets
Ayan Mukherjee's next film 'YEH JAWAANI HAI DEEWANI', which brings ex-lovers Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone together after their break-up. The film also stars Aditya Roy Kapur and Kalki Koechlin. This love story produced by Dharma Productions and first time Deepika is working for them. The Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani movie will go on the floors in January 2012. The producer of the film, Karan Johar announced on Twitter "Our film…Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani starts this month… directed by Ayan Mukherji and stars RANBIR – DEEPIKA and ADITYA ROY KAPUR and KALKI..." The film is currently being shot in Manali. Here are some photos from the sets of the movie 'Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani'.
Foreign Business Intimidation Association of America
This is beautiful in it's terrible-ness. I think it's safe to say I wouldn't hire anyone that produced this during an interview. It would be impossible to tell if they were mad scientist crazy or just too dense to understand the point of the interview.
How can you criticize the design, then, without taking it for a drive to test the functionality? I think this guy got it pretty damn well. I've seen other submissions on this page, including the one you link to, that fail in a major way: the damn up/down buttons. I don't know where the down buttons are going to go, but the current ones (and your linked ones) are too small and close together. On a small screen or with a clumsy (read: touch) interface they are very difficult to use. Designs that preserve them FAIL badly- not because they look bad, but for the very reasons you state: the function suffers for the looks.

And what's the point of the huge margins on the one you linked to? Can't we make better use of the space somehow?

I think the OP has a helluva nice looking start to a website redesign, and I hope he doesn't get discouraged from the hivemind criticism I'm seeing on this page.
Washington State offers free e-cycling: http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/swfa/eproductrecycle/
IMO, this is worse than the current. Displaying the points, author and comment links as floated on the right (for widescreen), and under the story link on narrow screens is a better improvement.
As soon as you try searching anything related to programming or computing, where you need exact matches, you start to loathe it (of course, there is always verbatim mode). I've also had a case where it included the antonym of one of my search terms in its "auto terms". Of course, since this is google, all of these associations are probably auto-generated at some level. So weeding out bugs would probably be rather hard.
Probability Paradoxes
I wish all companies were like this.
There are a lot of good ideas in here, but stack-ranking is a terrible one.

First, it makes people hate each other. Anyone who comes up in the bottom half is going to be looking immediately to move to another group simply because he ended up in the bottom half. And if someone ends up near the bottom and ends up with no bonus or on a PIP, he's going to be spending the next few months trying to figure out who screwed him, which creates this whole side game that has nothing to do with actual work.

Second, it encourages people to work on the projects that are most visible, which are not always the most valuable.

Third, it creates a general atmosphere of distrust. People are constantly watching their back for others who might screw them in the peer review process.

This is an outsider's view and a microgripe, and I think a lot of the ideas in that book are good ones. I just saw the words "stack ranking" and knew I had to speak up. It's seriously not a good idea. If someone's going to get whacked, it should happen for a real reason, and not because that person ended up in the bottom 15% because only a couple people knew what he was working on. Maybe he was working on something important but unglamorous. I've seen that kind of shit happen all the time with stack-ranking systems.
Recently someone on the Boost mailing list posted a version of the famous "99 Bottles of Beer" using Boost.MPL: https://gist.github.com/1130306
For me the most impressive part is where they list things that Valve sucks at. How many companies have a list like that?
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I'm curious about what the new business model is going to be.
They do mention it's only used for deciding salary adjustments. But generally, good points. What would you do instead?
True. Pyro would have been a better choice. :)
One of the pleasures of the great cities in the world is the fact that merely getting around is an enjoyable and engaging experience. When I say "great cities" I mean places like Paris, NYC, Toronto. Putting people into individual 150mph cocoons only encourages more depressing suburban sprawl and lonely cities.

It would be much better, more green, and more aesthetic to encourage populations to increase density: live close to work, live close to ammenities, schools, shopping, and "third places."
Its quite gruesome. Half of the point of the question (or maybe the whole point) is: do you understand what I've just asked you? Look at it linguistically. Ask yourself, what does he mean? Here's a quick way to do it in a spreadsheet (the same rule will work in any other language):

=IF(MOD(A1,15)<>0,IF(MOD(A1,5)<>0,IF(MOD(A1,3)<>0,A1,"Fizz"),"Buzz"),"FizzBuzz")

Fill column A with numbers 1 to 100 and use this simple formula to fill down the next column to see the corresponding results.

Just as trivial in a Python or Ruby array, say. Or C or C++, I'd imagine.
This is not true for money refunded by the Feds ... But if you deducted the full amount of state or local taxes previously, then you didn't pay taxes on those and a refund is indeed income.

It's as easy easy as (not pie) flying with wax and feather wings.
This sounds a lot like a "lattice" organisation. It was invented by Bill Gore, founder of W.L. Gore & Associates (famous for their Gore-Tex fabric). At Gore, apparently everyone is an associate with no specific job title. There are no chains of command or hierarchy. People choose to work on projects based on their own judgement.

As Gore grew, it was apparent that this structure did not work with more than a couple of hundred people. So now, teams are limited to about 200 people (approximately Dunbar's number). I imagine Valve will run into this social limit as well once they grow well beyond their current 260 employees.

Given that Gore still exists, has 9000 employees and is profitable after 60 years is testament that such a structure can work for small as well as larger organisations over a longer period of time.

I first learned about this organisational structure in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. There are multiple descriptions online, here's one that seems interesting: http://ecgi.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=61902009302412510712411...
Enough with the movements
> ...this record, which stood for 75 years, MAY stand
> forever as the largest prime found by hand calculations.

I shudder to imagine the holocaust which would have to happen before this record could be broken. Though I suppose we may find an alien species who might have found a larger prime "by hand."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3869288

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3869427

These are stories #3 and #8 respectively, to this story's #2.
Cool! If I needed a C++ guy, that'd be an instant hire (though he wouldn't do any meta-programming for me!).

Wondering how this works out in g++ or other compilers?
Essex Walks - Epping Forest Fallow Deer Hainault Videos
Google hasn't been that way for a long time.

You can move around as you wish if you're a Real Googler. The Real Googler Line used to be Senior SWE; now it's somewhere between Senior and Staff. Staff are Real Googlers, and Seniors who are likely to make Staff are Real Googlers, but Seniors who are perceived as having plateaued are not.

If you're not a Real Googler, 20%T will be perceived as slacking off, and you're going to have a hard fight to get a transfer. Generally, it's hard to transfer unless you've had a recent promotion, so if you're not going to get promoted based on your current project, you might as well leave.
Hacker News Clean Redesign
The "except" compared to Sweden is that if the information is correct, you don't need to do anything. The default on no action is to confirm it.
Design tweaks are beneficial if they actually make using HN easier. I really have no problems with the current layout, and I don't see how a more aligned HN helps me or makes it "better".
Functional is nice. Or it could just be me.
Show HN: We use Github Gists to store user data
How about halfway? http://diesellaws.com/hacker-news-clean-redesign/
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I second this. Pine's book has good learning flow. It makes you think through programming problems with the tools at hand; it prepares you just enough for practice examples, requiring you to work hard for the answers. This results in a very fun and effective learning process, and a long-lasting knowledge of basic Ruby idioms.
Which features, are making you consider MongoDB? I'm asking because I wrote a (really short and small) MongoDB-ish abstraction layer over SQLite the other day (https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/goatfish), and it seems to me that it's trivial to emulate the MongoDB queries and various other features over SQL without all the hassle of it eating your data or requiring 100 GB of RAM for a few indices.
Writing prompts.

V1: click the button, and get three words that a writer would use to kickstart a daily writing exercise.

V2: choose which parts of speech are delivered: noun, verb, etc.

V3: display a creative commons licensed photo (from flickr, e.g.) relevant for each displayed word.

V4: Take your experience developing the early versions and figure out what V4 should be.
New kind of quantum junction
Oldie but goodie: MicroVAX3100 on OpenVMS and 13mbRam effectively runing
As long as stack-ranking is only done to adjust compensation, I don't really see the problem.

As a more traditional manager, I have to consider salary adjustments for my employees. What Valve seems to be doing is to let everyone consider salary adjustments for (half) of the team.

And since the rankings appear to be averaged out, one vindictive co-worker isn't likely to screw you over.

>it creates a general atmosphere of distrust.

Alternately, it creates a culture of responsibility. You want to do well in stack-ranking, so you're going to do your best work.

Finally, 50% of any group are below average. I honestly wouldn't mind being considered "the dumbest guy in the room" if I got to work at a dream company. See the following quote from Moby Dick:

>And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Amazing!

At first I thought it was something even lower-level (that is, a true magnetic scanner that didn't depend on existing disk drives - there are solutions like that for shattered HD plates and disks, but I'm assuming it's very expensive)

But I don't know much about floppy drives to say what are the limitations of using a standard floppy reader.
There are not nearly enough social buttons on this page
awesome is also dynamic tiling, while I use a WM that does manual tiling (though I can make it dynamically tile by window class, application and other parameters - though I have to write scripts to do it - its not automatic out of the box) and maybe this is the difference: I can lay the windows out precisely how I want, while if I understand dynamic tiling WMs correctly, they will try tile the windows for you, which may not work well for multi-window interfaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy
So you're saying that all server-side data that all apps using Firebase want to store should be stored centrally on Firebase owned servers. i.e since trusted user/pw hashes must be stored on a server to be matched against and the only server we have is the one that Firebase provides, all apps using Firebase will store these hashes on central servers owned by Firebase.. That sounds like a really bad idea.
Google API spring cleaning
The Secret To Successful Networking Is A Four Letter Word
> The problem is that the benefits are going entirely to all your readers. It's practically a case-study in positive externalities [...] when you make 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, you are guaranteed to get nothing.

How could that be changed? One problem is that if people gained something worthwhile, some would game the system.
Chebyshev distance is the right metric to use if you can move on a grid horizontally/vertically/diagonally, which is the case here. Manhattan distance corresponds to h/v but no diagonal movement, and Euclidian distance corresponds to arbitrary non-gridded movement.

(That said, which one functions best as a heuristic can vary problem to problem.)
Samsung has since responded:

"Based on our internal investigation, we confirmed that the boxes were not discarded by Samsung Electronics or by one of Samsung’s recycling partners. Furthermore, the semiconductor components contained in the boxes were manufactured in 2004 and had been shipped to a customer overseas. In the case of components – unlike finished products – all rights and ownership are transferred to the customer after a sales transaction has been completed."

The full response: http://www.techinasia.com/samsung-denies-dumping-ewaste-chin...
That's a good point that's worth addressing. What do you suggest? Left-aligning the content to the window border or something else? Pull requests to the repo on github welcome!
This is not too long, and it's definitely worth reading. Here are some highlights:

... at the core of every movement, there's a little kernel of almost
universal truth ... become enshrouded in a shitload of meaningless
gobbledygook ... miss the underlying point completely

... there also tends to be a small kernel of software developers who
actually get it.

True evolution and progress in software development ... will require
us to drop the brands, dump the fads and the fashions, and focus on
what we know ...
I wonder if this only applies to the game developers or other Valve staff (say web developers) as well. Is there anyone here working at Valve to could clear this up?
Thanks for mentioning Cleaner Hacker News! It's available on Github: https://github.com/primigenus/cleaner-hacker-news - pull requests and forks welcome if you have any concerns or improvements.
I'd like for these redesigns to start by listing:

#1 The problems they are trying to solve

#2 The qualities of the current design they need to preserve.

The discussion could then focus on whether the two lists are valid and how successful the redesign is in solving #1 without fucking up #2.
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This doesn't make my quest to find the guy who's responsible for only shipping no-gore versions of Team Fortress 2 to Germany any easier!
Gaskit - git-backed issue tracker
Sparrow on OSX and iOS, with gmail in chrome from time to time. Sparrow is just brilliant, would really recommend that people give it a try.
Does this remind anyone of the dharma initiative type videos?
If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code

Exactly. This conversation exists because guelo was complaining about people choosing to not use the GPL code. They don't like the arrangement. geon articulates why.
Dropout Generation
I love my Thinkpad E325. Very quiet (although not entirely), small, light and good battery life. AMD Fusion is really nice.

I could probably use an SSD in it, I guess.
I still use my Chumby as an alarm clock, and it works really well. I hope that it will be possible to keep it running without the chumby servers through some hacks.

Really sad to see that it didn't work out.
I'm much prefer Georgify (alternative CSS for Hacker News) : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...
I really like the simplicity.

One thing, I originally viewed it on my iPhone and was going to suggest a mobile version since I found display issues.

It wasn't until I viewed it on my PC that I saw you have a mobile button, on the top right hand corner.

Maybe for the demo, if you detect a smart phone could you show the mobile version?

Keep up the great work!
Haha yes! I think their art style (60s) is very similar to that of the Dharma initiative as well
Exception Notification v2.6.1 was just released
It fixes custom views lookup for background notifications, so go get it while it's still hot!
Federal tax refunds are not income. Does the IRS send you a W-2 or 1099 for them? Are you writing them in under "other income" or something? Unless you're doing something seriously weird, they aren't income, aren't reported anywhere as income, and aren't taxable.

For state/local taxes, as smoyer points out, if you erroneously deducted a larger amount of state taxes than you actually owe, then, when you get the difference back, you have to correct that on the next year's form, if you had claimed the larger amount as a deduction. If that weren't the case, you could game the system by purposely having your state taxes massively over-withheld, deducting the inflated amount from your federal taxes, then receiving a state tax refund.
The comparison with physics is interesting. If you look at physics (or science) before Bacon it could be considered as a set of movements and people 'believed' things. Post Bacon and the Baconian method people tested and verified. This had the effect of unifying people behind testable facts.

Maybe Software Engineering is waiting for it's own Francis Bacon. Software Engineering is a young 'science' and the natural sciences went many hundreds of years before their watershed moment.

Of course then their is the argument that Software Engineering is a misnomer altogether and in fact it's an art/craft and well art is filled with movements all of which are untestable and (in)valid to the same extent.

Personally I think that Software Engineering is hard and most people are not up to the challenge and they latch on to movements as a safety net. Actual (real world) Engineers are weeded out during training in universities. We seem to let anyone call themselves a Software Engineer/Programmer and to be honest a lot of the ones I meet are well below par.
Doesn't work at all in Mobile Safari on the iPad with iOS 5.1
Topics deleted from StackOverflow
No nonsense messaging. Create a public discussion that can be shared as an url.
Too many features - How do we ask users to use them
There is a thing called "longevity" - i.e. ability to source the same SKUs for 5 years. It's very important in Embedded / Industrial / Military markets.

The only reliable way to achieve longevity is to buy spare parts and store them for entire period. Of course the supplier will charge much higher price. After longevity period is over the parts should be destroyed.
Were the Vikings really the first to discover the Americas?
5 unexplained pieces of evidence that may make you think different. Interesting and fast read.
kids

this kind of declaration is a part of growing up. once you watch a few go by it's easier to see the pattern.
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Super Mario Bros. at Isle of Tune
Mosh - Remote terminal application that supports intermittent connectivity
If it's only used for compensation, I agree that it's not such a big deal. Getting a 10% year-end bonus instead of 20% is not exactly "getting screwed".

The only large (200+) private-sector company where I've worked is Google, where their stack-ranking/Perf system had some serious problems.

The first was a 5% cut-line. If you were in the bottom 5% of the Perf stack, you ended up on a PIP. Who usually ends up here? Some were objective underperformers, who'd been coasting for years, in some cases running at less than 1 CL per month. Most, on the other hand, were junior people on underperforming teams-- and of course, those junior people had the least to do with that team's underperformance, but they were poorly established so they got the shaft. That's how most layoffs actually work: junior people who landed on the least effective teams. It's not atypical, but it's dysfunctional.

By the way, PIPs have nothing to do with "improving performance". They exist to make it easy to fire people without severance. I actually think PIPs are imbecilic, because I'd rather cut a 3-month severance check and separate cleanly than keep a fired employee in the office for 1 month, but that's another rant. PIPs make the finance department happy (look at what we saved on severance payments!) but piss all over morale and make the manager's life hell, to say nothing about what they do for the PIP'd employee.

At Google, a PIP is effectively permanent. Even if you pass the PIP, you become damaged goods and can't transfer. It sticks around on your permanent record until you leave.

Which brings discussion to the second problem with Google's system. It sticks around forever.

When these types of systems get rotten is when they start getting in the way of peoples' transfers. It means that the people who really should be moving to other projects can't get on to them because no one wants to take a chance on that guy who was an "objective underperformer" in Q4 2005.

So, to come around to your point, I agree that if the rankings are only used to adjust pay, there's not much harm done. Unfortunately, it's rare that data collected is only used for the stated purpose. If these numbers start damaging peoples' ability to choose their own projects, it can become nasty quickly.
Sturgeon's Law again. The way it works, is that a small core of people understand an idea, an aesthetic, a new mental system, and they create real value with it. However, the reputation of the new thing grows into hype, which is then exploited for marketing purposes.

The thing to do, is to focus on real value. That's hard sometimes and very natural other times. What empiricism works in software?