skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If significant questions get the “it depends” answer, I take it as a sign that either the place is so chaotic that it doesn’t have a corporate culture, or that I won’t know what culture I will work in until I find out who my manager is."

Or, you know, it means "it depends". Because sometimes, it depends on the circumstance. As they say, the exceptions make the rule.

The larger point here is that if you go into an interview prepared to dump on a company because they're not absolutists about your particular favorite development philosophy, you shouldn't be surprised if you don't get the job. And nearly every company is going to have something that they're letting slack in order to keep the lights on.

So maybe not having unit testing is a deal-breaker for you. If so, fine. Don't work for companies that don't unit test. But I hope your list of deal-breakers is short.
+1, although I don't think it is a sexist term.

This is a professional site, for a (hopefully) mature, professional audience.

Step 1: Grow up and learn to write mature, professional articles. I didn't bother to read it because of the headline.
Eh, no, exactly the opposite - what I meant was, the people I prefer are the ones who don't decide on tech first, then fit the solution to the actual problem withing the constraints of that tech. People who get the job done don't care all that much about one type of pipe vs the other or what have you (I don't know anything about plumbing really), or if they should use Perl of C++. They use what fits the problem, and don't fret endlessly about the tools, they just use those tools to get results.
The unspoken assertion in that point? The only basis for including "again" is the past work of the IE team themselves.
So if the plans are named after increasingly deadly things the crane is the least deadly? I guess I could see that.
As was the interview retrospective on fresh air this morning:
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-...
The releases complete a fix for a vulnerability in CGI-based setups (CVE-2012-2311). Note: mod_php and php-fpm are not vulnerable to this attack.

PHP 5.4.3 fixes a buffer overflow vulnerability in the apache_request_headers() (CVE-2012-2329). The PHP 5.3 series is not vulnerable to this issue.
Fascinating stuff. I guess the grey ecosystem is evolving on Twitter. A look at his followers - https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers - implies nearly all are fake just from their descriptions... not the '18 luv sex lol' fake but some sort of algorithmically generated description that seems legit until you compare it with all his other followers. Most are a riff on the following: "Thinker. Writer. Bacon buff. Typical music ninja. Extreme entrepreneur. Web geek. Social media fan. Devoted reader. Subtly charming troublemaker".

Anyone know anything more about this? Are there companies overtly selling followers?
Seems auto-generated. Looking through pastebin, this is what I found just now: http://pastebin.com/Rd1GjX9T

which leads to:

http://www.twitteraccountcreator.net/services/index.html

Edit: Why am I being down voted? The links above seem relevant to me.
I don't have in mind some kind of Soviet-style authoritarian state that would censor things and whatnot. Was just commenting on the more general issue of whether people would create things if it had no effect on their salary; I think many people would. I certainly would; actually I probably do more things as side projects than as "real" projects as it is. The incentive is that technology is interesting, and people using and commenting on my stuff is rewarding. How to actually set that up in practice, I have less confidence in. My own politics tend towards more Scandinavian style social-welfare state, rather than communism, because it seems much clearer how to make it work in practice (market economy, but with high taxes, high level of public services, and a strong social safety net).

Even within a strongly capitalist system like the US, being motivated by things other than money actually used to be closer to the norm for a large number of professionals. The current situation where people change companies a lot, get large bonuses, and have widely differential pay, is a pretty recent phenomenon. At Bell Labs, everyone got fairly similar salaries, despite the fact that some people were much more successful in research than others. Of course, you had to be at a certain level of success to get there at all, but once you were there, you just got the normal Bell Labs salary, with raises tied to seniority, old-corporate-style. Yet many people there excelled anyway, despite the fact that they could've sat around pulling the exact same salary without putting in much effort. Why? Because they were motivated by things other than money, I would guess.
In Real-time systems the two are synonymous. If you run-out of memory or fail to finish a vital calculation in a prescribed amount of time, your program is not correct. See Rate Monotonic Analysis for an example of verification (used in both formal and semi-formal situations) of time.
> I logged into a few of those accounts

Unethical and probably illegal. You just admitted to logging into someone else's account without their permission. At the very least you probably violated Twitter's terms.
Google's self-driving car snags first-ever license in Nevada
> Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up

I'm not sure that's something Microsoft can do. See for example the amount of XP deployments out there. Tell people that it's unsupported, no security updates, whatever. Enterprise customers and home customers who are terrified of change will not do it.

Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. Sure it would probably break a few ancient mission critical ActiveX apps, and my god the outcry would be immense and furious, but it would be better for everyone in the long run. Better for software developers who can stop coding around the foibles of ancient versions of software, better for Microsoft who can devote resources to the newest things, and better for the internet at large not being subject to Microsoft's old shitty browsers.

It's kind of like ripping off a band aid that gets stickier as time goes by. Pull the damn thing off already and get it over with.
How To Optimize Your Headline for Google and Humanity
1tb and backups are nice for $50, i wish them all the best to grow and drop price more
And I have used it in a previous project. I'm not questioning the quality of the driver.

My point is the inconsistency of the driver API vs the syntax used in the `mongo` utility. I don't know how many times I've looked at the MongoDB docs and then have to figure how to do the same thing with this driver.
When I started at my current job 9 months ago (with me, there are now two programmers in the team), there was no bug tracker or formal version control. We still regularly edit the code on live servers for some bug fixes. The first two were (barely) workable for a one person team and got fixed once the team grew, and the third is honestly the right approach for the kind of software we write. The user base for most of our products numbers in the dozens, and I'd rather get a prod bug fix out there as soon as possible rather than having to mess with commit;cd $prod_dir;pull -u or having to deal with the complexity of having too many code environments. I have not yet succeeded at getting a proper testing framework in place - too much hassle dealing with selenium and we don't yet have enough tests written to justify spending more effort. It's the initial capital investment that'll make it worth it, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Rather work on building an actual product that'll add direct value rather than just saving my ass.

These are all practices that in a larger team, or with a larger user base, or with higher requirements, would be untenable. But they work for us, for now.
conservative lot who are terrified that Microsoft will push something that will break their cheap-ass intranet

Due to...everybody say it with me...lack of standards support.
As jolhoeft remarked, sealing the e-reader in a plastic bag will do in a pinch. You can't (comfortably) do this with a bound volume. How exactly is this a point in favor of dead trees?

I worry less about water damage to my Kindle than I worry about water damage to physical books, even without any sort of protective covering. If I spill coffee on my Kindle, I simply wipe it off. If I spill coffee on a bound volume of paper, I consider it to be "ruined." My Kindle has demonstrated far greater fortitude than paper in weathering spills.
What law specifically are you talking about?

Federal unions have complained that their low union membership totals is due to the federal government being the largest ‘right-to-work’ employer. Right-to-work allows an employee to determine whether he or she wants to join a union. It also keeps employers from making union membership an employment prerequisite.

Via: http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/02/02/a-l...

See also:

However, the most important aspect to having a federal union membership is the collective bargaining agreement. This agreement is a contract between an employer and the union which terms of employment are negotiated and adhered to by the employer and the union. These terms can be about the hiring process, salary, working conditions employment termination, work hours or employee grievances. A union represents the employee to ensure that the employer does not violate the collective bargaining agreement.

There is a long list of things up for negotiation. It seems to me that very little is being forced on anyone.

and

Also, federal unions cannot compel a non-union member to become a union member; to pay union fees or make union membership an employment precondition. As a result, federal union membership numbers are relatively small in comparison to the overall size of the federal civilian workforce.

Again, no one is being forced into anything again. They can't even establish union only jobs.

via the same link.
The D/A diaries: A personal memoir of engineering heartache and triumph
How bad of a tab abuser are you? I can easily reach over 450 tabs. It helps that since Firefox 4, there is an option that doesn't load all tabs when you start Firefox up, but instead only loads the tabs as you switch to them. Tabs that haven't been loaded don't seem to have much footprint at all, so I tend to build up rather a lot of them.
I haven't done a formal analysis of the password text but by eyeball and guy these don't really appear to be real people.

The passwords are far too complex based on previous password dumps I've seen.
Swearing in a conversation is one thing; Not having the common sense not to publish something you took the time to sit and write & presumably reread and edit is another.

Guess what? There are lots and lots and lots of awesome programmers out there. We don't have to chose the immature ones to work with.
PHP 5.4.3 and 5.3.13 released
For the record, I think I wrote enough in the original post to show that I'm highly skeptical of startups that claim to have awesome work environments. That said, the community response has definitely been helpful for me to figure out some realistic expectations.
I was just thinking yesterday that their lowest $200/month dedicated plan seemed like such a leap from their 20GB $15/month shared plan.
"In all honesty the only reason I'm even here is because I want to see it (New York in particular) before it's gone. The US reminds me of the crumbling, dying days of the Roman Empire."

Thank god you got there in time! NYC TTYL is down to 5 years. Probably won't be there in 2020.

"But now the government seems to consist of self-interested parties who are happy to persecute citizens of every country including its own."

When has this not been the case in US history?

Sounds like you buy into the same "in the old days, things were better" pollyanna version of US history many of its own citizens do.
I am the author. We don't have comments on the blog, so feel free to chime in here.
You dont want to use a language where people build the most awesome thing they can think of? The people are all about building cool stuff but if you ask any of them what is bad you will hear them becoming very very critical.

Do you expect Rich or anybody else to write a blogpost that goes 'I wrote this library and here is why it sucks'. EVERYBODY writes blogpost on why what they themselfs build is good, I dont see any diffrence between clojure and other languages (or communitys).
> fraud, money laundering, regulations, and legal compliance

A billion times over. I'm very passionate about changing banking, but the reality is that every single 'new' model breaks down when you take into consideration the overhead created by compliance and fraud prevention.
NASA Space Telescope Sees the Light from an Alien Super-Earth
this isn't a list of passwords they gained by compromising Twitter. This is (most likely) a list of spam accounts and passwords. It doesn't look like anything was stolen from anywhere.
That's right. They are all Japanese things in increasing order of deadliness.
The Mayonnaise Jar and Two Cups of Coffee
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous "yes."

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things--your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions--and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.

The sand is everything else--the small stuff. "If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

"Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first--the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented. The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked.

It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend."
Already done, 2 years ago by Audi http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/21/autonomous-audi-tts-scale... Some competitive jockeying would be fun though!
Evil Clown hired for stalking, threats
That was, indeed, the entire point of the article.

What was the point of the article? I read it and came out of it completely perplexed. If I could summarize-

-Really terrible copies of something don't significantly impact the revenue of the something. OBVIOUSLY. Hence why Hollywood is going crazy trying to stop high quality copies (they want you nervously scurrowing in a corner of some dank cinema, fearful of the repercussions. Notice that there are no digital transfers or good quality rips available...piracy fail).

-Small numbers of people downloading something with wide appeal don't significantly impact the revenue of something. Hence why Hollywood needs to continue with lawsuit assaults and fear tactics and site takedowns to ensure that the number of people downloading remains small.

-Huge budget, highly anticipated, mega-marketed movies will do well regardless, so...um...

This piece could have been written by someone actively campaigning for draconian piracy laws. It literally promotes the anti-piracy campaigns.
We already have autonomous self driving solution to that here.

It uses all-electric vehicles and they even have a convoy mode where each car follows the lead vehicle closely to maximize the number of passengers and minimize wind resistance.

The guidance system is pretty primitive - it's all done in hardware with steel wheels on steel rails - but it makes it relatively difficult for it to go off-the-rails.
It's a fundamental flaw in defining the problem correctly. If you think banking is just shuffling bits around, then it looks like a trivial problem. But if you think it's a problem of allowing legitimate transactions while limiting fraud and fighting money laundering et al then it's a much thornier problem to tackle.
Do you have a source for that? From what I can tell its yearly releases.
>The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I believe a lot of old Ubuntu LTS releases have that). They'll be exactly the same.

You're forgetting quite how bad IE was. Having worked for a place that had to support many ancient browsers, getting IE8 working was three times as much work as FF3.2.

I hear the IE team have turned over a new leaf and are supporting all the standards, but I heard that about IE7 too.
Websocket Frame Inspection now in Chrome DevTools
It's a great hoax. On the edge of plausibility, with several related verifiable facts that make it seem allllmost possible. Toss that in with the I Want To Believe syndrome, and it's bound to spread.

Well done.
Not supporting it is fine. User agent sniffing is obnoxious.
Royal Canadian Mint's MintChip is the "Digital Currency of the Future"
I'm pretty sure I know exactly when the film companies will abandon the current business model for movies (theatres plus DVDs) and switch primarily to online pay-per-view-like scheme, with DVDs going out pretty much immediately and theatres surviving, but slowly fading.

It will happen as soon as the first studio realizes and takes advantage of the fact that with such a scheme you a) can charge for the same movie over and over again, and b) you can greatly improve the feedback on how popular which movies are, which could use an update/sequel and which should be left to die. This is something we in the Web business take for granted, but in the movies they are still too ingrained in the old ways that they don't see the benefits and effects of online distribution. But they will, mind you; not all at once, but as soon as it proves itself they'll jump on the bandwagon.
Most Dangerous Gamer
I guess that the writer is (understandably) pissed, especially at Paydirt using a torn IE icon image on their browser denial page.

https://paydirtapp.com/assets/ie_broken-7502950b14013927bbde...

You would be pissed too, if someone claimed your product that you worked hard on to work well is publicly called out to be broken when it is not and dropping support for it a user feature(indirectly suggesting others should do it too).
They need to fire the VP's and whatnot who think branding is the critical differentiator.

I don't care what you call it, as long as it works, well -- and sticks around.
AFAIK, Internet Explorer 10 user agent string starts with "Mozilla" ;-)
Maybe. I wouldn't really bet on the site becoming completely unusable in IE, but I suppose it's a remote possibility. Let's be generous to your argument and call it a 25% chance. At any rate, you're right that it would be irresponsible to say they support IE if they aren't willing to fix it in such a case.

But because there's a 25% chance that the site could break sometime in the future, they go out of their way to break it right now? That's what they're talking about, and it's orthogonal to the idea of choosing what configurations to support.

At the company where I work, we don't support people trying to eat the newspapers we put out, but we don't go out of our way to make the newspapers poisonous either.
Search as a service, awesome.
.NET / Mono dependency is somewhat of a dealbreaker here. .NET might be a fine technology to build an internal product on, like StackOvervlow, but for an open-source project it's a huge barrier to widespread adoption. Especially considering it's a proprietary technology from Microsoft.

The same could be said for Java. If it was up to me, my software stack would not include the JVM. Too bad there's no non-JVM alternative for Storm, and Clojure is so awesome.
Well, I know of one market where this conspirational explanation is exactly what happened.

Commodity and future exchanges existed, one way or the other, for 5000 years. The modern commodity exchange traces its history at least to 15th century Europe, if not earlier.

If you need to change currency, you go to the bank. You would expect a currency exchange, where buyers and sellers meet to exchange currency, would have existed given that it's much simpler than a stock exchange / commodity exchange to run.

Well, bank stifled the money supply to any such attempt, until they couldn't in the early '2000s -- but they invested and bought the emerging players, to make sure that their lucrative money changing business is not harmed.

Look up who owns currenex, hotspot, EBS, and the other currency exchanges. Also, look up the rules - they favor the banks above other players.
From the looks of it, this is talking about woothemes.com.
"this road is congested, use alternate route"

I guess someone will hack the software in his car to send a "road blocked" signal, so that he can drag race a friend on fifth avenue at rush hour. I also expect that it will become illegal to hack one's own car soon after that.
There is a crucial difference also between what you are responding to, and what I said. I am not necessarily proposing the user choice should be followed or is even necessary. It is just a possible variation on the theme.

If you get in a cab and say "take me to $x" it is the cab driver's responsibility to take the best route. However, since metering is distance AND time based, there is a lot of wiggle room in what best route means. It is always an optimisation problem, and relies on imperfect data of the future conditions of the route. Further, in most american cities, there are many routes that are no more or less direct, as a result of the grid system. Therefore the car taking you on the route that goes past paid displays is not kidnapping. It is choosing 1 of n equivalent routes - the one most profitable for the operator, while still meeting the criteria of the user.

Further, even with advanced traffic and condition understanding available to a robotic car, the ability to choose optimal path will probably improve significantly, even when the small fudge factor to go past advertising is accounted for. So what if it is 30s less optimal on your ride to go past the advertised place, when the human cabbie would have chosen a route adding 5 minutes?
I don't think "douchebag" has a sexist connotation in most people's mental lexicon.
I contacted the curator at the Lincoln Museum by email. His response:
"And now Opera is pissed at the usage of browser specific extensions and is adding support for -moz and -webkit which is sure to further mess up things."

I know Mozilla has been discussing this as well, to have a chance to compete in mobile. Do you have a link to Opera's statement about it?