skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This shit happens at my job and leaves me feeling depressed and at times questioning my own skills because I know and my bosses know that on my part, I just had to make a tiny, tiny change. But when you have a dozen such experiences, I feel like something is wrong with me because when the dust settles, this was a one line code change that took me a week to push to production. It also makes my bosses question my estimates. Of course, when I goto the other extreme and give a ridiculous estimate, that also pisses them off and makes them feel like I don't really know what I am talking about. Saying "I cannot provide an estimate" also does not cut it for the boss.

In the longterm, I can feel this killing a part of me. I have always been a start-up guy working for myself. Since getting my first full-time job, stuff that I would expect the start-up me to take an hour to do ends up taking days and weeks, even. I am aware of the (mostly legitimate) excuses to not take too much self-blame but at the end, it still feels shitty because I know, the start-up me knows, this should not have been a one week project.

Ah the perils of having a non-tech boss and coworkers and being the only tech guy. Reading stories like I experience at work is comforting in an odd way.

Here's how my typical story goes...

Boss: So can we make this little analytics thing your #1 priority for tomorrow?

Me: Yeah, as long as we don't have anything else for projectX(my #1 priority)

Boss: Well, do you?

Me: Not right now. But it can pop up any minute Jenny decides she needs something done.

--NEXT DAY--

Jenny: Hey this isn't working in ProjectX. Could you look into it?

Me: Sure. there goes an hour

Boss: I know you're busy but this is very urgent. Can we grab you for few mins for this meeting?

Me: Sure goes another 30 mins

...

Jenny: That thing you fixed. Can we undo it and push to production because I realized blabla?

Me: thinking wtf? Ok sure.

...

Amanda: Hey can you check if these 2 users signed up from same IP?

Me: You can check that in admin

Amanda: Where?

Me: The admin panel you emailed me info to when I joined the company..

Amanda: Oh right. Can you fwd me the email I sent, I can't find it. My gmail's not working right.

Me: Ok.

...

Before I know it, I have spent every day of my job troubleshooting shit to never really get in the flow of doing my own project assigned by my boss.

Boss(after a month): How's that project coming? I know you said it's a one day thing.

Me: Yeah but the next day we changed the specs in the meeting. Also, projectX is getting a huge rehaul.

Boss: But still...you said it's a week after that

Me: Yeah assuming I didn't have work for projectX

Boss: But you'll always have work for projectX

Me: Yeah that's exactly what I told you too

Boss: So where does this leave us? Can you finish it in next week? I don't think there is much work for projectX

Me: But...

Boss: You're the startup guy. We want you to push us to release stuff quick. When you give us deadlines and are so off, it makes us lose faith.

Leave work annoyed, put in a quiet weekend with no coworkers around and wrap up said project
Successful sharing sites are highly democratized, which means in some sense catering to the lowest common denominator.

Put another way, you need volume to gain any traction.

Reddit has a lot of crap because it has a lot of volume: but as a sharing site it has mechanisms to let people en masse filter the crap for the gems. Such as they are, in a place like /r/adviceanimals.

HN has a fair amount of quality because it caters to a very specific crowd and it self-moderates much more mercilessly than reddit; but it still has to deal with the problem of crap.

Upvotes are highly visible. Stories fail. Anyone can say anything. The crap and the site's system for reacting to it makes the process of content gaining traction _demonstrably valid_ to a visitor to the site.

If none of this is immediately obvious in your sharing site, I don't expect it to gain the critical mass it needs for success.

(You might think TED is a counter-example in the Wonderful Videos domain, but the obvious difference is that TED is a content provider, not a sharing site.)

Edit: And you've got the social bubble virus, in that your 'social network' requires people to once again set a glorified address book in order to really leverage your resources. You're too specific for people to want to spend a lot of time cultivating!

Was it really that long ago that "Build a social network for {{x}}" was regarded as a bad idea?
Isn't it up to "me" to decide what is partisan and what is or is not convincing?

Heh, I suppose the devil's "quality" control argument slides right in.
> Or you could just hire responsible people and ask them to use their judgement

If you know a fail-safe way of only hiring responsible people who always have good judgment... then I hope you're being paid millions of dollars in consulting fees, because nobody has really figured that one out in a general way yet!! :)

Also, those people tend to be expensive... sometimes it's far more cost-efficient to hire less-perfect people, but put rules in place to minimize any catastrophic damage they can create, at the expense of efficiency.
Respectfully, I think you are making an unfounded assumption about why consumers aren't buying things. I heard a news story just the other day about U.S. family savings being lower than recent history. This isn't it, but here's a similar article: http://www.standard.net/stories/2012/05/17/our-view-recessio...

i.e., consumers aren't "choosing" not to buy because they're saving the money instead, they're "choosing" not to buy because they don't have any money.

This is exactly why it is so, so important to foster a healthy middle class: they love to spend money. Give them $10,000, and they'll spend $9,000 of it.

We do not right now have a healthy middle class, and I'm super interested in whether or not our economy will recover without addressing that.
If you want a change request processed quickly, you should get someone in upper management to help you herd it through the system. Literally, take your VIP with you, and walk up to the desk of each admin in turn. Say, "Don't wait for Tuesday's meeting--approve this right now." And then walk to the next admin and do it again. And then walk to the test guys and say, "Drop everything and test this now." And then gather up the six essential stakeholders for the CCB meeting and say, "Impromptu CCB meeting, right now in the hallway instead of next month. Approve this."

I've gotten software changes that usually take two months to trickle through the system through in a day. You have to spend all day doing it, though, and so does your VIP.

But if it's really that important . . .
Ruby 1.9 lands NaCl support, can run in Chrome
UK government staff caught snooping on citizen data
I dunno... the odd bug fix has the potential to really screw things up, when the person fixing it isn't the person who wrote it originally, or it's been months since then.
the difference between config and code is largely illusionary, so PHB is right: both can break things and need to be tested.
The Winning Startups from Life 3.0 – Love, Sex, and Tech
Great ideas. Love the honeypot.

One more thought: once you discover a badguy, if you signal this immediately you are just speeding up his learning cycle. Don't just cut him off, tarpit him (gradually slow down responses) or return bad data.
I agree in theory, but it's a slippery slope...

If you make one exception, then a month later, you discover that nobody is ever bringing old code up-to-date ever.
This is a great overview, this will now be the default resource I'll point people to who are new to git and want to learn.
I agree with you: Spivak pronouns are definitely easy to understand. I just see getting more people to use them as key to having a standard third person gender neutral pronoun in English.
Moving parameters somewhere else doesn't change the problem at all, only moves it to a different file. Altering a parameter that effects a large chunk of the system still needs the exact same amount of testing to be done, all you save is a compile.

For what it's worth. I'd also say that anyone who thinks that hardcoded parameters are always bad, probably hasn't worked on anything large or complicated enough yet. There are plenty of cases where you've got parameters which could theoretically change, but the likelihood is small enough that it doesn't make much sense to move it out to somewhere else - not coincidently, these tend also to be parameters which effect large chunks of the system and should never be changed without a solid business reason and a full QA cycle.
Got my app out of the door with RubyMotion in just 2-3 hours
These guys have figured out how to create a tremendous business out of friggin notebook paper.

Can you explain the appeal here? All I see is the Beanie Babies concept for paper nerds, but am I missing something?
Frankly, I really liked RubyMotion. It doesn't save you from necessity to learn Cocoa touch, but it just makes the experience much more interesting with Ruby. The whole process was very very simple.
tl;dr - The guy really likes MixPanel.
I work with embedded linux on ARM. Check out EmDebian as an example of a full linux distro for ARM.
Yeah -- again, totally our fault for having an out-of-date site. We don't even use Python as our main language anymore (doh!). We're doing some really cool stuff with RoR (and other frameworks) and building a majorly Service Oriented Architecture internally ;)
It will fertilize the valley and help more tangible start-ups spring up.
If all those new millionaires don't move to foreign countries to avoid paying taxes, that is.
Thanks for the feedback. I'd read that writeup on the website before, but in my head, I think I pronounced "elite" as "l33t." ;-)

Maybe "motivated" would've been a better word. We all love technology, and I think we wanted to get that across in one way or another.
We tried this with https://twodeg.net.

TwoDeg (for Two Degrees) is a proof-of-concept (just for fun, not profit) social network that allows you to create ad-hoc channels (akin to circles) to communicate and share within smaller groups. We took the private-by-default approach as well. Moreover, we make the reach/extent of every post clear to the user by listing the people who can see it.

We used a combination of symmetric key and public/private key encryption in JavaScript to encrypt the information in the browser (I know the whole argument about how insecure that is - this is just proof-of-concept). Only you or your friends (or the people you share a post with) have the keys to decrypt the information. We, as the service provider, just move around encrypted data.

We don't have data export functionality, but that is something we could easily add.
Following the rules to the letter also produces bad outcomes.

The issue is not that using judgement is perfect it's that using judgement usually produces a better outcome than blindly following a rule.

Yes, rules should be put in place for the most extraordinary circumstances or places that good judgement is known to fail. The rule has to prevent the bad thing to be effective while also not creating something worse.
Let's see, Eduardo invested $30,000 in Facebook? And he's perceived (so he can borrow) to be worth over three billion now. So he can afford to invest $30,000 again about 100,000 times. Maybe he'll hit again. I'm not sure his investment is something to brag about though. He doesn't look good right now. Many folks might avoid his investments because they think he is disrespectful and immoral.
> "18 SpaceX's, 2.3 Twitters"

This industry is so messed up...
Coffee linked to lower risk of death
Sure. That's the point behind refactoring, it makes changes to existing code flow more smoothly. But the case here doesn't fit that at all: the change as described was a change in configuration (that just happened to be stored in a code variable), yet it was being reviewed as if it were a new feature being added through development. That's the "cargo cult" part -- refactoring in the course of development is good. Rules demanding refactoring are bad, because they hit false positives (in this case, a high priority configuration change).
No, this is how creativity is shut out after one too many incidents where she wandered in, decided to be helpful and, due to imperfect understanding how things work, caused massive loss of productivity, money and reputations.
Never was a real fan of Twitter, BUT since they've opened up all their cool open source projects, I'm their biggest fan!
I would argue that in this case where it was designed like that from the beginning IE detailed as how the system works then there should be no issues.

I did forget to mention it did go though a round of testing, which took less then 5 minutes to be verified as correct. It literally was 6 days of process wrapped around 10 minutes work.
I guess I was not clear in my comment. In no way, I was implying that India is better than USA. My surprise stemmed from the fact that based on my current experience, it seems odd that it was barely 50 years ago that race discrimination was rampant. I would have thought that those things would have put behind 100 years ago for USA to be where it is.
These "poor" people have earned their cash-out time. Hopefully, it triggers a new VC monsoon in Silicon Valley so that newcomers can finally afford those > $1M houses. :)
Profile – YouTube
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In many cases it's trivial to rollback. Why would you fight change if changing the change is as easy?

In this case process overrode rationale; and was cheered as a result on its own.
Look on the bright side: if large companies weren't this screwed up, small businesses and startups wouldn't have a chance.
Nick Hanauer - That TED Talk about wealth and jobs
LOL, glad to realize not everyone sees golden tulip bulbs.
No, creativity is a process to be leveraged and managed like any other. This story is an account of life at a company where the process simply does not support the needs of the business. There are no excuses.
Exactly what I was thinking. Heck, I've scraped using fake AJAX requests even when a legitimate API was available, simply because opening up firebug was faster than reading the API docs.
Brilliant move by both parties to make this talk more popular than if it had just been released normally.

Yes his presentation is not up to snuff as the typical TED speaker. So a quiet YouTube release and shitstorm of trumped up controversy work out great for getting the message out:

"In a consumption driven economy, the middle class is more important than the elite class."
Facebook IPO belies perils of collegiate inventors
Thanks for transcribing and commenting. Insightful.
Savings means there will be money available in the future. Money available for a small business loan. Money available to buy shares in a company, freeing up capital from the person you bought the shares from.

While your statement is not entirely false, it paints a misleading picture of how the economy at large works. Outside of venture capitalism, credit for running businesses tends to be provided by banks, and banks just create the necessary money out of thin air whenever they find a creditworthy borrower, i.e. a business with a solid business plan and with a reasonable expectation of sufficient demand for its product.

When the overall savings rate rises, it becomes less reasonable to expect sufficient demand for products, which means less creditworthy borrowers, which means less loans given out by banks.

Occasionally imbalances (e.g. too much capital tied up in housing) cause a massive recession

Not quite. The recession isn't caused by capital being tied up in housing. "Putting capital into housing" is just economics-jargon for spending money on houses. And that tends to create jobs in the construction sector.

The recession comes about when private households can no longer use their houses as collateral for loans to fuel demand because the value of those houses is reassessed.

Creative Destruction: it's the primary reason why we're all not planting seeds or hunting right now.

I think you'll find that the primary reason why most of us are not doing these things is actually creative construction. The destruction part is only really beneficial when one gets stuck in a local optimum.
Building A Great Work Culture (Inspire, Empower And Collaborate)
Respectfully, I think you are making an unfounded assumption about why consumers aren't buying things. I heard a news story just the other day about U.S. family savings being lower than recent history. This isn't it, but here's a similar article: http://www.standard.net/stories/2012/05/17/our-view-recessio....

i.e., consumers aren't "choosing" not to buy because they're saving the money instead, they're "choosing" not to buy because they don't have any money.

I don't see how your argument is necessarily justified by article. It seems entirely possible that families are trying to put food on the table, whenever possible, rather than save for the future.

This is exactly why it is so, so important to foster a healthy middle class: they love to spend money. Give them $10,000, and they'll spend $9,000 of it.

We do not right now have a healthy middle class, and I'm super interested in whether or not our economy will recover without addressing that.

How do you know if the middle class is healthy? Can you define middle class?
Yes, for an emergency change (change or there will be layoffs), this is a rather dangerous policy. The goal of any emergency fix should be "do as little as possible to solve problem".

I get the feeling that too many people in the chain did not treat this as an emergency. It seems very business as usual. When a company is talking layoffs, it is an emergency.
Fuck. That. Shit. Seriously, I'm not exactly thrilled in my current startup role but stories like this give me a new appreciation for it.
Beyond liking certain person or not (it doesn't matter to me if Ed is really spending all days in bed with asian models sniffing coke from their breasts and drinking champagne - guess that's good for him!), I don't get your point. Its not like he invested $30k last night in FB.

When he was putting money into Facebook, it was unknown and had zero or minimal traction! Its like putting $50k today in JoeShmoeMobile App. Yes, he is worth whatever he's getting out, because this money _made_ Facebook what it is today, whether you like it or not, whether $0.03MM != $3,000MM or not.

edit: I am sure there are people that will avoid doing business with him. But I also think having $3B buys you plenty time of other important or successful or brilliant people that would die to work for you.
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Not sure we were bragging, but feel free to prove me wrong :P But that's a lot of entrepreneurs whose dreams he can help make a reality now!
Android Income Report #8 - Nine Ad Networks, Over $200/day
Can someone explain what a reputation system is?
> a pretty ridiculous concept

That is an opinion. One that I don't agree with. Companies spend a lot of time and money collecting/refining/cleansing/etc the data so they can present it to their users. It is not ridiculous for them to want to keep some script from capturing it all in one swoop. A lot of sites have clauses in the TOS that prohibit mechanized data harvesting. But there are a lot people that place zero value on the work others do to create something so they wait for someone else to do the work and then just come in and share it. If you sit at your school desk and wait for the girl next to you to finish her exam and then you lean over and share her answers... is that not cheating? Sure she doesn't own the data she just wrote down. And most likely it was all in the course book anyway. And of course you aren't stealing her answers since you don't effect her ability to turn in her exam. But there is the total lack of respect for the time and effort that other people put into doing the work. This everything is free and share ALL the things attitude is not sustainable.
> We value our health

cardio-vascular disease, number one killer in america, is largely preventable through diet and lifestyle. being overweight (actually even high-"normal") is also significantly correlated with cancer incidence. i don't have the type 2 diabetes figures offhand, but they aren't pretty.

healthcare in america is very expensive. fat, inactive americans are a part of the reason why it is expensive (diabetics cost on average $6.6k more a year than non-diabetics..)

I agree that employer-sponsored healthcare is dumb, a relic from the difficulty in recruiting people after the war.
Our startup, bloc (www.bloc.io), pivoted four times in 8 months, and we're way happy with where we are now.

The vision, or core motivation, never did change though. There's a common thread through all four pivots. In fact the current product looks most similar to the very first. But it's different in important ways that weren't known during pivot 1.

Here's the full story http://jmtame.posterous.com/this-is-how-you-actually-teach-p...
This is an unfortunate reality. People really do not care about all the work you have just the things they want done.
The next great technology platform: The bicycle
As pointed out by others, many of the suggestions here break core fundamentals of the web, and are generally horrible ideas. It's unsurprising to see suggestions in the comments such as, "add a CAPTCHA", which is nearly as bad of an idea. If you're willing to write bad code and damage user experience to prevent people from retrieving publicly accessible data, perhaps you should rethink your operation a bit.
نتيجة الشهادة الابتدائية 2011 بالاسم
The dev community should not be at the mercy of incompetent sysadmins. Evolve or die. Such is life. Such is business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system :)
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I might have found this argument (for "not being spiteful" or "it's fairness, not just political gain") compelling, if Schumer and the media was having the same feat over the double-irish sandwich practiced for years by the like of Apple, Google and Microsoft (with some "nevada sauce") -- where the cumulative effect on the bottom tax line over the last few years is about a hundred to a thousand times larger than the saverin case (we're talking 60M right now vs. 20-60B).

Furthermore, saverin is actually giving something up, whereas those corporates are paying 2-3% and giving up nothing.

As rprasad mentions, the laws are already on the books to deal with Saverin-like cases; the IRS has the tools to go after him, with no new laws needed. They were better equipped before 2008 (10 years after denouncing citizenship, capital gains still applied), but congress changed that to just an exit tax.

I see nothing wrong in what saverin is doing. I see everything wrong with what Schumer is doing.
Is there a way to directly message a person I have in a circle without creating a circle with only 1 person in it? This would be a very useful feature I guess.
ICS Still Coming To Galaxy S2 Devices In US
> Will open trading at 110 P/E ratio, Google's currently at 18.8.

Khan Academy on P/E Ratios (great joke 4 minutes in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-rko8jgJ9o
2038 is going to be a fun one, isn't it? :)
This quote is appropriate here:

Skilled people without a process will always find a way to get things done. Skill begets process. But process doesn’t beget skill. Following a recipe won’t make you a great chef – it just means you can make a competent bolognese. Great chefs don’t need cookery books. They know their medium and their ingredients so well that they can find excellent combinations as they go. The recipe becomes a natural by-product of their work.

From http://the-pastry-box-project.net/cennydd-bowles/2012-march-...
> Was it really that long ago that "Build a social network for {{x}}" was regarded as a bad idea?

I understood everything else you said, but I'm unsure what you mean by this. Could you explain?