skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable.

I'm an owner / CTO of a consultancy, and this point always frustrates me. We are only 12 or so employees, and we're all very comfortable with one another (we'll have game nights at the office, watch the GSL, etc). Still, when me and my partner have a 1:1 or talk to the employees, about 80% of them will not tell us their concerns or things they need.

It's a huge problem for us - we are very interested in spending our money on benefits, etc. that people care about, rather than just guessing, but it's virtually impossible to do this. Story time:

We had a designer leave recently (I <3'd him, awesome guy) to go work somewhere else, and a huge part of his decision, in the exit interview, was about a difference in health insurance between the two places. We had met with him 2 months prior EXPLICITLY to ask him (and other employees) if they wanted us to pursue any changes to health insurance, and were universally told that our existing benefits in that regard were fine.

We have since modified our health insurance to be just fantastically good, because apparently this was a concern (and we've had to forego a few other things in order to be able to afford it). But the point is, this is a guy that I was friends with, and he just would not tell me what weight to give the health insurance benefit vector.

It's maddening because I'm a very data-driven guy, and for whatever reason I can't get good data on employee concerns to save my life. Does anyone have any pointers here?
> without signing any license agreement with Microsoft

Clickwrap is a blurry legal line, but you more or less are "signing" a license agreement by installing Windows.

And nonetheless the "OEM edition" that you get is potentially very different (license-wise) from the custom-negotiated contract that Dell is bound to when they order two hundred thousand licenses from Microsoft.
A couple of things to check out:

http://clb.demon.fi/files/RectangleBinPack.pdf

https://github.com/Lalaland/PixelPacker/blob/master/src/pak/...

The latter is an implementation of "MaxRects" which is highly regarded as the best algorithm for packing sprites.
"Money goes where it’s wanted, and stays where it’s well treated." The same goes for developers.

There are a lot of clueless companies and managers out there.

My wife interviewed with a company that was trying to hire a developer to commercialize their in house printing software. The hiring manager was surprised that developers aren't interested in working in a place with NO vacation the first year. He was also surprised that she was used to coming in and leaving at something besides 8:30 to 5:00 or (gasp!) leave the building for lunch at her previous job. I don't think the manager was a bad guy, just clueless.

The manager who calls his reports "whining..b" and would make them less productive to save a few bucks probably won't realize why he has a high churn rate or why candidates give his company a pass after the interview.
I have some, but not a huge amount of empathy because I came out of school right during a similarly depressed time for finding work. I pounded the pavement looking for jobs with similar results.

Clearly this guy feels that he is entitled to be at an executive level even though he hasn't built up much real experience. He doesnt want to pay any dues and scoffs at a $36k/year job. I lived in Chicago working for $18k/year making photocopies with an evening job cleaning offices, barely able to pay my bills. I did that for 4 years and was able to use that experience to get a decent job. (probably could have moved up sooner had I been looking during those years) A few more years at the new gig and I made a more significant bump.

I would have killed for a $36k first job . (even with inflation it's much better than my 18k gig - I'm not that old!)

I'm doing very well now but it was a lot of work to build up the career that I now have. I probably could have moved up faster, but even still I needed that first crappy job to start the ball rolling. Ironically I'm starting to think about being unemployable due too being old, since tech can tend to be a young persons field. Maybe I'm just too old to relate, but things were not any easier back then.
a short summary?! i could learn python in the time it takes to read this.

It takes a lot of work, study, reading, patience, and diverse skill-sets to become a successful programmer.
I chose to major in CS partly because of great job prospects. Had that not been the case I might have been a Physics and Philosophy major. My friends probably are an unusual sample of CS and Physics majors. However, they made choices which put them into this position. There might be some systemic privilege on their part, but they also helped themselves.

Your last paragraph resonates with me. I cannot truly believe that there's a huge glut of people with not very practical majors. How could we let this happen? Where were those folks parents, teachers, and friends? Why didn't they point out that success is slim? If they did, why did this glut of individuals stubbornly pursue their desires?

What I'm trying to not say is that this individual sounds a bit silver-spooned. If I couldn't get a job in my chosen field, I'd move on. Pop "Fortunate Son" in the tape player and head to wherever the jobs are. There's apparently an oil boom in North Dakota. There's always need for English teachers around the world. That sounds like an adventure.

I don't want to come across as incompassionate. Society ought to direct people towards success and help them when they're down, but I can't help but feel this guy is hurting himself. We don't have all the data, I hope he's an outlier.
So are they running Windows boxes but it's nowhere to be seen? Only AIX is mentioned.
Facebook IPO coverage (by a news ticker)
I don't think that's right. Microsoft has partnerships with manufacturers, and they give them early access to new versions of Windows so they beta test, they sign patent deals, and so on. In the Microsoft-manufacturer relationship, Microsoft is definitely on higher ground and can dictate them some terms.
Doesn't everyone by definition have the same risk of death? (spoiler alert: it's gonna happen).

Shouldn't this read "lower risk of health-related death causes?" or something similar.

Seems like a link-bait type headline with a lot of sketchy information to be considered a scientific study.

Also, correlation /=/ causation.

Although we cannot infer a causal relationship between coffee drinking and lower risk of death, we believe these results do provide some reassurance that coffee drinking does not adversely affect health."
It shouldn't take a day, just re-install the OS from scratch - its the best way. In fact many companies do this in the form of restoring HD images to make the process even faster.
Well, believe it or nat, Apple is the underdog in PC market :)
is it right that they are opening at 11 et?
I live in a small market served by one of the papers involved. Their website is the hub for local and state news in a way that simply doesn't compare with a large market.

One of the changes to the newspaper business is that I can get national and international stories from the NYT or Post at no cost and at my leisure. Big story reporting has become commoditized.

What has value is news that I can't get anywhere else and which is likely to effect people I know personally - like school board decisions or changes to the speed limit on local road or the city council considering the milage rate.

e.g: http://www2.oanow.com/news/2012/may/17/schools-working-new-c...
Make a dropbox sharing app.. instead of adding email via admin, share a folder between accounts with a bump... that would be cool :)
Why not reinstall windows? Won't that have the same effect?
I read this and think back...

The only ones who got dual monitors were management and HR. One of our developers wanted two monitors - he was told to go buy them himself, so he did.

Whiteboard? More frequent is post-it notes.

Current development equipment - Was doing kernel development in 2003 on Pentium 75s.
I'll save you the time:

With media:

1. Learn what journalists would be interested in your company (and why).

2. Send them regular updates about what your company is doing (in press release form or, better, as a personal email).

3. Be honest with them. Talk from the heart. Avoid exaggeration and "marketing language".

With customers:

1. Always say you're sorry when you screw up or when they're unhappy (for any reason).

2. Communicate as often as you can via all relevant channels...

3. ... while avoiding spam and "marketing language".

If you ever get big enough that journalists are coming to you, hire a specialist.
Very well written.
I have a similar feeling. We strive for happiness in future but sometimes tend to overlook our current life and how happy things are.It just depends on how you look at it. Lately, I have been wondering what is missing in my life even though I have a great wife, great family, great friends, healthy life (so far:)). I guess it is just a startup itch that I am looking to scratch. Other than that, I feel pretty good.
the real source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/apple-said-to-plan-...
I'm saying at most. Maybe you're new to this and need to read up on what partitions are and how the Windows installation process works? Maybe you need to do some reading to arrive at the conclusion that you need to re-install Windows in the first place!
How about C - there's no significant customer demand for pre-installed Linux machines. Yes, lots of you put Linux on boxes, but there are several different distributions.

People buy computers to run software. Until recently, that meant Windows for most people. For laptops and desktops, that will probably never mean linux.

As to tablets, it's android or ios.
MS would still be free to act as its own hardware dealer, just like Apple.
You've just made up your own definition of refactoring or worse taken it from wikipedia which is also just made up.

Refactoring all really started with Martin Fowler's book way, way, way before the IDE driven refactors were available and there are plenty of things that he describes in there that have no chance of being automated.

Where on earth you picked up your 'traditional definition' I do not know. I recommend reading Martin Fowler's book.
Travel across the Roman Empire in real time with ORBIS
I think the thing that concerns me most about the authors post is the implicit assumption that selling ones labor to a company and being managed, coddled and generally told what to do and how to do it is the only way to make money.

It seems like the author has never thought of creating their own job. It's pretty humbling to walk around the neighborhood offering to cut lawns or paint fences and building up business that way but sometimes it needs to be done. The author must have _some_ skill worth selling after all those years of schooling. Even if they make less than minimum wage initially they can do something.

The fact that the author isn't running their own business isn't what concerns me, it's that it's something that doesn't seem to have even been considered. To me, this seems like a societal problem as well as one for the author.

In terms of advice, I can only offer my own experience: I quit my first job at 18 (worked full time through college) to work for less than minimum wage at an ISP because I valued experience.

I moved. Twice. First to London, then to the US. If you are in a town where you have seriously gone after all the jobs you can and still can't get anywhere, it's time to look at places that ARE hiring and move there.

I was willing to make atrociously bad amounts of money (I was living in a country with no minimum wage law) for five years in order to get the experience and proof of ability to execute that I needed to move and get a "real" job.

In my mind, the 29 year old author's only real hope is to create their own job - they have nothing to show an employer that they have any kind of tenacity or desire to work in a specific industry and so they will need to get their experience elsewhere.

This sucks for the author. I get that but I see no other feasible way for them to explain why they are 29 with no relevant work experience in their field. More generally, this sucks for society - we seem to have convinced a large amount of the population that the only way to make money is to sell ones labor to someone else and have that person tell you what to do and how to do it. In short: there is a dearth of autonomy in the world.
So Microsoft are charging $99 just to tell you enter at the command prompt:

format c:

:)
Can Facebook's new millionaires save the world?
Would you burst into someone's office and start telling them all the problems you expect them to fix without even saying hi?
"who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents."

I agree, also except for mine, who was for all intents an purposes an immigrant.

This was a really great post. Look to the people who grew up with nothing to learn that it really isn't that bad to have "nothing". (I wish I could make those quotes even more sarcastic).
Part 2 of the interview:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/05/rothfuss-reread-pat-answers...
Survey: Search Users Perceive Advertising Incorrectly
What would you do with 1 million emails?
Other uses:

Quantum simulations. Sampling from solutions to linear equations. Shit we haven't discovered yet (you be shocked at how little research there is in quantum computing looking for new algorithms)
This is bullshit, the "preorders" are from carriers not actual customers. Samsung could sell zero units and still claim to have 9 million preorders.

> Samsung Electronics Co has received some 9 million pre-orders for its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone from more than 100 global carriers, the Korea Economic Daily reported on Friday.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-samsung-idUSBRE...

The number of "news" sites just blindly reposting this as if it were actual customers is frankly disgusting.
Probably wont see the first trade for a couple more hours
Doesn't everyone by definition have the same risk of death?

It's risk of death over a specified period:

"The participants were followed until the date they died or Dec. 31, 2008, whichever came first."
I whole-heartedly agree! What people don't see past the 100 resumes a week is the underlying desperation that has engulfed this person. He's nearly 30, isn't married, doesn't own a reasonably sized home, doesn't have a family of his own and doesn't command the wage that he had expected to earn by that age. He has lived a majority of his life with (what he thought were reasonable) expectations. However, he has hit the cold, stark nature of reality.

People do strange things when times get desperate. I'm saddened that some people here can't seem understand this.
This is a myth, introduced by an uninformed Google intern in a blog post. Hint; start Skype on an iPhone, switch to another app, and scroll a list. Note how your Skype call continues.
Apparently it starts trading at 11:00 EST.
Steve Jobs Wanted to Design an Apple iCar
This phone is one of the most exciting things happening, at least for me: It has a barometer! Joining the ranks of the Galaxy Nexus, Note, and Moto Xoom. Except, I think the SGS3 is way more popular than any of those others (by a couple orders of magnitude in some cases).

I'm the developer of pressureNET, an open source Android project to build a live, global barometer network. The project has seen solid growth, but not on the scale that would allow for groundbreaking weather prediction. We get about 17,000 measurements per day, but I think I need something like 1,000,000.

Does anyone have ideas that could help me with marketing and growing the network with the release of this phone? I've been posting to Reddit, XDA, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, but I worry about spamming them and I think I have saturated my audience there.

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I'm anxious about missing out on all these new barometer users.
You don't need chairs either, or central heating or even colour screens for that matter.
Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others.
I've also heard that KISSMetrics is more about identifying people rather than data points, so it makes retention and user-based events easier, but it seems mixpanel does that too, so I'm not sure.
It'll probably be an hour or two, actually, it didn't start trading when the market opened. I'm not sure who decides when to pull the trigger, but apparently recent NASDAQ IPOs have been starting around 11:00 eastern, give or take a bit.

Edit: CNN indicates the company decides in consultation with NASDAQ: http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/17/technology/facebook-ipo-trad...
It is also a way to essentially put your money where your mouth is, aligning interests and ensuring that you really believe what you're saying. Pushing out specs is a little too easy to simply delay others from doing anything.

Further implementations can be credibly compared and considered. Many "HTML 5" features came via Google Gears, and would have taken a decade the traditional paper route.
Forget PR, and focus on marketing.

Learn to market well, and the PR will write itself.

Any book by Dan Kennedy is good.
Please note that FB doesn't begin trading until 11AM EST[1].

[1] http://money.msn.com/technology-investment/article.aspx?post...
How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button
I especially liked chapters 1-3 which are very good introduction to MapReduce, those chapters focus on non-text processing related aspects of MapReduce. Also it is very short, and free.
The 2004 DOJ-Microsoft consent decree explicitly prohibits Microsoft from tying Windows licenses to the OEM's ability to install other software. So Microsoft is not within its rights to do that.
Facebook Sued for $15 Billion in Suit Over User Tracking
And still no websockets. Makes me sad inside :(
A ton of films get trashed by critics and imdb then go on to be commercially successful.

That doesn't mean it was a good piece of film. More likely it was accessible everywhere and well marketed.
You mean, they do that because MS used its sheer monopoly power to keep an Ex-Apple (Jean Louis Gasse) competitor out of the business?

Sounds familiar.
Only if you earn less than (52*495) $25,740 per year, and that's not considering vacation.
17:00 Brussels time
Friday Infographics: A look at their SEO Value
It's a term coined out of frustration. Having unboxed new PC's that were slower in operation than PC's from a previous generation I've felt and understand the emotional aspects of it.
Both ARM CPU's and GPU's seem to jump 2x in performance every year, so at least so far, they've been moving faster than Moore's Law.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the Exynos 5250 chip, with a dual core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 CPU and a Mali T-604 GPU (new Midgard architecture) that's supposed to be 4x faster than Mali400 (the original in GS2), so probably 2x or faster than the current overclocked Mali400 in GS3 (will also support OpenCL). This chip should appear in some tablets and phones, and maybe even a Chromebook by the end of the year.

I'm also looking forward to them pairing Cortex A15 with the ultra-low-power Cortex A7, maybe in a 2+2 core configuration. Samsung mentioned that they might be ready with Cortex A7 by the end of the year, but in general we can expect Cortex A7 to arrive next year.

I would prefer this over something like a pure Cortex A15 quad core chip, which should also appear next year. Starting with 2014 we should see the successor of Cortex A15 in dual core version, based on the 64 bit ARMv8 architecture.
It’s planned for 1.3.x: http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/milestone/1.3
It's weird how I posted the exact same thing with a slightly different URL two hours ago and it went unnoticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991295

edit: Not complaining. It seemed like an interesting accidental split test.
I worked tech support last year and yes, there is still a small percentage of people that use Notes in their daily work. I have no idea how they did not get an internal employee revolt yet. I didn't dare ask :|
I mean the name of the post alone makes him an asshole
Caffeine (used at strategic times) makes you care, boosting willpower and determination which brings success, success brings money and happiness, happiness makes you live longer. Too much caffeine has the opposite effect though. I want to know how much they consumed, not just that they did.

It's like saying a nitro boost usage in car racing causes winning. Yes, at a penalty of burning out the engine.
Technically it could be any time, but if history continues it should be just before 11:00.
I do not know how I could have forgotten to include devops borat. oops!
interesting that needs to go into the webmaster guidelines I was not seeing 500's or having it reported in GWT as errors on the site that it happened to
As an aside, if you look at the photo credit on that great color photo of Einstein and Gödel, it was snapped by Oskar Morgenstern, one of the fathers of game theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Morgenstern

Morgenstern and Einstein were Gödel's closest friends, I've just now learned. It gives me goosebumps looking at that photo and imagining the three of them on that lawn.

Semi-related, here's an account of Gödel's "pent-up lecture" about the inconsistencies in the American constitution that he told to his citizenship examiner: http://morgenstern.jeffreykegler.com/
What "who's Hiring" threads? Can you link me? (still new to HN)
Someone mentioned on CNBC that he had placed an order (and seem to have gotten) 100 shares of FB via e-trade. Can retail investors (aka ... unsophisticated Joes like me) get in on the IPO allocation? I thought the initial shares were only offered to large investors (> 100K purchases). This doesn't help me for FB, but would be useful info in the future.
IPO opening auctions are scheduled for the middle of the day. The regular market open auction is a very busy time and if they happened at the same time, everyone would be choosing between handling their normal business or the excitement of the IPO.
What is your point exactly? I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders. They don't want a ton of inventory just sitting on their shelves. So the carriers expect to sell them and Samsung did sell them (doesn't matter who bought them).
It's trading on the NASDAQ, and they that's just how they do it. They say they want their IPOs to stand out on their own.
the easiest language for english speakers to learn would have to be swedish, its very similiar and its grammar is about as simple as that of english, but there's not much value in it even if you go to sweden, since everyone speaks english. I'd say if you want a valuable language (besides english which is by far the most valuable in the world today), go with spanish for the americas, german for europe, and chinese for asia, all of these languages are very valuable and german and chinese bring with them booming economies.
Fed up with HN not having any new (billion dollar) ideas I can steal
Seriously, I've been reading HN religiously recently and no one has posted any killer ideas that are worth stealing and hacking together. Can everyone please just list the next billion dollar idea within the comments (in fact million dollar is fine). We can settle any differences once its been executed in court... ok go:
It's important to note that this is a development release, something that's not immediately apparent from the linked page. This does not replace or obsolete 1.2.0 that came out last month and it is not intended for production use. Rather, it's the first release of the new development branch that parallels 1.2.0 and will hopefully see WebSocket support added as a feature soon.
Amen to Dual Monitors