skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://jonathangifford.com/business-and-leadership/the-lonel...

It's not the full story of IBM's 1990s transition, but it touches on some key elements.

The change happened with a replacement at the top. Lou Gerstner. And no, in my list of people earning much intrinsic love from me, tobacco company execs don't score high.

Money quote, however: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.”

He had to change the culture. And he did.

There's a lot written on that subject. Makes for interesting reading.
Is sausagefest offensive?
Oh, that was my exact thought. Sorry if I failed to convey it. I am someone who does social hacking and the amount I have studied things like clothes let's me hack the system. I have a $3 haircut from another homeless person. I get asked by non-homeless types where I got my fabulous haircut. I get asked if it is permed and complimented on the highlighting. There is no perm and it wasn't highlighted.

I have two ASD sons who have a yawning disinterest in things like fashion and who live in shorts and t-shirts. We get told they are "beautiful" young men and asked about their hair, etc. too. So I think I am uniquely qualified to bring guerrilla fashion to folks who do not give a flying fuck about fashion and would take glee in being praised for their t-shirts and hoodies.
I thought the same. Then I found that Gow is shipping way older versions for many binaries compared to GNU-Win32, and its patch.exe causes UAC prompt for non-administrators.

GNU-Win32 is solid, integrates natively, and is good enough for deployment purpose.
On password breaches and security processes
I think its kind of funny that Visual Basic doesn't inspire the kind of hatred that it once did. Now PHP has taken its place. Reading through the comments there seems to be a level of fond remembrance going on. In the past, if you used VB 6 or lesser, you were not seen as a real programmer.

Maybe we will stop the PHP hate as well and move on to a new language to kick around.
They are upgrading their servers, I was told.
A salt-free diet is bad for your security
There are many many ways to package and deploy an app. That's a double-edged sword of the javascript ecosphere right now. For larger apps/projects, I think that a clean separation of concerns into widgets with a mediator of some sort is the way to go, and aura establishes such a pattern. Will it fit a blog? Probably not. But then, you won't even need AMD-style modules for most blogs.
You may be right... but might it also be the case that the people who are doing something about it just aren't making a big deal about it?

I suspect many people in their 20s and early 30s can think of a time when they were rewarded just for showing up. One year of little league was like that for me. Some of my non-core (or non-STEM, in modern parlance) classes felt like that, though I tended to participate actively in those. Put a lot of stories like that together and it's easy to say that the self-esteem culture affects everyone, and a small step from there to say it affects everything.

But that doesn't take into account my other four years of little league. Or my many music auditions. Or the difficult years when I decided I didn't want to do homework. (I assure you my grades suffered those years.) No one involved in those things was making a political statement; they were simply allowing the natural consequences of my actions to work.

Obviously everyone has different experiences. But I suspect a lot of people would be able to recall fewer cases in their lives where mere participation was rewarded than those where natural consequences were quietly present.
But Go was not created in a vacuum. Many other languages have solved C's problems since then.
To that I would add 1) various database glue allowing drag-n-drop bindings, 2) Incredibly good MS Office integration (or anything COM), and 3) Huge library of third-party components

(I haven't kept up with .NET desktop development, but in the 1.1-era, MS Office stuff was painful.)
The secret to success from Richard Russell
+1 Buying a notebook with such a huge screen seems to miss the mark. I couldn't even believe that there a such huge notebooks out there.
well FORTRAN was designed for technical programming so its not just IBM's muscle.
Women make or influence 85% of all purchasing decisions

That's awfully meaningless without the partner stat. If you stop and think about it, women and men could both "Make or influence" 85% of all purchasing decisions, at the same time.
What the Heck is Modular Scale Exactly and How It Fits With Typography?
As SEO is blamed, so one could also blame the existance of search engines themselves. What this really has to do with is "meeting consumer demand."

It just happens, not by coincidence, that there is a lot less competition in areas where the end product doesn't actually exist.

Last month I tried to reverse look up a phone number with Intelius. They tried to upsell me a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and then told me the phone number wasn't actually in their system but they would look for it. I was to expect an answer in 3 days. 9 days later they said they couldn't find it and refunded my charge.

Intelius knew they wouldn't be able to have that number. But, they knew there was an X% chance I'd sign up for their monthly recurring service; something I suspect would not have been refunded.

There are plenty of other businesses making money selling things that don't exist. Some are arguably legitimate, such as Kickstarter. Others, such as pyramid schemes, are quite less so.
The chief judge of a circuit can assign a circuit judge to hear a district-court case, if they deem it to be in the public interest. (I don't know anything about how often this is used, or what the reasons typically are, though.)
In a world that makes sense, this wouldn't be a big deal, because (most) graduating high school students really aren't special. We aren't all be a Jobs or a Gates or a Zuckerberg. But in today's society, this is making waves due to reasons the teacher cites in his commencement speech: because Americans have come to appreciate accolades more than genuine achievement.
> if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them.

This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder, are only exposed this way).

Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.

> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political reasons and not even properly supported by them.

Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.

Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list above) in any way.
What motivation does an employee, who is getting fired, have to sign the acknowledgment form?
I read this on a day when I'm about to head home and install Windows 7 on my new machine, because Ubuntu12/Mint13/Fedora17 all crash on the hardware because of known bugs with the modern hardware that haven't been fixed yet and I don't have a PhD in kernel development to fix it myself.

There's just something cruel in the world for reading this and being reminded of why I've dreaded the install I'm about to do.
Except Microsoft's modus operandi in the past was "embrace, extend and extinguish", which IS harmful to the community despite open licenses.
> particularly its module system (a kind of sideways inheritance where you could override an ancestor in a package, but not have to override all the descendants to have them inherit the behaviour - really handy for third-party plugins

Do you know if this can be done in UE1? I'm actually developing something called "NewNet" in UT99 for fun - plus, more people actually still play that game than all the others! Basically it fixes the movement lag associated with high pings and simulates zero ping by keeping track of the positions of all actors from within the past second or so, and "rewinding" the server to that saved position according to the ping of the shooter. There are mods for UT2003/UT2004 (UE2) and UT3 that do this, but nothing for UT99 - although there's the ZeroPing mod which is way too easy to exploit, as it's clientside hit detection. People said it couldn't be done for UT99 but I've managed to get a working prototype, even though it's quite messy and hacked together. It'd be great if I could do what you've mentioned, as it'd clean things up quite a bit.

The hacks I've had to do it get it to work right have been pretty silly, and there's a lot of duplicate code because I had looked for something like you mentioned (the sideways inheritance) but maybe I didn't look long enough, because I couldn't find it for UE1.
The Java infrastructure one of its great strengths. I really do believe the way it evolved into something that System Admins and (to a lesser extent) DBAs could live with did it quite a lot of good in adoption. I really do believe it was independent of the actual language syntax.

these type of things: I put the war and the server and run some scripts. I deploy more app servers.
Ask HN: Project and time management app for a freelancer?
Hi,

Two weeks ago, I lost my job because of one of their main client went bankrupt.

EDIT: I forgot to mention: I'm a software and web developer.

I decided it was the time for me to start working for myself and get clients myself so I could make my own money, manage my own time and put more time on my own project for my startup.

One big problem I have right now is, as I'll work for clients, I'll need to send my worked hours to them and manage my own tasks. For this I used to work with JIRA, Redmine and Springloops which are very good solutions. As much as I love JIRA I noticed that I spent way too much time tweaking it than working with it. Redmine is, in my opinion a big letdown on so many points and Springloops is riddled with bugs for the moment (they're working hard on it) and time management is not flexible at all (can't export time between two dates, etc).

So I'm asking out, what are you using? Any tips you could give me? I don't mind paying for it as it'll be one of my main tool.

I tried so many of them, Fogbugz, JIRA, Redmine, Springloops, Basecamp & Basecamp Next, Mingle, Many todo lists equivalent, etc. But never hooked on one.

Here's the most important points for me:
Project management with task managements, time estimates, time entries and time entries reporting.

Some points I'd like: Wiki and documents management is also a win for me. Advanced reporting for tasks / projects / efficiency is also a plus but not necessary as I'm always tempted tweaking them for hours.

Really any suggestions are welcome!

Thanks a lot and have a nice day!

- Tom
I'm beyond disappointed that the article is about the most important ruling regarding patent law in recent memory, and the overwhelming majority of this thread is arguing about the geometry cited in the judge's order. Rational people understood what he meant, even if maybe it's not 100% mathematically sound.

This pedantry really frustrates me, and it extends beyond Hacker News. It's pervasive in conversations I've been having recently as well, as if we're all looking for the slightest thing wrong with what someone has said so that we can achieve some kind of acclaim by pointing it out. I made a point recently about how people need to work together and cited a Star Trek film as a joke, and some jackass in the group decided to go to the mat with me on the fact that I had cited the wrong Star Trek film (my quote was in III, not II).

There is nothing more frustrating than a pedant. It seems like it's tech people that do it most, too, which makes sense, but still.
Drivers also appreciate driving more in Deutschland. They drive for driving's sake, while in the US, driving is just another waste of time, and people eat, apply makeup, make phone calls or text, etc. while they are driving.

Even if the US has the world's largest network of highways, you won't see anything like the Autobahn in a nation full of distracted drivers.
A few amusing anecdotes.

I had a lot of trouble learning to solve 2 equations in 2 variables because I did not see the point. Given any word problem that you were supposed to solve that way, I could solve it in my head. It wasn't until I was shown that I couldn't solve 3 equations in 3 variables that I realized that I needed to learn the boring way.

Secondly the single most useful thing that I did in school was try to generate a table of how likely it was to get various dice rolls when you rolled 4 6-sided dice and took the top 3. I learned a lot from that, and that sparked my interest in math.

Thirdly my biggest complaint about the way we teach stuff is that we present matrices and matrix multiplication with no context. It makes no sense to people. But if you know what a linear function, and realize that a matrix is just a way to write one down, then matrix multiplication turns out to be just function composition.

Just think how surprising the associative law is for matrix multiplication. I remember sitting there thinking, "How on Earth did anyone think it up, and see the associative law?" It becomes something you memorize because it makes no sense.

But the associative law always holds for function composition. Given three functions f, g, h and a thing they act on v, then by definition:

((f o g) o h)(v) = (f o g)(h(v)) = f(g(h(v))) = f((g o h)(v)) = (f o (g o h))(v)

Since matrix multiplication is just a way to write out function composition for a certain class of functions, it likewise must follow the associative law. THAT is how they thought it up!

I can hear the complaints already. "Oh, but this is too abstract for college students, they can't possibly understand this approach!" Bull. They can, and they do if you have the guts to present it this way. I've done it, with success.
You gain respect from others who get shit done by getting shit done.

I have often found it ("getting shit done") contagious. Somehow it feels right to roll up the sleeves when people around you do the same.
I have never seen a car without a passenger side mirror.
It's still that easy with .Net and Visual Studio :)

XAML or WinForms still rock.
Do you remember the story about the woman losing her teaching certificate because of a picture on facebook as a "drunken pirate"?

Now imagine that as government policy instead of an isolated incident.

"Quantity has a quality all its own."
Without the authors notes we wouldn't have learned anything from those lectures.

I received value from his summary and wouldn't remotely classify it as crappy but YMMV.
You can cultivate a positive "can-do" attitude without going overboard with positive reinforcement. A can-do attitude is easy to have if you are actually ready for anything.
How Baseball Will Usher in a Greener American Future
Microsoft is evil. Apple may or may not be evil, but it is not the subject of this discussion.
They fixed all the pain in .Net 4.0. Summary:

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42590
Well, at least high school graduates are not yet decaying since they have yet to reach their prime. After you reach your peak biologically, you are decaying organic matter.
Funny, I've resisted switching to Apple products for the same "Just Have To" philosophy in the other direction.

"You want to maximize a window from the window manager chrome? No problem, you Just Have To install (some app). What do you mean you don't want to pay $10 to be able to maximize a window, it's only $10, don't you think programmers should get paid?"

By comparison, Windows 7 "just works" for my needs, which is essentially providing a shell around Chrome and PuTTY.
People have forgotten all the terrible language warts all over VB. (From what little I can recall, the hatred is slowly seething back upward.) PHP might lack any sense of style but it's nowhere near as bad as VB.

Of course, there were a lot of good things about the VB environment, and Microsoft could have straightened-out the syntax without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But the strategy was to legacy the whole heap of VB/COM/etc.
.Net 1.0 code will run quite happily on the latest framework.

We just pulled one of our apps up to .Net 4.0 and it took about 5 minutes. Not a small one either: 350kloc.
At least it's not the exact same story getting re-hashed ten times in a day, which happens fairly often on HN.
Despite the Hyperbole, Flame is Kind of Lame
If you run into anyone still doing scaping, you might suggest Microfocus COBOL. It's a lot less painful to recompile for x86 and .NET than it is to deal with terminal scraping.
If you don't need to run cmd.exe, then this is likely not for you.

On Windows, I deploy native 64-bit Python, and the application has quite a few command line pyramid scripts, which works perfectly fine with grep, cut, sed, sort, etc from gnuwin32. Don't see the need for cygwin.
Have you thought about using one of those fabric softeners designes specifically for black clothing?

My t-shirts last about 3 years. Business-presentable up to a year or so ... that's hundreds of washes considering I cycle through most of my t-shirt stack every 1.5 weeks.

After 5 years they're only good enough for the gym, on account of the fabric becoming weird. The colour is still mostly fine.

Also, I think you're doing something seriously wrong when washing your t-shirts ... you are doing cold washes right? Nothing above 40C and all that ... also, is your washing machine filled with sand or something?
Indeed. I actually had a data structures library which included hash table, doubly-linked list and b-tree (disk backed).
It seems that each time I come back and read your comment, you've added a new recommendation. Awesome!

That Real-Time Collision Detection book sounds particularly interesting to me. I had resigned myself to just using Bullet in the toy engine I'm working on since I couldn't find any good resources on the subject. I'll check that out!

The only book you're missing is the one that explains how to get your foot in the door ;)
I agree with you in theory but I'm equally, if not more, skeptical of whatever perspective I think I'm getting from living in NYC.
Touche. I suppose it is use case dependent. My observations are of a developer desiring to work in a unix-y environment.
I run Photoshop on a VBox on my Ubuntu laptop and it works perfectly.
> Shouldn't they at least get the benefit of the doubt?

They would get the benefit of the doubt, if they changed their ways.

But their boot lockdown requirements for Win8/ARM and patent blackmail against handset producers indicate that they haven't.

So, no, they don't even get the benefit of the doubt.
Personally I'm waiting for the Python 3 support to mature. That'll be the day: No longer will I be stuck between a speedy PyPy implementing crufty Python 2.x and a slower CPython implementing Python 3.

Fortunately, progress is looking good: http://morepypy.blogspot.de/2012/06/py3k-status-update-4.htm...
Oh, HN, so grumpy.

What no one here has mentioned yet is that for most people, after you get out of school, you won't be winning first place and yet you will be rewarded (with a paycheck) for just showing up and doing a fairly average job.

The other comments with walking a fine line with this are spot on. How quickly we forget another piece of favorite HN repostery: praise kids for effort, not for being smart (or some other supposedly intrinsic quality). Yes, the kid that shows up, sticks his finger up his nose and receives a participation prize has learned little, but the kid that showed up, worked really hard, and totally failed might still get something out of it.
It isn't a "Just Works" thing, it's an "I'm experienced with this" thing. I've used Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, Red Hat (back when it was free), etc - I'm still most comfortable in a Window's environment and to this day still struggle with Mac's peculiarities. Why, oh why, can't I right click on something in finder and click copy/cut in the context menu?
Great example- the latest figures I can find state that only 13% of the US population use Twitter. I have to imagine the figure is even lower internationally, and only a tiny minority of that 13% post to it regularly.
The plural of anecdote is not data but...

I've changed my sex. I used to be male, now I'm female.

My wardrobe used to be "a collection of t-shirts and 4-5 pairs of jeans". Now it's a whole closet full of blouses, dresses, and skirts, plus a dresser with a few more things. I recently did a purge and got the stuff down in my closet to 100 individual pieces.
> it's not fair to write them off because of what they did in the 90s.

They are still doing it. The OOXML standard process loading was just 4 years ago; the UEFI requirements for Win8/ARM have just surfaced.
Huawei Activa 4G announced for MetroPCS
In a way, this system reminds me of Light Table[1] in its ability to change some code/settings and get instant feedback. It totally changes the way people create content because it becomes so much more accessible and so much faster to see changes -- you can play around with a lot of different approaches more quickly, resulting in more room for experimentation.

Pretty amazing stuff! Really curious to see the tools that power all of this, as well as hear the architect's (or architects') vision for all of this

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table
That's because many of us understand that fanatical religious terrorists are extremely extremely rare. Government abuse of power is not.

But you can rest assured that this viewpoint you're disappointed by is much more common on internet forums than among people with actual power.
HyperStudio was the most successful authoring environment inspired (not cloned) from HyperCard, and allows for project creation without scripted programming. With continuous use since 1989, it exports to html 5, and runs under both Mac OS X and Windows. http://bit.ly/HSTestDrive
What is the web app equivalent of this? There must be several different companies trying to create a drag and drop web application IDE
I have a basic grasp of what Backbone is capable of, but can't really tell what Aura improves on that. At first glance it seems to abstract MVC constructs away and lets you define those widgets with a single function call. Is that what this is about?
The parent post said that "all new team members" were subject to this. It's fine if you're willing to bring on candidates you aren't sure about on a temporary basis, but you're just going to send a lot of good candidates elsewhere if your blanket policy is "you will be terminated after a month by default". In particular, as other commenters have pointed out, you will be filtering out lots of good candidates who currently have stable jobs, but might be interested in your organization if not for the (justified or not) perceived risk of being fired for no reason.
I never noticed that until you pointed it out. Odd. I've always used Cmd-C/Cmd-X for that.
As a still photographer who sometimes works with multiple off-camera lights (strobist-style) I would love to be able to experiment in software to see a very close approximation of how a setup would look.
Wait until Time Machine Fucks you. (Written on my Mac)