skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed that the model makes a lot more sense for a consulting company as opposed to a product company.

However, in terms of how it actually worked, I was also involved in meetings to allocate people to bands, and the percentages had to be respected across the client group (UBS, in that case).

This means that if there were, say, 10 analysts in the UBS client account, then only a couple could get "Exceptional" (or whatever it was called), and so on...

The implication of this was that your performance (and therefore pay raise, promotion, and so on) largely depended on whether:

a) you had made a strong enough impression on your manager so that he/she would be motivated to do a decent job of fighting for you in the meeting;

b) your manager was actually politically competent enough, and had the political capital to spend on getting you a good rating;

c) you had made enough of an impression on all the other people likely to be at the meeting so that they'd know about it and accept it when your manager suggested that you should be rated Exceptional.

If you hit all three of those, you might get a great rating. If you didn't bother to network with everyone who was likely to be at the meeting, or if your manager sucked or didn't like you all that much, you were pretty much fucked.
Show HN: Hulu With Me (Firefox/Chrome add-on + Node)
To fight piracy, Microsoft tightens MSDN and TechNet terms again
More details:

I recently left my job at Mozilla to start a company. Before I do that, I wanted to work on some fun, quicker projects. Hulu With Me lets you watch TV shows in sync with someone else.

A few random notes:

* I wanted this to be frictionless as possible. Click the HuluWithMe button, get a link to send to a friend, and done. Let me know if you have problems or get confused.

* Debugging meant Firefox and Chrome, each running a flash video, each with an extension, and each with Firebug/Inspector open... it's amazing my computer survived. And each time I needed to test something, I had to watch commercials. So, debugging was a bit slow overall.

* This uses node.js + socket.io.

* Sorry non-Americans :(

* If you want to test with yourself on one computer, use Chrome + Firefox (not Firefox twice, etc).

* I couldn’t do Netflix for technical reasons, but would love to. If you know someone at Netflix that can help, I’d love an intro!

* Work at Hulu? Say hi!
Also, if you are working on a team then the incentives should be based on team performance, not individual performance. You get what you reward.
Second that. If you are going to go down this route, I wrote a simple tutorial with lots of visuals to construct a regular expression from a finite state automaton using JFLAP ( jflap.org ), for the "inverse fizzbuzz" problem -
http://www.jasq.org/2/post/2012/06/fbfbfbfbfffbfbffbffbfbffb...
CERN expected to announce Higgs boson discovery tomorrow morning
Two words: educational programming.
“We’ve observed a new particle”: leaked video reveals Higgs confirmation
The trade off, is, well, now you need a dedicated mobile site. Subsequent changes to your codebase suddenly require twice the effort, since you're changing two different sites.
Good luck!

Definitely don't "stop worrying about it" - or you'll get screwed.
It's mid 2012, why are you browsing the web with javascript off? I realize you want safeguard privacy and whatnot, but at least turn it on for website you use legitimately.
This is absurd. I worked at Microsoft and blaming everything on Stack Ranking is very shortsighted.

This is the kind of things reporters do. There are many bigger issues with Microsoft than stack ranking.

How about the company focused on Desktop computing for far too long and missed the web, cloud and mobile?
This has nothing to do with reviews or HR, and everything to do with lack of vision and innovation. They thought Windows would remain relevant forever.
When I saw this title, I thought "Oh no someone has figured out what plus addressing is"

There are already enough people not allowing + in address fields, by pure neglect. Now if we add FUD to that...us geeks who love and know these things will be the ones suffering.
One of the biggest problems with QR codes, is the resulting page is typically a standard / flashy desktop site, which isn't optimal for a mobile device. I imagine if the landing page were mobile-optimized (quick information, easy buttons, no zooming), engagement would go up.

It's not really a problem with QR codes, but rather, an execution problem on people mis-firing on how they're used.
The lower rated players on this list tend to be cofounders and CEOs while the higher rated players tend to work in finance. I wonder if that's a coincidence.
Palm copied the UI for the Apple Newton with their OS, which shipped in 1987.
Senate Voting: How Would you Perfect the UI?
It seems as though the important part here wasn't so much that he sold them himself as it was that he added the following clause:

"You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce."

This is something that any middleman could do, too... but the incentives simply aren't there for them to prevent scalping. Especially as Ticketmaster has its own resale site, TicketExchange.
What happens if someone does sell one of these tickets for over face? Will it get cancelled, the scalper refunded (in addition to the sale value), then the person who bought it gets screwed?
Then, are software vendor required to offer a way too resell the software? Or are they just not allowed to persecute those who come up with a way to do it?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. What do all these execs have in common? An obsession with chess as a youth.

I bet 90% of successful execs had a sweet baseball card collection when they were 10 years old, too.
Scalping always seemed like a mismatch between the ticket price incentives and the venues incentives. Venues like to sell out to increase concession sales / parking etc, but 'talent' is better off picking a price that fills, most but not all seats and maximizes their take. I suspect they also increase their cut by selling tickets early and sitting on a few weeks/months worth of interest.
I prefer to read over videos. Here's the article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18646243
We've made a lot of relevancy and speed improvements lately. If you have any specifics, we'd love to hear them. A good way is to try it for a week, collect all the ones that suck and send them to https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html -- we're listening!
Is this your first calibration? How long have you been working at this company? The second year is much more stressful than the first. At least it was, to me.

MSFT Employee
> "where does that put Kinect?"

The same place as Siri - interesting technology, bad execution, with lack of competent follow-through, becoming a mild laughingstock of their respective fields, and causing users to be mildly embarrassed that they believed all the hype.
>This is the first time they're past-tense, over and done with.

The sentiment on HN has been that for a while.

Except when it comes to UEFI secure boot on ARM devices.

Then it is all about how Microsoft is going to get a monopoly on tablets and stop other OSes from booting on them and thus must be restricted by legal means right now.
Disruptions Everywhere - Windows 8 Pricing Strategy
From the article: Kilamba was financed by a Chinese credit line - which Angola is repaying with oil - so it has technically been paid for. But if the houses go unsold, then the Angolan government will be left with stock on their hands and a potentially wasted investment.

So it's not a 'gift' per se. It's more like a bribe, to fulfill the president's promise of 1M new apartments. By pricing these at $120K each, China can extract a _lot_ of minerals from Angola.
I don't really understand your point. In MVC, we use functions on the controller to handle the incoming request and the response. There is usually a router that routes an incoming request to the corresponding controller and function.

How is this different than what a route function does?
I put up with developing for iOS because it is the only mobile platform that can do low-latency audio on every device. There isn't always a philosophical choice involved.
Top Patriotic iPhone Apps for 4th of July
Sounds to me like:

1) Louis CK isn't big enough for scalpers to care about going through a non-traditional method of obtaining tickets.

2) People that would turn to scalping to recoup their expense when they can't go are just going back to Louis CK for a refund.

Personally, it sounds like offering a full refund also comes with the possibility that scalpers will purchase the tickets because they can easily flip them back for a refund (an $0 loss sans time spent) if they can't sell them for a profit. I admit that I know nothing about the 'event ticket scene' so I may be missing something.
I couldn't agree more, hiring from the hip just to ship something just screams red flag.

As an employee, I want to come into a business knowing that each of my team members is as dedicated to the project as I am or is able to get me amped up for it. Knowing that one of them is only temporary (especially if they're one of the first employees) makes me question how serious the company actually is to make a quality product as opposed to trying to get dollars in the door as soon as they can. It also makes me question whether my employment is seen as just a stepping-stone as well.
That's too simplistic. Lets take the example of a gun. The gun industry makes a product that can be used for intentional harm or for protection. One company sells a 35mm handgun to the general public and another sells assault rifles to the general public. A reasonable person knows an assault rifle is not for protection (and don't get pedantic and say "well depends where you live", etc. because you know what I mean). That's like what MegaUpload is. Dropbox and Box.net are file locker services. MegaUpload was very obviously a file sharing service - one that was very much all about sharing movies, music, and software with no regard to copyright law. Dropbox and Box.net are the handguns to MegaUpload's assault rifle when you put it into my above example.
For broad marketing it's nonsense -- the early premise was that it was like some sort of exclusive code. For specific marketing, however, it can be great. I think QR codes on real estate signs (bringing you to the full property page) are brilliant. I've noticed manuals are often coming with them now, linking to the electronic version. Again, awesome. They have tremendous utility but it isn't surprising that people try to overextend them.
Plus the difference is, that he is putting himself out there and for the first time giving a face to the "fight".
Google Service Drops Support for Opera
Ouch! Your list in [2] is sad but true from my experiences at big co. Any thoughts on how to prevent company culture from degrading to this extent?
Great work! I don't have any experience with node.js but this looks very cool, and I love that you can just call it up.

From your writeup:

>This code is mostly self-documenting, however the one area that confused me starting out was that you need to open a Serial port in order to use the WiFly module.

>The one possible issue to note is that you cannot use the Serial monitor or the Serial.print commands because the WiFly has taken over the usual port.

If this was causing debug headaches for you I would reccomend checking out the NewSoftSerial library by Arduiniana[1]. It allows you to turn any digital pins on the Arduino into a UART serial (RX/TX) setup. I use it all the time with Bluetooth or Xbee projects. If you are using Arduino IDE 1.0 it's actually already included, you don't even have to donwload the library, it's called just "SoftSerial" in the library menu I believe.

[1]: http://arduiniana.org/libraries/newsoftserial/
Wow, that seems like a pretty random response to the BBC saying a town right next to the capital is "perched on an isolated spot 18 miles away from the capital".

And by the way, what you said is not true. Please investigate the concept of significant digits. Reading that something is "18 miles away" and taking that to mean an exact number of millimeters is ridiculous. Given that we don't know from which exact point we are measuring, "18 miles", "19 miles", and "about 20 miles" would all be OK here, as is "30 km". If any of these were true, that is.
The terms during purchase made it sound like if they discovered a ticket was sold for higher than $45, then they would cancel the ticket without refund. So both buyer and seller get screwed.
"Beautiful" Squirrel-Tail Dinosaur Fossil Upends Feather Theory
I guess what it really comes down to is: How does he know which ticket is being sold? I imagine if a scalper wants to avoid detection, they just don't give out specific information until the sale is final (banking that Louis CK won't buy their tickets at scalper prices just to find out which tickets to cancel).

If the ticket has some sort of ID, avoid giving that out before the final sale. If the ticket has a seat number, just state the general area of where the seat is rather than the specific seat (until final sale).
His personality might be a bit "problematic", but eccentric entrepreneurs have always been around, from Howard Hughes to Larry Ellison in his best better days.
Interesting. I wonder what would happen in this instance. They have admitted losing some transaction information forever. Wonder what the financial impact will be
The call out is "what I want to be" and of the 3 choices I'm given, all 3 are white male 25-30 something techies.

I can't understand why you'd want to advertise that so blatantly. I'd recommend something less abstract, like a useful explanation of what your site does etc.
Another reason Go has been helpful is that is generates a single executable that can be distributed to our clients. There's no complex dependency chain or layout of shared libraries to worry about.

This is such a subtle yet profound feature. Think about it: no more dependency nightmare during deployment!
You can go through the website and learn without logging in at the moment. But if you would like to 'Follow' any new roles, we are requiring people to login for that.
Having a demo is a great way to summarize the value we bring in. Thanks!
Perhaps nitpicking, but this is because of a bug in the leap second implementation, not in the leap second per se.
He's sad that having the company in the UK didn't work out.
He has played the media at least as well as his lawyers have done in court, but you also have to factor in that people are pretty fucking tired of the copyright industry being so heavy handed.

Breaking copyright is so normal, at least among those younger than 40 that almost any reponse would be seen as too heavy handed. Choppers and armed police, however are completely of the scale.
I don't think it's a coincidence. The blurb for Norman Weinstein says that after he was hired by Banker's Trust, "He was so successful that they kicked off a recruitment program for other strong chess players..." and then it lists a few people they recruited afterwards, with even higher scores.

The connection between chess and finance/trading seems strange to me.
who cares. i only hope to see something interesting with hubot[1] come out of it!

[1] https://github.com/github/hubot
Google vs DuckDuckGo: Without JavaScript
I love the idea and the project. It's so awesome. I am so happy to see NodeJS being used this way. +10 man.
What do you want to be when you grow up - if you grew up backwards?
This blew my mind. I was thinking it, but after reading your words it hit home.
This doesn't match the text on the site: "If the ticket is found to be offered for resale above face value we may invalidate the barcode and refund the ticket price."
I guess you could argue it should be UTC, but practically it makes no difference.

Everybody knows, or should know, their time zone's delta to UTC. I'm sure there are lots of people who don't know their delta to PDT.
Be aware that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz is missing the bits about how he ran some piracy and carding BBSs back in the days and then tried to sneak his way out of trouble by telling the law all about the users. I would not be surprised if Megaupload kept logs of everything for this purpose as well.
what happens with jellybean when you make an appointment for a time slot and you already have one at that time slot?
> and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

Someone forgot to show him Microsoft revenue numbers for the last decade.
I think this idea is great. One idea I had was creating a real time connection between friends watching the same live sports games in different cities ...

That way they can curse each other out or scream in unision and talk about strategy as the game is progressing.
Did you read it? #1 is invalidated by the fact they're comparing his shows (sold traditionally) vs. his shows (sold independently), not his shows vs. others'.

EDIT: nevermind, I get it now.
"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts"

The system you describe might improve individual performance to the detriment of the company's performance.

You don't need competition within a team, you need cooperation toward a common goal.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said, but the point is that AC was (Accenture is) a consulting company which is all about selling services and impression management (and seldom about the substance of the work, which is frequently copy-paste-and-edit stuff pulled out of Lotus Notes with the previous client's name and particulars replaced with the new client's), so the reward structure strongly mirrors what's good for the organization. And forcing people -- often excellent people -- out of the organization is actually a _beneficial_ side effect. (Yes, this is a very cynical view of management consulting, but I think I have some credibility here.)

The problem with Microsoft -- assuming we're talking about an accurate representation of their system -- is that the reward structure rewards visibility rather than results, but the organization actually wants results.
StubHub is owned by Ebay
StubHub is not owned by Ticketmaster, they are owned by ebay.

Source: http://www.stubhub.com/about-us/
It's no secret that third party developers fall pretty low on Apple's list of priorities. I get the sense that Apple's priorities are 1) balancing user interests with Apple's bottom line, 2) satisfying the interests of carrier partners, and finally 3) serving the needs of third party developers.

This doesn't mean that fixing this bug in Mobile Safari should be expected to be unimportant to Apple, since it affects one of their top priorities, the users. It would rather seem to be an indication of either a sub-optimal process for dealing with bug reports, or an issue with the author's submission, which given his liberal use of strong language, doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility to me.
Is this done by capturing the multimedia stream at the TCP level (with node_pcap)?
Really? You must be on a rare and exceptional org, then. I left Microsoft because the stack rank system most often worked exactly as described in the article and it was just as corrosive as they described. (I’m making more money and having way more fun now, too.)

In my extensive experience as both an IC and a lead at Microsoft the curve is enforced down to at least the dev manager level (i.e. teams of 20-30 people). A manager with 20+ people often ends up having to pick two sacrificial victims to receive a punitive review score (i.e. a 5 in the current system) even if everyone’s performing well. This causes all kinds of unintended side-effects and has absolutely rotted the company from the inside out.

I understand that the idea is to keep everyone on their toes and encourage them to keep pushing. It might even work ok if there were some fool-proof way to guarantee that everyone always got evaluated on their actual product work, but engineers are smart people and they usually figure out that it’s easier and faster to optimize for networking/schmoozing/backstabbing than it is to merely do brilliant engineering.

If a low review score was just a momentary, “better luck next time” sort of thing then it still might work ok but a low review score is a terribly punitive thing. You get no raise/bonus/stock, you’re not allowed to interview with other teams, and you’re in serious danger of being fired. It drastically affects your career prospects for the next several years. If that happens to you, it’s not worth sticking around. Because a low review score is so punitive, people are highly motivated to do anything possible to avoid it. The most efficient and effective means of avoid it is often not to spend time doing great engineering, but rather to spend time on non-engineering tasks that “increase your visibility”, or doing things that make everyone else look bad. Some people are quite good at doing that and they tend to be rewarded for it.

Sometimes low review scores are handed out to people who deserve them but often they go to people who just got caught at the wrong end of the political network. Being “the new guy” on a team as a result of a reorg is one of the most hazardous places to be at Microsoft. If a manager needs to dump a low review score on someone, he’s going to choose the most expendable (i.e. least well-known and well-connected) person. The point is that you can easily end up with a low review score through absolutely no fault of your own, then your career at Microsoft is screwed. That kind of chronic stress and fear shapes the company and has made it what it is today.

Granted, not every team at Microsoft is completely disfunctional, but enough of them are that the company tends to bleed great engineers and visionaries. The proof is in the stock price.
This is what amazes me. For a civil case another country has just run all over another country's laws.
I think "MBAs" are used as a "strawman" far too often (probably because I'm biased as someone who has an MBA and since I've been developing for over ten (10) years). Bad "business decisions" can be made by anyone.

Overall, it really doesn't matter who implemented this policy.
Sounds like ticketing is ripe for re-invention, how about electronic tickets via smart phone?
The town itself doesn't seem like much of a bribe, since the funding was provided as a loan to Angola, and is being repaid from oil revenues. Also, the vast majority of the workers were Chinese, although it's pretty usual in such cases to negotiate major employment for the locals.

Source: http://negociosangola.blogspot.com/2011/04/nova-cidade-do-ki...

Now, whether a bribe ended up in someone's pocket to enable all this - I have no idea.
The problem I have with stack ranking, and one that I would think engineering companies like MSFT and AMZN would share, is that it is just bad science.

I can get on board with the idea that it is good to drop the bottom 10% of the company on a regular basis. But they're essentially taking very small sample sizes (individual teams), and assuming their distribution matches that of the entire company.

Or to put it another way, let's say you ranked every employee in the company 1-40,000 or whatever. You are trying to drop employees 36,001-40,000. An absolutely awful way to make that happen would be to create 4000 small groups of 10 people and then drop the bottom person from each group. Anybody who's even somewhat proficient in stats can tell you that this setup will yield results WAY off the mark. You could even quantify it with some simple analysis, and though I don't have time to do so, I'm sure the results would be horrifying.

And that's assuming a totally random distribution of people, which isn't true, and totally ignoring psychological effects of such a system. But at the very least, stack ranking is just bad science, and that should matter to these companies.
>Choppers and armed police, however are completely of the scale.

But wasn't that NZ's decision. I think a good deal of people believe it was US troops.