skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you have handled it differently? We can all get handwavey and say, "I wouldn't let it happen on my watch!"

But, let's say it did happen. Something that you feel is fundamentally important to the companies core and culture hasn't occurred in six months, how do you handle it?
Reposting the comment I posted on the blog post here:

It seems to me that consumer tech startups have a default belief that selling the promise of sales is easier and more lucrative than selling something directly. It’s like a slightly fancier version of the “how to make money online” courses.

They also seem to look down on selling their products directly to users (“we don’t want to nickel and dime our users”). They have a strange attraction to portraying this benevolent change-the-world-for-free image (see http://help.kik.com/customer/portal/articles/654821).

I suspect there are big unexplored opportunities for selling software services directly to consumers – things which improve people’s lives noticeably, without them having to first do a ton of donkey work (checking in, writing reviews, etc). But, the approach to building such products would be to go deep on a specific problem in a small market and expand only when you’ve nailed that business. Unlike typical consumer startups, the focus should be on high quality not scale.

Anyway, I am working on some ideas along these lines. I shared my perspective to clear my thinking and also hear what you think about it.

Oh and thanks for introducing me to the delightful word Veeblefetzer!
Maybe I was being ridiculously optimistic, but ~200 projected additional cases of cancer seems pretty bad.
Not a Marine at bootcamp, for one.
Hi. I recognized your name. Love this essay: http://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html

Are you a technology worker? I've noticed many people with critiques of civilization are into technology.
i see! Thanks for the clarification. And, makes a lot of sense.
18 Year Old's Perspective on Customer Experience
Hey everyone,

Thank you guys so much for the feedback. I didn't know if I should be making the blog more techy about my experiences as a programming at 17. Or my high school/startup experiences. Any ideas?

@benjlang I did change my twitter name. I wasn't really expecting anyone to follow me, but I guess now would be the best time to change my name. It is @Spshulem (It was recently Shuby_Doo, my nickname), feel free to follow :).

@andrewcooke I will be crediting the photos and doing that, I simply forgot when writing this post, thank you for telling me.

Any ideas on fixing the loading of the site for you guys? Or is it working again? It seems to load fine for me now.
The current limit on image size is 10MB, so posting large raw image files won't be possible here.

The purpose of this app is to provide a quick way for people to share their images, so the use case you describe does not really align with the goals that I have. I'm sure there are services that are better suited for what you want to do.
> How would you have handled it differently?

The way Ben had intended to - by explaining things. He ended up pulling authority and threatening to fire everybody involved, for some reason.
تسريحات للعيد
A wall with posters. Well, a virtual wall with posters.
HN From Terminal.
"MySQL is dead, long live MariaDB" .. would have been a better headline. Mainly because very few MySQL users seem to be aware of MariaDB.
I think it's a combination of the over-priced, under-performing stock, advertisers realizing that fb isn't that great of an ad platform that makes the shine come off of FB and make stuff like this seem less acceptable than it would have just a couple months ago.
> Looking back more than a year after the event, it is clear that the Fukushima reactor complex, though nowhere close to state-of-the-art, was adequately designed to contain radiation. New reactors can be made even safer, of course, but the bottom line is that Fukushima passed the test.

He made a good argument that new cancer cases are statistically few, but I can't see what test Fukushima passed. As far as I know there were multiple meltdowns and dumping radioactive water into the ocean. From an engineering point of view, it was a clear-cut failure. If not of implementation, then at least of specifications and margins.
I could be wrong, but as long as the object is moving at "normal" (e.g. significantly less than the speed of light) speeds, this approach would work for moving objects too.
> in case employee had something to get off their chest

1:1's offer a consistent opportunity for dialog if there is ever a mishap, broken process or impending event to talk about.

Opportunity is the key word - it doesn't necessarily mean it's crucial information being exchanged every time.
This reminds me of the pointy haired boss, from Dilbert's cartoon.
Blacklist another VC here. And he is supposed to be one of the better ones...
This sort of observation & discussion should happen daily and feedback should be immediate

Of course! But, that doesn't always happen. The 1:1 is an attempt to ensure that, to some degree, the subordinate and superior get at least a little of said discussion regularly.
India To Biometrically Identify All Of Its 1.2 Billion Citizens
I think this makes a great TED talk title, but this probably kicks in at some point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
This was the most striking part of it for me.

He seems like a massive douche.
You're better off making that a generator:

sum((x for x in xrange(1, 101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0))

Notice the parenthesis instead of square brackets. Your version actually creates a list in memory. A generator generates the items one by one and doesn't need to store them all at the same time.
>> the rover could turn power off to non critical components after 14 years and continue to run on 100W

That constant source is charging a battery. As long as the battery is still working it would just take longer to charge the battery.
What a refreshing blog-post. Last night, I stumbled on cnn story about the Rich Kids of Instagram Tumblr snapping vintage shots of themselves high-rolling in G6's and throwing money on Moet like there's no tomorrow. The funny thing is that as I browsed through the pictures, I thought to myself: "God, that's the last type of lifestyle I would ever want." Instead, I spend my days and nights in a silicon valley garage, programming, reading, thinking, taking walks with friends and drinking green tea. And you know what? I find happiness in that. The little things that I cherish are so inconsequential in anyone's else life, and are yet so full of meaning and healing for me. Glad to see i'm not the only one out there thinking this way.
I switched to postgresql _fully_ since about half year ago, never looked back.
Relative to the title of the piece, do you think "Steve" left the meeting thinking that Opsware is "a good place to work?" How about during the meeting? I think there's a failure somewhere within the technique Ben employed to impart the values that he thinks are important, not to mention blindness to the possibility that he himself might be an obstacle in creating "a good place to work."
Thoughts on Acqui-hires & Soft Landings
If it's an allergy to a sugar present in mammalian meat, how does the body not become allergic to itself?
Did you ever use an LG Prada? Worked nothing like iOS. And yes, they did reinvent the smartphone. The first smartphone that had a full unix-based operating system. The first to use multitouch. The first to use accelerometers. A lot of firsts. The individual tech might have existed before (excepting multitouch which Apple invented,) but the application of those technologies into a phone was entirely new. Stop trying to Apple-bash after the fact. Apple's genius wasn't 'marketing' it was design. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player -- it was the first that let you have 1000 songs in your pocket. Stop short-changing Apple. After all, you certainly haven't invented anything of note. You build something innovative that consumers love to use and then you can call Apple's genius one of marketing. Every Home Depot has the tools and supplies to build the White House, that doesn't mean that architects are just really good at marketing because they didn't think of wood and paint first. Ignoring the synergy is to ignore the nature of creativity.
This is an Executive at a big company not a regular employee.

He stated that he trains everyone to do these meetings and the Exec did not do so.
You really have to put things in context, otherwise you get into the "think of the children" fallacy, where everything is worth the effort if it saves one life.

We die of three causes: cancer, heart problems and strokes. Well over 30% die of cancer. So this means some of those 200 will die of cancer before they die of something else (some of them will recover and live to die from heart attack later). This makes the new deaths a really tiny percentage, which means policy-wise it's hardly worth discussing.
This URL should point to the source of the video i.e. ted.com not kottke.org
Am I the only one who thinks wanting your employees to work at your company "12-16 hours a day" is surely not a mark of a good company. If I worked 16 hours a day, I know I'd not be having enough sleep to do useful work. I think I'd rather work with well balanced human beings, rather than obsessive, robotic workaholics...
a la pg's "I worry, though, that..."
Unfortunately, we don't have the data. Yep, it's non linear, but all of our data is basically on two ends of the spectrum. Low amounts of radiation on one end, accumulated from natural sources or working at nuclear plants, and high amounts of radiation on the other, accumulated from survivors of Hiroshima, Cherynobyl, and some nuclear accidents.

So, given those data points, with clusters on two ends of this spectrum you're stuck with interpolation. Ideally, we'd like a good, predictive, biological based model that explicitly showed how you go from biological damage to cancer or death. We don't have that (though there are people researching it), so we go with statistical techniques. This results in basically 3 different proposed models.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

The Linear No Threshold Model:

Draw a line between the two regions. Bam! Done.

This is clearly wrong for very large doses, but is used mostly to try and estimate the effect of a small change in radiation exposure to predict increase in cancer incidence. This is very important for public policy. Of course, this makes all these models politically contested.

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

Threshold Model

This model predicts that small amounts of radiation has zero effect on cancer incidence. According to this model, going to higher altitude, or taking a plane flight, won't increase your risk of cancer.

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

Radiation Hormesis

A little radiation is good for you! The biological argument is that your body gets used to dealing with damage from radiation. Don't tax it too hard and you'll be stronger. So take a plane trip, and enjoy the X-ray scans!
His interaction with Steve lost my attention that he had anything valid to say. Probably the reason his employees aren't doing what he feels they need to. He also spent zero time finding out how that manager was working with his team. It's pretty dis-empowering to have someone tell you how you need to work with, and run your team, and expect a great work environment.
> By requiring payment by credit card, you'll hopefully eliminate prostitutes, drug users, and homeless people anyway.

I'm not sure there's a way to distinguish a "regular" credit card from a prepaid store-bought "credit" card, which are easily obtained by the undesirables.

Maybe you could try putting a thousand-dollar hold on the card for verification. Car rental could also be a good business to study for inspiration.
Is this a Thing? Should I already know the use case for a posterwall? Do people use them as backgrounds on their Twitter profiles or something else that I'm too old or out of touch to know about?

And to be sure: I did assume this was for actual walls.
My social media links
John Siracusa's review of the latest Twitter guidelines
This isn't a reactive problem resolution as you describe, it is a proactive endeavor. The tactic used could have been improved significantly, but the priority is very high for the CEO. There is a big difference in response from ignoring a lazy CEO/manager that jumps from fire to fire shouting, "This is the priority! This is the priority!" and one that wants to ensure his management team is focusing on employee contentment.
If you're a weirdo then I am one too. I kind of want the sleeping thing from the movie Daredevil (tiny capsule where he sleeps in water so he can hear nothing).

I could build one myself but I always live with people who might treat me like I was insane.

But essentially a completely sound-proof little capsule where you can go in, close the door, set the temperature whatever you wish (18 degrees!), and then sleep without light or sound waking you.
I'm willing to bet he was a little horny and/or lonely while writing this.

And while I think few if any are actually good ideas, you have to respect someone for posting their brainstormings publicly. Yet HNers will tear through and criticize each one like he was pitching them for funding.
It's Time for an Open Twitter
Nope that was the first thing that struck me as odd about the post.
This looks amazing. It's nice to see a different take on a UI for working with bigger documents. I must say I'm not a huge fan of touch interfaces but something like this could port well to a kinect type interface. Project the screen onto a wall and add some voice recognition and kinect and you could have fun working on big texts while standing and moving around the room. You could write a book in a room without a chair or desk.
These guys are building a startup and Live Streaming it
Interesting to note the comments here, compared to comments about Steve Jobs, who by most accounts had a similar communication style.
While I agree with Ben's thoughts on good companies in general, I don't think he's really grasped how to make companies good himself (or if he has, it certainly doesn't come through in this story).

1:1 meetings are good, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. A far more beneficial way to make a good company is to make sure that when people fail, they are made to understand that failure and its significance in a manner that is both helpful and non-threatening. Long speeches filled with loaded questions and firing threats are the exact opposite of that.

Even the mention of firing someone should be treated like brandishing a gun. Don't bring it out unless you're about to use it.
I once nearly 'bricked' my router playing with some custom firmware. That in itself was terrifying, let alone the prospect of 'bricking the rover.'
I agree 100% (which is why I went with a silly "wat" instead of challenging the statement directly).

Every forum has a small group of people who tend to lack social graces (or what passes for them online) but aren't just random assholes and are correct most of the time. As long as these people don't stray too personal too often, their contributions remain a net positive, IMO.

tptacek certainly fits into that, he just seemed like a funny choice to lead off with in that statement.
Not necessarily. Sounds like Ben was doing 1:1s with Steve and Steve wasn't aware of the problem. If Ben never thought to ask Steve it wouldn't have come up. As CEO (with 100s of things to think about) its entirely understandable that Ben forgot to ask Steve whether his managers were having 1:1s for 6 months.
The "Are we clear?" -> "Crystal" exchange gives me an uncomfortable A Few Good Men vibe that reeks of Command and Control Management ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/08.html ).
pg remains personally invested (in the sense of interest and care).

Lacking such leadership, projects seem inevitably to turn into "Lord of the Flies".
The previous time Motorola Mobility wasn't owned by Google, which was the point of the comment.
But it could have been much worse, say like Chernobyl, and it wasn't due to good engineering.
You'll be happy to hear that the X1 Carbon has a new trackpad, which has been described by Notebookreview as "Oh my! Best touchpad surface ... ever!". The gizmodo reviewer: "Using the trackpad, was the first time I've ever done multitouch gestures on Windows and liked it."

As both a Linux and Mac user, I'm happy a PC manufacturer is finally getting it.
I clicked through strictly for the free t shirts, but it looks like they aren't free.
The base problem is that if you've resorted to threatening my job, there are two possibilities:

- You've genuinely exhausted all your other ideas and avenues for improving the situation. Obviously this means we aren't going to be seeing eye to eye. That means this job probably isn't worth either of our time anymore, unless one of us can come up with something that will drastically change our relationship for the better.

- This is what you resort to instead of thinking hard about how to fix problems. I don't want to work with you.

It's not about fairness, it's about fear. Fear isn't a good way to run a good company. In my opinion, of course.
Practical parsing of molecular data in Haskell
Despite the answers provided by fellow HNers, even if there wasn't a loop-less way to handle the scenario in Python, I assert that taking advantage of a language feature doesn't necessarily equate to "altering your thinking". You may find yourself, though, altering your thinking after defining language features have accumulated to a certain degree.
This is a defensive response to being sued by Apple, which seems to have been the entire point of Google purchasing Motorola.
Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The "video" of the pulse of light going through the bottle is actually the result of sending trillions of light pulses through the bottle, taking pictures at very precise (recorded) times and syncing them all together.
This isn't a meat allergy, its a mammal meat allergy. Doesn't really make you stop eating meat since you can still eat fish, chicken, etc.
I recently started browsing with dead links active and have noticed a couple of seeming hellbans on people where it really didn't feel warranted to me based on the recent history around where they got hellbanned.

Of course, this forum isn't a public commons so the moderators can ban whoever they want, but there are some cases where it seems fairly arbitrary.
I think the idea was that even if it was an engineering failure, it turned out not to be so dangerous. In a sense, it passed the tests of "What if things go wrong? What if the engineering wasn't so good? What if there's human error? What if events happen that weren't initially predicted?"
What am I missing? It seems the best case scenario is I get a never ending supply of free tshirts that I, nor anyone else, like. Why would I want that?
We need something along the lines of Diaspora (Open and Distributed). This would encourage geeks to develop on the platform due to it being distributed it would be hard/impossible to shutdown thus shall be around for ever (Twitter might not be). And due to the openness of the codebase etc people would start setting up hosts (Just like Wordpress or Diaspora etc.)
Exactly. I cannot think of any other use cases for ads where they would not cripple user experience but search. When I am looking for something you are most welcome to show me your suggestions. When I am chatting with my friends, o reading updates from Curiosity Rover—stay away.
Making cool stuff and being progressive actually kept them alive longer.

When x86's starting eating away the profits of their SPARC business, it was abundantly clear they would have problems down the road. Computing platforms tend to move up and what's on your desktop now may be powering servers ten years from now (quite possibly because by then people will have spent ten years writing and learning how to write software for it).

Sun tried to disrupt the desktop with the SunRay series, but they never got to the right price point. I'd have loved to have a Niagara-based desktop and I bet that had one been available for Unix enthusiasts, Firefox would be rendering pages and tabs on dozens of different threads.

People often discount that, but I can say it from experience. Back in 1998, I had two machines on my desk at work: a 400 MHz Pentium II (or III) and a dual-processor 200 MHz Pentium (both running Windows NT 4). While the single processor was somewhat faster, the overall experience of the dual processor machine was much smoother, with very few pauses and hourglasses. A lot of software today is single-threaded for the sole reason processors have only recently become multi-threaded.

And x86's only became multi-core/thread after the NT kernel became mainstream.
This is the only way the number could've slipped into Facebook servers. Still, sending fake friend request SMSes to the user when they don't even have an fb account is totally unethical.
Truthfully, I really missed the boat on what you meant then. I was adding another example of companies from the USA that have had less than stellar dealing with Latin America. I WAS implying that Chiquita did the same crud only larger.
And if you have multiple $50s, you can have food and other things too!
Payment Data Is More Valuable Than Payment Fees
I wonder what it would take to turn this into a business, and what the demand would be.
They were not designed to be able to resist an earthquake of that magnitude so I fail to see how it can be an failure from an engineering perspective (the fact that most plants handled it fine should if anything suggest that, from an engineering perspective, it was a success).
I used GoSquared(.com) to see where all of you guys are viewing from. It's really interesting: http://cl.ly/image/323G26341W3e
As an experiment, I volunteer to expose myself, my wife and my children to a yearly dose of radiation that is three times the maximum safe-level recommended by The International Commission on Radiological Protection. i.e. we happily live in the Denver area ;-)
> horrendously overengineered by committee

Yes, but it doesn't explain the rationale behind such a decision.
Really? I always found Safari on iOS frustrating to use. Chrome/Firefox/Opera on Android all seem like better mobile browsers to me.

I think Safari still doesn't auto-highlight the text in the search box (my most used browser function besides actually scrolling a page), so annoying to start typing a new search time and realize it's just adding on to the last search time until I hit the x. I guess Safari now at least syncs tabs and bookmarks with the desktop version, but still it's a stretch to say it even competes as a top mobile browser IMO.

I think notifications are only annoying on older iOS versions. In Android they've always been unobtrusive, and with Android 3.0+ (and especially in 4.1) they've got a lot of added useful functionality.

But to get back to the point I would say the defining feature on iOS is proper group texting. So, yeah, that's a lot of quibbling words to basically agree with your point.
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Waiting for the same list for Apple vs Samsung/Motorola/HTC.... and Microsoft vs Android manufacturers..
I don't want that though. I want to be able to alt-tab between my two most recent windows, without having to think about whether they're in the same application or not. It pisses me off that OS X (and Ubuntu now) has this two-level application switcher model, and I can't figure out how to go back.