skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm more like Rodrigo than Gabriella. I have all the soft skills that are needed but I'm not a great fan of following "deadlines". When I was working for a company I completed most of the tasks assigned to me before deadline but I wasn't happy doing that. I love to do the best possible work in least possible time humanly possible but as I have noticed most of the "deadlines" created by managers are unrealistic and stupid. Let me give you an example. Our project manager at that time(MBA from a top university) committed to client(electricity board) that the project we were working on will be completed in 3 days time and they can have a trial of it on 4th day. He didn't consult with programmers before making commitment. The reality was that it required another 20 days of work. Three of us had to work 56 hour continuously to complete it - an untested crappy code that just worked. I didn't liked it. Eventually after some months I left the job and never worked for anyone else again.

So this is how it works - Stupid clients will pressurize stupid managers for unrealistic deadlines and the stupid manager will accept it and will further pressurize programmers to do it. Good programmers will eventually leave the company/project and programmers like Gabriella will continue to meet the deadlines writing crappy code that just works and will eventually break down someday and it will be really hard for someone else to correct it because the code is a mess resulting in loss to client. It bites back.
In descending order of fullfilling-his-promises (all promises from his "Obama's Plan to Defeat Terrorists Worldwide" 2008 campaign document, pp. 5-6):

* He promised to end torture and rendition, and did so, AFAIK. +1

* He made a good faith effort to close Guantanamo, and failed. Let's call this a wash. 0

* He promised to revist the Patriot Act and implement "real and robust" oversight of the new powers it granted. This one's complicated, but PolitiFact seems to call it a wash. 0

* He promised to "eliminate" warantless wiretaps specifically, but hasn't done anything to accomplish this. In fact, he's signed reauthorizations of the Patriot Act twice without any change in the wiretapping sections. -1

* He promised to "restore habeas corpus". In reality, he's claimed the right to not only imprison foreigners without that right, but also American citizens. -1

* Not only that, but he claims the right to kill American citizens without trial. This isn't breaking a specific campaign promise, since even Bush didn't claim this (AFAIK), but I'm including it anyway. -1

In sum, aside from torture, he's ranged from a disappointment to a disaster on civil liberties. And I love the guy otherwise.
The result, they say, is an infinitely scalable database that goes beyond what most NoSQL databases offer.

No wonder NoSQL gets so much flake.
There are standard NoSQL databases?
Nokia Nexus: the impossible dream
Food is a solved problem as long as there are water and oil.
Why don't some of us want to give Kotaku pageviews?
I could jump to the moon if it weren't for gravity.

But I realize that reality prevents that, so I don't go around saying I can do it.

Are you saying that politicians are so out of touch with reality that they don't know what they promise is impossible?

Or are they being intentionally misleading?
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Instead of arguing about things in the abstract, it's possible to find actual data.

Corn prices are actually expected to hold steady until July of next year and then go down: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/grain-and-oilse...
Whenever people on HN and elsewhere say "X is really simple" and someone rebuts them, I like to link to this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-... about how 90% of people apparently don't know how to use ctrl / command-f to find words.

There is no such thing as too simple.
what political hand that he was dealt? A huge victory in the election along with a huge majority in the House and a super majority in the Senate? Yeah that's a rough hand to be dealt.
I see a lot of snarky comments (maybe that has to do with the journalism of the article), but my recollection of FoundationDB is that it is interesting. It's trying to tackle the problem of enabling ACID, while also not being SQL-dialect oriented, putting it in a somewhat unique part of the overall landscape.

So, if you are put off by TechCrunch's journalism, I don't know of a great reason to let that spill over into one's gut assessment FoundationDB. Here is a link to previous discussion, where many people try to poke holes into the tradeoffs being made for FoundationDB: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719

Perhaps the company needs to work to reign in some of the language, it seems like the last discussion revolved around some aspects of the system that tripped a lot of skepticism-detectors (or at least "glaring caveat-omission" detectors) last time also.
Change happens in spurts, only after things get bad enough to overcome apathy (i.e. I agree that a good way to look at this is complex systems theory). The last spurt was the 60's. The narcissism and growing wealth gap of the 90's and 00's are starting to make things bad enough again. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens this decade.
Protests are very different than riots.

Riots are when masses 'give up' and resort to something else.

Needless to say the entire western world is very far away from it.
I know you're not a dummy and don't mean to insinuate that, but I've had this conversation with people over and over and am just trying to understand it. We are choosing between the lesser of two evils here and it's extremely frustrating. I feel like it's time to stick to principles here and affect change like we would want to see in the business world. When there is a major problem in business, our instinct is to disrupt it to make money. Why do we throw our hands up in the air and say 'oh well' when we see such major problems in government?
Marco's original comment that set this off: http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/elephant

Hacker News seemed to agree at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500574

So the lack of the mention (especially around the keyboard/trackpad - I remember looking at the pictures myself, somewhat aghast) is actually, you know, notable.
Censorship may carry ominous tones, but censorship is merely the practice of an overseer examining material and suppressing objectionable content. There are varying levels, obviously. I am not trying to associate Instapaper with oppressive governments. But Instapaper did temporarily censor 9to5Mac.
Not really, so much as I am making a point about the validity of the resume comparison.
Agree with your first point, not so sanguine on your second.

The nature of Occupy may or may not be benign. The nature of social groups under Maslow pressures (fundamental hierarchy of needs) tends to be not so good.

As for food production in the US: it's a solved problem, with ample water, copious amounts of fossil fuels and fossil-derived fertilizers, utilizing soil-mining and -depleting methods, and monoculture agriculture. Climate change, drought, petroleum price spikes (though nominally coal and oil shale could probably provide for ag needs pretty trivially), or pests (insects, fungus, or others) could all have severe impacts on ag production. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s carried off as much as 75% of the topsoil (the organic substrate on top of bedrock in which crops grow). Changes in ag methods have greatly reduced, but not stopped, topsoil loss.

I agree that near-term food riots in the US are unlikely. With a broader time horizon, I wouldn't rule them out. Near-term issues are likely to arise in the same regions they have in the recent past (see chart in source article).
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Exactly right. The entire article seems to be based on food prices.

People have been predicting future behavior of complex systems for ever, and they are always wrong. Its very strange at first but it arises from the challenge of predicting things you don't know a-priori.

The Indian government could (not that they will but could) nationalize several million hectares of arable land and apply modern farming technology to them. Would double the amount of food. China's modernization program is resulting steadily growing production [2].

The price of food rises, and the production of food rises as well. Complex systems respond to a variety of inputs, not particularly easy to predict their collapse unless you can show something which can force them into failure.

[1] "According to the latest FAO report, the average yield of rice in India is 2.3 tonne/ha as against the global average of 4.374 tonne/ha. " http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-02/news...

[2] http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/06/jxb.e...
Because humans have such a capacity for learning, instincts would serve no purpose. Instincts are rigid and humans on the contrary are very adaptable. It appears to me that the scientific consensus is that there are no human instincts, but if you believe otherwise why don't you cite an example?
Moved the repo to https://github.com/petehunt/loris

Thanks for the heads up!
Or integrate in-app purchases, which is more likely to generate a conversion!
>I used to keep a larger, more generic "spark file" but I found it got to be too big to navigate. So I throw away more ideas now, and only write down ones that have serious merit, placing them in specific files instead of a "kitchen sink" catchall file.

You could also use Devonthink Pro, as described here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... as a placae for all this material, including the "rule to live by" file. DTP might help you find connections between ideas that you didn't realize existed.

EDIT: Mental note: Read article before commenting. You already know about DTP! Sorry.
Your -1 on PATRIOT leaves out significant executive branch restrictions that have been added to the wiretapping authority, which makes sense, because Obama didn't have the political capital to force a legislative change. My source: ACLU.

Your -1 on "killing Americans without trial" is an allusion to the NDAA. The NDAA is a smoke-and-mirrors issue; the problem isn't Obama's NDAA, but rather the 2002 Bush AUMF, which is still in effect. NDAA's enemy combatant language limits the powers already granted to Obama by the AUMF.

Obama also appointed Sotamayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court, but that doesn't fit nicely into a message board narrative about civil liberties.

It is a drastic overstatement to call Obama a "disaster" on civil liberties.
The thing I really like about Android, and to an even greater extent WP8, is that apps feel more like pieces of an integrated task. On iOS every app wants to be a special snowflake and this is annoying when most of the time I just want to grab an image or a chunk of text from one place and use it in another place. To me this is all part of one overall task and the UI should feel like a cohesive tool for this and not emphasize the (to the user) arbitrary boundary between one app and another.
It won't generally affect the real user test results because of a warmup/training phase in the test when those DNS records would be cached within the recursive chain.
It's almost like I went out of my way to judicially use the word "some" to ensure that I avoided doing just that.

And what the other guy said.
>whenever I'm annoyed with something I'm doing, I'll analyze why I am annoyed, and out of that usually comes an idea.

In other words, you're curing Schlep Blindness: http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html through greater awareness.
Those answers read like Klingon to me :/
With a username like that, I want to see an analysis of Rebirth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBirth_RB-338
> I'm actually not a kook about it. ;-)

I'm glad you were being hypothetical, because you were sounding kooky, but I didn't want to say :)

I gotta believe that HTML email doesn't pose an accessibility issue as long as the HTML is simply used for formatting. Any client can easily extract the text. Am I missing something?
What about this in conjunction with a loss of power due to a solar flare? Rising oil prices due to excessive unrest in oil-producing countries? Due to market crashes?
Yes, it's easy to give someone a list to do, but if you want him to do exactly what you want him to do, there's one certain condition: the man must be good at communication.
I got some colleagues who are like the guy in this post, it's very hard to let them see the importance of communication, they are very stubborn. Mostly, they see what they are doing matters.

I'm not saying teaching someone coding is easy, but at least you can see some progress on this, which make both side much easier.
That limitation (not-lucid dependencies between contribs) is rather sucky, but jumping into the world of dependency management will require a deep breath for sure.

Hence, instead of waiting for that, JSON support in un-adorned Postgres to solve a common use case in the interceding years.

The jargon for what this gives you is "a stable oid". Also more or less equivalent to a "system OID" at this time. These "Object IDentifiers" in Postgres are unsigned int32s that are (almost?) never reused (only accrued, or removed), and are all under the number 10000, and all assigned statically by hand. A-priori knowledge of these numbers can simplify writing extensions dramatically, but clearly this is not scalable for a future with dependency chains in extensions.
> I know in Australia much of the grazing land will
> not support growing crops.

I realize that some of the land used for livestock won't switch to farmland, but I'm not talking about reclaiming land, I'm talking about freshwater shortage.

> And it is also worth considering popular crops too that
> use significant amounts of water like rice and cotton.

I don't know about cotton, but I don't know of anyone growing rice in the midwestern United States. So far as I know, the only rice grown in the United States is in California, where they pump the water out of mountains (the Sierras). I don't believe that they are experiencing issues right now.

> So while livestock do account for much water use, it's not a
> simple switch to grains and the world will be rainbows.

It's more about freshwater usage. If farmers are having issues keeping their crops watered, would it make sense to pour more water into livestock (and the grains that go to feed them) with a lower rate of return on that water, or to pour it into the grains, where the yield is higher?

Also, comments like "and the world will be rainbows" are a little condescending.
The RSS feed doesn't show the domain next to the headlines, so if I don't click through to the comments, the cryptic headline is even worse.
This isn't unusual, amazon.com uses a combination of UltraDNS and Dyn, not their own AWS Route53 DNS service.
The site is popular with established start-up founders and has some very good information. If you really don't want an account;
http://bugmenot.com/view/quora.com
Catastrophes have been happening for thousands of years. Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. He documents the collapse of a dozen significant civilisations, usually because they used up some other resource (water or wood for instance) required to feed themselves. It was also remarkable how quickly they self-destructed - usually within a few years, and often with evidence of cannibalism. Starving people don't play nice.
A little bit, but also, they're selling more than their own election; what thwarts the fulfillment of most of these promises is politics. If Obama had a clearer mandate after the election, and, particularly, in 2010, he'd have had more success delivering.

What are you really asking? Do you honestly think Obama didn't want to close Guantanamo?
Your job posting is definitely one of the best I've seen. The focus on health as part of the culture is an incredible perk, and the transparency offered here definitely helps. If I weren't strongly committed I'd definitely apply ;)
HN: need your feedback and try my prototype
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What else would you have me compare the candidates on other than than their past experiences? You hire people for jobs based on their qualifications for that job. Obama hadn't done anything that remotely prepared him for being the President.
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Neither SSL nor SSH are straightforwardly susceptible to DNS spoofing.
In political circles, throughout the whole history of the word's existence, we don't say "Democrat president" -- it's Democratic. As in the Democratic Party. The opponent of the Republican Party.

Why?

Democratic is an adjective. Thus, it modifies nouns like president, party, congressperson, senator, carl-the-carpenter ... they're all democratic [insert noun], not democrat [insert noun]. When using the noun form, it is democrat. But nouns do not modify nouns. So we never, ever, ever say "democrat president". We say Democratic president.

It's apparently confusing because republican is both a noun and an adjective. But democratic and democrat are distinct.

Mr. Obama is a Democrat. [noun]
Mr. Obama is a Democratic president. [adjective]

Suggested corrections:

> In political circles it is thought that a Democratic president could never have been the first to go to China because they would have been accused of supporting communists. Only a Republican president could do it because he was insulated from attacks from the right.

or

> In political circles it is thought that a Democrat could never have been the first to go to China because they would have been accused of supporting communists. Only a Republican could do it because he was insulated from attacks from the right.
This is music to my ears. While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that all management is useless, they certainly seem to go out of their way to create barriers and waste time. They tend not to understand the observer effect: Making programmers spend more than five minutes a day reporting their progress adversely affects their progress.

And you're right about the ego. So much ego...
Strong disagree, regarding your view on qualifications.
This is how I feel about people who religiously use AdBlock.
Space Infographic - Keep scrolling & reach 13 billion miles from earth
well i moved to namecheap after i heard godaddy help crafting the SOPA bill. I guess they deserved it
It states that for integers a+b=c, the ratio of sqp(abc)^r/c always has some minimum value greater than zero for any value of r greater than 1. For example, if a=3 and b=125, so that c=128, then sqp(abc)=30 and sqp(abc)^2/c = 900/128. In this case, in which r=2, sqp(abc)^r/c is nearly always greater than 1, and always greater than zero.

Obviously I'm reading this wrong -- because as stated (and assuming that a, b, and c are positive integers) this seems trivially true -- sqp(abc) cannot be zero, r cannot be negative, and c is finite, so therefore sqp(abc)^r/c is greater than zero, QED.

Does Nature mean that the quantity does not approach zero as r tends to infinity (or some such)? Their example sure doesn't seem to indicate such.
Mating. The route to get there becomes more flexible due to our adaptability but the desire to have sex is instinctual.
Well, the people who were rioting in Cairo were certainly not suffering from Hunger, that is for sure. In other parts of Egypt, you may be right.
that he didn't have them, or that that is what we should be basing our decision on?
I think in India and around the world. People starve less because of shortage of food, but more because they can't afford it.

Distribution is a huge problem. Often moving food from point A to B is so expensive the economics of it just don't make any sense.

You can double you production. But what good will that do if the cost of moving it to hungry masses is not feasible? So really its not so complex, at the end it all boils down to a term called 'energy' and we just keep going in rounds around it.
I agree he should have explained "worse and worse". I assume it's supply and demand - urbanisation and climate change will reduce supply, population growth will increase demand.
Make a list of the worst offenders (it would have to be done per site) and a userscript could easily be made for them.
Most of the Arab Spring protests were encouraged and incited by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Err.. citation required?

The Arab Spring riots in Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt certainly weren't, although the Muslim Brotherhood did become involved in some cases once the protests were going.

Only in Jordan did the Muslim Brotherhood do anything that could be classed as "inciting"[1], and that was mostly unsuccessful.

The conventional wisdom for the organisation (such as it was) of the Arab Spring protests (especially in Egypt) is that it mostly had origins in the Otpor![2] movement in Serbia, and followed the model used by protesters in the Ukraine and in Georgia[3].

The later domination of the Egyptian government by the Muslim Brotherhood was due to a political miscalculation by the two main moderate groups (basically they lost votes to each other, giving the Muslim Brotherhood party enough votes to make the run-off poll)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Summary_of_conflict...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor!

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/the-revo...
I completely understand this, and believe it to be true.

My motivation for writing the book was primarily to get the information out there. I really love the Heroku platform, and would like to spread the knowledge around as much as possible. Charging for this book was really a way for me to recover a tiny amount of my time back, I have no intentions of really turning a profit from this.

After some feedback I set the pricing to be variable (5$+), and I've been giving away free copies to anyone who asked.

So far, the project has been a success (in my mind): over 600 copies distributed total, which means a large amount of users get to (hopefully) make use of the information :)
Source: https://github.com/niftylettuce/block-quora-login-popup
AND NOTHING OF VALUE WAS LOST
Wrote the book using Sphinx. If I had to do it over again, I'd likely use Markdown + custom tools. I'm actually planning to write a blog post about this next week some time :)
I understand the alternatives, but it is more the principle of the matter.

I regard Quora as a more technical focused Experts Exchange; Slimy, and not really worth the effort.
Thanks for posting this.

It actually made my skin crawl reading the article and imagining the state of software a decade or two from now in a world filled with Gabriellas, because "that's what you've gotta do to get ahead".

Of course, with the rate at which technology is "taking over the world", I wouldn't be surprised to see the required technical understanding of even managers start to rise, with that of consumers. Hopefully we might see some relief if that happens, ha!

A question though.. what do you do if you're 80% coder, 20% communicator and your boss just doesn't seem to appreciate it? Keep job hopping until you find where you fit? Because that doesn't seem like such a good idea.. especially not where I live =S