skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the last few paragraphs of this article, unfortunately, I've managed enough people to know the value of nerf guns/ping pong tables...

Ping pong/foosball/assorted games have a wonderful place in startups. Case in point - welcoming new employees. New people tend towards shyness. Cutting through this shyness should really be the first step in onboarding new people. Guess what? One game of foosball/ping pong is better than three (usually awkward) lunches with a supervisor/other coworkers...

Then, there is the struggle. Ben Horowitz wrote about the struggle from the perspective of founders, but startup employees feel it just as acutely. Ever been stuck at work, late into the evening, desparate to complete a project? Ever go out with friends from university and discover that you make 25% less than the rest of your group? Ever work for a company that has pivoted so many times you can't remember what you originally signed on to build?

Good founders and an environment built upon respect and open communication can go a long ways towards reducing the struggle. However, when you're in the thick of it, a couple of games of ping pong can keep you moving forward (or keep you from applying to any of the 35 other startups that would hire you)...

Finally, there's one other wonderful business reason for mixing work and fun. Retaining your talent. Really good people (aka - the people you need in startups) have all kinds of options. If they have fun where they are and work with close friends, they are less likely to quit.

All in all,decent article. Unfortunately, it overlooks a huge number of situations when ping pong actually becomes important.
I guess all Apple could ask is that we share the love. :-D
Agreed, this was a very good demonstration.
well, I don't make any secret that I'm an asshole, but if you got this far... I'm ticked off at HN for:

1) being exactly the hollow echo chamber that leads to bubbles, because amidst the "We're just connecting investors to founders" is the networking, smiling, and meaningless business-talk that leads to Color (Remember Color?) getting funded. And HN would like to distance itself, saying it, too, was skeptical of Color, but Color at least had some hint of being innovative and all too many startups I see here are bad ideas _and_ bland ones.

2) This account got hell-banned, probably because I drunkenly chewed out an asshat. Now, I have two things to say on that score: d'ya think I wouldn't notice? A pathetically childish technical "crowd management" technique that I get around by going to my other account on any other browser I have open for my various Reddit names. I'll give it one credit, though, it spurred me to leave for good for Android+technology+buildapc+programming+javascript. I make a habit of checking back here every so often. Quality's crap. And the actual quality articles get complaints about being poor quality.

Also on that score, I'm not really sure I regret going off on that guy. I don't really disagree with anything I said, but at the same time I'm faced with the fact that I'm not at all a nice person. But HN doesn't let you delete comments, which is some sort of redneck backwards, and the way I see it it's not fair to the dude or to me to have that moment enshrined forever. Best I can do is camouflage it a bit.

3) Along the lines of hell-banning, the meta-awareness of this place is so stuffy and clueless. Policies do not constitute meaningful group decisions. Reddit has what, fifteen metacirclebrokes? HN just has occasional rabid debate about problems and whether or not they are problems and then pg does whatever, as well as a constant barrage of "We're not reddit" and various other pretentions. Now I'm a pretty damn pretentious person, but that also comes with a fair amount of self-loathing--and granted, HN has that too (what else is that but this?), but not in any meaningful, sculpted way.

4) My Backbone tech article and in fact all my articles get ignored here. And I'm not being sour grapes about that: I was in fact quite pleased that my first WBH got a handful of HN views. But that Backbone article did _great_ in /r/javascript, and maybe HN has a noise/signal problem, but if so, it's one that means you have to be somebody or you have use friends to be seen.

HN is already being gamed. And I don't think it has the capacity to deal with that. It comes with being a part of the Networking Circlejerk.

---

So, HN, enjoy your startup launches and your occasional gender-war debacles and your considered harmful considered self-referential.
Forget Apple for a moment.

I don't understand why so many people are trying to defend the working conditions. Fine, the conditions may be considered fine in the context of China. That does not make them acceptable; it just means that the working conditions in China as a whole are bad.

If I'm honest, I had not ever considered the plight of the Chinese factory worker. I use things everyday that are manufactured in China under conditions that might be worse than those at Foxconn. That being said, this article was useful in that it opened my eyes a bit. This isn't to say that I thought the working conditions were probably great. I just had never considered them at all. It's quite easy to live in a bubble and sometimes articles like this help break out of it.
It's a global disease, it just receives much, much more attention in the west (for example, all the antidepressant ads during prime-time television).
Ditto. I don't have a Facebook account. I kind of have a Twitter account but

1- I use it so little that I would have to look up my credentials and that's a pain

2- I will never sign into a new / unknown website with Twitter for fear that the website would start tweeting nonsense on my behalf.
I'm not sure where the culture shifted to value things like saying you work at a startup or have free beer/lunch VS getting a highly competitive salary and normal working hours? I choose the latter every single time.
The date in the URLs is for today. Yeah, it's no big surprises on the names and updates. Just thought it was funny that Apple's search indexes on their site provided links to draft status posts.
I'm not sure where the culture shifted to value things like saying you work at a startup or have free beer/lunch VS getting a highly competitive salary and normal working hours? I choose the latter every single time. Another thing on the top of my list, working with people smarter than me.
jQuery tools has a product that does just that: http://jquerytools.org/demos/tabs/ajax-history.html
I completely disagree [1]. There's a difference between a cowboy programmer and a programmer that can go more than a day or two without checking in with his superior. In my personal opinion, based on the level of intelligence required to do good programming, the best programmers are self-managing.

As a corollary to that, it's too expensive to hire development managers (in the traditional "management" sense) that can actually add value. Good programmers are that good.

[1] I've fired every cowboy coder that ever worked for me except one.
Zynga moving away wouldn't make users stop using Facebook. It might drop usage numbers or hurt other metrics, but nobody's going to quit Facebook just to play Farmville 2. The vast majority of users on Facebook are there because it's Facebook, and their friends have accounts, etc.
Once upon a time I worked at a company where we developed in a platform called Clipper. We used a cross-compiler to port apps from a PC to an HP-UX system. Although Clipper was based on C and the cross-compiler created C code it was never as optimized as it could be if written from scratch-actually it wasn't even close. In the years since I've heard numerous stories of similar situations. The one size fits all, which was best materialized by Java, never lived up to its name.

You say HTML5 could deliver a unified UX. I disagree. If the problem is the need for unified visual environments then HTML5 is the wrong answer to this problem - CSS is more close to the answer. HTML5 was supposed to be that kick-ass solution for delivering a more robust development platform for the web that could reduce the need for third-party plugins like Flash or Silverlight.

I won't argue that what HTML5 has achieved is no small step. But I wouldn't have high hopes of it ever manage to compare head-to-head with a native app, no matter how mature it would become-and that last part takes a lot of argument since evolution of HTML takes ages.
This brings back memories of Computer Club in 5th and 6th grade. It was after school a few times a week. Had lots of fun with Hypercard. One funny side effect: my programs were stored on the school computers so during recess on rainy days I would try to make as much progress as possible in 20 minutes.
JavaScript:

There's nothing wrong with JavaScript. It's a beautiful, powerful language if you know it.

Fragmentation:

Seriously? One code-base with a few cross-device tweaks is, in my opinion, infinitely better than n native apps. Just because n is currently 2 does not make it scaleable.

Lack of APIs:

I don't know what you mean by this.

Sandboxes:

That's a feature not a bug

Morons:

You get that everywhere.

Memory management:

Ditto.

Poor support:

That's really just a rant against JS again isn't it? Cross domain "BS" is easily solved with allow-origin, and if you don't own the 3rd party server then you really shouldn't be programatically accessing it.

IE:

Meh, it's not as bad as it was. Nor is it popular enough to make it worth worrying about for lots of people.
I always find it difficult to come up with star ratings because I don't remember what ratings I've given to other things. I'd rather have a "rank in order of preference", or pairwise rank ("Did you like this more or less than..."). You can convert ranks into scores by looking at their position along a (probably Gaussian) probability distribution. Instead of having 1 to 4 stars you have -2 to 2 sigma.
> Multicore really doesn't help web rendering very much.

There are people working on changing that, for what it's worth.
You can code, code well, and then discover that the feature you just implemented was something that the upper management actually didn’t consider to be very important, or that they wanted something completely different from what you thought they wanted. That’s the sort of failure mode that Scrum and other development methodologies are trying to protect you against.
Hello OP and other readers! Most HNers are enjoying this hand-crafted content without bitching about it. This comment does not represent us. If you have a moment, please flag it.
Injustice means one thing for me and another for a negro. I have no idea what the standard of living is for typical negros. Is it better or worse than the alternatives? I don't know. Confederate cotton farmers could be a pioneer of better living and working conditions for negros I'd never know it. I'm biased towards a Union view on these matters. Everything must be considered when doing these types of comparisons, but there is no comparison here, just an editorial on how deplorable working conditions are. Again, on confederate cotton farms. I assume cotton farms aren't this way all over the country.
My stance is that this is an issue the government needs to resolve. It's unreasonable to expect cotton farmers or t-shirt manufacturers to do anything about this on their own accord. I doubt they are behaving any differently than any other company with cotton manufacturing operations. There's no need to crucify cotton farmers or t-shirt manufacturers over this.

Sounds kinda ridiculous when you change a coupla words, no?
Nerf guns are more the result of an already fun company culture, than someone trying to make it a fun culture.

If you build a company culture that makes people comfortable enough to play and have fun with eachother at work, then you've succeeded.
Thanks for that. I generally find it difficult to say that I believe something without also saying that anyone who disagrees is stupid, so I appreciate the feedback. The last thing I want to do is make anyone angry or come across as trollish.
Correct. Assuming 100 employees at capacity, they went through over 200 new employees a year, meaning the average employee stayed for around 6 months before leaving.

As far as I could tell, there was a core 5 ~ 6 people who stayed on and had been there since the beginning, and the rest were all on their way in or out.
Yeah, but are most of us who are capable at code going to want to deal with Appengine? Definitely not my own first choice.
Sometimes things like nerf guns are indicative of a culture at a company that would be more fun and upbeat than working in a corporate cube farm. Now, obviously, cube farms can just as easily buy nerf guns and I'm just picking nerf guns because it's in the link-baity title. Free coke, social gatherings and nerf guns might also just be indications that the company values you and wants to provide whatever they can to make you happy. However juvenile you may or may not find them, at least their trying.
OP mentions larger teams, so a 20-40 person team nets you around 22-45 seconds per person in a 15 min scrum. If we give each person 3 min that is a 1-2 hour scrum.
>I'm seeing it more and more--job descriptions with perks about nerf guns and happy hour, or new grads who joined a startup and are bragging about ping pong tables and free coke. This is apparently something that people see as a fun culture, a sign that this is a place you'd enjoy working at and has people you'd enjoy working with.

Heh. It took me awhile to find these:

>Excellent opportunities with an exciting, fun 6 year old .com company!!!
Skills wanted: JAVA, Weblogic, EJB, Solaris, Oracle. Fun atmosphere- pool table, ping pong table, foozball table, and cafeteria. @90-95K plus stock options $$$$$$
Don't miss out!!! This is a hot one, sunny California, in Culver City- very close to Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey!!! Beautiful beaches, blue skies and the ocean!
If someone could reply with the correct spelling of foozball, we have a bet going in the office!

>Wednesday, September 27, 2000 19:05

Source: http://www.coderanch.com/t/9714/Jobs-Offered/careers/JAVA-De...

> Free meals when working late; unlimited cold beverages; vacation homes in Lake Tahoe; monthly beer bashes; complimentary use of a Porsche Boxster when designated as "Employee of the Month;" and, additionally, a chance to win a $3000 bonus plus the chance to drive a Porsche Boxster for two years with each participating referral booked in the Employee Referral Program.

> Friday, September 15, 2000 13:40

Source: http://www.coderanch.com/t/9700/Jobs-Offered/careers/jobs-ex...

I agree that these things really don't matter. But to be honest, I'm a little happy to see some of it coming back. The last 10 years has been hard to be a programmer in my area; most of the jobs are large companies, most of the work is boring, and the startups are few and far between.
Better than asynchronous APIs, low level threading, thread pools, tasks, TPL, async/await in .NET?

Or better than Akka, java.util.concorrent?

I am not convinced, even after doing some small applications in Go.
In my quick test, about 42% of the sites in the SSL Pulse data set (~180k SSL sites in Alexa's top 1m) support compression. For example, mail.yahoo.com does.
It really depends on the architecture. There are some architectures with only 1 register, and others with many thousands of registers.

Current x86 implementations do a good job of being fast even when registers spill.

I've seen dual-issue Power cores (32ish registers) that only have 16k of 4-way dcache, which means register spills can easily kill performance.
Positive violence feedback loop. Nothing good will ever come out of one.
Whats the best way? Avoid creating spam? or let there be spam, but build algorithms to detect the spam. FB seems to be choosing latter.

It seems like apps like these are basically destroying "open graph" fabric that FB wants to put in place. Its a great concept in general, but I do not see any legitimate use of "auto publishing" functionality for any app. If there is, potential abuse far bigger than any gain from the legitimate use. Although this puts Open graph with its actions and auto sharing etc in jeopardy.
> A big problem with many parts of Africa is that everyone is lower class.

And the problem with many parts of North America is that everyone is a fat ass.

Please be a little more thoughtful in your sweeping generalizations. Better yet, don't make any.
That's possible. Assuming you use any retina apps, of course. I'm looking at the apps I'm using right now, and none would actually be making full use of the retina display on a retina mbp.

I guess if/when I ran iPhoto it might look jarring. If I weren't running it full-screen on its own desktop, of course.

All of which is to say that it really depends on individual usage patterns.
You haven't really jumped the shark with scrum until you have in place a scrum of scrums, and a scrum of scrum of scrums taking up half the day for all the key players.
I suspect most TLS libraries will flush the compression buffer after each write call so its highly likely that every request will end on a deflate block boundary already.
GoDaddy offers users one month credit following service outage
"The End of Silicon Valley" Is Nonsense
Part of HTML5's origin is a draft standard called Web Applications 1.0. HTML5 is meant to be a desktop and mobile app replacement technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Standardization_process
Vulnerabilities don't arise by study, they arise because of vulnerabilities. We have plenty of well-studied crypto that is fine, ranging from SHA to Kerberos.

Colin is right that we know how to prove that cryptographic systems have certain security properties. The academic literature is filled with laments about TLS and proofs of fixed versions of it.
I am rather disappointed by much of the discussion in these comments.

The HN community has always taken pride in being careful, analytical and data-led. If someone were to advocate an unproven cancer therapy based on anecdote, they would rightly be harshly criticised.

The evidence base for SSRIs is extremely poor. The most favourable metastudies indicate only a very mild benefit, similar to that of many non-drug interventions like exercise or conversation with friends. Other metastudies show only a weak effect in the most severely depressed patients. There is known to be a very serious problem of publication bias, with major statistical irregularities indicative of the non-publication of unfavourable trials.

We feel confident in making statements about the nature of depression, but in truth we know almost nothing with any degree of confidence. The long-held serotonin hypothesis has proven to be completely baseless and there is no good evidence that depression has a neurochemical etiology. fMRI data is often used to make the case that depression has neurological rather than psychological origin, but this is very poor reasoning; The brain is not merely a passive vessel for the mind and environmental influences can cause substantial structural changes to the brain, as seen in chess players, sportsmen and myriad other groups.

It is entirely possible that the idea of depression is itself a cause of depression, in much the same way that the western presentation anorexia nervosa has been imported into Chinese culture and is slowly replacing the far more common indigenous eating disorder, which presented as idiopathic digestive problems rather than a psychological aversion to food based in body image. It is entirely plausible that the belief that low mood is a medical disorder which cannot be ameliorated by the patient is itself pathological.

I believe that the only statement we can make about depression with any confidence is this: We aren't sure if "clinical depression" describes a phenomena that can be meaningfully thought of and treated as a disease, but we do know that if you do something that you believe will make you feel better, you will feel better.
The attack Pornin outlined involves only the client TX stream, which the attacker shares with the defender by virtue of content-controlled Javascript.
Yes! Keep your toys, your sodas and your junk food. Just give me an office with a door, where I can actually focus on work and be productive.
Israel does not have choice: it is a Jewish country and it has to invite Jews, not someone else. There are not so many Jews in the world to filter them (and the better kinds of them are probably well-off enough in their current countries to repatriate).

America has choice on the other hand: lots of people want to get there, and you can't take all of them even if yo wish. Why don't filter? That is even more true about Canada.
I believe that was the intent of the quotation marks.
In my experience (six months at a job that does Scrum and, I think, does it very well), the thing that slows down iteration planning meetings is when the product manager hands down a one-sentence feature description, the engineers say “we can’t size that, it’s too vague”, and then you need a five-to-fifteen-minute discussion in order to expand that one sentence into something resembling a spec.
Another way to deal with it is to merely hold down Enter when you login. If you hold down Enter as you login, you bypass the Start Screen and it dumps you straight to the desktop.
Obesity is obviously a problem in many parts of America. What's your point?
Yawn. They've also leaked thousands of parts. There are already knock off phones for sale that will look exactly like the one they're about to reveal. Global product launches involving over a million people don't happen in total secrecy.
This is generally my goal with making code testable. If I can make it modular and re-usable, that makes it much easier for me to maintain and extend in the future.

"Does this thing roughly do what I think it does?" is a secondary goal for me.
I'd disagree with the more global point (in the title) that tmpfs is harmful: it's actually quite handy for all sorts of things.

As an amusing example, the SHM (shared memory) system in linux is actually implemented on top of tmpfs (/dev/shm is a tmpfs mount).

Other uses include CoW shadow mounting (when unioned to an immutable filesystem).

That said, the point that /tmp should not be a tmpfs mount is actually a decent one, just because we're used to the idea that /tmp is neither space-constrained (it's scratch space) nor extra performant.
From Steve Gibson's Vitamin D 'fan page' http://www.grc.com/health/vitamin-d.htm:

John Jacob Cannell, M.D. and executive director of the Vitamin D Council has this to say about Vitamin D Toxicity: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml

The Merck Online Medical Manual ( http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec01/ch004/ch004k.html ) has the following to say: “Because synthesis of 1,25(OH)2D (the most active metabolite of vitamin D) is tightly regulated, vitamin D toxicity usually occurs only if excessive doses (prescription or megavitamin) are taken. Vitamin D 1000ug (40,000 IU)/day produces toxicity within 1 to 4 months in infants. In adults, taking 1250 ug (50,000 IU)/day for several months can produce toxicity.”
We didn't already know that. In fact, I would have been willing to bet that the new iPhone would have been called just iPhone in the same fashion as the new iPad. I thought that the "5" shadow in the announcement was a red herring.
It did not to me. It might have seemed so when I was in my 20s, though.
Your railing on this article undermines your whole point. You say that you lack perspective as to what the living conditions are in different Chinese factories -- but you fail to recognize that this article gives you one more data point than you previously had. You gain perspective by having more articles bringing these issues to light a little at a time.

It is also worth noting that the article in question was originally written by a news agency from Shanghai -- it is not an American, outsider-perspective that's painting a scathing picture, it's the Chinese themselves with their own experiences.