skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to reply to myself with a counter-argument. I just remembered the "No Asshole Rule," which is a great book with similar themes. I think there's a difference between someone who is simply an asshole, and someone who is tenacious and sometimes a jerk to management (which the OP article seems to show) and disagrees openly. The latter might be an asset, the former is almost always a net negative.

The point is, you have to evaluate these situations on their merits. If someone really is dividing the company and producing a negative effect, then obviously you need to deal with that in some way. But if they're not destroying the culture (indeed most are adding to it in some way if they care about the company and work hard), then it's not a cut-and-dry decision.

However, the No Asshole Rule makes some very good points along these lines, so perhaps there is merit to the idea of avoiding jerks at any costs from the beginning.
Funny thing. I'm in this very exact situation and, indeed, I feel like the Brilliant Jerk these days.

We recently made our B-series round. The CEO and CFO have been in closed door meetings for months, leaving us adrift. The VC firm has installed people on the board and in the office, so they need attention. The people around here that put in the late nights and hair-tearing conference calls are pretty much being ignored. Communication has fallen off a cliff. But hey, we're a Real Company now!

Good thing I'm turning in my notice next week.
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian to talk Venture Capital at WUSTL
> I don't think firing him did any good to apple.

By a roundabout way, it did! If Jobs had not been fired from apple he would not have learned a whole slew of valuable lessons which he applied upon his return.
If one is disciplined enough to go for 4 years following a rigorous schedule, sure go for it. I doubt most people could follow this program for 4 years. It took me 8 years to get through college (those 9 am classes were too damn early...), and I had no idea what I was going to eventually do. Many people entering college are not highly motivated, and certainly not motivated with the iron will required to play winning poker.

The states letting state universities set the price of tuition up to ludicrous level seems to be the main issue with debt. At a reasonable state college, a 4 year degree 20 years ago for tuition would have cost less than 2k/year (I think I have some receipts for $800-900 from 92 or 93 for a full semester, 13-18 credit hours at the time).

It is now about 2700/semester or 3x the price 20 years ago. Actually I guess 2700/semester is still not too bad, at full price for 4 years, that's a little over 20k.

While going to Stanford or somewhere and getting a CS degree might pay off, you don't actually have to go to freaking ivy league schools if you don't have the money or want the debt. If you are in the humanities or something where your future is probably a lower paying job, then a state school is probably the way to go. 20-30k in debt is still a bit painful, but that's a 4 year degree for the prices of a semester at some colleges.

Poker, btw, is a game of statistics, not chance. Since you can change your bet when the odds change, ie: betting more when the odds favor a bet, or folding when they do not. Craps, Roulette, and most other casino games are all games of chance, where the odds are not in your favor at any time. Craps can give you the best odds of a normal casino game, but every dollar you bet at craps is returning at best ~$.99 over the long run. I used to play craps until I read all the odds and now all I can see is the negative numbers everytime the dice rolls. Poker is pretty much the only casino game I enjoy playing, because skill can effect your outcome. However, I don't have the years or bankroll to be a professional at it, and haven't played in a few years now.
Mozilla and NSF seek developers to build “apps from the future”
Guido Van Rossum posts to the same group a few messages later.
If you click on yourself then you switch to a ghost - in that state you can pass through objects.

Explore away!
I think it's closer to 49.5% in favor of the player, but counting cards is an attainable skill and will push your edge a bit above zero.
Twilio’s Biggest Partnership: AT&T Will Resell Its Cloud Telecom Apps And API
AFP: Global warming freezes world economy
If you don't reinvest at least some of the money you save, then 'forever' will turn into 'until the project dies', so well done to the French.
Yeah, my first thought was "...collecting the shasums and md5sums?"
It can be argued either way as to whether copyright vests in basic documents like terms of use, however, I would advise you to err on the side of caution and assume that if they aren't clearly marked as being free to reuse (for example under the relevant CC licence) you shouldn't use them.

People can spend a fair chunk of money on retaining a lawyer to draft terms of use so might be a little bit pissed off if they see a third party has copied them. The reality is that there will unlikely to be any actual loss suffered but still, you don't necessarily want to piss someone off who you may want to work with one day.

Also, although most terms of use will contain generic content, you may like to consider that certain issues may be specific to your business. For example, personal data, risk, usage of user-generated content.

So if you're going to copy, try to find terms for a site which closely mirrors your own and which is incorporated in the same state/country as your own site. You can then either copy and take the risk you will piss off them off if they find out, or you could take lessons from the content (although of course there is no guarantee that they will be up to scratch, the bigger the site, the more likely they are to be half-decent).

There's also a range of template sites that can help you out for either free or relatively inexpensively. Docracy.com for example...

/edit - heh, didn't realise you yourself were a template site!
Nice way to get rid of honest and insightful employees.

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."--Thomas Paine
I figured the Hacker News crowd would hate this article but I thought it was well written and worth posting. I've been a bit of the Brilliant Jerk myself in jobs and I've also been a manager at places with a Brilliant Jerk problem. I've personally seen how the rest of a group can do much better if you remove someone causing problems. Sometimes you find the other non-jerks are brilliant too, they just need the room to shine.

The key takeaway for me from this article is that startup employee culture is as important as technical ability. It's a scaling challenge; if you need to go from 3 people to 20+ and one of those earliest people is poisoning the culture you have a real problem. Hopefully good management can address that problem without going so far as firing someone. But sometimes the solution is to get rid of a jerk, no matter how brilliant they are.
You can click on the stick figure and turn into a ghost.
URIs should be black boxes. My understanding is that the client should need no understanding at all of their content.
I was thinking about creating an Android app with 0 network permissions to do exactly this, but didn't get around to it.

Once you've loaded all the 3-grams (~50MB of data), you can run entirely offline, close the page, and then go back online.
One great thing that you can add its a preview of the code.
And from the same devs that brought us Uplink, Darwinia, and Defcon. Definitely a no-brainer purchase for me, too!
Saving Android From a Second-Rate Future
I'm even not a Windows guy but I feel it's too early to tell whether or not Windows 8 is stagnant. There's less than a month's worth of data. I think I'd be more interested in either a November or January update.
Brandery Prepares for Demo Day 2012
Thanks. Ill add that right now. Its my side project so I haven't had that much time for it recently. Let me know if you would like to help.
Between my 2nd and 3rd years at Uni, a friend an I got into pickup. We watched videos, read books then went out in the evenings to practice. Pickings were slim since Bath becomes a ghost town during Summer, but we persevered.

I was pretty good with women beforehand, and certainly got better afterwards, but at a certain point during our training, my focus shifted from pickup to something more akin to 'reading, understanding and influencing people better'.

I think that's what pickup is really about: improving how you interact with people in general.

So yeah, some people will hate it for a number of reasons and that's ok. There are other ways to work on people skills. But pickup has a little additional incentive for you to work harder..
I know Impulcity is looking forward to it! Can't wait.
Despite OpenFlow’s Promises, Switch Architecture Still Matters
Yeah, it's not like they just have a giant image search engine laying around!
Go Evan!
Seems to me that this quote applies: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."
Not quite the majority of parliament - it's the 'Ältestenrat', the 'Council of Elders' composed of representatives from the different political fractions that decides on these procedural rules. So perhaps about 15 people for a majority?
Opus, the open codec for podcasts and Internet audio
Why don't you post the papers on your own website?
Why Apple Inc. Should Take On The TV Industry With iTV
Suitable Technologies introduces Beam, the remote presence device (hands-on)
I really agree with this whole Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose idea, but I also think that it misses something very important: the emotional connection to the people you work with and the company itself.

We are social creatures. A company which ensures that its employees form strong bonds will have good retention.

The other thing which is important is internal competition.

I don't have any references for these things at hand so take what I say with a pinch of salt. However, I'm fairly sure there is psychology which supports this.
I would expect them to read it once, and bounce it back to the author saying something along the lines of "Cite your sources, please." That's certainly within Google's power, no?
I was counting card counting as part of "perfect play"
"You know that guy who's been here from the beginning, he's mentored most of us and covered 75% of the sick days and holidays and outages since we started?"

"Yea, what about him?"

"I fired him cuz I didn't like his attitude anymore. We're a growing company and we can't have jerks like that on the team."

"What took you so long?"

That is NOT the kind of company I want to work for.
Disposable Databases (in Rails)
My mathematician friend pointed out that all that "research at google" requires "experience with large data sets and quantitative analysis". They want statisticians, not mathematicians.
Why not a small trailer with battery packs for long trips? or if you don´t want-need to go green, it could go with an engine and a generator. You connect it to your car and that way you can add range in an easy way.
It´s also fast to swap at the e-station, just 2 min...
I think you actually pre-order one, so you are getting something for your investment.
Which is what they plan to do. Either through donations of cash or through manpower.

"He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."
I am uncomfortable with the advice being doled out here. In all cases mentioned, the "brilliant jerks" were clearly invaluable to the venture. In both cases they would literally not have gotten past the early startup stage without them. However, once they become inconvenient to manage, the "only" solution was too fire them.

Not only does this strike me as a mismanagement of talent, but it is almost bordering on the unethical. While I do not claim to know the specifics involved, some of the anecdotes gave me pause :

>> And the Brilliant Jerk speaks the truth. But I have also seen him stick his head in the door and deflate an entire management team. A growth company needs enablers, not disablers.

A growth company also needs sensible advice, and sensible advice should not be confused with being a "disabler". Too often I have seen rational advice get dismissed because reality isn't compatible with someone's bold new plan.

Not knowing the specifics here, it's not too hard to imagine a scenario in which a "management" team gets carried away with lofty and unrealistic goals only to be "deflated" by someone with actual technical insight.
What makes Opus particularly attractive for podcasting is the fact that it unites the benefits of music- and speech-specific audio codecs - listen to the examples ;)
Yup. This was why I said it's difficult to distinguish a brilliant person who has little people skills from a jerk who's good at convincing others they're brilliant. And you're certainly correct to point out that this doctor could have been nothing more than a management scapegoat. I've seen that and lived it.

At the same time, I've seen people convince others that they're doing the business a favor by hoarding all the work, working long hours, taking credit for others' work, and building up systems that require their knowledge to operate. This is all well and good in a startup where you have few people, but it's murder any time you go beyond that.
Note: it's xkcd, not xckd. (in the page title)
MongoDB developers team with EdX open learning collaboration
People assess likely outcomes more accurately when sad. While happy, people consistently overestimate their abilities and the chances of getting lucky.
I didn't down vote you.
> On one paper, the first reviewer said it had too much theory and the second reviewer said it had too little theory. Both rejected it.

I haven't read the paper, so it's possible that one or both of the reviewers were way off base. But it's also possible that both reviewers were "correct". Often, when you get conflicting advice like that it's a sign that you're stuck in a compromised middle position that isn't quite working for anybody. For the paper in question, the comments could probably could have been better stated as "You have some theory in the paper which is a little incomplete as it stands. To improve the paper, you could either expand upon it, or cut it, but probably not keep it as it is."
Can you give some examples for why Python is not appropriate for "heavy-duty corporate stuff"?
Same here. I almost got tangled in a bit of dialouge too.
Mp4 Mobile Masti
That's why you shouldn't use Google Cloud SQL
Thanks! We'll look into tweaking that.
If you're doing professional work, you should stump for a professional tool. Otherwise it's like complaining that your family car, though ideal for its purpose, is a load of crap because it can't take pallets.
(1) Write webpage for people to 'safely' type their passwords in.

(2) Replace Javascript

(3) Profit!

(Bonus: Give iffy password advice at the same time— "correct horse stapler battery" is only good if you're sure the attacker can't do a billion net-attempts per second. ... this tool tells you a random 128 bit long sequence of "a" "time" is insecure)
Congratulations. It's been a pleasure developing on top of twilio.
I watched a manager try (almost) his hardest to mitigate an asshole employee. The employee insisted on being an asshole and used the mitigation as an excuse to be even more of an asshole.

I say "almost" above because the manager should have fired his ass. He didn't because he was a personal friend that he personally brought into the company, which was another failing.
dis-envowelment probably produces better entropy that will never match a rainbow table (until they catch on)

bad: once upon a time

good: nc pn tm

(though you obviously want longer words)

In reality you are better off creating nonsense words.
I think Gates owned too much of the company, this guy is talking about hires it sounds like.
Better yet would be to get supported by CPanel/SimpleScripts (provided with millions of hosting accounts).
I like this guy. I am hopeful that this is successful in establishing a de-facto model that directly supports artists. I'm even more hopeful that if successful, that this will eliminate the need for major record labels to own all copyright and necessarily lead to the elimination of the RIAA and its oppressive actions.
Share stuff from Dropbox in your Facebook Groups
After trying the both PaaS, I recommend Heroku for better deploy experience and lots of add-ons you can use later if necessary.
Bicycles.
View in Chrome, hit F12, click "Network". Put some random stuff in the form and click the button. Witness the chirping of crickets.

Then try your password.

Alternate solution: load the web page and then turn off your WiFi while you test it.
Just wanted to say that I would love to see this as well. Actually though, what I'd love to do is be able to compare taking the bus and biking to 19th Street BART from my apartment near Lake Merritt (in Oakland). I'd also love a way to see what the optimal times for me to leave are, based on the schedule for the bus near my house, BART, and MUNI Metro. I want a way to see the optimal times to leave that will minimize my wait times at each location. I would also love a way to adjust the amount of buffer time for transfers in the App, because one of my complaints with all transit apps is that they make assumptions about how fast of a transfer I can make. I would even go so far as to say you should allow users to adjust this setting on a trip by trip basis, and allow them to bookmark trips/routes. Anyway, I have many more ideas. Let me know if you'd like to hear more of them!
collect the plaintext!
These are the ones I use most: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5rryu7904o9xku3/KcEycVRsxq

[update] - not sure why there is two Mobile Mouse =p
Can someone explain the tl;dr of this post to me ? This is what I got :

Brilliant jerk is great for a startup but get rid of him if you are no longer a startup and growing rapidly ?
What specific claims does Mr. Gamble make about producing energy?

(After reading the article, it looks like a non-falsifiable claim - which in my mind makes it a religion, and not a scientific advance.)

Happy to be proven wrong.
Who voted up this complete nonsense?
They don't have a "brilliant jerk" problem. They have a "clueless management" problem.
At least I gave the source :) And I don't claim I'm any better.
I tried mapping a trip with Transit, but I couldn't figure out where to see alternate routes. Maybe I should look more closely at it.
Who says post-processing has to be in real time?
Microsoft cares about C++, which already includes most of the C99 changes.

GCC has recently migrated to C++ and CLang is developed in C++.

So Microsoft reasoning is that C89 is good enough for them, and you are free to buy a compiler from another vendor if you really want to use C99.
I don't think the Java ecosystem is really that great any more. There was definitely a time when it was the biggest and best, but I don't think that's been the case for a while.

Is there anything in particular that's available in Java that you couldn't get in Go or Python?
Quick update: just added escape. Thanks for the feedback!
Four common words may have more entropy and that is helpful against a brute force attack but what about a dictionary attack. There are just about as many combinations of characters in a 10-12 character password as there are combinations of four English words.
iFrame works, direct link too. I tested also things like URL encoding via # = %23, * = %2A etc. - but does not really matter, the target is the dialer, not the browser.

http://pastebin.com/cGgs7T4h << some thoughts
As somebody who distaste the bailouts, I hope he did it to tell Greece that enough is enough.
Suggestion: abdicate and re-hire this guy as your next CEO.
Security flaw in Facebook
A similar project was release by Dropbox a while back (zxcvbn): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html
Good luck! Please post updates if you can.
Tears of Steel, the Blender Foundation's fourth short Open Movie is out.
It is probably because I'm not in the valley, but I would have loved to have been finished in 3 months. We closed our seed round 6 months after pitching our first angel group. Granted, we had a few bridge notes to get us through and we were pretty picky about the money we took, but still. Fund raising takes forever.
Agreed! What the heck? “What he discovered was shocking: that the torus is the secret to an abundance of energy, that it is embedded in crop circles and used by aliens to travel through galaxies, and that a complex political conspiracy is keeping free energy technology out of the hands of average Americans.”
On the topic of self-contradicting reviews, I once got one where the reviewer began by noting that "the paper is very difficult to read and almost impossible to understand" and proceeded to remark that "it contains very interesting ideas"...
Yeah, "arglebargle babelfish supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is better than "i love you".

However, the goal is to memorize it, or otherwise record it, in the end, so you don't want to get stuck typing in nonsense words, because then it's the same problem as Tr0ub4dor&3 .
Devbox setup with Vagrant
$100M for a SourceForge clone with prettier colors? OMG.
"The second law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot remain perpetually in motion in a closed system, doesn’t apply to the torus, Mr. Gamble argues on the Thrive blog, because 'a torus is not a closed or isolated system.'"

Wait, what? If I put a box around a torus, it can somehow exist outside of that box?
I'm not sure what exactly the page does... It seems to me like a word gets greener if it's longer... What exactly does the algorithm do to computer the color?
I agree. This is only possible when all resource access flows from a predefined "root" resource via hyperlinks. If you're doing that, why force (arguably more difficult) accept header handling on your api clients? Then they have to set the accept header correctly at every request instead of getting the version number right once when retrieving the root document. Beyond that debugging now requires access to / a record of the accept headers involved, and returning the latest version for plain application/json creates a very nasty bug for clients.

I don't think REST meaningfully comes down on either side of this idea. I do think practicality sits highly in favor of versions in URIs.
Top good reasons that you’re not (just) using the Cloud
Which also means you don't have to pay the 30% tax common with the other app stores.
examples and pricing :)

how is this different from the echo nest? what kind of data are you extracting from wikipedia?

i'm building http://cloudplay.fm and would have a need for an API like this.
Isn't C++, all .NET languages enough?

Just use the tools the platform offers, instead of using the same hammer everywhere.
Two problems with this page:

1. I entered "test for bob" as a test passphrase and it told me that "The word <bob> is an uncommon word." Might need a better word list.

2. More seriously, it should simply mark every password as being horribly insecure, seing as how you just typed it into an unknown web site with no reason to trust it.
12345 => green

password => green

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo => green

"eight six seven five three oh nine" => green
So is it limited to tweets? I could see how that might be annoying if anyone were following me on Twitter.
Just bought it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Text box hung (cursor disappeared), then browser hung, then had to kill the process.
IE 9.0.8112
That looks pretty cool. It seems that it's only single words, not phrases, so you wouldn't catch that adding "man" at the end of "One small step for" doesn't help the entropy of your passphrase.
What counts as a standard? Why isn't "swipe to unlock" considered a smart phone standard? What's the difference?
I know of at least two groups doing custom sex toys with 3D printers.