skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The advertisements for employees (whether there were or will be any actual hires is unknown) is Apple's way of controlling the narrative in a case where they have long known they would be shipping an inferior product.

Going out of your way to avoid the Occam razor, aren't you?

Hiring as a conspiracy to spin/control the eventual PR issues that would emerge from shipping an inferior product.

Seriously?

Somehow some job postings would make Apple "control the narrative"? Seriously? And how exactly do they "control it", now that they have made those postings?

How about using the bloody Occam Razor and saying that: Apple started work on their Maps app for iOS 6, saw it needed more manpower, and are expanding their team for the eventual iOS 7 release.
Instead of writing an opinion piece that will likely influence a few people, why doesn't this guy use his exemplary knowledge of Facebook and the stock market for profit? Why not keep this information to himself and short $fb or sell the information to an institutional investor?

My guess is that his "knowledge" is worth more as an article that he got paid $25 for writing than it is in actual practice.
That's all wonderful form consultant's point of view, but if everyone reasoned like this guy, there would be no open source software, no cheap consumer software, everything would be SaaS and... well, I'm not sure I would want to see a world like that.
'AOL squatter' takes wraps off new startup, Claco
>"Don't be surprised to see a double top on the markets and then a sharp retrace afterward."

The Fed is pumping money into the system, and has said they're going to do it indefinitely. The stock market is going up (at least in nominal terms).

At least, that's where my money is.
My immediate reaction is that I really want this as a screensaver.

Absolutely beautiful. I will definitely take a crack at making the screensaver myself when I get around it it.
People may have other ways to socialize, but there are plenty of social groups where Facebook has become the way that a lot of social activity is coordinated, and where standing outside means you simply won't find out about a lot of thing in time.
This is not true.

Some HFT firms have agreements with the exchanges that require them to be in the market providing liquidity no matter what. This is not true of all HFT practitioners, but major key players are required to do so.
You should quit. Life is short, there is no reason for you to spend it doing that.
Silicon Valley is Stupid (which is why it works)
There is a famous Chinese four character idiom about exactly this scenario: 愚公移山 (Yu gong yi shan), or "the foolish old man moves the mountain". Here's a link to the (short) translation of this story: http://english.cri.cn/4426/2007/01/15/167@185195.htm . I particularly like the role of the "wise man " in this story, who is actually the naysayer here. The names of the people in the story illustrate the common perception of these two roles: the old man YuGong's name means "foolish old man", and "Zhi Sou" means "wise old man". Who's the foolish one after all?
How do pre-installed ads violate any free-software doctrine? One can still access/modify the source code of any part of the operating system (except proprietary drivers). It does not attempt to hinder a users ability to do anything with the computer.

An example of a free-software violation would be the bittorent clients, which have to way to disable obeying the private bit. While one does have access to the source code, and can therefore modify this themselves, the software is designed with the explicit intention to remove the users freedom to dis-obey the private bit.

Adds are annoying, but do not affect any user freedoms.

EDIT:
Discussion on ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2060764

Here is a quote of a quote of the technology director of Canocial:

"Another addition is that we will be including Launcher web apps icons to
Amazon and the Ubuntu One Music Store by default. We feel that these
icons will provide convenient access to these resources for our users
and also benefit the project with the generation of affiliate revenue in
those cases that these resources are used. If our users choose to not
use these Launcher icons, they can be easily removed by the user by
dragging the icon to the trash."

I got that from the linked forum, but haven't searched the mailing lists to validate it.
How Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Will Change Las Vegas Forever
> Sorry to quibble, but no you couldn't. If you had 7B dollars and you literally made this offer to every person in the world, you still would not get Facebook's traffic.

I'm pretty sure you would. It's a dollar every time they visit the site, not one dollar per person.
I am creating a module of useful Algorithms in Python. Come join me.
That's an interesting point, perhaps the goal I described is impossible. It just seems like aiming for anonymity is aiming low and solving the wrong problem.
I guess I still don't understand how Appcelerator knew who the 'design agency' was for the end client. Was the app advertised as being built in Titanium by XYZ firm for ABC firm?

To follow up on my original point: The OP makes it seem like Appcelerator is shaking them down after the fact (and breaking the licensing/pricing model advertised for the product) yet there is no evidence of it. No one at Appcelerator has confirmed this has happened nor has anyone else in the comments had a similar issue.

It sounds more like Appcelerator reached out to upsell and it was taken/communicated badly.
I've done partnership deals with Amazon's BD department before. They're very wary of just going head-first into a long-term deal without some kind of "feeling out" process to make sure the two companies are going to get along.

I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't their "feeling out" period before launching exactly what you're suggesting in a year or so.
Multiple underscores work in Ruby 1.8, too, but for a different reason: Ruby 1.8 doesn't care about duplicated arguments in block parameters.

It looks like this used to work in 1.8, but a "duplicate checker" was added in 1.9?
I have a similar story... only I inherited terribly written JSP. It was just as bad if not worse than you describe.
I ended up re-writing everything from scratch; now, I am so glad I did.
Steve Jobs: "If you're not failing once in a while, you're not trying hard enough".

iPod: "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame".

iPhone: "What? No copy/paste? No third party apps?"

OS X 10.0/.1 shall we even go there?

Apple's way was always one of iterative enhancement.

The only reason for the current regression was that they started from zero, were the previous offering was from a third party competitor (Google) with 8+ years head-start in mapping.
For the record, I spent 10-12 years coding Java (the last 4 or so w/ Spring). Lots of OOP, lots of pattern based enterprisey big boy stuff. I definitely have a solid (but atrophying) understanding of the concepts. I get that they're the right way to do big Java apps. But Java makes implementing them fucking laborious. Back when that was all I knew, it seemed elegant and I was used to the scaffolding.. but the truth is that in a number of other languages the same patterns require so much less scaffolding and even thought, that we don't even notice them. They're a given.

I give my users vastly more value-per-line-of-code now than I ever did writing Java.

That said, I have nothing against Java or folks that enjoy doing it... but even when it was a language that I was knee deep in and stoked on, I was able to laugh at some of the shark-jumping complexity of these cartesian products of patterns that would arise.
IMO, it's a pretty sorry excuse for a law. While you can often answer with "no" and be accurate, it doesn't happen enough to say "always" or "any". Reading through my RSS feeds, I see about 20 headlines ending in question marks. Only 12 of them can be accurately answered with "no".
Glad to hear that, otherwise it was Goodbye Unity
The Cockroach Theory: Why Little Things Matter (even for Apple)
Sharding - Introduction to MongoBD - Part 14
Avengers, Dark Knight and LoTR on the top 5? FAIL.
Google, for example, charges companies for (lots of) use of it's APIs.
Maps and up to date, good quality data costs a lot.

Both are good reasons to invest in disruptive technology - to lower the cost in geodata - and to swap to a free mapping service.

See http://switch2osm.org for more case studies and information.
Haskell is a relatively recent language; I know that Prolog (a completely different paradigm) did the same for underscores back in 1972, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is an even earlier example.
Nvidia Cozying Up To Open Source, Will Release Tegra 2D/3D Documentation
"300 days/year"

Why does he get 65 days off a year? This is not North America, Europe or industrialized Asia. Most of day labourers I've spoken to in Asia consider themselves lucky if they get two or three days off a month. At that low level, for most of us, they lose a precious few days of work which is often vital for them to have enough money to eat that day.
That is my favorite Ubuntu release. I was on it for the longest period till last month when I shifted to Lubuntu 12.04. I have lost out on a few things, but I was getting tired of hunting for alternate sources of software for their latest version.

Lubuntu 12.04 is unbelievably good. Everything works out of the box and it just stays out of your way. You can choose Openbox at the login screen too. Highly recommended.
As someone who contributes OSHW derivatives, it feels really shitty to have a company go from very open (Makerbot in 2009) to very closed (Makerbot in 2012). Contrast this with Google Wave, originally closed, then they opened it.

The same thing is true with pricing a product: it's very difficult to raise prices, while it's very easy to lower them.
I was really looking forward to see what makerbot was going to add to the open source community. It is totally bait and switch. Thank GOD|FSM for individuals (RepRap, Open Source Ecology, Open PCR, Arduino) that continue to keep their efforts open and free.
I started writing some suggestions but you know what - someone is dumping this on you because they didn't care and their predecessors didn't care, etc. They probably make far more than you for doing far less.

The moment you start touching the code, you are going to start being blamed for the nightmare preceding you. It could even affect your career if future employment researches where you worked previously and gets told you made the mess in the first place.
That's comforting, at least. Still a very interesting decision
Python also supports the '_' character in that same manner. It's just a legal variable name that is given special meaning when in the interactive interpreter.

>>> p = { "Alice": ["g", 1, "a@a"], "Bob": ["b", 2, "b@b"]}
>>> [(name, email) for name, (_, _, email) in p.iteritems()]
[('Bob', 'b@b'), ('Alice', 'a@a')]
Don't touch anything. Run. There's no glory for you in this.
This might sound sacreligious to the many vim fans here, but get a good IDE, it will help you get a handle on what the code is doing and let you navigate around faster, which is especially handy if the execution path for accomplishing any one thing involves dozens of files. A good IDE will also point out blatant errors, and a really good IDE will point out potential errors as well. I personally really like PHPStorm by JetBrains, the code inspection tool is quite good. I was recently able to cut the size of our code base in half by using it to identify tens of thousands of bugs, a lot of them on inspection were "this never worked" type bugs, which with a little digging I was able to confirm could never be called. Eliminating code also makes refactoring the remaining code easier because you have fewer interdependencies to worry about.
I hope you're getting paid well for this.

One of the most important things is just to manage expectations - it sounds like you've got a huge task ahead of you and people will underestimate how long it will take you to fix stuff.

It might also pay to just focus on getting the software into a maintainable but ugly state.
Okay ... I guess I have to come clean and admit that the comment did make me smile. In part it was because when I read the headline the first thing I wondered was how many of the comments would mention minecraft.
Can't agree more with this. The way you reduce risk when migrating code (especially code you don't fully understand) is to build strong integration and end to end tests.

This will allow you to be more aggressive when replacing crap code with new functionality.

Given this huge mound of code, this process will be quite a drag, but it will pay off in spades in the long run. Trust us.
Awesome Dad Sends Toy Train into Space [video]
Is there an option to migrate db to another CRM with similar functionality? If memory serves, vTiger is a sugar clone.
duplicate
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049
I'm not happy about it, but for many of the less computer-savvy users, I don't see why this should be a big problem. They may very well be interested in this feature, and it still beats paying an exorbitant amount (comparably) just to use Office or Photoshop, or whatever it is that compels people to get Apple computers.

Some us already support websites by shopping through their Amazon links. Why not support Ubuntu?
If you're already familiar with Ubuntu, Debian or Mint would be an easier switch.
I feel very proud of this as I came from the same state of India where Dashrath lived and built this road. I remember reading this story somewhere in mid 90s in the newspaper and to this date Dasharth's story is a deep inspiration for people like me who come from that part of the world.

To fully appreciate what he accomplished you will have to understand the way things are or at least were in Bihar at that time. He came from a family of "mushars" which is a community of "Rat eaters". In the caste system, they are the lowest rung of the society. Nobody cares for them and they are really really poor. To top it all Bihar itself is the most poor state of India. Some districts of the state have worse malnutrition figures compared to some sub saharan african countries.
In all this, he had the courage to break a mountain and create a passage for his people. Even his own village people did not support him initially. I am sure the idea would have sounded fool hardy and people would have thought he has lost it.
It is pure 100% will power that one must have to accomplish something like this.
1. Get it onto version control.

2. Make sure there is some workable strategy for deploying and testing the code.

3. Ask somebody to provide you with a list of the changes, or else try to create some kind of diff against the original version of the code. If you can see crazy stuff here then find out who did it...

4. Ask somebody what the biggest bugs are? Which things are causing clients the most problems?

5. Try to establish which convention is 'winning' in the codebase. But you might want to create a more sensible convention which will allow unit testing (start this immediately!)

6. At this point, ask if you can hire people to work on this with you as it's a big problem, and you need to free yourself up for the rewrite.

7. If that isn't possible then leave. You have done enough to make your CV better and a company which passes you something like this does not care about your career.
Princeton University - 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks
In Tao, we have been trying to do it

1) for coordinates and graphical shapes
2) so that it works both ways, i.e. from code to visualizer, but also so that manipulating makes it possible to change the code.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPwjB46E5I for an example of how this works in practice (look around 1:20 in the video)
You will be lucky to get serious numbers of bug fixes on that timetable I suspect. These codebases are hard to work with. Been there done that.

I would look at migrating the clients to another product that works, or even a less forked version of vtiger.
Free as in freedom. You're free to remove the ads.
1. I'm so sorry.

2. Set up a development environment and deploy the code there. Get it working. With code that large (and with the added wrinkle of executing code out of the database) changing things is going to be a nightmare of unintended consequences. Getting a testable environment up will let you find those things and help you understand what it does.

3. Get it in version control. This should be number 1: Before you make changes get a baseline of where it was.

4. Find a bug that exemplifies the nastiness of the whole situation and make a fuss. Let everybody know why this bug is so bad and what caused it. This will give your employer a concrete example to look at when you say "this code is shite". Harp on this bug.

5. Fix that one bug. Roll it out. Be a hero.

At this point you'll have a good base line, some credibility, and the organization will understand what a mess they've got. Now you'll have to figure out what you want to accomplish: keep it limping along? Improve it? Rewrite? The above steps will get your feet under you.
> Access to chemotherapy or radiotherapy or surgery is much easier for wealthy people than it is for poor people.

Is it? When I underwent chemotherapy, I did not pay for anything (to be honest, I paid gas to get to the hospital, but did not pay for medics, hospital bed, tests, blood analysis nor lost my salary for the days I could not work). Even though the price of some of the medics that were injected in me twice a month was greater than my monthly salary. Cancer is a disease for which poors are very well treated in France (So yes, in some wealthy country, cash makes no difference).
%> sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

%> sudo reboot

You're welcome.
I'd describe it as less credible. Especially articles written by Leach. A hack if ever there was one. In fact a hell-banning of Register articles wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
What about Firefox which has shipped with Google search default since forever, which Google pays Mozilla for, which Google makes money on? Will you never use Firefox again?
Disappointing.

If this is because they were not getting enough donations from the users, then I am disappointed in us for not supporting them (I give $25 annually, maybe it is time to up that to $50).

If they are getting enough in donations, but they just got a taste for money, then I am disappointed in them for compromising the spirit of open source (even if it adheres to the doctrine).

If they are getting enough in donations but really want the capital to take Ubuntu to the next level, then I am disappointed in all of us (especially me) who just couldn't find the time and energy to join the project, write some damn code, and help make the project great.

But at least this last one is an interesting prospect...
Even though the DB is a monstrosity, I'd start by familiarising yourself with it intimately. Once you know what data is meant to go where, it should be a good starting point for fixing things.
Facial recognition will be turned off for Facebook users from Europe
Debian Wheezy is shipping with Gnome Shell 3.4 at present, Fedora 18 will have GS 3.6.

The RHEL 6 clones (CentOS, PUIAS Linux, Scientific Linux) have Gnome 2.x and support for ages.
Your Porsche analogy is awkward. Computer vs car industry analogies generally goes like “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”,
and i don't see a reason for this to change anytime soon, for obvious reasons (computer software and hardware are much easier to update and innovate then mechanical systems are).
Sage advice. It took me longer than it should have to learn this.
Successful startups are agile.
Also similar, but by a group of people: http://www.ssqq.com/archive/vinlin27a.htm (it will not win the 'best site design' or 'best written story' awards, but that site surely does have some gripping content)

(that road featured in BBC's Top Gear about a year ago)
You're not going to have serious progress for a year. The DB is borked, so you have no foundation at all.

Software Engineering is serious business, there's bugs, new features, maintenance, testing, etc. They failed to manage their code. You need to be realistic that with a team of 2-5 people it could take years to fix.

It might be best to put it out of its misery if they can't hold off their clients demands and buy you the time needed to rebuild it.
I know at least 3 friends of mine that bought the 4 on AT&T and suffered through several dropped calls - they even used my Moto once and Nexus the other time to complete their calls at the same place on the same carrier.

So Antennagate was real, iPhone <5 dropped more calls than any other phone on AT&T. That's the disingenuous part about how Steve handled Antennagate - sure competitors dropped bars when holding hand over their antennas but the competitors antennas weren't badly designed such that they would be easily covered while holding the phone and their phones didn't drop as many calls.

People decided to live with it but 2 out of my 3 friends are on non-iPhones as their work doesn't afford them dropped calls.
This sounds like the Mozilla / Google deal. It suits me fine as long as I can choose to remove them later on.
Or perhaps it is aiming high and solving the right problem. Unless one can back up their claims with good evidence, they're merely engaging in conjecture. Thus far, the only evidence we have points in favor of preserving the right to privacy and anonymity.
This is amusingly simple minded. Does the author not realize that it will just cause big pay cuts for the most highly compensated employees (not necessarily a bad thing). Corporations will cut CEO pay in order to pay lower corporate taxes. Why on earth would they increase pay across the board in order to decrease the highest paid:lowest paid ratio?

This is basically an argument for cutting corporate taxes, which I don't entirely disagree with, but if that's what he wants to do he should just argue that on its own merits rather than coming up with a scheme that even brain dead tax accountant could get around.
It was real enough that Apple settled a class action lawsuit over the dodgy antenna.

http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-20/tech/tech_mobile_iphone-4...
I posted it first, just saying.
Imai - autonomous city
But first... version control!
If you had an app that told you the truth, would you use it?
What would you want from it?
You should make sure to set expectations. If your employer only wants the minimal amount of maintenance done, then don't do any more. You could go to heroic lengths to repair the codebase, but if that's not what they're asking for it will be in vain.

Second, I suggest applying as many tools as you can. A modern version control system, of course, and keeping any version control history that you inherited (although it sounds unlikely).

A powerful IDE might also let you start cutting out crap immediately, so try PHPStorm or Eclipse+PHP (or both!) and see what they can tell you.

And start writing tests as you start making changes, because you'll likely break something seemingly unrelated when you start changing things.
It all depends upon the details of implementation. If they're spamming the user with "and before you open this window our sponsor would like to bring you this message..." then that would be pretty bad, and I'd stop using Ubuntu as a result. On the other hand, if you can use the lens to do shopping and get reasonable search results from a range of companies configurable by location, etc, then I think that would be a useful feature. If you're just limited to shopping with one company then that would also be bad (anti-competitive).