skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You can navigate through this story using either your scroll wheel, or arrow keys. (For mobile devices, I cut out the interface for now and left you with text)" ... Didn't work for you?
A Story About Queues in Four Acts
> Perhaps I shouldn't blame two amphetamine pills for something that was so much bigger;

No, you shouldn't. IIRC there was not even slightest trace of the substance in your body after a few days. Please, don't attribute to the drug things that can be equally well explained by inexperience in social interactions, emotional immaturity or any number of other reasons, inluding bad luck. Have you been using the drug for half of that year - maybe. But it's obvious that whatever made you "code and not listen to people" was not the drug. I mean no offence, and I guess it is, maybe, somewhat, possible that using a drug twice changed your character and way of thinking for a year, but I find it really hard to believe.
* This combined with the massive cheap intern labor pool makes you guys seem pretty sketchy. Like you basically want employees but you don't want to pay them or share equity.*

In response to the compensation, I think Patrick would confirm that his original internship was paying him so little that he would be losing money each month in NYC.

We are not faultless here.. we had to make a decision on how to save the company (after realizing how stupid our original plan was). We tried our best to be fair, and most of the interns were satisfied with some combination of pro-rated stipend and housing/living expenses. Admittedly, some were not as satisfied.
This story reminds me a little of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)

It turns out that many backup power plans have not been designed with longterm flooding in mind.
I didn't decide anything. I just explain that the decision to test is inevitable.

>> Years, decades of seeing kids die to suicide

Oh come on. You could at least wait couple of lines before you drop "you are a child killer" bomb. This is complete bullshit. There are very unfortunate cases of child suicide. It has nothing to do with existence and merit of evaluation system whatsoever and assigning to it responsibility for dying kids is a demagogy at its purest.

>>> And then you assume it is a good proxy for teachers.

Again, I don't assume anything - I say this criteria is inevitable, since the job of the teachers is to educate the children, and well-educated child is considered teacher's success, while poorly educated one is considered a failure. Since we don't have a way to test capability of teaches by supplying them with test kids to be taught in lab conditions - we have to test the actual kids to sample their level of education. It's not a choice, it's a logical consequence of current system of assumptions. It's as much choice as for a man jumping from a building it is a choice to hit the pavement.

>>> Your older education system did a great job.

It did great job for some and terrible job for others. It does the same now, only much more expensively. That is another reason why government is so eager to introduce testing - the costs are raising massively, the results aren't improving, and in some places are actually nothing short of disastrous - with schools releasing people that are completely illiterate. Every school complains it's underfunded but more funds do not seem to produce better outcomes. The budgets have limits, so it is no wonder that whoever distributes those budgets wants to see some metrics about how things are going instead of blindly throwing money in an hoping for the best. If something gets startups killed is exactly throwing money out without any way to measure if something was achieved or not.
Kindle Fire under fire from Project Gutenberg webmaster
Actually you're wrong on that part. Steve was the visionary.

He was the one who saw Pixar as being a brand (i.e. a modern day Disney) rather than just an anonymous studio. Kids are buying and trusting the Pixar brand not the Disney brand. So to be able to set that all up (e.g. equal billing) required a vision for what the company could be.

Steve was responsible for Pixar. John was responsible for Pixar's movies.
p21 in the white paper suggests the speedup is ~2x, for the parts that were actually parallelized. That's more interesting (well, to me) than the rather limited increase in overall frame rate.

You may be right that they are doing the wrong thing, but I think the fact it's doable at all is reasonable evidence that their tool is useful. I'm pretty impressed that somebody who's totally unfamiliar with the code is able to jump in and start parallelizing stuff - particularly if they've never worked on a game before, and so might not have any real idea where would be a good place to start, or how things are likely to work.

Maybe my standards are too low.

(Those screwy HUD textures might be evidence that they managed to get it completely wrong, of course ;) - or maybe it's just something simple.)
Deployd: making building complex backends simple
I actually think that this change is more from social media than it is from SEO. Both are excellent sources of traffic but optimized a bit differently. But the end result of both if these "optimizations" (including optimizing for ads) is a terrible experience and almost completely worthless content. Yet, sometimes, I cannot help but click...

I see a site like Mashable as totally optimized for social and ads. I remember a point in time when the site was interesting--when APIs seemed like new thing and hackers were "mashing" sites together on a scale like had never been done before. It chronicled the new web 2.0 trends (which I have to admit were really powerful--no one can deny that the landscape of the Internet was changing).

But now it's just a bunch of crap. Top ten lists (which, of course, make you click through each item so you'll refresh ads). And infographics: they used to be cool. Now they're just stupid charts with a graphical background and font. Every time I click one I think to myself, this didn't have to be graphical and it's not very informational. Like a movie trailer the headlines of these traffic-hoarders are catchy just to get you to click on it and once you arrive you're disappointed and 10 cookies have been dropped on you. Or you see some modal covering the content asking you to do something that will help the site proliferate itself. If you can stomach all this deception and read the meat of the article most of the time you don't feel very satisfied. You click the back button unless you're tricked into clicking another of their links.

I think the only real way to stop this is to significantly demote sites that have one than one or 2 ad units on the site.
Hopefully they have stair-dollies.
You are quite right in that, and I've always thought that the abyssmal treatment of employees by employers over the past 40 years (things have gone astonishingly downhill, far more than most people realize... between 1950 and 1980 the average salary of the lower 90% of US workers rose by 75%... between 1980 and 2010, it rose by 1% even as worker productivity and corporate earnings skyrocketed thanks to computers and automation technology) really does not earn employers any kind of expectation of loyalty. They have specifically manufactured an environment to force employees to have to hop from company to company every few years just to keep pace with market rates. They've gotten rid of essentially all pensions, and divorced salaries entirely from the value employees actually generate. It blows my mind that employees would consider an employer worthy of any sort of loyalty except in extremely unusual circumstances.

Loyalty goes both ways, or someone is being taken advantage of.
"Either way, signing a contract does not make you a slave to the company.. you can just walk away. Yes they could technically sue you for damages, but this never happens in real life. It's too much hassle and expense for the company (especially a startup) to go through."

I think it was fine to attempt to convince Patrick to join, but it is not ok to tell him he can just bail on previous commitments because his employer will not sue him for it. Either you said that because you believe it, or you only said it to convince him, which is even worse because it means you are willing to say whatever you need to to get the results you want.

And it seems like I was right before. You in fact did decide not to pay him the agreed upon salary immediately after he arrived.
I thought I made it clear how to navigate (why you would want to go to page 2 if you hadn't finished page 1?), but I guess you're right. I'm pushing navigation arrow buttons live right now. Sorry about that--Internet connection at my place is currently dying every minute. Pushing now!
That was your title!

Poaching - Illegally hunt or catch (game or fish) on land that is not one's own or is under official protection.
PageRank is no longer Google's primary mechanism. In fact, there is no single primary mechanism. Google has stated that the ranking you see when you search is the product of over 200 contributing factors.
The scroll wheel thing is tricky: I could only use the wheel if the cursor was not just on the virtual "page" but inside the margins, where the text was. Took me a bit to figure out. (Chrome on Win7)
"No. What is truly horrifying about sex.ly is that it so utterly and absolutely cheapens the experience of something very important."

I would say: it "logical-ize" it - in the computing meaning of the "term".
And here come the question: is it good? Maybe no because the logic of such an app is a cheap one but maybe yes because it becomes more logical in the sense of rational.

"What is so attractive with this logic is that.. it is logic" - Triumph of the Nerds
> Not even audiophiles can distinguish much audiophile equipment from more mundane equipment in a blind test.

That's a pretty broad generalization about a large group of people. Do you have any facts to back it up?
Just one example of how he may have indirectly lured more talent than it may seem possible:

Jobs was the main driver of the creation of the innovative-layout of the Pixar HQ building. Lassater himself said that he truly believed that the way the building was structured led to better collaboration and creativity -- ie. a better environment, which would drive more people.

It's not that people think, "Jobs is involved -- yay!" Rather it's the culture that Jobs helped create and helped nurture that people would find attractive. Many, many other leaders with different priorities would likely end up inadvertently squashing the open collaboration and creativity that made Pixar successful to begin with, rather than nurture it, preventing success and preventing new talent from choosing Pixar.
This is one of those articles that deserves a middlebrow dismissal. =/
Poaching is the standard term used to refer to convincing another company's employee or future employee to leave for yours.
New Windows Phone 8 Features Reinvented Around You
California attorney general sends privacy warnings to app makers
The fuel is stored in the basement of the datacenter. That flooded, taking the pump that was supposed to pump up the fuel stored in the basement to the 17th floor.

This has nothing to do with buying a pump, that was already there, this has to do with the fact that the diesel tanks and the pumps for them are under water.

In the future I hope they put the pumps on higher floors, and make sure the fuel tanks are completely sealed, so even if the tanks are flooded the pump can keep pumping fuel out of it.
CSS Pattern Generator
A link to nothing
Yeah, but are you testing those beliefs?
I didn't tell him to "bail." All I said is that he should weigh the options and try to determine what would be best choice for his life.

Though it didn't work out with us, Patrick had a fruitful summer with PlanGrid (according to his own article). We remain good friends, and I hope to one day work with him again.
This is ~6 years too late.
Grids are awesome.

So awesome in fact, that I created DesignGridLayout, a Java Swing layout manager. Jean Francois Poilpret has been the project owner for years and extended far beyond my original vision.

http://designgridlayout.java.net

It has a mostly "fluent API", so you just add components and it mostly figures out columns and spanning widths.
Indeed! For me all hosted solutions are automatically dead. Too many startups just disappear so quick that I would never do business with them. (And while FogCreek hasn't disappeared so far, at least WebPutty is gone)

Given that this is a unpopular view around here anyway, I want to add another thought:

If your company has it's own webpage at datacenter A, including payment from datacenter/service B with CDN C and Twitter-integration D, using hosted FogBugz for support mails, hosting it's CSS-stylesheets on TRELLO which was baked by Google AppEngine, and using email provider E...

Why don't you have downtime at leas one a quarter???

How can a system that relies on so many components and other companies be reliable? With all those AWS-outtakes?
I don' understand this.

If you host most of your stuff yourself, either everything works, or nothing. But not all goes down at the same time.
After reading your take on the matter, I've got to say it sounds like on the whole you had a great experience. Being able to tolerate uncertainty like you did is something a lot of people simply cannot do, and they get in the habit of avoiding it early on. It's what keep a lot of people in jobs where they are seriously underappreciated.

Also, on an entirely unrelated-to-the-industry note, young people rarely get the chance to meet and get to know (much less live with!) people significantly different from themselves. It's a very rewarding experience, and I'd expect you'll see benefits of it for decades to come. Many people today come out of college without ever having dealt on a personal basis with anyone but their peer group and a few dozen adults who were all in positions of authority over them. That's not very conducive to understanding the commonalities and compatibilities amongst all people.
Um, didn't the real history go slightly differently?

Steve Jobs invested in Pixar because of the hardware. When that didn't fly, the shorts and commercials being done by Lasseter (that paid the bills) turned into a gamble to make a full-length movie. This whole "branding" thing didn't come until the first movie was a success.
For someone saying "try again" you are awfully ignorant of News Corp and its business which is promoting a right-wing agenda worldwide.

It owns News Limited, News International which are dominate right-wing newspapers/websites in Australia and UK respectively. Foxtel and BSkyB which are the PayTV equivalent in Australia and UK. Wall Street Journal and Fox News which is influential in the US. It has also its hands in tonnes of other media assets:

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

Fox Studios is nothing but a tiny sideshow.
Política de uso de datos | Facebook
It just seems to me like relevant, interesting questions get closed all the time because just because. It's getting pretty annoying from the StackExchange network.
I haven't ever used Lua, but I think it's simple and easy enough to pick up and learn quickly, so personally it doesn't bother me at all. I'll definitely be using this service when I have the need for it.
Also, pumps must always be located at the bottom to pull liquid uphill by more than ~30'. Storing large tanks of diesel fuel on the 17th floor (or higher), is a heavy and perhaps dangerous situation.

An always-submerged in-tank pump, not unlike that of a water well, powered via a sealed line from the generators above could, in principle, avoid this problem.

I hope the generators are able to power some sort of mechanical lifting arrangement. Manually hauling the drums is mighty hard.
SmartAsset (YC S12) seeks VP Engineering, Software Developer & Financial Analyst
(Details and other positions listed at http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/smartasset)

*

SmartAsset.com is looking for a hands-on, experienced senior software developer to join our NYC-based technology team, as VP of Engineering. You will be responsible for a wide range of challenging tasks, leading various aspects of our product development effort in co-ordination with our product and marketing teams.

Responsibilities:

* Take a lead on various projects within the Software Development team

* Design and implement new features and functionality

* Track tasks and issues, fix bugs and optimize as needed

* Help design the plan for growth, scale and performance

Requirements:

* At least 5 years software development experience

* Excellent knowledge of an Object Oriented Programming Language, and OOP patterns

* Excellent knowledge of relational databases, and best practices for scaling and performance optimization

* Experience with nix servers, networking and internet protocols

Excellent knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript and web development frameworks

* Ability to turn product requirements into development specs

* Good social and cooperation skills

* Good communication skills in English are required

* Experience in leading teams of developers

Benefits:

* Highly competitive compensation (salary and equity)

* Medical insurance

About Us:

SmartAsset is a venture backed, Y Combinator Company. We use our financial modeling technology to provide accurate, interactive answers to important personal finance questions. We are a consumer advocate, recommending specific strategies so people can make smarter decisions and save money. Our launch in July attracted attention from over 40 publications, including the New York Times, Techcrunch, Fast Company and the US News and World Report.

EMAIL US AT jobs@smartasset.com OR APPLY ONLINE AT http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/smartasset
Overnight project - Palttr - Generate palettes from your favorite images
MOD to Flash Mac-Convert MOD Video Files to Flash on Mac os x
MOD to Flash for Mac Tool help you convert JVC, Panasonic, Canon MOD video files to Flash SWF/FLV with flash player, HTML Page etc on Mac os x.
It also doesn't work on Dolphin Browser Mini for Android, which is what I use when I'm in low-reception areas. It is really frustrating to wait forever for a page to load only to find it's doing some unneeded animation that makes it completely unreadable on mobile.
Is moral flexibility a bad thing?
This is completely and utterly wrong.

In the UK/Australia, News Limited has been heavily involved through its newspapers in dictating government policy. For example the "boat people" issue was very much promoted in Australia and in the UK there are countless examples of governments capitulating on policy at the behest of the News International papers.
I believe having the pumps at the bottom makes sense because you only have ~14PSI of atmospheric pressure to use to pull the fuel up if the pump were at the top, but you can generate as much pressure as you need at the bottom to push the fuel up.
Sobering reminder. Performance = output/time. so the timeframe is critical. its trivial to increase productivity in the "short term". in ways that are unsustainable (or: unhealthy). Exogenous modification of brain's chemistry is, however, rarely healthy, over long-time-horizons. At least given the evidence to date.
>Epilepsy Foundation was widely speculated to be a Church of Scientology false-flag operation.

That rumour was started by 7chan, where the raid originated. They also blamed ebaumsworld, because they always blamed ebaumsworld.

It strikes me as naive to think that they would be capable of launching a false flag operation that so closely emulated Anon's previous raids, given how inept the CoS was in responding to Chanology, and how readily and willingly they fed the trolls. The choice of target, means of attack, and escalation of the raid were all classic Anon.
Except the part where he uses gmail and facebook exactly the same way, with exactly the same amount of effort, and exactly the same amount of cost, and to exactly the same effect…
I'm baffled that the powers that be in NYC didn't learn from Houston's experience with Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. All the hospitals at the Texas Medical Center had their basements and ground floors flooded; there went their generators [1]. (I was part of a large group of volunteers from all over the city that helped to evacuate patients for transfer; it was spooky seeing a grand piano floating in a below-grade-level lobby of one of the hospitals.)

My then-employer's building had its basement flooded; we were on floors 19 through 25, but our electricity and phones and Internet were gone --- and this, three weeks before the end of Q2. Our developers and IT people hauled computers down the stairs, and we moved to temporary space for several weeks, but we still missed, that is, we didn't achieve the sales and revenue targets that we had forecast for analysts.

I'm given to understand that because of the lessons learned from Allison, Houston isn't quite as vulnerable to flooding any more.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison#Texas
You made a good point that I just wanted to make explicit, because I think it is generally not something people know or at least not something they've thought much about - The FDA has a very specific mandate. They regulate any substance which "treats, prevents, or cures any disease." They specifically do not regulate, or test for, any substance which would claim to improve the functioning of a healthy person. If a drug came out tomorrow which would enable you to lift 50 kilos more tomorrow than you can life today, the FDA would have no jurisdiction over it (unless someone wanted to give it to patients suffering from muscular impairment due to a disease, of course). This is also one of the reasons why the FDA does not regulate alcohol and cigarettes. Those substances are not meant to treat, cure, or prevent anything.

I'm not clear on whether such a 'strengthening' drug would be legal to sell, just that the FDA could not authorize it for sale.
The Galaxy Nexus had an awful screen though. Not sure about the Nexus 4.
I would like to add that if you read the first link in the article, I admit to serious mistakes. I'm not posting this to paint a rosy picture of what happened.. it sucked. In fact, that's why me and Patrick agreed to post this... it was a learning experience to all involved.

I was a student my whole life until this startup, and I admit to naiveté, but not maliciousness. And though I didn't intend to, I made terrible mistakes that affected the lives of others, especially the interns. At the same time, I saw an opportunity to meet and work with on equal terms with young and talented hackers and undergrads (which was my comfort zone as a graduate student).

I was lucky to get into YC (who isn't) and saw an chance to share this luck with others. I was told time and time again by my co-founders that productivity would suffer, especially since we didn't have a solid idea yet, but I thought that the extra energy would help us get to that state in spite of slowed productivity. For purely selfish reasons, I also anticipated that this would make my own summer more enjoyable.
It is when you convince a college student to ditch his current opportunity to relocate across the country (on his own dime) and then lay him off days later.