skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm really bothered by this one line:

"One said that computer engineers view coding as both an art and a science. A lot of them were pissed off at having somebody else dictate their art to them."

Well, yeah. Software is inarguably a combination artistic/scientific endeavor.

However, the very basic nature of working for a company is doing what they dictate they need from you. They're trading a little piece of paper called a paycheck in exchange for needed services that you provide via your talents and skills.

If you don't want anyone to tell you what to do, quit and work for yourself.

If that's how "a lot of" MSFT engineers think their jobs should work, then that speaks volumes about the historical lack of interoperability between one product and another, or even sometimes between one product and itself.

Disclosure: I used to work at MSFT a while ago but it was through an acquisition and I was fortunate to be insulated from the typical MSFT engineer, but the attitude above is unfortunately not surprising to me. :-(
Presumably because she would have been able to recruit support staff to delegate work to. Not all of us have that luxury.
> The myth about ideas striking people while taking shower is of the same nature

I don't know how much of a myth that is. I can say with 100% certainty that most of my good ideas come in the shower. Probably because it is the ONLY time of day anymore where I'm not connected to my phone, class, the computer, tv, other people, etc.
Seconded; also +1 for any mention of cliometrics, anywhere, ever.
Policies like this are a result of ignoring good science in social cognition on the reality of stereotype threats. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2570773/
They would share messages using un-flown pigeons in the same location of Washington d.c.
It would be, if all kids were mythical blank slates of equal ability. But all the evidence is that they're not; they carry in a lot of economic and cultural baggage.

To quote the superintendent of public instruction, 'So why do we have these different subgroups? Because we're starting with black children where they are. We can't start them at the 82 percentile because they're not there.'

It'd be nice to say that a 100% pass rate is the only acceptable outcome, but the reality is that you can't achieve that in the short term. So you can either a) label everyone who falls short a failure from the outset, or b) set realistic goals for different groups, allocate resources accordingly, and aim to reduce the gap every year until the passing rates for different groups converge to less than a single standard deviation.

It doesn't matter whether you're looking at scores or passing rates. Your objective is year-on-year improvement. I think this is both more honest and more desirable than declaring educational institutions to be 'failing schools' and tarnishing the reputation of everyone who works or attends those schools.
Heroku | Hacking Buildpacks
I'm not surprised that people who work the same job for a long time are more likely to have breast or prostate cancer. BECAUSE THEY ARE OLDER. I don't like this infographic, even if the final message is good.
Aaaargh :(

Why, why syntax does have to matter? I thought it matters too, at first, but after sixth or so language I noticed the feeling of importance of syntax vanishing. Now I find good support in my editor much more important than syntax.

(Edit: and "you don't need editor support if you have good syntax" doesn't seem true to me either)
Hands on with Nokia's HERE, a cross-platform mapping tool
There is still great chunk of goodness in the Erlang VM, which is not bound to Erlang language and can be further reused. Much like JVM having things like Scala and JRuby.
Social Media Reporting: What you should be measuring
The point is that more resources are not needed. Just going back to 40 hours a week will increase total productivity.
We don't know how many units were shipped. We don't know if Google is celebrating this or if they knew this would happen. It is possible that LG has supply chain issues and they can not crank out phones to meet demand.
Not to respond to a glib response, but the issue crops up when the minority population is underrepresented as part of the company/college/etc. So for Morehouse (for example, a historically black college in the US) the reverse might be true.

There's lots of literature backing this up - when you have a MORE diverse population in your company/college/whatever, it performs by almost any measure you can come up with, better as a whole.
I don't think one needs to be so pessimistic about it.

The historical trend is that as technology improvements have reduced the need for human labor in industries that used to be big employers, humans think up new and exciting ways to put the excess labor force to use.

When we look back on the era of cottage industry, we don't remember it as a golden age of high employment. We remember it as an era where the standard of living was lower because the huge amount of human labor that went into textiles meant that they were comparatively expensive. So expensive that after people were done paying to clothe themselves they had little money left for other consumer goods such as clocks, books, or glassware.

Similarly, we don't look back on the era of peasant agriculture as a time when every able-bodied person was virtually guaranteed a job in the thriving agricultural industry. We remember it as an era where most everyone was tied to the land and eked out their lives doing backbreaking labor.

As for whether the service economy can replace the manufacturing economy, I don't think that's a question we need to speculate on. Looking back on the past few decades of American economic development, it's clear that it already has. And that employment rates in the USA have remained relatively high throughout that process.
I agree that part of it is about trying to control a creative process but when it breaks down the author totally wipes his hands clean of any responsibility. Acting like "sabotaging the product" is an acceptable way to behave.

No, its the only way he could imagine someone behaving and its all the fault of the "Lousy young programmer" and the "Marketing types" with their "power neckties". The fact off the matter is that people who cannot adapt to change in a company are a poison and the biggest mistake that management made, was that they weren't able to replace him with more stable and mature (albeit slightly less creative) professional sooner.
I also endorse oDesk or elance. I frequently find help there and have spent $400 many times over...so I know you can make at least that on even a small project.

The trick is how to make it every month. On these sites, your reputation will either help you or kill your business.
I'm in the same boat. Anytime life presents a problem that I can't seem to wrap my head around I get up from my desk, take a short walk, and it usually comes to me.

As an added bonus I've discovered that there's a small lake less than a mile from my office that I never knew existed(part of a planned housing community) and I've seen all kinds of things I wouldn't have otherwise.
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, since few people seem to know it. If you are a software engineer or IT professional working in California, and are paid less than about 81K a year or $35/hr, you are legally entitled to extra overtime pay. Definitely something to talk to a manager (or a lawyer) about. See http://www.california-labor-law-attorney.com/it-professional... .
I can't believe Sinofsky was behind Metro. I expect more "Metro" now, not less.
Being informed that you're attending a 'failing school' strikes me as just as much of a stereotype threat.
There are cases when people need to follow up with an email, but there are many more people who just have quick questions that can be answered publicly with a few words or a link to what they need.
It doesn't promise to make a poet out of you, it's just a toy. You know, for fun.

People don't start anything correctly; babies don't start life running marathons or breezing through piano suites, we learn through play and toys are the tools of play. This is a toy for poetry, remarkably beautiful in its simplicity and the way in which it invites one to play.

but it seems you have never played before.
Hushmail? really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail
There's an entertaining article about one such attack here:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2011/10/attack-of-we...

For some mind-boggling reason, the designers of the XML Encryption standard decided to make authentication optional, so an attacker can simply avoid sending an incorrect MAC.
After losing all the data on a 4GB USB stick when it simply decided it was time to bite the bag, I have become more anxious about using an SSD as the boot and system drive in my home desktop machine. When I installed Win7, I relocated Users to a separate mechanical hard drive (which is backed up onto a Synology NAS RAID), and now I'm thinking of copying Program Files and Program Files (x86) to another mechanical drive. Am I being overly paranoid? or is this something I should have done from the get-go?
Well I'd argue that it's definitely devoting your life to work. It's an activity that you spent a massive amount of daytime doing for most of your life. It may not be the only thing you devote your life to but it is definitely one of them and probably the largest one.

I've never been able to get up after a day of work and do something. I'm just done after working for 8 hours. I'd just sit and do nothing wait to recover "energy" and as soon as I recover back to normal work starts again.
A consequence of school funding being based entirely on local property taxes.
Anybody have any more luck in canada?
I read about this in the past, and I think it's a really interesting conversation. Would you consider this spam?

Personally I lean towards no. Yes, you are emailing a stranger, but in a relevant way and presumably only one time.
I like this post!

Your "three tests of a name" don't mention "does someone else own that name, or something similar, and are they likely to sue?" That could be important for some people.

I'm really relieved that your name is 'learndot', and not 'learn.'.
Intl Energy Agency foresees energy-independent US in 10 years
I think SlideShare is one of the most underutilized tools out there. It's a great way to break up a lot of information (people enjoy clicking through) and they have a vibrant community. I post things up there and routinely get tens of thousands of highly relevant views.
From Holbrook Pond. But I'm just looking at Google Maps. Maybe pick a pond where you'd go swimming, so long as it has something different sounding, like Hatcase Pond.

If your favorite pond was Chemo Pond, lie, or find some other idea.
He's a poor salesman then, considering that not too long ago he was raving about how the Intel SSD was the only one worth using.

I suspect he, like most bloggers, makes liberal use of affiliate links and targeted marketing. I think he's admitted in the past that every new product gets shipped to him asking for a review and I'm sure that comes with pro level artwork.
If you like that, watch this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_c...
TV/Radio/Google Adwords/etc is drastically different from FB's advertising model.

The key point, as Cuban says in this article, is that companies spend real resources in trying to acquire "Likes" on FB. People build entire FB tabs. Curate what content gets posted. Build deep integrations on their websites. I've built a lot of this type of FB integration for clients...and I charge a lot, so I know this isn't cheap.

People do this with the expectation that they can reach the people who like their brand. When FB changes the game, it breaks this assumption and makes it doubly expensive to curate and communicate with your FB following. This is pretty much the gist what Cuban is arguing in the article.

On TV/Radio/Google Adwords/etc, there isn't a first step where a brand spends a lot of time and money sending users to said 3rd party advertising platform. You don't first spend development resources on integrating with the radio station's website, ultimately advertising their website for free and sending them tons of free traffic. You just give the radio or TV station your money, they play your ad, and that's it. That is the extent of your advertising investment. It's very concrete and simple to implement.

This is not the extent of the investments people have made in building up FB pages and followers. Brands have spent and continue to spend a ton of time and money on this and like Cuban, they are justified in being ticked off when FB changes the rules in an effort to squeeze revenue from them.

I have no doubt that money is the reason behind charging to communicate with your followers on FB. The altruistic motives like "fighting spam" would best be done with an algorithm. It surely wouldn't be something you could "opt out of" just by having a fat wallet. By FB allowing brands to pay them to spam people just means FB is fine with spam as long as they get paid. That doesn't seem like a stance that has the well being on their users foremost in mind.
Yeah. I'm not sure they'd ever go that far. After all, it's always better to be understocked than overstocked. Sold out after 24 to 48 hours may represent unprecedented demand. After 50 minutes it's kind of mindless marketing manipulation.
Unbeholden - it says we don't take shit from anyone
Racist Obama tweet, fake Facebook and YouTube pages used to steal passwords
Both parties did something inexorably stupid. Can we at least agree on that?
The next two parts will have more detail, but the short answer is "yes" to both a raw word list and a Bayesian filter in terms of techniques we've tried here. One of the simplifying things that makes the problem a little easier is that we don't try to classify beyond "does this need an immediate reply or not."
Hey, let me also jump on the bandwagon of armchair-quarterbacking your decision! -Insert quip about how easy it is to do this stuff here...- Boom! I showed you!

Seriously, I'm not sure why everyone in this thread is so convinced that their name or name-choosing process is somehow genius or better than that of the OP. Obviously the OP knows that choosing a name is tough and you're never going to get the perfect name. It's all about compromising in the right places to get a name, a domain, a social presence, and so forth.

Personally, I found the story educational and a close parallel to my own difficulties with choosing names. I'm especially grateful for the discussion of buying the domain name. I'd like to hear the actual dollar value, but I can understand why that wasn't mentioned. At least it's clear that the price moved by $1000's which gives some frame of reference instead of us just guessing whether it was $100 or $100,000.
USB sticks are removable media and thus need some kludges to get partitioning software to work.

Maybe it's easier now, but it was a bit tricky in 2010.
Yea, I agree. I was planning get one but didn't get a chance. Even if we can't pre-order, it would be great if they release some info about when the next batch will be available.
I thought this would be a 'behind the scenes' look at Twitter, the company. However, it's about using Twitter as a support channel at 37signals.
It depends on the company. I have done this, and quite successfully. I don't think I'll be going back to the 40-hour week any time soon.

I think you'll have better luck with tiny companies that can be more flexible, and also tend to be more starved for engineering skill. But YMMV.
I think it was referring to the earlier-mentioned practice of companies firing someone and then splitting their work between two people.
I also stand corrected, I thought the entirety of ILM became Pixar but it was just the CG division.
Grammar Nazi Rises:

"Why Hyperic is Going to Support Only PostgreSQL As a Backend Database"
The Checkbox Hack is not working on (older) iOS and (up to date) Android
I don't think the answer is so binary. Just because you like a product/company/person's page does not mean that you always want to hear from that page. The EdgeRank algorithm is supposed to rank social response and especially your friend's engagement in determining the importance of a post. However, there are clearly cases where the poster would want to attribute increased importance to that post and make sure that more people than usual see it (e.g. an important announcement). That is what Facebook is charging for: the ability to get around its algorithm. I think the problem in the past year for many brands is that Facebook has not had this feature, and the fact that you can pay for it is probably reassuring to many companies because it means they have a guaranteed channel if they need it. The alternative: people get annoyed with liking pages because they are too noisy and start unliking everything and you ruin the channel.
> Facebook has given too much power to the 'like' button. There should be a different 'follow' or 'subscribe' button.

Oh yes, please. I want to see the epic torrent of butthurt from "Brands" like Mark Cuban when that happens and they find that less than 10% of their "fans" are actually interested in their "messages" so their reach is far smaller than now.
hey, one of the authors here. We did realize this. This is a weekend hackathon project to allow the hacker news community to write nice clean markdown.

Firebase offers security, but we just didn't get around to using yet.

You shouldn't choose to use it for sensitive information, but for Github readmes and other already public content, it's a great tool.
The Apparel Formerly Known As Holden? :)
i think you'd have a pretty great mobile app on your hands here if you added a social/sharing side. A timeline of top poems. Instagram for poetry pretty much.
You don't mention the downside of buying options... If it goes up, but doesn't hit the strike, you lose all your money. Options are a pretty risky play and it's typically not recommended that your average investor play the options market.
You right. Thank you. We will think about how to do it.
I agree with everything you said, but as a practical matter I wanted to point out that it is possible on Facebook to like something and then "hide" it from your newsfeed. This allows you to register your like without all the spam. This is what I did with "Barack Obama", because I do support him and wanted to publically acknowledge that, but I don't need to see three captioned photos of him per day.
A New Chip Brings Electrical-Field-Based 3-D Gesture Recognition to Smartphones
You don't know that it was a stunt. It is possible they sold many phones. I really doubt that 8600 likes translates to sales numbers. There is no way of knowing if Google sold 500 or 2 million phones before it ran out of stock. It is also possible that LG does not have the production capacity meet demand. It would be a marketing stunt if Google is intentionally creating a supply shortage, but I doubt that is Google game. Then again, we won't know until Google releases a statement about how Nexus 4s have been sold.
I think both of your examples highlight exactly what the OP was talking about, that employees are not paid based on the value they produce. In both examples, some employer stands to make much more value off of someone's labor than what they will pay that employee. Businesses and capitalists are looking to gain more profit and value than what is reflected in someone's salary -- this is the way they accumulate more resources than those workers. This accumulation of wealth is typically backed by hierarchy and authority structures that maintain that the employer continues to get more value out of someone's work than the employee(s) participating in that work.

Like you said, there's nothing about capitalism that says it should do otherwise, but I think for me that shows how unethical capitalism is in how it treats the output of others.
Thanks Micah. The final price was greater than 1k and less than 5k.
>"we want someone who can take large amounts of data and do something awesome with it"

Yeah, that's kind of the problem; until "awesome" gets defined, it's awfully hard to be specific about what the company needs. But this is why it's going to be really hard for someone that couldn't do part of the job themselves to hire effectively.

As to the second point, I guess it's going to depend on the business and on whether the statistical component is crucial or just peripheral. It's nice if everyone is pretty broadly well trained. But if you're a hedge fund building algorithmic trading rules, you need different people than a marketing research firm or a litigation consulting agency.
What's incredible is that the Nexus 4 is so successful that LG won't make it available in Belgium or the Netherlands[1].

So they clearly think they can sell all of their stock for the foreseeable future in just a few countries.

[1] http://tweakers.net/nieuws/85507/lg-brengt-nexus-4-niet-uit-... (in dutch)
We're talking about Model X, but that's the model S pricing you're linking to.
Very cool, but Amazon says it's $230 for a 50 GB model!

I need to run more detailed benchmarks but hopefully the 64GB for $75 model is somewhat close to "real" SSD performance on the full gamut of IO.
> The question is why is it not a language in widespread practical use?

1. It kind of is, I think RabbitMQ, CouchDB and Riak are doing ok, for example.

2. Both syntax and semantics are sufficiently different from "industry standard" to be a hurdle for majority of people... I'm being told. I don't understand this; the more different the language is the more interesting it seems to me and the more happy I am to learn it[1], but I heard this argument enough times to accept it as (sad) reality.

[1] And there is still so many of them to learn! Take a look at any one RosettaCode page (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator) if you don't believe me :)
There are plenty of secure email applications, but Petraeus couldn't use any of them.

In other words, Petraeus could not be seen using those applications. Official secure email goes through official secure channels. Personal email went to through gmail / yahoo / etc.

If someone had found out Petraeus was using a different email app (and I'm sure they would have), it would have immediately raised suspicions as to why the Director of the CIA was using a secure email app that wasn't the gov's official secure email app.

I think the safest thing for Petraeus would have been to only send short coded messages via gmail (e.g. "talk at 10 pm" but replace that text with code words) and then to conduct most of the communication infrequently and in person.

But, clearly, Petraeus wasn't thinking clearly ...
That does not explain why all those things are made in china. Why could they not be made in the US by robots?
In the general Google USD to GBP conversion, that would be £199...typical!!
IWorm, for using a tablet hands-free
BMW Invests in Embark (YC S11)
Backlinks From Blog Commenting DoFollow
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If they are really going to replace that much of their workforce with robots then they are stepping ahead of the US in terms of manufacturing technology. I don't think this is a good sign for the future of US manufacturing. It could mean even cheaper assembly without human rights issues, etc.
Nailed it. The top post is just the sort of middleware dismissive posting that PG talks about trying to filter out.
That sense of exhaustion eventually goes away after a few months working full-time. That said, even now I feel the amount of interesting stuff I can do on a week day after work is pretty limited -- not just because of time, but because of brainpower. And you can't really use every weekend either, or you'll burn out fast. So a) make peace with getting a lot less done, or b) find a way not to work full time.