skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "everybody has bugs" response is intellectually dishonest. Yes, everybody has bugs, but most people's bugs aren't an intentional feature that a trained monkey ought to have known was a bad idea.

- Someone implemented a YAML parser that executed code. This should have been obviously wrong to them, but it wasn't.

- Thousands of ostensible developers used this parser, saw the fact that it could deserialize more than just data, and never said "Oh dear, that's a massive red flag".

- The bug in the YAML parser was reported and the author of the YAML library genuinely couldn't figure out why this mattered or how it could be bad.

- The issue was reported to RubyGems multiple times and they did nothing.

This isn't the same thing as a complex and accidental bug that even careful engineers have difficulty avoiding, after they've already taken steps to reduce the failure surface of their code through privilege separation, high-level languages/libraries, etc.

This is systemic engineering incompetence that apparently pervades an entire language community, and this is the tipping point where other people start looking for these issues.
Have you done a stress test on your system?
I think you missed his point. He wasn't trying to establish that New Guineans somehow "invented" the idea of not sleeping under a dead tree, merely that the author wasn't personally tuned to the risks of being under trees until he spent time with the people there. That's all.
> Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago?

WTF? What kind of person checks their email every 5 minutes and gets any work done?

> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them.

How is that a sign of productiveness? If anything this is an argument for working remotely. Read PG's essay on Maker's Schedule: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Show HN: Vines on a map
inertia.
However, prediction is still difficult. Especially about the future.
Because team work is all about you, right? Quite a myopic view. How dare anyone try to increase the productivity of the team by stealing precious seconds from you!

Teams are more productive when they're in the same location. That is a fact. Your individual productivity may suffer at times, but the team will do better overall if you all work together in one location.
I grew up reading comics like Asterix and Obelix and Tintin. <3

I've met a few people who knew who Tintin was (especially after that movie :/ ), but never someone who read Asterix and Obelix.
Your server don't have to be in the US to operate a .com (or in netherlands to operate a .nl).

Sometimes laws can be written as "a person/company shall not cause personal data to be stored without users consent" (say). So if you, in the Netherlands, programme your server in the US to store personal data without consent, then you might be breaking the law. (Since you have caused a computer to do that.)
A few notes from someone who's worked remotely roughly 60% of the last 10 years -

1) Most investors know that startups are generally at a disadvantage with a remote team and give founders shit for hiring remote people. I've found thats one of the reasons early stage folks don't hire more remote people. And there is some truth to being more creative with a team around you... if the team is awesome. Also communication is infinitely easier when you can walk over to someone and ask them a question rather than wait for them to respond to an email

2) Working remotely when you are self-directed and not under tons of pressure, really does lead to awful productivity. At home there are just so many ways to procrastinate

3) However, you can be more productive from home when on a tight deadline. No coworkers bugging you and the music cranked however loud you want, working whatever hours you want means laser-focus for some people.

4) A good checkin routine is key. I've been most productive and been in productive remote teams when there is a routine like a morning "standup" call, and maybe an afternoon call. A good ticket tracker is crucial. Working for folks who use the phone a lot tends to have the most productive outcome

5) There are a lot more small companies who use all remote workers than you think. But they hide in the shadows, and typically are very unsexy cashflow oriented businesses, not venture backed startups. If you're willing to work for consulting businesses that do boring backend for big corps you can find good remote work. But if sexy startups are your thing, expect to get a lot of hesitation until you really prove yourself...

6) Change environments. Sometimes the house can stagnate - spend part of your day in a coffee shop, lease a desk in a cowork space etc and change up workspace once in a while. It helps me at least
I have a new startup, two cofounders and a remote full time engineer. Things are working splendidly, but the reason is in large part because of how well we communicate. Yes, of course chat, video conferences, and email are important.

But I think our wiki pages and pull requests are what make it work. We also have been making information dense screencasts for each other. I'm going to be so bold as to say a remote engineer has forced us to work in a way every engineering team should.

I'll have more to say about this soon enough :)
Everyone Has an App Idea, Hyperdrive-Funded DANDY Makes Yours a Reality
From Waterloo, Canada:

Communitech announced today that they have selected Dandy to participate in their prestigious accelerator program, Hyperdrive, which provides technology start-ups with funding and mentorship. Dandy is an online community that allows users to submit their app ideas, gather feedback and if the idea is developed, share in the profits collected from the multi-platform mobile app.

“We’re excited to launch Dandy because on a daily basis, people come up with app ideas and most of the time you don’t know what to do with those ideas. Through Dandy people are able to submit their ideas to the site, the community then votes on the best ideas and provides feedback,” explained co-founder Taylor Jones. “If the community loves your idea, we develop the app for Blackberry, iPhone or Android devices. The money generated through sales is then shared with the person who submitted the original idea as well as anyone in the Dandy community who contributed along the way.”

The Hyperdrive program provides companies like Dandy with the resources to succeed in the competitive tech start-up market. In addition to funding, Dandy will now call the Communitech Hub their home, with an office space and access to a pool of world-class mentors as well as in-kind services.

Dandy was co-founded by three young and uniquely experienced entrepreneurs: Taylor Jones of DearPhotograph.com, Karl-Allen Muncey and Matt Scobel. Dandy (dndy.co) is currently in a launching phase, but is accepting emails from new users for early invitation to the active private site.

“There is nothing like this on the market. Dandy is a conduit for us to develop an app we know the community will actually use... after all they created it,” said co-founder Jones.

For additional information, please contact Alexandra Halbert, pr@dndy.co or 519-277- 0263.
I'm not forgetting, I'm just not bothering to dig deeper.

My point is that the vast majority of the crazy homicide rate in the USA can be attributed to the existence of large minority populations with huge problems of all sorts. I am not aware of any other Western country with similar demographic issues. Once you sort out that, the portion of the US homicide problem that is explainable by the prevalence of guns is nowhere close to what most non-Americans naively assume it to be.

If someone had access to statistics on comparative homicide rates only among the majority ethnic group in different countries, I'd gladly look at it. It frankly seems hard for me to believe that US whites score so well on that score given the size and diversity of the circumstances of the white population. But no matter what the answers are, you're going to have a hard time coming up with objective, unarguable evidence saying that guns are more than a tiny fraction of the problem in the USA.
" hundred of commits per month", you mean per week or per day?
How to use a million-core supercomputer—without it blowing up in your face
I feel similar. The reality of this example is that sexism tends to work in favor of prospective female secretaries, not against them. Attractive women would hold an edge over more qualified men simply by way of how superficial the position still is.
Let me flip this over. If 99% of companies say they don't do remote, maybe the issue is you and not them... Bear with me, because this isn't an attack on you. :D Take someone that's been married and divorced 4 times. Who would you say the problem lies with, the divorcer or the divorcees?

If you want to work remotely you're fighting an uphill battle. Most managers/employers know how to manage face-to-face. Remote management is a skill that many haven't learned yet. It is possible as you mention, however both of those work places are VERY progressive.

If you want to work remotely, sell the benefits of remote working to your employer. Make them confident that you're able and capable of doing remote work. Sell it! I contracted a best friend this summer to work remotely. I had confidence in the outcome because I trusted him. If you can sell that to an employer - how much more likely are you to get what you want?
Scientists can quadruple dip for all I care. It's such a tiny concern, and I'm sure they actually need the money.

Corrupt politicians and financial institutions? There's something to be worried about.
In my experience, "hallway discussions" can be equally as unproductive as they are productive. The benefit is cancelled out by the detriment.
Research scientists will soon encounter similar pressures to entrepreneurs who negotiate the Medicare system. The scenario outlined in the article is similar to many of the prosecutions for "Medicare fraud".

Briefly, Medicare fraud is alleged whenever a business charges a lot to Medicare. This could be due to rapid growth or due to actual fraud, but it's immaterial. And often rapid growth happens due to exploitation of a previously unseen gray area (e.g. Facebook News Feed for Zynga) so regulators usually have an excuse to allege fraud. Unlike FB, they don't just block your API calls; the consequence of a new name appearing at the top of a "biggest earner list" is often a meteoric descent from a fast growing business into a federal prosecution.

NIH is much nicer than other HHS agencies, as its primary duty is to hand out money rather than enforce regulations. But what happened here is similar. Someone ran analytics to try and figure out which scientists were getting the most money from NIH, and to put some blocks on that in a time of scarce funds. In this case, the issue is that scientists naturally want to avoid duplication of work, and some projects require more funding than the limits of one grant. So they package up the same papers for different agencies with a different spin (bio-terrorism for DoD and bio-remediation for DoE). That's natural and good: leverage your existing work to get more money for the same amount of input. Put another way, this is like selling the same product (your research output) in multiple distribution channels.

However, problems arise with third party payment. I don't mind that you got a "duplicate" can of Coca Cola, or that the Coke company amortized labor across two different cans. But the government is ostensibly paying on behalf of the public for this work, and its incentives are more to keep scientists employed and to appear egalitarian than to maximize scientific productivity per se. It also wants to award less in grants while seeming "fair".

In any case, while nothing criminal/civil is being alleged now, I anticipate that grant agencies will make use of software that checks for duplicates in a way to reduce the outflow of money and make it harder for scientists to leverage the same work in multiple channels. The only silver lining here is that some scientists may start to explore non-governmental channels for funding, like patrons in the technology sector, or Kickstarters, or MOOCs, or other vehicles. Another response will be predator/prey like evasions by scientists, to set up grant collaboratives of K people in which the senior author is changed for each application. This will mean no individual scientist appears at the top of a list of "biggest earners", and is not targeted for duplication-based denials.
I developed in a small team in a shared office for 6 years and have spent the last 6 working remotely. Half the team at Allinea are remote now - we find it easier to hire and retain great talent.

I haven't seen any evidence in our commit or bug history to suggest we were more or less productive when all of our developers were in the same room.
> Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave.

I took this to mean (a) be relative to the office specifically, not the industry generally, and (b) that those very best will get sick of the required face time, quit, and get a better job (the insinuation being that that better job will likely be majority or entirely telecommuting. I may have misunderstood the intent as I commented pretty much immediately after reading it.
The comments to the Retraction Watch joint blog post about this Nature comment

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/has-double-d...

tease out some of the details of what was reported and what implications the findings have for funding of scientific research. The Retraction Watch blog is a fun read in general, with many examples of published papers that are retracted when another scientist questions a published research finding on methodological grounds.
You're underestimating the number of non-photographic JPEG files in use despite lacking transparency. It appears a significant number of people don't care about artifacts.

That said, JPEG does today support lossless compression, if you really want to go there. It sort of even supports transparency[1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772760 for a javascript solution; other approaches use container formats
I haven't really experienced much with it. Having said that, I don't have a busy life :)

One day, however, my wife was traveling and the hotel reservation had been sent to my email address. Google Now had a card that said something along the lines of "Hey, don't forget you're checking in to such and such a place tonight!" and also showed a map, with the route from my current location to the hotel.

I thought that was cool, and I daresay if I had more of that (maybe parcel tracking, I don't know) I think it would be fun.

The other problem is that things such as public transit and traffic stats are non-existent were I am. That would be useful, too, I could imagine...

TL;DR: I'm boring and I live in a boring place. Therefore, my Google Now is pretty boring?
Where can I get that snake-head shower-head?
Not so black and white though, caffeine may have health benefits, e.g.

http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20120607/coffee-may-hel...
Deconstructing success
I endorse you too!
One of the reasons falls are so fatal for old people is because elderly people in our society rarely stay active. Look at cultures like the Chinese, where you so elderly women up in the morning doing Taichi, or working out on those weird outdoor gym sets in the rest of the day. Maintaining strength and flexibility during old age helps mitigate damage from falls a lot.

Physical deterioration is often a self-fulfilling prophecy,
Ask your doctor - but not via social media
The point is not lost, but the author does attribute it to a specific culture:

>"I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest..."

>"I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude..."

>"Traditional New Guineans have to think clearly about dangers....In contrast, Americans’ thinking about dangers is confused."

The truth is it's a common, learned attitude of anyone who spends a lot of time sporting in the outdoors - no matter where you live. The author himself points out the American/European pilot and raft guide, for example.
Right. From the post:

"It’s not that we fundamentally disliked the previous approach. We just reached a point where we felt our goals weren’t best served by this model. With lots of dynamic data, complex visualizations and a set of “static” interfaces, the traditional way was hindering our development speed and our ability to experiment."

It's very much targeted to our specific needs. Our approach is no more universal than Wordpress or Drupal. We have however harvested interesting conclusions from moving away from these CMS and that's mostly what I was interested in sharing.

With regards to using Worpress as a middle man for data centric apps, this is the kind of things we've done. My opinion: CMS are good at doing regular type of content CRUD based apps, but it breaks quickly. Moreover, most popular CMS are becoming bloated pretty quickly.

Have a look at Jekyll (http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll), it's a much better fit for that.
Everyone Has an App Idea, Hyperdrive-Funded DANDY Makes Yours a Reality
I think he's insinuating office romantics. Probably watching too much Mad Men.
Creating a 15G Wireless Connection
Bonding Verizon, Cricket, Clear and T-Mobile into a single internet connection.
He just said that it wasn't the technical definition for the simple language used. The note is not directly related to the algorithm he then explains.

Dynamic Programming can be seen as divide and conquer but using memoization to avoid recalculations.

The "subproblems easier to solve" are not easier complexity-wise but easier in the sense that we are solving a smaller subinstance of the main problem.
I believe the point was that people detest that working environment, and those with a choice will pull the ripcord, whereas people who can't get another job will stay. I've seen that happen.

I just generalized it to my experience, which is less about introvert/extravert and more about "bad conditions force good people out/prevent good people from being hired"
Compared to secretarial work? Absolutely.

Compared to working on an oil rig in the gulf? Come on.
Yep. This is why every dollar spent on the TSA would be better spent on preventing car accidents, heart attacks, and falls in the shower.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparativ...

But I like the OP's more practical point: personal attention to normal activities that are actually risky, based on a realistic view of those risks.
This doesn't do any good if it's not required/used, which it's not.

As a counter-example, the maven central repository requires signatures, and caching Maven repositories validate those signatures.
A lot of this conversation seems to be focussed on an individual's productivity - you might think you are more productive remotely or actually may be more productive remotely, but what about the rest of the team?
Looking at the bigger picture - you're getting tons of work done, but are you communicating well with your team/ is your team productive overall?
And if you are more concerned with your individual well-being than you are with your team's well-being, it's worth noting that psychologically, one of the main factors of simply liking someone is proximity. Obviously you shouldn't be promoted because your boss likes you more, and obviously if you're the most value adding team member remotely you should get credit for that, but it's impossible to eliminate personal biases that stem from bonds created at the office.

There are obviously arguments for both sides but I know (from working with a remote supervisor for 6 months) that communicating in person is easier than communicating remotely.
I'm a software engineer married to brain surgeon. She will be the first to tell you that the actual procedures, while technical, are essentially arts and crafts; they require care, but not extreme mental focus.

However, when she's reviewing patient charts and imaging to prepare for a procedure, that requires absolute focus, and she will isolate herself completely for hours and not talk to anyone no matter what. So, there is a time for collaboration, but there is also a time for focusing on one task to the exclusion of everything else.
On the contrary, "corporation" in a hundred years will mean exactly what it means today: "person." Ergo, this is how robots will get around the Turing test.
> Maven is an awesome thing. There will be minorities that just happened to dislike everything

I don't know maven from a bar of soap, but would you diagree with this recent hn post then? "Why Everyone Eventually Hates or Leaves Maven" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105164

Now I've had a look at the basics of what Maven does ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Maven " It can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#..."

Honestly, if it was that far beyond everything else, people in the .Net community would be talking about it a lot. And they're not.

> Imagine not having to download 3rd party library manually by visiting their website. Imagine autocomplete of the freshly acquired 3rd party lib via your IDE to also shows you the javadoc. Imagine trying to navigate to the 3rd party class and method implementation without setting up your IDE or messing with path/folder setup automagically. You cannot do any of these in .net nor vs.net.

Factually incorrect. The equivalent happens in VS via nuget right now.
I have suffered from severe depression since I was young. I (think) I'm pretty smart, but have definitely held myself back from achieving things that I could have because of it.

I have found this to be nearly crippling when accompanied with the rejection and difficulty of being an entrepreneur. Professionally, I have done a lot of freelance work as a result.

I've held pretty good jobs for ~ 1 year, but eventually have some problem due to workload stress combined with my depression. Regrettably this has made me leave jobs in non-ideal ways.

I'm looking for my next great position now, and it's tough to answer the "why did you leave this position and then go freelance last year" with "I let my depression get ahead of me and tried to kill myself."

I know that it's an incredible liability to a potential employer to hire someone that might do great work for a year and then abruptly leave.

I just needed to get that off my chest.
A lot of GIFs are use for meme.
> Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.

This is very true. The default state of the Internet is not to empower everyone. The default state is to further the power of those who already have it, with emphasis on anyone with power over the Internet.

The Internet is young, large powers are slow to adapt, and the Internet community doesn't have the best foresight, so the popular consensus has been that the Internet is by default the world's power balancer.

We've seen some attempts to control the Internet, but only a few have been successful. While some people use that as evidence the Internet "wants to be free", that's just the beginning. Nothing prevents more powers from trying more often and with better tactics. And they will.

Letting the Internet be a universal power balancer is going to require active work and engagement. It won't stay in the current form for forever.
So when brain surgeons are operating, do their bosses pop in and ask them inane questions they could get answers to via email?

Developers don't need to continuously collaborate. Even brain surgeons spend a lot of time reading up on papers and research and interruptions do not help them.
Now you can add inflation to the list.