skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great post, but my experience with Google is that it doesn't empower individual engineers until they reach the Sr. SWE or Staff SWE levels. There's a Real Googler Line, which seems to be somewhere in the Senior SWE tier. If you're above it, you have independent credibility and you can change projects and as long as you're not a total flake about it, you get enough opportunities that you can find a place where you shine. If you're below the RGL, you get locked out by headcount limitations and your best hope is, after 18 months, to transfer to a slightly less bad project.

What you're discussing is the Credibility Drought. Companies define credibility so that only managers have it, in order to create an artificial scarcity that makes employees easier to control. That's what enables the managerial extortion that forces employees to serve local goals (the manager's own career) rather than the benefit of the company (or the growth of the individual).

Very few companies formally allow a manager to unilaterally fire. That's way too much of an HR/lawsuit risk. Instead, these closed-allocation dinosaur companies define credibility in such a limited way that managers can either support or not support the employee, and then if the person is not supported, that person's credibility is zero and the manager isn't firing that person. "The company" does it, after "careful review" of "objective" performance statistics. On top of this, they set tight headcount limits so that for anyone to get a good project requires a special favor, allowing the company to say "no" and appear consistent on the matter.

Google is aware enough of this problem to allow engineers at above a certain level to acquire independent credibility.

At Staff, you can pull a Yegge (quit your project in public) and be OK. If you're a SWE 3 and you try that, you're fucked.

So Google may be different from the full-on closed-allocation nightmare corporation, but you only if you either (a) start at a senior level, or (b) get on visible, desirable projects when you start, so you can get promotions quickly. The only time it isn't difficult to transfer to something better is immediately after a promotion (and there are some managers who withhold promotions to keep people captive; Google, to its credit, has a system that occasionally overrides managerial objections to promo).

The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%. It's still pretty awful for a large percentage of people who work there, and the fact that it's so much better than most of what else is out there is a damnation of Corporate America, not an endorsement of Google.
Depends what's meant by "core".

If you're a cake business, don't outsource cake making, but do get someone else to build your shop.

But so many web companies spend time and energy building CMS, db astraction layers, and tonnes and tonnes of infrastructure that is nothing to do with their business.
The most common problem I see is technical outsourcing, there are a lot of MBA based teams who cannot convince a great technical person to join.

As a result, outsourcing to get the product done becomes a necessity and also easier than going around to find a good technical cofounder. It is also tempting since outsourcing seems cheaper and promises to get the product built.

The product just ends up not being good enough.

As a technical person in the startup industry, this is the #1 reason why I think startups fails.
Watch a City-Sized Glacier Collapse
Great presentation! It gets right to the point and offer advise you can use.

I think it's a good read for any entrepreneur. Selling your company requires planning from the start, before you've even made your first dollar.
Gee, I wonder why women don't feel welcome?
I'm not sure this has anything to do with attracting women to web development. These women were already attracted to web development -- or they wouldn't be in Girl Develop It or any of those other groups, right? This is about DevBootCamp patting themselves on the back for meeting their quota.

And regardless, this whole "invite women first" thing doesn't really address the basic gender imbalance problems in the industry.

In my experience (and I'm aware that this is perfectly anecdotal), the problem with getting women to be professional web developers has more to do with the industry's attitude toward women and less to do with inviting them in. It does no good to invite 60% women to a conference if they're all going to be treated badly or like sexual objects the entire time.

I have two female friends that I am mentoring in web development, and they are super ecstatic to have this extra skill, and they're actually pretty good at it (better than some of my male coworkers, if I'm being honest). But most often they go to conferences and get dismissed because they're women or get harassed because they have boobs (even though some of these men have bigger man-boobs).

I hear this over and over again: they don't feel comfortable at industry events or even in the workplace

TL;DR - I don't think it's about "attracting" women so much as making the industry gender-agnostic. It shouldn't matter whether I'm male or female, so long as I put out good code.
> It's honestly just a hard problem.

We really need a way to reset those bug report counters to zero in one fell swoop.

The solution, of course, is planned obsolescence.

Bonus: http://xkcd.com/844/
USPS plans end of Saturday delivery – despite law preventing it
It appears you are correct.

Oldest "Space Marine" trademark record in full:

1. Registration Number 2100767 (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4004:vp...) here:

<quote>

Word Mark	SPACE MARINE

Goods and Services	IC 028. US 022. G & S: board games, parlor games, war games, hobby games, toy models and miniatures of buildings, scenery, figures, automobiles, vehicles, planes, trains and card games and paint, sold therewith. FIRST USE: 19870900. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19871000

Mark Drawing Code	(1) TYPED DRAWING

Serial Number	74186534

Filing Date	July 19, 1991

Current Basis	1A

Original Filing Basis	1A

Published for Opposition	November 23, 1993

Registration Number	1922180

Registration Date	September 26, 1995

Owner	(REGISTRANT) GAMES WORKSHOP LIMITED CORPORATION UNITED KINGDOM Willow Road, Lenton Eastwood Nottingham NG7 2W5 UNITED KINGDOM

Attorney of Record	Naresh Kilaru

Type of Mark	TRADEMARK

Register	PRINCIPAL

Affidavit Text	SECT 15. SECT 8 (6-YR). SECTION 8(10-YR) 20051125.

Renewal	1ST RENEWAL 20051125

Live/Dead Indicator	LIVE

</quote>

2. Games Workshop Limited also owns "Space Marine" Registration Number 1922180 (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4004:vp...):

"Goods and Services: IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: video computer games; computer software for playing games"
"...listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story"

Wow, this is a really, really, really great way to think.
Tech/IT is already starved for qualified employees, and the 'Startup Visa', even if it is signed into law anytime soon won't completely solve that.

In the US, more degree earners are women now than men, so that is one large untapped talent pool for the tech industry. We ignore it to our detriment.
The website should be as clear as this comment. I didn't really understand what the product did until I read this.
Chromebook Pixel: A Concept ChromeOS Device with Ultra HD Touch Screen
This is really cool, nice job!
Live, global tweets visualised on a fluid map
More context might be needed here.

Where I live kids are interacting with computer way before they get to High School. I mean, five year olds are using computers and the Internet. To wait until HS to introduce some of these topics seems wrong. For example, all the local middle schools have some sort of a Lego Mindstorms class (some good, some bad, but they do have them).
Pairing an activity with another highly-gendered activity will most definitely change the gender ratio of your combined activities.

Here 'yoga' is playing the role 'pizza and beer' does at most hackathons - I know there's tons of exceptions, but generally speaking, women like yoga more than men, and men like eating pizza and drinking beer more than women.

I bet you could adjust the gender ratio even more if you mixed in more female-leaning activities - for instance, you could bring in a pedicurist.

The social engineer in me wonders what our profession would look like if every technical course over a couple of decades was followed by getting your nails done and a wine tasting.
Deleting someone’s business off Heroku
Interesting theory.

Why don't we take it to its logical conclusion and remove all services for anyone who doesn't live in Washington, DC?
Thanks for being so open about this. I've worked from the IT side with a lot of different accounting folks, and I can't imagine any of them sitting in on meetings in which changes of this sort were discussed without pitching a fit. I've tried and failed to get much smaller changes approved. (E.g., a change to G/L journaling configuration in our customer billing application that would have made absolutely no change to output but would have made supporting new products MUCH easier.) I would have thought that a business large enough to have a controller (and an ex-controller!) would have someone defending the billing process. I guess you became that person...
relevant visualization of where research happens: http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.8087.1355853889!/image/c...
The tilde file names in windows harken back to ye olde days of MSDOS, where file names were only allowed to be 8 characters long, and the extension was only allowed to be a dot followed by three characters (aka: the "eight-dot-three" file naming convention).

Like, if someone generated several thousand files, all named: "New Text Document.txt"

In the background, some versions of Windows will also record an alternate file name for ye olde backwards compatibility, such as:

NEWTEX~1.TXT

NEWTE~10.TXT

NEWT~100.TXT

NEW~1000.TXT

NE~10000.TXT

N~100000.TXT

It's not really about the space characters, so much as it is about length constraints from back when 640KB should've been more memory than anyone will ever need.
The question of 'why' is an important one, indeed. For example, I suspect that the disparity in cooking and ceramics is not due to a [perceived] unwelcoming culture, or a [perceived] pervasive attitude that men who are entering the field are inferior by default. It might be that women are considered inferior in blacksmithing; I'm not a blacksmith, though, so I don't know. I do know one woman who is a blacksmith, however, and from what I've heard from her--women involved in such a hobby tend to be well received.

People who work professionally in STEM fields in the US tend to be straight white males. This is okay, so long as the reason for the disparity is not that the culture in these fields tends to disparage members of the community who don't fit this profile. If we agree that women and men are roughly equally qualified when it comes to development, then the disparity in terms of participation is worth being investigated. This sort of statement (1:1 ratio) implies equality which will hopefully resonate with the community and ultimately tend towards a zeitgeist wherein people--regardless of gender or any other irrelevant criteria--are welcomed based on their merit.
> In the US, more degree earners are women now than men,

Not in STEM, which constitutes the vast majority of the degrees relevant to Tech/IT.
One of the best comments on this topic I've seen was by a girl at Stuyvesant on learning computer science:

"Before taking the mandated Intro class last year, when I heard 'computer science,' I pictured nerdy boys, who turned into nerdy bearded men, slouched over huge computers and click-clacking out codes that meant nothing to me. There’s nothing wrong with nerdy boys, comp sci just didn’t seem like something I would ever be interested in.

"This image was quickly shattered in that first intro class. Computer science started to resonate with me when I worked on my first project, creating a simple animation of a string quartet using Netlogo. It was while I was working on this that I realized comp sci isn’t about nerdy boys sitting at computers and coding out nonsense that turns into violent video games and complicated math problem solvers. No, comp sci isn’t this at all. Comp sci, as I have found in my classes at Stuy, is a medium for expression, a place for creation and creativity."

http://betabeat.com/2012/06/real-tales-of-learning-computer-...

This is both true, and probably effective for changing women's perception of the field and attracting more to it.
It's a pattern I've run into recently with Google products: I see unexpected behavior (Voice repeatedly fails to send SMS, Android fails to accept default action settings, Gmail hosts a 'mixed content' vulnerability...). I run through a short help questionnaire from Google to rule out the most common issues, it eventually recommends the Google Support Forums. I search there for others with the same problem, I find them or not, no one has a solution.

I post my issue and ask for feedback, never see any response.

I just chalked it up to the "support is expensive so we don't do any" model. I worry that the way Google handles support is spreading to other companies faster than the way Google handles algorithms or stripped down interfaces.
Fully agree with you - need to have strong product people as part of your founder team
10+ Inspiring SAAS Landing Pages
Quantity of consumption. It's a lot easier to buy Monster in multi-packs and gulp through three or four cans in an hour or two. Nobody buys multiple cups at Starbucks or returns to the store that frequently.
I see. So if I may paraphrase, TSX can also help write work-loads by eliminating locks that weren't actually needed because no actual contention over the same data occurred. This can happen if the lock was too coarse-grained and the writes were actually to different memory, or if the dynamically-executed path didn't actually mutate shared memory.

Both of these are problems you can code around, but doing that would likely require greater effort and complexity.

It's unclear to me whether recovering from mis-speculation is more expensive than acquiring the lock up-front. In other words, is there overhead in the case that you almost always encounter actual contention?

It's also unclear to me how this can be done without instruction set support, as the paper claims. Without having the critical sections explicitly marked how can this be implemented?
So all it takes to be a manager at your company is to bomb the job interview? I could use a pay raise, which company do you work for?
I used KDE 4.x at one point with NFS home directories via autofs (before migrating to Awesome). Could you elaborate on how it no longer works?
This is just evil customer service.

The only time that I'm ever home for mail delivery, in case a signature is required or something, is on a Saturday. That day is the only opportunity I've got for interaction with my letter carrier, so don't pick that day as the one to drop.

If cutting back to 5 days is the way to cut costs, why not cut Monday or Thursday or something?
Why Do Drug Companies Hide So Much Data?
The guy at the beginning of the article consumed only ~600mg of caffeine, but he consumed between 7,000 and 8,000 mg of taurine which is over 2x safe daily consumption[1]. I don't think that drinking 600 mg of caffeine is good for you, but I don't think it's the primary culprit for hospitalizations. I'm thinking the other ingredients in energy drinks, such as taurine and guarana, play a major role.

Here's an interesting quote from a recent Atlantic article[2]:
"Still, despite the fact that a Starbucks venti coffee has three times as much listed caffeine as a can of Monster, some people swear they're more wired after drinking an energy drink. That may be because of the extra caffeine in guarana. Energy drinks can advertise that they have the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee; but when you include guarana, they have a much stronger stimulant effect."

I found this chart from the Seattle Times comparing stimulant levels in energy drinks[3]. Not only does Monster have 160 mg of caffeine in each can, it also has 5,000 mg of guarana and 2,000 mg of taurine. That's a lot of stimulants for one can. I would be interested in seeing more in-depth studies on guarana and taurine.

[1] According to the Mayo Clinic, the recommended maximum daily intake of taurine is 3,000 mg (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/taurine/AN01856)

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/how-much-c...

[3] seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/health/links/energydrinkchart10.pdf
https://bitbucket.org/cfbolz/pyrolog/
https://bitbucket.org/pypy/lang-smalltalk/
https://bitbucket.org/pypy/lang-js/
https://bitbucket.org/pypy/lang-scheme/
I'm sorry, but "why?", by itself, is never a serious question.

Except in cases of extreme naivety, it's a challenge, or worse, a roadblock, posed to force a reexamination of the underlying assumption.

In this case, the underlying assumption is that the field of web development would be enhanced by a more equal ratio of women to men.

Your "why?" implies a host of reasons, bounded only by imagination, why this might not be the case — why we might be better off leaving this to the men — but luckily, you don't have to actually voice any of them.

So no, it isn't a serious question, and doesn't deserve a serious response here.
Anonymous attack releases password hashes and contact info of 4000 bank contacts
USPS is ending Saturday mail. Nice work, you emailing bastards.
Rewire Your Brain for Positivity and Happiness Using the Tetris Effect
The Volume of Minecraft (How many blocks can you fit into a Minecraft world?)
We ran into this dilemma last year at Lucidchart when we were debating how to handle SEO, PR, and general marketing. We flirted with outsourcing but eventually hired two full-timers and we haven't looked back. Took a month or two to get them up to speed on the product and best practices but I now glean off of their expertise and having them in-house makes our team stronger.

The only thing we would outsource is very quantifiable deliverables that need no additional maintenance to be valuable. Ie. data entry, template designs, link building.
In the future, all "space marines" will simply be "marines." In any plausible scenario in which we have "space marines," having a dedicated corpus of naval marines would be unnecessary.

Ergo, the solution is simply to let Games Workshop keep the silly moniker and just call your future super-soldiers what they would properly be called.
Fix the fonts on your site. Too small. Try reading the site on an iPad.

Yes, you can zoom on an iPad. On both Safari and Chrome (on iPad) elements of your site break and overlay on top of the text. Your header will do that depending on how you scroll.

Also, Safari on Windows mangles your main font and makes it really hard to read. It looks fine on Chrome (on Windows).

I try to make choices that work well when about three feet away from a 24 inch monitor.

Just being constructive.

Nice article.
Hasn't it always been much sexier to invent your own thing? I agree, picking up existing projects should be encouraged. The problems with this approach are:

1. The original owner is not there to give you commit access, so you have to fork the project. This means that if the project had some number of users you cannot bring them with you. Imagine if there was a better version of Django out there, made by a group of talented hackers but you never heard about it because GitHub never told you that out of 1,500+ forks of Django one is really pretty awesome and actively developed.

2. The original owner is not there to give you access to distributing the software. This means that even if you create and maintain a fork of the original project, you now have to distribute it under a different name, once again losing popularity to the "standard" version.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that if a project is abandoned it be given to the next runner up automatically. The above issues also serve as a negative feedback loop preventing all sorts of bad software from cropping up. It just means that large projects like ImageMagick can effectively become zombies. You develop your code against them, then realize they are no good and have to re-write your code against a fork or evolution of that project.
To be fair, he could have just been joking....
The site appears to be down?
We use Brosix too, especially because they are soon upgrading to being able to link different accounts, like AIM, and still run through a secure server.
If the goal is to benchmark Ruby execution time, it's unfair. The slow startup time is a valid concern when considering short-lived sessions, but it's kind of meaningless when trying to benchmark a Ruby implementation.
Isn't that bad for your users though? I would feel taken advantage of if I learned that while the cost of a game has remained the same (99 tokens) but the cost per token has gone up.
1985 called and wants its news back.
Ask HN: Which hand do you use to hold your phone?
I'm doing some work right now on mobile apps and we were discussing the differences between iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry 10. On BlackBerry 10 and iPhone, handedness is less of an issue due to the absence of a back button. In both cases, it's in the actual app and is on the left side, which follows what most left to right readers would expect. The hardware volume buttons are on the right side of the device.

On Android, this is a bit different. On a Galaxy Nexus, the back button is on the left, and so are the hardware volume buttons. On a Galaxy S3, the menu button is on the left, while the back button is on the lower right. The hardware volume buttons are on the right too.

I usually use my phone in my right hand, so the iPhone, Nexus, and BlackBerry make sense to me. Apparently some of you hold your phone in your left hand.

I'm wondering what the distribution is. I don't think it has much to do with which hand is your dominant hand, because if it did, I can't explain why Samsung would switch sides. Could it be due to reading direction?

Interested in reading the responses.
The title is ambiguous.
> "You probably can't even get an email returned if you are offering less than six figures to a top ten publisher," he noted. This may sound ridiculous - 'Who would turn away $20,000?' - but the reality is that many of the same legal, financial, executive, and support resources need to be brought to bear on every single deal, regardless of size, and taking time away from something that is in the tens of millions of dollars range is often not justifiable."

Valve is investing in the long tail with Greenlight. It might be that there's more money to be made from platform agnostic indie games than from the best offerings of the top ten publishers combined.

I think the other concern is that Windows isn't a sustainable platform for gaming, since it's hard to predict what the platform will look like in any given future iteration.
I agree with this - it just seems like last years media friendly buzzword HTML5 has been replaced by RWD but at least the thought is there (until facebook announce they aren't making any money because of it)
Growth Hacking is Here to Stay, So Get Used to it
It's just a flashy thing to do nowadays in web dev, probably using jQuery Waypoints. I personally think it's quite cool, despite it's apparent uselessness.
Please ensure you're logged into Google Chrome as this is enforced by Google. This may also be due to the instability of the nightly build for Chrome Dev.
Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery
Ask HighScalability: Memcached and Relations
Packets of Death
Play runs on Netty. No nginx needed.
Super Bowl Advertisers Ready for the Traffic? Nope..It's Lights Out.
How can that possibly be a logical conclusion? Are you just being funny?