skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are 4 types of workplace cultures. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/gervais-rehas... .)

Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates.

Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges.

Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture.

Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture.

Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil.

When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.
Easy litmus test.

Can I go to a project and immediately find a direct download link that I can paste into my terminal (for fetch or wget or whatever) ?

Or is it still user-hostile, requiring multiple clicks (pageviews) to get to a "download link" that gives me some 200 character long, ephemeral-link-monstrosity that assumes (wrongly) that I want to download their linux source tarball to my GOD DAMNED LOCAL MACINTOSH.

I'm not even going to bother to look.
If you understand programming (there is a difference between knowing how to program and understanding, a lot of people lack the latter) there is absolutely no difficulty learning CS if you know JS.

I've been coding CS for over a year now and I like it, I've never found it hard to debug and it's just easier to read.
Did they? I can't get to the end of the thread 'cause their infinite scroll thing is not working on mobile safari. Looks like they should focus on coding instead.
+1 to that. I have been working 100% remotely, full time for a client based in Europe for 4 years now - I've never met the people on my team in person & we only have a 3 hour overlap in terms of working hours. I expect myself to be at least as productive as when I was in the office and then some - to eliminate any doubts people might have. Its very easy for my boss to tell how I'm doing....just take a look at my git log.

Not sure I could ever commute 5 days to work & sit in a cubicle or open plan office (those places remind me of a Chinese factory floor)....they would have to pay me a LOT of money to endure that again.
If there is revenue coming in and you're running out of runway then if you don't sell something needs to be cut. The only other option is to shift some resources to get someone who just raises VC, or at least does the leg work.
I agree with the problem, but disagree with the solution. When I come across an interesting blog post, I also want an obvious way to the blog's homepage to see more posts. It would be equally frustrating if I want to see more posts, and instead end up on some landing page.

While designing my startup's blog[1], I looked at a lot of other startups' blogs and noticed that most of them had the same problem the author describes. My solution was to just put a 2 line description of what we do with a link in the blog header, so it is very easy to get to either location.

1: http://blog.tabuleapp.com
As someone that works at Microsoft I know I can't really respond to this without being accused of being a shill/apoligist (even at a place that prides itself in logical thinking, like HN), but this is such a massive oversimplification, and likely so far off the mark as to possibly be on the wrong planet.

Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common.

I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego.

I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.
It might not be quite that simple. There could be limitations on whatever database they are using and the way they set it up as well.
I agree with your point and find it quite disturbing myself. What punched me in my face in your article was that you asked people to comment on HN if they agreed. I quite honestly don't understand the reasoning behind this. Granted, I'm a new member on HN but asking for comments just for the sake of comments seems like broken Facebook "like"s.
It might have taken out Xbox Live cloud storage as well.
I was about to correct you and state that Starfleet Academy was (will be?) located in Sausalito north of the Golden Gate Bridge... but I was wrong! <:)

Starfleet Academy's HQ was in the Presidio, but the Academy's training facility was in Sausalito.
How would the app be installed?
Variants of this practice have been going on for quite some time.

However, past incidents involved actual user records subpoena'd from ISPs based on IP addresses identified as sharing a torrent [1].

In either incarnation, it's ultimately shady and is (IMO) infuriatingly close to blackmail.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20007446-261.html
Yeah, Glass + Goggles seems an awesome combination.

But even awesomer would be Glass + Word Lens: http://questvisual.com/us/

(Assuming it works well, I haven't tried it)
If you are mathematically inclined and good with probability, it could be a lot of fun.
On the plus side, there are now hundreds of former Yahoo employees who also won't be working at Google.

Good chance for a savvy startup to pick up some remote talent the big boys can't.
Hacking the Papal Election
Pretty cool, I like the automata diagram of the expression.

Here's another one http://ocpsoft.org/tutorials/regular-expressions/java-visual...

Done with GWT and Errai, source here: https://github.com/ocpsoft/regex-tester/tree/master/src/main...
Always interesting to see some templates for LaTeX -- but if the "selection" made in the CV section is an indication of the overall thought that have gone into the rest of the site, I don't really see that it offer much over searching CTAN[1] and looking at the pdf-examples that are usually included with the useful packages/templates available there ?

As I've recently been looking at writing up a CV with LaTeX, I've seen quite a few rather awful templates -- and the site happens to list both examples of the worst and best I found after a quick search on CTAN...

For others that are interested -- the best resource I've found so far is actually a nice blog series on using the article-class for CV:

http://www.texdev.net/2011/11/05/writing-a-curriculum-vitae-...

Also worth a read (but cover much of the same):

http://texblog.org/2012/04/25/writing-a-cv-in-latex/

[1] http://www.ctan.org/

edit: typo, minor clarification
The algorithm design is all said out loud. If I printed up a page of code and handed it to the candidate and said "make it better" I might expect them to work on style.

So I don't mind answering questions during the interview process. The candidate might be nervous and I should be clear about my expectations. I don't like mind games like picking a fight and making sure the candidate responds the "right" way.[1] I would hold no points against them for asking on clarification for what "better" means, as long as I didn't they they were trying to be difficult and accepted that faster was better.

I'm sorry if you don't think I would hire you. Maybe I wouldn't, but that doesn't mean you aren't a good coder. But I also think you shouldn't be intimidated by "algorithm invention." You probably do this a bunch already. In the order you write your code you are probably already doing implicit algorithm invention. I think you can write the code to figure out the biggest number in a list if you sit down to do it, and once you do that finding the second biggest just involves keeping track of one more thing and doing one more test on each pass through.

Often the question is figuring out what data structure you should be using.

Oh, I don't actually expect anyone to give me the perfect answer of how to find the nth-biggest element in the list. In fact, if a candidate did give the perfect answer, I would say "this person is more qualified than me, please hire." I'm not capable myself of giving the perfect answer even though I've thought about it a few times and it's essentially a question I've practiced.

[1] See question 7 at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html
He can now, but nothing will change if people become interested in the problems caused by the DHS and politically active only after they've had a bad experience themselves.

People are being harrassed and fondled by the DHS every day apparently. One seized boat isn't going to cause a revolution ...
So when some stupid kids extort money that they don't deserve in the name of artists that never see the money, it's a scam. When the RIAA does it, it's business.
That would be illegal (highly illegal actually). It should also be illegal to do what Spotify is doing, but I'll go out on a limb and say that they won't be held accountable. People have gone to jail for incrementing IDs in GET variables, accessing Facebook accounts without permission and installing apps goes way way beyond that.
CoffeeScript's scoping is broken. http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/12/22/implicit-scoping-in-coffe...
I've been there for a hayride/kids birthday party... bizarre.
"Cock Sauce" for me too.

Assonant and slightly inappropriate's the way I like my condiment nicknames.
You might have already come across these, but I figured posting them here might help nonetheless.

Start here - http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/ This gives you the neccessary understanding of how D3 works (from mbostock himself).

I found this tutorial to be pretty good -

http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/

He also has a book out there with O'Reilly.

Here's another good one

http://2011.12devsofxmas.co.uk/2012/01/data-visualisation/

Hope that helps!
With this approach, visitors that are viewing a blog post's dedicated (permalink) page may not find an obvious way to get back to the root of the blog as the logo links to the associated company site. To me, this can be just as annoying, since I don't want to get into manual-address-bar-truncation mode. Explicit links for each (blog root and company) in the footer are nice, but often not to be found.
Having practically grown up with this stuff, it's definitely been interesting to see its popularity skyrocket in recent years.

There's certainly a valid lesson in market adoption & product incubation to be had here.
> I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it,

You said that the last time I replied to you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751
I was confused and disappointed, too. However, Google already has a (small) SF office, just south of Embarcaderro: https://plus.google.com/116282327849562022127
Meanwhile in the US where technology is a huge part of our GDP

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Our-National-Broadband-Pl...
"Not looking for a solution. Looking for the thought process."

This is the part I can't understand. When the person is on the job, the opposite is in effect. If you tell the candidate to solve a hard problem, you don't wan them to just spit out their thought process, do you? No, you want them to solve the problem. Why the opposite for interviews?
Is this 100%? I need to do some crap for RSA next week and I'd strongly prefer to throw it on another host with a subdomain vs. some redirect magic, but would like maximal SEO value.
I think they were used in the UUCP days.
How To Get Free Wii Points Codes
I don't think Google's support issues have anything to do with people, they have to do with a lack of people. Google treats customer / client problems as an engineering issue and tries to use algorithms just like they do with any other engineering issue. Unfortunately for Google it's a people problem and not a code problem. Google just needs more, vastly more, real people to be at the other end of the
email.
> Good chance for a savvy startup to pick up some remote talent the big boys can't.

No, this is a chance to pick up talent the big boys don't need. "As few as possible" telecommuters means they do hire telecommuters. Apply, see if your skills make up for your telecommuting. As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office - if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
George V was on the throne then. So if it were a royal ship, which it wasn't, then it would be his majesty's ship Titanic (HMS Titanic).

The prefix RMS which was used for the Titanic means Royal Mail Ship. i.e. it delivered mail.

</pedant>
It'd be fascinating to see psychohistory come to be, and at smaller scales than the dozens of billions Asimov used.
yeah, when I was at yahoo, the one guy who worked from home (well, we all did on occasion, but the one guy who always worked from home) was really, really good; My feeling was that he was good enough that he was able to say "let me work from home or I walk" - I don't know if he would have been more effective if he was in the office all the time or not, but he was probably the most effective person on the team as it was.
The device gets data through Wi-Fi on its own, or it can tether via Bluetooth to an Android device or iPhone and use its 3G or 4G data while out and about.
Worth mentioning that the Thompson algorithm can be coded more concisely: https://github.com/darius/sketchbook/blob/master/regex/nfa_s...
I disliked and migrated away from SourceForge seven or eight years ago. Although it did let you provide compiled binaries / packages for end users, the process to do so was ludicrous, and the tools were paper-thin at best. rsync's comment about the download links are spot on; I can confirm that the Next SourceForge still gives you the ridiculous go-round when you want to grab the URL to an install package.

The catalog of software could be great - GitHub doesn't provide this, except in a developer-friendly format. And maybe this format still works (obviously I don't know their numbers). But it's slathered in ads and still reminds me of Tucows - I bet there's a better way to solve this problem.
That has not been my experience with other companies (such as Amazon), and did not seem to be the case for these people at Google I/O (whom I actually had a conversation with about this). Regardless, there is a big difference between someone working on something somewhere in the product and the people in charge of each of the major subsystems (whichb is the specific experience from previous years).
Tumblr "FUCKING" in Policy Guideline
http://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/community

Just search for "fucking"

Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. You can embed anything as long as it follows the other guidelines on this page. But please don't use Tumblr's Upload Video feature to host any sexually explicit videos. We're not in the business of profiting from adult-oriented videos and hosting this stuff is fucking expensive. You can use services like xHamster to host those instead.
This app store idea also made me think that they need to show big screenshots of the apps immediately, and allow developers to put videos in there, too.
(From the 2010-2011 final survey done by the American Math. Society, for new Math Ph.D.s, which I linked elsewhere)

Unknown (U.S.): 85
Not seeking employment: 18
Still seeking employment: 53
Unknown (non U.S.): 83

If you count all of these as "unemployed" (which is probably a significant overestimate), that's 239 out of 1653 new Ph.D.'s, or around 14.4%. If you count only "Still seeking employment" as "unemployed", that's around 3.2%. But I don't know how the numbers in the sciences or in engineering would be similar to those in math.
For a minute there, I thought I was reading Dan Brown instead of Schneier.
I love how this article mentions that sriracha is shelf stable without the fact that it's due to the addition of Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Bisulfite. If you're willing to add that you can probably make anything last on a countertop, but alas they've removed it from my diet as a result.

Anyone know of a respectable all-natural version?
gah. The idea is that your users are the product you are selling to advertisers, who are your real customer.
The main problem with the Fairness Doctrine is it's a limitation on freedom of speech. This is something that Americans can be quite sensitive to, more than Europeans, if we'd like to talk about people having blinkers on. :)

The Fairness Doctrine was designed in 1949 to "provide adequate coverage of public issues", and when challenged in court it was judged constitutional specifically because the radio and television airwaves were limited. With expanding sources of media, including cable television and the Internet, the availability of broadcast airwaves no longer presents a substantial limitation on Americans being able to access any given point of view.

Modern attempts to revive the fairness doctrine are led more or less exclusively by partisans who favor the Democratic Party and preferred the content of political speech under the old system. (For example, Bill Clinton stated that he supported it "because essentially there's always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.") Many of these partisans would like to apply the doctrine to cable television and other non-public-airwave broadcast media. However, court rulings made it quite explicit that if they ever found that the doctrine was limiting political speech, it would be found unconstitutional, so it is likely all of these attempts will fail even if legislated or regulated.

Neutrality and "fairness" is, of course, impossible to judge objectively. Just ask any Wikipedia administrators dealing with edit wars. ;) Government regulation of "fairness" and government domination of the media have the potential to present significant limitations on political freedom - look at various South American dictators' and their forays into controlling the media and bullying opposing points of view. It is the fox guarding the henhouse. Of course, sometimes you may have relatively benevolent foxes (I hear the BBC's okay!) or you may just have suicidal hens who fawn over the latest bit of personality-cult politician voluntarily (no further comment on this topic, this post is enough of a digression).
I just visited the Allura project page to check out the new design, and my eyes had no idea where to look. There's just so much text with no clear layout. The job ads on the side have the same color and weight as the main project description, and there's so much extraneous information.

My head starts hurting every time I visit an SF page. Even after this redesign, I don't see why anybody would use SourceForge for a new project over GitHub + GitHub Pages for the project page, other than they really hate git.
Thanks for your input! I'm glad to hear you like the platform.

I think it's worth noticing that a bunch of services (including a worker) is included on the free plan. The $10/month to run a full app with custom hostnames is actually pretty cheap when you take that into consideration.

If your app/blog is focused on the .NET/Windows developer ecosystem you can apply for inclusion in the community application program (https://appharbor.com/page/community-application-program). If included we'll pay for your app.
"The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member television stations in the United States which hold collective ownership.[2] Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia."

"Since the mid-2000s, Roper polls commissioned by PBS have consistently placed the service as America's most-trusted national institution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS
>I suppose individual agencies could decide to adopt a retroactive policy.

I don't think they could. If they've already signed a contract to fund a project, they can't just decide to change the rules. This will only count going forward.
The ones who want to install Ubuntu on the thing?
Sub directories are still considered best for maximal SEO value. [1]

[1]: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-be...
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You may well be right. I missed the first discussion when the appeal for legal funds was made.

It is disturbing that some are still claiming he broke into the closet when it was unlocked [1], and others here apparently believe that changing your MAC address should be enough to trigger federal charges.

[1] Swartz broke into a closet in the basement of a building at MIT http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
LinkedIn Creepers
This came up again in another conversation, if you're looking to build a structural base around your HW project this stuff is pretty easy to work with and quite durable. As more people do hardware this may come in handy.
Vimessa (YC S11) Deadpooled, Founders Launch User Retention Service, Userfox
Yeah, and someone else's mom uses AOL for email. Yahoo: the new AOL.