skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two different mechanisms being pointed out, and it's important to understand the distinction.

The first is the tendency for your burn rate to drift up to match your neighbors. Even when encouraged by your neighbors being assholes about it, that is a matter of discipline; if your discipline is in the top ninety-whatever percentile, it is possible to stop yourself doing this.

The second is the fact that some companies attach to some jobs very high unpaid expenses that they dishonestly don't point out until after your working for the company, e.g. refusing to give you a high-paid job unless you drive to work in an expensive car. There's nothing to be done about that in the first sense; if they won't give you the job unless you spend much of your salary on these unpaid expenses, then they won't. What you need to do in this case is recognize such jobs, subtract the unpaid expenses from your after-tax salary, and make your decision whether to accept the job or walk away, based on your take-home pay after expenses, not before.
>Are these companies doing so poorly that they feel that chance meetings in the hallways or at the water-cooler will be their salvation?

For what it's worth, that is exactly the logic Google is using for the design of their new building near SF.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/26/google-reveals-plans-for-ba...
There are even worse problems. Some games crash a lot, especially soon after a sale(frequently the first linux release). Psychonauts crashed on some of the intro cutscenes, I ended up playing the windows version in wine.
How does this compare to http://www.thebuttkicker.com/ ?
213 Beta Invites Left for SlimSurveys
Miguel de Icaza is hardly "some dev" though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

> Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the >>GNOME<< and Mono projects.
News Corp. Has a Tablet for Schools
That search functionality is now available on the Roku 2 XS... at lest for a title - search, and it will show you that it's available on Netflix, not on Hulu, or for rent on something else.
Specify "Cache-Control: no-transform" on assets that need to be skipped.
Firefox user here. There are so many great plugins I would love to use chrome for, but one singular thing keeps me using Firefox: side tabs.

Not even tree style, just a plain and simple side tab list. I'm a tab addict and I can't live without opening a dozen every session. Then i keep them open for weeks like a todo list.

Does anyone know if it's possible to write a chrome plugin that can integrate right into the side of the chrome window?
ROKU and most of the other serious TV device players have fully functional smartphone remote apps:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roku/id482066631?mt=8
I tend to think these National Security Letters violate the 4th Amendment by authorizing warrant-less searches and seizures - but is it really a secret the US government is doing that?

Wireless searches of phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication has been public knowledge since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of the program, first reported in a December 16, 2005, article in The New York Times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

In 2006 EFF filed lawsuit against AT&T after the US government installed monitoring equipment in an AT&T's switch room. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T

Warrantless searches and seizures and monitoring? Please that is so...1984. On August 30, 2010, the CCR and ACLU filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing targeted killing of US citizens, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit, holding the claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.

Back to the OP the only thing that shocks me is that Google and/or the individual employees, who are being personally slapped with a non-court ordered gag-order, have not sued the US Government. I am sure the EFF or ACLU would join as co-counsel to defer some of the resources, and if Google keeps complying maybe they will sue Google like EFF sued AT&T.
It's a bit ironic: I moved away from Firefox about four years ago because of its memory usage, and now I'm considering switching back from Chrome for pretty much the same reason.
For 1 there are many extensions like InstantFox or Omnibar
Spoiler alert: When people talk about "group theory," this is the sort of thing that it does. The operations of addition, multiplication, and functional composition share certain symmetries that group theory makes formally sound. Once you grok the relationships, and how multiplication is "the same type of thing as" rotations, then you can see how square roots are similar to fractional rotations.

Less abstractly... the Exponent operation lets you turn addition into multiplication. It takes a little while to wrap your head around that, but once you do, it's straightforward to see how square roots correspond to fractions.

This is also concretely visible in Matrix algebra. Some matrices literally are rotations, and the square roots of such matrices are rotations by half as much. Matrices are nice to study in group theory, because they bridge the gap between numeric operations and functional composition.
He got it from 2004 I think
Nexus 7 incompatibility appears to be a bug... stay tuned.
> > I can't remove the unwanted built-in menu options.

> Firebug allows you to do that.

Please please tell me how to do this. I want the "Web Developer" menu gone. I want Firebug as a first-class entry in the Tools menu again. And while you're at it, it would be really nice to have "View Source" and "View Page Info" in the View menu again.

Perhaps I'm a little bitter, considering I saw the DOM Inspector ripped out of Firefox, relegated to Firebug, kicked around, and now that Firebug is awesome, I see weird versions of a Firebug subset getting in the way. Why couldn't it be part of the browser, and why not just put Firebug in the browser if you want it back in?
that is impossible to estimate. If I were able to estimate that I wouldn't be asking this question. Also, your usage of the term NPV is flawed. Thanks though.
Sounds like a good reason never to give Google any other information about yourself.
I wouldn't rule out Netflix. HBO has a great brand name, but Netflix has a better direct relationships with customers. And Netflix has access to capital too.
Pretty, but no demo will ever touch the Dec 9, 1968 demo by Engelbart.

See http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint... for a description. In one demo they introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, AND a collaborative real-time editor. This was running on a SDS 940 which apparently supported up to 12 simultaneous users in their lab.

On what kind of hardware? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940, it could have stored no more than 200k of memory on drum memory. (It may have had additional storage attached - hard drives were available for 2 MB.)

It took decades for these technologies to become commonplace. But once they did, the nickname "mother of all demos" was completely appropriate.
One of my favorite Firefox extensions is RESTClient (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restclient/?s...). Haven't found a tool as nice in Chrome yet.

That said the only reason I have Firefox around is for that tool and browser testing. I keep subconsciously coming back to Chrome for most of my daily tasks and the lovable Omnibar.
It's just for dying companies.

Let us hope so.

Finding the really loyal employees is probably a good move. Scaling back benefits is a good way to do that.

But is that really the way it works? Somebody on another thread pointed out that this sort of thing probably actually costs you your best people, since the ones who leave first are the ones with plenty of options. The ones who hang around as long as possible aren't necessarily loyal they may just not think they can find another job, or they're "retired on the job" and hoping to milk it as long as they can until they get canned.
Wikidata is trying to make re-use possible beyond Wikipedia, as well. In fact there's already a couple of apps built with it. Here's a trivial genealogy visualization using the API:

https://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/geneawiki/?q=Q1339

It's also worth noting that Freebase itself heavily relied on parsing Wikipedia database dumps to build its ontology -- to a large extent Wikidata is giving structure to data that's been in Wikipedia all along.
>possibly with better privacy

Can you elaborate?
Yes. Don't forget the TPB/torrent tracker programmer anakata's warrantless international extradition followed by multi-month solitary confinment by his own government which is considered "democratic" and is part of northern Europe, nominally a bastion of human rights... a few years ago, before Sweden's right-wing swing.

I have met some (actually most) of the above mentioned people, so government harassment of these individuals sits very poorly with me.

I write this from China, where I carry no cell phone ... mostly because, quite luckily, I can function in society without one.
It seems very common with animals and humans alike that we tend to exhibit "mob mentality" when in larger groups. I picture the hens in a large group attacking each other over food to be similar to going out on "Black Friday" after the US Thanksgiving or a company with a broken employee culture. Not exactly the most attractive or positive examples of human nature.
Aside from the numbers (which isn't really relevant for internet set top boxes), normal people only tend to use the channel changer, volume control, and the power button. Most of the other buttons tend to be ignored, unless it's Netflix related. Did I miss something?
I think Nate probably uses some other way of formalizing specs, as I formulated in my blog post here: http://www.corebvba.be/blog/post/Opinion-TDD-and-startups-yo...
At the micro level, I have seen many teams pull everyone in to the same physical location when faced with a sprint or deadline. It doesn't strike me as inherently illogical, and is a strategy that IME has yielded results.

What yahoo and BB are doing is essentially this, but at scale. They are both companies under significant duress and pressure and are attempting to rally the troops. While it remains to be seen whether these drastic moves will help, they most likely will not hurt.
As a technical matter, many non-profits have a lousy history of serving the public.

Suppose the software license designates the "Dalke Foundation" as the primary recipient of the charity. I, as the organizer of the foundation, decide that I get US$80,000 as income for working at the organizer, and the rest is disbursed to the local animal shelter.

This is acceptable, legally. While probably not what you intend for the license, it seems like a good way for me to make some tax-free money.

Here is another technical difficulty. What if I am a company, who integrates source which earmarks 8 different non-profits. I charge $100/copy, I make 30 sales per month of which 30% goes to Apple, some goes to taxes, and some goes to my salary. What is the right way to split that revenue? Is it a fixed value per non-profit, a fixed percentage of profit to each non-profit (giving me inventive to raise my own salary and lower the profit), or a fixed percentage of profit which is shared equally to all 8 non-profits?

This is even worse than the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html .

Some other tricky points: is there an internationally useful definition of "non-profit"? Can Scientology, which is a non-profit in the US but not in Germany, use the software? Also, don't forget that the non-profit might cease to exist. Can commercial users of the software use software which requires a fee payment when there's no one to accept the money?

What happens if the non-profit refuses to accept the money? (For example, a local youth support non-profit might decline to accept money from an organization which advocates for the removal of pedophilia laws.) Can that commercial organization still be able to use the software?

If the software is free, and most of the revenue comes from in-app purchases, then does that count? Or is it only software sales which count? What about support fees?

These are the problems which easily spring to mind. I'm sure you can come up with more difficulties with the scheme.
I think he might be using the swipe to change workspaces, not tabs.
Leaf: Simple type conversions
Prism used to be kind of cool but Mozilla abandoned it. There also used to be more focus on being able to build arbitrary tools around Gecko but Mozilla abandoned them (except for specialized OSes?).

Gecko is my favorite layout engine and Mozilla makes my favorite browser environments. Firefox gets weirder and weirder sadly.

The multiproject browser environment thing sounds really cool. Multifox does some of that but its interface strikes me as a bit awkward.

Just so you know, Firefox does allow you to run multiple profiles simultaneously in different instances. I do this all the time. Just "firefox -a blark -P profile_name" (or -ProfileManager) and there you go. Don't know if it will work on OS X though.

It's also possible to preload plugins, config settings, and extensions so that you don't have to set them up each time. Let me know if you'd like some pointers. This was a big part of my work at a previous job.
Kind of on the topic - I know there is a way to calculate a square root without a calculator. Of course you can do it the "brute force" way, but one day my music teacher told be about a better way, but never explained it in detail. Does someone know how to do this?
Best Buy has been flagging for a while. I'm sure the good ones had left before this announcement arose.
> One of my favorite Firefox extensions is RESTClient (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restclient/?s...). Haven't found a tool as nice in Chrome yet.

Here you go: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-clien...

Postman has some amazing features like Environments and Collections so you can save some common headers/requests.
Yes. You can report bugs to Apple:

http://bugreporter.apple.com

It is a web interface for Radar and all bugs are triaged by the dev teams pretty quickly. Unfortunately you can't see outstanding bugs or track their progress.
I researched it briefly, at that time it was not possible.

There are lots of attempts to be "good enough" at tab management to make surviving without tree tabs possible. Some of them come close, most don't. At the end of the day, I changed my workflow to work with Chrome, rather than vice-versa because I found Chrome's responsiveness more valuable than Firefox's plugins.
The problem with it, is that it's the size of real keyboard. It's just huge, and it just doesn't feel natural either in the living room or on your bed. I've never found a way to only use it with one hand.

I felt the Co-Star's remote was much better.
> improve the user interface (better theme)

Oh no.

No offense, but every time Firefox gets on an improvement kick, especially when it comes to interfaces, it seems to just be a euphemism for "removing functionality".
That's exactly what it is; EA has now documented this behavior: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9337036.page
Link bait title. So, putting words in other poeple's mouth is what considered as journalism nowadays?
The Woz model - engineering as a fulfillment of curiousity is powerful. It is often hard to make the leap towards understanding what to commercialize...
aaaaaaand then we'd be back to SeaMonkey.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.
>> Let us hope so.

I'm not sure that it's really a big deal. For every company that ends telecommuting, another one will come around offering telecommuting as a strategy to acquire talent.
LoL!! Try coding to Gangnam!!
You really should.

Hearing that sort of thing doesn't get old. I'll bet he would appreciate it.
I think its totally understandable for a struggling company to do this and dont get the conspirancies about how they want to cut down workforce on the cheap.

I work remotely myself but still, managing alot of remote emplyees creates overhead in different places and this is one simple measure to solve these issues. Sure there might be better solutions, but its certainly effective and fast.
Soon, my friend. Soon. :)
Yahoo stock is up from $15 under Scott Thompson to almost $23 with Mayer, so not sure what point you're trying to make.

Please, since you are so familiar with the ins and outs of Yahoo, what would you have done differently?
According to my book, Leo Villareal by JoAnne Northrup, on page 45, "During the 1996 iteration of Burning Man, Villareal covered his rented camper with reflective plastic to minimize the solar heat. He was suprised to note that this gesture created a stunning illusion--very much like a mirage where the reflection of surroundings creats a kind of camoflaging effect" and continues further down the page, "The following year [1997], Villareal decided to address another practical problem, one that stemmed from the exponential growth of the events attendance: how to find the way back to camp at night...Using 16 strobe lights and a Basic Stamp microcontroller, he constructed his first light pulsation system and mounted it atop his camper on a wooden lattice structure. It turned out to be much more than a simple navigation beacon: it projected sequences that 'expressed a desperate need to communicate in a language that begged to be decoded.'"

and continues to talk about how modified the structure and exhibited it from his New York Studio and worked on several other projects leading up to Disorient in 2001.
What's wrong with Firefox? It's as fast as Chrome, with less memory usage and more features while having a decent design.
I learned one method in high school. I couldn't remember it, and too lazy to try to work it out, but here are some answers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_roo...
I'm in the same boat: I love chrome (actually, it's my primary browser), but I can never quite leave Firefox because of the plugins:
- Multifox ( N different browser sessions, rather than just one for incognito mode and one for normal browsing)
- DNS Flusher (Chrome staunchly refuses to accept when I change my hosts file, which I do daily to switch between live, staging, and production servers).
- Tamper Data (a great tool for monitoring and messing with http requests from your browser).
That's $4300 in a mortgage, not rent. A large portion of it should count as savings, not as a living expense.
To me its more clear that these companies have pretty clueless managers that have no idea if their people are working or not.
Yes, firefox tabs are definitely way better. I am a tab addict too - right now I have open 20 of them, and that's only because it's night and I'm not working and done most of my daily reading and closed the extra ones. Usually it'd easily be 30+ of them. Firefox allows to manage them much better. I still use Chrome though because FF memory management is still - even with recent improvements gets out of hand pretty quickly (matter of days with my - admittedly heavy - usage). But their tab system is one thing which always tempts me to switch. It is way ahead of what Chrome can do.
South African government charged US $10 million for a WordPress theme job
South African tech blogs reported that a web development company actually charged the South African government at least R97 million for a website. The website is basically just WordPress (free) and a WordPress theme (about $40) that they clearly didn’t modify much. Here’s a screenshot of the theme.
Unless your audience is in a particularly valuable demographic, you're doing better than average on ad revenue already IMO.
>>The Real Problem (TM)

It is really getting annoying to see the TM sign in every other phrase now. It doesn't make anybody look clever so please guys stop it.
What drove me away from Firefox to begin with was the crashing, memory usage, and (lack of) speed. Mostly the crashing -- I was willing to put up with the other stuff.

I'm a backend/systems developer. One thing that would be awesome for me would be a fully featured web debugging proxy ala Charles/Fiddler. This is where I spend most of my time debugging/testing.

I watched your video with the new webconsole (jsterm.v2). Looks pretty slick -- but I'd request code completion. It was hard to tell if you had it or not from the video.

Another comment in this thread mentions you are working on Firebug AND dev tools? Firebug functionality must be part of Firefox by default.
I can't believe all the talk about Finder here..

I bet Miguel is more like me than most of you, that is, living in a unix/linux terminal for the last 15 years or more - AND doing file management in that terminal!

I've also gone to the Mac from unix/linux as my primary machine as it just works. What I mean by that is suspend/resume, wifi, and all that stuff that you shouldn't think about anymore.

Sure, all I use on it is a browser, iTerm, emacs and dev tools installed from MacPorts, but it provides me with a good environment - that just works. Updates have never broken anything for me - not even the OS updates. Can't say the same about Linux.
Failing companies usually have managers who can't tell if their workers are being productive or not?
I found it pretty easy to switch from Firebug to chrome devtools. They were behind for some time but now I hardly can imagine a case where Chrome devtools did not work for me the same way as Firebug.
Yes Opera Mobile has the turbo mode which is similar to this technology http://www.opera.com/turbo where it proxies the connection and compresses the data.

Opera Mini on the other hand uses OBML http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-binary-markup-langu... which is an entirely different thing.
Depends on what level of abstraction you want to be at. If you use C-style IO, that's fine, but low level. If you use lazy-IO, that unfortunately made it into the Prelude, forget your performance. The Right Way is to use enumerators / left-fold based IO, or the pipe or conduit packages. But that's not trivial, yet. (Though not insanely hard, either.)
Fake Oakley Polarized Hijinx Sunglasses
Ever been quoted before? ^^ Worth quoting.
I gave away and eventually sold snippets of front end web tools (example code mostly) shortly after picking up basic JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills as a pre-teen in the late 90's.

My first product was a "login" script (just JavaScript which generated an encoded version of a username and password and navigated to that URL). I remember when I received my first envelope with a $10 check and an email address inside. That was an awesome feeling.

I also made a fairly complicated "calendar creator" script which allowed a user to stylize and customize a calendar template that would be output in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were the only tools I knew how to use that's naturally what I wrote the program using. Everything was output in a textarea field for "easy" copy-pasting into the user's website.

After a few years I realized the programs were becoming dated (I started receiving more frequent refund requests) and I stopped charging and open sourced them.

In hindsight, the programs were fairly poorly written but I'm glad to know that at least a couple dozen people found them useful.