skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it depends on the industry. But I worked in a field where everyone knew everybody if you'd been around for a few years. So it was an absolute no-brainer to look up who you knew at the companies the candidate worked, pick up the phone and ask what's the word on the street about this guy. And the guy I was calling would typically consider it a favor to me, not to the hire. In fact, failing to call, or to have a network of people who could help on hiring references, purchase references, occasional technical and best-practice questions, would be failing networking 101 and the real no-no at that level. Of course, this would be when an offer was about to be made, and not to anyone who wasn't supposed to know about the hire, or whose discretion couldn't be relied on, and just 1-2 people.

Of course, randomly contacting a bunch of people via LinkedIn would have been bad judgment and a reason for the candidate to question working for someone who would risk putting them in an embarrassing spot.

Also, I don't really agree with the most direct in-your-face questions in the post unless you know the reference really well. If I was the reference those questions would make me uncomfortable and I would shut down the call pretty quick. Would almost make me think the candidate had a buddy testing me for what type of reference I was giving, which is not totally unheard of.

Also, my experience is the check is mostly to check for the red flag, make sure their description of role was accurate, maybe confirm/fill in a gap about something you might not get the full story about from the applicant, how much were they really involved in X, circumstances of departure, basic strengths, weaknesses, would you hire again. If you can't do the technical / cultural fit yourself you're gonna have a bad time.

Other than that, I'm surprised at the pushback... for the most part this is the way it's done.
That's true. For me, I view redundancy as one of the values of Heroku. If you're deploying on your own, that may still require provisioning additional servers as needed, manually backing up databases periodically, etc etc. It can be a time cost beyond just deploying it once in some cases. Still, is the cost of Heroku worth it? It's an important question and a personal one for most I think.

I tend to think of deployment as a challenging thing too but the more I discuss it the less I think of it as a mystery. Thank you for sharing.
Wow. Just over a month ago they were posting their "Week 1 In Review," that was a fast acquisition!

This one is actually quite exciting I think though. They already have the product, but they need to scale like crazy. A company like Dropbox will help massively with that, and hopefully the service will grow without the Twitter-esque growing pains we're used to.

I'd far rather see these guys acquired by a company interested in keeping the product, than a company who just needs a talented team.
You seem to be disagreeing with a thing nobody said. It is possible that they were already exploring a news feed feature and that they see this as an opportunity to find out what their users want from the feature.
The dichotomy blows my mind. You should be proud of your career and the impact you've made.

If you've done anything worth being proud of, then it's likely that some people will hate your guts and want to sabotage you-- and powerful people are more likely than average to dislike you.

A roulette game in one's career (back-channel references) that one didn't ask for is undesirable to anyone.
the iphone app pulsepoint is worth mentioning here. its designed to alert people with cpr training when a cardiac arrest occurs near them. if more people use this app them more people should survive this type of accident
Why are some entries very fleshed out and comprehensive (jquery: http://overapi.com/jquery) while others are just links out (vim: http://overapi.com/vim)?

Would love to see more listings of keyboard shortcuts. Overall this is really cool. I'm working on a printed cheat sheet/shortcut product so I'll definitely use this ...
Analysis of Andy Ihnatko's Switch to an Android Phone
Only in the startup world is Dropbox considered a "giant company."
RSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to use Facebook and Twitter.

Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.
Nice project. I've been working on Dulwich (a pure python implementation of the Git protocol) as well as a higher level abstraction. I would definitely be interested in contributing to JS Git.
"...asystole frequently occurs..."

vs.

"VFib can persist..."

How are these incompatible?
It's this sort of attitude, "well, it's the lawyers' fault, you can't blame the engineers" that helps enable this sort of garbage. Yes, you absolutely can blame the engineers. They choose to work at IBM and choose to stay there even after they learned about the patent happy nature of the company. Same goes for every other patent happy company. You can't continue to patent everything under the sun if you don't have engineers finding it for you. "Just following orders" hasn't been a good excuse longer than software has been a significant field.
Agreed. I dumped the native mail client.
Well, if they crashed on a certain block then the operators of the client would notice and presumably update to a newer version of the client. The problem in this case was more subtle: the old clients did not crash on the block, they simply rejected it as invalid and continued working on an alternate subtree.

If you did somehow create a block that all clients except yours crashed on, you still wouldn't gain control of the network because the difficulty of creating a new block is calibrated according to the total power of the network, and only re-calibrates every few blocks. So for a while, you would still be effectively competing against the former power of the network, giving the client developers time to fix the crash.
I quit my job yesterday. In the evening, I just walked out of my office and straight home. While at home, I did absolutely no work for my former employer. I was unemployed for more than twelve hours. Then this morning, I returned to work and am now employed again.
TEDx’s guidelines for science and pseudoscience, and how to participate
You know, there's more than one person who works at Google. There are even multiple departments! So while it might seem that when "Google" says that it's removing Google Reader and then "Google" asks what we thought was good about Google Reader it's someone changing the subject, it isn't really.
This is, as the comments suggest, a touchy subject. I generally advise people to never respond to reference check requests with anything other than confirming they were employed.

There is a risk that a bad reference will get you sued by the candidate, and a good reference (where the candidate doesn't work out) gets you sued by the company. Its a lose-lose situation.

That said, one of the really interesting things about the San Francisco Bay area is that there is relatively high job mobility. So a lot of job motion (or not) is from other employees who refer their friends, or suggest that the company pass. Once someone has gone through one of the 'grinders'[1] they get some visibility to other people who worked with them or was aware of them. In my own experience I've met people who I won't work with ever again. And people whom I would work with in a heartbeat. And a bunch of people in between. I'm sure that I land somewhere on that spectrum for a bunch of people in the valley as well.

It is more effective to look and see where a person has been hired and stayed vs hired and bounced out again, to get an understanding of how they fit in or didn't. And if they followed folks from previous jobs or sought out new folks. Was their mobility increasing? (if so they are probably pretty good) or decreasing? (then you might want to probe that, with the candidate)

At the end of the day, digging up gossip on someone by seeking out back channels cannot get you useful data on the candidate.

[1] A 'grinder' is a large 10,000+ employee tech company which is constantly consuming new hires to fill roles due to a relatively high rate of turnover. Examples have been HP, Apple, Google, Sun, Xerox, Cisco, Etc.
The 'But You Are Free' Effect
As a manager at Microsoft, I wasn't allowed to answer anything further than confirming or denying employment. I don't believe I was even allowed to confirm/deny offense-based dismissal.
Reach for people in your social networks, former classmates, alumni, etc. Post and comment on websites that cover your area.

This is what we are doing at http://www.unioncy.com. We are building a platform that lets you easily catalog all your personal belongings.
Why are you encouraging deprecated mysql_* functions for PHP? overapi.com/php/
If you have left your heroku app alone for 3 years, you are definitely at risk of getting rooted: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/11/rails_security_vu...
Yay for Betaworks.
Thanks for the feedback on this. I just added an update.
I am usually a sucker for "do not feel obliged" and most of the times I don't feel under a lot of pressure taking up that extra responsibility
Number 6 is not mine.

Nitpicking: My name has another t on the end.

Another headline: Infra-hats become number one selling product of the year.
I am simultaneously kinda embarassed and also not that I've never actually been able to get Chef to actually work. I've tried two or three times, put two or three hours into it each time, and then said "fuck it" and either did it by hand or "git push heroku."

My time is more valuable than manually managing servers. It's an incredibly basic tradeoff: some people are more price-sensitive, others are more time-sensitive.

In my case, if I end up working on an app that reaches the scale where Heroku isn't appropriate (for cost or 'omg I need metal' reasons) again, I'm sure there will be someone else on my team who lives and breathes ops. I can manage, but I'd rather be doing almost anything else.

(and when I tried to load the article, none of the body text loaded, I had to refresh the page...)
What I value, and what I get paid, are two different things. No matter how theoretical you want to get, at the end of the day you have in your hand what you actually have in your hand.
By your logic, if any criminal ever fires a RPG at a police car, it makes sense for them to upgrade all police cars across the country to Strykers.
Hasn't swatting been around forever? Or at least for the time when phone number spoofing became easy. Even the Wikipedia entry is referencing an FBI page from 2008. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting
Step 0: get all of these people to use Dropbox as their email client
Neat! Fantastic first version! It has lots of potential. I love how it's not tied to jQuery. And I agree with what some of the others have said - it's possible you could build a freemium service with this. I don't know how ample that opportunity is though.

Here's another feature request to your list too: Have the word bubbles remain in the viewport, or scroll so they are always in view.
I think this is obviously not just a talent acquisition. An email client is something that Dropbox needs in the long run to provide awesome integrated experience for your productivity tasks. Without it, they won't be able to compete with Google on user experience.

I'm really happy for this acquisition. It could be an early sign of a new trend in which companies heading to IPO buy strategic products and teams in the early stages to build something awesome together.

Facebook's Instagram acquisition could be seen this way, but it was much more defensive move. Mailbox acquisition is clearly done from more win-win perspective.
Ask HN: Which programming language are the easiest to debug?
I'm curious... what, in your opinion, are the easiest programming language to debug? When you start using a language, the importance of straightforward debugging is huge (in my opinion), but it's a topic that I haven't seen much discussion on.

This question has two sides;
1. Does the language itself promote code that is easy to reason about?
2. Does the language have great debugging tool(s)?

Feel free to share any insights you have about this topic. Real world experience with a language is preferred, but if you've heard good things about debugging in a language you've not used before, please share this too.

Of course this is a subjective topic, so there's no point in pointing out when someone is "wrong". Please bear this in mind.

Thank you.
Let's suppose I was a super programmer that made the company millions, but I also slept with the boss's girlfriend.

If someone asks the boss for a reference, what do you think will motivate the boss more? The million of dollars or the fact I slept with his girlfriend?

This is exaggerated of course, but it isn't uncommon, specially at large companies, to be a good professional, but have personal issues with some of the people there.
Just remind senders to notify receivers that they're going to get some money (or "a gift" at least).
True enough. I have used Gambit for several apps in the last 10 years or so, but always for things that don't need a lot of 3rd party libraries. I wrote an article a long time ago on using Gambit for command line utilities and other small apps.
Will Git source compile with clang? If so emscripten is a possibility.
GiveO2 calculates your carbon footprint
Counter-counter point:

1) Yes, but you can get the mentorship without the burden of the investment, which locks you into a specific idea and protects you from learning how to make money.

2) Absolutely correct. If you're just starting out, don't start one of those companies. These are great companies to start after you've built something profitable and learned the basics of running a successful business. Why not start a lottery ticket company (that's how I call them) first? Because they're harder and less likely to succeed. I'm a big fan of setting yourself up to succeed. :-)
What to do when Google hates your software website
Case study of how a software company website recovered after being punished by Google.
How will it work on non-Filesystem API browsers
(that is, all of them except Google Chrome and… BB10)?

Are there plans?

http://caniuse.com/#feat=filesystem
We Need An Ephemeral Web
If the police know it spoofed, of course not, but if they have probable cause to believe a person is in danger they can do a search for that person without consent or a warrant.
As an Android user who has never tried Mailbox, what makes it so great? (briefly)
Where I work, Chief Architects do not make decisions about killing products. That happens higher than them. Their responsibility is engineering the architecture of their product. So, yes, I think it's accurate to refer to a Chief Architect as "an engineer."
A pure Javascript implementation of git?

0. Why is this a good idea? Have all the desktops and laptops died, and are people forced to use Mozilla OS for development? I'd vastly prefer native applications on iPad, Windows RT, Android and other such platforms (if I suddenly went crazy and decided to do development on them). And a PNaCl application on Chromebook, if that's what you're specifically targeting.

1. Why won't it die like git.js did? [1] Why aren't you working on extending git.js?

2. Where can I see a technical roadmap? You're planning to deflate, applying deltas, huge packfiles with 4G objects in Javascript? What performance guarantees can you make?

3. Git is not a dumb book-keeper where you just checkout, make changes, and checkin. How are you going to replicate what makes git so awesome: `rebase -i`, `filter-branch`, `rerere`, pickaxe, and so many other features?

[1]: https://github.com/danlucraft/git.js
Cookie Love in the Time of Cholera
Reader's Waves
I was under the impression you don't point guns at someone unless you're ready to fire, so I'd assume that if I had made any sudden movements it could have been fatal.

Was this hyperbole or honesty? Drawing a firearm is a deterrent and is employed in order to prevent things to escalating to a point where an officer has to fire.
For most non-techies, RSS (and Cloud Reader) never existed - they never even heard of it, much less used it. It's not "now" history.
> they will use your comment to help make better products.

Ironically, I can't really come up with 'better product' in this specific use case.

"Reader killed RSS" feels just wrong. If anything Reader made RSS thrive, because the data source that get sinked into Reader data is RSS.

Reader is a killer product that shifted the landscape because it fills one single role (RSS aggregator with read+fav status syncing), and does it extremely well, in a fantastically unobtrusive way. I sure as hell don't want another Google product as a remplacement, nor another existing or future product integrate RSS aggregation (and certainly not Plus) as part of it. I don't want a kitchensink or mishmash social/news/aggregator app.

Anyone current or past Google employee who put some work on Reader, here's my personal message to you: thank you, your work is awesome.
If you wear Google's new glasses you're an a**hole
Wow, that is as perfect as it can get :)
I like it, but its treatment of multiple mail accounts is crappy compared to sparrow (no unified inbox).
"The dichotomy blows my mind. You should be proud of your career and the impact you've made."

"but I also slept with the boss's girlfriend."

Strictly speaking, this is an example of an impact that you probably shouldn't be proud of.
You don't need to ssh into the box to take care of Rails vulnerabilities; just redeploy. Heroku is taking care of any vulnerabilities in the rest of the stack: Postgres, Nginx, SSH, etc.
OP has a good point about deployment. DevOps tools have made huge strides in the last few years and it's feasible to build something that approaches the convenience of Heroku's fully-managed deployment pipeline, but that's not the only value that a PaaS provides.

You really shouldn't underestimate the amount of work that it takes just to keep a product running. For example, dealing with hardware & network failures, maintaining data backups, keeping up with OS-level security, & scaling up. That's a huge part of the value that Heroku provides for us.
I think this statement really shows how our expectations of privacy have changed. You'd prefer GMail for it's privacy - That's the mail service that 'reads' your email and displays adverts based on it's content. Google clearly have the ability to access the plain text of your email so I'd be really surprised if they don't do some kind of storage de-duplication too.

(Unless of course you were being ironic and I misread you)
Man, I need to remember to not read the comments on other websites. They're just horrifying...
"If there is one lesson I took away from the experience it
is not to “live life to the fullest” or “have no regrets”.
It is to feel lucky. Feeling lucky means you are
appreciating the things in your life that sometimes go
unnoticed. It means you are achieving more than think
you deserve. Feeling lucky requires a certain humility
we often lose sight of."

I came somewhat close to death due to something that happened with my heart once. Probably not as close as the author of the article, but definitely close enough to make one re-examine a few things.

For me, in addition to feeling lucky and grateful, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that it made me much less patient when dealing with unnecessary unpleasantries.

It's hard not to shout, "Really? I have to fill out this ridiculous form and then call so-and-so? Do you guys even KNOW how insanely short and fragile life is, and we're wasting it here talking about this ridiculous thing?"

I deal with the necessary unpleasantries a little better now than I did before. When one of the pets makes a mess on the floor, I can't say I really enjoy cleaning it up now - but I still have to think about how wonderful and lucky it is that the pet and I are both here.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find this as the top comment on Hacker News. /s
What Do Angel Investors Actually Do? (Part 1)
>Honestly, a company that doesn't innovate

Go flame elsewhere, troll. I bet even the displays of your LCD/LED Tv's in the hall and your laptop were made by this very same company. And they're perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world when it comes to displays. And not just displays - Memory, SSD's, Processors (which even Apple uses)..etc.

Atleast, they exercise true innovation - Genuinely inventing something, instead of just patenting rounded corners and suing people for it.
tl;dr
I'll get around to reading this later...
Does heroku ssh in for you and update your rails installation or other custom software? If not there's no way you should leave any software unattended for that length of time. Most java, python, ruby and php frameworks/apps will all have had vulns in that period for example. Also do they upgrade things like ruby without you redeploying?

What heroku buys you is not having to deal with updating the web server and database, as they'll deal with all of that, but I wasn't aware that they provide a fully managed service like say wordpress.com, and I don't see how they could for custom apps.
Software Cartoons to Get You Through Your Friday Afternoon
I would suggest using the non-minified version of your library on the demo page, because programmers like me will want to look at the source in the fastest way possible, which is in the browser. (Your library is so small I don't think it will make much of a difference to bandwidth, and anyway you are cleverly using github as your static host.)

Nice work.
IndexedDB can store blobs. There's even a FileSystem API polyfill that uses IndexedDB: http://ericbidelman.tumblr.com/post/21649963613/idb-filesyst...
According to the second paragraph every actor they had played a stereotypical character. In other words they didn't single out women and make fun of them, it was part of a skit in which they made fun of a variety of people. I didn't see the event but it doesn't sound to me like they were being sexist.

Edit: after watching a few clips it seems like a really cheesy presentation, I didn't see any blatant sexism.

>> "The Brazilian woman was hot"

So? It really seems like the author has read far too much into this. I presume the Brazilian woman was demoing a feature of the phone. Should Samsung have discriminated against her based on her appearance and chosen someone less attractive? There are many problems women face in the tech world which need to be fixed but this is a poor attempt at turning a non-story into something bigger.
I have this OCD tendency to clean up my place before I can sit down to work on my projects, by the time I am done with it all, I am hungry, so I cook then there are the dishes...after everything's done, I feel mentally drained even though all I did was physical activity. I am similarly OCD about working out. All of this coupled with errands and family and social obligations, the desire to please everybody (do something special for birthdays, anniversaries, help out, never saying no)...makes it very difficult to work. Usually, on weekends, it is Sunday evening before I have taken care of everything and am in a good position to work on my projects.
Wouldn't it be easier just to ask for their Facebook password?
This is pretty useful! It would be cool if when you clicked a section title (i.e. String) it would take you to general documentation for that topic.
It also comes down to how much you value learning new technologies.

I started a project in Rails 4 a few months ago and it took several hours just to get compass working again... but it was still worth it.
Microsoft - Don't lock down