skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"So yes - we were being held hostage."

Wait, so you're saying that at any time the bankers could have flipped a switch and magically the economy turns back on in a matter of seconds?

So no, we were not being held hostage.
They have many more "mini-stores" than Sephora, so picking on that one to make it look like a bad idea overall is a little unfair.
> "everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding"

Have you worked at Google? My observation has been that most people here do want to do the coding. Which is not to say that they don't want to be in charge and establish credibility as well, but the culture is much more biased towards engineering than at many other companies.
The reason DRM gets broken all the time is because it's decentralised and it attempts to act like it like it is centralised.

There is a DRM system with a very high success rate , it's called SaaS.
What is good user interface design?
Cloud9: Web Development in the Cloud IDE
DMCA takedown notices in the event of an infringement.

For someone attempting major commercial exploitation of copyrighted materials, there's virtually always an entity which can be reached by injunction, subpoena, or legal action.

Filesharing (a noncommercial exploitation of copyrighted works) is harder to track down, but more overt forms of sharing generally can be identified. Remember: both the copyright enforcer and the copyright infringer need to identify and access the infringed work. The same actions which make it harder for the copyright enforcer to identify infringing uses make it harder for infringers to infringe.

Not impossible, but difficult.

There are many cases of plagiarism and content stealing, yes. But for the most part, once detected, these can be shut down. Tracking content theft from a developed country to a less developed one may be difficult (technically and legally), but it's also a relatively small economic loss.

What did you have in mind?
I'm assuming people will be working from all places around the world, which means different timezones. Maybe one person starts their "shift" just as another one finishes it. You don't want to be wired 24/24. The 24h margin is the longest it can take for an answer before people start getting frustrated. As I mentioned, the average should be way lower, 1-2 minutes preferably, but you can't enforce that at all times when people are working together from different continents. Of course a person who ONLY replies after 24h will be considered unreliable.

Also, you must account for no-interruption working blocks. You must be able to take at least 30 minutes w/out having to answer any IM in order to get sh*t done. That's the main reason why 37signals built Campfire in the first place...
Exactly. For some reason everyone remembers Apple as his only success story, but he was leading Target merchandising during their transformation to what they are today.
I don't get it. What's fantastic about it?
Sure. I objected to the assertion that the merchant lost $17k, which is a gross exaggeration.
Is H1B intended for workers just out of school? Should it be?

Bring in senior workers with school, experience and proven track record; but for just-out-of school jobs employ the local graduates.
One point though regardless that matters is that is that if I have a service that I charge money for and I use your product to provide value to my customers (even for free) shouldn't you be compensated for that even if those customers could have gotten the same content another way?

Isn't this what every ISP is doing with the content of every website in the world?

What about TV antenna installers - their product is virtually useless without all that broadcast content that they don't compensate the producers for?
New KDE Telepathy brings Better Text Editing and Improved Notifications
Monkey chatter smacks of human speech
Facebook Asks You To Please Select Your Emotion
It's possible to link to the Qt core and network components without bringing in the GUI.
It doesn't mean responding with finished work, just providing a clear status w/out leaving people in the dark. The time for that should be WAY smaller in most cases. But the 24h margin is a no-panic zone that should cover all timezones
> don't need to do - Be available at any particular time of a working day

Sorry… but how is anyone supposed to work with you with this attitude.

If I had to work with someone who was never around and I didn't even know if I could contact them for sure without waiting 24h for a reply then I'd be complaining to management to ditch the guy and hire someone who wants to work.
Pragmatically speaking, technology causes new problems. You might say it's already a problem that there exist crazy people who want to destroy the world, but really this is not a substantial issue nor one that is tractable to solve. So if there were a piece of new technology that meant that everyone had the power to destroy the world, that would for practical purposes be a new problem.

There is an established, reasonable position (e.g. Watchmen) that it is bad to increase the power of individuals, because when large power can only be wielded by large societies this limits the damage it can do, compared to the same power in the hands of a single individual.
I personally support the use of IT as a means of oppression by various regimes.
Not so much because of some peculiar esteem I'd have for said regimes, but because I'm kind of fed up by squinty libertarians and source-code rioters telling us what software and IT are and what they should be used for. Not even talking about the validity of armchair journalists' opinions about world politics.
IT is a bunch of tools, and tools don't have a nature or an intrinsic value but functions.
Now a tool that is used to control information _will_ be used to slow its spreading if needed, even though its creator had another idea in mind.
Damn, using a network to forbid information when it was intended to spread it is even a form of hacking if you thing about it.

Now regarding the IT industry : the liberalism that allows startups to pop-up all the time at a tremendous rate also allows a company to sell products to clients that would be deemed shady in said company's nation. When you get by a system, you either accept its flows as well or play this hyper-hypocritical game of being outraged when things don't go your way.
> everyone wants to be in charge

Seriously? When I was at Microsoft, it was like "hot potato" to have to give up a coveted dev role and take on dev lead responsibilities. In particular, being a first-level manager was treated as a sort of curse with all of the worst bits --- not enough time to still work on big things (e.g. as a manager, I too owned logging for a while), but not high enough in the org to justify being full-time on hiring, coordinating teams, and fighting for 0.9 offices / headcount instead of 0.75.

Which sounds dumb until you're on a team with 0.9 offices / headcount and you see the productivity soar, for reasons I never bothered to quantify (if free fruit on Friday => productivity, just buy the fruit; don't ask).
Hello smortaz,

Your post reminded me DataNitro[1] (previously IronSpread), a python-in-excel solution that was featured on HN nearly a year ago[2], and a YCombinator-backed company.

As far as I'm aware it seems closed-source and costly, while your solution is open-source and free. But how does it compare functionality-wise?

At my company we're using using Excel pretty often and python is growing, so using such a tool could be a really convenient.

1: https://datanitro.com/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4090337
Pusher-js 2.0.0 released: WebSockets, comprehensive legacy support
Creating a reliable nodejs library for APNS push sending
Textfac.es - A simple, minimal webapp for text faces. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Personally, my 'value add' is that I won't work for a company that won't support remote developers.

If they value my contributions, they'll have my efforts, if not, they won't.
Tetchy. I like it.
> ... the speed of developing something new has a marginal impact on the overall costs

But it has a large impact on the overall probability of getting off the ground at all - and this is what most projects (and people) never do.
I would recommend BLToolkit (and the newer lighter version Linq2Db -- not to be confused with Linq to SQL). You keep an abstraction level above raw SQL via LINQ and with multiple DB providers you can easily switch between databases without rewriting your queries (provided you don't use any DB-specific features).
From a few recent posts around here I guess he's not very liked in the tech bubble circles, but in case anyone is interested in reading a tiny bit more about this topic, I recommend Morozov's book http://www.amazon.com/The-Net-Delusion-Internet-Freedom/dp/1...
In this specific case you don't even need SSL Anywhere if you're using Chrome, because "www.paypal.com" is in Chrome's built-in HSTS SSL-only list, along with Google, Twitter, Simple, Mega, Braintree and a bunch of other places.

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tra...
Any developer can tell this is not a good idea. Developers need uninterrupted time of intense concentration.
Hosting company stole my website, and my domain name – what should I do?
> It no longer comes down to making three grumpy program committee members happy with the font spacing in your paper submissions.

As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)
> China knows if it uses totalitarian digital tools to opress it's citizens, they will simply avoid the digital world.

what makes you think they don't do it? they are just smart about it. stupid regimes deny access to media, smart regimes give away access but control the information flow.
Or Dinosaur comics, http://www.qwantz.com/index.php.
Definitely words as primary focus, since the artwork never changes.
You have the option of requiring user confirmation via email (right now users are auto-confirmed by default). Non-confirmed users only write to their localStorage (so they can still use the app pre signup), but nothing (apart from their tiny user object) is synced to the remote DB, nothing is parsed by workers, etc. Then write a worker to cull unconfirmed user objects after a while, and you should be fine. I don't know about additional throttling though, but it seems very doable.

Disclaimer: this isn't my area of expertise, but the rest of the Hoodie team are quite confident about this issue, and I trust them. The other two are currently travelling, but if you have more questions, I'm sure one of them will get back to you with more in-depth info.
I would read this, but it hurts my eyes. Respectfully consider a higher text/background combination: http://contrastrebellion.com/
Simply make partial telecommuting hard requirement from your side. I made it very clear at interview that I need some quiet time to keep my productivity. I got hired and now I work 2 days a week from home.

Surprisingly I work for large corporation at 'cubicle sea' and everyone has VPN access and works from home sometimes. My previous job in another large corp had similar policy.
It's not that high a success rate. We have escrow agreements and all sorts in place because people don't trust our SaaS.
I am from a EU country and that didn't help. That's explicitely written in the HR website the address shouldn't be a business address but you might find a way to have a kind of fake one if your employer agree. In my situation, it seem the company didn't want to be border line. My situation might not be the general case as I used to work remotely while traveling around Europe
In the early days of the web I worked at a dev shop where we used <script language="perl"> (or python, or a couple others) for server-side templating. It was a pretty nice system, actually.
One big problems which stops creative people from doing work is management. So essentially it is a good idea to move away from them.
I looked it up and it is about 21% ethanol. Which is more than most drinks I think.

EDIT: On further research it seems that they put stuff into mouthwash to make it undrinkable, in order to prevent abuse and avoid taxes and regulation on alcohol. That doesn't prevent you from ingesting it however. It's just supposed to make it unpleasant.
Blatant racism & sexism in open source code
cstross isn't Scottish though he lives in Edinburgh, but I think he's Northern English so the same general principle applies:

Being a Scottish Tory is like being an African-American Republican. Even if you agree with some or most of their stated policies, you're all too aware of the fact that in reality they've been waging class-warfare against you, your family and neighbors for decades and that often the libertarian (or otherwise) economic theories are just convenient masks for the worst kind of nepotistic crony capitalism, and that wide support for their polices is gained via populist xenophobia.
This is about living under a constitution guaranteed by law. Syria and china are oppressed because people obey orders. Regimes have only ever changed because people stop obeying orders or get invaded.

People obey orders because they don't know any better. They are manipulated by education and media. And not just in China, just look at Fox News or similar media in other countries. This happens everywhere.

Yes privacy is dead, yes we need to create new laws that give a level playing field in surveillance, but when we solve that problem, it will not solve the problem that Facebook knows you are gay, so some people will sell you tickets to G.A.Y. And some wil put a pink triangle on your shirt.

That is the position of Germany's "post privacy" advocates [0]. I don't think it works, for the following reasons.

a) This is about trust: you want to establish trust throughout a society so that nobody will ever misuse data you publish on the Internet. Because society changes, this trust can change as well. But digital data lasts forever.

b) This is about defining what's okay to do in a society (e.g. being gay). But you are usually not the person that gets to define what's okay. The oppressor is.

One technical solution is to not put everybody's personal data in a single database (Facebook). Distributed systems like Buddycloud or Diaspora still allow communicating and "sharing", while making data mining much harder.

[0] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Privacy
"I personally support the use of IT as a means of oppression ... because I'm kind of fed up by squinty libertarians and source-code rioters telling us what software and IT are and what they should be used for"

Fortunately for the rest us of, children aren't allowed to vote, so maybe by the time you've grown up you'll have grown out of your tantrum and you won't approve of screwing everybody over because you're annoyed at a handful of people.
How Your Website Might Be Draining Your Money
I agree this rule is problematic, and it's not just a matter of attitude. It's practical.

When you work with someone you need to have some time of the day when you know you can contact the guy.
Your Yelp profile is your restaurant's web site.
We're (mainly) in Australia, with one worker currently in Belgium an another in Tokyo. Europe checks in to Campfire before breakfast to catch us "live" at the end of the day for an hour or so of realtime interaction. Asking a remote worker to do something at the end of your day and getting it done while you sleep is a win.

When someone's working solo, they still use Campfire to announce what they're doing/thinking: "refactored widget X", "Think I have that validation working". It helps us all understand what's going on. Some of that is just primate grooming behaviour, but we're still primates, so it's useful.
Nice! I'll definitely try it even though I don't have two Macs :P
> Make your location available on each working day (for both reliability and safety)

Does this mean like over Google Latitude or Find my Friends or something? How would that help with safety? It'd help if you can elaborate on this point a bit more. Also, could it be a slight privacy issue with some folk if they accidentally leave it on after working hours are over?

I like the rest of the points you make though. Good luck with convincing your management!
I prefer Advanced REST client https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie... :)
You linking that Wikipedia article made me donate some money to PETA straight away. I can't believe you're defending obvious animal cruelty with the heartless argument that it was "justified".
Why is it that big companies get this? In two weeks I'll be going from a nine person company when there's no working from home whatsoever under any circumstances to a ~250k person company where it's supposedly allowed. WTF?
Nutzen Sie unser kostenloses Angebot zur Suchmaschinenoptimierung
Prestashop 101 Day 13 – Prestashop CMS
This is really cool. To make sure I understand, using it would replace the need to use services like pusher.com? Also, if I were using, say, Sinatra with nginx and unicorn, where would this sit in the pipeline?
Science weighs in on 'perfect'  size‏
My first thought is to provide some means of just putting the file into the repository, and damn the consequences. For example a web upload, the script/program on the server uses the current HEAD, puts the file in there, git add, git commit etc.

In that case, git won't detect conflicts, but humans might, so some git-savy user can remedy that. A slightly more sophisticated mechanism would assign a branch to each user, and then merge as you see fit.
The problem is, you only got the FAQ after a good while and without any decent apology from Heroku.

In your printer example, it's like your printer is not printing a 0 at the end of each of your invoices, and 2 months later tells you it didn't print the 0 because it didn't have enough ink so it skipped the 0 to save on ink.
Don’t Sell the Problem – Sell the Solution
That's a long account, but without anything remotely resembling useful advice. Here's the advice that should have been included:

1. Always register your domain name with a company other than your hosting provider. Don't even allow the domain registrar to be owned by the same corporation.

2. Always maintain a complete, separate copy of the website's content. Never allow the only copy of a Website to be in the hands of an ISP.

If the above two steps had been taken, the story told in the article would have been impossible, and the client could have told the ISP to go to hell and moved on to another provider.

In the above 100 words, I explain everything you need to know to protect yourself from unscrupulous Website providers. By contrast, in the linked article's 900 words, there is not one useful piece of advice, just a long, incoherent narrative about how unfair life is.
Next up: Microsoft Access plugged on top of an Oracle database!

So you get super-serious-business db with the frontend-widgets even Office-users can click together! Or think they can. They all clicked together some sort of very simple Access at one point and it looked so "great" and then it seems to be a very tempting and "logical" step to make it "legit" serious-business by swapping out the Access data backend for a real database - so you get all the serious business AND all the super great, easy frontend!

Once you go down that road, you find yourself in a very special hell.

From all my years in IT I can tell you, there is no amount of money and almost no task that wasn't at one point (against all odds) forced into an Excel file somewhere in the world. It is really ridiculous how far people will bend over to make things into an Excel file.
100%. However, socialized TV will never go away.

Politicians will gladly force TV subsidy, because its literally the platform that gets them elected.

All of those useless PSA "Now you know..." Gov funded TV-spots are exactly that: Mini handouts / free cash.

Meanwhile, mainstream news will get softer and softer on their political benefactors.
Hi there,

ZH citizen and heavy HN user here. We've got lots of talks in our company and a co-working space to go along. Would be awesome to host a HN meetup here. Ping me if you're interested in doing something together.

http://www.meetup.com/Pantalks-tech-non-tech-talks-Panter-AG...
HD Moore The Wild West Derbycon 2012 [video]
Top 100 external domains submitted to Reddit
No I didn't, tried them now, and they gave pretty bad results for me. 700€ more expensive than the cheapest ticket I found so far.
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Difficult to comment without knowing the specifics but I assume there is some transfer of data/code under specific conditions? As in your customers can't just say "gimmie your code , we want to fork it".

That's a little bit different and in most cases for consumer SaaS (facebook,gmail etc) there is no way to get at the software itself. All the consumer gets is a thin client layer.
HP launches Project Moonshot, powered with Intel's Atom at first
If by hotlinking you mean that terrible act of theft of bandwidth, then yes! Down with that✝.

If by hotlinking you mean inline images that are an essential part of hypertext documents, then no! It's a great thing to support.

But the basic thing is that by not hosting, and by being just a proxy, we haven't expressed any ownership or liability over the content that passes through the SSL proxy.

And as a side benefit, we don't have to build out storage for this.

✝ for those who like to externalise their responsibility to determine whether their servers serve a request by just stomping around claiming people 'steal' bandwidth.
10GE and Infiniband are actually not that expensive for HBAs now. Just expensive for switches, but not that expensive, and would be just as expensive for any other non-blocking switch with that level of bandwidth. Juniper EX4500 is probably the cheapest right now, at around $20k for 40 port.

$500/HBA and $500/switch port is cheaper than GE was at the same point in its adoption cycle, I think. Might even be half that with discounts. Aggregated GE is still cheaper and makes more sense for servers in most cases, though.
Most importantly, my team's success is no longer defined through an arbitrary and often broken peer review process, which applies to pretty much everything that matters in the academic world.

Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly?

Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who aren't decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that.

If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google.

Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that.

The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.
Well, that's using a particular framework (netty). Play seems much simpler.