skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that overstating his accomplishments a bit? Unless by "just about everything", you mean the DNS bug and the media, sure...

None of his published work seems consistent with the skillset that would qualify one to thoroughly audit bitcoin. He tends to stick to higher-level, less technical vulnerabilities.
Yes. You can send emails to people's usename @facebook.com, and they can send them out too.
Sure. But you can call xbox or ping-pong "the game" if you want and it has as much impact on keeping people as "the music". I don't want to listen to any music when I'm coding or thinking and I despise being judged for my taste (or lack thereof) in music. I'd rather play a friendly game of ping-pong which does not bring my personal choices/tastes into question. Of course, neither has any effect on me long-term.

It would have been interesting had the author elaborated on what "the chat" meant. Is it friendly banter between knowledgable folks about their personal takes on interesting problems? Or is it high-school drama or bro-code hijinks?
I wonder how much of this is because babies wake you up in the middle of the night and this was before birth control so most people had a baby at home at any given time.
More evidence perhaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Office
I am facing this situation right now. How do you deal with a manager like that?

Do you confront them directly and tell them how you feel?
Do you "report" them?
Do you realize life is too short and likely they won't change and just quit?

Any other suggestion?
This is actually quite simple,pick up a minor that interests you.
If you like basket weaving, take a basket weaving minor, maybe you can disrupt the whole basket weaving industry in the future...who knows. What you take as a minor has little impact on your job later in life, unless it's something you really enjoy which will give you some direction to apply your CS degree.
Interesting observations. Thanks!
The Netflix culture slides immediately came to mind:

"At many firms, when employees are hired, market compensation applies. (but at comp review time, it no longer applies!) At Netflix, market comp always applies: esentially, top of market comp is re-established each year for high performing employees. At annual comp review, manager has to answer the Three Test for the personal market for each of their employees:

1. What could person get elsewhere?

2. What would we pay for replacement?

3. What would we pay to keep that person? (if they had a bigger offer elsewhere?)

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

edit: slides 96 and 100
Pretty early on it calls code & design reviews "overhead", with "The Man" underneath.

Maybe I'm missing some context/voiceover here, but every decent coder/designer I've worked with embraces feedback & reviews. Not sure how I'd survive without them.
If backed up, this would be huge. Seismologists don't really stand a chance right now.
Jon Skeet inspects ReSharper
I hiked 800 miles on the AT two years ago. I can vouch for it. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I've heard about this since and it fits. I frequently woke up sometime in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'd read for a bit and sometimes I'd just lie there and listen.

I just chalked it up to more hours in bed and being really REALLY tired when going to bed, but it makes total sense that the lack of artificial light played a big part.
In that situation I either try to switch teams (if possible), or move on and just provide feedback during the exit interview.

If the manager's even a little bit politically-minded, you're gonna have a bad time if you try to fix the situation while he's still your boss.

(Sorry, the cynical codger in me is talking.)
Apply for other jobs.
This is the classic case of someone who excels at "managing up" but is deficient at "managing down".

The way most of corporate America is structured today, most managers are incentivized to manage up. That's why great managers are so rare.
At what time do you wake up? do you sleep during the day? do you take your coffee at 10PM ?
I'm sure it depends on your optimality criterion. I have looked into the research behind this two-sleep phenomena, and it seems like a highly plausible theory for human before before the last couple hundred years. One might expect this to be close to some kind of evolutionary optimum characteristic of the last 3000 or so years that most of humanity has lived in cities. This environment, I think, should be quite different from our society where we have things like "hackers" and are responding to interesting comments from the internet at one in the morning (maybe I should go to bed).
I think the wrong answer would be to drill a hole in the piece of wood.

Personally, I think trick questions like that are kind of a waste of everyone's time.
I would have loved to hear more about that. Couple of smart people discussing the merits of git-fs would be interesting. Ceaseless arguments about vi vs. emacs would get boring.
You can't chat with people while/before/after playing ping-pong or xbox?

Music, chat, xbox and ping-pong can all be either a means to that end, or a soul-sucking lie.
So You Think Quantum Computing Is Bunk?
I don't understand why water is such a scarce resource: the price of water will never increase past the cost of desalinizing seawater with energy from, say, solar panels.
I suggest (with no proof or expertise) that the optimum sleeping schedule is to sleep when you are tired and wake when you are no longer tired. This is very difficult to achieve given life's typical demands.

I've recently applied this same philosophy to eating. I eat when I'm hungry and I stop eating when I am no longer hungry (not when I'm "full").
I have done all of the following at various points in the past:

1. Report to HR.

2. Switch teams (new manager).

3. Quit.

IMHO (1) doesn't accomplish anything. Human nature is such that even the most empathetic, self-aware, fair people have a tough time changing their day to day habits and standards. The likelihood of a tyrannical manager somehow finding the light because some underling told them how they felt is infinitesimally unlikely.

Switch teams or quit, imo. (switching teams is kind of like quitting anyways) And start looking asap, since job searches tend to take a while.

Also,

4. Tell them how you feel.

My former coworker did this. Did not accomplish anything. However, when another team member left for a very prominent company which at this point had developed a track record of recruiting from our company, he did get a decent raise. (this doesn't help the root cause of the frustration at all, but letting your boss know that you're unhappy does make him realize that you might quit at any moment)

edit: I'm happy to be a sounding board in private if you think that'd help. Ping me on twitter and we can exchange contact details. (same ID as my HN ID)
What did I say wrong? I'm just stating my plans after hearing about another security blunder on Linode's part. Did what I say come off as sarcastic?
who is to say for sure, his past experiences does not prove that, it proves the contrary.
Another nice bit of advertising for Cloudflare..

There's some more about this on their blog:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/patching-the-internet-fixing-the-...
Ok, I'll continue to show my ignorance here.

What is ebay supposed to do for you? They can't verify the transaction, so it'd be foolish of them to start issuing refunds from their own coffers. They can't force the seller to refund (as far as I understand).

I'm going off-topic about the perceived arrogance. I'm just curious about what you expected ebay to do.
jinja2 slower than django?
There are lots of people in the world today that aren't exposed to artificial light daily -- I wouldn't expect such a difference in sleeping habits to go unnoticed.
You should check out Cloud66.com they are _almost_ there with what you are describing. I'm really hoping to be using them in a month or two.

They'll read in your Github repo and then based on that configure VPS's for you according to your specs (shared db server, standalone, etc.), it's very slick.

Right now, they're lacking in documentation and don't handle some aspects of admin (most notably server security updates) very well.
> Never before in history was there anthing like bitcoin. It's not a commodity like gold - is is pure fiat money, fully based on trust

That's what most currencies are today - symbols fully based on trust.

> In fact, by reducing friction, making transaction costs almost negligible, it will help this very thing!

What friction are you referring to?

> The only real problem is for governments, who won't be able to use the seignorage tax anymore, ie inflation, ie printing money out of thin air at the detriment of currency owners, to coerce people to do things or lose money.

There are a finite number of Bitcoins (21 million total), so yes, that would be one way to look at it. However, that would also lead to rampant deflation, which was associated with the Great Depression - rampant unemployment, social unrest, slow growth, etc.

Or, put another way, the governments currently prefer (out of the lessons of history) encouragement of investment, full employment, and growth ... over the rentiers (i.e. dead stock) sitting on their money, and letting everyone get poorer.

You seem also to be contradicting yourself, as easier you suggest:

> There is nothing inherent to bitcoin that may hamper a "country to convert a great part of this dead stock into active and productive stock".

Yet its finite nature actually does encourage dead stock -- rich holders sitting on piles of cash instead of using it for productive purposes.

> Bitcoin is a game changer, the end of a tyranny - the use of force to make people work, instead of being able to live with what they have without the fear that the government will decide to reduce the purchasing power of what one owns by 20% overnight, through inflation or plain just stealing (as in Cyprus) to "transfer that wealth", reverse Robin Hood style, to their well connected and too big to fall fat-cat friends.

Right, Bitcoin is far superior as it merely ensures that the current fat cats get fatter and skinny cats die of starvation due to deflation.
I'd hate the guy who spent 20 minutes asking about where, how deep, what bit size, how fast etc to drill his hole. Sometimes you just want to tell someone to go do something and trust them to muddle through the details without burdening you with all of them. The kind of worker that needs every detail specified is powered by servos and trained with a pendant.
I'm curious, can they use these 'magneto-receptor cells' for other things? Like predicting stock market moves?

No. Seriously. They've used 5 data points in the research. Five. Calling that a 'possible correlation' is just calling for trouble.

Here is a link to the original article. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/3/1/63/pdf
Karbonn Selects Broadcom To Launch Karbonn Smart A12
Feelgood Ruby news of the day.
I thought about this, and I think music/chat/travel are more directly tied to culture and inter-personal interaction than ping-pong/xbox/free-cola.

I remember reading that Githubbers are into Techno (trance?), so that speaks to the kind of people you're likely to work with.

Chat is passive communication, which is something many developers look for. (God, if I could get a dime every time a sales/marketing guy went to talk to devs directly despite me getting all over their case so many times...)

Travel I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and think it's travel for OSS conferences and the like, which again not all companies provide or look favorably upon.
Funny enough, I was just listening to the bit on ant intelligence from Radiolab:

http://www.radiolab.org/2007/aug/14/

tl;dl - Longtime ant researcher is resigned to the fact _individual_ ants are incredibly stupid and ineffective, sometimes just carrying a stick back and forth for days. But in colonies - somehow brilliance can emerge. They'll can predict major thunderstorms well enough in advance to build defensive walls around the entrance to their colony to direct floods around it.
Lean startup articles from BufferApp founder
Ooh I just got a 404 (ish) page that at first glance looked like an attack page warning.

Might want to change this.

http://i.imgur.com/77XpT2l.png
In related news, Italy has started shipping ants off to prison for failing to report earthquakes prior to their occurrence.
@Zach "Hire People who Frustrate Easily?"

That seems counter intuitive to me, what does it mean with example?
I'll never understand why people link to Amazon when they can get it off the publishers or another site for free.

http://www.teslaplay.com/auto.htm
Logged on to the net for some venting,

which the net, it seems, was resenting.

Got into a stew,

and threatened to sue,

for myself I was representing!
Predictive analytics and data sharing raise civil liberties concerns
Design reviews were big at my last company partly because the designer was DYING for feedback.
Ditto here, though I think there might be a subtext to it.

A few weeks ago there was a discussion on HN about the idiocy (or not) of standups. It turns out that a lot of people who dislike standups have very regimental ones, where it's underlings reporting to the boss, and there's an uncomfortable hierarchy to it.

I've been one company before where code reviews and design reviews felt very much like this - it was less about peer feedback and more about progress monitoring, and there's a tinge of "you're being assessed" at every turn.

This may be what the deck is referring to as "The Man".

Right now I have a pretty sweet gig - the best company I've ever worked for by a long shot, and code reviews, design reviews, etc, feel like a critical part of a collaborative process rather than an onerous and sometimes politics-filled chore.
Except we have evidence that you can sleep too much.
Like the wise scholar in England wrote, I'm most productive after a nap but before I go to bed.

Is taking a nap then "going to bed" later basically the same thing as a 2 sleep night?

I think naps are a good modern example of a 2 sleep night. I wonder when people began napping? The Google Ngram Viewer makes me think we've been napping for years [1], except perhaps right after WW2, but then 1970 happened and we started getting tired. :)

[1] http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nap&year_st...
You make some great points here that I totally agree with.
The traditional "annual review" where it's more like a "what did you not do perfectly so that I can dock you on your bonus" is not a pleasant experience.
I would consider my company, https://socialyzerhq.com, to currently be in a paid beta period.

Our paying customers are amazing. They provide us awesome feedback and encourage us to keep going.
so says the article.
I couldn't breath I was laughing so hard through this. Hilarious.
Give him a fair share of your mind, wait.
Then give his superior a fair share of your mind, wait.
If things don't change, quit.

PS: Don't threaten in any way though, that will make you sound like a loser.
If a customer was hacked, why reset everyone's password? Unless there is something Linode is not telling us, there is no reason they should be doing this. Think about it like this: what if Google reset everyone's passwords whenever a gmail account got compromised? Ridiculous.
Public Print Queue SPOOL/DESOLEE	2013-01-06T08:21Z SPOOL/TRUMPETS	2013-04-12T19:43Z SPOOL/SOLICIT	2013-04-12T20:10Z SPOOL/CAPRICE	2013-04-12T22:06Z SPOOL/HOMEWORK	2013-04-12T23:19Z
Not surprisingly one of the most commonly scripted search query at Blekko is for wordpress themes in one way or another. We do what we can to not return them any useful data.
I'm planning to develop a scientific programming class (likely focused on Python), and I'd love to make use of something like LightTable to make assignment, loops, and functions less opaque to first-time programmers. I think that this kind of UI has tremendous potential for exactly that application, among many others.
I found myself drifting into this pattern about a year ago, when I had moved into a new town by myself without much to distract me. I found myself getting sleepy about 8 pm, going to sleep, then waking up around midnight for and hour or so, then going back to sleep and waking up (naturally, without an alarm clock), about 4:30 am to get ready to leave for work at 6 am.

I found the late night period very relaxing, and productive if I decided to read or write something. I found an article similar to this one around that time, and thought "Aha! That explains it!"

Unfortunately, my family has come to join me here, and I've made a lot of new friends, and I'm definitely not going to sleep at 8 pm anymore. So the phenomena has ended. I kind of miss it!
Why should this be a mystery? It was a few centuries centuries ago, not thousands of years ago. Shouldn't such widespread habit be well documented?
"Dogfooding: Building stuff you use means recursive happiness"

This is the best and most succinct explanation of why dogfooding is awesome that I have ever read.
Thanks, I thought I'd read the entire article but I believe I missed the last two paragraphs.
So very, very true. Hell, half the time your employees don't actually know how much their job sucks until they start looking because they feel underpaid.

I felt into that category - spent two years right out of college at a company where my technical skills were atrophying and middle management reigned supreme. Younger me didn't know any better - but knew that I was being grossly underpaid.

I'm still a little bit thankful that they shafted me two compensation reviews in a row, otherwise I may still be working that job.

> "Also, performance review processes at companies are generally horrid."

I have never, ever met a review process that wasn't a complete waste of time.

There was always a huge disconnect between compensation and reviews. I'd get reviews where my coworkers vouch for my abilities and sometimes sing my praises, and then my total compensation adjustment would come in sub-1%.

We just spent the last week and half wasting everyone's time writing up these review forms so that the conclusion is "is very good at his job, well liked by everyone, demonstrates initiative and judgment, is worth a 0.8% raise".

Compensation is a big deal, and should have been mentioned in the slide deck IMO. I don't care how perfect my job is, if I feel like there's a 30-40% gap between my comp and market comp, I'm going to up and leave.
Dynamic DynamoDB: Scale up and down DynamoDB automatically
I do this all the time. I work/go to school, come back exhausted, eat, sleep until midnight, wake up, code/do homework around midnight, then go to bed again. I am not the only one doing this even in modern society. Most of my personal projects commit log is during that time. Of course some people think there is something wrong with me, but I don't think so.
This.

A manager should be able to provide the team with a unified vision, but allow the team members to be creative and flexible. A manager should be (or try their best to be) unbiased, respectful, and acknowledge the accomplishments of his or her team. A manager should be able to give the team valid and solid reasons for goals and vision.

I recently had the opportunity to work with a good team, but a weak (see: crappy) manager. I wrote a blog post about it: http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/how-a-b-environment-is-created/
His software ended up being too good, actually. It made other people feel embarrassed.
Call it a pilot study and go ask for funding. Seriously, if a specific behavior can be reproduced five times in a row that is pretty indicative that something is happening. Of course, uncovering the root cause is going to be quite hard.
Don't disagree -- but in this context, the content (brief as it is) directly refers to code & design reviews.
I'm not Zach, but I think I know what he means.

You want to hire someone who has a low tolerance for bullshit - because they're the ones who will automate a boring, error-prone task instead of just pounding the keyboard and doing it.

They're the ones who will not stand for brokenness and will push hard to get it fixed - which in the long run will save your company a whole host of headaches.

In other words, you want to hire people who will not let simple, small annoyances fester and accumulate into big, heavy problems.
IMO it depends a lot on what you want to achieve. "Optimum" is dependent on your metric. In other words, spreading your sleep out through the day could easily be optimum for activities that respond well to division. You get to re-approach your tasks refreshed, several times a day. On the other hand, if you are a farmer, daylight is precious and you can't do much at night aside from prepare for the next day.

The most important takeaway- as always, "optimum" only has meaning in the context of what exactly you hope to optimize for.
The one area that Bitcoin is NOT like fiat currency and like the gold standard is that it is (somewhat) finite.

However, keep in mind that the programmers behind Bitcoin can change their minds and decide to generate more bitcoins. Or they can create offshoot bitcoin currencies that do this.

That's how it's like Fiat money -- there's just people and trust behind it, not shiny rocks in the ground.

What's curious is why some think managing the economy (to a limited degree) is a bad thing.
Wow, my wife has started to do this and I thought it was really strange. I'm happy to see it's not unheard of. We live "normal" lives of course, careers and lightbulbs, but she will often go to bed early (by my standards) and wake up sometime after midnight and work for an hour or two before going back to bed.
How to Choose A Name For Your Startup
We have a federal government to resolve conflicts between the states. Maybe the federal government isn't very effective, but that makes it a problem with the way government is structured, not so much about water. Once ownership is settled, it's pretty clear what rights an owner has over that water vs. a non-owner.

The law being a mess is a common problem with the current government, again not so much about water, water is just becoming one of the many things it sucks at managing.

What percent of the US GDP do you think the government would need in addition to what it already takes in so that over the next couple of decades it can create and maintain desalination and other technology to get rid of the scarcity issues?

I don't see the connection from privatization --> slavery, but I agree things would be easier if people would just move where the water is (or where it's easy to get water to). It's not unprecedented for the US government at some level to force people to move.

I still don't see why water problems (generalizing from water rights) is the thing that is poised to one day become the definitive issue and challenge of our time. Maybe it will help spur a rejection of democratic processes or something, but then the defining issue would more likely be told as eliminating the currently most prevalent forms of government. What's your time frame on "our time" anyway? People born in generation X, Y, and Z? "Our time" isn't even half over yet. Speculating about what might be the definitive issue that people 50+ years from now look back on these previous and upcoming decades, there are a lot of things that seem more likely to be the issue than "water rights".
Time to start moving away from TurdPress.
Interestingly the british english corpus has a fairly even reference to napping. Though there is a slight downward trend to the graph.

I have also included napping and siesta in the plot. These have a fairly constant use.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nap%2Cnapping%2...
Whenever I go to bed early, I wake up for the best hour or two of my life around midnight. Good to know I'm in working order.