skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder.

The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.
Thanks for sharing your story. That's established credibility right there. You already had stellar open-source contributions which are probably more credible than an ivy league degree.

I am currently in (a non-ivy) graduate school and should start focussing more on open-source involvement. Thanks! :-)
For someone just starting to code, and looking specifically to work on web apps, this was such a well articulated response. I really appreciated it.
There's no point implementing TLS1.2 until browsers stop silently downgrading through TLS versions under attacker control.

And there's not much prospect of that happening: it seems we're happy to exchange compatibility with less than 1% of sites for security of 100%.
An Experimental Approach to Responsive Web Design
Could you please troll somewhere else vacri?
FWIW -- the Wikipedia article on MBTI gives several links to several studies that argue that the MBTI isn't very useful...
I've always thought that a spreadsheet/db hybrid would be an interesting idea for a startup, but surprisingly none of them ever took off:

DabbleDB had a great UI
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/Dabble-DB-Bridges-Database...

http://www.ragic.com
https://www.zoho.com/creator

something tells me that the incentives for paying for this kind of software aren't aligned with the management. it's just easier to push crap data down to "IT guys" to fix then look for a real solution. would love to be proven wrong.
Sounds like great execution, but one thing I find remarkable that of all the talk here of 'the internet is going to cut out out the middleman', and most business plans being build on that, this business is basically about adding a middle man where historically none existed (because of slim margins). Quite neat to see it work out so well - it seems a middle man can add value, even if that added value seems small at first sight.
HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know – Part 1
I would think it would also help in forging the right affiliations with influential alumni, especially in a large corporation. I'm only second guessing though, I didn't go to a top notch school and neither do I work in a large corporation like Google.
and again, thanks for another thoughtful response.
KAZE image keypointing
It depends on the meaning of makaron ;)

"Spaghetti with meatballs, please" -> nie ma (już) makaronu, because makaron is uncountable here.

"Do you have spaghetti or farfalle?" -> nie ma żadnego makaronu. Here makaron is countable as types of pasta.

I'would be glad to answer any questions about Polish language. My Polish is far better than my English, as you see.
Unfortunately technology's progression via marketing has turned it into a king of magic that is impossible to understand and is out of reach of them (past consumption). Look at most consumer IT products these days - black boxes for milking people.

DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.
Ah, sorry, I was referring to couchDB (which does sync and offline for us), not Hoodie itself. That's still very much under construction, of course.
You are correct.

I'd say magnify is the wrong term. It empowers people who have disingenuous motives.
> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days (unless explicitly taking day off.)

If this means responding with the finished code, than make sure the inquiries are small enough. If this means confirming availability or that you got the message at all, than why would you need 3 full work days for that?
My Favourite Wikipedia User User:Rama (2012, NSFW)
WhatsApp says acquisition rumors are false
The most interesting part that Schneier gets right is the relationships
between the technologies used for censorship, propaganda, surveillance,
and control. For example, if you want to use privacy to thwart
surveillance and censorship, then you unfortunately make propaganda much
easier, and in the sense that propaganda is effective, you also make
control much easier.

Though Schneier is great for stating the issues and relationships, he
tends to avoid proposing any solutions, and also avoids citing any
existing attempts towards solutions.
After years of being the butt of jokes about 'Start'-ing your computer to shut it off, Microsoft wanted to vindicate its decision by showing it is indeed possible to do something even dumber.
Kaze 2D feature detection
Dell support service can’t tell between a 720p and a 1080p display [UPDATE]
> I had so much respect for the company

Why? It's an awful company
When bitcoin was $4.
Best international flight finder
I'm looking to book some international flights, specifically from Halifax, NS, Canada to Linz, Austria. Hacker News members often seem very travel savvy so I wanted to ask for tools/strategies. I've been mainly searching on flight aggregators but there are so many and flight prices fluxuate so much it's hard to figure out which ones are worth using.
NASA plans to bring an asteroid to Earth for study
It's definitely not balanced. It's a cat and mouse game with temporary advantages on both sides.

However, all advantages are lost the moment someone legislates always in favor of the rulers which is what happened in the UK. Now we're tied and gagged with permanent threat of imprisonment for having an opinion (this has happened a LOT recently).
Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes
Yeah, online services, desktop software, it's equally hard to upgrade both.
>and they don't redirect properly

You can't redirect SSL > non-SSL without a browser warning though, right? Unless you get a cert, at which point you may as well put it to use.
I guess he means, don't work on the weekend? I.e. respond within 8 working hours, probably.
so bots can sign up easily:

while (true) {
hoodie.account.signUp(_.uniqueId() + '@gmail.com', _.uniqueId())
}

great effort though, but I still don't think you've got client/server separation right.

we've built something very similar over a year ago: an offline client db backed by memory/websql/indexed-db that replicates with dynamo-db so the app works offline. Looked at Couch/Pouch solution but decided against Couch for performance reasons.

Might open source it later once we figure out the user management/security bit. I still find the existing solutions (including Firebase) not ideal.
No.

I prefer simple clean websites which make it easy for me to accomplish my goals.
I'm fully aware of what is happening, and how things appear to be going the "wrong" direction, at least according to the tech news. Don't let that despair you.

What I proposed was something we (as in people with intimate knowledge about these things) could do to make this better. A lot of technical people are content with being high priests, and a lot of "consumers" content with not understanding what is going on. It may be possible to change that, albeit slowly.

Looking beneath the surface level hyper commercialized pooha, there are quite active developments by in distributed protocols, mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and people working on technology that is open and can meet basic human needs (for example see http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...), and so on.

Another thing is that centralization makes things fragile. Even though centralization may be more efficient at first glance, once centralized systems collapse enough, people will look for more decentralized solutions.
Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: Java Puzzlers

I might not be the best I've heard, but it's the one I enjoyed the most:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN_EYUvUq0
Stripe is the most recent YC AirBnb/Dropbox IMHO.
I guess it is "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours". I went through it and can tell that it is really a nice introduction to basic and some of the more advanced Haskell concepts.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...
I've seen posts where "it's from Google" is cited as sufficient explanation for taking an interest in the language. If Go was a random project on GitHub there is very little chance that I would have given it a second look, let alone learning it (which I am presently doing). I have great respect for projects which start out as random GitHub projects and succeed without having the advantage of a name like Google to give them street cred.

Most of the negative Go posts I've seen are to do with limitations of the language and performance relative to JVM languages. As much as I think go has a lot going for it I'm not about to claim that it's anywhere near as expressive as Python or even Scala. There has also been some frustration about denials over the performance gap between Go and the JVM despite very clear data in favor of the JVM. I'm not as bothered by the performance gap as I am about the head-in-the-sand denials. The JVM's have been optimized for 15+ years, so it's ok to admit it may be a few more years before performance can match the JVM.
> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days

Acknowledge any inquiry within 5-10 minutes unless on a lunch break. Otherwise it means you are afk.

(edit) To elaborate - there are two issues involved with this. First is that you are unlikely to ever work on a fully self-contained task that doesn't require collaboration with other people. As such having shared work hours is required. Second issue is that of trust. In common tongue "working from home" means "sleeping in, sitting on a couch, going for two hour lunch breaks, etc". It's a way to slack while pretending to be working. I'm working from home, wink, wink, quote-unquote. In a perfect world you would be judged on deliverables and perfectly met deadlines. In real world, you will frequently need to prove that you've been working and that 1 page of code has indeed been a result of a week of research and numerous rewrites.
An entry level physicist has a Ph.D. not a Bachelor's. I believe this is true for all the sciences. A B.S. in biology or chemistry gets you a job as a lab tech, maybe.
Erik Meier & co used it to enable Haskell as a scripting language (in 1998!). See his "Confessions of a used programming language salesman", HaskellScript

PDF: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/papers...]
Ask HN: Why did you start your startup?
I though of making this a poll, but then I realized that I couldn't possibly cover all the conceivable answers, so I'm leaving it open-ended.

So, why did you start your startup? Was it for money, fame, freedom, by accident, for adventure, something else? I'm curious to hear any details you might want to share. Thanks!
It depends what you're trying to compare.
> Oh, a hipster framework.

Pull requests > Witty comments
Thunderstorms contain ‘dark lightning,’ invisible pulses of powerful radiation
>The problem is not better hiding places - the problem is having to hide in the first place.

You are missing the point of privacy.

the whole point of privacy is that society is sometimes wrong. And if you can't tell I'm doing it without peeking in my bedroom window? (which is to say, if you can't tell I'm doing something without violating my privacy) well, that makes a reasonable heuristic for "maybe you shouldn't enforce rules about it"
Ron Avitzur's Google Tech Talk - "The Graphing Calculator Story"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY
> Has SQL Server started ... focusing more on the bundled tools than the main product?

Yes, quite a while ago. SQL Server has an outstanding SQL engine, but it had that a couple of versions ago, so they need a new unique selling point. This may be because a SQL engine is now a very mature technology. They always tweak it, but gains here are marginal.
http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
I know Bob, he's a much better footballer than he is developer
This seems largely in contradiction with the original post, unless you're saying Matt isn't being truthful. He says he spends 50% time coding, which seems like a huge chunk of his time considering his "unofficial" title, definitely not a non-coder amount of time.

What you're describing sounds pretty terrible, is that based on personal experience with Google?
Did you try skyscanner.net?
I do work remotely for several years (with infrequent in-person meetings at the office with colleagues), and I'd say in long run it's somehow hard to separate matters and, for example, stay focused on the work, while being at home.

It's certainly manageable, but still requires some fairly strong willpower to manage oneself. Being lazy, sometimes, I would actually perfer to have a distraction-free office envinorment.

So, my suggestion is, don't [completely] deprecate office space, at least for the first 2-3 years.
> I've seen posts where "it's from Google" is cited as sufficient explanation for taking an interest

That might be enough to draw interest, but what sustains that interest is the quality of the work and the utility of the environment.

> If Go was a random project on GitHub

Where it's hosted is irrelevant. It's about the work. Plenty of active, popular projects are hosted on GitHub. Some of them were just "random projects on GitHub" when they started. What distinguishes them is that there are motivated groups of people working on them.
Events Organizer
Now days most of the time so many events are taking place. But to handle that kind of event is really hectic somehow. But today there are so many good events organizer like SM Creations in India is there to help you.
It's because, fundamentally, it's better for most stuff. It has transactional DDL, check constraints, window functions, CDEs, joins other than nested loop, and a better focus on safe-by-default behaviour. It also has a query optimiser that is generally more competent on difficult queries.

The per-connection cost isn't much of an issue with a connection pool, and replication has improved a lot lately (and is clearly only going to get better).

Aside from ease of getting up and running, IMO there's very little reason to pick MySQL over Postgres nowadays.
Experiences of Djikstra when he visited the USA
It does help getting an interview, but can also help tilt the balance in tight interview decisions. I presume it would be easier to make the case for folks with degrees from elite schools.
My few side projects are, at present, just fragments here and there - nothing really cohesive. I do intend to post them here when I actually get something worth showing finished.

I'm pretty new to completing my own side-projects, so that's the main thing I'm learning at the moment: how to find time to get personal projects done, and actually doing it. I'm getting there, but there's a lot more to learn just yet.
To me that looks like a mistake by the Verelo programmer, in interpreting the "over limit" response from your API as being "down". To term that a "scam" is an equally misleading. I don't believe it is fair that you cast aspersions without proof. "Publicly shaming" you is a wild accusation.

If I had put such a service together, I can imagine that I would search for a public API method that I could call, and if I received a response I would assume that the API was up, and vice-versa. The developer has mistakenly interpreted an error response code in the context of a user over access limits as an entire API failure. An automated script keeps running and gives incorrect results. That's an oversight and not a scam.

I think you would have been better to try to get an explanation from Verelo before publicly shaming them. They might have worked with you to correct the problem.

By the looks of the http://whatsdown.verelo.com/ website, the vast majority of the sites appear to have valid uptimes. Yours is the primary exception. That suggests to me that this truly was an oversight, otherwise they would have been trying to extort other services in the same way.

Contact Verelo, and ask them for an explanation. If the explanation is valid and they correct the error, then I think they deserve a public apology from yourself.

On a side note, it might be useful for all public APIs to offer a standard /status call, which returns a standard response. In that way, services like these, which do have some value, could operate in a standard way without upsetting the API owner.
Rule of Thumb: Use Purposefully Weakened Methods
I'd suggest making several communication channels available, with several priorities.

For example, for me a phone call is something that prefers a quick response, an IM message can wait for some time, and a bugtracker ticket or an email is "I'll reply when I'll have time to do it".
Watch Greg Wilson's talk "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" -- he cites research that supports working remotely (http://vimeo.com/9270320).
I was thinking there might be some sort of throttling/banning mechanism within the signUp function itself, but then being client based that could be easily circumvented unless there's some server side logic aswell. I wonder whether there's a sane way to handle this client side short of minify and/or obfuscate the code and hope for the best.
Open `git glog` and look at the tree is exactly what I ment by manually tracking parents of a commit. I shouldn't have to do that.

That means that to see commits that were done in a particular feature branch I need to do some magic that walks up the commit tree from a given merge commit, guesses which one of the parents is the master and which one is the feature branch, remembers the commit ids, keeps track of merge commits it hits and makes sure it is still tracking the right branch (merges of master into a feature branch are common, merges of feature branches into other feature branches are occasional), etc.

All because gits branches aren't really branches at all.

As to fast forwarding a feature branch onto master, I can't believe anyone would actually do that. You might as well be developing on the master branch from the beginning there, what's the point of having branches if they disappear from history?
I don't agree with you. The problem with IT technology is that it's connected. It is (evenly) distributed, but connected. This gives people who want bad a much wider perspective.

Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.

And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.
yes but on the other hand, he has exposure and he does sensibilize people in the right way.
i doubt he actually has a solution - as he writes in his conclusion, someone has yet to figure it out. and I'd add, this will hopefully happen in our lifetime, otherwise, dark ages are ahead of us.
Absolutely. Working remotely and responding within 24 hours is a complete non starter. Teams need to work tightly together. I'd even go as far as saying 'acknowledge all messages within 1 minute'.

Being able to talk to people immediately is critical.

(I've been running a remote team for 5 years)
don't get me started...

Now here's an idea for any software developers - grab AutoIt (is it still around?) and make a quick script called "typical_user" that automatically clicks "Yes" (or similar) on any dialogs that appear. Now, run this in the background while testing the UI of your software :)

Edit: Yes, AutoIt still exists! http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/
This is not really a "talk" but rather a whole course. In 2009 Gérard Berry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gérard_Berry) gave a class in French at Collège de France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collège_de_France) on CS fundamentals: http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/gerard-berry/#course

This class is still, to my eyes, the best I have ever seen on this topic.

He has given another one recently on time and computing which I have not yet seen, but which is promising too.
1.6 3 year INR
The "next track" gesture confused me slightly. It looked like he went backwards, then I realised he was swiping the current one away like the iPod player.

Nice idea though.
this. and we're acting as if those things couldn't happen anymore, that its a thing of the past - but its happening right now and we aint stopping it.
>If you actually understand the data model and have reasons for not liking Git, I'm curious what they are.

Well, the fact that I can't easily find what commits were done on a branch, for one. And yes, I understand why it's not possible, they way git does branches.

Or that it doesn't track renames/moves, other than on similarity basis that often fails to detect rename when viewing a file history, for example.

The git answer to both of these is usually 'well your viewer could be doing that', except they don't, because it's hard when you don't track that information in commits.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/04/2124203/even-microso...

Two years later it's on the HN front page. Come on kids...
Ask HN: collaboratively writing with Git (Cucumber)
It has come up multiple times with my clients, but there is no easy way of letting non-technical people change Cucumber features.

Cucumber features are usually stored in the repo where your code is, so devs can run them while implementing behaviour. At the same time, they are (or should be) written collaboratively between testers, POs and BAs.

What we do at the moment is we write them together and I commit them to git. But if any non-tech person has changes to apply, they create a text file and send it to me to store. This is obviously an overhead.

Did you find you had this problem and if yes, how did you solve it?

PS: my client doesn't use Github
Also, not many people realise, but you can build forms in Excel which makes data entry much nicer
Is there still a shared tempdb across ALL databases in SQL Server?
The amount of things we can infer from publicly available information - where you were seen on the public streets, what you've worn when visiting certain groups - is growing immensely. For many, many things we only ever had "privacy through obscurity"; this is going away now and will not be coming back, and trying to make our lives private again is like trying to make bits uncopyable or water not wet. We should be figuring out how to adapt rather than trying to go back to how we were.
It is deflationary, of course. What I think the sentence shows is that this is not that huge of a problem. You still will spend your dollars, obviously, even though there is a deflationary currency out there that you COULD make a profit on, because at some point you want or need to spend your dollars. The same logic would apply within the realm of BTC.
> Target is a master of this. Johnson wasn't...

Well, Johnson was most likely a big part of Target's past and continuing success. He was VP of Merchandising (among other roles across 15 years) at Target.[1] JCP was just the wrong fit I think.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/ron-johnsons-resume...
I guess you should feel free to do so. It takes away lots of fun for highschoolers though :P
> Teams need to work tightly together. I'd even go as far as saying 'acknowledge all messages within 1 minute'.

If your units of work are so badly partitioned that this is a requirement, remote or local is not really the problem.