skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the time I recall most clearly when I ran into such a policy... Brief story. Old-line company's doing poorly, stock tanking. Board finally brings in some new senior management -- the "not nice", clean things up and (unexpressed, but fairly apparent) sell it off kind.

We were formal, but had gone business casual a few years earlier.

One of the first mandates of the new management: Business attire. Fortunately, in my role, I could skip the full suit, but dress shirt and tie, and "Dockers" and similar more casual slacks were expressly verboten.

If you didn't like it, good-bye. Since they were looking at wholesale reductions in head count, they couldn't care less.

My office was very "back end". I doubt I saw more than one or two external customers a year. Wages were simultaneously frozen, so you knew where the additional wardrobe expense was coming from.

Sure, this is pure anecdote. Just my experience. I've been at and watched other companies struggle with the "clothing" question. It inevitably seems that, in doing so, they are worrying about the wrong question. (And inevitably, the ramp up of formal dress seems to come along with hard times... That have nothing, in my opinion, to do with what people are wearing.)

Then again... maybe for the majority in mainstream corporate America, being made to put on a suit is a signal to "stop fucking around". Because, that was part of the problem.

P.S. Since I walk around a lot, despite my relatively short remaining tenure, I still managed to wear out a few pairs of rather nice dress slacks and put some significant mileage on dress shoes, before I got out of there.
There's a difference between being fired and being made redundant usually. (Although perhaps US terminology is different, in the UK usually "fired" refers to dismissal, redundancy is a different process with more compensation and a process employers must follow.)
Kale is popular outside of vegetarian circles. Paleo dieters love it too.

A friend who lives in my neighborhood commented that they've seen three 'I love Kale' bumper stickers. It's quite a popular vegetable these days, especially among those too young to remember the 'eet moar chikin' campaign.
It's all because the noun in "HR" is Resources, not Human. From soup to nuts, the employment industry treats people like equipment.
If you've heard of "Eat Mor Chickin" you clearly perceive "Eat More Kale" as a vegetarian retort to that. If you haven't heard that slogan... well I don't know what to tell you, what rock have you been living under?

EDIT: I think this may be explained by my being from the south and your being from Canada...
Memset isn't aweseome. It's what you do with that's cool. Explain what you do, not that you use Python or Go or C#. People want to hear a narrative, a story. What gets you really interested in your work? Why do you do it? Tell that.
Could you give examples of the kinds of things you've learned? Maybe top-3 or top-5. For instance, the first time I wrote a business plan in school, it was an eye opener.

Note: I took a bunch of business courses but do not have an MBA.
Would you want to hire someone that live tweets everything that goes on at your firm? Most companies would rather not risk being held hostage (so to speak) by their employees if the management decides it needs to shut down a department or stop offering a product.
Will anyone other than the writers miss these websites?
Actual study:(linked in the article)

http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill...
I used to backtest trading indicators a lot and the majority of time the indicator would work on a stock like Apple but wouldn't work on a stock like Tyson Foods. Or any other stock. I was just fitting the curve.
Fair point. Although it would seem in that case like time or social connection are bigger barriers. I guess people and orgs will do what they can.
That said, you may want to check out the average age at entry in the top-10 MBA programs. I was surprised how low it was.
If you can't recognize that men have a vast amount of privilege compared to women, then I don't really know what to say.

Last year a man named Geordie Tait posted an article called "To My Someday Daughter"[1]. It's quite long, but definitely worth reading. The context is gaming, but the central thesis is sexism. One quote from the article that really opened my eyes to how radically different men and women view the world comes from section 7 of the article. It's a quote by Gavin de Becker, and it says

"Men and women live in different worlds. At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them."

And according to my girlfriend, this is not even the slightest bit exaggerated.

[1]: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_...
If you goto the website they won't let you login now without reset your password. So essentially you only know there's a problem if you goto their website since they've yet to send an email.

But they had time to send me some great Mother's Day Deals half an hour ago!
> Chick-fil-A tried to stop him after first finding out about the sales in 2006 but then gave up the fight.

>That is, until Muller-Moore filed for trademark protection in early 2011.

well that's pretty different than it sounded like based on reading the other HN comments.

they aren't going after him for using the phrase (they did try that in the past, but gave up), but for trying to trademark it!
But isn't satire considered a non-infringing use?
I think a lot of it comes down to focus. You have tons of code to work on, maybe family and/or a full time job, etc... It's easy to forget that customer email represents a real person at the other end.

"I'VE GOT PEOPLE SKILLS"
Patents As Weapons: 1-800-CONTACTS Using The Patent System To Kill Startup
Please don't conflate people being ignorant of their privilege with legitimate criticism of The Ada Initiative.

The Ada Initiative is a destructive and notorious concern-troll organization that is reviled by many feminists of both genders. They hurt all real initiatives for resolving inequality and bias in technology. Supporting them is destructive.
Flynn - transparent web animations simplified.
Inspired by what Apple did with JPEG animations for their iPhone page, Flynn is an animation format which plays back using canvas, with both JPEG animation support and full alpha-channel support for PNGs.
Everybody says AWS has so low margins. I don't really get it. There are really number of other providers who are much cheaper. Just see here - http://www.cloudorado.com/ . If AWS has so low margin, what margins have others?
Mozilla's Anonymous Usage Tracking is not that Anonymous
You're right - it's an excellent product by today's standards. :)
This isn't about a bunch of people. Remember, we're talking about so few people that they don't even make a blip in any of your metrics. If you're getting angry replies or all your emails are deleted without being read or lots of people are unsubscribing, yeah, that's bad and you should think about what you've done wrong. But that's not the situation we're talking about here.

Again, McDonald's pisses off millions of vegetarians every single day. Would you say on that basis that they should go meatless? Should churches close to avoid pissing off militant atheists?

The point is not that you should be callous about offending people. Obviously it is better for all involved to make people happy, and that should always be your goal. But the point is that one or two guys saying "I'm so angry!" on an Internet forum does not mean you've failed. No matter what you do, even if it's pure charity work, you'll eventually find someone who gets upset about it. All you can do is apologize and offer to unsubscribe them — it's not rational to throw your business away on that basis.
Lewis's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Lewis_(journalist)#Lewis....
My bad, of course I meant BIND9. Unless you're using the 10beta already.
If the gender is not apparent, then there is no way to discriminate. I'm not sure what this has to do with the main article though. Many people like to connect their online accounts to their real identity (and thus gender), especially their GitHub accounts. Some don't. Is the suggestion that if women don't want to be discriminated against, they should hide their identities?
In early days of Airbnb, they were entering market with bigger competitors like HomeAway and Couchserfing. In those days their breakfast service was one of the biggest differentiators. They focused on small niche of the market. Once they outgrew that niche, they dropped the breakfast option. It makes nice narrative, when Brian Chesky says how naive they were in the beginning to insist on breakfast. But actually it was well executed entrance into a market - focus on small niche, until you have product market fit and then drop the features that prevent from extending from that niche.
Here's an "eat more corn, oats, ..." poster from WWI: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/sow-seeds/ I wonder if that's good for anything.
My favorite recruiter line lately is "They interviewed (insert high number) so many candidates and they picked you!" - translation they couldnt find anyone because this is a really shitty job and your it. But let me lie to you to boost your ego enough that you'll take this horrible job.
I saw a t-shirt once at a hacker conference that said 'I can read your email'. This was back 10 years ago now and I thought it was the best thing ever. Sadly they had run out of girls sizes and I never owned one, but I always wanted people to be just a bit afraid of me - not that I would read their email but that I could. Now I guess it was a good thing because people just might have been afraid of me, or thought I was bragging. But c'mon, email was pretty easy to hack into back then..

Oh and yeah. I wanted the t-shirt so other hackers would know I was part of their group. Because I was a girl I felt it wasn't obvious.
How 'quickly' is not quick enough for you? Companies like Walmart and Home Depot are getting pretty darn good at responding to disasters, especially for things like hurricanes where there is considerable lead time.

Smaller events like tornados are much easier to respond to because they are localized.

Price gouging laws negate any sort of systemic planning to take advantage of short-term price spikes. Eliminate the laws and you open up opportunities for creative businesses to plan and respond to these short-term opportunities.
Since, AFAIK, it's built on Rails, that's unlikely. However, it's possible that it's SHA-1 since popular Rails auth solutions used that by default at the time the company was founded (2007), assuming that's what they started with and never switched from.
It would work, but a) you might break the algorithm in ways that make collisions b) if your code is stolen in a breach, it's useless.

Most people should use bcrypt with enough rounds to make it difficult to brute force. scrypt is also an option, though newer (good / bad: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/26245/is-bcrypt-...).
Well, yes, you deserve what's coming to you if you run an unpatched system but that's a pretty baseless speculation.
Parody is a non-infringing use, but this seems more like playing on the popularity of Chick Fil-A's slogan than parodying it. Successful parody cases (where the use was found non-infringing) have been things like "South Butt" (versus North Face) and "Chewy Vuiton" (for dog toys).
They aren't going after him, just probably opposing the registration in front of the PTO.

If you are a party who may be damaged by issuance, you can challenge the registration before it issues.

EDIT: Actually, looking closer they aren't even opposing, the PTO issued the rejection directly, without any involvment from chick-fil-a at all. It never even made it to the opposition stage.

http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85412053&caseType=SERI...

There are no filings or documents from chick-fil-a in here at all. The examiner apparently came up with the rejection reason on their own (any communications chick-fil-a had by phone with the examiner would have been on record and here as well)

It's even been through two examiners now.

That said, the current examiner's arguments seem like complete and total BS.

Double edit: I take it back, it looks like one of these actually is a notice of a letter of protest (december 22nd, 2011), which functions much like an opposition. However, only the outgoing notice that a letter of protest is filed is there, the actual letter of protest (received, december 2011), presumably from chick-fil-a, is for some reason, not in the documents.

Sorry, i'm much more used to reading patent dockets than trademark ones :)
The fact that they partnered with the destructive and notorious Ada Initiative is disappointing. They are little more than concern-trolls, and they are doing far more to hinder equality than promote it.

GitHub is full of great people and poor choices like this are incongruent.

PS: This isn't male privilege speaking - The Ada Initiative is disliked (for very good reason) by feminists of both genders.
Photon-to-electron conversion: Two for one - Shockley-Queisser Limit Broken
No, you got it wrong.

>if you think that being a boy or a girl its an advantage then you are part of that problem

Unwillingness to recognize that women are at a disadvantage due to long-term social mores is part of the problem.

"Boys will always be boys, ignore them and move on?" You really don't get it, do you? Every little comment, snide remark, finger pointing... Words are sharp, they cut deep. In the end, it's these social pressures that result in fewer women entering STEM programs and careers. Ignoring them? No, that's not what we do. We, as men, must stop ignoring the problem, and put ourselves out there. Stop being silent, the problem will not go away, unless we speak up.
What is a linked list?
I don't think I phrased that quite right.

Modern web standards are attempting to render plugins like java, flash, and silverlight obsolete, because they're fragile, not universally available, single-sourced, proprietary, insecure and generally inconsistent with how the rest of the web works. There is an effort from various direction to kill off content viewer plugins like them, and the APIs that allow them to exist, and it appears it's going to succeed.

You're right that EME is meaningless one way or another so long as plugins exist--That's why EME exists at all, it's essentially a new plugin architecture that solves none of the problems of the previous ones. It's a bad idea for the same reason plugins are.
Thanks Teng. Hmm... whenever I hear that a new company is taking money to stack the technical team, my first thought is immediately "Aha! A planned run-up to a fast acquisition!", which you have perhaps already pointed out to be a misguided guess on my part.

But, this begs the question: expanding the platform, paying down technical debt, adding some adult supervision (heh) are all very valuable for the medium-to-long term, but can't this be achieved by using contractors alone? BTW, I ask this from the perspective of a full-time software engineer and part-time entrepreneur.
Site Advisor has flagged this blog as risky.
points not mentioned...

When making decisions for a library, ask yourself:

1) "What kind of problem is this library solving?" "Can I solve the same problem in a simpler way with less code, and later adopt the library if necessary?" -- Dependencies don't always make your life easier.

2) "Does this library make certain problems simple, and other problems no less hard than before? Or maybe SLIGHTLY harder?" -- Last thing you want is to limit yourself to a subset of solutions. Until you know EXACTLY what the long-term goal is, marrying to something that ties your hands is a bad idea.

3) "Is it magic?" -- This is important. In a startup you don't have time time or resources to just sit down and grok a library. If its too magical then its better to avoid it because when something goes wrong, you will have to either sit down and grok it, or rip it out.

Other bonus points for good decisions:

Break everything, but have the most solid data model possible. Test the shit out of it too.
If "standards of 1998" means proper parsing and display of metadata in various character sets from various sources (local file, internet streams etc), wide input format support, gapless playback and Replaygain support, relatively low resource usage, instantaneous search and unrestricted customizability then I wished more music players followed them.
Well if they don't have your source code, why modify the algorithm, you can just use sha1(password + user_salt + site_secret) -- that site_secret just made the sha1 unique to your site. Of course, if they have your source code, then it doesn't matter: they would have your 'site_secret' or your modified algorithm. Better would be not storing your site_secret in a accessible way (not on disk).

Edit: See udk1 below -- he's right, sha1 is an outdated algorithm for this purpose. Poor example choice on my part.
> (This shouldn't be surprising, since IT-as-industry is effectively just the outsourced version of IT-as-internal-organization.)

You're right. I've never thought of writing the software for a self-driving car as the outsourced version of configuring Active Directory for IE7, but when you put it that way it seems so obvious!
Swype VP confirms talks with Apple on revolutionary keyboard technology
I think that part of the problem here is a perspective created by the previous abuses of an activity. That activity is advertising. It isn't inherently bad to attempt to reach out to someone with something they might think is cool. The problem is, historically, the things advertisements show us suck. Because of this, we automatically associate attempts to connect a person with something they might be interested in to be bad if the attempt is initiated by the producer of the good or service.

There are good reasons for this, but it it's still a generalization. Like all generalizations, it isn't always true. It might be the case that this service actually provides value to both parties: the person with the good or service initiating the activity and the person who is made aware of it. This is the definition of a win-win interaction. The only real way to determine the quality of this service is to try to measure whether value is being created on both sides.
Since living in Holland I've started eating a lot more Kale. The boil it and mix it with mashed potatoes, served with smoked sausage and bacon bits.

With good quality hand made smoked sausage it's one of my favourite meals.

For anyone interested:
http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=2023...
I've tried Strikingly and really like it. I would like to recommend it to all of my non-technical friends who want to make simple websites but can't afford to hire someone to do it, instead opting to use things like iWeb (yes, average people actually use iWeb).

However. I'm apprehensive about doing so because I'm worried about Strikingly being acquired, and my non-technical friends being hung out to dry with their websites. These days it seems like any startup pre-Series B that gains traction is liable to get acquired and possibly disappear. I wouldn't want to put my non-technical friends in a situation where they have to deal with that.
It appears to be mostly sandboxed.
From what I understand, you shouldn't ever use SHA or MD5 for hashing passwords; bcrypt is a commonly implemented standard and much better than SHA. SHA is designed for hashing data quickly; which is the opposite of what you want to avoid brute force attacks.
Compared to advancing your knowledge of programming, CAD, et al, it's a lot easier to bolster your ego and social standing with video games, so that's what those kids do.

I think the solution (for schools, anyway) would be adult-led structured activities where intelligence and hard work are rewarded: electronics/robotics/programming clubs, with long-term group projects where people with varied levels of experience can be accommodated.

I'd naively like to believe that gender can be left out of it, other than making a structured effort to recruit students irrespective of gender.
To give some context to those of you that haven't been following this issue over the last few years, The Libel Reform Campaign has a great analysis of this law here: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/Libel/Libel_Refo...

TL;DR: This is a good thing for free speech.
> Most senior employees are gone at least 5 weeks a year.

Isn't this the case everywhere? I know we're a bit spoiled in Denmark with everyone getting at least seven weeks off by law, whether you're senior engineering staff or a janitor (10 statutory holidays plus 5 weeks of movable holiday).

But I thought in the U.S., senior professional staff at least got 4+ weeks, and were encouraged to take it. When I was growing up (in Chicago) my dad worked for a big engineering firm, and while he started with only 2 weeks a year of vacation, it went up with seniority to a max of 6 weeks once he was at the senior engineering ranks. It was quite useful from a work/life balance perspective, since it enabled us to take family trips to relatives in Greece for 3-4 weeks at a time, without which I would neither know my relatives there nor be able to speak anything approaching fluent Greek. My brother works for a Valley hardware company and gets something like 4-5 weeks as well, so I thought it was still a fairly standard perk if you had an upper-middle-class professional job. In fact to me it's one of the defining features of being on the upper side of middle-class, that you can both afford and are allowed take a few weeks of vacation each year.
Could it be that you are actually a serial killer on the run from prison?

What's the point in engaging in such idle speculation? If you have actual information to discuss, great. Otherwise, it could just as well be that they are working on a comprehensive postmortem of exactly what happened with incredible amounts of detail.
Well, you end up with something like kerberos. Horrifying complexity rarely evolves in a vaccuum.

Every tried building an ecommerce platform? It's really funny. You start out as a fresh whippersnapper who is all like "MAN, stuff like spree is maddeningly complicated. We don't need something that complicated, we can just start real easy!" and fast forward three months and you've got a few white hairs, a deep hatred of paypal and something not dissimilar from what you wanted to avoid in the first place.

The better alternative would be to lobby all plugin vendors to switch to bcrypt/insert preferred alternative here.
There are two reasons why "female" is problematic:

1. It refers to sex, not gender. I know many women who do not possess a vagina.
2. It sounds very clinical and sterile. It's appropriate for, say, a scientific survey, but not for addressing other humans with the respect they deserve.

I don't refer to 'men' as 'males,' either.
I would agree with this completely. I was in an MBA program from the ages of 23-25. A year later, the company I was working for started to run out of money. I had a lot of time on my hands throughout the day, so I started going through programming tutorials thinking it might be good mental exercise.

I started really getting into it, and now I've spent a ton of time over the intervening year learning and practicing. I think back and wonder where I might be now if I had started at 23 instead of going back to school.

It's not that what I learned wasn't worthwhile; it's that it took an amount of time and money disproportionate to its value.

On top of that, while I only (ha) paid about $58k for mine, having that amount of debt really hinders one's flexibility.
I wish developers had more sense of marketing in general - with all due respect to it's author(s) but BODOL (the word) sounds,... well strange, unsexy, uninteresting. It really doesn't do the language itself any justice!