skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny. I work in New Zealand, and I do my 37.5 hours a week as required (any more than that, and I get over-time) but that 37.5 hours takes such. a. long. time!

When I was working for a startup, and working from whatever time I woke up, till 3am in the morning, time flew by so quickly. I could easily do 80 hours, and have great fun. I was creative, and energised.

As soon as I went from a startup to working for a large employer and was forced to do 8.30am till 5.00pm all my productivity and energy flew right out the window.

Sigh.
All merchant ships are required to have enough compressed air for several starts (and we're talking about much larger diesel engines). I'd assume it's the same for a nuclear sub.
Opera might have been ahead in the past, but is it still ahead? Having tried their browser, I must have missed something because I think Firefox with addons is way better.

I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.
How to build a network attached fileserver with a Raspberry Pi
I'm going to guess (with no evidence what-so-ever except personal experience) that the older people are the more money they wish they had. Why? Because the older you are the closer you are to the age were you will have a hard time making money (companies will not hire you) and you will need money (bills, especially medical)

So yea, I'm with you. A little more money isn't going to make me happier. A LOT MORE will ;-)
Cryptography solves the problem of spying on or altering the communications, but not the problem of blocking them. If the US was engaged in a conflict that China didn't like, they could theoretically cut off satellite communications, rendering our drones useless.
>>Dude wrote in pen.

Most of us still do. Especially while dealing in areas which are not familiar to us.
The benefits of making your business look bigger than it is
http://tutsplus.com

I have tried several subscription sites, and I prefer this one by far. A few things make it stand out for me: Variety of content and content depth allows you to get a taste for different languages, tools, and syntaxes, while learning enough to kindle the fires of interest. Kindling and nourishing exciting concepts and ideas is what allows for real learning to occur.

Second, I much prefer the more bare bones approach to teaching than the highly polished, high production, hand-holding that defines Code School. Generally, less time is spent on useless background information which noobs will never appreciate anyways and professionals don't generally give a crap about until they decide to "buy in".

Additionally, they tend to purposely leave in (or even intentionally create) errors while presenting that give important context to the underlying logic. This is the sort of thing that always either get cleaned up in post, or is not embraced for the teaching tool it is.

The only drawback is that it operates as a sort of freelance hub, and not all of the commissioned teachers are equally eloquent OR qualified. However, my feeling is that once you get to the point where you're learning advanced patterns, you're already looking at source code and participating in a community.
>seriously, what did she expect?

now, first? you are saying "this is completely normal and expected" - and if by 'normal' you mean 'average' I agree. this is how customer service usually is.

But it's not acceptable. Certainly not acceptable from the perspective of the poor kid getting yelled at.

>it is assymetrical, one side has build up emotions, one hasn't. if you get affected by this, the job is not for you - and it is great to realise this as early as possible to prevent yourself from causing harm to others by being a shitty helpdesk, inbound call center, management person.

Here, you seem to think that it is mostly the employees fault. I'd argue it's mostly management's fault.

Yeah, a lot of the problems you list are real; sure. But they are hugely exasperated by companies that setup their callcenter such that employees can't be anything but emotional punching bags for angry customers. The place I worked as a tech support person? you were judged by your call times, not by actually solving problems. (fortunately, I got promoted to NOC before I got fired for, you know, actually helping people.)

It was exasperating, because, at the time, I had a bunch of experience helping old people operate windows boxes (I was a helpdesk tech in highschool for an office with a median age around 45.) /and/ I had a basic understanding of IP, routing, and the like. And I liked helping people. But my supervisor kept giving me a hard time about how long I'd spend on the phone with a person.

I mean, I was pretty good at focusing on the actual problem, and generally? when they figure out that you are actually solving the goddamn problem, even angry people calm down. And you know? actually solving the problem feels pretty good, even if many of the people start out angry. (the hard cases are the problems you can't solve, of course, especially when the problem is probably between the keyboard and the chair and they won't try the thing you ask. It's /way/ easier to do this in person.)

Seriously, if you (the company) aren't going to put in the effort to maintain a decent callcenter? why bother at all? people buy products without phone support all the time. The way it's set up most places, not only are most employees not technically qualified, you don't train, and you don't expect employees to be technically qualified.

But my main point, here? is that as a callcenter employee? you need to recognize a bad callcenter and /leave/ - if management's goal is to get complainers off the phone, well, you aren't going to be successful if you try to actually help people.

(I mean, I think firing your expensive customers; the customer who need the most help is a reasonable business model. Hell, I put a lot of effort into scaring that sort off at signup. But having a really bad callcenter is about the worst way to do that firing, especially from the point of view of the kid who has to answer the phone.)
They probably just want to tell their employees that sharing "trade secrets" won't be tolerated. Nothing better for that than a lawsuit with ridiculous amounts of money. It might fail but it sends a strong message.

Not that I don't despise this kind of practices...
I remember reading this published insight[1] from Marissa Mayer a few months ago:

Burnout is caused by resentment

Which sounded amazing, until this guy who dated a neuroscientist commented[2]:

No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.

During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.

For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.

That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.

Then I finally realized how many times I've burnt out in my life, and I became much better into avoiding it. Which is really hard to do.

And it seems to me that this is one of the many points that Ben Horowitz talks about on his What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology[3]

[1] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...

[2] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...

[3] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-diff...
I had that experience living abroad.

I lived in a city, Tokyo, (though I believe Shanghai, HK and SG are all similar) where the majority of foreigners are "expats" where expat = Person sent to foreign country by their homeland company and given a benefit package that includes reproducing their homeland lifestyle in the foreign country.

I was not an expat by the definition above. I was paying $1k a month for studio apt, sleeping on the floor. No complaints. But, 95% of all services directed at foreigners in those countries are targeting the expats so anytime I'd pick up a magazine or browsed a website targeted at foreigners I'd see ads for tons of things 5x to 10x out of my reach. Lots of companies pushing apartments starting at $4k a month and up. Companies for investing. Dating services that expected their clients to have a salary of $200k+. Etc...

The point being, I was not unhappy until seeing all these ads made me feel like I was at the bottom of the heap instead of above average as I had felt before I came.
Also amusing: Main St. was named after Charles Main.
The use case that comes to mind first is 'git bisect'. I love that feature, but I also love to leave a messy trail of commits in my history. In other words, I expect that there will be commits in my history where a full test run might not work, or maybe even things might not compile.

Of course, that sort of thing royally messes with 'git bisect'.

If git had a primary concept of "here's a synchronization point", then it'd be much easier to build tools like 'git bisect' (and even 'git log' etc.) around those sorts of paradigms. That'd offer the best of both worlds -- rich, detailed history showing how something got done, but also points at which it was believed that all was good in the world.

A push is (should be?) a natural synchronization point, for example.
How to get Chat Heads on iOS right now with MessageBox
> To truly master the art of programming, we must learn the techniques available to us, not just the tools. Data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and computer science concepts are what I’m talking about here.

Exactly how are those techniques not tools of their own? A binary tree is a tool just like a language or a framework is. A quick sort or a merge sort is just another tool - hell, if I'm using a modern language, I can quite easily get any number of sorts in libraries. And what do I gain from learning the implementation details? Divide and conquer algorithms and recursion are wonderful, but simply saying "learn QuickSort" is emphasizing the wrong things.

I'm biased. I'm 19 and never took a formal CS course. I've self-taught myself some of these concepts - not all (bit twiddling is still a mystery to me). But the best programming learning happens organically. I learned how trees worked not out of a book, but because I needed to implement a parent-child relationship in a note-taking app I built. I learned recursion by learning how to do elegant functional programming in JavaScript to simplify my code.

This is how learning happens. You code. You realize your code sucks. You learn to code better. You realize you don't know how to implement something. You learn all you can about it, then you implement it.

Learn concepts because they're practical, not because they're on a list of Shit You Need to Know For Your Whiteboarding Interview. Every single one of the concepts on that list has practical applications, but there's no reason to memorize them and know them by heart unless you plan to use all of them tomorrow.

Otherwise, you're just falling into the same trap you do using a site like CodeSchool: missing the bigger picture of hacking. You're here to build. Learn what you need to do that.
I think the current trend is for companies to not post everywhere, since just about everyone is hiring developers these days. So developers just seek out companies and apply to them.

Another current trend is for recruiters at aggressive companies to actively reach out to potential candidates via Linkedin and other similar sites. The big ones, like Google, even have specialized tools to collect info on various forums (such as this one, I'm sure).

This puts startups at a disadvantage, because candidates won't know to seek us out, and fewer candidates are using job boards to find employment. So we need to work hard to 'get the word out' that we are hiring.

Here's an example of getting the word out: Solum (http://solum.ag) is a Precision Agriculture startup helping make the business of farming more efficient. We're hiring Data Engineers, Software and Web Developers, QA Engineers, and Designers. Interested? Send an email to jobs@solumtech.com
You are not looking at Forth correctly. It isn't C, C++ or Java. It's a "raw" language that you should use to write a DSL. It's just above assembler yet many orders of magnitude faster to develop with.

Even with your comment backwards it makes little sense. I have developed in nearly every language between typing raw machine code with a hex keypad and Objective-C (not to moly that O-C is at the opposite end of the scale). I did years of Forth. Not one thing you are saying rings true. If you know a language you speak it. It's as simple as that.
>>Given that such kits are still sold [1] in India, I guess quite a few engineering students still learn to code like that.

Did my Bachelors(in India) in 2010's, and yes even we coded this way in our 8085 labs!!! Nothing has changed. Talked to my cousin who is now in his 3rd semester, They to start out coding the same way. Its 2013 and NOTHING has changed.
Others have mentioned the Belkin WeMo, which seems to be the best solution for anyone who doesn't want to mess with circuits (though I have no experience with, so can't comment). Does anyone know if it is available in a 220v format?

But if you do mess around with RasPis or Arduinos for that, I can't stress how useful the PowerSwitchTail is http://www.powerswitchtail.com/Pages/default.aspx - you give it a low power signal, and it switches a high power one. They have a 220v version as well.
>>Curious, if Path is acquired does the purchaser also acquire the 20 year privacy assessment requirements?

Probably, or else Path2 made of the same investors could buy Path and get out of the agreement.
tl;dw:

Design fiction orgs to look up: Superflux, Near Future Lab, Arup Foresight, Royal College of Art, Art Center College of Design, Arizona State University eMerge.

Don't need to write science fiction about future possibilities, just make a low-budget high-polish design fiction film and release it online.

Science fiction is a form of fiction, design fiction is a form of design.

The cycle: question mark -> rising star -> cash cow -> dead dog. Those that live by disruption die by disruption.

In the startup world you work hard and move fast to make other people rich. Then these financiers buy governments and destroy the middle class with "austerity."
I'm rather stunned to see the U.S. government even somewhat reacting to the startup culture.

Huh? Path is a company, they broke the law, and were investigated and fined as a result. How is that "stunning"? It happens all the time.

It's got almost nothing to do with "startup culture", it is just a business that didn't play by the rules.
I don't think the pun in the title is in good taste.
Path will probably just sell the tech, and the employees, and not the actual company. Corporations can do strange things like that.
A shortage of tech workers?  Not so fast.
On the common misuse of NSBlockOperation
Refactor your Code on the fly in Eclipse with Scertify’s Quick-Fix feature
> they'd have updated their commits to the current state of the codebase such that they could be cleanly applied.

Yes!

> If they had used a rebase strategy

No....

Take your out-of-date branch, merge master into it, and clean it up _in the branch_. It's not 2011 anymore, there's lots of tooling that makes viewing changelogs on a branch compare easy (Github's pull requests being probably the most common).

Rebasing removes your changes from the _context_ they were originally made, which makes following along through the project's history harder than it needs to be. It also creates revisions of the codebase that never actually existed, which means it's difficult if not impossible to use git-bisect to track down when a really gnarly bug was introduced (I've actually needed to resort to that 3 or 4 times in the past few years, to help track down the cause of the bug).
Excellent article.

This is the first time I've deliberately activated the Kudos mouse-over thing on this guy's blog.

I can't count the number of times I've done it accidentally.
Monitoring Spring Batch with AppDynamics
Why would I have to calculate the future sale of any game I buy into the price I pay for the game? I pay for the games so that the developers can continue making games I like for me.

Do you want to play more games from the creators of the games you've played and liked?

I too have a large collection of games that I will probably never play or finish. Doesn't matter though.
I think it's mostly batteries, a sub operating at constant depth and in motion is negatively buoyant. If something goes wrong and it loses propulsion, power has to be available immediately to operate the systems that can handle the emergency - whether it's blowing ballast or restarting the reactor. This is a somewhat different constraint than the procedure described by the other reply - ships float without power, subs, not always.

I mentioned this upthread - USS Thresher[1] seems to have suffered a loss of both propulsion and ballast control while near test-depth with, unfortunately, tragic results for the vessel and all on board.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
Excellent article. The funny thing is that when you don't have time to exercise, then it is the time you need it the most.
Show HN: Paying for Attention
Browse around his blog some more, I guarantee you'll find images far more painful than mere green text on black!

That said, his recent "SOMA Nature Walk" series would appeal to people into big engineering.
Some quick research on generator excitation:

* Each of Hoover Dam's generators appear to me, based on this photo [1], to have three stages of excitation, vertically stacked on the rotor shaft.

* A year 2010 upgrade to digital controls at Hoover Dam [2] shows:

___ o A total plant capacity of 2.074 GW from the 17 generators

___ o 20 seconds to go from reactive power control ("condense mode") to generator mode.

___ o Pictures of the original and replacement governor equipment; the red cabinetry shows a beautiful 1930s design style

* In "condense mode" [3], the turbine's penstock valve ("wicket gate") is closed off, the turbine volume filled with compressed air to displace the remaining water, then the generator operated as a massive synchronous motor. In this mode, the excitation controls can provide marketable power factor correction, aka "reactive power" for the grid.

------

[1] http://bayimages.net/view-photos/electric-power-generators-h...

[2] http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/hr/print/volume-29/issue-...

[3] http://www.bpa.gov/Finance/RateCases/BP-14RateAdjustmentProc...
MacArthur is for General Douglas MacArthur. It was cobbled together from a bunch of existing streets to provide a through route to the Bay Bridge when the bridge was new.

San Pablo is the road to the town of San Pablo.

Peralta is from Don Luís María Peralta, owner of Rancho San Antonio.
Judging from the comments and the articles, it seems like I've never had a proper burnout. I always recover within days, this seems to be a longer matter however. The author talks about warning signs, and many of you mention you can feel it coming, even two weeks advanced.

Would it be possible to describe this to someone like me? Not the burnout, but the warning signs?
I think flat UI is horrible. Outlook 2013 looks like piles of words. I can't tell where one email stops and the next starts. I would take leather trim over that any day.
We're working on it! We removed the software because it needed extensive cross-project reorganization, consolidation, and cleanup which just wasn't possible to do with a clean upgrade path using available resources (3 backend engineers). Plans are to re-release all of this and more, and we've already started with Plumbing and Graph: https://github.com/prismatic/plumbing. Which librar(ies) in particular are you most interested in?
I think that convenience wins over pirating. Just recently I bought Far Cry 3 after finishing the pirated version. What I discovered is that having DRM in the normal, paid version is completely annoying.

I would gladly pay for any service which offers one-click media consumption regardless if it was about games, movies, music, comics or some other.
It is worth repeating that the original paper, by Kahneman and Deaton--the one everyone likes to cite to support the opinion that happiness doesn't increase with salary above $75k--said nothing of the sort, unless you accept a very peculiar understanding of the word "happiness". The paper introduces two concepts, "Emotional Well Being = the quality of a person’s everyday experience such as joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger, and affection", and "Life Evaluation = a person’s thoughts about his or her life (on a longer time scale)." The first one, K&D found, is only affected by money up to $75k a year. The second is improved with more money at all levels. http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/Happiness_Mon...

So unless you're going to insist that the word "happiness" only pertains to temporary feelings, as opposed to how you feel about your life overall in the long-term, the claim about $75k and happiness never had any basis in data.
I love the business novlang in the templates.
Exactly. I'm trying to use other browsers too and stuff like these, like the way how ctrl+tab works, or, especially!!!, tabs thumbnails (seriously, this is the best thing ever) are keeping me coming back to Opera
People use the argument 'it's in the mail' as an excuse to temporize or avoid their obligations. Requiring overnight courier delivery creates a paper trail (via the tracking #) and also says 'we really mean it.'
I remember the bad ol' days of having to support that browser. It wasn't compatible with it's windows counterpart and the 0.5% userbase were highly vocal if anything broke.
Buying music on your computer is old
Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem
FizzBuzz [humor]
That's michaelochurch's game, though. Step 1. Experience a personal setback. Step 2. Make sure you never ever ever ever take any accountability for said experience. It's never michaelochurch's fault, he's been dealt such a bad hand, it's all because of those ASSHOLES. Everything bad that happens to him is someone else's fault. He's just a visionary, man, downtrodden because corporate blah blah blah blah... Step 3. Make absurd, mostly-untrue generalizations and nonsensically rant them all over HN. I mean, who cares if a few lies (FACT) are thrown in there, as long as they're about a big powerful company like Google? STICK IT TO THE MAN, MAN