skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has to be some sort of balance between criticism and "maintaining a professional attitude" (whatever that phrase means -- I have never understood it). A lot of times "be professional" is used to silence criticism of truly horrendous software development practices.

Being forced to use a stack of horrible software including IE strikes me as a perfectly valid professional criticism. Possibly, this might be because I worked at another company (also in the mobile space) that had exactly this sort of atmosphere of bureaucracy and using a contrived, corporate software stack for their development teams.

I don't have a company of my own right now, but if I did, I would have no problem hiring someone who ranted about an environment that is toxic to good software development. (I guess I would prefer it if he also gave an instance where he tried to improve that environment and failed, but from experience I know that it often tends to be a futile endeavour.)
There are tons of mental blocks we can have that prevent us working on our own stuff.

Some people don't have any of these blocks (or at least, none strong enough to stop them). These people are the ones who say "just do it", because for them, the only trick is to stop thinking and roll up their sleeves. But many people can't "just do it".

Some people only have one or two things blocking them. They fix those things, and suddenly they become highly productive. These are the people who will go around saying that they have finally found the magic bullet that solves their productivity problems.

Some people have a ton of mental blocks. Often these are beliefs that work as cross-purposes.

For example, it sounds like you have the belief "if someone else makes something that I had the idea for, that's terrible". This pushes the "knot inside you to inarticulately roar". Trick is it's not that you want to work on something cool, it's that you don't want to not have worked on something cool (subtle, but important difference - negative motivation is very poor at driving creative work).

Another belief is "all I want is to get something finished, these things hold me up on things that I know should be almost trivially easy". This one is familiar to me. This conflicts badly with belief number #1, since one part of your brain is telling you you have to get coding, and another part is flashing warning bells telling you that whatever you are doing can't be worthwhile because it's so hard. Result: paralysis.

The good news is you can debug these different blocking beliefs.

I learned most of this stuff from PJ Eby's site: trouble is he uses an offputting sales-letter/self-helpy language, but the ideas are golden. http://pjeby.com/ http://thinkingthingsdone.com/ are your starting points.
Email me (isaac@i.saac.me) if you (or anyone else) wants to talk more; I'm thinking of starting a site which communicates some of these ideas.
Programming by Coincidence - The Pragmatic Programmer
No I am sure, and they are producing more wealth than I (probably) _EVER_ could. But doesn't mean it's a fun place for a designer and/or software engineer to be.

It means it's great to be on the board, manager or shareholder.

OP is a software engineer.
Felt the same. Fish worked out of the box, but left me unimpressed about its abilities compared to zsh (well, I'd give it the same score as to zsh) until I realised I hadn't configured anything beyond generating man-completion files. I'll leave fish lying around so I can alt-tab to it and check it from time to time
Saying that a warrant is required is only as meaningful as the difficulty of getting said warrant is. In other words, a rubber stamp is still a rubber stamp and I do not think for one minute it would be otherwise.
No, share holders care about share prices. Which in big part in large companies comes from existing products/services + incremental work. Big leaps come from acquisitions.

You need managers to keep the status quo going. Come in, run affairs as usual and leave.
I think the title is quite confusing, I expected some what of an essay about problems with the opensource community, rather than yet another gender article.
Hangouts Feature Emerges as a Bright Spot for Google+
Most people don't realize Dilbert isn't an exaggeration until they join the workforce.
If my doctor prescribed something called paralytica then I would report him to my state's medical board.
Nice to hear this:)
All About Natural Language Processing
I would rather stab myself in the eyes with a spoon.
Outlook.com it is.
All your executable shell scripts should start with a hash-bang indicating the executable that interprets them. If your script runs on your custom shell and it's not installed, it'll let you know instantly.
Differences in DNA mean differences in biology. Resistance to bugs. Ability to jump. 3D spatial reasoning. And on and on.

If its useful to distinguish genes and cluster population by a characteristic, then a race 'exists'.

Recently somebody posted here a detailed chart of North American dialect. It included tiny subdivisions like a corridor of midwestern-speak they use from Des Moines to Kansas City.

Was that chart 'wrong' because you can't hear the difference?
For me, it is just random stuff is broken. One example is `git mergetool` doesn't work in fish. I have no idea why that would be the case.
You are so right!! You do not realize it until it hits you.

When I was in my last job, reading Dilbert almost felt like it was happening to me. Dark sarcasm..
So what? It does a good service to future prospective employees by spreading information about what it's like to work there. It's like saying that citizens under oppressive governments should never speak up because doing so can only land them in jail.
I've found that most people vastly underestimate the helpfulness of a good therapist.

Your fear of making a fool of yourself smacks of an irrational level of insecurity that may stem from dysfunction that you may not be aware of.

A good therapist can help you get to the root of that dysfunction and teach you exercises and attitudes that could make you feel immensely more confident and happy.

If all else fails, a therapist will recognize if you might need pharmaceutical help.

I've seen therapy work for multiple people in my life - but addressing dysfunction isn't something that you can deal with on HN. You have to seek out a professional and commit yourself to working hard on getting better.
What have you been expecting as Junior Developer? Especially in large company, there are lots of smarter people there, you are just starting. Sometimes people need to be a little more humble, than thinking that on start they will be doing new android features right away. I've worked for similar big cos as junior, did not like it also and runned away. But someone has to do the dishes...
The only reason I'll never work for a "big" company again: Clearcase

If the job involves this tool, I won't even apply.

(Yes, there are some other bad tools as well)
AFAIK, it tracks its own history separately from other shells. It's not going to read .bash_history (or whatever) to discover your usage patterns - you'll have to use fish for awhile and build some history.
I wonder if keychain now works with fish (didn't with the last version) or is there an alternative to get fish working with the ssh-agent?
ZPanel arbitrary code execution + root escalation vulnerability
Which desktop client do yo use ? I'd like to do the same but I know I will miss Gmail's thread formatting. I know there is a plugin for Thunderbird but it's not as great.
21 everyday objects you can hack, from a bacon sandwich to a pencil to your cat
Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people:
1. aren't managers.
2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".

I'm also curious why smart people become idiots when they're promoted.

Come on. Managing is hard and definitely looks different depending on your position. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.
That's because the syntax was redesigned to be more orthogonal. So $ is always followed by a word to expand a variable and not an arcane symbol, % is used for a wide variety of ways to get process ID's, and it's easy to set up arrays besides just $argv (plus if you do $argv on its own, it creates one word for every item in the array, without you having to worry about bizarre quoting).

Most of these differences, and why they were made, are explained in the manual.
My personal hate-passion is Lotus Notes.
Hi. Continuing to spread your ignorance is greatly welcomed.
The truth about Enrique Allen (500 Startups/The Designer Fund)
Dear all, I'm writing this to bring to your attention how Enrique broke the trust of his Kickstarter backers for a project that was successfully funded more than a year ago.

I hope by bringing this to light after futile attempts to redeem my backer rewards and possibly bring into question the character of someone prominent in the Tech/Design circles in SV.
Designer Founders (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/785344186/designer-founders-stories-by-designers-of-tech-sta) was the 1st Kickstarter project I put my money to back. It started out as a promising idea that eventually did not fulfil its full potential. The book is still a work in progress and the backer rewards for people who put more than $60 were never delivered. You can see backer complaints under the comments tab.

It’s been more than 15 months and even the Pebble watch, a project that closed its funding later has delivered most of the watches to the hands of its backers.

My initial worry was that they got my mailing address wrong but a tweet verified otherwise.
"sorry they're sitting in our closet waiting to get mailed, @blumenfeld is working on it"

So I guess he passed on that responsibility to someone else and its someone else's fault now?
Frustrated, I personally emailed Enrique thrice, 1 week apart to request for help on the backer rewards. Not receiving a single reply, I decided to ask for a refund and gave an ultimatum.
The entire saga made me think about how someone this prominent in SV can be this irresponsible. I've never met Enrique in person and can't be a judge of his character but I do think he owns all backers a written apology and should either process requests for refund promptly or just mail the rewards out.

If you'll like to help, kindly upvote this thread so the matter could be resolved.
Great blog post about l10n and i18n! I'm working on improving that process in our company and currently I'm choosing Zanata [0] as a (Java-based) translation platform because out of Transifex's no longer maintained community edition (how unfortunate!) and Pootle, Zanata's installation actually was painless and the community around it is very responsive!

Too bad I didn't stumble upon Weblate [1] first though, it looks promising (thanks onemorepassword).

I've set up an independant "localization server" that executes the following process:

1) Regularly pulls new revisions of the code and updates to the latest revision.

2) A mercurial hook [2] is thus called and the source strings are extracted from the code with xgettext [3] so that new POT gettext files are generated.

3) The POT files are finally pushed to Zanata's server via its API.

We currently do in-house translations for one locale, while others are managed by an extenal translation provider. Employees in our company can just login (Zanata provides OpenID authentication) and collaboratively translate and review the application strings. Whereas Zanata can be used to export ressource files and push projects to our external translation provider's platform via their API.

But as others have said in this thread, l10n automation curently involves a lot of manual code glueing and adapting with your version control system. There's definitely potential since available solutions only address the translation problem and haven't gone very far in the whole process.

I'd be more than glad to exchange about the subject with others who have gone through the same experience!

---

Links

[0] http://zanata.org/

[1] http://weblate.org/fr/

[3] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Hook

[4] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/xgettex...
The founders knew what they wanted functionally. These first three developers became architects out of necessity. Only broad technology had been selected, no code design, not even tool chains.

Two of the freelancers worked out of their office (they were partners in their firm). The third lived in the same town. Both were 2000 miles from the corporate office.

The product was a collaboration tool. In a few months the first features were demo-able. After that the company 'ate its own dog food' i.e. used this tool to meet multiple times a day. Eventually we spend our entire day logged into this tool, available for instant communication, aware of what other communication is occurring in our 'area', sharing documents and status freely.

Plug: this tool is amazing, and enables freelancers and remote workers to behave as if in the same office. We often notice we get LESS done when we travel to other sites, because its harder to stay connected when travelling.
Make It Real: 3D Printing Competition
You don't have to describe the new startup, you only have to describe how you organise your life with particular respect to the points you raised in the article.

And what do you miss from your enterprisy days?
Most managers are good talkers.

Most smart people aren't.
how do you change the motd, or remove it entirely?

its annoying having

Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Type help for instructions on how to use fish

come up all the time
i hope OP comes up with a farming related app and enjoys the best of two worlds. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/04/29/f-farming...
Congratulations and good luck with keeping it this way then.
No one said it isn't hard to manage or managers in general are idiots.
I was just clarifying that the decline of decent software practices isn't a scale issue, it's management issues.
That tends to be because of non-technical managers/superiors.
Yes, but I AM the administrator for the Google Apps account associated with my personal domain. It's not a matter of not having enabled it; G+ simply wasn't available.
This behavior baffles me. It happens often that someone will share a G+ post directly with me, so I'll receive an email and G+ notification thinger in the upper-right of Google pages. Then I'll visit <plus.google.com> and the post is nowhere to be found.
> But doesn't mean it's a fun place for a designer and/or software engineer to be.

I bet it was wonderful to work at Apple under Steve Jobs. Just wonderful.
Receta de dulce de leche
security? Was surprised that was first on your list. IME its only ever gets lip service. :(
For me, it's not compatible enough. At work we have a few batch scripts that set up the path and set some environment variables, so we can launch compiles/tests/etc with a short command. These work under cmd.exe, but not under powershell. I keep meaning to experiment with powershell, but never quite enough to overcome that initial barrier. (I'm 95% on Linux, so it's not as if improving my windows workflow would make a big difference.)
If we assume the adversary controls all network traffic as well as all Tor exit nodes but the would-be whistleblowers and the New Yorker's systems are out of bounds, a valid solution is still possible:

- The plainly accessible page needs to be served through HTTPS, preferably secured with an EV-SSL cert. The adversary would then be unable to read or change any of the site's content; i.e. the whistleblower receives the correct onion link.

- The onion site, too, needs to be served through HTTPS. All traffic passing through Tor is encrypted and thus out of reach of the adversary; traffic leaving Tor for the destination site is encrypted yet again and out of reach as well.

Since few CAs would accept to sign certificates for a .onion domain, that site might have to use a self-signed certificate. This solution remains secure for as long as that certificate's fingerprint is posted on the first page and the whistleblower cross-checks the expected and actual fingerprint values.

This should provide reasonable security for the exchanged message contents. In all likelihood, though, the adversary would be able to prove the whistleblower did communicate with the New Yorker.

One high-risk aspect of this whole deal is a possible breach at any of the whistleblower's trusted CAs. Convergence would be of some help there -- assuming the notaries involved are behaving correctly.

*edit: Sorry, I had a bit of a brain fart right there. Traffic to and from the hidden service (the .onion domain) never leave the Tor network and thus remain secure. Skip the second bullet point.
The Dilbert Principle explains this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle).

The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
I don't think this is paranoid at all, so far all the online hosted wallet services, including exchanges, are young companies run by few people with usually questionable technical competence, and hence are very prone to being hacked every now and then. There's no "Google" of Bitcoin yet that you could to some extent trust.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
- Cardinal Richelieu (a/k/a Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac)
The /package hierarchy
I would have such a serious moral hazard and hypocrisy problem there that I can't imagine being happy as a manager at Samsung. (I used to be an engineer, transitioned to pm, I'll probably be a suit within the next 5 years sadly) I don't think IP theft and blatant product copying is morally correct, and I can't work at a place where I have to support such practices.
Is there anything like this for Homestead.com? I can't remember any Geocities URL's
I cannot watch the voting for longer than 5 minutes without bellowing in outrage at how blatantly political the whole thing is. They could save time by dispensing with the music entirely and just asking everyone who their favourite countries are.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Writing a blog post riddled with grammatical errors (and emoticons!) slagging off your former employer is not a good look as far as future employers are concerned.
I work MUCH harder than in Samsung, but this work really matters to me. And what I miss? Hm.. I miss constant stream of salary on my bank account.
Manage your GitHub notification subscriptions with github-watchlist
Are you tired of manually watching and unwatching all the repositories in your GitHub organizations? Have a look at github-watchlist to automate the process.
Saving Money With Illegal Downloads Could Leave You Bankrupt
Not sure. It goes both ways. On the one side, nerds at tech conferences generally fall into the 'higher educated' category, who iirc are statistically less inclined to go into crime (and if they do, it's the type that pays off in millions instead of, say, burglar the local gas station).

However. I'm inclined to believe there's a bastard in everyone. I'm also inclined to believe the amount of single, frustrated men in IT is generally higher than other areas, where frustration can turn into anger, lashing out, and misogyny. There's also 'dude culture', where people in different demographics (gender, in this case) are made fun of / stereotyped / objectified.

tl;dr, it's complicated and I'm just thinking out loud here. Define "average"
>encountering 2 dicks at a 500 people conference are AMAZING odds - nowhere else in our every day lives the odds are THAT good.

This made me smile with delightful recognition - it's been, more often than not, that I've been treated with the utmost respect by my male peers in the tech world. The same is not true in other industries I participate in where women are even less represented, or old-school boy networks still reign.
Introducing: ActiveRecord Futures
can you elaborate why is client side encryption isn't secure at all?
When you shouldn't bother unit testing
It staggers me that there are people who, to this day, would defend Clearcase.
The idea of saying “Here is some file and I can't tell you whether it is valid Perl without executing it.” is magnitudes worse than all the C++ macro preprocessor and template hell combined.

Something like that is pretty much the worst imaginable thing to happen in language design, especially because we know at least since Chomsky, Rice and Turing how to do better.
What happens when a private company acquires a public company?
Hi Hackers , I like to know What happens when a private company acquires a public company ?
Banana Breakers
Data initialization in C++
The Relevance of Algorithms [pdf]
Working with Tween Animation in Android
got 3.
one is profitable, two not
Whatever is the platform there is always a C/C++ for it...
My personal hate is Crystal Reports.
Pretty similar to the Android app 'Relaxed Abs'. Awesome job!
I don't think it's a matter of non-technicality. You can find non-technical founders who are doing more or less well (Squidoo, Yammer, Groupon for example) and there's a lot of companies managed by engineers which are falling. I think it's a matter of lacking general management skills as well as number and level of complexity of problems you have to solve when you go up.
A couple of things can happen and it primarily depends on why the private company was buying the public company.

1) Reverse Takeover mentioned by Raysor above. In this case the private company is taking over the public company with the aim of taking itself public. The goal here is to streamline the process of going public by just including all the assets of the private company with those of the already listed company. In this case, the stock continues to trade (possibly at a premium depending on the terms of the merger) but the underlying business has changed possibly dramatically. Several airlines have gone public through reverse takeovers. For some reason, I also know that Frederick's of Hollywood went public this way (they have excellent annual reports).

2) The public company might be taken private. In this case, a stockholder of the public company is given cash for his stock. He actually doesn't have to sell (unlike comments from previous posters) but there is not really advantage in not selling. Since the company no longer completes all the filing requirements necessary to be listed, it will be delisted. Taking a company private is a good way of saving lots of legal and accounting expense and was particularly popular in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley a few years back that increased these requirements.
> bigco's software packages value security, safety, and supportability over beauty, usability, and time-to-build.

Why does it have to be either/or? I mean you can have secure/safe and supportable software which is beautiful and usable. It eventually helps in the long-run.