skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right on. Working conscientiously when easy excuses for doing otherwise are in season is the essence of professionalism. Providing one's best given the circumstances is the core character trait. Deadlines move, budgets expand, requirements shift and staff move on (including managers). All are beyond the line worker's control. Sometimes, life includes a deathmarch. You still gotta' throw strikes when trailing by thirteen in the top of the sixth.
I was speaking about consent forms with a physician friend of mine. We came to conclusion they are complete bullshit - you could always get them for whatever you want by just abusing the information asymmetry and framing the questions.

I doubt that there forms are much more than legal covering ass.

Depending on the place in the US by asking - don't you want to know if your kid is surrounded by gays/muslims/junkies/conservatives/random boogiemans/ in school - just sign here you probably could get them easily. So it is a weak protection at best.
Incase anyone is interested in the actual research, rather than just the media hype about this, check out: http://ce.sysu.edu.cn/UploadFiles/electrochemistry/2012/3/20... . It's a Chinese paper which talks about Hydrogenated TIO2-PANI as superconductors (Which is what this kid based her presentation off.
10,000 Hours of Practice Won’t Make You an Expert
Yeah, the 100 table thing threw me as I regularly work in business software with over 1000 tables.
The count of tables is less important than organization of them. If you have a clear structure and set of relationships, it is not too difficult to chunk their concerns.
> It may be graphical, but it's not very helpful. What is OP supposed to do to "save" the project?

I would disagree there.

A good manager might take the situation well - they may have been misinformed by others and think things are far better than they are.

If that isn't the case there may be the option of going above the managers head, though this has to be considered very carefully. In may case once it went rather well: the person above me had grossly misreported things above him. We are still dealing with some of the legacy of that period, but getting through it (and that person is no longer here). Of course depending on local politics this could go very badly, so I'll repeat: consider this sort of action very very carefully before taking the step.

In my case saying "things have been X bad for a while, if things don't change either we are going to fail badly very soon or I'm going to burn out inside a couple of months" got the message across (it turns out an honest assessment was appreciated and that not losing some of us through walk out or burn out was important enough to warrant rearranging some plans and expectations). Of course I'm lucky: the Powers That Be here are sensible and I've been here over a decade & proven myself a good few times over so my word carries some weight - a relative new-starter under a less receptive hierarchy would not fair so well.

If there really are no options for plan A for whatever reason, no end of time/overtime will fix the problem and there is no way the management can be made to appreciate the scale of the problem, that leaves plan B: get ready to jump ship.
Having conversations documented in emails really saved my keister on multiple occasions.

Admittedly on one of those occasions, the effect wasn't immediate -- the manager in question basically rage-quit the conversation. But she put a lot more thought into getting confrontational in future disputes.

(Although I have to clarify that this was a fairly dysfunctional environment (and had been for a while), due to which I figured getting things in writing was the safest choice. In future more cohesive settings, I didn't bother with this as much, as the teams tended to have more integrity.)
Lets be clear: neither of those stories do what I said.

I'm not, and never was, happy with the overreaching disciplinary actions taken by school systems. I think it tends to be reactionary and counter-productive. But your claims are still not accurate. While I disagree with the policies, and I think they are bad, they are as bad as your claims.
Yeah, I was not sure if this was an elaborate prank until I read that line. So weird.
Ruby on Rails with Interactors
If the person doing the cleanup is the same as the person who was directly in charge of running the project, then you have different problems.
Gotta love a social company run by a kid that was so incapable of making friends he had to build a website and make everyone want to be there.
Use pyramid. It's exceptionally well designed. It has very sensible defaults out of the box, but literally everything about the framework is swappable if you need it to be.

I can't comment on rails, but I spent quite a long time with django before switching to repoze-bfg (pyramid's previous name). In my experience you don't hit the same wall that you tend to with django when you need to step off the the common path.
My concern is not with the intention behind the survey. I believe that the intention was very good. My concern is the idea that a teacher reminding students that they are not under any obligation to complete the survey represents manipulation. Teachers are in a position of real power, there are a great many situations where are expected to do what their teacher tells them. It really is very important to be allowed to remind students of those situations where they don't _have_ to obey.

I think that the legal considerations here are a distraction. I think (and I am assuming here) that the teachers actions were largely driven by his conscience. And the simple fact that arguments about this tend to circle around debates over the constitution, and other legalities, make me more worried about the United States than anything else.
He's also in a room that is more likely to contain someone who will change the course of progress than most rooms are.

True, but not relevant to the argument I'm making. The fact that his attempt to influence people might well have more leverage because of his audience doesn't make influencing people, as opposed to informing them, any more right than it would otherwise be. In fact, it might make it even worse.

Look at it this way: his basic argument is that humanity's most valuable asset is ideas. The more good ideas we have, the better. And the best way to spread ideas is replication--people learn them from other people. So he's basically saying that influencing people is good because it helps to spread good ideas.

But here's the thing: in a sane society, good ideas don't need help to spread. They spread naturally, because people are not fools. If you have a good idea, use it. In this case, instead of telling people how important he thinks it is to develop good tools for thinking, he should just do it--develop tools for thinking that he thinks are good, and use them to do some superior thinking. If he's right, people will naturally adopt the tools because they can see that the tools work.

But when you add "influence" into the mix, you now have created a second way for ideas to spread, one that does not depend on whether or not they are actually good ideas. If people start thinking, hey, this guy is a mover and shaker, a "thought leader", someone I should listen to, they will spread his idea even if it's not a good idea. So influencing people, persuading people, in fact will have the opposite effect to the one he thinks: it's not needed to spread good ideas, but it can help to spread bad ideas that would otherwise die out. And if his audience contains people who are more likely to spread whatever ideas he persuades them to spread, the damage done by a bad idea is even greater.
"Gmail in particular has made Yahoo's products look like Detroit's cars in the 70s and 80s."

Have you tried the Yahoo Mail mobile app?
'"I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.'

There is nothing inherently English about Greek and a number of Slavic languages. There ain't nothing much that Afrikaans tells us about the practice of Modern English (is there, baas?) and only so much light that Middle English sheds.
I have always felt that there is some potential for brand confusion between Mozilla and SEOmoz. The potential for confusion between "Mozilla" and "Moz" seems even greater.
What we are doing now is replacing all of mongodb's storage. So all of the data and all the indexes are in fractal trees. This means we can compress everything (including the field names!) and keep everything nicely defragmented.
Why developers should always have a side project
Ask HN: Tips for maintaining a C codebase?
My team has a small but growing C library. We have a set of coding and naming conventions that are generally followed and things are fairly modular. Most of us are not C programmers though, so I want to continue reading and learning from other code to bring in useful ideas to our code base. Thanks in advance.
This sounds more like what I would expect working at Facebook to be like.
Show HN: Tweets like this make all our hard work worth it.
I missed it back then. I read this posting and got value from it.

So, for future reference, is one supposed to know in advance what news or articles one is looking for and search HN first? Im confused as to how this is supposed to work. If I missed it a month ago, am I not allowed to see it posted again, by some one else who might well have missed it a month ago?

Or, do you suggest that moderators look out for duplicates, block the links and comments, and merely post a link back to the original?

Or should people who don't read every article, and log it in some way just not be here?

But, people have up voted it. So, it must still have value. Are those people not wanted? Are they wrong in some way?

I don't understand the criticism at all. Cant you just ignore the article, instead of belittling those who did get value form a second posting?
Here's a post from Rand Fishkin that provides some more details into the rebrand: http://moz.com/blog/goodbye-seomoz-hello-moz
That's only partially true.

Pull requests on GitHub have to have an associated branch or fork in another repo. Even if you're not the original author, if you have access to it, you can do "git checkout" or "git clone", then you make the required changes and then on push the commits are automatically included in the pull request.

The only problem is that the maintainers do not have write access to the forked repositories of new or casual contributors. So if you're in a rush to change something, you have to fork that branch, make changes and then merge it, while ignoring the original pull request (although if you place the issue number in the commit messages you push, they'll get referenced on the associated page).

However, the commits logs made by the wannabe contributor are still in the history, so proper credit/blame is given where it is due, unless you rebase of course. And this isn't something you can say about diffs sent by email.

Also, GitHub sends you emails on pull requests. And you can reply by email too.

What I like about GitHub Pull requests is that you have a link you can give to people for review or that you can post wherever, a link that gives you a descriptive diff of what happened. Plus, the discussions around that pull request are left there, included in that link, left for everybody to see, instead of turning into a private conversation that nobody else will know about (incidentally, it's also the reason why I think native apps will never beat web apps, as long as native apps don't have URLs for referring to content or state within the app). This to me is useful enough to prefer it over diffs by email.

EDIT: there is one thing about GitHub I don't like - you cannot give write-access to people, while preventing them from pushing to master. If this where possible, you could give everybody access to push, except for master, in which case the above mentioned issue with pull requests would be a non-issue!
While we're on the subject of typos: the title of the main workonomic page is "workonomic - manage your time, without loosing it." It's also crept into the google results for workonomic.
Hopeful, but not much :) https://plus.google.com/u/0/115308028547191805295/posts/KCzc...
"Two-factor authentication" is too vague. Biometrics, smart cards, and one-time pads could all be used as second factors.
Clickable link: https://twitter.com/andrewsprinz/status/339737143146602496
I am in strong agreement with this comment. I had a comment on similar lines some time ago:

"Bit Coins represent trade in an Economy independent of the Rot Schild banks."

The Federal Reserve wrote off 16 Trillion Dollars off the banks, but did not write that off from the American people.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-...
> 5) Make it very clear to the business owner, all changes cause a delay. And whatever you do, do not let the business owner decide how long a change will take.

This, unfortunately, seems to be a rather large factor when it comes to figuring out why a project failed. Unrealistic expectations are absolute killers.
Agreed. Unpaid labor is not "culture" its slavery.
There's nothing stopping this developer from taking the requirements of the project and developing a solution from the ground-up in their language of choice over the course of a couple weeks.

Yes there is: if you can't get it done in 1.5 months having already spent 1.5 months working on it, you're not going to get >3 months of start-over work done in a couple weeks. Never mind the boss freaking out at the thought of you abandoning 1.5 months of work, knowing the remaining time isn't enough left to complete it (yes, he knows) much less start over from scratch using completely different tools.

If you had that kind of alleged ambition and talent you wouldn't be in this mess to start with.
"While none of these is the very heart of Google (Search, AdWords), ..."

Think again. AdWord/AdSense came out of "Applied Semantics", that they bought in 2003 for $102MM.

Here's the full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Well yeah, the reason I mentioned the level up is that sometimes your manager is the problem, and sometimes your manager isn't telling the business about the problem.

If both of those are part of the problem (don't worry! All is well!), rather than realistic (we know there are serious problems here but we think there's a chance/we'd like to try anyway), then it's time to think about the systemic problems and consider finding yourself a new job (IMHO).
Evidence:

1. Since Mayer was hired, Yahoo stock is up approximately 64%. This is the measurement by which all CEOs are eventually and finally judged. Whether that trend will sustain itself for the long term has yet to be seen, but nobody can see the future. We can only examine what data we have today. And we do have this correlation (acknowledging that correlation != causation).

2. There is a buzz about Yahoo. That hasn't happened with Yahoo's prior CEOs for a long time. For a consumer company, if you have no buzz, guaranteed that consumers won't be interested. Especially for online consumer companies, where customer loyalty seems to switch so easily and quickly.

3. There have been a number of product revamps that have been well received. The biggest one obviously is Flickr. Another one was Yahoo. When was the last time we saw a well-received Yahoo product revamp before Mayer?

Yeah, Mayer's time there has been short. But in less than a year, she's accomplished more than Yahoo has accomplished in several years.
We've built a prototype that does this: https://cloudsweeper.cs.uic.edu/. It works for gmail only, doesn't require full account access, and is completely server side.

Currently we only search for and redact/encrypt plaintext passwords, but the same workflow can work for whatever the user might decide to encrypt.

We get around the javascript cryptography issue by performing encryption server side. Very unintuitive for a privacy primitive, but our goals are (a) security at rest and (b) providing an improvement over what already exists (plaintext storage everywhere).

Our other design decision is to only encrypt the (as identified by the user) important passages. This allows server side search to (usually) still work which is nice. We're currently exploring other methods for identifying "lucrative" information in someone's cloud based data store.

I talked to Eric Grosse, VP Security @ Google, about trying to get a definite time limit on how long it takes for "old" versions of stored messages to no longer be accessible by Google. While there is a FAQ that states that old messages cannot be undeleted after 30 days (can't find the link right now), he wouldn't give me a straight answer for when the old email blobs are no longer accessible. It's anyone's guess regarding what the absolute security is here; regardless, for a non-state attacker, it's Probably Good Enough.

(please don't post this link to the front page, it's not currently engineered to handle HN style loads)
They are paying you to do a full-time job, so do a full-time job. No less, no more, and record your time carefully. Remind people, if necessary, that retaliatory termination of someone who is fulfilling their employment contract is illegal. Do what you can to keep that kind of talk from going up the chain any further than necessary - ideally only to your immediate and somewhat sympathetic superior.

In "extra" time, start Plan B. Find the parts of the code that might be usable for another project (possibly this one's successor). Make sure their interfaces and dependencies make that easier - which is good software engineering anyway, and can be justified as such if you don't want to explain the real reason. That way you and your employer will both be able to extract maximum benefit from the project when it does fail, helping you both to survive the aftermath.

You will be criticized for not committing enough to the project. You might even be blamed for its failure. It's very unlikely that you'll ever get any credit for helping the phoenix rise from the ashes. That sucks, but it's a bad situation all around and you have a duty to try if that's what you think is best for the company in the long term.

(P.S. To be perfectly honest, I'd already be out of there if I felt that way about a project, but that's the sort of advice the OP was explicitly not seeking.)
I am on record in the earlier thread about this incident

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5777578

saying that the first news report sounded like John Dryden is an unusually thoughtful social studies teacher, and that he was just relating the general concepts that he is hired to teach his students to a real-world situation facing the students. Even after reading the follow-up report submitted to open this thread, I'm not at all sure that Dryden was trying to undermine the survey process. Here's a key passage from the middle of the story submitted here:

"Dryden, a social studies teacher, told three of his classes that they had a Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate themselves when they took a social-emotional learning survey April 18. Some of the 34 questions asked students about their drug and alcohol use, as well as about their emotions. Their names were on the surveys, as it was intended to identify students who could use help, according to school district officials. Those whose answers raised red flags were called in to the school's student services workers, including social workers and counselors.

"Barshinger said there was no Fifth Amendment issue, for several reasons. Once students' names were on them, he said, they would have become student records and subject to student privacy laws. And students cannot incriminate themselves because, even if the district shared the information with police, police can't prosecute based on that, he said. They are only allowed to arrest students if they are harming other students, such as in a fight, or if the student is in possession of drugs or alcohol, Barshinger said.

"Board president Cathy Dremel, speaking on behalf of the board, said Dryden 'mischaracterized' the efforts of fellow teachers and administrators, some of who had worked on a committee for a year to find a survey instrument that would assess students' risky behavior.

"'The board will not support any employees giving students false impressions about those who come here every day' to work for their best interests, she said."

I am a lawyer by training. I don't actively practice law currently, but I stay alert to the law related to K-12 education, which was my motivation for studying law. In my experience, school district officials are often VERY BADLY advised on what the law is, and their default assumption is that they can do what they want, and hide what they are trying to do from parents who have the actual legal authority to guide their children's educations. I wouldn't take these kinds of statement from the district superintendent or from the school board president as the last word on what the legal consequences of the student survey might be.

I think another Hacker News participant said in the earlier thread that he lives in the district and would report on what he observed at the school board meeting about the survey. I'm not completely sure that this latest news story, which fills in more details that weren't reported in the first story, settles the issue of whether or not teacher Dryden's behavior was appropriate under the circumstances.
What do you mean? The arabic number system that most of the world uses is base 10. Also, I don't see why the base of the number system would make math any easier or harder.
Why Musicians Should Learn to Code
Been in one too many of these, it often makes you question wether it's your fault, and that is very devastating. Though unknown to most people as soon a project is treated as a project and not your own product, its faith is decided by someone else.

You have no input on the stories, estimation and design decision. It's faith is no longer in your hands. They pull the wires, they decide. Hopefully their decision will be good and you'll do fine.
Ask HN: First time in NY - Ideas, suggestion, meeting? 
Hello,

after 30 years my dream will become reality, I'll be in the US for 3 weeks, in NY.

I'm looking for some ideas about nice things to do related to the start up world.

I'd really love to meet someone that could be interested in the app I'm working, about vinyls - www.needle.me - Lovers, insiders, curious or possible investors.

This is my chance to be near and inside the world I'm "cutting" here in the city where I live - Vicenza -

I'll be in NY from the 2nd to the 24th of July

Best!
Filippo
The guy clearly said he is a developer. While your advice is sound, it is something that only the manager has authority and responsibility to do. It is just impossible it almost any organization that a developer can turn project and project methodologies upside down like suggested here.

> However, in the end, it is also completely ok to walk away, especially if there's no incentive to continue.
Any math teacher that uses language association to teach math is doing it completely wrong. If you want to teach math to children younger than 7, stop talking and start drawing! (scribbling arabic numerals is good, but things like the Japanese "multiplication by drawing" are awesome in teaching kids to "feel math") Teachers that teach children do things like "say out loud kids, what is two plus seven?* are basically handicapping ~50% of the children's ability to think mathematically for the rest of their lives.

..."spoken mathematics" is to teaching math like COBOL or Visual Basic are to teaching programming :) As the old saying goes, "shut up and do the math", don't try talking about it.
I'm flying from Asia.