skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plan for the failure. What will things be like when the project fails? How can you best position yourself in the wake of the failure?

Take the steps required to see to your own future.

Do not get caught up in owing anything to your manager or your employer. Your manager transferred a failing project to your group. He is more responsible for you having this failure hang over your head than you are.

To your employer you are simply a resource, not a person. Do not give them the loyalty you would give a deserving person. It will not be reciprocated. In a world where all employees are basically extended freelancers, you need to put yourself first.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.
SQL Server: Inner Join vs. Cross Apply
I found it interesting that his list of reasons why the project might fail sounds like pretty much every project I ever saw in the 1990s and early 2000s. Although some of them are definitely bad signs, some are just par for the course in organisations that arent big on software development. I wouldn't say its a guaranteed failure. He might just be unfamiliar with what real-world projects are like in an enterprisey environment.

- deadline approaching many of the must-have features are not finished.

- Application is unstable and very difficult to use.

- System is very convoluted, code very hard to understand, very difficult to change.

- complex relational database (100+ tables).

- Unclear leadership, the manager responds to every new information with significant change in plans.

- Almost no automated tests or unit test.

- Heavily depends on other systems, but no integration tests yet.

Perhaps upper management will fudge and extend the deadline (rather than be embarrassed) and the project will limp towards some sort of closure that everyone can just about accept.
Dillinger, the Last Markdown Editor ever
Source article actually points out that the teacher didn't do anything wrong in the warning, but that the warning was unnecessary and that the survey instrument was designed to protect students and give them a less risky way to get help than by talking to the police.

If the survey designers had communicated with the "administrators" of the survey (the teachers and aides), this whole flap could have been avoided.
China Announces Digitalized Combat Forces
Sweet project :) The page layout seems to break for windows narrower than about 900 pixels, though.
In a past life I built one of these CRUD apps. The CRUD part was simple. The volumes of rules and exceptions is where the time and money went. At one point I tried to replace a DOS terminal-based system with something that would resemble a GUI. Based off the old GUI it was easy to replicate, then the rulebooks came out and I realised I was way over my head.
All content aside, this is a wonderfully written article. Taking note of the author, and the style to use for inspiration.
Thing is... a lot of projects seem this way when you're in the thick of it, but towards the end the mess can untangle itself and provide a useful tool/product for someone.

> Application is unstable and very difficult to use.

Could be that there are a couple of "killer bugs", fix them and it might not seem so bad. Difficult to use is also subjective, people get use to stuff.

> System is very convoluted, code very hard to understand, very difficult to change.

This could be "I don't understand the code, or know how to change it".

> Datamodel is too driven by a complex relational database (100+ tables).

OK, this one I can't defend :-P

> Unclear leadership, the manager responds to every new information with significant change in plans.

Well, if the plans are adding new features, these should go to the "nice to have" list. If it's "we need to rewrite this" then that's not good.

> Almost no automated tests or unit test.

No autowhatnow? :-D I don't think a project is necessarily "headed for failure" just because there are no automated/unit tests.

> Heavily depends on other systems, but no integration tests yet.

Yet! That's good, there's still time to test this before shipping.

> In fact, we actually just inherited this project (along with the mess) around 1-2 month ago from another dev team under the same manager, who have worked on it for a few month.

Aha! The root of the problem "I don't feel comfortable with other people's code"?
I'm not sure how these calculations are correct - I have eu-west-1 set up, and the price for 1yr heavy reserved is fixed. But the AWS pricing still has an hourly rate against it. The final cost looks right, but the initial cost (eg., taking out the reservation but never running the instance) should just be the setup cost I think?
Here's what I told my parents over dinner one day:

You have a problem that needs to be solved and a way of solving it that takes a certain amount of time. I the problem grows, how much longer will it take to solve with that same method? If the problem is twice as big, will it take twice as long?

For example, I need to move a steak from one plate to another. My method is to use a knife and fork to cut the steak into bite sized pieces and move each piece to the other plate. If I have two steaks, I can expect this method to take twice as long. What if I have 10 steaks? It might take a bit of work to make room to properly cut a steak. At 20 steaks, I probably just don't have room on the plate anymore and it takes much longer than 20 times the time to move those steaks than it did to move 1 steak.

Now let's say my method is to just dump the contents of the first plate onto the second plate. If I have two steaks this takes about as long to do. What if I have 10 steaks, or 20? It starts getting clumsy and the time it takes to move them using this new method gets longer at a predictable rate. At 200 steaks I probably can't just dump one plate onto the other, I can't even lift the plate!

The question then is, up to how many steaks is the second method better than the first? Is it always better as the number of steaks goes up? Is there a better steak moving method? What if we change the container from plates to something else?
This is simple but excellent. AWS should have graphs like that on their calculator page to help people decide how long it will take for their investment in a reserved instance to get ahead of on-demand (or another reserved instance plan).
Every computer that has access to the internet can open them in Google Docs.
Every Tablet or Smartphone with Polaris Office can.
Every Chromebook can.

Also in what way would the Microsoft "Standard" be different?

Only for the MS time limited crapware installed on all the Windows Laptops?
Dont be a negative force in the team. No technology exist outside of a business context.

Be proactive, take control: cut the project up in parts and focus on those that you can deliver in time. Ever heard of agile?
And logical studies in the 20s
http://tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/
Fixing Perverse Incentives in Software Development
I think Yahoo has a lost generation[1] problem on its hands. Gmail in particular has made Yahoo's products look like Detroit's cars in the 70s and 80s.

Anecdotally, at some point in the 2000s, it became embarrassing to have a Yahoo email address. It invited in jokes of 'she must love spam!' or 'he must love getting his account hacked.' From here, it's a long and difficult road to recovery. From the 1991 article linked below, this quote sounds like it applies:

> "A lot of people would have trouble admitting to their peers that they bought an Oldsmobile even if they thought it was every bit as good as a Honda," said Chris Cedergren of J. D. Power & Associates, an automotive marketing company in Agoura Hills, Calif.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/09/business/detroit-strives-t...
The remarkable thing to me is that after they buy and prove the value of these things, they effectively rewrite them entirely. That takes balls, and massive resources.
> nobody will care about it.

I disagree. If the company in question is large enough having documentation that you were actively trying to avoid disaster, were competent enough to raise concerns and suggest solutions, etc. can be helpful when people come trying to assign blame after the fact.

If the company as a whole will survive the impending train wreck then having evidence of competence, however meager, is certainly useful in many situations short of criminal prosecution.
When you reserve an instance, it doesn't entirely eliminate the hourly cost to run it. What you are essentially doing is paying a large chunk up-front in exchange for a heavily discounted hourly rate, which ends up saving you money by the end of your 1 - 3 year contract.
Yes, but Monsanto now own the copyright to your DNA, not you nor your quite lovely and deeply loyal dog.

You are merely the current instance of your DNA.

[ By implication, you do not have the right to clone yourself and Terence, but big M do. To learn more, see section 23.II.XIV.12.3 of the EULA ]
> Bitcoins are steadily trading at $129 now, if the article was true there would be important fluctuations.

MtGox's BTC-USD exchange rate is currently trading at that price, and the price of BTC itself cannot be measured. The distinction is important, and hopefully in the future fiat currencies will be valued against BTC instead of the other way around.
It's deliberately dramatized but I don't really see it as wrong. Here's how I would (less dramatically--and less interestingly)phrase the choices.

a.) If you're sure there's a path to success and you're invested in getting there, do whatever you can to achieve that goal--understanding that one of the possible outcomes is to be told to pack your things and leave. Now. The likelihood of this outcome obviously depends on the exact situation.

b.) Accept that things are not going to end well. Do your job, keep your head down, and start seeking alternatives ex post haste. In some situations, seeking alternatives ex post haste may, in fact, involve fleeing (especially in a short time horizon such as this one) but I've certainly been in situations where the writing was more or less on the wall but more in the vein of a long ponderous collapse.
My point is that politics are endemic to large organizations. You can't have no politics, you can only have different forms of politics.
This one is a web-based editor which you can embed wherever you want. It's basically a replacement for WYSIWYGs:

http://epiceditor.com/
Thanks for the feedback, doing it. Will upload the new version in 20 min or so.

Edit : changes pushed.
I didn't say they were. I'm saying they shouldn't be allowed to track your withdrawals as long as they can legally confiscate the money you withdraw, no evidence of a crime needed.
Isn't that what I'm saying? That the cost should increase, albeit at a much more gradual rate, from the start of the term to the end?
Marissa Mayer has done one thing very very well. She's changing Yahoo's image. I see Yahoo consistently in the news, and am actually interested in what it's doing. It feels interesting. Beforehand I mostly thought of them as an outdated company that was popular in the 90's.
So? It's relevant, it's not like the user is just spamming HN to get affiliate hits.
Where does all the bizarre over-the-top Marisa-love on HN come from? Yahoo couldn't actually be wasting money on paying for this PR could it?

I'm beginning to think that there is some bizarre Natalie Portman nerd obsession phenomenon going on with Marisa. There certainly hasn't been an ounce of business evidence that she has any more gifts than the average CEO.
> If you're going to intentionally avoid using the tools the way others do ...

Facebook was sold to users as a way to connect and communicate with my friends and family. This is how I use it. I don't use it as a tool to pass my personal information in bulk to marketers.

In any case, Facebook has many features. Listing interests is just one of those features (and a peripheral one at that, which many of my friends don't bother with either). If people don't use every feature of a product, they're using it wrong? According to who?

Judging from the comments, there are many others who also feel that forcing users to login via Facebook is undesirable. For those people, it creates unnecessary friction. For me, it was enough that I'm not going to bother spending more time with their product.

> ... then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you. Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?

I'm certainly not mad. The truth is, they're here pitching their service to me, not the other way around. I took a look, offered a suggestion, and that's that.
Yes, absolutely. We would love to hire someone from UOP.
Don't bother trying to make sense out of this fantastically idiotic article, but, if you are interested in the subject, look at some of the references at the end. Krauss' book The Physics of Star Trek discusses some of these ideas, and reiterates the conventional conclusion, which is that even if travel-by-warping is possible, it would require us to manipulate an amount of energy comparable to that contained in the entire universe.
> 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.

I can practically guarantee (and the OP strongly implies it) that the problem with this project is not that it is hard to implement, but that its requirements are unspecified.

Rewriting it in a fancy feel-good language changes exactly nothing and should be treated as an act of sabotage, because it is exactly that.
"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."

I'm not saying that the school had anything but the best intentions, but It does give them a bit of a head start in targeting certain pupils should the school wish find a reason to remove a few bad apples.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll fix that soon :)
Readability is not subjective ?

So you have a mathematical formula for Readability, excellent.

That would be simpler than adjusting things by 3px until they just look spectacular and zing off the page.
>> where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore?

You know, there are a lot of really broken processes in the world. Ones that don't benefit from computers directly, however indirectly a computer scientist willing to ditch the standard toolset (computer, compiler, etc), could probably make a big splash. We are all trained to think hard about the steps to automate a process - what order is necessary, what order is irrelevant, where can we substitute a functionally equivalent but more efficient mechanism, what constraints and bottlenecks need to be worked around and so on. This thinking usually is just about code, but really, it isn't that different for a lot of other areas. I think you end up seeing computers applied as a solution where they don't fit very well, because that is the tool that does process in our minds.

Perhaps there is money/usefulness/something, in getting away from the computer and finding other ways to apply our skillset.
Not at all. The state government of Texas IS a big government, and they gather more and more power
Of all the sites to have two factor authentication, GitHub is probably the most important, maybe even more so than email clients. If your email is compromised, you are the only one who suffers directly. But if a large repo gets compromised, every single user of that repo could be compromised. I imagine there is some widely distributed auto updating desktop software that depends on GitHub repos. Imagine if one of those repos was suddenly changed to include a key logger for example. A lot more than one person would suffer.
Yes, I think the intention is for E(v) to be one of the inputs of the algorithm (I contemplated E(v) for half an hour to guess this is what he means). I thought maybe the following is possible: I create a new graph with the same vertices as his graph, but instead of having an E(v) I connect each vertex to the members of E(v) via an edge. Afterwards, if two vertices are not connected via an edge in his original graph, I remove this edge from my new graph. I cannot really get to the heart of it, I just had a vague impression this might be equivalent, either way I think the problem could likely be formalized in a more effective way.
Good read. I'd be interested in hearing the other side of the story.
Can a stealth project engage with VC's without the infamous intros?
Voice your opinion. Do your work. Look for other opportunities.
To come at this from a different angle, throw in some random thoughts, play devils advocate and all that....

What is the definition of "fail"?
Maybe, given that the project is a hand me down, just barely working is good enough to the client. Maybe there is accepted scope for an over run.

How do you know it will fail?
Given my questioning of what a fail is, clearly knowing it will fail is up for grabs.

Will the OP's negativity cause it to fail?
This bothers me. An employee who is dooming a project is in danger of dragging the whole thing down.

Perhaps the OP is prejudging things too much?

If the OP "knows" it will fail, the likely hood is that so does every one else.

What seems odd to me is the OP's seemingly isolated position, where it looks like he doesn't get to talk to his co-workers or management. If he knows it will fail, then surely so do his co-workers. Management must also know its not progressing. But, he seems unable to discuss this with any of them, even casually. If this is the case, then my concern would be for the future of the whole company.
Similar things have been done before: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/20/165590860/episode-...

But there are risks involved, particularly when you're taking something over versus starting it yourself.
It's not that bad, moreover the game is always about quality/quantity ratio. And if it had become a standard, its development would be heavily pushed forward and vp8 would likely now be really free and called theora 2.0.
Isn't the more interesting aspect of HN how it scales? Simply writing a few models, views and templates is certainly a nice exercise but only a first step.

Not to mention getting the audience, but that's not really a technical problem.
Who is Yahoo's CEO again?
The article is, IMHO, a press release from the secret service with annotations by the author.
Well, what kind of book has a collection of recipes? A cookbook, right? :-)

I haven't used any edition of the Python cookbook, but I've used the Perl cookbook and it's just like you described. I have also heard and read that the O'Reilly cookbooks are known (famous even?) for being the kind of books that you described.
Because she came from Google and, by all appearances, is trying to turn Yahoo into Google's worst nightmare. That's incredibly intriguing to the audience.
I think this is more of a Django tutorial than anything.
Ron Paul is a canonical example of a States' Rights politician, which isn't "less-government" at all. It's just taking more power for the state governments. The roots of this are not in Libertarianism but in the Confederacy.
It shouldn't take all that long to set up USB. Getting the host controller running is probably a few hundred microseconds of initialization. After that, it's all about enumerating hubs and finding devices; there isn't much there that requires delays. You're probably gated by the firmware on the keyboard.

I imagine the USB stacks are full of paranoid "let things settle for 200ms" sleeps that make more crappy devices work, or that give external HDDs time to spin up. I'll bet you could remove those if all you care about is a keyboard.
" 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. "

When I was younger, I would've actually done this. As I got older i learned some things, and one of those things is that 20% of the work will take about 80% of the time. I'm sure he could take a week or two, develop a kick ass demo that demonstrates a working concept... but it won't make the project finish sooner. Rewriting existing code that's hard to work with is essentially defaulting on technical debt. If he skips essential things like writing a proper design doc (documents are a really good way i've learned to communicate with your team, don't skip them!) if he doesn't have good code coverage, then he's simply taking out a new loan.
Show HN: Query Bitcoin transactions in MongoDB
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? The new CEO knows ALL of that.
Regarding privacy concerns:

http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/hottopics/ht10-28-02...

In specific:

Sec. 1061 Student Privacy, Parental Access to Information, and Administration of Certain Physical Examinations to Minors.

The No Child Left Behind Act contains a major amendment to PPRA that gives parents more rights with regard to the surveying of minor students, the collection of information from students for marketing purposes, and certain non-emergency medical examinations. PPRA has been referred to as the "Hatch Amendment" and the "Grassley Amendment" after authors of amendments to the law. Now, school officials may hear the law referred to as the "Tiahrt Amendment" after Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who introduced the changes regarding surveys to the PPRA. The statute is found in 20 U.S.C. § 1232h and the regulations (not yet updated) are found in 34 CFR Part 98.

U.S. Department of Education Surveys

Subsection (a) of the legislation was not changed. Subsection (b) added an additional category (see bold below) and made minor changes to the existing seven categories. This provision applies to surveys funded in whole or part by any program administered by the U. S. Department of Education (ED). PPRA provides:

-that schools and contractors make instructional materials available for inspection by parents if those materials will be used in connection with an ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation in which their children participate; and

-that schools and contractors obtain prior written parental consent before minor students are required to participate in any ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning:

1.political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student's parent;

2.mental and psychological problems of the student or the student's family;

3.sex behavior or attitudes;

4.illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior;

5.critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;

6.legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers;

7.religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or student's parent; or

8.income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).

Subsections a and b of PPRA generally apply when a survey is funded, at least in part, by any program administered by the Secretary of Education.
Enterprise software development. Plan, plan, plan, plan, execute, fail, extend, extend, extend, deliver. The PMs job is to get the project extended from day 1 because nothing was planned out correctly.
think about possible outcomes after it will become clear that it failed and think how to adopt to this situation as it's clear already that it won't be easy go
Well, the best heuristic is finding a mistake, and if it's a crank there should be several.
Does it pay well? I was under the impression it wasn't viable for developers in high cost of living areas?

Also what do you mean about number 5, rejecting proposals?