skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Expect no documentation in corporations.

True anywhere. Lots of OSS is horribly documented. Documentation is not only hard, but adds debt that now must be maintained. No documentation is better than wrong documentation.

It is not what you do, it is what you sell.

Welcome to business (and life really). While selling styling changes is going to be hard, selling bug fixing, code changes to be more robust and easier to manage are easy sells. If changes will make it easier (aka cheaper) to add new features even the least technical business person will get it.

Not everybody is passionate for engineering.

Not everyone has the same engineering passion. I don't care that my new router with IPV6 gives me some large number of IPs, but I do get excited when I can integrate a new framework which makes my job easier.

It is all about getting shit done

This is life. Do you really think the small companies of the world don't care about getting shit done? The small companies of the world are often more concerned because they don't have MS Office level cash cows keeping them afloat.

Latest software, meh.

Because it often breaks shit and gets in the way of getting shit done.

* I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code work, debugging strange things*

Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right now, but Clean Code references the study. Reading code is coding.
Don't worry I suggested it multiple times -_-
There are issues to be aware of, but for small amounts it's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge a transaction without confirmations (this is known as a "zero-confirmation" transaction).

For example, our service[1] clears transactions in seconds.

[1]: https://yumcoin.com
That's Tree Style Tab, great for tab hoarders like me https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Yahoo to kill off inactive IDs to free up ‘short, sweet’ usernames
I'm another one-year-out-of-college developer working at Amazon. This article describes how I feel almost exactly.
Do you really think that you have to.. well.. think more, given the new design?

Look at the old vs the new - the chrome is still there, it's just taken backseat to the content. It's not at all unclear what to click on to accomplish what you want to do. The call screen for instance. It's still immediately obvious what does what.. slide to answer, and a couple of buttons to decline with a note.

Settings and contacts screen - the "<" cue on the top left which goes back, similar to every modern web browser.

Maybe I'm missing something here, is there a thing or two you can point out that seems harder or more confusing on IOS 7 than 6?
Granted I don't work at Microsoft so I don't see their internal code. I have worked a bit with their .NET and older Visual Studio suites, and found that their documentation there was probably some of the best I've ever seen (better than Analog Devices, which I've used as a hardware documentation standard for a while). MSDN is a fantastic resource, and is extremely well organized (or was 10 years ago, I imagine it hasn't changed a ton since then).

And I more meant that they have to stick with technologies that they know work for two reasons: legacy & reliability. If Microsoft changes something within their legacy code, that could cause absolutely massive problems around the globe. If reliable features in their code breaks, same problem.

[Edited to fix redundant sentence].
As IBM lays off ‘hundreds’ in Ottawa, Shopify sets up recruiting booth
ummmm lets play devils advocate, how much would China pay Snowden for the design documents, specifications, etc for an advanced system for monitoring and extracting an entire nations online and phone habits? keep in mind china fairly recently got busted stealing of cybersitters net nanny software to power their national green dam project.

How much would the propaganda value of China being able to shirk its label as human rights invasion of internet privacy by showing that the USA is doing the same thing be worth? China protecting freedom of expression online...

Snowden is very clearly signalling that he has a lot more secrets, and would like to get some kind of special consideration from china. in particular he seems to be claiming he has a lot of info on US cyber attacks on China, which in no way are 'protecting the US constitution' and in everyway are good old fashion espionage.

... then again wonder if Snowden is going to be the justification for even stronger snooping once he turns out to be a spy.
Mismanagement
Even better he turns himself over to them in exchange for a Communist party position.
By "frame-by-frame", do you mean "shot-by-shot"?
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." -Wizard of Oz
Didn't the White House already confirm most of his accusations are true?
I find it deeply disturbing that Sen Mikulski clearly does not understand the meaning of the words she is reading.
They were 30 years ahead when they tipped their hand around DES.

Today? Who knows.
Sorry, I can actually substantiate my claim:

"The title bar is white, the tab bar is white. If I blur my eyes, I don't see the distinct areas."

"The Safari icon went from something beautiful to this"

"48px roundrect? Terrible."

"Really Apple? Icons on people's heads? HAS YOUR VISUAL DESIGNER LOST THEIR SENSE OF TASTE?"

"And most of it sits on ugly rainbow puke, again."

These all seem like whiny statements of personal taste to me. I don't use my phone with blurred eyes, I have set photos of people to my phone wallpaper (covering their faces - the horror!), transparency doesn't look remotely like any puke I have ever generated, etc, etc.
Trust me there is no resemblance
The previous poster is talking about the 'old definition' of VPN. If you don't have a office with a server you don't need to use a VPN to connect to it (and each other), since it's on the web.
For the application development side of this, see http://www.12factor.net. One of the tenets is that processes should be stateless, and therefore filesystems are ephemeral. Don't expect a file to stick around from invocation to invocation. This is explicitly true on Heroku, where they guarantee that they will kill every process sooner or later - and with it, the VM that it runs in.
because its simpler to pay him instead of kidnapping him. he is a spy thats all there really is to it it seems
The Code That Needs To Be Written
> Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander

The truth can not under any reasonable definition be considered slander.
While the facts of the statement would not be surprising to anyone, making these kind of statements are not going to help Snowden as he is viewed in the United States. I don't view this at all as a noble leak. This particular leak seems to be blatantly self serving and he seems to be outright threatening to harm U.S. national security to keep the U.S. off his back and to keep in favor of the Chinese government.
No. I deleted it way before that when I found out private companies where doing this. At the time I was job hunting and became well aware that companies could pay money to have access to my online data. Particularly companies that do any sort of background checks.

IMHO there is nothing "new" about the NSA fiasco.
Conversely, on its own, the fact that they remove some ambiguities is not a sufficient reason to use them.

Since the downvoters disagree, I'll provide a proof.

1. Suppose resolution of ambiguities is a sufficient reason for a separate case in written language.

2. Ambiguities exist that are not resolved.

3. New cases are not created to resolve these.

4. By contradiction, 1 is false.

QED

There may be other reasons which in addition to the resolution of ambiguity are sufficient to justify case, but you can't simply cite the resolution of ambiguity and say conclude that case is justified.
Just want to point out that the title difference on this HN post vs the actual blog is offensive to me as an introvert.

"How An Introvert Learned To Be A Leader" as it's written on the blog title is very different than "How Introverts Can Learn to Become Leaders". One makes presumption about the capabilities of introverts in a much stronger and general fashion. The other is a single person's experience.
U.S. Has Been Hacking Hong Kong And China Since 2009
The decline and fall of IBM
Matches my experience as well. I was there for nearly a decade, with several years in windows client, and I was always amazed that nobody there ever seemed to learn anything outside of microsoft tech. It's stunning how there are two almost completely separate worlds. Just taking web development as an example, outside microsoft, there's this whole culture of github, ruby, python, node, various open source frameworks, gems/eggs/npm. If you're a web dev outside of microsoft and you are completely ignorant of all this stuff, you're stunted. Whereas inside of microsoft, most people will stare at you blankly if you mention ANY of that stuff.

Mind you, none of this says anything about developer competency. There's no shortage of great developers at microsoft. They're just very insular and good at using microsoft tech and that's it. Oh, and these great developers are obviously hamstrung by the fact that microsoft isn't in the business of making great software, but that's a whole other rant.
perfectly describes some of the top mobile/chipset companies i have worked for.
Some of the code is so horrible that you feel it might be worth the time rewriting it. But time is too precious...nobody has time to step back and analyze or point fingers. just get the code fix and ship to it the customer.
GNOME, Ubuntu et al. rotting in threes
However, a growing number also do the opposite - for example patent law. (though that requires Mens Rea for punative damages)

But yes, I guess that most laws do (thankfully) still include Mens Rea.
There was a significant group of vocal "Apple Users" who have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years slagging off WP and Android for "bad design" and "stealing". It's to be expected that when Apple borrowed so heavily from WP and Android in this release that there are going to be strong reactions.

It's perfectly normal for companies to be inspired by eachother and to incorporate the best elements of rival platforms (and Apple have done a good job in many respects, particularly the default apps), but Apple's litigation and the comments of the most vocal Apple supporters meant that they really have invited this backlash.
"Protect our domains .gov .mil .com" -- so it's all about DNS attacks?
I think this may be a case of comparing apples to oranges. You're holding each method to different standards. Let's apply the same standards to each protocol:

The credit card transaction can't be double spent after 180 days (or however long the chargeback period lasts).

Bitcoin can't be double spent after your transaction is seen by the majority of mining nodes (ca. 10 seconds). Then, after a few blocks are mined (~30minutes) bitcoin offers unparalleled security.

TL;DR: When comparing credit card transactions' vs bitcoin transactions' hardness, use similar metrics for confirmation.
What We've Learned About Responsive Design
This presentation that Moxie gave at defCon 18 is really excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk
With credit cards, the transaction may be nearly instant, but there can also be chargebacks days after the fact. In the scenarios where instant transaction verification and/or chargebacks is in demand, companies can provide these financial services based on Bitcoin just like credit cards are based on USD or other centralized currencies.
You got to love this formula pattern. It implies so clearly that you are stupid and not mature if you feel otherwise.
Is there a name for this psychological method?

"iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that ... "
Windows has a package management system (Windows Installer). It's crufty and quirky and gets abused (package files that are just wrappers around standalone installer programs, for example) but is generally pretty usable. I've always wished more Windows developers would use it.
I'm not sure what I think of the visual aesthetics yet, some of the icons are really bad (e.g. Safari), but I don't know if I'm ready to say I don't like it yet in general. I do actually like the glossy look of the iOS 6 and less icons.

One thing I'm concerned about, though, is usability. Getting rid of all the bevels off of buttons and making them not look quite so interactive ... my two year old son knows how to get around already and I wonder how much of that is because things look interactive on the iOS 6 UI. I might have to install the 7 beta and see what he thinks.

He knows how to unlock my wife's phone (I have a password on mine) and can get to any app he finds interesting. I suppose the only thing he'll need to overcome is unlocking the phone and then he'll be back where he started.
Where did he mention poor code quality? Out of date documentation is all I see mentioned.
What are the default apps like in OSX 10.9? I absolutely hated the calendar, notes etc apps in 10.8, have they improved as much (visually) as the iOS default apps?
They are too simple, to the point of looking amateurish. I think they stopped somewhere in an awkward place between metro (the so called flat style that I am not a fan of) and their original style.

I was comparing to MeeGo, and the icons there look much more polished, because they smartly use gradients and shadow when needed while keeping it simple when it comes to colors and symbols. Apple just simplified everything.
Dude! You need to do all the frames. That would be truly epic.
When Booz Allen sets up an office (probably someplace handy like Hawaii or Greenland) to receive these samples, will the package-openers make $122k or $200k?
Again, so? Those people are participating in a sideshow and only matter insofar as they can be used to distract from the conversation we should be having:

Public: So, can you not give us any assurances that
these systems aren't being abused?
NSA: Sorry, you'll just have to trust us.
Public: We want to, but the problem is we think
you're lying to us. You've lied to us before.
NSA: What? Who told you that? THEY'RE lying!
Public: That is literally the least reassuring
thing you could possibly have said.
Interesting post... but I am not sure I can think up a situation where rape was, or could be, needed?
For the love of god or anything you find holy, STOP insisting that only direct democracy counts as democracy!
Part of the point is that we shouldn't have a system whose morality depends on individuals. Individuals are fallible. A system that is susceptible to the failures (or moral deficiencies) of people is bound to fail sooner or later.
Soon, but each hashtag on a page will only work until its continuation gets garbage collected.
Except people are now using them in both written and verbal communication when they know for a fact that there's no machine observer.

In other words, hashtags are now a functional part of grammar.

Sometimes it's for machine consumption. Sometimes it's for human consumption. Sometime's both.

As everywhere in language, context determines usage.

Edit: Here's an obligatory languagelog post on hashtags...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3671
Ok...I was generalizing from a friend's somewhat related experience. He was asked and chose not to press assault charges in MA and that was the end of it.

On second look, it seems that the state has a lot of discretion in these cases.
My server just came back up - 4h30 down. A lot of fail in this one, with status pages only reflecting issues 50 minutes later than my monitoring system, and phone techs claiming "no official information but huge call volume" after being on hold for 20 minutes.
Of course... I understand that your comment wasn't advocating that we only arrest poor people, etc. I'm just curious about a hypothetical: if we DID live in a dystopia where nobody could get away with anything, would this perhaps lead to more civic engagement in protesting unjust laws?

Laws that are easy to break are easy to ignore. But these laws can still be used by a government entity as a legal weapon against you, and that seems a bit scary.
The Law is full of legacy cruft, and is based on philosophies that largely predate empiricism. Has there ever been an attempt to design a legal system based on modern engineering principles? Laws are as much about systems as about people. When you want to understand people you might rely on a politician, but to understand systems you should rely on engineers.
نتيجة اعدادية بنى سويف 2013
Ensisheim (meteorite) - 1492
I mean i don't know if he is a very naive dude who came up with his own (bad) way of trying to work his way into the chinese good graces...

or if he is a very slick operative and this whole thing is part of a propaganda operation as he defects to China.

All I can say is he stole all kinds of classified documents, revealed some to cause an uproar in the US and paint himself as a hero, immediately flew to the one other super power in the worlds sphere of influence and started advertising he needs help and has a whole lot more documents that would be of keen interest to said super power
Stanford software engineering MOOC aims at future startup CEOs
After thinking about it: For languages with no spaces or other word separators hashtags probably don't work that well.
They might work for human readers but I think they are mostly useful because they can be automatically extracted or converted to links. I wonder if hashtags are used in Chinese or Japanese?

The fascinating thing about languages is that there is no rule without exception. When it comes to ! and ? even a familiar language like Spanish is suddenly strange.
As a community, we should react responsibly and warn our members against sharing posts like this. There is almost no useful insight, clearly parts of it are exaggerations, and the whole thing looks like it was written for 15 minutes of HN fame.

Couple of karma points isn't worth pissing your co-workers. If you really want karma, just make an empty post with title "If you don't vote up, I'll write a stupid post that will ruin my career." I promise I will vote up.
Looking at examples using XScope color blind modes, the default colors, and a few different colors (such as reds and greens), iOS7 is far more legible in color blind reduced palettes than iOS6 is that I can see.
For average users, maybe. But as long as I have source files, scripts, executables/etc.... I don't think the filesystem is going anywhere. The other thing is even if people get used to the "new" way of doing things, the old way won't go away entirely.

Look at guis versus command line. Most people never use the command line, but that doesn't mean its gone, or obsolete. It has just moved to being an advanced tool.
Most of the "insane" laws are really authors taking a general statute and conceiving of a highly-specific case that could fall under it, then presenting the law as if it covers only that highly specific case.

For example, many cities have laws about whether or not you can tie up a pet temporarily -- say, hook your dog's leash to a lamp post while you pop into your bank for a moment. But generally they're written broadly rather than specifying only a few types of "pet" animals, so then you get "ha ha this crazy law says you can't tie up a giraffe outside a bank!"
This is not encouraging... Hopefully they can resolve many of the usability issues before release.

For me usability is probably the best way to substantiate a design criticism.
And his systems administrator position in Hawaii for a contractor gives him access to records of this hacking? If so, where are the documents?

Seems he's trying to build a platform and turn into a pundit/commentator. A whistleblower should just hand over documents and attest to what he's seen personally from his/her inside position.
And that's something that frequently ends up being overlooked in discussions like this. Software development isn't special because you need to state it in terms of goals. Yet you don't see people telling surgeons "you should avoid operating on people" or architects "you should avoid putting unnecessary stuff in and on your buildings".

What makes software development special is the perceived comparative ease of doing the work: you just sit down and code. There's no risk someone's blood will get septic just because you sat down to code. One of the consequences of this is that eager, novice coders will churn out code they could avoid, because it's cool.

Cautioning coders to avoid unnecessary coding is good, as long as you don't start forgetting that there's necessary coding, too and that writing that code does, indeed, add value.
"According to Snowden, the NSA has engaged in more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including hundreds aimed at Chinese targets. Among the targets were universities, businesses and public officials."

So a tiny fraction are aimed at China, and this is the headline that's chosen? Did Snowden himself specifically call out China or is it just the reporter doing that?
Looking at examples using XScope color blind modes, the default colors, and a few different colors (such as reds and greens), iOS7 is far more legible in color blind reduced palettes than iOS6 is that I can see.

If you turn on the "thicken text" (not the actual name) in accesability, they stand out even more.
This makes so much sense. I find that when I am bombarded by info all day I get way more ideas for content but yet have a harder time executing writing that content.
IMO the best and only way to do this is to focus on the entry and exit of funds from the bitcoin cloud. As soon as one address can be tied to you, all your other accounts can be tied to you, no matter how many games you play with multiple addresses and shuffling coins around.

If you want to know how to achieve this, look to modern money laundering practices.
Not to mention Microsoft is terrified, and I mean terrified of any open source code accidentally getting copypasted into some Windows or Office. A team I worked on there had to indirectly use linux and there was literally one designated person who was allowed to have a linux machine, and the machine had to be set up by a contractor whose job it was to ensure it was scrubbed of any source code before being handed over to the one guy who was actually allowed to touch it. I swear, you could make the lawyers jump a mile by sneaking up behind them and whispering "GPL"
GhostBird Software is joining Yahoo
I'm not sure where to start. This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year (two if we're being generous). And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd. I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

I've been working for over 20+ years now. During that time, I've worked at half a dozen large corps, a few medium sized ones, and a few startups. I've seen both great teams with great practices and bad teams with poor practices. One thing that I can say though: the size of the company didn't seem to have much to do with it. Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there.

Note, I'm not saying that this guy didn't experience what he wrote about at Microsoft. But at a corporation that size, you'll likely find that different groups have different practices. This was certainly true at the large companies I've been at. Some teams were super-sharp, others were sloppy beyond words. Even if all teams at MS suck (which I doubt, but I will admit it's possible), this says nothing about how other companies operate and very little about how large corporations operate.

Word of advice: don't mistake the worlds you extrapolate inside your head for reality.