skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's harsh but it's quite true. Engineers (and other people!) would otherwise have to devote time and effort towards product goals and timeline management -- it would likely be only half as good as a full-time PM but they'd get it done without trouble.

Product managers are an extension of people's normal employee workflows but expanded for coordination and communication, however there's nothing preventing the PM from exercising minimal responsibility on things like product design and whatnot.
You seem to be saying that he saw through the BS that many technical certifications are, and I agree that some (or even many, or most) technical certifications are BS, but that's really not what happened here at all. That was not the reason he bailed on this one. He didn't call anybody's bluff. This is not representative of technical certifications on any level.
Wouldn't using this app be illegal, at least in California?
Your question rang with mine. Why is this on HN? Is there a policy about the content that posts should contain on HN? In the past 6 months it seems like much more non-code/hack/start up material is posted on HN and that's a bit concerning.
I don't see how there could be.

Although there does seem to be some debate about whether or not what he did should be considered a crime, and whether he's guilty of everything he's charged with.
I realized that it was horrible as written and I apologize. In that vein, I fixed it (replaced with "executive's gender of interest"). It was reverse-pattern-matched off of a certain company where the desk ornament happened to be female, but I've seen male desk ornament dynamics as well.

That said, if you don't think 95+% of workplace favoritism is based on sexual desire, you're misled. That's especially true in the non-technical/subjective roles where ability is so hard to evaluate.

Most corporate executives did their 20s wrong and want to Feel Like A (Wo)Man now that they're older. Which means that for non-tech/subjective proteges they tap either (a) young, attractive people of the opposite sex who give them a "hip" image, or (b) unscrupulous young men ~20 years their junior through whom they live vicariously.
Online tools for finding non-stop flights by destination
Yes. See here:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/06/23/a-look-at-the-charges-agai...

"Note that the second and third charges both require the feds to prove that Snowden's release of information to the press was harmful to the United States. This puts our government in the position of attempting to prove that it is harmful to release accurate information about how it is spying on us, and how it is misleading us about spying on us.

Espionage charges usually describe someone with classified information leaking that information to powers hostile to the United States government."
> And ofcourse NEVER put your config in version-control ;)

Why wouldn't you want to version your configurations in general? Maybe I am not sure what you mean by "config" but in general version controlled configuration is always good. I even set up git in my etc sometimes to track changes I make to it manually (not in production, on my home machine).
There are advantages to getting someone else to do some of your work half as good, for example they can offload work for many people at the same time. It's good for morale and concentration.
There is actually already a lot of law and regulation that deals with what types of functions contractors working for government are allowed to do.

IMHO the government far overstepped those lines during Bush and have failed to come back under Obama, as that would mean taking on civil servant headcount to replace the contractors leaving, which is politically a hot potato.

Unfortunately the people only rarely expect and demand less service from the government; instead they want the government to stop all the stuff that they don't personally use. So of course this means that the government rarely stops with a given function entirely.

The military ended up with the same problem. The draft would not be politically feasible and you only get to go to war with "the Army you've got, not the Army you'd wished you had". What the Army did have was money, and so they farmed out everything they could make even a half-hearted case as being a "generic business function" (e.g. building security) off on private contractors.

And that's even with the Navy drawing down on its already-undermanned force to send sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan to free up even more soldiers to do Army-type things.
its almost certain that he broke some law, and the US gov't is trying to nail him as an example for other to-be-whistleblowers.

Whether the laws he broke is justified for the sort of revelation his information revealed, i m certain that is the case, but i highly doubt the courts in the US will agree.
I'm more surprised that people aren't using something more reliable and proven, like the package manager their system already uses. Why introduce another piece?
Thought-provoking article.

I hope the theory is true. Although I guess we have to wait another season to find out.

Interesting, relevant counterpoint from Matt Weiner himself: http://www.businessinsider.com/matthew-weiner-how-mad-men-wi...
You know how much better the world would be if everyone was good at work? If everyone had a correct estimation of his/her own ability? If everyone knew when to defer to those with better judgement?

The world would be awesome. But that's not the way the world is. And not all well-oiled machines will stay well-oiled...and in such a situation, sometimes it may be worth it to have someone who manages the process and can play King Solomon anytime two workers are fighting over a baby.

I'm not sure if the PM role does this well in practice, I'm just saying, I can imagine such a role in an imperfect work environment paying off.
The creator of imgur was a reddit user who made no attempt to hide it. It was initially done as a side project for the benefit of reddit users and then spiralled into something much bigger. It's this guy: http://www.reddit.com/user/MrGrim
1/5 to 1/3rd of million Indian engineering graduates risking unemployment
IIRC, Google was having problems with licensing some content from media cos on Google Play (?), and then it was solved...as long as Google http://readwrite.com/2011/01/27/google_starts_to_censor_torr...
Having got repeatedly annoyed by this: if you're using chrome on an android device (nexus 7 in my case) and medium.com flatly refuses to scroll, pulling down the page settings and selecting 'request desktop site' will make it look exactly the same ... except actually work.

Sadly (sort of), that means it no longer annoys me sufficiently to have bothered to work out why I have to do that, as yet :)
What international police force with proper authority are you talking about? NATO? The UN? I think most of the world is actually against a world-wide police force with any real authority.
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When money is just information, it's indistinguishable from speech.
Another interesting color is Cosmic Latte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
Would be thieves? Buying from SilkRoad usually means illicit drug sales (good or bad, it's not legal). So, it makes perfect sense for govt agencies cracking down on such activities to seize what ever assets were used in said exchange -- cash, credit card, bit coins...
Well, remember what Cardinal Richelieu said about being able to convict someone on 6 sentences.

There was a valid criminal complaint, the rest that follows is international politics just like spying or cyberattacks; if Hong Kong had intended to comply with the complaint and arrest Snowden to start extradition proceedings they would have found an excuse to. If Hong Kong did not intend to comply then some reasoning would be found, "mistakenly" or otherwise, within the legal code to technically invalidate or delay the request.

Apparently Hong Kong or China didn't feel like complying. It's just not often we get to see cloak-and-dagger style diplomacy played out so publicly.
Seems odd that someone wouldn't have understood that even 10-15 years ago. Outsourced means being exposed to risk from your supplier -- by the company itself, by its employees, or by governments. Gmail has somewhat better technical security to protect from outside non-state hackers than your average self-hosted exchange server, and from insiders (the IT guy, like Snowden, may not have the same goals as the organization...), but that may or may not make up for the ease of serving a third-party communications service provider.

I still prefer well-run self-hosted mail unless:

* You have a <6 month retention policy (i.e. so ECPA's weaker protections are a non issue) (which can be specified in Google Apps for Your Domain)

* You don't have the technical competence to run your own mail server (which gets complicated in a larger organization due to HR risk), or don't have the business competence to hire a contractor to run it in-house in such a way that their staff don't become a huge risk.

There's a third way which would be a lot better for everyone, but it's not technically feasible yet -- a way to outsource some aspects of the server without giving up control.
Imagine a system where the private material of a wallet is shared among one or more trusted individuals (using secret sharing) who are under instructions to cooperate with each other in destroying or moving the money if you are ever arrested or fail to check in after a certain period of time.

Don't you think that people involved in money-laundering already engage in such conspiracies? There's a reason they call it 'organized crime.'
There's something to this. It's entirely possible that the password is some randomly generated one that you wrote on a piece of paper taped under a desk somewhere.

During the "raid" (I.E. your desperate attempt to set fire to your own property to destroy evidence), this password was lost.

The court can't force you to hand over something you no longer have. Of course, the court also can't give you a polygraph test since it isn't admissible as evidence anyway.

If the Bitcoins do get spent sometime later, you could argue someone likely bruteforced the passphrase (it was only 12 characters long). That's still reasonable doubt.

Edit: After reading my own post, I'm quite terrified of my own imagination. I think you're a bad influence on me :(
> Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.

BTW, this provided insight into question exactly what was Wolfram's results and what was taken from his colleagues/employees.

It very much confused me when I first read about the court order: Did he really not have enough of his own results in NKS that he needed to hide the fact that the results were not originally his? And merely by asking the question, the answer seems obvious.
Go ahead, post all random wikipedia articles you want. The cool thing is how only the most interesting ones will be upvoted. Now that I think of it, that could be a neat small script to hack.. post random wiki articles on HN, let HN-ers upvote the good ones, and only read the best ranked ones.
> That said, if you don't think 95+% of workplace favoritism is based on sexual desire, you're misled.

Yeah, that's bullshit. Maybe in certain sectors, but unless you have something to back that up, I'm calling bullshit.
Are there tanks engineered for those with tinnitus? Sensory deprivation + tinnitus only means screamingly loud ringing for me - nightmarish.
But what about GSOS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_GS/OS
Really interesting piece. I've been thinking for a while that the series would end with a live action version of the opening credits, with Don taking a swan dive off the top of the building. But I guess that's too obvious.
I don't think mpyne considers people in government to be brain dead, but it's a popular stereotype here on HN - whenever people disapprove of some government policy they complain that government bureaucrats are too stupid to understand technology. See, for example, the Bitcoin foundation thread on the front page, or any court case whose outcome disappoints people.
this isn't particularly surprising. every photo-sensor known to man has "dark" noise and it is indeed temperature dependent. noise goes up for a fixed temperature for sensors that are sensitive to longer wavelengths, so the fact that people report a more brownish color makes more sense than perfectly grey to me. the sensors in your eyes that are sensitive to deep red will be noisier than ones sensitive to blue.
Do you think there might be a way to receive data? Maybe measure the voltage drop from a normally high circuit?

Edit: Awesome project. (:
Second that. I think it only comes with maturity. If there is a small start-up and they have a couple of Ubuntu servers they'd start with just syncing their source repo, running 'make && make installs' by hand via ssh.

After a while if they use python, node or ruby, maybe start generating language specific packages (pip, virtualenv, etc).

Next phase is when the need for upgrade/downgrade transactions comes about, handling transitive dependencies (my package needs another package, which in turn requires a third package to be upgraded, which is a base system package to be upgraded). Now 'make && make install's looks silly and mess up the file system with left-over files. Deployment ssh scripts become a tangled mess and so on. Then slowly they think "It would be cool if there was a system created that can transitively handle package versions, and maybe provide transactions with pre and post install scripts".

If they are lucky, someone will point them to apt or rpms or they'll write a broken version of those things from scratch.
Our family actually ended up with PC/GEOS (16-bit) at some point in 1993 or 94 or so. Wasn't really that neat to use though, we quickly gave up on experimenting with it and just stuck with DOS and Win 3.1.
Thanks for the link. So, Marbury was
decided in 1803 and, thus,
added weight to the (by then already
old) concept of 'judicial review'
where a court can declare a law
unconstitutional.

While IANAL (although my brother
got his Ph.D. in con-law),
I would guess that by now just how
the SCOTUS could strike down a
law is well established. History
aside, apparently the situation
now is that the SCOTUS can
strike down a law as unconstitutional
and the rest of government and the
citizens will accept that decision.
It would be great to have a service that could manage your mailserver configuration, tracking reputation & avoiding spam, while not having any access at all to the data itself.
You seem to believe this kind of corruption doesn't exist elsewhere in the world, and that P.R China is somehow unique in it's corruption. I don't agree with this. I'd say the recent wealth in china means you have very rich, and very poor very close to each other and thus corruption is more visible. But the "chinese" are not any different to any other people. Spend some time in India, there is just as much corruption there (if not more?). Spend some time in the U.S discover how corrupt they are... it's no different the world over, just the visibility changes

All those cases you raise, are indeed bad, but are you saying they are the majority?

The cheating example isn't a show of corruption, it's a show of fairness. If this generation of students sitting the gaokou are all cheating, forcing a tiny subset of them to not be allowed to cheat, is disadvantaging. You seem to understand china fairly well, if it were my child, I'd be angry (even if they weren't cheating), as it is clearly setting that group at a disadvantage. Perhaps if the government did it either ubiquitously or (probably better) at random each year, then the issue of cheating would go away. But to "trial" it in one area, is wrong.

> How could you really have lived in Guangzhou for any significant length of time and be so in the dark?

Perhaps I am just more optimistic about where things are at.
The killer robots are inevitable, at least they are an improvement on the more imprecise F-22 airstrikes (we now have precision to make real mistakes, before mistakes were inevitable because we lacked precision). On the other hand, we are just a few steps away from SkyNet.

But the issue is should we be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq at all, or just let those countries go to hell by themselves? Civilians die either way given that peace is elusive. If you visit these countries, perhaps your perspectives shifts from "we should get out" to "we should at least try and do something!" Morality goes both ways.
Do I personally? No, otherwise I would be at least partially stupid myself.

I will say that many people simply don't think in terms of idealism, at least not to the extent they'd allow it to impact major life decisions.

And many who are idealistic would still feel they can "change the world" more effectively outside the government than within...
German adds mystique.
I can't believe you did the exact same thing as me. twins
No. entrapment is where I work for the government and try to persuade you to commit a crime. If I merely present an opportunity to do so (eg leaving my car unlocked with an expensive item sitting on the back seat), that's perfectly cool, legally speaking.
Sure. I assume I'd be truly blind if the fluid in my eye eve went below zero C. I'm talking about the perception only.
> international organizations with proper authority do deal with them.

Are you kidding? The UN has no authority unless given to it by the country involved, which of course they won't. (Example: Syria and chemical weapons.)

Plus the UN lost most of it's moral authority by allowing jokes like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Commission_on_Hu... to exist for years.

It's cute how they tried to fix it by starting a new council to replace it (instead of simply fixing it) - and the new council appears to be "the UN council to criticize Israel and ignore everyone else".

The UN is a joke. They are not weakened by country's military intervention, they are weakened because they have no legitimacy in anyone's eyes because of their own policies.
A bad PM can be countered with good engineering management. That said, I've been at a place that had both. Weekends were planned into the schedule and they thought that was the norm. At a certain point, the brain drain was pretty serious (myself included). Not meeting deadlines isn't always an engineering issue it is a management and planning issue.

Another more recent example, boot strapped startup. General engineering goal with a high level of what pieces are needed. Most of those working on it are contractors not always onsight. Functionality decisions are made between a couple of parties, but not communicated down resulting in added effort. In this case, there isn't a lot of engineering pushback, but the PM should be aware of the need to communicate more directly, yet doesn't. When pressed for specs, a blank face. An example, for me, of a bad PM.
Oh great, another Product Manager/Project Manager/XYZ Manager has pissed off the software engineering masses post again. Another "we can live without you, but you can't live without us scribe...". Really? You mean I can't go find a top notch, $15/hr engineer to build in Kathmandu to build the product to my specs? Get a hold of yourself boys. You're not all that. I can (and have) built plenty of products with a wide assortment of engineering resources worldwide. If you're worth your salt, you recognized that it is the relationship between disciplines that matters - nt your "Engineers will Rule the World" mantra. Get over yourselves....
Ember.js 1.0 RC6 released
Uh, yes? Of course? That seems obvious.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here.
Skype's Principal Architect explains why peer-to-peer was eliminated
Lots of people don't assign work to themselves, though, if given the opportunity. People shirk, they don't want to do this or that and if something is boring or hard and nobody is watching them they'll do something else.

Other people aren't very good at estimating what something will cost in terms of time or effort.

It's actually pretty rare to find people that assign themselves tasks and follow through on them. If you have an entire organization made up of people like that, awesome; it's the ideal, not the norm.
The best product managers I've worked with have been ex-engineers. I got technical specs that we could go back and forth on. Wonderful in-depth technical conversations.

The worst ones: I wrote the specs. Instead of talking about technical stuff, I have to explain why something like "getting cache coherency right" is going to cost three or four days, and that no, I can't go to another scheduling meeting right now, didn't we have one yesterday?

The best: Shields.

The worst: "Why isn't that bug fixed? I'm going to call a meeting about that bug at 4:00, and I want it fixed by 5:00" [seriously. this happened]
If the application registers itself as a VOIP application, it can run continuously in the background and have access to the microphone. It is likely that this app is using that to get the audio, so it would kill the battery.
I'm in my dorm writing wordpress code and fixing js for Business Catalyst accounts for embarrassingly chump change.
Sunday too. And half of Monday.

Maybe i'll get around to one of the dozen random personal projects I have stacked up. But probably not. Red Bulls don't buy themselves.
Most definitely. He may well be completely innocent per numerous laws, executive orders and/or the Constitution. An example of the relevant recent piece:

"Executive Order 13526:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.
(a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error.."
Hmmm. I googled, found a college kid nearby, met him at Subway and he did my (4) in 30 minutes for $75. 3 months later no issues. Maybe the 4 is meaningfully cheaper?
This threw me off at first. I had assumed that Iceland would be his ultimate destination, or maybe even New Zealand. Bot of which are high up on the list of free societies.
Hey Product Managers — Stop Pissing Off The Engineers
How Inviting the Unknown Helps Us Know Life More Richly
Let me add couple more:

(1) Asking for a feature and then never showing up once when it is being built. "Hey, we are adding this page here. Is it okay?" <No answer>. "Hey, is this workflow good?" <No answer>. Once implemented, come around and ask "Why is this built this way?"

(2) Not being interested in any feature that engineering is interested in.

It is okay to talk to customers all the time, but once in a while turn around and talk to engineering too.
According to Wikipedia, the guy was jailed for 14 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#United_States
I just spent the full day moving an Angular admin to React and so far, my initial optimism has died down a bit.

Yes, Angular has more concepts to learn (most of which you already know if you've used any complex framework), and custom directives are a mine-field of changing one property at a time until everything finally works, BUT, once everything's working in Angular, maintenance & updates within the existing architecture is quite simple.

So far with React, I've married Backbone.Router + RequireJS + React successfully, but it certainly feels like I'm still writing lots of boilerplate. That is partially RequireJS' fault (I've never cared for the bloat), and the other part how messy my views end up by rewriting much of Angular's "filter"s and "ng-" directives.