skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this part interesting:

"We found that combining project management and engineering into a role held by one person cuts down on a lot of communication overhead. It’s always the case that the person who understands exactly what we’re trying to build is someone who also understands all of the technical details of how exactly it’s built."

I find that in my office a lot of the project management is done by professional project managers. Rarely do they understand the tech/engeering piece, and it really makes it hard to communicate deadlines or timelines.

Having only worked in three total development offices I have limited experience here. How does most tech companies handle PM work? Is it done by experienced developers? Or simply the middle-management types?
DMT, the NeXT and the Soul of the Human/Machine
It would seem odd for them to run Xeons and not have ECC RAM with it.
> For reference: Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows was the first of its kind, and groundbreaking. It's entirely possible this starts a trend.

Don't count on it:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what-you...
Did you read the article?

Thom and Nigel seem to be lamenting new bands' inability to bring in money, they're not grieving about how they themselves don't make enough through Spotify.
Until iCloud/iMessage, all the actual information was transmitted through third party services (i.e. network providers, email services, etc.)

Why go after the myriad of handset manufacturers when you could just get the network providers on board?
Email Marketing: 7 Simple Ways to Craft A Magnetic Email Subject Line
Public health-care is a complete failure here in France. We actually pay more than Switzerland where it's privatize and the French assurance maladie is going completely bankrupt while being forced on us.
Many pure scientific research have been done by private entities, I don't see why only public programs could do any pure scientific research. Plus, if the people were given their money back , maybe they could use it to invest in stuff they actually care about such as pure scientific research which only represent like 1 or 2% of our national budget today.

As for policing, I don't think anyone disagrees that it should remain public. Justice and Police and Military security are what the state exists for. Not for subsidizing movie producers or a dying paper media industry like we do here in France. I'm ok with a low flat tax that everyone would pay to sustain the basic functions of the state. It would probably be cheaper for Google and Amazon compared to whatever they're paying their accountants to design their tax schemes and give them huge gain in time wasted for bureaucracy.
> Here is what I came up with during our discussion...

You are looking for reasons where there is none.

* Why Brazil speaks Portuguese?
* Why do we speak English now?
* Why do people in Ukraine speak Russian instead of
Ukrainian?

Not because Russian is more expressive. But because they were killed for doing otherwise.
It's not about language features, it's about politics, wars, colonization, economics.
This has less to do with some vast conspiracy pertaining to RFIDs and more to do with preventing proprietary technology (and their shortcomings) from becoming public. This of course prevents none of the amateur tinkerers from going out and doing some experimentation of their own and anonymously publishing the results in the true hacker spirit.
More of one's working knowledge is loaded into the specifics of vocabulary in classical Chinese, whereas more of one's working knowledge is loaded into grammar in classical Sanskrit. At least it seems so at first. Wrestling with the complexities of compounds in Sanskrit and syntax in Chinese blurs this distinction though. The animating morphologies transcend the vocabulary/grammar distinction in highly modular languages.

At bottom both Chinese and Sanskrit, like many other classical languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic), are quite modular. While Chinese's phanopoetic menagerie may not at first glance appear as RISC-y as Sanskrit's lexis (comparing radicals to roots may not be fair anyway), basically it's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means. Rarer, at least, than modern languages, which seem more atomized and dictionary dependent, as opposed to the classical languages, which by their systematic modularity were able to function as universalist languages of empire.
Suggest to read the previous articles by this Debian person (a comment on HN linked to the other ones). He wrote a document explaining that systemd is different daemons, utilities, etc. Further, some stuff is only done after forking (minimizing the impact a crash could have).
I think I'm about 70:30 stuff I already own to new stuff. Possibly even 80:20.

This is probably because I have a huge music collection already, and I'm in my 30s and don't like you kids and your darned modern music so much any more. Music was so much better in my day, mumble mumble, get off my lawn etc etc.
I thought we already saw? There were some token payments, a fraction of the amount owed, sufficient to placate the majority not bothering with the details. David Cameron is weak and serves the Bullingdon types - BBC news this morning: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23273448
This is described as economic recovery.
That makes more sense to me - thanks!
Not that I think the US has any moral high ground overall, but they only court-order your password under circumstances where someone's already seen evidence of something illegal on there.
> to the point I'd speak out against senseless M$-bashing

Senseless bashing - including intentional miss-$pellings and holding one company (Microsoft) to different standards to others (Facebook, Google, Apple) is still childish.

However, not all bashing is senseless - Microsoft has a lot of explaining to do. Sure, so do Facebook, Google and Apple but that doesn't let MS off the hook. It makes the case for installing a Linux instead a lot stronger.
2013 - I stopped paying attention to every new framework or MV-whatever that comes out. What matters is the product and end user experience, and every single decision on how to go about making that product should be made with that thought in mind.

For me, it's not even javascript anymore. Objective-C and Java rule 2013 since web apps are not as pleasant to use on mobile.
> rotatable/zoomable 3D views for molecules and crystals and the like would be great

Adobe Reader does this (?and maybe Evince).
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/reader/using/WSebddb957d123ebb01...
Oh, so I should use Opera just because it's produced by a cool company?
Firefox is Open Source and they champion (or so they say) the cause of a more standardised Internet. Oh, they also raise money to donate to charity. Does that mean I should use Firefox?
And speaking of standards: Your typical end-user doesn't give a monkey's about whether all the browsers use the same standards, or whether they all use different engines and different versions of HTML and force web designers to run browser detection algorithms. As long as the page looks good, and loads fast, they'll be happy.

Browsing data sync is also available on Google Chrome. And you're mentioning it even though it still hasn't been implemented on Opera 15? Well that's quite something. Saying that "Browser X is better because in the future it will have Y and Z" debases your credibility as a browser user. I don't use Chrome because "in the future it might use quantum computing and fly." I use chrome because it has bookmarks and it has them NOW. I don't have to wait.

Last but not least, extensions. Opera is perhaps the one that's lacking the most when it comes to extensions. It is good that they'll start supporting chrome extensions, but that doesn't automatically makes it better than chrome. If anything, it reinforces the idea that it's just a cheap clone of Chrome.

So there you have it, at least to me your "5 reasons to choose Opera" post should be renamed "Opera has server-side compression. Yay!". Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Opera hater. In fact, I used to love it. I installed Opera everywhere I could. I showed Opera to a lot of people, and explained to them why I considered it to be the best option. That was one year ago. Today I would recommend Chrome. That's just my point of view, of course. Opera can still improve. That's what I hope, that they will turn Opera 15 into a beast, as fast as Chrome and boasting all the features from the previous versions. But in the interim, I'll stick with Chrome. Is not everything I want in a browser, but it's close enough.
Not to pile on but ..

.. and some lines were far too tight and some were far too loose, at least in my browser. I am 54 and I can't see some things that I expect a 24 year old can see, and I depend on interword space to be there.
But WHAT, exactly, can't we trust? I've seen NO technical detail to any of these discussions, yet there are a number of sub-systems that might be compromised:

- low-level crypto APIs (the 'DLLs' referred to obliquely in the article); these are more interesting. I imagine they could be compromised for weak session key generation or other leakage of key / plaintext, or generate the session key in such a way that the mythical 'NSAKEY' can decrypt it. Huge impact, if so, but only to certain software; AFAIK Mozilla doesn't use the Windows crypto API / certificate key store (but Chrome does).

- SSL certificate generation (built-in CA for Windows Server builds); certificates stored and replicated via Active Directory; does anyone actually use this? In fact, does anyone actually use client SSL? It is likely also used for domain peer replication, which could potentially be over an external network (but why would you not use a VPN there?)

- Encrypted File System; already contains an escrow key-recovery mechanism to allow administrators (including domain admins) to recover a lost user key. Only likely to be relevant if hard disk or backup images seized, so less impact.

- BitLocker drive encryption; similar to EFS but uses a hardware TPM and is per-machine rather than per-user. Fairly sure escrow key recovery at the domain level is possible here too. Again, only likely to be relevant if hardware or backups seized.

- Office document encryption; did anyone SERIOUSLY think this was worth using anyway? There are so many key recovery services out there for this (Elcomsoft et al)

- Communications applications (Skype et al); again, did anyone SERIOUSLY think this wasn't already being monitored, even before Skype became a Microsoft product?

- Some other OS-level 'phoning-home' behaviour. I simply don't believe that no-one has spotted this happening, if it's there - we can do traffic analysis too, and there are plenty of people running Wireshark on their own networks.
Yeah, that is why i said this is not the case unfortunately. :(
So basically: "They pay taxes to us, fuck you and yours"
Will China surpass United States on innovation?
Interesting text about behind the curtains of a machinery called startup (at least a small portion of it).
"So the first news I see regarding Microsoft today is that Ballmer refuses to talk about the company's wearable computing strategy. My first thought was, "This is its priority? Wearable computers? So it can spy on your day-to-day activities?" The next story I read was about how Microsoft is going to reshuffle the organization, which prompted me to wonder, "Re-org? Why? So it can put some intelligence agency folks in charge?""

Seems like Microsoft has a lot of issues to worry about. Doing a reorg when the company is struggling just to put an agency person in charge seems like a lot of work. Why not just put them in charge in a small internally announced move?
I doubt anyone will move away from LaTeX, though I also like the one-click alignment of figure and text.

If LaTeX were to add a way to associate figures with text, then someone could write a converter from LaTeX to HTML to implement this idea.
That hurts somewhere to say this, but I've been thinking about this subject, and that's better that the idea I had. I'm going to use this, and this will get me back on Last.fm, which I kind of abandoned.

That gittip suggestion down there is also great. I'm in touch with a bunch of artists who would totally love that.

Please keep building this.
>> I think that as a French citizen I pay too much tax and I'm glad Google and Amazon are able to get away with it.

Even though their activities directly increase your own tax bill. You have an odd way of thinking.

>> taxing Google and Amazon more wouldn't change anything for local companies.

Of course it would, their tax avoidance games mean nobody else can compete.

You can argue that lower tax for everyone is a good thing, but I really don't see how you can argue for the perpetuation of special exemptions for those that can afford it.
It's definitively not as simple as your example. Both Amazon and Google have staff and infrastructure in UK and other European countries. Yet they channel all their profit to lower tax countries (Luxembourg for Amazon and Ireland for Google).

In the case of Amazon, when some sales staff is in the UK (evidence coming from whistleblowers, for instance http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/16/amazon-whis...), when warehouses are in the UK, and Luxembourg seems to be used only for signing the official contract, how is that not tax avoidance?
There are things network providers can't do: activate mic remotely, capture local-only data, keylog apps that use encryption, etc.
Much like Latin, a good deal of the regularity is because Sanskrit is only a written language.
One could take the analogy further - for the same reason people choose C versus LISP. :-) Sometimes structure isn't the best (or quickest) solution for the problem at hand.
But while consumers seem to have no problem with cookies, profiles and other online tools that let e-commerce sites know who they are and how they shop, some bristle at the physical version

That is a profoundly ignorant statement to make - the vast majority of web users have no concept of the scope at which they are being tracked online.

If there was a sign spelling out all the trackers on every web page like there was a sign in the store, you can be sure a whole lot more people would be "bristling."
I still have no idea what it does.
>I wish no one take this as an offense. But I will repeat the same speech I say when I see these examples: wrong use of CSS for nothing.

That's one thing that hackers are KNOWN to do. Build stuff for fun.
> A Flattr-esque system for music. You pay $XX/mo, can listen to whatever, and your money gets divvied up to artists based on play count. (if half of my play count in July comes from Blind Pilot, for instance, then they get half my money.)

This is exactly what I would love. ~30% of my monthly fee to Spotify for running the service, the rest divided to the artist I listen to.

But do you think this is up to Spotify? Could Spotify force these terms to the record companies? I always thought this kind of stuff in the contracts that artists make with the big record labels; "We own your music, we pay you as we please".
I blame VCs for making entrepreneurship an easy way to money, fame, and/or success.
With a public record as a LSD user, I wonder how they could have justified giving him clearance.
Then again, Apple was (and still is) huge on the mobile sector. As far as surveillance goes, I'd expect mobiles to be of high priority.
Both disks failing at the same time might indicate that the problem is with the controller or cables. One of our disks (at Hetzner) died on us a few months ago and unearthed an issue with backups. :(

Because of missing data we asked for a data cable replacement first (instead of just replacing the disk) - and it worked. Even more, it works without problems since. YMMV of course.

BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.
A startup I know ran a Dropbox like solution with hundreds of servers mainly on Hetzner servers and had no significant issues with disk reliability although it was not a high stress situation.
Will the REAL developers please stand up
I am not the lay person, and I am not talking about communicating your findings to the pubic, which obviously requires an entirely different set of skills than communicating your work to fellow scientists (another problem, but one step at a time!). This is purely a comment on the typical language and style of writing used in papers - not on the content itself, per se, although the two are to a certain extent linked.

> I'm a PhD student, and never have I read a paper with wording that I would describe as "convoluted."

What field are you in, because I wonder if this makes a difference? I'm in a highly interdisciplinary field, so perhaps that's part of the problem.
The new 'Too Big To Fail'
I seem to recall a research by Google which concluded that stress is not really an important factor in disk reliability... Can't find a link now though.

Of course, that doesn't make parent's claim any more true; just pointing out that this is probably not the reason.
Are you kidding me. Why on earth would you want to propagate that code over the internet.

You do realise that some really dumb people will actually take what you have written and go write an app (insecure and in-efficient) and that in turns has an effect on the internet as a whole.

I suggest you go and learn some PHP and think hard about repercussions of things you put into the wild
Yes, please could you add some explanation to the readme of what exactly this does? :) It looks like something that I might be interested in (I've previously rolled my own solutions, see: https://github.com/lucaspiller/1gam-january/blob/master/Make...), but yeah, I'm not going to read through the source code to figure this out.
Well if we're going to randomly speculate on such things, Scott Forstall resigned on October 29, 2012.
If its their oppinion, who is to say its wrong or that your oppinion is more correct?
Video style walkthroughs showing cool HTML5 created from scratch
Hah. OpenCL is no mess. It has a very specific spec for achieving performance. A big part of it is the data transfer from host to device and mapping or read/writing.

These high level abstractions aren't decisive on any of that and will cause pain and angst when you are really pressed for performance. C is the best for OpenCL if you want real performance.
Microsoft Cuts Surface Tablet Prices Amid Weak Demand
Is this just a function of the relative popularity of the services?
Dart ( http://www.dartlang.org ) is a attempt by Google. Of course, probably no browser except Chrome (and Opera?) will ever have the Dart VM built-in, but Dart also compiles to javascript for those other browsers.
That is still to the advantage of MS - saving on legal costs of fighting those agencies like Yahoo did.
In my case I think it actually was the drives though, it was the same model Barracuda. Looks like they're replacing them with Toshibas now, so I'm hopeful.

> BTW, I have worked with many providers but Hetzner is my favourite. Great support and very few problems.

I'll second this. Support is/was often a horror story for me, but so far Hetzner has been absolutely impeccable.

Contrast this with Mediatemple, where I once had to engage in a lengthy support battle with a chain of incredibly ignorant and condescending support staff before being escalated to a senior person who finally, finally admitted I had found huge problem with the cluster. This took several days of intermittent outages, dozens of emails, and a lot of energy...
Lamp in Retina display
What's the name of this site? I don't think it's "Use Tools For Their Intended Purpose Only News"
I think you forgot another one:

4) offsite backups
And my standard response to this standard response is: Hey it's hacker news. We hack things and share it with the world! I love it when people have the 'because I can' mentality. And through experimentation and uselessness we build experience in the serious things we have to do in life.

Edit: I accidentally a verb.
Not sure if the translation is OK, but in Norway there are a few companies tailored for people with aspergers.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=ht...
This seems right in the ballpark. The first company restores old images in photoshop. The second does various forms of programming/computer related tasks.

I'd try hooking his dad up with any of these firms, to find out how they can use the same means wherever in the world they are located.

Edit: This sentence is way off:

> Just off the old control tower on the dock, in a masonry bit beyond the old departure hall, sitting IT consultants to Cracow.

Should be along the lines of

> Close to the old control tower at Fornebu (...) sits IT consultants for Unicus.

e.g., the second company name is Unicus. First one is Pixellus.
This made me remember the guy who paints with Excel.
I have not proposed anything.

How would you suggest that decisions be made on questions where the necessary data to make an informed decision must be kept secret?

An example would be a country deciding between different weapons systems proposals for its military. An informed decision required detailed knowledge of the capabilities of the different systems, but there is no way to get that information to the voters without also getting it to every other military around the world, which would greatly aid them in producing countermeasures to the new weapons.
Shame I can no longer purchase from them because they banned me for asking for a refund on an incorrect order they messed up...
We are talking about early stage startups here. I don't think it's a good idea to hire dedicated tech support people at an early stage startup.

Hiring tech support staff is for later, when the product is solid, and the developers can't handle the flood of support requests any more.
Objective-C is really nice. I don't like Apple, but their development tools are actually fairly good, and the whole API in iOS is, if not necessarily a beautiful piece of engineering (which is subjective), at least thoroughly-documented and easy enough to learn and use. Android is terribly documented and very messy to develop on.

But yeah, it sucks that you can't do cross-platform development unless you like to be tied to a web platforms, which tends to result in inferior user experience.
You didnt meet upon Linux users, I doubt that highly, it seems the comments you got were from people who had a wish to use Linux or perhaps tried it out as a LiveCD/Wubi installation and felt they were on top of the world. Some kind of teenager fanboys.

Of all the quite many Linux users I know none would be interested in your, quite funny, article. Its just no on the radar to be interested in such articles if youve been using Linux for more than two-three months.

The problem is this fanboism and making choice of OS some kind of life-style choice and then we have flamewars like in Month Pythons Life of Brian when "Peoples Liberation party and "party for Peoples Liberation" fight.
>Nor is exchange BCC a copy to the NSA - again someone would have noticed.

True, but what about Windows Phone vs. Android (with Google's apps, not just a FOSS build like Replicant) vs. Apple? Which is the lesser evil for your privacy?