skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a nice reframing of his entire essay, which was about how the employees were being abused and how that was making them feel shit and shipping inferior product.

I must have read a different article than you did.

I didn't see anything in there about how employees were being abused whatsoever. Yeah, he thought that the politics were goofy, but they always are. Yeah, he thought that it led to an inferior product, but that doesn't mean he hated it, or that he was abused.

I don't see how I've attempted to 'reframe' it in any way, but we each took dramatically different things away from that article.

> You could say exactly the same thing about illegal jobs paying under minimum wage.

Except those jobs would be... illegal? This one is, from what I read, not illegal in any way. I don't see how you can make a legitimate comparison between something perfectly legal and something expressly not.
There are plenty who serve no time, and Federal prison for white collar crimes when compared to sentencing for other crimes, is token, at least in the relative sense.
I'm glad to hear that companies such as yours that are doing this are not necessarily considering making it permanent. I read PG's original article, and although you make reference to it, I felt he was addressing a different sort of issue than it sounds like you are. In your case, you actually went out of your way to engineer internal systems that let you do things manually, and you probably could have spent the same time and engineering resources you used to do that to instead develop the automation you don't have yet.

I may be in the minority, but let me give you some perspective as a potential customer who has experienced this kind of hands-on "service" from other SaaS-y outfits: I WANT automation from your service. I have worked with 2 companies that made me jump through all kinds of hoops to get an account set up with them when I could have had a usable account provisioned and active in 5 minutes had they automated their processes. As a result, it took days, because (surprise) their employees have their hands full, and I also have better things to do (you know, actual work responsibilities and customers of my own to respond to) than to have my hands held jumping through all of your contrived and artificial hoops just to use your service. That's just a waste of my time and yours and something that only ends up causing unnecessary delays to service turn-up, and in both cases, it seriously soured my taste for the service and almost made me contemplate throwing in the towel and going with a different solution.

This isn't the feeling that you want to leave your new customers with who are trying very hard to give you their money. You mean every time we need to make a change to service parameters, I need to submit a spreadsheet with my change request to somebody that's going to plug it in on your side by hand? MAYBE 24 hours later, if I'm lucky? Forget that: I'll go with somebody that gives me an API or a web portal that I can use to make the changes myself in a matter of minutes.
Employing someone for 11 months so you can avoid paying benefits is disgusting.

Just because it's not "unusual" doesn't make it acceptable.
No it's not a sensation, it's an association that happens as rapidly as it would happen under real circumstances. And the mice were not genetically modified, the rhodopsin was delivered through a virus.

This is important because it helps us understand the way memories are encoded, however it is for very primitive and basic kinds of memory.
> you will be rewarded for doing things that SEEM frugal and cheap.

It's exactly this. Temps are used because they appear to be saving money when reported to The Boss (whoever that may be.) People seem to forget the majority of folks in these companies only care about what they need to do to keep their jobs, so if HR needs to appear to spend less money, they're going to utilize the easiest method for that to happen.

I think everyone has this image in their head that companies operate as efficiently as possible, and if they aren't doing something, there must be a good reason. Often times, this isn't the case; it's more like a freighter being held together with duct tape and shoestring, and through some miracle, it floats.
Sorry for your loss. At least you understand the dynamics of the company you've invested in and took some (big) bets. Loses happen, companies tank.

I would probably hold the stock. Someone might buy them out for their talent, or whatever is left of it. I'm sure you're deep in the red, might not be the best idea to cash out.
We built something similar last year for our internal services, but ran into problems when dealing with asynchronous code and threading context.

How do you propagate the Zipkin info from thread to thread inside your code? An example - a request comes in, we generate a new request ID and pass this down into the processing code. Part of this code executes an async call to an external service with essentially a callback (in reality, it's a scala.concurrent.Future executing on an arbitrary context or an akka actor) - how do you properly rehydrate the Zipkin info when the response comes back? The only way we could think of is some sort of fiendishly complex custom ExecutionContext that inspected the thread local state at creation time and recreates that in the thread running the callback, or just have pretty much every method take an implicit context parameter. Neither of those solutions worked well, so we've largely bailed on the concept for the bits of our code that don't execute in a linear/blocking fashion.
Most of the switches we use are still opto-mechanical, just mechanically change the connection.
What would it take to make this virus airborne?
Quick translation:
1) Researchers found neurons that are active in one context (say, mice are in a blue cage).
2) They use a genetic tool to target these neurons and make them sensitive to light
3) The researchers then deliver mild foot shocks to the mice, while activating these neurons
4) Mice are put back into the original context (blue cage), and exhibit behaviors associated with expecting foot shocks.

Makes sense, nothing too surprising but getting something like this to work is impressive.

*edit for clarity
You could wrap the whole thing in a try-catch and catch the first error to occur.

In my experience, running this with Mocha, errors are handled automatically by it()
*its descent
Google’s free Netflix promotion for Chromecast sells out in a day
These foot shocks are pretty mild. This is a bit of hyperbole...
How is this different from, say, sending straces or something similar to Splunk?
They have $39 ones :)

https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi.xml

I wish they'd let Australians buy them... They actually forbid you from buying outside your country.
I feel like everyone who has responded to me so far plugged that coax cable from The Matrix into the back of their brain stem one day and just downloaded Everything Unix. I don't really relate to a single comment.

I call it an incantation because you're on your couch eating a frozen meal at 7:30pm on a Tuesday night with your laptop in front of you. The TV is on, but it's muted so it sits in the limbo between a social coping device and a distraction for the few hours you have between the commute from work and bedtime.

Yeah, one day you want to learn more about Unix and tar and how electrons flow on a circuit board and maybe what gravity is -- like, what it really is --, but tonight you just want to get nginx set up for the first time on your linode so it can serve your hand-rolled blog and move the needle just enough so you feel like you're making some progress in life.

You've managed to use `wget` to download nginx-1.2.9.tar.gz onto your VPS. And all you want to do next is get the files out of tar.gz. You'd love to right click it and select "Uncompress" from a context menu, but it's in a terminal window.

For now you just google "ubuntu uncompress tar", click the first result, and copy the incantation into .bashrc aliased to `untar` for future reference before pressing forward into the abyss.
How do they demonstrate this is not mere classical conditioning? Perhaps the mice are simple afraid of all chambers after the shock.
It seems most likely the motivation here is to make sure all of the Googlers in SF are able to be online and thus able to work from more places. Many of Google's benefits are about making sure employees never have to stop working...
If he was hired on the promise that his contract would only be 11 months, and he knew that up front, I don't see why it's a problem. If he were just randomly fired after 11 months so that they could avoid paying the difference, then I would completely agree with you.
If it does not override state law then it's next to useless. As in any new federal law could override it so the long term protection is simply at the state level.
I edited the comment within a minute, I thought I'd caught it before it might have been seen.

This being said, creating an environment that makes people do subpar work is something of an abuse. I've had to leave two jobs previously because the structure of the position meant it was impossible for me to turn out quality work. My initial pre-edit comment overstated this considerably, admittedly, but I do disagree that there was no comment on what can be considered abuse in the essay (eg promotions based on physical attractiveness)
First, the idea that IV is a scapegoat is an amusing one. IV is the world leader in patent trolling - that is what they set out to do. One of its co-founders in fact coined the term "patent troll" while watching the practice in play at Intel. IV are relative experts in the business of patent trolling, and are doing it on a scale never before attempted by any troll. So, if you mean that HN commenters are singling out IV as a scapegoat for all patent trolls, I do not agree. It is entirely reasonable for IV to 0have to to answer to the community on the subject of patent trolling. It is their core business.

If on the other hand you mean all patent trolls, including IV, are effectively a scapegoat for the systemic problems inside the PTO, then you might have a point.

With regard to tax collecting, invention is worth something for sure. Too many patents are used for defensive purposes only, but let's leave that aside. Having rights to an invention is commonly a necessary precursor for successful innovation. With invention, usually mutliple parties can lay claim to the same "invention". There is no shortage of "inventors". Rights to inventions that are never commercialized are always difficult to value. What are they worth?

Innovators are another matter. Innovators have to take on the risk. Successful innovators are relatively rare vis a vis inventors. IV is not an innovator. They do not bring products to market. That could change in the future, but as yet we have not yet seen anything more than PR stunts (e.g. donations of vaccine refridgerators). There's no reason to think IV will ever engage in manufacturing for the benefit of any inventor outside IV. IV's business is licensing. HN commenters are rightfully skeptical of any announcement that IV is anything other than a troll.

"They actually pay inventors."

Yes, IV pays inventors... if their implicit or explicit threats of litigation are successful... and then only after IV takes a cut. Law firms can do the same thing for inventors. But I never noticed anyone stating, "They actually do pay inventors." What's your point? Of course they pay inventors. If I ask a lawyer to find a licensee for my invention (or at least get someone to agree to a cash settlement out of fear of being sued), then yes, I expect to get paid.
Considering how much we already know about the human psyche and society, and how little of that is applied because it hurts our ego and profits, that's just the predictable naive response that could be said about anything. We also know very little about humanity coping with global nuclear war, so why not simply fire off a few nukes? "everything helps"?

I say thinking comes first, then poking around in the brains of creatures that can't defend themselves. If it's that important, why not do it on volunteering humans? If it has to be fucking around with mice, why not make them like a location a lot? Why create fear? Because it's easier? Or hey who cares, it's mice, bred en masse for whatever? You know, mice may seem minor to you, but they're basically persons just like everyone. There are arguments for some medical experiments, but I still haven't heard one for this. You just said it yourself, "everything helps". So why this? If anything else would help as well, and you can't even tell me what it would help for, other than temporarily satisfying some kind of inferiority complex about not being omniscient?

And do you realize that it's the brain we're talking about? You know, just because something is there and can potentially be fully understood and manipulated, doesn't mean we should get to do that with it... I'm not sure everybody is on the same page though.

But I know everybody including me is a hypocrite. Just take free will. The idea that there likely is no such thing is a LOT older than neuroscience (even Nietzsche said that the idea is only still around because every now and then someone digs it up to disprove it haha). Yet we kinda ignore that because you know what? Life is pointless and no fun that way. So yeah, everything helps when it's mice, or someone else's brain, but we reserve the right to tell science to back off from how we'd prefer to view ourselves, don't we. And sometimes for good reason, but that can't be answered by just "is it doable". Just like "should it be made doable?" can't be answered by just "does it exist?".

I mean, before we at least got to hear about all sorts of diseases that maybe might be positively affected by X or Y, but now it's really nothing more than "but think of the brain!!!1"? If that is true, wow. I'm not going to take your word for it, but just in case, wow.
It's not unusual, but what I and some others find objectionable is this concept that people are get let go after 11 months to avoid a deeper contractual entanglement (eg become eligible for benefits or pension contributions or whatnot), regardless of performance.

This is particularly irritating to read about when full-time employees such as the manager in the story enjoy greater authority and job security despite being demonstrably less competent. That says that people who are wise enough get into management roles can get greater rewards without needing to be particularly (or at all) skillful, while people who choose to develop some operational skill or otherwise start at the bottom are suckers whose opportunities are decoupled from their competence or productivity - and there's a strong feeling that in many firms, this sorting takes place at the time of hiring, before the contract employees have an opportunity to become familiar with the corporate culture. Such a setup, where it exists, is deeply at odds with the meritocratic ideal that is heavily promoted in American culture, education and by most employers.

tl;dr treating employment like prostitution is destructive of goodwill between suppliers and consumers of labor.
Twitter util to the rescue!
https://github.com/twitter/util/blob/master/util-core/src/ma...
Hey guys, the images on the project page are missing. Here's a Pull Request that fixes that: https://github.com/twitter/zipkin/pull/278
I actually haven't lost money. I still have a 57% overall profit (at a price of $3.03).

It does suck though. Similar to how it probably feels to have your startup be acqhired. It's not a total loss - but it's definitely not what you were aiming for.
or this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/09/google-cli...
I stumbled into a lucky situation maybe 5 years ago. I posted a topic on a development forum mentioning my services and linking to a couple of examples. I received a few responses, people wanting work done for a couple hundred dollars, which would basically be a waste of time. Anyway, I get caught up with other projects, and a few months down the road someone sends me a message on AIM, saying they saw my post, and needed a quick project done in the next couple of days. Turns out they're a huge firm in New York with a bunch of Fortune 100 clients. Why on earth they sent me an instant message on some half-assed forum post, I'll never know. I ended up working for them for years and 80% of my work originated from them. It launched my career, and I quickly went from being a freelancer picking up scraps to working on big name projects and networking with tons of great people. All thanks to a random forum post, one of the few I ever posted during that time.
I don't like the model of paying for a digital object that doesn't do anything besides bypass a bit of code that makes the experience more laborious or time delayed.

I personally download these games and play the shit out of them, but never ever give them money. It becomes a different aspect of the game -- sure, I have plenty of money to give you, but I don't think I should give it for something to speed up the experience -- I mean, you designed the experience, so it becomes a personal challenge until the game becomes boring -- oh, and I never mention it to anyone else, as to remove the word of mouth part.

I happily pay for good games that don't use this mechanic and tell my friends about how rad they are. It's how I speak with my wallet.
Except those jobs would be... illegal?

I'm not talking about the legality of the job, but the argument structure. By saying this on the legality, you're effectively making the argument that as long as a job is legal, it's not abusive.
I ran a HL-2070N from 2005 to 2013 when it finally died, my only question when buying a new printer was which one of Brother's budget laser printers supported double-sided printing. Went with the HL-2270DW, couldn't be happier.

I gave the old one to my 8-year-old son to disassemble. He demonstrated what finally failed was one of the platens had actually separated from glue holding it to the axle. It was orange foam rubber, still pretty soft, I think it was for post-heating press.
You need a "WiFi modem" to use it effectively inside a building.
Could anyone give a brief summary of why the IPO was a scam and what exactly Pincus did?
IE5 and 6 were great browsers, and they were much better than their Netscape equivalents at the time. The problems came when they decided to stop any more development once they had put Netscape out of business.
IMO when IE4 came out, it was the best browser.
Correct, but that doesn't make the statement of the causes for SQLi any different.
I'm confused as for why one would let go a successful employee that worked for 11 months just not to let them work for 12th. Is there some regulation there that significantly changes the cost structure and forces this behavior? Is the change of the cost structure so great that it actually exceeds the cost of constant retraining and the risk of a team completely disintegrating like we witness in the OP article? We're not talking about digging holes there, it takes significant time even for experienced programmer to get into the project and become productive, and the knowledge transfer is always flawed and incomplete even with best intentions, I can only imagine how flawed it is between two "I'm only here for 11 months" people...
"The level of skepticism was greater than I expected," said Jim Reavis, co-founder and executive director of the CSA. "I had thought that more people would understand that these activities happen all the time in their countries as well."

Way to not get the point Mr Reavis
Zipkin is designed to piece together operations that are distributed across a fleet of systems. IE: nginx calls your rails server which calls memcache then calls your login server which hits a mysql database. It's most useful when your serving architecture is distributed across many many machines and many many different services.
Merged thanks
I did a comparison of price per GB of cheap VPS hosts recently and BuyVM is the best.

I'm with http://budgetvm.com/ myself because for the same price (as a BuyBM box), you get a ton more RAM and CPU. The problem here is they're running OpenVZ, which among other things, doesn't support certain iptables (firewall) functions.

Also you sacrifice disk space. But for the application I'm running (Riak cluster), memory is important too.
'rm' file deletion utility for GNU/Linux implementation
The Benefits of Seniority
Thanks for the excellent advice. Have you gotten any kickback from customers having to go through these new forms?
Do you mean an external antenna with higher gain, and/or an outdoor antenna and internal repeater?
We actually built something quite similar to that, but how do you avoid having to artificially insert a save() and restore(context) call all over the place? It looks to me like you'd have to do something like
val context = Local.save()
val eventuallyFoo = someServiceClient.makeCall("data").map { result =>
Local.restore(context)
//do work
}

for every single async interaction.
'SQL-injection vulnerabilities in the victim companies' websites'

/facepalm
Submitting links that are subscriber-only kind of sucks.
Yes, one can do the googlebot trick but one shouldn't have to.
I agree with you, except that beginning a piece with an argument and then following that argument with supporting evidence isn't inverted -- it's Essay Writing 101.
Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM
> "If you're going out of your way to create a new account to voice your opinion, chances are your opinion is shit."

That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? Some opinions are more unpopular than others, and sometimes recipients of said opinion aren't as restrained as one would hope when they encounter an opinion they don't like.
Look, I think federalism is stupid, and best understood as the Framers' attempt at a jobs-program for lawyers. That said, it's not unreasonable for State AG's to chaffe at a federal telecom law preempting their state criminal laws. Legislating criminal law is one of the core function of the individual states. Yes, that makes it complicated if you're an internet company and operate in 50 different states with 50 different criminal laws, but well tough nuts. At the very least, this letter is not some far-reaching attempt to gut the CDA's protections.
Tracking Jquery Ajax Errors and Exceptions
Hey forgot images in the other files. Sent another one. Sorry 'bout that. https://github.com/twitter/zipkin/pull/279
What this tells the US Gov't is that you can have money or you can have PRISM, but you can't have both.

Money (aka 'the pursuit of happiness') medium of exchange and shield against tyranny
Rocket: a hybrid approach to real-time cloud applications
precisely. chromecast is essentially a xbox killer and a platform for marrying the computing power of a desktop, the development model of the web, and the leanback experience of the TV (assuming the streaming works well).
Didn't Apple preach several times, especially at keynotes, about how they're all about the intersection between education and technology?

Seems BS if you're just going to censor the education part for your own benefits.