skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Furthermore, you yourself were pulling it in one direction (it would appear). So, then, were you also guilty of this ad-hoc influence?

Not the OP, but I would like to note that influence in this context has a couple of different flavors. One flavor is that of adding on directions/ideas/possibilities, and another flavor as that of focusing on directions/ideas/possibilities (i.e. remove clutter and narrow down your scope). It seemed to me that the OP was addressing the former with his complaint, and trying to steer them towards the latter. Which makes sense given that he/she was hired on as a 'business' person.

> Were you being micromanaged?

Again not OP, but that's kind of orthogonal to his point given that he was addressing 'micromanagement' of engineers, whereas he was hired as a 'business' person. Personally, I think that sort of quasi-outsider perspective to the whole situation gives the observation a bit more merit.

We could argue about what 'micromanagement' actually means, but usually nobody uses that word without a negative connotation, and a negative connotation in a management relationship context usually means butting heads -- which, unsurprisingly, the author claimed to have experienced himself. And there is a difference between having respectable disagreements, and the concept that the phrase 'butting heads' implies. Hence, the negative tone of the post.
It's completely dominant in the console market. That is going to change with the new generation though but if you go buy a console today, you're buying and IBM PowerPC.
Another good advice Thomas :)

I have a question. I have a friend which does interest on late payments. Not sure what his interest is like, but say something like 1-2% penalty for late payments. Do you recommend that or think it's a good idea?
What pivot opportunity? Why pivot when the pivot opportunity would involve throwing away 90% of my customer base?
> If you are okay with a few people being mad at you, then knock yourself out, but it might cause a PR issue

Worked pretty well for Rockstar Games -- just sayin' ;)
I remember this from back in the Sharper Image catalog which predates (according to my quick check) J Peterman.

In any case I'm almost certain that the original Sears Roebuck catalog did a version of this as well.
Most other posts on HN don't involve such degree of mudslinging. When they do, I think you'll find similar questions being asked.
If I'm being too literal then you're being too presumptive. I'm not sure what one can take from "Engineers were constantly told what to do." -- I gave my theory and asked for clarification (as the other HN'er did). I don't think I'm in the minority here. It seems like a pretty bold claim, after all.
I don't know. Every action you take "changes the world" even in an incredibly insignificant way. That's a much lower bar than "rebuild the internet". You say that and I'm like "O rly? So does your new internet use IPv6?"
> Most startups fail. If that's unacceptable to you, stick with Big Co.

I agree with your point, but would only like to point out that there is a middle ground between "early stage startup" and "huge corporation." I work for a small company that's been around about thirteen years, is profitable, but only has about twenty employees.

I wouldn't want to work for a huge corporation, but there are certainly alternatives to tiny startups and megacorps.
If there were any justice, the restitution that the bribing company was required to pay would bankrupt it (them?). But we know that won't happen :-(

I would have thought that at least somebody in the company would be thrown under the bus for signing the expense report for the bribes (regardless of the line item description used instead of "bribe"), though. This will allow the company to hire a new patsy to bribe new judges to continue their operation.
As another Arizona native about to leave this state for good, let me give you some advice. Don't make the mistake I made: LEAVE NOW. Arizona isn't getting better. It's getting worse. More old people are moving in. The laws and policies are getting more regressive. The homophobia, racism, and anti-intelecualism isn't getting better, it's getting WORSE.

I spent the last ten years of my professional career here and now realize that I've done lasting harm to myself by staying here. I could have been working with much more quality people in other places, and learning more from them.

Arizona doesn't want us. The old people don't want websites and technology and that crap. They just want low taxes, green grass like in Alabama/Mississippi, and no pesky dark people.
Who will those families all sue though that will 1) let them, and 2) have enough money so that all of them get reasonable restitution?
Hahahahaha. I am sure they will get the justice they desire.
The high end POWER stuff always had crazy cooling, though.
I didn't post here for you to feel sorry. I posted here so other people can learn from my mistakes.
I meant that as a general "you" -- talking about the engineers (which the claim was about). Confusing, I agree. My apologies.
> The main turnoff for me when it comes to Rails is watching other major companies like Twitter completely rewrite their application away from Rails.

I do not like Ruby and have never used Rails, but I feel your conclusion is wrong. Twitter would never have outgrown Rails (at that time they were already wildly successful) if it hadn't been the right (or at least a sufficient) choice for a prototype and initial production framework.

An overwhelming majority of web sites will never grow to the point where they need to drop Rails for technical reasons and some of them will still be hugely successful. If you reach the point where Twitter needed to switch, congratulations, you will able to afford it easily.
Pro audio and now, with the direction Apple is going with the Apple Pro/Final Cut, pro video.
Flagstaff is a nice place, but jobs are sparse and pay is low:

http://www4.nau.edu/insidenau/bumps/2008/4_23_08/knau.htm
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=485...
>"The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_Instruction_Set_Archi...
There are "doomed" companies in every batch, which is okay. Startup investing is a numbers game.

This is a great time for the company the OP is talking about to reflect on possible mistakes they've made. I take what the OP says with grain of salt, but no startup is perfect. This is the time to think about the culture they created and how they can improve it to stay alive.

Most of the time, it just takes an honest conversation with the team. Lock yourselves in a room and have an open talk about what's going on. Let no feeling go unspoken. Don't make any excuses- just focus on how you guys can be better in the future and make every effort to do that.
It has an outstandingly good name and some quirky, viral Steve Pavlina-like self-experiments by the founder.
Agreed! That was my biggest surprise - not lying but half-truths.
Here's a very thoughtful response from Rob, the creator of Soylent answering your very question:

http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...

tldr; There's room in the market for more than one non-solid dietary product, the goal of Soylent is to be a complete alternative that supports an active life rather than something that just lets you survive, ensure is expensive and low calorie.
Can you expand more on the factoring bank? Which bank are you using, and what's the process?
Regardless of the technical merits of the approach, are there that many people who care about protecting their Twitter account that badly?

I would understand a bank thinking very hard about this problem, or an email service (most bank account thefts happen not from breaking passwords but resetting them via email, so email inboxes are extremely sensitive).

But a Twitter account? Aren't they over estimating the importance of their data a bit?

I think the real reason is that they are trying to kill whatever third party Twitter clients are left.
I am stunned that Robert Mericle, who paid these judges to sentence children to his facility has apparently been able to buy himself a get-out-of-jail free card.

The message being sent here is, if YOU own a prison and YOU do this, it might cost you some extra money if you get caught (and some token prison time).
Perhaps DOJ should consider suing Pennsylvania for civil rights violation?
You don't come the engineering team with a solution already decided down to every last detail.

And you've already concluded that that is indeed what was going on at this start-up. Just from the mere use of the word "micromanaging"?

Too many biz-dev types starting companies treat their engineers like code-monkey servants, to the detriment of the product and the company.

Sorry, that might have been true a decade ago but today, everyone knows that engineering and coders rule the world at most start-ups. If anything, we may have gone too far to the other extreme where coders don't value a good business guy as much as they should.
It would seem to me (i.e. someone who knows none of the details of IBM's internal business) that if IBM is so sure that its mainframes are so much better than using "cloud" services, then they should be building a cloud solution on those mainframes to compete with the Amazons, Microsofts, and Googles of the world. It's really not that different from the lease model with their mainframes (which they invented, I believe) and they would actually make their systems somewhat relevant again.

But I'm sure that I just grossly oversimplified the problems that they are facing.
> How is Soylent different from Ensure Complete? Is it cheaper? Better made? Easier to order? Tastes better? Better for me? Higher quality?

More popular and prominent in certain demographics. Which is what "disrupt" implies, versus "improves upon."
Read my comment again. I wasn't making any statements about the Samsung conglomerate as a whole. I was only discussing the flash memory market, and in that market, Apple was indeed responsible at one time for purchasing more than 50% of Samsung's production of flash memory (this was during the heyday of the iPod Nano and prior to mainstream SATA SSDs).
> causing its stock price to plummet and forcing the company to lay off half of its workforce of 900 employees

Seems like it almost destroyed the company.

I wonder how they should've protected against this. Their source code was obviously their "secret sauce", but their engineers need access to it to work. The best I can think of is Secret Gov't style protections of no external network access, but that's hardly conducive to a productive work environment.

Maybe put some backdoors into the source to phone home, but in their case I doubt the wind turbines have wifi access.
You can turn off the combining but you can't turn off the grouping. (unless 8 reverted what vista/7 did)

Also annoying is that your only options are 'combine, without text' and 'don't combine, with text'. Why is windows so fond of using one toggle where there should be multiple toggles?
Engineers were not encouraged to think independently.
I wanted to compare the ingredients and their amounts but I can't seem to find the formula for Ensure Complete. If you know where to find it, please post a link. If not, I guess that would be one reason why Soylent is preferable to Ensure Complete.
Project94 – allocation of 1- and 2-character .org domain names
Yes, there is a Back To The Future aspect. That said, cpus are just cheaper and easier these days. POWER, as a core, might break out.
ARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes.

In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.
Given that companies, individuals, dissidents, and sitting government officials use Twitter as both public & private communication streams in many cases the security of the account is more valuable than a checking account with a couple of thousand dollars in it.
you're right, also, to make compression work, ASDF is not enough, attacker needs https://domain.tld?q=value="ASDF
Sounds like a clean solution, and very similar to smartcard authentication[1]. It improves on smartcards by showing which application is attempting to authenticate. It improves on Google Authenticator by allowing faster authentication in the common case that you have Internet access, and removing the shared secret so they can safely deploy the verification to commodity servers.

One thing that isn’t clear from the blog post is whether you can have one set of S/KEY backup codes to put in your drawer for when you lose your phone, and another set of backup codes for when the phone is offline (to use just like you use Google Authenticator). Both use cases are important.

Another question is whether Twitter intends to open the protocol and app for third parties to use, as Google did with Google Authenticator[2]. A potential sticking point is that the app probably trusts the Twitter servers to not lie when it tells the app that a particular URL in your browser wants to authenticate, and opening the app probably means depending on X.509 certificate chains in order to trust a server request.

[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms953432.aspx

[2]: https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Congrats on finding it!
"It's obvious when it comes to art and antiques. It's less obvious when it comes to technology products."

I actually agree but will add that if the product is, say, a cloud service I think the wrap will work because it can create an image in your mind and you aren't holding a physical object.

So perhaps selling boxed software it doesn't apply that much but with a cloud service you don't really know what goes on by the wizard behind everything. So you could spin some story much easier talking about how great you've got things setup or done better than your competition.

I'm reminded of all the web hosting companies that talk about and show pictures of their data centers which are actually just the place they have their machines racked at. But they don't tell you that they make it seem by wording to be their data center with the multiple feeds and diesel generators going into explicit details about things that most people don't know about (which is another way to sell to talk about things that confuse people that they, for some reason, put a higher value on oddly enough.)
Australian Startup news roundup 4th August
@2. But it's not easily harnessable, being essentially invisible, so it doesn't get as much rep. Facebook, Google, etc. are like Continents and Countries. Emails...that's the Ocean.
Funny, I saw a documentary about lawyers that showed very similar footage... =)
Cool, I'll just email MS and ask them to port Sharepoint to BSD.
You could similarly say that RIM's troubles signal the beginning of the end of smartphones.

You could say it, but I wouldn't believe it...
Please provide an example of base62 encoding. With base64, it is trivial to break 192 bits in a group of 6 bits each and assign one of the 64 characters to each (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, /, +). With 190 bits, how is the encoding done?

I'm sorry if I'm missing something trivial here.
Anecdotal, but I've found that if you play one player 'at random' where you simply draw and play the card unseen, that random player tends to do pretty well and even win a significant number of times.

I think what this draws on is the tendency of humans to interpret unexpected statements which shift out understanding as humorous. (Joke setup which leads me to expect punchline x, but what instead what follows is y.)
It seems like marketing mostly. Maybe I'm just too old to understand all these crazy kids these days, but I don't see the appeal in drinking my meals. I really don't think this is going to work out.
Are there any companies of that size out there actually using Node in production?
My first thought too. I'm going to need citations.
The article mentions 10nm process size, whereas I thought the current state-of-the-art was 20nm. Is flash memory an exception? And if so, does that also apply to DRAM? Or am I just confused?
Your UPDATE is right, attacker can probe a..z 2 times, and just choose the letter that was compressed in both of them, ignoring random compressions
Foursquare Moving Forward
>If you don't want people browsing your passwords, you can't ever give them access to your user account or your unlocked desktop. That's it, that is the entire solution.

Nope.

Just don't use Chrome. That's an even better solution.
Drones to fly over parts of Onondaga, Madison and Oswego counties
Honestly? Yes, I'd seen them, but I passed them by quickly for the same reason I ignore other "perfect" domains like "www.books.com" or "www.photography.com".

I will take another look.
True. Know your target market.
Also, this might answer the question of potential acquirers...
Rumour has it Apple have been trying to move away from Samsung for components, though.
A bad idea run by someone who has no clue about what he's doing combined with another bad idea supported by people who have no clue about what they're doing? Sign me up.
@scuzzlebot uses them... by the fact that he is an implementation of MegaHAL (http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/).

He's out of order right now. I plan to fix him when I've got time. For a while he ended up tweeting tons of nonsense with no spaces between words... my fault. Anyway I will fix him up again soon, but hope to (in my copious free time HAHAHAHAH) redo him in a more exciting way.
Right, not contrived at all.

It will be interesting to see if the New York Times refers to it as "I.B.M.'s P.O.W.E.R. technology."
interesting point that CSRF tokens break caching. People can store it in cookie, and not put into the actual HTML.
It's a shame too... so many beautiful threads.
Yes, I've read that in the past and without being rude I do not consider that to be 'thoughtful'. It's a repetition of what he's said a number of times about his goals for Soylent, but it does not answer my question.

He mentions Ensure as follows: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal." That does not tell me anything about Soylent.

Sure, he wants to make it cheaper. Can he? About a month ago I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875246 The pricing is very close between Soylent and Ensure Complete. Abbott claims you can live long term on it etc.

My suspicion is that he's comparing Soylent with the common consumer "Ensure" product which is relatively low-calorie etc.
He has OFTEN been awkward and offensive. I do not censor him nor feel any obligation to do so.
Except that nearly all of the cool kids in the community hate Express and nearly all of them believe that chaining micro-utilities together is the wave of the future. (Because, of course, researching 25 utilities takes the same time as researching one.)

Express uses a convention that is not harmonious with many of the later best practices that have been emerging.
Twitter rolls out two-factor authentication that’s simpler, more secure
I got the sense that VCs were lining up for Series A

Did they tell you that VCs were lining up for Series A? Because when you just say "you got the sense", you say little about what they said and more about how you perceived whatever they said.
http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes

Click the [+] to expand ingredients etc.
How about enough money to pay off your mafia creditors who are out for your head?
Flash and DRAM have highly regular structures, which means they tend to be ahead of everything else in terms of feature size (and also, feature size isn't an exact measurement anyway).
> The leadership was struggling with the vision of the company. It was pulled in many directions - sometimes ad-hoc based on customer feedback or angel advice.

I wouldn't call it vision problem. Vision is generally very high level. When it comes to actual implementation you need to dig 100 ft deeper into the problem.

Moreover, isn't it the case with most of the early stage startups that are yet to hit product market fit? I run my own startup and I get constant feedback form all the stakeholders. Of course, my team makes decisions based on the feedback and insights. But we are constantly evolving as a company and decision making is very quick.

In fact, from my interactions and readings even successful companies were like that. For example Google -

"Key decisions made in the cafeteria line while a founder is loading his plate with baked organic tofu"[1]

[1] Early Google Employee experience: http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2011/04/so-different-yet-so-ali...
Hi Ben!

FWIW, my biggest issue with Rails (and much of what's produced by the Ruby community) is magic: I find the amount of stuff that's implicit, either depending on naming conventions, or automatic inclusion, or overriding default language behavior, or whatever, to be absolutely maddening. And as magic, it's mostly ungreppable and ungoogleable. Trying to figure out what exactly a given line of code does can take way too long. If I was writing an app from scratch as the only developer, I suppose this would be ok, but trying to maintain an existing app, or working as a team, this is a major problem.

The (lack of) speed in my local development environment has been pretty annoying as well.
"According to The Art of Manliness..."

Seems like a very authoritative source.
Former NSA Chief on XKEYSCORE: It's Real, and It's Spectacular
Don't worry, they'll find someone with enough money to be worth suing. Anyone will do, guilty or not, so long as they have money.
"IMHO, that doesn't mean it's not shouting. "

So why did you write IBM, instead of Ibm? Or ARM, instead of Arm?
This is absolutely revolting and disgusting! Good think he got 28 years.
Hey, I had not seen it before and I enjoyed the read. So don't worry about it, and thanks for submitting.
Like it or not, this is an extremely common startup story. You have heard that 90% of startups fail, right? Each failed startup goes through some kind of phase like this.

Borderline dishonesty is also common. Every startup is trying to pitch itself in the best light possible, and they all got a hockey stick graph sitting around somewhere no matter how poorly they're doing.
Not implying that, but haven't seen something as similar and high-level before.
What are Grid Systems and Why You Need to Know About Them
I suppose he is hosting other stuff too, and nginx proxies.
My take is that it's all about the execution of creating a chip. x86 for example is a much worse ISA, but there is some research (no source on this assertion) that says at the end of the day it doesn't matter too much since the machinecode is just translated into some internal RISC code.

So, it isn't that PowerPC is doomed from a technical standpoint. Instead it's all about money, business cycle stuff. Less sales means less R&D. Less R&D means you fall behind of the competition. IBM doesn't really have the heavy hitters they used to in the chip business (Relative to Intel/ARM/TSMC). If you want the newest flashiest tech, you can't really use their fab - that sort of stuff.

Every chip technology node is getting more expensive for foundries, which means the chip market will likely naturally converge to a small number of players.
If 'raises questions about governance' means the leadership can't predict the future, then I agree. Else, this is not fair, since features were added to Python 2.6 to reduce migration pain (which incidentally enabled this single-codebase thing possible).
How BugHerd Increased Their Activation Rates By 35% Using Lifecycle Email
Thanks very much. I understand its a rough method. I will try to refine it. Any sources that I can read from? There are many sources online, but they are not curated.