skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to work with a psychopath?
Hi HN,

This is a throwaway account. I need your help to deal with somebody who has a psychopathic behaviour at my work place. Basically all he does is about self promoting himself, and he has very good communication skills. It seems that I am the only worker to have noticed it, apart from one or two colleagues. Examples of what he does:

- befriending all the managers

- spending more time writing documentation in the internal wiki than doing actual work

- posting lots of pictures of his life on facebook, which would be fine if he didn't have facebook before joining our company (we do lots of things on facebook) and presumably all his FB friends are from the company.

- organizing meetings with no purpose, where he appears to be making decisions

That guy is supposed to be my very closed co-worker, but his acting is taking its toll on me (basically he is more chatting with people he wants to please than working at his desk - and he's not at all in a manager/lead position), and for reasons I will not mention here, I can't quit my job at the moment, and so I need advices from you guys.

Thanks.
> on another note, he looks a lot like putin.

I don't see any resemblance at all.
Also when under pressure the spleen shrinks substantially which raises the level of oxygen-enriched hemoglobin.
Yeah, the constructive reals lib is really cool, and that's definitely an example where it really shines.
No offense to anyone, but I'll take that Berkeley kid any day.
> It doesn't have much to do with designing a vehicle

Err... most bicycles are not meant to reach anything at all like those speeds, so it's very much about designing a bicycle that's fit for the job.
You can only vote once in 4 years. I, on the other hand, can stop paying any private company at any point in time if I believe a company hurts me or other members of the society. I don't see how that situation makes a company less accountable.

In practice, private companies don't need to maximize profits at the expense of poor. In Russia, for example, ISPs are competing hard against each other and internet is dirt cheap, you could have a 30mbps connection for around $7/mo. No regulation.

But suppose you're right. Suppose companies would maximize profit and the way to do it would be by not providing service to poor people. It doesn't make it okay to steal money (in the form of taxes) from me. Ask me nicely and give me a REAL option to not pay, and I may as well pay even more than required. But IRS are not nice people. They make people's lives difficult at the slightest hint of tax evasion.
From One Second to the Next
On my current contract, we go to great trouble to install whole-disk, multiuser encryption on all laptops. And then we use a trivial default password, as in one of the first few you would try if you were guessing passwords. Tech-savvy people for sure, but lazy, I guess.
I think the only use case is spam. But it's a big one.
+1. So true, Vim just cannot be beat.

If you want to meet the real vim hacker, try to do some task in vimgolf.com. We will see ;)
The intern bit is disturbing to me. The trouble is, he can't actually believe this is the best decision for these kids to make. He himself started a business while still in school; he didn't slave away for someone else as "low cost" labor. His own experience tells him that the best "career stepping stone" is to create things, with friends, for yourselves. Any truly "wicked smart" kids shouldn't be making this decision and he's not doing them any favors by encouraging it.

In my own experience, offering a fairly-paid internship (ie, what they would be making as a junior full-time employee), of a few months, is a great way to evaluate a potential hire down the road. Do I expect useful work to come out of these few months and build a business plan around it? Not really, and I believe it's dishonest to do so.
I love it that these guys are experimenting with content and analytics but the stats look contradictory.

Bounce rate is 1- n_visits_with_more_than_one event/n_visits.

The default GA setup doesn't register any events except page views so "more than one event" means more than one page view.

However the charts in this article showed that while the bounce rate fell, the average pages per visit stayed constant. For bounce rate to drop you'd expect pages per visit to rise... unless there's also a new event being fired.

My guess (as suggested by some commenters here before me) is that they shipped some type of event which fires for a fraction of visitors - scrolling a certain distance down the page perhaps.

If this event fires, the visit won't (by default) count as a bounce. it will also effect time-on-site. Time on site is normally zero unless you visit another page or fire an event. In this case it's determined by the time of the last page view or event that google registers. If they did ship an "on 400px scroll" event (for instance) then for each visitor for whom the event fires for, the "time on site" will be registered as the time of the event.

For my money, I think that bounce rates for content-driven sites should actually be set by a threshold time-on-site. Most visitors don't read more than one page so it's a very weak indicator of a "bounce". Someone could read for 10 minutes and still count as a bounce which isn't a fair appraisal of a very successful article. The raw "bounce metric" makes sense for a transactional site where onepage view == no Revenue but makes little sense for a site where one ten minute read of an article is exactly what the author hopes for.
Thanks... we are taking away your stuff, so we figured enjoy something sweet till we get back 24 hrs later.
Right, so everyone in this case are local bureaucrats who are partially employed by big bad state and federal governments through handouts from taxation and monetary inflation, who don't want to show if the emperor of their local debt obligations aren't wearing any clothes (possibly because of what recognition of misallocation of resources/labor entails), because the public is not demanding it from them today?

There's gotta be money in opening this can of worms up, right?
>"I need medicine for a condition I was born with, fuck me right?"

More like fuck everybody.

Insurance companies claim pre-existing as a matter of course and will demand a letter of necessity just to waste time.

Insurance is a well-oiled machine optimized to take your money while using every trick in the book to avoid providing anything in return, particularly when it matters most.

I say this as a current customer and prior employee of the industry.
Big races are won in the time trials and mountain stages. In the former, there is no "shield". In the later, there are still tactics, but they tend to not be as important as raw climbing power unless someone makes a big mistake.
Thanks! I could have found that if I'd really wanted. It just seemed like a major omission in the article! I did recognise the sound from that clip, but that article seemed constructed to prevent you from remembering it, featuring so many very close examples that aren't actually it.
Semi-related question: is the word gross being redefined?

I only remember it being used for something physically revolting.

Lately, I've seen it used to mean "unseemingly, icky in the non-physical sense, a morally bad act".

Anyone else seen this, or know what segments are driving the redefinition? Urban dictionary stuck to old sense, but this is about the fifth time I've seen it used this way.
Julia and Python: a dynamic duo for scientific computing [video]
I think americans and russians both generally think the other country is more homogenous and more in control of their government than they are. To cite examples from US politics (because I'm American), we have many problems with the classic setup for democracy to fail: a few parties with concentrated benefits or costs and on the other side many parties with diffuse costs or benefits. Plus we have private financing of elections, and thus, as the joke goes, corporations have the best government money can buy.

Hopefully Snowden will be allow to stay in Russia; he'll have fun learning Russian though; it's a difficult language (source: I spent 4+mos at mgu studying russian full time.)
There is absolutely no connection between the two. Media Player Classic is an open-source imitation of the "classic" UI of Windows Media Player, and is only for Windows and was originally closed-source (but is now GPLed). MPlayer is an open-source cross-platform media player that doesn't have a default GUI.
Sorry, yes, I meant become publicly trade-able. I assume this is done to force companies over a certain size to open their books? Maybe I've misunderstood how it works in Ontario/Canada as well, considering the other comments mentioning the number of shareholders.
No idea. Though I do get a dry mouth quite easily.
I'm 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook
> On WebGL, we can reinvent presentation and styling entirely without sacrificing performance. Maybe keep parts of HTML, and ditch CSS entirely in favour of something better, and use a JS lib to render it all on GLES hardware, the same in every browser

I'm not sure I follow you when you say "keep parts of HTML". Are you suggesting that we should have a canvas element that spans the entire region of the page, store the actual markup of the page hidden somewhere on the page, and then parse and render that markup to the canvas element using JS+WebGl+<some CSS alternative>? Or are you saying that the browser should simply give up on rendering HTML markup, and give it over to your JS App which will render it itself using WebGL?

> We now have many competing programming languages, competing frameworks, and so on, with a few mainstream ones and improvements/replacements all the time. Rendering entire websites in WebGL enables having the same world-wide innovation in presenting web sites and web apps to users.

If the rendering is done in user/app space, I find it hard to believe there would be any uniformity at all. Everyone would end up having their own unique dialect of HTML that behaved and displayed differently in their own customized WebGL based rendering engine.

EDIT: Disregard that last bit, I misread what you were saying to imply that it would be more uniform than what we have now.
Introduction to making HTML5/JavaScript games with Coquette.js
The Economist had a great article on this the other week:
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21582282-pension...
Very awesome. Do you guys explain something about the development process or the shaders themselves? I'd love to learn a bit more about it as I'm new to the graphics party (but loving it). If you can't tell me, what should I search for to be able to reproduce a shader like that?
Snowden’s Father Says He Will Visit Son in Russia
Why Baby Boomers Are Moving to Hipster Neighborhoods
It sounds like a lot of passengers figured it out on their own.
Harvard my ass. He's trying to overthrow the incredibly lucrative University of Phoenix.

Also, his reductionist approach to higher education means Minerva will lose a lot of the quality of education and community that makes a top-tier program worthwhile.
HTML and CSS are the way they are because they, together, are markup for documents--and documents on the web are of indefinite shape. You can resize your browser window, or change your text-zoom, or insert/remove content in the DOM, and things have to reflow. Most importantly, this means that boxes containing reflowed text will get longer or shorter, and then push other boxes on the page up or down.

Because of this, it really makes no sense, in the context of an HTML document, to center something vertically--it'd just end up at some arbitrary position on top of some paragraph in the middle of the page's content, found after N/2 screens of scrolling. This is what separates an HTML document from, say, a PDF: PDF pages don't reflow, each one has a fixed height, so there is such thing as the "center" of a page on a PDF.

If the web were like PDFs, sure, it'd be easy to render it all using WebGL. But try imagining, now, writing an interactive text-layout-and-reflow engine in Javascript, to render web documents onto a WebGL canvas. How would you specify the constraints for that engine to follow? Some sort of declarative markup language based on a box model with paddings, borders, and margins, perhaps?

---

Now, on the other hand, web applications tend not to care so much about the shape of any "document"--what they're interested in is the shape of the viewport. That has completely different semantics, and can be done easily in WebGL ("viewport" being a jargon term in GL.)

But... web applications tend to embed, and rely upon, the reflow semantics of web documents surprisingly often. As soon as you want to include any controls with user-contributed content, you need that rich-text layout engine, and you can't just pre-render it all to a canvas to bring it in, since users will want to copy and paste text from it...
The old adage "If you haven't got anything nice to say..." applies here. When someone else posts a short explanation of how they created something, why do you feel the need to deride it as being "not a big deal"? Does dismissing the work of other people help you feel better about yourself?
Try asking this question at http://workplace.stackexchange.com/
Could this affect stuff like ssh key generation or HTTPS traffic on Android, as well?
Ya'll seem to be arguing apples and oranges. To get to the point, when webGL is commonplace what stops you from creating a 'structured and well declared' markup / styling language that renderers to webGL without all the HTML / CSS baggage?
When the url flashed up on screen at the end, I felt compelled to go to your site, so I'd say it worked. Very since production quality for a low-budget video. I would be highly tempted to use this service if I lived in the areas you are servicing. Nice job!
2 liters of fluid is about the minimum per day (you need more if it's very hot). It doesn't have to be tea, of course, but I have a tendency to drink nothing but tea.

Tea is often assumed to be utterly harmless and just as good as water, but I have my doubts that's still true at the volumes I used to drink it. Nowadays I drink just 2 or 3 liters.

I basically drink per pot, and one pot is about 1 liter (depending on size). Always one for breakfast, one or two at work, and maybe one in the evening. Okay, so I guess it's 4 liters. Still better than the 6 it was.
Sounds like what happened is the original reporter in Boston came across him, did some investigating, and found out how wealthy he is. Also sounds like he didn't really want the publicity, preferring to live a quiet life. If he ever intends to sell, his competitors certainly know about him, and I expect equity firms know about him as well.
I've discussed this topic of consciousness with others and there is a common visceral reaction (like the one in this comment) that is common when challenging the presumed location of consciousness, especially from programmers, and I'm curious why.

One thought I've had is that programmers (given our profession) tend to fetishize the idea that ultimately we will understand the brain well enough to recreate consciousness in machine and code. It's pretty exciting to believe that as a programmer; much like it was probably exciting to think that we were at the center of a Ptolemaic universe.

I'm okay with someone wanting to ask whether the world is really flat, even if he doesn't address what other shape it could be. I found this article to be a very interesting questioning about some assumptions we have regarding consciousness.
Presumably, if your lungs were working well enough for that to be an option, you could just breathe air.
To be fair to the interns, it is resume filler. I do, however, feel very sorry for the interns who are seniors.
I'm perfectly fine with there being a by-geeks-for-geeks-only-because-of-required-expertise exclusive internet club. That's how it used to be.
The essential reason non-tabular data shouldn't be represented as a table is because HTML tables coerce a particular presentation, whereas you can use CSS to arrange data in a tabular presentation if you want, or if you want to do it differently, just use a different set of CSS.

The whole concept of tabular data is a concession to people who insist that they have to use tables.
Haskell? Just let it fade away!
app/concerns is a perfect example of the problem I'm trying to communicate. If I want to extract code out into a concern, everyone is perfectly ok with it because Rails has "blessed" the concern pattern by providing a parent object to inherit from and a directory where concerns should be placed. As soon as Rails weighs in with an opinion, everyone is onboard.

I think the message I would like to see communicated is that we as developers are free to create app/foo if we feel like foo is a good idea. Technically there's nothing stopping it. Culturally, it's almost unheard of.

I brought up lib/ because structurally it is a free for all. Nobody looks twice if I create lib/foo and add some code there. The problem is that I don't want to put app specific code into lib. I'm not sure if app/lib is a good idea, but I feel like it would communicate the idea that it is OK to write app specific code that doesn't fit into anything Rails has approved.

Anyway, I realize my concern is very much a culture issue. That culture has its pros and cons, and if we didn't have the strong opinion to stick to MVC, we would probably end up with a ton of spaghetti code in app/lib. I just wish we could strike the right balance.
the linked article was using deterministic output from an explicitly seeded PRNG as a key. it broke with openSSL which uses setSeed only to augment, not replace, state (as you know, just being complete).

so i don't think the parent link explains the current issue.
This is exactly the same rhetorical fallacy that thecodeore made, and that I think is damaging and dishonest to propagate. Which government do you live under that subjects you to an "annual mugging"? Do you really not see a relevant difference between taxation and being forced to give up your money at gunpoint?

We can agree that some of the actual budget allocations of our governments are not ideal. That's not the point. (See what I said in response to yummyfajitas elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196119) The point is that taxation is not theft, and characterizing it as such unhelpfully distracts from the real and difficult problems of self-government.
> More like fuck everybody.

This is very true, but it's one of the reason that kids are such a dice roll. Since we, as a society, are obsessed with "what about the children", then we should by default ensure everyone has insurance from cradle to grave independent of employment.
His family sort of has a history of doing this kind of thing.
As someone who's written software for all his life, I'll posit that most "software engineers" write code like this. People don't test corner cases; they just shit out code, check that it works in the browser, and ship it. That's why the regexes like /.PNG/ are in there: they work, but they don't prevent the security problems they intend to prevent. If the engineer writing the code had written unit tests that checked various filenames, he would have discovered the bug immediately. If there were code reviews by someone who knew even the tiniest bit of Perl, the `$user_controlled_command > file` bug would be gone. If the programmer had run Perl with taint mode enabled, he would have discovered this bug instantly.

I think it's a mental thing: most people writing code never think "how could this go wrong", since they assume that they don't make mistakes. If you don't have a healthy fear of the code you write, you're not going to test the corner cases or not write complex features.

Ultimately, I'm not complaining, because buggy software is great in the context of devices that try to prevent you from doing something with your own property. I especially encourage people to write their system-level software in C and use lots of strcpy calls. It ensures that I can root my phone even though the carrier doesn't want me to.
I believe tea leaves have more cafeine than coffe beans, but coffee tends to be made far stronger than tea.

From what I understand, steeping your tea very short won't help much in reducing the cafeine in it; cafeine enters the hot water in the first half minute. You'd barely have any flavour if you steep that short.
If I'm a prospective student for this university (I'm not), I'm thinking I'm going to regret being videotaped in all of my classes several years down the line.
This is the first "let's completely overhaul university" idea I've heard that doesn't completely suck. I like the ideas of world travel and reasonable tuition, and doing away with a lot of the useless cruft of a traditional university - Minereva sounds like fun, and if I was in high school right now, I'd be applying.

That said, one possible hassle I can see with this plan is that to bootstrap an "elite" reputation, and deliver these big core courses in a useful way, you're going to need some amazing professors, and as a PhD candidate with ambitions of teaching, I'm not sure I'd want to work for this university. Teaching via email and video lectures is unappealing, and (more importantly for catching top talent), I don't think it would be a good career move - they don't have the elite reputation yet, and I feel like at the end of my "flexible short term", I'd have trouble convincing a more traditional university that my experience wasn't from some online diploma mill.
I can promise you, that despite all of the drafting in the world, his legs would still be on fire. It's not a "free ride" despite being assisted!
I have a feeling that all the people still arguing in favor of dynamic typing at all, are tilting at the windmill of static languages without type inference. Nobody really thinks those are good languages any more :)
In my tests, serialization to a hash before oj writes it out to json is the slowest part. Doing 1000 records (~30 entries each, some with nested entries) to json via OJ and as_json results in less than 20% spent in OJ and the other 80% in generating the hash.
Blood can be blue-- if you're a hermit crab.
Nelson doesn't lament that his mind wasn't adequately "cultivated" but that he wasn't taught some basic skills that he quickly, but probably painfully, acquired on the job and which presumably he found critical in his career.

This isn't a question of "mental development" but of having useful things pointed out so that you don't have to suffer whatever damage accrues from not knowing them.
I always wished Exceptions captured variable values so I could log them and not have to reproduce a bug in order to see what happened. To that end, I made https://github.com/ericbeland/exception_details. Perhaps Rails exception logging could include logging variable values at exception-time?
As a mixed Windows/Ubuntu user (sticking to I3 tiled windows manager for reference) just trying this out, I have to say this is quite impressive.

I might actually change my Ubuntu setup for this, but I still haven't decided.

Edit: To make it clear, I've considered elementaryos before. I've even booted a live-installation once or twice. But now I'm considering putting this on one of my main systems. This is snappy. This is an improvement.
> pre-existing conditions are covered under Obamacare

As someone with a spouse with a serious life-long "thing": This is why I'm so glad that it's still around. I'm optimistic that once it is in full effect, it will not bring an end to the world so we can pass fuller and better reform.