skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah. We really hate public transportation in this state. When we do finally imbibe, we usually suck at it (Houston Metro, especially Metro Rail). There has been a lot of talk about intercity-rail to connect Austin, San Antonio, DFW, Houston; but it never gets past talk. Fewer people are opposed to inter-city rail, but it still never gets anywhere.

>plenty of cheaper land,

Given the scandals around the Trans-Texas Corridor, I wouldn't bet on it. Specious use / threats of use of eminent domain, a Governor who fancies himself a land speculator. People got wind of those things and killed the project. They're even having trouble with the Keystone pipeline here, even though nearly every fool believes that since it is an oil pipeline, it must be good.

>and a willingness to try grand new ideas.

Don't bet on that either. More like a stodgy old stubbornness and a lack of empathy for anyone who has less. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." is the motto these days, and the demographic that controls elections here doesn't see anything broken (except Abortion, public schools, and democrats still having the right to vote).
You can also count on index funds to lose 50% of their value in two years in an upcoming crisis. The roaring 90s and mid 2000s isn't a pattern that will continue to repeat itself. The fed can't keep printing the S&P500 up forever.

I think made a great decision, but you ought to diversify your nest egg.
The difference between Google's advertisements and OpenText's is Google (usually) identifies advertisements as advertisements.
Government of India buying deep surveillance, monitoring equipment
Ask HN: How to find and assess QA/test people?
As a developer, I know I can find other developers on websites like Hacker News, Stack Overflow, GitHub, etc. And I know I can assess other developers by looking at code samples and by having them write code to actual problems in an interview.

However, when it comes to recruiting someone to work as a test engineer, I am totally stumped. I've read a few things online but I still don't know where to start.

- Where can I find QA people? Do I just advertise on a regular website?
- How do I assess their skills? Do I have them write test cases for a real program?
- What sort of skills should they possess coming? Do they need domain knowledge?

Thanks for any help you can give me.
Show HN: Extended Progress Bars for Bootstrap 3
I voted this up (tried to submit, actually), but is this article correct, or is something in this person's stack not actually programming sockets correctly?

When you call shutdown() to arrange a FIN for a socket, especially after you've sent data and received no application-layer acknowledgement, you're supposed to verify that the connection closed properly. You do this by select()ing on the socket and then read()ing 0 bytes.

The error condition (the RST segment they're getting) is signaled by the "Connection closed by peer" errno --- and -1 from read().

The reliability signals this app needs are built into both TCP and the socket programming interface, from what I can tell. The application-layer acknowledgement it wants appears duplicative.
>Talking about it endlessly here accomplishes two things: jack, and shit.

This is absolutely untrue. The longer it is kept in the public consciousness, outside of a government frame, the better. Talking about it with your grandmother is useful.
"At one company I used to work for, I also saw my leadership completely lose their minds and fire off all of the development staff, thinking we could coast with a new sales team and the product we had and pull ourselves into profitability."

LOLZ

I watched this particular face-plant occur once as well. When they actually got customers the results were hilarious. Hilarious because I was not a direct employee, mind you.

It was like having a high-end trendy restaurant with excellent branding, great decor, a great location, and no food. So they run across the street to McDonalds and order fifty Big Macs, run back over, dress them up on plates (who will notice), and...

Running out of money sucks, but this maneuver was destined to fail from the get-go. Anyone who knows anything about tech could have told them that. One smarter alternative would have been to lean the development staff -- they had to -- and hire a small number of salespeople on contract (not full time) and offer them disproportionate bonuses to bring in sales.

What they actually did was fire anyone who knew how to make anything -- and in a way that burned bridges! -- and hire a bunch of sales guys full time and at full salary. Hilarity ensued.
In the case of Google's 20%. The numbers are easy to quantify, how much does 20% of the engineering staff's time cost? How much money has the output of 20% time earned? It might be that Google thought the work was too unfocused, and outside of some pretty obvious early big hits, fairly little else of value was coming out of the work year after year.

The best way to deal with it, I think, is to have people submit proposals, pick the best, then take those people out of regular work for a few months and put them into a "lab" where they come up with an MVP. If it looks good at that stage, invest more in the idea.

but...oh yeah...Google got rid of "Labs".
For around $110 you can get a decent android phone from China, for example www.buyincoins.com/item/31125.html
The BLS says that prices have increased about 3% every year since 1993. Many people claim that this estimate is obviously too low. I'm claiming that it's reasonable. To test my claim, you suggest naming products or services that have increased in price by 0% or less, cumulatively, over the last 10 years. That's not a good test of my claim.
The former. Pascal isn't someone to be trifled with!
The Eight Myths of the E-Commerce Startup
When you're a big company, you usually get disrupted because you lost focus.

That sounds completely backwards to me. Big companies get disrupted because they are too locked-in to milking their current cash cow, and they either don't see - or consciously choose to ignore - any threat to that cash cow. It's more like a case of myopia combined with tunnel-vision, IMO.

Meanwhile, scrappy upstarts are experimenting and trying new ideas, find a better new approach, and can launch it and start growing it, while $BIGCORP remains blissfully unaware, until it's too late. Basically, the classic Innovator's Dilemma situation.

And while $BIGCORPs often ignore disruptive innovations even when they develop them themselves, it still seems to me that you're better off to be the one developing the disruptive innovation yourself, so you at least have a shot at adapting before somebody else comes along and takes your lunch money.
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Hail to the Chief(in one page)
Instamojo - Introducing Advanced Analytics
I was thinking that my response below (same city) didn't cover such cases. It would have been quite possible for someone in the right region of Europe to have lived in four countries without moving, with a lifespan of about 80 years: Austro-Hungarian Empire; Rumania; USSR; Ukraine.
Writing the hacker's way: Mess up; Tidy up
If you want it bad enough you can do it.

I think for Americans many perceive it to be too difficult. I think we put our own biases onto other countries. For example:
It's hard to get a visa here in America, so it must be hard to do it in other countries as well.
It is expensive to vacation any farther than Mexico/Canada so it must be expensive to get a job that far away as well.

An example of if there is a will there is a way, Svalbard (part of Norway) doesn't require work visa's for many passport holders including USA.
http://www.emb-norway.or.th/Embassy/Visa-and-other-permits/S...
Downvoters didn't notice sarcasm.
Heh. This should really be titled "they're using it while drinking coffee". Some of these pictures could be offices, coworking environments, desks in home offices, and so on.

But yes, the "tech products are better used next to a mug of coffee" trope is amusing :)
> proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think.

This is a completely unjust attack. Quite frankly, I have no idea what "MBA-think" even is. You make an assumption that an MBA making a bad decision is making a bad decision because they have an MBA. That doesn't pass the test. Would the same person make the same decision even without the MBA?

I always seem to get sensitive over the general MBA hate expressed at HN. As someone who spent years in web development before getting an MBA, I completely fail to connect to any of the insults typically thrown at MBA's on here. I certainly don't recall a class where we learned it's best to destroy 20% time. I don't recall ever being indoctrinated to the type of business thinking that is negatively attributed to MBA's. I recall getting an education on things like finance, economics, marketing, strategy, operations, etc. that weren't covered in my undergraduate technical degree.

I appreciate the developer-oriented aspects of software startups and Hacker News and I'm certain that many people have encountered assholes who happen to hold MBA degrees. I'm certain the degree attracts certain segments, I clearly had some as classmates, but attributing every business decision you disagree with as MBA-think is not a good approach.

This just seems like taking shots at a fuzzy construct for sake of taking shots and I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion. I'd rather see legitimate reasons why removing 20% time is a bad idea for Google's operations.
Just added this address to my AdBlock list.

The only thing left to find out is, when will they change this implementation... unexpectedly.
"I always thought I might commit suicide someday"

that explains it to me
NSA asks Washington Post to substitute language in its story
With the whole "NSA has a GMail backdoor" and "Windows Phone YouTube app blocking" thing, I really don't wannna defend Google but...

Baseless accusations like that will get you nowhere.
No, it's not. A partner's monogamy is a gift, not an entitlement.
I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums.

I've encountered a particularly nasty variation of this since Agile became a Thing, where anyone who isn't writing code or running tests or showing up in the commit logs every few minutes obviously isn't working. The idea that it might be better to step back for an hour, or a day, or even a month, to think things through properly and maybe do some throwaway prototyping before you start pushing code to production, doesn't even seem to be accepted as credible any more in some quarters.
I don't think you have a good characterization of this:

What Google has learned over the last few years is that the people they were hiring as "the best" weren't necessarily getting the job done any better than employees from more "average" backgrounds...who happen to be much more readily available in the job market.
I never thought i'd be this pedantic but the article really is difficult to read for me due to the lack of proper punctuation, namely upper-case letters. For comments, i don't mind, but for decent length articles that take more than a minute to read, it gets annoying and it removes my focus from what the words are conveying, to how the words are conveyed.
The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish
Related: here's an interview with the owner of an ISP who went through something similar. He was under a gag order for 6 years. The interview also has comments from the Lavabit owner and his lawyer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpRp-D5v5NQ
The Digital Economy Is a Massive, Escalating Energy Suck
Programming can be fun even if it's unfun after 8 hours of programming.
You're missing a ton of vim's value by doing that. The reason for those key mappings is so that your hands can remain in standard "typing ready" position, so that you can both type and navigate without moving your hands. If you are moving away to the arrow keys, at that point you're one step away from just navigating by mouse: it's really missing the point.
But he thought it was acceptable to kick her. That's abusive.
Wouldn't suicide render the life insurance contract null?
San Francisco: 10 things I hate about you
Its just "Man", not "Men," from what I can tell.
Building a Modern Cloud Empire: What the Incas & Romans Can Teach Us
Think about that again. It would take freight trucks and cars off the roads. The pipeline welders are the only ones involved with the oil business who would benefit. It also doesn't solve a congestion problem, there isn't congestion on the roads between cities. It just gets people from city to city faster, so why would rural voters support it?
> "that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire"

This was probably one of the big reasons USSR fell apart. The attempt to make everything secret made discussing real problems very difficult.

This may work.... Of course, the other serious question if nation states as we know can exist without conspiracies and if we would be better without them.
The drawbacks of freelance web development
You can only cherish what you know. And knowing something takes effort, and even more effort the more obscure (as in hidden) the thing is. Now obscurity doesn't mean the thing is less important. A watches clockwork is obscured by it's face and it's hands, but without a clockwork, the watch would be useless.

But far more people will see the watch face than the clockwork (some watches expose it partially to show craftsmanship, but we hide it as well as we can). It's not that people wouldn't cherish the work of these men if they knew it ("Oh, Engelbart, he's the reason you see clickable pictures on your screen instead of a flashing cursor" "That's pretty cool, never heard of the guy before"), but they simply don't know them.

Really, if we want these men to be appreciated for their impact, it's us that have to go out and spread the word, because we're the only ones knowing that impact. If we're not ready for spreading that awareness (I don't think it's easy to do), then appreciation of the clockwork by watchmakers is what we'll have to be satisfied with.
No. A smartphone has a fully competent web browser, which instantly places it far, far higher than a brick or flip phone.
It's seems very rude and arrogant to the other party in the conversation.

On the other hand when the 'seen' thing wasn't happening the other party could at least think that you just haven't checked the message yet.
This guy rationalized his own suicide. I read a few of this essays. He's cuckoo as a clock.
I've been tempted to try to coin the term "paleolibertarian": the original meaning of the word was much more left-leaning. http://youtu.be/RxPUvQZ3rc

I think there is an oppurtunity for a coalition between the far left and the far right over civil liberties, if only we can "agree to disagree" on economic theories until the rule of law under the Constitution has been restored. (There's even a good brand hook built-in: the Green Tea Party.)
Slightly related: some super rich CEO's learn to fly helicopters and then commute to work via MD 500 series helicopters, aka "the littlebird".

They make a lot of sense in somewhere like LA!
For me personally, it ends up being far more annoying. I really wish wikipedia would just put small unobtrusive text adverts on each page rather than the massive intrusive banners begging for money.
Because one can buy success? Like Google+? Or a lot of things Microsoft has tried recently? I realize, all else being equal, a threat of a major investment by a deep pocketed company shouldn't be taken lightly, but the idea that Google can "throw a billion dollars" at a market segment and thus dominate seems like wishful thinking by management.
Only in the first two years for many policies.
I'm very positive about FFOSes future, but if you're thinking of buying one today, bear in mind that you will be buying into an ecosystem that is under very heavy development.

My dev phone is very, very slow. I couldn't use it as my daily driver. But I look forward to the time when I can.
This is all about selling people on a dream, in my opinion. A lot of tech people work in drab settings (at least I do), so images of colorful, social environments awake a yearning for something better, for something more enjoyable. Isn't it a dream that many of us share, to earn a high income doing the things we love, all from inside a neighborhood coffee shop surrounded by smiling faces and cute baristas instead of some sterile office building?
For those who missed it, he's in the Triple Nine Society (top 0.1% iq).
Err, what? Months? It's just an API. I was once given two weeks to write a prototype of a small Android app, w/ no prior Android experience (years of Java, though) - granted, just being a prototype, it didn't need to be production-quality code (and I'm sure it wasn't), but I got the job done. I would feel perfectly comfortable putting an experienced Java dev w/ no Android experience in an Android role, provided they were working under the mentorship of an experienced Android dev.

ETA - I do agree w/ your main point, though - I wouldn't put a Java dev w/ no kernel experience on a kernel project either.
How does Google measure its programmers productivity?
I believe you made the same mistake as the article: Making sweeping generalizations about people of a certain age group without empirical evidence.
> It's hard to have a debate about the reasonableness of the government's actions

It's not hard at all. A government mandating people do things that they can't tell anybody is not reasonable by any measure.
There has to be at least one player rich and powerful enough to stand up to them.
There is an upvote limit?
But this is a way to operate on fractional stocks. Can you elaborate on "api" original speculation?
This is awesome. I thought I was pretty good at vim, but the added pressure of needing to switch modes and directions at the same time without thinking about the keys was a great learning experience! (and fun game too!)
"Replacing Rails" seems silly. You can enable the asset pipeline in development if you really want. But most people would rather deal with slower page loads in development rather than debugging minified/uglified javascript in the console.
Sending letters... You Americans should be on the fucking streets!

I'm sorry, I'm in a bad mood. As an European, all I can do is upvote these articles and donate to the EFF...
Should this series be added to the OEIS?

https://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C2%2C3%2C5%2C17%2C161%2C15681
"What if you have two buttons, search and 'be lucky'? I guess you will have to await for a controller object that wakes up that if either one of the buttons is triggered, and then test what button was pressed."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh194796.aspx
Out of habit I used jj to escape. A touch of inoremap would help this game :)
Reading this makes me sick to my stomach!
actually I think that structure is a bit overwhelming for learning angular, but when you scale up your talents I think that's the best I have seen.
Not a Googler either, but I can't believe it'd be anything like the forgiveness/permission dichotomy, since I believe they're all given explicit permission upfront. It's a part of the culture.

Rather, I've always imagined that it's not that it'd be closer to the perks like "unlimited vacation time": you can't just decide "well I'm taking the next 5 years off", because that'd be a dereliction of duty. In other words, if you have the premier release of your main project coming up in 2 weeks, it may be in your best interest to not take that 20% time for the time-being, but instead use that time to fully ensure that your project has a successful launch. But, if you don't have any big deadlines coming up soon, and you're reasonably on schedule, then by all means take the 20% time.

The 20% time is a perk, and just like many other perks, your use of the perk cannot preclude any tacit duties that you may have, which include delivering on your assigned projects.

But, this is just an outsider's view, I could be completely wrong.
I live in India now. Born in India, lived in the USA for some time. Then came back. No plans to go back ever again. (I might still visit the USA, have family there)

Occasionally I feel a twinge of regret that I'm missing out on all the "cool tech"/risk taking/fast moving SV atmosphere. But in the end, you gotta live where your heart is.
By the time robots take over software development, they will also be causing such a disruption in all other work positions that society as a whole will have to find a different paradigm from the current "everybody works for a living".
>>I don't see the career ascent about forgetting my own life. I see it as a way I can do good for this world. If I have people under my span of control, I can impart what I believe to be good in this world as a part of my leadership and management style.

I'm saving this for later, because I love it. Thank you.
The title of this article may unintentionally embody a point about 20% time, because GMail and AdSense have something else in common that Occam's razor implies was more important than Google policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit
"(Honestly, I would consider a FfOS a feature phone and not a smartphone.)"

You would. I hope to God that AT&T will, too. The whole "you -must- have a data plan if you have a smartphone" is ridiculous.

In any case, I don't think they have automatic 'smartphone' detection, and if they do, they probably won't add ZTE Open to their list any time soon.

By the way, I didn't know AT&T had a 'basic' phone data plan. Will have to look into that. I -do- happen to have a feature phone now, so it won't be hard to convince them to give me that option.
did this recently and it's been very useful. if anyone's interested ('kj' is faster for me), add to ~/.vimrc:

inoremap kj <ESC>
At first I was thought it was similar to TaskRabbit where I could just outsource all the work I don't want for a monthly subscription which I would be okay with (not saying I would use it but it would help some people). Once I realized they actually want me to do my own work I was totally turned off...
How to do mobile marketing: target, measure, analyze
Show HN: Mindsy a 'Netflix' style platform for watching video courses.
If you want to use it as a secondary phone and use it infrequently you might want to look at the pay by the day plans from T-mobile.
http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-by-the-day-cell-phone...
This is what I plan on getting when I buy one of these phones.
SEO is the most annoying. You end up writing server side templates to mimic the client side templates just for the spiders benefits. Not a unique angular problem.
wow they send to Cyprus. This must be a first!
Control freak is probably the right description, which makes it for a unbound bystander as myself a bit clinical to read.

My condolences to anyone tied to this person though.
NSA Agents Told To Withhold Target Information From Those In Charge Of Oversight
I can't believe this post was downvoted. The sarcasm in the last sentence ought to have been obvious to all.
And "leaves", not "leave".
Isn't the saying, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

By rights the Marines should have been kicking the NSA's doors in.