skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL. If I write "my girl was like a bomb yesterday", Google may only show a penis-enlargement ad the next couple of days.

One of our stupid government filters may think either me or my girlfriend is a terrorist because I wrote "bomb" and place me on a no-fly list. Has happened...
Culture fit can be a perfectly valid explanation for low performance, for example:

- You are cautious and methodical but the company needs to experiment and swing wildly.

- You excel at focusing on a project but the position requires you to multitask frequently.

- Your understanding of the company's goals has become more complete and it turns you don't find them as motivating as you expected.

- You don't adapt to some general work practices re: hours, remoting, scheduling & tracking, deployment, meetings.

- Personality clash with other team members due to age, personality, lifestyle or (dare I say) some demographic factor.

However, 'culture fit' is a reason for low performance, but low performance should still be the reason why the employee is getting fired. If the company has not identified the problem and tried a recovery plan before actually firing the employee, that company has a serious HR problem.
I'm still waiting for this: Selectively De-Animating Video (http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/deanim/)
So I can use it over SSH... which I do often. It's not like curses apps are that hard to make, especially with Python.
Or the individual is self-aware and feels that it is a good fit, but is unaware that others don't. Or they define cultural fit differently. Or they define it the same way but have different tolerances for a "good" fit. For example, the individual may be comfortable with say, an 80% cultural fit, while the team requires a 99% cultural fit.
This is because you are a software engineer, and are currently enjoying a market where there are more employers looking to hire than hirable engineers. In other words, you have a choice.
I'm not being even remotely serious. I was mocking slashdotaccount's "wish list", which amounted to little more than a list of prejudices and grievances about the United States.
I interview a lot of people. My experience is that people with degrees are better are a little better at algorithms and they know big-O complexity. People without degrees hate it when I ask big-O complexity problems.

However, I think the programming ability is something that's gained by doing and not by studying. I think the programming abilities, knowing how to debug, the languages, the IDEs, the people that know this well, are the ones who are passionate about programming.

If I interviewed you, I would ask you some basic Python questions. I would make you code and solve some simple algorithm questions. I would also ask you some SQL questions. I would expect that you could write a SQL statement that does a join, a group by, uses a having clause.

If you can demonstrate this knowledge in an interview that's awesome! If the interview doesn't go well, don't worry too much about it. Try to learn what you didn't do well on, then try again.
Fun with Julia, Metaprogramming and Sublime Text
Maybe this is a tangent, but isn't it strange that programmers accept that a competent person could, and should, be fired, if their personality doesn't gel with whoever happened to join the company earlier than they did?

If we were digging ditches, how likely would it be that you would fire an above-average ditch-digger, for "cultural fit"? I mean, maybe it does happen (I've never worked that sort of job) but it seems to me there's a cleaner separation there between work product and the contents of one's mind or one's personal associations.

It seems to me this is an unacknowledged downside of software jobs; despite our apparent autonomy, our minds have to be very open to being molded and harnessed.
"The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, and what the students are doing with them at all times."

(Emphasis added.)

This is not in the lead, not in any way suggested by the headline, and not mentioned again anywhere in the article. So I guess this feature of the district's monitoring isn't really worth thinking much about and it's okay to condition young people to get used to it?
When I was in high school (~4-5 years ago), I was often "caught" for using a proxy to get around the firewall. Other kids were often caught, too. In both cases, the proxy would become blacklisted. However, in all other regards the school would turn a blind eye and never reprimand me because they knew I was visiting sites like gamedev.net (a game development/programming website that was blacklisted because it had "games" in the description). However, most other kids were punished because often times they were visiting porn sites and infecting the computers with viruses/malware/etc.. Unfortunately, the majority of kids (in my school, at least) fall into this camp who aren't bypassing firewalls for productive reasons, but rather for reasons that usually at least cost the school hundreds of dollars in fixing the computers.

The take-away I'm trying to convey is that, in my experience, (a) schools dole appropriate punishments -- it's not a black and white "you disobeyed rule X, which means punishment Y follows" -- and (b) the (limited) censorship is also a cost saving measure and usually warranted.
It's superficially ugly.

It's deeply ugly to have to maintain "%llu", "%lu", and various other format strings for a single (uint64_t) or indeed (time_t). It's also ugly to up-cast everything to the largest potential size whenever you use format strings.

This seems like a case of choosing deep ugliness over superficial ugliness...

"%" PRIu64 ": The time is: %" PRI_TIME_T, x, y

Seems nicer to me than:

"%llu: The time is: %lld", (long long unsigned)x, (long long)y /* time_t is signed? Who knows? */

What type would you use if you wanted to print uint128_t? %llld ?

Finally, I think rejecting a standard C header file because it is "ugly" and coming up with your own solution is unnecessarily fragmenting things, especially when it isn't clearly better (IMO it is clearly worse).
I see no fundamental difference.
Actually, I think that saying "but I behave professionally" is equivalent to saying "I am a great lover" or "I am a very humble person" - making such a statement is an automatic disqualification for the quality you are claiming.

The point I am trying to make is that if someone says "he/she is capable and behaves professionally, but the culture fit is just not there", that's when I become fairly suspicious of the circumstances.
Google didn't kill a hundred million of its own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that.
int64_t is in the ICO C(C99) standard: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n869/n869.pd...
Why I Hate Resumes and Facebook Equally
Wow. Can't believe the almighty Google failed me. Apologies.
exactly. this is the model I'm using, and while it's not quite making me a living yet, it seems to be heading that way. :-)
The difference is that when Google screws you over, you see...advertisements, maybe embarrassing ones, and maybe your personal data is given to some other company. When your government screws you over you get a hand in your rectum when you try to fly, or thrown in a prison cell, or have your home invaded by a team of soldiers. Which scares you more?
Toca Boca CEO: Scaling is a matter of trust
I have a higher-level "ideas.txt" file. It looks a lot like my TODO list:

Things to learn

Things to read

Stuff I'd like to do

I visit it every few weeks. There are entries from 25 years ago that I haven't touched, and probably never will. This year I checked off [x] Learn Python for Real, and a few other things I won't share. (Haskell is probably one of those things that will remain unchecked, until I find a project for it).
> I do not have power costs.

How do you get your power?
How about to-do lists helping you to remember things? They definitely help me. I'm the kind of person who forgets everything, and doesn't even WANT TO keep useless stupid things in my mind rather than thinking something creative. Like pay rent. It is not an automatic monthly deduction in this apartment. So I HAVE to remember, otherwise it'll be a fine. There is simply a recurring task which reminds me of that. Keeping account of things that need to be done in a big project is also a thing everyone does. The thing is, everyone (including the author of this article) maintains a to-do list in one way or the other.
Should Time Life be a company? Are they the "Scum of the earth" that people seem to thing JustFab is?

JustFab took Time Life's business model and applied it to shoes.

Yes people complain.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/misc/timelife.html

Yes there is a life lesson in there about reading the Terms of Service.

No, I don't think they are illegal.

No, I don't think they are the scum of the earth.

What do you want VC's to do? Not invest in profitable companies that operate with in the law?

At the same time most of Hacker News cheers on Uber which operated illegally, and was losing money.

What kinds of companies do you expect VC's to throw Millions at? Cause it seems like the ones that are legal, profitable, and "scummy" are good investments for a while.. Zynga springs to mind. Google... Quite a few people don't like PayPal, put them on the list...

Mostly though the more you talk about JustFab the more press they will get. How do you think TechCrunch picks stories? Based on what gets read. So the more you vote them up the more they will write about them, the more they write about them the more money they will raise.

Maybe I should piss off the HackerNews crowd so my company will get more press....
For people looking for more advanced todo systems:

1. GTD: Actionable todos with contexts (plenty of apps out there)

2. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Puts a accent on your goals (http://weekplan.net Disclaimer: my app)

3. Personal Kanban: Tells you not to start too many things at the same time (with http://trello.com)
If they just added a macro to inttypes.h, you could use that for the format specifier. If you want to print a uint32_t, you just use PRIu32.
I've been evolving towards a hybrid of the two approaches. I think To-Do lists work much better when you also have "time buckets" scheduled on your calendar. In other words, schedule time on your calendar in which you'll be able to complete or at least partially work on specific tasks and then use that time appropriately.

For example, instead of scheduling "write up a proposal for so-and-so", schedule "work for so-and-so" and then writing up a proposal could be one of several tasks needed for that project. Instead of scheduling "vacuum the downstairs floor", schedule "House cleaning" and then that's just one of several tasks you could do.

I find that when you schedule individual tasks, it gets crazy because some things take more time and other things less time and pretty soon your life has nothing to do with what you actually scheduled. (Which feels weird.) On the other hand, if you just have a bunch of ToDos and your calendar is mostly empty, you're going to be constantly feeling frazzled. A combination of the two seems more ideal.
"In fact, it's diversity of thought and experience in a team that makes a Rockstar Team" -- this, a million times this. You don't get rockstar results without deep thought and questioning everything. The most efficient way to do this, and the easiest way to create this in your company, is to build a diverse team.

I believe that this is the real secret behind Google.
"Responsive"?
http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2013/08/responsive-design-doe...
I completely agree. It feels like the industry has been hijacked by people who were actively ejected from all cliques in high school, and now they create their own cliques around them and eject people arbitrarily because "they are not like us".
I don't think it makes sense to compare Redshift to HANA. There is no way that HANA could scale the way ParAccel/Vertica scales within the same price range.

Besides all the marketing buzz SAP has been throwing it out there, how many companies actually use it with a decent amount of data (at least 10TB+ range)?
Yes, it upsets me watching the startup scene slowly mutate in to a cheap, low budget facsimile of the financial crisis. Fast money from naive investors, cynical players and unlimited wet behind the ears 20 somethings used to be the sole preserve of the financial industry.

Sadly, the same rot seems to be spreading to the tech industry and, if left unchecked, I fear will one day soon result in our own subprime/CDO style watershed moment. If (when?) that happens, it will make it a lot harder for honest/sensbile startups to attract the investment they need.
I think you're describing compression.
One of the skills, I think, of being a 10x developer is picking the right tool for the job--picking a language and level of abstraction that will as cleanly and simply solve the task at hand.

It takes a good amount of experience and knowledge to know when to, for example, prefer assembly to C to C++ to Bash to Ruby to Prolog--not only that experience and knowledge, but the wisdom to see how that choice affects the other people on your team or future people maintaining the code and environment.

(This is an area in which I wish I was further developed.)
Isn't Bootstrap itself a starter template? Why is this necessary, and how many layers of templates do we need?
I find dark pattern doesn't lend it the gravity it deserves - when you say "dark pattern" I think of sneaky ways to sign you up for mailing lists, or sneaky ways to get you to click on more ads.

Which is to say, relatively low-damage varieties of evil.

It's a whole different ball game when you're using said patterns to directly extract money from people's bank accounts.

It's a little like calling a bank robbery "shoplifting". I feel like extremely egregious violations of basic morals and ethics shouldn't be described with the same word we use to describe garden variety sketchy practices.
The Latency of Dialogue: What we lose in a stream-based culture
int64_t is a much nicer type than "long long".

"int" makes some sense. Word-size of the machine.

"short", "long", "long long" are all non-sensical. You use them when you want to trade size and range. When you want to make that trade-off, you care what their sizes are.

Instead of lower/upper bounds on their sizes, which aren't very useful, they should just have specific sizes. At which point, you might as well use uint32_t, and uint64_t in place of long and long long.

Prefer the sized int types over the "long"/"long long" ones when you can, for saner coding.

Use uintptr_t and such when you need a ptr-sized int, rather than a specific size.
There's a huge range though. There's the "Uncheck this box to not subscribe to our newsletter" versus "We're going to hide wording calling this a subscription opt-in outside of the expected eye tracking range for our audience."

We already know "people don't read online" (anywhere?), so adding words outside of the experience itself justifying their actions isn't just a "dark pattern," it's much worse.

I think dignifying it with the name "dark pattern" makes it too easy to dismiss as "oh, one of those silly things people do to get more signups" versus "Uh, this iOS app just maxed out my credit card because I let my 5 year old play PAY-FOR-POINTS 2.0 FREE EDITION."
I feel you tanbo. I've been teaching myself and considering a career change through one of the bootcamps. Always makes me wonder how I'm going to suddenly become more employable than someone with years of experience. Haven't quite figured this one out.
ethics. look it up.
I almost quit my last job because of culture fit. The other programmers were almost impossible to work with. Being new to all their products, business model, and source code, there are a lot of questions to be asked when things aren't document and done in very strange ways.

The office had all the stereotypical 'bad' co-workers: the guy who turns every discussion into an hour-long argument, the guy who's never in the office, the guy who doesn't check or reply to emails, all backed by the boss who doesn't make anyone accountable.

I got along with the rest of the staff great. Graphics, sales, customer service... But the developers were just un-socialble, bad at communicating, and full of bad habits.

I felt so frustrated, there were a few times I almost walked out the door. It'd take me 2 days of chasing something around a product (that could have been answered by myself, a year later) to find a fix or answer a 'why?'

But I stuck it out. When we hired our next developer, I was put in charge of getting him up to speed. The boss was impressed with how much information I had prepared from him and that he knew I started with 'nothing'.

It may have backfired because he never really go to the point where he didn't need handholding, but at least he didn't feel as frustrated as I did for the first 6 months.
> I'm not saying it's wrong in software, but it is an unacknowledged downside to the job

But it is an upside as well. It could be a sign that the team and the position is not at the same level as a ditch-digger. Because it is a creative position, relating to communication, and working with others, unable to work with others for whatever reason (language, culture, different approaches to solving problems personality) matters. Flipping burgers, digging ditches, picking apples, selling cars, culture fit amongst the group of workers matters but not in the same degree.

On the other side of the argument, places shoot themselves in the foot, because of this. Because ultimately what matters most if whether the person is a net benefit for the company. Maybe their personality or age or gender or religious beliefs, or sexual orientation doesn't match the average there but ask yourself this, is that more important than the benefit for the whole company. Young start-ups get all gung-ho on culture fit and by that I mean they want to hire 20 year old something that dress, walk, talk and think just like themselves. Each one of them hasn't asked themselves whether they can manage to work with someone of a different gender or different age because of the experience and perspectives they bring, they take the easy route and say "well they are not like us, and we are awesome, so they don't fit".

Anyway, two sides of the story. When it comes to things like this no matter how much we hammer at the issue there is not one clear answer. It always depends.
I'm not taking about having beers with the team or how one spends their leisure time. I'm talking saying that it is important to have a functioning social dynamic in the workplace.

For example, at Google we place a big emphasis on "Culture fit" during our hiring process, but we have a very diverse workforce. My team and I share few common interests outside of work, but we're all able to get together in a room, communicate effectively, and generally enjoy each other's company.

In the past, I have worked with people that I can't wait to get away from. With these people it was a really challenge to get good work done, because to work effectively requires good communication. It's a lot easier to communicate if you actually enjoy talking to the person.

None of this has anything to do with musical taste, hobbies, or drinking habits. It's to do with attitude, courtesy, patience, and other character traits. Each workplace is different and different kinds of people will thrive or fail depending on whether they fit the culture of that workplace.
I was going to quote the exact same sentence.

"Knowing where the iPads are at all times" is an invasion of student privacy. If a student (or their parents) claims the student's sick, but the GPS shows their iPad spent the day riding roller coasters, can they be busted?
I see what you're saying, but at the same time, a company (especially a small one) can't be "everything to everyone". But I agree that there should be concrete, identifiable problems (so you can check if they are fixable).
"second is pledging the greek-letter organization/start-up - during which your suitability for hanging-out is determined"

Like I said in another comment making a similar point, I completely agree. It feels like the industry has been hijacked by people who were actively ejected from all cliques in high school, and now they create their own cliques around them and eject people arbitrarily because "they are not like us".
Tessel: The end of web development as we know it
This argument suffers from a severe lack of historical context.

The original USA, founded on, among other principles, freedom from an overbearing government, has changed.

Actually, the USA is founded upon the need for a strong central government following the failure of the Continental Congress (under the Articles of Confederation) to yield stable governance or economic growth, culminating in Shays' rebellion (although the Constitutional Convention had already been called by that time).

The government installed following the Declaration of Independence was ineffective and proved unable to negotiate treaties or even manage its own frontiers because it was too decentralized and provided the States with too many incentives to compete rather than cooperate. And so, 13 years later, the US adopted its current Constitution, creating a much stronger central government with distinct powers over the States and strong Executive and Judicial branches in addition to a legislative branch. This was bitterly opposed by a group known as Anti-Federalists, and the famous Federalist Papers were a series of essays published in newspapers to refute their various claims and argue for a strong federal government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution#Firs...
Is that tracking that important? Did officials learn anything useful from it (other than a fact that people hate being tracked by officials)?
> USGov offering a FedCoin

i highly doubt this will ever occur - the Fed Reserve (or more correctly, the current cohort of "elite" bankers who control the Fed Resesrve) will either fight bitcoin if it threatens the dominance of the US dollar as the world currency, or the public will drag it kicking and screaming to adopt it (without much success i'd presume).

Control of currency is of utmost importance to those who are in power - and i mean really in power, not those who are voted into power like the POTUS.
That is a rigged comparison but too often that matches reality. Everyone in the team works on massive Big Balls Of Mud in C#, ASP.NET. One guy in the team builds a new app in Python with Django in one tenth the time it would take to do it in C#/ASP.NET. Is this guy a rock star? Or is this a symptom of a toxic IT environment created by incompetent management who simply have no concept of "accidental complexity" and "technical debt".

So many enterprise IT shops are effectively bankrupt due to technical debt and the only thing propping them up is the cash influx of the enterprise that owns them. This affects J2EE shops just as much as .NET ones.

And the multicore future, end of Moore's law, has effectively made all of their software, both built software and purchased software, obsolete. It is not a pretty picture, but we will see this all play out over the next few years. That is far more important than chasing after the fantasy of the 10x white knight who will save you.
It might have been difficult to combine blinking GIFs with JPEG artefacts – that said, it wasn't all that bad with the mouse on the ‘next’ link and tapping of the left mouse button to read the next slide, at least it works in Opera :)
Easy enough to calculate your destination time via software as well. I wonder if 2D time zones would reduce cancer incidence by encouraging consistent melatonin production via a daylight synchronized sleep cycle.
Djangoboot
it is absurd because every mail server and email virus checker, and firewall, and depp packet inspector ever also scans those emails.
Mocking a server for Backbone applications with Sinon.JS