skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at a company where my entire (too large) reporting change turned over, and yet we were still displaying all the symptoms. It was horribly demotivating to always be blocked, and to have even the simplest of fixes wait months to get deployed.

In our case, the biggest problem seemed to be siloing. Developers were not allowed to touch ANY systems, even the QA and Dev environments. If we wanted to deploy a fix for QA to verify, and the SysAdmin team was busy, it simply didn't happen - often for weeks. The same was true of database problems - if there was even a small flaw in the SQL, I had to sit around and wait for them to come up with something new, put it through our system, and then I could copy and paste it.

The problem was it had been going on for far too long, and was too entrenched. Any new manager who got hired just slid into the current "way we do things" - there was too much momentum.

The various fixes that were attempted were all either counterproductive or pointless. The most common was to "slow down" the process to reduce the number of bugs that got pushed out, which was maddening. There would be other fads (A Kanban board nobody used was one of them)... we also tried to switch to estimating time using fibonacci numbers for no reason anybody could figure out.

We also had sprints that the manager-du-jour would try to revive. They were never meaningful. Instead, when the sprint was over, we'd go through the tasks assigned to us and bump them to the next sprint in Jira.

We went through a couple different managers (and VPs of Engineering/CTOs/etc). The biggest practical difference between them was how much they cared about the trappings of work - that is, how much they cared that developers were at their desks at time X, how angry they got when they saw a non-work website open when they walked by, etc.

None seemed interested in fixing the deeper problems. None seemed able to change the fundamental cultural preference for silos, gates, and an ever slowing pace. None seemed incredibly concerned that a developer who spots a bug and wants to fix it would be embarking on a journey that would involve almost a dozen people, countless "gates", and probably months of time. (First QA needs to verify the bug, then requirements needs to specify what fix they need, then DB team needs to make any SQL changes... and of course managers need to specify priority...).

The company was ultimately sold off at a steep discount.
Towards the end of the article, Mr. Bryne touches on a topic that is at the heart of a city devoid of culture --- people who buy large swaths of property and then do not live here. We don't need rent control, but we do need to build affordable housing instead of luxury condo after luxury condo for people to use a few weeks out of the year. The least expensive average rental price for a studio is $1481/month. Landlords require you to earn 40x the monthly rent. That's $60K a year. That's a nice living in most places in the US. In NYC, it's just scraping by. http://www.mns.com/manhattan_rental_market_report
This reminds me of a quote in Machiavelli's The Prince about Mercenaries:

> I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy with chalk in hand; 1 and he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty.

> I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms. The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.

Source: http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince12.htm
Does that terminal emulator handle all control sequences that xterm would allow? When I tried ChromeOS, whatever terminal emulator I was using was largely worthless for me because Chrome was intercepting certain control sequences and not allowing the terminal emulator to get them.
Dwolla Launches Realtime
I think you're partly right about it being branding, and I don't think that's bad. It's okay to put a label on something to make it easier to communicate the differences. Hobbies can be many things but not all of them involve making stuff. So a Maker Faire couldn't be Hobby Faire, that's a different event. Craft Fairs tend not to involve things like electronics or say, fire or robotics. And if you can hook into the mystique, like you say, to bring more people in to make new stuff, fine by me.

I personally do cringe a bit at "Maker" the same way I cringe at using "creative" as a noun but it has value.
(We)Blog: The new, hyper-social blog
Even std::string today isn't perfect and on more than one project I have replaced it. :\
According to FutureCrypt.com, time-release encryption can be used for Sealed Bids, Competitive Proposals, and Press Releases. So things like sealed bids for government RFPs could be transmitted electronically rather than "sealed" in a FedEx envelope. Full disclosure: I own FutureCrypt.
Frontend Engineer?!?
Personally I find git log easier to handle than an enormous list of tags.
I have a book of jokes from the 1970's. One of the jokes is "if it weren't for the muggings, there would be no human contact in New York." I remember reading it recently and finding it so anachronistic. The idea of getting mugged in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn seems so alien to me today (though I remember as a visitor in the early 1990's the same areas seemed quite post-apocalyptic).

My point is... take off the rose colored glasses.
What is the bottleneck you're hitting at 300 concurrent users? Is everything hosted on a single box? You might see better performance if you had a separate database and app server if CPU or disk I/O is the bottleneck.
Reminded me of http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html, which equates selling your company to hiring someone else to manage it full time. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to focus on anything else.
Using Amazon CloudFront for Video Streaming
Geezers saying today's start-ups are only social cloud services for pets is the modern version of the "get off my lawn" cliche.

Stop saying it, plz. It's not how old you are, but how old you sound.

(I'm 45, btw).
India’s audacious plan to pair mobile payments with national ID card
They say Americans should learn that 100 years is not a long time just as Europeans should learn that 100 miles it not a long distance.

What if we were in year 95 of the 100 year supply? How would you feel then?
This is exactly what Toronto is trying to do by subsidizing housing in metropolitan area.

People maybe inclined to argue against subsidizing more expensive housing in downtown areas, but the cost of commuting from lower income outer areas actually increases pollution, and traffic costs. It also breaks the poverty cycle by preventing geographic and possibly cultural segregation of the lower income families.
As someone who is on the other side of the fence for this program (I'm currently a CS PhD student at Georgia Tech), I can tell you that many of the faculty are excited about online programs. Hopefully the learning process for the faculty goes smoothly and the online students have a worthwhile experience. I know I'm excited to help TA some of the courses!
Right now at Yammer we're moving our basic infrastructure stack over to Java, and keeping Scala support around in the form of façades and legacy libraries.

The link you provided doesn't contradict that.

Language can be too simple or too complex. The tradeoff that gives maximum productivity is somewhere in the middle. And in my opinion, languages like Dart or Ceylon are much closer to the optimum than Scala.
The article makes a crappy defense as to why there is poorly written code coming from India. However the points as to the reason in the comments section are much better. In my opinion you get what you pay for. So if you hire an Indian programmer based solely on price then you made the mistake as an employer. Qualifications are not the issue but rather supply and demand. Everyone wants to pay the lowest price and get the best outcome. It works as long as supply of good developers is less than the demand. However the demand is outstripping the supply because there can only be a finite amount of experts in a field.
The article is about research on time lock systems, not about someone actually building one. Thus I think a speculative, "risky", novel idea is appropriate.
Do you have any experience with this program? BSc in Information Systems and Management looks interesting.
Search function is kinda weird. From my journal, under Update Your Journal, I searched for "space quest", and my game wasn't one of the five listed, but there was no scroll bar or way to expand results. So I went to Browse and searched there, and finally found "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" roughly 40th in the list.

The game also has 5 sequels which didn't show in the list (unless I didn't scroll down far enough), not to mention it's one of several "quest" games produced by Sierra. Would be good to show related titles on a game's page.

EDIT: also went to the "Space Taxi" page. There should be a clickable Platform listed there, so I can go find more of my favorite Commodore 64 games.
Clearly you do not rent property. Renting on AirBnB is more complicated, expensinve, hard then your typical month to month. First of all you have to clean up between guest, re-stock soap, toilet paper, napkins,... You have to furnish the place, pay all utilities including Wifi and probably cable. I have gotten calls at 10pm because a renter could not figure out how to change input on the TV from DVD player to cable. Regular landlords don't want to deal with these types of issues and probably couldn't with out a customer support staff.
Is it just me or are areas of the map that show "improvements" where you would more likely find immigration?

Just a very casual observation, may be completely wrong.
A list of all the courses:

http://www.class-central.com/initiative/gatech-oms-cs
How he's describing it is new to me but I think it makes a lot of sense. What he's describing is a business layer written in whatever language the backend team wants (likely different from the frontend team). The backend is not concerned only with the web client, their code can be used for a variety of internal and external clients. Then the frontend team can use Node, they're already hired based on their JavaScript expertise, as the UI layer.

It makes a lot of sense. With services architecture the backend team shouldn't be concerned with the web client but because of historical reasons this is typically how things work.
This looks really nice. What are the advantages compared to some comparable blogging platforms out there? Couldn't I just use Octopress or Github Pages to achieve similar functionality?
It looks really good, but I hate a lot about the demo theme. Why does anything move without me doing anything? Will the annoying bottom bar always be there? What if I can't find a high-res artsy photo? Was it necessary to knock off Medium's (distinctive) menu icon?
Juce is an incredible framework, jules is also a great guy, he implements stuff daily that the community requests. It makes creating C++ stuff even fun !
India's audacious plan to pair mobile payments with national ID cards
I have an ALM in IT from Harvard Extension School. I've always felt like a degree without any 'extensions' would be nice to have. On the other hand, I don't want to pay 7k a year for another program that's similar to the one I paid for already.

Am I even eligible? Is this program better or more challenging? Is it worth it? Other thoughts?
Ask HN: What is/was your server setup for BETA?
Given the unpredictability of demand, I am curious how people went about sizing their infrastructure for Beta. I presume the tradeoffs where cost vs performance/stability.

What was your setup and did you end up under or over estimating your infrastructure needs?
Define "simple loop". Its really hard to believe what you said .
Implementing REST APIs with Embedded Privacy
A Product Manager’s reading of Twitter’s S-1
Bluefin Robotics Acquires SeeByte
Steve Jobs announcing the first iPhone in 2007
> What's he want, more rent control?

That's one option.

> To put "the 1%" 'up against a wall'?

That kind of hyperbole is unwarranted given the very reasonable tone of the article.

> What is this article other than a whiny complaint, pandering to the envious masses?

I'd call it an astute observation by a creative, intelligent person about the city in which lives.
From the linked article:

>The slide suggests the presenter hoped to reach out to American superhackers – the NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” group – for a more specialized operation: “I am working with TAO to further examine the possibility for a Man on the Side operation.”

And from an earlier article (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa...) from Schneier:

>To trick targets into visiting a FoxAcid server, the NSA relies on its secret partnerships with US telecoms companies. As part of the Turmoil system, the NSA places secret servers, codenamed Quantum, at key places on the internet backbone. This placement ensures that they can react faster than other websites can. By exploiting that speed difference, these servers can impersonate a visited website to the target before the legitimate website can respond, thereby tricking the target's browser to visit a Foxacid server.

It seems that MITM attacks are a relatively general purpose tool. Tor users --excuse me, terrorists-- Brazilian petroleum companies, and other "new [targets] to develop"... Who's next on the list of "[targets] to develop"? I would have thought MITM attacks were a more closely held technique, but it seems they're routinely deployed.
The sentiment about startup 'engineering' is dead-on, and it should be called what it is: anti-intellectualism. Rather than thinking a bit harder, going a bit slower, or designing a bit more, it pushes you to produce faster, break faster...after all, everything's in INTERNET TIME now! Things don't usually have to be like this.

You should be deeply suspicious of any culture that drives you to work longer, rather than smarter. My real life fuels my research at work and in open source.

There will be more noise about ageism in the future, but only when the current crop of SV favorites realizes they're no longer the young hot thing. Ageism screws everyone eventually. You will be discarded and ignored.
Because that shouldn't be the responsibility of the business layer. Perhaps they are serving many apps other than just the web client, some of which don't want cached data.
He'd likely be a free man if he were in Croatia or Kazakhstan

You think Croatia or Kazakhstan don't have anti drug laws? You think they have stricter rules about police, law enforcement, or picking people up off the streets? You think those countries have nicer prisons and less corrupt judges and cops than USA?
I said, if you think Dilger is a good reporter and you can't see any wrong fact and lie in that post I can't do nothing.

Well, perhaps you also think that Appleinsider is a good site
I would say that if you need an IDE because of the size of your project, the components are too tightly coupled.

(Admittedly, I like what IDEs can do in static languages to catch errors early and improve productivity, but that's independent of project scale.)
I think he wants the 1% to leave because they're not artists but their presence drives up prices. There's only space for one of them in that town...

Kind of like no one can afford to live in SV unless they're in tech and/or are rich.

Price out the producing class, production leaves the area.
1 in 4 women die of heart disease. 1 in 36 die of breast cancer. Which one receives more attention?
PG on the Meaning of Life
I don't think it's really that different. I see "front end Ruby on Rails developer" job ads all the time and have for years. It really depends on how the company is structured as to what is the front and back ends.
True, but they have no CS degree. There are lots of online "information systems" undergraduate degrees out there.
Whole Brain Emulation and Nematodes
Unfortunately, I don't have any quick answer to this ready to hand, and I don't have remotely enough spare time right now to try and write a long one. I know that sounds like dodging the question, and maybe it is. But I see it as a symptom of myself feeling like I'm only in the early stages of really understanding this stuff.

Given all that, here's one glimpse of how I'd start to answer your question (meant only to point in the right direction, since I don't have time to build a convincing case). I think I'd say that my active definition of "equality" is something not far from "equality of opportunity" and perhaps also "equality in everyday experience". Our society seems to inhibit women from taking the same risks that it allows for men. Some of that is formalized (e.g. women in the US Army haven't been allowed to serve on the front lines) but a lot of it is buried deep in societal attitudes. I couldn't begin to trace how that happens, but everyone seems to agree on the result: men are overrepresented at the upper and lower ends of society. In our system, women are systematically "sheltered", which sounds nice, but it means that they are prevented from living up to their true potential, and that can be soul-killing.

The "everyday experience" side is (I think) closely related to that on some deep level, but probably feels quite different on the surface. It's hard to summarize, but basically I'm thinking about the many ways that women in our society are forced into a defensive mindset when they go about their daily lives.

An anecdote (presented to me as true when I saw it) may illustrate the idea: A high school teacher asked her class to imagine that they were in a shopping mall late at night and had to walk to their car on the far side of the parking lot alone: what precautions would they take on their way there? The guys in the class wanted clarification: was this mall in a bad part of town? Had they seen someone dangerous hanging around to make them worried? And so on: they wanted to know why they were taking precautions. Meanwhile, every single girl had already gotten well into a long list: "Carry my keys in my fist." "Watch under nearby cars." "Have my phone out." "No way I'm going alone: find someone to walk me out there." "I always park under bright lights close to a door." The lists go on and on.

That's just one illustration, but I hope it captures the basic idea that I'm trying to describe. (To be clear, the threat of violence is a big part of this "equality of everyday experience" factor, but far from all of it. I think that there are big doses of "hard to get taken seriously as a professional" mixed in with it, too, for example.) [The same sort of thing happens in other contexts, too: e.g. how Levar Burton always puts his hands in view outside of the car when he's pulled over by the police http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/01/levar-burton-explains-... ]
I have seen a turnaround, a dramatic one. I forget the number, but this was for something in the range of a $60MM contract. I will not identify the company or product for various reasons.

How was the turnaround accomplished? By firing everyone in charge, and replacing them with people that could actually make reasonable decisions. Some lower level people were also let go; we had some people without the chops to do the job. But that was not the main problem. The problem was consistent management focused entirely on 'process' without regard to what we were trying to accomplish. In the form of "MIL-STD-1234 says we have to produce documentation in the form of X. Therefore, produce X". Documentation does not result in a great product. Documentation can only, wait for it, document what was done. That was just one sliver of it, but entirely representative. Methodology X, process Y, 5 levels of sign offs all focused on what color ink you used or if your document's headers use the right capitalization. Just shuffling requirements along an endless document chain, without actually trying to figure out how to meet those requirements.

A really smart systems engineer who had the bosses ear was able to say 'they will never make it', he eventually listened, she was put in charge, our best engineer was finally put in charge of the SW, and from there we recovered.

In the interim we hired a bunch of outside consultants to come in. I don't see that they did anything of value. Lot's of interviewing, lots of 'do x, y, z'; meanwhile the people that had successfully produced this sort of project before were still being ignored.

That is one story. The problem was mid-level management, and only once they were all fired (actually, there were several rounds of getting rid of person A, and replacing them with an exact clone, and of course that person had identical results) did we recover. This probably doesn't apply to any place where the problem is not middle management (say, a team full of cowboys, or a PM that sends you off on wild goose chases, or whatever).
If science and medicine has the same unregulated freedom as software development, it would happen. Connected data is just the beginning. Give it 30 years, when 3D printers can make anything you need for a lab.
I'd be interested in articles on ideas for dense and affordable urban housing which side steps the blight/crime aspects. Does anyone know if there is work going on in that space like the MIT small house[1] competitions?

[1] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/1k-house-prototype-0915.h...
How to build a billion+ dollar business in big data: the Palantir case study
I think I see the insides of a Lisp hiding inside ;-)

http://www.juce.com/documentation/tutorials/valuetree-class
In my experience everything in the "Whole Apartment/House" category on AirBnB is a faux-hotel, and pretty much everything outside of it is demonstrably different (since if the owner/lessee stays at that point it's for-pay couchsurfing).

I have no idea about AirBnB's numbers but it would be interesting to see which is more popular and if they could sustainably eliminate the "whole apartment/house" faux-hotel segment they've created without going under.
Toronto has a really interesting problem to solve. 1/6 of the entire population of Canada lives in the GTA. That's simply stunning to me, especially since having spent a great deal of time up there, it doesn't feel that dense to me.

Honestly though, Toronto needs housing in the downtown areas. I haven't been there in 7-8 years but other than tourists and shopping, the streets around the business districts felt pretty dead/lifeless. It made the area very boring after 4pm. Having some residents in those areas would really improve the city quite a bit.