skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that people sue over everything, so why deal with the hassle when you can go into defense mode early and stave off frivolous court proceedings?

I suspect that going into "don't get sued" mode actually encourages lawsuits.

I read an article a while back that indicated the doctors with the highest rate of malpractice suits were not the ones who made the most errors but the ones who were the least empathetic. There has been at least one study that concluded insensitivity and poor communication after the incident was a major factor in the decision to sue.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7911925
I would agree it has a huge potential, however a lot of that potential will not be realized until there are regulatory changes with respect to car buying [0].

[0] http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/05/25/the-fight-for-...
Github streak days 31-60: What I’ve learned
I would love to see Amazon and Tesla and a few other companies challenge and disrupt the traditional dealership model.
I know for a fact it feeds a ton of the YC companies.
I believe it's a 'miss' for the manager if they can't do the performance reviews the right way.

I worked with two folks that had previously worked at Intel. The same procedure was implemented there. There was a top 10%, a middle 80%, and a bottom 10%. This isn't a problem when working on a team of 10 to 20, but you certainly don't want to be on a team of 3 to 4. In that case, someone has to be the top and someone has to be the bottom. Once you are on the bottom once it's pretty much a 'start looking' situation.

These types of systems have their obvious drawbacks. You don't want to work with good people because the better they are the bigger chance that you'll end up on the lower end.
I'm still confused by this part “in order to meet the bell curve”. Sounds like they are forcefully ranking people poorly regardless of their performance. That doesn't make sense to me.
Well, only if you compare SF prices :)
Facebook adds star-system to pages
That would completely defeat the purpose of the extension.
These types of forced ranking systems are very tough. Microsoft has had a lot of complaints about there's. GE, on the other hand, has had success with theirs. I've seen them work successfully at large firms where they were ingrained, and the companies had other cultural norms to increase teamwork. I've seen it flop at a few software firms.

What they're good for:

- Forcing managers to make hard decisions and give real feedback. (You can't just tell everyone "You're doing fine.")

- Highlighting who at the bottom should be let go, and who a level below should replace them. (In most firms, the top 10% at a given level outperforms the bottom 10% at the level above them)

- Providing internal guidance for larger layoffs.

- Encouraging constant trimming to avoid those larger layoffs.

The problems of these systems are numerous though:

- It can discourage teams of superstars from working together on large projects. "What if only 1 or 2 out of us can be ranked high?"

- It can encourage selfish behavior and infighting if there aren't other counterbalancing forces.

- There is frequently disagreement for anyone not in the chosen group.

- Much of the differentiation is based on managers ability to fight for their employees, rather than employees actual ability.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In Marissa's defense, she wasn't hired to continue "Business as usual".
How the way we walk can increase risk of being mugged
Looking at their mobile offering, I would love for Amazon to move into the space. I am curious to know what are you lacking right now in GA that you're looking for another free solution?
How do you mean? We don't manufacture the shirts we use (yet), but I suppose we're open to it if the demand is there. Do you know anyone that's doing it well?
Which fits with the idea of "pay the price for the for the very best"
The replication you get when you combine it with Galera. If postgresql had that I would drop mariadb, but the painless replication and having multiple read write masters is too good to pass up on. Conversely if Mariadb would add the json data types that postgresql has I would probably never think about moving.
I tried to build business on it (didn't have time/resources to push it) then sell it in the past, but it didn't happen. Then I started seeing more and more value having your own, really short and easy to type URL shortener - for exact reason author wrote this post.

I plan to set it up like my personal "tiny.cc" allowing for vanity urls for easy navigations

For example:

http://c.gg/regex
http://c.gg/az
Hypocrisy, Anonymous, and Activism Policing
Google Introduces Chrome Apps Developer Tool
I think there is one quite simple aspect that both Monty and reporting around WebRTC misses in general:
there are actors involved who fear WebRTC itself, because well-working WebRTC will hurt their business.
The "war" of VPx vs. h264 is just a tool to postpone working WebRTC.

The quite obvious name is Microsoft (with Skype and Nokia). Apple and Cisco also seem to benefit from
stalled standard. Google is only one that has would benefit. Mozilla perhaps too, but Mozilla
is just a browser, with no weight in the matter.
I develop a Rails 3 web app and recently moved from MySQL to MariaDB. Well actually the guys at Rails Machine did the move for me. I don't know what all they did on their end, so can't speak much for the server admin side. We ended up making the switch since I was moving to a high availability setup with multiple DB servers.

On the web app side, I am using the mysql2 gem and made zero changes to my code. Also, I frequently import SQL dumps from MariaDB into my local MySQL development with no problems.

The only issue I had was related to some nasty SQL I had in a select in a finder (yeah I know bad practice). MySQL was returning a 0 while MariaDB returned NULL. Either way, it was my fault for messy code and when I fixed the select, everything was good.
Reporting in from the "I hate Unity" department. If I wanted to use something that looks like a mac, I would just get a mac.
Might be off topic, but for anyone interested in porting your data over from MySQL to Postgres, I found this[0] useful from the Postgres docs.

I had to edit it very little to fit how my data was stored, and imported it successfully to work within Django.

[0] https://github.com/lanyrd/mysql-postgresql-converter
What might be cool is allowing the globe's roll to be locked but instead of being rigid, allow the user to affect the roll yet bounce back once they release.
status: FORBIDDEN
errorType: AUTHENTICATION_ERROR
message: Developer Inactive
moreInfoUrl: http://developer.edmunds.com
This actually sounds quite interesting. I might just go and do it. The question is, will SO approve?

Edit: I'm guessing SO probably won't have an issue with it.
Meh stack ranking sucks. Bad move.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ran...
It's quintessentially a bait & switch. Businesses were lured in with a low flat rate, avoiding interchange rates and now square is pulling the rug and defering the rates back to the business.
As a Canadian who's never seen or even heard of a print edition of the Onion, it blows my mind that they've been around since 1988. I thought they were just a website. Even then I'm surprised the site has been around since '96. Even that's older than I would've expected.
We just switched to it at our office and the service and food have been great. You really do need to find the right mix of price, choice, and health for your company, but for us it was a great fit.
The last place i'd be bitching about my work, performance, or someone else's performance is somewhere that's persistent. It hits home when its face to face.
Generally speaking, yes, that's a problem. If you're targeting a completely different audience and you use 100% new code, then you're probably fine, but the specifics really depend on your contract and the kind of people that run your company.
Just to clarify, I don't know what problems sgrove ran into, I've asked him in IRC and will elaborate if he tells me, but at present, I dunno.

So here's what I have encountered:

Datomic's primary limitation is at the transactor level. Storage is a non-issue, especially if you're using DynamoDB. Even with PostgreSQL write-throughput was ridic because of the way they're using the database.

Transactor fail-over I'm not sure I'd take too seriously, but I don't think they'll drop any writes on the floor either.

You shouldn't attempt to run a datomic transactor on a cheapo VPS. Try to put together at least 4 gb of RAM. Which is the same as what's currently standard for consumer laptops. No excuses.

Deploying Datomic itself is straight-forward. The config is super simple and all you need as a dependency is Java. I'm actually a little puzzled that people want "Datomic as a Service". Datomic and PostgreSQL were the simplest parts of my stack to deploy.

You want beefy peers as well so as to make maximum use of the peer limitations on the license. This isn't as big of a deal as people think because you're not structuring your app the way Rails and Django apps do on Heroku. You don't do 1 beefy database + 5,000 terrible VPSes. Not only is that a management overhead (automation or not), but you're better off vertically scaling a couple peers first before running a shitload of dumb VPSes running your service.

The running assumption is that you should use DynamoDB, but PostgreSQL was seriously efficient for our purposes.

Indexing adds write overhead, but given the current limitations on what you can change in the schema online (nothing), you want to plan ahead here.

If you fail to anticipate something in your schema, you'll have to use a migration toolkit such as I plan to release soon.

The componentized nature of Datomic makes vertical scaling fairly pleasant as you can more precisely target what you're upgrading/improving.

You probably want to include a pass-through querying API in your peers accessing Datomic so that you don't have to run the REST service. This'll enable access to the data from a long-tail of servers that don't necessarily need to be that close to the data and are performing dumb queries. This solves the "but my webapp needs 100 crappy VPSes to perform!" problem.

Any kind of heavy-duty aggregation/analytical workloads against a Datomic dataset should be performed on a big peer with memcached. Use roll-ups for pete's sake! You can use a bi-temporal timeline with analytics data but I haven't fully explored the implications beyond Datomic making querying along that dimension nicer.

The Doc Brown array store presented at the Clojure meetup last night is a very interesting option for people doing multi-dimensional slicing of analytics data.

I'd personally use Datomic as a stand-in for any SQL database doing an OLTP workload, where previously I would've used PostgreSQL. Especially if history or reproducible results are important. That having been said, it appears to be adaptable to workloads I wouldn't have expected (analytics).
Apple, Google and Microsoft have a lot to learn from Amazon
Starting Washington by Paul Johnson and rereading a lot of favorites: John Boyd's biography by Coram & Seneca's Letters from a Stoic.

On the side, I am trying to finish Eisenhower's biography - 500/700 pages.
I have had 2 adults, on separate occasions, quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry they read as children. If the shoe fits, I have no problem with it.
There's also Percona's fork of MySQL.
"Maximizing shareholder value" is as pernicious an idea now as the day Friedman uttered it. At least post-2009 it's universally recognized as such:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-06/business/41816...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...

You have responsibilities other than making money. Paying your dues as a citizen is one of them.
Star Wars: Episode VII gets an official release date: December 18, 2015
I worked as an editor at an alt-weekly in 1999. It was a wildly profitable newspaper drunk on the idea that the internet was the future, and the path to the future would be paved with outrageously expensive website projects!

I'm reminded of an all-hands-on deck meeting we had on the loading dock (where trucks unloaded pallets of newspapers, hot of the presses) in which a middle-aged guy who had been promoted from account executive to something like webmaster announced "beginning tomorrow, our readers will be able to purchase a car on our website!".

I can assure you, nobody ever did. (Obviously Amazon is a whole different animal, and buying a car in person still sucks, so more power to them.)
Depends what you mean by real money, of course. There might not be super-startup-huge-exit money, but there's definitely make-a-small-business-you-enjoy money. And, more broadly, there's always money if you're willing to cut corners or be unethical. We're more interested in building something sustainable and something that makes people happy. T-shirts make people happy, and Cotton Bureau helps people make t-shirts which makes those people happy too.
I thought about the API - this is a good idea. I was thinking that I also can do a widget that people could put on their website. For example, they could put: "Top news mentioning USA in Finance category". I think that would be really useful for a lot of websites. However, no time for this now. Improving design based on feedback and looking for investors.

I didn't really get your idea about search engine. You can already type anything you want in the search bar at the top. The results then can be further categorized.

P.S. Too bad HN doesn't send out notification when someone replies, I missed your comment three days ago.
I'm using rc3 in production right now so I'm looking forward to testing this out upgrading.
Arch Linux -- OpenSSH_6.4p1, OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013 (Supports AES-GCM)
This article is lame. I'm an IBM shareholder, and I want as much good news as the next shareholder, but the conclusions the author draws are absurd. He mentions Jeff Bezos' wife's review of that book to discredit Amazons marketing strategy? No wonder why all the CIOs I've worked for who read CIO.com made so many dumb decisions.
Please make this free software (open source).
It looks really great!
I feel the same way. I loved when The Onion was in print in SF, but now I subscribe to the blog on my Kindle, and as a result read it far more often.
Yes, this is correct. Although it is capable if switching, this would cause problems that require a motherboard fix which is not implemented, so the machine runs big endian in practice. I included a wikipedia link to explain.
I'll believe "amazon is selling cars" when:

* price listed on the website is "firm" and non-negotiable

* price on website is way below MSRP

* car comes with 2-day amazon prime delivery :)

* I can get most major models I would want

IMHO referrals back to a dealer are pointless.

from my perspective, the #1 reason shopping for cars sucks (compared to flat panel TV) is that you can't get a price without dealing with a dealer. and yes, even if you call the dealer a consultant. just an awkward conversation all around.

The #2 reason shopping for cars sucks is that unless you're an absolutely savage negotiator, you'll always be wondering whether you could have gotten a better price. the current trend of non-negotiable prices sold by consultants doesn't really change that, i assume it is a clever way to disarm prospective clients.
It's not "just a government issue," by saying this you complete sidestep from the real issue which is privacy in general. The government is really not the only party that anyone should be worried about spying on them. I personally would say that any company that amasses personal data on users, as well as distributes locked devices, DRM, proprietary software, etc, is not one that anyone should support. I'm not singling out this device, all locked-down devices like this with curated "online experiences" have just as much potential for abusive data harvesting, censorship, predatory business practices, dodgy vendor lock-in strategies, and all that other good stuff that these companies love.

I agree that, as users, complaining publicly to these cathedral-like entities serves little purpose. The responsible thing to do is to be aware of it and to either avoid as much of it as possible, or to be very cautious about what you do around it (and before you go taking that to mean something specific, I mean in a general sense). I would say this matters even more when children become involved, the fact that this is an entertainment device marketed towards them is somewhat of a trojan horse. This is the reality of what you must do to retain privacy. It's perfectly feasible, it just warrants some of your attention.
so nothing triggered it? just random?
Not quite 1 click, but we have had people purchase a used car in 13 minutes. Currently we are only in Atlanta, but we are working hard on expanding nationwide.

www.carvana.com
Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes:

1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great.

2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations.

My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say putting your head in the sand is good, but setting a high bar can be better than second guessing folks in an area you're not knowledgable about.

Perhaps it's ok to make a good judgment over time, but I think there's a lot to be gained from saying, "You're the top team, I believe you can do it." If over time they struggle to make the grade, then you have to recalibrate.

This is very tough, because studies have shown that most people of all fields do believe they are better than average.

Much more on this phenomenon here -> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/

Thank you for starting this discussion.
Sorry, see the note I added above about getting a free API key, then use that to make the call.
> I feel so uncomfortable because in order to meet the bell curve, I have to tell the employee that they missed when I truly don’t believe it to be the case. [...] More often than I’d like I’m told we are executing a certain way ‘because Marissa said so.’

If you have an underproductive department with overprotective management, layoffs (and negative performance reviews) won't happen as frequently as they should.

Maybe members of management just want to protect their respective fiefdoms. Maybe they have their empathy makes it difficult to lay people off. Maybe they genuinely believe their teams are doing well. Maybe their teams actually are doing well, and exceptionally few layoffs (if any) need to happen.

Regardless, "because Marissa said so" is a perfectly valid answer. There will be collateral damage, but it's likely that she's dealing with some extremely protective, entrenched management who won't negatively review anyone on their teams unless they're forced to.
Six Totally Easy Tips For Millennials To Get Ahead In Today’s Economy
Most people seem to use Google+ like a blog, but the two column card layout on the desktop (three columns on some Google+ sites) makes it impossible to read posts in chronological order.

This is configurable. I set it back to the single column precisely because the crowded page of mostly images didn't suit me.

Can you actually add titles for Google+ posts? It doesn't seem so. This means you redundantly repeat the name of the blog author as the title of every single card/post.

People seem to have adopted the practice of bolding the first line of there post content (using asterisks) to have it stand out as a title. Seems to work pretty well, at least when scanning down a page of posts.

As for your other observations: Yeah, there's a bunch of odd clunky shit going on. Greasemonkey has been a big help for me. :)

There are also some Chrome extensions that mitigate some of the g+ UX pain.
Preferred number
Yeah, it's kind of a press release for United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau, but that's only for people who don't know who we are. Within the web design industry, we have lots of friends who would be interested to know why we're done working with clients. We tried to write something that works for everyone. We'll be writing a lot next week on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau to speak directly to those audiences.
My Problem with HN Blog Post Links
"I built a semi-successful web app. Now I am an expert on one or more of the following:

1. Business Management

2. Hiring

3. Company Valuations

4. International Relations

5. Human Computer Interaction

6. Industry Best Practices

I will confidently state my point of view as if it is fact. The tone of my blog post will convey this."
You guys should check out Voltera (http://volterainc.com). We are working really hard to make this a reality. :)
While I generally agree with you that stack-ranking is a terrible idea for software companies[1], my guess is that the goal here is "lay off a bunch of low performers who were hired over the last 10 years". How do you think they should handle that? Managers, generally speaking, are never going to rate their team member down if that means their team will be effected by the layoff.

- Trying to bulk-remove low performers is doomed to failure, don't try

- Bulk-remove on something else, like what projects you worked on instead of your rating

- Let them rank as high as they want, then let the bottom N% go regardless of whether they were technically rated "meets expectations"

- Some solution I'm not seeing?

This is an honest question -- I've never run (or worked for a long time) a company as big as Yahoo.

At Twitch, this isn't a problem because you don't have many layers of management and the number of people is small, so it's easier to get consensus on what acceptable performance is across the entire organization. But I really have no idea how you'd manage that somewhere like Yahoo.

If this isn't a one-time thing and Yahoo is moving to a permanent stack-ranking system...nevermind everything I said. But stack-ranking seems like a reasonable one-time way to cut deadwood in a very large company.

[1] And maybe in general, I'm just only experienced with software companies.
Oh, clever.

I set up plus.jamesbritt.com to redirect to my g+ profile page.

Yours is cooler. :)
Alright you guys, I'm gonna blow your minds.

Try this kind of link: profiles.google.com/[YOUR USER NAME HERE]

For example, vrypan's custom link would be: http://profiles.google.com/vrypan
All PUAs are assholes. Not all assholes are PUAs.
No, you're very badly mistaken. Are you a shill for an advertising company, by the way?

Deciding to put ads on your work means you are primarily making money by serving people ads, not from what you create.

You are now probably writing stories like "1 Weird Trick To Get People To Read This Blog..." - populist work that fulfils your essential need for pageviews. This is not content of the type you claim, whereby people think or draw meaning from the work.

That aspirational type of work normally has a small audience - at first - that wouldn't satisfy your need for advertising revenue: you can't make ends meet by depending just on that during your lifetime.

The beast of advertising only takes talent and creativity away from human society.
The Curious Case of Polywater
If you read "Straight From the Gut" by Jack Welch, you would know that this is standard practice that is supposed to weed out the bottom 10% every year.

The "GE Way" was to keep pruning from the bottom, and yes, it would mean that sometimes decent performers would get cut. In the book, there's an anecdote about how at some point, groups would take on crappy workers, just so that they could fire them for the yearly purge.