skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not give everyone the same bonus based on company performance? Make it collective good.

I don't know whether this is common in other industries, but at top American law firms, salary raises and bonuses are lockstep. That means everyone gets paid based strictly on seniority. At many firms, this even carries through the partnership ranks.

There are benefits and disadvantages to such a system. The benefit is that it reduces competition between workers, and reduces unproductive credit-seeking. When you rank people against each other, the focus ultimately shifts to optimizing to the ranking metric, which is inevitably different than actually optimizing job performance. Such systems favor people who are good at taking credit, not people who get the best results. Lockstep systems also increase cooperation: nobody avoids helping someone else or avoids working on a stronger team for fear of the zero-sum nature of rankings.

The downside is that strict lockstep systems keep you from giving superstars extra compensation. This can be a liability if you don't have a uniformly high quality of employee, because superstars will leave for companies that offer individualized compensation. That being said, the advantages of individualized compensation decrease as it becomes more difficult to achieve true measures of individual performance. Nobody complains about individualized performance ratings on Wall Street, because it's easy to compute how much money a trader made for the firm or the value of the deals an investment banker worked on. The relevant metrics are objective and hard to game. It's much more difficult to evaluate a programmer's contribution to a development team.

The most troubling thing to me about stack ranking is not ranking per se, but the fact that stack ranking is applied by HR departments. This issue has come up before in the context of hiring, and what I said then is the same thing I'll say here: HR should not be involved in hiring, or firing! It's perfectly okay to identify weak performers and fire them, but it should be an organic process that happens based on the decisions of technical leadership. HR folks are administrative people. They're there to fill out W-2 forms and keep you from getting sued by disgruntled employees. They do not have domain expertise and do not know what makes for an effective technical employee.

This is an area where tech companies need to take a page from Wall Street rather than traditional Big Corps. At an investment bank, a banker decides who to hire and who to fire, not some HR person who has no understanding of banking. To make this system tractable, firing decisions are made at a low level, early and often. That prevents getting into a situation where the organization builds up a glut of weak performers that need to be fired in some comprehensive and systematic culling.
Nothing was or could have been lost permanently. The commits were all still there, it's just that none of them were in the commit history for any branches anymore. And the entire history including sufficient info to restore the state prior to the `push -f` is all there in the reflog.

It's just a pain in the butt to restore it all, especially if in the meantime people started making new commits on top.

But if someone has commit privileges to a repo, they have the ability to mess it up, I don't see any real way around that. The UI of the client side tool(s) that made it so easy to make this mistake can perhaps be blamed.
> I think a well-designed tool would easily allow the user to undo the silly thing he just did.

Agreed. From a usability perspective, undo is always best. Especially undo that the user: 1) knows about, 2) trusts, and 3) is fast. That encourages exploration and lets users fix mistakes.

> their mistake has now limited the actions that every other user of the system can make, because the system will be modified to prevent other users from making the same mistake.

I don't think this is a black and white issue. It's not about denying all users the ability to express X ever again. I think it's more about having systems that can tell if X is an unusual or heavyweight action and say, "Hey, you're about to do X, which impacts a lot of stuff and you've never done before. Are you sure that's what you mean?"

It's velvet rope permissions, not a locked door.
It's an awesome piece of hardware, thank you for making it! I'm currently brainstorming ways to use it more extensively in the tests.

This benchmark does have a connection to virtual reality, as part of my inspiration to make it came from my experience using vr.js[1] and WebGL for virtual reality in browsers[2]. The Web isn't yet ready for VR due to latency issues, but I hope to change that!

On that note, are you guys interested in browser support for the Rift? I believe the latency issues are surmountable with effort and some cooperation from browser vendors, and I'd love to see something official in that direction (in fact, I'd love to work on something official).

[1] https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7...

[2] This is what I made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWYlTIt4j0Y&hd=1&t=1m11s
What sort of workflow are you using when you need to use --force every day?

The company I work for has at least 50 projects all using Git and the only time we use --force is when we have to clean up a major mistake (eg a premature merge to release). I can count the number of times this has happened in the past 3 years on my hands.
one man's isomorphic javascript is another man's text file...
Many boosters of NoSQL forget that relational database engines are not all the same. They evolve, and are no longer the same as they were 10 years ago when people started building NoSQL engines. In particular, PostgreSQL is not the same as Oracle or MySQL, and PostgreSQL has been evolving quite a lot in recent years to make it a stronger competitor wih NoSQL.
Pseudo classes are very slow. Take a look at the bottom of the table he had using more complex attributes. The bottom line is that when we don't know how many elements are going to be cycled, it's a good practice to think in terms of worst case scenario.
12-year-old kid learned to code on online, built 5 apps, and is speaking at SXSW
He has a point. The system they are describing in the article isn't even isomorphic. If it WAS, it wouldn't depend on node.

To clarify, if it was a true example of isomorphism it wouldn't be contingent on a single runtime environment or language.

A better example of isomorphism in computing would be two modules of code that perform the same function and have the same abstract interface but that are written in DIFFERENT languages.
I don't mind a certain amount of advertising in Linux magazines because it lets me know that the company caters to the market in the first place (which isn't always apparent).
>> "I give a ton of credit to Linus for having created git back in the day."

Back in the day? It seems like git just came out, is just a few years already like ancient times? I don't get why they can't use git? Git is used to maintain the entire Linux kernel and they want some system rarely used?

I wish people could make up their minds on what DVCS we should all be using and stick with it for 20 or 30 years.
An unfortunate accident. Makes me wonder though -- what is the worst a developer with full git commit access can do? (without having access to the actual server)

If someone sets out to mess up a repo ON PURPOSE, he can do force push. Can he also somehow trigger GC to preclude recovery? Do something else?

What are the attack vectors?
Ask HN: Why do I see ads for websites I just visited in my Facebook Feed?
It feels a little disturbing that after visiting a website like One Month Rails I see ads for that site in my Facebook feed. Is that just an ad program that looks at the cookies I have, or what? Am I being irrational by finding this troubling?
That's "monomorphic". Really!
Penetration Testing vs. Vulnerability Assessment
The Tiny Adjustment That Could Change The Course Of Your Next Interview
Half price Hacker conf HopeX tickets - Tuesday
What == does is pretty simple and easy to understand. If you have a hard time with it, use ===. Problem solved.
For those interested in GWT, I've got a similar library I'm working on for GWT, but I call it "PoA" for Page-Oriented-Architecture. The idea is to have the best of both worlds from both an SPA (Single-Page-Application) standard point, while preserving the fundamental webby-ness of URLs/pages. Of course, since it is Java, a lot of code is shared between server and client, running full performance in the JVM, plus globally optimized JS on the client.

It works by authoring all pages in HTML/CSS/WebComponents with basic MDV-style two-way databinding as separate stand-alone pages. These are then globally optimized together as a monolithic SPA application, and then code-split back into separate pieces. A servlet then processes the template on the server, does the data binding, and sends back a fully rendered bit of HTML + inlined JSON data within a single HTTP request. The JS code starts up and binds to the template and model, and then launches async loads of the rest of the compiled templates.

You get URL addressability, crawlability, fast initial page load, plus SPA-style fast switches, global aggressive optimization, offline, sharing of heap objects between pages, etc.

Initial hacked up draft of what I'm prototyping http://goo.gl/ZNpxTk
Saw this being discussed on the news, congrats on the quick release! The simplicity of your design should put the contractors to shame who tried to build something that ultimately couldn't work properly.
A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain
I just wish it were a viable development platform without having to install a *nix distro. Let me set up and run a MEAN stack out of the box, Google!
I suspect there isn't actually a lot of need for graph operations in a social network. At least, not in implementing features for the users. A distinctive thing about social networks is that although the users form a network, they are primarily social - they're interacting with their friends.

They will end up interacting with friends of friends via their friends (eg having a flamewar with your cousin's neighbour in the comments of your cousin's post about potatoes), but not with friends of friends of friends or any degree of separation further out. The queries needed are overwhelmingly local, and a boring old relational database will handle them fine.

Where a graph database might shine is in analytics over the whole network, looking for trends, hubs, clusters, etc, lthough i'm not convinced it would be any better than a relational database which supports recursive queries (as PostgreSQL does). However, this is exactly the sort of privacy-busting awfulness that Diaspora was built to escape from!
Do you still think everything in that post holds? Would be curious to read an update from two years later. A number of changes seem to be happening much faster than anyone was predicting (i.e. adoption of MOOC's, the pending adoption of online into traditional universities). I'm curious if that would have you changing any of your theses.
Indeed.

But, do not be fooled and think that we seeing the last 10x cycle.
- It's an e-commerce startup.

- I owe a lot of what went into creating this to HN because I consume 80% of my knowledge from here.

- The website is made on a YC company's platform (strikingly) using basic code I learnt from another YC company (codeacademy), and I'm working with a third YC company (crowdtilt) to launch the post-kickstarter website.

I understand why you may not find it to be directly relevant, but I love the crowd here and wanted to share it. The following is not a shameless plug but is meant to give you an insight into how much of a startup this really is: https://medium.com/entrepreneur-advice/c88326a21d42
> we can't live without some "parasites" - see gut bacteria

You made me curious to know if we would literally die without gut bacteria.

The answer is no: "humans can live without gut flora"[1].

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165247805...

(Note: no criticism is intended. I understand the larger point you're making.)
This isn't anything new...
S3 is actually not that cheap. I have well over 100 GB of data to back up (and that's not even a full backup by any means, just the stuff I don't want to lose and can't get back by redownloading and reinstalling things), which racks up a significant bill on S3. CrashPlan isn't cheap either but the cheapest ones of the bunch, so I use them instead. Actually getting the data back in the case of disaster would take a while but I could certainly restore the most important things first, then backfill the rest as I go.
Actually, the strawman here is your assertion that the NSA has set up a strawman.

Let's not forget that this article was prompted by the NSA's universal, "because, terrorism" answer to virtually every "uncomfortable" question about its secret activities aimed at Americans.
Ask HN: How would you treat a VC who turned you down but now wants to invest?
I didn't try to get in shape actually, I succeeded.

On topic though I don't even know what you're talking about. There are plenty of other mathematicians lined up to work for the government from thousands of schools around the country. There are plenty of PhDs in DC/MD/Va who have no problem taking the money at a R&D Firm or at the University they teach at.

As long as the NSA shells out money then smart people will take it.
In what circumstances is it the best choice? I get the impression that monad libraries in dynamic languages are basically toys, or are written to show off. If I'm wrong, I'd love to see examples of how you used them in a ClojureScript project, why (other than novelty value) you chose them over other approaches like atoms, and how they worked out in practice.
Agreed, I have it and it's a great laptop. The battery is pretty solid--I usually get ~5 hours out of a full charge
I tend to assume people pretend to be surprised because it allows them to be more outraged. This assumption could easily be egocentric bias, but I have difficulty seeing how any moderately informed person would be truly surprised by these 'revelations.' Some interesting specific details, sure -- but nothing particularly strange has surfaced.
I have not used Redshift in production but it's been getting pretty good reviews thus far. I did some testing using pretty small dataset which you can read more about here: http://bicortex.com/amazon-redshift-review-data-warehouse-in...
I don't think it's the answer to all data storage/warehousing needs but it does look promising and it should only get better.
You have to play by DC's rules which means you have to go the legal route. Just saying "Sorry we won't play with you anymore" won't work because there are a lot of other smart kids with PhDs on the playground.
I'm curious to see how this shared rendering between client/server plays out for non JS based frameworks such as Django, Rails, etc.

I've been feeling the burn myself—the desire to fully switch to handlebars templates in my Rails app. The expensive part would be building my API out more than I have, because I rely on associations in Rails view renders. However, gaining 1 template engine to rule front & back.
Homepage at linode.com lists 2GB Linode at $40 a month. Am I missing something?
Not so much with the usual coding standards (see "Best Practices" book etc).
Inside the Sausage Factory: Xamarin iOS/Mac 64 bit support
The Linux kernel and the NT kernel are approximately the same age.
This button, when pressed, will order Domino's pizza for you
You would need 500,000 people mining on your site all the time to match one 10GH ASIC...

Any site that constantly has 500,000 active users would have server costs that dwarf any revenue this would bring.
HSP Color Model - Alternative to HSV (HSB) and HSL
I believe this was regarding feedback about why they were choosing not to invest.
I like your comparison of SQL to JavaScript. However, personally I love SQL and always use an ORM. My vow is to never have a line of SQL in my application source code. This is perfectly doable with SQLAlchemy, though not with crappy ORM such as ActiveRecord.

Indeed, I blame ActiveRecord for making NoSQL popular. When your ORM doesn't create foreign key for you, it is a slippery slope to blatant denormalization and eventually NoSQL.

EDIT: The other party to blame would be MySQL with its painfully slow "must-make-a-copy-of-everything" ALTER TABLE.
> "I don't get why they can't use git? Git is used to maintain the entire Linux kernel and they want some system rarely used?"

They are presumably trying to use a single repo for a very large chunk of code. Large, not in the sense that the Linux kernel is large, but a repo one (maybe two or more) magnitude larger. Multiple gigabytes large, with most of those gigabytes taken up by small objects.

Git does indeed start to fall down with these sorts of repos. The thing is, if you keep on growing like that, other VCSs will as well. Even with perforce you'll hit a wall eventually.

The solution is to restructure your project, breaking it into several different repos. Understandably, large organizations capable of creating large repos like this are typically going to be resistant to large changes like this brought on by what they interpret as limitations of tooling. Doing it requires restructuring code, training, and may require extensive modification to internal systems that work with your codebase.

My perspective is that this 'limitation' of git is really a symptom of an anti-pattern that should be corrected sooner, rather than later, before you find yourself in a really painful situation (read: three years later your repo is now 10-100 times as large, and you are discovering that continuing to scale with Perforce is becoming untenable).
You get another chance next year to excel and come out on top.

A year is a long time to be passed by for additional compensation. Our technostartup environment makes a year feel even longer since the rate of change and adoption of new products is accelerating.

How do companies justify holding paltry bonus parties when teenagers are selling companies for $30 million or raising valuations at $4 billion for things that didn't exist 12 to 24 months ago?

Yearly bonuses feel like an entire lifetime passes between them. Sure, great, here's your bonus amount, but out in the real world there are still people going from zero-to-millions in the same timeframe.

Does this just go back to people are weak/scared/risk-averse and companies can exploit that sociopathically by paying someone $X while their work generates 10$X to 100$X value to the company?
What fight is that, precisely? What exact principle would you like Rap Genius to defend on everyone's behalf? Because at first glance it might seem like you are referring to the right to publish someone else's work for profit without paying them anything.
As someone who has never heard of Bayes theorem, is this good or bad? So some things would be explained well and other things over my head?
Venture Capital: How to Make the Most out of Rejection Letters
I think the following anecdote may illustrate the silliness of the ranking systems:

My wife works in a big manufacturing company (which is just slightly related to IT). She started to work in a just-opened position for some department. As the position is new, they are not sure about her obligations.

After one year, she had a end-of-year review, where her immediate boss rates her performance. Because she completed everything she was asked to (which was not a lot... given that they still are defining the role), her boss gave mainly 9s or 10s (out of 10) for her rating.

Well... apparently, nobody in that company is supposed to get 9s or 10s, as that would mean that their work is perfect, and their motto is that everyone can improve. So my wife's boss was scolded by her boss, and had to decrease my wife's ratings.

The worst thing is that my wife is the only person in her actual position, so she is not competing against anyone.

...
Let's say every mathematician agreed to no longer talk to NSA at all. NSA would just hire Computer Scientists and dump loads of money into security research. Or they would hire computer scientists to work as insiders at M$, Apple, Cisco, etc.etc. and push well hidden vulnerable code

There's no shortage of things you can do when you have a lot of money.
Part of the course requirement seems to be improving the quality of relevant Wikipedia articles: http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/fall13/projects/Projects2013.pdf
You can also write it in C and use lthread. It will be faster than what Go has to offer.

https://github.com/halayli/lthread
Developers who built this app: Michael Wasser, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos
http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/about
Yes it could be difficult to keep your job or maybe even your career. Snowden faced that same decision point.
I'll shed a tear. Some of those ad traps provided exactly what I wanted: lyrics for a song.
Go: "I have already used the name for *MY* programming language" (2009)
i've been using this for numerous projects and it works as well as advertised.

though he uses Rec. 601 Luma coefficients and I get better results with Rec 709 (sRGB)

jsFiddle here: http://jsfiddle.net/HBQrw/
For all the talk about how "MongoDB totally has SOME use cases", I've never before heard of a use case where it would be unambiguously better to use a document store. Thanks for explaining that so well.
How about an RSS/Atom feed? I'm not crazy about signing up for another email.

And what happened to the 'Ref Log'?
what kind of BS is this? DC's rules are their rules, not yours. This is like asking the mafia if they could kindly reconsider extorting you by sending a petition.
Playing to Win – How Video Games made me a better entrepreneur
There are many different ways to measure speed. For example this benchmark says nothing about page load times or JavaScript speed; Chrome might (hypothetically) be way faster than Firefox there and still score worse in this test.

> FF takes around 2-3 times as long to run the tests than Chrome.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, lower latency is more difficult to measure, so it takes more trials to get the same number of good measurements. Secondly, Firefox has longer scroll momentum than Chrome, and the benchmark waits for the scroll momentum to die down between each scroll latency measurement.
The Field Guide to Data Science
The same way you'd treat any other VC who wants to invest.

You may have an additional data point to consider if this VC behaved badly in the past.

Don't consider punishing the VC for not believing in you or something similarly silly. It's just business.
Thanks! Mind sharing your email (or pinging me)? I'd love to hear about what you found.
Hand Held High-Tech Camera Computes 3-D Images Within Seconds
I don't know nearly enough about CSS ... how does this work?
It would be awesome if they tracked something like most used repositories, not just most starred. Like https://sourcegraph.com/repos
Yes. There seem to be a lot of people with quite poor reading comprehension commenting here. The case that the article makes is something like:

1. Document stores are no good for data with non-strictly-hierarchical structure
2. All interesting data has some non-strictly-hierarchical structure

The first point is common knowledge nowadays. It's really the second point that is interesting. Moreover, interesting and correct.
To my knowledge, all the possible algorithmic optimizations have been developed and implemented since 2010 or 2011. Once you have as minimal a SHA256 implementation as possible, combined with retaining parts of the state for further calculation (as you describe), you can't really make it much faster in terms of software.

I believe the only optimization efforts possible beyond this point will be better utilization of GPU drivers (or maybe custom GPU drivers?), as well as designing new hardware.
Cool idea. I thought every day wouldn't be as special, so I went for every week. I'm looking forward to seeing some new projects...maybe some to contribute to.