skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW, Google tried to avoid this scenario with 'snippets' which everyone was supposed to do every day. Basically you posted a snippet of what you were thinking about / working on that day which gave folks evaluating you some idea of what was going on in your head at any given time. (note that snippets were world readable)

Unfortunately, when I was there, there wasn't a lot of protection from the conflict created by your snippets, so if you wrote "tried again to convince team X to let me fix their code, they brought up objection a, b, c. Still no clarity from them on what they really want." In your snippet it would make Team X look bad, and at some point it could come back to them that you were bitching about them in your snippets (even if you were doing what you were told to do) and then they would counter-attack in their snippets, and a little sub-surface adhominem would go on for a while. Moderating your snippets made you look non-productive. It was an epic failure in leadership.
Wayyyy back in 2007 I half-jokingly made a prediction about the future of computing. The hot topics at the time were AJAX and new multi-core processors targeted at consumers. Everyone was trying to envision which language would win out by making it easy to write massively parallel programs. There were lots of articles published about Haskell and software transactional memory. The demise of C and C++, and their managed Java/C# spawn was imminent. How could you write in a language that couldn't handle multiple cores for you?

The future is here, in 1/4 of the time I thought it would take. I guess I have to go write a new prediction.

So. . .here's my prediction, taking into account the pace
of hardware development and the history of software
development. In 20 years, cheap hardware will be
ridiculously fast, but it will still look very much like
Intel hardware today. We'll have many, many CPU cores to
work with, but nobody will use a parallel programming
language designed to take advantage of multiple cores.
Instead, virtualization (i.e. VMware, Xen) will be
integrated into the operating system, and each process
will run on its own virtual machine.

Each web browser will have been expanded into a full blown
widget toolkit and have merged in something that looks
like Flash, but there will still be multiple incompatible
browsers. The latest craze will be a browser compatibility
layer written in a programming language that compiles
to "raw Javascript", and it will reduce the performance of
applications but allow you to use them anywhere.

People will set about re-writing a version of Photoshop in
the new compatibility layer, and everyone will wonder why
they'd do that, when the current version of Photoshop runs
in Internet Explorer just fine.

Edit: The lesson here is that if you want to predict the future, try to do it by making a prediction so ridiculous it could only be a joke.
This is another one of hose "better for privacy" changes that google implements to keep all of your private data in their hands while not sharing it with others unless money is involved.
It's not exactly lying by omission if there is no omission, is it? By your logic, headlines would be banned for not containing the entirety of the content of the full article.

You people keep on clinging to the idea that the additional footage somehow dramatically changes the narrative. Maybe in your mind it really does, but most people who have actually watched both would likely disagree.
JPMorgan applies for patent on bitcoin-like currency
Another point of anecdata:

Once upon a time, early in my career, I spent half a day automating and error-proofing a 15 minute task. My boss, at the time, was slightly annoyed, and slightly amused. Fast forward two months from that point, and that same task needs to be done not once, but several thousand times. My boss wanted to go get coffee before we got started, so while he was grabbing his wallet, I fired up my automated process. By the time we got back, the task was done, and the boss was annoyed at himself for being annoyed earlier, and never again questioned why I built the systems I did. I, unfortunately, was too young and too inexperienced to realize that he was an excellent boss, and left a couple years later for "greener pastures", where I encountered many "productivity is measured entirely by the time you sit at your desk" bosses.

TL;DR: I work hard to look this lazy, had a boss that recognized it, and was too dumb to realize how good I had it.
I have been "bricklayer B" in this hypothetical scenario when working at a large corporation with a terrible boss.

"Bricklayer A" was constantly rewarded for working hard. I was constantly reprimanded for wasting my time since I was deemed to have a much larger "potential," despite producing more output and with a higher quality than most others on my team.

This ended up with my leaving that team. So I can't agree that "bricklayer B" is always preferred, but I would say that a good manager would usually prefer that choice. Good managers are not easy to find.
The article kindly submitted here notes, "I would submit that the appearance of hard work is often an indication of failure. Software development often isn’t done well in a pressurised, interrupt driven, environment. It’s often not a good idea to work long hours."

I would submit that this applies to many "professional" occupations. A lawyer has to produce a draft of a brief or of a contract in time to meet a deadline set by the client's schedule, so the work output just has to get done. But the draft brief or draft contract works best to meet the client's needs if it is developed after thought, and being just-plain-busy isn't the same as thinking. "There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."[1] So, yes, whether you are a manager of programmers, or a manager of lawyers, or a manager of physicians, or of any other kind of professional, you have to know the professional's craft well enough to know what good work looks like, and you have to make sure that the professional has time to think, and usually time to confer with colleagues to get a reality check on the thinking. (The article kindly submitted here gives the example of the author learning from the original coder of a body of code how the code worked. The code was elegant, but it wasn't easy to see the elegance at first glance.)

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#Misattributed
I attended Caltech about 35 years ago. I kept my notes, but looking at them now without recalling the context of the lectures makes them a bit on the incomprehensible side.

I sure wish those lectures had been recorded and I could refresh my memory on the more interesting ones.

I've also seen some of the MIT online videos, and my recollection is the Caltech lectures I attended were of comparable quality.
All your positions are in SF :(

Would you be interested in a remote (east coast) Rails engineer w/ 8 years experience?
I know everyone here will tell me to get off their lawn, but I just built a Pentium II computer about 2 months ago. I pulled most of it out of my uncles house when he died about two-ish years ago, and decided that its time to do something with this crap that's lying around. It's not quite the first computer in the house (a Compaq 486[1]), but it runs all the things it could.

http://theandrewbailey.com/article/119/Project-Twentieth-Cen...

http://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Cen...

[1] it was (what would now be called) an all-in-one, and it came with some Windows 3.1 thing called TabWorks. And before anyone asks, no, I didn't program on the thing. Not every programmer has programmed since he was in diapers. Also, Windows didn't come with a programming environment back then and search engines sucked ass.
That's basically the question I'm getting at below and am wondering about, how does that 6 person team structure scale when you get to be a 500-1000 person company.
The Future of Probiotics
Now if only it worked on iPhone...
The image is a bit misleading. That is not an automated bricklayer, it's just a bit more ergonomic way for human workers to lay bricks.
Because if you stop serving up the remote reference before it gets requested by a particular client, it won't be there.

If it's archived {immediately,on first request} permanently thereafter, there's now another copy outwith your control.

Edit: moreover, the images are requested locally by the user's browser. Google doesn't get a look at them at any point[1]. Whereas now, they get a permanent copy for free, because they're doing you such a favour!

[1] Directly, anyway. I guess they could use js to get the requests and headers and submit them back to the mothership, but on slow connections that could be pretty obvious.
Truthfully I rather have my privacy invaded by thousands of small companies getting only a tiny chunk of my info, than by one behemoth with access to everything I do online.
> If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.

If the elected actors interfere with the news you read, you also stop being a responsible citizen. We simply never had a chance.
> Update: I'm not sure when this feature will actually be rolled out.

FTA: This new improvement will be rolling out on desktop starting today and to your Gmail mobile apps in early 2014.
I've worked in a Dilbert mill or two where managers mistake movement for progress. The thing is, if you aren't ready to quit, then you must play the game. And by that I mean play some actual games. Like Call of Duty or Halo or something. Just come in to the office on some nights and weekends, get your frags in, yet still look like you are "working hard and sacrificing" like the bozos who are only there because they can't design/program well. :-)
When a hacker gets your credit card info, you're liable for $50 and have the hassle of a few days without your card until you get new one.

When a hacker gets your bitcoin wallet, they can empty out your entire account.
Looks professional, my feedback is to reduce/simplify words on homepage box and consider using bold.

Example: "1. Verifies your application process and checks for any issues"

could be..

"1. <bold>Verify:</bold>Find errors automatically"
Bouncing badly typed addresses is more useful for users than stymieing spammers. However, a spammer doesn't need to know if an existing gmail address is being actively used or not.
http://example.com/trackingimage.php?email={yourusername}@gm...

Or, if they snip the GET variable for whatever reason (I don't see them doing this):

http://example.com/gmail/{yourusername}/trackingimage.php

Or even:

http://example.com/{emailidfromadatabase}/trackingimage.php

This tactic is already in use by most mass email companies.
LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs
> I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as

It will protect you from it being as a read receipt if (and I'm not sure if this is the case, though it should be trivial to test by sending email with images served from a site you control to an email you control without opening it) Google requests the image once it has received the email.
500Mbps Internet over phone lines might solve fiber’s “last mile” problem
are you too stupid or too lazy to use a proper web search engine?
Ahh! The good ol' days. I started programming with Turbo Pascal when I was around 7 years old, I still remember the green glow of the CRT and the clickety-clack of oh-so-heavy mechanical keyboards. Man, those were good times, interrupting the BIOS, corrupting sectors and playing paratroopers deep into the night :D
Women face global disparity in scientific publishing
LOL, I posted this same message on the blog comments and they deleted it. Nothing like censorship to stifle opposing opinions.
Going through the thread calling people names. Keep it classy teamgb.
Now it will seem to the sender that 100% of e-mails sent to Gmail recipients have been opened, rendering actual measurement impossible. A unique ID is useless if all unique IDs are requested all the time.

I'm sure they built-in rate-limiting to prevent DDOSing the sender's image server...
Mass-email senders probably would put a unique identifier in the image url (different for all users), so Google will open each image, because it can't know before loading them that it's the same image.
I think the GP's point is exactly that: With a physical contractor, you want it done, to spec, as quickly as possible. Anyone can tell that B is a better bricklayer than A, because we can see that the same work got done, but more efficiently, and are happy because we had to pay them less.

With software, it's hard for people to tell that the finished product for Team B is as good as (or better than) that made by Team A, and therefore all they can look at is often effort. They see team A responding to alerts, alarms, production issues, etc, all night and weekend, and then see you cruise out at 5.
We have about 14 teams. The topic of management is a great one. We've shifted our approach over the years. That story might make a good blog article in itself. We've ended up with what's sometimes called a "matrix" structure, where people's day-to-day activities are based on what the team is doing, but each role (dev, tester, UX) reports into a manager (who's usually not on the team) with expertise in that domain. We've mostly avoided middle managers who only manage -- nearly all our managers are also on teams and, if they're devs, code. But we've also learned that having more than five direct reports can get pretty overwhelming, and so we've had to expand our org chart as we've grown for that reason.
Except managers do reward hours vs work.

I had a VP once who decreed that the "Productivity" rating on our annual review was to based on the average hours/week spent at work. To be deemed "Productive", a developer had to average 45+ hours/week. This had the effect of screwing over two subsets of developers:
1 - Those that were very efficient and got their work done in a reasonable amount of time.
2 - Those that didn't spend hours/week on timetracking, and just stuck on 40/week by default
And rewarded those who were inefficient and took 50 hours to do 40 hours worth of work.
I suspect you could find people willing to sell that put for less than $300. If there's no action at $300, somebody will step in at $200, or $100, or $10. Remember that Bitcoin can only go up, so there's no risk. It's like free money, you just have to be willing to accept a little less free money than the rest of market to get yours.
What's the right metric? Pre 1.0 typically means the software is still in beta. I realize node.js is used by many sites and large sites, but if it is stable/reliable the versioning should reflect that.
Tbh I'm a native speaker and I've messed up gendered pronouns more then once in my life. So don't feel too bad ;)
Couldn't one figure out how to divert enough stream water and the fish through their natural environment?
For something that you're "really intrusted in", you really should familiarize yourself with the studies on workday/week hours and long term productivity.

It will however put the kibosh on your plans to extract more value from your employees by working them to the bone.
I'm surprised to see this fundraise. They have a strong customer base and I worry when good companies get a huge investments like this and how it could affect the future of the company, it's growth, culture etc.
Spotify has a great article on this, if you haven't seen it: http://ucvox.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/113617905-scaling-a...
"In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links"

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_imag...

This is an inherent flaw with auto-displayed mail images loaded on demand. They are easily rigged to act as read receipts.

Hard to see how that's a privacy enhancement.
Nice, since this comment was 'shutdown' you added it again and fooled the 'moderator' ... GJ!
Unfortunately, you are wrong. There is a continuation pending - you can look it up at http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair under application number 13/220,621. The claims in this application appear to be broader than those that were issued. They can also file any number of continuations they want off of this pending application.
I use hiccup + laser on server-side and enfocus on client-side. Then every static html/js resource that I can make use of looks like nail to my hammer.
After reading this story, it's remarkable how much it reminds me of my own experience. I worked for Amazon.com as an intern for 3 months, then at the end I wasn't offered the position. They said that I showed "excellent technical skill," but they didn't feel that I embodied an Amazon.com employee. One specific criticism was that "For some of the interns, it was difficult to get them to stop working and go home. Not so for [me]."

I figured out the system mostly independently, because the senior developers were always under fire due to the over-large workload for our team. So while other interns would need help for an hour or two every few days, I'd ask something about the data type of a certain value in a function and be on my way. My mentor was especially impressed, but he was the only one because nobody else saw how much code I was writing or its quality. They would just see me getting up to pace about when the problem was very difficult, or opening up hn when I needed to give my brain a break.

Long story short, my manager said that they weren't going to hire me full time, which came as a shock because I thought that producing quality code to the deadline was the important part. He cited early mistakes in writing documentation (I'd never written a functional spec before the internship, but I posit what I eventually produced was of the highest quality) and my perceived lack of motivation. This despite me working as well and energetically as I ever had. I decided to look at it through a lens of another article I'd read on HN: Any company that doesn't want to hire me is a company I probably don't want to work for.

So while I'm dismayed that this pattern will continue, it's nice to know that there are some people who know the difference between a good programmer and one who puts in overlong hours.
You could sell dollar calls for BTC and cash that out immediately. Opens you up to larger potential losses, but at least this way you're the risky counterparty. :)
I have no answer for you. I mean... the solution seems to be 2121 or 2122 (no, it isn't, see below) determined by brute force, but I don't know why.

But, it's worth noting that if this interests you, Project Euler almost certainly will as well and is worth checking it out if you don't already know about it:

http://projecteuler.net/

EDIT: So if you're wondering why I got a different brute force result from other users, it's because I had a stupid bug. I was looking at the ratio of meeting the criteria to the ratio of not meeting it, not the ratio of meeting it to total.
Thanks for the link, interesting stuff.

It may actually be easier to model "coherence" by using natural language processing on the midi file pre-render. It is very hard to get coherence features that work across an entire piece. Definitely worth exploring (and I need to learn more music theory).
You're right. I'm not saying "Hey, I spent a month and now I can tell my co-founder how it should be done" - the first couple months is just the beginning. But I feel like I can relate to/understand 10% of the process when before I could relate to 0%, and that's a big jump.

I can see how it could get out of hand if I started questioning things I don't understand, beating my chest and saying "Don't tell me that, I know how to code," but now at least I can have a discussion with him without everything going over my head. It's difficult to explain how big of a difference that makes.
No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.

That way you aren't evaluated so much on when/how you work, but on what you accomplish.

(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)
Sure, it is regulated by FinCEN but what does that do for me? It seems FinCEN is nothing more than a part of the national security theatre than actually regulations that help me.
The fish go into the pipe, then get into a 'special' chamber. Some are eaten, others used as compost. Can't be any greener ;-)
>I don't need to use bitcoin.
>Did you need to use the Internet in 1993?

I think this is actually the most interesting point. The truth is that, no, you don't actually need to use bitcoin right now. And that's different than not needing to use the internet in 1993. Right now, there are plenty of substitute goods - more stable, more accessible currency that is used by more people. In 1993 there weren't that many substitute products for the internet.

Said another way: I wanted to do something like send a text string to another person in 1993, the internet was my only option. But if I want to do something like purchase an item right now: there are tons of other ways of doing it.

So, In order to convince me that I need to use bitcoin, the benefits of using it need to outweigh the costs, risks and hassle of converting my money.

From a ideological perspective, I think this really appeals to the HN community (including me). But from a practical standpoint, I can't see this catching on with enough average consumers to really become a stable currency.
Dan Ariely tells the story of a novice locksmith who discovered that as he got better (and was able to open locks much more quickly, with less effort), his customers increasingly resented his fees.

Customers/managers value the perception of hard work, even when the result is measurably worse for them. In fact, we all do this.
Google employee ports Amiga emulator to Chrome
This solves the problem for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

23 people is a 50% chance, 57 is a 99% chance, 367 is 100% chance (including leap years).
If you decide to use Gmail, Google will already know what you’re doing and where you are, for better or worse. The choice is between Google having access to everything you do in connection with your email, or Google having access plus thousands of small companies having tiny chunks.
Don't agree.

At least, as a programmer, I know that having to switch into other modes really diminishes my ability to focus on the problem I'm solving (programming).

Your day sounds like a way to turn a 40-hour programming project into a 80+ hour project.
Here's a link to the wikipedia entry on the birthday problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Vim is your new IDE
I know Derik the founder of Yogaglo. He's both passionate about the practice and ideals behind Yoga and a savvy business person. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.

Despite all this Yogaglo is a fantastic case of a highly successful, primarily bootstrapped business.
The real story on the PrivateSky takedown
It's pretty ridiculous to make a blanket statement like "News is bad for you", which is akin to saying "Food is bad for you". Certain food/news is definitely bad for you, especially in large/excessive quantities, but that doesn't mean we don't need it.

The amount of bad food/news in the world has increased exponentially in recent history due to the ease and low cost of production and distribution.

But like we've seen with food, the more unhealthy options proliferate, the more of a premium there is for e.g. home-cooked, organic meals. I like to think that Hacker News, on most days, is my source of healthy and nourishing news, and it's up to me to discern and sift through the junk that might occasionally get mixed in.
I recently discovered someone patented the android robot (granted in 2013) and other functions of robots such as walking. So I am not surprised.
http://www.scriptol.com/robotics/patents.php
Publish an RfC.
JavaScript template engine in just 20 lines