skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really great. Very slick.

Add some of the exchange volumes?
Num transactions?
Number mined?
I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day, so the programmer I want (obviously) is one that works nights and weekends but gets shit done the whole time.

Do you think that if you worked nights and weekends (say another 20 hours a week) your total productivity would be diminished vs. your normal week because those extra hours aren't productive?
I'm pretty sure they won't make it available. They still don't allow uploading images to their service using an API, so I doubt they will allow to send messages.

After the Twitter example, APIs are not attractive to these kind of startups. If you give full capabilities to 3rd party developers, they're going to create clients for other systems and the startup will lose control over its content and how it's shown to users (ads).
if (true)
Checkout the movie Europa Report to feed your SciFi fantasies.
Please forgive my ignorance. What makes Europa more likely to contain life than other moons thought to contain oceans like Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus ... ? [1]

[1] http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jp... [2]

[2] http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-solar-s...
I think this is aimed more at BBM and Kik than SnapChat.
So if you actually have those pre-reqs upto scratch: Linear Algebra (up to the level of Strang/Sheldon Axler), Statistics (any undergrad book), Algorithms/Data Structures. You can ramp up on your own time and read key research papers. I would do it only if there are amazing people in UVa who you want to work with.
GOG is also currently under such high load, it fails to work most of the time. Ah well, I already own all three games.

The Fallout series is pretty fantastic though and worth a play (or revisit)
See also kiwiric. ALthough they have yet to to deliver on persistence.
> Ie bitcoin articles focus on the speculative aspect and not that it's a more useful, less friction method of payment.

... what if bitcoin, currently, _is_ only about the speculative aspect, and is not actually more useful with less friction?
[2002] Distel: Distributed Emacs Lisp
Oh, OK, I didn't realize that the article dated back to 2011.

I checked my email to see when I first registered on MtGox and I found out that 23rd of June is just a few days after MtGox got hacked.
Would You Rather Have Brazil's Economic Problems or America's?
see: http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...
While you can't judge programming and knowledge work in general the way you judge physical labor, it would help a manager to know when programmers are likely wasting time and company money. This is especially important for resource constraint startups.

I guess the question should be, Are your programmers working primarily to serve your need as a business or are they devoting their effort and time on work that is more aligned with their own ideology (choice of technology and approach).

A few months back I was in Philly talking to a startup founder whose company was at death's door because he kept hiring developers who came in and replaced whatever the last person did because it wasn't what they preferred. This phenomenon is a much bigger problem than the question of whether programmers are working hard or not.
> If the motivation to save pictures is there then a person will save the pictures.

Considering most "snaps" are sent between friends and family these days, it's important to understand that friends aren't fucking each other over to save pictures of cats with finger-painted mustaches.

Of course, if someone is dead-set on saving a picture from Snapchat then it's possible... but Snapchat isn't about sending dick pics anymore. I believe it's outgrown that, the same way when Vine started with was essentially an amateur porn broadcasting app. For the general public, Snapchat images appear and then they go poof, but I agree with you... it's hard to stop dicks from being dicks no matter how you send your photos.

But the one objective fact about the situation is that Snapchat is still the most convenient way to send photos and videos that are reasonably guaranteed to virtually disappear. Saving them out of Snapchat secretly isn't a priority nor is it trivial for 99% of people using the service.
Burnout and tunnel vision would certainly ensue in the medium term; or someone external would intervene and snatch the programmer from you, by proposing them a better deal. It can still serve you well, depending on the market you're in, and how steep / long is the learning curve of your codebase - but I would argue it's not the best strategy in the long run.
Because I could then build the entire interface client-side in a browser?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a webdev guy. I have no front end/fullstack experience. I'm a longterm sysadmin/DevOps person. But if you're a power user, you want control over your mail interface/workflow. In that case, all your mailserver should be doing is accepting email for you, storing and indexing it, and serving it via API to clients you're using. I like IMAP, but it doesn't easily support some Gmail conventions (multiple labels per message).

IMAP and SMTP could easily be condensed into an XML/JSON API that could be done over HTTPS; I'm not familiar enough with CalDAV to say that though.
>Do you think that if you worked nights and weekends (say another 20 hours a week) your total productivity would be diminished vs. your normal week because those extra hours aren't productive?

Yes, but it depends on what type of work is required.

In creative work: if I don't get enough sleep, enough exercise, enough relaxation time, my personal productivity falls to at most a quarter of normal. Total productivity is surely less.

In grunt/repetitive work: my productivity is affected a little but probably not enough to decrease total productivity, and I've noticed my work is appreciated more because I appear to be more 'busy'.
This is, I think, a very relevant case for the "Non-technical co-founders need to learn to code" argument. There are always problems with judging how much work is being done in any creative project - heaven knows my best marketing work comes in spurts that tend to happen at 2 AM. But the larger issue here is that the guy issuing raises has no idea what is actually happening in the codebase.

I'm by no means an incredible engineer, but I've spent a couple hours a day over the past few months building basic Ruby/RoR apps, and it makes an enormous difference. Of course, I still have a long way to go before I'm able to really estimate anything, but if nothing else I understand why my co-founder would just sit there for hours with a whiteboard and model data. I know that "burnout" is a real thing, especially when you're not overcoming little bugs you've had for a long time. I know the value of getting a second pair of eyeballs on some code. etc.

It's just impossible to understand what you don't understand the technical aspects of what you're trying to do.
11. The method according to claim 8, further comprising the step of making loud and guttural moans for no apparent reason.

12. The method according to claim 8, further comprising the step of having the camera positioned looking down the actor's abdomen during penetration.
Modern media is a good way to make yourself neurotic. Fear sells and misery sells. Everything else is not of interest.
You're "investing a ton of money" into getting a high quality image, only to then turn around and slap a watermark on it, which more than likely has now downgraded the quality of the image.

To fully deter your competitors from using it, you have to place the watermark in the center of the image/over the product so that they can't easily crop it out.

Now from the potential customers perspective they want to look at those quality images you took and visualize having that product, however now they have to look past/around your watermark which kind of puts a downer in their customer experience.

TLDR: So you've spent tons of money on photos to slap a watermark on top of them and hinder customer experience?
>> A sure path to mediocrity is to glorify all round generalists. Single purpose tools will win over them any day!

Except the days in which they don't.
This method follows Google's own guidelines on Making AJAX website crawable.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
"A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed."

You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?

Good luck getting any sleep.
Absolutely. Working those kind of hours, especially doing something as mentally draining as programming, is absolutely soul-crushing.
Repurposing the alphabet with CSS – to create design elements
Same thing with system administrators. If you're a bad sysadmin your stuff is going to break constantly and you will look like your working hard to fix it. If you're good at it, hardly anything will go wrong and to management it looks like you sit on your butt all day.
"If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen"

in other words...

If the team is wildly dysfunctional, then bad things are going to happen.
Some oil & gas companies, like Chevron, believe so much that over-working your employees leads to an overall loss in absolute productivity and work quality that they give many engineers every other Friday off.

Of course, you could rightfully question whether this is actually increasing the company's productivity or whether they are just so flushed with billions of oil dollars that they can afford to pay their engineers full-time salaries for slightly less than full-time hours.
..Thanks, I guess :)

I actually drove up to Alaska as a tourist too and stumbled upon Whitehorse. I liked it so much I decided to come back and live here.

Unfortunately, it's very much not off the beaten path, it's quite literally on the Alaska Highway, and thus gets an enormous amount of through traffic in the summer.
> What's wrong with texting though?

Facebook doesn't make money out of it
Why not, it's already taxed and considered pollution.
Pirate Bay Docks in Peru: New System Will Make Domains “Irrelevant”
Definitely looks like some tricks can be blocked. But no mention of how it'd affect the classic technique of having a single pixel image with a unique URL (Per user) so that you can track opens.

I'm assuming at this point that that would still work. But as mentioned in the Movable Ink article all sorts of other tracking and image request headers are lost.
What? This news made my day. Thanks :)
Well of course a contract is void if it is pertaining to illegal activity. However agreeing to give a company information isn't illegal.
Indeed, a majority attack is a lose-lose scenario.
This is interesting. And definitely a "real thing". To me it raises an interesting question about effectively demonstrating value to one's higher ups.

It's a little sad that pushing for "visibility" is so important, especially in large corporations, but it helps to put yourself in the boss's shoes - how will he/she know you're doing good work unless you blow your own trumpet?

Arguments that a good boss "should just know" certainly have merit, but it's up to each of us to determine whether our own boss fits in that category and emphasize our accomplishments accordingly if we're to be "performance reviwed" with bonus etc depending on that perception.

Edit: s/now/know/
> When people are doing a physical task, it’s easy to assess how hard they are working. You can see the physical movement, the sweat. You also see the result of their work: the brick wall rising, the hole in the ground getting bigger. Recognising and rewarding hard work is a pretty fundamental human instinct, it is one of the reasons we find endurance sports so fascinating.

We've all heard about the stereotypical manager-perception of "effort invested will be proportional to results delivered!", like the article laments. But this analogy breaks down really quickly.

Let's use an example that's not from software to illustrate the point -- in fact, let's use the author's own example, laying bricks. Who would you rather hire?

-- Bricklayer A: Takes 2 weeks to finish a wall, stays late every day to finish the job, finally builds a brick wall of passable quality.

-- Bricklayer B: Finishes your wall in two hours because he realizes there's a better way to lay your bricks, and builds a wall of excellent quality.

I feel like most people, even managers of non-software folks, would rather hire B. At least, I certainly would.

So I think the premise of the article is wrong. There's something deeper going on, and dismissing it with "managers want to reward hard work, and creatives don't look like they're working hard" is an explanation that is "neat, simple, and wrong" [0].

[0]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
This has been studied quite extensively, for the majority of people productivity plummets if you consistently work more than 8 hours a day. You may be able to cram it for about two weeks but that effort needs to be payed back with more rest if productivity should stay the same.
It can be really unappealing to deal with an existing codebase which contains whimsical choices, and ideally a team should have a turnover low enough to ensure continuity and consistency of coding style. And to overwork people it's hardly a good strategy to keep people sticking around. The problem you mention might be connected with the issue of overworking more than it seems, imho.
I remember reading something about "good web development" back in ~1997 and the author saying the Yahoo! page loaded in about 6 seconds and I was thinking "wow, that's pretty fast."
Fast Bitcoin Explorer with TESTNET and REST API
People have been doing that for a while -- it's very common to put a 1 pixel by 1 pixel image in an email as a tracking bug.
How does this affect invisible pixels (for analytics)?
Word (and the other Office software) are amazing, vary powerful, etc. And the OS that these modern softwares run on are full of features.

And so software does do very much more than it used to do, and that's what people talk about when they talk about bloat.

I could install a minimal Arch, with JWM, and Abiword, and run everything from RAM and get blazing fast operation. But it is odd that modern software, even though it's so feature rich, is also so slow.
I believe it's "staffing" as is, i.e. efforts to fill the open positions. It's not payroll.
The post doesn't make such a distinction.
Exceptional engineers can PM their own work. For everyone else there's product management.
Meet WordPress 3.8, "Parker"
Badly: http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...
"If he had just released the full, unedited video and a shorter unedited snippet of the video, would we still be seeing attacks on his credibility this long after the fact?"

The number of times I have seen people either flat out lie and claim that the 39minute video does not exist, or lie by omission by never mentioning the release of the 39minute version when criticizing wikileaks for releasing an edited video leads me to believe the answer to your question is "Yes."

These people are already grasping for complaints, playing fast and loose with reality to do it. No matter how wikileaks released that video, there would always be a portion of the population with an interest in discrediting it.
Good point. My plan offers unlimited text and 98% of my friends are in the US so I often forget this.
A $25 million bet on Bitcoin: is this really the “tipping point?”
It's not spying if the customer agreed to hand over the information.

That's why you have to read contracts very carefully.
Webinar on overcoming entrepreneurial depression
A QUANTUM Thought: Advanced Targeting
And this is why NASA's Planetary Sciences division should not suffer huge budget cuts.
StrongLoop | Mobile News Round-up - December 12
That's not dumping on the UK, it's a very true point. Many UK HN readers will agree with you that a lot of the UK press is just toxic.
Congratulations, you have won the award for the most incredible semantic nit-picking of recent memory.
"Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late" http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
What Miley Cyrus Can Teach Us About Bing & Google Image Search Results
That's...not entirely true. They work what are called 9-80s, so they put in 80 hours over the course of the 9 days every two weeks that they do work. So they actually end up working more than 8 hours on the days they do work.

Source: I worked for one of the majors w/ this policy.
TLDR; effective (and often basic) marketing strategies work
Ask HN: Could bitcoin have happened sooner?
does the bitcoin software build on technology which didn't exist 10 years ago?

obviously it had to wait on the arrival of the internet.

storing and downloading the blockchain in its current form would have been prohibitive but not impossible 10 years ago.

are there any other reasons it couldn't have happened sooner?

how close to when it could have happened, has it happened?
Set aside a dollar now just to be safe.
This is not just a problem in the programmer domain, though it may be exacberated by how divorced much of management and executive types are from the work of programming. Other domains in which performance is more easily measured by eyeballing, office politics and plain poor perception can still be a factor. At one place I was an intern, before I got formally hired, everyone told me that I was a sure bet to be hired, because everyone thought I worked so hard...when in reality, and I can say this now, I wasn't as focused back then as I am now, and so they were basing their perception about how early I showed up and how late (by late, I mean, maybe 7pm on days when I was really distracted and didn't do enough work during the actual day) I stayed...but not on how much I actually produced.
Snowden and the Pope both have, but mostly -- in both cases -- in terms of provoking conversation and debate, with only fairly modest impacts in terms of substantive impact.

OTOH, that's not really inconsistent with what the "Person of the Year" normally means.
Well, my roommate is on this schedule and most certainly does not work more than 8 hours per full working-day on average. He might work 8 hours including the time driving to and from work. And on the Fridays he doesn't have off, he only works until noon or so.

Maybe his case is not normal?

Edit: Granted, I think another reason for this is that, based on his descriptions, there's a remarkable amount of bureaucracy involved in the oil companies. It's a very, very complex industry, and while it moves quite fast on a global scale, it moves very slowly for most individuals involved in it. His training program alone lasts a few years, so he won't really be a highly productive member of the company for quite some time.
hey ozh - my name is kraig, one of the founders of getfeedback. we put a product video on the homepage of www.getfeedback.com, and have a more detailed version in the app (on youtube and vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/channels/getfeedback/81350016)
Q&A with Tobias Lütke of Shopify (2010)
> No you don't need to read 10+ hours of news about the same story unless there's new information and it has an effect on you. I didn't make that point so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

The NSA story keeps coming back around as new information is revealed. The initial revelation was in May of this year and information is still tricking out. Following the news means taking in at least this much information on the NSA scandal.

> There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.

The only means we have to protect ourselves is encryption (where possible) and keeping things offline. Ok - done (after the initial revelations, as noted). As a non-american I have no influence on the American political process so the other two are out.

> There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.

I agree completely, but news isn't education. Most of the information in daily news has a very short shelf-life (e.g. current events) so it's not even an accurate representation of the world after a few months. Science reporting in news media is notably terrible - big headlines around single studies and results that turn out to not amount to much later. This is in-fact the opposite of education, it's information pollution because you're learning things that turn out not to be true.
Ah yes, the ol' honor system. It's certainly worked on a large scale before. [nope]
Theres also http://postgresguide.com/ which is intended to have practical examples of various Postgres and SQL features.
I hate to be "that guy", but does this mean Google is storing every one of our pics on their proxy servers? For how long do they store them, and what is their data retention policy?

Also, remembering that Google has no obligation to protect non-American users, does that give the NSA access to them, to run things like facial recognition, etc?
Would the image not still load only once the receiver opens it?
TFA indicates that there's no technical reason. You really should read it. It's a good read.
If that is the case, then I used a bad example, but I really don't think I did.

Off topic, but...
I recently bought a days usage from put.io with bitcoin. They got their money instantly, I don't have to worry about a hacker getting my credit card info or using more bitcoins in my wallet than I gave. I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.
Having a correct insight can save 6 months of work. I only get those insights when I can take a step back, usually on the weekend.
To clarify, it's bad for marketing people, but good for users desiring privacy.
Well, the PM job is so fluid depending on the product, the team, and what's needed to get it shipped. I've worked with engineering teams that just needed project management from me, although I think PM-style project management may involve more ruthless decision making as it's usually a case of fitting a very large peg into a very small hole.
-find-replace-paste-

how many more cases like this will we see before the authorities realise that Big Yoga is abusing the patent system and stifling innovation that will seriously damage the whole yoga industry
Doesn't water freeze and become ice at 0°C?
I don't hold that view. Keynesian economics doesn't make much sense to me, as a change in the value of our medium of exchange is not what creates prosperity.

Its investment in technology that makes things cheap and makes a country prosperous. Not manipulating the medium of exchange.

Austrian economics makes a lot more sense to me, although not everything they say does.
> I'm not sure whether Pope Francis will/has inspired policy change, moved political waves, etc

There's some indications that it may have, if not spurring political change, at least reduced a barrier to it with some immediate effect [1].

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2013/1106/As-Illinoi...
Thanks for all the replies, not psyched about the negative comment score :(
Not only that, but people have absolutely been charged with felonies for doing exactly that. Do not ever lie to federal agents.
Those extra hours have negative productivity. They cause you to make mistakes which take more time to fix than you gain in the extra hours. (Mistakes which you also make in the rest of the week by being more tired.)

Read Peopleware if you haven't already. It covers myths like the 60 hour work week and outlines how to make software projects productive and predictable.