skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Night-before-opsmas.txt
If they weren't infringing, the companies wouldn't be paying. It's not like we are talking about some mom and pop that is going to go out of business from legal fees. We are talking major handset manufacturers.
That's a bit facile. The evidence for "universal truth" comprises many data points, of which DigitalJack's is one, and yours is one. It's not that the approach is invalid or the anecdote uninteresting, but that these are samples of size one (i.e. anecdotes) and hence insufficient for inference.
I was flown in for an interview a few months ago, coulda been written yesterday in my opinion.
The Google = slimy politician comparison really undercuts the detached perspective that he's hoping to impart to Googlers or potential Googlers.
I'm surprised at how polarizing no offices vs open offices is. My first job at IBM, I had an office with two co-workers. They were great, but on days they were out it was sooo isolating. When I quit and took a job at a start up in SF with an open office plan, I loved it immediately. I could look across the room and see if the systems guy was there or getting coffee, instead of pinging into the Sametime void.

So, I'm clearly on the open office side of the camp. What are the main arguments for offices? Peace and quiet and the ability to focus?
Yeah, that's what I was saying. He is taking his personal experience, and generalizing it as if it were a universal truth. That's why I said exactly that.
Some of these issues are created by the bulk power system model. For example, heavy industry and long distance transmission require much more precise balancing than neighborhoods. Others can be financed in the same way that HOAs finance capital improvements, or the same way tenants of an apartment benefit from the use of a building and maintenance crew they could never afford to build or have on retainer individually. Others would be obvious how to resolve in practice (ie, How do you prevent your neighbor from wrecking the system? Well, how do you currently prevent your neighbor from hooking up his pipes to the neighborhood fire hydrant? A combination of common sense regulations and social mores.)

If our default position were microgrids, we might wonder of a unified system, "but how would you prevent cascading blackouts?" The current answer is you don't, major cascades just happen around once a decade.

It's all a series of tradeoffs, and I agree with you, usually the tradeoffs favor bulk generation. The balance shifts when monopolies abuse the public trust. So here, things like load balancing are an interesting example, since that's not an area where HECO has always excelled. UCSD is using a microgrid because they can't achieve sufficient reliability from California's bulk power system:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-17/ebay-to-ellison-emb...
Actively hating a band/musician is faintly embarrassing in anyone old enough to vote. I mean, when you're 15 everything is either the shining heart of the universe or the worst thing ever, sure, but there comes a time when you have to realize that Justin Bieber is completely harmless and anyway nobody is forcing you to listen.
No offices -- just open spaces. not true; plenty of offices around perimeters.

Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes. also untrue; googlers are mostly evaluated on quantifiable impact on products, not by their academic research publications. they are explicitly not an academic lab. for details, see:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
Presumably the "we" is out of place if it's not your country.
> Google was offered a seat in Rockstar, they also placed a bid, and so on. They didn't want to.

This is not correct. You're thinking of the Novell patents. Google did make a bid on the Nortel patents, but was not offered a place within Rockstar.

> What exactly do you expect Rockstar to do when several Android OEMs are infringing on their patents without paying for it?

This has zero relevance to a claim of them being a patent troll, as a troll can ask the exact same question (and usually does).
clicked as i was curious why that was on hacker news, but asked me for a gplus login. meh.
Before anyone grabs their pitchforks and condemns ad-retargetng, the question has to be asked. How much did the OP pay to use Facebook as a social platform? With that said...

There is nothing nefarious here. This is standard internet marketing efforts.
Right after college, I was enticed by these perks: free food, laundry services, etc. After a few years in industry, I became more interested in the less sexy but more substantive benefits like a competitive salary, a 401K and good medical coverage.

College-like perks and grown-up perks are not always mutually exclusive. My understanding is that Google pays developers well and offers great benefits.

However, my experience has been that some tech companies emphasize their college-like benefits in lieu of providing strong adult benefits. "Stock options? Who needs stock options when you have beanbag chairs?"

If a company is going to play up its college-like perks, it should also bring to the table substantive financial and health-related benefits. Otherwise I can see how it would be difficult to retain young developers as their priorities change.
Play Cards Against Humanity with a couple understanding, native English-speaking friends. My girlfriend's sister's boyfriend is Swiss, and CAH has helped him learn a number idioms rather quickly.
I think the app refusing to play a hated band is creative and have never heard of anyone doing that. Sure hating Nickelback isn't new, but since when does the subject of the joke make the joke itself uncreative?
Apparently you haven't worked for Microsoft. Google is engineer's heaven compared to MS.
Paras,

I enjoyed your article. I too grew up in a middle class family, much the same as you. I was taught to work hard and to use good motives when working.

I remember early on, deciding not to take part in activities because I just focused on the money, I was 16 years old. I consider it unfortunate that I repeated that decision many times until my late 30's.

Looking back I missed out on many of the experiences that later brought me much joy.

So now what?

I try to focus on the experiences, instead of just getting the money. I have experimented with less money, and the joy was still there. However I still need money, I still want and work to be comfortable.
"
I work with many that just focus on the money and point out that "with so much money you can do good for others." I think you can do good for others before you get 'the big pot at the end of the rainbow.'

Keep sharing.
1. Surround yourself with native speakers and spend as much time as you can with them carrying on daily conversations.
2. Stop worrying about your accent or the fact that people won't always understand you.
Funny, my experience is the opposite on literally every concrete assertion about people and motivations.

Looking at my team, and the broader team under my director, only one was hired "straight out of college". Well, if you consider fresh PhDs to be "straight out of college", there are a few, but I doubt Aaron meant folks approaching 30 with kids on the horizon when he was talking about people just out of college.

Perhaps a couple are cynical, but I wouldn't call any childish or enthusiastically adolescent, which isn't too surprising, considering that the median employee within two levels of management of me is mid-thirties with two kids.

We have a couple of visiting scientists (professors at major research universities), and they were surprised by what we're doing, so perhaps the secrecy doesn't do such a bad job of keeping things inside the company after all.

I don't doubt Aaron's experience, but it's exactly what you'd expect due to selection bias. How old was Aaron when he wrote that, 20? He probably wasn't hanging out with the median person from my team. There's nothing wrong with that. But, all things considered, that essay contains a lot of awfully strong assertions.
AFAIK, Google doesn't have stock options. I don't think you worked for Google.
A month earlier, Aaron wrote about his experiences working in a more traditional kind of office:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/officespace

> Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.

So I'm not sure what kind of office would have ever met his approval.
A Christmas message from Edward Snowden [video]
Tech firm posts employee salaries publicly
I think Instagram is not a good example too, but could you please provide the name of a project as big as Facebook (or better, 10% of it) using AngularJS?
Talk to yourself (in your head or out loud, whatever floats your boat) and think in English. Do this constantly when you're walking alone, doing the dishes, folding laundry, etc. It's a good way to practice and get yourself used to not having to rely on your mother tongue during downtime when you cannot do focused study/practice.
I've worked in open-space offices most of my career and I hate it a lot.
When I'm debugging or writing new code, I need concentration.

Open space takes it away. There's too much going on. Someone might be talking to someone else. People might just be moving around. And if you desk is in the proximity of the kitchen (mine once was), you're screwed because you're definitely not getting any concentration with all the chatter that usually goes on around the kitchen table. Yeah, sometimes you can block the noise out by putting on headphones and playing some repetitive techno/trance, but sometimes even music can get distracting.

The supposed benefit of open space is that if you have a question, you can just go and ask that person. But we have IM for that. Not to mention the fact that when you're asking the question personally, they have to stop whatever they are doing and answer straight away. That, by the way, is another concentration killer.

I've come to the conclusion that my ideal working space has 2-3 people besides me in it. 4-5 is a little crowded, but OK, anything beyond 6 is bad.
Depending on your level of risk taking, you may be interested in something like this from eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MOBILE-HOTSPOT-FLASHED-TO-VERIZON-PP...

The units are flashed and use Verizon's prepaid Internet plans but are effectively unlimited - if you prepay your account for a year - you get unlimited 3G data during that time for about $100/yr.

I couldn't quite believe when I stumbled across it - but it reminds me of hacked satellite encryption back in the day. Hard to believe this would actually work - or keep working for a long time - but based on some questioning - these eBay vendors stand behind their products....

Perhaps someone has a better idea of how these actually function....I don't.
Take notes at all times; every time there's a word or phrase she should write it down and google it later. Learn idiomatic phrases and "think" in English.
Is this due to the CC processors fraud detection? They just figure it's the cost of business and most of the time, the merchant ends up footing the bill, right?

Is it possible the CC companies are worried that if the government steps in, it reduces their role in anti-fraud and helps their competitors?
Merry Christmas, HN 
For all the east coast readers out there.
Try MS, that's where the real competition is :-) I've heard horror stories about how someone on the team simply has to get low performance score, and when you get a low score it's basically a signal that you're getting fired. I can't imagine how poisonous that must be.
Top 100 Scala Libraries for Typesafe
Yes, I believe that. Based on their past statements and actions I don't believe they would use them offensively. Do you believe they couldn't use the Motorola patent portfolio against those companies if they wanted to?
On the road to fault-tolerant quantum computing
Nice and simple. The only thing I think that may be needed is a way for the receiver to identify that the package has not been opened or tampered with. Tape on the outside fills this need with current boxes, so obviously, could be used with this new design as well.
Chosun Ilbo might sometimes have some information, but they are basically South Korea's Fox News. You can trust them to have more misinformation than anyone else.

A typical example: in 1998, Chosun Ilbo led a witch hunt against a liberal historian (Choi Jangjip) based on one of his history paper contained the phrase "...thus Kim Il-Sung made the historic decision of invading South Korea." Chosun Ilbo's rationale: only good things can be called "historic". Choi just described Kim's invasion as a historic decision. Clearly he thinks North Korea was right in starting the Korean War: he's a commie!

Apparently the Korean wikipedia has a whole article on the shitness of Chosun Ilbo: http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%A1%B0%EC%84%A0%EC%9D%BC%EB%...

These "conservatives" also have been saying North Korea will fall any day since Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, so take their "instability warning" with a grain of salt. Somehow the NK government keeps defying everybody's hope that it would die (or change) someday.
The first thing to do is to always be listening to people speaking English. Try to be aware of how they pronounce things and compare them to how you do it. Be aware of little things like verb conjugations. People will still understand you if you do it wrong but you'll definitely stand out as a foreigner. Also, don't talk too fast.

In your case this won't work, but try to stay away from other speakers of your native language. I see students at UC Berkeley who end up getting roommates from their same country. This is a very bad idea because they won't be forced to adapt their brain to the new language. I always found that having a girlfriend who speaks the language I'm trying to learn was a good idea.

Reading books will help your vocabulary but it probably won't help your understanding of spoken language. What I did when I was living in a foreign country trying to learn the language was to watch children's TV shows. Once I was able to speak and understand at a 5 year old's level I felt like I was ready to expand my horizons.
>"People read the airbrushed versions of Google technologies in talks and academic papers and think that Google has some amazingly large computer lab with amazingly powerful technology."

Latest acquisition of "Boston Dynamics" and team working at "Google X" and other projects lead to second thought . In the end it's choice of people , we should not have say in what they should or shouldn't.
The Microsoft experience varies a lot throughout the organization. I was on a workaholic team for a year and it was a nightmare. The other four years, though, my typical day was from 10:30-4:00, and whenever I didn't feel like going in I'd "work from home" - typically on my XBox. The majority of the MS people I know have similar work ethics. (Though, it should be noted, we did get our work done. I got the highest review ratings every year I was there.)
ZenPen ~ Minimal Distraction, Maximim Zen
...and I officially envy you...
Christmas Eve -Night Of Music 12/25 by The Wacko Network
> Google was offered a seat in Rockstar, they also placed a bid, and so on. They didn't want to.

Of course they didn't want to. Why would they want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a bunch of patents they couldn't actually use against any of their main competitors? All it would have bought them is a hole in their pockets (because who would have bought the patents from them if the entire industry had already been immunized to them?), and Apple and Microsoft would then have just bought a different set of patents to sell to trolls expecting for them to be used against Google.

Buying overly broad patents is paying the Danegeld. Once they know you pay the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane.
That article is pretty worthless. First, he says "clearly the terminals had access to the Internet", and that if they used a private network, it'd not have been a problem. That's just wrong. Let's assume the POS terminals connected via IPSec over a frame relay linkup to several datacenters. A compromise in the processing center could cause an issue. Or, you could attack the POSes and have them record data to some internal site which you can access from another point in the intranet.

Second, his only actual argument is: "Someone probably made an out of process change to Target’s POS system and nobody noticed."

Sure, maybe. Or maybe someone subverted some other security system first. Who knows. Useless conjecture is just that.

Then he goes on about how the NSA should be fixing these issues. Okie dokie.

This is the same guy that doesn't understand how search engines work, and asked Eric Schmidt to manually fix his sister's website ranking in Google. I wouldn't take him as a useful source.
Your startup?
Just like standard AdBlock + Ghostery... and other assorted goodies to block that crap.
I don't think this is really accurate. It's not about treating people like kids, it's about rejecting the attitude found at dilbert-style corporations.

The T-Rex skeleton and the shark fins are there because they're cool. Google has monorail cars as meeting rooms in the Sydney office [1] - because an engineer requested it. It shows that management listens to employees. It gives people the confidence to propose somewhat outlandish ideas, because if management will buy a monorail because an employee requests it, management will allocate resources to things that actually matter because employees request it. Those stories don't get publicized, but I've seen it happen multiple times.

Also, the idea that all google employees are young kids just out of college who are being shielded from "the real world" by free food and buses is silly, many of my coworkers are married with kids.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+PaulCowan/posts/Sfm9SpV4eCE

I work for google, but I'm not speaking on their behalf.
This is now no longer the case.
Not Just Koch Brothers: Study Reveals Funders Behind Climate Change
"This could be embarrassing if you ordered a gift for someone who then saw it on the screen."

This happened to me! Luckily the other person didn't realize there was anything special about that ad.

I don't get these ads though - I looked at a product and either decided to get it or not. Why are you still showing it to me? I'm done with that product.
I think the distinction is more like medical researchers and practitioners. CS is more like the research aspect of the craft but once it's done it has to be applied in practice. Sometimes you don't need to be a doctor when feel you have a cold and just take a day off and stay in bed, but a nurse can't help you with cancer. Most people get the common flu and for them you don't have to see a doctor, but what happens in our profession is that some people think that all problems are equivalent to the flu.
I personally think that there are more unicorn jobs than people think. It's just that everyone has a different idea of a unicorn. The work I'm currently doing (the level of influence I have over the final product, the technical challenge, and meaningfulness of the work) all combine to make this probably the best job I've had. However others I talk to doing similar work in the past couldn't wait to find a different job.
Checkout workflowy.com <- it's "just" an outliner, but it's really changed the way I work.
>How about: there are people in the world, quite a few of them, who like Nickelback. A "Refuse to play Nickelback" feature mocks and insults them. It's a little weird to feign surprise over that.

Even if you're a Nickelback fan, it's a little weird to not get the point of a joke setting (which you can also turn off).

It's not like it was any Nickelback's fan first experience with mockery for what he listens to (or as if he doesn't deserve it).

A world where you cannot mock anybody because everyone is gonna be a cry-baby about it, would be a sad world indeed.
This is the case that gets you pissed off at Apple's use of patent litigation?
We get stock units directly, maybe that's what he meant. I certainly find my team has a pretty decent work-life balance, and we are at a pretty high pressure org as well.
>just says you wanted to make a joke but weren't creative enough to think of one.

Well, the same can be said for 90% of what passes for situation comedy. Hardly appropriate to pinpoint this to an app company.

P.S Also, the originality of the joke is not in using Nickelback, but in having a "ban this one artist" button in the first place.
The artist being Nickelback is secondary, it could be Bieber or Cyrus etc.

That said, it was important, for the mechanics of the joke, that the artist was someone important and almost universaly despised, else it would be lost in the majority of users (where's the fun in "don't play King Crimson"?).
Rip DVD The Wolf of Wall Street
This is a tutorial of copying and ripping DVD The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo DiCaprio on PC or Mac; you can make a DVD backup of The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the best 2013 movies, and convert DVD to MP4, AVI, WMV, MOV, ISO image, etc.
isn't being a douchebag for PR purposes the problem?
Having a process for doing dumb things helped me raise revenue 300% in 1 yr
The best analogy I've read in this thread so far.
Untethered Jailbreak for A5+ Devices on iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 Release Imminent
>For example, "Australians are upside-down". Lazy, and makes many people upset.

Exactly. It's a little known fact, but given Earth's exact orientation in space coordinates, it's actually Hungary who is upside-down.
1. True believers of the Juche idea are more likely to get postings abroad, and brainwashing from childhood is remarkably effective,
2. The lack of regimented lifestyle and strictly formalized social interactions can make the outside world as frightening to some North Koreans as living in North Korea would be to us, [1]
3. You must return with enormous amounts of hard currency to pay bribes to everyone involved in sending you abroad, so you're kind of constantly hustling, and probably too focused on those daily practical necessities to think about radically changing your life, [1]
4. Some spies do defect, the real defection rate probably isn't publicized by anyone on either side. [2]

[1] These themes are hit upon in some of the "inside NK" lit, I especially liked "A Year in Pyongyang." A bit dated, but NK nonfiction holds up well with age, and it's all free online:
http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang_1.html

[2] Former NK spy: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/29/former-north-korean-sp...
Something that sounds like an ideal is nothing like what you would expect it to be?

That's like every other thing in the world ever, isn't it?
> But does one go from becoming an expert at breaking systems to automatically churning out a secure cryptographic system? Or does one become an expert at breaking and then build a bunch of flawed crypto systems, as the learning process continues?

Both and neither. Once you get really good at breaking cryptosystems, designing them looks very similar. You start with best practices: use sane primitives (or thoroughly vetted components, preferably!) and put them together in known, simple (simple is key) ways. Then you put on your breaking hat and you attempt to violate every constraint. If you find a flaw, then you iterate or redesign. Once you are happy with it, you start showing it to other crypto breakers, until they're happy with it too.

At this point, you have something that would withstand most basic attacks, and you might be ready to put it out into the world. It's still not battle-hardened and ready for uberconfidential data, but it's in a better state than most cryptosystems. As more and more people look at it without owning it, its trustworthiness goes up, and the risk goes down.

Secure cryptosystems don't pop out of nothing; they're iterative, but not in the "I should do a Show HN" sense. It's iterative like writing a poem -- you don't release it one line at a time.
Harvard student offering to pay someone $40k a year to attend class
Thanks, bud. You too.