skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A local Subway franchise was the very first company that hired me. I was extremely young, shy, and intensely socially awkward, yet excited to join the workforce (as I had my eyes set on a Pentium processor).

When I worked at Subway, the bread dough came frozen, but you would put loaves in a proofer, proof it for a certain amount of time, and then bake it. My first shift, however, got busy and I left several trays in the proofer for a very, very long time. Consequently, they rose to roughly the size of loaves of bread, as opposed to the usual buns.

It was my very first shift alone at any job in my life, so I did the most logical thing I could think of and put the massive buns in the oven. They cooked up nicely enough and I thought I was saved. Until I tried to cut into one.

Back in that day, Subway used to cut those silly u-shaped gouges out of their buns. In retrospect, I think this was most likely a bizarre HR technique designed to weed out the real dummies, but at the time I was oblivious (likely because I was one of the dummies they should have weeded out). When I ran out of the normal bread, I grabbed one of my monstrosities, tried to cut into it, and discovered that it was not only rock hard, but the loaf broke apart as I tried to cut it.

That night, my severe shyness and social awkwardness had their first run-in with beasts known as angry customers. I was scared I would get fired, so I promptly made new buns, but spent the rest of my shift trying to get rid of my blunder. I discovered some really interesting things about people that night. First, you'd be surprised how incredibly nice customers are if you are straight up with them. Some customers I never met before met the big, crumbly buns as an adventure and, in doing so, helped me sell all the ruined buns.

In the end, I came clean (and didn't get fired). That horrible night was a huge event in the dismantling of my shell. It taught me an awful lot about ethics. And frankly, that brief experience in food service forever changed how I deal with staff in similar types of jobs.
Classic forgetting the full WHERE-part of a manual UPDATE-query on a production system. The worst part is you know you fucked up the nanosecond you hit enter, but it's already too late. Lesson learned? Avoid doing things manually even if a non-technical co-worker insists something needs to be changed right away. And if you do: wrap it in a transaction so you can rollback, leave in a syntax error that you'll only remove when you're done typing the query.
> On the other hand, did you see there is another post directly suggesting you to have your name changed with a middle initial.

Right, I responded saying that I already have a middle initial which uniquely identifies me in the US, but Square won't take it on the signup form.

> Don't think you are always 100% perfect and it's all other people's fault. […] When conflict occurs, check on yourself side first. I gave you advice because I wish this type of thing would not happen to you again.

You are correct. However, I believe I made a genuine effort to find out what's going on: I spend hours researching on Square's website, comparing policies with other payment companies and other companies that use knowledge-based verification, and trying to ask them to clarify things I didn't understand.

> If you don't learn the lesson, you may have more similar type of experience down the road. Didn't you see the other people's story with his credit record? Do you think it's fun?

The person shared a name with someone else, so the system decided to merge their credit histories after awhile. That is not the customer's fault if they make a wholehearted effort to fix things.

> You didn't get my point at all. Choosing simple name and always making job simple has the same culture background as fast food. I don't need to mention about the good or bad about it. Everybody can make his own choice.

I did not choose my own name.

> You may stick to your common name and have the other consequences. Other than you, yourself, who will care?

For me, there is no way to win this game. Yes, I could waste a ton of time and money changing my name, updating government records, convincing everyone I meet that I am not an identity thief, re-purchasing things like domain names, etc. On the other hand, I could waste a bunch of time getting mixed up with other people named Kevin Chen.

Philosophically, that's asking humans to change themselves for the machine's convenience. As an engineer, I think that's a backwards concept and it should be the other way around.

> iPhone is not made with regular PCB design techniques, it's not that easy. VLSI design is not PCB design. With this type of attitude, you are not qualified for any of those professional work until you are trained or change your attitude. This is my point.

My attitude (as seen in other comments and in my post) is that I try to understand the other side and expect people to treat each other with courtesy.

> BTW, if you don't mind, can you please tell me how you down voted me?

If you were downvoted, I didn't do it. I just wanted to get some clarification on a seemingly off-topic comment.
Why Apple could be dead money for the next decade
Whats stopping people selling their gift cards and using them before the buyers? Or am I missing something?
Submarine Cable Map – The Internet's Backbone
So does Namecheap.
I sent an email to three thousand insurance agents informing them of the cancellation of policy number 123456789, made out to Someone Funky. I learned to appreciate Microsoft Outlook's message-recall function, which got most of them. I also learned that just because you're using the test database instance doesn't mean nothing can go wrong.
Be careful, I don't think there would be a good way to do this anonymously without distributing the workload.
easy:

me: "unix definitely won't just let me cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda"

other: "sure it will"

me: <presses enter>

what I learned? unix will absolutely let you hang yourself. 1998, production server for a fortune 5 company.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually: basic income + no minimum wage (or if politically impossible, not raising minimum wage) -- since the basic income will continue even if someone is employed, it's a great incentive to stay to in the labour force and advance even if the pay is minimal.

I do think that Milton Friedman may not have foreseen the way automation might lead to at least long-term (but perhaps not permanent) structural unemployment.
During a server migration for our web based file sharing system our lead engineer (at the time) forgot to ensure that all cron jobs (for cleaning up files and sending out automated emails) had been turned back on.

Queue me 7mos later reviewing the system. Realizing that critical jobs were no longer running and that our users were all essentially receiving 100% free hosting for however much storage they wanted. SOOOO i turned the jobs back on.

The lead engineer before me left no documentation of what the jobs did other than that they should be run. In my stupor i did not review the code. The jobs sent out a blast of emails warning that files would be deleted if not cleaned up or maintained. Then seconds later deleted said files...

We nuked around 70GB worth of files before we realized what happened. WELL GET THE TAPES! Turns out our lead engineer ALSO forgot to follow up w/ system engineers and the backups were pointed at the wrong storage.

No jobs lost, thankfully the manager at the time was a word smith of the highest degree and can play political baseball like a GOD.
Even non-terrible people for their terrible contributions.
I think you get to the nub of it here. TDD lets you develop a spec that is consistent with requirements (the subset so far implemented) and the code at all times.

This is another TDD-related argument that I just don’t understand.

A specification might say that the function add returns the sum of its arguments.

A unit test might verify that add(1,1) = 2.

One of these describes the general case. One of them describes a single specific case. Unless your problem space is small enough to enumerate every possible set of inputs and the expected result for each of them, no amount of unit tests can replace a full specification of the required behaviour. Unfortunately, not many real world problems are that convenient.
How is this a removal of content?
Tried to prevent a massive product failure.

It failed anyway, but I wasn't around when it did and there would have been no "I told you so" credit even if I were.

One of those "big company" lessons, but probably applicable to startups (which have an even higher ego density).
There are many, many niches where you could do well by downloading free software from the internet, reading free literature/guides/checklists from the internet, applying a tiny amount of common sense and competency, and then offering related services in exchange for money.

That so many companies manage to screw this up so badly, and still stay in business, indicates that all you need to succeed is some business acumen, the basest level of technical competency, and a little luck! :)
> Would this be interesting?

Of course it would! but make sure to create a profile for each company, what they are trying to achieve, how, etc..

And then all the biography of the company.. what events ocurred.. also analisys could be collected from bright folks of what they were doing right and wrong.. just some ideas :)

We can learn much more from failures compared to the successful enterprises.. we dont hear much from the failed side of the trench. and thats a shame..
No, they gave it to him "for his 'extraordinary efforts' to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

At least if they had given it to him for being black, they wouldn't be lying through their teeth
One time I tried to change a column name in a production database. I learned that when you change a column name, mysql doesn't just change a string somewhere, it creates a new table and copies all the values from the old table into the new one and when that table has millions of rows in it, it really slows down your production server.
Can Online Classifieds Make A Comeback?
Play framework's a decent gateway drug to Scala, can help you get some of the basics under your belt while seeing tangible results.

Otherwise, a book or 2 on Scala goes a long way.
Depending on circumstances, currency devaluation might not be such a terrible thing, as long as the movement is swift and rare.
Also try gh[1], a Go port of hub. It's faster (mostly due to the difference in speed between Go and Ruby), and it doesn't require Ruby be installed.

[1]: https://github.com/jingweno/gh
Maybe e-harmony, since it'd be double blind model-driven matching, but with near real time feedback while one is refining a set of preference parameters.
tried out the site (had a card with 10 bucks) and tried creating a bitcoin wallet. no luck having the bitcoins show up in my wallet yet. I have a feeling I did something wrong...
I actually think this idea is pretty great. I am currently in the market for a new chair, and have a specific style in mind, but have had trouble finding it just by going to stores. I also think browsing on Amazon is a terrible shopping experience. A simple place to find furniture from different retailers could be really useful.
What does 'OBT-125' signify/mean?
I was in a remote meeting and failed to realise my laptop's camera was broadcasting. A roomful of people saw me, clad in horrid workout clothes, jam my finger up my itchy nose and scratch my balls.

Key takeaway: always check the cam.
Here, Here! In the end, more knowledge will lead to more peace. It sounds hokey, but clandestine infinite historical data storage can only end in disaster.
I think the big interface problem with the website is that it makes the user work extremely hard to figure out what the hell each product is about.

I don't think there's any point in emphasizing the product names, when they don't serve to explain the product.

A really simple improvement would be to display the name and description similarly to HN:

<description> (<title/domain>)

E.g.

Realtime code sharing for developers (CodeShare.io)

I mean this in the most helpful way possible: the interface is really, really bad at serving one of its basic, fundamental functions.
Boomerang by Michael Lewis is a pretty book on the Icelandic financial crisis. If you've read the Big Short, then Boomerang is a look at the reverberating effects of the financial crisis of 2008 throughout the third world.
FYI, Brasil is how you spell Brazil in Portuguese.

"I am from Brazil." // "Sou do Brasil."

More fun fact, it's pronounced brah-zew like you're saying eww gross.
Ask HN: How would you be convinced to try out a new product as an enterprise?
I have launched my startup Poucher (http://poucherapp.com) and I am daring to ask a business question in Hacker News (considering most of them are related to technologies)

We are currently at the phase of speaking to restaurant owners. Our primary contact method is cold calls and later we proceed with a 20 skype chat (video call, if possible).

What I would like to ask on behalf of the business team is, if you were a restaurant owner (actually a potential customer in general) what would it take for you to be convinced to try out that product.

Questions

1)Would you have to see the sales person in a real meetup, or would you be convinced if the product was good enough?
2) Would cold call leave a negative impact on you?

Any answer would definitely broaden our vision and improve our approach methodology we apply to potential customers.
He wouldn't die full of rage and bitter if he's dying past the point of no return. He more than likely will not have the mental capacity with the amount of oxygen he is receiving combined with his body shutting down to have anger at his friend. It will be more of a desperate plea than an angry begging.
OK, that is what I had heard.
A total absence of government would be just as destructive to your natural rights as a government with too much power over its citizens. The government didn't grant you the rights, but in some situations its very capable of preserving them.

There are two main problems with the United States, the first is that too many of us are ready and willing to trade personal freedom for economic and physical safety. The second is that we allowed money to control politics.
Hackers Pull off a Crafty Attack on Michaels
I have not looked into these details being discussed at all, but the "sending jobs elsewhere" angle sounds nutty. I have to assume that money transfers are also regulated in the places you're thinking of, especially if it is a developed country or a desirable place to live. I mean, you can't reasonably expect to just set yourself up as a bank without jumping through a few hoops.
yes, exactly

also having money to pay them

last but not least, before you get a CTO, get some good technical advisers. They can be your virtual CTO until you get a real one, and help you to vet candidates too.
So please, don't try to justify your disrespect of someone who clearly identifies as a woman as Manning does.

Now wait just a moment. Surely if Manning's own identity can only be understood from his/her own perspective, then my own meaning -- whether I am being disrespectful -- can only be seen from my perspective. How dare you project disrespect into what I am communicating.

You are trying to make it sound like trans women aren't women, when they in fact are.*

I never said anything of the kind. What I said was that someone who is not transgendered might claim that they are in order to get some sexual kicks, or to subvert legal protections afforded to women. I'm not trying to take away from the genuinely transgendered, I'm saying that the claim of being transgendered can be misused.

That you aren't familiar with it is not an excuse to make a bunch off the cuff remarks that, whether you realize it or not, are transphobic.

I believe that I made clear in my post that I was largely in agreement, but was playing devil's advocate in order to draw out some deeper understanding -- just vanilla Socratic method stuff. Your reply seems to indicate that someone who is not fully up to speed ought to just shut up, and accept what his betters are telling him.

that history is not immutable

Ummm. How is history mutable?

As a society we generally honor people's personal decisions about their identity. We do so for religious change, name change, adoption, interracial marriage and dating, and so on.

Something I don't get here. I'm married to someone of a different race. I don't see what that has to do with my identity. The fact that my wife and I are married and of differing races, has nothing to do with who I am or who I expect people to see me as. She's my wife, I'm her husband, and that's all there is to it. I fail to see how this is expecting someone to change, or even have, any view of my personal identity.
I asked them for a job in the first place.
Not the worst at all, but probably one I found most amusing. One of my jobs included some sys admin tasks (this wasn't the position, but we all did dev ops), among my other responsibilities. I spent half a day going through everything with the person responsible for most of the admin tasks at the time. She was an extremely dilligent and competent admin, did absolutely everything through configuration management and kept very thorough personal logs and documentation on the entire network. One of my first tasks was to change backup frequency (or other singular change) and going by how I usually did things at the time, just sudid a vi session, changed the frequency and restarted the service.

She found out about it pretty quickly due to having syslog be a constant presence in one of her gnu screen windows and gave me a look. She quickly reverted what I did, updated our config management tool, tested it, then deployed it, while explaining why this was the right way to do things. I slowly came around to doing things the right way and haven't thought much about the initial incident until we found her personal logs that she archived and left on our public network share for future reference.

In the entries for the day that I started, we saw the following two lines:

[*] 2007/09/09 09:58 - yan started. gave sudo privs and initial hire forms.
[*] 2007/09/09 10:45 - revoked yan's sudo privs.
Ask HN: Why aren't databases 0-indexed(ie IDs start at 1)?
It seems like most everything else in computer science is based on counting from zero.
http://www.producthunt.co/posts/442
your life in google search terms: http://bit.ly/1flJZvm.

take a look at this 10-minute read on Connu. We are trying to make fiction publishing simple. How do you want to interact with what you read? (If you read fiction?) How does the short time slot work for you?
> Well, GS knowingly sold AIG junk CDOs days before the collapse, while shorting those same CDOs to make money on them. I'd call that fraud.

That's not fraud. It's probably unethical, but businesses selling customers products they know are shit is more or less legal, or at most the subject of a civil action by the purchaser. I mean, look at the software industry. How many software companies sell products that are buggy crap, that they know are buggy crap? And when it comes to investments, that basic dynamic is at the heart of a lot of sales. If I think this investment is a great deal that's going to just go up and up, why would I sell it to you?

I'm willing to entertain the idea that what GS did crossed the line in terms of the standard of ethics people expect of investment professionals, which maybe should be higher than for businesses generally. Maybe we should put such standards in place and make them enforceable,[1] but it wouldn't be fair to throw people in jail for what they did before those standards were in place.

[1] For example, it would be punishable ethical breach for a lawyer to represent a client then take a financial position adverse to the client's interests.
No the problem is that Iceland collectively ignored its responsibilities - for which I and other UK tax payers picked up the bill.

So if a UK scammer tricked your parents or grand parents out of say 50% of their life savings you'd tell them you where stupid and deserved it?
One summer in college, I got an internship at a company that made health information systems. After fixing bugs in PHP scripts for a couple weeks, I was granted access to their production DB. (Hey, they were short on talent.) This database stored all kinds of stuff, including the operating room schedules for various hospitals. It included who was being operated on, when, what operation they were scheduled for, and important information such as patient allergies, malignant hyperthermia, etc.

I was a little sleepy one morning and accidentally connected to prod instead of testing. I thought, "That's weird, this UPDATE shouldn't have taken so long-oh shit." I'd managed to clear all allergy and malignant hyperthermia fields. For all I knew, some anesthesiologist would kill a patient because of my mistake. I was shaking. I immediately found the technical lead, pulled him from a meeting, and told him what happened. He'd been smart enough to set up hourly DB snapshots and query logs. It only took five minutes to restore from a snapshot and replay all the logs, not including my UPDATE.

Afterwards, my access to prod was not revoked. We both agreed I'd learned a valuable lesson, and that I was unlikely to repeat that mistake. The tech lead explained the incident to the higher-ups, who decided to avoid mentioning anything to the affected hospitals.

If it's any consolation, the company is no longer in business.

Just remember when you screw things up: Your mistake probably won't get anyone killed, so don't panic too much.
Considering buying Starbucks gift cards with stolen credit cards is already an activity of scammers, this seems a bit dangerous. Let alone the FinCEN issues.
I did this once and have since always typed the WHERE first in an UPDATE.
Been there done that. Usually I always work inside a transaction, and carefully examine the results before typing that all important 'commit'. But a "simple" change at 4:55 and me in a hurry to get home....
Exactly the same...

I was hired by my college to build a grade management system in my second-to-last year there. I was in a hurry due to a lunch meeting with other IT staff at the University, forgot to add the where clause, and suddenly every single student was a Computational-Science major (mine).

Funny part of the story was that the moment it happened I uttered "oh shit." My boss, who sat beside me, said "what'd you do?", and about 15 IT staff from other departments walked into the office to go out for lunch. I'm sure I was an interesting shade of red.

I had to explain what I did in front of all these people. My boss laughed out loud, brought the system offline, and simply said: "well, after lunch we get to test our backup process." We went for lunch.

Two valuable lessons I learned...

People make mistakes, that isn't a problem, it's how they respond that's important.

Don't try and solve hard problems when emotions are running high. If shit is going down in production, the most important thing to do is to breathe, and get a glass of water. That little bit of time helps a lot.
It's not too difficult to add tenting to the Ergodox; just replace some of the screws with a longer variety so they act as legs. Also some of the Kinesis Freestyle tenting accessories have been adapted to the Ergodox to address these issues. It's a really hackable design, which is the main draw.
I think you're wrong. Spike nozzle has the spike which extends the whole length until flow from different sides converges. Aerospike is truncated but the circulating gas doesn't need to come from turbine; neither X-33 nor Spiral projects dropped turbine exhaust through the spike.
And which patents do you think should never have been granted? Those supposed bad patents have been held true in courts, repeatedly, around the world. Perhaps you just want a boogeyman to blame for what you perceive to be a broken system?
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PREDICTIONS FOR 2014