skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow ! Obviously sexual discrimination and workplace bullying are in favor at AOL.

Seriously, this sounds like another 'top notch tough businessman' appointed at immense salary.

My experience has been the first person normally claiming they are top notch is none other than themselves, and otherwise prosperous companies with generally good prospects seem to bleed money shortly after their arrival (normally into their pockets) and end up as burned out shells being sold off piecemean with some golden parachute to the outgoing top notch guy before he repeats the performance or retires to a recently purchased, by a tax haven based company, island in the Carribean.

And as proof of true sexual equality, there are examples where the he is a she.
nope, they can only argue that the French law that struck them is illegal under an EU law. The rest would fall under national sovereignty.
Most large companies self-insure. They just hire a "health insurance" company to administer the plan.
Wow. A billion dollars in profit, 12 million in his pocket each year...but the 7 million for health care has to come out of the employees' other pocket.

Also, the fact that he's blaming two babies - I find it highly unlikely, statistically, that two such cases blew the cost of premiums for a group as large as AOL. I'm pretty sure they had more employees with cancer that year, for example, and that's also super-expensive.

This guy is despicable.
That could have been her job. Also it's not my printer, I'm not supposed to change anything. Of course I'm half guessing since she didn't talk much with me after that first day.
I found this article very difficult to read, and while it talks a lot about procedural music, I don't think that any of the people it covers are making any except the "Birthday Song Crew", who are clearly geniuses.

It did, however, introduce me to http://yaxu.org/tidal/ which is going to force me to finally learn Haskell.
[The Economist] Want to avoid disruption? Then keep exploring
How To Determine Your Virtual User Quota
For his sake I even checked if the images in that page are not in fact hosted on facebook servers. Still... I'm pretty sure browsing facebook in incognito mode would be enough
This isn't company versus country. We're not talking about some arbitrary bureaucratic regulation.

This is corporation versus civil rights in a free and democratic Western nation.

This is a level of greed driven arrogance that makes 90's Microsoft look like saints.
I don't think Google looks for traffic originating from a server specifically. I doubt it is really even possible as it would look just like traffic from a normal computer.
Neither of these 2 posts say how long you've been doing this work for.

Maybe your just using a language that doesn't relate to you? Have you tried writing in Java? PHP? Ruby? You might be a crappy C programmer but excel in Java.

I sucked in FoxPro but really excel at PHP and am getting pretty good at Obj-C. It's all a matter of how badly you want to learn something. PHP is my career, but I want to be an iOS developer. So everyday, I try. I fail often, but the more I've worked with the language, the better I've gotten and I struggle with it less now adays.
I just watched Charlie Wilson's War last night in memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos convinced Congress to authorize $500 million to arm the mujahadeen. Rep. Wilson couldn't get his subcommittee with an unlimited budget to authorize $1 million for school reconstruction after the Soviets left. Seems like a pretty good example.
IBM went to the EOY lump-sum 401(k) plan awhile back.
It may relate to prematurity. The cost of hospitalization of a premature baby can be 500K to 1.5 million on average given a 20-40 day stay in the NICU.

AOL's insurance would cover it and rates might rise slightly, but it is disingenuous to blame the women.

AOL might be self-insured, but I doubt it.
Now that everyone in this thread has pointed out what the problem is and has shared how they feel about the problem, what's a real world, plausible solution so this doesn't happen again in the future?
To everyone who's saying "they make X billions in profit each year and can't afford Y million!", that's not the point. It'd be irresponsible of him to simply eat the extra costs. Hopefully, people wake up and realize what a horrible law Obamacare is and demand it be repealed.
How I learned that HN-whoring bloggers are deluding themselves to keep blogging.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The only part of Java used in Android is the syntax. The VM was written from scratch. In fact, Oracle took Google to court over allegations that Google had copied parts of the Java VM (and lost on the majority of counts, getting no payout).

And there is also the fact that I know it's not true because my phone (LG G2) has no problems with touch response.
As far as I know, the guys making custom ASICs for mining are selling them to miners for real dollars. I don't think that helps your point much.
He's not blaming two babies, he simply stated that unforeseen events caused the company's healthcare costs to go up unexpectedly.
What is wrong with you? Are you suggesting AOL employees should be paid minimum wage?
Because their cancellation policy is intentionally designed to make it nearly impossible to cancel your AOL account.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/technology/29link.html?pag...

I think they might have changed things in recent years, but it's still not easy to cancel your AOL subscription.
Late 90s was horrible and difficult time. Russia is not by any means warm, cozy and polished place now, but it changed enormously since 90s.
Obamacare: the perfect scapegoat for large companies trying to cut costs.
I'm assuming that when it says a "fixed number of states," it means that the number of states can't be tied to the number of soldiers in the line? (e.g., a five state solution would have to work for any number of soliders)
High-level CPU
We, the programmers and engineers, have absolutely no say in the matter. If you wanted that influence you should have been an MBA. We're Morlocks.
Even if the two babies did have a significant impact, it's utterly disgusting to parade them as an excuse for cutting benefits.
The worst part might be him putting part of the blame as an aside to the women with "distressed babies." It seems awfully small for a CEO of a Fortune 1000 to pin this cost-cutting decision, even partially, on two people.
If something is very cheap and provided by a company focused on advertisements based on user data, I am going to be skeptical. What's in it for Google?
​Struggling US Postal Service looks to bitcoin for new revenue
Bad Sex Media? BINGO
Why are CC versions of Adobe software not in Adobe agreements?
As an AOL employee, this news and other internal news really, REALLY makes me want to reconsider my options.
It's not that they're "leaving it up to its customers to be responsible", it's strategically employing black patterns to exploit specific mistakes people make.

Are you 100% on top of your every bill? Do you know everything going in and going out of your bank account? Have you made any mistakes in looking over something? My friend's dad is a CFO of a Fortune 500 company (and is a generally well-reputed guy) - I recently found out that he's pretty bad at managing his home finances - forgets to pay credit bills and all that.

This shit just happens. I'd rather that I deal with a company that doesn't try to actively exploit me on my weaknesses. The companies that do this have a bad character and I wish they just didn't exist.
The situations you describe.. I would have acted the same and cannot imagine anyone getting offended over it (as per experience from comparable situations). Did you find out why exactly you caused problems and what their feelings were and why?
People can be hurt when they are made to feel incompetent or looked down upon, for example. Sometimes they have a bad day. Maybe it was the precious new printer and you put an ugly sticky label on it without asking (some people are like that with 'their' stuff).
If you understand what exactly the problem is/was, you're half-way to fixing it and/or doing better next time.

(Note that I'm living in a hippy scientist bubble where you have to work hard to make people take something personal, so I'm playing on the easiest level.. (plus, young woman bonus))
Less. Federal interference in wages is an abomination. /s
From my view, this is a case where random big box mgt consulting firm (McKinsey, PWC, Booz) found some loose cash on $xM engagement.

Tim then publicly regurgitated much of the internal deck logic. Obamacare may have been his own (questionable) addition - but the two distressed babies was definitely in the deck.

Whichever consulting firm it was obviously need's to coach those CxO's better on implementation.
That's mostly because there not being any restrictions on health care pricings (as far as I know); the insurance companies don't pressure hospitals to keep costs manageable, the government doesn't prevent health care institutions from charging widely different prices, and nobody stops pharmacy companies from charging exorbitant prices for medication.
You got what he is saying right? It want meant to be taken literally.
ah! I knew you were joking!

Sorry for giving you space for a reply ;)
An important tip missing on the OP is: be persistent, fully knowing that you might be annoying, but never, under any circunstance admit that you are annoying, or act as you knew you were being annoying. You must sound totally naivee, act as all you want is your prospect to better and completely convinced that using your product would make him a better person/professional. Act surprised when the prospect act irritated. And always use the argument that the prospect himself kept that door open with you by not saying he didn't want your product.

This was a great read to me, because now I know that I've been doing it right for the last few years. Before my "2013 startup year" I worked on a philanthropy advisory non-profit. 80% of my job was selling to wealthy individuals our service of being a guide to better donations. So I was basically a salesperson selling a service that almost nobody in Brazil consider a real need or problem - btw that's one difference between cause driven non-profits and market driven startups, you don't pivot if the market doesn't need your service, you persist. Mainly because the people you are solving a problem and the people giving you money are two separate stakeholders usually. That's kind of inevitable, because the social problem wouldn't be there to begin with if the market/society were really bothered by it. I can't imagine Watsi pivoting because people do not want to pay for medical anymore, but they would be willing to pay for a exotic tourism service to where the people they aid are from. They might get more money this way, but social tourism is another cause, solves another problem (maybe). It is not an acceptable pivot for a non-profit.

Back on topic, I learned to be persistent to get to a no. People hate saying no to something that the society consider the right thing to do, even if they have no intention of actually doing it, so this was crutial to my job - get a "no" was always my objective.

But I disagree with a reason to do it is getting feedback. I never got real feedback for why people were saying no - maybe because of what I was selling, there is a stigma in saying "I won't donate because I earned it by myself and I am antitled to spend on whatever I want, and giving them away to other people's benefit is not my idea of a money well spent".
Start-up idea? Digital signatures for cell phone calls/texts. Doesn't have an official signature and is not self-signed family member, ignore the text/call.
OboeJs: Streaming JSON loading for Node and browsers
It's debatable who actually does read large amounts of code; see: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/

I personally only read large amounts of code when trying to grasp the overall structure of a large application. But I'd rather not read large amounts of code; I'd rather read a design document! But not everyone writes them... :-(

I would opine (based on experience!) that work like bug-fixing can be so monotonous that your mind starts getting a little mushy as you do it day after day after year after year. It doesn't tend to be the kind of work that promotes great engineering thought. It's . . . a job. Which is okay, as far as it goes. But if you want to grow as an engineer, you need to design and build things.

I would suggest reading:

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

and especially:

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup

which talks about professionalism for software engineers. You might find some inspiration there. (And the whole book, even if you don't build web applications, is still a worthwhile read to gain some insight into how a professional software engineer thinks.)
And here I was being sympathetic to "healthcare problems" until he threw those two mothers under the bus with that backhanded remark. Has this guy shown no class while at AOL?

I'd like to think AOL has made a meteoric turnaround with HuffPost and Patch especially (the content is better than the local papers in my suburban hellhole, which isn't saying much) but maybe I spoke too soon.
I have to admit...

the baby thing really bothered me.

If you want to make a political statement against Obama... fine... I get it.

But why drag two innocent families into this? What were these people supposed to do??? NOT try to help their children???

That was a very classless maneuver on AOL's part. Just state that your medical benefit costs were higher than expected this year. Don't be a douche about the whole thing.

I apologize for the rant... just rubbed me the wrong way.
My bitbucket repository[1] has 8 public projects and over 25 private. I know people don't care about them but I have fun writing them. That is the key, liking what you do, not do it for getting recognition or else. If one day you can come up with a complete project that you think other people can enjoy you are more than welcome to share it and push it to take off, but the most important thing is that you do it for you first. it's not even about being good, I have seen simple projects taking off easily and amazing super complex projects getting shut down immediately.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101
I hope libcloud gets some traction.

The problem is, currently it's not really mature enough. The whole idea is to use one interface so you don't end up with writing special cases for different IaaS. The problem is that it simply isn't fully-featured and that the interface for different platform differs even when it's not really necessary.

I've been using it to interact with AWS and OpenStack, but still end up with lots of special cases and even falling back to boto for some AWS features (e.g. CloudWatch).

I really hope they fix the interface issues and cover more features of specific platforms in future.
This is partly about the insane European cookie directive [0] (cf. [1]). A problem with forced apologies is, when the crimes you're apologizing for are actually controversial political issues, it takes on the character of political speech.

"I'm sorry I stole from that guy" is an apology. "I'm sorry I hacked your computer without your consent, in violation of privacy law" -- meaning you set a browser cookie -- that's something else.

[0] "According to the watchdog, Google didn't adequately inform users about its data collection processes, nor did it obtain consent or tell users how long cookies would be installed on their machine."

http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/08/google-privacy-cnil-fine/

[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=eu+cookie&sort...
Lots of possibilities. A premature birth. An congenital heart defect. etc.

Also, my read is that Armstrong thought he was going to sound like a great guy ... doing everything they could to help the distressed babies.
First there were CAPTCHAs, now there are GOTCHAs
Still disgusting to parade two specific examples like that.
Casting the return value of malloc is necessary in C++. I think that's why it's so widespread, so you can compile your C program with a C++ compiler.
+1 to this - try something else to try that you've not already tried, e.g. if you've only ever done C or Java before, why not branch out and try HTML+Javascript?

Just tinkering around with other stuff can be a fun & educational diversion.
Healthcare costs have averaged ~15% inflation since the 90s.

Not even close[1].

CAGR of U.S. health care expenditures 1990-2012: 6.05%

CAGR of U.S. health care expenditures 2000-2012: 5.59%

And that's total spending, not accounting for population growth.

Health care expenditures have grown faster than inflation, but not anywhere near 15% annually.

[1] http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat...
You mention that healthcare costs have increased by ~15% per year. But using this percentage (assuming it is true) is misleading.

How does that cost-of-healthcare increase change the overall cost of employing someone? Clue: it's a lot less than 15%.

If you're laying off employees just for this reason, you're either doing something wrong or you're making political excuses.
a company i worked for self-insured, but they did have insurance that kicked in at a very high level.
Ok, so you don't mean it's the God suddenly introduced democracy in new countries, but revolutions; the revolutions started because the population was unhappy - not about the lack of democracy, but about poor economy. I agree with that. I can also add that the countries where the democratic principles developed slowly and organically (US and Britain) happen to be rich (strong economy is a condition where people can start to think about democracy and human rights, poor economy is where people think about basic security) and it was these countries that induced the democratic changes in other countries (e.g., post-WW2 Germany), using their wealth to stabilize their economies, and eventually transplanting their own democratic traditions to these new countries.

So this works fine as long as the revolution-inducing country is rich enough to sponsor the economy of the country where the revolution is taking place. In addition to economy, there are other factors, such cultural norms (e.g., family clans), that will need to be overcome, but this worked as long as the cultures are not too different (US and Germany, or Western Europe and Central Europe, for example).

So basically, we seem to agree that Western-style democracy is not something that can now be organically implanted in Ukraine, not without massive amounts of money poured into it by the West (which is problematic given the size of the country), and even then this will be difficult because of huge differences in traditions to run a country.
Wasn't that precisely the first complaint - observing a pair of incidents which make no sense as a consistent policy? (the second complaint being that even a senator had trouble clearing up a mistake). Both the original comment and reply are consistent with that reading.
Actually it isn't - it's a story about how I learned to better help others. :)
You're Worth $128 on Facebook
If the customers are actively paying for a service that AOL is providing, despite not needing that service anymore, AOL has an obligation to mention that to them. Otherwise AOL is exploiting the technological ignorance of their own customers, which is immoral.

If AOL's logs show that a customer hasn't used their service in more than a year, it would be trivial to send out a 'are you sure you still need us?' letter to each of them.
Good advice +1
I doubt that person supports the minimum wage law.
Not your idea exactly, but these guys do something similar for designers & dropbox

https://marvelapp.com/
BackBlaze only keeps deleted files for 30 days. They are backup copy, not backup archive. At least CrashPlan could be used as both with "remove deleted versions: never" setting.
Yeah, a third world law asking them to tell their users exactly what they will do with personal data they will send to a country that has notoriously no legal protection for them and a very active market in personal data and identity theft.

In this case, having google comply to the most restrictive law of the countries they are operating in would benefit the rest of the world. They are not asked to come to work naked. They are asked to explain their users who will be able to know of their secret homosexuality or the brand of their car.
It disappoints me to read the knee-jerk reactions here by those who obviously have not gone through childbirth. To help some of you along, a "distressed baby" would be his way of saying that the mother or baby experienced trauma or were under life-threatening duress either during childbirth or prior. This is not that unusual - things like umbilical cords wrapped around a neck, a small birth canal, and other reasons can cause significant problems during childbirth. How many millions of women and babies have died during childbirth? Half of the commenters here are acting as though childbirth is always a safe process.

The guy used a term that the writer of the article took offense to and you guys are making a huge deal of it. Get over it. Imagine yourself having to tell the same story to 100 reporters 100 times over two days. You'd try different ways of saying it and, no doubt, at least one of those times you'd use a word or phrase you wished you could take back.

If you're unhappy that he's bitching about paying for healthcare, fine - let that be why you complain. But stop falling for the buzzfeed/linkbait BS titles and "tricks" that authors use to try to make stories facebook-worthy.
Hedge Fund Boss Speaks Out Against Bitcoin
This seems like a step in the wrong direction when it comes to the online reading experience.

- can't save it for offline reading

- can't scroll, have to scroll and flip through fake paper book

- can't search inside the book

- resizing text can cause pages to be cut off

Why would I read it on bubbl.in when I can read it like this?
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25420/25420-h/25420-h.htm

or any other format I want?
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25420
Not necesserily, it's still good to realize that there would be a more efficient solution. This applies in the real world too: you might be working out the best way to notify servers of an event through P2P, but it may be better to simply notify those servers in some broadcast pattern. (The idea of a mirror to notify all soldiers at once would be a broadcast pattern)
To clarify, a European billion is an American trillion [1] (an American billion is a European milliard), which is why RBerenguel said "the latter would be... big, very big, hugely, mindbogglingly big."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
How are pseudorandom and truly random numbers different and why does it matter?
I think he was just using that as one example of AOL's questionable business practices. The company has been known for things like charging customers for service they don't need, making it difficult to cancel service, and pumping out a large volume of low quality content (pulled from original sources) to get higher search rankings.
Optimality implies objectivity. You don't choose the optimal name, you find out what it is.
Was the Target POS Attack Preventable?
Unsolicited advice are a pain in the ass 99% of the time.

The biggest problematic with advice is that you gave them against information you have received. Vision is much more than a few sentences.

Outsiders' short-term advice are most of the time contradictory to long-term vision.
Sounds to me like he's blaming the babies or else he could have left them out of it and said something like 'exceptional events'.
That video is unavailable.
By the way: this needs to be matched against a baseline distribution of initial letters in words and common names. Zoozimps, yo.