skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today we are launching dweet.io, an amazing IOT utility. We are giving it away for free, so please try it. Thank you!
Single seller - Google commands 2/3 of search engine volume [1] and 1/3 of online advertising [2]. Yes, they have competition, but in several verticals they are the only practical choice. Note that this does not make them an abusive monopoly, which is what those characteristics seem to be describing more than a monopoly per se.

[1] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/google-is-projected...
I'm not sure I would recommend this for 90% of the people out there and I build a product (http://gitsense.com) around it. Using Gitlab, gitolite, etc. would be much wiser choice in my opinion.
The only people who are overly concerned with IQ and take advantage of every opportunity to mention their own score are the people who have nothing to offer but an IQ score. You come across as incredibly haughty and condescending.
Having seen a demo with Brad @ Geekdom SF. Drone.io is to jenkins what IntelliJ is to Eclipse.

What I see as a benefit is how all the features of this CI system work for you out of the box. Definitely worth a look.
It is relevant to this:

> I . . . decoded _gist_session cookie (which is regular Rails Base64 encoded cookie)

In Rails 4 the session cookie is encrypted with a server-side secret, so the end user can't decipher it.
Good old power-laws.
In european countries you get between 3 and 12 months of paid maternity/paternity leave by law (in some countries, maternity only, in others, 12 months divide between parents). In some countries you can extend this by 3-6 month of unpaid leave while still protected against termination.

> I also appreciate that the lack of labor regulation in the US results in a labor force and companies that are more responsive to change than in Europe and other places that are heavily regulated.

companies that are more "responsive to change"? What does this mean? Yes, they respond more easily to quarterly results by firing, but I don't know of anyone outside of Wall Street that considers this a good thing.

The US labour situation is all fcked up, sorry - up until last year, health insurance was tied to employers (meaning people kept working in places they hated, or did not start a new venture, for health coverage). Now, it's just ultra expensive and tied to a location. (Moved? unlikely you can keep your coverage)

Some places in Europe are fcked up in the other extreme - e.g. I've heard from people in Austria and in Denmark that they won't hire employees because they won't be able to fire them without a year's notice.

But the e.g. UK, Northern Ireland, Sweden and Germany are doing fine on the both the health care and labour law fronts.
> I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. (...)

A person with an IQ at or above 145, who is also fully conversant with reality, would know that IQ testing has a reputation nearly as bad the field of psychology that popularized the activity in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

> 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years.

A person of your age should know better than to use IQ as a point of argument -- assuming the IQ score is real and has created a tangible intellectual outcome.

With all respect.
I've definitely built this sort of thing at least a few times. There comes a point where it definitely makes more sense to build this sort of functionality (or now use sendwithus!), i.e. when you get tired of hearing about changes to email templates from marketing! At the end of the day making it easier to test and optimize all the communications with your customers no matter how mundane the email is awesome. Just simple things like upsell messaging depending on the user is huge -- and not something a developer generally wants to or is capable of worrying about :)
This highlights to me that our infrastructure is horrendously overcomplicated. We have all these great abstractions, but you have to worry about bugs and exploits in every possible layer of every system. Even the simplest modern web-application has an enormous surface-area to secure, and that makes getting it "right every single time" damned near impossible.
I agree 100%. Annual performance review is stupid. Not only that, at my old work, we had mid year review.

It may be just me but feel like performance review has stuck around as long as it has because 'HR' says so...
Have you used the Tesla music system before?

No. Can you install your preferred streaming music sources, such as Grooveshark or Pandora or Last.fm?

Can you remove all signs of Slacker if you decide you don't want to be bothered with it?
Would that cover their S3 costs to store the data?
He was also very young then I believe, now he's realised he can make a lot of money by acting cool and professional so he does.
I find it a little amusing that you would talk about social and emotional intelligence, right after you directly accuse someone of having a superiority complex.

No one cares what vis IQ is, but they care how good ve is at programming, and ve attributed vis programming ability to vis IQ. Do you think that connection is false, i.e. that there is only weak correlation between programming ability and IQ?
Agreed that the lack of minorities in tech can be traced to dismal STEM programs in high schools, but as a programmer of color, I will tell you, there is a disconnect in the workplace with minorities and the white 'bro culture'. Many minorities come from a different upbringing and when attempting to assimilate into the workplace, you find that you are forced to water down who you are or be alienated. This is not just a skin color issue, I have a white Russian friend that faced the same issues.

I have worked for a startup that went on to IPO and I will name a few things that happened while I was there:

- Was asked by a peer to bring him and his clients coffee during a sales pitch.
- Constantly reminded of my lack of white pop-culture knowledge, to a condescending level. (Most knew nothing of black pop-culture, besides Biggie.)
- Being shown a picture of a guy they saw in the bar that "looked like me". The only thing we shared was the color of our skin.

I can go on, but my point is that there is much more to this than just getting minorities into technology, it's overcoming the stigma that many minorities face on a daily basis with being treated as novelties. I was born and raised in America, but many times I feel as if there are two America's. I also see minorities who have abandoned their identity for something more generic in order to assimilate and it saddens me, but I respect their decisions. As a first generation American, this is part of the struggle we go through.

There is a huge problem with exposure in tech. I believe the tech industry wants to believe we are better than other industries, when in fact, we are deeply flawed - and this is just one of the many problems we face.
The Link header [1] works very well for this. It exports an index of links with the same semantics as the <link> element.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css">

But in the header, which means API consumers don't have to search the response body for links, and can specifically request the index with a HEAD request.

Link: </styles.css>; rel="stylesheet"

The reltype is pretty powerful - it enables semantic standards and lets a client make assumptions about endpoints. Since the Link header is a standard format of, you know, links, it's also very discoverable.

1. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988

EDIT: hm. No idea why I got downvoted, but I tightened it up to get more to the OP's point.
The word "culture" doesn't mean the same thing in "bro culture" vs. "culture fit".

To me, "culture fit" is another way of saying "chemistry". It means that people work well together, and is what you want if you are forming a band, say, or any other creative endeavour.
An open-source version of the backend code would be pretty awesome, though. It was a smart idea even if it wasn't well-suited to the use it was put to. Wouldn't it be neat if you could have extra contextual info added to your e-mails without having to install anything on your phone or mail client? It could be made modular so whatever services you use could provide plugins you could add/remove at will -- CRM, lead tracking, sender analytics (this person e-mails you 3X a week?), Amazon links for products, social network profiles, etc. If you host it yourself, you don't have the privacy issues of (another) 3rd-party having access to your mail.
Yes you have a constant number of states at your disposal. Otherwise, there is a trivial solution that takes n or so time, matching the theoretical lower bound (imposed by the "speed of light" for information propagation in this kind of automaton), rendering the problem thoroughly uninteresting.
The more accurate list is the "Sources of Monopoly Power":

* Economies of scale
* Capital requirements
* Technological superiority
* Network externalities

All of these apply to Google, to some extent or another.
I signed in just to say that. First thing I noticed was good girl Gina. You really integrated her into the site, which might not be a good thing. Otherwise, I think it looks pretty sound.
5 Keys To Safeguarding Your Dream
I had a similar experience. I purchased a GoPro to use for a trip to Mexico. I had heard great stories about how durable and reliable they were from friends. So I didn't hesitate to buy one on Amazon.

Long story short all the footage from my vacation were unusable as many of the videos and pictures were corrupted/distorted which was annoying. Tried customer support but weren't able to fix the issue so I ended up returning it.
Will this always be a free service? Who will pay for operational costs?
Interesting idea. How about documenting the real-time updates protocol?
So we agree that there is opportunity for some growth in the POV camera marketplace but disagree in how much there really is.

You mention "every urban biker in the western world" but unless GoPro figures out someway to make it necessary for every biker in the western world to have a camera attached to their bike how on earth is this a realistic goal to shoot for? That is like saying Redbull is shooting to get their product into the hands of every athlete...it's a silly assumption.
Do you guys make any promises about latency between when a dweet is sent and when a following client will receive it?

Among other things, this seems like it could be a free pub/sub system.. If the latency is low that would make this incredibly useful.
Ode to Review Board
You can pay attention but not worry. The two are closely related but not the same thing :-)
It would be great for educational purposes if a sample app was setup so this vulnerability could be tried on it. Most of the white hack vulnerabilities are fixed by the time white hat blog posts come out so there is no way to actually try them out.
In fact, Saudi Aramco's 2012 revenue[1] was greater than Microsoft's market cap (at 4th most valuable us company).

[1] http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/55/55881.html
I regret that I have but one downvote to give.

The AWS API is convoluted, overwhelmingly complicated, and often yields no insight to the actual behavior taking place in the Amazon system. I can think of countless scenarios wherein my API call succeeded but nothing happened, with no reporting of the reason why anywhere. A later run of the exact same call again works. No explanation.

Now, arguably, I'm discussing the implementation of the specific API, but even on an architecture level the AWS API tries to handle absolutely every case in the most complex manner possible. This is because AWS tries to handle every case in their systems; where other providers trim things for simplicity, AWS adds as much as it can. This flexibility can be useful if you need it but to someone getting started, it is a giant wall. They've gotten much better about guiding people through setup, but the API still reflects the kitchen sink philosophy. Everybody I've ever known who loves the AWS API has only ever used boto. As an exercise, launch an instance with ephemeral and EBS storage mounted using the bare API on a clean account. You'll see what boto hides from you.

The correct approach is something like libcloud with the ability to interact with platform-specific things in a way that the library does not anticipate. However, there's a school of thought in that if you are digging yourself in to platform-specific features, your ability to move is now a significant line item of technical debt that could put you in a position where you are completely stuck and cannot hire enough people to get out.

As a former hosting employee it is immeasurably frustrating that everybody mentally defaults to AWS these days without even a second thought. All of Silicon Valley is basically wired to funnel venture capital directly to Amazon. The VC firms might as well just invest in Amazon and skip the startup risk, since inevitably most of the cash burn of a startup will go directly to AWS (because it takes a genius of reservations, flexible scaling, and other tricks to not spend six figures a month on your hosting). AWS was designed for flexible scaling, not running your 700 instances 24x7 regardless of load, but nobody operates that way. You think Amazon is going to tell you that?

With Amazon, the API is full of issues, and that's even before speaking about the service itself as well as the support; even with paid support, 12-hour ticket responses were the norm for me including in an outage situation. My personal favorite was a six-month ticket that culminated in "we don't know, so we're closing this ticket," when reporting buggy behavior with their API. There are many aspects of AWS that are dreadful, the API being only a small example, and the suggestion that we should standardize on the AWS way of doing things as an industry is very harmful. I'd contend we need a viable alternative, but Amazon has made themselves a Kitchen Sink Provider and other companies can only bite at little pieces of the pie.
Hey there,

We are actually working on a solution that might be useful to you. That said, feel free to check out http://ladr.io. We are hoping to launch a beta/prototype in the coming 2 weeks.
That's the risk of fixed-price contracts.

Some clients will withhold final payment until you do lots of extra things. Following the sunk cost fallacy, having put a certain amount of time into the project, you'll do more so you can get paid. In most cases, the client knows it's impractical for you to sue them. You either have to do the extra work for free, or write off the time you already spent as a loss.

Another risk I noticed with fixed-price contracts is that the client almost always doesn't have a proper spec. If I help them write a proper spec, then they can post it on the freelance sites and hire someone cheaper to implement it. If you start a fixed-price contract without a proper spec, you wind up with the problem you're having.

Now, I just flat-out refuse fixed-price contracts.
We’re Shutting Down and I’m Scared – The Aftermath
Between here and Hacker News, it took me two days just to go through all of the awesome words of wisdom and support. I read everything — three times. I even read those of you who told me to “quit whining” and to “man up”. Thank you, ALL, for your support.

I’m not yet ready to reveal my company or name, I may never be. But, for all of you who offered your advice, I want to at least share with you how things turned out.
so I wonder how this impacts the circleCI funding. Looks like some pretty steep competition. http://blog.circleci.com/we-raised-a-6m-series-a/
The tech companies would not exist for very long without those oil companies.
No one gets it right every single time. No one. That's a completely unrealistic expectation. What you do is establish a bar, which you share with everyone who will use your software. Then you evaluate your efforts against that bar.

One of the keys to developing good software is hiring third-parties to conduct audits. A bug bounty program is one way to incentivize people who are already probing your software to take the next step and tell you about the bugs they find.
Maybe I'm thick. The article is dated February 2014, it says flexbox "currently lacks browser support, mainly in IE (version 10 has partial support and full support won't arrive until version 11). Chrome, Safari and Firefox have support but with browser vendor prefixes."

IE11 came out in preview in June 2013, released officially in November 2013, and at least IE and Mozilla are currently supporting it unprefixed (though Mozilla's multi-line flexbox fails last time I checked). This article is over 3 months out of date, if not more, but being presented as new and current.
This is excellent and very much needed. It has been a real pain tracking down extensions until now. I never realised a lot of those extensions were actually even possible, so didn't even know to type that into my preferred search engine.

I hope this site succeeds and continues to grow. Thanks.
Three Impediments to the Internet of Things
Yeah, I've since learned that feature of Python :) Like I said, this is some of the first Python code I ever wrote; it definitely does not reflect my current knowledge.
Pre-compiled scriptable SMTP gateway, based on FreeBSD 10
Send him an e-mail saying, "Hey, I sent you $100. I would deeply appreciate it if you spent it on your beverage of choice, or a nice dinner with a friend, rather than on necessities."

It's no guarantee, of course. :)
It's socket.io. But we can/will document more on it soon.
This article only scratches the surface of the "programming is easy, programming is hard" riddle. It's a big question really, linking up with the "mythical man month" and all the paradoxes that commentators have observed since people began thinking about the process of programming.

The way I would put it is that programming gives a person more power to realize their ideas than any other device in existence, in that sense, programming is the easiest thing ever. But since programming put so much power at your finger-tips, it gives you more ways to shoot yourself in the foot than any other activity. So programming while avoiding the pitfalls can suddenly look like the hardest thing in the world.

Arguably humans have a natural facility with language. And I am inclined to believe that our ability to produce programs leverages that facility. But again, the upshot is we wind-up with a really big cannon that, if aimed at all wrong, blows our feet clean away.
6 dollars for a loaf a bread! hahah!
The product looks nice. Well done.

To the founders: can you write a bit about how Sendwithus compares to Vero and Customer.io? Also, have you considered bundling an email service provider? I know other companies have some arrangement with SendGrid. It would be nice to not have to go get my own account.

Thanks!
Hawala is discussed widely on HN before, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666557
Thanks a lot weavie! We hope it does well too because we had the same pain point as you and a ton of other people. It's just been too hard to know what is even out there for the Sass community, hopefully this helps.
And that could be why he might now be considered, but why he wasn't before.
The idea is to keep the basic platform free, but to charge to make devices private (ie writeable and readable with key authentication).

Similar to the github model...
"What are the expectations for the position?" might work.

"What can I expect on a typical day? Typical week?" is probably better.

But absolute realism probably goes a long way. It's unlikely the job expectation is rewriting the Mumps to Cobol middleware in Lau and CouchDB. How does the company produce profit, who are its customers, what kind of business is it?

This above all else: https://sivers.org/below-average
Very cool. One suggestion for the product page is some simple use-cases for why you'd use such a service. Also, are there size constraints for the dweets?
I left Heroku for OpsWorks and shaved 40% off response times
Buffer’s open salary policy is working for them, but it might not be sustainable
Every bubble comes with people who claim a technological shift or other fundamental shift has occurred.

Instead, look at it analyitcally; A P/E of 30ish means that people think Google could grow 3X. Seems reasonable.
Yup, this was me. Bought the Hero Black and returned it two weeks later, for all of the reasons you cited.
Considering Kansas launched in September 2012 [1] that gives them a year and a half of service. They've already announced Austin and Utah (Utah starting service soon ~Feb 20 [2]). They are having to build new infrastructure to the "fiber hoods" which takes a lot of capital and time. Let alone massive political fights from the current ISPs that are sure to take months of time. I'm not sure how they could be more serious about it?

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
[2] - https://fiber.google.com/cities/provo/
Left for dead: the mysterious disease killing thousands in Central America
No promises yet, but we plan on offering paid plans that could offer SLAs on latency. Although I will say we architected it from the get-go to be high throughput and low latency— it's all using redis in-memory on the back-end.
Putting aside for the moment that this article doesn't even mention Social Security:

How much of a decrease to baseline CPI would constitute a "gutting"? It's not as if the current formula is engraved on stone tablets from the gods: Like any estimate, it could probably be improved over time, up and down.

Anyway, if AEI has a motive in writing pieces like this, I think it's more to emphasize how incredible technological advancement has improved our buying power and consequently our lives. I run into a surprising number of folks on forums like this who are convinced that they'd much rather live in the golden "Mad Men" years of the 1960's, when you (a man) could raise a (typically white) family on one blue collar income, which came with a house, car, a wife with time to raise the kids, and a golden retirement in Key West. It's easy to lose track of just how much everyday "magic" you'd be giving up, even if you're not some poor minority who'd be really screwed trying to earn a living back then.
...the future is bright.
I don't think the comparison is valid because Saudi ARAMCO is basically a state owned company with a monopoly over the natural resources of an entire country. If Google attains a trillion dollar valuation it would be amazing because they'd have achieved it due to their vision and hard work.
Performance reviews are terrible, because there will always be error, and people who are overrated get complacent and those who are underrated get pissed.

If the manager's any good, people know how they're doing. Okay, so what if the manager's not good? Then the employee's performance, if low, isn't really his fault.

There's not much upside to reviews, because companies will either (a) find ways to give bonuses and advancement to top performers regardless of what they formally score, or (b) won't, but reviews won't help them.

They exist for two reasons. One is to intimidate people. But that just doesn't work. Intimidating people into working hard leads to a useless product. The second is to generate a paper trail before firing people. But I think PIPs and performance reviews are a really bad solution. Better is to fire as soon as the problem is evident and irremediable, but to give severance instead of the 2-month "walking dead" phase in which he shits all over morale.

The worst thing about formalized reviews is that they inhibit internal mobility. Top performers don't want to leave, for fear of risking a bad review. But in most companies, no one wants to take on the 80% of people who are "just average", even if they might become A players on a better-fit project. That makes departmental residency permanent and causes the "warring departments" phenomenon for which Microsoft is known.
is it still a good idea to buy google stock?