skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends what sort of life you're turning upside down. For low level jobs I can see hire fast fire fast being a fairly good thing, it lets people have a crack and maybe prove themselves, where they wouldn't be able to pass a more risk averse setup.

Both sides gamble. What's kind's going to depend on what they're putting up.
Is it too much to ask that a web-based clone of a single-input game originally designed for phones and tablets also work on a phone or tablet? Apparently for you, it is. Either that or this was some kind of platform flame. I can never tell any more.
It was also pretty weird to see Erlang on that list. Erlang may be good at parallelism, but I've never heard that BEAM is especially fast at sequential operations.

edit: s/linear/sequential/
Assuming you've done well for your company you might say

"That's very disappointing to hear that we're struggling so much as a company. I was (hoping|expecting) for X.

<pause>

Is there any advice or direction you could provide to me where I might help ensure we do better as a company going forward? I'd like to set up a plan of what I can to help and revisit compensation in the next 1-3 months."

And at the same time, start polishing your resume and interview skills.

I would think of this approach as a probation period for any company that I work for. If an employee isn't doing well, they're put on probation. Why not do the same for any company that is vying for our technical abilities?
At that rate, better stock up on diapers.

http://xkcd.com/605/
could someone point to some article that expand on this topic ? thanks
I took this out because it was unclear. I meant scripting in the sense that Python and Ruby are called "scripting languages". One possible policy is to use Java for your application, and something like Python to write scripts for stuff like devops or whatever else "scripting" is. Instead of this, I prefer use one language as much as possible, currently Java.
Still Terrible at Flappy Bird
Works great for me, and I have amblyopia.
At the risk of being 'that guy,' any chance you could spare an invite for me?
Since the author hints that they migrated to Go templates, this article is more about when you should render templates client side vs/ server side than an opinion against AngularJS.
Perfect, thanks for sharing. Now if only we could subscribe to multi-reddits.
Outgoing NSA director: ‘It’s not our mission’ to spy on everyone in the world
You evaluate whether they're telling the truth. Some companies genuinely cannot afford to pay you market rate. That's why OP said "as soon as you can." In those cases, you say, "I understand. Please consider it again when the timing is better. Thanks."

But if you feel like the company can afford it and they're just shutting you down, the proper response is, "Seeya."
Ubuntu. Hands down.

None of them are perfect, but my experience with Ubuntu is that it is hands down, the most desktop-friendly distro out there.

On the other hand, the "RPM hell" that is rumored to be gone in RPM-based distros, is still alive and well. I had a STABLE server-based distro warn me that packages were broken, and there were unresolvable dependencies. This was with a very vanilla install, and no extra repos. Needless to say, it scared me away from RPM-based distros for the foreseeable future.

Is Ubuntu problem-free? Certainly not. However, when I have encountered the occasional issue, there have been workarounds.

The other thing is... if someone is making a Linux version of their app, everyone and their uncle is providing .deb packages. There's a LOT of momentum behind it. So... if I'm going to go off the beaten path of OS X and (heaven forbid) Windows... Ubuntu is the most painless.

Another reason I like Ubuntu so much is its polish. It looks more polished than any distro I've used, to date.

I hear they may do some patching with their fonts, and some other magic under the hood.

I like Arch Linux, as well. If I could get Ubuntu's polish on Arch, it would be a perfect world. :)
"Flat" == non-management and hidden biases
People who might like a Lobsters invite should make their E-mail known in their profile.

(Having some contact info in your HN profile is probably a good idea in general. I think the likelihood of spam is pretty low.)
Honestly, as an employee, if you are looking around and get a good offer, accepting a counter offer from your present company is rarely a good thing. Management clearly didn't plan for raises/growth, expected you to maintain course and be happy. At the point you have already gotten an offer, most management at your present company is not going to look kindly on one's activities...

Despite the advice above.

There are many factors to "an offer", for some money is important, for others support for built up work habits (odd hours) may be another. That said, I think the initial advice of the article is spot on -- stay engaged with your employees.

The last three times I've left a company, it was either a surprise or a shock. Twice bonuses promised were over due, the third, slave pits that founders refused to see (previously commented on).
I've tried explaining this using terms like system programming or high efficiency programming. I guess it is best to just say "explicit memory management", so I updated the post.
There's a difference between "somebody" needing a dictionary, and "20% of your audience".

If you write a book, go ahead and insert "fluffy" words.
If you write a blog post or create site copy, assume the worst and keep it simple.

I like Steinbeck and Hemingway. Simple and powerful.

PS Neither am I.
You should check out http://business.snapzu.com or http://tech.snapzu.com (same service, different categories)

It's a more visual approach, and new submissions start small and get bigger as they get more popular (amount of votes) on the grid.
NOTUSEFULSHUTDOWN
LinkedIn is a great professional platform for sales and marketing people. Not so much for developers.
If you'd read the book and worked through it you would understand why a hidden variable theory is not experimentally justifiable.
Rbutr Makes It Easier For Anyone To Flag Misinformation On The Web
Ask HN: Do all investors need to see traction?
This is my first raising money. Everyone I talk to, and everything I read says that investors won't invest if they don't see traction. Is this true?

The way I see it, the quality of an investment depends on its expected value: chances of success X magnitude of success. No traction (yet) doesn't necessarily mean that chances of success are low.

For example (not to self-promote, but my situation is a applicable), my website solves a real problem. Student reviews of colleges ask questions that are too broad. Applicants want more information. I ask more specific questions that provide more information, and thus solve the problem. I've shown that I could get reviews because I paid for them for 3 pilot schools. However, I need a seed round to pay for reviews at the other 297 schools. I don't have traction yet, because I need reviews first. But people say I need traction in order to get the reviews, which is a big problem.

See https://www.dropbox.com/s/8cuu8ztl4srfgb6/Questions%20Comparison%20pdf.pdf to see the questions that I ask compared to the ones my competitors ask.
That would make ensuring my phone has a charge before leaving for work in the morning all that more annoyingly important.
I don't understand, I'm used to doors with handles on random sides, how are they biased?
This is an article with no attempt to understand the state of the art outside of what Airbus wanted written and is PR spin. Most of the techniques here were used in the 737NG program in the late 90s
I need to stop clicking on the "why we left x for y" articles on HN. Mostly people have picked the wrong tool for the particular job and the articles are just an embarrassment.

Obviously SPAs take a lot of extra work to make search engine friendly and are probably going to be the wrong tool for the job for any site which requires that. Much of the web isn't searchable and doesn't want to be searchable. If you are writing a web app to solve some business problem which sits behind a login angular really isn't a problem.

Think of the millions of poorly maintained and inflexible VB and Java business apps out there that are due to be replaced and the employees who are wanting to do business on the road with their macbooks, chromebooks and tablets. There is your market for Angular.
Recruiters certainly have a conflict of interest.

It would be pretty straightforward to add a couple questions to any general survey of employees in an industry to figure it out.
Yahoo Labs Announces $10M Partnership with CMU's Machine Learning Dept
There's a difference between "somebody" needing a dictionary, and "20% of your audience".

If you write a book, go ahead and insert "fluffy" words, if they are more precise.
If you write a blog post or create site copy, assume the worst and keep it simple.

(PS Neither am I, and so do I, but I admire writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway. Simple and powerful. It's actually harder, not easier.)
Drug site Silk Road wiped out by Bitcoin glitch
EyeBeacon
on glassdor you can sometimes filter salaries by different levels of engineer's experience, but it only works for large companies
Maybe a lot of people know that moving job comes with a 10-20% raise, so they take the counter offer while planning to move on in 6 months or so, meaning that they get a double raise...

They might also feel they will be taken as a more skilled candidate if they can quote a high current salary, enabling them to score a better role at a better next employer. That might seem counter-intuitive, but if you know you are under market, people selecting employees for quality over price will wonder why.
I'm thinking there's probably a happy medium in between yours and OP's extremes.
A+ers? 1%-ers? MVPs? Cream of the crop? Apex-ers? Acmeees?

People are going to end up using some term to denote their top performers. Verbal shorthand is very hard to get rid of.
It's true. Sometimes, until you get big enough, you can't provide a career path in the short term. But you can at least make someone that is truly great a lead, and let them know as you grow, you want to find a bigger path for them. At least, you can tell them you want to do this. Sometimes, they will need to go to achieve their goals if you don't grow fast enough.

But, if you grow fast enough ... this resolves itself.
Not really the same but I typically just do something like this to prevent magic numbers sprinkled all over my consuming code...

<code>

class Section(TransformerCommon):
""" working model
"""
TEMPERATURE_COLD = 20

NONE = 0
END = 1
BOTH = 2
END_INSULATION_LOC_CHOICES = (
(NONE, "None"),
(END, "End"),
(BOTH, "Both"),
)

...
end_ins_location = models.IntegerField(
choices=END_INSULATION_LOC_CHOICES,
verbose_name="End Insulation Location")
...
try:
if self.end_ins_location == Section.NONE:
...
elif self.end_ins_location == Section.END:
...
elif self.end_ins_location == Section.BOTH:
...
else:
...

</code>
The Digg technology tag is actually pretty good.

http://digg.com/tag/technology
Do you use a framework for routing and handling HTTP requests, or just servlets? What about accessing the database, if any? I assume you're not using Java EE.

EDIT: For iOS, http://j2objc.org/ can help you share code between platforms, but you'll still do the UI and other platform-specific things in ObjC.
You can clone an idea just add your own twist to it. Don't just copy someone else's idea blindly. I believe in niches. Find a niche that you can stick with and start working at it.
not most programming. For client side ui work maybe, but pretty much everything I do algorithmic efficiency is a big concern. It's this sort of attitude that gives java it's reputation for being slow and results in behemoth's of software like weblogic.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/push-to-deploy (Git + .netrc)
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain
Solar/Thermal Desalinzation Technology Could Help Farmers
I think this simply reflects the positioning of Guardian America, which is aiming squarely at the market gap to the left of the NY Times. There's a noticeable difference in tone between the US and UK comment pages, the US page seeming much more bombastic.

In Britain, The Guardian fills a political niche quite similar to that of the NY Times, perhaps with a little less stuffiness as it does not consider itself the paper of record (a position traditionally filled by The [London] Times, a more conservative paper.) It also has a tendency to be less deferential than the NY Times, but that simply reflects the UK press in general, where politicians are widely regarded as being only marginally higher than scum.
Huawei uses SIRI to promote new tablet and smartphone
The number of cities in St. Louis county is mind-boggling to me.
The 25 most popular Reddit posts of all time
For those wanting modern boardgame picks, my current recommendations are Bohnanza (cute German card game about bean-farming ... I like it even though I generally detest card games), Caribbean (a little like the computer game Pirates! meets Age of Empires), Cornish Smuggler (just great, with bonus anti-authoritarian streak), Pandemic (fast, very adaptable to different numbers of players, and the best cooperative game ever published), Risk 2210 (for 4 players with 4+ hours to burn), and Ticket to Ride. I've played quite a few board games with groups or in cafes in China, LA, London, Thailand (where my friend is the Thai Catan licensee/distributor), and try new ones fairly regularly.
If I wanted contract work, I'd do that instead.
About the blue color and color-blindness problem...

It depends on the colors badges can be, apart from blue. If they can be yellow or green... that might be a problem because of tritanopia and tritanomaly. But I only know of blue and orange badges. So true... those orange badges might appear red to someone with tritanopia... but he's not going to mistake a blue badge with an orange-red one.

You are still right for the fully achromats out there. But a shading level difference between the orange and the blue badge could be enough. Otherwise, a simple indicative letter is enough (E for employees, I for interns and C for contractors would be more than enough).

Again... if there are more than two colors for those badges (green, yellow, red?) the problem of relying on color to convey information could be more problematic.
Given that he's a web programmer, I presume "high efficiency" in this case means "getting the most out of the hardware" in a more general sense, to which "idiomatic code is automatically concurrent" contributes quite a lot in some cases.
Google In The Mission
If this contains one great truth it's this

> By The Time You Give Them a Raise, It’s Too Late.

I have seen this happen often. If you get a higher offer from a second company, you will think that the first employer paid you below par, which leads to a feeling of being taken advantage of. At that point, it doesn't really help if the offer is countered, the feeling of being exploited has already taken root.

Unfortunately, most managers just don't get this, or they somehow believe that they can counter offer. Maybe that works in sales/marketing, who knows, but I think it's different in dev.
GWT may not be fashionable, but the compiler and other development tools are very advanced, and big Google products use it. So I'd think twice about bashing it.
Does nobody here remember modems? You take an old 2400 baud modem that's supposed to work over a crackly telephone line - www.engadget.com/media/2009/05/090527-300baud-01.jpg

that's literally how TCP/IP was invented. This stuff - pure, analog audio - went all the way up to 28.8kbps, which was the limit of the line bandwidth. Why not just take those protocols and put them into a speaker and microphone. Why bother writing new protocols? Just start with modem protocols and play with the frequencies.

Home Internet connectivity was literally born out of TCP/IP over audio...
I'd switch away from Android for this, but to what?
Honestly, I don't get this.

I remember working in a computer lab in the 90s and talking to one of the graduate students I really respected. She had interrupted a discussion some of us were having about compiler errors & warnings, specifically the various flags to pass to enable them.

She was opposed to them -- strongly. I don't remember everything, but I remember he discussing how the days of punch card were ideal. The compile/execution phase was so divorced from act of writing your program, that you had to be really sure about what you were going. You would go over it several times before you find out if it ever compiled.

For a long time, I took her words to heart. I still enabled the warnings & errors, but that was because I didn't trust myself. My goal was to get to the point were I wouldn't need to.

After several years, I realized something: She was wrong.

I would waste a lot of time identifying things like silly typos, etc. Things the compiler would have caught in an instance. I switched my habit to compiling frequently, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I didn't expect the compiler to be magical, but I also stopped under-utilizing my tools too.

And that's the same way I view Stack Overflow.

I learned to program in a small town, when most computers didn't even have a modem. If I had a problem & got stuck, that was it. I would either figure it or have to give up. Sure, sometimes I would figure things out on my own. But that would take days. And, I hate to say it, but in a lot of cases, I just gave up.

On the other hand, I picked up Objective C a few years. The difference was night & day. If I couldn't figure things out after an hour (my general bar), I'd resort to Googling & asking on Stack Overflow.

I have no doubt that I learned more and learned faster with the second system.

The goal shouldn't be to reduce your toolset. It should be to learn to use them effectively.
As a rubyist by day this is the thing I find so exciting about Haskell. I write dynamically-typed code all day, and the most common bugs are not because of passing an Apple to an Orange interface—that just isn't very common—it's because of cascading nulls. Of course Java's static checks are worth something, but not much more than the most cursory of checks that my basic test coverage does in Ruby.
Any sort of standard server side rendering, or possibly a front end framework that can be rendered server side as well (I think React can do that, same as Backbone).

Basically, SPA frameworks are useful when you are working with lots and lots of data moving back and forth. A good example is something like Intercom.io's interface. They have tons of tables and modals and data flying around. This isn't conducive to the standard browser request -> server render -> load whole new page on the client. It's just too slow. When you're interacting purely with data in a master interface, SPA frameworks are the way to go. And it isn't even a matter of literal page loading and rendering speed, it's the fact that refreshing the view with a whole new page on each link click is a context change that adds up when you're managing a lot of data or performing a lot of small tasks in an application.

But something like Blogger, where you're reading just some content, maybe some comments...there's no real benefit from loading it in a SPA environment. Render it server side, cache it, and fire it to my browser as fast as possible.
I kid... partly. What I can't get over is a common justification for using GWT seems to be "but you can program in java and Swing then!", which only holds for fans of Swing. It seems is most often advocated by people uncomfortable with Javascript development and little UI development experience outside of Java.

I don't think Swing is terrible but I do think it isn't particularly productive for user interfaces compared to Javascript or even Objective-C, C#, etc.

So if all you have a Java/Swing hammer then GWT is great, otherwise not so much.

In any event, I look forward to your post.
And especially not if you have type erasure.

Java makes you type class names, and the compiler makes you cast things, as for it being a statically typed language, I'm not really sure.

As with most things java it's a lot of typing for not a lot of accomplishing anything useful, but somewhat better than C.

OCaml/F#/Scala have far better type systems that check a lot more things, and require less typing.
Sorting out the taxing dilemma of paying taxes on crowdfunding campaigns
An alternative, 100x uglier version:

http://reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy+Clojure+coding+compsc...

Maybe someone would prefer it linked this way, though.
The "create a copy" function is probably as good as it gets.

I think it would be awesome if reddit were to blur the lines between subreddits and multireddits. Many defaults have huge lists of dedicated subreddits for stuff banned from the default in the sidebar. If the defaults were multireddits newcomers could incorporate or exclude these specific subreddits into their version of the default multi.

Of course, I'm almost certainly underestimating how impossible it would be to integrate the two like that. Still fun to consider though.
I remember Xenix as an available OS on the $9K-ish TRS-80 Model 16 (Z80 for I/O + 68000 for processing).
I think the key word is "App." There is a difference in nature between a web app and a web page. Both can be built using the same underlying technologies, but the goals are very different.

Knowing which one is building can greatly inform choice of framework.
GabeN's response: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and...
I saw Jessica speak at Startup School in 2012 alongside some of the biggest names in tech, and her talk was by far the most useful/practical for me as a 23 year old entrepreneur.

She is really really good. I suggest watching it.
If you think they have a future, ask for stock – they're asking you to accept low pay to help their business, so it's only reasonable to expect part of that return in exchange. The usual cautions about option games apply but again, if you're expecting to get screwed cut to:

If they're doomed and / or you don't trust them (i.e. does it seem like the managers also subject to low pay?), start looking.
comm is the one I always forget the name when I need it. Because it's not cmp/diff but the idea is similar

Very nice for finding differences between files (like config files, or results of some tool) where diff won't help you (too big a diff, or files are too different)
Enterprising research IDs zero day malware
> We'd give them a problem, and their first instinct was to hit a period and start hunting through the method options that IntelliSync gave them to see if one got them closer to their goal.

IntelliSense is like GPS for programming. When driving, do you prefer to plan your trip using a map or use the GPS instead? I guess there are still people in the former camp, but most younger people are in the latter.

> Instead of stepping back and thinking about the problem generally, they'd try to solve it by stringing together IntelliSync suggestions, like stepping stones across a pond.

And are they less efficient for diving in right away and using their tools vs. waterfall planning up-front?

Kids these days...
Watch: Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Zipping by Earth on Close Approach
The flattest organizations I can think of have the most talented and career-driven people in the industry.
The ARMv7-M architecture (which the popular Cortex-M series microcontrollers implement) allows reordering as I described. Even if a Cortex-M3 probably doesn't ever do it, nobody is making any promises. If a particular behaviour is not documented, it is wrong to rely on it.
"Achievers", man.
As per TFA, we're talking abot 0%-unemployment industry here. Such situations happen, but they're the exceptions, not something to base your policy on.

Seriously, even all the quality 2nd year undergrads I see are working already, at least here if you want to hire people who don't have a job then most of them are seriously incompetent people or extremely young.