skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HR law in much of Europe can make it VERY difficult to fire someone unless they commit an act of "Gross Misconduct".

I used to work with an Italian company (via acquisition) that suffered from these kinds of troubles. You can't demote someone, you can't get rid of them, so they get a "sideways promotion" to something like a "project manager" or "team leader". Eventually this leads them into a managerial position. There were so many incompetent people in management at that company... their job was literally just to pass information down the chain. Meetings were hell because every project had 5 layers of managers that wanted to be involved.
Ironically, your comment on the outdated SOAP API is based on knowledge that is quite outdated. AWS has had a REST API for basically the entire existence of DO.
I love the term "The dead sea effect" for this.

Seconded!

For those who don't get the reference, think of good employees as water, bad ones as salt. Organizations get a fresh water mix of employees who include both kinds. But over time the good ones evaporate and go to other organizations. The bad ones tend to stay. Over time the "saltiness" of the mix increases.

If this process continues long enough, you wind up with something resembling the Dead Sea.
>You're probably more or less correct, but turn things around: from the point of view of the Node.js user, Node does pretty much everything they need, and Erlang does "extra, cool stuff" that, however, they can live without

They're blub programmers

>As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

From PG's "Beating the Averages"
They used to at least. I had to used this quite a bit years ago when working on RHEL5 systems with new/experimental drivers.
Has that ever happened in the tech industry? It seems, following that logic, that Dell should have beat Apple long ago and be the dominate player in hardware as they have historically catered to the lowest value customers.
I remember skype being known for making it possible to spy on user conversations, text and audio/video, way before microsoft bought it.

With microsoft moving skype back from p2p to centralized server architecture doesn't hints at making spying on users more difficult.
Wanted to download playboy album from Facebook and ended up developing this
> I wonder if that's still common wisdom.

Personally, I think that not indicating you can see cars coming and crossing that way would be a good way to get killed. However, I haven't actually tried it. I haven't observed the natives using this tactic either as far as I can tell.
Previous submission and discussion (21 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270973
We need a javascript implementation!

oh wait...
I think a bit of buzz around renewal time is good. The best new signups come from referrals, and the best time for referrals is shortly after a customer has made the decision to pay for the service.
I'd love any feedback that you might have
Lync is the buggiest Microsoft product out there. Messenger in comparision was a real joy to use.
I have not had to do this in a while now.
Oh wow, that's really neat (although their main website won't load for me, I'm checking out the github repo). It's exactly what I've been looking for, cheers!
They noticed. But by the time that they did, they decided that the lower risk course of action was to stick with the one they had since the people who most disliked her have left, and they didn't know who might like her and leave if she did.

I believe that they made the wrong call. But then again I'm biased, disgruntled, and all the rest of it.
Better App to App Data Sharing in iOS 8?
This is because you likely think before you code.
Ask HN: What's the big deal about Deep Learning?
Yes, I agree, but just several weeks ago I had to recover a MySQL InnoDB database after a power problem. MySQL is very popular, and it turns out it is an unsafe database server according to your definition. Well maybe it is.

Edit:

Besides, hard drives have write caches, and they can report a successful write operation to the OS when the data is still in its cache physically.
If you first trigger a fire alarm, it wouldn't.
Testdriving Plasma Next (KDE Desktop evolution)
Alt + SysRq + k will also do this if you don't feel like writing a xorg.conf.
Mark Zuckerberg 'confused and frustrated' by US spying
For the tl;dr crowd, here's the key takeaway: "Most companies promote workers into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than because they have the talent for it. This practice doesn't work."

Before I started a startup, I was a software engineer at a large firm, and it was clear they were grooming me for management because I was a strong individual contributor and had "put in my time": 3 years as an engineer. Advancement at this firm was measured by "how many reports" you had, as in "direct reports", or people managed by you, and if you just did superior individual work but had no one "under you", you weren't advancing. So they sent me to a couple of training courses about management and started prepping me for the path.

This was one of the many reasons I quit this BigCo to start my own startup.

I am now the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly (http://parse.ly). In our first two years after starting up, I spent all my time building stuff -- which is exactly what I wanted. Ironically, because the company has grown and now has a 13-person product team, I am now technically "managing" my engineering team with 13 "direct reports". But at our company, we have completely decoupled management from individual contribution -- certainly, if a strong individual contributor shows an interest in management, we'll consider it. But becoming a "manager" is not how you "advance" here -- you advance by doing great work. Our first employee who joined in 2009 is a great programmer and he is still with the company, but he's still doing what he loves: building & shipping stuff. Based on our frank conversations on the topic, I think he would quit if I forced him to be a manager. The appropriate reward for doing great work isn't a "promotion to management" -- that's actually a punishment for a great individual contributor. The right reward is to ensure you continue to provide an environment where that great work can continue for that contributor, and where they can continue to grow their skills and apply themselves productively in the role.
I wrote a similar game called Fibs, where the game mechanism is that adjacent Fibonacci numbers are combined to make the next Fibonacci number. It's also command-line based.

https://github.com/brilee/games/blob/master/fibs.py

A short writeup is here:
http://moderndescartes.com/essays/fibs
I don't think that's true. Consider the two extremes.

1. You somehow manage to get a cardboard box up to 70MPH. You strike another fellow pulling the same trick. How badly are the two of you hurt? I believe the chances are excellent that you both die immediately.

2. You somehow manage to get a container ship up to 70MPH. You strike another fellow pulling the same trick. How badly are you hurt? If you're strapped in and not near the front, I believe chances are excellent that you'll both walk (swim) away.
My Car Got Impounded Because I Was Driving for Lyft
This is a great article and I think nails everything.

One thing I would add, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that Accountability is probably the least important. I don't mean to say that you should let poor performers hang around, but that, given that everything else is firing on all cylinders, your team will let you know who their poor performing peers are. So an innate talent or process at 'accountability' isn't really overly important.
Bike Headsets
Is a lawn legally allowed to block a sidewalk? I know the right-of-way stretches well past the boundaries of the road. I've always walked on the edge of people's lawns when there's no sidewalk, because I'm fairly certain it's legal to do so. If there's no sidewalk, pedestrians walk on your lawn within a few feet of the road, and there's nothing you can do about it.

One thing I would never do is step into the street to walk, regardless of how angry a homeowner might be about it.
Bin nicht sicher, ob diese Seite hier richtig ist :-)

But if, then please the english version...
Can someone help me build my own no link referrer like anonym.to?
I'm looking to implement my own no link referrer similar to how anonym.to operates for my forum. Thanks for any insight / advice / interest.
Generally good managers know when the best are leaving. There are other challenges at work. For instance - if a team is still hitting it's numbers, the manager may not want to make a change. Or there could be no other leadership alternatives. Or they don't want to set the precedent of team mutiny. Hard to know without knowing the details of the situation, but sometimes there is more going on than meets the eye.

And yes - this should be trivial to measure. Hiring a good employee costs X. Of those, 1/Y is a great one. The cost of losing a great one is XY. XY is usually significantly higher than a year's salary.

For the same reason, I also think managers should be rewarded for creating great employees and giving them to the broader organization.
That appears to compare Go channels to "simple" lazy Haskell. A more apt Haskel comparison would be to something like "pipes" or "conduit", which will be quite different.
I still don't understand what you mean. Look at this page:

http://gyazo.com/ed84537df50abd7f0d34212a6ba6a497

How long didyou have to look before realizing where the ads stop and the organic results begin? For me it's dead easy...

Note this may be a bad example, because if I'm searching for "insurance", an advertisement for an insurance company is actually a relevant result.
Fortran is the oldest programming language in existence today, because of this it has a lot of cruft. However, if you put your compiler in standard mode (2003 or 2008 standard) you have a pretty modern language: modules, interfaces, functions that contains functions etc ... You can do OOP in Fortran if you use a modern compiler and stay close to the standard.

Where Java beats hands down Fortran is at the huge ecosystem and libraries available for a variety of domains. Another weak spot for Fortran is that it doesn't stop you to shoot yourself in the foot and you can use implicit types, case insensitivity and globals all over the place.
In my experience, one of the reasons teams end up quitting like this, is the hopes that it sends upper management a signal that "this guy is no good". Turnover has tremendous immediate and long-term impact on the bottom line. I guess the hope is that upper management will swoop in, fire the crappy manager, contact out all the about to leave/left employees and put them back in their jobs.

But it never seems to work that way. I think it's more a fear that if you bring them back, it gives the inmates a reason to revolt rather than the signal getting lost somewhere.

My wife went through a similar situation with a manager two levels above her. And this guy was easily among the worst managers I've ever even heard of -- case study worthy material, the textbook definition of a Machiavellian management style (it's funny that he also runs a management consulting business on the side). Within months of him being put in place the company shed about 40% of their staff under him, including people who had been there more than a decade.

While all this was going down, his manager would come down and talk to the malcontent and implore them to not leave. But the condition was clear, get rid of the asshole or they'd have no choice. As it turns out a few months later they did eventually fire him, but the damage had already been done and not a single former employee was contacted with a "hey sorry about all that, we fixed things, would you think about coming back?" From conversations with those that left, most of them would in fact return.

In the interim, they've lost tens of millions of dollars on failed projects, outside consultants to try and fill in the gap, and other related issues.

From the employee level it seems bizarre, but the only rational explanation I can think of is that they're afraid of bringing people back and thereby granting them too much power. Somewhere in management training, the seniors probably learned that "officers don't show weakness in front of the men" and have been holding to that at all cost.
My first guess was Youtube API + youtubedl/ffmpeg. But after cross-checking some results at least source "b" isn't youtube. If you just check for unusual song titles like "testtest" you'll see that there are other sites which are getting the same results, so it's probably just indexing a couple of these shady sites to get the results. I highly doubt there's some kind of API behind this you could use in your project.
What I really love about this game is its meta qualities. Frankly, it's impossible. You simply can't beat it under any normal play. Its utter difficulty actually becomes part of the storytelling experience as you realize you simply will fail no matter what. You truly feel despair when you play.

Moreover, I've found myself becoming rather patient with people who work in the TSA directly because I now know how shitty their lives must truly be.
Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring
Is there a replacement for the mini? We're still using ours, and don't need the full Google Search Appliance.
This is not for the situation in the article, but a slightly different one. You have a remote server, there's an ssh session still open to it but it's somehow lost access to all its mount points including /
You have nothing to work with but bash builtins and /proc, you're 100 miles away and you need to get it up and running again NOW. Emergency reboot -

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
I thought they just wouldn't go over 9 minutes due to internal rules (e.g., you'll get written up if your average call time goes over a certain level). Do you have a source for the "local governments" claim? I'd be very interested at yelling at my city council for imposing stupid rules like that.

(My main source for this goes back to Joel's article on Measurement[1].)

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020715.html
I've just started looking again at getting a DAW, so I've looked at Logic and Ableton and Reason etc.

Being a JS programmer and having a small amount of exposure to the webAudio API I concluded that there will be, at some point in the future a whole eco system of open source js based music components.
There are programmers who can't hack that. You just can't let people take credit for your work.
And introduce yourself to a new set of problems? Like the possibility of some part of the program saving first name and last name as one field and other parts as one field.
I worked at a place where the manager was chosen simply because she had a few months longer tenure than another coworker of mine. She was so obviously unqualified, it was ridiculous, but they stuck with the decision and within half a year they lost their two best developers. Even sadder, the person they passed up, IMO, would have made an excellent manager. Won't ever know now.
If you'd have bought WhatsApp, you'd have bought WhatsApp.
+1000. Github routinely detects the wrong language for my projects, and there is no way to manually override it. My take is this: If you want to auto-detect the language, fine... but let the owner of the repo override your detection when it's wrong.

It's probably also a bug to even have the notion of "a language" for a repo given the burgeoning polyglot programming trend. So many repos these days contain multiple languages, especially when you consider javascript, that I question if it even makes sense to say 'This project is in language X' at all.

Like you say, the best option really would be to let the repo owners / maintainers just specify this stuff. They are, after all, the ones who know.
I just tried it on my Ubuntu 12.04 install, and it worked. I definitely didn't change any kernel config options.
Spy satellites only see what they are pointed at and there are not enough of them to constantly watch all airports.
5 facts about DDoS attacks
This came first to my mind when I saw the OP, I like deep thought articles and sometimes I share them here, check my submitted stories and among some very shallow submissions maybe you might find something interesting.

Later edit: You might also want to check arethuza's ribbonfarm blog link above.
sadly since most teams don't quit as a whole it can be passed off as bad apples, y'know "that guy didn't like change", and by the time the team is nearly all gone its too late and upper management either forgets or has bigger fish to fry.

There are many signs of bad managers, I am sure we all have them, but my number one is, thinking their title makes them right and beyond question. Got enough of those around to choke a horse. Worse it is usually a symptom that comes from top down and is hard to fix.
Exactly that. People sediment to the most accessible technology that allows to, more or less, do the work they are after. If Erlang was the only way to solve a given problem in a decent way, people would switch to it, as, for example, people switched to Git eventually: it was different, more complex to use in some way, but it really was so much better at solving a given problem that everybody moved.

Btw when we talk about Erlang, to me, is not just a matter of the language itself. How accessible, small, easy to run, the runtime of a language appears to be make for a big difference as well.
I expect it's a lot inflated. I also have repos that are primarily Groovy, but show up as "Javascript" due to the presence of JQuery, Bootstrap, etc.
I used to speed read fiction. I found that I would get a couple pages ahead of my understanding. As I aged, I realized that understanding a few books deeply is much more important than understanding a lot of books superficially.

Why read Hunter S. Thomson if you can't pull out the few awesome lines. When I raced through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I missed "And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back"

How many more of these did I miss? And this isn't even deep literature.
Yeah, doesn't seem to be:

http://www.ardec.army.mil/armamentsec/facilities/crows.aspx
The best managers I had share a few traits: They are creative and effective at solving problems when you have one, and they stay out of the way when you don't.
He said he didn't say they wouldn't buy it for $19B...

> Microsoft would have been willing to buy it, too. I don’t know for $19bn, but the company’s extremely valuable
It was a while ago, but I remember spiral being taught with a big spiral diagram - looked kind of like a snail shell. And waterfall had arrows that could go back up the way if needed.

I also remember being taught that errors caught after the software had been implemented was 100% more costly to fix than errors at the design stage - I think that was the idea behind big(ger) design up front.

https://sites.google.com/site/ucscsadg12/system-domain
Some reading material on Pono
>I do not have a magical format to propose to replace it

So why did you even comment in the first place?
The article points out that good managers don't make decisions based on politics. What I have seen is not only do bad managers make decisions based on politics but also ego. I have seen ego destroy startups and big companies alike. Many tech companies interview managers purely from a tech perspective and do not effectively drill down into the management side.

A good interviewer can get a sense for someone's ego vs. assertiveness pretty easily, but so many interviewers are looking at experience and skillset over character, personality and style. Experience and skill set are important but the other aspects are often overlooked. As an example, a hands-on development manager needs to not only be screened for the development chops but also if they are mature enough to handle the decisions that need to be made in that management role.
hence the </irony> at the end of my comment.
I'm so glad my family got out of Russia 17 years ago.
Crowdfunding Platform Aims to Break Cycle of Poverty for Adolescent Girls
nop. even if it would - HN users will find their way through such blocks, in contrast with mass media users
I was about to agree that Steam is DRM, but your comment reminded me of the time I bought a game (Dungeons of Dredmor?) that had a Linux port but which wasn't on Steam. I contacted the developers about getting the Linux port and they said "oh, it's in your Windows Steam game directory, just launch the executable for Linux", and it did, indeed, work fine.

That said, Steam is still not as un-DRMed as GOG, which provides a pretty installer you can copy and back up and do whatever you want with, but it's pretty good.
Using something other than JSON is a great idea if you don't want anyone to ever bother using your API.
Still using Windows XP?
Yes, because XML is so much more compact.

Oh, wait....
I wondered this too, so I went out and implemented a large project in Node (Haraka - an SMTP Server). It turned out to be such a success that Craigslist dumped Postfix for it (an SMTP server written in C), and managed to get rid of more than half of their servers due to Haraka being faster.

We just added another example company doing the same - bounce.io - they are seeing similar gains.

Yes Node has problems like any language does, but the gains are real.
It's also often true that managers tend to get promoted/retained for advancing their own interests as opposed to advancing their subordinates. When upper management looks for junior managers to promote, they see the easy stuff first. They see the people who get their reports in on time, network effectively, and argue forcefully in meetings rather than figuring out who is actually leading.
fantastic, thanks for the reply!