skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What was _your_ reasoning for losing a job over a completely semantic argument?

I wanted a reasonable work environment that was delivering product to the customers, for the business.

The work in question was 20k lines and involved the whole stack. As it bled into web page stuff that actually had calls to browser open "dialog" commands, no find and replace was going to safely work to now make it comply with the clarification on the coding standards (UK English var names). We would spend weeks changing it and re-testing, weeks in which we were not delivering it.

I felt we were no longer working for either the customer or business, when we were willing to hold back an improvement that would immediately create revenue, for a petty argument.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen this architect do that to others, but I never thought it would happen to me so long as the product was good, the code was good, deadlines were met.

I was no longer convinced it was possible to create work that wouldn't fall foul of some rule or other. And the architect had managed to position himself on the org structure outside of a chain of command, so there was no-one to appeal to.

There are too many good jobs, and good companies, that want to ship product to their customers and build a great business to even consider staying somewhere that doesn't.

It was a very easy decision.
Wow. Thanks! Submitting this as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
So you are saying that of you win the genetic lottery, you make profits?
None of these fonts are SIL. So why is this on the HN front page?
People lose interest in programming as it is practiced commercially - highly constrained, deadline driven, curiosity-thwarting, having our talents harnessed and pimped out to some imagined consumer, etc. At least I did.

Since retiring from this profession, I have enjoyed a rebirth of the original fascination I had with programming doing exactly what I want and following where it leads. To me this is a 100% consuming and joyous activity.

To those who conclude this is unattainable in the real world of business - perhaps what you love is making money, not programming?
WCAG?
Pro-Kremlin astroturfers recently attacked Polish Newsweek [1]. If they care even about _Polish_ web, there are certainly plenty of them in English web.

[1] http://swiat.newsweek.pl/wynajeci-rosjanie-cyber-bombarduja-...
There's no inherent bonus in actually 'surrfing' the wen, 3D visuals do not necessarily convey information in a better medium than the flat web we have today.
Supposed to because Apple makes it hard, not because of any technical requirements.
Lol, don't worry, I only exist on the internet. Your bosses on the other hand...
If your spouse is helping contribute to the business on that level, you should hire them. Otherwise you're really doing a disservice to everyone by having your spouse work without compensation or recognition.
This seems to be an explanation of how to install Ubuntu on an Acer laptop with Windows 8 - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2176273&s=3a5c2ecb6...

I can't believe how convoluted and snafu-prone the process appears to be. I bought my Aspire V7 laptop in December and have never gotten around to installing Ubuntu on it simply because I dread the almost-guaranteed loss of 1-2 working days trying to undo whatever screwups happen.

I can't imagine even one lay, non-Linux lover even thinking of attempting something like this.
If you are male and a founder, one of your most valuable business resources is your wife. People will call me sexist for saying this, I expect, but women think socially with a level of complexity that I think most men never approach. If you are a man, chances are your wife does more to build the business than you ever do.

I've definitely seen this in the past. At startups where I've worked or friends have worked, the founder's wives have played important support roles in ways that are easy to observe but hard to quantify.

When one spouse is a startup founder, then it's a true "family effort" whether the other spouse likes it or not. And if it's "or not" ... well, then, that substantially hinders the chances of success.
I am aware of the architecture of Mac hardware. But OS X doesn't have driver (thus hardware) support for all (or even a large range of) hardware that conform to the architecture. Apple develops (espcially when it comes to optimizations) OS X expressly for it's own selection of (as opposed to general purpose) hardware. Apple also goes so far as to actively try to prevent OS X running on non-Mac hardware[0]. Contrast this with Linux, *BSDs that are developed on and for a wide range of (and general purpose) hardware.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectur...
Yes, that's exactly what that kind of tax is for.
Wow, I didn't know this. I was so annoyed when the slim got rid of backwards compatibility but it makes more sense now. It's easy to underestimate the complexity of emulating older systems I guess.
Because your proposed solution to possible working awkwardness is not 'growing a pair', it's making an already awkward moment even more awkward, or possibly scary. Now not only does she have to deal with your blustery bravado in the moment, she also has to worry about unwanted advances in future situations where you might be alone together.

What you seem to think is candid, useful communication is anything but.

If you are attracted to someone you're going to be working closely with, there is a time-honored approach for dealing with it. You flirt. If you're good at flirting, then it is non-serious and does not create a threatening atmosphere. It shows off your positive personality qualities and hides your negative ones.

Most importantly, it gives the lady in question an out if she doesn't want to go there with you, she simply doesn't respond. If she doesn't respond to your flirting, then she's not interested and the stand-up, manly thing to do is to stop flirting, and carry on your working relationship in a completely professional manner.
I think I dislike the Brick version just for that ugly Q thing that takes up half a word, but it seems less bold and clear as well on Chrome on a Mac here. I often hear the Mac OS causes this sort of thing anyway, though, where "improved" fonts don't look much better in other web projects as well.
Man v Robot: Table tennis champion Timo Boll takes on Kuka robotic arm
Isn't the point she's making that she didn't fit the culture primarily because of her gender? And that any work culture where one's gender matters is a toxic culture in itself?

A workplace just filled with happy young male developers is not necessarily a healthy environment, or one that necessarily has a good culture.
In a long term lease I'm personally meeting the renter, running a credit check, getting references from previous land lords and/or friend, an up front security deposit equal to 3 months rent, not furnishing the apartment and insuring the apartment against any additional damages.

A standard long-term apartment lease situation is considerably different.
Out of every professional programmer I know, probably 1% use PHP and 90% use Rails. (The other 9% use either Python or Clojure or something more exotic.)
If you really believe that the public considers watching women hula-hoop or a rug that says "meritocracy" to be sexual harassment, please give some thought to the possibility that you might be living in a bubble.
Skills people can quickly learn to improve their resumes
The fact that the tech architect spent any time at all contemplating this issue is a massive red flag to me.

Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.

If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.
Or just have each language option specified in said language, so that native-only speakers and pick it out.
I guess I'm too jaded, but I question getting married. If
you hit the lottery and you become a successful Founder, your wife will own 1/2 of all those aching hours sitting
in front of that screen. If she's the type of chick that
will stick with you when you loose everything and work
the paint booth at HD, by all means marry her, but those
women just don't exist anymore. Women look at men so
differently than we judge them--it's not worth taking a chance.
How to tighten up your game at work when you’re depressed
If you're already primed, through some other form of hostility, to think that you're surrounded by a bunch of sexists, then innocent watching can look at a lot like gawking.

It is too open to interpretation, and thus not objective.
>> The lack of an overt chain of command means that power asserts itself covertly.

> Thats the whole point of bossless environments and both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

What, their point is to encourage death-match power struggles? And that's their strength?

In nature, the fittest survive, but that's because nature is cruel (indifferent, actually). But a business must nurture its employees and make them feel safe – not send them into a battlefield.
So, I have a Lenovo laptop, running dual boot (formerly Gentoo, now Ubuntu) with Windows on UEFI using rEFInd. Zero problems so far. Am I lucky or what?!
It's a shame that crying sexism is beginning to take on the trappings of Salem Witch Trials. Simply implying that what happened was the result of sexism seems to be enough proof that sexism was the cause. This is a nuanced case that probably has much more to do with managerial mistakes. The sexism angle in this story seems very forced and sort of used as a last minute boost to an otherwise boring story of bad management.
Indeed!

In particular, if you have HD-activity LEDs, watch and wait until they stop blinking - after the 's' (sync) key.
I ran into this problem with an Acer laptop, somehow I got it working by disabling something in the bios (think legacy mode) then installed ubuntu from live cd and made that my boot loader. Ended up returning the laptop since I didn't like win8 and got a thinkpad T530 and mostly use ubuntu on it.
Since when can you not use a windows license more then once.
The hula hooping probably wasn't particularly sexual - I would be impressed if any of my coworkers could hula hoop.

I can't. I suck at it. :(
I thought the 3D web died in 1999 when people realised that VRML was rubbish, and 3d interfaces are generally as hateful as flash.
> Does that entire paragraph not just objectify the wife and establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience?

Re objectification: couples get advice from their life partners. That doesn't mean this is their life partners only goal.

Re: 'establish differences between the sexes based on anecdotal experience' is there anything ethically wrong with this? Would you prefer a citation be added, eg, 'newborn female infants stare at faces more often than male newborn infants'?

Or do you find the mere existence of differences between the sexes to be 'offensive'? In which case, you're more than welcome to be offended.
I bet that rug really tied together the room too...

</Lebowski>

All joking aside, that rug thing is pretty silly. "Meritocracy" is not code for "Straight White Males only." Nevertheless Horvath being feminist does not invalidate any unfair treatment she may have experienced should her claims be substantiated.
Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap
SecondLife will not get a second life. Affirming TazeTSchnitzel opinion that SL was poorly designed to start. I have been building virtual worlds for 14 years, and my mesh based platform is one of the world most successful. Problem with mesh based platforms is users can't create content, they can only manipulate it (ok, a very small percentage can, but not enough). If you look at what Phillip Rosen is doing now, he is trying to make a voxel platform.
Plus 3D is not good for 99% of information. I suspect the future will be more along the lines of "Rainbow's end"
How to manage an ASP.NET MVC Partial View, Ajax with JQuery UI Dialog
Maybe he figured the work was done and wanted to move on to something else. It should have been a trivial issue, either way, and he wasn't the one making it a non-trivial issue. But the architect's propensity for blowing it out of proportion was a good signal that his working relationship with that architect was never going to be good, if something as simple as that was a problem.

I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.
The creator, Mate Rimac, has a long build log of his first electric car, a BMW E30 conversion, here.

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/bmw-bi-m...
Test Your Startup Idea With a Minimum Viable Transaction
This would be worse on laptops. It's braindead easy to just snag an Intel-based laptop and know everything will work out of the box. (Other than the Poulsbo netbooks generally speaking they've done a great job supporting Linux on their hardware).

With AMD laptops you might end up with a Broadcom wireless card and an AMD GPU.
Pirating isn't all roses either. There's a lots of ads to support some of the services. Many services are dubious and try to make you install software that compromises your system integrity. It's not always easy to find the content in good quality. Some jargon needs to be learned. To know how to navigate these waters it means that time has been invested by the consumer.

I suspect there is a ratio between the available price and the perceived value of time from the consumer.
I guess you get what you pay for; http://i.imgur.com/wZcxCGZ.jpg
In case some context is necessary, this excellent article was pointed out to me by scott_s as part of the discussion of the stuff going on at GitHub.
I have come to the decision just not to buy anything HP.
I had two horrid experiences with two HP laptops, and
two printers that went too soon--1 less than a year--the
other less than a week. Off subject, but when ever I hear HP I cringe.
The blue background and lack of Safari Reader option made this difficult for me to read. The version on the author's own site is much better designed: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Github has no formal QA process or code review?
"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...

People believe these things...because they have faith."

-From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".
Same here, I boot Linux from UEFI on several computers and it works fine. It boots faster and uses native display resolution instead of VESA. I dual boot Win 8, chainloading from GRUB.

I think there are just a lot of people who don't know how to install GRUB to the EFI partition, or don't know how to edit their EFI boot menu with efibootmgr. UEFI is more complex than BIOS booting and if the only mental model you have is of a boot sector, you will have trouble understanding why a misbehaving system is acting as it is.

I don't enjoy needing to fix my boot loader when I install Linux or update Windows, but I'm always able to make it work. I always had boot loader issues when I dual-booted BIOS systems too, so although it's still unpleasant, it's not any worse. It's just different and requires learning some new concepts and command-line tools.
The key there is to only buy expensive HP stuff.

Their office laser printers are great, and their workstations (e.g. the Z820) are pretty awesome.

Their cheap stuff on the other hand... I agree with you on every point.
Screw you Big Pharma
I agree with you completely. It belies an inappropriate attitude for the 21st century.
I'm not the first to mention it but for me the big issue is the wife having access to private company information. That type of thing really does make me start thinking about Bitbucket (any other good alternatives dudes?).

I don't see a ton of sexism here though. A developer removing her code because she didn't want to date him isn't sexism. It's unprofessional as hell and possibly a fireable offense depending on the circumstances, but it's not about a generalized animosity toward women.

The hula hoop thing too seems dumb. Maybe you had to be there? Were the male developers' tongues out? Were they making obscene comments? Two ladies hula hooping in the middle of an office is likely to attract attention. Are men supposed to immediately duck and cover and avert their eyes? Seems like she's over-reacting.

Still, assuming everything stated in the article is true, it does raise questions about the founders' judgment. I really like Github and this situation certainly is disappointing.
The license key gets tied to certain system internals upon first use, and is checked against the existence and value of the same internals in subsequent checks. Apparently, toggling UEFI (and/or Secure Boot) modifies one such internal.

EDIT: license -> license key
That's good of you.
Ahhhh, gotcha gotcha, rereading it I completely see what your point was.

In fact I'm pretty embarrassed to not have parsed your meaning the first time, my initial thought was just that I had misused the phrase in some way.
It has traditionally been illegal for the US to spread propaganda to US citizens: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

But in 2013: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/12/us_backs_...

There should be a law that requires the US government to put a notice on anything that could be considered propaganda. Hopefully that would mean more transparency, which is a good thing.
You'd think that a site like GitHub would have mandated code review for all commits by now. Especially after that time a few years ago when they managed to accidentally delete all the pull requests in the entire site, or something like that!

Wait, they're a ruby shop, they don't even believe in letting the compiler help you avoid making basic mistakes. dons flame-retardant suit
I'm confused. Are you sure you know what sexism means?
This is important. Uncertain why it would be downvoted. Please people, at least state your reasoning.
according to the 1992 constitution Crimea can declare independence and then unite with Russia. How is that any different from 1?
> at least in Win8. So you either buy another Win8. So disabling UEFI is not an option, for dual boot.

I don't use Windows however that would be the point where I'd just pirate it, if I buy a single user license for a piece of hardware I expect to be able to run it on that hardware.

Fortunately my life and work (web dev) is better on Linux than Windows.
I already have exceptions for things like that. I think our code handles zh_{CN,TW,HK} separately, as well as things like pt_BR vs. pt.

> curl -I -H 'Accept-Language: zh-hk,en;q=0.8' https://dolphin-emu.org/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK # No zh_HK translation (yet!)

> curl -I -H 'Accept-Language: zh-cn,en;q=0.8' https://dolphin-emu.org/
HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND
Location: http://cn.dolphin-emu.org/?cr=cn

> curl -I -H 'Accept-Language: pt,en;q=0.8' https://dolphin-emu.org/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK # No pt translation (yet!)

> curl -I -H 'Accept-Language: pt-br,en;q=0.8' https://dolphin-emu.org/
HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND
Location: http://br.dolphin-emu.org/?cr=br

i18n is hard but I think I've been doing a fairly good job on it. Proud to have more than 50% of our visitors from outside of the US!
If MH370 crashed in southern Indian Ocean it wouldn't be seen or heard
Fluent 2014: Brendan Eich Keynote
Wow, yeah that definitely makes up for it then. I didn't really look too much into how much.
It's the classical problem of a standard that nobody actually follows. Every UEFI firmware that I have come across has behaved differently.

My current laptop has an UEFI implementation that only boots from a hardcoded path in the EFI partition. You guessed right, the path of the windows 8 bootloader.

The UEFI in my home server overwrites the UEFI boot manager list every time you save & exit the configuration tool.

If I remember correctly, the UEFI implementation of a MBP that my friend and I tried to make dual boot Ubuntu required a blessed HFS boot partition for every OS.
How to write useful bug reports
Language choices are a mess. There can easily (and often) be conflicting data based on:

- accept-language header

- URL that includes language/region codes as a subdomain or part of the path

- language preferences set in a cookie or account

- IP region detection

In the end, any website is trying to provide the right language most often for their users, and there are no easy answers. When I access webmail from an Internet cafe in China, I don't want the interface popping up in Chinese just because the browser's accept-language is configured for Chinese. Fortunately, it doesn't.

Most web users have never even heard of accept-language, it's just automatically configured by whatever language their browser was installed in, which isn't always the language you want to be browsing in. (E.g. you bought your laptop overseas because it was cheaper, so it runs in English instead of your own language.) It's not a surprise that IP address detection provides the best default experience most of the time, which can then be overridden by URL or user choice, and that accept-language is fairly irrelevant.
I guess it's the same, because it's Qt anyway. The UI, for example, looked very bad. But I tried it a while ago, maybe it has improved a lot since then.

On Linux, btw, I recommend Nicotine+.
Wow, yeah, seems like it was.

I still would like to see someone that ridiculous operate... Sounds like the most incompetent architect/engineer I have ever heard of.

Sorry for the snark fellow human.