skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What stood out from that comment [1] was the following:

In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group.

You could argue that successful startups (as well as other successful companies in any category) do something similar with their selection processes (aside from the fact they they do not have or exercise political power). Colloquially, the term "meritocracy" has come to imply "organization with clear and rigorous standards that hires, promotes, and fires based on such standards".

Maybe it's not a perfect word, but there seems to be some general consensus about what it means and what people are aiming at. Perhaps it's better for an organization to be more humble and to strive to be a meritocracy, even if it knows it can't do it perfectly.

If you don't have some concept of "merit" - based on job-specific skill, communication with others, emotional regulation, self-discipline, general effectiveness - how can you staff a company at all?

[1] I assumed you meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406566

----

edit:

(based on clarified response in child post - thanks @steveklabnik )

I don't really see much distinction between the intention of "we try to hire good people" and "we objectively determine who the best people are", aside from the humility in the first statement and the hubris in the second one. If there were a process to objectively determine 'merit' for some company and job, people would be all over it. And 'merit' is obviously conditioned on the particular tasks to be done, the culture of the workplace, and a pile of other factors.

Bottom line - to be overly hubristic is not good. But striving to define your company's concept of merit is not a bad thing - it can only help in making better decisions in hiring and promotion.
Dix no read history
Slander turns out to not be covered under the DMCA, so the hosting site is under no obligation to remove a post after a notice and no trial or court order.
I think the key assumption here that is wrong is that Amazon is this amazing retail outlet that you just need to use.

I disagree, as someone who has been a huge customer.

Why? Amazon prices suck, and have gotten increasingly less competitive over the years. The huge 3rd party vendor market on Amazon makes it very difficult to identify product that you want to. It on many cases as well.

The whole premise of Amazon Prime was to push the uncertainty of shipping time out of online shopping out of the purchase equation. That experience is both being watered down and made more expensive. If they don't deliver on the premise/promise, there are literally thousands of competitors for just about any product.

IMO, Amazon needs to stop patting themselves on the back and focus on the customer experience.
for 3D graphics, you need to sort objects (meshes) by Z so that you end up with semi-accurate blending (Z-Buffer does not help there).
I'm all for anything that makes managing servers easier, but why use swear words in the name? It is unprofessional.
The central supermassive black hole does consume the galaxy, but in fact the rate of consumption is so excruciatingly slow that the galaxy will have "evaporated" long before then. Random processes like collisions with other galaxies will eventually eject nearly all stellar remnants into intergalactic space. The central black hole will only end up consuming about 1% of the galaxy's stellar remnants (as you say, all stars will have died trillions of years before the galaxy evaporates).

The Milky Way is fated for just such a collision with Andromeda in a few billion years, and there's a chance our solar system will be ejected!
Something that actively reinforces the status quo by what it is, is unable to ever be “part of the solution” by its very nature. The very idea of meritocracy reinforces the status quo, by virtue of “merit” generally being defined by the people who have the most privilege and power, and who, additionally, rarely ever recognize the merit of the contributions of people who are Not Like Them. (also, the term was coined as a parody, as a warning; it wasn't just "written about")
They wouldn't want to use that term, at the risk of making an MBA sound useful :)
Pretty sure NewEgg and crew have competitive options to Amazon...
All of the incidents of claimed harassment in tech that have resulted in enough noise that I have noticed them (5, if I am remembering correctly) have involved North American women. I think they were all in the United States, in fact.

There could be some bias because I'm in the United States, and most of the tech news and tech discussion sites I read are in the US, so I'm probably more likely to learn of things happening in the US than in the rest of the world. Still, given that every example I can think of is North American, I cannot criticize his observation.
When the speaker isn't intending a racial insult, and the tone, circumstances, and relationship between the speaker, the subject, and any third-party listeners make that clear to all involved.

Which are pretty much the exact same circumstances where a black person can do the same thing.
Here's my take - Hackers have simply become more business-savvy. Let me explain...

"Full Stack Startup" is clearly not a new idea, as tptacek mentioned in his comment; just a modern application of an age-old business concept. Rather, I think hackers as a whole have simply become much more business-savvy since the Dot-com bubble, which was obviously a low point in collective business wisdom. As a result, they are increasingly choosing smarter, more sophisticated business models (i.e. vertical integration) and distribution strategies when building their companies.

It also shows that the "disruption" of the MBA is now more or less complete. Business principles and fundamentals will never change (just like human nature doesn't change), but the practice and application of those principles has changed drastically as a result of the Internet, and I doubt MBA curriculums have been able to catch up, simply because most of the people involved don't understand the core technologies driving these changes as well as hackers do.

On the other hand, we've seen the rapid growth in the number, size, and influence of hacker-friendly institutions like Y Combinator, which for all intents and purposes is basically "Business School for Hackers" (let's be honest). YC brings together people who already have a deep knowledge of technology, and helps them make better business decisions while building a strong professional network in the process (the latter of which is cited as the main/only benefit of an MBA). The same goes for hacker-friendly business methodologies like The Lean Startup.

The reason terms like "Growth Hacking" and "Full Stack Startups" become a thing in the first place is probably because they started off as "hacker dialect" for traditional business terms and concepts (Marketing and Vertical Integration, respectively). "Marketing" has for a long time been considered the exclusive realm of MBAs, but obviously that's not the case anymore, and using a term like "growth hacking" was probably a way for hackers to "take back" the concept and make it their own so to speak, though obviously that term has since become severely overused and bastardized.
This looks interesting, but the conjectures people are making about pcell (the frontrunner for 5G cellular) being used for wireless power describe a more attractive solution.

They would provide power only to the area of space where the receiver is which first and foremost makes it inherently safer than a system which doesn't focus the power. I'm not going to claim I know much on the topic, but intuitively it would seem that the ambient power produced by the pcell transmitters would scale logarithmically with the power being transmitted.

But I trust that Witricity's produce is safe for most people since these things are highly regulated for safety. Perhaps more important to adoption is that the nature of Witricity's technology makes it impossible to selectively transmit power. Therefore, it would be impractical to charge a fee for using a power source. Pcell can do this, because it has to to be useful as a cellular technology.

I don't see a world where electric cars are charge wirelessly by beacons on roadsides, not at current electricity prices and the loss that would be involved, but I can imagine low power devices such phones and laptops becoming much more elegant through wireless power.
You can fully disable these apps in Settings and you won;t see them again anywhere. As for the space, unlike iOS, you can install another OS with Gapps at all.

UI performance woes? Coming from an iPhone 3GS, it's flawless to me. As for battery, it fits my bill and it's the price to pay for the huge screen.
Was just thinking about designing a dream keyboard after the "look at my chair" and "what's your keyboard" threads here on HN.

Came up with the following requirements:

- Must be split into a left hand and a right hand.

- No wires! (since it largely defeats the first point)

- All the regular relative raised key/ergonomic issues.

- Mechanical, obviously.

- Since the point is essentially arbitrarily positioned keyboard hands for touch typing, there's little purpose in having the letters on the keys: they're no longer necessarily right in front of you to look at.

- Optional: can either free-stand successfully or have some various means to allow it to be mechanically attached to various things/surfaces/mechanisms: Say if i want to have a lazy-boy chair with each arm being one of the keyboards.

So get to work HN :P
Blackstone’s Home Buying Binge Ends as Prices Surge: Mortgages
According to Julie, GitHub's HR department is aware of the problems, and has been for a while: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 .

GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there.

But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.
> Amazon Instant Video is _much_ better than Netflix Streaming.

Libraries are constantly in flux but here's a comparison of imdb top 250 tv shows across services:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AqP8TDyPzj3NdDRl...

Methodology, etc.:

http://lifehacker.com/tv-streaming-head-to-head-netflix-vs-h...

Spoilers: Netflix dominates Amazon by a wide margin. I'd love to see the same data for movies if anyone has it.
Since NYPD counsel isn't a judge, they don't rule on things. They might make claims or declare things, but they don't make rulings.

It matters because there's a chance that this will go before an actual judge, who might rule that NYPD's counsel is wrong.
Not the same rules. :)

We should not be able to make new card appear when no other one can move.
> So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?

If I was a woman interviewing at GitHub and then read this, it would absolutely influence my decision. I'd want to work there more.

There are two possibilities here:

1) Github has a culture of sexist workplace harassment

2) She is not telling the truth and Github is a perfectly nice place to work

In 1), I would be harassed, sure. I would then take care to document the harassment and file a lawsuit against the unrepentantly sexist company. I'd get a great settlement, Github likely has deep pockets or backers who do and would be desperate for this to go away. Cha-ching, cash in, and feel great doing it.

In 2), I'd have a nice job and everything would be cool.
I absolutely love Amazon's Locker service. It only works in large urban areas, but it allows them to cut out much of those last-mile costs. I hope it's working for them.
I actually thought the same thing as I watched it. Once I realized that the cringe was intentional and that it was poking fun at how ridiculous some "startup people" are, I actually started to like it.

It's not my favorite TV show by any means, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Comparison:

http://brick.im/preview/brick.html

http://brick.im/preview/google.html

On firefox on osx, I see:

- better kerning (space between L and o in "Lorem")

- better definition in some letters (like the l in "elit")

- cool stuff like ligatures (f and i in "overfilled")

- and swashes (the Q in "Quisque").

Great work! I'm consistently annoyed but how much stuff google fonts are missing and how slow they are to update their fonts to the newest versions. Crimson Text comes to mind.
That's a screaming headline, but not a lot of meaning within. Actually, I understand what author is trying to say, but it's pretty pointless. Yeah, I also see a problem out there, but it's a little deeper than "only Mozilla understands".

Open Source Software is there because somebody is writing it, software isn't going to write itself. And mostly it's alive not (at least "not only") because somebody is financing it, but because there are people that both can and want to write it. And, oh, I should've said "make", not "write", because making it is so much more than just writing it. Especially when we talk about general purpose client-side apps author cares about so much.

And here we have problems with both "can" and "want". Generally, people that are actually able to write software prefer slightly different stuff from your "typical end user". Actually I don't know a single browser that I would still like and it's pretty obvious that your "typical user" won't be so much delighted by my beloved CLI apps.

But what really makes me sad is that "can" problem. There might be enough of those who can do some simple coding in community, but it still takes large company to hire somebody who will cooperate with programmers to make beautiful design for their app or some folks that can do some serious math/programming. FOSS apps still generally suck in terms of UX and visual design (at least for that typical end-user). There's no FOSS that could compete against Photoshop or Cubase or be even close to quality of Google's text-to-speech services.

Of course there's no one to blame except ourselves, but if you want to see the problem — here it is. It's about us improving our skills to be able to build something outstanding, to build it for free and make it open source.
You forgot the time cost of driving to Walmart.
Oddly your aurgument Sounds like a traditionalist argument for keeping slavery around in the 19th century.

Is "being protected from change" a fundamental human right?
I'm not calling you stupid. I'm accusing you of not using your intelligence at a point when to do so would invalidate part of your argument

I agree with you that Apple prioritized power over the near-term quality of the resulting product. That was the point I made in the first place.

In order to be able to make maps better at their own pace, they must have control over it otherwise they would just be held hostage again. The alternative is not compromise; it's defeat.

This is why simply presenting a list of other vendors doesn't change the equation. Control is a hard technical requirement.
LOL, I totally love that name!
But it might be in their best interests to take it down regardless. The fact that they're not legally compelled to do so makes it even less like censorship.
Internet Freedom in China: A Menace That Must Be Removed.
Selection is not actually disabled, it's just that selected text is styled the same way as unselected text. You can still hold your mouse button, drag your mouse across the page, ctrl-c, ctrl-v and...

Flying squads with police protection, surveillance cameras and mobile jammers are deployed to stop the nation's students from cheating.

It's examination season across India, a matter of grave security concern. The threat comes from cheating, which has organised itself into an industry. For those who seek to prevent cheating, like flying squads that randomly check exam centres for malpractices, police protection is often necessary.

The exam season could well be called cheating season. It began in the middle of February. Here are the headlines. In Bihar, 200 class 12 examinees of the Bihar School Examination Board have already been expelled for cheating. In Assam, 421 have been caught across various centres. Odisha had a slightly better time, with only 367 caught this year, down from 654 last year. The Odisha board attributes this to multiple-choice question papers that give them no time to cheat. Students who want to pass the exam will have to answer 50 questions in 60 minutes.
Also some particles might travel faster than speed of light by tunneling or similar quantum mechanisms.
If she doesn't want to go through actual channels, she could write a blog post with actual meaning instead of tweeting vague accusations.
Their site states that your balance rolls over to the next month when it's < $20 and doesn't pay out until it reaches $20. Presumably they could make interest off of this "float" that's sitting in their account.
To be fair, their full-HTML image pages seem to load incredibly quickly and are very plain.

And that second issue is barely worth mentioning, it's an incredibly easy fix.
I guess it depends on your setup. On Windows XP + ClearType + Chrome the difference is _huge_, it has a much better font smoothing.
Nice work. There is a small incompatibility when you press a key and no tile moves / collapses. In the original version it doesn't count and a move and nothing happens. In this version a new tile appears.
Reducing life to alphanumeric codes...(and bureaucracy)
I see what you did there. At least Tumblr gives credit to the actual artist.

http://redd.it/20fb5v
http://bedabug.tumblr.com/post/78998774555/snails-kiss-on-ch...
> no way in hell we'll be able to emulate those old, custom graphics cards with full accuracy and full speed using only general purpose CPUs

I see your logic there. Claim there is no way in hell it will happen and it will significantly increase the probability that it will happen.
Just for the record, even though I wrote about the parade, I am not aware of harassing that person.

I don't know what your problem is with the parade statement. I'm not a native speaker - I actually took it from a Robbie Williams song... I thought it just means ruining somebodies parade.
A similar story is how Chernobyl happened.
My sales are $2000/day, 7 days - I'm in my 15th year of business. 100% of my presence is automated (I do nothing day-to-day). The only advice I'm qualified to give, is how to succeed: don't listen to anyone elses advice: use your brain. It is 100% common sense - everyone elses opinions are uninformed and almost always from someone who doesn't really know.
Nobody who has succeeded will willingly reveal how to succeed - they're too busy enjoying the fruits of success to waste the time. If you find someone who is willing to tell you, they are usually fake - the "telling you" part is a cog in whatever scam they're involved with (stock investment, bitcoins, realestate, whatever).

Read my lips:

COMMON SENSE.

And, no, I like my income. I'm not telling what I'm doing!
Also it tends to be very much under reported because it's seen as often quite normal in Germany.

I live in Germany and have female friends who worked in tech here.
Thanks!

Unrelated note: I locked myself out of HN because I had noprocrast turned on...
Also to be found: https://rms.sexy/
print "a = #{a} b = #{b}, c = #{c}, d = #{d}\n"

V
print "a = #{a}, b = #{b}, c = #{c}, d = #{d}\n"
I don't know what you're saying, but I assume you've found a fundamental flaw with my theory. Two biggish pips?
Meritocracy, like all real or imagined power systems, isn't about merit, though – it's about power. Power is real, so who gets it in a meritocracy? Let's say it's people with merit. Alright then, imagine this poor black girl growing up in the projects. She sees drug abuse all around her, but she stays away from it. She grows up and tries really hard to get her kids out of poverty. While she takes two jobs and sits with her kids for hours every day to tutor them, she fails as bad influence proves too strong. Now imagine this boy growing up in Manhattan to rich parents. They send him to all the right schools and make sure he takes part in all the right extracurricular activities. He works hard and gets into Harvard, where he continues to study hard to get his Comp Sci degree. A meritocracy grants power to those with merit: which of these two people will have power?

One of the reasons meritocracy is a joke is that merit cannot be measured; only success. Those who claim to believe in meritocracy think it simply means removing power from those who've gained success without merit (say, through connections and/or inheritance). But that doesn't really change the picture much, because the biggest bias is against those who haven't had success at all, in spite of their merit.

Like I said in my previous comment, when considering meritocracy, you should ask yourself "who does not have merit and why?"
Your sibling is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406416 , and my response is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406531 .
Just curious. Is this an image you own? I remember seeing it on Reddit a few days ago.

Edit: the point was made.
>"Vertically integrated" is strongly tied to physical goods production.

Not really. It simply refers to the degree of a company's involvement in the production of their product/service. I don't see the need for a new word.
Thanks. Yeah, I worried it might be confusing. I use survival analysis and speak about how statisticians use jargon and I wanted that to be in the title somehow.
You might think of this as the opposite of outsourcing, except these companies do outsource. However, they choose partners with relatively less negotiating power. Uber is an obvious example, but large companies like Apple, Amazon, and Walmart do the same at much larger scale; they can partner with large suppliers as long as they're relatively smaller.

This lets them control the user experience better and, not coincidentally, their own profit margins as well.

(I'm reminded of Gailbraith's theory of countervailing power, that large retailers arose because they had more buying power than consumers when negotiating with suppliers.)
Valve recently open sourced vogl, voglperf and togl - https://github.com/ValveSoftware
CryTek are going ahead to open source RenderDoc - https://twitter.com/RenderDoc
and Sony just released an awesome .NET/WPF framework (used for a lot of tools in some of Sony's internal studios) - https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF
http://www.miniclip.com/games/table-tennis/en/ ?
Show HN: ChefSpec – RSpec testing for Chef Cookbooks