skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cool! I had to get 5 interns spun up on a few dev environments last summer and this definitely would have made it easier. I can also see this being useful for sharing output like logs or errors.

I'm sure as the developer you've thought of a lot more applications for nutty (great url btw), what sort of things do you see it being useful for?
4 Steps To Improve Perceived Performance of your Web Applications
NPR Blacklists 'Sexist'
In a world where WhatsApp costs more than a small country, $2B seems kinda low for the potential next hottest thing in virtual reality.
Gamers are very sensitive to this type of stuff. There has been previous malcontent in the gaming scene about major corporations like EA or Activision acquiring smaller independent studios. There's a general trend of criticism towards "casual" games, especially from the core "old school" gamers, there's constant bickering between PC and Console world, and even intra-wars between various consoles and fans.

It's a very active and rebellious scene and gamers enjoy direct relationships with studios like Valve, CDProjekt, Mojang, etc etc, those "big" studios who still operate independently and directly listen to their audience and target instead of trying to monetize everything to maximize income.
Language is ultimately defined by popular usage, and the majority of the usage of "hacker" means "black hat" type activities. You can argue for a different usage until you're blue in the face, but the black hat usage is pretty clearly the dominant one and has been for quite a while. Insisting on a different usage and using the word that way yourself just leads to confusion and makes you sound pedantic, no matter how correct you feel your definition is.
You seem to be assuming that the country which has isolated itself so extremely is also led by rational people.
Make a public example of this termination

WTF? When did this become feudal Japan?
>"Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop."

Hardly.

When one executive contacts another directly the intent is implicit. If destroying this person was not the clear desire this communication would have taken place at another level.
It's a stretch to assume the employee "went rogue" in the sense of crossing a well-defined boundary. I'd hazard a guess that the no-poach rule was phrased (or at least understood) more as a suggestion, since explaining the reasoning behind the policy would hand HR evidence of the illegal cartel. Perhaps they even gave the HR people a BS reason, like "poaching leads to salary asymmetries and conflict in teams," which the unknowing HR employee proved wrong under the assumption that she could successfully work around the stated issue. When the no-poach suggestion didn't work, they needed to resort to making an example of someone to get the subtext across using the time-honored strategy of creating a "obey me without question" atmosphere to avoid uncomfortable discussions.
Yup. "It was St.Steve of Cupertino, and the Do-No-Evil Company Inc., so that makes it quite all right."
EU app makers have a hard time making it to your smartphone home screen
There is a bigger system than Google/Facebook here: all the engineers that work for these and other companies. It's not just this one person who is affected. There are all these engineers whose wages and opportunities are lower that they could be.
Exactly

To me it means, "I am pleased with the response"

One thing I've learned from email communication is that you can't grok the emotional response from text alone (even with emoticons)

This could be either a thankful smile, a loathful grin or anything in between.
> a known rule

That "rule" is an illegal collusion that's probably worth billions in salary, ISOs, bonuses, etc. That is, the totality of the crime here is that the participants in the collusion literally stole billions of dollars from salaried employees.

How obsequious the HR people are in this is a minor factor. This is a Bernie Madoff-sized crime. What Madoff did was a more visible crime, so he was punished like a common criminal. But if you shave a few tens of thousands of dollars per year off a few tens of thousands of engineers' salaries and your motto is "Don't be evil" (or if you do something really big, like diddle the LIBOR rate) people think different, for some reason.
A non-comprehensive comparison of Data Science programs on cost and frequency
There is a great 60 minutes episode about Luxottica @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM
That's a problem anyway. :/

Here's my thinking, and I'd love some feedback on this. I live in Minneapolis, home of more Fortune 500 companies per capita than anywhere else on Earth (really!). These giants are full of very smart engineers that are frustrated and stifled by the nature of the beast they work in. I want to try to poach talent out of the giants by, among other things, offering a chance to work with technology that wasn't chosen by two years of committee meetings. And of course the speed, clarity of purpose, and control over their own destinies that comes with a startup.

This gets to another value of mine, and is going to play into my hiring. I want to hire people who have real-world experience in mainstream enterprise programming/ops. I'm building a product targeted at simplifying the lives of enterprise engineers, and I think it's very important that I hire people who have felt the customer's pain directly. I could get kids fresh out of school, but they won't have that experience.
Too bad someone already snatched softwarecartel.com :P https://www.transip.nl/whois/prm/softwarecartel.com
> It forced me to learn all these issues and understand them well enough to be able to customize each and align them with a products design.

This is a standard developer response - I recall when Sinatra was a fresh kid on the block, and the same arguments people used against Rails - but just because something is more fun doesn't mean you're going to get all these details right.

The attack surface in modern web apps can be such a large search space that the majority of people will never get it right. The point behind frameworks is that you can engage in efficiencies in scale when it comes to sensible defaults; even the most well seasoned and security paranoid developer can drown in the cornucopia of details that all have to be done right.
"use public funding and subsidies to get technology off the ground, then transition to the private sector once it attains a certain level of maturity."

It's the belt way bandit model.
I despise Jobs completely. FIXED.
Yeah, a lot of editorializing going on in that article. Better if you just read the emails.
Do you honestly believe a single person can produce that much insanity?
No, see, there's you're problem. History has proven that Will Wright always underdelivers on anything he hypes up. The guy that designs The Sims is not going to design a realistic evolution simulator.
I believe people everywhere in the world are used to supressing the difference between the stated ideals of their land (equality, liberty, free elections) and the reality (prejudices, xenophobia, racism, assassinations ordered by the government, voter sway via public ads).

If our minds can supress the differences between ideals and reality in USA, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan or any other country of residence, I believe North Koreans can do the same -- focus on their daily life and ignore the atrocities.

All of that is just my opinion, obviously. My family adapted fine after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that's just anecdotal.
The talk he links to (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBL59w7fXw4) is really fantastic. Kudos to Aaron Bedra for issuing a well-considered and practical wake-up call to the Clojure community.

I support a Clojure/ClojureScript web app in my day-to-day work. I've also written an OAuth2 workflow for friend (https://github.com/ddellacosta/friend-oauth2 ...pull requests welcome), one library Aaron Bedra spends a lot of time talking about. The story really is exactly how he describes--Clojure web security could be better. I suppose you could argue that, at least, the defaults are generally not bad...but that's because there aren't defaults in many cases.

I think the main issue is, ironically, the same thing that makes Clojure development so great: you end up composing a bunch of small libraries together, each of which do one thing well. But as Aaron points out, there are things that aren't taken care of and you can't assume they are done for you, and a lot of security is something that you don't technically need to get a web app working...

I wouldn't want to give up the approach of composing a bunch of libraries to build concise, easy-to-reason-about web apps in Clojure--I think it helps with security in and of itself--but the community could really benefit from having more libraries which nail these things down and help developers build web apps more safely, with less work.

That said, I don't think it's all bad: you can build high quality, secure web apps in Clojure, it just requires you to really pay attention to security. And we should be doing that anyways, right?
Read 1984 and you will understand why haircuts are important.
I don't think this is the case. Sony's VR R&D has been in motion since 2010 and John Carmack initially tried to get them to hire Palmer Luckey before the founding of Oculus[0]. According to leaks, the model they showed off this year was nearly identical to one that they almost showed off around the PS4's launch[1]. Sony have been working on this a long time and, just like Oculus, have been trying to make sure they don't somehow ruin the market like past VR products have. VR for consoles is a very different product than VR for high performance computers; Sony has to make many more compromises to run on the PS4 hardware.

[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/446122463747776512
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/20vzid/massive_infor...
Fight Club Reference "Roommate Rivalry"
some messy fun
I don't understand these smartphone-game-makers going public. There seems to be a trend: they are all based off one game, have little (or none) in terms of net revenue, and do poorly in the market. Zynga: down ~50% since it went public.
Why was it illegal to /follow/?
I imagine you don't mean this and ended up doing this by accident because you didn't bother to research the person at all, but this comment ends up being unbelievably sexist.

I would like to have an interesting and informed discussion, but that requires that the other participants do some basic reading before making snide remarks.
But also the same IMVU co-founded by Eric Ries i.e. The Lean Startup
Worth noting that SingAlong (the OP), is also a contributor to Kandan - mentioned in their README
Does anyone think the former should be considered a good description of a hacker? To me it is someone using their intelligence, to do something clever (or at least in a clever way) to disrupt or destroy something, make someone uncomfortable or piss someone off, or challenge something, for some result that satisfies them or someone else in some way. And the essence really lies in that first bit. A random programmer isn't a hacker unless that first bit is there, the unorthodox, challenging or subversive bit.
Sony unveiled their VR headset recently: http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2014/03/23/gdc-2014-hand...
Agreed - great blog post bringing up points I hadn't considered.... Love the opening line too.
The lack of reverse debugging isn't an inherent limitation. One could index the replay and take micro-checkpoints along the way; then when you want to step backward, you rewind to the last checkpoint and play forward until you hit the previous instruction.
>"tinker with shit".
That's gold!
I can't take anything these companies say as true after the no poaching agreements came to light. Sergey tried to keep it off the record and didn't want a paper trail, and that's behavior coming all the way from the top. How can you trust anything these companies say?
You mean, you didn't like Steve Jobs but you do like Brin. That's okay. But no need to rationalize, they're the same guy.
I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length

If only there existed such a thing before facebook, a platform to enable others on the internet to read it,... a blog if you will.

Oh wait...

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/author/john-carmack/

--------

I guess If someone gives you a lot of money you have to talk nice about them.
> But at least pip, npm and gems are a breeze compared to cabal.

I've not really used the others, but Gemfiles have the concept of upper bounds:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5170547/what-does-tilde-g...

Docs: http://guides.rubygems.org/patterns/#pessimistic_version_con...
> because it looks really fucking stupid when NK is
> allowed to ban haircuts and starve people.

So don't do the things you can do, because there are some things you can't?
What do you mean "get a pass"? This story has been on and off HN's front page for months and the companies involved, including Apple and Google, have received nothing but strong criticism every time.
There is mounting evidence Steve Jobs was a sociopath. Corporations select for these traits in their CEOs and Google is no expection. Not surprising, not shocking, but sad.
> On top of that, a lot of us are actively hoping to see the death of Facebook- I personally am, because I think they've acted unethically.

And this is really at the heart of all the nerd-rage. None of the responses I've seen are based on any kind of logic. They are completely emotional based on people's biases (justified or not) against Facebook the Product. If you look at Facebook's actions when it comes to their major acquisitions, ignoring all the controversy around Facebook the Product, you will see that they've been pretty good stewards of acquired tech so far. I was certainly impressed with their handling of Parse thus far.

The way I see it, Facebook has been having a hard time coming up with their second act. Pretty much every new Facebook related feature or product has been a flop. So they are wisely looking to acquire rising stars rather than engineer them internally.
The employee was female, as established in the first line of the article.
That's correct. There are thousands and thousands of SREs, but gmail data is considered to be basically the most private thing in the data centers - its access is heavily gated and audited.
Is the HTC One the best Android phone you can get?
Yeah I agree. A smiley face just means "thanks" or "good", not "MUAHAHAHAAA". It doesn't mean this is all OK, but the article really goes over the top trying to drum up emotions (warning: the next email you're going to read will scar you for life and possibly kill you). It's almost cartoonish.
> It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.

Does that make it ok?
Interactive Road Orientation Distributions – How Ordered is Your Town?
It seems much easier to use a different word to describe yourself than it will be to convince everyone else to define hacker the same way you do. The whole point of language is to communicate ideas to people. Choosing a word you know in advance your audience is likely to misinterpret doesn't seem like very effective use of language to me.
Eich hasn't been involved in Rust for the three years that I've been watching the project. Whether he was involved before that, I don't know, but given the primitive and under-the-radar state of pre-2011 Rust it seems unlikely.
Maybe the impending EC2 price drop (predicted by many in light of the new Google cloud pricing) will bring it in line.
Could the fired employee seek damages for wrongful termination? I dont recall what brought about this whole non poaching case.
Roommate Rivalry
I'm trying to get a viral video
> Could web applications written in Go, or to a lesser extent, node.js, suffer from the same shortcomings?

Yes, and they do. And there's no "lesser extent"; if I can't set up a fresh node app with the correct defaults for all of this stuff - if it's not safe out of the box, and I don't have to go out of my way to pick crappy settings - then it's just as vulnerable.

People made a lot of fun out of the Rails vulns that hit last year but they were the visible growing pains of having to mature a framework. It's not about the individual bits, it's about the ecosystem at large.
A true hacker would be pleased at the idea of making a potential business partner uncomfortable about his talents, and relish the challenge of meeting their goals despite that discomfort.
It's hard to knock that logic. Initially I was disappointed that the Occulus team made this move, but against the backdrop you paint, it's hard to see it as anything other than a smart move. My only criticism would be... surely there's someone better than Facebook to do this deal with. But most likely there isn't.
Does this employee now have recourse to sue for wrongful termination since she was fired due to failure to comply with an illegal policy?
Just navigate to your city. It uses OpenStreetMap data

Some examples:

Austin TX: http://veloviewer.com/roads#map=12/30.254505071257608/-97.70...

Sheffield, UK: http://veloviewer.com/roads#map=11/53.37813000840681/-1.4728...

"The City": http://veloviewer.com/roads#map=11/37.738851585164944/-122.4...
Agreements between companies to not recruit each others' workers are not actually immoral.

There are many immoral laws, and whatever law is being thrown at them in this case is one such.

I also think it was immoral to stop MSFT from selling their product as they saw fit---with Windows and IE bundled. So you can't accuse me of being partial to one set of companies over another.
> yet they're worrying about the people having too much freedom with their 10 allowed haircuts?

My guess is this is a response to something specific. They're tightening the clamps to assert their control and once people fall back in line they'll loosen the restrictions just a little to show that they are benevolent.
This is excellent! Hav you considered using hardware the hardware acceleration available in the Pitfall II mapper to get enough raster time for colors?
Science through press conferences. Exactly how you're not supposed to do it.
Say what? "The greed of an individual employee". Said employee is a recruiter, her job is to source people. Can hardly be called a case of greed especially when considering the whole context and greed on the part of the participating companies.

The outrage over the attitude of the execs in question is not so much because we don't understand business. Yes, we get it. This endangered a strategic relationship and deserves a strong response. The outrage is due to the nonchalance and utter arrogance shown by these execs, which were in previous times considered as inspirational leaders and models to aspire to.

I personally think it is important to show our outrage and reaction over the attitude of the execs because many folks would like to work for Google, Apple, etc... This gets them thinking about whether they'd really like to work for such companies and under such leaders.
Agreed. I understand the concept of wage-fixing that's happening here, but I also see the vemon that's laced in all the articles written about it to make Google/Apple execs seem as evil as possible. I get it, they've been doing stuff under the table and people are losing their jobs needlessly... but it doesn't need to be stated in this manner.

And it hasn't left my mind that even with all these wage-fixing complaints, those of us in the soft-engineering field are still enjoying the current good times and we still have SF-gentrification issues, and all the outside-of-tech people, who have real problems.

This whole thing is beginning to lose perspective. Because seriously, we're doing...pretty...freakin'...well these days on our average 6 figure salaries. The real victims are people like the HR-lady who lost her job.
> What do you mean "get a pass"?

This is what he's referring to:

> all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me

I'm no "occupy wall street" fan, but I think taking millions of dollars from the pockets of a lot of workers is very much something to be outraged about.
I know people hate on StratFor (for no good reason IMO) but the below article from them is an interesting summary:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/ferocious-weak-and-crazy-nort...

"When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits. There were reasonable expectations that its government would soon collapse, leading to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it. It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy. North Korea has pursued this course since the 1990s, and the latest manifestation of this strategy was on display last week. The strategy has worked marvelously and is still working."

I guess the haircuts would be the "crazy" part of the strategy.
I run http://releas.io. It generates download cards for physical music releases (typically vinyl).
It yields around 400€ per month but I don't do any biz dev. I don't think it's a viable project (beyond a side-project) so I didn't try to make it full-time.
> This is a Bernie Madoff-sized crime.

Really? Equivalent to a $50 billion ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their pensions and become destitute? That's the same as denying a few thousand dollars to already very highly compensated engineers? I'm not excusing what they're doing but the Madoff comparison seems off.
I could do that (quicker/better/cheaper) comments are the worst.

Put your money where your mouth is.
Turning Off the Vacuum Cleaner
I hear you, but do you know how many people would kill to have people stalking them with job offers.
This article is so sensationalist. They could have just reported the facts without the histrionics and it would have been so much better.

This, especially:
"The language is brutal, and as you’ll see, there’s an almost sadistic, military glee on all sides with the way in which the Google recruiter is 'terminated'"

The email following that description was exactly what I would have expected. "Yes, this person screwed up. We have a clear policy that they failed to follow. We're checking to see if they did this more than once. We've fired that person. Please apologize on our behalf, it won't happen again."

Making the story about "brutal" this and "sadistic" that is senseless, naive, and detracts from the real story, which is that they had these (illegal!) policies in the first place. Stop buzzfeedifying the news.
I'm bouncing back and forth between "ah shit, and I thought they were cool..." and... Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?