skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A team of 4 was told to move 7 tons of bricks 100 yards. Dutifully, they loaded a wagon by hand, moved the wagon 100 yards and dumped the bricks out. Again and again. After about 1 ton, Management wanted to know how long it would take to move all the bricks. The team multiplied their time spent so far by 7. Management wasn't happy.

Trying to be helpful, Management bought 6 more wagons.

The team said that with 4 team members, they couldn't productively use more than 4 wagons. Could we please have another team member? Management wasn't happy.

Trying to be helpful, Management set a deadline, and gave a speech about how important the deadline was to the company.

The deadline was completely unrealistic. The team worked to move bricks as fast as it could. After moving about 3 tons of bricks, they missed their first deadline. Management wasn't happy.

Trying to be helpful, Management set a deadline, and changed the goal to be to move the bricks 60 yards.

The team was pretty happy for a while... Until they realized that management wanted them to move those first 3 tons of bricks BACKWARDS 40 yards. They tried to explain that this was like moving 3 * 140 + 7 * 60 = 840 brick-ton-yards, rather than 7 * 100 = 700 brick-ton-yards, and was therefore an even harder goal! Management wasn't happy.

Trying to be helpful, Management hired a consultant.

The team was told to stop moving bricks for a while, and talk about everything with the consultant. The consultant gave some fun presentations, and coached the team through a lot of soul searching... They decided to have stand-up meetings every so often, to talk about their progress, and their plans for the day. The meetings took more time, and bricks weren't moving themselves. The team now had about 1 ton of bricks at the 100 yard line, 2 tons of bricks at the 60 yard line, and 4 tons of bricks at the 0 yard line. Management wasn't happy.

Trying to be helpful, Management bought 7 tons of gravel, and dropped it the 0 yard line, and said the new goal was to move the gravel 75 yards. They also hired an offshore team, but all they could really do was try to dial in to conference calls at weird hours of the day, and they really couldn't help move any of the gravel. Then one of the Managers was fired, and the new Manager said the goal was to move 1 ton of bricks and 2 tons of gravel 186 miles, in the back of an El Camino, that has no tires and no engine, and there's no budget for either...

...then some manager four levels up in the company decided to spend enough money to rent a few pieces of construction equipment, brought in an external team, and moved all 7 tons of bricks and all 7 tons of gravel the whole 186 miles in record time. With scorn, he talks to his peers about how awful his team is. No raises. No bonuses.
Ask HN: Startup spaces to visit in SF
I will be in SF next week for my startups YC interview and I was wondering if there are any cool startup/startup incubators that I could visit while on my trip? Having a startup in Canada, I am actually very curious to see how startups in SF work and function.
The Art of Contributing
How can you tell that two clocks are 22 nanoseconds apart?

If the clocks are in the same room and you have a fast oscilloscope at hand, it's easy.

If the clocks are more than about 6 metres apart, it really is impossible.
This entry from "Time and Frequency from A to Z" published by NIST should get you started.

http://tf.nist.gov/general/enc-ti.htm#timeintervalcounter
If you think that they will keep your "content" for 1000 years, you might be dreaming.
Yes. I rewrote it to use the less baity subtitle.

The HN guidelines call for not rewriting titles except when they are misleading or linkbait.

Edit: the article is pretty lame too. Is this a significant announcement? If it is, can someone suggest a better url? If it isn't, we may tag it as fluff.
Heartbleed Shows Government Must Lead on Internet Security
Same issue here. FF 28.0 on OS X (10.8) and none of the animations are working.

Works fine on Chrome and Safari
Amen Jeff. I had a todo-list problem with digital tasks that I needed to do in the future. That led me to the startup that I'm running right now. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/later/id725222144?mt=8
Startup Banking’s Looming Leviathan
How To Gain Influence At Work (and actually get your ideas listened to)
Good point, also Ruby Gemfiles can reference github repos.

For both Gemfiles and submodules this is an extra reason to fork the original and reference your fork rather than directly link to the original (unless it is big and reliable and unlikely to to be replaced e.g. rails).
hello! First time I've been on HN (thanks for sharing it). FWIW - this isn't one of my favorite things I've written. It's just something that annoys me personally, so I wrote it down.
in fact I think that's one of their main (only?) selling points

I have a 32 GB Surface RT. Here are some of its many selling points:

1. Memory card slot to upgrade storage to 96 GB

2. USB port that can be used to connect and charge devices

3. 10.6" touch screen

4. Cost only $179

5. Runs full version of Microsoft Office 2013

6. Runs full version of OneNote which is a must-have app

7. Unbelievably good Type keyboard with magnetic locks

8. Built-in standard Windows utilities (ex: RDP client)

9. Built-in kickstand

10. Tons of apps/games

11. Multiple user profiles on one device

I have a 64 GB iPad Retina as well. My three kids actually fight over the Surface and the loser is left with the iPad.
Her quitting was like a superhero retiring.
Responsive Dynamic Height Sticky Footers
Having worked on both line oriented and free-form languages over the last 30 years, there's less opportunity for foolishness when 1 line = 1 statement. (so long as you can continue a long line with an obvious convention such as a trailing backslash, ampersand or perhaps a comma)

Line oriented syntax need not be limiting: Ruby, for example, does a good job of treating statements such as "if", "while", "case" as expressions that can return values.

Also, there's only one correct way to indent with "END" type keywords: the body is indented to the right of the start/end lines, and the start (FOR/IF/...) and end (END/DONE/...) lines are aligned.

Now if we could just get an "AGAIN (parameters...)" keyword for tail call elimination, coupled with almost mandatory immutability, in more languages... :-)
I think the question is more along the lines of "Should the core data type be the cons cell rather than the list?" Clojure takes the approach the GP was talking about. It has lists with heads and tails, but it does not have dotted pairs. The tail of a list is always a list.
The problem is never dealing with the things you have to do today -- It's dealing with the things you don't. Whether it's things you need to do sometime in the future, or things that you may never need to do at all, or the things that you want to do.

For me, keeping track of the three things I'm doing today is far less of a problem than making the decision what those things are, and in being able to file things away so I can say to myself (and to others), "If it's important, I'll deal with it (and won't forget that it exists), but for now it's not my top priority".
Yeah, that's totally understandable. Fortunately almost all of these cases are for accounts with no repositories.

In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name and create repos with the same name[1].

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-...
Without a phone in hand, information seems kind of sparse. The Narrator in desktop Windows doesn't seem all that impressive (wouldn't want to kill the 3rd-pary screen reader market, I guess).

From a development point of view, devs still need to add accessibility labels to their apps and use the other accessibility APIs available. I have no idea how easy or hard that is on Windows Phone. iOS is easy enough that a dev would have to be borderline negligent not to type a few descriptive labels while they're doing the UI. Android, not too bad but not as much infrastructure as iOS (I'll admit to being a much weaker Android than iOS dev, so maybe I've missed something) for gestures and the like.

Point being, even if the WinPhone accessibility APIs are fully fleshed out, 3rd party apps still need to support it, and I haven't seen a big push from Microsoft to do so. Contrast to iOS where devs get the accessibility spiel at WWDC, and Apple seems to push it elsewhere. Android, meh, seems kind of tacked on IMO, though I guess it works well enough (fully-sighted user here, so I'm not the most qualified to say, and I'd be interested to know how the Nexus 7 works out for you).

Sometime in the next week I should get a chance to play with a friend's phone that I'm sure he'll have upgraded to 8.1. Again, I'm fully-sighted but have been the "accessibility guy" across several companies (including an accessibility lead at MSFT), so I at least know what to look for. I'll ping you if I have anything to report.
the way we work is very different, but the end result is the same. We focus on relevant timely trending stories reporters are writing on the topic you might have interesting facts about. We help you connect with these reporters over the timely article they wrote. We also help you think though your pitch and give you the contact information to reach out. We make sure it's a very relevant fit for both your pitch and the reporter's interests.

I'm not familiar with PressFriendly, but it looks like they look through entire archives of what reporters have written and curate lists of reporters based on their past articles and their fit with your topic. Again, I'm not 100% sure.

Two different approaches, both helping people with the same issue. I think it's great to see companies such as PressFriendly around. There should be more of them around, this is a painful problem for companies and PR Firms is a bad solution.
As a result Gruber has made himself almost entirely irrelevant. I almost can't wait to watch him twist himself into knots when Apple releases a larger phone.
There are other reasons why choice of language matters. If you need a simple web app, you're probably writing it in PHP or Ruby instead of C. But you'll likely use C if you're interfacing with hardware. A lot of apps that need high concurrency use Erlang. If you can write a quick Python script that solves a problem before you can even get Eclipse to load, then why would you even bother trying to write the solution in Java?

Language errors aside, it's pretty obvious that at least in some cases, the choice of programming language does matter.
Is not there some 'anti hacking' law in US? Aaron S. got like 30 years for downloading a few documents.

Call FBI and see what happens.
the source code is about two years old. does that mean that the code is so stable that there is no need for patches/improvements? or has the project been discontinued?
Building the Internet of Music Things (starting with gTar)
Philomena Cunk is world renowned for her research and documentaries, the Time short was particularly accurate.
Sure, that would be a good reason to go there. I didn't mean to cast aspersions at dependent types. I was just confused/amused at the typical case being cast as a hypothetical.
Its actually pretty impressive that 88% of tor operators have deployed OpenSSL updates. Curious how that compares to the web.
So, if you have a room that's got a dimension larger than 6 meters, and a fast oscilloscope, you can have a situation in which it is both easy and impossible?
Simple filesystem monitor in go
PSA: Always put brackets after your conditionals (for languages where you can). You never know when a one-line conditional will become a ten-line, and you can get this sort of bug. It's not worth the two saved keystrokes now to have the NSA in your data later.

I think the most readable code has no shortcuts and no tricks. I'll take unambiguous over concise or 'beautiful' any day.
> I'm unhappy that Levison's overbearance on email caused Pamela Jones to quit Groklaw.

Can you explain?

I may be wrong, but my misunderstanding is that Groklaw shut down because there is no way of knowing whether or not the privacy has been compromised.

In other words, this incident revealed information that was already true; Groklaw shut down in the light of the new knowledge, but not because the previously-private communication was suddenly vulnerable.
Anybody familiar with this project? Does it successfully and securely achieve what it claims to achieve? What's its status currently?
We help you construct your email pitch and give you the contact information to reach out to the reporters. We make sure your pitch is a very relevant fit to the reporter's interests.
Tooling around – Are we focusing too much on the tools and not the output?
Show HN: ResetPassword.co
Wow that YT clip is awful, its laggy as crap :( 3d map and big menu both drop down to single digit fps at times.
How can you sell $100K car with laggy dashboard? :(
Back about 5 years ago, a prominent VC behind TechStars came to my college and talked about entrepreneurship. I was so enamored that I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and apply to their incubator program.

I applied about 5 times with various ideas to various programs (Boulder, Seattle, New York). I got close once -- I was a "finalist" for the Seattle program (Top 30), but didn't get chosen as the top 10.

Each time left me pretty crushed. But I decided early on that I could sit around and feel bad about myself, or I could use it to become better. After each time I was rejected, I contacted the head of the incubator and thanked them for their time, and if they could give me any tips towards success. And more often than not, I got responses that helped me become a better entrepreneur.

The first rejection is always the hardest. And so is the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. But Edison is widely quoted as saying:

"I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."

Despite what you may think of Edison, I try to take the same mentality. To those who got rejected -- think of it not as the end, but as the beginning. You'll enjoy the ride if you do.
What algorithms are we talking about? The ones that are printed on the tax form? "Subtract box 3 from box 2 and enter it in box 14"? They aren't secret.

The problem people have with tax forms is not the calculations, it is understanding what has to go in the box in the first place. And, for a non-negligible part of the population, enough English literacy to read the form in the first place. Which is why volunteer tax preparation is a thing:

http://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/info-2006/volunteer_aarp_tax...
Good for him that he have only three things to worry about every day, but it's pretty silly to assume everybody else have that much free time, and only three things to worry about any given day...

I understand he means three main things by "Three Things" for the day, but why the earth would you want to memorize a shopping list or dozens of small things you need to do?
I found that keeping small things OUT of my head actually helps me very much because, they aren't popping up throughout the day as I know they are safe and I just need to look them up and do them eventually. David Allen suggests this in his GTD book, [1] and it really free my mind from anxiety of forgettings, losing things! Great advice.

Also every issue tracker in the world is a huge TODO list, I'm sure he has a couple if TODOs in one of those. ;)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
The article only covered error handling, but Zones are a lot more powerful than that. They are nestable (forkable), they can store arbitrary values, intercept microtasks, timers, wrap closures to be associated with the Zone, and a few more things.

Then the key part in Dart is that all of the APIs that invoke callbacks based on external events run the callbacks in the Zone they were registered in. This is what allows Zones to be used to easily run code at the beginning or end of every event loop turn.
> Tor's Bleeding Edge nodes (guards and exits) [1]

Seriously, the choice of Heartbleed as a name is genius. It makes for so many awesome derivative names. I mean c'mon, "Bleeding Edges?" That's brilliant.

[1] https://encrypted.redteam.net/bleeding_edges/
It seems to me the line of argument here boils down to "bad code can be bad". There's no language that can prevent code that is simply wrong from doing something wrong, not even the proof languages. Even "pure" code will happily generate the wrong value if you "map (+1) ." twice instead of once.

We should instead discuss the affordances the language has for correct and incorrect code. It is not that C is objectively "wrong" to permit an if statement to take an atomic statement, it is that it affords wrong behavior. And the reason I say it affords wrong behavior is no longer any theoretical argument in any direction, but direct, repeated, consistent practical experience from pretty much everybody who makes serious use of C... that is, it is the reality that trumps all theory.
Any {Free,Open,Net}BSD system.
The sysadmin who can not personally automate his job through programming is not a competent sysadmin.

In between putting out fires and occasionally setting up new systems, this is what sysadmins have been doing long before the word "devops" came into being. Anything you had to do twice, write a script for it.

At least that's what I remember from my sysadmin days: automate the shit out of everything so we could spend more time on Usenet, IRC and reading BOFH stories. This of course to counterbalance having to be on call to fix issues at 2am on a Saturday.
OK, he oversimplified it a little bit: the error checks had side effects, which determined the return value of the enclosing routine.

His point still stands, I think: the code didn't do what was obviously intended, and should have been flagged by the main compiler/interpreter/parser, rather than a supplemental "lint" type tool.
Track custom events without JavaScript?
We wanted to track user behaviour on our web application. At first we were a small startup that didn't have the time to code for all the behaviours we wanted to track. Then we sold our company to a large public software behemoth. Then we had many more resources, but management still kept them focused on developing the core product, even as our user base grew further. So we still didn't collect the detailed user behaviour we wanted to track, and we didn't get to run insightful reports in Mixpanel or Google Analytics, and we didn't learn from our experiences.

So when we left to start a new venture and ended up building a solution that solved our problem. In fact we found it so exciting and got such great feedback we decided to build our entire business around it.<p>So whats my question? Simple. I'm looking for sniff testers, tire kickers and nay-sayers that might be interested in having a deeper dive and giving some honest feedback. No matter what I've shown her, my mom still says my ideas are great ;}

Check us out at http://trialfire.com - We're currently looking for testers to be part of our closed beta.
I choose to interpret this in a way that isn't anti-planning, just anti-scheduling. Pmarca wrote up a similar anti-system a while ago, although it is more structured: http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html
"Finally having a voice assistant app confirms the suspicion I had when Siri arrived on iOS: I don't really have much of a use case for this."

I definitely can relate to this. I only have three real use cases for Siri these days - setting an alarm, starting a timer and setting a reminder for myself. All three work pretty well with Siri.

I just don't use it for much else. I don't use Siri's dictation features because Siri only shines at dictation when you know exactly what you're going to say, word for word - for "casual dictation", it falls apart really quickly. I can't think of anything else that my first reaction is "let's ask Siri".

Cortana feels like a really expensive "me too" feature.
Surely, there are more interesting things to comment on.
So you completely rely on a free web service to store something that important to you? It's unlikely now that they're owned by fb, but trusting a zero-revenue startup to offer you free access to some photos indefinitely probably isn't the safest assumption.
>that does nothing? Oh.

Doesn't that depend on what you consider your condition?
createSomething=function that creates something and returns true if correctly created and false otherwise

if(createSomething());

did that do nothing?

edit: perhaps nothing useful since we can't know the state returned by createSomething.
Wake Forest is test bed for Gigabit internet
U.S. Intelligence Community Supports Sharper Satellite Images
I used fish for about 6 months or so and loved it - with this exception. Initially I'd just hop into bash to do whatever I needed (as another comment suggests), but what was the "last straw" for me was not being to have some of the convenience functions that virtualenvwrapper exposes for working with python virtualenvs. My solution was to switch to zsh/oh-my-zsh - I'm pretty happy with it so far, although I do miss a few things from fish (namely the auto suggest/complete when typing previous commands).
What's the difference between "!reject" and "not Valid"?

Edit: I'm a TOR noob, I have no idea what a Valid flag does. Why wouldn't it show up in logs the same way?
BeagleBone Black doubles flash, embraces Debian
Learning Agda has quite an academic feeling to it, not because it's not widely used, but because the ressources are so scattered around, often out of scope for beginners, and so on.

For that reason, I really appreciate these "let's do a simple task with no prerequisites" kind of posts about it. It shows me (and probably many other Haskellers, functional programmers, programmers) that simple problems are manageable, and provide plenty of catchwords to read up on. Thanks for that!
Solution: Split Roll [1]. It would prevent egregious abuses of prop13 like the transfer of ownership coordinated for Ernest & Julio Gallo winery [2], wherein a sweetheart tax valuation on property was transferred to a new owner without triggering a tax re-evaluation, while removing any impact for 99 percenters (and even some of the 1%).

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/13/business/fi-hiltzik1...

[2] http://www.car.org/meetings/carmeetings/committee-materials-...
I'm glad someone is coming at this problem from a different angle.

Maybe the subtext to this submission is "OpenSSL totally sucks so bad you need to evacuate NOW NOW NOW!!!!" If so, I'd point out that now is the time to upgrade OpenSSL, ditch all of your old keys, and keep an eye on the future.

Today is not the day to forklift in a whole new chunk of infrastructure.

Instead, set up a lab, play with it, get a feeling for it.
Show HN: Drive Assist app for android
The S-100 buss based machines before those were very modular, if perhaps not PCs in the same sense.
The Detectives who Watched the Elite Prostitutes of 18th Century Paris