skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally, it's best not to say anything more than the minimal amount necessary; if you want to get a particular angle on the story out, you float it through friendly media, of which SiV has a preponderance. ("Sources close to the story say that ...".)

It appears that GitHub and the Preston-Werners aren't coordinating their messages (though no doubt all counsel involved have reviewed them): the GH release is appropriately terse, giving away the bare minimum of information in order to minimize both PR and legal exposure, while the P-Ws are working their angle to the story while still minimizing actual information. The P-Ws really don't have any legal exposure, so there's very little downside to their attempts to work the refs, while GH is operating under the continued threat of legal action (even if it's remote, their attorneys are obviously being appropriately cautious here, so kudos to them).

Of the two statements, Tom Preston-Werner's statement is far more effective and well-crafted than his wife's; he comes across as -- at least for public consumption -- sincere, open and genuinely remorseful while affirming his dedication to Good Things and avoiding admitting to actual culpability. It's a very nicely-handled statement, and it's instructive to compare it to how MoCo and Eich handled their crisis du jour. (The OP statement by Theresa P-W, however, is less artful, more defensive, and personalizes the criticism. Understandable from a personal point of view; not good PR.)

How much of this is true? Well, does it matter? Truth is for courtrooms and confessionals; what matters here is spin. Again, consider MoCo. In both cases, an executive was ousted but, in GH's case, the company looks stronger for it (investigation by outside counsel! No wrongdoing found! Action taken!) and the P-Ws don't look much worse (we support diversity! Created an open culture! Feel terrible that some people felt hurt!).

The ouster of Eich, however, just made moCo look opportunistic and weak, and Eich personally came out looking pretty bad due to his inability to craft a solid message (he said the right things about diversity, but failed to connect it to his personal narrative, so it rang hollow). The lesson, I think, is either move quickly and aggressively (as GitHub did), or else buckle down and stay the course (as Mozilla should have -- though, as I've said previously, I have no issues whatsoever with the campaign to oust Eich). Anything else is going to make a problem into a crisis.
This is a great example of the type of critical looking at the evidence. The words that are used should be examined closely - especially official / legal words. There should be no reading between the lines if written properly.

Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Basically, legal speak only addresses a specific thing. The objective is not to uncover the whole truth about an event, but to reveal only as much as necessary.

In short, the report on the investigation should not if done properly comment on anything outside of it - even if evidence of those things are found.

Thus, looking at it - it gives no evidence of other things.
We do have virtually equal quality of life in the US. A rich person can have ten cars, but he can't drive ten at the same time. It is a left-wing cliche that the burden of fighting wars falls upon the poor. In the real world we live in, the military is all volunteers and mostly middle-class, not from the poorest demographics. And pretty much everyone in the USA has access to state of the art care. You cannot buy your way to the top of an organ donor list or something. Certainly there is a difference between rich and poor, but you have not shown that it is an unjust difference or that it is harmful to the poor person.
preview button doesn't work in firefox 28
As a general rule, types are dealt with at compile time, and will only influence the optimizer leading to faster code...

But as people already pointed, in practice compilers are never optimum. When it's important (that is, rarely) it's good to test, or at least read the compiler's manual.
OneDrive is a drive as you would expect. OneDrive for Business is really SharePoint. Terrible branding.
we shouldn't be surprised to see allegations from all sides.

The line is drawn at "anonymous internet sources". At least in the sense of euclidean geometry, that is not a "side" of the argument as much as it is a literary device to create an infinite attack surface.
That site is just as unusable as back when I did SOC and Code In a few years ago. Just browsing that list already had me frustrated.
The guy who wrote Github is responsible for some of the worst coding atrocities in a major piece of F/OSS. (Evidence: the Linguist debacle.)

JS for Cats is, in comparison to Linguist, a work of towering intellect.
Cable doesn't get blacked out?
Cryptographic algorithm usually are pretty straight forward when you look at them.

Beside good verifiable coding practice to have a quality implementation, it seems that the issue is with the many side channels attack that needs to be obfuscated and make the whole thing a lot harder to maintain and verify.

So I'm guessing the issue is probably more about the very badly engineered protocols with blurry designs and too many bells and whistles rather than with the basic cryptographic building blocks?
Congrats! Its an absolutely awesome experience. Take advantage of the mentorship you get, because unless you go into academia you may not have a lot of opportunities to have an experienced engineer field your questions and review your work in a setting where there isn't "real job" deadline pressure.

Also: This makes me feel so old, as an '05 participant.
The characters also fall out of your memory after long periods of disuse. Like many Chinese Americans, I went to Chinese school on the weekends as a child. Eight years later, I can't even compose a basic sentence in Chinese.
Actually it is about raising more money. The argument offered for the switch from Mayer's house to YC's space is to get more paying people in the event.
"Bullying someone into quitting: Illegal."

Bullying someone into quitting is legal (at least under federal law)[1], unless you discriminated against them based on their membership in a protected class (e.g., sex, religion, etc.), which is fairly hard to prove if it only happened to a single individual. Unfortunately, people get bullied at work all the time, and some of them quit because of it.

"Asking an employee to relay private conversations between her and her partner: Illegal."

Distasteful, but again, not illegal. (What law would it violate?)

Also, if Ms. Horvath had any grounds for suing GitHub, she would have surely talked to a lawyer by now, and the very first thing the lawyer would have told her is to shut up and not make any public statements about the case. These quotes lead me to believe that she has no case, except perhaps in the court of public opinion.

[1] "Subsequently, to be illegal under one of the laws in the eyes of the courts, a hostile work environment typically must be caused by discriminatory workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, national origin, disability, genetics, age or sex; or it must be caused by retaliation in violation of a discrimination law." http://employeeissues.com/hostile_work_environment.htm
The original Luddites were skilled artisans being priced out of the job market forever based on their skills and what robots and child labor could do, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
With this post, I also think that Tom's wife has inadvertently incriminated herself of meddling in company affairs. Given that she was not an employee at all, I do find it highly inappropriate that she would interact at all with GitHub employees regarding her business. Strangely enough, I think that most of this situation could have been mitigated if she had even a $1/year figurehead role in the company.
I have no problem paying people for content. However, if I'm not able to get the content I want, I don't feel as good.

The problem isn't trying to save money. It's accessibility.
>The stress of commuting isn't from the physical act of driving, but from having to negotiate a crowded space. Regardless if it's a highway, bus, or a sidewalk, when you're in a crowd, you're forced to play a zero-sum game with the people around you.

I disagree. The stress from driving doesn't come just from navigating a crowded space. It comes from the potential consequences of making mistakes. If I bump into someone walking on foot, it's no problem. Once I'm on a bus/train/etc. you have your own space. Granted, it might not be a lot of space, and sometimes it might be uncomfortable, but it's hardly stressful.

Bumping into another car when driving is a completely different beast. Now I need to deal with insurance companies, and it might cost me a lot of money. Or I hit something inanimate and I'm still doing a lot of damage to my car. That's where the stress comes from.
This post rather misses that while Make is simple, making Make do all the things we're used to (e.g. Java dependency management) not as simple.

I'd like to think people have decided that it's easier to replicate the task part of Makefiles onto their environment as the simpler alternative to making dependency management and various other language-specific tasks available to make.
A valid criticism. I've addressed this above and added a paragraph in the essay to deal with it too.

Thanks!
> I do see the email as spam. I did not make the conscious decision to receive email from you about your products or anything else: to me, I clicked a box that said I read and agree to your ToS in order to get your product.

Yes, I get that you don't want to be responsible for what you agree to with other people.

However, you punish the middle man - the mail carrier - because you regret your own decisions you admit were made in ignorance.

> Argue it if you want to, but understand what you're arguing against is perspective and that I don't share yours.

I think you're simply unreasonable: you're whining about getting a sales message from someone you proactively established a business relationship with and turned your contact information over to, and that they disclosed your information would be used that way.

In no way was that message unsolicited. You just wish you could get the product without even having to pay the meager amount of receiving sales literature in return.

I think that makes you an asshole, because you're punishing people for conducting reasonable business rather than taking some ownership of your behavior and simply unsubscribing.

> down-voted you

This bolsters my view that you're largely just an asshole: you're trying to punish my internet points or hide my comment because you don't agree with me, while you yourself admit that there's nothing in my comment but a difference of opinion.

So, really, I wish mail carriers would just ignore people like you when they submit spam reports - since you admit you're not using it how it's intended, but to flag solicited emails you agreed to receive, which damages the reputation of the mail relay, even though they're not doing anything wrong. They're just delivering requested mail.

It's like you trying to get the phone company that a second company uses to call you in trouble because they had the audacity to connect a phone call after you gave your number to that second company and told them it was okay to call you at the end of your free trial.

I really wish someone could present a argument for your view that didn't just make the person sound wildly entitled and assholish.
That's an interesting way of describing a non profit that you have listed under the heading "Examples of Useless Design."

The point is, they got something out there and while it may have just been a "cut-up plastic chair attached with wheels and bolts", it gave mobility to hundreds of thousands of people who would have otherwise not had it. I can't see how anyone would categorize that as useless.

It was only through creating that original wheelchair, then watching them being used in the field and getting feedback that they were able to get the knowledge and funding to continue to serve that community.

I think that the Free Wheelchair Mission has had a fantastic feedback loop with its wheelchair recipients which has allowed them to design and distribute their Gen 2 chairs.
True. The weirdest accusation is that toward the wife... That just sounds.... strange.
Honestly, I found Horvath's account to be fairly implausible from the first time I read it. The kinds of things she alleged don't happen in a vacuum: if what she was saying was true, there should have been a lot of other instances of that sort of harassment, or at least indicators that something like that could happen. Horvath described some very extreme behaviors that just don't appear out of the blue.

The anonymous account just makes the whole store make a lot more sense.
That's interesting - want to give your numbers?

I would think, however, that any sort of reasonable minority calling it a "hostile work environment" would indicate a problem.
R3: Announcing the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory-optimized instances
Does two prove it? Here's another fine example: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/how-to-choose-a...

It's a well-known problem with auditor/audited relationships. What the customer wants is a clean bill of health after an easy audit. The auditor needs to be tough enough to maintain a good reputation, but beyond that they are looking to maximize volume. The Economist mentions this every year or two [1], and they're especially concerned when auditing firms do a lot of financial consulting for the audited firms. Then there's an even stronger incentive to make the audit generous.

Another good analogy is medical marijuana cards in states where marijuana is supposedly only for medical purposes. In theory, doctors are careful gatekeepers. In practice, the doctors doing those certifications have a strong financial incentive to certify as many people as quickly as possible. I've lived in San Francisco, and I've never heard of anybody getting turned down for one of those cards.

[1] e.g.: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/03/dewey-lebo... or http://www.economist.com/node/954033
Or to reuse an adage: "It's easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code."

You can always find the slow part and change it to use raw floats/ints/etc.
A loud public witch-hunt also counts as a Wrong Thing, so this doesn't really tell us much about what happened one way or the other.
Erlang/Elixir noob here. Are you saying that protocols are a useful thing to learn in a) Erlang, b) Elixir or c) both?
It can be worse than that, one build system I looked at built everything every time. Why? Because "Computers are fast enough that trying to figure out exactly what needs to be rebuilt is an anachronism, this can rebuild everything in the time it took that crufty old system to figure out what it actually had to build."

I've given up trying to educate folks, I just make a note to check in with them, 6 months to a year later, to see if they are still building everything.
I've been thinking a lot about build systems lately. I enjoy the discussion that this post has provoked. The post itself is weaker than it could have been, in that it does not stick to a single example when comparing build tools, and does not pin down any criteria for distinguishing between build tools.

If you are interested in a comparison of a few interesting build tools, please check out Neil Mitchell's "build system shootout" : https://github.com/ndmitchell/build-shootout . Neil is the author of the `Shake` build system. The shootout compares `Make`, `Ninja`, `Shake`, `tup` and `fabricate`.

Another possibly interesting build tool is `buck`, although it is primarily aimed at java / android development. See http://facebook.github.io/buck/ . There's a little discussion about `gerrit`'s move to `buck` here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/10/gerrit-buck .

Here's some questions I'd ask of a build system:

- is it mature?

- which platforms does it support?

- which language ecosystems does it support? (language-agnostic? C/C++? ruby? python? java?)

- does it support parallel builds?

- does it support incremental builds?

- are incremental builds accurate?

- is it primarily file-based?

- how does it decide when build targets are up-to-date, if at all? (e.g. timestamps, md5 hash of content, notification from the operating system)

- does it allow build scripts for different components to be defined across multiple files and handled during the same build?

- does it enforce a particular structure upon your build scripts that makes them more maintainable?

- how does it automatically discover dependencies, if at all? (e.g. parsing source files, asking the compiler, builds instrumented via FUSE/strace)

- how easy is it to debug?

- is it possible to extend in a full-featured programming language?

- does it let you augment the build dependency graph mid-way through execution of a build?

- how simply can it be used with other tools such as your chosen continuous integration server, test framework(s), build artifact caches, etc?

Many of these criteria are completely overkill for trivial build tasks, where you don't really need anything fancy.
New regulations are banning the development of delivery robots
I realize this forum is for technological entrepreneurial pursuits but are you kidding me?

A single MRI costs ~2 million used (Angel Investors are always the hard ones to grab). GE Medical Holding invests more then 1 billion dollars a year in R&D with almost 18 billion a year in revenue. This is like reading up on a Intel Processors and wondering if their is a way for you to personally refine and profit from refining the technology.

Yes there is a chance, but good luck.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Healthcare
How much should the common shares be discounted vs the preferred shares? Do you have any rough rules of thumb?
Netflix has done a great job building that service and it is easy to underestimate how hard it is to build. Amazon has EC2 and Google has Youtube. There are no other realistic competitors in the streaming service at that scale for now in my opinion.
What a nugget
The investigator in this case is not about uncovering the truth of everything - it's about investigating this specific case. They do not have an obligation, for example, to mention that they found taxation irregularities during their work.
A New Theory of Life from MIT
Nimrod v0.9.4 released
It was flagged to death by users. Normally we kill reposts of such stories (because if you can just repost them, then the flags don't mean anything), but not if there's an ongoing discussion, and this repost has already been flagged heavily in its own right.
The thing I find most interesting about a service like Netflix is the complete inversion of costs of product and delivery for someone in Australia. A monthly Netflix subscription costs less than a couple of coffees here. The data caps on Internet connections and the inaction of successive governments to address market failures means I could pay hundreds of dollars a month to stream a service like Netflix. It can be quite a lot cheaper to buy box sets of shows or take out a cable tv subscription than pay data costs but you don't get the same flexibility.

I thought the towns local video store would have followed others around the world into bankruptcy by now but they are still charging $7 for an overnight rental and still have customers.
This is, of course, true, but I don't know that it really diminishes the accomplishment.

(As the joke goes, for some dialects, you just "modulate [the tones] down.")
Second this. I use GitBlit with my team. It is a very good fit for Java teams new to git who can't let code out if the firewall especially if most of the admins are strong in Windows; specifically I mean it is good for small teams in big corps.
It will be really interesting to see the diff in morale/productivity/happiness between Apple employees in this building vs the 3,800 engineers in the new FB "one-giant-room"
Flynn is the product ops should provide to developers.

Flynn is a single platform that runs all your services from databases to applications to individual Linux processes. With Flynn ops teams can stop being consultants and start providing a single product to their internal "customers". Basically you can deploy and scale whatever you want all in one place on any infrastructure without having to think about individual hosts.
Screwed up the URL, here goes: http://cookmellow.com/meet-mellow
What makes Horvath's claim have any more bearing than Theresa's? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
As an entrepreneur, it worries me a fair bit. If most of the capital is tied up in a relatively small number of families, then it will be much easier for existing players to defend their financial turf.

It won't matter much for me, but I'd be sad to see America's broad culture of entrepreneurship die in future generations.
> Or, to put it another way, how do you decide a given method should have "small types" used for parameters?

I think a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself what the "dimension" or "unit" the parameter has. (See also: Dimensional Analysis.) You never want to pass 4.33f radians into a function expecting 4.33f newtons!

A few more examples:

Distance in meters, Distance in feet, Speed in m/s, speed in yards/minute, Acceleration in m/s^2, Acceleration in cm/s^2, Mass in grams, Weight in pounds, Force in newtons, Force in dynes, Temperature in Celsius, Temperature in Fahrenheit, Angles in radians, Angles in degrees....

"But I don't do physics programming!", you say? Well, there's plenty more:

Time in seconds, Time in milliseconds, Distance in pixels, Distance in inches, Numeric ID of a Foo, Numeric ID of a Bar, Bytes in UTF8, Bytes in ASCII, US currency in dollars, US currency in cents, Euros, interest rate (yearly), interest rate (monthly)...

And that's not even getting into industry-specific dimensions that might exist.
> Here we have "no gender based..." of Tom and his wife. Nothing mentioned about whether there was other people who did were involved in that type of activity, nor whether the two individuals were involved in other types of activity.

Great point. I didn't notice that phrase, but now that I think about it, you're right.
This is a misleading title and not the actual title on the page.
Im over using anything with this much drama, I want features, not headline news.
Theresa Preston-Werner's twitter bio reads:

"Obsessed with inspiring the tech community to support underfunded nonprofits."

Mostly, her own nonprofit, I imagine.
I think this makes a valid point in describing a problem with nonprofits.

However, other than that I find this very unconvincing. It seems to me like they don't really have any concrete solution or message. They do mention these four points, but I would assume that these are already followed by most nonprofits anyway. They do of course not always succeed (as the examples in the beginning show), but I don't think this is for a lack of awareness.

I also don't really understand what their point is with the "Great Design for Everyone" paragraph. What does the fact that Coke is popular around the world have to do with anything? I would argue that this is much more a question of marketing than product design.
> I personally only care about the shipping.

I only care about the shipping as well.

> I'd gladly ditch all of the other tack-on services for $10 less a month.

I would even ditch the other tack-on services and keep the existing price if I could opt to "stop using OnTrac for anything"!

OnTrac regularly delivers late, not at all, or with the package arriving in a condition that my friends and I have started to refer as "OnTrac condition". Maybe you have to pay extra to not get the "looks like it was kicked down several flights of stairs stairs and smells like it was rubbed down with cigarette butts" treatment?