skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine you want to settle a dispute with someone, and agree that you won't pursue it further in court. Generally, that's a very wise thing to do, when possible. Preparing for and doing a trial is extremely expensive and disruptive. Rarely is your own case as strong as you feel emotionally, and you truly have no flipping idea if you'll win. Even if you do win, it can be appealed. When all the appeals are done, even if you still won, can you even collect all the money? And what about the years of your life gone by?

OK great. So, you're able to settle on terms both parties find awful -- but better than the alternative. Whew. But a month after you do, your opponent might go out there trash-talking. Then you do, in response. And your whole settlement has unraveled.

As a result, it is entirely normal and appropriate for two parties who aren't stupid, to agree to remain silent.

If the settlement has one party paying the other (as is often the case), you can imagine that they will pay somewhat more for a final settlement -- one that doesn't unravel -- because that's worth more.

It's nothing to do with gags or free speech. It's just the kind of painful common sense you acquire from having gone through any sort of legal dispute -- or if you haven't, that hopefully your attorney has, and hopefully you are listening to her advice that you're paying for.
I clearly stated it as a personal opinion (I think) not a fact so I still don't understand what your grief is.

All I can say is that most people I talk with are no longer talking about it and are still using Github, still likes the company so I don't think my view is that far off, but of course it's a personal opinion.

If you don't believe that is the case you are free to disagree but I hardly see any reason for the pedantic voice or the downvotes (not saying that's you).
You need a cohort graph to properly illustrate retention.
We have two different definitions of minimal here.

My take on a minimalist design means that life is made easier for the user. E.g. process data so the user has conclusions to interpret instead of raw data (that fits a minimalist design, but takes more processing).

I see now that your take on minimalist design is to remove unnecessary features from software. I'd argue that nobody wants "useless fancy features", unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you (otherwise why build those features anyway). So, it's all good to say let's keep to minimal designs (by whichever definition you mean), but in the end I don't see how that solves the problem that returns on hardware improvements is slowing, and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either.
I see another player that Skype is going after - WebEx. Most uses for WebEx are simple video chatting. Most times no one need the dozens of other features that WebEx offers in their bloated product. In true innovators dilemma fashion, I can see Skype now truly eating into WebEx's market from the bottom up.
I'm pretty sure those are civil laws and involve financial penalties [fine], not jail time.

A crime is a misdemeanor/felony/etc, not a fine.

I'm not a lawyer tho so I could be wrong.
SMS logins: an illusion of security
> Effortless...except you need to configure every client to use the non-default port

I've never seen this as extra effort given I'm already in the ~/.ssh/config file adding an "IdentityFile" line anyway? The only time you wouldn't is if you are using the same (default) private key for every configured connection. I will faithfully assume that no-one is advocating for that :)
I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well).

But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times!

Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.
Yeah, I get that. I think it is a maturity thing. I mean, the fact that it's anonymous allows me to not care about it AT ALL. Who cares what "someone out there" says? I certainly don't. My life experience, and long time exposure to the internet has taught me that right now, someone, somewhere out in the world is saying just about anything you could think of. You can't care about all of it.
Weev to start hedge fund
That's what I was thinking. I can't imagine ever getting upset because some anonymous person insulted me on some app, or taking anything it said about anybody else seriously. How are people killing themselves over this?
The point is we can’t be truly meritocratic. It’s a utopic ideal that doesn’t hold up in the real world. Those who are deciding what merit is are the ones who already have power. Also, there are many barriers to entry before supposed meritocratic judging can even take place. The goal isn’t to just completely abandon the idea of judging people based on their accomplishments, but to recognize that the supposed ideal of meritocracy is a harmful fantasy.

Worth reading, Selenda Deckelmann of Postgres: http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2011/03/30/where-meritocracy-fa... and everything else here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meritocracy
Agreed, too many people conflate any kind of paging with server death. Yeah servers get slow when they start paging too much, most of the time I can still login and checkout what is going on.

So much time is wasted by not enough swap space resulting in rebooted or hung machines. The way linux memory allocation works, it is really not a good idea to constrain swap. It is really easy to trigger the OOM killer by using up too much virtual address space. Doing a `fork/exec` from a process near your physical memory limit can easily get you over virtual memory limit with not enough swap, even though under this condition no paging would occur.

swap on and have great week.
"Imagination, suggests Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, is related to the brain’s “noise” (random firings of neurons, or nerve cells), thus generating more associations. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia and their unafflicted family members show mega-amounts of random noise. Brain scans of control subjects (no schizophrenia in the family) do not."

Good enough for my first-pass filter. ;)
A while ago I wrote a CLI tool that does exactly that:
https://github.com/ema/nubo

The tool also exposes its functionalities as a python library, so it might be useful for those who want to manage their VMs through a panel indicator.
Google Power8 motherboard [photo]
RoboPoker: Your bot versus others
This is the double edged sword she was playing with.

If her allegations are found to have merit, then a lawsuit is what she would file next with this as the only evidence she needs to confirm what she's been saying.

Now that the results are in and they found nothing to support her allegations, it looks like GitHub has a strong defamation case to bring against her.

If I was her, I'd be looking for a good attorney to represent me. Since she never filed a lawsuit, this makes her look like what most people on the GitHub side have been saying all along. That she's indignant, bitter and feels entitled. Not to mention the whole time she's been feeding GitHub plenty of ammunition via social media.
Sounds like underspecified failure conditions. Rarely are they as clean as, "I am dying, poof!"
You find another job ASAP. Organizational and culture problems will not be fixed by one new employee.

What happens is the competent people bail, leaving behind the less talented and/or less motivated which creates a positive feedback cycle.
^ Every self-respecting app developer should be thinking about and mitigating the security vulnerabilities outlined in this comment.
7.5h of work with 30 mins lunch break is fairly common in Europe; when my wife was an accountant in London, she had that schedule. In the UK, the typical hours for that would indeed be 9-5. (In some parts of Europe, 8-4 seems more common)
I'm a Software Engineer working at EPiServer.

You get 480 days paid vacation per child (shared between husband and wife). It is very common in every office (regardless of occupation, work type) that people go to 6-8 months vacation for full time. Lot of persons take half day off for extended period of time.
It was written straight after it, yes :-) But unsolicited redesigns keep coming forth.

Here's one dissection: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August...
Who is the guarantor of variety for the consumers (and suppliers) in your version of the free market?
Regardless of what actually may have occurred at Github between Horvath and any other Github employees, in court the case would be dismissed on lack of evidence.

Her response on Twitter, on the other hand, will stand for all time as a testament to her character and I'm afraid it won't do her any favours as she comes across as having a strong sense of entitlement.

I don't think people should be expected to accept mistreatment. But it swings both ways - they shouldn't be allowed to believe that their point of view is any better or more right than anyone else's and the things she said smack of someone who is angry they didn't get what they wanted.

There were hurt feelings at Github. I can appreciate that. In the public eye, though, you have to handle it with dignity - you have to be beyond reproach. And I think the things she said on her Twitter feed have done a remarkable job of painting her in the worst light possible and put her credibility beyond repair.
Suggest HN: Use opacity for better downvoted-comment hiding
Downvoted comments whose font colors are adjusted to more closely match the background page color are still easy to read simply by highlighting them because the highlighted background color doesn't change, leaving you with outlined, legible characters. And it's actually quite tempting to read these comments since it takes such little effort to do so.

Adjusting the opacity property seems to affect both the font and the highlighted background, making it near impossible to read a comment set at, say, opacity 0.2. The only options you'd have to render the text legible would be either editing the css file, or copying/pasting the text elsewhere, both (I think) being too high-labor and making the effort just not worth it.

Edit: Tested a bit more, seems like opacity only seems to have a noticeable affect on legibility at around 0.4 and under. What about a combination of both systems whereby after hitting a certain threshold of negative karma, a greyed out comment is rendered more transparent? The idea is to make it difficult to read comments that are almost without a doubt inflammatory and uncivil. Often you'll see an endless stream of repetitive and replies made to a completely greyed out comment.
What's your particular objection to it? It seems to be a pretty good overview of many of the prime leads and perspectives we have to look at a fairly common and well known disease, especially one with significant cultural/social impact.
This never occurred to me...I don't use GUI tools for database management outside of a local development environment or diagram generation.
I answer this above.

In short: I originally ran the site at just a few schools, my alma mater being one of them. There, it was used productively and mean-spirited gossip was far from the norm. It helped people get honest advice, ask questions related to events around the school, etc.

When we "acquired" JC, everything changed, as the masses were coming in with an expectation of mean-spirited gossip. Despite my efforts, I could never meaningfully change that mindset.

I spent most of my 2 years running the site fending off competitors that would "let anything go" and were trying to "win" by maximizing the salaciousness of their content.
yes, feedback service integration is next on the priority list. i think it should take about 30 minutes or so. so far this whole project is only a few hours of work. i don't open-source much of my code, but i thought this might be a good candidate.
Here it is: http://blog.andrewsomething.com/2014/04/25/digitalocean-indi...
RethinkDB actually has Joins -- http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/table-joins/
Easy, just add a USB port!
NDrill – Navigate lazily and null-safely through C# objects
For fans of This American Life, there was a really good show on a similar topic a couple weeks ago called Tarred and Feathered (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/522/t...).

As a brief summary, the story discusses a man who lives in a small town in the US. Like many small towns, residents frequent a website called Topics where gossip is shared anonymously in much the same way that it is on Yik Yak. One man, whose wife was killed by an ex-husband, ended up on the receiving end of a stream of particularly vicious rumors and lies spread through the site. This gossip, posted anonymously by a single person under multiple pseudonyms, ended up tarnishing his reputation and costing him his job. Keep in mind, this is a community of grown adults we're talking about.

A high school is similar in many ways to a small town in that everyone knows everyone else, which facilitates the spread of gossip. Add to that the lower maturity levels of children and teenagers, and it is easy to see how anonymous gossip can do some serious damage to a community.

Anyway, I can't recommend that episode of TAL enough, it's very relevant to this whole topic of anonymous online forums.
I think even then, the chances are pretty high that someone will go "oops, I accidentally merged back in the old version of the repo. Sorry guys". I've tried rewriting an entire repo before (to remove huge binary files) and even with a small team, it only takes one person out of the loop to bring everything back in.
This is called the lump of labor fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
I won't claim to know much about Yik Yak.

I contemplated building HighSchoolACB.com, but held up because I was 1) unwilling to subject an even younger, cattier population to the service; and 2) unsure of the specific legal ramifications of building a service that was ostensibly "only for those above 18" and yet targeted at an audience that was clearly younger.
Also known as: Quick Hack, Kleenex Code, Disposable Code, Scripting, Killer Demo, Permanent Prototype, Boomtown. [1]

http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-big-ball-of-mud-and-other-a...
I don't think many people work more than six hours a day.
Most work probably considerably less, the fact that they are at work for 8 hours notwithstanding.

If they could remove some of these inefficiencies and return the time to employees it would be great.
Just think of how little time your car is actually driving versus being parked.
> The quality of Skype is abysmal. Most of the time, you do not have HD video.

That comment reminded me of what Louis CK says about wifi on the plane — or attitude towards technology in general. I won’t link because the swear ratio is… well he uses all the possible syntactical options of the f-bomb.

The quality difference is striking, and Skype pales in comparison. But live video feed between common computers is something that, no matter the quality of the feed, should still be seen as the miracle that it is, and somehow only seem so to too few users. Doing that with limited central server is even more impressive. It might not be enough to gather facial expression, and that is a real problem for their offer. But what they do remains the result of ten years of high level engineering, with broad room for progress in many circumstances.
I disagree with the results of the investigation since they don't support my claims and actually show some of them to have no substantial evidence in their favour. I'm glad someone got fired over this even though my initial and highly incendiary claims of sexism, the grounds on which this investigation was started, were shown to be false.
> Our rapid growth left the leadership team, myself included, woefully unprepared to properly handle these types of situations.

Can we now stop touting immature companies and bad employership as the future corporate organization? Please?

When you put people together in an organization, shit happens. There has to be absolutely no malice involved for things like this to happen. Shit just happens. People fuck up, and sometimes their fuck ups hurt other people. I did it, you did it, we all did.

But not creating a decent company structure to deal with that reality and instead make your company an experiment in social Darwinism under the guise of "meritocracy" and "no managers" is utterly irresponsible. It's begging for shit to escalate and people to take advantage.

If you have over an x-number of people in your company, you need people to manage that, which has fuck all to do with hierarchy.

So Github "recently we hired an experienced head of HR". Over 200 employees, over $100 million in funding, and now they finally fucking bother to hire someone to look out for them.

I'm not so much pissed off at Github as I am at the entire tech community that have been cheer-leading running a company so badly.

"People are their own managers" works fine when it's just about work. But it isn't. It never is, because they are people. With all the dumb, stupid and sometimes ugly stuff they do besides just work.

Employees are not lab rats.

P.s.

And don't use "rapid growth" as an excuse. It was an ideology. Github's leadership didn't believe they needed to be prepared, that somehow these things would magically not happen in their happy start-up commune.
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
I don't think 6h/day of work is particularly unreasonable, if you can avoid losing blocks of time to useless activities (unneeded meetings, or waiting for people).

If you're remote, and only clock-in when actually working, spending 3-4h/day working productively can easily outdo someone spending 10h/day in an office. I've worked in places where my ultimate client billable rate was obscene, and tracked to the 6min or 15min interval, but we also had "house time" for other projects. A day where you spent 3h directly working for the customer and nothing else was perfectly fine (especially if you blocked the entire day out with "need to be available for client" so no one else could interrupt you.)

Spending the downtime doing actually interesting research (not so much 20% time as 50% time) was awesome.
The PiPhone Is A DIY Cellphone Powered By Raspberry Pi
I don't think Go's concurrency model is as successful as others.
So? It's still possible to create one. (There's no such thing as dereferencing an invalid pointer according to the standard, but that still happens.)
Interesting! Could you explain why []rune needs to be wrapped in a struct{Runes []rune}? Rather then just calling "type Runes []rune"?
Where is the SQL being executed? Where is the database?
Money Is Really An illusion And Why The Only Thing Traded In The World Is Time
Yes, I'm with you. I would also value a larger block of days off each week as there's more potential for trips etc.

A six hour workday would be 30 hours a week. Imagine that as three ten hour days instead. Wow, that would be fantastic.
A little off-topic, but Rob Cockerham's investigation into Herbalife is one of the best pieces of citizen journalism I've seen.

http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome.html
History rewrites must be force-pushed and force-pulled, which would have been very conspicuous to everyone who had a checkout of the repository in question.
In the retail space investors look at same store sales[0] (or comps) to see if a company's growth is coming existing stores, or just from opening new ones.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_store_sales
There will also be one new manager for every 13 managers. I see that it would be very difficult to make a law to achieve this with a big bang, but I don't see any good reasons why a country could not make a law requiring to reduce working hours by 3 or 4 over a period of maybe 5 years.
I'll send you an email tomorrow. Is the email address on your profile correct?
Do the eight hours really include an actual lunch break for Americans? I did not know that … that’s why that 9 to 5 thing never made sense to me. The standard workday without overtime in Germany would be more like 8 to 13, then one hour break, then 14 to 17 (or something like that).

In Germany you are required by law to take at least a 30 minute break during an eight hour work day, but that break is not paid. You have to clock out. (I suppose employers could pay employees for that time, but they don’t have to and they usually don’t.)

In fact, at my last internship the system automatically subtracted 30 minutes from the work time at the end of the day if you didn’t manually clock out for more than 30 minutes, assuming you just forgot to clock out. After all, the employer can’t pay you for eight hours of continuous work, that would be admitting to illegal wrongdoing.

Employers can also require employees to clock out for shorter breaks, though they usually don’t when you are just chatting a few minutes with your coworkers in the office kitchen while getting coffee or something like that. (General, uhm, personal maintenance like just getting something to drink in the office kitchen or going to the toilet is not considered taking a break and employers can’t force employees to clock out for that.)

I never even considered that it could work any other way … (My dad is a civil engineer and always has too much work. However, during my childhood I vividly remember him coming home every day at 1pm until about 2pm to eat lunch at home. His office is only about a seven minute drive from home. He was and is often at work until 8pm, but he hardly ever missed lunch at home. I know that’s not the norm even for Germany – most people find some place to eat around the office or bring something to eat to the office – but that may explain my perspective on this.)
You can't compare assembly line work with what most of us do.
Hey, Peter. Fellow Wes'12 here. As a student at the most-active school on CollegeACB (CollegeACB was originally developed as a replacement for a LiveJournal-based board active at my school), I saw the good and the bad. It was terrible for some students, who were heaped with anonymous abuse. I was lucky enough to never face that, but I know others who did and saw the negative effects of anonymity first hand.

But there was also a lot of good. During a terrifying two days after a student was shot on campus, it was the only source of information and communication while we were locked down in our dorms. It also helped build a sense of community across cliques, even if nobody would admit to reading it.

On the whole, I'm glad the CollegeACB existed. And anonymity is not going away. With strong moderation and flagging I think the worst impulses can be tempered.
Isn't 'ValleyWag' actually located on the other side of the US?
Depends on what kind of logs they have. Laying down a couple of assumptions:

1. They only have the git repo history to go on.

2. It's been long enough that errant objects have been garbage collected.

It's possible that the code she committed removed via a push that removed it from history entirely (e.g. `git push +old-master:master`). If this push was never reverted, then the commit object would become an orphan that was up for removal at the next garbage collection interval. After that, the incident would absolutely just be 'he said, she said,' and a lack of evidence would not be proof that she was lying.
Oh right, `brew install brew-cask` first I think