skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the situation described by the OP, and shared by many of us, myself included, your managers simply do not care about the professional integrity of the software developer.

My boss has explicitly told me to forget about industry best practices or retiring technical debt. It interferes with the prime directive, which is to log 40 billable hours per employee per week, for as long as the contract gets renewed. The technical debt is simply used as a justification to extract more money from the customer while doing less actual work. In that case, informing the manager gets you reprimanded for destroying his plausible deniability and ass-covering.

There is simply no way to act professionally in this situation. The best thing to do is simply keep quiet and leave ASAP. The emotional detachment is simply to delay burnout and preserve any potential enthusiasm for the next thing.

I can truly say that there is no way I could possibly make the codebase noticeably worse than it already is. It was like that when I arrived. When I suggested that it could be fixed if approached prudently, I was shot down. When I suggested that the developers read a book on better development practices, I was shot down. That was when I sensed the knife against my back ribs and checked out.

Stay sane. Use the opportunity to be more selective in your continuing job hunt.
My Windows PC never crashed like my Macbook does.
That is a good reason to stick with Angular.

One of the great things about Meteor is the shared data between a server side mongodb instance and a mini mongodb running on the user's browser. If you are not or can not use mongodb for your app, at least for right now that seems like a deal killer for Meteor.

Meteor requiring sticky sessions can be another negative for scaling.

All that said, for apps that are not likely to have to scale much Meteor is really a sweet spot - everything you need for efficient development. I have read several articles about scaling Meteor, but I have never had a Meteor app that would not run well on a single server.
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
Some analytics companies track mouse movements to watch how people interact with web pages. They can also use JavaScript to fingerprint browsers beyond what is available with cookies.
How Dropbox Uses C++ for Cross-Platform iOS and Android Development
The funny thing is, I actually don't have as huge a problem with the shell or lack of classic menus as some people do. I can just pile shortcuts onto the desktop like all my install programs want to do anyway.

It really is the touchpad for me that's the huge annoyance, and dealing with the UI to make wifi work properly, which I guess is a Metro gripe. The last time I checked, the touchpad thing required registry tweaking and positive results were not at all guaranteed. Whoever decided that the touchpad, of all things, should sorta-kinda try to incorporate the same gestures as the touchscreen (maybe? I have a touchscreen but barely use it) was probably guilty of huffing gasoline.
No problems over here at all.
AMS maintainer (though admittedly doing a poor job of it lately :/) here.

Which version were you benchmarking? The in-alpha 0.9 was a total re-write, so it'd be interesting to see how it compares.

Also, AMS has a caching feature (that is being re-written, too) that'd make for an interesting benchmark.
Don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be possible to target one specific individual (yegg wrote http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted... about it), and it was possible to cross reference this with other RTB venues (e.g., adnexus) - so that, while they didn't give out your details - if you were targeting someone specific, you'd actually get to see a significant part of their web traffic (everything that had ads through those RTB venues).

It all boils down to what you mean by "identify" - if you include "complete name, address, age, etc." - then, no, FB doesn't directly identify you. But if you mean "know whenever that same user does anything else anywhere", then - yes, they do let the advertisers identify you.
Same here, on iMac and MBA, both 10.9.3 as soon as it was out.
It's not just the actor, it's a pretty common name. People mistype my email address into all kinds of things, judging by the random emails I get for pets in Texas and real estate in the UK etc.
Except in the US after Congress and the Senate pass the bill a conference committee gets to make the two versions match so I believe the "vote" on the substantive motion couldn't occur until it's in conference.

Also the votes for amendments may only be recorded as voice vote (not a roll call I believe) which means you wouldn't know who voted for what. Who offered the amendment should be public record.
The Five Letters that Will Change the Data World: BYOBI
Thanks for expanding your story ... I wish this thread had become popular enough to contain another couple dozen stories (histories). Sometimes posting here feels like buying a lottery ticket.
You mean like the "import" function in ES6?
It's been rock solid on my four week old Macbook Air.
So is that a name doctors, after much painstaking research, slapped on top of what has been known for millenia as meditation? Because that's exactly describing something like vipassana, or mindfulness meditation. Sometimes it's funny to watch the west's child-prodigy "scientific method" take so long to come around full circle at age-old wisdom, in this case something that's probably been known from before Civilization.
I've had terrible issues with my rMBP 13" (freezing, kernel panics) until, 1 year after I bought this machine, the SSD finally went out. Got it replaced and no issues so far.
I really don't like this new UI. Instead of having a sorted drop down, now there's a bunch of boxes I have to look through to find the one I'm searching for. Takes a lot longer than it used to.

Example: http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y
Review of most Operating System GUIs
> Also, my WiFi is randomly disconnecting all the time since the update.

I don't get the WiFi disconnects, but 10.9.3 has stopped being able to automatically connect to WiFi.

Wake up Macbook from sleep and find WiFi disconnected. Click icon, see only a couple of SSIDs, click the one I want, get the "unable to connect dialog". Click icon again and wait for refresh; now see a much longer list of SSIDs. Click the same one that it couldn't connect to before and it finally connects.
In fairness, just the single fact that they put a button exactly where the hand needs to go when actually using the product in one of it's core use-cases is a pretty good excuse for some MS bashing.

They could have taken 5 minutes, given the prototype to an artist and noticed the hand placement issue immediately.

You can be an apologist if you wish, but I don't know how you can excuse such a glaring failure of design.
One kernel panic bug, and the system is "toxic" and "disease"? I'm not saying that this issue is acceptable, but I don't think those adjectives are really appropriate in describing it.
I'm seriously unimpressed with 10.9 in general.

I bought a new MBP a few weeks back, and the hardware is awesome... the retina screen, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD make it a joy to use.

But...

* I enabled Bluetooth, plugged in my Magic Mouse, and the next time it woke from sleep wireless connectivity had disappeared and has only come back sporadically since

* the machine occasionally 'loses' USB drives, complaining that I didn't eject them properly when they're still connected

* plugging in my Nexus phone via USB, or an HDMI cable, sometimes causes the keyboard to freeze, needing a hard reboot.

Rebooting twice within an hour isn't welcome when you're giving a lecture and have already met the student who loudly proclaims that Apple hardware is overpriced crap.

I do wonder whether Apple actually test new releases of their OS, or just leave it to us to do it for them.

And don't get me started about the usefulness of the "Genuis" Bar at my local Apple store...

I am wondering whether a downgrade to Mountain Lion may fix a few problems.
Your kitchen analogy is great! I hadn't heard it before - thanks for sharing.
If you want json to be fast in Ruby, chances are you might want to look at https://github.com/ohler55/oj

Not sure how easy it is to jam oj into either of these two serializers though.

EDIT: rabl seems to support it according to the webpage
The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?
Following your brilliant thoughts on criticism in general, I propose that we ban all tech reviews, literary critics, and all sorts of critical thinking, with the exception, of course, of people who have created flawless pieces of work. Roger Ebert should be dug up and then ceremoniously shot and stripped of all of his awards.

Also, it goes without saying that if you want to submit any criticism to this comment, you'll have to submit a full resume, a short fugue, and run a marathon backwards.

edit: Heh, I might have gone a bit over the top. On-topic: SP3 is a seriously impressive piece of work and I sense great things coming from Microsoft under Satya's reign (if only they would start properly leveraging their wonderful MSR).
if this interests you, you should checkout a Zeer Pot (aka Pot in Pot) refrigerator. No electricity, but does require water and can get down to 43F. http://practicalaction.org/zeerpots
Remember this is a review by a designer. There's little doubt the Surface Pro is pretty good for that. The problem Microsoft has is that it's not really a mainstream device. Most people would be better served by a laptop with more storage that works better (not lag, not touch-confusing interface, and so on).

Also, Microsoft made a huge mistake keeping the 4400 GPU. It was already slow for the 1080p Surface Pro 2. And they kept it for Surface Pro 3, which has even higher resolution. By comparison, the Macbook Air comes with a much faster Intel HD 5000 GPU, and it has a much lower resolution.
To add to this, one thing that often doesn't get enough attention is that the majority of the best developers tend to be artists (or at least artisans). Most often this fact is unappreciated because most of the artistry of software is invisible except to the people working closely on it. Also, when looking from afar or when looking close up for only a moment the work looks mostly technical and mechanical. But people ignore that the same is true of artistic works, because we can see the outcomes more clearly so we avoid being misled.

Many times I've seen developers getting burned out because their management treated them like factory workers or, worse, cattle. Often what happens is that some of the better devs start leaving and then that creates a cascade where the working environment just gets worse and worse for everyone else (fewer good people to do the work so more work and more stress for everyone else, and fewer coworkers you enjoy working with) and more and more good people leave.

What you say is totally true about working on projects you care about. That's always the way it will be with artists. If you want to work on something that you don't care about, you can, but you won't be able to do so at your full capacity. You'll need to disengage with it enough to keep it at arm's distance, to disinvest much of your self from it. That too can be perilous because it risks becoming disinvested from development as a whole and losing your passion entirely.
These benchmarks are already using OJ: https://github.com/thuva/json_serialization_benchmark/blob/m...

edit: although not sure it's being used properly yet
A few words on MVC Models in Node.js using SailsJS Framework
Nice post, Well thats the cycle of life. Everything has an expiry date!
While LA itself is a desert, there are mountains in the area, within a few hours drive. A few hours drive should qualify as close.
If you have a house large enough for a front lawn, you can also have a back yard where you can typically maintain a small garden.
Versions are AMS 0.8.1 and RABL 0.9.3
Goatse as industrial sabotage (2011)
Tell HN: Potentially impressive meteor shower tonight. Get outside
Looks like it could be a really awesome one.
10.9.3 is not pre-release software.
That's exactly how my currently Macbook behaves. I could write a short script to turn off/on the WiFi after login, but it's really annoying that you have to do that for such an expensive device.
I don't know about Amazon, but I do know some people who use it to get mundane but necessary tasks done. For example, if you have a forum and you want to seed with questions...you can use mechanical turk to get people that.

Also, for a semantic search engine I was working on, we needed to add categories for various articles. We used Mechanical Turk for this.
If anyone is looking for a quick intro to FT this was posted on HN a few month ago:
http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h...
This isn't prerelease software. This is the current version of the OS that Apple will prompt you to upgrade to automatically.
Some people have felt that switching graphics modes is the source of Mavericks crashes. I had five crashes in several days last week. I went to the Energy Saver control panel, and turned off Automated Graphics Switching. Haven't had a crash in a week. Could easily be coincidence, but I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone else wants to try it. I'd be very interested in hearing whether it helps.

By the way, what happens on my machine is that the UI completely freezes. I'm not sure if that's what other commenters experience when they talk about "crashing".
This sounds like very interesting analysis. You can actually get the data using the Octopart API (http://octopart.com/api). I'd love to see the results so please let me know if you do the analysis.
One of the project owners here. I've used the capsense arduino library a long time ago and it's decent when you don't need the accuracy. I found that the sensor values were affected by the environment quite a bit e.x. I'd have to recalibrate everything if the project was being used in a room with a carpet which affected the body charge. Maybe you found a way around it?

Re: the sensing method, they're similar in the sense that both the avr and mgc3130 detects a change in capacitance to figure out the position. But the mgc3130 controller can detect capacitance changes in the femtofarad range.
Ask HN:  Build a chat functionality in iOS app
I am building an iOS app and I need to build a chat functionality within the app. The app connects two people (both using the app) and I want to build the functionality to have them chat with each other in the app?
What is the best way to go about doing something like this?

With my limited experience in building iOS app, I guess that this would essentially send push notifications back and forth for chat. Are there any best practices on building something which will be cheap and could scale at least decently.

Any general pointers on building this?
So... now that he has, will you share your story too? :D
Not sure how HN feels about a promotion like this, but I gain nothing from it so I'm going to try: I compiled a list of tips and locations to watch the shower from, and put it on github pages last night.

Also I was pretty happy with the domain name :)

http://www.meteortime.com/pages/may-2014-camelopardalids-met...
That's fine. But at what point does an anecdote of a changed mind and life become admissible in the public court of reason? Do you require one story? What about a thousand? A million? Tens of millions?

At what point would a rational person conclude, "Hmm, maybe their answer may also apply to me?" I at least figured I could say "OK, God, if you might be the Answer, then show me the way..."
I'm curious what you and others think - would working in a software development organization in a non-developer capacity (management, QA, documentation, etc) have an effect on your stress levels?
"But secondly, it is claimed that he cherry-picks. Economists (we) do that. A lot. And it has to be called out."

The total effect of his cherry picking can't even be discerned from this article. With a lot more work (more than a single blogger probably has time for), it might be shown to be much worse. For example, Piketty chose the U.K., France and Sweden for his list of European countries (averaging them all into "Europe" without adjusting for their populations, as the article pointed out). But why those particular countries? Would the results have been completely different if he would have also included Germany, one of the wealthiest and most populous European countries? We'll probably never know how he came up with his set of countries, and whether he deliberately omitted other countries whose data was available because they would have caused his results to be not significant enough to publish (or even contradicted his thesis).

This reminded me a lot of one of the original studies linking cholesterol to heart disease, which chose a carefully picked subset of European countries even though results were available for several others. Subsequent research showed that including the data from the missing countries would have yielded very different results.
Yeah, but in that case, wouldn't you have to hack on the actual Meteor source to let it use a different backend rather than Meteor's own provided one?
> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

To the extent that this is really an issue, its quite easily addressed by using the average net upvotes rather than total net upvotes for whatever weighting, if any, the comment display system gives to poster score/karma/etc.(If you want to also give some weight to engagement without encouraging post frequency, you could accumulate a score using the average in each day or week, so duration of regular engagement would be rewarded, but high frequency would not.)

Of course -- I think that to the extent that excessive influence by frequent commenters is an issue, its more because most of the volume of comments is going to come from them, independently of any reward system.
I disagree. I prefer the new bigger box UI. It took a mere moment to understand everything is in alphabetical order, and scanning through them was much quicker than trying to pick from a dropdown list.
MBPR 2014. Had a few issues (crashing, slow wake/boot, etc.) with 10.9 + 10.9.1, but most of these problems were resolved by 10.9.2. Haven't had a crash with 10.9.3 as of yet.

What I also realized was constantly upgrading from one version to another kept around some legacy files that messed up my OS a bit. A clean install might do the trick for those having issues.
Hex Code for Facebook White
The hex code for Facebook's white is #fbfbfb.
Just out of curiosity, how is this possible? If the web server can't handle being crawled...how can it handle serving web pages?

"If your web server is unable to handle the volume of crawl requests for resources, it may have a negative impact on our capability to render your pages. If you’d like to ensure that your pages can be rendered by Google, make sure your servers are able to handle crawl requests for resources."
This is all anecdotal. Mac user for years and never had a crash. These types of comment provide very little to these threads.
I liked your point, which is similar to my reaction to the book. Part 1: "Relative inequality is rising" Step 2: "?" Step 3: "Policy proposals"

Most notably, Piketty never made a case why his policy proposals are the best way to improve the lives of the bottom 50% on an absolute basis.
Saying that it's a "failure of design" suggests there's an easy non-failure alternative. If so, can you tell us what it is? Are you sure that solution won't fail under some conditions?

People like to take something that exists, take the problems it solves as a given, and act like all that's left is fixing the problems remaining. That's not how it works.
The issue is with the "fatalism" of the comments. For example, you refer to a "glaring failure" when this can be fixed with a simple "drawing mode" patch.
Wacko Bobs Music Fest – Special Time 05/23 by The Wacko Network
Video tape was vastly less expensive than tape drives used for nine track data storage and all. You could actually buy a decent Beta or VHS machine for 1) less than $2k for a while and 2) less than a kilobuck later ( before DVD drive it down ) .
So you need to be a cook before you can criticize the food that the cook serves you?

What a crock of bullshit.
I'm glad it works for you. Anxiety can be caustic. I like to see this positive attitude. However, I'm careful to distinguish the mental relief gained from trusting a higher power, to any conclusions about the existence of that higher power.

Wouldn't it provide about the same mental relief to just accept that all is not in our hands, and leave it at that? I think it does, and I reduce stress that way.
You might be looking at it from the wrong angle. What if we're all intrinsically autodidacts and 12-16+ years of compulsory education successfully trains that quality out of most people?

It's probably not a coincidence that those willing to go against the grain with respect to education seem to be disproportionately represented among the successful entrepreneurial class.

This entire discussion reminds me of the "mappers" vs "packers" theory. It's a bit long winded but a good read:

http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-th...
10-20 msec is the neighborhood of the Haas Limit. That's why, sfaik.
The author hasn't been to reddit in years if he thinks that r/atheism and r/politics are still default subreddits.
I am going to assume your comment is in good faith.

My observation was that a single glitch is seen as some sort of disaster, when in reality is a simple issue in one scenario that clearly was not prioritized over many other scenarios. Anybody knows there are constraints in design, and clearly they decided one thing over another.

We can all be arm chair generals, but my focus is on the engineers themselves who must be frustrated that their work is generalized as a global failure because "it's Microsoft."
I'm really surprised by all of the reports of crashing. I've had 3 different Macs over the last 7 years and I've had just one crash in all that time. I use my Mac anywhere from 8-16 hours per day and tax it pretty well. Before that I couldn't stay away from the BSOD on Windows, one of the reasons I finally made the switch.
Its data. The existence of crashes is evidence of something.
Show HN: Entrepreneurs or Pablo Picasso?
Probably because there's no magic in how they made it so thin for an Intel machine - they just underclocked it a ton in order to achieve a minimal TDP and not need huge air vents, free space and fans.
This isn't elementary school where everyone gets an "A" for effort. Microsoft has demonstrated with the Surface line an institutional inability to execute. From Surface RT shipping with a buggy beta of Office to continuing major deficiencies in Windows Phone (no forward button in IE until 8.1?) to the schizo nature of Windows 8 that only makes sense if you look from the engineering side and realize that its schizo only because it would be too hard to make everything run in Metro. Yes, there are engineering compromises that have to be made, but they shouldn't result in what the user perceives to be a compromised product.

Sometimes its better to not do something unless you can do it right. E.g. Surface RT shouldn't have shipped without a final version of Office. It featured prominently in every rewview, and almost nobody went back and updated theirs. E.g. Surface Pro shouldn't have shipped without Haswell. E.g. Surface Pro 2 shouldn't have shipped without the major firmware update that improved battery life by 20%. E.g. Apple has wisely avoided shipping a Retina MBA because they can't do it yet without regressing battery life.

Microsoft is playing in Apple's price range, and is late to the game. What it lacks is Apple's ability to take on limited ambitious, but (usually) execute those without major flaws.
Show HN: Orb – Gesture based iOS/Android Game