skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're welcome.

> later studies on the importance of deliberate practice have almost all come up with lower values for the correlation between deliberate practice hours and performance.

What's also really interesting is the differences in the kind of data used to measure deliberate practice: daily logs, which you'd think be the most accurate, showed the least correlation with performance, while retrospective interviews showed the most. Biases in recollection or researcher allegiance?
> When I tell pretty much anyone outside the tech industry I work at a start-up, there’s usually a pause. I can watch her compose her face, waiting to hear the worst. If I’m lucky, I’ll field questions about foie gras burgers, daily massages, or what it’s like to work with a bunch of clueless bros.

I'm still reading the article, but I'd like to write this while my mind is still fresh on this sentence. I'd started writing a longer pondered comment, but ultimately reduced my thoughts to this:

If your interlocutor can't see anything past the wacky aspects of your job or interest, perhaps the problem is on them. Sometimes a display of ignorance masquerades as cynical, truth-to-power rebelliousness.

—

I almost want to visit SF just to see if there are as many bros as some people have led me to believe. I want to be stripped of my illusion that SF is not a college fraternity, just a place with socially awkward young people who don't quite see the output of contemporary cultural studies and sociology as gospel or particularly insightful, most of them incidentally male.

—

My penchant for reducing serious issues to pithy conclusions is maddening, but I wonder me if a quarter of the people complaining about the techies would be willing to give up the stuff those techies are making.
Breaking down an application into micro services allows me to keep a clearer picture of the entire application and how it should work. Not to mention the advantage of evolving the services individually without affecting the entire system.

I've started a little library in Python for writing small services. It leverages nanomsg. link: https://github.com/walkr/nanoservice
Anybody interested can read the UHH:
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
OT/ I'd really like to hear your story, even if you were to leave out identifying details. Were you using a pseudonym? What political area were you being "overly vocal"? How did they intimidate you?
Recently I marvelled at how far we have come since 1999, and how many changes in focus that meant. Not just tech itself, but also paradigms and methodologies.

Like the OP I started doing with design-y tasks as an intern in a web shop. Then followed a lot of t.gif style table layouts. Then followed some flash development, and my fist scripting with ActionScript and copy-paste JS stuff. Then ASP classic and PHP.

Then followed the push towards semantic html and progressive enhancement, and the first JS libs like mootools started popping up to be eventually boiled down into jQuery.

Couple years later and it was all about MVC frameworks, databases and so on. Like the OP I did php based stuff, and it meant learning 4+ different frameworks, i.e Cake, Zend, Symfony and so on.

At the same time there was Agile and TDD coming into the mix and you had to learn a whole lot on how to do your work.

Following that I started looking into node pretty early on and that shifted my understanding of JS as a language and pushed me into the niche where I am working today, namely JS stuff be it server or client.

Looking at the current tech choices and popular stacks, or even just the browser APIs available and coming, I cannot believe how far things have gotten.
On one hand things have become a lot easier for menial dev tasks, you have things like bower and grunt/gulp whatever really helping you, boilerplate generators and the likes. Deployment is often just a git push so some PaaS or some docker file and shell script.
On the other hand is just SO MUCH OF IT, that it's impossible to keep on top of even one aspect of the stack properly if you need to get on with making stuff and have a life. If you just take the browser these days (audio API, Web GL and so on).
In 15 years of dev work I have learnt and forgotten so much that my brain feels like a sieve. My approach to deal with that is to not desperately try and REALLY remember many things. Instead I just focus on the current stack I'm working with and remember the general concepts of that, plus some good knowledge of where to look for things. Come the next project in a different stack I basically anticipate a learning curve.
I've been using a combination of Hacker Web [1] and TheNews [2].

Hacker Web IMO is perfect for browsing on mobile devices, whereas TheNews is great for desktop viewing.

[1] http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/
[2] http://thenews.im/
The "Manhattanization" argument always struck me as odd. How is a mess of ugly, uncomfortable five-story buildings (at ridiculous prices) superior to an 80-story tower of modern housing? Sure, the tower is more prominent, but it frees up space for parks and makes housing cheaper. These people should either have the courage to say, "We're trying to keep housing costs artificially high and rob people" or get out of the fucking discussion.

Manhattan is expensive, but relative to the local job market, it's cheap. It has its problems, but it's relatively smartly designed. San Francisco is expensive, relative to the job market. Even in California, it's almost impossible to crack $175,000 doing real work, and every corrupt official in Asia has bought housing in SF and the Valley, driving prices into the millions.

California seems to insist that it is building the future, and yet it lives so much in the past.
Is anyone interested in renting out an apartment for the weekend?

I'm right now looking at airbnb and couchsurfing.. nothing convincing so far..
A: Was it an even trade of days off for pay?

B: What is your unpaid time off policy? Could your employees take 4 weeks off and receive their regular 2 weeks vacation pay? (Specifically, can they do this upon request. I understand that your engineer is doing this, but I don't know if that's available to everyone as a rule.)

If I was given the option of making 100% pay with a relaxed unpaid time off policy, or making 80% pay with a 20% PTO policy, I would choose the former option. That way I can decide exactly how much vacation/unpaid time as I want.
As others have said, this totally depends on:

1) What your company's setup was. If it was an LLC, Corp, or other such entity, then you in theory have at least some protection, assuming as well that

2) When you did business with this other company, you can show (legally) that they knew they were doing business with your company, and not you as an individual. What you put down as your address probably doesn't matter, what matters is what the communications between you said (e.g. did you contact them from a company-related email address and say "I'm ordering X for my company Y?"), did you sign the contract as a "Member" or "Manager" or "CEO" or whatever of your company, etc. This is what it would come down to in court that you'd be trying to prove (assuming 1) was in place).

As with any situation like this it's all in the details of your specific case, get a lawyer to talk to you for an hour and they can give you a good overview and it's worth doing if you might owe $20k. For example, even if 1) and 2) check out, if the debtor can show that you paid yourself money from your company before the company paid its outstanding debts, they may be able to get at least some money from you personally even if the company's accounts are dry (basically, you can't just take money and run from a company and leave company debts on the books). That's just one example of what might complicate your situation, IANAL and there are probably a lot more. So, again, get a real lawyer.
I've read this whole book while working at some boring job as a student and have it all printed out on an A4 paper in my desk.

I've always had a great interest into reverse engineering, so I thought learning assembly from the ground up would be a good start. However, I've actually learned more about some general concepts on how the computers work on the lowest level than I did the actual assembly programming; probably due to me losing focus further I went into the book.

I've never really continued my journey into the reverse engineering in great depth, but I'm curious how much this book is relevant to the problems today that are solved with assembly language.
I keep wondering if the only reason you see that many ads for a trending tech is because those are newly-founded startups or small web dev shops that will be going under in a year anyway, or maybe because tech recruiters are out of ideas.
I think the stack switching is probably what leads a lot of older folks to force their stack on folks. I used to see it as inflexible but I'm starting to think it's just economical.
Productivity Boosts
It's very hard to care a lot about the new technology that is just the same as the old technology you used 10 years ago.

It's a giant zero-sum game to expect everyone to pour time into running in place to not fall behind, and we're not getting any better.
Why have you chosen not to use HTTP and all the ease of use and interoperability advantages it confers?
If you check Gtk+'s history, I have contributed back on numerous occasions.

Unfortunately, convincing the people who write my paychecks, VMware, to contribute Workstation and Player to the Open Source community seems to be a pretty big stretch.
Great, thanks. Glad you like it. :)
25 hours a week is for me the perfect schedule, dedicating four hours a day to full coding and one hour to fuck off with management about brainstorming, requirements, proposals, design, and boring meetings.

Once they're happy, I say goodbye for the day and immerse myself in my editor. Not a single fly tries to cross between me and my monitor while coding.
Great explanation regarding how to think about state and mutability (place oriented programming).

A brilliant related talk by Rich Hickey: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values
It would be interesting if you would post roughly how many corrupt officials you believe there are in Asia and approximately how many housing units they each purchase.
While a prisoner is being moved from one facility to the next, it's a sneaky way of reducing prison overcrowding, on paper at least.
Occupy Wall Street, the Seattle WTO protests, off the top of my head.
Perhaps his real customers are internal, and his continued employment proves they are satisfied.
The Life And Death Of 'The Internet's Own Boy'
In 1973, when I was working at a summer job as an assembly language programmer for a university medical research computer center, I asked the section supervisor about the career path for programmers. I was told: there are no old programmers, after 15-20 years or so you will go into management or leave the profession.
What did he think was going to happen? He acts like an idealistic and naive attention grabbing princess.
Hacking and internet connectivity
I just got off a plane between Dubai and Seattle and although it was a very long flight it turned out to be one of the more productive ones I'd taken in a while.
Generally when I get on flights I start to code a little and realise that without any reference material I quickly lose motivation. So this time before I left Dubai I got some protobuf libraries and basic reference docs describing some encoding schemes etc. and I ended up getting much more done that I normally do at home.
Instead of browsing around and checking HN, I took quick breaks to read a chapter or two of a book and then opened the laptop again without immediately procrastinating.
Any suggestions on how others get around getting sidetracked when working on personal projects?
> Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz improvisation, it's just learning new keywords to do the same crap because the old keywords have been remapped.

Perhaps you should look into Haskell, Clojure or Erlang for a change?
Ask HN: Do you bother with financial/business forecasts?
Do any of you guys find forecasting a useful part of your business? Do investors usually impose requirements on tracking certain metrics vs what you said in your plan over time?

I'm a former financial analyst turned programmer and am working on developing some tools for tracking business performance vs. a rolling forecast. Just wanted to get some insight from the community before I get too far along.

What are the most important things you monitor quantitatively to measure the success of your venture? What are you doing today to measure them?
Yeah, it's the nicest one I've seen by far. HackerWeb is a not-so-close second.
I use the iOS app. I wish the developer would update it to support left edge slide for going back.
That is how technologies become popular, but the process is symbiotic: culture changes from technologies also.

For example, mobile phones became popular because they were culturally compatible: we wanted to be able to contact anyone from anywhere, and this technology met that need. As mobile phones gained usage, culture shifted because of it: we started messaging more frequently in text, we started ignoring the world around us when we wanted to use our phone instead, possibly our attention spans decreased, etc.

These changes are not "decided upon," but derive from the way technology meets our needs. Our culture shifts through our technology use. But sometimes, our cultural needs aren't fully met by technology. Those who feel socially isolated yet communicate plenty via the internet may feel some of this. Just as our physical needs prompt technology, our cultural needs can do so as well. It's a process that goes on whether or not we're conscious of it, so being conscious of it, I'd argue, is important.
Looks like a figure of speech to me.
JSON Resume – a JSON-based open source standard for resumes
It's been proven these arbitrary restrictions don't actually enhance security. We need to see the TSA move to behavioral analysis for them to actually make a difference.
I'm 27 and I've been thinking about the problems described in the article. All the new learning becomes bullshit when you work on your own project. I can see that it's a huge annoyance when it's required to earn a salary. For example, we are a TDD shop for a rapidly changing software, learn or know TDD or gtfo. Even though, you know TDD is solely practiced by the sadomasochistic crowd stuck in an acid trip, you have no choice.

What if you just focused on creating your own software and your own projects? For me, when I focus on my own development projects, all of the angst and worry described in the article goes away because I stick to the tried and tested tools instead of jumping on trendy frameworks or javascript-not-just-on-browser type of crowd. I just use the best tool that I am familiar with.

It really doesn't help your career when you've written a desktop app using Java Swing on your own project or when you've spent a long time working on a SaaS using LAMP, or if you haven't implemented it with AQMPMONGODBMETEORJSANGULARJSAGILENODEJS, or for jobs that list 10 years of AngularJS experience.

Ultimately, aren't we, as holders of highly intellectual skillset, should be masters of our own destiny, instead of worrying solely on the career aspect of it? Why not say, fuck this job, I'm gonna build something and sell it? This is the way I see it.
The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show.

If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent).

If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifically designed to make us sad, that's gone beyond "less than competent". That's "actively malicious".

THAT is the reason people are getting upset. Or at least it would be if they understood how facebook works.
Another good comparison might be Singapore, where people live in residential high rise towers with plenty of space for greenery in between. (Hong Kong also has high rise residential, but not nearly as much greenery in the city centre.)
This is a huge pain in the ass. When I travel, I often don't use my phone for many days at a time, and usually return without a charged device.
There was the famous PA "kids-for-cash" scheme. What's the other case?
Show HN: Calculator for Baking/Cooking
It's a thing. See http://www.ehow.com/how_4928010_add-music-yahoo-email-signat... for example.
But you're assuming the competent case is based on some criteria which is ideally unbiased and fair to all. I say, it's impossible to design such a system without knowingly affecting people emotionally on some level.
> ...is there really a reason to bring it on the plane with you? Just check it in and hope they don't wreck it.

That's exactly the reason why I bring stuff in with me. If they're valuable or fragile, I would never check it in.
It was less ambiguous last time they posted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926038

Edit: And another time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964831
I believe he's referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7963678
> "In practice, it makes much more sense to allow the system to enter certain inconsistent states and then remediate them. Out of an ingredient? Refund the money. Can't pay? Pull the drink out of the queue, or just write it off. This can involve some cost, but less cost than than the throughput you'd lose by enforcing consistency."

I don't know what practice you're referring to, but unlike commodity coffee drinks paid for in cash 1) CC refunds are not free, and they're not cheap in volume at all if you intend to do it casually during normal operation 2) not all goods are standardized and available in large quantities.

Your examples are all over the place. Ticketmaster is an example of a reservation system similar to one I was trying to give an example of (two step commit). A resource is locked, the lock is held for a short period while collecting answers from the other subsystems (in this case, payment gateway), and then a final commit is issued (or a rollback is issued).

Airline overselling isn't done because it was some microservice design dogma about how great inconsistent state is, but because every seat costs the airline a fortune if left empty, and a certain % of passengers cancel or reschedule their tickets, and the airline is trying to arrive at an airplane with as few empty seats as possible. Having your tickets canceled is certainly not something that happens "often", thank god, but it does happen as a result of that tradeoff.

But if I reserve and buy my seats online for a cinema movie, and then I go with company and get handed my money back because "it's practical", I'll make a scene. And so no one implements cinema ticket reservation this way.

For bank overdrafting, it's a very special case - your money is a number in a computer, and the bank owns that computer. They make the rules... so they did. It's easy to mess around with numbers like that. Bank account overdrafting is probably the biggest exception of them all as no physical products and services are involved. No one's going to have their lawn un-mowed because the bank allowed your account to overdraft.

The only common thing between your examples is that they're driven by business concerns, not some ivory tower concern about service design. And this is why they're so different, and reserving resources is and will remain a common practice for many, as long as the business logic calls for it. There's nothing wrong about it.
...and the funny thing is that the majority of Manhattan's residential real estate is, in fact, a mess of ugly, uncomfortable five-story buildings (at ridiculous prices).

I'd estimate that less than 5% of Manhattan's residential space exists in buildings taller than 20 stories, and maybe 15% of said space exists in buildings taller than 5 stories.
If the shoe were on the other foot, you would want to be paid what is owed, wouldn't you? Look at your budget, speak honestly with those to whom you owe money, and work out a payment plan. If that absolutely can't be made to work within your current budget, borrow from lenders like friends and relatives (parents and siblings). Write everything down including the amount borrowed, and the interest you agree to pay (if any). Make sure you record all payments made (it is so easy to lose track of this information). I DO understand the need to claim bankruptcy in certain situations, but the burden of 20k can be divvied up.
From the article:

> Scudder’s FOIA submissions fell into two categories: one seeking new digital copies of articles already designated for release and another aimed at articles yet to be cleared. He made spreadsheets that listed the titles of all 1,987 articles he wanted, he said, then had them scanned for classified content and got permission to take them home so he could assemble his FOIA request on personal time.

So, apparently the CIA said 'nothing classified in this list of titles' and let him take them home... only to attack him later for some of the titles being classified. If he isn't lying, then do you support the CIA punishing him for someone other agent's mistake?

> if this guy based a freedom of information request on information that he only knew about due to his access to classified information, then he did in fact mishandle classified information

So just knowing that they exist to create a FOIA request is a 'mishandling' if classified information? What about the 1,400 articles that were cleared, but were just sitting around? What about the fact that the CIA cleared his spreadsheet of titles to take home and work on the FOIA requests?
Airports facing chaos after US declares it wont allow uncharged devices
I'd be much less annoyed by these restrictions if the TSA did a better job explaining the reasons for them. Unfortunately, a statement such as, "Our scanners can't reliably tell the difference between batteries and specially-crafted explosives." is not something they want to publish. I have no idea if that's actually true, but it seems plausible.

Also, the implementation of this policy seems rather inconsistent. Are broken/powerless devices allowed in checked luggage? Can they be shipped via air freight? If I bring spare batteries, do I have to put them in a device and power it up? Etc.

Edit: It looks like this is a reaction to rumors of a plot to build bombs that look like laptops.[1]

1. http://abcnews.go.com/International/terrorists-team-syria-bu...
I appreciate the response. Machine learning is something I might be interested in and it looks like they're doing some sweet things with it.
I am quite naive in these matters but I see two reasons why this won't happen: 1). This will effectively tear down the security theater (again, I assume this is what it is and may be uninformed that there is a real threat). 2). It is difficult to train a large number of personnel to perform behavioral analysis given the traffic the US airports handle.
> He acts like an idealistic and naive attention grabbing princess.

Please put in at least a little effort to remain civil on this site. All that you've contributed to the discussion is:

> He got what was coming to him. <insert-name-calling>
> In an interview, Scudder, 51, cast his ordeal as a struggle against “mindless” bureaucracy...

I think this is wrong.

Bureaucracies are made up of people. Some of those people choose to persecute whistle-blowers. They don't have to, they have a choice. They are not automatons.

Blaming it on bureaucracy wrongfully absolves the individuals.
That's okay -- I'm sure they'll have a wide assortment of convenient charging devices which you can use. Hope your phone isn't vulnerable to USB-channel attacks...
yes i used meteor