skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CA is an "at will" state. A company does not have to give a reason for letting anyone go. It is best practice NEVER to give a reason. If you provide a reason then you better be sure it is documented in detail and there is zero discrepancy between the documented reasons and anything that anyone could ever say in a court. If there is even the smallest issue with your documentation you could end up losing in court if you are sued. While posting this response might have felt good it is clearly not a smart thing to do. Reddit would have been better to delete the AMA and then sent a letter to the poster explaining the non-disparagement agreement and how it protects both parties. I would hope that a CEO would know better.

The person posting the AMA seems to lack the experience needed in dealing this this sort of thing and could of used a bit of help understanding the realities of work life. It is very reasonable to believe that he was angry on being let go but this is a life lesson and I hope in the future he is able to handle things better.
Great idea - it's all well learning the concepts/APIs but putting them into good practice is great. I think a section on this would be perfect!
I sometimes wonder if the inventor of the shower was shouted down by people explaining how they enjoyed their baths.
No. If you make accusations in a public forum (as that employee did) the company is going to respond. That is a given and perfectly normal.

The guy basically said he was "laid off" followed by "because I pissed off management with my feedback". Claiming it was a retaliatory firing forces a response.
I mean, they also fire those people.
GCC dates from an era when, to do cool programming, you had to work on compilers or operating systems. Those are hard. The people who might have worked on GCC in the past are now out writing "apps", hoping to get rich.
NY's Senator Schumer tried to pass a law that made anonymous prepaid cellphones illegal in 2010 (http://www.schumer.senate.gov/new_website/record.cfm?id=3252...).

While this bill seems to have quietly died, it shows that it is certainly possible.
This post was about grown men, not fourteen-year-olds. Grown men... as in, people who should know better.
That's one interpretation - alternative: He said the truth, Reddit tries to get out of a bad spot and throws dirt against an ex-employee.
Can someone shed light on why it takes 6-7 years in the US? My European friends tend to manage in 3-4 years. The opportunity costs look quite different at that stage in life. Much better to find out you need a new direction at 25 than 29.
I see CCleaner on probably at least 50% of the desktops shown by people streaming on Twitch. Seems so odd to me.

Then again, I used WinRAR up until probably 2010 or so, whenever ninite made it easier to install 7zip.

A sort of related oddity is how often I see OpenOffice on the desktops in doctors offices - usually alongside Microst Office icons. I have no idea what they would use it for.
I've seen Samza's documentation comparing itself to Storm, I wonder what the reverse-perspective is...
Quite often, this kind of detailed reiteration can be an important part of maintaining one's own knowledge. And making the effort to explain a topic well keeps one aware of what is and is not well understood outside of one's own, narrow circle. This can be enormously advantageous when having to work with the larger group in some capacity that demands their trust in your ability and openness.
I really don't like this. The problem is that Yishan never explicitly states that there was an exit interview, and the reason for the termination was clearly explained.

He could have a half assed HR person that gave some bullshit reason like "you are not a good fit", and the ex-employee is legitimately confused about why he was terminated.

The other potential issue is that employees go into shock when they are told they are terminated, and are highly unlikely to remember the rest of the conversation correctly. People that get fired, generally aren't good at digesting feedback in the first place.
It originally became popular simply due to lack of competition.

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was popular but full of ads and didn't offer many features. MSN Messenger (later "Live Messenger" ".Net Messenger Service") didn't exist yet (1999) and while Windows had something called Netmeeting it was simply terrible.

ICQ technically came around before AIM, being released in 1996 Vs. 1997 but AIM hit the ground running as AOL hooked up their massive (then) subscriber base. So while AIM was a more popular service, ICQ became popular with a certain more savvy class of user (e.g. tech' nerds, who wanted more functionality, and something NOT tied to their email address).

ICQ offered that. Less ads, more features, and slightly anonymous (ICQ numbers). ICQ sucks by todays' standards, but in 1996-1999 it was really competing with AIM. There's also Yahoo! Messenger that came out in 1998 which was fairly popular (particularly as an "AIM replacement").

ICQ just somehow remained popular in certain parts of the world for the same reason Facebook isn't going away: It reached a critical mass, now "everyone" is using it which means "everyone" has to continue using it...
Very interesting, and sounds delicious.
Python and NLTK :)
Trobo the Storytelling Robot
This was my response as well.

If anything, he should have someone else respond. The fact it irked the CEO enough to stop whatever important things he was doing to log in and craft a fairly long rebuttal is telling.

I know plenty of people in PR and most would look at this and say this situation was completely mishandled. The CEO's comments actually makes him look worse than the whining ex-employee.
This isn't my own insight (borrowed from a coworker), but he points out that Reddit is doing another round of funding and here this schmuck is implying that they're careless with revenue/profits... that could raise a big stink anywhere.
What's interesting about this story is that it starts out seemingly like it's going to be about devious marketers devising a way to turn a product nobody wanted into a hot seller strictly through marketing, in much the same way that clever marketing turned the universally reviled Patagonian toothfish into a big seller by bestowing upon it the more upscale name "Chilean sea bass" (see http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-chilean-sea-bas...).

But then you get into the meat of it (sorry) and find that the root of the turnaround is an actual technical accomplishment -- a method to cook and distribute pre-cooked bacon that wouldn't rob the bacon of its flavor:

> The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. Hormel and Swift worked on microwaveable precooked slices for home consumers, while Chicago’s OSI and the now-defunct Wilson Foods poured their efforts into bacon spirals that would fit perfectly atop a hamburger.

These technical innovations turned out to be the key, because the pork marketers were pitching bacon to fast-food chains as a "flavor enhancer," but the chains that tried it mostly came away dissatisfied: the hassle of adding bacon-cooking to their highly regimented kitchens created expense and added time to the burger-assembly process, while existing methods for pre-cooking bacon yielded a tasteless product. Pre-cooked bacon with taste intact (that came in shapes ready to plop on top of a hamburger patty, no less) took all that friction away.

My only regret is that the whole thing is written from the perspective of the Pork Marketing Board, which funded the research into pre-cooking bacon, but doesn't really tell you much about the research itself. That seems like it'd be an interesting story, for those of a technical bent; here's a problem, how do you solve it?
Wait.. but what the guy did (whoever is) is really stupid; of the unbelievable type..

Now i imagine that Linus suffer a tremendous pressure to not let any bug pass, cause everybody in the world would eat his liver if there's a smallest security hole in the Kernel

Millions of lines of C code, that run in every gadget we can think of, the guy is stressed out; and you have a "code terrorist" do deal with?!

Also Linus has a strong personality, everybody knows that; so i dont see this as something bad as its being painted here; And we have to take the cultural background into account; i prefer the German/Nordic tought/transparent way than the hypocrisy/"you are great, but i will stab you when you turn your back" kind of culture (and im from a relaxed kind of culture)

I Think this is more of a cultural clash
Thanks for sharing - I wonder if there are sites like this for other languages?
How a Successful Ello.co Can Help Montréal Tech Companies
I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point:

> There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.

Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect targets any more adversely than direct but non-abusive language.

I guess it's a debate one can approach from many angles. But maybe you're right, perhaps focusing on highlighting why one thing constitutes verbal abuse and others don't is too semantic of an argument, and it's more productive to focus on the fact that just because one person has never been truly bothered by verbal abuse doesn't mean that should be the universal expectation.
Once again, reddit is a free-for-all until it looks like reddit might lose face, then we get an amateur level public response.

The employee might not have been a good employee, but this kind of public dressing down is absolutely unprofessional by the CEO.

Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_...
"When an employee is dismissed from employment at a company, the policy of almost every company (including reddit) is not to comment, either publicly or internally. This is because companies have no desire to ruin someone's future employment prospects by broadcasting to the world that they were fired."

IMO there need to be a better solution than this. I also don't like anti discrimination laws and I have a proposal for getting rid of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727917
"because I pissed off management with my feedback"

Umm -- did he say that, in the words you are using (and took the trouble to put in quotes)? If so, where? It doesn't seem to appear anywhere in the comment thread.
"No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either."

I don't think that follows; we don't expect any other single meal we eat to necessarily be able to a complete diet on its own. I can well imagine it to be far easier to make a 1-meal-a-day replacement than an all-food replacement.
This is awesome.

Estonia could have a shot at becoming the "Delaware" for non-US entrepreneurs, esp EU, i.e. have all the high-growth companies incorporate because of clear, friendly startup support infrastructure and laws.
How to Create Text Effects Using CSS: 14 Cool Examples
It wasn't deliberate. I wasn't grokking what you were saying. I was reading:

Many people talk nice, but [niceties are] all bullshit.

Instead of:

Many people talk nice, but [their talk is] all bullshit.

The ambiguity of that 'it' is really what this stemmed from.
> If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well.

Such conduct is not tolerated in workplaces, where people are paid to contribute, why do you consider it acceptable in an environment where people contribute for free?
Todd Motto also has a great style guide, as well, that could be used as sort of a best practices: https://github.com/toddmotto/angularjs-styleguide
Even after substituting the fancy ampersands on your homepage, and requiring nightmare your example still does not run:

var Nightmare = require('nightmare');
new Nightmare()
.goto('http://yahoo.com')
.type('input[title="Search"]', 'github nightmare')
.click('.searchsubmit')
.run();

yields:

node yahoo.js
phantom stdout: TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'element.value = text')

phantom stdout: phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():3
phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4
phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4

stream.js:94
throw er; // Unhandled stream error in pipe.
^
TypeError: undefined is not a function
at next (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/lib/index.js:56:23)
at f (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/once/once.js:16:25)
at Proto.apply (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:123:13)
at Proto.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:99:19)
at D.dnode.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:140:21)
at D.dnode.write (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:128:22)
at SockJSConnection.ondata (stream.js:51:26)
at SockJSConnection.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:107:17)
at Session.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/transport.js:220:25)
at WebSocketReceiver.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/trans-websocket.js:102:40)

The examples in the githubs pages readme don't run either.
I am too lazy to debug this.
Maybe it's just me, but I find the site difficult to view due to the light contrast.
Except if the CEO knowingly made a false and damaging statement about an employee in public, he could be sued for libel. It's unlikely that a CEO would be stupid enough to do that.
@Animats, this is very true. Many only want to use languages which are considered easy. Ruby and Swift are examples of the easier languages which allow developers to avoid issues like memory allocation bugs. I do find that the side effect of using simple languages, relying heavily on frameworks and easy to use dependencies leads to complex applications which the developer does not really understand. The extreme example is a WordPress site which is slow or buggy and the "developer" who put it together does not know why much less appreciate what is going on in the MySQL database. I wonder how many developers are even capable of doing this low level work in relation to the total number of people who call themselves developers.
For some time, I have daydreamed of various cool scenarios that would only be possible with a government-issued digital ID.

But in my daydreams, I've never considered a third-party government issuer. I don't see value in this beyond the value that I see in a corporate-issued digital ID, and that's hardly more valuable than a self-issued ID.

Obviously, Estonia has considered some angle which I have not.

I think the angle is that it allows a business presence in the EU and Eurozone for essentially anyone.
MahaSherpa – Job that fits (India)
InstaTake and the short earthquake in the privacy debate
Good lord, I hope the $50M investors in reddit are beating down the doors to get a PR person at the company so the CEO stops making crazy moves like this. There's no way a good developer would want to go work for Reddit when the CEO slaps people around in public (whether they deserve it or not). Sometimes you need to be the bigger man and move on instead of quarreling in public.
> That doesn't mean CCleaner's behavior is correct, but it's probably a situation the developers haven't been able to test against.

So reading between the lines, you're saying that CCleaner is a bad idea simply because they cannot possibly understand the registry well enough to make the changes that they're making.

We agree completely.

Honestly if people want to use CCleaner to do jump lists, file history, and caches (although that last one is misguided) then I'm all for it. There's very little chance anything will break with those (it is hard to screw up!).

I just warn against the registry cleaner primarily, and just feel like with Disk Cleaner and Windows' automatic cleaning that has been integrated for a while you could live without using CCleaner (unless you still have a Windows 9x box).
Unlikely. There's a clear distinction between being fired and being laid off and so the disagreement is about a matter of fact, not opinion. More likely the guy started an AMA without thinking it through, then lied to save face when someone asked why he was let go.
I was paraphrasing:
"Officially: no reason. And I get this; I vaguely know how CA employment law works and that you limit your liability by not stating a reason. It's also really hard to work through in your mind.
The best theory I have is that, two weeks earlier, I raised concerns about donating 10% of ad revenue to charity. Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn't.

..."

When you make a statement like "Some management likes getting feedback, some doesn't." in relation to being laid off, you are implying it was retaliatory. I'm pretty sure Yishan saw it as that hence his reply.
DragonEgg is an LLVM backend for GCC:
http://dragonegg.llvm.org/

There was some discussion of joining forces in the early days of LLVM (ca. 2005 I believe), but for various reasons that did not go forward. Licensing is indeed a big issue: GCC has had the explicit goal of making proprietary plugins technically infeasible, which leads to avoidance of some modularization/decoupling opportunities.
Obviously The Pork Board would wish to claim credit for the shift in demand for bacon. Lobbyists and advertisers will tend to portray themselves as essential to the industries that support them. It is more likely that "the bacon boom" was a market phenomenon driven by lots of small cultural and technological shifts, not social engineering. The article is undermined by its title and reliance on Pork Board anecdotes.
Alas, there is also no concept of substantial copying in copyright law (for derivative work). The language used in Berne convention is "a work based upon one or more preexisting works".

Derivative work is not a factual statement of a work, but a narrative statement in how it came to be. It helps to look at other arts (film, books, music) in order to examine the legal theory as it is used.

Lets take a manga comic written in Japanese language, using Japanese culture in order to express a story. That is then rewritten into a movie script for an American audience, using language and culture that is familiar with that market. The two works might in the end share nothing substantial in common, but the narrative defines the movie as a derivative of the written manga.

For books, fan fiction is simply defined as derivative works. The word itself defines a narrative that do not include copying but a process which bases one work on an other.

For music, style from a couple of notes has been know as enough for derivative work to trigger. If a song provide an association of someone else song, the narrative has an implied infringement on the original work. Copying as an act is more or less completely absent from those cases.

So for all the different copyrightable arts, software seems to have the most narrow interpretation of derivative work. Look and feel was dismissed in a US court a while back, and API was thankfully also dismissed. My guess is that the beneficial effect a weaker copyright has on the software market is favored by the courts compared to the arts of films, books and music. That said, only looking at copying as the defining factor is unlikely to yield the correct conclusion. I do think inspeqtor has a decent defense. Since look and feel is not enough for software, Monit will have a uphill battle to claim a narrative that defines inspeqtor as based on Monit. The twitter statement seems to hint towards it, but a court might very likely want more to find inspeqtor guilty.
Tell us what you really hate about programming. Research Study
Hey, I designed it, and I've felt the pain of low contrast so often yet I guess when you're knee deep making it all look right you lose sight of the forest. I'm uploading a version with more contrast, let's see how people find it.
Looks like the time variable is not updated...

Update: Sorry - Time is just really slow there :D
Sadly, English style back bacon is really hard to find over here :(
You mean some people use Tor differently than as you suggest?

Why?

I had assumed that everyone would be either on the 'net with their 'net computer or on tor with their tor computer.

Doing both with one computer obviously defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

...Also, the chances of breaking out of a VM into the host are non-zero. Just sayin'.
The "speculation" was pretty mild. Most of it was vague, the most specific bits were either implausible (fired for being insufficiently charitable) or have been said by almost every employee of every company in history (management doesn't like criticism).

I see no reason a rational executive would feel compelled to raise the profile of the issue by responding at all, much less in this dramatic fashion.
An inspiring story, although I feel like it supports my point. My parent was basically stipulating that college is a waste of time for the gifted, but from the sound of Faraday's story he spent a lot of time on a sort of a "college track" of learning & lectures, even though he wasn't enrolled.

It's a great story of tenacity, but it reads more like "determined underdog gets a foot in the door and proves his worth the hard way" than "gifted magnate skips apprenticeship, becomes master"

Thanks for sharing it though :)
I'm saying it is objectively worse than the cities which have coordinated, centralized and effective public transportation systems and the overall cost in lack of regulation, pollution, noise, and other factors is much greater than the alternatives.
iOS 8.1 Jailbreak guide and iOS 8.1 cydia download – iOS 8.0.3 cydia download
There is no concept of "clean room" in copyright law

Sure there is. "Clean room" just means you have good legal evidence that you created an original work not a derivative one. It is a bit like having an alibi during a murder trial. There is no law that says you must have an alibi to not be convicted of murder, just like there is no law requiring clean room to dodge the copyright bullet, but having one is strong evidence that you are not guilty.

even APIs (see Oracle vs Google) are not protected by copyright

You need to check the news more. The Federal Circuit Court ruled APIs are copyright able, and handed it back to the lower court to rule on fair use. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/dangerous-ruling-oracl...
Popcorn-Time 0.3.4 – Because It's Cold Outside
People are different when it comes to how their fat is distributed. Men tend to get a potbelly, as opposed to women who tend to become fat in a more distributed way.

Considering that, I guess a person could change when it comes to how their fat reserves are stored. Maybe a hormonal change? But this is just a guess.

(The other explanations given also seem reasonable.)
I live in Alberta, Canada. The Personal Information Protection Act governs the use of personal information by the private sector. Companies are allowed to give references when asked, but I believe public posts such as these would be illegal under the act.

Even giving references can be an issue. The law states that the company must make an effort to make sure the information is accurate and complete. For subjective measurements, there may be argument over what is accurate. When my father was working, their lawyers recommended they not give any information other than confirming employment dates and duties for references.
dblyzer.com

I thought of some ideas on creating front end reporting/query editor for databases but never got time. Feel free to ask me for this one.