skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I consider getting a visa for a short-term tourist stay to be a hassle. You can't just buy your plane ticket and show up, instead you have to fill out paperwork, fax copies of your passport around, etc.

(Personal story: I transited Shanghai a few weeks ago. If I didn't need a visa to visit the city, I would have added a stopover or picked a longer connection so that I could go into town. But since this would have involved money and paperwork, I decided to skip it.

I did get to see the Great Firewall in action, though, which was kind of neat. I felt like I was Sticking It To The Man when I had to ssh to my server at home and use w3m to read blogs.)
I will share something which worked for me...

Take life one hour at a time... or one short goal at a time. So before leaving from home for work, I would have one goal - "I need to get to work in 45 mins", that's it, no more thought about anything else.

Once at work, I would have this short goal "I need to check my mail in the next 30 mins", then "I need to work on this bug or feature for the next hour"... and so on.

This kept me on track without letting my mind get caught up in the problems, and become numb.

I also took 1 hour vacations... where I would go on an hour long drive to some nice place away from the city, and listen to music. It helped me refresh my spirits.

HTH.
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What the hell is he talking about?
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well .edu is just a filter, we can chose to allow any domain/TLD
Science and Arts are public things, promoting their benefit is for the public good. If the goal were about giving inventors a payday, they wouldn't be required to disclose their inventions to the public at all, they'd just be given ownership of the idea forever. One could argue it was designed to help them both I guess, but when founding a nation, it's the nation and thus the public that you're looking out for. Giving a payday to inventors just doesn't make sense as a goal, but it makes perfect sense as an incentive to achieve a large goal.
he's saying that the various processes, methods, and tools we espouse should follow from a fundamental theory of software development. Right now, the nicest thing that can be said for the various things we espouse is that they are "laws" based on empirical observation.

But we don't have an underlying theory explaining which programming languages are more productive than others, or which processes will work and which will fail. It's a lot like chemistry before the periodical table and especially before quantum mechanics. In orther words, it's alchemy.
So obviously variables should be able to have more than one name: a long one and a short one. SQL offers the ability to define an alias name.

Unfortunately that would be a kind of kitchen sink feature that no standards committee is likely to accept. As a substitute, one could create a variable with a long name, then put the value into another variable with a short name, but that could be confusing unless very clearly noted in a comment.
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@codexon, my deepest respect for _noticing_ this -- I had kind of started to wonder if anyone ever would (except a couple of my colleagues, also active on SO but less openly, had already commented privately to me about this;-). Still, seniority counts for A LOT on SO, and of course I'll never catch up to Jon -- if I keep gaining 15.4 points/day on him, bridging the 64337-points gap would take me almost 12 years from now... I kind of doubt it will happen!-)

BTW, I made a "lateral career shift" within Google -- since about a year ago -- I'm not "uber tech lead" now, I'm "senior staff engineer" (no people-management chores -- I get to hack on code/design/debugging/architecture, nag^H^H^H evangelize on proper development methods, &c, in >80% of my time, vs ~40/50% of my time -- and that, with an effort!-) -- averaged over the many years in which I was uber tech lead, saddled with people management, budgets, strategy staff meetings, and the like... management at google is cooler than anywhere else I had ever managed, but, it IS still management in the end;-).
And yet us iPhone developers get the shaft. I can't help but think whatever part of the corporate culture that breeds this kind of stuff got cut off near the iTunes Connect department.
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> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

Yes but there is a significant portion of the population that doesn't understand this. They are indeed likely to give the both the article and the underlying research much less credit.

> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

It depends on your context. The underlying proposition is unaffected by its supporters but your 'best guess' view of it based on limited information needs to take this into consideration. Apart from unreliable sources I'm sure there are some people who pass on information which is anti-correlated with the truth. A biblical creationist is likely to be strongly attracted to exactly research that an evolutionist would dismiss. Both of these two would be right in pre-judging any research put forward by the other as have a reduced probability of being valid according to their views of reality.
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Engineers were building steam engines before there was any thermodynamics. Engineers were playing with batteries before anyone could understand why they were producing an electrical current. The theories followed and they were based on Maths. Maths is the underlying
analytical tool.

There was never a 'Theory for Mechanical Engineering' or 'Electrical Engineering', why the need for a 'Theory for Software Engineering'?

Best practices develop over decades (for example in Fire Protection Engineering), as well as Management techniques to manage time and complexity.

Is the Model View Controller technique a theory? No, it is just a management technique. (It will work just fine in one long program as well).

Just hack and let the theories follow :)
Is this a duplicate?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857283
>the move has been towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic ...

Just walk with me into any museum in Europe and I will show you the counter evidence or let's go and interview the locals in Afghanistan or the sharks .. sorry traders in wall street.
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American users would actually care pretty keenly

Looking at the market share figures I would say your argument falls apart at this point.
Gotta love the quote from the VC:

“When I invested, I thought Mark was one in a million. Now I think Mark is maybe one in a trillion.”

In other words, he thinks Mark may be the most extraordinary person ever to have lived.
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Anyone know if there is a good way to make that sort of demo video?
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Sarah Palin book part of conservative boom
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In Italy that, trust me, is not the best place to do business in the world, normal bank accounts with home banking can be used to transfer money among individuals just paying 50 cents for the transaction. The donwside is that it takes 3 days for the transfer to complete.

Here in Europe this is the most common way to exchange money. I perform at least 5/6 transfers every month as individual, and many more with my company.
That does indeed look very nice. I've heard some not-so-great things about actually being an Apple employee, though. Can anyone comment?
Sweet. To be honest though it looks more like a laptop case (that has a laptop inside).

Now all he needs to do is load up Yellow Dog Linux and it'll really be a P(S3)C.
Getting yelled at (and terrified) by Steve Jobs? At least that's what I saw in Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I just don't really understand this "hire and fire" mentality. I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really, really not productive, nobody respected him, etc. But it was a terrible experience. I never want to do that again.

What happened to finding better ways at hiring good people? Sure, times change, and yeah, you'll have to let a few go over time. All of these companies just seem to go with a test drive approach. And I rarely find any new, novel approaches on hiring practices.

These sorts of practices seem to breed a very impersonal culture, that just makes me biased against big companies. A culture I hope I'm never a part of again.

This article is pretty novel in that it's about Enron. But I'm sure you could substitute many more legitimate businesses, and the techniques would be pretty similar.
Oh, absolutely. I just don't buy the idea that the default expected behavior from people is to shot themselves in the foot so blindly (e.g., a race to see who can empty the lake first).

That people may slowly stab themselves in the foot repeatedly is more likely.
I got one that says "Save the Shire" and I have no idea why.
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Some of the blockings are done really this way. Nearly every Turkish Internet user learned about opendns now :). Also there is a huge demand for ktunnel like applications.

This is dns hijacking by the government.
The critical part of this strategy is continuous improvement

I'm not sure that's true. The occasional sweep to clear away the deadwood is one thing. But if I think about the team I'm in right now, it took a long time (years) to build, we are very very picky about who we let in, and it takes a considerable amount of time to get someone up to speed (regardless of the experience they had when coming in).

If the edict came down from on-high that we had to fire the least-performing member and hire someone new every year, well, we simply can't find people at the required level and train them to our own standard that quickly. It would simply destroy a high-performing team for the sake of some fad.

Also, deciding the bottom 10% is not always as straightforward as it seems. Say HR simply sacks the guy who shipped the least features that quarter and the team loses the guru who helped everyone else with their tricky problems?
Maths is the underlying analytical tool.

But there is a mechanism for this. Maths -> Lisp/Haskell/etc -> time passes -> F# ships in Visual Studio, the most widely-used development tool on the planet.
it's not just developers. it's also partners, subcontractors and, primarily, users.

I also wonder whether Sun Danyong was treated as nicely?
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yeah, the glorious days... now I guess it's more like getting yelled at and terrified by your average middle manager.
> I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really, really not productive, nobody respected him, etc. But it was a terrible experience. I never want to do that again.

Yeah, I've done it too. Very hard letting someone go. Terrible experience.

But you do get people that are a bad fit in their roles, that shouldn't be in them. It's not just bad for a company - it's bad for their coworkers, bad for customers, and maybe it's the worst to the person who is doing a bad job. It must be self esteem crushing to not ever accomplish anything interesting or valuable in the place you spend the most waking hours.

So I wonder if the hire-and-fire-regularly cultures do so to desensitize the people there to the process? Everyone I know that runs a moderate to large company or division either lets people go regularly or has a lot of people who are a bad fit on their staff.

Which goes into point 2:

> What happened to finding better ways at hiring good people?

You try, but it's impossible to always get right. Jack Welch was generally regarded as one of the best hiring people of all time, and I listened to an interview of him on hiring. He said that he always thought of it like a "batting average" - how many hires are a good fit and mesh well? He says his best rates, even towards the very end of his career, was getting about 2 out of 3 right.

That means 1 out of 3 wrong. You ought to spend some effort trying to get someone on track, but having a person who is a bad fit onboard is no good for anyone. The best way to fix that, though, is a really hard question to answer.
His boss isn't rich either.
Google App Engine's data store is also "simple" by your definition (unnecessarily limited). IIRC, it makes it very difficult to bulk download your entire database.
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When I was at Google the sheer number of crazy projects being worked on internally, whether or not for profit, was insane. Literally thousands upon thousands of projects. They are working on anything and everything, I think that is something that the competition really underestimates here.

This is why their parking lots have electrical sockets to plug your car into or why they released Lively (when I was there it was but a one man project that I saw at an internal techtalk). It's all things Googlers wanted to work on. They will work on anything they find interesting and they'll generally get the full support of the company (at least that's how it was in 2007).

Now I'm at Microsoft and the biggest change to me is how focused Microsoft is at executing very specific projects. The other big change is how many strengths Microsoft has that most of the world refuses to acknowledge. Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, but holy shit when they target something, they go for all or nothing. There is a drive internal to Microsoft unlike any I've seen... when they want something, they won't stop until it's theirs. They want blood.
This is, as it appears to be, a small, light folder with a few pieces of paper in it. Easily under a pound, it feels lighter than an iPod.

Steve Jobs is the messiah and Apple his gospel.
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Or HR's metric for determining who is in that bracket may be a) wrong, as they don't understand the business or b) skewed.

Let's say at a large company the HR department worked out an "objective" means of ranking employees, but when they ran it it turned out that the bottom 10% were overwhelmingly women/an ethnic minority/whatever. They're going to tweak it until it delivers the result they want, in which case how confident can anyone by that it was "objective" to start with?
Interesting talk. Usually when people are challenging conventional wisdom, it's not difficult for me to see where they're coming from. In this case, however, I find myself struggling to agree.

Yes, there are benefits to autonomy, mastery, and purpose... but c'mon, isn't that blatantly obvious? Is anyone actually surprised that employees are more engaged when they're working on their own projects?

Regarding the "candle problem" that Pink brings up, I'm not sure if easy-candle-problem vs hard-candle-problem is analogous to mundane-career vs challenging-career. The candle problem takes minutes or even seconds to solve: It's not difficult to see why those under pressure may jump into action prematurely, before considering multiple possibilities. The correct solution is non-obvious, so those who act the fastest actually perform the worst. In other words, the people with the higher incentives are actually working harder, but it's backfiring because this is a special case. I doubt employees at big companies run into this issue when offered incentives, as their projects take months/years to complete, not seconds.

I haven't seen anything to suggest that incentives are ineffective. The "old" wisdom isn't wrong: people are willing to work harder for higher returns. If anything, incentives work too well. When poorly designed, they can actually go against the best interests of a company. If you tell ProgrammerJoe he'll get a raise for working quickly, then he's going to write craptastic code as fast as possible. If you tell him he'll get a raise for every new feature, then he's going to create a barrage of unnecessary and poorly-designed featured.

By all means, dangle carrots in front of your rabbits. Just make sure you're leading them in the right direction.
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No, if anything is wrong you do not sign the default contract.

Non-compete agreements are not enforceable in California under most circumstances. [1] Surprisingly, most companies I've worked with have not updated their new-hire documents.

Having negotiated several consulting or employment contracts over the last few years (in SF and San Jose), I can confirm that that most companies aim for "everything you create belongs to us." I find that practice despicable. Luckily it's usually a negotiable point.

I recently started with a company whose employment contract basically said, whatever you do here belongs to us; whatever you do on your own time belongs to you. This was refreshing.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2008/08/08/california-supreme-c-1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-...
My approach is basically the same:

Long-uppercased names for anything global, settings or security-related (ie COOKIE_NAME, SECRET_HASH)

For dummy loop variables: i, j, k

For everything else I use common sense.
Sure, there is a mechanism for development. It is Research & Development, that is why a 2009 BMW does not look the same like a 1969 BMW.
So, you're an iPhone dev getting the shaft hey? Prey tell, what do you think Apple owe you now?
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are indistinguishable with regards to their policies in this matter. A hypothetical startup which did not have or particularly want a presence in the Chinese market could differentiate on this.

Granted, they'd have to be pretty adroit about it, but it is a compelling PR story since it makes Google look like the giant, not-particularly-moral, profit-focused advertising firm that they are instead of the two dudes in a dormroom that they pretend to be (and probably actually seem themselves as).
hi.

when i left in march, facebook had about 100 engineers writing primarily PHP code. the engineering team has continued to grow rapidly over the past few months so the number is probably close to 200 now.
You can't prove any negative. Prove that you won't ever commit a violent felony in the rest of your entire life. Prove that the easter bunny doesn't exist.

It's not okay for google to be crazy because they believe MS is evil. Being paranoid about the MVP NDA agreements is about at the level of psychosis of web developers who "disable" right click on sites in order to "prevent" viewing the source or media companies who insist on releasing music and video only after it has been festooned with draconian DRM.

Plain and simple, google is being unprofessional here. They are stepping away from being a good, "cool" company that "gets it" and turning into a big, crazy, paranoid company just like any other big, crazy, paranoid company.
i think it comes to the bottom line, all the "causes" don't really mean anything.

I disagree -- Google reacts to bad PR. It is about the only external factor they react to, since they've got a de-facto monopoly on the Internet's license to print money combined with essentially no regulatory oversight, anti-trust issues, etc.

See, e.g., how quickly they killed their I-can't-believe-its-not-Campfire app when seven PR-savvy guys in a room in Chicago threatened them with being seen as the Goliath for a change.
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Who said "inherently evil?" On the whole, I'd say that software patents do more harm than good, and should be eliminated on that basis. I agree that it's not inherently evil doesn't mean we should do it.
While reading these comments, someone quoted well that: "The intent of patents is to get inventors to disclose their inventions to the public for the benefit of all." This sounds like a good principle. Instead of applying the traditional patenting method to software, we should find the equivalent of that principle in software world.

So, patents apply to implementations, right? Also, code itself is the design, right? And yet, so far we try to describe the implementation with vague words of mostly English language, and to bend the boundaries by making it as broad as possible. Doesn't seem to work too well.

In real world, you can patent an implementation of a bridge -- effectively the design of its construction if it's novel. You can't patent the underlying, generic bridge-construction principles. Code is design.

I think the principle could apply analogously to software patents by opening the source of a proprietary implementation, and then licensing interoperability with the patented implementation. In other words, that spells like kind of a code-escrow for an exclusive licensing rights for limited time.

The patent would only apply to forks or third-party implementations that are compatible with the patented implementation. If you invent a clever protocol, you could require money for compatible implementations: this would hopefully incentivize opening proprietary implementations.

On the other hand, if someone takes your ideas and builds his own implementation, you would not be entitled to anything: that someone will be required to build his own market share, compete with your implementation and user base from the ground up, and effectively do the same work that you have already done -- just to get on par with you.

Complete codebases and unit tests could be required to make it easy to verify the compatibility or incompatibility of programs potentially based on the patented codebase.

Reviews for novelty would be much easier to arrange if expert programmers could study the working code and compare it to earlier implementations. That is, as opposed to lawyers trembling with the words and semantics of patent applications.
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