skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I was let go for writing about my depression. What should I do?
So this happened around the middle of October and ever since, I've been trying to process my mind around it. I wrote about my depression and shared it with others. I wrote it as way to sort of come to terms with things and let people know that they aren't alone.

A couple days after I wrote it, I shared the piece of writing with a couple people on Twitter. I'm going to guess that my boss must have saw it popup on his timeline which led to me getting a phone call from him. We just talked about it and how I was feeling. He told me to take the next day off. I guess he was trying to be nice and be a good person but the day after the day I was given off, I received another phone call from him. He pretty much said, "I don't think it's best if you come into work. If you have anything of ours, just return them when you feel like it." aka we're letting you go. He reassured me it wasn't because of what I wrote over and over again. I, on the other hand, do think I was let go because of what I wrote. I wasn't given an explanation as to why I was being let go. I don't and didn't think of myself as a liability but I guess that's how I was viewed.

I talked to a couple people about it. Some said he was in his right to let me go, others said it wasn't right for me to be let go. I'm currently on a gap year and all I wanted some work to do and hopefully gain experience from. I can't do that and every junior Android developer position I've applied to in Chicago has pretty much turned me down. Chicago doesn't have that much junior Android developer positions compared to other cities. I can't get the experience I wanted and can't earn the money I planned on earning. At this point, I have no idea what to do. I just work on my own small projects day to day. What do you guys think I should do? Do you think my boss was in his right to let me go even though I didn't mention anything about the company in my writing?

Any help would be appreciated.
It's mostly them becoming a service company (Azure) rather than a software company (Windows, Office). The more people that can push code to azure, the more money they will make in the future. So giving people the tools to do that for free makes a lot of sense. Still charging the big money from the enterprises of course, because not doing that would be insane.

The mobile thing is relevant of course, but Azure is where they are betting the farm.
Not sure why the downvotes. I'm rooting for MS to be successful.
Great idea! Integrating with Githooks is super convenient.

This reminds me of watson (https://github.com/nhmood/watson-ruby) which manages TODOs pretty well (with GH support) but doesn't generate the hooks for you unfortunately.
You can read the piece of writing I wrote here: https://medium.com/@tmidao/confession-55fa5d4a3c0b

I'm always happy to clarify on any part that wasn't clear or you need more information on.
This is really big news. I'm not sure why Microsoft is doing it, though? Seems like a great way to completely kill Windows in the server market.
It's what we have. It's filtered out that HTML5 is an application platform. It succeeds where Java tried and fell almost completely on its face: write once, run (mostly) anywhere. It started with ubiquitous and came to functional, rather than the other way around with other cross-platform development systems. Take that for what it's worth. But that's all it is.
That was my initial thought, too. But it looks like the Docker-related news they hinted at is still coming:

https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/529493907839533056
The Case for Security Intelligence
> Do you know anything about cache hierarchy and memory models on modern CPUs?

Yes.

> Performance is important to some of us.

... and in those cases, you don't have to use data structures that model your problem domain poorly.

The problem isn't "immutable data structures" or "theoretically robust" languages. The problem is finding ways to express computations and their constraints in a way that can be efficiently modeled for your problem domain.
From what I can tell, it's a combination of a few useful tools:

1) Configuration monitoring – if an app is running on six identical servers, and all of the sudden one box has a different config file sitting on it, or somebody installs updates that they weren't supposed to, I'd like an email about that.

2) A "source of truth" for your cloud resources. Smarter people than I have articulated our need for this at my employer, but the simplest way I know of to describe it is that you can query the configuration of your boxes to figure things out. "Show me all the boxes running Nginx 1.6," for example, or "Show me all the boxes that haven't gotten the latest Bash update." Not sure how it does that, but it seems to be in there.
My worst tweet is insulting myself. (To be fair I rarely use twitter anyway).
I wonder if self insults are weighted any different than regular ones.

"I feel dumb for never thinking of using %2π"
Wikipedia's app used to be. Not sure if that's the app they still run across all the platforms though. https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile
Should work with the free tier of Xamarin. Afaik, you can download a free VS + Free Xamarin and churn out an iOS+Android app using C# immediately.
A therapist told me that the former is almost as bad as the latter in terms of its effects on daily function.
> Do you know anything about cache hierarchy and memory models on modern CPUs?

Yes I do. Worked 3 years on a soft real-time system with massive load, profiled the shit out of everything. There's an interesting discussion we could have about when immutable data-structures work best, when they've got problems and when it doesn't matter, especially given the extra benefits in dealing with accidental complexity. This isn't the right place though.

> Performance is important to some of us

Yes it is, but performance problems are fixed by means of profiling and optimizing the bottlenecks. Even in a system that has massive load, in many cases in doesn't matter and in some cases immutability increases performance by eliminating contention on reads. And seriously, most people invoking performance problems are not having those performance problems to begin with, therefore my assumption.
Agreed, and I think a lot of early adopters ignore this. Creating the technology itself is a milestone, yes, but so is advancing it to the point where it's appealing to and digestible by the masses.

My mom recently created a WhatsApp chat for our family using her Android phone, and now I keep in touch with her a lot more easily and often than I would have otherwise. That would've been unimaginable to me a decade ago.
It should not involve humans in its aggregation and moderation. Needs to be intelligent enough to gather information and categorize it without the biases of a human being.
Having hacked Google, Juniper, Symantic, Morgan Stanley and countless USGOV sites - why not hack NOAA? Its not as if there will be any USGOV response. No sanctions. No demarche of which I'm aware. No counter-attack that has been publicized by China. Turning the other check is not a valid strategy in a prolonged conflict.
Fonts have been fixed on GitHub now.
> Ohh I see you want to write a tcp server with asynchronous processing? Here's some generics you can just c&p.

So we've come to the point where copy-pasteability is a language feature? Tell me I can use a library or module. Tell me that the language comes with built in features to help me do this or that. But never tell me I can copy-paste generic code. Please.
They could switch to Linux and drop Windows. That would surely revive their image in my view. Is it April 1st already?
ESA Singing Comet Song rendered with my visualizer
So far I've been able to avoid vendor lock-in on the code level (besides S3, but the S3 API is simple and has become pretty much a standard for object storage).

On the infrastructure level, the "lock-in" part is not so much the technology, all of that is relatively easy to replace. But it would take me two additional FTE's to configure and manage everything AWS offers as a service ourselves.

But that applies to a lot of things these days, AWS just happens to be a one stop shop for a growing range of commodity services.
OK, perhaps they wrote a MySQL-Dynamo (or whatever it is) wire-protocol translation engine, and do not use MySQL server. But custom storage engine looks like most natural way.

We will see it shortly.)
(Disclaimer: I work for an AWS competitor.)

To me, there is a very interesting contrast to be had between this announcement and Microsoft's announcement: it feels like Microsoft is discovering the business value of being open at the same time that Amazon is living in the time warp of proprietary everything. Has Microsoft internalized that open source is (or can be) a differentiator in the cloud? Amazon is clearly still oblivious to it -- and it will be very interesting to see if this service generates fear of vendor lock-in...
After my experience in DMOZ, I have carefully NOT joined Wikipedia as an editor. However, I make minor spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic changes when I notice the need. I also correct obvious factual errors. I usually don't introduced NEW facts, but I delete false existing ones if I notice them.

And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.
I think you should talk to a local employment attorney. In the meantime pick yourself up and look for another job... A change of scenery can help too if you are not very tied to your location. Also, I hope you find the help you need. You don't have to take it on all by yourself.
I'm not sure if there is any topic I am passionate enough about to post 22+ comments on a single HN news story about.

You must really, really dislike Microsoft.
Halo 5 Multiplayer Beta
You're conflating a lot of unrelated issues here by lashing out against things you seemingly don't understand.
To be fair, understanding I/O in Haskell takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics. :)

The I/O monad modifies the Universe that contains the set of all functions that comprise your program (if I even understand the concept correctly).
I'm really wary of the "don't invent your own crypto" mantra, so I want to venture an idea I had here, rather than writing any code for it:

I understand the problems with adding a random delay to try to add "noise" to the measurements, but what if the delay was non-random? Specifically, what if the delay was calculated to make the whole operation always take constant time?

Example:

User input comes in on thread A. Thread A sends the request to thread B and delays for time t. Thread B does the encryption and sets the result. Thread A resumes and returns the result.

If we pick 't' such that it is always larger than the amount of time it takes to do the operation, any timing differences observed by the attacker won't be correlated with the timing of the cryptographic operations. I think.

(NB: it could be something other than threads, such as "microservice B" instead of "thread B", that particular detail isn't important)
By its very nature, the "popular stuff" is the stuff that more people are interested in. If the "popular stuff" is done, then there's going to naturally be fewer people interested in fleshing out the "unpopular" stuff.
Microsoft has, consistently, supported developers better than almost any other ecosystem. It's a walled garden, but it's well-kempt.
Ah, VS2013 Express for Windows refused to install on Windows 7 (which is the one for developing Windows Phone apps, my area of interest). Perhaps this requirement has not changed then.
It confused me.

It started as white and 1000/1000, so I wasn't sure if that meant all were available or none were available - I suspected all were available.

Then I scrolled down and the progress bar became blue and looked more as though none were available.
The short term solution was a configuration change to force a 1s SYN retransmit timeout, even if that's a 99.9th percentile handshake RTT in this environment. In the longer term we need to evaluate the timeouts in the most widely deployed systems, so that we can offer a calibrated set of completely safe / reasonable / aggressive values.

For example one of the links in the post suggests that OS X has a 700ms SYN retransmit timeout. If that's true (haven't tested yet), and the same is true for iOS, then a 700ms timeout might be a pretty reasonable setting rather than an aggressive one. Because if a piece of kit fails for iOS traffic, it's not going to remain in service for long ;-)

One of those cases where you can't do much more than follow the herd.
It seems odd to use Tesla and SpaceX as the counter example to "building toys for rich people".

Tesla and SpaceX are exactly that...toys for rich people. But who cares? Look at the Wright brothers building the first controllable, fixed-wing, powered aircraft...that was a toy for rich people. Tesla and SpaceX technologies to become accessible to the masses likely need to start out as toys for rich people. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if I had listened to what the people wanted I would have given them faster horses.
This is a misconception. In totalitarian countries, yes, the government can do whatever it wants and extort money, labor and other favors from the people by sheer force. But in the US, we control the government (we can get into notions like tyranny of the majority or regulatory capture, but for the most part the government is very limited in what it can and can’t do or else the people go on strike). In other words, the US government is the largest union (in the labor sense) in the history of the world. We all pay our dues in the form of taxes and get rather remarkable protections, such as a military industrial complex larger then the next dozen or so countries combined and a level of trade that lets the vast majority of the population veg out on reality TV.

I may personally agree with libertarians that the current system is far from ideal. But where we critically disagree is that a private system would ever come anywhere close to the level of civilization we currently enjoy. If you read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, almost nowhere do they talk about economics (other than taxation without representation etc). That’s because a wild west style free market is the most basic form of trade above barter. We see it everywhere, from third world villages trading with one another, to banana republics, to the startup community. It doesn’t need a specific mention, just as we don’t need to bother saying the Earth is round or gravity exists.

The free market is the basis of economies, just as evolution is the basis of the laws of our universe.

So trying to place it above things like human rights or progress in things like public health or education is just bizarre. The idea that we’ll stop paying taxes and turn every road into a toll road, charge tuition for public school, or fight the bad guys with our own handguns when they come surging over the border is.. sophomoric. And what really sucks is the more libertarian a stance the population takes, the more we see concentrated wealth and power undermine the public good, as we just witnessed in the midterm election. Why would we elect people to office whose campaign slogan is that government is bad? That’s like hiring an undertaker as your doctor. Yet we see it over and over, to the point where ideology is given equal weight to pragmatism.

So to get to the point of why paying taxes for government space exploration is a good thing: because if we didn’t, we would be paying the entirety of our incomes as debt service to a central private bank that spends the money suppressing us (the end result of global fascism). We lucked out that a slight majority of the founding fathers were more in favor of government by the people (wherever that may lead) and were willing to fight and die for that rather than fall back to the default position of oligarchy that previous governments had used for thousands of years. Yet here we are again, where wealth inequality from free market policies has reached such a degree that the scales might tip back to a government that only serves the financial elite.
Silicon Valley is all OSS/Java.

ElasticSearch, Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase, HDFS (mixed with C).

Newer infrastructure for big-data are either Java, Scala, Clojure (one or two tools).

Some of the startups also use Java (not all). I rarely see C#. So yes, C# is not catching up yet.

Sorry, Eclipse + Ecosystems (that include plugins/integrations and whatnot) = beats VS any day (with or without pants). And if you have money, IntelliJ is right around the corner circling VS.

I think people don't realize that comparing the Java and .NET requires dragging the community, the platform, the tools, the plugins, and everything else in-between.

I granted in Windows/Desktop .NET is the king. Everywhere else it's the other way around by a long margin.
> because I think Go's target audience (systems programmers) are not all that interested in IDE's,

Target audience or not; it seems that most people that write about Go and state their background have a background in some scripting/dynamic language. But those are the people that write about stuff like that; they may be a vocal minority, for all I know. But Pike has written that he was surprised that relatively few from languages like C++ has made a transition.
I'm confused by your comment. The author of this blog post had problems with the experimental design in the paper you're talking about. Specifically, he said: "However, since the scripting language group had significantly different (and easier) environment than the C-like language group, it’s hard to say how much of the measured difference in implementation time is from flaws in the experimental design and how much is real."

Said another way, the experimenters picked a task which some of the languages were designed for. Which sounds rather like the point you're trying to make, too. Did you confuse the quoted abstract with this author's comment?
MongoDB 2.8 – New WiredTiger Storage Engine Adds Compression (with Graphs)
Classic? I think you mean clbuttic :)

(ass -> butt)
The title of the article is based on the faulty premise that fewer editors means a decline.

Edit: the first sentence of the abstract indicates that they don't mean a literal decline in pure numbers :)
.gitignore ignores "foo" and "bar". Should I trust the rest of the project? Is this a convention?
That I readily believe. But game addiction hopefully does not have the longer term effects on the body that drugs are usually inflicting on their users. So one would hope that a gaming addiction could eventually be undone completely without lasting harm (other than wasted time).
xkcd 1446: Rosetta Landing Animated GIF
Yes, but in the long run it's much more likely that you'll emerge from a game addiction alive, in good health, and with the ability to integrate into society.
The Top Abilities Employers Demand from 2015 Graduates
...which is why it should disappear completely after it is no longer relevant.

After all, stores don't leave their signs up after a sale is over. "Oh sorry, yeah - that was $19 yesterday. We sold a ton of them! You can buy it today for $26 though."
Why was this comment downvoted? This is exactly why Phoenix — I mean Firebird — I mean Firefox — was started, because the Netscape Suite was a fiasco, but the underlying Gecko rendering engine was worth salvaging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
Keep in mind that document-level locking will be available only for WiredTiger storage engine and not default one (MMAPv1). MMAPv1 will support only collection level locking.
The same story goes for compression. Also only available in WiredTiger. Question remains - how stable will WiredTiger be in 2.8...
I doubt it. The .NET ecosystem is strong and C# is still the only way to write code for Windows without growing to hate the platform.
I have created a node package a couple of months ago which I regularly keep up-to-date with the latest upstream changes. It exports everything that the javascript version of libphonenumber offers. You can check it at http://seegno.github.io/google-libphonenumber/.
Hang in there man. Things get better, even if they seem like they never will. :)

Keep working on your hobby projects, maybe go enjoy the parks, and maybe see if there are any little webdev jobs or something available on Craigslist in your area. Worst case, see if anyone is hiring waiters.

Don't stop reaching out for help, and try not to spend too much time in your own head. Good luck!
Congrats on what seems like a very warm reception on HN!

Can you provide a little more clarity on what the Photon Kit listed in the store consists of? The short description says "several sensors" and the description in the modal is even more vague with "a couple of extra surprises".
I have to agree with this. Amazon sees the competitive landscape and their move is to attempt to create some form of vendor lock-in by providing the services that their customers have asked for or are probably hosting themselves. This is by no means a bad move and will result in holding on to a lot more customers as well as creating new revenue streams from those services. For someone like myself however, it completely turns me off the AWS path. I will use AWS as a compute resource, as well as any other cloud provider. They will fight a battle for profit while compute costs continue to come down allowing me to reap the benefits while building a cloud agnostic stack.
Sure i could point out that this mission could indirectly advance health technology (landing a robot on a comet is no small technological feat. The side-benefits of big research projects, such as the WWW that allows us to argue here, are no small thing)

But most importantly it bothers me that you think that risking a relatively small amount of money to expand our limits is not important. IF it were a "showoff" mission or a re-enactment of the moon landing, i would agree with you but this is about going into unknown territory. When Columbus set off to find a short path to the Indies, i bet someone would think the money was frivolously spent, but this guy never made it to the history books.

If you insist that we shouldn't take risks like this, you are literally asking the civilization to stop.
Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.

This is a convenient misunderstanding and refraiming of the privacy debate. Privacy is IN PART hiding, but privacy is also IN PART exercising the self control and granting the respect for others to not collect a dataum, even if they haven't made it outright infeasible to collect. Or for the more fishy situations, collecting dataum X for purpose Y (which the customer/user/exposed passerby likes), but refraining from using it for purpose Z (which they dislike).

Corporate interests want us to forget the second half. If a person reasons like "I technically can, therefore nothing is wrong with doing so," that's a sign of possible psychopathy. I don't see why we should let it slide when someone's simply appends "because money."
Ridescore: Grading US Cities on Car Service Regulations
FreeBSD is just much more organized, Linux is more of a hodge-podge.
are there any deis with ruby or rails application tutorials? I didn't see any, but for getting people from heroku, it would be great to see some tutorials so people can easily migrate.

on the minimum cluster of 3 nodes with 2 gb each, what is the minimum amount of apps that could be run?
Using Writeable CTEs to Improve Performance in PostgreSQL
The C++ and Xamarin stuff is native. Take a look at Xamarin.Forms. It looks very nice.