skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Former MySpace engineer here. Got there when it was 1500 people and left when it was 300. The company failed for these reasons:

* MySpace sold ads to Google when they didn't have ad inventory to sell. MySpace had to meet impression thresholds each month or pay penalties to Google. To meet those requirements, MySpace added ads where they should not have been. Impression ads were put up in odd places. MySpace forced users to log in for the sake of generating an impression. The result was a poor user experience.

* Tom & Chris were from an email spam shop background. eUniverse bought Tom & Chris email spam company. Once eUniverse had the emails, Tom & Chris had nothing to do, so they put their effort into creating something new. Friendster was doing well at the time, they decided to clone it, the result was MySpace. Spam and poor user experiences were part of their upbringing and it showed in MySpace.

* There were no coding standards. Engineering teams worked in silos with each team having their own standards. For example, at one time someone put a picture of all the different submit buttons in the break room. Tom & Chris shared this brake room. I'm not sure if the poster was motivational or insulting. We all knew the site looked ugly and this picture of all the different submit buttons quantified it.

* MySpace didn't leverage an API. FB users had the ability to add plug ins like calendars and classified ads from a myriad of sources. The result was users were able to choose the best solution. MySpace users were given the same tools built internally. Those tools were pushed out in rapid succession, without much effort, and users were left with poorly created solutions.

* MySpace cherished metrics that had no meaning. Your number of friends, for example, were meaningless. People like Percival created companies to help people add friends under the guise that having friends meant something. MySpace bought into that snake oil, Percival perpetuated it, then they hired him on as a VP.

* MySpace thought allowing users to create their own unique page was a competitive advantage. Users were given the ability to embed their own HTML within their own page. The result was ugly bloated pages. At MySpace, we had an internal message board to debate ideas. This idea was debated and people in product defended the ability to customize pages as a competitive advantage.

* Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'. Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll hear things and I'll leave it at that.

* Employees were not given stock. Given salaries were great, people did not seem to be emotionally invested in the companies success.
What Is the Real Value of a College Degree?
Domain Switcher: For switching between dev/stage/prod/individual ec2 hosts/etc.

Incognito Filter: Always load certain pages in Incognito mode.
I second GetHoneybadger, incredibly useful for pulling up domain traffic/whois etc...
vacant vacant retail property tax everyone!
It's Bayesian evidence that the subject might be more complex, yes.
It's running on the Java VM, so I guess catching the exception created by the user pressing CTRL-C is very bad. It's also bad to catch the one created by Runnable.interrupt.
Agreed. It's pretty cool, but if you don't have Flash installed it's not a reason to install Flash.
MEAN = Mongo, Express, Angular, Node
1) You are critical to the company's success yet..

2) They don't want to compensate you to your liking..

3) So you walk. Yes, this is meant to intentionally hurt the company with the only lever that you have (your skill set and institutional knowledge).

You working for this company costs you opportunities elsewhere.

You're convincing yourself to stay because it "doesn't solve any problems and certainly could create some." Your vague fears are holding you back.

But if we get rid of these vague fears, here's what we know is certain:

1) You're critical to the success of the company.

2) But you're not going to be compensated to your liking

3) And you're costing yourself other opportunities by sticking around.

Quit being scared, look them straight in the eye, and say "I am walking unless I get X,Y,Z." If they say no, then kindly resign and don't look back. Bring on the lawsuit (highly doubtful).
I mean who's first doesn't matter, before trivia crack there was quiz up, and etc. I only mentioned it cause it seems recently trivia crack as blown up.

> but we dream of many many people playing at once, which would be pretty unique, no?

Isn't this kinda like quiz-up, but instead of matching me with a random stranger it's a group?
it will, in general, instantiate N-n/N records (even distribution, right - N=total records, n=sample size)
that is still too much data to fetch to the client for any large data set.
I'm curious. If the "default deny" theory pans out and we discover it does indeed result in less women, why would you conclude that sexism is not a factor? Seems to me it would be evidence of systemic sexism, reinforced by an inability to see that the rules and structures provide more mobility for some and not others.

For the record, I don't think women can't cope with "default deny" mode and I do think all genders have to face the anecdote you selected. However, when the hierarchy is dominated by one gender, there is an additional hurdle that the privileged gender will not encounter.
Ask HN: Anyone familiar with Namecheap's JavaScript bot detection method?
I noticed today that upon my initial visit to the Namecheap.com home page I was prompted with the message:

"We're just verifying you are a real human and not a bot. After a couple of seconds, our site will automatically load and the rest of your visit will be nice and fast. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Further inspection reveals some obfuscated JavaScript along with a base64 encoded .png image.

Anyone familiar with the method being used here and it's level of effectiveness?
I know this is a bit off topic and a touch on the personal side(feel free to not answer) but I am curious how you taught yourself to read body language? Did you use books or trial and error, or??
Well C levels executives are the only persons I support unconditional death penalty for. But mandatory opening of all source code will be more valuable than money.
Looks pretty great!

My experience: installed it but couldn't figure out how to import existing itineraries, and nothing at https://hopon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us, so uninstalled after a few mins.

Best of luck!
That it will not be around in the future.
Imagine you are writing software to sit on a router to:

1) collect data for some length of time, and

2) thereafter have available for querying the (maybe approximate) 25th, 50th, 95th, and 99th percentile TCP connection bandwidth thresholds, and

3) signal when a connection grows beyond the 95th percentile.

You only have a fairly limited amount of memory.
vim & webstorm
D'oh. Yes, I think you're right. That'll teach me to try to mentally debug code at 2AM!

I'll fix the code and publish a new gem a bit later today. Thanks!
"* I was bad at reading body language."

This was such a huge issue for me. Being so observant, it's easy to judge someone based on body language and tone. Yes we can gain valuable information from this observation but we should not assume those observations are correct. I find it very easy to assume my assumptions are correct and this often creates situations where there are none.

Thanks for sharing.
thanks for the feedback! I just did an update and elaborated on this point.
>In the old days, I've gotten jobs with 30 minute conversations. Is that pretty much gone now?

That's an unrealistic comparison. If I'm a hiring exec and I'm going to invest in you-- we want to thoroughly you check out. That includes multiple conversations, team buy-in, and a technical test. That's how we shake-out individuals who are serious from posers.
BackBlaze -- I have a 2009 MBP and my wife has a cheap 2008 Dell laptop and it runs poorly on them (takes a lot of resources), so I don't run it continuously (just nightly). Other people I know rave about it though.

The price and service is otherwise great. I pay the annual plan, so $100/yr for two unlimited backups.
Talent agents for top 10% developers
Why is this at the top? Because corporate junkies be all like ohh shoot am I gonna get fired for reading Hacker News....
Here's an example: https://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/570336180849373185
Yeah, me too. It seems like desktop search as a product sector just kind of fell out of favor one day -- one moment there were a bunch of products scrapping it out, the next they were all gone. I have no idea why, I found it desktop search incredibly useful and would also happily have paid for a good product. But no really good ones exist anymore.

The even more mind-boggling thing is that for Google especially, desktop search would seem to be a huge opportunity. Imagine how precisely you could target ads to users if they let you scan their entire hard drive! Jeez louise.
My advice when asked for input on YC applications
Knowing your age and stage in career would make it easier to give a helpful response. I can relate to that anxiety when I was first getting my career started, but it all lessened as I aged a bit and became more competent in my domain.

But if you aren't simply fresh out of college, and notice the same pattern in other areas of your life too, then you have something that's in your interest to address.

I know you're not seeking 'an answer' but, the best advice I can give is be motivated primarily by what you want. I remember reading an article on HN that's stuck in my mind about showing up everyday, taking what you want from your job, and then simply wait to get fired. As in, don't orient yourself around others' demands (to guarantee employment), but orient yourself around what you want to get out of it, and if you get fired then you get fired.
""How Github Uses Github To Fire A Github Employee" deck coming soon
Zach was a quite visible ambassador for GH, an excellent speaker and spreader of GH love and lore. Would love to hear the story behind this.
I'm soon releasing the most useless(but fun) extension, which will allow you to play Gen 1 and 2 Pokemon games over the internet on a real Game Boy: https://github.com/pepijndevos/TCPoke
What do Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have to do with Github?
If nothing else, I'm thankful to Zach for a lot of the guidance he's provided on his blog over the years. When we did a "field trip" to Github thanks to Scott, I shared Zach's quote with the engineers here:

"We’re currently at 35 employees and growing, and this approach still works great. But managers love to assign hours for a reason: it gives them the illusion that hours can measure performance.
If you don’t go hard on hours, you do have to look at different metrics. How good is their code? Are they fixing bugs? Are they involved in work, or is the greater flexibility not motivating them?
It’s difficult to make these qualitative judgements, but they’re still going to be more valuable than “did this guy put in his ten hours of work today”. Because as soon as you make it about hours, their job becomes less about code and more about hours."

4 years ago a lot of us had just come to Kiva from corporate gigs and such and were building a culture of meritocracy rather than bureaucracy and even though this advice seems obvious now, they were truly inspiring words at the time. Thanks Zach for all the writing!
I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

If this were Reddit, this is the point where I would post the "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" image.
Why was he fired?
Wasn't this guy called out by Julie Ann Horvath, the one who complained about harassment at Github? Guess this has nothing to do with that?
The customizable web presence is what killed it.
Google Summer of Code in 10 Minutes: A Crash Course
Hey let's face it. Why are you employed? You're employed to generate more value to a companies product. I assume you're working there for at least 3 months or so. I think the fact you're not fired at this very moment proves that you'll doing your job somewhat right.

Don't get me wrong i know your fears quite well, but the thing is sometimes you have to face realities. There is no easy way to deal with it but a thing i had to learn was that dedication an passion are far more valueable to a company than failure.

You seem to me like a guy who reflects a lot of his own actions. Think of Software Development. A bit of reflection can lead to some kick ass smart solutions but a lot of it causes performance issues. Same with your mind.

A thing which worked for me was to get intouch with my coworkers. Talk about work related issues, do code reviews and such things. That is a healthy way of validate whether or not you're performing well. You'd be surprised by the fact of how your coworkers realize your perfomance.

I can't give you any advice on how you could possibly accept that feedback, but maybe you could try if this and it will work out for you.

I'll hope this comment helps you in any way gaining more self confidence.

Rock on
where do you get all the data for planes, hotels from? are you scraping it? do they block it after a while?
If anything, it's a huge pain to configure and manage because his software follows the Unix way more faithfully than most Unix server software: collections of small programs that communicate over well defined interfaces.

As a programmer, it's great. The very minimal feature set and lack of high level abstractions makes the code very easy to understand and modify. The fact that everything uses stdio makes debugging really easy.

As a sysadmin it sucks because providing the features your users rightly expect forces you to maintain patches as well as configuration. And a good deal of that configuration is long pipelines where tiny changes have huge consequences. Set the magic option in the magic variable to change behavior. Certain files that aren't explicitly mentioned anywhere just have to exist, and one wrong permission or file ownership just breaks everything and it's really annoying to figure out what's wrong.
On Mac you can use a 3-finger tap on a world or select "Look Up In Dictionary" from the context menu to look it up in the dictionary and Wikipedia.
I'm not aware of any specific reading... but I'll share a few more thoughts:

The key is to not make it a blame game. Every bug that is discovered on staging or production should (in theory) trigger a root cause analysis of some kind... because it means that one of the earlier processes failed.

If you have manual QA people, it's mostly just improving the QA plan and adding edge cases and domain knowledge, but it can also sometimes be that there are data bugs or integrations on production that are not on staging, slightly different on staging, etc.

With every bug there is an action plan for how to fix the bug, but that is separate from the knowledge that we gain about our system because the bug occurred. Maybe the fix is to get someone to manually clean up some dirty data that wound up on production due to someone forgetting to validate/clean input data ... that's great but from the QA perspective you might have learned that several of your steps failed.

So I think the main thing is considering bugs opportunities to learn about the system as a whole. The philosophy behind chaos monkey at NetFlix is that even a well tested, solid system needs to be resilient, so any opportunity to make your system stronger (regardless of the cause) is a good thing. In particular, any bug found before it hits production is a win overall.

I'd also add that it's important to let the knowledge flow back out of QA and into the product team, etc. QA people often end up becoming internal domain experts who catch lots of issues, but that is something that quickly exceeds what one person can remember/understand as a system scales, so organizational learning/practices pay off big.
Bratäpfel Mit Aprikosensauce – Baked Apples with Apricot Sauce
Combine the apricot cubes with the raisins, marzipan and half the apricot liqueur, and press the mixture down into the apples with a spoon.
Place the apples on the tin baking sheet and bake in a hot oven at 425 ˚F (220 ˚C) for about 20 minutes.
Back in December 2012, Julie Horvath expressed her desire to have Zach fired. I wonder if these two incidents are actually related.

@Holman is my ex-partner. He was complicit in the actions of
both Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner and even admitted to
plotting with Theresa Preston-Werner to get women at the
company fired. He should be let go from GitHub and I regret
being kind to him in previous interviews.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/ims-and-email-support-allegation...
Thanks for your reply. Pertaining your last point, I've actually already added some scope creep to the OP (see the second paragraph of the question section, pertaining expiration, etc.).
> Part of the problem with not admitting publicly that you were fired is that people inevitably assume you're moving onto something bigger and better

I thought the issue with admitting it was that people would now question your reliability as an honest contributor to future workplaces.
Human nature is really amazing. After the reading the first 4 paragraph I saw his openness and honesty. I felt compassion and trust. And I was already thinking to myself "Zach really looks like a cool guy; if he is skilled I would probably hire him", without attaching any significance whatsoever to the fact he was fired. If you are reading this, Zach, continue to be open, honest, accept your mistakes, show you do learn from them to continuously become a better person, and you will have a good life :)
a visit just to your welcome page at groupon.com attempts to install a huge amount of proprietary Javascript on my machine — lucky I use NoScript to reject it

That's an eye-opening perspective! For the most part I agree with your point about alienating fewer people but the above quote stuck out.
I wonder when they'll acknowledge the OG art made with code people and link to this: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=thumbup
"Tree Style Tab" is very useful if you like to have a lot of tabs open at the same time:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
The first and last wearable you'll need
Google Moving to Rank Sites on “Facts” Rather Than Popularity
The most advanced wearable in the world - use multiple applications and control with simple gestures..what do you guys think?
Entering Phone number now MUST for Tor users to open a new Twitter account
> It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

You mean like google docs?
+1 for Postman, I use it all the time. The history feature is especially great for me.
Ancient oceans in Mars
Maybe because it touches on our own fears of inadequacy. "I mean whoa, if Zach Holman was fired from GitHub, what does that mean about me?"

Of course, it doesn't mean much. Different situations, different people. I can't deny that when I saw this I thought about myself and my own company in the context of termination.
By comparison, food processing companies introduce 9 new food products every day [1]. 70% fail within a year. [2]

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/processin...

[2] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/failure-rate-new-items-launch...
Another way to put it is that reservoir sampling only makes sense if you have to iterate over the entire table regardless. That means, no keys, row numbers or unique values that can chosen at random and found more quickly.

It seems less, not more, likely that this kind of situation would exist in a huge table - what use would such a table be if you could only process it sequentially?
An example of 'business as usual'...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Neville_Nevill

I wrote the first draft of this page in 2004 as a result of an interest in Victorian lunar observers (long story). This minor Victorian astronomer produced an important moon map and contributed serious work on celestial mechanics that was rendered obsolete by Ernest Brown's major improvement in lunar ephemeris computation.

The subsequent history shows a purposeful improvement in the page and adds a couple of references. I think the current version of the page is better than the one I contributed.

I'm wondering if the wikipedia process sort of mostly works but gets derailed around notability/contentious issues?
I highly recommend Dev HTTP Client
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dhc-resthttp-api-c...
I was there before Facebook changed the expectation. Obviously companies retrieved this information in other ways before federated identity but the idea that you can't get an app or a service without handing over your real name and friends list is entirely on Facebook.
List of great haskell talks that you might be interested
Regarding Partner Offers – The Official µTorrent Blog
proof is in the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it bad for him to talk about this publicly and insinuate that his manager was shit and that he was fired for no good reason?

This situation reminds me a lot of the time an ex-employee of reddit complained about his firing, on reddit (!!), and was publicly called out for it by reddit's CEO at the time [1].

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...
MoMA Recognizes Susan Kare, the Designer of the Macintosh's Original Icons
That was my first thought too. But this seems too far after that incident for it to be the cause.
I have had my share of anxiety that led to stress that led to depression that led to my selling my stake in the company for a dollar.

There is no easy cure, but there is a simple one!

First understand that shame and anxiety cannot survive sunlight, so start share your worries.

Also start doing yoga/tai chi/meditation or some similar physical and mental training.

And then practise letting go (see Leo from zenhabits book on the subject.)

It works slowly and takrs time, but it works!
If it were connected, you would figure the firing would come sooner than two years later. Though it is possible there was another incident.
Most google code projects don't use git.
No. It's a great way to separate one's involvement from the issue. Things like this happen all the time and you don't hear about it because it's treated exactly like this. CEOs are displaced at the top level in a way that makes it look like a natural next step.
I cannot figure out how to actually use Panda. There don't seem to be any signup or download/install links on that page.
Just for completeness' sake: The 5150 came out in 1981, the VT340 in 1987. The thread was from 2002.

I'm German, so take this with a grain of salt: I think there might've been humor involved.
It was volatile before his passing as well. I think earnings volatility is an excellent explanation.
I think the quote is from Churchill not PG.
Great Advice anyways.
This doesn’t really change the fundamental problem—most people think that all they have to do in order to be compliant with the GNU LGPL is release the (modified) source of the library under the GNU LGPL. The licence is (reasonably) clear that this is not the case, but this confusion is one of the reasons why it was renamed from the GNU Library GPL to the GNU Lesser GPL.

I personally recommend against using the GNU LGPL because of this confusion. If you want something that does what most people think the GNU LGPL does, use the MPL with a GNU GPL exception. (IMO, the MPL is a superior licence to anything in the GNU GPL family, but it is also not my licence of choice—that is the MIT-style licence.)
I actually don't feel he trashed GitHub at all. The article was more about the stigma of being fired and how it made him feel versus whether his firing was valid or not.
The investigation into the claims was performed and completed in April 2014. https://github.com/blog/1823-results-of-the-github-investiga...

I don't believe it would take a year to fire someone.