skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one of those interview questions that tests for someone reading hacker news and pretending that they figured it out all on their own...
A clear sign of a broken Scrum process is having daily standups with 5+ people who know/care little about what the other team members do.

Teams need to be tight and involved with eachother, otherwise the standup makes no sense.

What makes this a little difficult is that Scrum™ insists on cross-functional teams, i.e. all teams have a UI guy, a backend developer, a tester, etc. So you can end up with some very disjointed teams, like the one mainframe dude who works on stuff no one understands or cares about. Yet you have to hear about it every. morning.
Out of curiosity, how do you know if your interview process is better ? Is there some scientific method ? A lot of what you write makes sense, but how can I convince myself that I am not falling prey to Confirmation Bias ?
Is there a list of other source code annotations on Genius? Their "tech" section of the web site is full of crappy startup news and doesn't even link to this gem.
This video always makes me wish Apple would have bought Be, Inc. instead of NeXT. The BeOS was much more interesting than NeXTSTEP!
Next week: Google launches its own payroll service
I dont want to have to enter my email just to try it
Man, you layer it on thick. I just turned 30!
> Could you elaborate on that?

If the value isn't passed by (perhaps elidably) copying, that would mean it's getting allocated on the heap and deallocated.
This is HN, not Facebook.
Some time ago I was playing with the following idea: Let's take 2 randomly chosen research papers and merge them together to get something new. I have never realized it and consider it much likely to fail then give anything useful. This project seem a little similar to me.
Exactly that. Your body has a defect that causes it to choke itself to death in certain circumstances.

And thanks to the evolution, if not for science, the defect might be eliminated in a few generations. Or not - perhaps this is an optimal variant of immune the immune system. That is - 90% of organisms will have an excellent immunity, but it will go haywire in 10% of cases, whereas an alternative would be a system with 99% organisms having just an average immune system, but 1% being haywired.

Finally, evolution has no "target" or "goal" really. Some features will be broken, and some will be useless. Some may serve a purpose that's beyond our understanding or extremely complex.
There is a fairly interesting book written by the current finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis on the subject called "The Global Minotaur", he argues that after Bretton Woods the trade surplus of Germany especially vis a vis the United States was by design, as the profits of German corporations ultimately ended up in the hands of Wall Street. On the other hand Europe lacks such a surplus recycling mechanism, which according to him worsened the current economic crisis in Europe.
When I was a kid I was running BeOS and it was really cool at the time.
For the First Time for WordPress Users, Checking Existing Comments for Spam
Reverse Name Server Lookup – Find all domains using a specific name server
badthingfactory may have been waiting for a more tactful time to say it, rather than blurting out "You're full of it, I did that for you!" in the team meeting.

While such a thing may be true, and may need to be communicated to a manager, it probably looks bad to do it in front of one's peers.
Once you reach your goals you will be in exactly the same place as those who are 25, 21 and 19. Don't confuse ambition with competitiveness: if you are strictly ambitious about your life goals then it really doesn't matter if someone else reached theirs first.

Furthermore, in some ways you are ahead. Having a "normal" young life is a good thing. In some ways I pity young successes like Evan Spiegal: they never had the camaraderie and joy of e.g. scratching together some money with friends for some beer and steak for a BBQ. In a nutshell, success is about improving your life, not replacing it. One day you'll value the days when you had the ability to procrastinate.
This is a cliche, but worth bringing up. Sanders, founder of KFC, started selling fried chicken at 40, and KFC founded when he was 62.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders
Yes, please check http://florin.link
Used the .eu one, thank you!
I thought ,at some point in the future, there would be an effort to recreate all of the game's artwork and sounds from scratch, at which point the original will no longer be required. Has anyone started this work?
It'd be interesting to know where Apple would be if they had bought Be, Inc. Would we have iOS? Would Apple be successful? All very interesting!
Too late because you're 26? More like too early. The way you deal with the gnawing in your chest is to correct your view of success with a healthy dose of reality. The 21 year old success is almost exclusively a lie, little more than a media fabrication; don't buy what they're selling.

Here's a nice list, and the age at which they got their big hit:

Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi)
I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island
I remember that "extra colours" could be archived on a ZX Spectrum using the bleed of the RF or composite output.
Ask HN: Any good books on Affiliate Marketing?
I would like to learn how the Affiliate Marketing industry works (especially, but not necessarily, in Internet), but all I can find on Amazon make my bullshit detector go through the roof. It feels like if the main point is to scam everyone, the reader included.

Is there any boring, serious, textbook-like, book out there that gives real information? A book that treats this business as a way to exchange work and luck into money, exactly like any other business out there?
All good interviewing is done this way. The goal of the interview is to get into the thought process of the interviewee. You just need them to give you a thread to start pulling.

I think a lot of candidates think they're immediately screwed if they don't have a compelling answer to every question. It's not seen that way on the other side of the table, at least not when I'm there. Often the interviewer himself is just trying to find a foothold that he can take to really start digging into something. Good interviewers throw out a bunch of questions that are designed to get you talking until you start talking about something they can sink their teeth into. Bad interviewers have no idea what to do and throw out stupid, random questions that sound like job interview questions to them, accept your answer, and then do it again for the entirety of the 30-60 minutes. At the end of your interview, they'll make the same decision they would've made if they'd only seen your picture and were told they had to decide from that (unless you managed to offend the interviewer during your responses ;) ).

Any nervousness I had as a candidate was permanently resolved after I started interviewing people and seeing how others reacted to interviews. Most interviewers are not disqualifying you for all the stupid crap you imagine. If you're good and they pass, they're either that incompetent in which case you don't want to work for them anyway, or they have many good candidates and the choice is then based on unknowable differences in perception like perceived likeability or other superficialities.
Sent. That was the last one.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I’m not just blindly spamming Google. For every one of those 150 applications, I looked at the job description and thought to myself, “Yeah, I can do that,” before hitting the Submit button. I have a lot of skills, and a lot of the postings are duplicates. I’m not applying to jobs that I don’t think I can do, like Strategic Negotiator for Network Content Distribution in Asia or anything like that.

If you notice Thomas’ posts about Matasano, they don’t filter based on resume at all. I wish everybody did that.
So you could cover the entire surface with 1.1 meters of ice. Does this mean Mars has a higher water-to-surface-area ratio than Earth?
While that may be technically true, AFAIK it's hard for someone to immigrate to the US. If I wanted to move to the US tomorrow, I believe it would involve me having to get a job before I got there.

One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.
I've used word "replace" in another comment about pair-programming.
It feels now that it's a trend in "cargo-cult-agile" to somehow inverse agile manifesto principles. E.g. replace understanding of how team should work with a formal sertified scrum process - "you do iterations, standups and stuff - you fine!"
Burn-down carts and sheer numbers of closed tasks disguise real state of the software being developed(just create more tasks and then split them to create volume).
smartctl --test=short /dev/sdX
smartctl --all /dev/sdX

Check "SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED" just under the drive stats. If it fails, the drive is definitely very faulty.

Any non-zero of the following would make me likely to reject. If you're in real need and can stretch your standards a little, five or fewer of any could be acceptable.
Multi_Zone_Error_Rate
Offline_Uncorrectable
Reallocated_Sector_Ct
Reported_Uncorrect
Runtime_Bad_Block
End-to-End_Error

Non-zero Current_Pending_Sector may be a bad sign, but may also clear itself in time. Treat as above.

Any non-zero, but not very large (i.e. obviously misinterpreted) of Command_Timeout.

Power_on_hours more than 10,000 means a consumer disk is getting a bit old. If it runs above 45°C idle (depending on ambient) may also mean it's getting old or is worn. Any breached temperature threshold that isn't again, misinterpreted (i.e. 255°C).
Any Old_age or Pre-fail attributes that breach the threshold indicate an old/unwell drive.
Hello,

Yes, there's plenty of reasons. First of all, babylon.js for instance, has been made specifically for the web. It's been tested on all browsers & on as much mobile devices as possible. Our shaders architecture has been made for that: to run on as much platforms as possible, mobile included. We're also spending a lot of time optimizing the performance for the web browsers and we're taking into account some of its specifics: offline via IDB, support for multi-touches (Touch & Pointer Events), streaming of assets, GC friendly, etc.

We have plenty of tools to help you testing the behavior of our engine and your code in the targeted env, the web: the sandbox tool, the debug layer, emitting user marks for F12 tools. We even have something we’re very proud of, our playground: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/. Test & debug your code directly in the browser. Learn by experimenting in the target platform.

Moreover, babylon.js is free & open-source. You can debug your game and our engine directly in the browser. You can tune our engine to your needs if wanted as you have access to the source code, fork it and do whatever you want with it. You’ll also write the logic of your code in pure JS (or any great compiler like TypeScript or CofeeScript).

Babylon.js offers then a pure web experience. You can customize everything you want, handle the UI yourself with the ton of existing libraries, add some cool CSS features on top of it, mix it with SVG. Well, it is the web. Last but not least, we have almost finished our Unity exporter to Babylon.js that will dump all the graphics & sounds assets from the Unity scene to our .babylon format. It even seems much more efficient that the Unity 5 export.

Well, you see that this is a completely different philosophy. On the other hand, Unity 5 benefits from a huge community & assets. But creating a simple scene with a couple of meshes could take several minutes to export to WebGL and create up to 100MB of JS! And it's a very specific JS based on asm.js that can't be read by human nor modified. Plus it will only run correctly on Firefox (soon on Spartan too). At last, you will have to write the logic of your game in C#. But it’s a real great option for games developers that don’t master the beauty of the web. Unity is doing everything for them.

Conclusion: Unity 5 targets people with games already built for mobiles and will offer a very specific WebGL option. It's closed source. Babylon.js targets web games developers that build games specifically for this platform. It's free & open-source.

Note: I'm probably not objective as I'm the co-author of babylon.js ;) But I'm sharing my vision.
Philosophy’s Great Minds Problem
On Atari ST, it was possible to change the palette colors in midflight, and using that trick to display more colors on screen. The technique was used by Spectrum 512 and Quantum Paint and many demos.

"QPs 512 mode is pretty straightforward; its only color limitation being that it can display a maximum of 40 colors on a single scan line. Mode 4K uses a special technique called "interlacing" in order to display a supposed 4,096 "colors
-- http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n2/quantumpaint.html
see also http://www.atari-wiki.com/index.php/ST_Picture_Formats
I've used Scrum/Agile for several years and daily stand-ups seemed to the thing a lot of people hated. As a started my own business (Financial Analytics for SaaS) I finally understood why. An effective process shouldn't need polling to keep it going - which the meetings really are.

I'm happy to see new processes appear, where that kind of extra hassle is removed, like: http://timeblock.com

In timeblock, communication happens when a developer can't get his task done. Otherwise everyone can assume that the week will proceed as planned.

In practice this seems to keep people happier than Agile/Scrum.
Firefox seems to have a lot of Web Audio bugs. I've already pinged one of the developer of the web audio stacks on Twitter. But I probably need to open a firebug request also.

Our Web Audio engine runs fine in Chrome & Spartan.
> big ones, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA/Netbeans, for all their bells and whistles

How many languages do your "big ones" support? How easy it is to add a support for a new language?
Thanks for the feedback zubairq, I completely understand where your coming from.
I have read often that in academic settings, many people make their biggest research contributions in their mid- to late twenties. That's where you're at, you seem to know what is important to you, you are working hard; it sounds to me like you are doing all the right things. If you spend less time looking at the facades of other people's success, you'll be fine. And facades is what they are.

As for the procrastination, an unexpected learning for me recently was the insight that I really need to start my day with a clear head, free of distractions. No email, no hackernews, no twitter. Sit down and get straight to work, get in the flow, do a few hours of really good work. Protect this time, eliminate all sources of interruption. I would guess I produce 2/3 of my work output in the first 1/3 of my work day, which makes me feel happy and relaxed for the rest of the day. Recommended reading: "Daily Rituals, how Artists Work", by Mason Curry.

Finally, don't forget that you are only young once. Party, do crazy and stupid things, that's your privilege. You can always work more (and get rich/famous) later in life. You'll just replace youthful energy with experience.
My favourite: https://github.com/mrkrstphr/illacceptanything/pull/230
The Geek of Chic
Why people hate PHP, a book from hell
You are comparing yourself to others way too much. If you want to be happy, stop comparing your abilities and characteristics to those of other people.
I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!)

I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward.

After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I stuck with it.

But I'll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.
May I suggest the following
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)

Can you find a question (not an answer) that can help you look at things differently?
Who is it who is jealous?
How does it feel to be jealous?
What's going on right now?
The problem with that comparison is that responding to job postings at Google is really fast. Once you enter your data in their system, it’s just click, tab-tab-tab, enter. It’s not like I’m spending hours every day begging for Google to give me a job.

And I’d be really disappointed if all the submissions just went into the same person’s inbox. Somebody at Google should speak up if that’s the case. The way I expect Google to run, each submission just goes to that division’s hiring staff, and Google has a lot of divisions.
I would commend your friend's wife for choosing the right priorities. Family is the most important thing in the world. 7 months is a really short time for maternity leave.

How can someone "exploit maternity"? Maternity is not the same thing as being sick. Being sick is a transient personal thing while parenthood is a process that lasts through a lifetime.

People need sleep and eating. People are not machines. The fact that people are not required to work 24 hours a day recognizes this. People also need an occasional time off. This is recognized as well.

Family is a similar natural need, but with different temporal cycles. Any workplace that does not recognize the allowances required for family is not really in it for the long term.

Any coworkers that begrudge a maternity or paternity leave are themselves at fault, not the parent.
For anyone who is prone to ignore vertical dynamics, keep in mind that this OS was competing with Mac OS 8, Windows 98, and GNU/Linux in the Lesstif/GNOME 1.x era. In short, it trumped all the rest in speed, development environment, multimedia, stability...

But the Wintel cartel was stronger than ever. Microsoft even settled with Be years afterwards for colluding to keep their OS off of any vendor computers. But that can't ever commit backwards into history what computing would be like if the best OS at the time had been given a fair shake.
Same age, used to have same mindset when I was right out of college.

I now believe, firmly, that being intensively competitive with everyone like that, constantly comparing yourself to others, will greatly increase your chances of failure. People who accomplish truly great things, technology, sports, politics, philosophy, whatever... get so invested in their vision that they pay zero attention to what others are doing except in a practical sense, and they definitely don't measure themselves by other's external standards.

I mean, if I were an investor or something, and I knew that all you really cared about was success for the sake of success, I would get out real quick.

You should do some introspecting, make some tough changes, and get rid of a stifling mindset like that.
Best Practices for Improving Your Sencha Apps Course
The worst part about it is it becomes a way to force people to come in at a certain time. Look, if I only have GOD FORBID 6 hours of time overlapping with someone and want to come in 2 hours later, I think I can SOMEHOW catch them. Especially since they sit to my left.
If you like BeOS, you should check out Haiku which is an open-source OS inspired by BeOS [0].

[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/