skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, this is eerily close to describing me. Even the bit about your first coding job being at a young age at a research laboratory (though mine was a university).

> When my grades dropped low enough my school's intervention programs kicked in. It was suggested that I go get checked out for learning disabilities. Since I felt somewhat compelled to show I was making an effort, I did.

This is where the stories diverge though. My college's intervention program was basically them calling me lazy and forcing me to sign a paper agreeing that I would improve. I knew I couldn't accomplish that, so I didn't re-enroll the next semester.

I had always accepted that I was very lazy and learned to work around/with it. But over the past few years I feel like it has been getting much worse. My passions are starting to feel like chores. I used to practice the guitar for several hours each day, but now it's closer to an hour each month. Even sitting down to watch a whole movie on Netflix can be tough. I'm not sure if I've watched even a single movie in it's entirety at all this year.

But of course, I won't even notice myself spending 4 hours aimlessly browsing the web without leaving my chair until I realize that I've wasted my night...

It's gotten so bad that I have considered it might not just be laziness and comments like yours are really encouraging. But I don't know where I'd begin. And, frankly, the idea of seeing a specialist for help or medication really scares me.

Do I just google for psychiatrists near me and give one a call? Would I need to find one that specializes in ADHD? Are there any websites that can help direct me?

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this comment by the way.
… and every year, millions of people lose data because it was stored on a non-redundant filesystem without strong integrity checks.

There are multiple businesses which sell software which exhaustively attempts to recover data from corrupt drives & cards.

It's a standard service listed on the local phone / computer shops.

I see messages on my neighborhood's mailing list every so often from someone looking for help recovering as much as possible from a flash card.

It's simply absurd to claim that the status quo works for the general public. It's not terrible, probably not that different from various mishaps which befell printed photo albums, etc. but there's still plenty of room for the industry to give people safer tools.
EULAs can't really be considered the same as contracts in a philosophical sense, since they're presented after sale.

Back in the 90s, there was a Microsoft printed EULA that said that breaking the shrinkwrap counted as agreeing to the EULA, but you couldn't access the EULA without breaking the shrinkwrap (and opening the box). :)
And there's no chance you will from reading this article, since there's no link to the ESA's statement, so the whole article is based on 4 excerpted words. I would find this article much more persuasive if there were a better attempt to establish the content.

This is the ESA's position: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/En...

I am broadly sympathetic to the EFF's position, but the ESA's argument is a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than the way the EFF is portraying it. I see this happening more and more with the EFF, and I trust their advocacy less and less because of it. It's one thing to be for a particular position, it's another to misrepresent that of your opponent in order to garner support. If you're confident of your position, you shouldn't feel the need to obscure access to primary sources so people can make up their own minds.

Oddly, while the EFF has multiple submissions to the copyright office as part of the open rulemaking process, and they're available on the EFF website, I've seen little acknowledgement of the fact the the Copyright Office is conducting a 3 year open rulemaking exercise on this topic, or about the Congressional committee that's re-examining copyright issues. I strongly urge interested parties to draft and submit their own arguments directly to the copyright office, where they will carry much greater weight.

http://copyright.gov/rulemaking/

PS if you're only interested in proposals to add exceptions to the DMCA, they're here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/
and here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-020615/
One key problem here is that the business wasn't particularly reliable, so even if Pincus had a reasonable measure of employee performance, there was undeniable uncertainty in what realizable monetary value that performance actually had.

If you have an employee who is underperforming but you can't find cause to fire them, then you as a manager screwed up. You matched them with the wrong role, failed to develop them, or maybe you (or the employee) just got unlucky and it's really true that some unexpected event prevented healthy employment. Then execute a layoff if you really have to. Invoking a poorly understood clawback measure only further demonstrates managerial incompetence.
Cash is king. Citizen Kane comes to mind:

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.
but if you stop assuming processes are iid Normal, the math gets somewhere between hard and very hard
Very cool. I'm not really the target audience for this, but if you could make it work in TypeScript, I might actually try programming in JavaScript (well, TypeScript) again.
I walked into my local Apple store in November with an iPhone that wouldn't wake from a screen-touch, 15 minutes later I walked out with brand new handset.

Apple's still like that, its why I buy their hardware.
People pay for the experience: see college.
Right, so what you see is in areas where people have a choice, Comcast rationally decreases prices and increases service levels. That's the entire logic behind Google Fibre. But for most of the country, there's literally no choice of broadband and there's no incentive for Comcast to improve.
I had a feeling you might cite some of these examples :)

Admittedly the Lyft example was unknown to me--I'll have to dig in, sounds interesting.

Specifically to airlines, I'd direct you to some interesting info on Southwest[1]. While TBH the case study doesn't really prove to me the causation of success by being customer-centric, it does show that they can compete in that industry with that approach and be successful.

For the cable industry I'd argue that Sonic.net has carved our a nice business for themselves in part because of their amazing service. That doesn't really disprove your statement that it relegates a business to a niche of the market and makes it hard to expand outside the niche, but I again think back to the question of correlation vs. causation. Comcast, TWC, etc. were all well entrenched before Sonic.net even existed. So it is hard to say how much of a factor that played in their limited ability to compete vs. the fact that they focus on customer service.

Respectfully, what I still remain unconvinced of with your examples is what exactly Comcast and others like them are leaving on the table by not having awesome customer support experiences. You don't necessarily need to break the bank to have one, but you do need strong direction and culture, and that comes from the top down.

I go back to the notion of customer acquisition costing potentially 5x as much vs. retention costs (all hypothetical averages of course). If an industry has razor-thin margins and cost-focused customers, wouldn't you think it would make them a lot of money to maximize the LTV of said customers?

[1] http://digitalstrategies.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cds-uploads/case...
No, what happened was that early employees got equity grants that seemed reasonable when they were hired. When Zynga became a smash hit, those unvested options became very valuable.

Then, Zygna's board decided to try and weasel out of paying the options. They made up the excuse that the employees were "underperforming", but really they just didn't want to give some low-ranking employee the $1M+ payday they had earned by being an early employee of a successful startup.

Instead of outright firing the employee (a downside of "at-will employment"), they instead pressured the employees to give back their unvested options.

That breaks the startup social contract. If the company is going to try and weasel of its options when they are a unicorn, why would any employee accept equity as compensation?

I.e., you hire an employee and give them $50k of options. Suppose the business is a 1000x unicorn, and those options are now worth $50M. Why pay a software engineer $50M? So you ask the employee to give back his unvested options, because his "fair share" was only $50k and not $50M.

Also remember that, if the employee is fired, they have 60 days to exercise, come up with the strike price, pay a huge tax bill, for shares that may not be liquid (or ever worth anything). So the employer does have leverage over the employee, because they're forced to exercise and pay big $$ if they're fired. It's unethical to exploit that leverage.
I deleted root and it froze. Where can I file a bug report? This is unacceptable.
What you're talking about is a hedge. Hedges are expensive. A better strategy to a lot of investors is to "hedge" by trading smaller. Of course the spectacular failures you name were spectacular because they weren't hedged and were done with immense leverage. There is no way looking forward to predict if a hedge that eats 1/2 your returns every year is a better investment than just taking a catastrophic loss every several years. And it's not as simple as taking a 50% haircut on every trade: in reality maintaining a hedge will turn many of your small winners into losers.

I personally guard against the prospect both by staying small (trading with only a small portion of my total account) and by maintaining net short deltas (beta-weighted). Keeping short deltas in a bull market with upward drift also has a cost, but it lets me sleep easier at night.
Even if the implementation turns out to be lacking, the goal is good:

> As customers adopt modern applications and next-generation cloud technologies, they need an OS that delivers speed, agility and lower resource consumption.

I know the kneejerk reply to this is, "Yeah, Linux!", but I can think of at least 2 Windows-based applications in my company which would benefit from this. And in general, yay competition.
Reminds me... when I post a support request to Google Apps, the issue description header says "in as much detail as possible"... but the field is limited to 1000 characters. When you're dealing with anything other than simple first-level support issues, a user simply can't put in a usefully descriptive amount of detail...
GitLab CEO and author here, I would love to discuss remote working. At GitLab we're now 13 people and when people ask about our HQ I point to our car. Although we'll open up an office for sales and marketing soon in San Francisco.
Get blazed and confused with these Xbox One games
PowerShell Server "gives users the power to securely manage Windows remotely through PowerShell from any standard SSH client"
Just worked on deploying OpenAM on tomcat with Docker. A few things stuck out to validate the "hard to deploy in containers" point:

(1) node.js/Ruby/Python scale with processes, not threads. There's no supervisory/control environment over the processes, just the OS. JVM on the other hand expects to do a lot more process/thread control itself so it's kind of another "layer" between the OS and your code.

(2) Port binding doesn't work the same way, either. Most of our dockerized services have one port/process with simple load balancing built into our "routing fabric", which is something ops controls at my company. My understanding of JVM scaleout is that the servlet container is responsible for multiplexing incoming connections onto free capacity, which isn't how most docker shops work.

(3) I'm not sure what the typical deployment patterns are for servlet containers but they seem more multi-tenant w.r.t # of applications running in them, vs. a typical docker setup where containers are very thin and meant to be run in the dozens or more per-machine.

It's not that the JVM is inherently inferior, more than Docker has grown up around unix/linux ops-minded folks and they're bringing a lot of their assumptions about how software should be deployed and operated (e.g. "things should be scriptable") with them, and that their thinking is dominant among the current container-using crowd.
The only problem I see is for software that gets new versions periodically. Often times an old version is "good enough", but if it became public domain then it would compete against the newer version. Of course depending on your viewpoint that may not actually be a problem.
They're contracts. Contracts are binding on the signatories. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to accept them. Also, contracts are evaluated based on what they say, not on what you think they ought to say. I'm no fan of the game publishing industry, but just because you don't like the idea that you're buying a license to use the game in a particular way rather than in perpetuity doesn't mean they're breaking the law.
It seems to be based on git-media initially, would be interesting to know why they changed that https://github.com/github/git-lfs/commit/10a8eceefdb081edf61...
Consider that the EFF just ripped the word completely away from its original context, it's not surprising that it seems vague. Here it is: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/En...
Stop making the NSA the bogeyman of privacy
You make a very interesting point about emulation. For older consoles emulation was essentially guaranteed by Moore's law (and specifically the frequency scaling that went for a while). For a slowing down Moore's law, may we reach a point where real time emulation of a different architecture is just impossible? (and instead some kind of translation will need to be done, à la wine?)

An advantage is that architectures are converging anyway to PC-like instead of exotic stuff like Cell.
To celebrate the broader support for git with large files we just raised the storage limit of GitLab.com to 10GB https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/gitlab-dot-com-storage-l... also, we're glad GitHub open sourced it and didn't call it assman
Yes, will do. It definitely needs a FAQ and more information about the team.
I suppose that means the Swissie unpegging from the Euro qualifies as a once-in-six-trillion-year event ;)

Could any of the experienced traders on here offer some insight into taking advantage of the upcoming volatility in intra-day Treasuries price-action? Is it mostly done via TY futures and options or are some of the directional, leveraged ETFs (e.g. $TYO) also attractive? Or are indirect strategies preferable?
That always drove me nuts. It's got to be one or the other. Seems like there might be an interesting court case to be made by say the Internet Archive:

1. Buy a CD and then damage it

2. Then ask for a new one for free, with proof of the damaged one

3. When they refuse, get your lawyer to send the same request certified mail

4. When they officially refuse, sue in small claims and they'll get it tossed out since "you bought it" (hopefully)

5. Tuck this in your back pocket and start archiving and making them re-playable galore

6. When publisher X who told you it was a sale sues for "hacking" go to court for a summary dismissal based on the previous court case where they argued "hey you bought it!" and a judge might have no choice but to agree

I'm sure it wouldn't work, but it'd be nice!
non normality of asset returns are known to finance in the 60s, maybe even earlier.
the normal distribution is still used in many cases because it makes problems solvable.

in any case I wonder how much of these price aberrations are caused by bad statistics and not exuberance, overconfidence, or system failures. the latter things can't really be captured by math.
It's not just financial events. Various psychometric traits (such as G) are not normally distributed. The tails are much too fat. So you get a bunch of policy decisions based on assumptions that most people roughly average when that's not true.
WoW at its peak
Focus on traffic--not rankings.

You or an employee should become super familiar with Google Analytics (or another package) and Google Webmaster Tools. You need to measure traffic and make sure your site is being crawled. This is also the best info you will get on rankings.

I hesitate to tell you where to spend $5k. Investing in people would be best. The best solution I could give is to buy the traffic through AdWords.

Do not buy links.

Content is important. Make sure your Title tags are good. But content is close to your core business so I wouldn't necessarily throw $5K at it.

Not sure how you would buy press.

Xenu link sleuth is a great tool.
FarmVillains [2010]
I am not sure about Google Drive, but Onedrive does have native access to the photo storage and does allow you to manage your backups on it.
Yep, SmugMug :)

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not a Support Hero, but have to say that everyone who works here from the top down has nothing but utter respect for our amazing Heroes. It is an exceptionally challenging job and thus warrants exceptionally talented individuals--I sure as heck know that I couldn't do what they do.

I wish all companies had our level of customer support, but I know that isn't realistic. Fortunately for us, that creates a great opportunity to win customers for life.
Surveillance Reform Movement Rallies Ahead of June 1 Deadline
"I used to be a police officer. I’ve held a gun aimed at a dangerous offenders head and had to choose whether or not to pull the trigger."

Wait, what?
Zynga has strong lawyers. They would force small devs to take them to court, if they could afford the legal fees, then settle if they had a strong case. By then Zynga's game went viral and the smaller devs lost their first mover advantage. The SF chronicle wrote a great piece about these tactics a few years ago. The article showed how they cloned FarmVille, then settled with the victim for 11 million (FarmVille would make a billion in rev that year). im on mobile and can't search for the article rn
The four-word system (yea, nay, yes, no) is interesting. Might the modern "yeah" be a relic of "yea"?

The following sounds strange to me:

Shoot, there aren’t any open pubs in Canterbury at this hour.
Yeah.

But the following sounds just fine:

Is Chaucer drunk?
Yeah.
Hi John

Former-MS guy here working in SV. I could tell you work at MS by some of the terms you use which aren't common outside the company (e.g. "SKU") but MS people say a lot ;)

You should set up your profile on HN so that people know you're an MS guy and write a bit about yourself. I would email you directly, but your profile is blank.
Is it, really?

Consequently, contrary to EFF’s assertions, multiplayer gameplay over the Internet is not a “core” functionality of the video game, and permitting circumvention to access such functionality would provide the user greater benefits than those bargained and paid for.
My understanding of JVM scaleout is that the servlet container is responsible for multiplexing incoming connections onto free capacity, which isn't how most docker shops work.

No, not really, typically you would just run N of your JVM processes with either some sort of load balancer (or your "routing fabric") to balance between them or a discovery mechanism.

I think you might be referring to some sort of big-box "enterprise" servlet container like Websphere or something quite different than Tomcat.
Someone asked if this was temporarily or permanent, it is permanent, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9344984
Does your bouncer let you view the full scrollback from multiple clients, without having to keep them constantly connected (and preferably without lagging out one's mobile client when it connects and the bouncer deluges it with old messages)?

There are a few different solutions for this out there, especially clients that run some custom protocol between the GUI and the bouncer, like Quassel and Smuxi - but I've tried both, and each both (a) has poor mobile support and (b) once you get used to it, turns out to just suck in general. (These opinions are a few years out of date, though.)

Thankfully I don't actually care much about mobile support: I don't use IRC for time-sensitive discussions, and for recreational purposes, trying to participate in a real-time conversation where everyone can type several times faster than you is, IMO, a pain; I'm faster at typing on iOS than I used to be, but it's still just not comparable to a real keyboard. Better to save the chatting for when I have one. But I find ssh+screen an unacceptable solution: partly because of issues with notifications (i.e. out of the box, there are none) and copy+paste, though both can be fixed in theory, but mainly because of the latency. When the letters I type don't appear for 100ms or more, it really trips me up and I make a lot more typos. I could find a server with less latency at home, but that wouldn't help when traveling, especially on an unreliable connection - even though there is no fundamental reason chat should be latency sensitive in the slightest. Tried mosh (ssh + prediction) as a compromise for a while, and it works better, but it has some issues and doesn't fully hide the latency.

These days I'm using Glowing Bear, the web-based remote for weechat (that uses yet another custom protocol). Latency's gone, and like other web-based clients it has the neat feature of embedding YouTube videos and images, so I'm finally pretty satisfied with my IRC setup. (And I can be paranoid about security and run it on localhost rather than using their website directly.) But there are disadvantages: Glowing Bear is somewhat feature poor, it (again like other web-based clients) is relatively slow to render, and there is no native iOS weechat remote. (Guess I could still use weechat as a regular bouncer, or perhaps try Glowing Bear from mobile Safari...)
New Facebook Messenger packaged as an app (unofficial)
I like how that idea gives incentives for people and businesses to hold onto the really valuable IP.

BUT...I think I'd actually prefer a return to the simple copyright rules: 14 years, it's yours. After that, it's in the public domain. I'd even take away the 14-year extension, or maybe make the 14-year extension be sold at an auction.

And after that, no more copyright.

Intellectual property is the flimsiest of modern-day "property" fictions (i.e. things we made up to help some people/businesses out), and the wealth of public domain is so very, very enriching to all citizens.
> In other words, if you want to run a Linux based Docker container on Windows you're still going to need Virtual Box.

Is this a surprise?

Containerisation is not magical pixie dust -- it's a particular approach to implementation that is specific to the OS. You have a single kernel, and it follows that in general that single kernel will only allow corresponding containers to be run.

That there will be a Docker server backend that can speak Hyper-V doesn't magically make a Windows kernel into a Linux kernel, or vice versa.
When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way.

My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously than consumer support. I'd be curious to know what industry you happen to work in.