skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: developer turned manager
I was doing excellent as a developer in a well-known software development company that I will not name. I was doing development in important areas and in interesting projects, and my performance was (I've been said and I believe it) impressive. So I was promoted to manager and I was promised an impressive career in the managing team.

Then something changed, my performance as a manager is good but not stellar anymore. I don't enjoy it the way I enjoy development. Because of that, I'm probably never going to be as good as a manager as a developer. But being a manager is nevertheless attractive to me. I would like to find joy in it if possible, and to become a great manager if that's possible to.

I've heard this is something that happens very usually, does any of you have any advice?
Even with pre-population, I would have to give them an e-mail address and create a new password. Sorry, I'm not joining until my friends make me. And given that I'm just barely still in my 20s, not bloody likely.
Perl would certainly be my language of choice for screen scraping. And, some people see it almost like stealing. I know of people that look at Google negatively for its news indexing method. I have skimmed through a book (though I do not remember the name) that seemed to claim that Google profits only from the work of others. (I think they added value in their collaboration of information, though.) Nonetheless, you must be careful not to create a backlash (or legal issue) with screen scraping. The irony is that one of the best targets for screen scraping content for your own benefit may be Google itself... however, it almost seems like they encourage it. (They want you to use their APIs instead, though.)

Spidering has been around for a long time, and people act like screen scraping is new. It is really the same that has existed for years. If you are going to do it, though, Perl is certainly the way to go. It is fast, efficient, and robust.
ICO publishes guide to Data Protection Act
JRuby's startup speed isn't that much different if you're actually running something fairly heavy, like a web framework; it's not like Rails starts up in 200ms on MRI and 4000ms on JRuby, both have you waiting for a few seconds. With source reloading they're not that different in practice.

Sure, leaner RAM consumption is nice, but so is stable RAM consumption. It's not uncommon to see a Rails app on MRI eventually grow from, say, 70MB to 300MB+ and never shrink thanks to heap fragmentation and gc confusion, while JRuby stabilizes at maybe 100MB.

Sure, I also have MRI services which sit stable at 8-15MB for 6 months or more and JRuby's not exactly going to help there, and for short running interactive tasks it's certainly not going to be my first choice, but having the choice is very, very good.
You know, there are people out there who do PR for money. And you make it back in the increased sales. Not that I want to suggest ruining your indie cred . . .

Though, frankly, this is adorable and may be good PR just on its own.
i'd like to see all these phones get a little smaller.

like down to 100mm x 44mm

Nokia 8210 was the best sized phone ever - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8210
A major problem is they have refused to publish the raw data they used for their conclusions. One of the emails said something like, "I hope nobody figures out that the Freedom of Information act applies to us." (Britain's FOI act.) I also don't get the sense that they faked data. But they hand picked it from different sources at different times and used questionable statistical methods to make it look worse.
Donald Knuth interview by Richard Morris
Starbucks is one of the rare places in New York that will let you use the facilities without buying anything.
Miss World 2009 - India Today Special
One quick note: its "JavaScript" one word, no spaces. Java and JavaScript are two very different languages putting a space there would only infinitely confuse everyone even more.

"Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster" - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/29/misunderstanding-...
That's not the perspective in question. The point is that when you are taking other people's money, you have a responsibility, as part of that society you mention, to take that money more seriously than you might take money you earn from your own labors.

Money is a big deal; money is retirement funds, money is food, money is medical care, money is all kinds of things. Money isn't just "big TVs" and "fast cars", though it is those things too. Society needs to take money to do various things, but the recipients should be treating it as a sacred honor, not their birthright. When you waste $1000 of your own money, you (hopefully!) do it in the knowledge that you can afford it; when you waste $1000 of public money, you should do it in the knowledge that at least some of the people that came from really couldn't afford it, especially if it brought them no value.

I say this in general, actually, not specifically in reference to any recipient of public money. And I say it with full knowledge that it's horrifically utopian and there's hardly anyone that actually acts that way. But they should.
Another reason not to eat ground-anything. One, it's harder to keep ground meat clean; you can't clean off the e-coli once it's been mixed in.

Now we won't be able to tell whether we're eating real or synthesized sausage.

I would be reluctant to eat synthesized meat because we probably don't understand (or manufacturers will ignore) the entire relationship between a) the result of the complex process of growing meat on an active bone that's running around, and b) how our bodies evolved to process and benefit from exactly that configuration of protein, nutrients and composition.
Yes, the mechanisms are completely different, but from a programmer who hasn't yet had the Lisp revelation, they appear similar. The goal here is to write higher-level code to more clearly describe your solution to a problem. Ruby lets you get part of the way there, which is often good enough, but it hits a wall that macros cross without even glancing back.
The Exile series was a staple of my youth. Great stuff.
x86 assembly language is similarly universal. Nobody writes in it.
CrunchPad dies in a stunning display of web-drama
Data-Parallel Virtual Machine (Dr Dobbs)
I just wanted to emphasize that the best part about Kaiser is their interface - it is super simple to schedule and receive care and it rarely felt "slugish" to go through their processes.
i haven't RTFA yet, but i'd be interested in seeing whether the same gender gap exists in other countries; from talking with friends who grew up in places like Eastern Europe, it seems like it wasn't as 'nerdy' for women to like engineering, math, or computers, so more talented women got into the field in college and as a career
Keep in mind that if you have existing tracking goals set up and you implement URI filtering like this, your goals will need to be rewritten to accommodate the domain being appended to the beginning of each URI. This will also break the site overlay/clickmap, if that's something you use.
Not just the same coffee, the same protocol for describing exactly the coffee you want.
Quick Trac backup and upgrade script
We'll just have to see how your diet compares to my lab meat, multi-vitamin, Metamucil, acai berry extract, and Slim Fast diet.
What was that strange word you used there? Vista? Never heard of it :)
Does anyone seriously think these folks don't know about robots.txt?

Folks, it's clearly a form of institutionalized trolling. Various of the folks involved are clearly piling onto the best troll since, well, since the marketeers of some movie managed to get their 2012 troll onto HN.

Like spam, trolling is now a business model.

Please don't feed the trolls.
yup, unfortunately he learned the hard way that as a public figure (e.g., university president), any statements that could possible be misconstrued to fit an agenda against you will probably be :/ he already had lots of political enemies around the time he was ousted, so that statement was the straw that broke his back ...
How do you decide when less is more, and when more is better?

There seems to be this optimal balance that he alludes to, but never really discusses with exact detail.
about time, don't you think?

guess they finally realized, that they aren't going to be doing too well in the future, if the only exposure to their browser will be at work on the IE6

"switch from firefox to IE? Are you CRAZY? I use that piece of crap at work all the time, it's the crappiest software I've ever used and all sites look like garbage in it. No Thank You!"
Add Song Suggestion to your App
For anyone concerned about the environment or aninmal welfare, they should find pasture raised animals, which sequesters carbon as the topsoil grows. This lab meat is going to end up getting its energy from oil until our society is powered by renewable sources of energy.
I'm actually rather surprised that the researchers had as much luck as they did (with either gender) in the "dentist office waiting room"-like environment. I personally cringe every time I have to go to my dentist office, precisely because I have to look at his horribly generic, lifeless waiting room. At least the nerdy-gamer room had some personality.

Perhaps my feelings about generic, lifeless rooms are just atypical.
I can't find a link right now, but a month or two ago there was an interview on NPR with the author of (I believe) this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Care-Anywhere-Health-Better/dp/09...

In the interview he talked about how some doctors at the VA hacked together a computerized medical records system in the 70s, and how having these computerized records actually allowed the VA doctors to discover links between some dangerous drugs and disease. That's in addition to the benefits of a doctors being able to pull up 30 years of your medical history on a screen.

Wish I could remember details about the interview, but the book is probably good.
I never thought I'd be able to select text from the Star Wars opening crawl... while it was crawling.
what has come to be of HN!
Apple-Google mapping split-up: Easier said than done
Firstly I cant see any information about who was tested etc. and how many. To really refute it I would need to see that.

My main point was r.e. the Star Trek thing. I agree entirely that it might put women off (as I said, it even puts me off) but I am not sure it is good evidence that this is how women [or anyone] perceive cs (and so puts them off). The test doesn't cover that issue at all.

It's like saying "we did a study where we found all men were unable to breast feed babies. As a result we conclude only women can get pregnant" :)
So many start ups are expecting users to broadcast their lives and reveal even more info than what's already floating around on the internet.

Personally, I think that people will begin backing away from these types of start ups and will become less inclined to reveal anything about themselves. It's just too much.
Do I think the guy on that podium who gave the speech may not know about robots.txt?

Yes
Full Disclosure: FreeBSD local root zeroday
New member, first post, long time lurker.. love the site.

Wanted to share with you all our new API.

We Are Hunted (http://wearehunted.com) listens to what people are saying about artists and their music on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, music blogs, message boards and forums, Twitter and P2P networks to chart the top songs online everyday. All this data is yours to play with.

The Suggest function is pretty neat. Not sure if anyone else is doing it this way.

Pass an artist, playlist or text (blog post) and we will suggest some fresh new tracks that you should listen to.

We use the ranking data from Hunted to make suggestions and return Grooveshark, Spotify, Myspace or Youtube playable tracks.

Rather than use collaborative filtering or song analysis to make recommendations,our suggestions are based
on what we think are the freshest tracks the music experts are listening to right now.

Our goal is not extreme accuracy, but extreme freshness, seeking to always deliver music that is new, cool and relevant.

We are constantly discovering and ranking new tracks so our suggestions change frequently.

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Stephen Phillips
I was surprised to learn how just little computerization there is in the ER. Each medical device is basically a standalone unit, with its own input and display. There is no central computer system that automatically alerts doctors if the devices connected to a patient are configured in a potentially dangerous way. For example, apparently it is surprisingly common for surgery teams to use a ventilator, switch to a heart-lung bypass machine, but then forget to turn the ventilator back on once the heart-lung bypass machine is off. This can cause permanent brain damage if the patient doesn't get enough oxygen. There should probably be some system that warns the doctors if both devices are turned off. Unfortunately there is no standard communication protocol for these devices, which makes it impossible to build such a system. Here is a presentation on the state of affairs if anyone is interested: http://www.mdpnp.org/uploads/Capitol_Hill_NSF_CPS_MD_PnP_9Ju...
http://postabon.com/pc/deal?guid=451&lat=40.757&long... has some broken encoding. Did someone copy/paste from Word?
The biggest problem with "Javascript on the server" right now is that Javascript has no concurrency story whatsoever. You could easily hack in shared-state threading, but there would be no faster way to turn me off of Javascript forever than to do that. You could hack in message-passing, but it won't be clean and you're still going to have terrible fun trying to not pass mutable references, which, again, if you leave that in I will run screaming. STM isn't exactly going to be easy to stick in either.

(I say I will "run screaming" not merely because I don't want to deal with it, but because I don't want to deal with yet more libraries based on shared-state concurrency. No. I've left that behind and I'm not going back, and certainly not in a space where I've got an abundance of languages to choose from.)

Without a solution to that problem, I see this as a terribly, terribly wrong move, and a terrible time for JS to try to be picking up the server. Servers are in the multicore age and have been for a couple years now.

(And if your answer is "well, we'll just keep all the tasks simple and we won't need multiple threads", I would remind you that you're running on the server, which often needs to do, you know, actual work. A language that can't do that may have a small niche, but it's going to be an uphill battle against entrenched competitors.)
The Climate Science Isn't Settled
Your points are quite valid, however, I must say when I went in for my last surgery a young surgeon was standing at a computer and reading up on procedures on a medical Wiki. I would have to guess that has improved his efficiency versus trying to find the information in some books?
From the Reuters article:

Apparently the experiment isn’t working. A former Starbucks insider said that Seattle’s 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea – the first of the new not Starbucks stores (its website, by the way, is called www.streetlevelcoffee.com) – is doing only a third of the business of the regular green-logoed Starbucks store that used be at that site.
Here's some anecdotal info that bothered me when I saw it. I've graded several CS 1 courses and found that out of the class of 20-30, there might be 2 or 3 women, tops. Fine and good, since my school's engineering dept is 87% male and the CS dept is 92% male. However, the thing I noticed was that too many of these girls did poorly in the first few weeks and frequently dropped the course altogether; I'm not sure what they did then, since you can't really do any CS/IT/SE/CE degree without CS 1. Of the guys, maybe 1 or 2 would drop.

Why does this happen? My school is trying hard to get more women in CS and engineering fields, which may mean poorly-qualified girls are being accepted and pushed into these degrees; are we just a statistical anomaly? The numbers in the article would seem to indicate otherwise. Anyone else have insights from their own grading/teaching experiences?

Oh, and regarding pair programming, it's the best possible way to make sure you won't want to see your friend's face for another week, because half the time one of you will want to do something the other one just doesn't "get", so you sit there and explain it repeatedly when you could have just implemented it by yourself, all the while watching your teammate type with a speed and error frequency generally associated with senile chimpanzees.
RPath Expands Operating System Coverage to include RHEL 4 and 5
A narrated taste of the Plan 9 OS
Debrief: A month into my novel’s lifecycle
It appears that someone used Word's insane 'smart quote' character (which isn't valid UTF8).

I'll have to put a filter in for that (and scrub the existing data).

Thanks for the heads up - I wasn't aware of that.

(interesting article I found in the course of looking stuff up: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/911587/iconv-gives-illega...)
Job Satisfaction
There's nothing else to a tablet if you're one of the scores of computer makers that has already done exactly that (tearing off the lid, keyboard, and touchpad and put in a touchscreen).

For Apple, I don't know. They haven't invented it yet and I've learned that they can be more creative with years of product development time than I can be with a few minutes of writing comments. But they sure as hell won't release something that isn't significantly different in some way than what's been released before in the tablet space.
Does the heavy-equipment industry have similar discussions?

"Hey, how come there aren't more wimmin running our Caterpillar D9s in the Brazilian rainforest?"

Oh yeah, Philip Greenspun points out science is a dead end job for any ambitious woman: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Looks pretty nice, clean interface and well polished. What is your profit strategy? Do you plan on making money through sponsorship?
hospital IT systems are big , complex , require training, have bugs , generate changes , etc etc...
that's basiclly the essence of your rant.
probably like any computer system in any complex organization.

But

they have huge potential(in the long term) , when done properly to transform medicine , reduce costs , prevent errors , give better treatments, enable better research , etc, etc.

In essence , medical IT systems are a huge problem , with a huge payoff.
should'nt we tackle the problem because it's huge ?
Forgive me if it doesn't flow perfectly in some spots; I basically wrote down a set of bullet points and then ran through each ad lib. I'd also like to hear any topics you'd like to see that weren't covered or weren't covered thoroughly enough.
Paper occupies space and eventually becomes expensive to store. Paper can't be easily shared with other providers outside the hospital walls. Paper can't be automatically copied to the patient's PHR. Paper can't be data mined for quality control, outcomes analysis, and clinical research; we must have those capabilities to eventually be able to improve quality of care and drive down costs.

The EMR/EHR problems with usability, reliability, and interoperability are gradually being fixed (although some vendors still lag behind). At this point there's no going back.
Michael Robertson on how the world has changed for Internet startups
Video’s Impending Tsunami in Education
The Problems with Graphviz
I think when it comes to animated content like games, Flash/Silverlight is here to stay but HTML5 introduces a vast amount of new features (that you probably know of) that will target an entirely different media.

I have faith in HTML5 because of how hard Google is pushing it. I think with a behemoth like them behind it, it will propel much quicker than the 10 year cycle we're used to. Atleast, I hope so :)
a way to stop my phone ringing at a distance. How would that actually work? Would you need to wear some sort of proximity sensor?

#ahem# bluetooth #cough#
Another moral question is made moot! Science, you've done it again!
The structure of your data matters a lot. If one will fit in cache but the other won't, the one that fits in cache will almost always win. Then they have different big-O characteristics: binary searching an array is O(log N) where N is the number of items, a trie is O(k) where k is the length of the key, a hashtable is O(1), but this is misleading because the hash function is usually O(k) and performance can degrade to O(n) if you have lots of hash collisions.

I thought that an autocompletion widget for stock tickers would be the perfect application for tries: short, dense key space, lots of elements, and a fair likelihood of hash collisions. But apparently not, because our data size just happened to be one where cache effects dominate. I talked to one of the GMail guys later and he was quite surprised, from which I inferred (but it was not stated) that GMail probably uses tries to good effect.
They were expecting a class to be taught in it, so it wasn't the vile pit of hour-long silent pastel neutrality.
Used tape drives
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A patch is available: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=0+0+current/fre...
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: reasoning about a highly connected world (ebook)
This is really, really cool. And this is obviously how they powered Rama.
The article mentions that the proportion of women in biology is 60%. So maybe the women that could be doing well in computer science are seeking out the greater competition and camaraderie of the biology scene.

Self criticism:

1. Blame the victim?

2. 60% still isn't a supermajority like in CompSci/Eng.

Self affirmation:

1. Personal experience affirms. I have met more (in number) intelligent talented female students taking chem and bio disciplines. Example: last weekend I met a girl whose father taught one of my computer engineering courses, wearing a shirt that said "neuroscience".
Why does it need to "store data on my computer for offline use"?

FF 3.5 on Kubuntu gives me that warning that I haven't seen before. Looks very dodgy.
Another thing to consider is physical disk i/o. I know on our VPS (its not hosted with one of the big guys), if one of our VPS "neighbours" does something IO heavy like importing a big MySQL database they can basically bring our VPS to a crawl.
This might have more to do with the Droid keyboard actually being that bad (it is rather cramped compared to the G1) than individual users developing a global preference.
Dan Bull did a nice response to this bill, an open letter to Lord Mandelson in a musical style:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_P4lJD_OPI
Even if you're forking processes for concurrency, all memory pages assigned to the process at fork time are shared and use copy-on-write semantics, so anything that doesn't change doesn't consume real memory in each additional process. I don't know how much outside of each thread's/process's heap and stack sees writes in apache, but I suspect the difference between threads and processes is pretty slim in this respect.
Loneliness is transmittable from person to person, study finds
Interesting idea, but built on a false premise. Jobs aren't necessarily unpleasant. You could find yourself in the position of enjoying something most people don't, like programming, or being better than every one else at something that many people enjoy, like golf.

In both cases you can get paid to do something you enjoy, and no matter how much fun you have, your boss can't pay someone else to do it because either there aren't that many other people who can do it, or there aren't many who can do it as well as you.
This is of course only true if response times are largely I/O bound. If the CPU time spent on a response is almost the same as its walltime, more RAM is useless.