jjindev

You just did describe a new problem and process. If you have someone on staff you can watch him closely. On the other hand "exit day" brings complications ... especially for sys-admins.

Edit: and so it wouldn't surprise me if a government department with huge budget tended to accrue employees over time. The "easy" path is retention.

If you had unlimited budget, and disgruntled ex-employees were a greater risk than current employees, what is your short term strategy?

The company started with stolen data and stolen clients. Salesmen wanted to steal clients and data again. It was life on a pirate ship. I'm tempted to say it had to end badly, but I suppose there are some companies which do rise above bad beginnings ...

You guessed the "maker" blog ;-)

When I looked at this, and ran my primitive simulations, I decided that it really, really, mattered when you were born. 70 year averages, or 140 year averages, matter very little when markets and economies turn on spans of decades.

I mean, we know that if you put a bundle in the market in 1980, you did pretty well. you did the same in 2000, not so much.

No average can make that easier.

edit: put differently, none of us live long enough to benefit from 140 year averages

That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.

I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.

As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm.

The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest.

Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?

Yes, there is a Back To The Future aspect. That said, cpus are just cheaper and easier these days. POWER, as a core, might break out.

This was full on alarm and blinking lights on my old Android Droid X. About 30x the sound volume of a text message.

It only woke me up, but I wondered how smart they were. I mean, someone driving might have been shocked into an accident. The cost-benefit of a really loud system might be more cost.

It ranges from large companies who say "this is an important issue, let's meet next month to discuss" to small companies who say "I was worried about that, so I made a fixed decision an hour ago." There really are different cultures of ... not really so much failure, but dysfunction. Companies can succeed while being dysfunctional at the same time.

Definitely. And I wouldn't discount that bliss-period at a new organization. If it is happier, it is happy.

When I was a young man, at my first job, I expressed my discontent. My dad (Viggo Jensen, RIP) gave me sage advice. He nodded his head, and said "it takes about 3 years to find out what's wrong with an organization. After that it's harder." (Shockingly, this from a guy who spent 35 years in Los Angeles City Schools.)

I would not suggest that Jaclyn is wrong in her choices. Not at all. But sometimes it is a choice between working within an imperfect organization, and moving on to another .. whose flaws you will discover over the next 3 years.

At some point they must cycle (with TAs?), right? How else to amortize fixed costs?

As I say in my other comment, since it is web-distributed, it "can't" have carrier specific software. "Assembled by me," in black, with (almost) pure Android.

"Where is this heading?" ... "Instead, it comes with an almost pure version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean."

I think the color shells is misdirection, it's a way to get the Moto resellers on the (almost) pure stuff.

For reasons not completely unrelated to the rant.

Perhaps I should expand the history, for those who don't know. In the early 80s, QNX was the first fully multitasking operating system available for the IBM PC architecture. It was small, efficient, real-time, and somewhat idiosyncratic. It was fully ten years ahead of its time.

At the same time, in another sphere, POSIX was shaping up as factor in the emerging Open Systems wars. It drove compatibility between big vendors like IBM and HP and Sun (over other idiosyncratic offerings, like Apollo).

Perhaps POSIX as a user response to corporate power had value, but there was also collateral damage. As I understand the story, Canadian colleges standardized on POSIX, and so a great little Canadian OS (QNX) was left out in the cold. They had to become like others to survive.

Conformity served to reduce innovation and developer choice.

Now fast forward to 2013, and leaving aside shared memory details, what is POSIX driving today? Don't forget that ultimately a non-POSIX OS killed them all. And don't forget that users have their own means of bubbling up new features and architectures in the Open Source projects. Their control is far beyond what users got out of POSIX in the Open Systems age.

[buried my lede: the front page algorithm]

I'm new, pointed in by the coursera startup engineering course. I have no idea how large that cohort is, or how uniform it is.

I certainly scan the headlines for startup themes (tech and other practices). I have found a lot of great things. My humble thanks for all it.

If I'm curious about one thing, it is the idea that people visit many times a day, and then expect many new high quality threads. If I understand the purpose, shouldn't visits be less frequent (to sync with startup world) and the front page less changing? Because if the front page "must" have new items, it must go further afield. The algorithm, which seems to [be] based on "velocity" of new items rather than strict rank, may favor the "topical" at this point.

I really liked QNX, when it fit on a couple floppies, and before it swallowed the POSIX anchor, and so .. sure.

I only want Linux to succeed because I want there to be open software stacks, especially for poor and beginning developers. Android's implicit distribution of LInux core means a more secure open stack ecosystem (even if it is special purpose at the higher levels). The same is true for the fledgling ChromeOS. And actually, ChromeOS is the real next step and competition for "distros." I mean, does ChromeOS outnumber Ubuntu yet? How long will it take?

My fantasy vision, predating go, was publisher/project/version with /src and /bin below all that (separate bins and srcs). I am open to re-balancing that tree ;-), but somewhat surprised that version wasn't in from the beginning. Perhaps there were more worms in that can that I expected. (version should be constrained to x.y.z numeric form)

Perhaps the people who click with Go will just be different in their natures than people who click with other systems and frameworks. Programmers are not a uniform population, and tools which map well with subsets have real value.

plot twist, my friend's anglicized name is Nan, but in Vietnamese I think it is a number. (nth birth)

I had a funny experience. Before I ever worked with Go a developer I'd worked with (and argued small details and big philosophies), told me "why don't you use Go? It seems your kind of language." From my later glances it seems like he was right. So I might be in the fortunate subset for which the philosophy matches, more or less.

Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)

It seems the go team chose a method that would produce zero name collisions under parallel development. That's the highest goal, but of course the burden of it is that paths below /src must be kinda long to support it. A "rare collision" solution could have been more concise without being as robust.

I think it's good to have a low-overhead method for infrequent writers (people who want to expand beyond their tweet on occasion). Medium seems a good name and place for that.

On the other hand, I can totally see why people who write frequently and think of their corpus as more than an auxiliary to twitter would want more.

I love old books, and was amusing myself by reading a geology text from around 1880. It was my first exposure to that science. It amused as I started that I might end up with a good education, a hundred years out of date. As I continued I came to suspect that geology hasn't really changed all that much.

As much as I'd like ~50 year copyright on all classes of works, the good news is that those 1880s texts really are very good. (See also the telegraphy love story that just came across HN.)

Excellent, thank you.

FWIW also, comparing that $200 pricepoint, Newegg recently had a Lenovo server Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GH Dual-Core; 4GB RAM; DVD ROM, no-disk, no-os, for $250. (reputed backdoor at no extra cost!)

Update: I just went to techbargains and searched "server", that one was recently expired. When I'm in shopping mode I just keep an eye on a couple such shopping sites to see what comes by.