skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you configure your Linode Disk Images?
Linode doesn't have backup functionality like slicehost, but they suggest that you only allocate a subset of your disk allotment towards your active image, and use the rest for backup images.

Since there's such a huge population of Linode users here, I wanted to ask what sort of "best practices" you have evolved for these images.
As a Rails developer doing a fair amount of TDD and some BDD, I have a first-hand view of the state of the art of view testing for the web. Tools like webrat, selenium and cucumber are compelling because they hold the promise of end to end testing.

I'm really glad that people are working on solving these hard problems, but, I'm also a designer and usability guy, and I can tell you that these tools are still very very crude. You know the sayings "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail", and "use the right tool for the right job"? Well, to developers, code is the hammer. Developers (especially consultants) would like to believe that if they write a cuke test and it passes, then their job is done. But the fact of the matter is that test code is not free to write or even to run, and the amount of things that a QA person is actually testing when they click through an application is several orders of magnitude more coverage than an state-of-the-art acceptance test gives you (this may change eventually, but it's an AI-level problem).

I see a lot of value for the initial acceptance tests that verify basic flows, but they are just one tool in your belt. Usability testing and QA provide orthogonal human perspectives that provide more bang for your buck then increasingly fine-grained automated tests. Think of it like this, automated tests take your product from complete failure to mediocre, but design, usability testing and QA can take it from mediocre to great.

I've seen brilliant programmers get obsessed with "all green" to the point that they do all their work without firing up a browser, and miss dozens of terrible usability flaws that would be immediately obvious the first time you click through.

None of this is in any way disparaging of GUI testing per se, but just that it has limitations which I've seen ignored for the sake of code fetishism.
I disagree with his assumption that these forums, let alone every forum of similar size, earn enough to "make a living" from. Forums are notoriously hard to monetize, and traffic at those levels is likely to bring in at most a few hundred a month in advertising and affiliate revenue. That's not enough for a young single guy to live off, let alone a family.
Perhaps if someone researched where most telecom lobbying dollars went - and which government/(congressional?) positions tend to have their people siphoned off by the telecom corporations... we might discover where there is disincentive to get these recommendations into action.

As one famous whistle-blower said, "follow the money." [/cynicism]
First of all, based on my own personal experience, I don't buy that formula for one second.

Secondly, a link on a TechCrunch post is by no means a high PR link for any decent length of time. You MIGHT get your link on their front page for a few hours before it rolls off into the archival abyss. Maybe if you're lucky, over time and with enough inbounds link to that post, you'll get some juice out of it.

I guess my point, which was lost because I didn't clarify well, is that a link from TC (in terms of traffic or SEO purposes) is probably overrated.
Left to my own devices, I would never leave the house. So I ask for experiences. From my wife, I ask for her to find a local event that I wouldn't think of going to by myself, and to arrange tickets/reservations/etc. From my parents (who live nearby), I ask for them to watch our kids while my wife and I go to said event. It works well.
Dear Facebook, it's time to act like a grown-up about security
Well, I was hopeful before opening the thread.
I just found this: http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zips.txt

So here's my solution:

def state?(zip)
zip_code_list = File.open('zips.txt')
suggested_list = zip_code_list.grep(/(.*"#{zip}\d+".*)/)
end
This reminds me a bit of Andy Tanenbaum's cookbook, which contains a breathtakingly bad lasagna recipe consisting of noodles and beef topped with ketchup:

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/how_to_prep.ps

I first read this more than 10 years ago and still get a little shiver of revulsion every time I think about it.
Can't tell whether this design is horrific or brilliant
What's hilarious about this myth is that I learned to program in NeXTStep using Objective-C well over a decade ago and am enjoying writing iPhone apps. But I hear younger programmers bitch about how hard it is to write code in Objective-C, manage memory, etc.
The creepy, exciting and growing world of location-based services
AT&T might just have the best 3G network in the US
Some colleges now accepting YouTube videos as supplementary essays
Munger is clearly advocating for "the Volker Rule" and a middle of the road economic policy when it comes to regulation (It's hard not to agree).

The finger pointing at Bershire here from self-proclaimed free market advocates is bunk. In theory, we all benefited indirectly from TARP, they just had enough foresight to position themselves to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the turmoil.

It would also be nice to clearly differentiate Bucket Shops and Over-the-Counter Trades. The concepts are very similar, but only one is legal. Anyone have a good explanation?

P.S. The article is a good parable, but switching from the casino metaphor to talk of actual casinos threw me for a loop.

P.P.S. Most everything is a derivative. The problem is with counter-party risk and transparency. Derivatives are not inherently bad.
I'll add functions at the drop of a hat. Even for one line of code: instead of commenting the line to explain that it Does Foobar, I'll just drop it into a function DoFoobar().
Would be interesting to see if this is ads only on twitter.com or wide-spread like AdSense. Also will it be self service or will it have to go through Twitter approval first?
That or they get pushed into management with the lure of higher $ multipliers. But, it's too late to realize that management sucks and the lure of $$$ was a siren song. It's with great courage that you attempt to go back the other direction.
Horrific: Usability Fail. Animated gifs. Need I go on?

Brilliant: I have already shared it with 6 people.
That post still gets 1500+ hits a month from people searching for variations of "fruit salad recipe." I get at least 1 email a month from random strangers who appreciated getting more than just a recipe. :)
The Facebook Avatar - Hardcore Facebook Gamers
I imagine the hardest stuff to work around will be fresh produce as it just has a short shelf life. I rarely follow recipes exactly myself although I haven't gone this far out there yet. I usually look at a few recipes to get a general idea of ratios and ingredients and then come up with a blend that sounds most appealing to me. I haven't gone this far out there yet though. I'm not even sure what all is available at most 7-11s and Walgreens other than snacks - although I have been noticing that 7-11 seems to be trying to carry some produce. Any other unusual combinations you're thinking of trying?
Actually, research shows that unlike buying stuff, experiences like vacations lead to happiness that does not diminish over time.

You're not just trading $1000 and a week to get stuff done, but also a lifetime of happy memories.
It's both. Ironically, the more progressive places I know of to work that do pretty cutting edge stuff are more likely to hire older programmers with demonstrable experience.
Hey its true. My wife the other day complained about how her blackberry is super slow. Guess how many apps shes running:

AIM, Google Talk, Browser, Brickbreaker possibly, Google Maps, Facebook (a killer). Yea its easy to tell whats running (alt-tab of sorts) but she never made that leap. Hey maybe its just facebook.
Ask HN: Should I hire a company or build a team from scratch?
If I'm going to make the leap and bootstrap the creation of a mobile and web app (I'm not a developer) should I hire a firm or hire individuals and build a team?
Actually, I clearly stated that I don't know how much these forums are making, but I don't think that's the point. Yes, forums are hard to monetize, but in my opinion, these forums have clearly demonstrated that there's an audience for the niches in question. There are almost certainly better ways to monetize that audience (blog with sponsorship, ecommerce, membership site, etc).
Whence means from where.
Transplants That Do Their Job, Then Fade Away
Out of curiosity, where did you get it?
Would you mind elaborating on

> but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.

Please? It isn't obvious to me :-/
There is a time and a place for one-off throwaway code, and also for extremely fault-tolerant provably correct code. Most stuff falls somewhere in between.

If you are experienced you can determine what is necessary and make good recommendations accordingly. If you are good at what you do, you should be able to get a job working with other people who are good enough at what they do to listen to you.

Maybe you'll be involved with a few projects that fail for various reasons, but I think it's possible to navigate the morass of failure and come out with a good track record at the end. Your production code may not last a long time, but if it served its purpose at the time then you should be proud.
I believe (1) may be true for some, but is absolutely false for others.

Also, I think it's safe to broaden (2) to mean "creative culture" -- as in not just restaurants, but galleries, plays, music, nightlife, and so on; along with the indirect repercussions of that -- in which case it remains true, but lacks the shallowness you tried to imply.
Show me any tool and I'll show you a horrible use of that tool. That doesn't make the tool horrible.

ELSE statements don't kill. Drunk programmers kill.

This reminds me of something I once ran into:

Junior Programmer:

if (m==1){Month="January")}
if (m==2){Month="February")}
if (m==3){Month="March")}
if (m==4){Month="April")}
if (m==5){Month="May")}
if (m==6){Month="June")}
if (m==7){Month="July")}
if (m==8){Month="August")}
if (m==9){Month="September")}
if (m==10){Month="October")}
if (m==11){Month="November")}
if (m==12){Month="December")}

Senior Programmer:

switch(m)
{
case 1:
Month = "January"
break;
case 2:
Month = "February"
break;
case 3:
Month = "March"
break;
case 4:
Month = "April"
break;
case 5:
Month = "May"
break;
case 6:
Month = "June"
break;
case 7:
Month = "July"
break;
case 8:
Month = "August"
break;
case 9:
Month = "September"
break;
case 10:
Month = "October"
break;
case 11:
Month = "November"
break;
case 12:
Month = "December"
break;
default:
Month = "unknown"
}

Lazy Programmer:

MonthNames == ["","January","February","March",...]
Month = MonthNames[m]
What is 'referral traffic'? :/
I'm not sure I follow the argument (or agree with where the author places the blame).

Notwithstanding Ruby's handling of type safety or its implementation of arrays, isn't it my job (as the programmer) to know what kind of object I'm getting from the helper library? That is, when I get 'h' (in his example), the black box is how 'h' gets filled, not what kind of collection object it is.

Or am I confused?
They are probably wishing that you would lighten up.

Edit: I know this seems trollish, but it's probably also true. Although I could have worded it better, my point is that your expectation that people _not_ give physical gifts is no different or more noble than other peoples' expectation that you accept physical gifts. Recognizing that, there's the tried and truism that it's easier to change things about yourself than things about others.
timing issues and edge cases are one of the reasons i value tests, assertions and strong design so much: debugging is hard.

It always seems like when you scratch the TDD surface, "writing tests first lets you write bug-free software" becomes "tests are an important tool along with good design, assertions, etc". I agree with the later but I don't see how it's different earlier methodologies - and earlier methodologies certainly didn't let you write bug-free code.
Totally been planning on "The OnStartups Book". Good news is now that my first book (Inbound Marketing) has been a runaway success, I have some leverage with the publishers too.

Also, I want to donate all profits from the book to an organization that promotes entrepreneurship. Looking into who the lucky organization will be.

And, I'm looking right back at you Alexis. I'm going to need help promoting the book and you're an internet rockstar.
It's a little amazing that we're still having threads vs. events debates 15 years on. I guess I'll have to wait a few more years for someone to invent an event-driven fast path (that loads no plugins for reliability) fronting a preforked pool of worker processes.
I started blogging recently (the start of the new year, actually), and it's been quite interesting watching the analytics bounce up and down depending on what I've posted that Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

Perhaps the most striking thing I've noticed is that when I blog about Haskell, I get a lot of hits. :-) Perhaps that says something about the importance of keeping audience in mind.

As your standard egotistical human being, I'd love to increase readership. That's a great validation for me. But it definitely means that you have to write about more popular/accessible subjects. And there's a lot more competition there.
You're asking a bit more than is answered directly here, but it may help, if you haven't seen it yet (skip to the middle of the page): http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/01/python-threads-and-the-glo...
Upvoted because I hope it's true.
I've been leading. I've gotten rid of basically everything I can get rid of without asking for permission, and that has inspired my wife to clean up some of her stuff too. It took my about two years, but now I've gotten to the hard stuff, and -- surprise! -- it's harder than throwing away a box of old papers.

(Oh, and no offense, but telling my wife "we're getting rid of this television come hell or high water" would have been... less than successful in the long run. Every relationship is different. Good luck with yours.)
I'm not 100% convinced this is entirely wise. Following the advice blindly could lead you to build something which is wonderful, but impossible to sell.
Nvidia's Fermi (GTX480) is broken and unfixable
It was opinion. They don't know with concrete scietific evidence how much salt is good or bad for you. I'd suggest that too much of most things is bad for you therefore I choose to have everything in moderation and follow guidelines given out by the Food Standards Agency (http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/fss/salt/). Whether you follow that advice or not is up to the individual. Am I overweight? No, Is my blood pressure high? No. Is this due to controlling my salt and fat intake? I have no idea. But it works for me.
And it explains this quite well:

The harder the experts try to save Americans, the fatter we get.

Obviously, since the dogma is "low fat", and "low fat" means more carbs, and carbs generally make us fatter, the explanation for this becomes blindingly obvious.
It's missing step 7 about getting distribution for the book.
AskHN : "Don't judge them by their website"
I was reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145343 when something hit me : "don't judge them by their website" (talking about http://bowker.com/).

I was thinking about how people here often reject sites based of their look (it happened to me twice) but maybe are passing beside great services.

I was thinking about services I use and couldn't live without and if I judged them by their websites, I would have never given them a penny.

DIDWW : http://www.didww.com

PrgMr : http://www.prgmr.com

Callcentric : http://www.callcentric.com

TarSnap : http://www.tarsnap.com/

Lyrics (this one is from me ;) :
http://lyrics.azankatech.com

Do you know other interesting sites that we shouldn't judge by their website?
Yeah, the produce thing is a problem. 7-11 by me has been carrying things though like fruit, so more recipes I'm making explore stuff with apples and oranges. I've also been exploring what I can do with fruit snack cups that have peaches and stuff in them. I found a recipe for a mango chutney, I didn't have mango :) but I had a peach snack cup from 7-11, turned out great.

7-11 has been carrying avocados and potatoes every now and then. And I hear walgreens started to have onions sometimes.

One of the most fun cooking experience we've had was when my wife was signed up for Freshpicks http://www.freshpicks.com/cms/. So she would get pretty random assortments of fresh vegetables and we would figure out what to make with them or try and screw them into some recipe that called for something else. I'm thinking of signing us up for that again because it plays well into this habit of making stuff with what you already have without planning.
Rein: Unreal Engine 4 may not even run on next-gen consoles
Change commands - COBOL
AJAX using Django
The only part that struck a nerve with me is when he refused to plug the TV back in.

He had already made his point that they don't use the TV very often, but the fact that she wanted to use it at that moment definitely weakened his argument. Refusing to plug the TV back in at that point just resulted in pissing his wife off and probably hurt his chances of getting rid of the TV.
In the ever ending question to find Product/Market Fit having a successful forum can easily help someone identify the market portion of the equation. What MVP could you build for a group of jacket loving film peeps?
Are mouse-overs really used that much anymore? I can't think of many sites I visit that use them. I went to both examples (Yahoo & Facebook) on Safari and I can't find any mouse-overs. Am I missing something?
That strategy will work exactly as long as she chooses not to "lead with authority" in her desire to have stuff that Mark doesn't want.
Be glad arrays in PHP are implemented internally as hash maps, so the average inexperienced web developer doesn't run into issues like these.
It's exactly what I'm doing at the moment.
Or maybe it's possible that virtually none of what you wrote is meaningfully correct, which would account for the dearth of women in CS despite the huge market for practically risk-free CS/IT jobs in the US.
I think it's time someone lifted mainstream programming languages from the world of control-structures that some guys in the sixties thought were enough. I cringe every time I see C/C++/Java/C#/etc. code that would benefit hugely from more expressive control-structures.
plus an extra week to accomplish stuff you want to do, wouldn't you take it?

For many people -- possibly most people -- what they want to accomplish mostly involves stuff like "going to Barbados", not "putting in another week at $job". If (like me), you have a job you like, or if you have a job that basically consists of accomplishing things that further your own private goals, that might not be the case, but such a situation is rare. Less rare for people on this site, I guess.
‘Sophisticated’ Hack Hit Intel in January
Could you not just email me your direct website please, or address as the domain of your email is redirected to a parked domain.
If you haven't before, make sure you apply for a spot at Startup School (http://startupschool.org/) this year. It's run by YC and open to non-founders.

Edit: This is of course assuming that there will be a Startup School in 2010 since it hasn't been announced that I'm aware of yet.
Brilliant - also because the owner (some mad Chinese bird apparently), monitors her website and notices that all you little children of Great Satan are visiting her website. And bothers to come and post here. Amazing huh? - Ling
were all focused on what's happening at the "they are female and want to work for a startup" point. we really need to focus on the steps that happen before that point.
Easy LAMP Server Installation
There's a world of difference between "there's an audience, and somebody might be able to find an effective way to extract cash from that audience" and "If You’re Passionate About Something, You Can Make a Living From It Online".

Remember when the dot-com bubble burst? The fallout was littered with sites that had audiences, but no effective means of monetizing.
Hope is not a strategy.
Roll Your Own DSL
Horribly bad reporting. Again, the "no emissions" claim, a claim that seems to originate entirely in the mind of the reporters, because Boom is not making this claim. "Low emissions" yes. All fuel cells produce emissions. Just less than combustion for the same energy output.
Yup - that link's got a lot more details missing elsewhere. Thanks a lot!
read: breaking an extremely narrow class of weak captcha by gluing an OCR library to special-case image operations.
> in the short term it's going to require building versions of sites specifically for them.

Or re-think their design choices in the first place (which is of course building a new version, but perhaps not specifically for touchscreens).

1 - Links should look like links. If I have to move my mouse around to figure out which part I click or if it's clickable at all, it's a failure. I shouldn't monitor my status bar or watch my mouse curser for a change. I'm not saying everything should be underlined or something, but make clickable things look like clickable things in whatever way is intuitive for the given site.

2 - Hover to navigate. Get rid of it. Find a way to make the click action do the same thing. I abhor menu systems that require a series of mouseovers to get to the clickable element. If I move my mouse a bit too far it disappears, or FSM-forbid if I don't even know that I'm supposed to be able to just hold my mouse over it to do an action. Also: Javascript required.

The above may not apply to flash widgets, so that's understandable. But even some of the complaints in the linked article could be fixed with a better UI:

"Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise." - OH NO! Maybe do what every app does already: tap once to show controls, fade away after no clicks within a window. Is that hard?

"Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click." See #2.

"Buttons that have important explanations/summaries on mouseover, which you need to understand before deciding what to click." This is relatively valid, but again, make your UI cleaner or more intuitive and this problem solves itself. Look at game controllers for consoles: do they have tooltips?

"Functions that use mouseover to preview and click to commit; such as choosing hair colors for an avatar: you mouse over the colors until your character looks the way you like, and then you click to commit."

Hover becomes a click. Make a separate submit button. Done. Please hire me, I'm apparently an exceptional UI engineer.

... Anyway, I'm not saying there wouldn't be issues of someone took an existing for-desktop flash app and tried to run it on a touchscreen. Most wouldn't work. That being said, is it really so hard to come up with a UI that doesn't require mouse-hovers?

Is it impossible for Adobe to conceive of their product ever working on something without a mouse? That when the mouse-n-curser paradigm is phased out (and eventually it will be) that Adobe is going to close shop because there's just no way to do Flash w/ touchscreens?

I doubt it.
Customer interviews: What you should be learning