skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what Google calls "SREs." Rather than explaining what it is, this guy's google groups post...

I liked OmniTI's description of a role akin to SRE and the progression through the web operations career path they identify: http://omniti.com/seeds/what-is-web-operations .

"This role is in no way fitting for failed developers, it is for developers/engineers that have outpaced their career path. One that has a deep understanding of how things work: a complete systemic view of general site architecture."
When I interviewed with facebook, I was told that every person in the company knew how to code so that if someone had a cool idea, they didn't have to wait for an engineer to implement it.
Harrison Bergeron, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut
I think you are mixing up the fact that IT has a large userbase, while ML, NLP, etc; are more niche (relatively speaking). 360 users IS immediate traction for this area.

> Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful.

Successful for it's founders, yes. But for me, the reader, I'm quite happy to have only the few thousand most-active researchers and professors and their students of Machine Learning, NLP, etc; post on metaoptimize.com. Otherwise, I might as well go to Yahoo Answers for generic, watered-down responses.
That's not so bad if you're given the freedom to not be a fucking idiot about it.
We live in a world where PageRank is truth. Whatever shows up higher in Google is assumed to be true.
Right now, find a company doing something bad ass with HTTP and then make Mongrel2 blow their socks off. Then repeat it again and again until I've got something.

Either that, or getting a Ph.D. in Education.
So, thought experiment: say that I applied for this Web Developer position. And I left off my degree. And it said on my resume, "Implemented the current Google Search Result Page."

Would you reject me?

I guess your answer says a lot about the type of hiring process you have. But if I were the hiring manager, my immediate reaction would be "Fuck the posted requirements, this candidate has demonstrated that he's more than qualified for the job." The same goes for any other significant achievement. The requirements are there to give prospective candidates some idea of what we're looking for, but the ultimate trash-or-interview decision involves the whole package. If a candidate shows strengths in areas we didn't anticipate, so much the better. If they're missing one of the requirements but nail the rest, I'm not going to turn them away for that.
Obie,

Totally understand your distraughtness. And loyalty to friends is a bfd in my book. That being said, it's probably in the best interests of you and hashrocket to not comment, to not talk about it, to have a conversation with your lawyer about it, and let the courts be the courts.
Wow. I know people at Facebook who don't know how to code. And that's fine, they are business types. Seems really disingenuous for Facebook to claim that during interviews.
> However, on the other hand, I've seen so many lies (both blatant and subtle) and so many anti-humane, pro-rich, pro-aristocratic, anti-health, anti-education, pro-superstition, anti-science, anti-environmental, anti-empathy, pro-military, anti-fairness actions supported and advocated by right wing folks that yes I do come to expect it much of the time.

Have you subjected other folks to the same scrutiny?
Version 1.0: Deciding What Makes It In
When are we getting a ZedCam?

I think the world deserves to know when Zed is taking a crap.
Using Clojure actually isn't that hard. It is basically the same amount of difficulty as any other compiled language. You can basically take any text editor and do a standard 'write->compile->run'. However, most people that are familiar with Lisp, prefer a more interactive development environment that allows you to make changes to a running app. Probably the most powerful environment for doing this is SLIME in Emacs. As a result this is what is mentioned the most. I think this tends to scare people off.

I don't know why the Enclojure plugin for Netbeans isn't mentioned more. It provides an interactive development environment for Clojure in package that is much easier to digest for anyone who is familiar with an IDE.
The link in the article is to a tweet which has a hashtag #PARODY. Makes it hard to believe.
hey pstinnet, I really like it - I have no trouble seeing anything on your app. We're definitely going to take inspiration and thanks for the tip about 8tracks!
Wow, it seems we've had quite a few submissions lately revolving around Game Mechanics as a service. Glad to see others jump into this space.

I'm really curious to check out the API and learn how users will configure the requirements to award the points and badges. As a founder of a company who is working in this same space, I share and fully understand many of the complexities and difficulties of offering a service like this. Its oddly refreshing to see competition validate an idea and market we've been trying to develop (what seemed like alone) for so long.

I saw that on your site you wanted to Skype with people to get feedback. I'd love to talk sometime about where we see this market headed.

Best of luck! - Are you guys funded?
They tried to give him a pager
I think the author is missing a key point... these guys are letting you own your own data, whether you host it on your own server or on a wordpress.com-like shared host. Presumably since you control the database your info is in, you can easily export it (and your friends') or extend it as you wish.

I don't see how the author can ignore that point. Data portability is a key driver for Diaspora.
What kinds of things could a VA do for a startup?

EDIT: After Googling around to answer my own question, I'm still not sure about start-up specific tasks. But you might find the results of this survey useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/06/the-personal...
I'll admit I stopped reading when I got to the part about the iPhone 4 losing 24 dB when held a certain way. How does the article reconcile 24 dB (a 250:1 power ratio, or a 16:1 ratio expressed in terms of voltage) with 38%? These are two vastly different values.
Music Blogs: Don’t Kick This Addiction
Indeed. Though with variable arity (which can be a good thing!), currying will always be at least slightly more cumbersome than in languages with fixed arity of the ML type syntax for function application.

Currying and combinators are my preferred ways of creating new functions. Having infix symbols can help a bit, but I don't see it as crucial.

Incidentally I only really began to use reduce/fold in Clean and Haskell, though I had been exposed to the concept in Scheme before, and used it a few times. But perhaps that was just a learning effect of prolonged exposure and would have happened while staying with Scheme, too.

I still like Scheme. Matthias Felleisen is doing great work using it for education.
The easier it is to find "stolen" credit card numbers, the easier it is for legitimate services to protect against their misuse (analgous to vulnerability disclosure).
Congrats on creating a new cultural tradition.
"I'm gonna go make my own interview room. With blackjack. And hookers."
WTF IS HTML5(Infographic)
Heh. You say "literalist reading" is if that's a bad thing! Surely you jest. In my opinion it's the only way to read that document, and on this point we obviously disagree.

I will be more clear. In my opinion, freedom of the press is intended to perpetuate the ability of private citizens to monitor actions of government. Freedom of speech protects the right to publish those facts discovered by the press. You may twist that to include intrusion on private parties, or a slippery slope where lawlessness and slander rule, but that is not what I am saying.

The foundation of my argument is that proceedings of any court are official actions of government, and therefore information that shall be in the public domain. If you want, you could add the word eventually to the end of that sentence, I don't really care. I'm not talking about beauty contests or "courts of public opinion", I'm only talking about accountability of government. In that context, if the press deems themselves, or their viewers the private citizens, best served by documenting the actions of government with the most sophisticated technologies available, where is the power of the judiciary explicitly enumerated to deny it?
So, what's the point of questioning how good they are at coding if it's going to be open sourced by the time anyone can use it?

Also, I think you misunderstand how the node model is supposed to work: one node is going to support multiple user accounts. More like OpenID than pure peer to peer.

Also, who cares about what Facebook is doing? This represents an entirely different operational model.
Why Apple's iPhone 4 Update Won't Fix Your Reception Problem
Yes. That's partially the point.
Yeah, SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming, but they need a skill that's almost harder: the ability to quickly evaluate whether a change is likely to bring the system down or otherwise cause reliability problems. SREs get consulted very often by engineers for questions like "Do we have enough capacity to burn 15% more CPU for the next week?" or "Is this change likely to cause an unacceptable risk of serving bad pages to users?" They also do code & design reviews.

In that respect, the job description is pretty accurate. You do need a strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics, and problem-solving to perform well as an SRE. You need to be able to think on your feet and evaluate the suggestions that engineers are throwing at you before somebody does something stupid, as well as the ability to figure out how to avoid having problems recur.
I love Steven Levy's writing. It has shaped my life.

I found 'Hackers' when I was 16, read it over and over and decided to become a programmer. Then 6 years later, at 22, I read 'Artificial Life' and left my plum programming job to go into computational biology.

Well, I came back to programming eventually, but this guy can sell me anything.
They do "preach the gospel of freedom". If you e.g. have a look at their press releases, you'll see that very few of them are about copyright. But these don't make it very far across the Internet and with obscurity as their greatest threat in the upcoming elections, this kind of "propaganda" is necessary. Also the current issues regarding the pirate bay isn't about copyright as such, but instead about where liability stops.
Jura makes a very nice machine, but it's about $2000. That (more than) a little out of my price range, but we have one at work, and it's fantastic.
Vancouver Carpet Cleaning
AAA Miracle offers a range of carpet cleaning, furnace cleaning and upholstery cleaning packages at the Greater Vancouver Area for houses, apartments and commercial properties.

We are Fully Insured for both Public and Professional liability and our staff are reliable and fully informed.
HR, scheduling, to name a couple
Joshua Abraham Norton
How do you look "hacky"?
It does seem that everybody is into this kind of stuff lately. Don’t really understand it though, but thanks for trying to explain it. Appreciate you shedding light into this matter. Keep it up

http://www.aaamiracle.ca/
I definitely read bass as bass. I fish too much (blasphemy).
"Thanks for requesting Reputely's whitepaper: Best Practices: Game Mechanics.

I'll be sure to email it to you when it's ready! Thanks for your patience.

Cheers,

Dru"

That felt a little bait and switch IMO. I had the perception that I'm dropping an email address to get a white paper and now I feel tricked into get my email address
Vegetables: A Salty Menace?
Anyone else turn HD on and look at the URLs? http://washington.joindiaspora.com/ et al. I've been trying to create an account without luck, but they're running the app in the development environment so I've seen a lot of in depth back traces and things like that. They're using Rails 3 (beta 4), Thin and EventMachine's async features, Mongo/MongoMapper, Devise, and Warden.
I majorly agree with you.

Also, I can't help but get feelings of the author being too critical and dismissive. Is this because the Diaspora folks got a lot of initial funding from their petition? Or is it the author's own ego? Either way, the article gives me a nagging feeling of superiority.
A New Problem for Insurance Markets
I actually find that pretty interesting because it allows me to learn about different types of businesses I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. I guess the key is to work in a field you're interested in.
Using Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts to Track Economy
Correct! The most recent version.
Software Tools for Debating, Argumentation and e-Democracy
In democracies, participation in the political process is now possible online, but that requires some tool support. Ideas need to be shared, votes have to be cast, petitions have to be filed and debates have to be structured. All of these require tools...
Gmail - Hoşgeldiniz nattya numkum - Haber.gen.tr - icecreams888@gmail.com
/Second VBox. I'm using it on Ubuntu to play around with Arch, Nexenta, OpenSolaris, and WinXP. It just works.
Perhaps having live streams of trial courts might not be the right idea(1), but if we can't videotape trial courts, I definitely think appeals courts should have A/V access. In large part, appeals courts are where the law is "decided," versus the outcome of a case impacting, usually, a single person. The actions, decisions, and debate found in appellate courts (including the Supreme Court of the U.S., as well as the highest courts in a given state) should be widely available. The Supreme Court's practice of not immediately releasing audio recordings of certain high-profile cases, but selectively releasing them in others, is troubling to me.

1 - Editorial: I think that all courts should have live A/V feeds automatically available, except in cases involving a minor or a victim of a sexually-related crime.
Bsdtalk interview #193: Colin Percival
I missed some of the other links for Game Mechanics as a service... could you list any you remember? Thanks!
Gmail - กล่องจดหมาย - icecreams888@gmail.com
NYTimes jQuery Slidebox tutorial, with CSS animations and analytics tracking
You know what, forget the blackjack.
Reminds me of Pris from Blade Runner: http://bit.ly/aiM8xZ

Maybe she was just trying to avoid being recognized :)
To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's good for formulating hypothesis but it's not science, at least as described by Francis Bacon or Karl Popper. Good science provides falsifiable predictions, more dubious things that are called "science" merely provide scientific sounding explanations for natural phenomenon.
SPUR: A Trace-Based JIT Compiler for CIL
It's how often people claiming to have the utmost integrity turn out to be crooks. Yes, it's innocent until proven guilty but your words now are already smearing the prosecution. You have already claimed there's no basis for any wrong doing. Do you know the facts? Why don't you wait until the court sorts out the detail?

It's funny how all the defenses presented in HN are character witness. Do you know for sure that they didn't send out fake invoice to trick people into paying them money?
> One of the main arguments is that it's not stealing because revenue is not lost (like a physical item). My argument has always been that over time, the perceived value of the items would go down (because more and more people would expect to get it for free).

I can see that, but I suppose I see the first one as a natural sort of property right, and the second one not. The right not to have someone come into your house and physically remove things from it seems like something reasonable for the government to protect. But the right not to have those things lose value? If someone can make items in my home worthless without actually entering my home and taking them, e.g. by finding a way to make cheap copies of them easily, then I don't see that as a property-rights issue.

I do think encouraging innovation and creation is a worthwhile social goal, but it's different from the idea of protecting property imo. It might be done via quasi-property sorts of temporary monopolies (like patents and copyright), or through government subsidy of the arts and sciences, or both, but it's basically social engineering either way, and which mixture of approaches we take should be based on some analysis of what benefits we get out of each.
sometimes the open dialog would not respond to keyboard tabs/input or mouse clicks. i'm on mac osx using google chrome.
It wasn't ignored. The point was that if its on a worpress.com-like host, someone still has control of your data that isn't you. What's the different if its on a wordpress.com-like host or if its on Facebook? Someone else still has control and a copy of your stuff.
I have downloaded many copyrighted works that I own physical media for as a convenience, since ripping them can be such a pain and kids are hard on little plastic discs. Courts have held that this copy is a legal copy.

To say there is no legitimate non-lawbreaking use is incorrect.
If you don't care about steamed milk a Rancilio Silvia (check out the videos on YouTube for technique).

If you do drink coffee with steamed milk a machine with a double boiler will makes things easier. Get an E61 machine like a La Vibiemme. Don't skimp on the grinder I have a Mazzer mini, but that's probably going a bit far...
I did get the feeling I was being a little over belligerent. I was just extremely angry that the general public is so caught up in the hype that they failed to see the major failure points. $200,000 is a lot of money that could have been put to better use (such as charity or donated to OSS) instead of being wasted on a project that's business model contradicts its reason for existence.
I run a boutique outsourcing company in India - we have been working (for some time actually) for 3 venture funded startups in silicon valley.

This has mostly worked because in all of these startups, we engaged through people whom we are linked to through our past professional lives - we dont do odesk or any of that stuff.

What has also helped is that we try to spend a couple of weeks at the client's site, which helps us to understand the culture as much as the technology.

But what was key, as I later learned, was to get the clients to interview and choose from among our employees themselves (or hire new one)

run your outsourcing team just as tightly knit as you would run an offshore development team - talk to developers (not just project managers) directly and you should be fine!
This is really great; I'd love to see an iPhone app!
http://jobs.hiidef.com/

So is HiiDef, creators and operators of Flavors.me, Goodsie, Dashboard.me and more!

Django, JQuery and/or *NIX administration.

We are distributed around the east coast of the United States, Canada and Australia. Everyone works on multiple sites simultaneously, making for a uniquely challenging and constantly changing work environment.

Email: jonathan@hiidef.com
Anyway you can get that to work nicely with Firefox's find-as-you-type feature?
I disagree, I think this is a good idea with potential, diluting it with freelancers, will attract the crap shoot that elance, guru and the rest are.
It's cheating because the point of the "challenge" is to see if you understand how scope works in Javascript — particularly with loops and closures, which confuse a lot of people — and how to use it properly. This "cheating" solution simply sidesteps the whole question by having the closures mutate a variable that the rest of the function doesn't touch.

And no, I don't think the potential problem you see is much of a problem at all. The function will keep executing even if the timers fire. As long as the timeouts execute in order and the countdown function is able to queue them in less time than they take to execute, it will work.
As you say, legal torrents exist (indeed, many open source projects rely on torrents because they can't afford the bandwidth costs of direct download). Therefore, a torrent tracker has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Similarly, I can find legal and illegal content via a Google search.

There isn't any ambiguity here. Torrents and web search are both multi-use technologies. In the case of multi-use technologies, we should prosecute the criminals based on their use of the technology in question.
These are the few that I could find again. I found others but they were blog articles talking about Game Mechanics.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479966

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482380

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413784

The companies I'm aware of that offer these kinds of services are:

http://www.IActionable.com - mine :) Coming Soon

http://www.BunchBall.com - rajatrocks is the founder and posted on HN years ago

http://www.BigDoor.com - Just received more funding I believe

http://www.BadgeVille.com - Coming Soon

http://www.Reputely.com - Coming Soon
if it were true that to see is to conquer, there would be an awful lot of turnover.
Ask HN: Are Web 2.0 "badges" played out?
I'm talking about these things: http://akoogle.blogspot.com/2008/05/web-20-badges-collection.html

They seem to be a rite of passage for a Web 2.0 site. But they seem played out. At what point, if not already, do they signal that a site or those behind it are more followers than leaders, or is that an unfair conclusion? Does it matter if it's unfair? Does it matter at all? And what will replace these things, if anything?
Read for yourself.

http://bit.ly/united_dir_filing

And while I wish I could say I was a super L33T hacker, I'm afraid these docs are public record if you are set up to look.
What's your sales pitch for mongrel2 against things like Unicorn & Passenger. The new features of mongrel2 seem awesome (particularly multiple protocols over the same socket) and given the success of mongrel, I think we all have high hopes for mongrel2. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on what the "killer apps" are for mongrel2 that make it the superior solution to the alternatives.
Step 1: cut a hole in a box...
Upvoted for funny book name.

Oh, wait, this isn't reddit. Damn.
Not the right thing to be worried about. Once you've built your tech, consulting a designer and doing A/B testing on your website will take care of the rest.
Thanks! We're working on one. For now though, the website works in mobile Safari
Our Brains May Be Growing Poorer off Facebook and Twitter
I think reading any/all headlines with the mindset of "interesting if it's true" is worthwhile here. The facts need to materialize before declaring fraud or any other type of malice. $425 million makes for a wonderful headline.
I tried getfriday.com for a week and then let them go. I used my VA primarily for research tasks.

One task I tried: find me a plain-text format wordlist of technology jargon. Specifically, I want a flat text file with each word on its own line. She billed several hours and provided me with websites I initially found on a google search.

When I started with getfriday.com, my access to their customer interface wasn't working. I tried calling their toll-free support number and received a "beep" rather than a greeting from a business. When I wrote in to cancel my account, the VA manager contacted me and I let him know about these issues. He was very attentive on the phone, but ultimately... I closed my account.

To their credit, getfriday.com let me close my account with zero hassle and they didn't charge me for the trial period.

YMMV.
Why Is Gas so Cheap Right Now?
Or that you've got knee problems, like me. ;)
Science is not as well demarcated as you may think -- here's a good overview: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/