skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't at all about quitting Facebook.

I guess not RTFA and commenting on the title alone isn't isolated to Slashdot. er... I actually knew that but this thread shows it splendourly (is that a word?).

Anyway, the actual meat of the article, although a known issue for those who have any interest in the media business, would give HNers an opportunity for some shots at Techcrunch (pottle/kettle).

The internet isn't much different than television on this regard. There's a popular, hot topic one week that vanishes on the other. The blond girl that has gone missing happens every couple years. The media reports the case extensively, then another shiny topic comes, and it's dropped. Of course, boys/girls gone missing/kidnapped happens way more frequently than every two years, but sometimes through some crazy conjunction of factors, one is disproportionally reported.
I had a roommate who got an Electrical Engineering degree from Queens University (one of Canada's more prestigious universities). He then worked for Motorola somewhere in the USA (so he had the right visa) and had a few years experience. Then Motorola downsized, he got laid off and started looking for work. He wasn't getting many calls...

He applied to grad school at Purdue University and was accepted. His resume now said he was at Purdue University, but he hadn't done anything yet besides show up.

He sent off some more resumes and the next thing we knew, our (shared) phone was ringing constantly with people calling to offer my roommate a job.

I guess the robot recruiters liked "Purdue"!
State of the Art - Apps That Don’t Exist, but Should
How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made
Tonido 1.0
It's interesting indeed.

Either they controlled for occupation (doubtful) or sitting in an office didn't matter or the thing whole is just off-base.

One way that sitting in an office is different from watching TV involves complete passivity whereas in an office setting, your actively engaged in some task.

But driving a car is probably closer to sitting in an office than watching TV. So the whole things seem problematic.
HN has a social network. It's called this website and email. I don't want people "poking" me while I'm trying to GID. The quality of HN is a direct result of it not being like any other online environment, social networks especially.

Joking aside, emailing and calling and meeting people really is a great form of communication. The barrier in this sense is a TRULY GREAT thing.

Also: Github.com for me is the most direct network that aligns with HN. On github you are what you contribute. That's beautiful.

Many people seem to think its a good idea in the realm of idealand. I truly doubt HN can be ported to a social network. Anyone I'd be interested in social-networking-it-up with is too damn busy to dick around with me on some casual website.
IPhone4 might be their Vista
I've been wondering for a bit if there's enough potential profit to build an image upload processing service. Image uploading and manipulation is one of the very common pain points to Rails applications and I assume a lot of web applications in general.

A nice pain free, embed the uploader and set some settings and then the 3rd party processes the images and then uploads them to your S3 and pings you. With the ability to reprocess old images to a new size and integrate with attachment_fu or paperclip (or has it's own similar plugin)
I'm not sure exactly what files get pulled in by the compiler, but it will remove any dead code (meaning 100% of any extra files) and output a single minimized file.
Pak, consider using your real name and email in your HN profile. What you're building really is impressive. It's worth making it easy for HN'ers to contact you directly.
You may be experiencing a mild case of burnout. Career capabilities and recognition often undulate based on many factors. Even when you think you're doing everything right, it may be harder to do what you used to be able to do easily. I think that's a natural part of being human. Over the long haul, though, you will continue on an upward trajectory--assuming you continue to absorb new information and practice new skills.

If it really is burnout, there are many resources for how to approach that. An important part, though, is taking a break. Surfing the Net doesn't help. You need time away. You'll know you're at least partway through it when you begin itching to try something new.

Like many here, I went though similar periods in my career. You do get through it and you can definitely become a better developer over time, despite age. Assuming you like what you're doing and you want to improve, then the question is, "what to do?"

Decide on something new that you want to learn. A new language, development environment, operating system, tool set, or whatever. Then pick a problem and work on it. Do it at home in your spare time, so there is no pressure and no expectations. You may not notice any immediate benefit, but you will be growing and improving. This is what makes the difference long term.

Best of luck.
I appreciate the thought, but I'm not sure I buy it. For the content to be reasonable, the user's need to opt-in. Your pitch is that the evaluation will be fair.. ie: not everyone will be above average. What's the motivation for a potential employee to use/stay-on your site if he doesn't like his ranking?

I just can't get behind a service that figures out how to solve everyone's recruiting issues by assigning them a Better Number.
Does anyone know if there are any plans to update Odersky's "Programming in Scala" book? I'm intending to buy it in order to learn Scala, but if there's a second edition pending I'd rather hold off.

Alternatively, if someone knows a better community that could field this question, I'd really appreciate being pointed in that direction. One thing I've not really grokked about Scala is where to go to ask such things!
From the co-creator of OpenSSH: Dsniff 3000. (Now go change your password.)
I noticed you forgot "Return some videos" in that list.

Note: You are awesome if you catch the reference.
5 minutes seems sort of arbitrary. How do they know they have a representative set that describes the whole population? What if in the next 5 minutes they get a rush of users who prefer the other headline? On the other hand, if they are getting second by second updates and they are looking at the standard deviation of the entire minute, then maybe it would be easier to tell which dataset was more statistically significant...no?
I wonder if I could get the same results from 2 weeks at a chicken packing plant and a typo?
"We could push our images to Amazon, and never have to worry about backing them up, or keeping extra copies in case of hardware failure"

Perhaps a clarification, but Amazon does not guarantee your data as part of S3. They will do their best job (and have a great track record), but just like any other service -- failures will occur. Ultimately their SLA may provide for reimbursement of downtime, but that won't get your data back.

That being said, S3 is still (probably) magnitudes better than what you can homegrow.
On the topic of Apple he is spot-on, but the fact is Apple's PR team is untrained because Steve Jobs IS the apple PR team - every semi-crisis / etc he addresses personally.

I expect that with critical mass unfolding Steve will come to the rescue, but it illustrates how entirely and completely dependent on Steve Apple is - it's not just product design or inspiration . . .
As someone also working on building a community site, I hope you or Jeff could one day write down some thoughts on creating a community from scratch. Considering your IMO truly amazing successes, I'm sure you have a lot to offer people like me.
A Knee* Chair is another cool way to sit and always be "in movement". Due to their design, you're forced to reposition yourself every few minutes or so.

*Technically you don't sit on your knees. You sit on your bottom (bearing most of the weight), and use your shins for balance.
Atlassian, AU company raises US60M, unheard of for Australian company
Apple's done a crappy job dealing with the antenna fallout. At the same time, the press and other attention seekers are blowing this way out of proportion. I've seen some compare the iPhone 4's antenna issues to Toyota's accelerator disaster (which I always suspected was largely manufactured by the press and politicians), demanding a recall. That's just hilarious. At worst, they should give out free bumpers until they can fix the design.

It's still Consumer Reports' highest rated smartphone, and the antenna problem has a variety of easy fixes. I can't say I'm that impressed with the phone (for all its improvements, it's a big step back ergonomically), but most of the controversy is manufactured. I'm sure it's done wonders for pageviews, though.
Atlassian grabs Accel's biggest venture round, at 60 million
Gmail Server Side Deletion of Contact Phone Numbers for Droid Users
Hacker Angel Roy Rodenstein (founder of Going.com, sold to AOL) on Mixergy
New Mono Runtime Features
Step 1: Get popular. Step 2: Turn followers into early adopters. Step 3: Profit.
"Nobody else cares" because for a lot of people it is easier not to care about annoying issues like security & privacy. Never attribute to ignorance what can easily be attributed to carelessness.
Private Beta is underway http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ Will open for business on July 21st.
Encrypted Incremental Backups to S3
I suspect that your inability to concentrate is at the root of everything. Judging from the responses here, it seems to be a common phase for software engineers to go through.

I went through it myself recently, and it lasted for several months. At first I attributed it to stresses from homebuying, marriage, etc. But eventually the excuses ran out, yet I still found myself spending a lot of time surfing the net and cruising on my past accomplishments. I tried schmacking myself across the face. I tried changing the position of my monitor to make it easier for others to spot my laziness. Nothing seemed to work. I had gone from being a top producer to a worthless slouch, and I couldn't get seem to get out of my rut.

Then I finally realized the bleeping obvious: I simply no longer had any interest in what I had been working on. What started off as challenging work had turned into an endless stream of moderate enhancements and inane customer support issues.

I was very fortunate to be in a position where I could transfer ownership of the project and move on to different things. The effect was immediate. As soon as the work became challenging again, my productivity immediately shot back up. Hopefully you're in a position to do the same. Good luck!
Our little firm just went through this issue, having had to replace aging Windows XP computers used by our staff and being told by our IT guy and our vendors for key software components that we use (Hummingbird for sophisticated document management, Lexis for time and billing, calendaring, etc., and others) that Windows 7 clients would be incompatible with our network setup for a variety of reasons.

This meant either spending $10K or $20K for various small upgrades using Windows XP clients or triple or quadruple that amount (or more) for doing a global upgrade to Windows 7 for clients and attendant network components. While it is nice to consider bringing everything up to date at once, no business will do this without considering the cost/benefit aspects and, for us anyway, this meant going with the more incremental changes and deferring the more disruptive ones. The hardware aspects of these upgrades are pretty modest in cost. But the expense of paying tech people to reconfigure everything gets high pretty quickly.

Thus, the point made by the article is spot on, at least from this non-tech user's perspective. I assume this will also help explain why it will be comparatively hard to dislodge Microsoft from business-related markets generally - no one wants to make radically disruptive changes on infrastructure items unless they have to.
I'm still seeing 2014 for extended support

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173

Is that the wrong page? Can someone provide where Microsoft is saying it's now 2020?
> His resume now said he was at Purdue University, but he hadn't done anything yet besides show up.

He had convinced Purdue to accept him.

It's sort of like the bias towards hiring folks who are currently employed.
Vimcasts adopts Flattr for micropayments
Since typography relies on human judgement of appearance, people cannot be replaced. However, much of their dull work can be automated: if LilyPond solves most of the common situations correctly, then this will be a huge improvement over existing software. The remaining cases can be tuned by hand.

This is the thing that we so often forget: algorithms can take us a long way, but they can never completely replace judgement. Everybody should read this article, even if they couldn't care less about music notation. (I also particularly enjoyed the section on how not to design software.)
true, but you could also go the Physician's Assistant or Nurse Practitioner (or just Nurse) route... shorter training (only by comparison to MDs), and they all spend a lot of time on their feet.
It all depends on the amt of traffic they get. I'm sure they've experimented enough to realize that 5 minutes is enough time to get a representative sample of their general audience.
I know you kid, but there is a lot to be said for the fact that lack of margin leads to corruption. ie, the best way to discourage this kind of behavior would be to create some sort of noticeable difference in value from one model to the next.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171
South Korea enlists armed sentry robots to patrol DMZ
I feel with you, man.

Unfortunately I cannot offer words of advice, I'm in the same mood and a similar position right now (and it starts to influence my private life a lot, which sucks. Explain to your SO this kind of "I'm feeling that I don't accomplish anything so we're fighting regularly, sorry").

Story's, as I said, similar, but with some key differences: I'm senior in title and in practice, but not in payment. My job's in a niche (OCR/DMS) as well, where basically people just jump between competitors if anything bothers them.
I don't want to follow this practice. I might leave, but this inbred culture leads to lots of problems.

Coworkers are mostly converts from VB times and stopped caring about self education after they were forced to learn C# 1.1 (it still works. Nvm that 4 is out).
I lobby for a (company provided, I use git personally) version control system for 5 years. The company handles projects in the 5-6 digits range and didn't manage to support this request for the most basic of tools yet.

To add insult to injury we're divided into two divisions, one is doing projects for the customer, one is developing the platform. The latter is elite and you won't get a job there. I'm sure they don't even earn much more, but they do the interesting thing. Design new features, research new possibilities. We (as I said, I'm "senior", but still) are just code monkeys.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but this crushes me, right now. I'm seriously unable to get up, unable even to turn on any machine. There's so much I want to learn and do, but the mere thought of my day job currently stuns me. I constantly find me wandering off, I even think the Net is boring and I've seen it all by now.

(Queue the "Quit the job" responses.. Currently searching for better alternatives, but I've a family to support - and maybe I just abuse that as an excuse to hide my fear for something new).

Long post, in huge parts offtopic - sorry for that. Let me finish with "Yes, you're not alone". And the best of luck to you, this is for me the writers block in programming - and it sucks.
Like jrnkntl said, we cache all resized copies.

The reason we resize and apply effects at request time instead of at upload time is that our design needs may change over time, and this way we don't need to go back and batch reprocess things.
Parallelized bloom filter creation with MapReduce
I use http://github.com/markevans/dragonfly for this purpose, using rack/cache to hold on to the generated images (also with no expiration necessary).

Right now I'm working on doing streaming intermediate resizes that never load the full decompressed image into memory, because I need to be able to take uploads of 50 megapixel images and be able to respond with new versions based on user input in a timely manner. RMagick may be an extremely shitty implementation, but even a more solid one is stymied by the algorithm.

The solution is to just do something else -- for JPEGs, libjpeg has the capability to do a cheap streaming resize to 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8 by partially sampling the 8x8 DCT blocks and for PNGs MediaWiki's image server includes a utility for doing streaming resizes, though it's finicky about the exact scale factors it'll allow: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/pngds/
Linkbait much?
Here's a pretty good A/B testing article. I'm sure some it can be applied to blogging:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guid...
Selenium Most Popular Test Framework (ActiveState Developer Survey)
Renting regulations are pretty notorious in Switzerland. There seems to be a rule for everything & it is notoriously hard to get rid of a bad renter. Also, as a foreigner, it is often difficult to acquire property in certain kantons.
> easily phrase ad-hoc questions and have them answered with almost no programming

Queries are programming, the worst kind, programming without composable abstractions.

What people actually mean when they say this is they like having a workspace and a live environment. It's like working in Smalltalk or Lisp in a live image.

Put your email in your profile, I'm disappointed you didn't continue the discussion yesterday after saying do it over email, which you don't make available.
Apache Training Resources
I use Authorize.net with Automated Recurring Billing (ARB). I only intervene to handle exceptions like an expiring card or failed transactions. I bill each customer each month on the day they signed up to avoid explaining pro-rated transactions.

I don't typically email invoices or receipts, but when customers request it I setup a Blinksale recurring invoice to coincide with their billing cycle.

Authorize.net CIM is great if you need to bill irregular amounts or at irregular intervals, but it requires an outside trigger to initiate a transaction. The Authorize.net ARB service is more self-contained and works for my needs.

Every couple of months I reconcile my accounts spreadsheet with my recent charges to be sure that no accounts fall through the cracks.
> Just about every survey of "Business-Friendly Tax Rates" tends to put CA, MA, and NY near the bottom, surely a higher tax rate can't be that discouraging to potential startups?

It isn't fatal at current levels given their other properties. If you don't have those other properties, you're competing with low-tax places that also don't have those properties.
I've considered it briefly for PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com). It would be very expensive to do for all cities, though - the volumes of listings they would have to look through are pretty enormous if you were doing it generally. One of the big things you get out of this is that you tell the person exactly what you want, and they throw away everything else.

There might be some way to make it work, though.
I was hoping for something a mere mortal like me might have a chance at. If the first step is "Get popular"... :)
Can someone who can get to the page copy/paste the text? It's down for me.
I thought they weren't shipping the RS now...
Wordpress And GPL Debate
A big problem is that contentEditable has never been part of an official spec until now (HTML5). My fingers are crossed that we'll see some improvements over the next few years.
True, there is guarantee. But it's a pretty good track record - and the underline technology holds up pretty well. It's more reliable than what we'd be able to build with a small startup budget (or pay for offsite backups/storage).
Hehe, I was about to post exactly the same comment.
The Easy Way to Quantifying Accessibility
I've been doing the stuff in this article for almost a year now but instead of x-sendfile, I use nginx's proxy_cache which does the 'get from S3, save to disk, serve subsequents from disk' for you.

That way deploying more photo servers for speed just requires nginx and a few lines of config.

A couple notes:

1. Make sure you partition your data on your local disk properly so that there are never more than ~5000 files per directory, you can use nginx rewrite rules to do this for you (and make nginx save the actual url to nested folders).

2. If possible, make thumbnails smaller than 4kb.
My only exposure to the Old Spice campaign so far has been through HN, despite generally considering myself a relatively internet-aware individual. Interesting.
Three firms point to upbeat tech IPO week, analysts say
It's a good track record unless it happens to you, and then you're screwed if you didn't do something else to save it. I'm sure at least one person on HN has posted about losing all their data 'cause a machine failed.

It's the equivalent of not getting insurance. Yes, it saves you money, but on the other hand if you're really unlucky the consequences are truly dire.
The pile-on begins. I see Computerworld is now saying the iPhone 4 is Apple's version of Vista.
PadMapper really is a good way to find listings on CL, if anyone needs it. Was my go-to for finding places in SF last year.
I'm not really sure what the difference between "Artificial Intelligence" is and what people have been doing.

It's not like the system is discovering new factors or whatever.
Karma is really a "black swan" thing: sometimes you get one or two points, sometimes you lose a point because people don't agree with you and downvote you, and once in a while you post something totally innocuous (but potentially well-informed) and suddenly they're all over your post and you get as more upvotes than for all these carefully-formulated snippets of distilled thought.

The community quality is, IMO, helped by the fact that there are dictatorial interventions to prune the few trolls that can survive in a karma-based community. (The legend is that some people are made to live in their own editorial padded cell where their HN posts can only ever be seen by themselves).
Getting Ahead in America
Sounds like a defensive move to make sure nobody thinks too hard about switching to Macs or Linux machines.
The main GitHub app is served from Rackspace's IAD data center on bare metal.
This traffic camera blends in with its surroundings: camouflage in plain sight.
they should stop doing the videos today, if they haven't already. it was fun for a day (or two) but if they continue, they're just going to get stale. everyone that has seen most of them already are going to get tired of seeing links posted everywhere once they reach past the reddit/twitter crowds, and it'll become like those annoying e-mail jokes your parents forward you.
Dragonfly looks pretty cool. I like the approach of using rack (our app was written pre-rack, but it's been upgraded to newer versions of rails, so we could make it rack-enabled).

Have people written different datastores (like S3?). I love the idea of a modular, pluggable image server that can choose different backends based on business need/scaling.

Luckily, we deal with pretty small pictures since they are just pictures of our users & their classes. We don't really have any need for handling larger sizes, and our biggest use cases surround generating thumbnails (similar to many social networking web apps).
Maybe a trend beginning here? At first, I liked Flattr. Does it have what it takes to reach critical mass?