skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The CPAN ecosystem provides some basic guarantees that I haven't seen mentioned for other language's repositories. For example every distribution uploaded to the CPAN is tested on some subset of (using last month's statistics[1]) 15 different operating systems, across 81 platforms, and 26 different versions of Perl. Not every package is tested on every perl and every platform because this is a volunteer effort, but the major platforms (Linux, Windows, BSD, Solaris) are generally covered. These test results are aggregated and reported on search.cpan.org.

Every package uploaded is given a Bug Queue (rt.cpan.org) so bugs and patches can be reported to the author. Additionally distributions can now specify in their metadata (META.yaml/META.json) the source code repository for the code so you can see from search.cpan.org the place to get the latest code to patch against. Additionally there is a process that if a maintainer goes rogue and stops responding, packages can be taken over. This doesn't happen often but has been used when other options fail. Many modern projects have several co-maintainers who can all make releases lowering the "bus factor".

Right now the biggest problem is finding the wheat for all the chaff. Sturgeon's Law applies, 90% of everything is crap. With 21038 (as of this writing) unique distributions, finding the ones that are well written, useful, and generally "best" is actually a difficult problem. You're not alone in finding that hard, but there are projects like Task::Kensho[2] to curate CPAN. This process is hard and would require a full time team of experts to perform properly.

It is big problem but one I think I'd rather have than when I was (for example) working in Java in 2005 and not only had to go through the effort of assessing the module in question (will this work? is it good? will I have problems later) but also had to hunt around the web for where all the different projects were located.

[1]: http://stats.cpantesters.org/

[2]: Full disclosure, Task::Kensho is a project I started in 2007 based upon the feedback of several people in the Perl community.
Hmm, the article says marginal to large, and it looks like it's still much slower than 3, which is already a dog... Too bad...
The God of Technical Things / CTO / Co-Founder
the title is clickable
And with "how" i mean specifically with technology is the app using. I am assuming is it a native app?
The bird watching doesn't count?
Check whether it lets you export. That could be a massive pain further down the line.
Here are some more examples:

http://www.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/bosch/tspart-page.html
Like a handshake: how to remember which side to kiss first
please contact me, its regarding cofounder post by on the Cofounder Wish List, elvirs at gmail dot com
thanks
Tell that to someone who's had an idea copyrighted/patented and used without their permission.
The chap who created Elements on the iPad made more in one day than he made from his website in the previous x years.
Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective.

Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase.

Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments becomes outright hilarious above roughly that threshold.

And with hilarious I mean really hilarious, as in the $3500 price point for a 50G memcached instance. For that money you can also buy a physical server with 64G RAM every month, fresh from the factory...
This is purely commentary, but perhaps his whereabouts were no longer a secret? That would pose for an immediate risk.

"The violence has killed more then 28,000 people and made Mexico one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists, which explains why Blog del Narco cloaks itself so heavily in anonymity."
Lol. Actually I believe 0MQ (or rather, the principles it embodies) is something all serious developers need to learn. How to do concurrency properly, how to get above TCP sockets, how to design simple APIs, how to do open source properly, etc. It's hard to see that exposure to 0MQ would make anyone a worse developer.

As a programmer, using 0MQ is Better than Sex. You can quote me on that. It would be unethical to deny such fun to anyone. What beginners need, with any new technology, is a set of clear recipes that they can implement without having to invent everything. This was why a books like Stevens' trilogy were so vital to getting TCP out of labs and into the grubby hands of ADHD bleeding-edge types.

We're working on that, with books like http://www.zeromq.org/docs:user-guide. That'll grow to cover all of 0MQ eventually.
Not sure about the times before the sysenter mechanism (maybe int 0x80 was more portable?), but now that sysenter is in place it is faster than call gates, because most of its behaviour is hardcoded in the CPU itself.
There is no lock-in using Heroku. Start with it and if you later want to move, just get a VPS of the appropriate size, apt-get install PostgreSQL, install RVM, and then the Ruby you want and required gems. Once you do this a few times, it takes very little time. As another poster mentioned, make sure you setup cron backups to S3, etc.
Exactly right - and even if you CAN setup your own VPS it doesn't necessarily make it a valuable use of your time. I've setup probably 3 slices for various projects and it's annoying/time-consuming enough that I use Heroku now.

Also - their free plan levels the playing field a bit on price since it's free the entire time you are developing and up until you have a handful of users. On a VPS you pay up front for that.
Revolution OS [video]
My first job was at McDonald's at 14, I wasn't even old enough to work the fryer.

I had an almost identical reaction, I promptly became vegetarian for a year and didn't eat beef for the next 10. I still can't eat McDonald's to this day. And I definitely learned similar lessons about life.

But the biggest lesson I learned was that McDonald's food is really, really greasy.
If you read the 0MQ Reference Manual at http://api.zeromq.org/zmq.html you'll see that it specifies the abstraction, while the code implements that abstraction.
Yes, this sounds a lot like Mendely http://www.mendeley.com/
Ok, maybe not so flippant comment this time...

I thumbs downed the article because as a security professional we try to stress the importance of actual security rather than obscuring the problem for long term success.

Take port knocking for example, interesting idea but what a pain in the ass... just disable root and set a strong password.

Changing the port from 22 will prevent all of the automated botnet driven SSH brute force attacks, which do little more than messy up your log directories.

Best thing you can do is use SSH brute force blocking script which reports attackers back to a webapp which the security community can use to track infected hosts.
example:
http://danger.rulez.sk/projects/bruteforceblocker/blist.php

Fail2ban is a nice one too as it supports many services including http-auth.
I am a Heroku fan. Some things for you to consider:
1) The real value of Heroku is time savings. Their deployment mechanism is near instant, so your savings come from the time you are spending doing more development, rather than managing servers. If you wanted to hire an ops person, that's a cost savings.

2) Scalability. As your system grows, Heroku manages architecture choices necessary for scaling all parts of your app. This is at the dyno web tier and database tier. But it also includes choices around architecting add-ons. For example, if you wanted to include their memcache add-on and you had multiple apps, should you create multiple memcache instances or one large grid? That sort of choice is handled behind the scenes.

3) Add-Ons. They handle configuration, billing, and setup of any add-ons you might need. Biggest savings is not having to research all of them to figure out which ones are stable, viable, functional.

4) Cheap to get started. You can deploy new apps for free, and migrate your code elsewhere if needed.

5) Their polyglot strategy is interesting, and they are pushing the envelope with beta implementations around nosql data stores. There is a nice polyglot post on their blog.

6) There is some performance advantages of using some of their add-ons. Because Heroku is deployed on EC2, and many of the add-ons are also on EC2, the integrated performance can be higher. EC2 ping rates are faster than gigabit ethernet in some cases.

7) Creating identical environments. If you manage your own servers and you need to create staging, QA, or development servers, you'd have to create those manually and they'd be close, but not identical because there is different hardware involved. In debugging scenarios, being able to clone a whole app environment has some advantages.

Good luck in your endeavor.
Heroku is great. But, if you use something a bit outside ruby/add-ons (which is a lot, including NoSql databases, Apigee, and lots of other great services), you will need to move.
Question about heroku: I know that they have delayed_job support, but I need something that will kick off a DJ call every 5 minutes or so. The hourly cron add-on just won't cut it.
Over the past couple years I think I’ve come over to the point of view that the university degree system should be abolished and that higher education needs to be restructured.

Higher Education was born out of the need to verify applicant knowledge for employment. Then society realized we needed institutions to instill that knowledge. So the university system was born to disseminate knowledge.

But today we have infinitely better ways to disseminate information and the only reason we aren’t using them is because Universities don’t want to lose their stranglehold on education. The end result of which is an elitist system that traps knowledge behind a very expensive paywall. So expensive that only 27% of the nation manages to actually get a degree.

I don’t have a problem with the Universities still existing. But I do think we should make a free education available online for all people and grant degrees based on standardized testing.
Im a sys admin and have to administrate dedicated servers at work but choose to use heroku for personal projects just for ease of deployment.
That's got to be a cultural thing, I've never even heard of wheels of fortune combined with hangman.
Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress.com (probably in that order)
Yes, but I believe there exists a half-hearted superstition. It doesn't hurt to hang a horse-shoe above the doorway IF luck really exists.
bit.ly makes 'em.
When I look at 2D 720p, I see 1280x720 per eye too... When you encode a new information with the same bandwidth, there must be a trade-off.
We did all manually before. Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized project it is just perfect. We replaced about 1 to 2 days of works by 10 minutes with heroku. I cannot recommend it enough.

It took only 3 hours to adapt our projects to heroku. Compared to many days working on hosting ourselves our projects. Because the longer is not to set up the environment but to choose what will be the best. I believe the heroku team made the best choice for me.
I bet solving the Riemann would be pretty fulfilling.
Nope, Minnesota.
Keynesian teaches wealth is created by fooling people into investing in things that they would not ordinarily invest in.

But all it does is misallocate investment into things that are unsustainable and that ultimately collapse, like the housing bubble. Or the dotcom bubble. Or the recent mini-bubble in the stock market.

And the only response offered by the Keynesians to their collapsing bubbles is an even bigger bubble.

Nothing can ever be allowed to return to normal in this bankrupt theory. A return to organic growth with investments in things judged to be a value to the people who actually are playing with their own hard-earned money is somehow vastly inferior to the judgement of the illustrious leaders who spend other people's money to make it through the next election.

In other words, when you've used up one credit card, its time to obtain another. And this is the only way to become successful, according to the Keynesians.

To defer consumption and invest in one's ability to produce works for the individual and it works for societies in the long run. And societies that cannot act sustainably, that eat their seed corn before it is even harvested, will fail.
Part of childhood is having freedom to basically play at / study what you want, without having to worry about paying the bills / social approval, etc. That's what he's doing.

So, there's a possibility that this is exactly what he wants to do. The danger is he may not have had a lot of time to sample other interests, so he's doing the first thing he was good at, while there may be more optimal (for his happiness) alternatives that get closed off by this focus.

Also, if he has a close group of friends and moving to university will separate them, that's something that can be quite traumatic.

Can you tell I'm ambivalent? I'm speaking from experience.

The goal of my entrepreneurship is pretty much to return to a state where I can work on whatever I fancy, without having to worry about how to pay the bills (and without sacrificing the obligations I've accumulated).
I never knew there was so much spam. I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer.
I can probably get my brain to generate one faster than visiting a web page :) .... but here's something similar in python:

import string
import random

def random_pronoucable(minpairs=8,maxpairs=10):
consonants='bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz'
vowels='aeiou'
password=''
for x in range(1,random.randint(int(minpairs),int(maxpairs))):
password += consonants[random.randint(1,len(consonants)-1)] + vowels[random.randint(1,len(vowels)-1)]
return password
Authenticity : Take The Path To The Real You 
http://www.secondactive.com/2010/09/authenticity-real-you.html
Really easy with DJ, but hackie: jobs create jobs, set run_at to five minutes in future. Optionally, similarly created batch of twelve with hourly cron.
Why do you think more than 27% of the nation needs a college degree?
I've been working through some of the MIT OCW math courses lately. It's actually been a better experience in many ways than my old college classes. Instead of sitting in a room full of 100+ people with a teacher too busy to answer questions I can sit back on my couch with a laptop and a lemonade and take my time, pause, rewind, etc.

There is something valuable in the kind of direct interaction you get at higher course levels in most colleges though. Any real alternative to the current system is still going to have to employ specialized, dedicated staff to answer questions. Crunching people through a meatgrinder of canned lectures and standardized testing is only going to take you so far.
Yep - do some crowd sourcing like HN for academics.
9 Disappointing 90's Movies...for 90's Teens
Here are nine disappointing 90’s movies, for 90’s teens.
Here's a horror story from the other side (the buyer's -- or person-who-wanted-to-be-a-buyer's) of PayPal.

I'm American, but 7 or so years ago when this happened was living abroad, had no credit card, and wanted to buy things online. So I created a PayPal account and transferred $100 in from a bank account. I then tried to make a purchase, but found that as an outside-the-US user, I would not be able to make payments until I registered a credit card with them. I couldn't qualify for a credit card at the time... oh well. So I tried to move the money back to my bank account. But that transaction was covered by the same policy; I wouldn't be able to do it until I registered a credit card with them.

Looking through the ToS, I found that this rule was in there; an international user had to register a credit card in order to disburse any funds from the account. So the fool in this story is indisputably me. Still, I found it hard to believe that the system was set up to allow black hole accounts, which money could enter but never leave. Over a lengthy email exchange, I was assured that such accounts were indeed possible, and that I had created one.

Eventually I let go of the $100. But I never let go my scorn for PayPal.
The same must be doubly true with respect to graduate school. There are around 400 students at the graduate level in electrical engineering at my university. WTF!
That link currently has more votes than this one, despite the pain to skim and evaluate an 80-page PDF. Thanks for the good find.
That's what I was thinking. Ruby, Perl and Python are all fine alternatives if you can find people with those skills.
Some notes on Affiliates & Referrer Marketing
so, once the infrastructure is there, GMail is more expensive?
That was the paragraph that jumped out at me too, because he got that exactly wrong. The iPhone designers clearly did understand their users, all 120 million of them. My wife is a total technophobe and the iPhone has finally connected her to her friends online.

I still deal with this issue working with techies who have iPhones and develop on iPhones. There are 100,000 iOS developers. 120 million iOS devices. So Mr Platt may be correct about developers in general, but he certainly got it wrong about Apple.

I must disagree that the best designers are like their users. The best designer is someone who can design a user interface for 120 million. Yet most iPhone users can't. It takes a different mindset to design a UI than to use it.
so, GMail more expensive?
JMS does cover some of the same ground, all messaging does. But it's basically an API wrapper around two ancient technologies, a queue system and a topic system. I think it might have been IBM MQSeries (which became WebSphere MQ) and some other product but can't find the details.

What JMS achieved was to somehow turn these two very different semantics into a single one, based around "destinations". That was very clever but also makes JMS weirdly complex to use because the queue (request-reply) pattern and the topic (publish-subscribe) pattern just don't work the same way. We designed AMQP originally by taking the JMS spec and reverse engineering that into a wire level protocol. Then around version 0.3 we threw out destinations and came up with a generic wiring model based on exchanges, bindings, queues. That was my summer holiday in 2005.

AMQP is BTW still some way away from a 1.0 standard and mainly it's been five years trying to get reliability working in the center of the network. That always seemed destined to failure, as I explained in a presentation to the working group in 2006: http://www.zeromq.org/whitepapers:switch-or-broker.

AMQP and JMS both focus on resources held in the center of the network. It's familiar to anyone using HTTP as their stack. Thin stupid clients talking to big smart servers. 0MQ turns the focus to smart clients working across a thin, stupid (but massive) network.

Both approaches have their value. We (iMatix and the 0MQ community) tend to believe we can do a lot more, faster and more cheaply, using the distributed approach.
The End of Tenure?
We are a garage-stage company with a product that provides premium booking services to demanding taxi users. We are pre-funding, have a demo-ready prototype, and our product will be ready to ship in a couple of months.

We are looking for a business cofounder who will be initially responsible for taking the solution to market: a combination of strategic thinking along with plenty of hands-on work developing sales channels on the supply side (taxis) & on the demand side (users). We are in fairly advanced conversations with several partners already, so you will have to hit the ground running.

This is a high-risk/high-reward position with a big slice of equity for the right candidate, and the opportunity to be first in line for tackling a market valued at $1-2B (worldwide).

Ping me through HN or write to us at jobs [at]swishly[dot]com
I think the most important thing is getting something up and running quickly because you don't know where the design of the system will lead and you don't need the distraction of setting up a server. Don't waste more than a week fretting over this issue. Even a week is too much! During development you can still consider this issue so it's not an either-or thing. You're still developing in rails and can easily move your system to a standalone server. You're just delaying the cost of hiring a system admin or training one while you spend your valuable time in creating a working system which is very valuable in terms of figuring out the design of it.
The iPhone app is a native app developed using the iPhone SDK. The website is developed using .NET and Microsoft SQL on Windows.
The Showman Ships
interesting to know - I had no clue - that SMS messages use "the same channel your phone uses to negotiate a connection with the tower and to migrate between towers", and that it is a separate channel the one that handles voice and data.

I know, my question is very much apples vs oranges. My question is something like: if I could use email as a perfect substitute for SMS messages, would I (a web startup) be able to compete in a downward spiral on price against operators?
30% seems a little high in terms of retention. What industry?
So bored intel ops can play spot-the-difference between natural and IR images?
I am almost sure the Narco guys already track and detect this guy. Their financial resources are incredible and paying for a hacker could be easy.
@lethain - you beauty. Nice work. The thing is - it is not surprising that redis maps well with the python DS. It is that after reading this it occurred to me how powerful having Persistent DS(Not in the Functional DS sense but in data storage sense) can simplify web programming.
I have a long list of places I like to work given a certain level of free time and financial security. McDonald's isn't on it, but UPS is.
If you make user jump through hoops when creating passwords, the users will inevitably employ very insecure methods to remember the passwords, like writing them down on a post-it note and sticking it to their monitor.

Force them to change it often? They will take your rule about using numbers, and just serialize their password: same password, incremented every time they are forced to change.

But in the end you are still better off, even if they do this. You may not solve the problem of local security (witness the post-it notes), but at least you won't have people hacking into your SMTP server and using it to relay spam, because someone used their First Name as a password.
Toronto, ON.

Myplanet (www.myplanetdigital.com)

Job title: Emperor. (we don't have job titles)

Who you are: Brilliant software developer with an iron grasp on PHP. A tinkerer of the highest order. Bonus points for other languages/frameworks/musical talents.

Why you'd want to work here: We're growing. Fast. 300% this year. We're no-nonsense. We work on really cool projects. We're soon launching some amazing products. The average age of our team is 24. We are obscenely ambitious. We only hire smart people. Benefits are included. We'll soon be starting an options program. And if you live in the US, we'll walk you through the process of getting set up in Canada. If you get sick, there are no copays here. ;-)

What we do: We help organizations use the web to become customer-obsessed. We're developing novel product out of our client work this year to launch next year. We think they're going to be really, really big.

How to get in touch: Email me at dustin @ myplanetdigital.com

An even better way to get in touch: Tell me about/show me an awesome project you've worked on for fun.
Actually, Heroku supports all the popular NoSQL databases out of the box via their addon system.
RTFA.

But no, he's arguing that even if you had the best armor in the world, an international agreement that all tanks must park at the top of the nearest hill would be Bad for the life expectancy of the crew.