skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. It could argue against almost anything, because the real problem indicated is a lack of balance, not an inherent harmfulness of the thing in question. For example: "If everyone became a DBA, society would come crashing down, so I should not become a DBA."

DBAs are good and helpful — they just aren't the be-all end-all of human existence. I don't think anybody should be held up to that standard.
2011 B2B Marketing Report from MarketingSherpa is Out
You missed out the bit between Access and SQL Server where the Access frontend is stuck on a Citrix server and the backend is stored there for 'concurrent multiuser support'.
Heh data monetization sounds good.. what about skill monetization? I'm getting a MS in computer science but am unsure what to do with it..

I'm particularly frustrated with brainless Java / .net development jobs.
Microsoft is dead
Good call. I had considered that but it was plainly visible to me so I figured it was nothing to hide. I trust your opinion though and censored the address.
Yep, for something simple just use Sinatra / other microframeworks.
Dear Developers, a "Free" Headhunter Will Cost You Over $10k
Thanks for the collection; I realized especially that Erlang after all is more interesting than I had anticipated - it's almost as simple to interface with C as Python is, and aspect I appreciate a lot. And I must say I really am delighted by some of its unique concurrency features I was not aware of. So I just installed Distel and erlc and am playing around a bit!
I just posted answers for both your questions.
Is the base number for the programming jobs even meaningful, since it seems like every language adds a modifier?

Or, to put it another way, the modifiers are 4-8%. So that 4% baseline could be subtracted out to give a better base.
I posted an answer to your question on Stack Overflow. It looks like you're trying to make the problem much harder than it actually is. I hope that helps you out.
Sure, drop me an e-mail.
Yeah, I've seen this where someone goes from in-office to work-at-home locally to work-at-home distant, and there was no salary cut at any point.

OTOH, the multiplier for our company for NYC is not 40%.
That's not my point.

People join facebook because all their friends are on it, and they get to see a news feed.

It's not instantly familiar or usable, and no one knows what's a wall or a news feed, but when you find pictures of a friend you haven't seen in 10 years, you'll probably stick around and try to figure it out.

Of course, at the beginning the only users where college students and people in their teens or twenties. But now even people in their forties join just because they can keep in touch with their distant relatives and old friends.
Thanks, I'm so green to this I didn't even know what an ETF was! Doing more reading now...
On the other hand, as of this writing this complaint post has 131 points. That seems to suggest that more people are against the offer posts than for them. Curiously, the only post on the frontpage now with more posts is "Things Paul Graham is Wrong About", another post with a flamebait title. Not surprisingly, flamebait attracts the upvotes!
Poll: For or against Offer HN type posts?
Though obviously offered with good intentions, a lot of people find the Offer HN posts to be a bad thing. It is hard to get a sense of the community based on upvotes (being that there are no downvotes for stories), so a poll is the best way to measure sentiment.
Support more Offer HN posts
Oppose more Offer HN posts
What are some of the unique business models around data monitization? The most obvious are pay walls and generating content to drive advertising. Any thoughts on how successful paid access to data is, like with imdb pro?
We participated in the Rails Rumble with Splendid Bacon http://splendidbacon.com and I did the design and most of the fronted ui. (I wrote a summary about the process: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803155)

A) - Usually in our projects or in my projects, I try go with the design first, starting with describing what we are doing, why, for who and how.(The Five W’s Of http://52weeksofux.com/post/890288783/the-five-ws-of-ux). The concept, being 5 lines or 5 pages, sets the background for the whole project.

From there I try to go with sketches, or wireframes to iterate the views or the interaction flows. Then start doing the ui in Photsohop. When I'm quite set with the UI I start implementing that and iterating the interface along the way. After that, or about in the same time we start coding the features.

B) - I'm not sure how much wisdom we have accumulated. About some things sure, but natural multitouch interfaces or multimillion user web services are still quite new. If we would have followed Jacob Nielsens advice on everything, we woudn't have sites we have today.

I think the best way is to keep updated what's out there and from there you can get inspired to find your own solutions. That's why I have iPads & iPhones, try to use most of the new services to understand how they work and how they're built.

I try to learn from other people and their process (like with simple todo app, Cultured Code produces a lot of sketches and mockups http://culturedcode.com/things/iphone/makingof/ and one of other Rails Rumble attendees described their process: http://www.thevisualclick.com/notebook/2010/10/2010-rails-ru...

C) - In our company we usually have 2-3 person teams, where one of them is a designer, which is something I would recommend. Personally I think the best is if the designer can also implement the design, because Photoshop mockup is not the actual design, the app or it's interface is. For best result, you need to be charge of the whole interaction.

D) - I'm not that sure which way around I got started, I had some classical arts education as a kid, and later started making websites and developed some web services. I'm quite bad programmer, altough in addition to html&css I can handle javascript, rails and php.

I think the first step is to know what's is great and what isn't so you know how well you're doing in your own projects. So develope your taste by surrounding yourself with great design. And like in any other learning, the key is just practice. If you have coded hundreds of features, then by the same time I might have done dozen of designs.

For me the hardest part still finding the right process for some cases. Sometimes I'm able to see the whole thing right way, and sometimes I'm just stuck or feel that something is wrong with the design without knowing what.
Strong minds think alike « Muna Abigail
Ask HN: how important is it to be an expert in something?
when I read job postings for the latest hot tech startup, or read profiles of big name programmers working at these startups, it seems like being an expert at something is a necessity to make it (and in some cases, an expert at multiple things).

I've been programming professionally for a few
years now, and I don't feel like an expert at anything. I don't know if it's because of the environment I'm in or that my "expertise" thinly spread across coding what I code and the industry/domain I'm in.

I guess I'm sort of a jack-of-many-trades, but truly an expert at none. I know startups often say they need generalists, but it also seems like a startup needs people that are really, really good at many things to get a startup off the ground.

should I be spending my weekends consciously trying to become an expert at something, even if it's not something I'm going to use/reinforce in my daily work? or is depth overrated compared to breadth?
Oh, okay. Sorry again. I was testing a script that pulled text from a file on my computer and submitted it to HN in the appropriate fields. I had a feeling it might look suspicious, but it was just too much fun to play with. Lesson learned.
Happens all the time. They get the same degree in the end and no one cares. It's a great hack.

I have friends who are doctors who went to fancy med schools and complain all the time about the other doctors who went to school in the Caribbean. To the average Joe, a doctor's a doctor.
No worries! I'm not trying to scare you off, I just want you to be aware of how deep and murky the pool is before you dive in. Ultimately, all of this stuff is really very interesting and fun to learn even if you don't one day make millions off of it. :-]
"What are you doing?" is not very ominous. What were you doing, out of curiosity?
For a bit of a different flavor, here's the one I've been using that accomplishes the same aims:

http://gist.github.com/649724

It's a good bit more compact, recursively refreshes the CSS in all frames in the window, and uses a timestamp instead of a long random number.
Ain't nobody gonna hold me down.
Military links between systems usually traverse the network over Internet (albeit in an encrypted manner, such as with a VPN).

Energy firms link sites together via site to site VPNs on the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if remote support for SCADA networks weren't linked in a similar manner, which would at least make for an interesting fluff article on zdnet.

It's a bit like Madagascar in Pandemic 2. What are they going to do? Shut it all (or rather sections of it) down? Then what?
I think it's really cool that Heroku is so transparent about their outages. A lot of companies try to cover them up or blame them on someone else.

It's refreshing to see a company that not only acknowledges their outages, but even has a list of all past issues and outages. This transparency can only help them to become better in the future.
Does Heroku use anything like 5 Whys to incrementally address organizational-type causes?
I graduated in my May. My friends who were CS and went to work for "normal" software companies (i.e. exclude startups, wall street, and the big guns like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft etc) are making $50k-$65k. Those salaries were mostly in Philadelphia and Washington DC.
Scripts that are submitting stories seems like a really bad road to be going down (even if you do it with a reduced rate)...
Ask HN: Are there any experimental / new media artists on HN?
Hello, some of my things are at http://cixa.org. I believe there are other experimental artists on HN, are you one or do you know of any?
we would realize how little value we're getting in comparison to those "socialist" countries in Europe (and Canada) where they don't pay much more but get much better services.

Eleven carrier battle groups, biyotch.
I don't think we should be worried about these. As PG said, it's fascinating to see how Internet evolves. My only worry is that for some "Offer HN" posts I'm not yet prepared to ask for their help, however, I certainly see myself looking for these "services" in future and I'm not sure how it will pan out then ;)
Ah, well, I should have a closer look at times... Thanks for the hint ;)
Tough questions for the General Manager of Windows Azure
It's ok. I did something stupid ages ago (posting a thread more reddit-suited than HN IIRC, which I might not) and got an email from pg politely but firmly asking me never to do it again. Just do as the man asks and don't worry about it.
"The fact that Microsoft's efforts in this area have been largely unsuccessful over the past decade doesn't mean they aren't trying or aren't willing."

Yes it does. That is exactly what it means.
The dynamics of post upvotes are quite different, they are not always sign of agreement.

I saw a lot of time people saying they disagree, but they upvote the post to make it more visible and involve more people in the discussion. I even do it myself from time to time.
>That's a pretty cynical worldview.

Cynical or skeptical? Or both? Does the fact that his worldview is either of these remove the possibility that it's true, at least in some cases? Does the risk of a drop in overall quality of HN as a result of promoting 'offers' outweigh it's potential benefit? Who knows, but I'm with swombat and can't help be a little skeptical. Personally I'd like to hear some ideas for how one might minimize disingenuous posts before plunging into this thing.
F.T.C. Drops Google Inquiry on Street View Data
Thanks! Have some reading to do :)
We're working on a contextual gadget. It would be up on the marketplace in around 2-2.5 weeks.

We built the DOM scraping+manipulation version first, as it gives us more flexibility with the placement of the "Send to GrexIt" and the search area.

Hope you try it out.
I like this question and I hope more startups/companies explain how they maintain quality. There are far more stories about how "I code this in 24/48 hours/1week/3week" but less stories about "this is how we maintain high-quality code" or "this is our automation strategy".
Mark Zuckerberg on What Hollywood Doesn't Get About Silicon Valley
Can't go on friday night, but count me in at any other time!
Yes, it'll be a free download in a couple weeks if you buy the PDF.
For successful API calls that return a status code other then 200 I would just ignore them. There are no API methods that will cause havoc by being called twice (other then maybe sending a duplicate DM.)

For failed API calls that return a 200 status code validate the response. For example if you are getting a user then verify that there is a screen_name and id present. If they are present in the response you are fairly safe to assume the call actually succeeded.
thanks for doing this! my question:
http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3089/how-far-can-you-ge...
Totally agree. I definitely don't have any malicious intent to use this. It was just fascinating to see if I could.

I'm new to this programming thing so perhaps I get a little carried away when I develop a new found power.
Followed the advice I got here from you and others and am now studying the language. And, so far, I must say, Erlang rocks. Naturally it will be a few weeks before I can write something real and make more of an educated decision, but it really looks very nice so far - so many solutions to problems I have. I especially like the "selective message passing" bits and the ways you can operate on bitstreams already.
Is there an established (or perhaps undocumented) way to retrieve an entire conversation from a single tweet?

The ugly way a coworker and I ended up using was to just see if the single tweet was in response to an ID, request that ID, see if that was in response to an ID, and so on until it either ended or we cut it off prematurely after a certain conversation length. This method also doesn't allow you to see any future messages within that conversation.
Google Place Search: a faster, easier way to find local information
This is a surprisingly creative bit of Halloween flair from Sears, of all companies. If you didn't notice, you can switch the language to "Zombian" in the top right corner of the page. The following link should work to get you there directly - http://www.sears.com/shc/s/dap_10153_12605_DAP_Zombian
Save time by creating macros to deal with assholes.
10 Years later Conde Nast publishers get control of their Websites
Heroku had 45 minutes of downtime in August, 28 in September, and 45 in October so far. (Source: http://groups.google.com/group/heroku/browse_thread/thread/f...)

That's 99.90%, 99.94%, and 99.88% (for the month so far), or simply 99.91% for the entire period.

So, what would you consider "rock-solid"? Personally, I'll echo what was said in the other thread - 99.91% is much better than what I could accomplish on my own, so I'll continue to trust my business to them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless
I don't care for Heroku, but this is over the top: distributed systems are complicated, to build and especially to test. Even Google gets it wrong: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-i... is not entirely dissimilar.
Offer HN now at news.ycombinator.com/offers
just curious, what do you do now? what brought you to HN?
For now they'll only last this server invocation, because I merely pasted the code into the repl. Let's see if we still need them in a week.
I'd like to point out the lesson that other industries can learn from IT infrastructure companies.

Heroku sells a technical product to a technical audience. They're foundational to their clients' products. So when something goes down, there's only one option: explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what happened, why it happened, and how it's going to be fixed in the future.

Why? Because their clients can smell bullshit better than a purebred bloodhound. Too much bullshit means it's time to move on.

Beyond being the right thing to do, being accountable is essential to trust. When you fuck up, it will piss people off. That's just life – everyone makes mistakes. So you need to be the guy where people can say "Okay, there was a fuck up, it was bad, but look at how hard these guys worked to fix it. Check out their plans to prevent it in the future."

Luckily, the incentives are aligned here to make this mostly non-negotiable. When you get medical malpractice, a financial meltdown or an oil spill going on, the cover-your-ass impulses are much more compelling.

Even in those cases though, I insist we need to encourage a culture where accountability and transparency are rewarded. Because, for me, accountable guys are the kind of people I want to do business with.

I dunno much about scaling a Rails server, but for now, at least, I know the Heroku guys are the sort of people I'd trust.
After isolating the bug, we attempted to roll back to a previous version of the routing mesh code. While the rollback solved the initial problem, there as an unexpected incompatibility between the routing mesh and our caching service.

To me, it seems like they just needed to apply the "Hot patch", instead they panicked(?) and did a lot of unnecessary version control gymnastics, which delayed the bug fix.
Maybe not, but I certainly perceived it to be ominous at 3 am. See my reply to pg. In hindsight it was a bit of a bad idea.
gtk. Not into M$, but wasn't aware of Bizspark available to startups that was noted as a way to get access to Azure: http://www.bizspark.com/Pages/home.aspx

And gtk this is the Azure suggestion area: http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-...

Service pricing model seems to need work for Azure.

Too bad that msdn is not free, otherwise I might actually check out visual studio every once in a while.
Ask HN: Automatic cross-browser regression testing?
For the last year or so I've been hacking at ending the enormous pain caused by browser testing.

I'm creating a cross-browser "validator" similar to the way a W3C validator works that offers true cross-browser regression testing.

I think I've finally got a decent prototype in the works. You can give the app a domain name, and it will perform cross-browser testing, spitting back a list (and screenshots) of pages with compatibility problems, along with the browser culprits.

Basically it works by crawling a domain and processing an image of each page for all selected browsers, including a "golden browser." The golden browser is whatever browser the developer uses to develop the site, and what we assume is visually accurate. Each browser image is compared to the golden screenshot using a difference filter, and any problems are notated. There are certain variances allowed to deal with font differences and rounded corners, but it really hits the nail on the head with float drops and other layout problems. It does this automatically and produces a list of all the culprit pages and problem browsers.

I've hated browser testing so much that it drove me to do this. I'm not sure how much time everyone else spends on this, but I'm sure it accounts for 25% of my total dev time.

Available solutions like Litmus and Adobe's browser testing are decent, but are far behind what developer's really need. I hate going to dozens of individual pages to make sure new changes didn't break old pages.

Is this grounds to build a startup around, or just a feature litmus (or others) may offer? Is this something you would use?
How is it over the top? I am genuinely curious about their QA process. I am not judging them.
to _its_ site.
I think a separate /offer area for the Offer HN posts would be great, if they continue appearing on a regular basis in the future. (I voted in support of Offer HN posts, if that matters.)
I offer things by putting them on my blog. For example, I wrote a long piece about getting press the other day: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/how-to-hack-media.html

I prefer that approach and anyone who wants to ask for PR advice can contact me.
The Do's & Don'ts To Getting in Contact With A VC
It's a new trend that might explode and take up the entire HN aggregate. If you don't like the kinds of threads, I'd voice my dissent to nip it in the bud, too.

I appreciate the expressed dissent, but I happen to disagree and find it to be a lovely phenomenon. I don't expect it to last forever, though.
This piece doesn't explain or detail the circumstances of the suit whatsoever. SAP has already admitted fault. They acquired a company called TomorrowNow that was scraping it's clients' Oracle servers to service parts of their systems that it wasn't licensed or authorized to work on. What is being fought over now is damages.

What's new to the story is the public accusation that Apotheker was directly responsible. (He was involved with the acquisition as an executive and had become CEO by the time the suit was filed)

So, if the HP board didn't see this coming, they simply didn't vet Apotheker well enough or are still underestimating Ellison. Probably both.
The medium verses transformation is a really interesting argument. I wonder how the law will see it when that day comes.

I have a feeling that the transformation argument may fall pray to the "color of bits" problem but perhaps not. I think it may even come down the choice of algorithm - if I use a publicly available encryption algorithm then it might be considered a medium, whereas if I invent my own language maybe it won't.

As for the forgotten key, that's another argument. There is probably a burden of proof somewhere in there (and probably more on the side of the prosecution). If, for example, the police knew you accessed the contents of the hard drive last week, it would be pretty difficult to claim you forgot your key.
Altruism doesn't exist, and this is not a bad thing. To 'provide help', even anonymously, is to help yourself by bettering the environment in which you live ("Karma" sans magic).

I don't think anyone has posted any sort of story or comment to HN (or read HN for that matter) without some hope for personal betterment as a result.

As far as chilling trends in the future, I see HN as 'the new Slashdot', and I'd be more afraid of it following similar patterns over the long term.
Personally, I just find web applications extremely painful to develop (on all the frameworks/dev environments I've tried, not just Microsoft ones). Desktop development is a lot more fun, but web apps are where the jobs are these days, unfortunately.
They had over an hour of downtime yesterday alone, one 8m outage and one 1h15m outage. (Source: http://status.heroku.com)

Regardless, 99.9% is really not special or even acceptable from a high dollar host like Heroku. Cheap shared hosts like HostGator can give you 99.9%.

I'm pulling for them, but they've got some work to do.
Get ready for animated banner ads on your iPad...

Seriously though this looks like an amazing piece of software that will finally bring the full power of CSS3 animations to a much broader range of designers.