skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't agree enough with a job interview being a 2-way street. It is extremely important to ask tough questions from your interviewer(s) and make sure that any job offer is a good fit for both sides.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time your interviewer(s) only care if it's a good fit for them.
I feel like products like Windows 7 and the Kinect among other things are a sign of a rally from the Microsoft camp.

Agree / disagree?
you should add those spammy overlay button links to your website on top of the youtube video. seriously, there's no clickable way to get to your site from the video
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Webfaction

- Invoicing: Billable (http://billable.co.za)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Basecamp

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Github + Webfaction git repos

- Instant messaging: Google + iChat
I thought this part of the essay was strange, because they sure as hell can be. Courtney Love, Brody Dalle, Joan Jett.

Not to mention:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi
I sometimes call it the "Lisp non-syntax", because it's so trivial to define something-Lispish and parse it, even in a language with crappy string support like straight C with nothing but the standard library, that it's hardly like you're writing a parser at all.

Slamming out a halfway decent parser is getting easier than it used to be with things like Parsec, and JSON support is nice enough in the languages I work in that I tend to just use that now, but in the 90s I went to this solution several times. (XML, on the other hand, wasn't much help. It did indeed take care of the real grunt work of processing but what was left over still took a lot of love to translate into the native idioms of the program you were in, what with the attributes and the mixed content and whatnot.)
That's why you must use Modern Perl. See guidelines in the free Modern Perl Book : http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/11/the-book-is-out.ht...
Because access (even if they do, which they dont) to startup emails is not enough to replicate startup's success.
Counting by lambdas
I'm Polish born but raised in Canada. Does that count?
Thanks for the information, it was very helpful.
Calif nonprofit: We'll store digital data forever
>Until the PC goes away

I have a sneaking suspicion this may happen much sooner than I initially expected. Currently working on business software for a non-U.S. market, word is that our customers have more smart-phones than PCs.
This seems very dishonest to me, and if I was a random walk-in customer of that coffee shop, I'd feel cheated. I have absolutely no idea how many ounces are in a "medium" at any coffee shop, and I don't want to know. When I ask for a medium, what I'm really saying is, "please give me a reasonably sized cup of coffee, not too big, not too small."

If I'd have asked for a medium and gotten a super-jumbo-medium handed to me, I'd have felt manipulated in some vague way--as if the big coffee shop knows damn well what a "medium" is, and they know damn well that that's what I want, but they're going to give me their own special interpretation of a "medium," which is more coffee than I want, and also just so happens to cost $1 more. Fuck that, and too bad you didn't mention the name of your chain so that I can try not to visit.
Is this meant as a proof-of-concept, or a production system? What is stopping me from using Firebug to change the client and issue a 'rm -rf /'-esque command to Redis? Does Redis have some kind of permission checks? Is there some interesting solution that would provide a thin ACL layer in between the client and Redis?
You can also hit the "pdf" button on your profile itself that will generate a nice-looking resume.
A Programmer’s Guide to a Healthier, Stronger, Happier Life
So, what you're saying is, if our tool says your web app is "fat" and to "lose weight" -- so you plan to implement that suggestion by cutting off a leg?

Measurements exist for a reason. You have to use your own judgment to interpret them.
Yes I've thought about it. I'll consider it when I'll create that app ;)
Perhaps not, but it's more than enough to find out strategy, preempt potential competitive advantage, reconstruct development patterns, cherry pick staff members, and gain a huge upper hand in takeover negotiations (potentially driving down acquisition price based on unfortunate private data).

Would you write down everything you're doing, and post it to a competitor? Because if you work in an area Google's interested in then that's what you're doing, modulo a privacy policy you'll never find out they've violated (and has happened at least once before - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl...).
I believe that most of the articles that been posted to HN that are negative in regards to doing a PhD are referring more to the liberal arts types of degrees, and the author here points out some reasons that these people are going on to do PhDs in the first place.

Sure, getting a tenure track professorship in English or the Humanities would be great for a lot of these people, but isn't doing a PhD better than the alternates that most of them have available? I would rather pursue a PhD than go do phone marketing, myself.
The way enliven works is really neat and interesting.

One thing that jumped out at me though. The author talked about how he changed the login/logout text from being plan HTML in his template, to being what looks like a tokenized representation, a pre parsed format, f or performance reasons.

If this is something people are tempted to do whenever they use large sequences of static text in enliven templates, then it seems like there's maybe room for an improvement in enliven here. Since it's lisp, couldn't enliven somehow detect that this is the first time a template is used, and scan through the code looking for opportunities to make these kinds of speed optimizations automatically before first use?

Still, really impressed with the whole setup.
position:relative helps fix a number of overflow and box model bugs in the IEs (especially IE7)
Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
It would be great if Jobspice (YC S09) had an option to import your personal information, work experience and education from your Linkedin profile.

http://www.jobspice.com/
Ok. Shitload of lib err bricks. Great. Where are the prefab houses (frameworks) that help you get the thing done ... fast ? Perl has building blocks but lacks known products. Either finished products you just have to configure (like Drupal or Wordpress) or higher level building blocks (say Rails) that help you get where you want to get faster.

Note I didn't say there is not such product/framework, just, as the articles says, they are not promoted/known.
Agreed. It also highlights that you don't need an mvc frameworks for web app. Due to the popularity of framework such as Rails, many assume a framework is the only way to go. Powerful client JavaScript library is changing how people develop web apps.
I wonder when they'll make the shift again when people figure out that the "small" is really what they want. Then there can be a "small" 16oz coffee :D
I remember when pg first wrote this. A lot of people misunderstood the headline. From the pg's Cliffs notes: "What I meant was not that Microsoft is suddenly going to stop making money, but that people at the leading edge of the software business no longer have to think about them." That's at http://paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html

So the two definitions pg gave in 2007 were "You don't have have to be afraid of Microsoft" and the definition above.
I could lower the lid on my macbook so the webcam is pointing at my fingers to show the chording. Hmm, yeah, probably not so helpful.

Emacs has also had a really strong community for over 30 years (perhaps driven somewhat by the higher education roots). As such, I think it had a more firm underpinning than vim did, so more of the tutorials and such already existed.
And you just made my day!

That is one incredible product video.

We've been looking to do these for our products but couldn't find anyone to do it. That problem is now solved.
Defining Goals for a New Software Business
While it's possible Google might snoop on their competitors email to figure out their strategy, I'd think the possible consequences if they got caught would be too significant for any possible benefit. With regard to the guy that got fired for looking at other people's messages, one rogue engineer messing with a couple people is very different than a deliberate corporate strategy of espionage. If Google got caught doing that, they'd never be able to pursue government or enterprise contracts again.
How to Create an Image of a Crashed Hard Drive and Mount it in Windows
mod_rewrite does exactly what you want here. Rewrite urls matching that pattern to a static file, so the request returns quickly and has very little overhead.
Good point, but I was measuring through bit.ly links, so lost referrals isnt as much of an issue
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode(much better than Slicehost) & EC2/S3

- Invoicing: Freshbooks

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Nothing

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Its our business, so our own redundant servers(not Linode or AWS)

- Instant messaging: Skype
I don't really think this sort of question is HN worthy. But if you convert to PDF then run through Calibre you can convert to EPUB.
I've started to ask the questions in my interviews that Joel mentions in this article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

They really helped me size up a company's development culture, walked away from a couple of interviews because of weak responses to those question list.
Why Do People Use Twitter?
There's a simple UI design answer to this.

You know the blue "verified" seal that appears on celebrity accounts that have gone through Twitter's verification program? Add a second icon. A Rubber chicken or something, labeled "parody" for accounts such as ceoSteveJobs, BPGlobalPR, SarahPalinUSA, and any others that might trick more credulous viewers.
I'm in the process of releasing a game for iOS:

- Email/Cal/Docs - Google Apps

- Hosting - AWS

- Accounting - Quickbooks

- Source Control - Github

- Issue Tracking - Jira

- IDE - XCode

- Libraries - ZLib, LibPNG, Lua, Bullet Physics, Wild Magic Geometry Tools
If your definition of "blind faith" is broad enough that accepting things on "blind faith" is actually a good, fairly reliable predictor of possible future observations, then I think you should get a narrower definition.

For example, I accept on "blind faith" the fact that Australia exists. But if I got on a plane to Australia, I have every reason to expect that it will go to a real place called Australia, rather than secretly taking me to Botswana or something. By your definition, a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification.

All our observations of the world -- even sight, sound, smell, and so on -- are indirect. Your eyes don't see all wavelengths, and they can be tricked into confusing combinations of red, green, and blue as "the same color" as a pure wavelength of light. And don't get me started on the preprocessing that happens before the signals even reach your brain! Will you categorize everything you see as being taken on blind faith as well? Where do you draw the line?
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Strato, EC2

- Monitoring: Cloudkick, Stashboard

- Invoicing: N/A

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: toodledo, orgmode

- File-sharing: Google Storage

- Version control: SVN, Git

- Backups: Google Storage, S3

- Instant messaging: Etherpad

- Production platform: AppJet, Node, CouchDB, Eucalyptus
Amazon previously kept a semi-official list of all netblocks for EC2 in their forum. They've recently moved to posting updates as official announcements, here is the latest:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=877

It's interesting to see the size of their deployments measured in usable IP space.
Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst (biggest and most enterprise one), CGI::Application, Jifty.

There's a whole bunch of them, with different design goals or philosophies.
If you're feeling nefarious, 301 their requests to a static, empty RSS feed.

If you can figure out who's actually running it (does the user agent say?), simply sending them an email and asking them to throttle their script may be the simplest solution.
I agree. The fact that you don't hear about an old big company that often doesn't mean it's dead. It has found it's business model and doing well in some not-that-hyped sector.

On the other hand, the fact that you hear about 'new-hot-startup' on all hi-tech sites doesn't mean it'll survive it's first year.
We're on a hybrid nginx/apache setup.

I just added some lines to my nginx.conf though that appear to be working based on tips from here and elsewhere:

location ~* /neighborhoods/[-\w]+/feed/?$ {
deny all;
}
Mee too!
It's only natural that we feel we're more important than we actually are. 99.99% of those who have access to your inbox either don't know who you are or they don't give a damn about you or your startup.
Universities in the Netherlands are getting hit by budget cuts pretty severely as well. This means that permanent contracts are getting harder and harder to come by in academia.

Three main reasons for this in the Netherlands:
* A permanent employee of a university is considered a civil servant, which means that it is impossible to fire him.
* A temporary employee is "protected" by law; after three consecutive temporary contracts, the next contract is by law a permanent one.
* Most funds at the university come from limited time projects.

This means that universities are very hesitant to hire people on a permanent contract and labour protection laws sort of turn against you.
User Expectations: Create an Illusion of Space
I know how and why it works, but some part of me feels that it's improper.

I can't be sure because TFA didn't show it, but I'll bet that the store have a display with sizes and prices readily visible.

Thus, taking this approach is basically saying "We're going to try to trick you into ordering more than you want, charge you more than you expected, and hope that in aggregate our customers are too lazy or don't care enough about 50 cents to push back. At least for a few years, and by then we'll be much richer."

I can just never bring myself to resorting to such tricks. Am I the only one?
Upcycling
Indeed it does. Welcome fellow Polish cannuck.
Agreed and bonus points for using a map of Vancouver :)
"Consider all the partners in your own firm and similar firms like yours, how many of them come from fairly unremarkable academic backgrounds?" This also runs a but suspect. Pick a big venture firm and start checking out their partners and associates. Most will have a fairly remarkable academic background.
You can use varnish to cache all of these requests and just never expire them. Make the page as small as possible. It'll make the overhead of serving the requests as low as possible.

http://www.varnish-cache.org/
Since we have been discussing nutrition lately, I wonder what HNers think of this?

I have always classified "anti-fluoridation" to the conspiracy theory domain and never paid much attention to it.
The mad people of comp.lang.lisp
Agent doesn't say unfortunately.
Chrome-like Moving Highlight With CSS Gradients
Hey, currently I am living in Warsaw.
Keeping Python packages tidy on AppEngine.
Sadly, @SarahPalinUSA is no parody.
Ask a few questions and you can still work out whether they actually learned it or just had it in class. Details depend on the curriculum in question, but recently when we faced this problem at a university recruitment a simple "Hey, what's a generator and why would you want it?" seemed to separate out the real learners from the classroom coasters.

Not that it really mattered that much, you still want to see learning of languages not in the curriculum and no 4-year program will ever cover all the interesting possibilities. We just learned that where "Java, C++, C, nothing else" is a warning sign from one university, "Python, C++, C, nothing else" was the warning sign from that one. You could probably generalize to "C, (Java/C++), exactly one other" and still be right.
I know this is a toy example, but really, people should not be storing passwords in plaintext in a database. jBCrypt has a simple API, and can be used from Clojure.

http://www.mindrot.org/projects/jBCrypt/

Also, the password authentication finishes early if it detects a mismatch between the given password and the one in the database. This makes it fairly easy for an attacker to get people's passwords with a straightforward timing attack. To fix it, always go through all the characters in the strings to compare them.

Fantastic article otherwise, though.
Would be interested in hearing more about your salesforce.com development. Can you email me at the address in my profile?
The programmers should hone their tools first, as they are going to be the most important part of their experience. For copy-pasting code, in vim -- surely other editors have similar, highlight the new code (and surrounding code) and hit "=" (equals) key.
Wow. In Norway, there is a similar problem with the "four-year" rule, which means it becomes very hard to fire someone who has worked for an employer for over four years. Now the PhD of course also takes four years, and PhD students are employees. In practice, almost no-one claims the four-year rule following, say, the PhD and a short-term research-assistant engagement (there was a recent case where two people in Oslo did something similar, and the university settled out of court, hiring them permanently, but it was quite unprecedented), but this means that universities much prefer the fixed-term contracts to be shorter than that, again reinforcing the glut of temporary positions; but if we had the three-contract rule, quite a few people I know would have been permanently hired already.
194 Top Dance hit Songs ever
It's part of the point. The idea being that when you're doing operator overloading or metaclass hacking there's a simple, easy visual guide.
Interestingly I don't see any mention of your robots.txt, or if the scraper identified themselves in the UA string. If the person or organization running the scraper is legit, they would probably like to know their software is misbehaving, so that they can fix the issue. Did you attempt to contact them before launching into a cat and mouse game?
Do you have a document on your site establishing that this idiot is violating your acceptable use policy? Then you should report them to Amazon's abuse group:

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/co...

You can use technical countermeasures to defend your site, but you'd be doing the rest of the Internet a favor to get them knocked off Amazon.
The silver lining is that by the time this project goes through study after study, development, testing, and finally deployment 5-10 years will have passed and the Internet will fundamentally change in ways that either makes this instantly irrelevant or impossible to enforce.
You should report the behavior to Amazon:

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/co...

In my experience they take it seriously and deal with it promptly.
The clarity of your writing makes this point very clear.
I agree, and I very much doubt they'd ever do something like this. My argument is just one of prudence - if you wouldn't leave your business plans and private data lying around in a competitors house, why would you risk even the 10^-7% chance that doing so with Google would damage you when running your own e-mail server (or, if you don't want the maintenance, encrypting e-mail through G-mail) is relatively trivial?

Looking back in time and given what's happened, would Google the Startup have been wise hosting their e-mail on Hotmail?
As pointed out elsewhere the comparison don't hold up.

Startups are high risk high return.

That can't be said about PHDs
I understand he meant that nobody is scared of Microsoft anymore. I guess the question I have is, is there a company that exists that everybody IS scared of? No. So I rather chalk it up to a sign of the times.
I think there still was one good point in the parent comment that you did not address. If screencast were not the reason of RoR popularity but it's consequence, then maybe we should not lose too much time on making screencasts and instead concentrate on some other things? I have to attest that screencasting does require enormous amounts of time, especially if you try to do that on Linux where the tools break every 5 minutes and you need to make manual savepoints to keep with moving ahead with your work. Even though it was also very captivating and quite entertaining.
Is this done anywhere else in the world? It is the scariest of the scary Big Brother measures I've seen recently...
For pure transaction throughput, it's still hard to beat a mainframe. The hardware is optimized for it, and so is the software. They are a niche product but a very profitable one.
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Rackspace cloud

- Project management & invoicing: our own app (which is what the startup is about)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Version control: Mercurial

- Backups: rsync

- Instant messaging: Skype, GTalk
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Amazon EC2 / Linode

- Invoicing: Xero (& Recurly)

- Analytics: Google Analytics, Woopra, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics

- Project management: http://PlayNice.ly (our app)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git(hub)

- Backups: Github/Dropbox/Time machine

- Instant messaging: Skype/Yammer

Other stuff:

- Billing: Recurly

- IDE: TextMate

- Dev other: VMWare for local Ubuntu dev environments
- E-mail/calendar: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Oxilion (local hosting provider)

- Invoicing: Excel

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Excel

- File-sharing/docs: Dropbox

- Version control: Git: Codaset (previously Beanstalk)

- Backups: Amazon S3

- Instant messaging: Gtalk included in Google Apps for Domains
Here's an article I think you'll like:

http://jeroenvloothuis.blogspot.com/2010/07/deploying-clojur...

It walks you through taking a Clojure web app that uses the Ring middleware -- similar to WSGI in Python, or Rack in Ruby -- and deploying it as a WAR file that runs under Tomcat, behind Apache. Since the OP uses Ring, this should work.

It's also possible to run the app from a REPL on your server, with a Swank connection to emacs for remote hot-patching and debugging, with something like nginx in front of the built-in Jetty HTTP server, but that's not really something I'd feel good about.
"The contraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. In that sense computer science is like an abtract form of engineering; it's the kind of engineering where you ignore the constraints that are imposed by reality." - Harold Abelson in SICP lectures
You realize in the US company directors can face criminal charges for corporate espionage ?
The Estonian ID card is somewhat similar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card
Break a leg! I defended mine last month, and let me tell you- the sense of relief afterwards is amazing.
Krakow born, Chicago raised.
This article is pretty light on details. Here's a quote from the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt:

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027800-281.html#ixzz1AZD...