skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey I'm Matt. Honest answer at this point - we don't know, hence the open-sourcing. I think our initial attempt last year was not explained well and too difficult to get started with. This is our attempt to simplify our initial work as much as possible. Blueprint figures out what you did to a server and sandbox uses chroot magic to give you an isolated container to work in.

Our current direction which should be open for testing in April is a hosted Puppet service. We're hoping to make it easier for people to get started w/ a devops backend (Puppet, Nagios, etc).

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions I'm all ears matt AT devstructure dot com
Indeed, which I'm a big fan of. If we reach a point where it's confusing for people (and I'd be delighted by that), we'll consider a change. Since they're pretty different concepts I don't think it's a huge problem at the moment.
If you were an alpha male, under these circumstances you would have left long ago. Someone who refuses to address problems is not worth keeping as a co-founder.
By "some external sources of data", you mean "Bing". DDG's primary data source is Bing, via the Yahoo search APIs.
Ask HN: rate the fab.com viral signup process
20k pre-launch signups in 1 week. Thoughts?
This is the same project earlier known as RepLab:

http://www.replab.org/

"Open Source Micro-Factory" is perhaps more descriptive, which is good for the goal of a Kickstarter campaign.

disclosure: I am one of the moderators of the RepLab list.
Just half year ago I thought that it can't happen any time soon. Now I think some day we will have a new kind of transport and many other technologies based on superconductivity.
One of the biggest problems with development at FB, Twitter, Google, etc is that frontend engineers may not know "serious CS" and/or have some distributed systems "common sense."

It's remarkably easy for an apparently simple commit to dramatically increase load on some backend server, causing site stability issues and/or cost increases.

Your big-name media company probably doesn't care as much about getting every last penny out of its hardware, and its users probably aren't growing at a breakneck pace.

The questions you mentioned were designed to test if you know basic math and CS. If you don't know binary search, you probably also don't know asymptotic complexity, which means there's a chance you'll sneak in an O(n3) (expensive) loop in your javascript somewhere.
Here's an easy example. In some code I'm writing for my startup, I'm attempting to build the DAG that maximizes a scoring function. I permute through the candidates, and then run a scoring function. I perform greedy hill climbing , and return the DAG with the best score.

Since this is Clojure, and my DAG is build from Clojure's persistent data structures, iterating through all possible dags is easy. Clojure's "update" functions return new structs that share structure with the original, both the original structure and the new one exist at the same time. If I were using mutable data structures, I'd either have to deep copy a new DAG (slower), or write "rollback" code (buggy).

Additionally, because the Clojure data structures are purely functional, and Clojure includes tools for multi-threaded synchronization, parallelizing this algorithm is trivial.

A separate example:
I have an existing function that can take several minutes to an hour to run. I wanted to add a button to the web UI that says "go run the function". Of course, you don't want multiple versions running at the same time, so you need to queue up the function call, and you don't want the user to queue up 5 calls when they only need 1. It took all of about 4 lines of clojure to make the function run in a separate thread and handle all of the above issues, and I'm guaranteed to never have multithreading bugs in that code.

In summary

* purely functional data structures greatly simply multi-threaded programming, and make some algorithms easier to write.

* Clojure is designed from the ground up to make multi-threading easy and painless. Many multi-threading tools are built into the language, and you don't have to deal with locking and deadlock unless you drop into the Java synchronization primitives.
"In a dynamic language, and where you trust the person doing the configuration, there's no reason why your configuration shouldn't be in a source file. Both Django and Rails do it this way."

Not true. In Rails, sensitive information like database passwords or AWS keys are not stored in the source, you store them in configuration files, YAML files by default. It's also widely recommended that these not be checked into version control.
Are you a student? Join KDE for Google Summer of Code 2011
Worst blister pack I've ever encountered
I meant in the one discussed above,

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=library.gettracks&#...

It was originalyl all on one line, but now it has numbers for hundreds of lines that don't actually exist except for formatting.
If I were not working on my own startup, or an important stakeholder in the startup I'm working for, I'd much rather work for a big company. The stable hours and free time would give me more time to work on my own startup on the side.
It seems like tech journalism itself is experiencing a bubble.
Good looking site. Don't care for the domain name.
This is cool, but it's too bad I can't download without filling out a 1.5 page registration form...closes tab
This is the only thing that makes sense, I've turned down a couple contracts now for people wanting me to develop and maintain code bases on three different platforms for the same app. Until someone figures out a way around the cross platform legal and technical issues this is the sanest way for indie developers to compete.
That future might be happening already. Both AMD and Intel have products that pair CPU with GPU, ARM has Mali, NVidia's Tegra has on-chip GPU.

I think discrete GPUs will become niche products in the future. Once mainstream GPUs are on-chip, the variety of different GPU architectures will probably be reduced. The next step might be a standard ISA for GPU.

It is hard to say where GPUs will be in three years, but at least the industry is getting interesting again. It has been more of the same for so many years in discrete GPUs, but now the on-chip GPUs are potentially game changing.
New York Times Paywall - No Bold Steps But Hardly DOA
This is cool. As a solo cofounder/CTO/developer/sys-admin this is what I need, both to evaluate what I can scrap from my boxes and in case of everything going south to rebuild stuff. Pitty my VPS runs CentOS now, assuming it's not supported? (only Ubuntu is mentioned)
He left out that there's a time limit. You have a party with guests coming over in 10 minutes, and it takes 5 minutes for the wine to kill the rat (in any dosage amount). Given those constraints, how do you do it?

It's a fun question, but the best response I've heard to this is, "Move. You're never going to get laid with rats at your place during a party."
We are actually going to migrate from one dedicated to another and documenting all the software, libraries, settings, and data has been a pain. Would love to try this but we don't run Ubuntu 10.04!

Side note: I am surprised that there is no floss migration tool that does this. I know that it would be a complex piece of software but I would actually pay/donate money for it.
Even thought the phone screen was amusing, I couldn't help but think to myself: Did it really happened? And... when?

While reading it, I felt like it was a cute/short marketing story. So, I wasn't surprised at all to read the last paragraph (Working for hirelite, a better interview process blahblah)
Google, FBook, etc in particular are fighting over some key execs and senior engineers, as well as the flow of new grads from key universities like CMU and Stanford.

That's the war. For most industry engineers, its a crapshoot.
I don't believe it is fair use to make an entire copy of someone else's material, if you've made no transformative change to it.

I understand there is an opt-out. My post on daggle.com goes into great depth about that. However, I don't think that's the way Google should operate.

Google just assumed that it was OK to reprint material through its cached pages; many have felt that was presumptuous. So far, they've been OK with it -- but it remains something that colors them as evil in some quarters.

I get you don't agree with that, but others do view it that way. And it sure jumped out to bite Google when it levied allegations that Bing was copying Google.
That's a typical summer day here in eastern Canada. Seriously.
We've had early talks with a few contributors about what it would take to handle Redhat/CentOs based distros if that helps?
Flash — it rhymes with "crash"
I'm pretty sure the ZIL is not mirrored. If it were, it wouldn't increase performance since you'd still have to wait for the disks to fsync their copy to guarantee reliability.

This is why Sun Storage products (and Nexenta, or homegrown clusters) put the ZIL SSDs in the JBODs and not the storage heads.

You could of-course create a pool that did use a disk as the ZIL, but again, there'd be no point since the mirror has to be kept consistent otherwise it's worthless.

Since the cache (L2ARC) is just cache, and you can lose it at anytime without data-loss, it is in the heads.

Nit-picking. To be clear, the ZIL can (and should be) mirrored, you just want to do it with SSDs consistently. Mixing devices is possible, but you'll be limited to the performance of the slowest device. You can also create storage clusters with multiple heads. Again, a good idea IMO, but the ZIL is a critical component of the FS. If you lose it, you lose the whole pool (as a rule I think, but there might be clever hacks around that under special circumstances if you're lucky). So if you're going to multi-home your zpool, make sure the ZILs are in the shared-storage region. It's no good having redundant controllers if your ZIL is on the dead one.
Some of my favorite 'startup' punks :)

www.dischord.com
"Lets spell out very clearly why the myth of homeownership became religion in the United States. Its because corporations didn’t want their employees to have many job choices. So they encouraged them to own homes."

If that was their plan (which I doubt), it wasn't very effective. Americans move much more frequently than people in most other countries.
Good platform for start ups & new ideas and also the networking part is cool..
I almost always use lzjb compression. It's nearly free and gives good returns for mixed data like the sort you'll find on system drives. Binaries, text, etc.

Also the reliability aspect. I haven't had HFS+ go bad on my own systems, but I've seen it several times on servers. It's on about the same level as ext3fs in that arena, which is pretty bad in my book.

I get the "less is more" argument and I agree generally. ZFS is so far beyond a traditional FS though.
Ask HN: Advice on my side-project, helping you share links more efficiently.
Usually, when you find something on HN or somewhere else that you want to share with a few friends, you tweet about it or put it on Facebook. This is a scattergun approach and it's not very likely to get the thing noticed by the few friends you know might enjoy it.

To this end, I've built YourPane (www.yourpane.com). Basically, you install a bookmarklet, add a few friends' emails and it pops up an overlay with those friends whenever you click the bookmarket. This way, you can just send the current page to specific people with a few clicks.

If your friends have an account there, they can see the link you sent embedded in their account. If not, they get an email with the link inside.

It appears that most people who have used it have a bit of trouble installing it or getting it to work correctly (a few have asked me to add functionality that's already there, which tells me that I haven't made it easy for them to notice it).

I would appreciate it if you could look it over a bit and let me know if there are things I could improve. Also, if you're hesitant to enter your email address on sites this will not be very useful to you (as it works over email), but I promise you that any emails entered aren't ever leaving the app or misused.

Thanks for your feedback, HN!
Actually, we're stuck on ubuntu 9.04 - but maybe that also works?
EE.UU.: Reportero de ABC casi es atropellado en vivo
I don't understand what the boob autographing picture has to do with the article whatsoever.
I don't see that website linking to any kind of a scientific or academic publication about this. If this was real, I don't think it would be only on the web.
Currently in the middle of a re-architecture/re-write due to its flaws but something similar to this in Ruby I worked on last year: http://github.com/peterc/pismo
Clickable: http://www.yourpane.com/
Wiki.php.net compromised
Recruiter: Do you have J2SE?

Seriously at this point, just walk away. Nothing good can come after a question like this.

(Not because of the technology, solely the wording of the question)
Some apps from Mac App Store that are actually useful
It also takes a lot of RAM. 380 bytes for each de-dupe entry (block pointer) IIRC? I think it translated to something like 1GB of RAM per TB of storage assuming half of it was de-duped.

It's really a useless feature when you do the math. Unless you're running a small amount of storage with a very VERY large amount of basically identical volumes (think Amazon) you'll spend more on memory than you did on disk and once you get to that point you'd have almost certainly been better off spending that money on SSDs and using any extra memory for primary cache.
From a strategy perspective, analyzing Alex' reaction (and others reaction to what he says) is useful for understanding how others think.
But the question is, how many summer days do you get in a year?
This is the principle problem: "It is less important to me that a candidate has a particular skill with a particular technology because those things can be learned easily by good programmers. I'm looking for more of an intuition, problem solving ability, and the ability to cleanly translate the solution into code."

No, they can't be easily learned by people fresh out of college. I'm 31 and have been doing this stuff since I was a teenager. It takes years of hard won experience to really know the ins and outs all the various facets of frontend engineering. This particular sub-field isn't one programming language. It's knowing what html, css, and javascript do across at least 11 different browser platforms. It's knowing what kinds of interfaces work for different devices. It's knowing javascript as a true language and not a copy/paste thing. It's being able to know know to translate a 2 dimensional design into the correct underlying structure, in real-time.

So that's just my answer to your "any good programmer" statement. That just means you don't really know what you actually need to be hiring for.

I agree 100% about being about to get along with people. But problem solving is directly related to the field you're in. Ask a programmer to be a heart surgeon, I'm sure any smart programmer can easily learn those skills. The intuition will be there if the interview is about what the person should know.

Suppose your database queries are running extremely long and slow because you're a startup and you and your cofounder are generalists. Your company starts getting traction and now that database is becoming a problem. You're a frontend dev that knows python, and your partner is more of a biz guy that does some coding. Now you both identify that you need someone who really knows how to scale databases. Do you ask candidates random CS questions to see if they have some ill-defined "intuition", or do you find out if they know how to scale databases?

It's no different for frontend engineers.

I also agree about the coding part. But you have to do it in the context of the requirements. For a frontend, look at their previous work. Identify some area of your own product that you think can be improved, or was improved. Have the frontend candidate work through how they would improve the js/HTML/CSS etc. This should involve coding, and the person interviewing should have at least enough base knowledge themselves to know if the candidate is worth their salt or not.
Biggest moon in 18 years
It's a shame we live in a society the likes to kick people when they are down. These are the same people who were cheer leading when digg was on a roll.
I can't say much right now, but you'll see how we're different in the coming year! We've just been setting the stage :)
Okay, AMD: Stop making new graphics cards. Stop the market churn, let it get uniform and predictable and then let developers catch up and start stretching the metal. Remember, content has to catch up, too, and that's several years worth of effort.

But in the mean time, your competitors are going to eat your lunch.

That's what consoles do. They provide a large, uniform ecosystem which makes it possible for developers to stretch performance without breaking the bank on testing or risking tens of millions of dollars on a buggy dud.

Any time you want to declare your graphics cards "a console," feel free to stop introducing higher powered hardware.
"Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t begin with an ingenious idea."

Oh please. They began with an ingnenious idea and then had more ingenious ideas.
When I started using the internet in 1992 Usenet (which BTW was almost always referred to as netnews or just plain "news" before Time magazine, etc, used their influence as explainers of the internet to the general public to change the name) was the social heart of the internet the way the web is now, and you did not need algorithms to extract the text from Usenet because the text was all dead-simple plain text files.
I think just because it is an "extremely tough thing to do" doesn't mean that people shouldn't do it. Sure, people who aren't capable of coming up with a brilliant idea shouldn't do it, but those that are exceptional are better off thinking about the next big idea than a small one.

I think its more of a blanket statement to save those who aren't "exceptional" but are just good-very good. If you're good-very good, then yeah stick to the smaller ideas instead of daydreaming about creating the next Microsoft, Apple, Google. Its tough to say, but some people are just better than others. Some people are great. The few that are "great", for the most part, are the ones who will create the next huge thing.
What if people don't know what they need or want? Sometimes we try to build or develop something exactly as someone asks. Most of the time, that's exactly what they need; but many times they are wrong: requirements are wrong, even the sense of "need" or "want" is misplaced.

When we are developing something new, a new product or service, software or building, we always try do please people, trying to perceive what their needs or wishes are. But what if they don't really know? As Ford said once "if i asked people what they wanted, they would say 'a more powerful horse'". Sometimes, what people need or want is something that isn't here yet. Maybe we try to much to build something according people's wishes, and the finished product is nothing more than a copy of thousands of solutions made by people who thought the same thing.

I know it may be hard, but to really make a difference, we have to try to stay ahead. Even ahead of potencial customers. Either you're right or wrong, you'll know it soon enough
I've found that small companies,100 or so people, with shipping profitable product are a good fit. They are small enough that an individual developer has an impact, but they dont have the stifling bureaucracy of larger, especially public, companies.

Surprisingly, I've found that the frequency of releases is a good indicator of how happy I'll be. A release every week or two is very comfortable without huge pressure. Releases every few months are hell. Death marches, endless requirements documents, way too much process, lack of tools, cant get something because it wasnt budgeted last year. You get the picture.
Unless the next words uttered are "OK, please use it to demonstrate [...] to us".
9m uniques monthly is still a decent amount, whether or not the company is profitable is yet to be seen.
I'll believe it when I see it in a peer reviewed journal--published by more than one group. Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object). If it were real, then reports would be all over the March Meeting of the American Physical Society which is celebrating 100 years of superconductivity this year.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=digg.com

I used Digg for a while, and it became apparent over time that the quality both of the news and also the comments was tanking. Once I discovered HN I stopped using Digg altogether.
Ended up less clear for me - I, probably foolishly, was expecting a piece on the screen of a mobile phone.
Yes. The outage was due to an Amazon EBS hardware failure.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 
Book Review – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett
Not really a phone screen, either. The phone screen happens after the recruiter gives your information to someone you'll actually be working with.
Their claim, "described best by Jane Jacobs, who claims that the highest level of evolution (like Maslow’s Pyramid) for cities - is for those cities to return to local production (import substitution)." is false. Jane Jacobs described import replacing as a stage from importing to exporting. It keeps capital in the city by not using as much of it for imports, while developing manufacturing skills suitable for producing exports. Also, as she points out, it just changes the makeup of imports, you import the raw materials instead of the finished items.

Microfactories are a neat idea for several reasons, there is no need to misrepresent their benefits. I have been playing around with the idea since the late 1980s, the technology still has a good ways to go before it is practical though.