skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, a single character change + a developer not testing their code locally + not running high level unit tests + deploying untested code to production.
Plants vs Zombies on sale for $1.99 - all proceeds going to Japan relief effort
Footnotes? Academic papers have until recently been designed mostly with print in mind and had no problem directing people to primary sources.

I guess part of it is the print mindset of giving the impression to readers that the journalists at the paper generated all the content without any borrowing of materials.
If anyone would like some pointers about press relations for their startup, you can contact me. My email's in my profile. I left the PR industry after several years to pursue a career in development and know a bit. I'm not a superstar or the world's greatest BSer but I know a thing or two.

The thing about these general press relations articles written by a journalist or media outlet is that it's tailored to them. What works for one may not work for another. (Though to be fair this article does have good general principles!)

(edit: I'm obviously not charging for this, just a friendly offer.)
Yes. If anybody is interested: For example offering half of Sillicon Valley salary to developers I could find the brightest 10-20 programmers from my country. I am well connected amongst developers. (Hungary is a 10million people country.)
Just give me a very hard 'test', I will give that or something similar to hundreds of developers, and choose the best 10. If you offer higher than market salary, money makes miracles.
Wouldn't it be surreal if Kevin Rose went to Reddit?
I suppose my app can potentially be more flexible. First thing coming to my mind is that you can insert as many Post-Receive URLs as needed so you can notify not only yourself but your mates too who want to stay in touch. Actually, it solves our problem easily and quite well now.
Why You Should Never Buy a Home Again
Nginx/varnish can also catch Content-type: text/plain (or text/php?) and treat that like a 5xx response. Yes, that's a bit of a hack, but unless tumblr needs to serve text-files (which I doubt) it's a legit safeguard.
Puisi dan renungan ku » Dan Kehilangan diri mu
Obviously, the author does not understand the effect of rounding on atime, mtime etc.
Yes, but of course this is all speculation: we don't know how this change managed to make its way to production. The fact that it happened is unfortunate, but that doesn't mean the entire engineering staff is incompetent.
Ghost in the Machine by Erika Iris Simmons
Ghost in the Machine by Erika Iris Simmons
At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, I will state again that "Joy of Clojure" is a very good book. (I'm a Clojure newbie, so I can't judge its technical content, just that it is well written.) The Manning early-access program is highly disappointing. We got an update in August 2010, and then again on March 18, 2011. Nothing in between.

When I pre-order from PragProg they update their PDFs much more often, and I can see the evolution of the book.
I thought it sounded pretty low key and nice. I'm not sure I like the team lunch, and team Yoga as much...my inner introvert needs some time "not with the team"...but I can see an appeal (now team Kung Fu might work better for me).

For some reason I like it a heck of a lot better than dropbox's http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/inside-the-psychobox-a-tour...
You are so right. this isnt about some kiddo being a smartass by not even hiding some of the keys. It's heroes like Him who save us from catastrophic errors bordering on criminal negligence. Guys like him will descent into the Fukishima reactors to save humanity. Songs will be written to remember his life. Personally, i farted.
Domain squatters. SEO experts. Companies who want to protect their name.

I wonder how lot it took google.xxx to get registered?
Don't play their game. If you are a great dev, ask for what you are worth (100-150 an hour). Or get solid equity. Or start your own company.

Don't be fooled by cheap gimmicks. You can buy your own Dr Pepper.
4.2 on the Rant-o-meter. "fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass..." more Yegge yadda-yadda.

Not sure if i prefer "class-five tropical storm" or a fire hydrant book shoved up. But those fire hydrant books, say,

- Wampler / Payne's Scala book, or

- Cesarini /Thompson's Erlang book

- Syme/Granicz/Cisternino for F#

- (dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; dunno which are scheme/common Lisp fire hydrants, and ocaml doesn't have one)

are very important, not to read in their entirety, but to figure out where to find stuff when you're hauling yourself out of intermediate developer-ness i.e. get you up to understanding production code, and cover the edge cases so you can figure out the corner cases and save you asking hundreds of questions on stackoverflow. Somewhere in amazon i wrote a book review that tutorial books cover 1 sigmas of the language, standard libs and dev environment, but books that cover 2 sigmas are rare.

And this is that book for clojure. And clojure does have that "perfect storm" feel
With logic like this, I suspect you're not what you meant by "HN caliber programmer" either.
OpenCL University Kit (lectures from AMD)
Languages as Libraries, PLDI 2011
Encyclopedia Astronautica has the full list of Russian/Soviet Mars expedition concepts.
http://www.astronautix.com/fam/rustions.htm
They had ideas to do a lot of things related to Mars but never even came close to developing flyable spacecraft.
Open Source Micro-Factory
I like the raphael.js highlighting interface. Would be nice to get a randomized puzzle/wordbank.

Small bug: if you highlight the same word over and over again, it will eventually say "Good Work!" as if you finished the puzzle.
The rule of thumb would be to fill in the implied verb and see which one makes sense.

"So nobody could be more surprised than I was that a Lisp dialect ..."

"So nobody could be more surprised than me was that a Lisp dialect ..."

Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct.
The point is that no server configuration can save you from an error like this.

Huh? Yes you can protect against errors like this; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343675
It's a symptom of PHP's slightly horrible execution model. When you request a page, a new PHP process spins up, parses it, compiles it, and executes it. There is no shared state between requests within PHP (generally - there are ways to add it) and so if configuration was stored in YAML or XML, it would have to be parsed /on every request/.

Many people have made suggestions on how to trap these kinds of error... storing PHP files outside of document root is a good practice, otherwise the code can be revealed if the webserver stops interpreting PHP files for whatever reason.

Any amount of testing would catch accidentally dumping the configuration file, if it isn't being parsed then nothing on the site will work. Development -> testing -> production setups aren't as common in the PHP world as they should be, though.

Personally, I'm tempted to say store configuration in a .ini or YAML file or similar. If you're building a small site, it won't be a big speed issue anyway. If it becomes a speed issue, there are many ways to mitigate it, such as compiling the human-written config file to a PHP file, removing the human element that is more likely to transpose a character.
This is a revisit of five-year old gripes; Google didn't do that five years ago.

But yes, it's annoying.
I used the rounded triangle tool (you can find it under the Custom Shape Tool selector in Photoshop) on a 10px by 10px canvas.
If you get on Manning's email list, you'll get a steady stream of discount codes and never have to spend full price.
This is stupid. Why doesn't the ICANN just sell TLD's instead of domains? If you're going to make a million TLD's why even bother with the domains at all? The last thing I want in my root namespace is hard-coded categorical pigeon-holeing information. The com/org/net/geograpical stuff was bad enough.

Just stop.
I like it, and just registered.

If you can avoid being another Quora (i.e. littered with social media experts seeking yet another channel) I'll like it even more.
Totally cool with it because the link is transparent in the title.
They wish to lower his status and raise their own.
Windows Phone 7 Blog Series from The Visual Basic Team
Top 10 Signs Tech Is A Massive Bubble Again
Really, it's that publishing at the scale of a big paper requires separation of responsibilities. The workflow hasn't caught up to the new medium -- and neither has the publishing software. Newspapers are notoriously slow to adopt new tools. The New York Times was composed using linotype machines until 1978 -- about 20 years late -- and when I worked there in the late 1990s the pagination system (essentially, the CMS) was a green screen application running on a few rows of PDP-11s.
Let's take a look at the difference between my writing and his:

1. I don't tell people what to do.

2. I don't tell people that they should do what I say -- FOR THE GOOD OF THE WORLD -- because doing what makes them happy is "not living up to their potential" (paraphrase)

3. I don't rip apart any individual's work, or finger them as a case study in what not to do -- or, much worse, accuse them of "duping credulous customers into overpaying for..."

Take my "Don't Follow Your Passion" post. What do I say? I don't tell people they have to do anything. I give them options and scenarios to help them seek their own happiness.

Example:

"Likewise, if you love slinging code, but hate interacting with people who don’t understand you immediately, then you’re going to be miserable doing training or providing support of any kind. If you love creating dramatic illustrations of people and places, but chafe at people who tell you what to do, being a freelance illustrator is going to rub you raw."

Or here's the whole thesis from "Chill The Fuck Out":

"Make things. Help people. Be happy."

And my actual prescription for people who need to chill?

"If these simple, deeply mundane ideas make you feel challenged and insecure about what you do or what you want, make you feel like striking out, go back to Hacker News. Go read the 98% of tech media that supports your viewpoint.

In other words: Chill the fuck out, Dominant Paradigm. This is not for you."

In other words... unlike what al3x wrote, I gave multiple different paths for people to choose.

There is a huge difference between preaching passionately -- and actually, honest to god telling people what to do, insulting their work, telling them their little dreams are not good enough for THE WORLD.
A lot of the important concepts we'd consider "object-oriented" are implicit and will likely be picked up intuitively.

If you're writing python functions that return ADTs like dictionaries, sets, and lists, you're already using OO programming. Your function is a constructor, and you get back a collection of data with a set of methods that can operate on that data.

I wouldn't say that "non-OO is better" for a beginner, just that there isn't much advantage to a peculiar focus on object-orientation, especially as a program design philosophy.
Well, arguably, the syntax checker could detect "valid but dangerous" PHP statements. So, for instance, if there is a terminating </php> but no <php>, that could be triggered as suspicious or dangerous. (I'm just saying this as a general example, but I know it might not be the best solution for different reasons).

Also, unit tests should definitely find that error.. no? I mean, a simple high level test that use something in config.php should fail.
One place that a little more money on hardware can improve productivity is using two monitors:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx
sales pitch != hacker news.

edit: Actually this is spam, link goes to a "blog" and it's got a affiliate link to the App Store on it.
because his command prompt runs so many extra commands and causes so much disk activity every time he hits enter, it wastes battery quick enough that he needs to monitor it.
There is also boron in the spent fuel pools to further retard neutron production. As well, the steel structures for the spent fuel pools are often made of borated steel.

It's not like they just toss the spent fuel into a kiddie pool and call it a day.
Ask HN: Is there room for another TC alternative like: Startup Foundry
Hi, I know that this post might come across as a rant, but that isn't the intention.

I have been a somewhat long time lurker @ HN, and over the last couple of months, I have/had noticed a ton of negative bias towards the coverage that TC provides; a friend and I were planning on starting a new startup friendly blog to cover the news from HN folks and other members of the startup community.

I understand that execution is key, and that ideas are a dime a dozen, and no matter how much I justify why we didn't do something earlier, they will just be excuses. But if you must know, we are both university students that were working on a web.app / managing a really heavy course load at a good named university that has a harsh-ish course load and we are also involved in planning a conference in April which was/is a huge time suck with small advantages. This didn't leave much time for the idea lest at the cost of our health and more sleep deprivation. We had registered a domain, and twitter id, but the plan was to launch in May, and continue for the summer , as we had decided to pursue this startup blog idea and the development of our web.app instead of internships/classes.

We since did contact some members of the community to ask for their stories, but we were usually buffed away, and pointed to the direction of TSF pointing out that they are already tackling the problem.

Since HN is our only portal to members of the start-up world, and I believe that this was true of TSF to get the initial momentum, and stories for their blog, we really wanted to know whether this community would be appreciative of another alternative / and willingly contribute their stories for us to cover ? We really could launch in a couple of days to a week, but that would not be feasible time wise, we are however debating still going ahead with the idea in a couple of months from now, and I believe that since TSF is already doing a great job, people might be reluctant to accept another alternative or feed it with stories /tips (sorry for the pessimism) once another alternative has been executing on that idea for a couple of months.

Please let us know what your thoughts are. Thanks.
I wonder if YC would consider a startup application, and if anybody here would be interested in starting up something, based on this tech.
good idea - need a site like that!
Whenever someone writes an article like this I've always wished they were more careful with their terminology. There's a world of difference between solving TSP and approximating TSP. Something that truly solved TSP would be impressive. Something that fails to approximate TSP when appropriate would actually be surprising; evolution doesn't leave much room for organisms that hunt suboptimally.
http://www.badscience.net is Ben Goldacre's blog, and he publishes his Guardian articles there.
Are you seriously disputing the ability of music to make people's lives more enjoyable?

By the way, Lady Gaga is something people actually pay for. If I recall right, her personal income was $60M last year. Presumably people paid a lot more than that for her music/entertainment.
At first I thought the blog adds some value, as submitting the App Store directly doesn't give as much information... But actually their links all go to themselves. The Popcap homepage has a popup and banner about the sale and donation, so that would suffice for a submission I think.

I would say this is HN suitable though, it's interesting to see a game developer giving all proceeds to a worthy cause and slash the price too.
Attractive Designs Creative Motorcycle Helmet,
Okay, so New York has hipster traps:

http://www.jwz.org/images/hipster-trap-560x795.jpg

New Jersey has guido traps:

http://www.thehighdefinite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/je...

And now Silicon Valley has developer traps:

http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2014e5ff76eed970c-500...
A production config file is typically an exception to the rule. If you have a development team, you will probably not want each one of them to know what your production passwords are. If you have sysadmins, they will probably want none of the devs to know.

For what may be a thoroughly tested and properly deployed release, what happens when a sysadmin needs to update a password for a database? In many cases, without custom tools or a formal process, they'll just pop the config file open with vi and rsync the change out to their web cluster. I'd bet this is what happened in Tumblr's case. A sysadmin did it. Probably to avoid doing a full production redeployment for a simple config update. They will put resources into formalizing this now that they've been bitten.
Is it possible that someone accidentally pushed a file live?
I was kind of surprised the Groupon story wasn't mentioned in this article.
I just downloaded the finished ebook. Searching for "monad" returns three hits. :lemonad, one mention to monadic and one mention of monads in the source list. I was a little disappointed.
That could also be the case because the business world is slow to adapt to new paradigms. There are not many ingrained best practices yet for distributing development teams over the world.

The market is moving in this way, but slowly. There is a certain threshold above which it just isn't worth to pay multiple times the salary just for someone that lives closer.

It might also be that better collaboration tools need to be developed, or improved, to support this. Or that good tools exist but they are not well-known enough.
Damn I miss that guy.
I think the term you're looking for might be "adjacent track erasure", which is the idea that the magnetic fields of adjacent tracks on a hard drive interfere, so if one track is written frequently (such as a file system metadata block), the tracks that are physicially adjacent on disk may eventually have some bits flip. It's hard to find concrete numbers on whether this happens, or how often, but it's something that people are getting more concerned with on the higher-density drives that are being made now. Of course, ZFS makes the issue pretty much moot.
Interesting, it says on the About page that the site was inspired by Robert Scoble's question on Quora..
Richard Feynman: Magnets and Why Questions [video]
Let me recap:

* You have the time to post on HN strongly implying that these "puzzles" are likely not that great (they're not even puzzles to start with)

* You have the time to purposefully misread replies (I suggested that you go read them before judging them, not that you go work on them) and reply yourself

* But you don't have the time to click on a link and read 20 lines of text?
It doesn't really matter if the configuration is in an executable form or not. Without testing, you can break it either way. With testing, you probably won't. They're equivalent.
The bubble exist and will blow. But it will not be such big as years ago.
Look to joining another startup. Three years is too long. Look into evaluating your current predicament every 6 months. In a corp job, two years is the maximum I'd expect in any position, and you stayed three with a startup...

Seriously look to join another startup.
Fukushima explained for Japanese children [video]
A quick question: why xxx usually means sex-related?
You are right, it wil expose the front controller, but it wont expose the includes from there. If you screw up the open tag on the config file, even if it is outside of webroot it will be exposed

I just tested a few variations on one of my old projects and the reason why I didn't see it is because I had ob_start() and was killing the buffer in my templating class (which is a good idea)

not to mention that the db passwords were in an external yaml file anyway (most of the frameworks do this) which would get loaded and cached
It's a config file. How can you make dozens upon dozens of unique memcache, database, and defined constants DRY?
Well, off the top of my head, mod_security has rules that scan outgoing data for password or code leakage.

A deployment strategy that requires testing that pages show what you expect them to show would also likely catch it.
.xxx adult entertainment domain approved by Internet regulators
Very good ideas, but too early.
Calm down buddy.

This is my site and yes there is an affiliate link there. I've already donated more money to the Red Cross than I'll ever get from this post.

This way more people see it, more people benefit from it so i don't particularly care if you think this is spam. sorry.
all-the-worlds-a-va.xxx
1. The programmer market is HOT HOT HOT now. We're having no end of trouble finding developers.

2. You need to take stock of what you've done these past 3 years. How are you different today from when you started? THAT is your "career credit", and you need to figure out how to communicate that to a big company. You probably have a ton of management skills (project management, people management, time management, etc). Big companies like that.

3. There's NOTHING wrong with going to work for a big company. Big company = stability, and after a long roller coaster ride with daily uncertainty, that can be appealing. You can always start over if it turns out you're stuck with the entrepreneurial bug ;-)

The key to being an entrepreneur is failing fast, right? You're 3 years in and haven't launched. Why? Do you know what your customers want? Because once you build what they actually want, no matter how crappy your first launch (within reason), you'll have the opposite problem of not being able to retain enough talent to keep up with their demands. You'll be constantly inundated with emails to the effect of "Yeah I really like your product, but it'd be so much better if it did X..."
Failing is not just the CEO's decision; it's EVERYBODY'S decision. YOU are an entrepreneur, too. Use your spidey sense!

And make sure you're honest about it when you talk to your CEO. If you can't come to common ground, that's too bad, but if you CAN, you might turn this around yet.

Also: Read up on Founder's Syndrome if you haven't yet: http://managementhelp.org/misc/founders.htm

Edit: And if you're an Android or iPhone developer who's interested in education and games and lives in the bay area, forget everything I just said. Your company is beyond help and you should come work with us ;-)
I'm pretty close to mattfoster's master.
That was my first thought as well, as a long time vim user I kind of cringed.
In my opinion, of course, sys admins shouldn't be touching configurations that affect production code. You can have config files kept from the development team, but only allow access to the actual config file to a few select individuals if you need to. Sensitive data can be kept separated.

> For what may be a thoroughly tested and properly deployed release, what happens when a sysadmin needs to update a password for a database?

They coordinate the efforts with someone on the development team to deploy this. A sysadmin touching source code is as bad as a developer making changes to the networking side, especially if neither are talking back and forth.

This is how we work. Any changes made by networking are first vetted on by me, for example, for the systems I'm responsible for. I work with them to ensure that deployment is done at the proper time, and we handle any possible problems on our end. The networking team doesn't touch anything we work on, and vice-versa. Communication becomes key.
If you can "break down" something to real password, it's not hashing but rather encryption. Anyways, I don't see how it helps if the actual php code is exposed. Adding layers of super-duper-secret php code (Database class) is not going to help if you display them in browser.
that means the edit was done on the production server?