skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course. =) But it's fun to speculate while I'm busy doing chores around the house. As for being incompetent, I didn't mean to imply that. Rather, my focus was on the fact that the mistake wasn't just a typo. There were a LOT of mistakes that were made.
I'm sorry to hear about your situation. From the way it sounds, you were never treated as a cofounder and three years and still no launch is an insane amount of time for a startup. Regardless of what the reason may have been, it should definitely not have taken that long.

Given your low reserves and being unable to join another startup because of that, I don't see an issue with joining a company that can payroll you till you're able to pursue another startup idea down the road. You should be able to work on something on the side. I actually don't share the sentiment that working at a big company is bad (or as you say, not held in high regard). Definitions of startups are skewed. Technically Facebook is a startup, yet I look at them like they're a big company. It really depends. I think there's value in being at a big company as well. Some of my best business lessons were from regular jobs working at some bigCo prior to building a startup.

In regards to your career credit... you should have been vested for stocks on a typical four year vesting schedule where if you've been there for three years, you should have vested 3/4th of your stocks already. If you were an employee, and had stock options, that's different. You would need to check.

As a developer, assuming you're good, the market is wide open.

PS As a side note, if you're ever interested in joining another startup, I am looking for a cofounder (made a post on here earlier).
Sounds like Manning just lost the opportunity to win a customer for life. In fact, they chose to lose him for life. Go Amazon!
I know you were kidding, removing all text editors from your production servers might be a good idea
Loving life, as a young business person
Ask HN: evaluating project ideas, how do you do it?
I've read some articles in the past days about idea verification before diving into it. I think that nails the problem I have when building stuff - it looks like it might be useful for someone to pay for it, but I don't really know. I've given up on "build it and they will come" model because there's simply no time to execute false ideas while maintaining a full time job.

My last app is youtube -> mp3 converter, I've spent 3 weeks of midnight grinding building a python powered backend server on top of ffmpeg and another ~2 weeks building the frontend website. Launched in mid Jan it now has very few subscribers, adsense rev. was laughable so I took it off completely. Should I have known how hard it was to gain search engine rankings, how unwilling users are to pay for such service - doubt I'd do that again. But I did not verify it, I simply hoped there's still room in this space (well, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, who knows). How could have I verified it?

My next idea is to build a self hosted client, workflow, invoice and preview manager targeted at small digital service firms, such as countless psd2html companies so that they could install it, have a link on their website called "client area" where their customers could login, see progress, invoices, give feedback on shown work. Now this does seem useful to me as I've been into these type of services, but would anyone pay at least 50 bucks per year? To verify it, do I just create a wufoo form and approach target audience directly, promising some incentives for filled survey?

Appreciate any insights.
"just about to heat up" If you haven't launched there is nothing to heat up, well maybe the air(as in nothing but hot air.)

one that a future employer won't have heard of-- do for (or to) one's career Do you believe your future employer has heard of every company that has ever employed a software developer? Sure they won't be like wow that guy worked at Google, but they also won't say he has been living in his mom's basement for the past three years. It will be up to you to convey what you have been doing professionally in that time.
Because you have a fever, and the only prescription is more monad? "Monad" is a loaded term and we didn't feel that talking about them in that way added any value to the book.
This reminds me of the Chernobyl story.
That Robert guy is everywhere..:-)
Intentional pun in the blog? "This shit is crazy! Let me show you a log."
I loved the good old days of Techcrunch and learning about promising startups. HN does a good job now at recognizing early startups that look promising. I think what's missing is a blog that offers readers a deeper analysis and review of promising early stage startups. I want to hear about both the good and bad things about the startup, and don't really care about just reading press releases. This is what I think made Techcruch great back in the day.
Operations at Twitter: Scaling Beyond 100 Million Users
Or Quora ;)
Yes, its is that the web root contains code, at the very least an index.php but likely much, much more.
Of course. =) I don't know what their deployment strategy is like. My point was, they made a series of mistakes, and it wasn't just a typo. Though, if they did push a file live, they would still have skipped numerous steps, like testing.

I haven't read the update, so I really don't know.

I'm not suggesting they are morons. Rather, they made a series of mistakes. Every programmer makes mistakes. The key is to have a strategy to catch mistakes. Something as simple as a staging server where something like this could have been caught, and having a deployment strategy where you cannot get past staging without going through deployment is a good idea.
PyCon 2011: TiP BoF
Chats.io, new HTML5 / Node.JS-powered social group chat, launches
PyCon 2011: Saturday Plenaries (with Dropbox and Guido) « Mouse Vs Python
that is a great idea. I check if any of the 'hardened php' projects do this, and they don't
How real-time baseball scores were done in 1913.
I wonder if there's a point where the talent wars in the Bay Area could actually affect pg's view that the Valley is the best place for a startup. I know that Jason Calacanis has talked about how it might now make sense to do your development somewhere else.
I know this is probably inappropriate, but I've googled his wife out of interest, to see if USSR took good care of her, this is what I've found http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/valentina-Komarov/131556909...
http://staff.tumblr.com/post/3959106211/update-regarding-sec...
Have you read "The Four Steps To The Epiphany?" If not, get it, read it, then read it again.

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then check out the series of videos that starts here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5E38frHo1U

Or read some of Steve's blog posts from here:

http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/
I could definitely do this if the startup job could pay me full salary. Alas, I'm in New York and would not leave the city lightly: family and friends. It'd have to be a dream job for me to consider moving, and with the rocky career I've had I don't even think dream jobs are available (or maybe it's just that I feel like a failure because I'm near 30 and haven't broken out yet).

My appraisal of startup vs. big-company life is that startups have more variation in individual monetary payoff, while big companies have more variance in quality of work. At a startup, you get a mix of interesting work and shitty grunt work that has to be done, and there's nothing personal about it because everyone is getting about the same quality of work, and because doing the grunt work is well worth it if the startup pays off. In a big company, you can end up in an AI/machine learning research group with high autonomy... or you can end up maintaining some shitty legacy payroll system.

But yes, I would consider a job at another startup. Or at a big company. Or at my current company if I knew the situation would improve. I don't want to be a "job hopper" and would love to find a job where it's still worth it to show up for work after 5 years.
The book hasn't been released yet. You can cancel your Amazon order without penalty until it enters the shipping process.
Finding good talent elsewhere is non-trivial, but with some care it is much easier.

We're currently doing our development in WA (one founder), NH (lead developer, almost founder), and IL. If we get into one of the Bay Area programs, I'll move to CA for the program, and probably then some.

The reason for the move isn't for development talent, it is for networking opportunities and mentoring opportunities.
A human error caused some sensitive server configuration information to be exposed this morning. Our technicians took immediate measures to protect from any issues that may come as a result.

We’re triple checking everything and bringing in outside auditors to confirm, but we have no reason to believe that anything was compromised. We’re certain that none of your personal information (passwords, etc.) was exposed, and your blog is backed up and safe as always. This was an embarrassing error, but something we were prepared for.

The fact that this occurred at all is still unacceptable, and we’ll be seriously evaluating and adjusting our processes to ensure an error like this can never happen again.
I think he's suggesting that if any part of the reddit codebase is too complex, then it needs to be ripped out.
I find preparing the data is actually easier in R than in something like python, but that certainly depends on type and amount of data. And, of course, each to their own..
But if you don't do the validation postback, anyone can fake an IPN message if they know your IPN URL.
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I've been doing this recently: gathering up my recent and old code and putting it on GitHub. I'm employed currently but this is still something I've been pushing off for a while.

One of the things that held me back though was that I wanted the projects to be "ready." To get them to a point where I can show them off instead of having several abandoned and "poorly written" projects. (Quoted because you really are your own worst critic.)

I now think it's much better to show you can ship on your ideas. To build, publish, and move on to your next idea. It's a much stronger indication of your passion for programming than words alone. Saying "I like to hack in my spare time" without further evidence just doesn't have much impact.

Does anybody disagree? Are there cases where publishing imperfect code and abandoned projects alongside your best was a disadvantage to you?
If you're serious about wanting to build a community, I suggest you read Building an Online Community [1] by Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter.

1: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/building_an_online_commu...
Can you please explain how you built a multi-AZ load balanced infrastructure, given that Amazon's ELB only load balances within a given AZ. I assume you used some external service. Would you mind providing the details. Thanks.
I bet the tumblr developers are happy 100+ people are debugging their mistake.
Inside Anonymous' Secret War Room
> Hardware setup is not that important for me. Never was.

Maybe that's because you've always had a decent hardware setup. I once worked for a company where the clueless management decided to save money by having fewer workstations than developers, and our department had to make sure they all looked in use, otherwise a management snap inspection might take even more away.
Couldn't find much, but there's this:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1628/whats-the-orig...
This is what happens when your primary demographic is people with no jobs and no money -- no ad revenue because nobody clicks the ads, and no possibility of selling subscriptions. Compare Reddit's target demographic with Bloomberg's target demographic. I bet Bloomberg has more than one developer.

(Incidentally, what a scam. Bloomberg terminals cost some insane monthly fee, and they have ads! And all I've ever seen anyone do with them is check sports scores and read celebrity gossip. Google should have put them out of business years ago.)
AP Stylebook Finally Changes "e-mail" to "email"
Maybe they could also use something bigger:
http://www.terramax.com/technology/the_brains.cfm
2011 Honda Civic Type-R Review
Every time i click to a new page that f'n chat window pops back up. I minimized it. Leave it minimized. It's terribly annoying.
TopTal does this: http://www.toptal.com/ . You should contact them if you're interested.
What made Techcrunch great at one time was not only learning about early-stage startups, but reading Arrington's honest analysis, opinions, and reviews. His brutal honesty did upset founders who got a bad review, but at least he was offering readers more than a BS press release.
NASA's Pricey planetary probes could fall under budget ax
Facebook had one or more servers in their rotation not configured to actually execute PHP, so it was instead delivered as text/plain. This is a different error - the file was executed by PHP, but since they mangled the opening tag (i?php instead of <?php) it was passed through as HTML by the PHP interpreter.

Except for the obvious – never edit files on the live server – other ways to protect against this would be to have multiple opening tags (first line of file would just be <?php ?>, then another opening tag on the second line), have your VCS check that certain files begin with <?php, store the config in a non-executable way (in a YAML file, or in the server environment), or using a combination of file() and eval() to always prepend the '<?php'.

And people should really install a PHP error handler first thing - before they load anything else - that delivers errors with a HTTP code 5xx they can catch in their caching layer.
I don't know what you imply with fever, I am not a native english speaker, but I just paid for your book. I am also a beginner to functional programming and curious about what monads are and I have read about them without really understanding them.

I was reading up on monads the last two weeks, these are the good sources I have found for Clojure:
http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure...
http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html
http://vimeo.com/20717301
Hehe this seems like one of those ideas which everyone has at some point. Here's my take on it - http://laughingcomputer.com/startups/. I am too busy with other stuff, so feel free to copy.
Sure.

Their site has a front-end controller (www/dispatch.php) to which all requests get routed (by a mod_rewrite rule, perhaps), rather than having .php files in the web root for each page. This file sets up the environment -- among other things, it registers a custom error handler and includes a config file (config/config.php) that defines a bunch of constants. Then it dispatches the request to the appropriate controller, based on the URL.

Someone (probably a sysadmin) edited the config file and accidentally changed the opening tag (<?php). This caused PHP to output its contents, rather than parsing and executing it. Since there was no output buffer active, those contents were sent directly to the user, which caused HTTP response headers also to be sent automatically. That's the big first line you see in the output.

Since no error had actually been triggered by this point, execution continued. It tried to set an HTTP header ("P3P: CP="P3P_CP"", whatever that means). However since HTTP headers had already been sent, this did trigger an error, which was passed to the custom error handler, which sent some debug output (the rest of the output you see) and stopped execution.
Okay here's my honest yet skeptical question:

Reddit is down to running with only one developer (and surviving fine).

How many people does it take to run/develop for Quora and why?

Isn't Quora "simply" a feature-rich forum system like Stackoverflow (with a different layout) ?

ps. why are we not allowed to see when a question was asked on Quora?
This is my guess. Anyone who's used VIM for years knows that the first couple of times using a different editor, your text is littered with "i" and ":w".
Microsoft switches ad-agency horses for key piece of its $1 billion budget
Hopefully this will end those insipid "to the cloud!" commercials.
Coordinating between teams for any changes to a production config file is a hard sell, but yes, this is the only really solid way to make certain stupid mishaps don't happen. This is how we did it at my last company as well. In addition to using production branches.

Most companies pin down their processes in response to issues that pop up.
Ask HN: Simplest way to start paying people?
Hi Folks,

I'm working on something and wondering what the quickest way to get setup to be able to pay people money would be. Basically I'll be taking money of one group (probably businesses) and then paying some of that money to others (probably individuals). I'm wondering what the simplest way to get a proof of concept up would be for the paying money to individuals part. Can I just require everyone to have a PayPal account? Or would something else be easier/better.

If anyone has a recommendation as to the best way to do this as opposed to the quickest way I'd be interested in hearing that as well, thanks.

Robin

==edit==
Ok, trying to be more specific.
What would be the easiest way technically speaking to arrange payments from a webapp to individuals? And are there any.specific gotchas to be aware of.

Thanks for the help.

== Edit 2 ==
Payments will be 10s or $100s
"Please inspect and clean Roomba's radiation sensors!"
Chris - this is awesome! Love that it's open source too:

https://github.com/chrismatthieu/CHATS.iO/
100-150 an hour? I have 6 years of experience and I can hardly get more than $70 an hour in NYC. Maybe I'm not a "great" developer.
Stochastic optimisation in analysing efficiency of betting exchange markets
Currently, my research is centred around investigating semi-strong form efficiency [1] in betting exchange markets. Semi strong efficient market hypothesis says that all publicly available information about the market is reflected in the current market prices. In other words, this hypothesis claims that it is not possible to make a positive profit from a long term betting, having access to all publicly available information, including historical prices trends, traded volume, news from magazines and newspapers, scored goals and red cards in football markets, number of aces in tennis markets, and so on.

Sometime ago, I reached a point at which my studying of betting exchange markets became complex and time consuming, consequently I decided to introduce stochastic optimisation [2] to boost performance of my research. I present, how I was analysing betting exchange markets before and after applying stochastic optimisation.
My point is more that there's at least one layer of protection between that page and the actual password, which I'd say is more important than displaying some code. It would take more than one mistake to really do damage, which is better than nothing.
If you are a great dev, ask for what you are worth

You don't have to be a great dev to be worth north of $150 an hour. Step 1: get inserted into the part of the company that makes money. Step 2: adjust any knob available such that they make more money. Step 3: get in the habit of citing Step 2 when you aggressively negotiate salary.
Bloomberg's annual revenue is about 25% of the entire journalism industry's.
What Kind Of Beer Is Your SEO?
Down voter: care to explain why? My statement is correct ...
(adds on to headline)..."if you have a difficult time reading market conditions, don't understand your financial situation and feel comfortable moving your belongings from house to house every few years."
There's an obsession to own your own factory - which certainly is sexy, but this plan is pretty naive to anyone in manufacturing. If you want to prototype something - there are hackerspaces* and even TechShop - the later investing $8M and they definitely couldn't make all the systems for a car.

You can't ignore poor process fit - I.e. have fun using a MIG machine to weld your car together from sheet metal cheaper than GM can stamp it out. And you can't ignore raw materials - have fun casting your engine block from metal cans without any alloying tools / testing.

In reality, local production of many things (cars) won't work with today's tools, and a real mix of general purpose local shops and standardized / accessible large ones is the real "Industry 2.0" path.

* http://hackerspaces.org

Disclosure: I run CloudFab, a cloud-based manufacturing company.
I could easily refute all the points in that article if I had the time. I'll suffice to give this example:

"A" buys a $100,000 house, "B" rents a $100,000 house. Both pay about $1,500 per month. At the end of 15 years, "A" owns an asset worth $100,000, "B" owns nothing. You decide.
It's also running on http://nodester.com - the free and open source node.js hosting platform.
What bothers me is the lack of perspective. Obviously the Valley goes through cycles, and -- let's hope! -- we're on the uptick right now.

That doesn't mean we're in a bubble, and you shouldn't dread it. There's a big difference between an uptick and a bubble. A bubble -- a stock market bubble, mind you -- means irrationality all-around. If you think investments and hiring are irrational, please do some research on what was happening in 1999. Today's behavior is entirely sane.
The problem with this approach is that you never see the code of those not interested in jumping through your hoop.
Regardless of how it occurred, and given that this isn't a language issue, I have two questions....

Does anyone know how long was it actually in this state?
(There's a heck of a lot of entries in the Google search quoted in another comment, but then how often does Google index tumblr?)

Did no-one at least press F5 or CMD-R after making the edit, let alone run tests? Quality control is the real issue. I can easily imagine myself making this mistake, typo's are the source of the majority of my bugs, but I find it hard to imagine taking more than 10 seconds to notice it.
Porn News #1 (Lupe Fuentes and Child Porn)
Thanks for the link. However, not much of a GA user here. I wonder if there's anyone at HN who uses/has used this plugin who can share the experience.
People love absolutes - usually...
Out of curiosity, it looks like it's down right now. Can you provide some info about why? I thought the node stuff was supposed to be able to handle all the simultaneous traffic requests with ease. Just curious!
Those are the best Clojure monad tutorials available. Definitely better than we could have written. :-)
..."and don't mind being at the mercy of inflation when your landlord jacks up your rent 10% with a month remaining on your lease."
An older poster of the moon before tonights
Yeah, that's it. Lease everything, don't own any assets. Let me know how that works out for you.
I just had the opportunity to sell a large 30-year fixed-rate bond with massive leverage into an overheated bond market with damn near a guarantee of serious inflation over the next 30 years. Thank you, Bank of America!
Same thing on my Mac laptop in Chrome. Works like a bubble rather than a marble.
If you're renting a $100,000 house for $1,500 a month, you are probably overpaying on rent, no?
Tumblr has at least one full time sysadmin. I think it's more reasonable to suppose he made the change to a production config file, rather than a developer. A definite failing in their deployment process, but it really says nothing about the quality of the application code or developer testing.
Thanks Chris. This is handy, for sure. I gave it some love on The Next Web, if you want to monitor the comments.
The div buttons seems to stretch to width 100% in IE (all versions). Perhaps give it `display: inline-block`?