skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the first part, but have to quibble with the statement "there were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level."

I suppose that's true in absolute terms (nobody is at Facebooks level). However, there are definitely an army of really high traffic sites out there written in PHP, many of which predate Facebook. Problems of scale aren't exclusive to Facebook by any stretch.

It seems to me that Facebooks choice of PHP, in that context, was a big advantage. They've undoubtedly been able to draw on the experience that others have had at scale on very similar stacks. That might not have been as true for MySpace.

That said, MySpace had a whole host of internal issues. I briefly worked for a sister site at Fox Interactive Media and had at least some insight into what was going on over there. I'm sure someone will write a book about it one day:)
Some of those ideas are right on the money, but this is pretty hard to read if you didn't actually work there.

> Make it very clear that good, small ideas matter.

This is a problem everywhere big, and I agree one million percent.
I agree. They could be making $100 million in revenue a month but if it costs them $95 million to make that then a $21 billion valuation seems crazy on a company that profits $5 million a month.

Complete vanity.
You seem to believe there are only two sides to the discussion. There are three, actually: two very vocal partizan sides, and a third side doing actual research. Scientists have spoken on patents and other forms of Intellectual Property protection. I believe [1] in science, do you?

----

[1] in the figurative sense ONLY. Science is not matter of belief; nor the beliefs I hold personally have anything to do with science.
Facebook Questions : Is it good or bad?
Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown PHP-to-C compiler https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/ and Cassandra, their own custom database system http://cassandra.apache.org/

If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.
Robot bird, (not the humming bird)
You are only worth what someone else is willing to pay you. If you feel you're underpaid, your two options are to find someone who values your work more, or convince your current employer that you're more valuable than he's giving you credit for.

That said, it seems you are being wildly underpaid. It would be pretty easy for you to find another web development job and double your salary, plus benefits. Your current boss is unlikely to double your pay, so you may still come away underpaid even if he gives you a significant increase.
Woody Harrelson to Play John McCain’s Campaign Manager in HBO's 'Game Change'
Two time Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson has been cast as Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s senior campaign strategist and advisor in HBO's upcoming film, Game Change.
Holy mother of god, no change management, staging or testing servers? On a site that big?

Appalling, if true. (Not that good technology and process would have made the product suck much less.)
Very good life hack IMO. There's a very similar trick I've heard of to help get you doing the chores you don't want to do: start a 5-minute timer, do the chore, and after 5 minutes you can stop with no guilt. Most of the time what happens is that you end up continuing until you finish, e.g. I've washed half the dishes, it's not a big deal to wash the rest.

I've found this really helps to get my cognitive processes over the initial hurdle of taking the first step. For me, that makes up almost all of the resistance and aversion I have to things like cleaning the apt, etc.

Edit: I think the 5-minute time slice is really key here because it so drastically reduces the amount of perceived effort and commitment I have to make toward any task.
When I hear "open source", I think "developed in the open". While projects that occasionally dump source can be technically called "open source", they don't look at all like the open source projects I like to work or or with.
Folks need to lighten up, then. We're not curing cancer here.
I've often heard people cite Friendster's outages and slow loading time as one of the reasons for its decline. But yes, it's usually a secondary issue and not a primary cause.
What are good elements of design for conversation-sparking slides?
If that worked, then movie studios would just churn out chick movies with guaranteed profits aplenty.

(actually this does seem to work in the Harlequin romance corner of publishing - if you can apply this to a startup, more power to you)
... why didn't Mozilla collaborate with Google on this? ...

Firefox sync is user encrypted. Firefox/Mozilla has no idea what bookmarks you got.

This collides with almost every other bookmark management system out there (including Google sync I guess), because they all want that information to gather intel or make money with it.
You can try to blame Myspace's "death spiral" is due to their tech stack, moving to L.A., but the root cause is their inability to innovate. It was virtually the same site in 2010 as it was in 2002. Think of how many new features Facebook has launched and relaunched in that time. There was a time when many people enjoyed their custom designed profile pages. But then they grew up and MySpace didn't.
This is a fantastic comment, and advice that should be seen by everyone -- especially scrappy startups on YC that have aspirations to turn into said dreaded enterprise.

There is a balance that one has to achieve between agility and stability - but that balance, the agility and stability can all be compromised based on early infrastructure choices.

Sadly, early infrastructure choices are 99% of the time predicated on available budget.

Due to this, there is one infrastructure choice, policy really, that can be made that will provide you with the best available path throughout the life of your companies infrastructure: VIRTUALIZE EVERYTHING

I spend a lot of time in the weeds of infrastructure as I design the physical cable-plant and data center environments that people shove all their stuff into - I cannot virtualize physical cables - but I design the plants around the idea of virtualization.

This means that you want to collapse your traffic to as fat a pipe as possible as quickly as possible. Allowing you to run minimal physical cabling.

as you grow as a company, and you get to a point where your services will transfer from hosted infrastructure to owned infrastructure maintain as much virtualization as possible which will allow you to pivot easier higher in the stack.

With virtualized storage now, the only thing you cant virtualize is your actual transit.

It's funny how net diags now just look like a bunch of tiny clouds linked together then simply to larger clouds.
Center of U.S. Population Over Time
"Techcrunch speculates on revenue numbers, gets caught."

Am I reading this right?
There is nothing stopping anyone from doing a startup on the side. Needing to pay rent and working on your own project are not mutually exclusive.
Googled todo timer, 2nd in search result is your itunes app link, congrats!

Also interesting is 8th result is techrepublic's listing. Did you submit to them or did they mined it?
he gave a talk at RailsConf '10 and was much better. I also don't think he's that bad though, public speaking's hard
I had the basic pre-college understanding of probability and statistics when I started as the senior architect at a company producing multi-variate testing software.[1] When you dip your toe into that pool, Taguchi is the first thing one reads about, so the team implemented that.

It became apparent that Taguchi wasn't really appropriate or sufficient for web-based testing, so the team learned, devised, and implemented more appropriate MVT models.[2]

One notable bug that we discovered involved a self-optimizing test. The idea was that, once we reached a certain confidence level, we would slowly grow the number of targets that were fed the most successful variant.

We had a minor (on the order off off-by-one or switching a < and a <=) code error that grew the successful variant too quickly, at a point where the confidence level was effectively non-actionable.

As I recall, it took us about six months to notice, and none of our clients noticed.

MVT, and especially our implementation, is obviously much more complicated than straightforward A|B testing. Given the fact that no one was able to sniff out such an obvious error when their tests didn't improve conversion as much as expected has left me with the idea that, while testing is not snake oil, I have 99% confidence the population involved in split testing has only a superficial idea of what they're doing.

[1] I had previously implemented a very simple Apache plugin, mod_gating, that I should clean up and throw on github. Most of the work was in the lexer for the configuration file. :-)

[2] Much of the design of appropriate statistical models was done through consulting with statistics departments at a couple local top-ten universities. We figured advanced stats is like cryptography, if you're not an expert in the general field and you come up with a "proprietary" solution, you're probably screwing something up.
I usually try not to stay once I've shown my intention to leave, no matter what the counteroffer from the current place is. So, I would change it to: Ask for a raise. If refused, find another job that pays more. Period.

edit: decided to remove a personal story for privacy reasons
No offense, thinking about it is fun, but we're not exactly accountants; and we're definitely not accountants with access to Groupon's numbers. It "seems crazy" isn't exactly a critical argument.
Great article. Is this the same person that Palantir mentioned as a potential source of Facebook information for social engineering attacks?

From the leaked HBGary emails:

"The Palantir employee noted that a researcher had used similar tools to violate Facebook's acceptable use policy on data scraping, 'resulting in a lawsuit when he crawled most of Facebook's social graph to build some statistics. I'd be worried about doing the same. (I'd ask him for his Facebook data—he's a fan of Palantir—but he's already deleted it.)'"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-ho...
Time Warner iPad TV app drawing users -- and litigation
I found this fascinating on three levels:

1) Materials technology which allows durable and light weight construction material of the bird.

2) Energy density, birds are notorious for having high energy metabolisms because flapping flight when manuevering is quite inefficient.

3) The kinematics are spot on, your brain says "this is a bird" which makes low altitude missions like surveillance much more reasonable.

The Festo guys are just showing off of course but it does seem like a meaningful contribution to the UAV design space.
Leonardo da Vinci would love this robo-bird
As a international symbol, searching for ♥ in Twitter yields results in multiple languages, presumably having something to do with love, or Justin Bieber.
If you are ever exercising your options; get out the crowbar, pry open your wallet, and go find an accountant to explain all of your tax options and the risks involved in them.

If you exercise your options, I believe you generate a taxable event. If you do not sell the stock for twelve months (as advocated in the article), you risk the stock price dropping below your strike price and you might not have enough money left to pay your tax bill. I recall reading a sob story (Money magazine?) about a guy going bankrupt because of this but I haven't been able to find it.
An even better question would be 'what are you willing to give up to start a startup?'.

On most measures (experience, contacts, etc) you're better waiting a few years before starting. The trick is that people tend to accumulate personal and financial obligations during that time that make a startup a much bigger sacrifice. If you end up on the spouse->house->kids->midlife-crisis-at-45 track before starting, you'll have a very hard time changing direction.
I don’t think it matters. If you think it does I would like to hear some reasonable scenarios from you that affect a large number of users negatively.
It's always been my understanding that spam is what killed MySpace. I'm sure Facebook's long-closed membership system helped make it a somewhat more manageable issue to deal with.
Chrome was initially developed behind closed doors.
I believe this to be an important indicator of the sheer size of the Google Inc. and the state of their ability to innovate. It's not a disgruntled employee quitting; it's a conscious employee searching for more fertile workplace.
Color is Surprisingly Innovative But Will Still Fail
Thanks. Techrepublic must have mined it as I don't recall ever submitting anything and they have all my apps listed with descriptions word for word.
To be honest with you, I don't care for Ashton Kutcher as an actor -- but I am very impressed with him as an angel investor.

I don't know who his tech handler may be (if any) but they get him exposed to some very interesting projects, and I think that he has made some great choices on his investments. Further, his lending of some of his celebrity to (twitter and otherwise) is a good thing for those that he invests in.

I can say, that if I were in his shoes, I would be doing exactly what he has done -- take the money made in his industry and invest heavily in tech.

In fact, based on his broad range of exposure alone, I would be very interested in his opinion as an angel investor in my projects as I do think he has a pulse on contemporary tech and how well it could be adopted.

Whether that is due to his own acumen, or that of some staff of tech advisory (or just friends) that introduce and connect him to deals is unknown.
You're getting screwed, and probably taken advantage of. I've been there before.

A significant raise is unlikely, especially since they're OK with dramatically underpaying you now. It reeks of poor ethics, and companies like this think every one is expendable (except the inner circle of management).

Don't blame the degree; I have a history degree. That stuff is only important before you have experience. You have it. The company knows you're good, degree or no degree. And they're still doing this to you.

You should be shopping for a new job. You're in a field where you're in high demand. Take advantage of that and don't look back. You can get a contracting job making 40k+ no problem, and in a couple of years you can add 20k more to that.

The disadvantage to this field is that you jump around a lot, but understand that it's to your advantage and businesses are used to programmer turnover.
The argument that you can't do something big and challenging unless the talent all lives in one small area is clearly refuted by the movie industry.
I would like to know how to subscribe RSS feeds of the comments of the individual stories (not all comments, but comments on the threads like this one).
Thanks Peter! Please help us to spread the word :)
While giving free stuff is nice, filling your post with random numbers makes it pretty ugly. I wish there was a different way you could do this...
Microsoft was just hedging their bets. Development of IE was specifically to take Netscape down. Once they had won a majority of the web browser market they put it into Windows-style "churn" mode, where they release new garbage versions without any innovations or improvements.
if it contributed it was a much smaller factor than it's ugly design and skanky/teen vibe.
I think he looks more nervous because he's looking down to read off the paper. Maybe extemporaneous speech would have looked smoother?
IIIT to break online language barrier
Changed the title of the article which i found more relevant.
It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers.

It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms.

From linked article:

> Silicon Valley has lots of talent like him. Think about the technology he knows. Hint, it isn’t Microsoft.

http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-t...
Thank you! Please help us to spread the word :)
Ask HN: When to use or not use your own money to fund your own startup
According to techcrunch, Tony Conrad created a startup called Sphere which was acquired by AOL for an estimated $25 million. Then Tony decided to start about.me but when he did he raised over $400,000. Why didn't he use his own money to fund about.me?

On a more local level. I feel like I have finally saved enough to start my own startup and if I fail I just lose 1/2 of my savings. I don't want to fail and then be in a debt that I can't ever get out of. How does one determine if they should spend their own money on their own project or not?
ClickEquations and SearchForce seem to target companies far larger than my side-project.

I got a demo account at AdGrok, but they don't seem to provide an automated bidder. Will keep looking though.

Thanks again for the information zoomzoom!
Is it heavier than Java? People have run some pretty big and busy sites on Java fine (iTunes store, for example).
I'm saying there's a snowball's chance of my device seeing Honeycomb at all; manufacturers are certainly not going to go out of their way to get a broken version.

(They might go out of their way to get a broken version for new mobile devices they're trying to bring to market. But it seems like aside from time-sensitive situations like Motorola trying to compete with the iPad2 by pushing the Xoom out the door, integrating and qualifying a new release is enough trauma that a device maker is unlikely to go to that effort with an immature product).
No kidding. They're using php as a template language to call thrift services. That's hardly "using php" in the sense that most people would think of it.
".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace."

This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's easier than addressing the true underlying problems.

"The biggest problem was they didn't allow the developers to have staging or testing servers -- they deployed on the production servers on the first go-around... And all this with no change management or control. No versioning either."

Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone.
Scrapemark: Using Templates do Scrape the Web in Python
I don't give a you know what for karma!
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...
Yes, exactly like Firefox. This may be after all a good idea.
The fact that Firefox sync is encrypted has convinced me to use them.

Based on a youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_sq5zpN0M&t=1m45s), they said the bookmarks are encrypted BEFORE it gets sent to their servers. This means it's private.
Here's Andy Rubin's well-known definition of open:

https://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429

This ("access to source code") is clearly less than GPL, and that's OK, as other commenters point out.

But what they're offering now with Honeycomb is less than Rubin's definition above.
Show HN: New App - WhatYouHateAbout.Me
http://whatyouhateabout.me

It's easy to get positive feedback from people, but when it comes to negative feedback, people tend to hold back in fear of ruining relationships. Yet, we know negative feedback is one the most valuable things you can get when it comes to self development.

We built this app to make it easy for people to get honest opinions from their friends about what it is that they hate about them.

The goal is not to promote hatred, but rather to help people identity their weaknesses so that they can work on them and hopefully become a better a person.

I would love to hear what you guys think about it. Any feedback or thoughts for improvement would be much appreciated.

Thanks.
Computer Vision is Artificial Intelligence
AT&T Internet usage billing off by as much as 4,700%
Flying Robotic Swarms Create Wifi Clouds
LCE & SRE “blockers”. Having support for Launch Coordination & Site Reliability is great, but when these people say “you can’t launch unless…” then you know they’re being a hindrance, and not a help.

Isn't that the point? They are there to maintain a larger point of view from individual developers. Giving every person with their own agenda launch authority is disastrous (in a large organization): Of course my project is important. My project doesn't need review, I wrote it.
Scalability is relatively new hiccup; given the fact that only in past few years users have swarmed the internet. Sites never expected that and developers weren't prepared. They learned mostly by trail and error and reading case studies and then figured out what to do. You would find inexperienced PHP devs who don't know scaling just like you would find .Net devs.

I think the article has the right notions. Stack doesn't matter, a team of highly motivated devs who can milk the technology involved is more important.
Why do their articles get posted here so frequently? They are consistently garbage.
Intel's HP-Oracle-Itanium soap opera: Why you should care
Isn't Darwin open source in the same way Android is? As in, the development process can only be seen by those in the inner sanctum.
"I have to believe that this isn't the case with all developers. I think it's possible to find a developer to work with me instead of for me and in that case I think they'd play a key role in the discovery of the product."

Very true. And that's key - to find a developer who shares your vision and passion.

You might want to consider picking up a copy of Balsamiq Mockups (<a href="http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups>Link</a>). You can quickly start mocking up the UI. You can even make it clickable and export one as a PDF (still clickable).

Having a mockup will allow for you to add to and take away from the UI. It would also come in handy when you're ready to pass work to a developer.

Having trouble finding tech savvy folks in Waco? Start a networking group, something akin to <a href="http://refreshingcities.com/>Refresh</a>.
Largely unimpressed with Scott Shane's take on things. He seems to bastardize the work of Paul Reynolds.

We need a tax policy that rewards a certain kind of entrepreneurs - what we have now is a disincentive.