skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you push from your Build Server?

Why wouldn't you?

Seriously. The role of what we call "build servers" has been dramatically expanding. When I started in this business, nightly automated builds were the state-of-the art. Then we went to automated build systems that would build whenever new code was checked in. Then the build systems would run tests as part of the build. Then the build systems would spit out reports of automated test coverage so you could know if you were missing something you thought you had covered.

Also, I wouldn't ever deploy production code that wasn't built by the build system. So I'm having trouble with the "nothing to do with deployment" argument. It has everything to do with deployment.

I don't consider my TeamCity install a "build system" I consider "building the code" a subset of the overall Continuous Deployment system that's powered by TeamCity (which is amazing, cross-platform, and free for small teams)

The end point of all of this is that instead of releasing every few months or weeks, I can release every few hours or minutes. Basically, every single change that isn't demonstrably broken gets released without us even thinking about it. It's transformative.

What's the safest change you can make to a stable production system? The smallest change possible.

When do your customers want to get their hands on a bug fix or a new feature? Right fucking now.

If something does go wrong, how many changesets do you want to go through to try to find the problem? As few as possible. One is ideal.

How many new features and fixes do you want to have to roll back if something goes wrong? As few as possible. One is ideal.

Some specific questions:

Rollbacks are done by just re-pointing IIS manually. I've only had to do it once. Alternatively, I could have backed out the change and pushed that through the continuous deployment system.

As far as DB Schema changes go... Again, the safest change to make is the smallest change possible. Generally, I make DB changes that are backwards compatible (adding new tables, adding columns to existing tables) so if I need to roll back the code, it's just good. If you're tightly coupled to a lot of logic in stored procedures (I'm not) you're going to need to make their changes backwards-compatible (generally by using default parameters) or embed a version number in the procedure name (e.g. "InsertEntityV2", etc.) to let the two versions of the proc live side-by-side.

If I need to make some sort of breaking schema change, I would have to do a scheduled downtime and handle that particular deployment mostly manually. As far as I can tell, there's no real easy way around that problem (IMVU also does their schema-breaking changes outside of their continuous deployment scenario).
This reminds me of an interesting event that occurred in my C++ class. During one of the assignments I looked at a peers code. I became convinced that the code was wrong. His code looked a little like this:

bool operator<(.., ..)
{
return operator<(.., ..);
}

He ran the code and it worked. I was confused.

Another student saw the teacher pass him and copied his implementation. His code didn't work. It gave the stack overflow error that I was expecting.

It turned out that the reason the guy had his code work in the first place was because it was never included in the program. He had put the code in his C++ file, but forgot to include it in his header. When the program compiled, it never knew his code existed.
New website builder for hotels
This kind of thing is why I loved working for the Guardian. If you ever get the chance to be a programmer in an international newsroom, I recommend taking it.
No objects = no structs?
Hmm. Caviar goes well with worcestershire sauce, but worcestershire sauce does not go well with caviar.
Well, I will definitely give Ubuntu (and Gnome) another try.
Chrome OS: Headed to a Tablet Near You?
its a trade-off. the point of javascript is you don't have to download an image. i've heard of people inlining base-64 encoded images to avoid an extra request. is 4k javascript worth it to avoid a 2k png download hosted somewhere else? maybe.
We need common sense & neutral specialists in control. This world is clearly becoming far too complex for the electable caste.

How do you reconcile those two sentences? As I read them, they directly contradict each other, even if by "electable caste" you mean the good looking and charismatic crooks who tend to get elected.
Spiderwebs In Trees
Bing's iPad app takes aim at Safari
Amen, brother. Like being a contractor with a high rate who gets to program all day and ignore the political bullshit.
50 Fresh And Inspirational Fashion Label Websites
The Internet is actually full of of fun, daring and stylish fashion websites. There are hundred of interesting fashion blogs with ever popular collections of street style images, interactive online wardrobes and sites with so many enticing tops, bottoms, dresses and accessories that they practically yank your credit card from your hand.
Covered on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/07/linkedins-android-app-exits...

And, Mashable: http://mashable.com/2011/04/07/linkedin-android-app/

And, TNW: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/04/07/linkedin-androi...

Finally, RWW: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_gets_an_androi...
A lot of times there are jokes about the silly and overprotective American consumer culture. What a lot of people don't realize is the sheer amount of useless mental energy you need to expand in other areas of the world, double checking everyday purchases and never really trusting what you buy.

Sure sometimes it can get a little extreme (I'm looking at you McDonald's coffee) but in a lot of cases it's an efficient system that frees up your attention and focus on more important things then checking whether your milk contains poison.

Personally, I think this over protectiveness is actually a sign of an advanced economy taking specialization to it's logical extent. Not having it is an economic cost in the long term.
I'm a little leery of this: People have to realise that an idea is worth nothing.

An idea is worth nothing in the sense that an idea can't make money by itself. There are still such things as better and worse ideas, and "your idea is worthless, so it's not stealing for me to use your idea" (a la http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235218) feels like a pretty slimy use of the phrase.

"You aren't the only one who can have good ideas, and you don't own an idea just because you had it first" seems like a much less judgmental way to say this.
Show HN: Said.fm now with Semantic-ish Search
Good overview; a couple nitpicks:

Technically Scala's inference is not Hindley-Milner since you still have to declare method argument types for JVM interop.

The speed difference between Scala and Clojure has less to do with the static/dynamic gap than the fact that Clojure relies upon reflection by default. However, once you identify your bottlenecks, adding type hints to remove reflection is pretty easy.

Good stuff.
Sidenote: Is there a Ann Arbor-Detroit HN group? If not, anyone interested in starting one?
CustomInk rips off a lot of people
CustomInk "takes possession and ownership" of your artwork the minute you load it. On top of that they stole the entire graphical database of CSA Graphics and were sued in Minnesota Fed Court. CI settled for TONS as they had stolen art for years to popular their on-line design tool. SCHMUCKS. They should NOT be pointing fingers at OOSHIRTS at all. CustomInk has been successful in controlling any bad press or internet comments. Look a bit deeper and you'd be surprised about the myth of the "core values".
Like real estate, it is about location, location, location. Think of it as a lever - if properly applied, it can move a world.

There's also the emotional component. The Japanese population has been shaken by the initial quake, the tsunami, aftershocks, and the problems at the nuclear reactor. Adding another significant quake and tsunami (2m, last report), will further rattle already stretched nerves.
Andreessen Horowitz Raises Another $200 Million To Invest In Huge Startups
Yo, seiji. You're wrong: http://m.gawker.com/379498/yahoo-millionaire-paul-graham-sec...

They reported about pg's personal life after the ban (which went into place April 11, 2008).

Try not to make up your own facts next time.
It's totally reasonable to say "I only want $ from big firms" because they can actually do followon rounds. As much as USV seems to be regarded pretty well, their stated preference is to only put a few million in over the life of a company - if you're expecting to build something capital intensive, you're better off going with a firm that can back you sufficiently. Even relatively early rounds ($12M at 60 pre for Uber, etc) are getting done for more than the smaller VC firms want to put in over the entire life cycle.
+1 for "dumb people say dumb things". Unless you realize this when participating in internet citizenry you'll likely fall into the trap of saying equally dumb things.
For many or most programmers, the "transition into management" is a major career change from something they love and are good at to something they don't enjoy and aren't very good at. However, we're all assumed to be following that track because we're supposed to hunger after money and prestige in the eyes of society at large. This morning I interviewed a woman for a technical position (same job as me) who got her master's degree when I was in third grade. What's wrong with that?
The experimental-music band Bull of Heaven recently released a prime-looping generative piece that they project will last 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955.2362595095 years before repeating.

http://bullofheaven.com/media/260.html
Declaration of Colors and Borders in CSS
That's the rough estimate that Harjeet quoted. Certainly could be more or less.
Energy crisis over - for 250 years?
Fair enough, I guess.... they could have done many things.

Although they do not provide an answer, here are some links to additional info - I spent some time searching for additional info on the Top500 setup, but found little:

* http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/the-new-amazon-ec2-instan...
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904590
Funny coincidence!

I started doing something similar a couple weeks back -- trying to recreate the SICP LaTeX files so that I could generate my own beautiful PDFs, instead of using the slightly wonky HTML edition.

I even sent an email to Hal Abelson asking after the original TeX files, figuring it was a shot in the dark. I was blown away when he sent me a response... in less than an hour! He told me that he didn't think they even had a copy of it anymore, and that he didn't think it would be very useful in any case, but it was still really cool to get an email from a programming legend who has touched so many lives.

Too bad I forgot to ask for an autograph! ;)
Thanks for all your support, so far my case has been picked up by several media outlets but I am yet to get a response from any of the political representatives. However, the fat lady hasn't sung so I won't be dropping the ball just yet. My case, I believe, highlights some of the inefficiencies and absurdities that are in place, within some governmental organizations. I fully recognize that because of my involvement with entrepreneurship and my network I have managed to gain a great amount of support to my case. Saying that, there are many smarter and more brilliant people out there who's case will remain silent and they'll just disappear into the night. I hope, if one thing, my case can be an example of what others can do to show that a country shouldn't be known by it's policies and procedures but by the amazing people within it that won't lay down but are willing to voice their disapproval to cases like mine. Thanks again for your support!
Vatican hails hacking culture, Wikis
RIM PlayBook to benefit Quanta and Foxlink (delay due to panel shortage)
"Not sure" in this context was meant demonstrate I'm open to both variants of the situation, good and bad. Since OP had upvotes already indicating that people find it good/funny/whatever, the point was to bring other side of this to light. There's a saying that fits your comment so well - don't tell me what to do and I won't tell you where to go.
Unix Power Tools is a great reference for data analysis.

The author does not mention the chapter on: "You Can't Quite Call this Editing" which I used extensively for some pretty involved flat file data analysis.

covers the great tools:

cut

tr

sort

uniq

also:

piping to grep and grep -v (invert match)

I also came across this great line in the sort man page for allocating in-memory usage SIZE for the sorting data:

SIZE may be followed by the following multiplicative suffixes: % 1% of memory, b 1, K 1024 (default), and so on for M, G, T, P, E, Z, Y.

...that says about all you need to know about unix ;)
Isn't the planned google music (set to launch in 2011) service going to be more or less in direct competition with Amazon MP3 & Cloud player? I doubt they are protecting Amazon interests here.
Eric Ries, Creator of the Lean Startup at Google in Kirkland, WA
On inventing JS module formats and script loaders
Are you where you think you are?
This is probably the best explanation available online http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky-abstractio...

Also, objj is an extension to js, so "learning" it is not some monumental task, kind of like learning the latest additions made by ecmascript 5.
Ask HN: Reasonable accommodation in Shenzhen or Hong Kong?
Hey.

Could you tell me about reasonably priced hotels or furnished/serviced apartments in Shenzhen or Hong Kong?

I heard that in Shenzhen/OCT, the rent might be around $120, which seems kind of.. outrageously low. Is this far from reality?

I'd be open to any suggestions on where to stay in China (or Hong Kong). Most of all, I'm concerned with being comfortable and safety.

Any ideas?
I'm a student in Ann Arbor, and I'd love to get an HN meetup group going in the area. It could possibly coincide with a2newtech.org.
Http://News.YCombinator.com/item?id=1674374
CustomInk "takes possession and ownership" of your artwork the minute you load it. On top of that they stole the entire graphical database of CSA Graphics and were sued in Minnesota Fed Court. CI settled for TONS as they had stolen art for years to popular their on-line design tool. SCHMUCKS. They should NOT be pointing fingers at OOSHIRTS at all. CustomInk has been successful in controlling any bad press or internet comments. Look a bit deeper and you'd be surprised about the myth of the "core values".
from the article: "Sources from touch screen panel makers also pointed out that PlayBook shipments were postponed for about a month from the original schedule due to a delay in software testing as well as shortage of touch panels because Apple already booked up most of the available capacity."
FPGA designer here. I don't think it's accurate to claim that SystemC is replacing VHDL and Verilog for ASIC/FPGA design. I view SystemC as a niche tool to allow software engineers to dabble in hardware design. I use C for embedded software, but would never dream of designing hardware in anything else except pure HDL. It's a bit like trying to write a letter in a foreign language using Google Translate-- the results are non-optimal and often comical.
Hello Michigan, Governor Snyder: I hope someone is hearing this. It needs to happen in this state or we'll spend the next century becoming more irrelevant than we already are.

antidaily: I'm in Lansing, but would definitely attend an A2-Detroit HN group and have some people I think I could convince to come along. E-mail me.
How is this pertinent to HN but the Israel attacks on Gaza not?
Bacterial Marketing
Here: http://thingist.com/before_i_die.cgi

See what everybody posts to it: http://thingist.com/t/global/3207/
Ask HN: How legal is Grooveshark's model?
Is there business of providing free streaming songs when searched sustainable?
Before I Die... I want to have truly lived.
Google Saves The News
Spam, Spam, Spam: Twitter's Arms Race
Good post. It's also not hard to throw together quick data stream-processing tools like that in awk or C. I have a couple: drop (opposite of "head"), til ("til 10" -> "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"), slice (read given 4kb chunk numbers from file, via mmap), and dozens of little scripts. I don't really care for shell scripting, but awk is great.

If you want more stuff like this, check out _The Unix Programming Environment_ and _The Awk Programming Language_. Both co-written by Brian Kernighan.
Apple wins $625m Mirror Worlds patents appeal
Well, there goes one of the advantages of Android that I mention when endorsing my phone to my friends.

On the other hand, as Android still has Flash, even if you couldn't install non-market apps one could just go to Grooveshark's website.
Hah, that trumps my example by 200 years. Well done.
I would love to answer anyone's questions about what's happening around the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor!

I lead a project in MPowered, the student entrepreneurship org here at UM, I study CS in the College of Engineering, am a regular A2NewTech attendee, and am generally pretty familiar with the ecosystem here.
> First of all, C++ offers higher-level semantics which leads to an increase in productivity.

Strongly disagree. The full C++ spec, templates and all is pretty complicated. I am sure you can squeeze out less LOC out of it, but then why not just use APL.

> Second of all, for a developer that has good knowledge of both C and C++.

I think there are very few people who know C++ well. And by know I mean they know all of its aspects equally well. Now there are plenty of people who _think_ they know C++, but don't or just know just some parts of it well. I can easier trust someone who says they 'know C', because it is a fairly short spec, not so with C++.

If you imagine a team of developers. If all of them are true C++, experts, then everything is fine. But I have never seen that. So one developer likes templates, another likes some other part of C++, and they start using that and eventually they all write C++ but they can't all necessarily read and understand each others' code. And here is where another 50 pages of C++ style guide comes in to help. But if a language needs 50 pages of custrom style guides to be useful, there is probably something wrong with that language.

> It's almost impossible for C++ to be more verbose than C - consider that you can write C-like code directly in C++.

I think it is a false dichotomy. I know the original article compared both head to head, your point picked it up, but in general it should'be be between C and C++ only. It should be C++ vs C+Python or C vs Go and so on. In other words comparing lines of code by presenting a somewhat artificial constraint is not that representative of the real world.
User Needs for a flight search site
Dell to spend $1B for 10 data centers
Maybe I am a minimalist. But this seems like way too much stuff man.

But regardless of that it's a pretty need guide of tools and I use a few from this list myself.
Which open source license? (flowchart.)
Interesting. Sounds like he doesn't have a patent, no one at the other firm has ever had any contact with him, the idea is so obvious there are many companies with similar apps, and it's a conflict that crosses international borders and would cost an absolute fortune to pursue legally.
I believe that the songs they play are properly licensed, much like radio stations. I also believe this cost them a stupidly large amount of money.

So I believe your question can be rephrased "Will the cut the studios ask for be insufficient to bankrupt grooveshark or other streaming media suppliers?"
Fedora 15 is going to ship with Gnome 3.
Didn't gumroad just do this? Or is this something else?
The Designer Fund will invest in startups where the founders are designers
One simple typo to correct on the front page: 'seperate' should be 'separate'...
An earthquake in Japan is not controversial and might have business implications for some people on HN.

Edit: Removed pro-Israel defense. This is not the place for a political discussion.
>NHK World TV reports that external electrical power supply has been cut in two of the three lines servicing the Ongawa nuclear power plant in the Miyagi prefecture because of the quake.

More tech-related than Gaza.
Canadian TV Censors OK On-Air F-Bombs
Regulators rule that parade goers who blurted the swear word during a live news broadcast displayed “innocent enthusiasm.”
Let's Back The Startup Kids - A Documentary That Needs To Be Seen
While the C&D likely had no merit, the snarky and insulting response was just as unnecessary. There was a mature and professional way to blow the guy's email off.

Making this public makes Taxi Surfer look worse than the guy threatening to sue them.
Mentioning it's a duplicate is good, thank you. Next time this happens, a link to the original post would be very helpful.
More comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419884
I would love to answer anyone's questions about what's happening around the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor, from a student's perspective!

I lead a project in MPowered, the student entrepreneurship org here at UM, I study CS in the College of Engineering, am a regular A2NewTech attendee, and am generally pretty familiar with the ecosystem here.
> I have made the experience that a good C++ developer also automatically knows everything about C.

Not even close in my experience. In college, we used C++ in our intro course. The addition of pass by reference, classes (with constructors and destructors), and the standard library (e.g. std:string) hides a lot of the common paradigms of C, and that's not even mentioning boost.

In my experience, people coming from C++ tend to write really bad C. Many of them have a poor understanding of the concept of pointers.

Once you get familiar with some good C design patterns, it's pretty easy to write clear, modular C. Knowing C++ is not a very effective measure of ability to use C.
My second ever experience in programming (the first was typing in BASIC on a Soviet trash-80 clone) was typing in example programs from a C book. I did quite a bit of C programming in university. I've contributed C code patches to several Free Software projects. I am currently writing a C compiler.

You would think this would qualify me as someone who, if not enjoys, is at least is competent at C.

You would be wrong.

I absolutely despise C, and never would have become a computer programmer if I had to do most of my programming in C.

The horrible syntax, retarded pre-processor, and absolutely brain-damaged memory model (addressing modes? segments? virtual memory? reified stack? fuck that, let's just pretend everything is a pdp-11!) make it into this zombie that can't quite decide whether it's a shitty assembler or a shitty Algol clone.

I don't consider myself a competent C programmer, and I have no desire to become one.

Trying to write a compiler for C (https://github.com/vsedach/vacietis) has only cemented my dislike for the language.

I don't blame Dennis Ritchie for it. He probably thought it was a dumb joke too. I blame all the retards in the 1980s that thought it was the bee's knees and made it a "standard."
Excellent points in here. If you're planning on working until late tonight because you think you have to (not for some specific item), don't. Go home early. Start work tomorrow and try and analyse what went horribly wrong. Chances are, nothing.

There are very few ideas around which will be world beating if done for 15 hours a day, but failures if done for 7.5.
He meant as a duplicate of the earthquake that already devastated Japan. He wished he could downvote it as a duplicate, that is, that it hadn't happened again.
TinyShark is still in the Market. It requires flash, so I imagine it is loading the Grooveshark website and automating it via a nice UI.