skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even that way is kinda fragile and fugly, though. I always recommend:

$stmt = $somePDOObject->prepare("INSERT INTO folks " .
"(name, addr, city) values (:name, :addr, :city);");
$stmt->bindValue(":name", $name);
$stmt->bindValue(":addr", $addr);
$stmt->bindValue(":city", $city);

Slightly more verbose, but it has the upside of being more resilient.
The proper permalink for this is actually http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost. Can someone update the title?
It's not as simple as that. Greece is in a hole largely because tax evasion is the national sport. The "average Greek" should bear the brunt of it. He or she owes decades of back taxes anyway... The premium Greece will have to pay on it's debts won't go away with dropping out of the Euro.
There are few industry standards for C++ that define a more reasonable C++. See JSF C++ Coding standards and MISRA C++. gcc has something like -Werror -Weffc++, which also helps programmers to follow some "best practices".
It's a shame that smart articles need stupid headlines to draw pageveiws.
What's that other tech interview series by the same name? Oh yeah, VC-backed-swing-for-the-fences TC Founder Stories - http://techcrunch.com/tag/founder-stories/

Total coincidence, I'm sure :-P
I'd be more interested yet if it were possible to fire your own IO events and such --- so that you could replace the top levels of the framework, and use the remainder as a library. So that instead of spreading your code like jelly on a pre-built slice of bread, you instead layer your code and library/framework code as you see fit, into a delicious cake.
Stop the iPhone 5 Rumor Insanity
A web of support
Microsoft snatches up a pair of Sony related domains
The Braudel book looks really fascinating. Is it understandable on its own, without having read volumes one and two?
Twitter and Flickr Use Across the World (color-coded maps)
Google+ : Over 10 million users and 1 billion shares per day
SPORE
If you are a language maintainer, and you have a choice between removing a dangerous feature and not removing a dangerous feature, what should you do? At some point, you have to realize that languages and libraries which enable you to readily and repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot are a Bad Thing.
How Groupon Funders Find Their Next Investment: "Office Hours"
@Locke1689

Would it? Gold has gone up nearly an order of magnitude in a decade. Has this caused your computers cost to go up dramatically? Are there industrial alternatives to gold? Would stability of the value of your currency be worth an increase in the cost of consumer electronics?

I know no right thinking person, especially with an elite education, would consider a gold standard.

All the more reason to consider it carefully.
This reminds me of when I played the board game "Life" as a kid. I never wanted the highest salary since you knew people would swap with you if they could. The trick was to get that $80K salary so you could sneak under the radar while everyone was trading the $90&100K salaries.
I hope you do not seriously believe that the reason gold is not used for trade is that governments suppress it.

Exchange of gold is subject to capital gains tax; exchange of the US dollar is not. It is clearly suppressed as a currency.

(As would any other attempt at private commodity currency, nothing unique about metals).

The fact is that using gold is actually extremely impractical compared to modern forms of payment. [...] However, once such fiat money systems do exist, they are simply better and there is no reason left to use gold as a medium of exchange.

I do not follow your reasoning at all. Are you perhaps confusing paper money (exchange of documents certifying ownership of wealth instead of physical goods, as a logistic convenience), with fiat money (ability of a state actor to create money and force its creditors to accept it as payment of debt, as a variation of its power to impose taxes)?

There's nothing inconsistent between gold and paper money -- in fact the US dollar was at one point both at the same time, paper bills backed by gold. You have a dollar bill, you have gold; you want it in your physical possession, you trade in your dollar bill and the US redeems your gold. But for convenience you trade in paper bills.

Pics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_$20_1905_Gold_Certifica...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate
At this point, the mysql extension has been a "don't use this, you idiot" for nearly a decade. I have no sympathy. None. Choosing to write bad code when examples to the contrary are all over the place means that when somebody finally Does The Right Thing, you will be in for a world of hurt.

Besides, I'm sure some well-meaning soul will come up with some API-identical library or another to drop in. Yes, it'll still take time; consider it penance for screwing up.

But as noted by a sibling comment, it's deprecated instead of being removed. You have plenty of time to not fix your sites, I guess.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /21000

or

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Sounds like a dilemma to me, for the user at least. It doesn’t really matter who is to blame, right?
Do you think people in general secretly wish for others to fail, or at least not succeed?
Impressive SocketStream demo
Not to divert too much attention from the OP, but where might individuals go for this purpose online? Specific forums? Meetups?
I want to meet programmers with the desire to start something together as well, but am embarrassed to say I don't know where to look, and I want to find ways to go out and hang with people locally to have a good time with a common purpose: talking technology, science and the future. The ideas we want to develop into reality.

You gotta KNOW people, as in personally, before you can make that invitation... I would never dump my thoughts and hopes onto a stranger, but a cup of coffee a few weeks in, and you have a good bead on a friendship prospect. Where can I find these guys outside of a college bar, which is creepy as hell, being as I am no longer in college.
Can you imagine the conversation/intro: "Hey buddy-- you code?......<cough>"

Where do you meet people that are legitimately interested in talking shop about this kind of stuff, assuming you don't have them in your circle already?
This is the reason that I would not use Mint.com, yes. (Also it isn't available in my country.)
High Performance Python Tutorial v0.1 (PDF & github, CCbA licence)
It feels like yak-shaving, but when you're learning a new language, that yak-shaving helps you dig into areas of the language (and it's infrastrucutre) that you wouldn't otherwise know about. It will pay off in the long run.

Your productivity is down, but that's expected, you're learning a new language.
Very good article. The candidate response in that interview is indeed brilliant, but in my experience it's very hard to come up with something like this on-the-fly, without sounding like you're just rephrasing the other guy. Maybe that's why I don't work in sales ;)
They also don't disclose how the files were stolen - SQL injection? Social engineering? Compromised email account?

I mean, obviously they don't want to draw specific attention to what methods were effective to sneak into the freakin' military, but I suspect it was something simple like that. It seems to always be the case these days.

It interests me though, because I just launched a startup to help mitigate broken-into email accounts: http://www.emailambush.com/ I wonder if it WAS a hacked email account, with someone just sitting there, slurping down emailed Word and Excel files. Further, I wonder how the heck I'd even begin to approach them about my service, should that turn out to be the case. I've never dealt with large-scale procurement-style folks before.
Writing a static site generator using org-mode
Apparently TDD is a test-driven development.
ReCaptchas are generated by failed attempts with OCR, which means the computer has no idea what the word actually is, and consequently can't know how it should be oriented. ReCaptachas are actually digitizing unknown text, so they serve a pretty meaningful purpose in contrast to competitors. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
I don't know much about replication, but I'd like to learn. Can you recommend any books/courses/tutorials that address the sorts of design decisions you're talking about?
Yes.

It was called the gold standard. It worked quite well for a very long time.

No respectable academic economist takes it seriously.

Which is why you should.
One is also supposed to never change the test after it has been etched in stone, especially in BDD, but good luck getting people to follow that rule, especially in this modern age of Agileish development cycles. TDD, if practiced exactly as originally described, ends up being a drain on resources. You care more about the tests than about the code being tested.

As a now-classic example, observe a TDD master struggling with Sudoku: http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/
Ask HN-what are good ways to reach users interested in one topic?
as an exmaple, for the topic of stock trading, what are good ways to reach users who are really interested in this topci?
how can a hacker effectively find those people out from web and get them into topic discussion using some tools?
depends..

I have found that when learning a new language that if I have someone's unit tests it makes it easier. BUT, I have a few languages of exp such as C/C++, COBOL, assembly, Pascal, Forth, Java, Groovy, Python, etc.

In most cases, TDD is not to be used with beginners unless its used as pair programming. In fact if you read back when TDD was established that was one of the use cases for paired-programming..
Precisely! Taking out a loan to pay for college should be seen as a good thing. Taking out payday loans to cover living expenses should be seen as a bad thing.
Amazon Releases aws-sdk, An Official AWS SDK for Ruby Developers
You were faster, but a littlebit unclear.

The desire for personal immortality is the oldest known human desire, it's written down in the oldest story we know http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh, or still standing in the pyramids and similar burial places all over the world.
How can you know about edge cases without knowing lower-level implementation details? How can you test behavior for a unit without understanding the code which comprises the unit? One of the tenets of TDD is not testing obvious things, and there are bunches of obvious things which can permanently eliminate corners from an implementation. Overtesting is a real danger if one dogmatically forces their tests to specify the limits of the API.
Hey all Matt here, if you have any questions/comments my email is matt@devstructure.com.
Oliver here (I wrote the article, and run Silktide).

It's early days for us, so I can't speak from years of experience, but so far there are marked differences for us:

1. We have a lot more customers. Before one or two of our web designer clients could hold us ransom over a big cheque - the sort of thing we needed to make payroll. Now we'd need a mass exodus of customers for the same to happen, and usually that would be because we screwed something up (i.e. it's fair).

2. Customers now have clearer expectations. Web design customers can expect all sort of things which they consider reasonable, and don't understand why they're not (e.g. supporting a website 5 years after you built it, changing their business fundamentally mid project, expecting 'as many designs as it takes' to get right etc). I know you can and should educate your customers, but essentially you're dissatisfying them. With products, generally people pay a fixed amount to use a thing for a time. If it doesn't work, we refund them. Simpler and happier all round.

I totally agree with your last point - if you can scale it pays better. So far, the jury is out on that one for us, but let's see where it goes...
I'm looking at it right now, and I'm on the verge of projectile vomiting.
>Well, generation numbers can be determined by counting up through parent commits. So they are derived information, it's just that that takes ages and lots of disk seeks to count through.
>Timestamps aren't really needed.

First off, timestamps are needed. They're used to order commits in the history. Generation numbers do the same thing, but a bit more elegantly, because they avoid most of potential clock issues in a distributed environment.

You're making the assumption that the set of derived data and the set containing the absolute minimum amount of data git needs to work are mutually exclusive sets. They're not, especially if the derived data is computationally expensive to get, and is still used for normal operation.

One of git's primary goals is fast, scalable performance. Commit generation numbers help reduce potential errors with the current timestamp approach. However, they're expensive to calculate, and don't scale well at all. Linus' argument is that instead of calculating them every time, it's far simpler to just add them in and be done with it.
I agree with the general premise that the social situations are only very loosely analogous, but your argument against it is quite poor.

>So that means every other man, or one in three, is an alpha male? I have my doubts.

No, that is not a conclusion you can draw at all. Not every animal that reproduces is alpha, as you would have realized if you read the article.

So say the baboon group has 10 males and 10 females. 8 females reproduce. 2 males each have one offspring each, the beta has 4, the alpha gets 8. That's 40% of the males reproducing, half the number of females that reproduce.

Obviously humans are different, because we don't have a harem social structure; we're a lot more monogamous. But we do see high status males getting a disproportionate number of women.

>What happens, if you put 100 acknowledged alpha males from all over the country

If you take 100 alpha males and artificially create a new social group with all of them, what would happen is they would fight with each other and establish a new social hierarchy. You're acting as if there's some platonic version of the alpha male. The alpha male is just the dude that can kick the other dudes' butts in their current situation. Social hierarchies shift constantly.
Not always the case. While it's true that my total knowledge is going up, it's going up slowly because I'm trying to learn two things at once instead of learning one thing and then another.

Consider someone who wishes to learn how to drive a car and also how a car works under the hood. Learning how to steer and learning the complete function of the steering apparatus at the same time is not as effective (for me at least) as learning how to drive in one session with the mechanism either not explained or vastly simplified. At another time, I can learn about steering mechanisms and hear all about power steering and differential gears and what-not.
Ha! I like the new design! That would be great if they made a piratebay and 4chan version!
If you go the resilient route with everything you end up with code that looks like Java code. It's not usually worth it, as when the query changes, odds are you'll be looking at the parameters, and will notice changes. Not true for large queries, of course, but for beginners? They're writing things like the above, where the entire process fits in a single eyefull. Making it more verbose from the get-go means they're more likely to just concatenate strings.
FOWA: Discovering New Opportunities in NING Communities
As I recall, Kurzweil referred to such applications as "narrow A.I." Human-level AI capable of passing the Turing Test is called "strong A.I." in his lexicon.
Why can't there be an interface specification beyond the testing layer? Why can't the API be specified, then the code written, and then the tests written once the initial API is implemented?
Sape Mullender and Noah Evans from Bell Labs announced last year that they are working on a system called Osprey. There's video of the talk floating around somewhere.
If Google had come out and said "Nope, not going to do shared circles." then I might give the headline some credit, but basically saying "Hey they missed this feature that will be important, they will fail if they don't implement it." doesn't get the clicks.

I've been puzzling out how they have implemented this stuff and from what I have seen / poked at, I don't think it will be that big a deal to implement shared circles.
> I can think of 300 sites that need to be re-coded off the top of my head if this is a hard stop on it.

Do you understand written words? Because you don't seem to grasp the concept of deprecation.

> And I don't have time for that. Nor does anyone else. I understand what they're saying, and I understand the need to migrate over time ( i.e. stop using mysql and move to mysqli today ).

Actually, "stop using mysql and move to PDO/mysqli" has been the recommendation since PHP 5.0 was released.

It happened 7 years ago.

You only have yourself to blame.

Oh, and since you don't care for not-broken APIs, it's not like you'll have to migrate your sites to 5.4 (let alone 5.5), you can just stay on 5.3. There's no mandate here.
Hi,
I have started a crowdsourced translation website: http://www.wikitranslation.org

I am seeing a lot of people willing to request translations, but not as much people are willing to translate. How can I encourage users to contribute?
Also, any pointers on the design are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Why do you need someone to only use yours? I know a lot of folks who use Facebook and Twitter and Google+ right now.
Slicehost was great back then. I remember jumping on the early waiting list to get my first server and how much cheaper it was than anything else at the time. The service was top-notch - I'd jump on IRC if something bad happened and there would always be someone there handing out info.

I'm still on Slicehost for a few servers and it's still good, but it feels like it's frozen in time (which it is AFAICT). Can't blame them for cashing out and they didn't really leave us hanging - things are still running fine.
honest question: is "sparks" not good enough ? or am i missing something fundamental ?
Frankly, I can see the situation in two very different ways: ...

That's one problem identified!
Correct, which is why I laughed.
I also find TDD to be rather useless when you haven't quite figured out what your architecture is going to be yet. My general process is model -> test -> code. If I can't yet determine my model because my knowledge isn't deep enough yet, the tests are all garbage that will have to be rewritten anyway.

I get the argument of tests as interface specification, but I just don't buy it. Some people may not like to model outside of code, aka UML or variants, but any reasonably complicated system needs a high-level concept drawn up before you can safely start pushing through individual components.

I love TDD for known problem/known solution scenarios, but I've found it to be a pretty bad time sink for unknown solution combinations. YMMV, and I think everyone finds their own comfort zone with TDD after some experimentation. The big lessons for me were that [x] testing is a net time saver versus the spray and pray code like hell strategy (yes, this makes sense before you realize you're not a programming messiah after all!) and that taking the perspective of a code consumer helps you write more fluent APIs.
Intriguing title for what turned out to be usual generic career advice platitudes
Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex
> If you go the resilient route with everything you end up with code that looks like Java code.

Meh. Prepared statements are useful when you'll use the it multiple times through rebinding, and for one-shots it's easy enough to have a function taking a parameterized query and an array and doing the annoying crap internally.

Then you just write:

$result = executeSQL($somePDOObject,
"INSERT INTO folks (name, addr, city) values (:name, :addr, :city);",
array("name" => $name, "addr" => $addr, "city" => $city);
"God had given him a tail to keep the flies off... he would sooner have had no tail and no flies"
What would be the difference, apart of the named parameters? I mean, does this add any security?
This has always been my perception.

I think that the market forces an underestimation of risk as the only viable long-term strategy (ironically).

If I can run my finance house on a "I will blow up on a once-every-5-year event" I will outgrow a business running on "I will blow up on a once-every-50-year event". So I outcompete my competitors and acquire them or steal their best employees with high salary etc.

Basically, short-termism seems to be the optimal solution in the game theory of risk management.

(Of course, the real problem is the frequency of such events is poorly understood. What happens is that a finance house pursues a 'more profitable' course without perhaps fully understanding their increased exposure. See Taleb, sub-prime crash etc)
Help
Hey i am trying to develop an app on facebook that uses the klout.com to show the users score in klout. They have a business agreement with a company called Involver and their facebook api is "secret". Is there any way to get that facebook API without having a business agreement with klout?
I find it disturbing Wired released these. There is a TON of extremely personal information about Brad in these logs, and I know I wouldn't want anyone knowing those things about me, even if I was in jail for the rest of my life.

In the end, that twitchy little rat fuck Lamo turned Manning in because he got shot down hitting on him.
I had the same problem, even though I know what test-driven development is. It's good practice to expand an acronym at least once in an article.
You should say how large the envelopes are, and/or define how much candy (by weight) comes with each shipment.

Also, try to find out if there are candies which are sold only in Japan; I'm in NYC, and have lots of places where I can buy Japanese candy, but if there's something I can't get here, it will be more appealing.

Finally, you need to do something about the cost: I might try it if it were under $10 but $24 per month is just way too high.
I've designed a simple way to deal with this where I pass a string (the SQL) and the params as a 2-d array, it ends up looking basically the same as the above.

It lets me feel like I'm passing json, which makes me happier.
OK, but this isn't a recent version of Android, right?
> I mean, does this add any security?

No, or he would have mentioned it.

It's clearer (especially as the number of parameters increase) and easier to change (in order to e.g. add a new parameter)
you should install adblock
haha that's pretty funny. Interesting how you realized that strategy so young when the adults were probably still fighting over the $90-100k salaries :D