skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What pisses me off the most about this is that the consumers are the real losers, here. What I'm hearing is, it is perfectly possible for all our lives to be better next time we search online for soft goods, but the system fucked up and killed this innovation. This is the opposite of everything the system is supposed to do.

If they don't plan to use this tech on their next startup, why don't they make it open source? Once something has been invented, it cannot be un-invented. Now that we know this is possible, I'm sure I am not the only one who, tonight, is going to start trying to replicate what they did. If they'd open source it, it would save someone else in the world a lot of wasted effort.
I'm going to be the contrarian voice and disagree with all of this. This type of interview process is seriously inefficient. All of the "soft technical" skills you're measuring with this process can either be judged by a single conversation, or can easily be learned. The only thing about software development that can't easily be learned or enforced is problem solving ability. This is where puzzler type interview questions come into play.

Comp sci "puzzles" are a microcosm of the types of mental processes needed in day-to-day development. Having the developer code on the whiteboard tests communication skills, ability to analyze and handle critiques, etc in one shot, while also testing the most critical skill that can't be learned or enforced later on.

All these "hacking interview" ideas are missing the problem. For top companies, the only problem with the interview process are finding enough good people and the potential false negatives. The process described here just turns the problem of false negatives into the problem of false positives for these companies. This really is no solution.
The thing about being a leader, or a bellwether, is that you need to walk outside the mainstream, be just a little bit crazier than your colleagues, but not so crazy our out of the mainstream that you leave everyone behind.

PG's position is clearly not in the mainstream of the business world (though, one might argue that, if anything, he's more conservative than his hacker audience) - but he's close enough to their interests that he may encourage followers. Or not. That's always the risk of being a leader - you may step out, and people may not follow.

He does speak to their interests which is, "If you want to hire great developers, you should align your corporate ethos with the best and brightest that you want to attract" - and, in general, large companies virtually never, ever, sue _small_ companies for _software_ patents - so they have little to risk.
you should be worried about Microsoft: see the chilling effect case of virtualdub, a Windows-only software.
Workless
Almost every place I've worked has had some version of a lunch decider or another. At one place, it was a rails app I wrote in 5 minutes, just to prove to my coworker that it was faster to make than pulling names out of a hat. At another, it was a yelp scraper someone had written to find places near us.

It happens everywhere. I think it's the natural result of any problem that takes a long time but seems pretty easy: a programmer will naturally try to automate it.
I know he's going, we all do, but man it feels like a kick in the gut for tech. Yes we know tech is actually bullshit, in the grand scheme of things, to keep us occupied, but somehow no Jobs means something less ... like the suits will kill off all the beauty because they don't understand that.

We need a new big visionary in the higher boardrooms but I don't see any, lately they're all just wall street and more so with time.
Huge thanks to Philip Mateescu (https://github.com/philipmat) for adding support for Phyton, PHP, Perl & Bash.
It isn't quite consistent even there. I have a Replogle globe that according to the chart is simultaneously post-1975 (with Suriname) and pre-1971 (no United Arab Emirates, Zaire, or Bangladesh). So I suspect the Suriname entry is an error in the chart.
How? Don't commercial OS vendors get hacked?
> Intruders gained root access on the server Hera. We believe they may have gained this access via a compromised user credential; how they managed to exploit that to root access is currently unknown and is being investigated.

This is more related to weak security policies than OS security flaw.
Patents Per Capita Biggest Factor in Gap Between Rich and Poor
but on your site under dead it says:

> Fandalism - Like Soundcloud, but not as good

make up your mind! unless I missed a joke.
A key point seems to be:

"""
The new pricing model charges are based on the number of instances you have running. This is largely dictated by the App Engine Scheduler, but for Python we will not be supporting concurrent requests until Python 2.7 is live. Because of this, and to allow all developers to adjust to concurrent requests, we have reduced the price of all Frontend Instance Hours by 50% until November 20th.
"""

Our app (python runtime) is going from about $9 a month to projected $270 a month, almost entirely due to frontend instance hours. I have to think that once python 2.7 is live and concurrent users != concurrent frontends, this will get waaay more reasonable.
I'm guessing he's implying that higher level thought processes more associated with intelligence act as a defense against the advertising influence.
Hurricane Irene as Economic Stimulus
Killing Elephants, Space Travel, Running Marathons: 12 CEOs In Their Spare Time
tl;dr

Steve (yes I call him by his first name) live near me. As a neighbour. Just down the street. I have moments where he has acknowledged my existence. He even knows my waspy name.
I dunno...

If I'm looking for a "low consideration" product, I just go for the cheapest one. They're all the same, so what's the point in going for a particular brand? This is where the "store brands" are nice.

For snack food, I check for MSG, which, if present, indicates that they're putting other nasty shit in and using MSG to mask the taste. If it passes that test, I'll try any of them once, then stick with whatever tastes good and has the least amount of ingredients I can't pronounce. Or I'll just buy some trail mix (whichever brand they happen to have).

If I'm looking for something I plan to use long term, I go to a number of trusted review sites to see what people are saying about it.

I've switched between Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and WD many times over the years based on which company maintained quality at the time and which one cheaped out (once again, based on reviews from places like Tom's Hardware, Consumer Reports, etc). You'd be amazed at the swings in quality these companies have year-over-year. Same goes for Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, Intel, MSI et all for motherboards, Toyota, Mazda, Ford, GM, Audi, Citroen for automobiles. Glues, power tools, jackets, shoes, bicycles, furniture... the list goes on. If you're not researching them, you're gambling with your money.

I could rattle off a huge list of advertising jingles I've heard throughout the years, but I've never paid them any heed in disposables (I buy the cheapest one), nor have I bought big ticket items without some serious research upfront.
Get BALENCIAGA 0103/S SUNGLASSES at Best Prices at Visionspecialists.org
Paul, how do we join? I'd like to support this.
If Google had said from the beginning that their pricing was discounted for the preview, I would not have had a problem with this. But given that they didn't communicate this and that the cost of switching platforms is high, this feels more like a bait and switch tactic.

My cost is only increasing about 4x, but others in this thread are seeing 20-100x increases. Changes like this impact more than GAE -- this will make me hesitant to use any platform that I can't easily migrate away from.
If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.

However, to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution states, it's necessary to demonstrate both that patents serve as a widespread source of inspiration and teaching (which they don't do very often, as demonstrated by the relative rarity of willful-infringement awards), and that trade secrets actually do keep advances from becoming more widely available. This is hard to show, at best.

Nobody refrains from producing a touchscreen phone with a swipe-to-unlock feature because they can't figure out how... they refrain because Apple is allowed to financially destroy anyone who tries. Most patents work the same way, in that they keep people from being able to use techniques that might have been obscure and irrelevant at one time but are now obvious, no thanks to the patent itself.
Not much familiar with GAE but how hard would it be to build an abstraction layer and have it deployed on, say, AWS or Rackspace, using HBase or Cassandra as backend?
The problem with the Internet startup craze
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.”
It's not a question about whether you read them; code review isn't the mechanism. The modified commits will have different hashes and thus cause merge failures for anyone that already has them in a local repo. At the very least, that's going to include Linus and everyone downstream as far as the original author. None of these people need to do anything to notice the tampering beyond trying to merge from mainline.

That may not be perfect, but it sounds pretty robust to me.
Facebook pays $40,000 to hackers to expose bugs
Not to be the guy who takes it there, but religion isn't always just a harmless quirk (if you consider a willful disregard for facts a harmless quirk).
That's crazy. As I was reading it, I thought it was a joke or a publicity stunt it's so crazy
Graphene 'could help boost broadband Internet speeds'
Oh shit, and the $270 a month is with the 50% discount:

"""The Frontend Instance costs reflect a 50% price reduction active until November 20th, 2011. Learn more about the price reduction and ways to reduce your costs permanently."""

So come winter, I'm looking at > $500 a month... here's hoping concurrent requests on the python runtime will make a huge difference, otherwise, sheesh.
Use Google “Search by image” to track your pictures
The opposite: the choice matters so little that having a convenient implementation of rand() readily available produces a better result.
The only problem I see with patents is the legal process (legal bullying). It should not take 2 years and $1 million to prove your innovation does not conflict with another patent. That's ridiculous! Ideas & companies are killed by the threat & cost of going through a lawsuit, not by the threat of actually losing a law suit. That's why so many companies would rather pay a fee to use a patent than actually go through a lengthly lawsuit to fight the patent owner. (See Microsoft & many phone manufacturers.) It's called legal bullying, not patent failure. It doesn't just happen in the school yard anymore. PG is simply trying to get the 6th graders to stop picking on the kindergartners, so the kindergartners can play safely in their own playground.
If you've ever wondered what a pure name-drop is like when extended to multiple paragraphs, your wait is over.
I don't think Steve's claims about OpenDoc were bullshit at all, he was totally right that any limited success in that market was Java's to take and that OpenDoc had no chance whatsoever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udyy2gQyNso

But he did directly insult that guy: "I know some of these people, they haven't done anything in 7 years… they leave, and act like the company's going to fall apart the next day…"
This is the guy's brother doing all this. Being in "virtual hiding" isn't going to stop this kind of thing.
NyanTube - Synchronized video player for you and your friends
I think it solves everything unless patent trolling.

Here is why. Well let's say Microsoft marks its name into the current patent pledge because it’s so green to be in the patent pledge even in its current form.

So now, it is the same as always, Microsoft will not be able to pursue ANY company which SEEMS to be a STARTUP at a given time from the point of view of the mass. Do you understand? Microsoft can’t say: “Hey! Are you dumb? This company has 26 people so I can sue them. Don’t troll me fools!” Hello the greenness… That’s too late! The goal is to be green, nobody care about the strict truth. I think even a hype company with 500 people can be safe with the current patent pledge.

And probably it may even overtake the patent framework. It may be almost a "don't sue a startup" pledge.:d
Religion is an excuse and a justification. I'm willing to bet that if you removed religion from this situation this guy would be just as crazy.

Cultural and religious homogeneity I'm much more afraid of - it's the magic sauce that breeds this form of ignorance and insanity.
http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
We'd not know about it :)
Kernel.org Server Rooted and 448 users credentials compromised
About the huge cost increase people mention in the comments: New cost unit is IH (Instance Hour) and GAE python scheduler has a habit of revving up new instances aggressively. To lower costs one needs to lower Max Idle Instances and -maybe depending on the situation- increase Min Pending Latency, thus lowering the Instance count (and the cost).

With the price increase and very harsh cut down on API free-quotas (plus the absence of long expected SSL on custom domains) GAE no longer seems a good option for me :/
The reason is the peering, the traffic volume of Youtube is not profitable without peering infrastructure.
I hate to be a jerk but using :last-child at this point in time seems like a pretty poor choice; its not supported by IE8 and below, which is still an awful lot of people
What if it's not a binary (advertising works/ doesn't work)? In my view, part of Google's success is they allowed advertisers (as well as self serve businesses) to better measure the ROI from the advertising. In other words, for direct response campaigns, the best option pre-AdWords was through TV. But Adwords really let's you measure your ROI with a granularity not possible with mailers/tv ads.

So direct response campaigns existed before google b/c there was some value holding it up; Google just came along and revolutionized it. That's part of their power from the advertisers POV -- metrics.

Large, nationwide branding campaigns have been effective b/c the entry cost to run one means they are only feasible to large corporations. And those corps have the resources to run the market surveys that are really necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. Smaller ad budgets just can't do the followup efficacy measurements.

I definitely think both direct and branding based advertising works. I wonder if Facebook's play will be to revolutionize large branding campaigns, while google focused on the direct response (CPC v CPM, at its core).
Well, that was my original point above – the difference between cmd-T in TextMate vs. Sublime Text 2 is that TextMate ordered the files with the most recently opened at the top.

In TextMate, I got used to using cmd-t to jump back and forth between files. Minor thing, really. I just wondered if anyone hacked that same behavior into Sublime Text.
We (at bugsense) have about 500k requests per day and some of the are very intensive. Currently we pay $5.40 daily and it will go up to $22. So per month with the old pricing we ll be at $162, with the new pricing we ll up to $660.
It's x4 increase and that makes it bit cheaper than EC2 for the same amount of data. If we subtract the administration cost it makes it cheaper.
The old, cheap days are gone :( But still it compares well in comparison to other popular cloud solutions.
Windows seems popular among programmers who also want to run PC games, even if they don't program for Windows.
Whoever didn't like my sentence is admitting that it's true.
Photoshop Textures Taken from Household Items
Household items make excellent textures for backgrounds and other elements, maybe because everyone can connect with these everyday designs and immediately relate to them.
>However, it's also useful to note that the potential damage of cracking kernel.org is far less than typical software repositories

What about code that's hosted on kernel.org itself? Isn't kernel.org a source for the public to get the kernel and not git?

http://www.kernel.org/pub/
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/
rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/

It would be easy for the exploiter to insert trojaned/rootkitted kernels into those places.
It's deploying a branch to production.

If you think about it, this is completely the example of "master is production-ready" idea. We care so much about keeping master deployable, that if we have code that may have issues and need to be rolled back, we deploy just the branch. That way if things break, you can "roll back" to master and everything is good again.
Have any lawyer-types looked at this? IANAL, but I kind of doubt corporate lawyers will allow this even informally. For any target that a big company would want to sue, I'm pretty sure that going through with this pledge would leave the company vulnerable to a laches defense (basically, "You should have sued me before I invested billions in this") once the little startups aren't so little anymore. If I'm talking nonsense, anyone can feel free to correct me. It will be cool if this works.
Chile offers entrepreneurs a program that includes $40,000 of free equity
Very well put. It is not access type (direct vs indirect) that make schema improvements hard, but access preservation: availability. And indeed copying the data often leads to one or more of the copies being wrong, unless special measures are taken in that direction.

> How do you guarantee that all of the apps that touch that data use the current version of said code?

An approach that may be worth considering is to not require all apps to use the current version: allow multiple versions. For some cases this would work, say if the semantics of the newer version are backwards compatible with the semantics of the older version. If the data semantics are preservable, transforming a schema could happen while each data access request to the schema is actively transformed.

But it clearly wouldn't work in all cases. More work to handle that would be needed.

> Code normalization is as important as data normalization.

True, this is the near show-stopper really. In that case, the best one can hope for is preparing the state of the new version (new data in new schema) and carefully coordinating a quick restart of the old version for the new version.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. We have been working towards that direction with ChronicDB (http://chronicdb.com) and would welcome feedback.
Ahem ... divining.
Anonymous Attacks Apple & Others, Reveals Name Server Records
Wish it could be hacked, but while you _can_ create search panels like that, you can't access the list of recently opened documents, as far as I've found.
Currently all files get verified.
The kernel.org admins have digital signatures of all files...
One or two Halloweens ago, I went over to Steve's house. While everybody was waiting in line, it turned out that Steve was standing behind a doorway, where everybody was going through.

He just stood there. Nobody noticed until they started walking back having gotten their treats from the front door.

I was impressed. Impressed because he was not the one handing out the treats, but the one standing behind a doorway, where nobody noticed him.
I'm one of the Lost Decade Games guys, we used the Game Closure SDK for our game Onslaught!, which is what allowed us to release on both iPad and Android. Really amazing SDK, makes cross-platform development fun and easy.
Ask you anything eh? How's blippy?
I did this small app, just to make my life easier. And I thought that maybe others would need it too.

Sometimes I need to comment some videos with my friends and be sure that we're talking about the same moment - and this is the reason why it was created. But right now we use it on almost every video that we need to watch together - and it's probably because it's easier to chat in the same window... and synchronization is just an added value.
The most disappointing thing for me was that the little bit of banner advertising I have on the games is no longer going to cover the cost of the hosting. It was nice a thought that the games could sit there forever and people could enjoy them for free.
No, it does not reduce to 1%. At worst, it will reduce to (1/p)% (with p<1, you assume p=~0.5), but probably much, much more: All of these processes realistically take months to years (have you noticed how long SCO vs. Novell was going on?) - if you "deactivate" a subset while you're still suing, that reduces your damages. So, you'll have to keep it active, say three years - which with p=0.5 makes it a 6% tax on damages.

However, it does chill the chilling effect - right now, e.g. Microsoft has ~20,000 patents, and they can sue anyone for anything. This way, they will actively have to choose strategically what they want to enforce.

Finally, and I think I haven't made this clear enough, I don't think my proposal is a GOOD patent system in any way. It is bad. But it is not as bad as the existing system, and (I suspect) it has a much better chance of passing than a complete reform.

Furthermore, it stops some of the (currently legal) tax loops that involve passing patents among shell corporations.

The basic idea is to align value with cost. Any system in which the value of the patent is potentially infinite (as in the current system) is materially broken, and it is just a matter of time until someone finds a way to game it (non practicing patent trolls). Any sane system must have cost (of patent, property, copyright, etc) rise at least linearly with value.
Wow. That guy Anthony Navarro is kind of a gigantic asshole.
Oakland Blended Learning with Khan Academy Results Are In
Maybe so, but in today's era of celebrity gossip, I'm thankful for someone to be famous for actually doing something memorable than the endless stream of minutiae about a sequence of borderline NPDs whose only talent is capitalizing on media exposure.
Do they have anyone on their team with any game dev experience?

I worry because so many game development libraries appear (like the very barebones xcjs, which one of the founders wrote) that are all about pushing static sprites around and handling events, but not useful/hard/boring things like collision detection, animation, localization, serialization and save game management, networking and mirroring, etc.
Is there a way to verify the billing credit after making a budget change? I think this $50 credit will mean webputty.net can run for a few months for free, but I can't figure out where to find the credit after I made the change.
AWS: "We'll continue to cut our prices forever"

GAE: "Almost all applications will be billed more under the new pricing"

Pick one...
Heroku currently supports Python, or is that something that is in the works? I can't find much on this...
Marc Zuckerberg goes past my house almost every week in Palo Alto. Seeing on the streets someone you see in the media helps making him normal.
What is your Clout on Google+? PlusClout Just launched.
it does not matter, you can add a new commit (or modify an old one anyway since it'll work fine - but lets say you notice it, so we add a commit)
you make the commit look legit and all, its going to be pretty difficult to say where its coming from and which has been tampered with, since, of course, linus himself will have it when he pulls it.

and that's not just linux.git, but also the ton of other .git's in there, which linus will pull from and will not read every line of.

The caveat here is as real as it can get. usually when it looks "slightly complex" people overlook the security aspect "no one is going to do such an attack"

then the attack happens, often unnoticed, because the attackers aren't lazy if there's a hole they use it.
Rails 3.1.0 has been released (release notes)