skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems as though you are actually contrasting two competing philosophies.

Bare Bones with Add-ons : Heroku handles deployment (via git, releases), app servers (thin), reverse proxies (varnish), and caches (varnish). (That's "bamboo" rather than "cedar" for what it's worth.) Heroku provides optional data storage via Postgres and background jobs via worker queues. For everything else, a combination of add-on providers (MongoHQ, RedisToGo, SimpleWorker, ...) and your own custom EC2/S3 code is used.

Integrated : GAE handles deployment, app servers, reverse proxies and caches. It also has channels, XMPP, workers, a data store, and a blob store built in. All of the documentation is in one place and from one provider. All of the billing is unified.

Personally, I have always assumed that the integrated approach is by necessity. GAE can't rely on other providers to provide functionality like a blob store because they don't want other providers running in their data centers. By contrast, since Heroku is in US-East, basically any SaaS can pop up to offer functionality with low latency to Heroku apps. If there's no SaaS, in the worst case, the web app author can write their own backend services within US-East to meet their own needs.

I think you're right that the inconsistency of pricing, documentation, and quality of many providers can be a problem for the bare bones approach. However, I've found in general that almost everything I want is (a) S3, which has a simple API and a well known gem, (b) Redis, which has a simple API, a well known gem, and basically one (somewhat overpriced) provider, and (c) very rarely EC2 instances if I need to run some really weird, open source Java or backend code. I'm also much more comfortable knowing that there are basically no problems that cannot be solved, at some difficulty, by the EC2 backend solution.

I could see the appeal of the integrated solution. For example, if I had a class of students, I could just point them to one documentation source with GAE, or monitor one billing page with GAE.

Do you think that web developers generally prefer (a) integrated solutions with shared documentation and the possibility that some functionality may be impossible or (b) piecemeal solutions where they may get varying quality from a set of services they select, but where basically all functionality is possible?
It's also the case that at the highest levels of executive decision making, being on the losing side of a major strategic decision often leads to resigning. If you own PR, and the entire PR strategy is overridden by the CEO, you might leave simply because it becomes clear that you can't e effective in that company; the CEO has usurped your role.

That's not a value judgement or anything; it's just life in the big city.
Was CopterKid your first app? You talk about building a following of 1000 FIPLAB fans before CopterKid's launch. How did you engage them if that was the first app?
If someone is paying you to do it then by definition it is good enough in my opinion. The idea of perfect code is very abstract and impossible to ever reach. Coding is a journey and about incremental improvements I think, always try and learn something every time you sit down or you will fall behind the pack!
Kindle Tablet Does Not Mean eInk’s Death
The good news is that this shouldn't affect too many decently-written SQL Server-backed .Net applications at least (where you program against the base ADO.Net interfaces and factories). If I were using OleDB in a native/COM based application I might be a bit scared though!
"Our parents generation spent 10-20 years at a job. Our generation spends 2-5 max."

I wonder if in some ways we're getting just as much done in those 5 years vs the 20 earlier generations spent. Perhaps there's a set amount of work at which people tend to move on (or get laid off) and we're just reaching it faster?

Far-fetched, I know, but still crossed my mind.
I recently started at a small company; Google Desktop is installed on most people's machines, but people have installed it themselves, rather than IT doing so. To me, that is the definitive "I have made a user-friendly product" feeling.
If you're using it for a start-up - it's much more important to deliver usable software than quality code - you can always go back and clean up the code - but if you don't get traction it's all over.

Also - consider buying code reviews from developers you respect - even a couple of hours a week can make significant difference to your quality.
It remains to be seen whether this evens the playing field between employer and employee or not. I suspect not. It is certainly a great way to get out of health care costs, etc., although to be fair a lot of regular jobs don't pay that sort of thing anymore either.

This doesn't seem to be leading toward a more organized workforce with regard to compensation. That's probably not a good thing. There seems to be some opportunity here though for an enabling technology to work that out, but I don't know what it would be yet.
The Amazon Kindle Tablet – Not the Droid You Are Looking For
Human-powered Q&A/search. You ask a question, a human gets paid a pittance to answer it. They are focused on mobile now (text a question, get a text back with an answer). Sometimes their answers show up in search results (I've encountered them), and they're usually just a few words and not very useful.
Yes, it was our first app. We engaged them by involving them in design decisions, naming the characters, selecting the various islands (country side, city, desert, snow), picking the app icon from a selection of 3 choices etc...
Same basic idea. He's using variable-length input strings and mapping them to unique symbols rather than the other way around, but it seems like he's using entropy measurements to build an optimal trie.
I gave a lightning talk some time back on this topic called "You aren't good enough" - video is here:

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/archive/conference-video/yapc-eu-...

Any time somebody says they feel like you do, I throw them a link; it seems to help.
I think that nearly all good developers feel their code isn't "good enough", so its nothing to worry about! This search for perfection will drive you to constantly improve and practice, which can only be a good thing!

Keep coding, and as always ask the developer community for help and advice, stackoverflow has certainly helped me a lot.
MeeGo also has a much broader set of target platforms along with some other fundamental philosophical differences. Android is exclusively a mobile OS and it diverges significantly from a typical Linux install, whereas MeeGo is much more standard and can run normal applications without too much trickery, as I understand it.

MeeGo could be very interesting. Every distribution doesn't need to have the goal of "crush Android, become #1 marketshare". MeeGo could even get there eventually, but I don't think that's ever been a priority for the Intel/Nokia team.

And let's not forget that MeeGo was formed by combining Maemo and Moblin; both Intel and Nokia were working on the software independently before Elop sold out to his buddies at Microsoft, so there's not necessarily a reason to believe that Intel doesn't have an interest in continuing the project independently.

There is still a lot of hope for MeeGo as far as I'm concerned. It'd be a shame if Intel dropped it merely because Nokia has become a Microsoft pawn and Android is going on to (at least short-term) dominance of the mobile phone market.
I think if you're shipping and it works, and you find you can revisit it in a few months without being completely lost, you're in pretty good shape.

I have the opposite problem where I'm generally happy with what I write, it works and is usually well-factored, but it seems to take me fucking forever to get it to that point. So count your blessings :-)
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Well, that's kind of the thing: it's not so much "customer-facing" as "geek-facing".

It doesn't really do the customer much good at all except tell them that their service sucks or, contrary to their experience (why else are they looking?), that it doesn't. Either way, you're making people angry and not doing anything about it.

For people who actually care about and can make sense of the information, it's more about curiosity than transparency. The information there could all be falsified, there'd be almost no way to hold the carrier to account.

It's more a UX searching for a carrier, particularly one who's built their brand on real customer service and honesty. You know, the one who would, at the end of your dashboard say "we think we dropped the ball last month" before offering you free minutes, messages or megabytes. Otherwise, it's just a frustration engine even if the carrier isn't doing anything bad.
Panda killed rankings for a lot of my personal sites that I don't update often, but still have a lot of content on them (that I created, not junk). One of them seems to be actively excluded from search results now.

As an example of the ridiculousness of the new algo, try searching for "shopsquad" (a friend of a friend's startup). The official site had to purchase an ad to appear in search results. Why?
Is this site ironic? Great to see crap websites dying.
Brian Kennish's disconnect extension/plugin for FF, Chrome, and Safari (available at http://disconnect.me/) very neatly does this for all of the major social networks.
Can someone fill me in? I don't know anything about "Panda".
A better sensible default would be to bring to the front only the ones that are in _that_ workspace, a second click (in case you didn't find what you are looking for with the first one) would bring to the front all the windows belonging to that app (current behaviour).
They wouldn't show up for a typical $500 phone, either, as is amply documented by many people's accounts of trying to recover phones that have been precisely located.

But it's extremely disingenuous to say that this is just another phone, it's value is much higher than $500.
I'm just going to point out that this site is hosted by wisegeek.com, a site that was hit hard by the panda update (see http://www.quantcast.com/wisegeek.com). Although the data is accurate, I wouldn't feel sorry for most of these sites.

Full disclosure. I used to work for ChaCha. I am no longer associated with the company, but in my time there I know a lot of time/effort/money went into producing original content.

An aside. Pandalized was using a domain proxy so I connected to port 80 via telnet which gave me back the following banner (which gave up the hostname): Apache/2.2.8 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.5-3+lenny2 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at strongwiki.wisegeek.com Port 80
what is the y axis for the alexa plots? the numbers seem to be increasing downwards.
Ah, thanks for that correction, I mistakenly read "I am a 26 year retired law enforcement professional" as "I am a 26 year old retired law enforcement professional".
Or the fact that all ATT (and possibly Verizon) traffic goes through the NSA.
A religion to get foreign entrepreneurs into Silicon Valley?
What Makes a Website Big?
This doesn't help as much as you'd hope.

When you are using your non-FB browser and visit a website with the FB buttons installed, FB gets click data about you.

You need to use a blocking extension in your non-FB browser in order to effectively implement your technique.
That's terrible that they're saying that. You would expect a CA to be the last person to try to educate others to ignore those warnings. It kind of undermines their whole reason of existence.
I suspect the Cnet download wraps are only for Windows executables. This is the direct link to the Android APK file.
What if you text it "Goodnight" and it responds with your alarm times? Easy to use, no data plan, and should be relatively simple to code.
Why is unit testing useful, to you?

I have often heard two justifications for testing: (a) correctness and (b) developer speed.

Phrasing (a) differently, is X functioning as intended? Phrasing (b) differently, how quickly can I make a change to Y, and if I change Y, how long will it take to manually check Y (with a browser, etc.), how likely am I to introduce a bug (leading to extra development time) and/or will I have to rewrite a test?

If your primary justification for testing is developer speed rather than correctness, does that impact which features (models, controllers, views with div ids, actual view graphics) you should write tests for?
I think it makes sense to get a lawyer at some point, but right now this would divert your attention away from your product, especially as you're bootstrapping it. As long as you have clear terms/policy statement outlining the usual (plenty of templates online) I think you'll be fine for now. Focus on the product, then worry about legals when you're ready.
The majority of the market for high-performance cars does not (and cannot) appreciate the major features of those cars. How many BMW buyers really understood the difference between the US and the Euro manifold, or understand the different kinds of variable valve timing systems?

My point here is, it may not be that the tech market wants to be sold based on features and not benefits; instead, it may be just that he was selling the wrong benefits.

It is a benefit (albeit one we tend to be derisive about) to have the most feature-packed, cutting-edge, sophisticated variant of something. To make the case for that benefit, you probably have to name lots of features.

But that's not the same thing as marketing based on features. For instance, the specific features you market may not matter, so long as you exceed the bar for "enough awesome sounding features to be the feature-leader in your category".
This letter from him[1] came up on HN a week or two ago.

[1] http://aberant.tumblr.com/post/167375099/a-letter-from-why
Assuming you mean programming professionally (i.e. most of every day), then five years is around the point where you become self-aware and realize your code isn't as awesome as you thought. Also, remember that if you see code published on the Internet, it was probably extremely polished, and likely written by someone who has had quite a lot of experience in a particular area.

By having to maintain my code, I learned to write simple, concise, well-documented code. Nothing teaches you about bad programming practices better than having to maintain your own code after six months or a year away from it. I've also learned that iteration is key to quality. The first time I create something, it's basically crap. By about the third time I've tackled the same sort of problem, I have some pretty good insights, and come up with vastly improved solutions. Of course, people see the output of the 3rd iteration and think I'm a brilliant, insightful programmer, not realizing that -- like everyone -- it didn't happen on my first try.
Start-Ups, VCs, and era of the Personal Brand
I really like your "clarity over cleverness" rule. It seems to incorporate so many good practices: premature optimization, over-design/second system syndrome, and doing the most obvious thing.
That's a great idea. I hope this grows into being able to ship anything to a 7-11 and then picking it up.
I love the privacy "oh no they're selling our data!" paranoia that people still have without considering WHY and what legitimate reasons Facebook has for sending back data when a Like button is implemented.

First, they are a SOCIAL network, this data helps them figure out the engagement level with different brands that participate on the Facebook social platform. Second, in this case, the use of 2-click solution creates a disconnect with the expected behavior of the Facebook Like widget which means users going across different sites will not know whether they need to make one or two clicks to enable a "Like". Third, when you don't use the Facebook Like widget, you don't get any insight into your connections with your social graph unless you click on the Like button which defeats the purpose of being able to see that "4 of your friends like this".

There are real privacy concerns that we should consider but I'm tired of reading EU Privacy office statements that show a lack of understanding of how the web works and without regard to the impact to the monetization ecosystem which is the lifeblood of many web publishers. What bothers me more is that there's a lack of consideration that there are legitimate reasons a certain level of data is collected in order to make the web more social.
That made me think: if Amazon is putting these products directly in the locker, do they even need to wrap it in packaging? It surely would save them money and time, although then it's more checking on the part of the guy loading things into the lockers.
Beacon?
Fresh pasta blogs
would love to see reasonable mono hosting service (and yes mono not .net due to mono specific features)
I find there's a general perception (especially Slashdot) that this isn't the case, I'm not sure why given that Facebook's been fairly explicit about it in the past
A recent update to Google's ranking algorithm aimed at penalizing content farms and other sites with low quality content.
Ask HN: Could QRCodes be Abused/Hacked Like This?
First, I know nothing of QRCodes except how to use them for price comparison so this may be a dumb question to those of you who are up-to-speed.

Basically what would stop someone from getting QRCodes assigned to a url, 301'ing that url through an affiliate link, printing their QRCodes and slapping the stickers on price tags in major chain stores like BestBuy?

I'm not going to do this. I'm just curious if this is a vulnerability in them???
If you are programming in imperative languages, I think you can learn from Dijkstra and Gries.

In my own experience, mathematics is the only way to gain assurance.
You mean this one?

http://www.smartecarte.com/storage-lockers

There's a hidden aspect of these lockers, you know. TSA likes it when they can have a backdoor to these lockers when needed.
No benefits or job security is an industrial revolution? For the companies, maybe...
It's overall rank. Lower is better.
This would give Amazon a physical presence in all 50 states. Really bad idea unless they wish to start charging sales tax.
If you're worried about keeping it up to date, why not outsource the test runner to something like saucelabs?
After every big push...

One way that I minimize my front-end testing liability is to do as few "big" pushes as I can. The safest change to make is the smallest change possible.
Thank you so much. I was not even aware of this. I really appreciate it. Opens up my options.
There is a "fleet of open-source lawyers", but their time is limited. Like the ACLU and other pro-bono legal organizations, the FSF, EFF, and Software Freedom Law Center vet cases for potential impact in order to maximize available resources. Such organizations can't take every case that comes in the door, or they'd spend all their time on the legal minutiae of persons able but too cheap to hire a private lawyer. There has to be significant relevance attached to a case in order for the EFF, SFLC, or FSF to assist.
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Either CBS is trying to attract Anonymous, or looking to increase pirated downloads of Star Trek-related works. Either way, I think they'll get positive outcomes from this action.
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We are working on something related: http://chill.ly/. We aren't as focused on dropped calls as I don't think even the carriers track that, but we will help you save some money.
I live in constant worry of changing css and totally screwing up a completely unrelated bit of the web app

I understand this worry, but it makes me think that it may be a design problem with the CSS. Unrelated bits shouldn't be using the same CSS, related bits should probably change together.

In a more practical note, I have created selenium tests which capture screenshots and then saved those screenshots as artifacts in the CI (TeamCity) system. Having a human look at a bunch of static images makes for a faster and less error-prone sanity test to see if things are totally broken.
> Facebook's track record seems to be to befuddle the user and trick or opt them into sharing things wider than they understand or want.

Are you saying that the product designers at Facebook want to design interfaces and settings that intentionally confuse users into laxer privacy settings? Turning this discussion into a rather presumptuous smear at Facebook in the face of many privacy failures by Google is rather childish.

Perhaps you're saying Google's privacy missteps were accidental, and thus tolerable. But what makes them more accidental than Facebook's? Bugs are accidental, sure, and are addressed as quickly as possible (last summer my mentor was locked in a room with a bunch of people for a week trying to fix the bugs that came up, and come up with long term solutions). As a result all privacy settings are as explicit as possible--especially with the most recent launch, the privacy settings of every single item is clear.

It is unfair to claim that Google values privacy and demonize Facebook for its privacy-related product decisions. If anything, privacy nuances are what prevented the new privacy features from launching for multiple months, as we iterated on details that an organization that cared less about privacy would have overlooked.

Here's an interesting comparison: Everything Facebook knows about me is something I or my friends entered (i.e. via tagging). In contrast, Google knows so much more about me than I told it. How did it automatically link my Quora, Twitter, etc accounts without my knowing or permission?
Asking a computer to check aesthetics is start of your descent into madness. Use Selenium to check that links do what you expect, elements are loaded etc. Don't use it to check if a button graphic has the right icon loaded.

Computers are great at functional testing but you still a Mk1 eyeball to check aesthetics. Luckily, functionality is what your customers will really care about. No one will shout at you if an element is misaligned for a while before you catch it with manual testing
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Thanks! The only reason I am still using Firefox instead of Chromium is the availability of RequestPolicy.
Ask HN: What are the top 5 albums you listen to while hacking?
Anybody know how well this compares to ep.io? As far as I can tell, ep.io is pretty similar, only Epio targets more frameworks than just Django. For better or for worse.
Re Chrome, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2957201
Actually, I think it's still not possible to perform map-reduce. The mapper api only is just for map, no reduce.
This is the lab that is used at Carnegie Mellon for introduction to asm.

I still felt like it was one of the best labs I've ever done.
+1 for the having to maintain your own code. I remember looking back at my own code and swearing "what the *$$# was i thinking.."
Well, here's all of BBC's Radio 1's Essential Mixes since 1993: http://soundcloud.com/das-boy/sets/essential-mix/

Pretty huge. As far as hacking goes, you can't really beat a 1-2 hour long seamless mix.
Absolutely. After all, we use fabric for some administrative tasks at AppFog. You will also need to write a provisioning layer so you can add, remove and replace hosts as needed. By the time you are finished, you will have your own PaaS.