skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To solve your customers' problems well, you have to understand their problems from their point of view. This is why technical people often need a business co-founder: one who understands the domain well.

I had a brief stint as a teacher (three years in a private school) so while my experience is not vast, I do have a sense for the teacher's point of view.

Teachers often do resent spending their own money on their classrooms, but it's not out of a sense of entitlement. Often the budget is tight, so teachers have to buy pencils, classroom posters, etc. out of their own small paycheck. Also, simple things like how many copies you can make are limited.

So imagine a software shop where each developer:

(1) had their bandwidth per month capped

(2) if they wanted an extra monitor, productivity software, or anything beyond the standard developer setup they'd likely have to pay for it themselves

(3) has their salary cut in half (or by two thirds)

So it's not a case of entitlement at all; it's a case of scarce money.

About teachers not wanting technology solutions: as a teacher I had very little time during the day. There were some days where I very literally did not have five minutes to spare and had trouble finding time to go to the bathroom (other days were more sane). My personality is one that craves change, but as a teacher I found that I was juggling so much work that I did not necessarily welcome changes to existing procedures. So I think there may be some truth to this in that teachers may not have the time resources to adapt to a lot of new technology. That said, target the teachers in the summer. They've got time to make changes then.
La mejor explicación de WordPress que existe en el mundo entero - Parte 1
I, like the rest of the commenter's here, do certainly agree that a break can be all you need. However, I think the OP is missing a valuable lesson, which is that not only should they focus on getting the code to work they need to understand what was wrong and importantly - how to spot the symptoms that it was wrong. In this case, it was a misnamed variable. It's great that that's been fixed, but it's very easy to go hurtling on into the next problem. A few minutes of reading the error message again (and perhaps trying to cause it somewhere else in purpose) goes along way in building up a much more reactive way of working.
Disarming WordPress - Piece 1
Thank you very much for your kind words. The paradigm that I have in mind is fundamentally different to how web dev tools are usually done. This is just a very rapid prototype of some of the most basic elements done rather crudely but I hope it gives some idea of the direction we're going :)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Start-up Accelerators
Hi there, not at the moment but I may be releasing something at some point depending on time etc., keep an eye on https://github.com/nrkn
Given that the practice originated with 4chan users, I think the Epic Fail Guy meme is more likely for a source.
Agreed. You're not the first person to say that.
I am going to put the source code up on GitHub, so if people really don't trust me that can run their own! :)
I actually had some transitions etc. but I found they made it feel slow on anything but a desktop machine
Facebook Job Posting From Late 2012
This is the sort of thing that causes governments to enact legislation. Either you self-regulate and do a good job of it or sooner or later you get a bunch of rules forced upon you that may be far more impractical and expensive to implement.
http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
Hm, I meant it more to indicate when it ended ;)—also, the option to view the lessons at 1.2x speed is a godsend.
Thanks, I have a todo list longer than my arm, a lot of which is UX related. There simply wasn't time, I expected to run out of bytes before I ran out of time but it turns out that 10k is a lot when you throw in zip compression - especially if you're coding with the way zip compression works in mind from the start
FWIW that wasn't my experience for the past two IOs. I mostly met real developers and entrepreneurs, even at the after-parties. To be sure, the lure of free phones makes for a few fanboys and denies some deserving developers. But it was overwhelmingly a developer conference and the sessions certainly reflected that.
This is why you always use braces, even when they're optional. Imo a single-line if without braces is an accident waiting to happen.
Facebook is a closed system?

I'm not one of their employees and yet I know how their build system works, how they store more photos than the rest of the internet combined (Haystack), how they process their analytics and likes (HBase counters + scribe + ptail + puma), how they store messages (HBase), how their data centers are built (open compute), the list just goes on and on.

As far as large internet companies goes Facebook has one of the most open engineering departments I've ever seen.
Just registered for this and looking forward to getting rolling.
Curious, as I didn't touch anything to do with cookies in the code. Perhaps browsers use the user setting for allowing cookies to also allow/disallow html5 localstorage, which the site does make use of.
Does Lua not have the startup time issues of Python/Ruby? If it does, then to counteract the lack of threads you'd probably use a coroutine-based system like gevent and Python's greenlets.
I may start keeping a notebook next to my computer with a list of common error messages I encounter.
So for those of us that live in the US, is it not possible for us to request to have the data that Facebook stores about us???

Related (well, maybe): You can easily download a copy of your Facebook data no matter where you are located, by logging in and clicking "Account Settings" > "Download a copy of your Facebook data". This will include all things like messages, pictures, etc., but I am positive that it isn't nearly as in depth as what is outlined in that article.
FWIW there are numerous libraries available for OS threads in Lua. Some are low-level, directly binding the OS threading API[1], some are high-level[2], supporting message passing and atomic counters, etc.

[1]: https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-llthreads
[2]: http://kotisivu.dnainternet.net/askok/bin/lanes/
Yeah the whole thing around that is a bit iffy, it was a compromise I made because it's a little fiddly on very small screens (my phone) and I didn't have time to think about it properly.
I wouldn't say it changed my life, but the first pretty serious piece of software I ever wrote was a game loader for Doom/Doom II/Heretic/Hexen. You could select which game you wanted to play, and which WADs you wanted and if the WADs were originally created for a different game it would run them through a conversion script for the game you wanted.

Later on I added support for DeHackEd so you could modify the exe to change things like weapon speed power. Pretty sure I had support for setting up multiplayer games as well.

It was all written in Turbo Pascal and had a really nice GUI where I programmed all the primitives (radio boxes/check boxes/scroll boxes/buttons/etc) myself from scratch.

I really really wish I still had source code to the thing, but I lost it years ago. I was really proud of it.
Facebook's infrastructure is open, but their product I would not hesitate to label as closed, even if it has APIs.
If this future is true, facebook wouldn't need to post job openings, they would know who they want to hire and what it would take to bring them on board.
He's right, the "walking away" trick does work wonders some time. It gets you to relax, take a step back, and see the big picture.

The other aspect to this is reliance on Google. This is part stood out to me...

I start to panic a little bit...I turn to google hoping
for a quick fix and copy/paste one of my error messages
into the search box.

Unless Ruby/Rails error messages these days are completely anemic (I haven't worked with Rails in a while), then the line number and error message should provide enough clues to debug a misspelling without having to go to Google.

Trust your analytic abilities -- it will keep you from that "panic" state.

Instead of seeing an error and panicking, be like Stanley Moss in Wag the Dog -- "This is nothing" :) Eventually you'll get to a point like Paul Graham where debugging relaxes you:

I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as
straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally
constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it.
Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where
does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end.
It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Thanks for the link, a very interesting read. I've been brainstorming some solutions with a friend and we think that perhaps the problem could present an interesting research project. The idea of digitally signed and verified Javascript, maybe a browser plugin to check these signatures, etc.
Fact Check: SCADA Systems Are Online Now
If you use git, that can definitely help you. The trick is in making small, targeted changes that do one logical 'thing', and then committing that. Don't be afraid to make tiny commits -- often I'll make a series of 1-liners if they aren't strictly related. Commits are very cheap in git, so don't worry about making "too many".

Then when you run into a problem, you can easily use "git bisect" to figure out which commit caused the problem, and if you've kept to small commits, you should hopefully be able to figure out the offending line(s) of code pretty quickly.

But beyond this, I think the early sign is your gut says, "it should be so simple but I can't figure out what's wrong". Listen to your instinct -- it's probably right! Don't spend another 2 hours poking at it. That's a good time to either step away for a bit or ask someone else to look over your shoulder for a bit while you try to explain to them what's going on.
matthew@rusticanum:~$ time python2.6 -c 'print("hello world")'
hello world

real	0m0.027s
user	0m0.024s
sys	0m0.004s

matthew@rusticanum:~$ time lua -e 'print("hello world")'
hello world

real	0m0.005s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

Nevertheless, what you describe is practically how Tir works: http://tir.mongrel2.org/
TransMY Exhibiting in World Cyber Games (WCG) 2011
New battle Old Network Marketing Companies
Sadly, most of the material I've found is purely anecdotal, so I can't vouch for it's efficacy empirically. While I haven't used it consistently, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that on the occasions that I did use the technique, I truly was more productive than I usually am. Perhaps I should record it over the course of a few weeks so I can draw more reasoned conclusions. Even so, I've only come across one serious piece [1] critical of the technique, so I suppose it's been more useful than harmful to most people who've given it a try. In any case it is not recommended for activities you enjoy, you only ever need it when focusing takes a disproportionate amount of effort.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/02/pomodoro-critique
Join the herd
Why it's ok to love Apple.
I think Sydney Australia has the biggest #fomo epidemic the world over. I challenge you to find anyone in that city who does not have an iPhone.

Would that make Sydney a great place to launch a new business?

What is it about that city which inspires the widespread desire to copy our peers?
You may have meant to talk about humans in general, but the context here is Microsoft. Your claim that Microsoft has very rarely acted against the interests of users on purpose is in need of supporting evidence, as the general sentiment on this social news site is that this is not the case.

To your question: Steve Mann has some interesting thoughts about how being a part of bureaucracy makes it easy to do evil. This is not a new idea: any discussion of collaboration in WW2 Europe will bring up similar themes. Do you think humans who are acting at the behest of an impersonal corporation are intrinsically good in that context?
The missing data is what's interesting. The data they provided isn't surprising or shocking at all, it's exactly what I'd expect to get from this type of request.
FYI: According to one reviewer of the extension, the extension itself includes Google Analytics tracking code. I haven't verified it myself (or maybe it's automatic for all Chrome extensions ... I don't know how those work).
Submit Link here Directory
Yup, it's a fake. The nameservers aren't Google's (dns.b.register.com instead of ns.google.com).
> so you need not worry about previous apps suddenly doing something that you previously did not agree to.

Except that pretty much every single app requested permission to post as you, even though almost none of them actually did. I don't know if this was because they wanted to leave themselves open to add extra features, or if there were obscure features that posted as you, but everything from bumper sticker apps to WSJ apps had the permission to post as you. In very close to none of these apps did they actually post without you taking a specific action and answering a prompt saying that yes, you really do want a post. I absolutely do not want any app to be able to post as me under any circumstance, and I have apparently had dozens of apps with this permission so far without me even realizing.

Because there is (apparently) no permission "allow them to post after prompting me", "allow this app to post as me" is the defacto choice for the former. If I authorized netflix to post as me in 2007, and it 4 years pass without it posting as me, then it suddenly starts posting as me in 2011 without me taking any additional action that is a serious problem, and that is the situation as I understand it right now.
Also the process showed him his lack of knowledge very clearly: He can't read error messages. This is an useful skill in every language although it transfers not at all to any other activity (even reading compiler messages of a different vendor). Especially since this was a common error it is important to realize it early and fast. You just can't go to sleep every time you have a typo. OP only sees the immediate solution (insofar just waiting for a flash of genius counts as a solution) but no the actual error.
What I learned on a round-the-world yacht race
My old boat died today, during a crane mishap. I thought I'd share some of the ways it changed me.
It does include Google Analytics, but that just tracks usage of the extension, not a user's every move across the web.
As a little bit of background for those not from New York state, Senator Schumer has a news conference almost every Sunday that gets picked up by the local news media where he rails against some injustice or another. These injustices are usually minor issues that are usually supported by anecdotal stories and manage to get Schumer in front of the a decent chunk of Sunday news viewers once a week.

I'm sure some action gets taken from at least some of these news conferences but it certainly feels like grandstanding on an issue as I've never personally read/seen Schumer follow up on any of his Sunday issues.

In the interest of disclosure, I've voted for the man twice.
"When you visit a page, you don't have to worry about other parties knowing it because it's guaranteed that way. This is about to change. Act now."

I'm not sure if you only mean "your friends" when you say "other parties", but there are plenty of people that already know when you visit a site (ad-tracking).

Besides, "it violates http get" is still a horrible argument.
I work for a european social network. I helped make a self service page, where users can view their info. However, we only some basic the information that is easily accessible for us in our databases.

So far no one send request for all their access log data, but that would mean, that we would have to go though billions of entries.

Actually not a lot of people request their information anyway. It's sill better then the software patent situtation in the use.
Ask HN: Is there a scope of DIRECTORY of internet?
I'm just wondering that like early days of internet when sites on internet were on a meta-lists/portals, if there is a scoope of portals like that. A modern version can solve problem in following ways:

For example - a person wants to learn to program and he wants to have a list of nice/proven programming online tutorials.
OR a person wants to get information about best bookmarking or file storing utilities.

Then a list would emerge based on the data from google( may be +1 button), facebook likes, alexa ranking of the site and many more.
The question is can they help people in going to the best websites?
Isn't it vastly more helpful for everyone involved and reading this to name those apps?
I love small and simple, I love self-contained. But then I got to GetMimeType, where he wrote his own binary search code instead of calling the C library to do it.

Though it sounds simple, binary search is a minefield of edge cases and I've seen textbooks that do it wrong.

So when I read the GetMimeType function, I didn't think "how nice and simple"...I thought "Hmm, I bet that doesn't work."
When you browse the web, you don't GET the pages. Your browser does much more than that.

If you really GET the page and parse the HTML yourself, you won't get these ads, for sure.

If Facebook uses POST in their JavaScript, then what's wrong?
That time line might be a bit aggressive.

But what's undoubtedly true is that Facebook is laying the infrastructure for predictive analysis of pretty much everything.
Or you could have single use browsers. There are so many browsers out there that it doesn't seem like a problem to me.

That's what I used Opera for before I deleted my FB account. Safari is currently the browser I use only for my real Google account activity (Gmail, Calendar and G+ only).

I know there are solutions like http://br.mozdev.org/multifox/ , but they have never worked quite as I wished.
For me a big tell is if it should work and you have no clue why it doesn't or why it really behaves strangely/unexpected.

For showing code to others in general i really like pastebins. http://paste.pocoo.org/ supports "multiple files" which means you can upload multiple distributed snippets at once. http://jsfiddle.net/ is really great for javascript/html and helps others to change/modify the stuff.

I often try to simplify the example (if the persons i am showing it to are not working in the same team as i am) to make it clear what the problem is and make the problem more accessible. This simplification often helps me to understand and solve the problem.
"devil’s bargain"

"it preys on our children"

"covert influence by their engineers on forums"

Seriously, Andrew? How about this: instead of spending a nice Sunday afternoon with my wife in the park, I, secret blackops covert Facebook employee, am reading and trying to understand 30-odd blog posts like this one. :(

You bring up a very good point. Perhaps the permission model is flawed because it's based on contract law, which usually assumes both informed and motivated consent. The low stakes of a permission dialog may be a difference in degree that becomes a difference in kind. Your simpler model, which is a kind of lazy evaluation of permissions, is interesting but I humbly suggest that it should be thought out more.

But your point is buried under paragraphs of fear-mongering and attempts to pre-empt any sort of counterargument or constructive discussion. If you want to have a reasonable discussion, ok. My email is in my profile or we can have it here. Otherwise this is just another hasty hitpiece.
Using POST would probably make non-geeks even more uneasy about this - i.e. if you try to reload an article you're reading and chrome gives you the ('are you sure you want to resend this content?') pop-up that you're used to seeing when you submit a form, I think any frequent web user would find that strange. Using GET instead (breaking HTTP protocol) lets them slip this by people unnoticed, and I agree with the OP that this is at least worth thinking about.

That said, at least FB requires you to approve this. Ads have been doing this kind of thing for a while now, and i'm not sure how I feel about it (I recently was browsing for pictures on art.com and didn't end up buying anything, but for the next month everywhere I went on the web was showing me the exact pictures I had been browsing).
Still on Windows XP?
I love a follow-up. Especially with regards to the sublease agreement.
Scientists Reconstruct "Movies" from Brain Activity
Note - if you check the manifest, you'll see it only runs on domains matching: "://.facebook.com/*"
Well, high-traffic by certain standards. Higher-traffic than what seems to cause many server setups to fall over, anyway; front-page on HN or Slashdot doesn't send more than that much traffic, and yet a bunch of sites seem to be unable to handle it.
Seling Your Business?
A reporter's account, for a lay-person's description:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/brain-scan-movie-sc...
The main reason why facebook and many other websites do this is risk minimalization. What if some spam filter goes wild and deletes half of all profiles?

EDIT: That was just meant to be an example. I believe it's generally a good practice to use a delete flag as the default option (unless there are legal or serious privacy concerns), because it makes you sleep better at night. I don't know if it justified in this case, but I just wanted to point out that they did not do it just out of pure evilness.
Wine tasting holidays
Discover our beautiful and luxurious wine tasting weekends and holidays - including breaks to France, Italy, Spain and in the UK.
Oh, that is so creepy - and true.
PHP wasn't an original goal; the first versions of haXe only supported Flash, JS, and NekoVM(A server-oriented VM Nicholas created). The community added the PHP target later since there was demand for using it on cheap web hosts in place of Neko.

Today there's a stronger demand for the C++ target and cross-platform graphics APIs, to get a solution that works on the web and mobile platforms equally well.
When do these officially start?
That's an interesting idea, but you still have the problem that essentially everything in the browser can be MITMed. Even SSL isn't really secure. Just look at the recent CA incidents or the BEAST exploit.
Disney Imagineering's 4 Rules for Brainstorming
Some of the other recent posts about facebook have similar comments from low karma accounts. I'm just writing it off as some facebook employee ring.
Actually, the clause you quote (and the restriction I mention) only applies to free apps.

They certainly DON'T enforce the policy very often. Of course they'd need an army to enforce ALL of their policies. I doubt there are many apps on the market that adhere religiously to all the policies, and most have lots of obvious violations.
10 october for the ai-class, probably around the same date for the others classes.
This would just do a zone transfer of facebook.com (plus delegations of sub-domains) not all zones on their nameserver. It is also normally deemed a security vulnerability to allow zone transfers to unauthorized clients, which is basically any client that isn't a secondary nameserver.