skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I deploy and update certain things at night because they REQUIRE down-time. I can't have people making certain updates while something is being moved, for example, so things have to be shut down for a few minutes.

That whole line about trusting your infrastructure, etc, is hog-wash. I say, don't trust your infrastructure. Don't trust your code. Be safe, be smart, do things at a time when the least number of people could be affected by a problem.

Humans are responsible for everything that is happening in a deployment, and humans make mistakes. So, no, I don't trust my servers or my code at a time of deployment.

It would be irresponsible of me to do so even if I had the most talented developers, and the most solid and secure platform in the world.
It's all about the catchy whistling soundtrack!
I don't think the point of that post was "You should always take a side, no matter how little information you have".
The RubyGems index needs a ton of work. It's definitely not ideal right now, this was the easiest thing we could do to get Bundler happier and speedier.

I would love to see a more apt-get like system where you cache things locally, but that has its own implications/difficulties as well.

Basically, it's hard to keep the time down from "gem push" to "gem install" if you go towards more distributed/delayed indexing systems...but I'm willing to compromise if it's way better.
Mortgage finance: Greed and ambition
Wow, I wish I could downvote responses to my own comment. In what way does the standard "I'm too cool for Java" rant address the point I was making?

Yeah, type inference would be an improvement, it's also not that big a deal.

If you're dealing with integers you can quite easily do

int fiftyFive = 7*5.

And operator overloading, unless you're specifically doing numeric computation, is usually a very bad idea. Makes you feel clever, and makes your code unmaintainable.
I am loving bluehost (http://bluehost.com/) right now.

I tried Netfirms before, it was good but not cheap.
I tried Godaddy too, cheap but not good AT ALL.

bluehost has been fast enough for me and cheap.
To be fair, I don't the the point of Texts From Last Night (which this is a parody of/homage to) is "celebrating" ill-considered drunken text messages. For whatever reason, humans find it entertaining to watch other humans do stupid things.
Show HN: validate.js - lightweight JavaScript form validation library
Can Google Siriously compete with Apple?
It is a valid point, perhaps I should do a followup, showing how these settings affect PHP and examples of how someone could exploit them.
You may be correct as I think I saw an informal survey of iPhone 4S buyers that stated only a small percentage were upgrading.

However, iPhone 3GS users for the most part have had the phone 24 to 12 months, and if you are eligible for an upgrade with AT&T, it seems you pay the iphone subsidy each month (by my estimates, around $50 per month) regardless of whether you upgrade or not. So it makes sense to upgrade and sell the new phone on ebay if you want to keep your 3GS.
800M+ monthly active users, actually [0]

This isn't an argument for our continued relevance or anything, just fixing your figure :)

[0] http://www.scribbal.com/2011/09/facebook-now-has-800-million...
Looks like it's been corrected to something a little less dramatic. Cool.
How to Write a High-Quality eBook in 30 Days
Yipit launches a Django focused blog
When Did Pink Ribbons Become Fashion Tools?
Build it for you, scratch your own itch, worry about customers later
The idea is that by building something that is useful at least for you, chances are that it might be useful for other people. If not, at least you didn't waste your time because it is something that is useful for you!
AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint pay Apple an undisclosed sum of money for each carrier-locked and two-year-contracted iPhone sold.
The idea is that by building something that is useful at least for you, chances are that it might be useful for other people. If not, at least you didn't waste your time because it is something that is useful for you!
I repeat: when you quit your shares were worth nothing.

First, you have no idea what they were worth. For all we know, the company could have been profitable in its first year of business. Second, you have no idea whose fault the break-up was, and are assuming the OP is at fault. Third, if passively owning shares in a company means one is not entitled to any of the capital gains thereon, the vast majority of investors are in for an unpleasant surprise.

I can't understand the angry tone of your comments. You seem determined to assign all fault to the OP, despite his observation that the firm's first patent is still a core part of the IP. I'm guessing you're against software patents or something and are discounting the net present value of that contribution to zero, so as to argue that all value derives from the operation of the firm by the OP's ex-partner.

Patent #7,676,834 was applied for in 2004, but only granted in 2010; it's conceivable that the granting of a patent was what made it worthwhile for Equifax to acquire the firm, as opposed to its book of business. I'm not a big fan of software patents, but this one looks unusually valuable as these things are currently handled.
Photoshop CS5 Water Text Effect Tutorial
Disabling parse_ini_file looks like a mistake too ;)

(It's just a ini file parser; it has nothing to do with PHP settings.)
Why I'm learning to code - Roy Bahat, President at IGN Entertainment
truly amazing!

about the stanford ML course (i'm not taking any others) -- i especially like the fact that i can always rewind, re-watch, pause-take notes-play, answer questions during the "lecture" without the embarrassment of getting it wrong the first time, unlike in real lectures. the forums are there in case of questions/problems. the content is presented in a clear and concise manner. and the length of each "lecture" is 10-15 minutes, no need to focus heavily for an hour straight.

for people who have not seen the ted talk by salman khan http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/salman_khan_let_s_use_vide... which, along with increasing number of online courses from prominent universities, suggests that the educational system is changing.

people who are behind this, i salute you.
The Alternatives of Alternative, Renewable Fuels
Study HN: Linear Algebra 1, fortnight 2
A bunch of us are learning Linear Algebra together (previously at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3060521) by working through one of Strang's textbooks. Here's a new post to kick off the next two weeks. Will two weeks be enough to finish Chapter 1?

Most of us are squeezing this into limited spare time - a packing problem in its own right - and several are working through all the exercises, so our pace has proven slower than a typical course would go. At this point, though, we should at least declare 1.2 and 1.3 done. Less than that is just embarrassing. If you made it past 1.4 long ago, good for you; please post some comments to goad the rest of us forward. If you're not on 1.4 yet, get your ass in gear! Here are a couple observations to entice you.

1.4 is about matrix multiplication, which would seem to be about as mechanical and shallow a topic as you could get. I was surprised at how deep Strang was able to make it. (But be aware that we're not reading Standard Strang, we're reading Hippie Strang. That's ISBN 0030105676.) I thought that mastering the element-wise way of multiplying two matrices was all you needed to have it down. But Strang doesn't want you to think of it that way; he even impedes that view. Instead, 1.4 takes the earlier theme of the "row picture" and "column picture" and develops it further by teaching the matrix product AB as a combination of the columns of A or (alternatively) the rows of B. This is the book's bias in general, to de-emphasize formal representations and focus on the meaning of the constructs instead.

The other point concerns the exercises for 1.4. I put them off for a while because I thought they would be rote. They're not. They're designed to trigger insights that don't come automatically from reading the text, and turn out to be surprisingly satisfying. I found myself alternating between "aha!" and "doh!" when completing them. Yeah, that says something about the obtuseness of the student, but more about the skill of the teacher. Clearly a lot of love was put into crafting those exercises. So so far, I'd say we lucked out in picking this book.

p.s. If this sounds like fun, you should join us. All you have to do is learn. And it would still be pretty easy to catch up.
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Of course I don't have a formal citation, but I was only countering the earlier poster's firm pronouncement of why they had sold so many with a note that his/her statement was just conjecture. As I said, certainly that conjecture plays some part, but it doesn't seem valid to me to state that it's "the reason" for these sales in opposition to other reasons that customers (on Twitter, Facebook, the nightly news, etc) are (yes, anecdotally) giving.
At least (he said, heaving a huge sigh) it didn't advise them to run the commands via sudo.

That is literally the only nice thing I can say about a "tutorial" that tells people to blindly run code snippets off the net.
> Actually, an 8am deployment in Europe has the advantages of a rested brain and a few hours before America hammers the Internet ;-)

And the disadvantage of happening in the middle of mainland Europe morning rush. I think the point is that you take the downtime when it's least disruptive to your users, who/wherever they might be.
What I see here is a desire to prevent any bad outcome by denying the legitimacy of a whole system. 'Copyright can be used for evil so it must not be a good thing, nor allowed to exist'.

As I am sure most here would agree, any complex system has both positive and negative effects. I will leave it to others to describe the negative effects of patent and copyright. For me, one of the positive effects of copyright is how it allows a personal innate skill and drive to translate directly into social and economic mobility. It's how a poor boy from Gary, Indiana becomes Michael Jackson.

Now, some people may say - who cares about Michael Jackson - but we are all human: there are thousands of people who have drawn inspiration from the progress of others - progress in arts and business - to better themselves and their communities.

Why should I sacrifice all the good of a system that allows that? In my world view, the total disrespect for individual creative rights is that huge step back to a Royalist world of serfdom.

Most importantly: it doesn't have to be either/or. Systems that respect both the artist and the consumer can exist. I find it hard to understand why asking to meet in the middle is asking for too much.

Not only does that not make sense to me, the denying of a right to meet in the middle feels very much to me, as a creative person, that I am simply being forced to trade one overlord for another.
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Grockit Raises $7 Million Series D Financing to Drive Social Learning
That is what I hated about the article. No companies shouldn't be doing this to their staff. It is bad for business.

But that the same time I want the government to be forced to undergo not just this level of scruteny but a far harsher one. Why? Because I am forced to pay for it so they damn better work hard for it.
I think that asking for $12.8 million is a lot.
However, the person is co-inventor of a patent on which business was based on, so he does have some legal ground. Or at least common sense.
I typically disabled it because (historically, not 100% sure now) even with restrictions in place, you can still read PHP.ini and (not now mind) you could also write to the INI config with the ini functions.
Sure, I would definitely read and spread it.
Our school is actually one of the beta testers, and I think it is important to point out that it is not actually a Google product, but a Pearson product. So although it is available through the Marketplace and plays nicely with Apps, it is not provided by Google.
Yes, it should gloss over those things. If you're getting into Rails, there's an understanding that you know what the terminal is. That's like complaining that a tutorial on how to make a good sandwich doesn't explain how to open a refrigerator.
Cloaking To protect Your Commissions
That is very impressive. I used to do a lot of photorealistic modelling using mental ray or vray in 3ds max, andt he level of precision of this is quite frankly extraordinary. This could very be a game changer in the 3D industry.
Exactly, and they don't - it does return a random location when I put in a random user_id (they simply expose a user object in the global space with all sorts of attributes in it). They totally upped Apple's "Find My Friends" with this "Find My Strangers" site.
Jackpot. Love all of these open learning programs, especially when supported by universities. Definitely helping me learn RoR!
Data visualisation: in defence of bad graphics
How to play animated gifs in Android part 3
If you don't know much about PHP security, the single best step to secure your installation is to start by using the recommended PHP.ini file for a production deployment (often called php.ini-production or php.ini-recommended). This will set sensible defaults you can tweak for your own app.

Also, open_basedir is nice and should be used whenever you can but it doesn't match a system-wide chroot.
I just listened to the podcast (episode 46) and was expecting Marco to be some major ego-maniac. I didn't see that. Marco seemed thoughtful and insightful to me.

Sure, he's opinionated, but not in any offensive way. Personally I find it appealing when a podcast/radio host has a strong opinion, whether or not I agree with it.
It's the only thing I wish had an equivalent on the nook. (There's plenty of ways to sync a feed, but I plug my nook into a computer about once every two months.)
Yes, I would be interested in that.

Also, why don't you do the recursive lookup internally instead of having bundler do several calls? It seems like performance would be strictly better because it saves network round trips.
I don't think the author's point is that everyone should be doing middle-of-the day seamless deployments from day one. I think the point is that if you continue to do deployments at 3am indefinitely you are hurting yourself.

There are lots of things that make sense at the appropriate scale. Not having any tests. Completely manual processes for builds and deployments. Having only one server. Making backups every day or maybe even just every week. Etc. However, as your business grows you need to recognize that it's important to change these things and move to better processes. Because if you don't then those things could become a very serious drag on development velocity and even business capability. You could find yourself spending all your time drowning in process when you should be spending your efforts more efficiently.

You stay up until 3am to perform a risky manual deployment, sometimes you spend some time fixing problems afterward. As a consequence you either spend a day in zombie mode with limited productivity or you start working much later. In either case you've taken away a fairly decent chunk of time that could have been used for productive work. Similarly, perhaps you spend too much of every day fighting your build system, or recovering from your build always being on the floor, or excessive operational support because your platform doesn't have sufficient redundancy at every tier. Etc, etc, etc.
Notes From a Dragon Mom
Yes, you do - in one of the Build and Analyze podcasts, Marco mentioned that he didn't support that behavior and probably wasn't going to anytime soon. I think it was in a discussion about Readability (which will do that), but I don't remember exactly which episode it was in.
I'm simply saying I don't think it's revolutionary.
My point about The Office is a legitimate one - and I did not mean to cause offense.

The language to support piracy is often couched in terms of civil rights - and I can understand that side of it. In practice though piracy is used for consumption that mirrors almost exactly what people consume in the 'un-pirated' world.

I won't use this fact to damn piracy. For me, it is a clear recognition that the 'pirate' model would flow quite naturally into a mutually-beneficial marketplace if given the chance.

The best way to get the government or governing powers out of the way is to support a legitimate marketplace of one's own. If that lower threshold can't even be met, the argument that a 'fairer' governing power exists falls on deaf ears.
You're right there are not many grand parents able to install an OS. But in our family the children offered a laptop three years ago to their mother - she never had a computer before. We installed Ubuntu on it and she is using it happily now for 3 years. We do not have a single problem with viruses and such. This is what was behind the decision to install Linux.

But to come back to the topic, the author of the parent comment is right - it is already difficult for old people to get used to their application, but if then every 6 month the applications for photos is changing it is a pain. So for my mother in law we go with Ubuntu LTS. I am a little bit worried how it will work out with the next LTS if it is going to be Unity :D
Several single-letter domains were purchased before the IANA reserved all of the remaining ones in 1993. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_doma...
Remember those faster-than-light neutrinos? Great, now forget 'em
Better way to debug:Keep Taking Steps Forward
Equity is given before most of the expected value is provided, so it's important to have a mechanism to reclaim it if the expected value never materializes. That's why vesting is so important.

If you decided to provide less than the expected amount of money, you would receive less than the agreed amount of equity, but it's really apples and oranges.
This is great - love the interface.

I'm wondering about the pace metric - just by listening, it seems that some of these pitches are much faster (mailchimp) than others but the pace indicator looks pretty much the same for most of them. What are the extremes of the scale? It seems in order to get a "slow", you'd have to speak at 1 syllable per second or so. Maybe narrow the range a bit?

EDIT:

And it would be cool to have some sort of summary or total score on the overview page for each pitch.
http://twitter.com/search?q=siri

or for something more visual

http://trendistic.indextank.com/siri

People are talking more about Siri since the release date (on average) and for more dramatic effect, look at the results over a 30 day timeframe - not bad considering that Siri is essentially 2 year old technology.

Yeah, people are impressed by Siri, even if they just want to make fun of it (in Australia we call that Tall Poppy Syndrome)
Those are some good tips, however, the memory and script execution limits you're setting there will not play well with any sort of CMS or Framework. Wordpress, Drupal, Symfony all will need an occasional (or perhaps regular) bigger load. Minimally, maybe you could leave a note that custom settings should be made for these systems. I can just see hordes of wanna be sysadmins (like myself) going out and making all the changes you've said and unnecessarily break WP.
This is truly incredible. I have been trying to learn how to code, but am having a hard time, mostly because I'm used to the university lecture style. The Stanford Courses are amazing - the provide lectures, handouts, homework assignments, reading assignments. It's just like being in class, and I'm loving it. I have mad respect for Stanford and all the other colleges who are being progressive and opening up their education to everyone.
I can't find either of these plans on their website. I went to buy a Micro SIM card, and the only unlimited everything plan is 105$ a month. There is no 100 minute plan or 30$ plan that I can find.
YouTube insult/trolling generator.
The author is giving advice, not telling you what to do.
Mobile Web App vs. Native App? It's Complicated
It's completely the same as the death of traditional newspapers.

Instead of well-written news, we got sensationalistic blogs.
Yeah, I've coded java, around the 1.4 days. I'm not too cool for it, I just don't care for it. Nor do I care for its philosophy. My rant addresses that most of "the best of" java also sucks. Albiet it sucks less than the stuff designed by committee.

I've coded erlang, but not haskell. Like both syntaxes much better than java.

Ok, point ceded on integers, now what do I do if I want to use a positive integer in excess of 2^63?

2^63 seems like a weird cutoff to me for positive integers, but keep in mind that features like this are the "best of" java according to you. I bought a 64 bit chip, I'd like to use more than half it's integer range.
Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers.

Unfortunately what you get with this system ends up looking like Amazon's reader reviews, because most readers are neither perceptive nor trained in analytical reading.

Viz: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint-pr...
>The problem is, Unity has done nothing but alienate power users.

Ubuntu has almost always acted as a stepping stone for people to come learn Linux and then graduate to a real distribution. There have always been reason for power users to be put off, even back when Ubuntu was just an ancient african word meaning "I can't configure Debian". Are you saying that by putting those issues in the GUI it alienates them too soon?
What about the old Marshal problems? I just played with Marshal on my rails console again and it seems it still encapsulates all sorts of implementation details. I haven't tried whether it's now compatible across Ruby versions, but I recall the Marshal format changed a few times, introducing incompatibility.

tl;dr: Why, oh why, Marshal, and not, say, JSON?
It looks like what you were thinking of was a merger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Beginnings

PayPal was the new result of a merger between Confinity (the company Max Levchin founded, as discussed in Founders At Work) and X.com, an online bank.
At first, I assumed it was some programming language I had never heard of ;-)
> Zuckerberg is even maturing into a capable presenter. Compared to Bezos, Cook, and Page, he's most adept at mimicking Jobs's singular skills, and comes off as infectiously visionary when unveiling a new product.

really?
There have been a couple instances of "interviews" or profiles done of celebrities based on their Twitter feed.

Here is one Slate did of Kanye West:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/08/kanye_...
If you even know what a Hugo/Nebula nomination is, you're an anomaly.

Unfortunately.

(Says a guy who (a) has some, and (b) has seen precisely what they've done to his sales -- i.e. nothing.)
It's AT&T's subsidy. They pay retail (or very close to it) for the phones. They a $199 iPhone, but pay $649 for it. Apple books revenues for sales over time so they may not get it all up front (they're at least not realizing all the revenue up front), but the sale is worth the $649 value regardless of whether it was sold off contract or not.
I agree - this descended too quickly into a discussion of what the OP "deserved" or what his shares were worth when he left. His claim is based on ownership, which should be established (or disproved) according to the law.
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