skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the article admits that..

> In some ways, it's unfair to compare Facebook to Amazon, Apple, and Google. While Facebook's growth is impressive, its actual numbers barely register next to the other three: Facebook is reported to have made $1.6 billion during the first half of 2011 (about double what it made in the first half of 2010), but Apple makes that much in nine days.
Export & Download your Instagram photos with Instaport
Researchers turn any surface into a touchscreen
The best thing HN can do is to bury or delete this thread immediately. Any money he makes will not be enough to pay for defamation costs.
This seems a bit oversimplified and misses opportunities to teach a lot of the fundamentals about Rails as part of the installation process. I still recommend Agile Web Development with Rails for learning rails: http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...
But bundler cannot determine which versions it needs until it has all dependencies, right? And in effect, all it does is recursively call for one "layer" of dependencies after the other, so it seems like the backend might just as well recursively query itself and return all dependencies at once.
> getting the company off the ground

Angels routinely invest in the early-stage with the understanding that their stake will be diluted by future rounds to which they may not be invited to, or can decline to invest further in.

If you're cahooted with an early-stage angelish investor who somehow thinks their initial financial contribution to the project ultimately lead to its success and should therefore retain their undiluted equity and equally participate in the liquidation of the company, then you have other problems you need to deal with.

How do you identify these people? Usually financially unsophisticated and like to go around telling people that they are, in fact, either an owner or founder of "their startup". Some VC's have a habit of doing that as well. It's gauche.
> I'm not talking about a reader browsing some books and picking one based on the publisher's mark.

I have. Killed a few hours in a Barnes & Noble the other week. Every single book on the shelves was drivel, except for the Dover and Penguin titles. (Which I bought a couple of.)
"Don't actually" is also an interesting word choice. It supports a scenario where the action of copying and distributing copies is meaningless. If it were so - as with any meaningless action - one would expect it to have no real effect on the system as a whole.

If that were the case - if that unlimited copying and sharing didn't have an effect or even much of an effect - there would be no piracy problem to discuss.

But the reality is rather different. Those actions actually have huge effects.

I would much prefer a system where those huge effects are channeled into a win-win system. At any level such a marketplace would be preferable to denying that such effects even exist.
Jason Santa Maria did/managed the design work. http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/instapaper-4
Running an ad for an opensource project on reddit
Adobe MAX 2011 Sneak Peek videos, direct from Adobe
The calories in sushi for all your favorite items
Listing the calories in sushi for all your favorite types of sushi and sashimi items, along with fat, carbs, fiber, and protein. Weight watchers points too.
I actually find "idea guys" highly insulting. What does it say when they view the hard work required to implement an idea as trivial in comparison to their idea? How does that view reflect upon my expertise? Moreover, do they really think that people with practical abilities are incapable of coming up with their own ideas?

Insulting.
I was just gonna say that. Paypal Europe is a registered bank based in Luxembourg, and subject to all kinds of bank regulations.
Collective senate portfolio outperforms market - insider trading?
I'd love to see it also
Phonegap Plugins - Part 2 Developing plugin classes
The Future 1%
This was pretty much just the first iteration, I'm fine with experimenting going deeper cue inception soundclip.

I could definitely see future iterations going down more levels and caching the result as well. Right now each dependency lookup is not cached, so that might cause issues once 1.1 is actually released :)
I don't think Marco is too arrogant, just highly opinionated (like the way he doesn't want to support Android - he just isn't interested in that environment, and really like Apple), but I wish they'd talk more about Building and Analyzing and less about coffee or Macs. I was hoping he'd talk more about programming and software development. When he starts to overlap with Siracusa and Gruber I start to tune out. Especially Gruber, when they both talk about Apple stuff. Siracusa isn't too Apple centric on Hypercritical and has some good episodes on more general programming topics and things like Perl, so he doesn't overlap with Marco too often.
By saying that he's "the bad guy" I did sort of imply that there is malicious intent on his side even though that may indeed not be the case. Perhaps he did not deliberately name the company he worked for in the OP to gain extra leverage, and perhaps he did not deliberately play the victim card and perhaps he really feels he deserves to get $12.8 million for his contributions. Perhaps.

And for what it's worth, I think he should get some compensation for his contributions and that the counteroffer of $0 is unreasonable as well, for the reasons given by other people.
No, you can do hello world without a C compiler assuming you installed ruby from somewhere. If you want to use JRuby you will need a jvm for it to run on, this is the same as any JVM language.
I feel particularly knotty about this news because I pitched Peter a magazine idea back in February '10. Pasting in the initial email for reference here, and to close the loop:

---

Subject: Maybe a magazine.

Hi Peter.

I read your comment about starting another book after "Coders at Work", and thought I should pitch you an idea...

Instead of a book, consider creating a magazine. An intelligent forum for essays and articles discussing the nitty-gritty of the software topics covered by "Coders at Work" would be an invaluable resource. It's a hole that's being filled poorly by discussions on blogs, Hacker News, freenode, and Google Groups. You're in somewhat of a unique position, with the connections to solicit contributions from the leading lights, so to speak.

Here's a hypothetical table of contents, just for kicks:

* Brendan Eich on ECMAScript5.
* A critical reading of The TeXbook.
* Build your own homoiconic mini-language.
* A brief history of exceptions.
* Thomas Ptacek on safely storing passwords.
* Fun with Octrees.
* Visualizing strange attractors.
* How to implement significant whitespace.
... and so on.

Naturally, the magazine wouldn't have to be print-only, or even print-first. I'd imagine that every article would exist first on the web, with groups of them getting packaged up into issues every month or two, and made available for purchase using MagCloud or LuLu. With programmers as your target audience, I think it could do quite well.

I think you're one of the few people out there with incredible writing chops, and a deep understanding of code, so... it's just a thought.

Cheers,
-- Jeremy Ashkenas
A quibble: it's validator, not validater. Pull request sent.
Again--I am that developer, and I find that keeping "all that crap" in my head is extremely easy and makes me write better code. It wasn't straightforward to learn, but it made me better at doing my job. A question about memcached isn't a "sysadmin" question, it's a developer question to demonstrate that they understand what memcached (or whatever) does, its limitations, and its knock-on effects. These are things that I am entirely and without reservation convinced that a developer must know, and know intuitively, to be worth trusting with code. We have to write the code that uses these things--we'd better know how it works! That a sysadmin should know it as well is of course true--but a sysadmin should be a developer, too, to be able to make correct decisions in everything you've said above.

I don't say this stuff just for show--I've been there and done that, and it's stuff I've done to become what I consider an acceptable developer. I can, and have, set up a three-tier fully-enterprise-up-the-ass application infrastructure on my own (I have a couple machines on a VLAN at home as a VM farm) in order to learn this stuff. A developer who can't work the stack is a developer I don't want touching my code, because they're a developer that doesn't understand what they're doing actually does. Abstractions are great, but every abstraction leaks--they should be treated as productivity enhancers, not as insulation from knowing what you're doing.

Nobody can know everything about everything (there's a guy here at my current job who has forgotten more about the JVM than I've ever learned), but you gotta at least be able to talk about it. If a developer can't explain to me high-level concepts like how your web server handles threading, I don't even know what to say. This stuff is just so integral it's not even funny. You just gotta know it. Specialization is for insects.

.

EDIT: I think you and I are coming at this with very different philosophies. At my current employer, we don't have a PFC. We don't have TDOs. We have two live-site guys and a few operations engineers who are able to jump into our codebase (one is probably the most knowledgeable developers at the company who wanted a change). We have developers who can be trusted to make good decisions, and we have senior devs and managers who are very well equipped to analyze the plans and ideas that come from junior devs to say "hey, that won't work." But to be able to trust developers, they've got to understand how stuff works. (We don't ensure full-stack knowledge as well as I'd personally like, but we do a pretty good job of it--at the least, there are no "front-end engineers" who can't sling Java and no Java guys who can't write HTML/CSS/JS if a project comes along that requires it.)
One thing that might be useful is can you make things look polished (relatively) in less time by using something like Twitter BootStrap, etc.

Are you adjusting the last margin to make things pixel perfect and are you fretting over two different fonts that to my mother look about the same? Then they are probably right.

However, are you focusing on 50,000 foot page layout issues that the client is going to see. Then you're probably doing them a service.
Book your hotel now!
Vim Text Objects : The Definitive Guide
He did, you do a rolling update, take a few systems out of active duty, upgrade them, and then begin directing some percent of traffic to them.
That, of course, only works if you are of a scale to have that many production systems, and loose enough interdependencies to allow for new and old code to run at the same time.
I think some of his point was that if you aren't able to do that sort of update, it was worth your time and effort to get there. I think he's probably right, but the work to get from where you are (it requires site outage to upgrade) to where you want to be (rolling upgrades, ability to run multiple versions in parallel, etc) is going to be site specific in most cases that it's hard to discuss that move in any depth.
Interesting... is inline validation an option on this?
It's hypocrites all the way down.
To me a "swegr" sounds like it would mean "an outdoor event on a really hot day where you have to dress in formal attire."

Cause you'd sweat a lot.

It probably stands for software engineering, though.
How we Autoscale Heroku
Do you want managed or unmanaged?

I would say webfaction is by far the best managed host bang for the buck.

If you're looking for unmanaged then linode is probably the way to go.
Use Salt to Multiply Hard Drive Space
2^63 isn't a weird cutoff for signed integers, it's exactly what it should be :)

Bigger than that, you're out of the range of the primitives that they coded into the language, or into most languages for that matter, so you're going to use to use some library construct to handle multi-word numbers. That's one of the few cases where operator overloading might help you, but frankly if your program is primarily doing high-end numerics, you should probably be coding in C which is much less friendly on all counts.

I don't actually prescribe Java for web dev, strong-typed languages are generally bad for web dev and the lack of type inference and some other syntactical shortcuts make Java even more of a pain for that type of stuff. It got a lot better with 1.5 on a couple of the niceties, but if what you're doing maps better to a scripting language, use a scripting language.

As far as the philosophy goes.. as I've worked on more projects in my life I've learned to distrust everything clever. Sometimes Java can be a bit too restricting, and Scala seems to be an unabashed improvement in terms of promoting better programming practice, but super clever things like monkey-patching and operator overloading for the sake of brevity can be very unpredictable when you need to fix a bug in someone else's code and do it quickly.
Richard Branson opens spaceport in New Mexico
This looks great. Though I think the validators list should probably be an actual array of validators instead of a pipe-delimited string.
BlackBerry outage "made roads safer
Fantastic update, as always. There aren't many developers who'd continue updating a $4.99 app this long... not to mention that its a universal app!
Are there any companies that do nothing but paid identity management?

One of the sticking points I've always had when using my TwitBookOogle account as an OAuth provider is that if something happens to that account & it gets locked out, I'm screwed everywhere that I've used that identity provider.

I'm also of the opinion that the only reason these companies provide identity is for user lock-in. I would pay money to have a reliable service that only cared about managing my identity securely online.
I'm not sure what your saying here. The fact that apple decided to bundle gcc with Xcode doesn't have anything to do with ruby or rails. On linux you are fine as long as you have gcc.
Yeah but most of the companies that sell your info aren't payment processors / pseudo-banks that have direct access to your checking accounts, who you paid last month, how much, and for what. The implied value in Paypal rating your users is that Paypal can and will tell you their income level.

There are a few things wrong with Paypal doing this. Firstly, they're notorious for freezing any user account with more than $2-3k in it, without warning or reason, until you have a lawyer send them a letter. Hasn't happened to me, but it's happened to enough friends that I wouldn't trust them with more than a couple hundred bucks at a time. Sometimes for no reason other than that they logged on from an IP address Paypal had flagged previously for someone else's transgressions. We can leave Wikileaks out of this, but suffice to say that if Paypal has any reason whatsoever for seizing your funds, they'll be happy to do so and ask questions later. The fact that they don't adhere to any open standards and never reveal their reasons for freezing accounts should raise the question of who they are to be an independent arbiter of identity.

Secondly, consider the ramifications of walking into a store with your tax bracket printed on your t-shirt. This one's obvious to anyone that's spent time as an American in a third-world country...the price of Phở goes up by 300% right off the bat. There's no doubt the market wants to rid itself of inefficiencies by selling to every single consumer at the highest price she's willing to pay and not a dime less, but the ethical consequences are staggering.

I would never enter my paypal info for any reason, on any site, other than to submit a payment -- just like I wouldn't give them my bank account number or answer questions about my salary. I think many consumers would feel the same way.
Secrets of Successful Leaders
You won't need a hotel since it will sell out in milliseconds.
There's really no comparison for all the features, the ease of install, and the rate of improvement - in any language. Mojolicious is in a class by itself.
The title is actually:
Why A + B != A - (-B)

not:
Why A + B = A - (-B)
It is roughly as unstructured as a typical 5by5 podcast. There are often topics and/or guests selected in advance, with some or a lot of rambling.

(Personally, I like some rambling. A good podcast is like a good essay in that it will go off on tangents. But there needs to be unifying theme acting like gravity to reel the tangents back to Earth. For the StackOverflow podcast, the initial unifying theme was building StackOverflow, with the cofounders debating various decisions. With 5by5's The Talk Show it's typically one (or more) Apple events from the week plus a James Bond movie at the end. For The Pipeline and some other podcasts, the focus of each show is the guest who comes on the show that week.)
Thanks for letting me know. I just pushed up 1.0.1 with this renamed.
Siri and Her Girls: Why So Many Robot Helpers Are Ladies
Math is probably the subject least at risk. Every prospective engineer or scientist needs to learn a lot of math, and a significant fraction of those students will be unable to master the subject by simply watching videos. That means that there will always be a significant demand for real, live math teachers.
I worked at BBC between 2000-2006

I never saw a biscuit in a meeting, let alone ate one - although I'm sure thats because I was at the most junior level of the organization at the time (year 2000).

But let's just calm down a little over this £200,000 figure - 27,000 people worked for BBC in 2001. So that's £7.41 a year per employee on biscuits and snacks to be consumed in meetings. Doesn't sound all that crazy to me, personally. I wonder how much BBC paid per year per employee on toilet bowl cleaner or light bulbs?

In more recent times the BBC has had a massive reduction in it's budget and so the amount of cost cutting going on there totally eclipses the biscuit debacle.

Finally, it's not a tax. Taxes are paid to governments. BBC is not part of the government (thank god). And while you may resent paying £2.80/week for the BBC the British media landscape would be a lot poorer without it - even if you were to never watch a BBC channel or look at a BBC website.

If you don't believe me, try living in the US for 6 years and examine the horrible state of media in this country.
This list makes me weep. Where are the startups actually doing useful work? Do we really need to another company to help us target customers, sell crap people don't need, or share experiences with each other?
Critical Path is also very good. Insightful and entertaining sometimes on topics that I won't otherwise care for.
About ten years ago there was a kid named Imari Stevenson. He had a gigantic site dedicated to his game ideas which he hoped he would sell to Sega, Nintendo, and Square. I won't get into the content in much detail. It suffices to say that flaming breast milk was usable as a weapon in one of the game proposals.

I told him the same thing that was written here, though I'm nowhere near a pro game developer. I said, if you're so dedicated to these game ideas you will probably have to write them yourself, and oh by the way, it isn't all that hard to do. He basically ignored me and insisted that his skill was in concept generation, not programming or art.

Some people just don't want to download GCC or the JDK and get cracking. They have a GREAT idea, they want it NOW, and they think it's up to a triple-A studio to make it happen. Yeah, only if you have brain cancer and can cajole the Make-A-Wish foundation into helping.

These days the name "Imari" can still elicit fits of giggles from some of my friends in the game industry. He's an "indie filmmaker" of sorts now, creating low-budget CG films about women who can shoot flaming breast milk or something.
IPhone 4S First Weekend Sales Exceeds 4 Million
While client-side validation provides a possibly snappier user experience, developers should constantly be reminded that the client cannot be trusted. Data integrity checks and conformance validation that matters must take place at the other end of the transaction.
Anything that makes it easier for faculty to communicate with students is a win-win. Bb is a difficult system to use on multiple fronts - for the student, instructor and administrators. It's also a very compelling add-on to schools that were on the fence regarding Google Apps for Education. This should provide a nice boost for Google.
It looks like a 5-10k advance. Anybody know how this advance works?
Even if it does, is there any hope of getting rid of it now? That genie seems to be out of the bottle, unless some sort of trading limits/time-period could be instituted, which I find highly doubtful and probably having even worse unintended consequences.
Why does anyone trust Microsoft? They always fight dirty.
Yes, true, but the point is something like this: things that reduce costs in a way that is centrally measurable and worthy of bragging are not the things that waste real money, but are the things that will hurt morale.

- They saved £200,000 by not having biscuits at meetings of executive and middle-managers.

- They continued having large, expensive meetings of large, expensive staffs of executive and middle-managers who don't add value.

They would have saved ten times as much by getting much better biscuits and firing large swaths of their management staff.
By way of a more pointed reply to your specifics:

you express that an individual getting to decide how their work is treated is not a 'right' at all. You see it actually as a limitation on other people's right to use that work.

So, do you support a minimum wage?

An average worker has only their 'labor' to contribute; that is their basic, creative work. It is also fundamental to all sectors of the economy.

So, should laborers have a right to a basic level of recompense for their work?

Is their demand/desire for recompense such a limitation on those who benefit from their work that that desire for recompense is illegitimate?
nor is that the first step for rails. But for anything non trivial app you will likely need a C compiler in the end. I'm guessing this is the same for python.
To put that into perspective: the BBCs revenue is over £3 billion a year and the BBC has over 20,000 employees.
Introducting Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
Greylock Looks To Help Portfolio Companies Recruit Talent With New Hires
I completely agree. I will probably add a note in the docs to remind people that you should always still perform server side checks.
IPhone 4S: How to Teach Siri to Tweet
Too bad all your points are completely subjective and trivial.

The only thing that matters is what ownership he legally had.
SAP Has Better-Than-Expected Earnings
I'll fully agree with you on monkey patching, I think the extension method system on .NET is a far better idea.

Operator overloading can be used stupidly but then again so can just about any feature. Operator overloading is no more clever than method overloading.
Four months with Android (An iOS user's exploration)
Far from daily, but Yosef K's blog is usually a good read when he does post:

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/
Daily Mobile Minute: My perfect mobile wallet does this
RealAcad Mondays - Think Positive Outcomes - A Story
Why Titan and Why Balloons
How wouldn't paying back authors be a recurring cost? It's quite simple actually; how do you divide your $20 between publishers? You can't (before you either die or stop reading that is). A monthly subscription on the other hand can be divided between the articles you've read that month.