skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you but I'll go even further and say this guy has no idea what he's talking about. As someone whose been in charge of a fairly small cloud outlay (8 virtual servers, 2 of which go off at night) I can tell you the cloud introduces its own set of challenges.

So there's less hardware replacement and more DNS configuration but none the less there's still a job for system administration.

In fact, I'd say the role of administration becomes even more significant because the cloud industry is so new. Hardware has, in many ways, become pretty rock solid in the last decade. We're to the point where a hard drive in a RAID setup can go out and the users won't even notice.

The same can't be true for things like SQL Server Federation and caching servers which used to be the exclusive domain of large web sites but are increasingly being used by smaller companies who don't have a whole staff to dedicate to their upkeep.

(One Caveat: If cloud models like Microsoft's Azure take over this could change. By that I mean clouds that are literally frameworks in themselves and not virtual machines)
It is a reflex to upvote any post from pg.
The images are scaled based on HN popularity.
VCs want a specific kind of entrepreneur. You might need to face up to the fact that, generalizations aside, they don't need you or me, despite the fact that we are entrepreneurs. Similarly, as admirable as it is to get a local small business off the ground, all the rationalization in the world isn't going to get Fred Wilson to fund your favorite pizza shop. Try convincing the owner to make grilled cheese, instead.

You might also pay careful attention to what Joshua Schacter is telling you about how VCs look at content businesses, because all the HN comments in the world aren't going to change the fact that it's hard to get funded with a business model that has become unpopular among VCs.

But on the other hand, like I've said ad nauseum: if you can go it alone without VC, I agree that you should. We did; we've been growing at a steady clip since 2005, and not chasing VC is (by unanimous consent among the founders) one of the better decisions we made.

I'll say it yet again: there are a lot of things to complain about with the VC model. I just don't buy that what they choose to fund is one of those things. If VC won't put money into something that is obviously a strong bet, that should be an exploitable market inefficiency; a place to build up market power and differentiation without competing with 10 me-too valley shoot-the-moon built-to-flip startups.

Good luck with your thing!
Selection bias. This is his site.
Need more females. :)
With any non-trivial assortment of servers, you need a dedicated sysadmin. The security issues alone should dictate this, but your developers don't need to be worrying about sysadmin stuff. They need to be coding.

I totally agree with proper deployment procedures. But having them doesn't eliminate the sysadmin at all. Sysadmin should be deploying standard packages that are necessary for the system, along with updates for them. Developers should be deploying in-house code, and updates for that.

I worked at a company that hired a sysadmin too early. When he quit, I ended up doing his duties and mine, too. Of course, I automated 99% of it and everyone was happy. That was really early in the life of the company.

Later, when it came necessary to hire one, they didn't. They'd expect a developer to deal with the issues, and were always dissatisfied with the time it took, and the lackluster results. Eventually it got so bad they hired a dedicated sysadmin again. Now, unlike the past, they actually needed one and he was busy all the time. Developers stopped being unproductive for weeks at a time, working on projects they didn't understand and couldn't complete satisfactorily.

For a startup, yes, skip the sysadmin at first. But once you have a complex system, hire one. It'll save your company.
I think he was being sarcastic, and i think it's because strlen(quantum)/strlen(eris) is much closer to the golden ratio than "quod erat". "Quantum electrodynamics" is another famous acronym that follows the golden ratio (+- 30%)
His contention is that they own the equipment and they rent labor from their suppliers. The supplier remains the employer responsible for working conditions. This approach, if true, would give Apple control of supplier without owning them.
Thinking about choosing a new iPhone carrier in San Francisco?
Interesting... it seems you must have some other criteria because my (admittedly woefully outdated) profile lists my (admittedly neglected) Twitter account, but I don't see myself on there. ~5000 karma should put me only a couple pages in.
Living poor but having dignity seems to be impossible in the US?
$120k is nosebleed high for full-time sysadmin.

Are you sure we're talking about "system administrator" and not a more specialized role like "devops"? I know to us nerds those are basically the same thing, but they really aren't. If you're doing sysadmin for the primary purpose of deploying and maintaining boxes designed to run one proprietary application, you might be a devops person, and not a sysadmin.

Again, this might be a valley thing. I've got a bunch of friends who have complained how hard it is to get sysadmin in SFBA. Just know, if that's the case, the dropoff in salary outside the valley is waaaaaaaaaay sharper than it is for dev, which is pretty much just COLA adjusted from place to place.

(We staff offices in Manhattan, Chicago, and Mountain View, for what it's worth).
WooIt.fm - Listen to your Friends Facebook Postings as a Internet radio stream
Zero effort investment return is typically a shade or two under inflation, so even if the absolute number increases your ability to buy stuff steadily decreases, as does your effective net worth.
I was just reading an anti-PayPal rant the other day (that I agreed with) and someone was saying that this was the very reason that PayPal was holding the pre-order funds for an indie developer. And here we are, with that exact situation.

I think it's a pretty rare thing, but I can't blame PP for covering themselves on this.

The developer -should- refund everyone's money if they aren't going to be able to deliver. And if there's a major delay, they should offer the choice to the customer.

But likely, they don't have the money, and it's just not an option.
For me, leader board needs to be sorted by average karma per post, with a minimum karma required to be eligible to be on the list (like 10K points).

The list would look very different with such sorting. Maybe pg or someone working on the site can change column titles to clickable headers that sort by that column. Not that it's particularly difficult to just copy paste as a table to Excel.
I'm female and fairly openly so (and people still sometimes refer to me as "he/him" because they assume I am male, presumably just because it's HN and for no other apparent reason). A lot of the women here seem to intentionally downplay their gender a good deal. On at least one occasion a female member created a throwaway account to explain in part why she hides her gender while posting here.

So a) I wonder why you are saying that and b) I wonder how accurate perceptions are in that regard. (FWIW: I am assuming I did not make it onto this list because I don't have a twitter account and I have no idea if I have enough karma for it, which seems to be a factor.)
I found this really odd. Any idea what the reasoning behind the "slashdot" is?

On a side: I like Haskell's take on lambda syntax (prefix with "\", e.g. \x y -> x + y).
I would completely understand that the LibreOffice folks are bitter about the whole Sun/Oracle situation, but you'd think it would be in the best interest of everyone to reconcile and merge the two branches. Yes, Apache Foundation would probably add bureaucracy, but that's not always bad.
If he'll probably never hire another pure sysadmin then he'll probably never build anything of scale that people will pay for.

Sysadmins do a lot of stuff, and this is only somewhat reduced by cloud services. Or is he expecting to get the developers to maintain OS versions, security patches, log monitoring, proxy servers, database replication, backups, firewall rules, failover testing and so on across dozens or hundreds of systems? Right.

Absurd.
Same experience here. Totally unusable on iPhone.
Sorry, but it reaquires Javascript. On mobile phones it can take a while to render.
The idea is that Shen has a turing-complete type system, so it shouldn't even be possible to create a more powerful type system (given a specific definition of "powerful").
Pictos Free + Spriting with Compass
Actually, Apple could stop selling all of their products and they could keep their operations running until 2018, probably already 2019 after the next quarterly results are in.

Source: http://www.asymco.com/2011/04/26/2895/
How to Get More Energy
Pictos (Free)
Talking about not being too much inspired by others, I'd love to know what colours were used all over these slides. This blue background is beautiful, add to that the cute green and white text..
I don't see the point really. LibreOffice already has working infrastructure, did loads of cleanup and has a working community. I don't see the point of the Apache Foundation, nor rewriting stuff just so it can have a different license.
here's the whole book TOC : http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-way.h...

and the tiny object system :
http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-waych...
If you squint (a lot), /. looks like a lambda.
I'm just pointing out that there is at least one candidate who want to change things. Rather than complain that things will never change, one could go to work supporting and promoting politicians who would fix things. An example is http://www.revolutionpac.com/ which is basically a bunch of regular folks, political outsiders, getting together to produce and air commercials for Ron Paul. It's never been so easy to organize and communicate. Declaring that "there's nothing we can do" has never been more false.
I "love" those articles sticking "Quora" next to every major tech buzzword. Yet quora is not relevant for me anymore. Are you guys still on quora?
People on this thread seem to be objecting to the idea that agile companies should avoid hiring people who manage their systems. But that's not what he's saying!

My read is that he's saying that the days of the "system administrator" with a job description that begins and ends with tar flags and Apache vhost configuration are numbered.

He's not saying sysadmins are being replaced by Puppet and Chef; he's saying they're being replaced by a new kind of sysadmin that can be expected to extend Puppet and Chef.

This seems closely related to a point Patrick McKenzie makes all the time, that being the difference between a "programmer" and "someone who provides business value by means of applying specialized skills with programming languages". Don't be a "programmer".
> they're currently the only really successful example
> of this model

1. Is OS X more successful due to the Mac AppStore, or is the Mac AppStore just riding on the coattails of OS X's popularity?

2. You can't really compare Linux distributions and apt-get to iOS and its AppStore. People are buying iOS devices for different reasons than they would run Linux. You could probably only make the comparison if iOS and Linux were able to run on the same hardware (and if it came with either OS from the retailer).
For me, the path to enjoyment involves my own freedom. Freedom to work on what I want and to have, build and implement my own vision. I think this community has a higher than average amount of people like this and that is why these articles show up.
It is a viewport meta tag. Sorry that the page doesn't work great on iphone. I am working on making the layout scale, and the page leaner for iphone. My nexus S views it just fine, but even it could use a better page.
heh... I was wondering why I started getting a bunch of beta signups + twitter followers today.

I like the highlight effect you have on mouseover, although it kind of feels like something should happen when you click on someone's profile. Perhaps redirect the user to the person's HN profile?
A Geek’s Guide to the Wall Street Occupation
If TC had any reliable source on a $1 billion Google offer for Quora, wouldn't that morsel have gotten it's own story, rather than being trickled out indirectly in a guest post?

Someone – maybe someone who'd like to make it true via self-fulfilling premature reporting – has been pushing the ill-sourced 'gossip' of such an offer since Quora's last funding round. Nicholas Carlson gave the gossip a more sober treatment back in February:

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-22/tech/30094132...
I don't agree that this will "send ripples through the Indie community for years to come" as the article suggests. Perhaps people will be a little more wary about putting up cash for a project on the the promise that it will be finished one day, but that's about it. Independent games have been around a lot longer than the last few years. A little drama from one project won't upset anything.
There wasn't a 4G. It's called the iPhone 4, and it's successor is the 4S. Notice, no G in there.

The original iPhone was called "iPhone." No 2G in the name. Yes, it was using a 2G network, but it was NOT the iPhone 2G. The iPhone 3G and 3GS (maybe) were the only named phones based on their network connectivity.

1. iPhone
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone 3GS
4. iPhone 4
5. iPhone 4S

So while you have a possible chance of the next iPhone being called the iPhone 6 based on past naming schemes, that doesn't make your argument correct.

Also, Apple can call their phones whatever they want. There wasn't an iPhone 2 but that doesn't mean there can't be an iPhone 5.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but that's your own fault for being so damn confusing. You seem to be struggling between understanding the "G" to mean phone generation instead of network generation.
I disagree.

If you include tricks that most working class doesn't have the ability to pull off effectively, I believe that the returns will likely continue at that rate, and so does my financial advisor. Stuff like tax harvesting, margin borrowing, offsetting dividends with margin interest, carrying forward capital losses indefinitely, etc.

The simple fact that the majority of the population can't do these things means you get some premium over "regular" investments like mutual funds, CDs, and cash.

That said, it's perfectly fine for us to disagree on this, but no need to be rude (or down vote :P) since really none of us will know who wins this debate for 30 years :)
Bocas Del Toro
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I agree with your analysis but Apple may also be motivated by a desire to delay or diminish a competitor's ability to leverage a supplier's excess manufacturing capability.

This strategy assumes more risk by taking ownership of the capital equipment but it strengthens their negotiating position with the supplier considerably. The supplier is only leasing labor and would be more effectively barred from running a second or third shift in the same facility to create competitive products. For example, ownership of the capital equipment would allow for considerably more visibility into factory operations by virtue of maintenance and product test activities.
Both gamers and gamers with programming chops have grossly unrealistic expectations for how software development actually works.
SEC to Enterprises: Account for Cybersecurity
First I've ever even heard of the project. While it may have been popular, and a lot of OTHER people might have heard of it, indie games are all over the place and I doubt this will have much of an effect on the overall market.
Show HN: Occupy Everything; a weekend project
Agree, but what is "zero effort"? My financial advisor is self-described "lazy" (he's an odd fellow, we're lucky to have him) but he does quite a bit more stuff than your regular Joe does when it comes to managing our money. That's why I believe that 9% or more is still reasonable to expect - even with inflation.
I don't think I implied that. I said only that I interviewed a handful of people and of that sample set, the people that charged less than $100/hour were not competent. They suffered from things like only knowing one flavor of UNIX, or having never heard of chef/puppet/etc, or not really knowing shell scripting, or not having heard of security stuff that even I know about.

I am not an experienced sysadmin, but when I feel like I could do a better job than the person I'm interviewing, I consider that substandard.
No no.. We don't need a "lean" iPhone layout.

The iPhone is designed to view webpages. So make it a standard webpage. No special casing. =)

But... Really, just strip out the meta stuff for now. It's unusable on iPhone at the moment.
Both versions are really nice but I find the C version to be lots easier to understand (I come from a C background, so that's probably not a surprise).

What does this look like to an experienced lisp/clojure programmer, do they have the same feeling but reversed?

What about programmers familiar with other languages?
It's called "Fuck you money", and it means he can choose to be productive or not as he sees fit. He's not trapped to working somewhere he doesn't enjoy being.

Why is this idea of being a member of society a good thing? I'm here to live my life.
For my part, I suppose I was talking devops, or at least a sysadmin that thinks devops is a good idea and can help make it happen.

It's probably wrong from a larger perspective to lump the two together, but for me sysadmin as a role has been supplanted with devops. If you are a sysadmin that doesn't want to automate away their work via devops, you are not doing it right.
Assassin's Creed II has some good examples of worthwhile and non-worthwhile side quests. I cannot imagine completing the game to one hundred percent, but half of that is activity which reveals more about the story (tombs, "truth" encodings), while the other half is just numbers (collecting feathers, weapons, and paintings, although I admit to having taken interest in the last one having been an art history minor).
Occupy WallStreet: Why Baby Boomers don't understand the protesters
It could go down too, by 4%. Risk works both ways, hence the higher reward. You can't really expect anything, the only thing that you can do is trade risk for potential gain or loss and hope that you jump to the next ice-floe when you should.

Miss the beat and you'll lose rather than gain.
Makeheaders by D. Richard Hipp
That is an interesting notion but I don't agree with it.

You can not look at the price for stuff for a long time without having that much money as long as you stay away from cars, houses, etc.

On the other hand even if you have $100 million (which would make you rich in most peoples books) you can waste that in a couple of years buying homes and planes.

If you actually have so much money you can buy planes and houses without worrying about it for the rest of your live then you would be among the top of the fortune 100 list.
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Thanks for doing this. Its great to put a face behind some of the people whose comments I have loved.
At the very least it serves as justification for Paypal to not allow pre-orders for an unfinished product. I'd never heard of this sort of incident prior to this, but it just proves that Paypal and Google are right to protect themselves from this sort of problem.
Regetron (a regex shell for learning)
Wait, but that's not true. It has a full-fledged class definition, instantiation, and method call.
A capacitor will deal with the sparking -- they've been used (under the name condenser) in conjunction with points and mechanical distributors in internal combustion engines for years.

This all presupposes a memory of methods to create reliable electricity, though -- including rectification and filtering, if that memory involves alternators. A purely mechanical representation of computing would probably be more practical in a forced Iron Age reboot of society. A treadmill-powered version of Photoshop would be a bitch, of course, but number crunching (at the level needed for serious societal progress) would come fairly quickly.
Don't have Android but the product information page looks great, very clever idea and great use of a weekend!
Seeking wisdom
For me, leader board needs to be sorted by average karma per post, with a minimum karma required to be eligible to be on the list (like 10K points).

Agreed. I was surprised to find myself on that list; I've over 10K karma, but my average comment score is hardly impressive.

It's important to have interesting posts submitted but the comments are what really make HN.
First ever coverage of your work makes you very happy, i know
Looks like it's mostly just based on a Twitter account in the profile, so I would assume that those are Twitter proflie icons.
Initial impression suggests this is similar to tungle.me

Could you describe exactly what it'd do for me & my blog, besides allowing folks to see through my calendar of open/booked slots & schedule?
Much thanks, it's coming to iOS soon! Any ideas for improvement?
I'm a fairly private guy, and I find this a bit creepy. I've never been more glad that I don't have a Twitter profile.

(Which is not to say that I think that the developer is doing something wrong, or even unethical: if you have a Twitter profile with your picture on it, one could fairly argue that you've made a contract with the world that the information is public. But all the same, stuff like this makes me want disconnect my internet connection and line my windows with tinfoil. If someone can make a site like this, someone can just as easily make a site that reads "Top Internet Pedophiles".)
It's not like when you are constructing a house and a tornado happens to knock out months of your hard work. Programming is less like laboriously laying thousands of bricks, but more like very carefully laying a small handful of bricks in just the right places after a lot of thought.

I have a feeling that as they start re-developing what they have lost, they will find that the work goes 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than it went when they originally did it and in just a few weeks they will be caught up.

I think the way that they are handling it (treating it as pretty much a project ending blow) is pretty questionable.
Wouldn't you be annoyed if you were in their shoes and people did that? If you want to mail them about a new competitor, then what would you do if you raised $$?
I'd prefer to read an appreciative post about a positive and helpful change than somebody bashing HN or any other site (which rarely happens).

Personally I always have about ten tabs open so its handy when I can go straight to the HN tab that I want.

How else can HN get feedback on changes?
Quora has the worst karma-whorage of any site out there and its more about who answers the questions rather than what they say. This has killed its credibility in my mind. (Contrast this with Stack Overflow, which is about high quality answers and doesn't seem to suffer from whoring for karma)
The Holy Trinity of Making Backups:

1) If it's not automated, it's not a real backup.

2) If it's not redundant, it's not a real backup.

3) If it's not regularly rotated off-site, it's not a real backup.

Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces "a copy." A copy is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of all three layers.

http://www.43folders.com/2010/03/15/yes-another-backup-lectu...
Just wanted to point out that the page is almost entirely unusable on iPhone 4, it freezes for 5-10 seconds at a time.
What? Why? That would confuse people.

iPhone 5 is the only name that makes sense.