skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not bad, but it needs editing. The Joel Test is a hugely important document (for a blog post) because it's incisive. Spolsky could have added, "does your team ban sprintf, strcpy, and strcat" and then written a graf on buffer overflows. He didn't, because that's not one of the very few questions in the Joel Test.

The Joel Test isn't "if Joel Spolsky was designing a new dev team from scratch, here's his whole checklist". But this sysadmin test seems that way.

So in that spirit, here's my first wave of things I think you should cut:

(3) Plenty of very excellent ops team don't keep internal team metrics (other than availability stats). It's also too fuzzy.

(8) Prioritizing features over stability actually contradicts Joel on Software ("some bugs aren't worth fixing", to paraphrase). Saying that you prioritize one over the other is also a platitude. Axe this.

(9) Virtually every great dev team uses source control, has bug tracking, &c. Not every great ops team has "design docs" for every (or even any) project they undertake

(11) Similarly, an "opsdoc" for every service (the mini website with "how to rebuild this") is a nice-to-have, not a must have. How I know that is, I've never once met an ops team that actually has this.

(14) Dev/QA/Prod environments: I don't think you can axe this, but I think you got too aspirational, on two axes: first, most teams don't have dev AND QA AND prod (though every good ops team has at least a prod and a "something else" environment) and secondly, there are services that don't need this much rigor.

(22) Refresh policy for hardware? If it ain't broke, &c. Why does a good sysadmin team refresh hardware just for the hell of it? I remember when network admins used to be proud of keeping highly utilized networks running on the old ugly Cisco AGS+ boxes and made fun of the kids who bragged about their 7500s. This is too fuzzy to be part of a "test".

(23) Why do I care if servers stay up when one hard drive dies, as long as my service stays up even when a whole rack catches fire?

(28) Anti-malware? Really? In 2011? I'm sure you have a whole blog post to write about this, but if you have to justify it, maybe leave it out of your "test".

A suggestion for your document that also adds another acid test to things you should keep on the list: what's an ops team that everyone knows that kicks ass as a result of doing all these things? When Joel Spolsky wrote The Joel Test, he got to use Microsoft as a "12 out of 12" case. Who does all these things? Amazon? (Did I miss that in your document? I'm tipsy, sorry).

Hope that's constructive.
I was arguing with a lisper the other day about how lisp' power make it easy to go overkill and have too much nested lambdas.. while language like Java, forcing you to use vars, sometime makes the code easier to read.

He then told me to not blame my weakness at reading code on Lisp.
All the commercial DBs have similar issues. Just deal with them and go on.
It is sites like Ge.tt, Box.net, Minus, Titanfile...

But yeah, i think you are right about the thing about programs connecting with the file sharing site to make an complete ex.

But where the sites are right now they are mostly online, but they would properly come to desktop too.
The follow up book, "More BASIC Computer Games" is also there: http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/

You can show your age by pointing out that BASIC is an acronym and should be all-caps... :\
JavaScript has the most important dynamic features of Lisp (GC, dynamic typing, first class functions, conditionals, eval, etc). JavaScript, is even a pretty solid tree processing language, because most JavaScript programs manipulate XML trees. XML is basically S-expressions with hundreds of pounds of useless clothing (end tags, attributes, etc) weighing it down.

Considering all this I think what Douglas Crockford said is completely accurate, JavaScript is Lisp in C's clothing. That would also make CoffeeScript Lisp with fairly nice clothing.
At Drew Houston's Startup School talk he mentioned something almost in passing which I think summarizes exactly why every investor wants or should want a piece of the filesharing pie: these systems have the opportunity to become the "filesystem of the internet". In this world of systems such as iOS and Chrome OS where the local filesystem becomes abstracted away, and while internet connections become increasingly ubiquitous, it isn't unreasonable to expect that "uploading" files to a website will really mean linking to a third party where those files are kept and "downloading" files will really mean pointing to the place where you want said third party to keep them. If that were to happen, and there existed a dominant player in the space who wasn't already a Google or a Facebook, they would quickly become one.
I'm only replying to tell you this because you mentioned being a non-native speaker of English, but, typically, in English, "grade school" is what comes before "high school," which typically starts at 9th grade. The fact that we refer to students by the "grade" they're in in high school as well doesn't mean anything. Saying you have "just grade school" implies you dropped out of high school.
Security Vulnerabilities in Amazon and Eucalyptus
You're a programmer, most of what you is put people out of work.

That thing you automated? Someone who doesn't know how to program lost their job because of it, and it ain't coming back.

You'll tell yourself that you've created opportunities for two more programming jobs for someone else to enhance your automation work, but that guy with the GED is still out of work. Tough shit buddy, should have learned to program.

The difference between you and people in finance is they've stopped lying to themselves about what they do. Btw, I'm a programmer whose going into finance. Why? Because I can eliminate more jobs and make more money for myself doing that then I could eliminating jobs as a programmer. Now I'm just eliminating big money financier jobs instead of 40K grunt jobs. Hey broker dude, screw your 5% finders fee, my program will take 1% instead. Hit the bricks pal. Middle men need to eat just as much as producers and consumers.

We put people out of work for our own personal profit, the only difference is you're pretending about what you do and I'm not.

And you know the really funny thing is? We'll all be better off because the next generation of people won't have to do those silly jobs, but in the mean time people are going to be out of work.

Do you know how many researchers, secretaries, etc are out of work because of Google? Stop kidding yourself and get real about how the world works.

I could write a brilliant essay filled with bullshit about how I'm making the world a better place increasing efficiency, allowing one person to do more, and live a better life, and it would be just as true as what I just wrote. Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true.
awesome! looking forward to it!
Go Blue!
If you are copying many lists, or copying many large lists you still want to use the slice method ( new_list = old_list[:] ) as it is faster then list(). It is also the fastest method of copying lists if you consider copy.copy() and copy.deepcopy() as well.

The only caveat here is if you are copying a list of lists, you have to use copy.deepcopy() if you want the lists inside your lists to actually be copied.
It is not just Goldman doing this and not just for metals

http://www.simplerna.com/2011/11/who-are-biggest-commodity-t...
using list() in this manner feels a bit weird to me.

If you want to be truly explicit, why not use the built in copy module?

eg:

from copy import copy
b = copy(a) #or deepcopy(), depending on your needs

*edit: I should note that the docs for copy suggest using the slice operator.
Unfortunately I feel not much is going to change until something even more drastic happens (think brink of revolution), and that makes me sad.
And, even worse, Verizon soon has a financial interest in not improving their network capacity.
Why Wall Street Can't Handle the Truth
I grew up in Sydney, Australia, where humidity is reasonably variable. And you can definitely feel it some days, definitely not others.

You can see some graphs here: http://www.gids.nl/sydney/weather/ - notice how it fluctuates between about 25 and 100% humidity, particularly on the month-by-month graph.
Matlab is a very flexible and productive environment for doing exploratory programming. In my experience it even beats python (ipython + (emacs+auto-complete))[1]. The ability to execute small blocks of code in sequence using the %% notation for marking blocks was[2] a real joy to work with.

I thought C++ (.mex or .oct files) are where algorithms go once they've been proven useful for 'normal people'.

[1] http://bfrsblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-emacs-first-clas...

[2] How I miss the free Matlab license at the Uni. Last I checked a commercial license costs about $2000. So, now I've been forced to shift to Octave. Heck, if Octave is good enough for Andrew Ng, I guess its good enough for me.
I just think the same as you with the YouSendIt, they really did not come anywhere. And these sites(mention above) are only online as it is right know.

It just men there is slot of filetering sites, like rapidshare, megadownload, and i could go on forever, so why are these websites getting funded, when there already are tons of filesharing sites and app free. And filesharing is not that complicated, upload -> store -> share.. But as mention above, they are properly trying to be the hun for other programs.
No one else is upset about the HTML 2.0 doctype on the examples page? WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE? http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#templateexpression
Unless you actually want to turn some other type of iterator into a list, why wouldn't you use python's generic copy?

from copy import copy
b = copy(a)

This has the advantage of being advertised as a shallow copy, so the intent of the operation and its effects are clear and well-documented.

I've been working with Python for a year now, and I don't claim to have swum its depths.
'huge chuck' is an understatement. Windows is the majority OS.
You're being too literal with the quote. The long form of that quote, which is in the link[1] that Bratwurst provided, is a lot closer to what Steve meant.

[1]: http://www.businessofdesignonline.com/picasso-good-artists-c...
I have been asking that too and I concluded that it is due to dishonest marketing. Up until a couple of months ago they basically shipped a database product with disabled singe server durability. That fact should have been written in bright flashing red letter warning on their front page, it wasn't. So it made for very fast benchmarks, because everyone benchmarks for speed, not many benchmark for failure.
Boxing Legend Joe Frazier
Boxing Legend Joe Frazier
Boxing Legend Joe Frazier Pat Dollard for example, took strong issue with Mr. Rooney dismissive comments after Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana committed suicide in 1994. It was not surprising
Strictly speaking, it's not the same as Chickenpox, especially in symptoms and effect.
Modern Warfare 3 - The Vet
Fine, how's this for question 18: how do you know when your notification system goes down?
How the frustrations of Internet access in China have led to a hacker mentality
"Hotlist" does not ring a bell, but yes, that seems to be like my idea, although Hotlist appears to be limited to Facebook and Twitter, because: "So you want to go out but aren't sure which place has the crowd or event you're looking for? Hotlist enables you to take a peek inside of venues to see the crowds before you head out. Read reviews and real-time Tweets, discover upcoming events, and check out key stats like the guy-to-girl ratio and the general age of the crowd, all from your computer or smartphone. Then use Hotlist to coordinate with your friends on Facebook." (#1)

I'm reading through the articles on their Wikipedia page (#2), to better understand what they do, and how it compares to my idea. Thank you!

#1: http://hotlist.com/about

#2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlist
Google Needs To Focus
Absolutely this is a very good point and often over overlooked.

Plus I would argue that up until recently the whole file sharing industry was living by some form of "illegal" filesharing (rapidshare, megaupload, etc). Systems like dropbox are most likely benefiting from the same idea but making the whole thing more "private" among friends and therefore making it less obvious. I still can't see there any substantial market in the filesharing area for normal users outside of the classic movie and music sharing. It is not like we are all now operating with music and video master files and need to juggle 1gig+ data files around.
You're really going to try to compare a little time wasted with IE6 to a brutal death on a freezing battlefield thousands of miles from home? Really?
Agreed. The options are not mutually exclusive. I also was an engineering major and picked up two minors outside my field specifically in the social sciences.

I wonder how common the reverse is? As in [choose: English, Art, History, etc] majors taking Calculus or Physics..
You could also argue in the other direction: the substantial risk that stock in a startup may pay nothing at all should require paying a premium in stock options to make the expected value line up.
At Libs lets you create 140 character Mad Libs on Twitter
That's pretty neat, I wish they'd publish on how they did this so others could use it. Sounds like another great way to remove friction for the user, always a great thing.
Getting the data in, part 2 – CSV and "manual" importing
Maternity sundresses
You say that like it's a failure on the devs' part, but that's kind of like blaming regular users for not switching to Linux because they don't like editing network configuration files.* It's masking the problem that there are real developer-friendliness issues with the existing databases. And taunting users will not get them to switch back.

* but then Linux distros get network autoconfiguration and suddenly it's obvious that it was the right solution all along.
When it comes to app sales, does it really have to be stable long-term? I thought app development was already generally a short-term gambit anyway.
I think they should have used that information differently. Given they know that you are already logged into your gmail, any visitor to your machine will therefore know how to reset the password to his advantage.

Instead, they should have make a block, so that you are forced to logout of your gmail and login to your gmail to enhance security.
Really well done replication of social network trailer ... pure hustlers
Because copy won't necessarily work the same way on things that are not lists, which removes some of the flexibility afforded by python's duck typing. Unless you have good reason to require a list specifically, why should you?
Lisp isn't about just any sort of list, it is about nested lists, aka trees. JavaScript programs commonly manipulate XML trees.
If your biggest issue with java is about restarting containers/redeploying your app, you should check out JRebel (http://zeroturnaround.com/jrebel). It's a tool (javaagent) that will pick up changes you make to your code and introduce them in your running application. Unlike Play! it supports your application server and your framework stack.

Also it supports picking up changes in the configuration of major frameworks, like spring, for example.

Basically, with JRebel you can develop in java as you would do in python :)

disclaimer: I'm employed by the company that develops JRebel, but this fact doesn't make it any less awesome.
Ah yes, you're right of course - there is no objective measure of the balance of good and evil. What I do does eliminate jobs. Does the benefit to everyone else outweigh the loss of these jobs? Many people would say yes, some would say no. Some job eliminations open the door for more jobs - for different people. Does this balance the morality of putting people out of work?

I don't know. Nobody does. But there is some measure of balance to what we do. What we do has a benefit - a benefit to someone other than just ourselves. Right now I work in travel informatics. What I do empowers tens of millions of customers to make better choices about how they travel, find better prices, put more information at their fingertips, keeping them informed.

The price of this is that I'm also putting airline service agents out of work, not to mention travel agents. I've made an end run around them and made it easier to get all of this information than going and talking to a human.

Personally, I think this is a worthwhile balance. The loss of these jobs also means a massive improvement to the efficiency of travel, and the happiness of tens of millions of travelers. This isn't a clueless assumption either - the emails I've seen from users demonstrates that people are passionate about what we do. You can disagree - and you wouldn't be wrong. I am, after all, not the arbiter of what is and isn't a worthwhile trade.

There's a difference between this and what Goldman does, though. The balance is way on the other end of the scale. The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself? The price is obvious - rising consumer prices, starving people who can no longer afford to eat (re: the food crisis that Goldman is also accused of contributing to), wars and revolutions caused by desperate, hungry people.

So what's the upside? What did we gain for this price Goldman has exacted?

> "Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true."

Please name the "credit" of what Goldman has done here.

We're not idiots, we know there's a credit and a debit. The question is, this doesn't seem to be the case in situations like these, where it seems we're all paying the price, and the only "credit" is to the financier.
SkyDrive's integration with Hotmail seems to mostly solve that problem, from what I can tell. You can "attach" an Office doc or image in the email composing interface (just like a normal attachment) and they'll be uploaded to SkyDrive and linked to in the email.

The problem is that you need control over the email clients to really have a shot at solving the problem.
[Podcast]Believe In Something Bigger Than Yourself
When I tried the same thing, it popped up a OpenID dialog the first time, and I confirmed it by seeing facebook.com on https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens Revoking the facebook token causes Facebook to prompt again.

Subsequent attempts make the auth dialog flash briefly without displaying any content and still present the "You can change your password immediately because you are logged into your email account on this browser" message.
What about all the time you'll waste debugging your app because you can't make good assumptions about the structure of your data?
In the UK and NZ, the vaccine is only given to those at-risk from Chickenpox. Children don't receive it as a matter of policy, and I don't believe adults who've never caught the disease are normally offered it, either.

One of the reasons/theories I've heard for this, is that if you've had Chickenpox, you are at-risk for Shingles -- which is often extremely painful and difficult to overcome. However, if you are regularly exposed to Chickenpox, your immune-system gets "reawakened" to the virus, therefore can more-quickly recognise and fight-off a recurrance, before it becomes Shingles.

One of the easiest ways to aid this exposure is to keep the virus active, but under-control, in the community. This has a useful side-effect of the community also being aware and more-knowledgeable about the disease, too.

Another argument I've heard against the vaccine is that it's simply not possible to get rid of Chickenpox totally -- it's _highly_ infectious, and the infectious stage is before symptoms appear, etc -- but the vaccine gives a false sense of security of protection, perhaps in the same way as everyone thinks they're safe from Smallpox, Hepatitis, Ebola, etc because we worked so hard to get rid of or control it.
It's not very hard to do. The trick is to know a resource that only the user can access and then trigger an HTTP request to it.

For instance if you have website a and say the user profile "mitsuhiko" can only be edited when you are logged in as "mitsuhiko" on http://a.example.com/profile/edit/mitsuhiko you could use this code to see if the logged in user is "mitsuhiko":

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://a.example.com/profile/edit/mitsuhiko"
onload="user_is_logged_in()" onerror="user_is_logged_out()" async="async"></script>

Why does this work? Because onload is fired if the resource answers with 200 OK, not if it's a valid script. onerror is called for any other error code.

So if you know what you are probing for: easy.

// Edit: Yes, this is most likely not what Facebook is doing if that's their only method of security. However see my reply to the first comment here about the security aspect for a possible way to solve this problem.
How to Tweet from Facebook?
You can do exactly the same document store with indexes on any RDBMS.
This was the book I learned how to program with. I had actually not seen the cover since I lost it way back when. So, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
It's right in the uncanny valley for me... The super deep Winklevoss twin voice makes me uneasy for some reason.
The Lisp machines were a platform, they lost, and utter crap won instead.
fyi Slovenia IS in Europe
Except something like this would be easily spoofable, ie. you could set your hosts file to make all a.example.com links return HTTP 200's, or open firebug to call user_is_logged_in() and you could reset passwords without any email.

Also, for something like that you should use <img> instead so it's less of an XSS risk.
You can't copy a generator that way.

Using list(gen) will fully consume the generator, which may be undesirable, but at least it will generate a list with the correct values.
I guess I'm not sure I understand the problem. Why would investors be turned off? It's one thing if the partner is not pulling their weight, but its another if they are. From the investor perspective, assuming that some founders are more valuable than others, wouldn't the passive founder be disproportionately diluted out on future rounds through vesting or options?
The vast majority of musicians can only support themselves via live performances. This was true before streaming services. It was true before the Internet. It's still true.

Radio stations pay (through a complicated scheme) royalties to songwriters. There are no performance royalties (whereas there are on Internet-streamed radio, which can be seen as a victory for radio broadcasting lobbying).

Major label artists typically earn nothing from music sales [1] due to RIAA accounting.

The parallel artists shouldn't be drawing isn't to the cost of purchasing a song or a CD but to radio royalties. If a radio station plays a song, how many people hear it? How much do they earn per listener? Unfortunately, that's really hard to answer.

Streaming services should be viewed as a means of discovery and curation. The bigger the audience you have the more you can make from live shows, which is your staple income unless you're the Rolling Stones, Sting, the Beatles, etc.

To focus on the <1 cent per stream figure is shortsighted. You should be letting as many people as possible listen to your music. There's a reason tech companies typically start by giving away their services: build an audience and you can scale. This applies to musicians.

Think about it: charging $5/head for 50 people at the local bar to listen to you takes you exactly the same amount of time as charging $50/person for 10,000+ people to listen to you in a large concert venue.

Sure not everyone is going to get so famous but I guarantee you this: if you don't get relatively well-known, your income from music sales in any form won't sustain you or even be that significant.
You should post that as an answer to the question.