skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think only relatively small teams can be 10x teams. With big teams, people can easily underperform and not get noticed, while the contributions of the true team players are often overlooked. This leads to declining morale. With small teams everybody knows what everybody else is currently doing and you get credit for being a team player and working on unpopular tasks etc.
Delayed... till Wednesday.

I can hear the glass that was the internet shattering from the future.

Mike Masnick: Update.... Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111216/11102617108/sopa-m...
Quoting a comment under the question:

Language preference aside, the fact that no language has good support in the browser, the server and stand-alone totally baffles me.

I do wonder about this. I don't think the challenge of the task is the only answer. I think - guess - the rest of the answer might be that in practice, most developers focus on one of those, maybe two (most probably server and browser), rarely the three of them. I know first hand that some do work on the three, but they must be rare, seeing the interest in this. Maybe the momentum of the app stores bringing web devs to work on apps could gradually make people more aware of the benefits of having a universal language. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the variety of languages, but I would be very happy to be able to focus and become proficient at one only language, even if that means giving up on some language specific advantages.

Ironically (given of the context of the comment), javascript might be what comes closest today.
I think he meant that the quirky individual was wearing frumpy "1980s English professor"-style suits, not some sleek expensive architectural thing.
Gundotra in, Mayer out. In Google’s inner circle that is
Given that jmxtrans has native support for writing directly to Graphite, why are you using it to write to rrd files?

If you want those rrd files for other tools, the beauty of jmxtrans is that you can have multiple outputwriters so you can write to rrd AND graphite at the same time, with no loss in performance, since it happens in a multithreaded environment.

Also note, writing to rrd files from jmxtrans is terribly inefficient. It spawns the rrdtool to do it because (unfortunately) the java implementation of rrd outputs files which are not compatible with rrdtool.

(I'm the author of jmxtrans. Thanks for using my stuff!)
> You're not the first person to posit that adding a new VM "almost guarantees breakage". So what? Keep the old VM, transition to the new one by specifying that's what you're targeting, then deprecate the old VM and eventually lose it altogether.

That means both VMs will be in the browser together at some point. That is a hard problem, for example because of cross-VM garbage collection (the WebKit thread where Apple refuses to accept Dart into WebKit references some papers on that).

This will cause an immediate slowdown on existing code, and a very large maintenance burden, for example you typically need to optimize fast paths in the DOM for your VM, with two VMs that is double the work, and if the VMs are allowed to communicate - and they can, if they can both access the DOM - then you have three paths to optimize now.

It's possible to migrate from one version of a language to another - say Python 2.x to 3.x. But they are not both running in the same process and communicating directly with a third shared environment like we would have on the web.

I hate to be negative about this, because as engineers we all love technical challenges. But the fact is, it's very hard to do this stuff well. (And it's even harder to standardize it.) We need to be realistic about this: Compiling into JavaScript is the only way we will see other languages on the web for the foreseeable future.
Darrell Issa: http://twitter.com/#!/DarrellIssa/status/147795287732264960

Chaffetz: http://twitter.com/#!/jasoninthehouse/status/147819972498948...
Zynga Disappoints in Market Debut
What is 280 Slides? Ive never heard of this.
I have no use for this because I never carried around a shopping list in the first place. I also don't own an iPhone, but I would imagine the app store is already saturated with shopping list apps.
My girlfriend's organization is dedicated to doing this. www.maplight.org

Here's SOPA aka HR 3261: http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/tot...

They're a very careful organization, so they're very cautious in stating a congressperson's vote before the actual vote. But it's a start. The contribution ratio for my representative definitely prompted me to call her today.
Some of the Christian groups don't believe in hell either - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_conditionalism
I doubt such companies would put their data "in the cloud".

And if they don't, the cost of supporting this "straightforward" Hadoop infrastructure, both in terms of hardware, engineering and support, is so massive that the little elbow grease for a simple I-know-what-it-does solution may well be worth it.

In other words, I share alexro's concerns. If you're buying into the M/R hype and process your blog logs in the cloud, that's one thing. But legitimate business use-cases are probably not as common as people may expect/hope.
Really Terrific Personalized Wedding Stationery
http://www.weddingpapermasters.com You've got to check out this website for wedding invitations, save the date cards, place cards and more if you are a bride to be or a Mother of the Bride. INCREDIBLE!
This is a tough seat to go after because it's a reliable Republican district (around 2/3) and Smith has held his seat since way back in 1986. He's extremely entrenched, so the Republicans aren't going to be particularly tolerant of a challenger (edit: in the Primary), and the Democrats probably can't win the district.

I'm not sure who exactly lives in that weirdly-outlined subset of Austin, but unless something dramatic has changed since I lived there, his segment of San Antonio is dominated by traditionalist Chamber of Commerce types. His chunk of Austin might be an exception, but I would expect it will be pretty hard to get much traction in the rest of his district based on tech issues.
Since I didn't get a chance to comment on yesterday's post on "The Hard Way" command line course, I want to mention today that Zed Shaw is also working on a very nice C course for experienced programmers. I've been looking unsuccessfully for an online C course like this one, that doesn't do things like explain what functions, primitives, etc. are. Starts out a little slow with compiling and setting up your development environment, but then reveals a very well-written introductory course on C programming for experienced programmers. As an experienced Python/Javascript/PHP programmer with an interest in C, I've been looking for an online course like this for a long time.

Zed: can we somehow compensate you for your works-in-progress? I've gotten a lot out of your C course. I can't wait until it's available in epub format.
It does feel to me that joining YC and then taking a significant funding round afterwards is producing a lot of auditions where either the product is outright shut down or only parts are kept.

Sure looking from a higher level these may push forward innovation. Just makes it harder for us early adopters to justify investing time in using their apps/services.
I still don't get why we can't retract and change votes.
Bbq and sessions pool
It was te original demo app for cappuccino the web app framework cloned from cocoa to JavaScript and based on objective-j. They went on to build a web equivalent of interface builder called atlas then got bought by Motorola.
Install Other OS Feature On The PS3? Fed Judge Dismisses Class Action Lawsuit
that's for the crawl sample, not the entire 4TB index, right?

how much data was that?
Handlebars is cool
I think any corporate data warehouse is an area that Hadoop+Pig/Hive could add a huge amount of value. Here's why. Conventional data warehouses are built from running ETL transforms against existing sources, where you are carefully selecting which attributes you want to transform in. These transforms are tricky to set up and even trickier to change if you decide you need a new piece of data (which happens every day in big BI implementations). And if the source system isn't permanently preserving the data (eg. log files) then pulling in data retrospectively often isn't possible.

With a HDFS cluster you can cost effectively dump undifferentiated data from existing sources into a "data lake" without worrying about complex and highly selective transforms, and then use tools like Pig and Hive to do ad-hoc interrogations of the data.

Most data warehouse implementations fail to a large extent because of the ETL problem - Hadoop could help solve that in a big way.

Further reading (no connection to me)
http://www.pentaho.com/hadoop/
Fun fact: Stanford President Hennessy is the same Hennessy who with Patterson wrote that great computer architecture book: Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Oh, he also co-founded MIPS

Although as my first job was doing MIPS related stuff I may be biased about usefulness of the book. Amusingly the first featured 5-star review on Amazon is from John Mashey whom older readers may remember from comp.arch on Usenet.
You don't suppose a lot of actual, real-life prostitutes are in situations more desperate than that?
I'd been familiar with the concept of verbs and nouns in vim but this really simplifies it all. I wish there was a more comprehensive list of everything in a readable format. Man pages just don't do it for me :(
Ask HN: Is narly.us dead?
narly.us popped up on the front page of HN a week or two ago, its a website to let you tag Github projects (similar to Repos.io, but tags instead of categorizes).

However, the site has been down for almost 2 days. It looked rather neat, and I'd hate to lose the functionality because it looked like it was going in the right direction.
Pakistan, as a (nominally) democratic nation, is probably not the best example of your average Islamic nation (most of which do not possess democratic forms of government).

In any case, my familiarity with non-Western cultures is rather limited, and therefore I didn't want to unintentionally comment on any others in my initial post.
If you're a fan of Niklaus Wirth, I recommend The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity, a book of essays by Wirth's colleagues and students about some of his work.

http://www.amzn.com/dp/1558607234/
And there he goes ago, producing yet another marvelous gem for us to admire.
Maybe HN should have larger buttons when serving touch devices.
How Aston Martin Builds the Gorgeous One-77 Supercar
Studying Teacher Moves
Hey Alex,
I lived in Miami for 7 years and moved to Chicago 4 years ago. I recently organized CodeRetreatMiami.com and a lot of people showed up.

This was unexpected for me. I thought 4 people would registered and 22 people showed up and stayed all day.

My objective with the event was to start paying my dues back to Miami and bring back what I have learned from the tech scene in Chicago.

I contacted a few of the leaders of the local meetups and got good responses from most of them. I also contacted 2 guys that seemed to have been putting a lot into the community and surprisingly both blew me off.

I have been comparing the tech communities of Boston, Austin, Chicago, SF and Miami. People from SF have said that one of the most important key in the startup community is collaboration. By that he meant that you would be able to contact anybody from the tech community no matter how high their position is and most of the times they would be able to give you some time to talk to you.

The same is happening here in Chicago. I could call anybody to ask for advice and they would actually find time for you to meet you. Nobody (so far) is trying to rip off your idea, instead they want to hear your problem and see how they can help.

There are a lot of meetups here and usually a lot of people show up. The meetup with the most attendance is the Lean Startup. On average they get 200 people to a meetup and they come from all over the city and the suburbs. Some people even drive up to an hour and a half to get to those meetups. And not only this but also other tech meetups like Ruby, Android, Drupal. Which means that distance is not important even if we have good transportation system.

The same happens with Austin. You have to drive everywhere just like Miami. Austin has a scene because real state is cheap, a couple of big tech companies are there and there is a college in the middle of downtown.

I would say that even when people say that the problem with Miami is the distances, I would say is not a problem comparing the same to Chicago and Austin.

I would say that the challenges are people communicating with each other, encouraging people to go to events and evangelize an attitude of collaboration.
Hadoop is not a cloud solution - most organizations deploy it on their own infrastructure. Some folks (eg. Amazon AWS) offer a "hosted" version.
I cannot. The time limit ran out by the time I noticed.
Why Use Inferior Tools
Shutup, Twitter Isn't Censoring Your Dumb Trends
Wow, that looks damned interesting. So should I drop the whole thing off my radar, or does Motorola axing everything not effect Objective-J and Cappuccino?
Alternatively one could boycott the entertainment companies lobbying for the bill. Which really is not much of a sacrifice.
>If you really don't have the skill required to use Javascript...

So it's a lack of skill that makes JavaScript a poor choice for largescale application development?

No.

Developers like this are a large part of the reason we can't have nice things.
How to mine an asteroid
I'm actually trying to get a Congressional Gallery pass for Wednesday, to see the session in person.

Although it looks like if I do, I can't live-blog/tweet it, as you can't bring anything electronic into the gallery. That makes watching it on CSPAN a little more appealing.
I'm so sorry, but I really don't see the value in spending $26.78/month for only 50 metrics. I could install Graphite on a small instance at AWS and get nearly unlimited metrics for a fraction of the cost.

Never mind the fact that if I point your tool at a JVM, I can quickly get over 50 metrics (and double my cost to $53.57 since your slider only goes in increments of 50) just by looking at a single ehcache instance.

Yes, your service is nice, your graphs are pretty, but at the end of the day, I think I'd have a hard time convincing my boss (me) that this is a valuable thing to spend a lot of money on.

It seems like a lot of these 'monitoring' companies are springing up these days. I feel bad for you because I see that industry quickly being commoditized into who offers the lowest price. It is also not the easiest problem to solve because of the data storage and availability requirements.

Anyway, I don't mean any ill will. I wish you the best in your business, I just don't see how it would work for me.
This is the first pitch deck Foursquare ever showed investors
While I'm glad that you aren't dismissing Windows out of hand like some people, interleaving the Windows instructions with the POSIX instructions could get a bit confusing. It may be better to maintain separate builds of the book for POSIX and Windows.
My HTC Desire actually got dramatically worse on the Android 2.1 -> 2.2 update: the backup function disappeared. It's apalling there's no supported way to backup and migrate data.
Sadly, my Google-fu is failing me. I believe it was a This American Life episode which looked into partisan politics, and how the majority tries to stomp all over the minority at all times. When the tables are turned, the exact same thing happens again. It's always happened, and the politicians know it. They treat the minority opposition terribly, knowing full well that they may be on the on the receiving end of such treatment in only a few years. It's simply seen as the way things are done.
How Iran hijacked and stole a U.S. drone
Rumor: Apple Building 3.5 Inch Tablet (Frobes)
This is one of three facts why I prefer other mobile OS's over Android.

Other reasons - there are so many Android phones which for me water downs the excitement for the platform. The issue that all apps are not available on all Android phones and there is no Android/Google store to take my device to for a quick fix.

Hopefully they solve these issues when Google/Motorola starts releasing phones; force other manufacturers to follow same UX/UI. Also, possibly open stores as Sony & Microsoft has done following Apple's lead.
I called it "grouping" until I realized that items could be in multiple groups, so "tag" seemed like a more accurate metaphor.
If you're asking me that question I have to say that for the most part I don't care about the ads one way or the other. In the second paragraph I pointed out that we don't have to imagine your scenario because there was a time with no ads in the past and we have a method to see that history.

Perhaps you would prefer to pay an Internet fee?

I feel dumb for needing to point this out to you but...I already pay an internet fee. Everyone I know pays a fee to access the internet.

Maybe your Corporate Overlord Internet Dream can't be sustained without ads but I know my internet can. I connected for years to BBS's that were free and maintained by volunteers. To believe that the internet can't function without ads is shortsighted.
Quick concurrent programming in Python
One Sunday I got a call from a help desk guy involving an application I had worked on. This was the first call I had ever gotten about this app. I am pretty sure I was last on the contact list
PM calls me 10 minutes later and says we need to discuss my level of commitment, Says I have been shirking my duty and letting everyone else handle support.
All I could say is that it was the first call I had ever gotten, maybe bump me up on the call list.
He didn't know there was a call list they followed in sequence, still I should have been doing more.

I made sure this guy never PMed me again.
They'll just replace it with some other software from some other company that does pretty much the same thing.

The bigger issue is how the heck this software -- dare I say malware? -- has infected just about every mobile device in the first place. There is some sort of institutional or cultural entitlement the carriers have on spying on their users. I think only legislation can really fix that, but given how much law enforcement relies on this kind of surveillance, I doubt that will ever happen.
"why didn't some universal client based on them take off instead of the web?"

Because you had several companies all fighting to have their desktop platform be the standard. The web slipped in the back door because nobody felt threatened by a hyperlink document publishing system. As such, it was the only platform that was available everywhere. Worse is better.

Interestingly, the web is starting to adopt the old desktop model. If you look at many of the emerging frameworks for web development (talking client side here), they all seem to be loosely based on the work of OpenStep.

It is actually a really great question posed by dman. If the web is suitable for applications, the browser chrome should be one of those such applications.
It's actually pretty foolish to do this, if you want to keep your sanity in the future. If it takes you 30 seconds, they will most likely expect it that quickly in the future, even if it's not possible.
You get employees to care by compensating them well for the job they do. This compensation isn't always money. It can be money. It can also be good benefits. It can also be interesting work, but working in retail is inherently non-interesting for most people. So basically when it comes to retail the way to go is to provide good employee compensation and/or benefits. With some notable exceptions (eg. Costco), very few retail employers compensate their employees well, so of course the employees aren't going to care about their jobs.
I'm not sure why this is being up-voted so much. It won't work. SOPA works by not routing specific IPs, not by failing to resolve domains (which is why it fundamentally breaks the internet). Additionally, a single IP won't work for a major site like YouTube or Facebook, which work off multiple data-centers and CDNs (which also complicates how to "block" a site served by 50 IPs that may also be distributing content for another major brand). This is bigger than a hosts file.
Adding to your 'as customer' comments, I've had immediate success in person with front line staff by saying "If you do X for me i'll write a very complimentary email to HQ and mention you by name".
To be fair, the confusing structure of anonymous, and the multitudes of 'alternative' press releases under the name of anonymous certainly confused the issue. As more people joined the occupy protests in SF, new issues started getting mixed in (from prosecution of banking board members to banning circumcision), and the press naturally published what was most interesting to the general public.
People like to analogize the Android vs iOS battle of today with yesterday's Mac vs Windows battle to make gloomy predictions about the long-term market share prospects of iOS. But would Windows have been so successful with a host of meddlesome third parties deploying major updates out of sync according to their own various incompatible agendas?
How to easily optimize your landing page
Yehuda Katz: What are the key differences between Ember.js and Backbone.js?
Is there a shortage of bright minds flocking to work for the "financial services industry" now that they've got a distinctly bad reputation?
If you're rooted using MIUI, CM, or any other custom mod you won't be able to do the update - it verifies the ROM you're on - wants stock GB.

Use this ROM instead. *Still uploading at time of post.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1396038
You read about all these companies that are having issues hiring great engineers, yet when I check their product it seems to be just another DB driven site with social sprinkled around it.Please enlighten the non-engineers like myself, what is it that great engineers do at companies that are working on a website (ecommerce, social network, social media tools etc...)
Great essay, Avichal. Totally agree on 10x teams being the real differentiator.

On "shared culture", I want to point out that a shared monoculture can be just as big a disadvantage for some companies as it was an (likely) advantage for Paypal. If you don't need to communicate because of existing shared assumptions, that can make you efficient, or it can make you blind because you completely miss better solutions or other problems.

I'd love to see a follow-up on just the complementary personality-type diagram-- it's already a sort of Myers-Briggs for startups. Almost every category would work for non-engineers too. (I'm not saying it would have real diagnostic value, but it'd at least be fun.)
It's hard to say exactly how much it means, but it's at least interesting to note that the people that "left the group" are all women and the people added to the group are all men.