skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."

I have nothing to add except that this struck me as such an excellent distillation that a mere upvote seemed inadequate.
Allow for an easy path to recovery, with near-zero downtime, when that PC-in-a-closet inevitably has some sort of failure.

The nice thing about the fact that EC2 instances are at least to some degree ephemeral is that it forces you, from the start, to have a solid backup/restore plan. And when an EC2 instance goes down, you can have another one booted within minutes, compared to the days/weeks that it might take to get another physical machine set up.

That's not even to mention scaling issues; right now I'm managing a stack of over 50 EC2 instances, and it's easily manageable by a single person (most of those are in a load balanced array, and they'll come up and go down automatically as load dictates). I have no idea what I would do if I had to physically set up servers to handle this type of shifting load...
This critique of Vegas by VJ is pretty famous (I love that you still have to FTP to ftp.ee.lbl.gov to get it):

ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/email/vanj.94mar14.txt
Vegas (and uTP and LEDBAT) tends to get outcompeted by Reno variants, so people generally only use it when they're trying to be "nice".
Here's your chance to win a walk-on role on Breaking Bad Season 5
Here's your chance to win a walk-on role on what The New York Times calls "the best show on television." One Grand Prize Winner will be selected to receive a walk-on role in a Breaking Bad Season 5 episode and a four-day, three-night trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I also think it's important to point out that Pharo and Squeak do have a rich set of keybindings, so it's not as if you have to do mouse-based development if you don't want to. The editor may be a bit weak, but the general keyboard situation is pretty good.
I'd just be happy with a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of those franchises that has languished and whose reappearance, alas, seems as far away as an actual mission to Alpha Centauri.
This doesn't sound right. Since when does Spamhaus police site content? I'm pretty sure they primarily go after folks sending out spam email, not after websites containing spammy pages.
Agreed. The fact that arrays were simple memory-offsets making zero-index easier for low-level programming doesn't make it easier for humans who historically prefer 1-indexing.

Zero is not a "natural" number, in fact many societies / civilizations never even understood or used zero in arithmetic [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals
Camelot - an open source framework for Python, Sqlalchemy and Qt
I agree. I am anti-SOPA, but this is not censorship so much as an overzealous attempt to stop spam, executed poorly. Did they do a wildcard block/hold/whatever on a top level domain of yours *.mydomain.com so all your sub domains got blocked? I'm guessing some goober at bluehost just went one step farther than he should have in just removing the one DNS entry, and they definitely should have contacted you. Sounds like poor customer service.
The code itself is simple enough to function as a tutorial, no?

I'd much rather wade through the html and css in a github project then try to decode the ramblings of a hastily written tutorial.

I wrote something very similar a couple weeks ago - going to go back and apply some of the nice visual effects this contribution shows - very appreciated!
KR Drama - Korean Drama |
Pardon my general ignorance on the subject, but I remember a documentary saying that certain forms of hypnosis require a therapist to actually instruct patients to blink because they won't do it on their own. I know I wouldn't want my laptop to bluescreen in a middle of a session like this.
Changes to Come: 9 Past Predictions for Funky 70s Tech
Pewen Collector, is the first Mapuche inspired game available in the App Store
Pennebaker discusses language and psychological states w/ ref to Twitter
What does AnalyzeWords do?
AnalyzeWords helps reveal your personality by looking at how you use words. It is based on good scientific research connecting word use to who people are. So go to town - enter your Twitter name or the handles of friends, lovers, or Hollywood celebrities to learn about their emotions, social styles, and the ways they think.
If my host did that then reversed the decision I would still be moving out of there as fast as possible.

There's absolutely no reason to be giving second chances to online services with so much competition about, on what is, essentially, a commodity.
I don't think it makes sense, but I think it makes more sense than Anonymous doing it.

Note that Obama recently declared war on whistleblowers, and Stratfor's entire operation is based on George Friedman's cozy relationships with a lot of top officials who tell him things off the record.

Obama's promises to end the wars go directly against Friedman's predictions, and anyone who trusts Friedman's judgment will realize that Obama is lying about pulling out of Afganistan and Iraq.

The attack on Stratfor could be intended to silence any insiders who may have planned to debunk the idea that the US will leave either of the occupied countries any time soon.
Everyone voices this concern, but it's important for people to understand that most Smalltalkers consider the binary image a throwaway artifact, and sometimes a deployment mechanism - it is emphatically not how you store or distribute code. There are standard, largely textfile based ways of doing that. I almost if it would be an advantage to not show beginners the "save image" menu item, because then it would be like any editor or IDE: if you haven't saved your source files, you lose your work, and you have to start each session by loading your source back in.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen the text of this before now.

It's interesting how interpretations are so easily drawn, because while you cite the "Deems human life" as synopsis, I draw "each state has authority to protect the lives of unborn children residing in the jurisdiction of that state" as justification that it simply allows states to have more sovereignty.

That said, I agree that the language, which I don't personally agree with (or have much opinion on) would likely tie the hands of states trying to enforce or enact pro-choice legislation.
Can someone please explain why "John D Cook"'s blog makes the front page so often? I see that he has a large boat.

Who is his target audience here? I have been using emacs for over 10 years, and this is possibly one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard of for someone to try emacs.
I also prefer the single-page-application description. I use the acronym form (SPA) once I've introduced customers to the idea. I scope projects like this:

* You want a web app

* The web app will be composed of components

* Some components will be standard CRUD applications

* Some components will be SPAs

The "page refresh" is the cognitive anchor I use for clients. I tell them that standard CRUD applications are applications where the page disappears and refreshes when they click the save or submit buttons. SPAs are pages where things happen seamlessly on the page when they click buttons. I usually contrast their existing site to a site like Gmail.

The thing is, I don't get in to this detail until we're past the opening conversation. During the opening conversation, my approach is to avoid correcting them at all. Rather, I ask for clarification of what they mean, then let them continue using their own terminology; abusive of our craft or not. I find that people are far better at explaining things in their own terms than they are trying to wrap them in our terms. Asking for functional examples (micro workflows) is a great way to understand what they really mean.
If the directors of the first two Alien films are returning to sci-fi, I wonder if David Fincher will follow.
Assign users and labels with commit messages on Github
I agree that this is annoying, so instead of using the vimium tab-switch bindings I use the standard chromium tab-switch keyboard shortcuts (no mousing is necessary)
Main R archives lost "packages" directory - don't copy to your mirror site
It's better, in my opinion, to think of various cloud providers as just another endpoint in the evolving infrastructural API layer available to people and companies.

The breadth of options becoming available is fantastic; it's not that long ago that hosting options were:

* sharing a single physical machine with a group of unknown other customers
* renting one or more single physical machines with preselected hardware/OS
* Purchasing your own hardware and co-locating it in a data center
* Building a data center

Right now, PaaS providers are taking advantage of all this newly available, ephemeral, programmable computing power to build abstracted services, allowing other developers/companies to take advantage of pooled expertise and resources.

I think, if I were building the infrastructure for a company today (which I am helping with, for a lot of companies), I'd definitely eat the additional cost (can be offset quite a bit by reserved instances) and idiosyncrasies (instance degradation, unexpected performance characteristics) of Amazon.

I spent years toiling over hardware quirks, flakey SCSI adapters, power outages, failing or aging machines. If you rent boxes, you're relying on SLAs (if you can get them) and sometimes insane costs for an onsite engineer to fix something you broke (I mucked up a firewall config once on leased dedicated hardware. Don't do that. Ouch.)

There are similar outages with cloud providers, but depending on which rung of the abstraction you're on, (IaaS, PaaS, etc) you might be in a much better position to redeploy your infrastructure elsewhere if it's a real disaster.

The bigger your product/service gets, the more expensive your downtime is (and the more you're spending on engineers to make sure it doesn't go down. Oh, and your hardware has quirks, and your engineers know them - if they leave, they take that knowledge with them).

Of course, there are situations where you'll want to minimize financial outlay, run something that's not a "web app", don't mind getting your hands dirty, willing to risk hardware failures, etc. Hopefully PaaS providers will continue to bridge the gap for most people.
The quote -from Wirth himself- was not about classroom environments, it was about software engineer(s|ing).
Web2.0 Users Giving away all their rights - And There They Go
All of those offered, at the time they appeared, a completely new service that had essentially zero competition, and have become entrenched since then (can you even e.g. get a job without a phone number?). Not to mention that the USPS is mandated by law to exist, so it can hardly be compared with Facebook.

Facebook never offered anything so revolutionary. It's just a well put together implementation of something that was already possible.
What is the coolest thing you can do in 10 lines of simple code?
The first step is to admit you have a problem, hallelujah my friend!!
I disagree. All books are released too early if you think about it. The technology will change rapidly no matter when you buy the book so it's up to the buyer to make sure it's the latest release for the version they'll be working with if a version applies.

Let's take nodejs for example. I think it's safe to say that it's new enough to be considered too early to publish if there were such a thing. Even if node changes drastically within the next few months any book about any technology that's worth anything at all (did I say anything enough times? Haha) will teach you the fundamentals about how to get it, set it up, configure it how you want, and get you going with some reproduce able examples. That's really all you need. No book can be expectd to cover every last bit of the technology in great detail. I'd argue that most people learning to program get the fundamentals from the books and maybe some bonus knowledge and the rest we pick up with experience and research.

Then you have remember that there's a good bit of time between the writing of the book and it's publishing and then some more time between editions. No book can be current. But it doesn't matter because of why we buy the books to begin with. We learn the ropes from them. Even books about advanced techniques teach you enough about a technology so that in a case where the advanced technique is out of date you can still get what you want done by inferring how you're supposed to do things now based on other data from the book combined with experience and practice. So given all this, I don't think there's a such thing as being released too early and in fact believe all books are released too late. But they're valuable nonetheless.
Why do people always compare EC2 _On-Demand Instances_ cost to classic hosting cost?

The actual cost for a planned _Reserved Instance_ on EC2 is much lower and is a much more realistic scenario for hosting : it cost about 27$/month for a 3 years reserved small instance (425$/36 months + 14.64$), not 60$/month.

No one knowing it will use an instance 100% time should opt for On-Demand instance, because yeah, it costs a lot.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
I think writing it in (perhaps a subset of) Pascal, then translating to assembler either manually or by interpreting the Pascal source by hand would have been the Right Thing To Do (tm). Writing in the high-level language makes it easier to get the algorithms and data structures right. Translating to a lower level language later is easier with that framework in hand -- the Pascal source would serve as a sort of spec for the ASM translation. I know that when I write code in Python and translate to C, it's frequently easier than starting off writing in C, partly for that reason.
I can't actually find a link to the new paper, the "Red in a new light" paper. Just the citeseer link. Is it online?
If you're interested in "view models", then check out Draper:

https://github.com/jcasimir/draper

It provides exactly that, and it was a huge "a-ha!" for me when I started using it. Suddenly, things that felt icky to do in a helper (because they were tightly coupled to a model) or in the model (because they rightly belonged in a view helper) had a place to live. My templates are nearly fully devoid of twisting logic now.

Based on my experience, I think that Rails is missing the decorator/view-model piece, and would benefit from it as a core addition, but one of the great things about Rails is that it's easily extensible. Drop the gem in your gemfile, start using decorators, and go home happy.
Have you tried using Spamhaus's Blocklist Removal? http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso
It's only a challenge if the challenged has the ability and intention to rise to it.
First of all, Ron Paul has significant power in congress. He is a member of two important committees and was instrumental, as a recent example, in strengthening the auditing standards for the Federal Reserve. He also has significant ideological influence on the Republican party, whether they like it or not. The rhetoric of the tea party movement was in many ways a direct attempt to co-opt Paul's support. He has used this power in near perfect accordance with his principles, stood against reckless war, attacks on civil liberties, favoritism for Wall St. and special interests, and economic plunder.

There have been plenty of opportunities for Paul to sell out, as there are for every successful politician, and he has rejected these opportunities at every turn. Contrast this with Obama's record: a supporter of the patriot act from the beginning, a friend of Wall Street, a believer in empire, in favor of suspension of habeas corpus for American citizens, in favor of the drug war, tolerant of illegal spying on citizens, tolerant of torture. Obama has broken promises and sold out the American people time and time again. It seems pretty clear who has the better batting average.

Paul is far from perfect, but the only alternative at this point is the status quo or worse for the next four years, and believing in that is a lot more insane and dangerous than any of Paul's most controversial beliefs. In fact, when you look pragmatically at the scope of what Paul would actually be capable of as president, you see that he could only really affect policy in the moderate and generally popular portions of his platform--ending permanent war, ending the drug war, vetoes on overspending. His more 'fringe' positions are well beyond the purview of the executive branch, and his principles explicitly preclude him from overstepping those bounds.
Why do you think it's "clear" that the business owns the contacts and relationships? Contacts and relationships form the basis of a salesman's job, much as language and API expertise are the basis of a programmer's job. You may invest considerably in a programmer's training, only to watch him leave for a competitor, but you will have a difficult time claiming ownership of his knowledge and experience.

I think the lesson is that, from a business perspective, you need to guard access to key contacts and companies where possible, if the likely departure of an employee who knows them will cause the business undue hardship. How else would you propose to structure a job where the employee forfeits relationships upon separation? (And how would you get any decent salesperson to accept such a job?)
First class mail generates 51% of the USPS revenue today, and is projected to hold onto 35% by 2020. Not quite a "nominal fee", I'd think.
Sorry, should have been more specific. they might ask you if and how JS handles general threading concepts. The correct answer, as you alluded to, is that aside from web workers, JS is not multi-threaded. You could then talk about the challenges of creating complex applications in an asynchronous event driven structure.

In other words, as an interviewer I would ask about threading to filter out the "huh?" type applicants and give them a chance to talk about some of the nuances of working with JS.
I think my development experience in php is up to maybe 15 - 20 lines or so now...

Thanks for the pointer!
EC2 instances are not reliable: they degrade all the time. The solution, recommended by Amazon, is to have redundancy. So, plan on having at least two of every type of server or using their services like RDS.

With EC2 my approach has always been that if you've got enough traffic to justify it, you should move rather quickly to a load-balanced solution. This really forces you to stop relying on what's stored on any particular server, and focus your energy on making sure you can boot new ones and get them seamlessly into the rotation.

Obviously this doesn't work for stuff like databases (for which I definitely recommend RDS or SimpleDB if they suit your needs), but even there, if you're hosting your own and make sure that the data goes on to EBS volumes instead of the instance stores, you can set things up so that you snapshot those volumes regularly and can boot up new database servers without trouble.

Services like Rightscale can help manage stuff like this pretty easily, too, though they're probably a bit expensive for startups (and you've got to be willing to put in a little setup time, I've always found that their templates needed pretty substantial customization to suit my needs); in any case, Amazon is starting to pull more of that type of functionality into AWS itself, with stuff like CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk, so if I was starting now, I'd probably give those a closer look.
I disagree -- in this case, you should consider storing local time and the Olson tz it's due to be in. Microsoft make the mistake of doing it your way in Outlook, meaning that everyone had to update their calendars when the US changed their DST rules.

Events in the future are commonly scheduled relative to what the time is going to be in a specific place, regardless of how the tz rules change in the meantime. Automated actions in the future, however, may well need to be fixed to a UTC time. In short: you need to think about how your system will actually be used, and possibly store values differently depending on how they will be used.

On no account ever use a raw UTC+n offset.
True. But, "high-level, type-safe language" need not refer to unextended Pascal, and I see no evidence that it was intended to. He could have meant Algol W. Depending on when it was written, he could have meant Modula 2, Modula 3, or Oberon.
It's easier to switch states than to switch countries. If you don't like the draconian laws in your state you can move to another one that shares your views.
Planets don't disappear in a matter of years. Even in the 100,000 to few million years it would take to traverse the entire galaxy they wouldn't disappear (although any life would evolve significantly).
The key to a successful interstellar probe is probably miniaturization. You only need about 5kg of Pu-239 (energy density ~8.8e13 J/kg) to accelerate a 1kg payload to 10% of the speed of light (energy requirement ~4.5e14 J). A single large H bomb (2.1e17 J) could accelerate 100kg to 0.2c.
He uses lots of words to say dont badmouth past employers, be on time, be confident, and be friendly.
The usual response by Open Source and free users (myself included, to be honest) is "I'm paying with my attention".

Unfortunately, with the exception of open source contributors, that attention is non-transferable, so while the instinct is quite reasonable from the user, it does nothing to help defray the costs of building the free product to begin with.
There are actually 3 major alternatives here, and the article ignores the third:

1) Run on dedicated hardware.

2) Run on EC2, or another "Infrastructure as a Service" provider.

3) Run on Heroku, or another "Platform as a Service" provider.

For smaller companies, it really comes down to a few questions: Who's worrying about your database backups? Who handles security patches? What happens when a critical machine fails on Christmas week?

Many smaller companies will be happiest with option (3), because somebody else worries about backups, security, and machine failure for you. Sure, it's expensive. But it's a lot nicer than calling your senior programmer back from vacation because of a catastrophic RAID failure.

Option (1) certainly looks cheaper on paper. But many small companies are skimping on something critical, and they'll get burnt within the next 5 years.
<Quote>
Time in bathroom spent reading on your phone [Side note: how freaking scary would it have been to explain to your great-great-grandfather that people would carry around computers and look at them while in the bathroom or driving - he would have been terrified of this future]
</Quote>

Really? Try telling your ancestors that you have bombs that can destroy entire cities.
Or try telling your ancestors[few centuries back] that you could go to moon today, or that you have the whole world's information in your fingertips, they might faint in disbelief! My point being, that our ancestors' reaction is not a reason why we should not be doing something!

But, I do agree with the author that, the availability of tremendous information is forcing us to judge too quickly, and probably will lead us to making bad judgements!
The difference is that there is a recourse from this. You can call people and get it reversed. If SOPA goes through, you would have to go to court get it fixed.
What are the best python companies to work for?