skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had something similar happen to me earlier in the week. The conversation went something like this:

Boss: Hey, we've got an urgent production issue that needs to be looked at. I'm getting some heat on this one and I need someone to diagnose it to see if it's a blocker for our release.

Me: Would you be able to ask X and Y to investigate? It seems they are on the support rotation for production issues. It'll take me at least an hour to clean up what I'm doing and switch over to run the old production instance locally.

Boss: It's urgent, I think you need to drop whatever you're doing and look at this.

Me: OK, sure.

(50 minutes later, as I'm almost done building the old production instance)

...

X and Y come back from a meeting.

Boss: I'll have X and Y look at this, you can go back to working on your stories for this sprint.

Me: !@#?$
Heh, onetime I had to get on a conference call when the blue angels were in town. "No, I don't live in a war zone, sorry about the noise."
I'm pretty sure Hacker News can be viewed and contributed to by folks in Europe already.
dump it in the ocean...
Eats all the plastic bits...
?????(probably gets fat)
PROFIT(no plastic in our water)

;-p
He took this course http://i.imgur.com/mXuz8.jpg
Please don't feed the troll.
I don't know this person. Never interacted.
Oh wow, this is brilliant. I had heard of rainy mood before, but I'm so grateful you've found an mp3 of it. This is going to be on my mp3 player all the time now.
Seeing as how SuHoSin's patch/extension together stop this flaw from even being exploitable I would say SuHoSin is perfect. Even on PHP 5.3.9 my servers were never exploitable because I utilised the SuHoSin patch/extension with sane defaults.

I think any project that doesn't take "security" fixes into consideration, doesn't use code-review and lets developers that clearly have no business changing security sensitive code commit bad code could use a good safe-gaurd that fixes those issues.

Yes, the time could be spent working on the core itself, but clearly that won't stop people from committing stuff they shouldn't be committing without having a qualified security guy checking off on it, so that won't help me have a secure running PHP installation...
It wouldn't be healthy, but it would not be "toxic" the way the video describes.

But you'd have to add a lot of fibre. Take a third of a snickers bar. Now add enough fibre and filler to make it the size of an apple. Imagine eating 3 apples as a snack.
Respectfully, do you have any references regarding your first point?
> must remember to follow the command with an ampersand if you want the app to run in the background and retain the usability of that particular terminal window

If you forget to to this from now on, just hit ^Z (to suspend the process) then run `bg' (to put it in the background).
Tubular: jQuery plugin that lets you set a YouTube video as your page background
Completely agree. I've been trying to help some non-programmer friends learn, and I've recommended all the beginner-friendly things I know of, from langauges like Scheme, Python, Ruby, Javascript, to online tutorials like CodeAcademy and other similar sites, etc. But nothing seems to stick, until they get excited about something, usually coming up with their own idea and deciding they want to build it.

Hence, I more and more believe that a strong emotional investment is necessary to plow through the initial learning curve and constant-debugging-induced frustration of learning programming. Everything else - OO, functional, recursion, pointers, and all the other key learning concepts - is secondary. And odds are you won't get that emotional investment from working through online tutorials, no matter how nice the UI, or even from reading books, no matter how well written.

It's the realization that with hard work and perseverence you can turn your own ideas into reality, and the feeling of empowerment that comes from that, that I think is crucial to learning programming, especially for those who may not be naturals at it. Then, from that passion, one can develop craftsmanship, and learn the aforementioned concepts that take you from a beginner to a professional, engineer, or perhaps even computer scientist.
I am a music addict and can (and do) listen to almost all genres of music during coding. But a consistent pattern is that I rarely listen to _new_ music while coding. What happens to me is that when I am really concentrated, I start listening to one album over and over to make sure that the music doesn't surprise me or force my attention. Sadly, its also a way to kill albums for you real quick :).
I've found the traditional synchronous approach I am familiar with from Ringo (http://ringojs.org) a better fit for general purpose server side work, so I've made it possible on Node with the help of node-fibers.

Common Node (https://github.com/olegp/common-node/) gives you the best of both worlds: it's easy to develop in & debug just like Ringo yet has low memory usage and is easy to integrate with existing Node libraries.

Here's a very simple CMS I wrote in it: https://github.com/olegp/mcms

Here's a canonical blog example that also shows the use of the synchronous Mongo driver: https://github.com/olegp/notes
Anyone have experience with Amazon Flexible payments marketplace solution?
HSBC threatens blogger for writing about security flaws
Great response. It's hard to get any real work done when you have to constantly context switch between different things. Ed didn't know that he'd have to waste 3 hours of his time. It was only supposed to take 10 minutes after all.
I think you mean you miss having him around. Not having him around is the current state.

That said, this particular game started a while ago.
Except, as stated in a different comment, for things such as "unsubscribe" links.
I would set up coding and design schools in areas of the world where students do not have access to fancy IT equipment and software etc. Then I would set up small incubators in those areas to foster entrepreneurship.
Then I would give each Apple employee 15 days of per year to travel to those areas.
Scrolling horizontally is particularly important when viewing horizontal timelines like Gantt charts and large tables.
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Suspending ratification is only temporary, there needs to be legislation making much of it illegal.
I used to find http://musicforhackers.com/ the perfect background to coding, but they're down, and I've never worked out another source of the sort of stuff they played.
Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex
Giant Prawn Discovered Off New Zealand Coast
What a lapse. One would expect that the FBI and their international counterparts would be doing any conference call over a secure, classified network... not POTS.

Is this really par for the course?
Funny... I assumed the punchline was going to be about the hours it takes a developer to get back into high productivity mode after interruption.

Sure, bosses and customers frequently underestimate the amount of time these sort of calls take and an intermediary (support) ought to take a stab at pulling a clear issue out first, but they're not always wasted time. There's a lot of value in getting devs and customers talking directly. It just needs to be (and can be) planned in a way that avoids breaking up the developer productivity curve unnecessarily.
Show HN We just launched forking for your Minecraft worlds
Generic names for soft drinks (mapped) by county
"A version of this article appeared in print on February 3, 2012, on page A21A of the National edition with the headline: A New Resource for Hiring Programmers Has Become Entirely Too Successful."

Bottom of page. So NYT printed a syndicated article? That's interesting.
Most other countries also don't have nearly as many lawyers per capita as the US.
As someone who's been looking at system76 for a while, what made you pull the Apple trigger?
Yeah, I managed to hit the limit where it stopped being fractal. Damn these limited-precision floating point numbers!
If you do not already think it has been hyped, I am at a loss as to how to prove it to you.

Let me put it this way: Why do we hear so much about Node when it's just another event-based single-threaded "asynchronous" execution environment running on a dynamic language, like half-a-dozen others that preceded it? Basically, it won the hype lottery. Whatever nice things you may have to say about it apply reasonably well to the half-dozen predecessors, too.
Fabulous production values on a par with a scifi movie.

Glad to see how Corning, an old line US glass manufacturer, has remained innovative and competitive worldwide.
Hackers intercept conference call between FBI and Scotland Yard
If you're looking for power with 7-8 hours of battery life, checkout the Y570 from Lenovo. Seems like this "aspiring IT professional" needs to do a LOT more research than just checking out whatever new macbook is out. I spent $700 on my laptop, and put a 120GB SSD in for another $100 and I do have the 8 hours of battery life and instant wake up (arguably almost instant boot as well, it only takes ~10 seconds). I don't disagree that laptops aren't about to get better (ivey bridge is going to be huge), but they're always getting better.
Yeah, and the publish date at the Bay Citizen site is 9p.m. Eastern yesterday. NYT print must've either snapped this up immediately or had advance notice that it was going out on the site.

Further digging shows that not every BayCitizen article makes the NYT, so I guess there's some editorial back and forth involved.
Apple iPhone 4S 16 GB wіƖƖ replace iPhone 4
The Digitally Imported trance channel is pretty good.

http://di.fm
>the web is not limited to reading plain text documents anymore

That is true. It is also true that it is becoming more frustrating to use the web for its original purpose of reading plain text documents, and the need to scroll some pages horizontally is a symptom of that.
The author may very well be wrong about the investors' perspective and the talent-hunt motivation, but he's probably right about who's running the show, and the answer is, invariably, the big companies. Why? Because there just aren't enough successful startup IPOs to keep the entrepreneurs trying. Founders may like risks, but they're not suicidal. The only reason this show is running is that there are plenty of acquisitions at prices that appeal to both entrepreneurs and investors. So if it's big-tech that's running the show, the only question is what's in it for them. The author suggests talent, I think it's market and product research, but one way or another, if big-tech stop acquiring, the startup craze will be over within a day.

EDIT:

I guess you could say that entrepreneurs and investors are all actually working for Google or IBM or whomever, trying to find the next big thing. They're just not getting a salary but working on a commission. And once in a while, some startup may get away, do an IPO and become a real force, but that's just like an agent on commission starting his own competing business. That's a risk any employer takes.
I find them most valuable in a larger codebase. The project I work on at Google is millions of lines of Java. I'm an Emacs user by preference, but a lot of my job isn't writing code, it's discovering and using the existing abstractions. For that part of my job, Eclipse serves my needs a lot better.
Why Would Europe’s Largest OSS Convention Identify With a Shrivelled Brain?
I didn't think horizontal scrolling was too bad, until Apple screwed that up. For a while, I could just use Firefox, but they implemented this same behavior, but without the nice animation. So, it's even more befuddling.

It's one of the many reasons post-Lion that I've decided to just move on to another OS. I shouldn't have to adapt the way I work to some OS updates quirks.
Something like a third of a second, maybe a half. Enough to notice. Slower on Unity2d for some strange reason.
The title reminded me of the old line about why programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas... because Oct 31 = Dec 25.
I was looking for something like this last night, and I found this project: https://github.com/seyhunak/twitter-bootstrap-rails

Using this generator is a very fast way to get your rails app using Twitter's bootstrap.
A study of the Zen aesthetic
Interesting. Just last week I got my first Arduino board. Will love to watch the story behind it.
I could build the next Mint w/o people saying "How is that different from Mint?". I could build Twitter w/o people saying That's like Twitter! I could build the next Match.com w/o people saying "But everyone's in Match.com!"
The majority of services out there are self-sufficient. Take a very simple http server. It needs to talk to the local filesystem and serve the content requested. The only thing in that equation that might block is the filesystem. Node provides you the tools to deal with that and more. Building an http server in node is enjoyable, easy, and the end result performs well.

The majority of software like a CMS is not self-sufficient. It needs a database, a filesystem, it talks to the http server, it might talk to a dozen other services (generate thumbnails, upload some files to a CDN, scan for viruses in an upload, etc. etc.). You get the idea.

Each external dependency is a blocking dependency. You need to handle it and it isn't easy. Node provides you the tools, but unlike in our first example, where the only thing that blocks is the filesystem, here you have dozens of services that block, with hundreds of pain points. Writing code becomes a chore that is very unpleasant.

That's not the worst of it.

If you miss a blocking operation and don't handle it properly in node, which is very easy, your entire server will go down. In a thread-based or multi-process server-side language mistakes are painful, but not fatal. In node, missing a blocking operation is fatal.

The node guys get this. That's why they're busy trying to cook up a solution around this problem. But they don't talk about it or advertise it.

As of right now, node is definitely not a general purpose solution. It is, however, an excellent solution where you don't have a lot of dependencies that block.
Wouldn't that pretty much describe any open id provider?
I was not even aware that they create profiles from my public data on Github, and the only way it seems to remove my profile is to log in using OAuth on Github.

That just seems even more sleazy.
I always thought that some day in the future we would start digging up the dumped plastic for turning it back into oil or fuel.

There is another fungus which is capable of turning cellulose from wood into diesel. A fungus which could digest plastic into fuel would be great.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2008/2008-11-04-02.asp

Of course this fungus should not be injected into the dump sites. Better dig up the plastic and have it converted into fuel in a chemical plant.
This true for non-coder creatives, too. I can't count the number of times I've been asked to "look at a design" or "go over some copy" because three other employees had some feedback in some meting I wasn't a part of, but no one can remember exactly was "off" with the deliverable. We then have to do the SKype/email round robin until everyone has given their comments again.

This gets even worse when we, the creatives, get feedback about functional changes.

"When I click the checkout button, it goes to the shopping cart."

"Uh...yeah."

"Could you have an upsell page pop up between the two."

"I can write the copy and spec the creative and functional design, but I can't change the button functionality. You'll have to get that prioritized in the next sprint."

"We don't want to bother engineering. We need to get this done quickly."

"It's a functional change. We have to involve engineering."

"So you can't write the page."

"I can write the page. I can spec the page. I can't build or deploy the page."

"That's disappointing."

"You have no idea."
Apple Doesn’t Want to Own Your Content: Updates iBooks Author EULA
But what if Node isn't the right tool for any job? What if everything Node does well has already been done even better and years earlier by Erlang?
Facebook hit git performance issue on large repository
I am, sort of.

On Rails 3.1 I have these in the Gemfile:

gem 'sass-rails', "~> 3.1.0.rc"
gem "compass", ">= 0.12.alpha.2"
gem "less-rails", :git => 'https://github.com/christiannelson/less-rails.git'

I'm in the process of transitioning from sass to less (mainly because I'm tired of compass and because bootstrap comes as .less). The above configuration happily compiles sass/less alongside for me.

It wasn't smooth sailing to get there, though, as you can tell from the pinned versions. The above will probably not work on Rails 3.2 or 3.0, and might even break with the next minor upgrade of 3.1. As it stands the asset-pipeline and supporting gems have been very fragile for me...
Ask HN: What's your 'go to' tech analogy?
Simple question that I ask because I'm curious. What do you use to try to explain technical ideas to non-technical people? Mine is most commonly a car analogy - not that I know much about cars, but a certain level of innate knowledge about them is in the public conciousness.

So what do you normally use?
Comparison of the Prix to the iPhone
Micron CEO Steve Appleton dies in plane crash
No, it's because the maximum number of iterations is too low for that zoom level.
I guess nobody in your entire organisation knows to mute their microphone until they're talking?
We let our users create accounts on our system or use facebook. 80% choose to create an account on our system instead of using facebook (This is an iOS app).
Checking out site now. First thing I've noticed is that the Chrome plugin doesn't work. Keeps referring to localhost.

http://localhost:3000/bookmarklet/?url=...
Honest question: Revenue streams of the host company are an important consideration in choosing a blog platform for you?
Spot on. My favorite moments are when the person joining an in person meeting via conference call tells everybody that they can't hear. Usually, everyone just looks around awkwardly and somehow silently agrees to ignore that person.
Yes, I am.

I use the 'less-rails-bootstrap' gem and then use less for anytime I need to customize bootstrap.

For everything else, I use sass.
People love new things and the story of the new guy overtaking the evil status quo. Node and JS in general seems very hyped right now. Every day there is a new blog about accomplishing something in these technologies that was entirely possible with alternatives for the last many years. But its new and exciting and blogged about. Because it is so new, there are not really any accounts of what a Node architecture does to your maintenance, refactoring, upkeep on a 5 year old application that no one cares about anymore (and the team that built it left).

Maybe it's a sign that the hipsters are rising as the neckbeads retire.
do you have a contact email ? mine is in my profile.
What are you referring to? The only node post on the front page doesn't have any Node bashing comments in it.
All else isn't the same. For one, this event-based, single-threaded "asynchronous" execution environment running on a dynamic language uses javascript, which is a surprisingly powerful functional language that just happens to run on the other side of the web server conversation in the context that we are discussing.

Being able to standardize and coalesce the two sides of the web pipeline -- regardless of what magic happened at the other layers -- has obvious merits.
> I've made it possible on Node with the help of node-fibers

Cheating! It's not in core. Yes, it largely solves the problem at hand, but we're not talking about node + fibers or even the node + features they're currently working on. We're talking about node. Node doesn't have fibers. Although I wish it did! Fibers really don't belong in the user-space ...
This is the full paper, as linked from reddit: http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=f1de9924&page=1...

The pageturn navigation is in the upper left hand corner.
>I don't trust FB with my privacy.

Then open an account, and don't upload private info to them?
That's what geeks do. Seriously.

Geeks love to debate technical stuffs.
Saying anything anti-rails or anti-apple on HN would be blasphemy methinks. I think the issue with node is it has a little bit of promise for a small number of applications, but there's a lot of falsehoods that are propagated around node. The whole "non-blocking means that it scales to infinity and beyond" and other stuff like that are things that need to be reigned in. Scalability is a lot more than just saying "well, throw nodejs at it and you're done."
No, you're missing my point: I'm saying you should not remove all fats from your diet. As the linked article I provided suggests, you need fats in your diet.

And I did not suggest a hypothetical diet of only snicker's bars. Any healthy diet needs a balance of fats, fibers, minerals and vitamins.

Suggesting that all fats should be removed is not accurate. (And I'm simply providing information that you need fats in your diet.)
A Short History of the Modern Calendar
Seems reasonable. If they run out of money, where does your blog go?
> It's politically easier to bring on someone new, deal with the productivity hit, and then have them start addressing the systemic technical issues.

I can see the reasoning behind that and it would be wonderful if that tactic actually worked. In my experience however, it does not.

I work at a company that is heavily driven by a non-technical management. They don't understand the concept of "technical debt" and your characterization of how it is to work at such a company is _exactly_ like I have experienced it. But: the managers/MBAs/what-have-you at my company are not idiots. The problem is: if they bring in a new hire into a team (which happens fairly often, we went from ~100 engineers to more than 250 in 2011 alone), they also raise their expectations of said team's output.

The team-leads (which is the highest technical position in my company) do, of course, try to fight that back and try to use the plus in productivity for fixing underlying technical problems (of which there are plenty). Sadly, they have a hard time explaining even the productivity drop that stems from bringing the new team member up to steam. After that, there is just not enough argumentative leverage (I hope that's a term that exists) left to explain why we could not move even faster, now that we are one engineer more.

So, in the end we are exactly where we were - and find ourselves longing for another new hire to work exclusively on the technical debts.
What's all the fuss about getting new developers up to speed? This time last year we added two new hires to a team of three, working on a ~500k LOC project. Unlike this example, our project wasn't late and adding them didn't slow us down, it sped us up.

They both delivered valuable new features in the next release a few months later, fully pulling their weight. Now, they're bringing new hires up to speed.

We spent a long time (several months) looking for very good people. We imported one of them from Germany. Perhaps Brooke's law only applies because the sort of developers you can hire in a hurry aren't the sort of developers who are going to hit the ground running.

TL;DR In my experience you really should hire more developers and you should do it before anybody starts working a 60 hour week.
I get what the author is saying, but don't we all know that all languages are "bullets" but non-silver bullets aren't going to slay the beast (metaphorically, software design/management).