skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I meant that if there were a WP-caliber Rails blogging system (and community), I'd happily switch to that, because I'm very well-versed with how to run Rails sites and because that would make it much more hackable for me. (I'm theoretically capable of writing PHP code, but practically have "Don't do it, Patrick, this is why you are best friends with a PHP developer" written in indelible ink on my wrist.)
There's no censorship here. They analyze the file and tell you if they think it's malicious. You are free to do with that information as you will.
Tomorrow's Web Meetup: #01 - Presentation Videos
The forty yard dash provides one of the most important signals for football recruiting. Essentially, it's a measurement of the time from when the athlete takes his hands off of the start line to when he crosses the finish line. Most commonly, it is run in cleats on grass with no pads, and certainly no players trying to prevent you from reaching the goal line. In addition to that, the best technique for running a forty, literally falling forward to build momentum before lifting your hand off the ground, is actually illegal for offensive players (and pretty pointless for defensive ones).

So why is this completely unrelated activity so important for measuring football players? Because it takes ten seconds to measure, and a guy who can run a 4.2 forty can almost always play pretty damn well.

Tech interviews today are a low cost way of getting a rough idea of ability to code. Judging from Google's output, it's pretty damn effective for them.
If we've come to the point where you're fleeing the country from Nazis with only what you can carry in your hand, the only thing that's going to be sustainable is investment in _yourself_ through massive education. That way you're up and working and earning from the moment you're safely away.
You don't really have to balloon it if you want just a blog. Over the years my blog-generation script has slightly expanded, but it still clocks in at one Perl file of 639 lines, a lot of which is boilerplate. It generates HTML, an index, and an Atom feed, with a few options for the index, which is about all I need.
But is that utility that you mention the reason why people bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it?

Gold may have some utility and practical applications but that does not seem to account for all of it's perceived value.
The death of Firefox
From their website:
>By reducing the maximum speed and acceleration of Urbee compared to what many other cars are capable of, we can dramatically reduce the maximum horsepower required to power our car. The smaller motor/engine size in turn decreases the weight of the vehicle and increases the range.

I think this is great, cars are grossly overpowered and under-optimized for their most common use. I drive a 4500lb V6 truck with a ScanGauge, and cruising along only takes 50hp. Without any figures to back up their eco-marketing, though, I'm a bit worried. There are some slow accelerating cars on the market already. Making an even slower car gets into the territory of "dangerous".

I know they might not be able to release numbers yet, but "our car is slow and doesn't have a lot of power" isn't going to help their marketing if they don't do some explaining besides "power = energy".
"required all access of the admin to happen through a proxy that I control"

How is this accomplished using nginx?

Does this mean creating a Socks Proxy and a special URL that's only accessible through the tunnel?
Stocks are meant to be an investment vehicle, gold is not. The difference is, in an inflationary environment, stocks get murdered in real terms. That was the first line of my initial post in this thread.

The problem with stocks on the smooth sailing point, is that you can have a company that goes bankrupt, and plenty do over 30 years or more. You should look up the rather shocking numbers on how many publicly traded stocks have been vaporized in the last 30 years.

Gold does not go bankrupt, and it will not go to zero (if the last 2,000 years are any indication). Even more specifically, it won't go anywhere near zero.

With stocks you must constantly manage your holdings. With gold you do not have to manage it at all, assuming you didn't go chasing it on a bubble run (which represents less than 1% of the time duration that you could have bought gold over the last 60 years; 1980 for a few weeks for example).

There is a huge time management cost to stocks, most people simply do not have the time to focus on that. Skilled investors certainly do either have the time or the ability.
I wonder if the chance to work for a good cause is a natural filter for exceptional engineers.

When you've already made millions, or when your reputation allows you to get any job you want, money surely becomes a much smaller work incentive.
As a cloud analytic developer I'm excited to see articles like this. A "Hadoop Patterns"-esq book would be a welcomed addition to my bookshelf. My only complaint with this article is that the prose is difficult to understand.
Right after I posted that, I realized I was missing a line, so now it's 14 lines.
> Having base coding knowledge and experience will go a longer way for our children then teaching them a foreign language like French, Russian and other languages!

People who make false dichotomies like these threaten to undermine the entire push to make programming and computer science available in lower education.

Our children should be able to learn a foreign language; our children should be able to learn to code. One is not better than another; what's important is that children have the possibility to learn both.
Ah, thanks for sharing that.

Looks like the spec even changed in the past year too

http://mbelshe.github.com/SPDY-Specification/draft-mbelshe-s...

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol

Oh well, maybe the attention will get this updated.

I wonder how Firefox developers are implementing SPDY support without tools like this?
Great post Patrick. I know you'd had a series of bad experiences with both Apache and self-hosting WP. This article makes a pretty compelling case to give WPEngine a closer look.

I ... was not asked to write this by WPEngine (who are,
again, clients of mine), and would not have written it
except that their service really rocks.

This statement feels a bit disingenuous to me. It seems likely that they didn't ask you to write it simply because you offered: "How about I write up a mini case study/sales pitch on my popular blog. You win because I'll send you business, and I win because then future clients will know I did work for you and indirectly advertises my services".

I'm totally cool with that, btw, it just seems a bit like lying by telling the literal truth... which is something that rubs me the wrong way.
I use it all the time for mixed unit equations and conversions.
US Jobs Gap Between Young and Old Is Widest Ever
Hyde is another great one, I use it for my personal site.
Lets say I open up the web browser, then I use the application selector to go to my Twitter app. If I hit back I'll go to the homescreen, rather than the web browser. The app selection button somehow flushes out the entire back stack, which is really, really annoying. As to unpredictability regarding views within apps, its a bit worse but not hugely different.
That maybe the case in some select schools and those schools are now offering html,css,photoshop,javascript, python, ruby, iOS, java, php and others. Though those schools are not your average schools.

In general the school system is still more focused on offering foreign language classes to students then teaching them coding languages. The latter skill being more valuable then the former!
Fast native methods for javascript collections
You mean like Lazarus?

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/loljledaigphbcpfhf...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-...
Gold is subject to speculative bubbles just as housing and stocks are. Gold is not a wealth protector unless you are lucky, but that's true of anything. If you buy gold during a speculative bubble then gold is more likely to be a wealth destroyer. If you buy gold today, near the peak of a classic and obvious speculative bubble then you are not doing yourself any favors.

Worse yet, gold tends to return to a constant value after speculative crashes. Compare that to property and stocks which tend to end up higher in the long term, regardless of speculation. If someone had invested their money into houses, land, or stocks in 1850 or 1919 they would have seen a vastly superior rate of return than from gold.

People who advocate buying gold right now are giving irresponsible advice that if followed will almost certainly lead to people losing money.
Yes, I got myself the SparkFun branded version http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10173 for Christmas, and it's a blast. Very easy to get started, and yet, compared to the inventor kits of my childhood, much more versatile because of all the third party hardware that is made for Arduino or can be made to work for it, and because an open source community has developed around it.
… Which is why Buffet also says he doesn't like currency denominated assets.
Ask HN: Can you relate to what this investor says?
This was interesting - In the video Julie Meyer talks about what her investment company looks for in startups and entrepreneurs. What's especially interesting is the 90 hour week.

Personally, I find myself working 90+ hour weeks more often than not with http://www.corsvi.com although recently I've decided to place importance on sleep(!) to keep balanced and healthy (it also helps with thinking clearer).

What do you guys think, can you relate to what Julie talks about? Interested in hearing your views/experiences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJtAOBceM8
I find that in tech culture--startups, coders, hackers alike--there is an attitude that if you don't live, breath, sleep your profession that you will fail. And I wonder if this idea that for a startup to succeed you have to give 24/7 comes from that attitude.

One ruby conference, there were two talks by startup founders, the one presenter stated that the only way to succeed was to work 24/7 while the other presenter stated that success only came through working smart and taking time off to recharge and do other things. Both were successful. Personally, I have other things that I want to do and the sooner we can abolish this startup myth the better.
I agree, but alternatively, we could study git and the lessons learnt there and design a distributable ACID database with version controlled data, extensible user collections and the performance of a more traditional database.
I had similar exposure in school, but from what I've seen with the young people in my family, it's gone the other way. There are no computer classes. They don't even teach typing anymore.
They also own that thing called YouTube which may or may not have been a part of Khan Academy's success.
Except gold and silver have a couple of millenia of history, that shows that unlike fiat money, they retain their value.

(Unfortunately, your friend is likely to lose his pants again -- not because gold is going to lose its value, but because there is no way to invest in gold without fiat and counterparty risk which is equivalent or even worse than the equity investment risks. If you don't believe that, ask any MF Global customer who had money and gold futures worth lots of money where his money is)
Google Responds to Google Wallet Security Flaw
Why does this lead to a 1x1 GIF?
Was a great event, I hope even more of the HN community comes to the next one :).
This is well beyond your neighbour owning a Ferrari. It takes serious money to race in those leagues.

And if I recall correctly I remember seeing a video of him racing one of my personal favourites, an Aston Martin V12 Vantage (Could have been a DB9/DBS, can't recall exactly).

I would personally consider anyone who can drop six figures annually on a hobby filthy rich. The one's "living a good life" did the kind of racing I used to do, and the wealthy guys there only dropped 20-30k/ year racing around in parking lots.
Btrfs: The Swiss army knife of storage
Have you considered that the chart merely shows the value of gold in US dollars, and that it could be, this time, that the US dollar is the speculative bubble that has been bursting for some time now.
My experience has taught me that it can be all or nothing at during a startup's inception. At my last startup, we had to work incredibly hard to keep our first customers happy. I do, however, think 37s is right when they say that you can turn a startup into a sustainable, quieter business much earlier than most people would assume.
I agree with you! Working with children I realized how amazingly fast they are able to pick up anything you teach them. I wish I had someone to teach me coding at age of 8 or something. Its just amazing seeing kids do stuff in a weeks I myself could only do after months or years of learning programming
First off, extreme kudos to the original developer, and to nerget.com for implementing the algorithm. I'm curious how the display seems to be able to maintain a sense of a gridspace inside of a single text "p" tag. I need to look into that a bit more.

Secondly, I couldn't resist playing around with this a bit. I added a few UI components - allowing the user to change the ascii characters used, the color of the text, removes the dialog box after a period of time, and binding the clear feature to the space bar. All of which I felt like made it a little more fun for me to play with in full-screen mode.

Here is a link to my modified version for fun: http://www.johnmick.net/fluids/
Your contact form does not work.
Win Odeon Cinema tickets with Strepsils
10 pairs to give away daily
Watch this video then answer this question..
Q. How long can Strepsils provide relief of sore throats for?
open to UK, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, 18 years+
The Competition will run from 9th February 2012 until 19th February 2012 (inclusive).
By the 1980 CPI, inflation is running at closer to 9% right now. So yes, I'm saying inflation has been chugging at a brutal pace the past 12 years. When the CPI was that high back then, Volcker had to take extreme measures to tame inflation. When inflation was 3% to 4% in 1970/1971, Nixon installed price and wage controls. Now when it's much higher on our new CPI, we don't even bat an eyelash at the extreme inflation.

You might think, for example, that real estate has gotten cheap? It's up 100% over the last 12 years in real estate disaster zones like Phoenix. How many people have seen their wages climb 100% in the last 12 years? That's pure inflation, as the historical rate of return on real estate is closer to 1% to 2% per year.

You can also blatantly track the huge inflation of the last 12 years in most commodities.

The current Fed CPI, which was altered during the early Clinton years to hide real inflation, says that inflation is around 3%x. It leaves out all sorts of fun inflationary items (because the Fed says they're volatile, har har).
Hopefully you've learned your lesson and no longer engage in genocide.
Had an awesome time, great people, really well put together. Looking forward to the next one.
At this rate, this adventure game will also be ported to MS-DOS
Indeed providing the option to learn a foreign language to our children is valuable.

Though for me what did five years of French class do for me? I would have preferred spending that time learning a skill that would help me later in life.
The front-end interviews are a mix of front-end focused interviewers and gen-eng interviewers (usually 3 & 2, respectively). That's because the frontend-SWE position involves writing JS/HTML/CSS to run in a browser, but it also involves writing the server code that generates that JS/HTML/CSS (same reason that Java or C++ is part of the job req). We care very much about efficiency when your code runs on tens of thousands of servers.

There are also a bunch of algorithmic questions that come up in the browser as well, because unlike a lot of sites, Google actually cares about latency. You often can't use a library function if it involves pulling in a 300K library, nor can you write an O(n^2) algorithm if it involves locking up the browser.
Funny headline allusion error. It was a nice surprise to see that they were 100% funded in just 8 hours. I guess Notch's push made a big difference.
What Happens In Your Body When You Eat Ramen And Gatorade
It's Warren Buffett, man. Perhaps he invests (long-term) in stocks because he believes what he writes, rather than writes what he does because he just happens to be invested in stocks. You really think there should be a disclaimer here?
Yeah, it was a pretty ridiculous suit. The die maker sued the design shop, which happened to be that die maker's only design shop. The die maker went out of business before it got to court when my dad's firm stopped making designs for them.
> Later on, I reduced another interviewer's search problem to a polynomial equation that had integer roots when a solution existed

well, you can reduce any computable problem to that form

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_Hilbert_problem
I believe you put the time in and I would never doubt your (or anybody else's) capability to optimize a site.

So it was really just me reading something between the lines that is not there, or the post sounded like "the site was down when I published something... it kept on for several months... then I installed this... it was still slow... then I installed that...".

There's absolutely nothing wrong with outsourcing your blog. It just didn't seem justified.
Stock indexes are more like: heads you gain 10% (average year), tails you lose 50% (every 5-10 years).
This presumes that all 24/7 startups are working 24/7 because of the "swinging for the fences" idea - because they need to rush to build something before someone else does - and that they aren't doing so because they think it's the only way to work.

While some 24/7 startups are 24/7 because of a true need, surely some amount must also think they need to work in perpetual crunch mode because "that's just how startups work"
"I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."
value(canned food) > value(bullets) > value(gold)
From my response to this comment on the blog:

If "swinging for the fences" requires 24/7 work, chances are you're not focused enough, not validating your ideas fast enough, and from my experience, you're probably wasting a huge amount of your time doing on inefficient work or unnecessary stuff that will be scrapped entirely. That being said, starting small and focused does not eliminate the possibility of building something big.

To build on your baseball analogy-- who wins more games, the team with the most homeruns or the team with the most hits? 37 Signals proves the analogy-- a series of simple, focused, products, that started small and have achieved massive success.
Learn jQuery in 30 Days
We need a new definition of "PC."
Our blog is hosted as part of our general website, and it lives in 4x servers at AWS. Did you ever consider load balancing across 2x512 instances rather than 1x1024mb server? We considered options like outsourcing the hosting of elements of the sales site, however its just part of our standard build and in reality i don't see any major issues with load balancing a WordPress blog.

Your main bottle neck once your WordPress blog is under load will become your DB, but if that's your problem you're probably doing something else very right (so congrats?)
They should probably test twitter bootstrap as many folks will use this with bootstrap. Unfortunately bootstrap compile fails.
"2.65 GPA on a 4.0 scale" at Homestead High School . What a boss.
123exchanges.com Launches Online Payment Gateway via PayPal
And the then that goes into a 'packet' which gets sent to a hiring commitee where a different bunch of people read it (and the notes of everyone else) and they they decide if you are going to move forward in the process.

Doesn't most of the personality of the person get lost in this setup? I mean, hiring people purely on technical merits may sound fine, but I'm not sure if that makes for a very pleasant working environment.
Bah, "We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts." Is still a non-apology. We're sorry that YOU feel this way. Not, we're sorry that WE screwed up.
I'd argue any content software that doesn't automatically provide a complete page cache is incomplete.
I don't really see the problem with a simple NDA.

Them: We're going to tell you secret stuff during the interview. Promise not to blab?
Me: Yeah, sure.

As far as non-competes and IP-assignment, from what I've seen these have gotten much more reasonable over the past 15 years. If you write or invent it on the job, it's a "work for hire" and the company owns it. What's wrong with that?

If you don't want to sign, that's fine. But there are probably 400 to 1000 other people interested in that open position, and 99% of them are going to sign the NDA.

Them: Please sign this NDA.
You: No, I don't sign NDAs.
Them (looking at the next guy in line): NEXT!
Also:

In Chicago, we desperately need a battery that can make it through a morning commute when it is 15 below zero.
If I understand you have $100k burning a hole in your pocket and you want to use it to fund a start-up in some way. If you want a riskier way but more input and ownership, you can post on angel list. You can post on HN for potential start-ups that need funding. You can invest in many project on kickstarter and spread the risk. Also, I personally have several niche start-ups that could use funding and man-hours to move a little faster.
Show HN: My weekend project - A handy little checklist webapp
Why gay-friendly firms do well
You can work relaxed hours while testing hypotheses, building MVPs, interviewing prospective customers.

Once you've got to product-market fit, it becomes drug-like addiction. It's too much fun to give it up for something else.
He comes out and says they hired him for marketing...
Facebook doesn't run on plain old PHP, it's compiled with HPHP into "highly optimized" C++
You can always have buyers purchase a bundle of credits and then pay for favors with their credits.
Buffett is great at picking stocks. The problem with his statement is that he is a professional stock investor but we mere mortals are not. We have our busy lives other than watching the market. For us, the correct strategy is to do balanced portfolio with 50/50 :: stock/bond, or some other ratio.
Competitor for Dropbox and co. Google to launch cloud drive service says WSJ
To me, the best counterpoint to Arrington's remarks is to understand where he's coming from. He's a blogger/journalist & VC. The biggest dreamers and swing-for-the-fencers make the best stories / investments.

Of course, the journalist has it even better: He gets good copy when the home-run hitter swings and misses. :)
The changes that accrue over millenia all happen in some 100 year stretch.

My point is that looking at the last 100 years, by definition, will overlook times of revolution and change that certainly have happened and will likely continue to happen.
How is that an 'image thing'? He's a professional programmer and SEO consultant. It's not an 'image thing'. It's a basic 'this is my job, why isn't it working' thing. That it's still such a pita in this day and age that you need professional keeper-uppers because it's so opaque and complicated that web programmers have no real clue what we're supposed to do is all a bit odd.

Taking your analogy it's is more akin to the tills in the store keep crashing in the middle of the lunchtime rush.

You can walk around and tell you customers it's the till software suppliers, but in the end it just reflects badly on you. Or you can follow your suggestion and get out a pad, a pen and a calculator and write out their bill. Neither is a good solution.