skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree (especially with the last sentence), I would point out that the engineering behind these problems is rarely black and white, and hindsight tends to make it look more so than it is.

I do not believe that if someone knew with 100% certainty that Challenger would blow up that it would ever have launched. The trouble came in in the judgment of that risk. In this case, from what I've read, they got it wrong - very wrong[1].

You can argue about how certain they have to be, or how negligent people were to ignore estimated failure probabilities of whatever magnitude. But it's not like someone says, "this will blow up 85% of the time, period. Make a call." It's more subtle, complex, and less concrete than that.

1. Note that this is not equavlent to "if it blew up, they got it wrong.". Sometimes the small, properly calculated risk blows up on you just because you're unlucky - which is different from a miscalculated risk blowing up on you.
There are plenty of ways to calculate the value of a clean atmosphere, though I agree that a good calculation is difficult, and the question of who should pay for it and how isn't easy either (but more of an ethics-politics question than the value itself).

I disagree that we'd be better off if they assumed the value was infinite. Under that calculus, anything that might possibly impact the atmosphere would be banned: things like energy generation of nearly any form, which most reasonable people would agree is of positive benefit.

There is a value to it, that value is hard to calculate, but unfortunately, 0 is much closer to the real value than infinity.
Look at this graph: http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/GL...

Is that the sign of an investment that keeps growing in value steadily across the ages or merely the sign of a speculative bubble about to burst? Hint: look at the late 70s as well.
Is that really a fair comparison? Soda literally is just sugar water. Google provides lots of really good and useful products that people genuinely depend on and they push technology forward.
FBI releases background investigation on Steve Jobs from 1991
Yes, they should. However, I think they should hire doctors of education in the same way they're hiring engineers: the engineers are creating the technical infrastructure to deliver lessons, and the educators should be creating the pedagogical standards and informing the engineers about what kinds of tools to create.
>Gold is up 87 fold over 90 years or so. There is no way to capture that kind of return out of stocks, other than to buy one stock

$1 in gold 90 years ago: $87 today (by your number anyway)

$1 in a basket of stocks that were traded to match the DOW starting 90 years ago: $174 today (from the article's numbers)

Keep in mind this includes the recent 5 year period where gold has shot up and stocks have performed miserably. If we picked different dates, gold would be even further behind.
The American Beer Revival
The alternative – no prefixes – is even more horrible. That would be chaos and disaster.

Webkit’s might is the problem here. Dropping prefixes without having some alternative solution in place is definitely not the solution. That’s why it’s a hard problem.
Nice point-blank statement there buddy. The problem is the chronic pot use, not the fact that his partner is a family or friend...
I probably wont do that, but maybe updating the selector would allow for more form elements to be used (if somebody wanted to use it for more than just textareas)

textarea[data-save-id]

to

form *[data-save-id]

I dont even know if that is a valid sizzle selector though
I'm so confused why I would use that rather than http://incident57.com/less/

Thoughts?
I wish we saw some specifics of those tweaks-to-the-limit. This post is vague and advertisey IMO. It reads to me as "I might be throwing money out of the window, but I'm fed up with dealing with a critical part of my online presence."

Shouldn't switching to Nginx be the very first step? Enabling gzip the second, copying assets to a CDN the third? 1024 Mb is a plenty of RAM to keep every post in memory, too.

If you have the resources to outsource non-critical parts of your business, good for you.
New Revenue Stream for ATM and Vending Machine Owners
I remember coming across a group of other students who were getting into a argument about a tricky calculation required for a chemical analysis pre-lab. After this had gone back and forth for maybe 5 minutes, I pulled out my laptop and settled it in about 15 seconds, which was pretty fun.
How to Add Google Analytics Page Tracking to Your Backbone.js App
Because Windows ヽ( ｡ ヮﾟ)ノ
Juan Enriquez at Solve for X - Harnessing Synthetic Genetics
I found yr.no visually appealing and easier on the eyes, but I found WeatherSpark more informative. WeatherSpark allows me to put other stuff on the graph, such as humidity. If there's an option to do that at yr.no, I missed. I also prefer being able to see the exact values right there on the graph, instead of having to look them up in a table. Just my personal preferences.
Tree Collection
"I love being out of the hosting business."

I can totally understand that feeling. I was in a similar situation a year and a half ago and not having to fear incoming SMS (hello your server is down...) is a bliss.
Coding syntactically correct code on a whiteboard is a waste of time. Drawing pictures, diagrams, and pseudocode while trying to solve a problem with others is a great way to get collaborative work done.
For that matter I bet there's an awful lot of science that goes into that bottle of Pepsi in your fridge. Everything from the chemical formulation of the sweeteners and preservatives, to the purification of water, to the design of the bottles for maximum strength per gram of plastic. And then there's the whole organization of the distribution channels and salesmen to get Pepsi product into every restaurant and convenience store in the entire world.
wow it's hard to post 'text' on a 'website'
I enjoyed reading this. Sometimes I watch too many cop shows and think that I want to become a detective. Then I read reports like this, and realize that 99% of police work is producing reports like this one. You may get to interview the occasional reference, but you're probably not going to be getting into many gunfights.

I feel mislead by fictional television programs :)
DHH seems to have gotten plenty "filthy rich" hitting singles: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/racing

People who swing for the fences generally fly out to shallow center. You can score lots of runs hitting single after single after single.
W3c homepage doesn't pass its own validation test
Man, you'll never be able to convince gold bugs it's a bad idea.

Shit's just too shiny.
Gold per ounce

1968 $39.31
2012 $1,750.00 (current price give or take)

http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf

Berkshire Hathaway one share

1968 $36.00
2012 $118,000.00 (current price give or take)

http://allfinancialmatters.com/2008/04/02/a-look-at-berkshir...

Which would you rather invest in?
>The HR rep sent over an email with some guidelines and things to brush up on which included comp sci 101 things such as sorting algos, hash tables, binary trees and so on.

Does your NDA allow you to post these guidelines? Is so, please do.
But the app would need to contain the salt in order to send it to Path's servers hashed and salted. So a hacker could decompile the app to determine the salt.
tell him that his pot use needs to be brought into moderation. you will not disavow him over pot, you know better, but your side project will most likely come to a halt as it is not entirely in your interest to maintain these stressful encounters when you don't really need to. And he is obviously more interested in his pot right now. the best bet would be to start painting him mental images of what his life will look like 10 years down the road, and to consider the real levels of remorse and regret he may feel if he does not take a slightly more serious approach to life and his future.
I think it is more the desire to have an impact. Seriously as you get older and interact with more and more people you see the choices and opportunities that lead them to the current space-time co-ordinates. And you get a little bit sad sometimes that folks who could have been great have become de-railed due to some addressable issue into crime, or poverty, or drug addiction.

It is hard to sit at a company working really hard to fill jobs and to listen to all the folks who are out of work but not qualified for your jobs. Its hard to listen to the stories of good, decent people who work hard and are certainly capable, unable to break the chains of poverty because they can't both get an education and stay off the streets. Its hard to listen to young people, now young adults, who suddenly realize that it wasn't learning they hated it was the school and now they are trying to make it as adults without a solid foundation.

KA is has three things going for it, the founder is passionate about the cause (so its not going to sell itself suddenly), the technological sub-pieces have finally come into existence across a critical mass, the availability of 'self funded' (which is to say folks who no longer have to work if they don't want to) individuals to volunteer efforts for it.

So being remembered for lifting some fraction of the world (no matter how small) out of poverty by providing educational opportunities, or being remembered as someone who worked at one of the companies that formed the Web as we know it. Easy choice.
I don't know, Patrick, it really seems like a lot of pain and suffering you went though for nothing.

Perhaps if you added your actual volume numbers to your entry it would help the conversation? I have several sites on various platforms, and I'm currently running over 160K visits per month across all of them. It's not unusual to have 10K visitors from HN drop by on any given day. I haven't had any problem with WP. Of course, I don't really check it. It just works.

I hate to sound non-caring, but is it really a problem if ten people come by your blog at 3am and can't load the site up? They'll be back at 4am, and the site will be fine then. Do you really need 99.999 uptime on a blog? It's all a numbers game. If you lose 2% of visitors due to technical problems it shouldn't be a huge deal. Just take a look at your funnel and conversion numbers and do the math. There's no way that damage is going to come out to $2500 per year.

On a personal note, what I find is that there are a huge number of opportunities for my startups to accrue costs that don't justify the benefit. It's tough figuring out what to spend money on. Things like hosting or tools have to pull their own weight.

ADD: There are a lot of companies that made huge amounts of money leveraging free blogging services. Not my cup of tea, but it does provide a bit of context.
People often assume that clearance is only given out in rare circumstances. It's surprising how easy it is to be told you need it and often when you're dealing with certain agencies it's easier for them to make sure you get it so that if they say the wrong thing then they're covered by your arrangements too.
Piracy is also a culture
No problem, it's often hard to find the thing you want, so you just build it. Thanks for sharing and helping others!

However, I would say, that for 4kb (minified), sisyphus offers a lot of functionality - and is supposedly cross-browser compatible. If you want to limit it to textareas only, it's not much of a modification.

Anyway, just thought I'd point out an alternative, and thanks again for sharing your work!
Unless you expect to be in the blog software business this is the first step down a dark path into the abyss.

It always starts as a "Hey, I can just have this static page". Then, "...well I just need this simple feature, and I've been wanting to learn node.js anyways..."
If someone raped you and then paid you the then-prevailing rate for a whore, does that make it not rape?

What makes an exchange stealing is the involuntary aspect.
I'll mention that we're still hiring for both full-timers and interns. Here's the job post:

Our mission is to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We already have millions of students learning every month, and we're growing quickly.

Our students answer over 2 million math exercise problems per day, all generated by our open source exercise generation framework (http://github.com/khan/khan-exercises, http://ejohn.org/blog/khan-exercise-rewrite/), and Sal's videos have been viewed over 117 million times. We're just getting started feeding this data we're collecting back into the product to help our users learn more (http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac...). If you're interested in data, analytics, and education, this is a dream gig.

Plus, it's one of the highest educational impact positions you can imagine. We're hiring all types of devs -- mobile, frontend, backend, whatever you want to call yourself. Big plans ahead.

http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs
I highly doubt they're proceeding in the dark. While they may not have teachers on staff, I'm sure they're consulting with the brightest minds at the best universities to develop optimal delivery.
It's kind of a big deal that you pick the right algorithm. From what I can gather, the interviewer didn't care what algorithm was used, as long as the candidate could implement it.

This is kind of silly, and the candidate decided to be a smart-ass and rub it in by demonstrating a really bad algorithm.

They should ask "well, what do you think the trade-off should be? Given that, what's the best algorithm you know for this set of trade-offs?".

Interviewing is hard to get right, because it's confrontational. Bad candidates want to fool you. Looking at the total system, the best bang for your buck is getting better candidates to apply. I've met very few managers who do anything other than a piss-weak job at getting good resumes onto their desk. They often throw a rough job description to a some liberal ars major in HR, who puts the ads up then tries to prune down the candidates who's buzzwords don't match the requirements.
Once upon a time I was working with a psychologist who wanted me to do a take-home exercise. Knowing that I was a software developer and an excellent typist, she insisted that I perform the exercise while writing by hand. She said that it was because I would be using a different part of my brain when handwriting than if I were typing.

Which brings us back to the whiteboard interview. I ask: If I am correctly interpreting what the psychologist said, why force interview candidates to use their brains differently than they normally would while coding?
What you say may be true, but it's no indicator (at all) of a weakness or invalidity in the book's message.

Just look at any book that advocates healthy eating as a way to lose weight and be healthy.

That's why the saying "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" exists.
Grammar is the future. Learn about sentences.
Well, combinging ads and educational content is a whole new area.
Does commissioning a custom supercar not count as filthy rich? What can Mark Zuckerberg buy that Jason Fried and DHH cannot? The big difference is that 37signals didn't make a bunch of VCs filthy rich, just themselves.

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/07/pagani-zonda-hh-commissio...
I thought I was fairly explicit: I previously had nginx proxying to Apache2, using WPSuperCache and a few rewriting rules to serve all static content and the vast majority of pageviews without hitting Apache. Cache headers were set and quite generous, static content was split over multiple subdomains (and served directly by Nginx). I had manually edited the WordPress theme to fix inefficencies with how they bundled CSS and Javascript. Gzip on, images crunched when I remembered to do so, yadda yadda yadda. (A lot of this work had to be repeated every time I switched themes, so I'm not entirely sure it was all up on the most recent one, but I've done it three times at least.)

Trust me: I put probably high four figures of engineering time into solving this problem "for free."
I'm in the process of negotiating for an engineering job with Google now and it's been extremely difficult to get any information about what positions they're actually hiring for. When I was there for the interview there was very little time for me to ask any questions about what the teams actually do and what I might be doing if I joined. This is very different from every other interview I've had before where I'm talking to the team members I would be working with.

Later, after talking with an engineering manager and getting agreement to be assigned to one team, they tell me I'll be working for some other team as if our conversation never happened. It's almost as if the attitude is that I should be lucky to have been offered a job and I should be happy with whatever I'm given.
Not exactly. If you're asking as a skilled money manager or investor, I'll give you X advice. If you're asking what I think the average Joe should do (someone with limited time and skill when it comes to money management), I'll give you Z advice. A lot of it depends on how hard you're willing to work to protect and grow your wealth.

If the market is near 13k like it is today, with corporate profit margins at all time highs (cyclically impossible that they'll stay up there), I'd say you should be out of the market. Corporations are accumulating debt at the fastest pace in history (which is one of the reasons they're also hoarding cash, as an offset). When rates spike higher as they eventually must, those companies will get demolished. Far better to wait for the next plunge and be opportunistic, than to hope for a few more points on top of this already huge several year run. Buffett's mantra works very well in that case: be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.

Buy gold on big drops, like when it fell from $1900x to $1530x recently; but never chase it when it runs. Keep it a modest part of your portfolio (10% to 25% depending on your particularly preferences). It's not a growth vehicle, it's a wealth protection device.

Corporate debt is a great place to get good yield right now, but again you have to know what you're buying.

It's perfectly fine to take an annual hit on inflation against liquid dollars (granted that's under, say, 10%); better to have opportunity cash available. Typically people miss big opportunities because of a lack of cash. Really big opportunities are not that rare, they come around every 3 to 5 years, and the returns you can make off of them are extraordinary. You buy the Dow at 7,000 when everybody else is writhing in pain from the ride down from 14k.

Own commodities when they're occasionally cheap. For example, when potash crashed during the global implosion a few years ago, you could have purchased stocks like POT for 80% off. When oil was $10 or $12 circa the late 1990s, the common 'wisdom' was that oil was dead, a terrible investment, and so on. In reality, cheap energy is almost never a terrible long term invest. The human desire / need for cheap energy will continue to be infinite, which ensures that prices will swing up at some point (even if it takes several years).

Right now, I'd tell most people to look around themselves and invest there. Get a strategically better education perhaps; or find a good business to purchase or invest into. Something you can directly apply your sweat equity to with multiplication potential. Shield your wealth until you find the right opportunities; people seem to often undervalue patience. You don't need lots of homeruns, you need very few.

In this environment, it's all about having liquidity to be opportunistic. The volatility in the global economy is almost guaranteed to produce wild swings over time. When people panic, be there with your cash.
> Now just think how awesome you would be if you had learned how to code when you were seven years old.

I started learning at 8 so another year wouldnt've done much.

In regards to the program this is really cool. I've been trying to teach my younger brother how to code to help him in his math classes at school. If you can break a math problem down far enough to be able to build a calculator for it, you must understand it, which is in fact why I started to learn to code so young.
Having a luxury brand and affordable products is not mutually exclusive. Many car manufacturers function this way. Just an example:

Audi cars are nice, but ultimately nothing special. Anybody can own an Audi, because the cheaper ones aren't that expensive. That doesn't prevent them from having the R8, though, which at $130,000 is purely a luxury sports car. Everybody who sees an R8 knows that whoever owns it is probably a millionaire. The fact that there are cheaper Audis doesn't minimize the value of the luxury model. The luxury brand essentially becomes "R8," not "Audi."

Other examples: Mercedes and the McLaren SLR, BMW and the i8 supercar. Ford and the Ford GT. So can it be with Tesla and the Tesla Roadster.
You talk like the price of gold has never gone down or been stagnant for decades at a time. How much of that 87 fold is due to the last decade?
If he's the first employee, doesn't that mean he helped create the Google search engine, and thus changed the world? I think that's a lot closer to the truth than what you're implying. I don't think Google started worrying about advertising until years later.
i hear stories like this a lot. serious question... why does Google ask standard comp sci questions when interviewing for front-end developers?

in over 10 years of front-end development for non-trivial business applications, i have yet to encounter a scenario where ignorance of bubble sort prevented me from doing my job well.

i can tell you what i value when interviewing a front-end developer - in depth knowledge of cross browser quirks and coding techniques to address said quirks (sans jQuery). someone who can tell me what OOCSS is and why it's beneficial. someone who values every pixel, http request, and div like it was their last and uses them wisely.

i don't discount the value of standard comp sci knowledge, but i get rage face if someone judges my skill as a front-end developer based on how well i answer those types of questions

lastly, ever view source of any Google app? that tells me all i need to know about their idea of a front-end development
> Khan said that they are currently working on a platform
> to make it easier for anyone to add things to KhanAcademy

That strategy appears to ignore what made KA as successful as it is -- quality content. His 10 minute lessons on, say, calculus are genuinely well-made and effective; not too rigorous, but helpful and to the point. If they fully open up, KA becomes YouTube with exercises.

Not what I find exciting about KA. Educational standards should be enforced, which necessitates the hiring of educators. I'd be disappointed if Khan falls into the good ol' Silicon Valley trap: believing that it's all about technology and platforms.
The web is not some inalienable right handed down from God for the betterment of humanity.
Yes, that's why I feel sad when the people who meaningfully brought us the web get sued by people who didn't.
Recent KA hires have included:

Beth Harris and Steven Zucker (http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/)

Vi Hart (http://www.youtube.com/user/vihart)

Brit Cruise (http://www.youtube.com/user/ArtOfTheProblem)
The Senate’s SOPA Counterattack?
This is the most sensible reply here.

I code in a variety of languages and every time I use .indexOf(), I can't remember if it's (needle, haystack) or (haystack, needle). Of course, my IDE shows me the correct way and I go with it in 0.3 seconds.

On a whiteboard, if I were marked down for getting that the "wrong", I don't think I'd like to work for those kind of people anyway. I have no interest in memorizing the exact syntax of every standard library call in every language. When I can look it up almost instantaneously, my mental efforts are best spent elsewhere.