skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the greatest coups corporatism can pull in modern times is to get a patent on something and then get the government to mandate its use and restrict all substitutes. Its 100%, grade A, screw society, corporate win.
Considering that people still type www even when asked to go to an IP address, I'm not sure this would have changed anything in regards to non-technicals' understanding of how the internet works.
How could someone answer this question? I think you should elaborate on what you are looking for.
I link to that page in my story. I tried to interview Buxton but Microsoft's PR people turned me down.
Frankly, if you can stretch your degree into an additional year or take summer classes, do it. My primary regret from university (May 2011) is that I graduated in 3.5 years.

On the one hand, I had no debt. On the other hand, crunching my requirements down that way meant that I often had scheduling conflicts with interesting but non-mandatory courses like Cryptography, Networking, Computer Graphics, Robotics, Philosophy, and Sci-Fi Films.
I'm pretty sure I didn't say "the iPhone was just a copy."
Creating Responsive HTML5 Touch Interfaces
On top of that, it's perfectly possible to learn without ever having made a mistake in the first place! I've learned plenty of things perfectly the first time, and didn't need a mistake to lock it in.

So mistakes are only half the key to learning.
My Palm Treo was the original smartphone. Blackberry, iPhone, and everyone else stole from that.

No wonder Apple has never sued Palm, or now HP who owns all the IP. Palm had half the iPhone probably patented lol.
Cox Interactive Media. The division doesn't exist anymore. At the time it ran the web sites for the media properties (newspapers, TVs, radio stations). http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com...
What professions do you speak of? I know many (recent graduate) lawyers, doctors and dentists who are all bogged down by loans. For lawyers, making partner seems to be the main road to riches. But that's a lottery. A dentist I know has taken on even more loans to start his own practice. Piling more debt on top of a sizable one seems sheer insanity to me. But perhaps that's just the risk one has to take these days.
"The dirty little secret that I don’t mind saying is that software development isn’t hard. There’s lots of handbooks, manuals, blog entries and Stack Overflow Q&A pages out there that very clearly describe how to work with any development language or tool. Follow it step by step and you are a software developer."

Great, yet another article continuing the tradition of thinking software development is an easy discipline, but it's our mindset that makes us special.

Good luck developing anything mission critical with a team of low paid googlers.

One day even people in our profession might come to actually have some self-respect for what we do. Software development is a hard and challenging discipline - to trivialize it by pointing at guide-books and Q&A forums just demonstrates a total lack of understanding for what we do.
Then it seems like you're not really rewriting as Joel defines it, you're launching a new product (it does new things, and it doesn't replace the old one). I guess it then becomes a question of effort spent in cannibalizing your own product vs. the income the new version brings, which is a very different equation for Basecamp and the products Joel talks about.
You can go look it up on wikipeadia; but in summary, the battery relies on a chemical reaction to produce electricity. After a certain discharge point, the chemical reaction is irreversibly changed, and can no longer be recharged.
Having a Bsc in psychology, I can remember that this was one of those concepts that I picked up from my classrooms and have used for myself. I believe that you could expand on this and say something similar about your athletic abilities. Being from Canada, I've played a lot of hockey and would be told that I was quite good. Having that thought in my head stagnated my ability as a player. It would be mean that when I had a bad game, I would question put blame on other factors and not myself. After reading this article, it made me realize that my self-perception about being a good hockey player was not a good way of seeing myself. After having a bad game, I shouldn't feel bad but rather I focus on finding a way to improve my weaknesses.
We did precisely the same thing at our company about 18 months ago. Our original codebase just couldn't scale. It was a great MVP platform, and we learned a great deal from it, but it simply couldn't handle load, sophisticated billing options, or any reasonable expansion of the product functionality.

That said, we left the new and old systems running in parallel (all new users were directed to the new platform) for over a year before we even informed users we were shutting it off, then gave them another six months to migrate. And we never purged the old data; it's in cold storage in case someone ever comes looking for it.

Rewriting the codebase isn't something you should take lightly, but "never" is pretty damn strong word.
Start asking me about B-tree algorithms and my eyes will glaze over.
However you can go and look inside my MySQL database tables and you will see a beautiful relational database. I enjoy computers/programming because going back as far as I can remember I have never run across a problem that I could not figure out with enough gray matter time. I really enjoy making stuff and solving problems, I used to do all of my math homework in my head and then have to go back and write out the solutions (for the teacher to check) just because I enjoyed solving the problem step by step.

TLDR: I build stuff, it works and I smile.
Sure, and the web couldn't have existed w/o the Internet before it, which took many years to get to where it was in 1991. But it is definitely the Internet's killer app.
Data Blackholes - Wake up before it is too late
6 things you should do if you just lost your biggest customer
I'm a computer guy who loves his work a lot! That said, I do have to eat and I do need to retire some day. That is certainly not the purpose of my life but it is kinda necessary. I've also done the numbers on how much I need to retire and it doesn't look good.
I don't think you need a detailed 50 page plan, but you need a general idea of your short-term and long-term goals and most importantly, how you are actually going to make money. I find that this is important because without a list, it's very easy to veer off the path and start going in wacky directions, which can lead to your company never getting off the ground or releasing a new product, etc (this has been my mistake for years)

Many software startups start out as something cool and then the owners scramble to find a business model. If you want a better chance at success, figure this out in the beginning and then mold your cool idea to your business model.
Actually, I'd say the #1 thing not to ask me in an interview is "What is your passion?".

Did you really want to hear about my time between the sheets with my wife? No.

Did you really want to hear about my love of outdoor Humans vs Zombies games, or the different kinds of Munchkin games? No.

You probably wanted to hear about my work as a hobbyist Computer Science researcher, but I don't want to tell you about that. You would understand half of it and then decide that I'm a grad-school egghead who doesn't belong at your company.

Luckily, I applied to graduate school this year.
Alternately, just realize that the rectangular strip of paper has a natural set of coordinates, and nothing is lost by twisting and taping. You get a discontinuity at the tape, but that's not a problem.
Of course you can shop around for a doctor who will diagnose and prescribe what you want. All you have to do is find someone who will completely disregard medical ethics in the name of being paid to give you expensive happy pills.
> Satire ...

The heading on the page "geek humor and other drivel" was also something of a hint.
Show HN: A Chrome plugin that injects Twitter bootstrap into any page
Appeals Court Says Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop
Far beyond, in fact. The moon landing, though cool and awesome, really didn't lead to much in the way of technological advancement or societal change. certainly not as much as the web, at any rate.
For a software product sold on an app store, the icon is probably the most significant individual piece of branding and marketing work there is. Hence I assume that nobody changes the icon just for kicks, and I was curious to know why they decided on this change.

Isn't discussing a product's marketing strategy completely ordinary on HN? Why complain about it?
"Can you imagine George Washington or Thomas Jefferson
going to the airport and saying, `Go ahead and stick
your hand down my pants. I need to get where I'm
going'?" Ivory contends that Americans are slowly
being conditioned to "just submit" to the feds. "Our
liberties are being conditioned away," he told the
Deseret News.

I have mixed feelings about that lead-in argument. I agree with it in the sense that I am painfully aware of the erosion of liberties and rights. I donate heavily to the ACLU and EFF for that exact reason.

On the other hand, the hypothetical George Washington and Thomas Jefferson quoted are just about right. How early, exactly, should I leave for my flight in order to stand up for my rights and still get where I need to go? Even an Alaskan Representative was barred from her flight. And I, lowly non-lobbyist-wielding citizen, stand what chance?
Say, you gave you two papers each with a column of numbers and an empty one for the result, and ask me to process them in the manner given. I would place them side by side, move B down a line, C up a line, then add them row by row.

The lining up is a matter of prepending the lists with some border values; then, use map to do the add. Finally, discard the edge cases.
I can't stop thinking about this, but I have real work to do. Do you see what you've done Stripe??? :) It's going to be another long night...
Why replace the places where people have thought to place ads when so much of the world is empty of ads and has plenty of space?
Perhaps you want the Haskell zipWith function? It takes two lists and, instead of zipping them together -- i.e., applying the tuple constructor (,) -- it lets you apply an arbitrary function.

I think from your python, you want the first element of A to be 0? (Python is not my best language.) Thus in Haskell,

a = 0 : zipWith (+) b c
Does anybody remember "Internet in a Box" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box)? I remember back in the day I was so excited to purchase my own browser software. My how things have changed.
[ PDF ] PHP 5 Power Programming - CEH - Saher Team
Hi, just out of curiosity, did you own a smartphone from 96 to the early 2000's?

The Treo was the original smartphone. The orignal smart phone that Blackberry copied was the Treo.

Apple's spin was ditching the keyboard, but by then even the sony ericcson P800 had a full screen phone with a touch keyboard years before apple.

http://www.google.ca/search?&q=sony+ericcson+p800
Fulham vs Queens Park Rangers live streaming online
Fulham vs Queens Park Rangers
Home - Away
Match schedule:
Barclays Premier League
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2012
TIME : 15:00 GMT
LOCATION: Loftus Road
Watch Fulham vs Queens Park Rangers live streaming and also watch
English premier league full season live streaming online. You can
enjoy this game on your PC, So why you miss this exciting race? Get
the best online sports coverage on the net directly on your PC
Pinterest Users Need to Read the Fine Print
The book written establishes a copyright, not a patent.

Bringing this back to technology with an example: Palm synthesized the smart phone and color LCD screen in ~2004. I'm pretty glad all smartphones have color screens today.
Understanding technical debt
DHS's Mark Weatherford on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012
Setting the Record Straight on Google’s Safari Tracking
PACELC[1] helps distinguish just the kind of CAP sacrifice this makes.

[1] http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...
OpenLabel's App Turns Barcodes into Product Reviews
My code-reading leads me to believe that they're using Autocomplete.js in conjuction with the Google Maps API.

.pac-container
.pac-item

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-ma...
Don't Hire- Automate
Meeteor Weekend Hack: Meet the Right People Attending SXSW
I don't find a line in a maintenance manual an effective tool for handling this 40k expense.
> Most languages cannot serialize a closure, though. Lisp is pretty unique there

Perl can also serialise closures using the Data::Dump::Streamer module - https://metacpan.org/module/Data::Dump::Streamer
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800. Like the iPhone, it had no face buttons. It came with a stylus but the OS was much more finger friendly than many of the phones I used after. Then I "upgraded" to a few HTC phones running Windows Mobile that again were all touch screen.
How weird. My iPhone actually loaded the non-print version of the page when I tried to access it.

I actually prefer print links. Bookmarklets like Readable make those articles, well, readable.
According to Wired Magazine, the web is "not hot". People are sick of looking at pictures of your cat.
I appreciated it when I put the marker on my home - I could then clearly imagine what the destruction range is.
Just to add a little on to what you wrote, seems like there's also a part where anything much over 50 MT just blows the rest of the energy out into space, so there seems to be a cap on how big one can be?
Linking to your Windows Store apps on the web
I'm surprised that when accessing data, officers don't have to enter a reason, e.g., "investigating case #3894".
Maintain a Rockin’ Blog for Your Startup
>Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.

Palm was making touchscreen smartphones before iPhone.
Regarding the "A Sane Command Line Interface" topic. Linus mentioned in his talk at Google about Git that he often chose the opposite approach to do things rather than follow the Subversion approach. This might be why the commands are not named the same as Subversion commands.

git add/rm handles making changes to the index and there is no similar concept in mercurial or subversion.
VIA unveils new quad-core mini-ITX design
That's silly. There were more touch-screen smartphone models than non-touch screen models before the iPhone was released. If anything, Apple copied those designs and improved on them.
Comparing the icon to an outhouse is not a discussion on marketing strategy - it is a slight at those that put a lot of thought into the new icon. The new icon is obviously of a much higher quality, and is a good representation of the apps purpose (markers, html5, design feel). I just thought HN would be a place to discuss things over and above personal taste.
Obviously the satirized sysadmin has never read TPOSANA. Automation and consistency are highly regarded in the sysadmin field. I've seen significantly more casual attitudes towards operational needs from the development side of the house.

DevOps was a term created because other titles have been watered down. Any real sysadmin has been automating deployments, updating, backups, and failovers for over a decade now. Don't claim we aren't sysadmins anymore now that it's getting interesting.
Another Piece of the Stuxnet Puzzle
>just a symptom and an effect of the initial cause.

The major problem was that the banks had all that bad debt, not Fannie and Freddie. The government caused Fannie and Freddie to take on a lot of bad debt, but that in no way sank the economy. The stampede for the mortgage securities was all private sector and voluntary.

Saying that Bear Stearns' collapse was a 'symptom' of government policy is the conservative party line, and it's maliciously untrue.
Yes, the author seems to be referring to higher-order functions as "closures".

> Listing 1. The simplest possible closure

> 3.times {puts "Inside the times method."}

that's not the simplest possible anything. it's magical syntactic sugar gone wild.
Successful people attribute almost everything to their own intelligence, willpower or hard work to feel better about themselves. Luck is extremely important for any individual trial - once you get up to a large sample size, sure, your traits will win out - but many people will never reach such a sample size in their entire life.

When I see "fail fast", what I really think is: "increase your sample size".
Dilbert gets a design contract from Samsung
Carrier Ethernet 2 aims for global connectivity
Don't get me wrong, I love closures, but all of these examples are basically as miserable as the "3.times" example.

"Oh, hey! We can replace a for loop doing addition with a fold, with only the added conceptual complexity of ensuring that (+) is an associative operator, and making sure that we don't accidentally blow our stack by unexpectedly recursing too far because we assumed the wrong evaluation order." (Which by the way his example does.)
Jesus Christ, no kidding. That was almost painful to see on here. If anyone is wondering, this is when it's appropriate to hit a thread with a barrage of down votes.
Great idea, great idea...
DyBASE embedded object oriented database
For anyone curious about this expression, especially those who didn't grow up speaking English:

"A thinking man's [noun]" is an expression meaning, "A [noun] that thoughtful, intelligent people will likely appreciate".
You're quite right, but paying the costs of synchronization at a hardware/C level rather than at a Java one defrays the cost of going out of process.
In other words, you will do what 99% of all applicants will do, even the ones that didn't really want the job in the first place: you'll tell the interviewer what you think they want to hear.

The lesson here is: "asking questions" does not equal "having a conversation". No amount of lists, short or long, will result in a good job interview.
Unless you're a really small org, devs and sysadmins have different roles and need to have distinct privileges to prevent them from stepping on each other. The bigger you get, the more important this is.

You have a few things from an internal control POV that you can do to help prevent "bad" things from happening. Examples include: privilege separation, change control, dev/test/prod environments, scripted deployments, automation, etc.

When devs bitch about not having the privileges they need, the biggest issue is usually communication. The SAs work for a different Director, and there is an adversarial relationship. Fix that, and most of your problems go away.
Ten Best Linux Distros For Web Servers
Should Coaches and Teachers Have a PreFlight Checklist?
Why do I sometimes learn faster?

1.) When I've had a decent night's sleep.
2.) When I've made efforts taken to manage stress.
3.) Coffee!!!! (Dyn-a-mit-eh!)
4.) When I'm just in interested in why I made a mistake.
5.) Active presence of mind that I should be focusing on the task at hand.
6.) When I'm interested in the material.
7.) When I don't give a damn how about smart or dumb I might think I am.
8.) Removal of any negative influences at the moment. (PHB)

And most importantly,

9.) When I've exercised that same day.
The rise of the Internet itself was an interesting phenomenon. There were a number of larger networks in place, but the Internet was used by the 'cool kids' (e.g. students and professors).
Usabilla Discover launches and is much more than “Pinterest for designers”
Imagine if, for any given position in a list, there were only 4 values allowed:

A

T

G

C

What is the value of the next item in the list? Pure guessing and you have a 25% chance of being right. But what if a review of past lists allows you to develop weighted averages, to the point where you could be, say, 70% correct? What if there was a way to do multiple scans, such that the chance of correctness gets to be some value of 99.x% ?

Imagine the 4 values stand for:

Adenine

Thymine

Guanine

Cytosine

It seems to me there is here suggested a new way of parsing a genome. I have friends who've worked on automated cancer detection based on recognizing certain patters in photos of cells. Possibly similar techniques could take electron microscope scans and figure out a sequence of DNA?
Mobile Device Security Primer
I like what's on the git part of the table better, and it isn't just familiarity with git but familiarity with unix. I'm glad that since I use git and git-svn, I don't have to type remove and move instead of rm and mv.
The first Windows Mobile phones were just WinMo PDAs with cellular radios in them. So while the iPaq isn't a phone it's the direct predecessor to many of them.
Independent Rails deploys: My experience with Slicehost, AWS, and Heroku
A lot of startups seem to be raising seed rounds in the $1.1M-$1.3M range (a cursory HN search turned up seven in the past few months, links below).

What kind of valuations are they getting? Anybody willing to post anonymously (or otherwise)?

Gumroad $1.1M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3568962

Curebit $1.2M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3520175

RJMetrics $1.2M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419670

Ginzametrics $1.3M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239636

Zoomingo $1.3M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235490

Tealium $1.1M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3447834

Cloudability $1.1M http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395361
Thanks Buzz!!
I believe that the quants actually warned against believing their equations were infallible, but were ignored.
The people who ask what your passion is and are looking to hear that you program for the heck of it are simply trying to cash in. Likely you'll be willing to work longer hours and get paid less then your knowledge is worth because you'll get to work on "exciting and challenging stuff!".

I've met several people who think this is the only way to hire "real" programmers. They never get it when I point out that no other profession operates in this manner.
great stuff Meeteor team!
My story about lucid dreaming and lottery numbers
Meeteor - a must have!
It is a bad thing to have just one command to move files instead of 3? Nah, I don't get it.

That git has different commands than svn is because it is different.
Why should it adopt any of the commands if it does different things?

When I started with git, I never ever destroyed any of the history. Because it's not easy to do so.

I looking forward to read the follow-up article where he wants to point out some advantages of git.
and the event logs messages are so intuitive...
I agree with your above comments except "> via overlay boxes - I don't even." - Why are light boxes bad?

I personally agree with using light boxes, IF they are done right. If the connection speed and browser can easily handle it, why not? But still always having the permalink "/sign-up" (or whatever it is) so you can link to it.

Can you provide more insight on why you are against that? Just curious if I missed the boat on people hating light boxes now? haha
I think this is not only about similarity. For example, branching works with `git branch foo`, but it doesn't immediately switch to that branch. If you want to do this, `git checkout -b foo` is the way to go. While this might make some sense if you understand the details behind git, it is horrible from a user interface perspective. I know a lot of people that didn't know about checkout -b because they never thought about looking there.

Also, some features are half-implemented, for example `git add -p` which does not trigger on file-additions (and sometimes is broke out of the box on some distros).

I like git, but the interface: not so much. Too many rough edges.

The blog post does not illustrate this, though :/.

Update: and for the downvotes, would you care to explain why?
Damn, that's super fast and easy. Very curious to see what shows up in my inbox.
That is a good analogy, thank you. It does seem to produce code that is more difficult to understand, however.