skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to terms with and accommodate that. The first 80% of Instagram is the app and sharing, the next 20% of building the network out is where all the value was created and the majority of development time was invested.

The founders described it as "replacing all the components of a car while driving it at 100mph", and even having worked on projects orders of magnitude smaller (albeit with a considerably more complex datamodel) I can't say I disagree.
Are you forgetting or not aware of security issues with Dropbox where a bug made passwords optional for four hours[1], some people claiming that it's not secure by design [2], and mislead customers about security policies [3]. I don't know how relevant these issues are today, but you're claims make it seem like that have a perfect record.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-p...

[2] http://dereknewton.com/2011/04/dropbox-authentication-static...

[3] http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/2295006...
Linkedin Blog Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army
When we started a product, we agreed to split shares according time spent on the product. For example, I worked about 40 hrs per week (we all had another (main) job initially), but other 3 people worked ~10 hrs per week. So in the end I had higher stake.

If you both work full-time, this strategy will not help. However, you can find a measure of value. Maybe your partner is good at something else, like promotion and marketing. Then you should discuss responsibilities and maybe he can do some smaller features, but will focus on something else. If that will not work, I think you just can't keep work together, that will be a waste of time and a road to failure.
How about reaching out to the original author and outlining the problems that you've been encountering? This way, you can at least give them a chance to respond privately or correct potential misunderstandings with the paper (perhaps publicly).

Similar analogy would be approaching a vendor regarding a security/vulnerability disclosure.
We were just messing with you guys (Causes). ;) You can have your 4sq mayorship back. We initially were trying to enable people to connect based on similar charity interests. It's still available and people still use it. We just broadened the focus.
It's a nice app based on a simple idea. It's worth it.
Interesting, sometimes we underestimate the value of assets that cannot be easily estimate
Introducing the New GitHub Graphs
So is regulation the answer or the cause?
'Nope' is not an argument. Government rules previously forbid kickbacks, a common commercial practice. the rules were changed to remove this restriction. If legislators are corrupt for changing the rules, who is corrupting them? why should they skate? This was clearly a reduction in government interference in the marketplace, and what we've got instead is a situation where the dominant market player uses its commercial power to negotiate long-term exclusive contracts. Nobody in government forced them to issue such contracts or the hospitals to sign them without negotiating the right to purchase competing products.

Lobbying is a problem, but it is NOT illegal. I fully agree with disallowing it. So long as it isn't, those who can will use it.

Then advocate for that instead of putting all the blame on the government, and explain what you're going to fill the campaign finance gap with, or how you'll circumvent existing first amendment precedent. Bribery is one of those dances where it takes two to tango.

Something else that needs to change: Government workers cannot be unionized.

I happen to agree, but this is hopelessly irrelevant to the subject at hand.

In the real world the government workforce should have been cut by at least 25% to 50% and their salaries by another 20%+.

Suprisingly, Obama has cut government more than Reagan [1], and wants to cut it more [2]. Rome was not built in a day and it isn't torn down in a day either. Your argument seems adrift from reality and increasingly resembles mere ranting.

1. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/under-obama-a-r...

2. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/13/news/la-pn-obama-see...
a sum of money that three years ago was a record
quarterly profit is now just the blip between the
(historically strong) holiday quarter and the
(historically weak) January-March quarter.

This is definitely the best quote.

I'm wondering if Apple's mainstream-ness is going to catch up to them soon with the hipster crowd. Then again, the only other major options for consumers are Microsoft-based which are even more mainstream and corporate.
Another fantastic resource is the railscast series (railscasts.com) by Ryan Bates. Each one is short, pithy, and focused at about seven minutes. Whenever I watch one of them, in addition to learning what the particular episode is about, I invariably pick up a cute new rails or ruby idiom. It is like watching over the shoulder of a guru as he writes code.
Anything You Can Do, the Internet Can Do Better
Thanks! But we feel like we are only 1% done. Our team has confidence in what we can accomplish... now it's just a matter of execution and having smart hackers on the team.
What data structure are you using to represent your matrix? A list of lists? If so, it's not terribly difficult:

>>> a = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
>>> b = zip(*map(reversed, reversed(a))
>>> b
[(9, 6, 3), (8, 5, 2), (7, 4, 1)]
>>> reduce(operator.add, b) # could also use a lambda with + instead of operator.add...
(9, 6, 3, 8, 5, 2, 7, 4, 1)
I strongly believe that for hiring purposes, the research
skills of profs should be evaluated on criterion that are
incidental to research. Mostly math, probability,
statistics (yes even for psychology) then methodology
skills and also maybe leadership, communication skills
and dedication to science (last only because it is
difficult to measure).

I like the sentiment, but the problem is that to do good research requires real initiative and creativity. Testing for the skills you listed would filter for people who are skilled, but it doesn't distinguish at all between those who can do new research versus those who are merely good at following instructions from other people.
Sheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30; she doesn't stop working at 5:30 [1]. In that same article it goes to great lengths to talk about how late she stays up working and how early she would start to ensure people didn't think she was a slacker.

[1] http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg...
Pulling Indian Farmers Out of Poverty
Four main points in the veto threat:

1. Protect user privacy, separate intra-government sharing from government/private sharing (troubling because data shared with DHS could possible be shared with NSA or FBI then, even if the company doesn't intend for that data to go to those agencies)
2. More oversight/liability for inappropriate use of these proposed powers; data sharing should not be used to help incumbents crush startups
3. Liability waivers to encourage information sharing go way too far, protects bad behavior
4. Internet is civilian, but bill treats it as military re: intelligence, which is bad
The function lets you specify height/width, passing it through makes some sense. It's also usually (though not in this case) to not hot link--a document can be viewed by thousands of people. There are some privacy issues too, viewing a Google Doc could have your browser making requests to unknown servers that could return whatever they want.
It may not be interesting, but it may be useful to some folks.
Great! Texting LOL to my grandmother suddenly has a whole new meaning. I love it! She often complains her memory is getting old so it works even better!
Is this typical for, say, the software industry there? I wonder if it's the equivalent of non-competes and intellectual property agreements here: ubiquitous enough that most people don't even blink when they are part of an employment contract.
Am I reading this right that if, for example, you're a professional photographer, and you backup your photos on Google Drive, they then have a license to print and distribute your photos without your permission (beyond this EULA)?
Are you monitoring everything you can?
Thanks for pointing that out, my list comes from public sources.
> its interesting that these are not necessarily idiomatic python despite being a slightly higher level abstraction. note they are idiomatic in all "real" functional languages, which python is decidedly not. also list comprehensions are faster than map/filter in python. (this is probably python's fault and is really dumb because you could just implement map/filter as a list comprehension. some people have criticized Guido for some of his design choices.)

I don't miss map/reduce syntax the slightest. List comprehensions (for when I need to read multiple times a list result) and generators expressions (for lazy evaluation and genericity) are incredibly readable and efficient .

Here's an example script[0] I threw in a cron to report on some daily FTP transfers from a legacy system. Those list comprehensions are very descriptive, like a mathematical set syntax. In comparison e.g Ruby's map/inject feels terribly awkward and alien to me. [1] (and [2], although a bit academic) is an invaluable resource on the subject.

[0] https://gist.github.com/2492951

[1] http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/

[2] http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/
What bothers me is that it matters how long someone works in a week. If you are getting payed for a 40 hour work week then you should only work 40 hours a week. If you are getting paid hourly (as I do) who cares as long as stuff is getting done. Some weeks I work 20 hours, some I work 60 it just depends on my workload and mood.

If you want to work 40 hours a week and be done then go for it, good for you. If you want to work 60 hours a week, also good for you. The problem comes with you start judging other people by how long they work, just because someone goes home at 5 every day doesn't mean they don't care about their jobs...
I am aware this is basically a duplicate and was submitted 16 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3815764 plus a related article was submited yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3883202. But neither post generated any discussion at all. I actually tripped across it on Metafilter today.

I find it intriguing in part because he built it while homeless and I am currently homeless. I also find it intriguing in part because the sort of housing that would work best for me and my health issues is more like this small structure and, like this structure, is all but outlawed in the U.S. today. In fact, Tumbleweed houses were put on wheels to circumvent American laws about minimum house sizes. I don't need much space. I need something small, made with a lot of natural materials, which I can keep adequately clean for my needs. That sort of thing is nearly impossible to find and creating it takes more resources/ingenuity/whatever than most people can come up with, let alone most poor people.

I have had a class on homelessness and public policy some years back through SFSU. I think the degree to which we have outlawed small, simple structures is part of why there are so many homeless and a growing divide between rich and poor while the middle class shrinks away into nothingness.

Thoughts?
Wish I could double-upvote you, Paul. Health care has been regulatory-captured for a long time now. (Obligatory blog link to relevant anecdote: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/06/if-we-told-yo... )

I don't know if anybody has read Thomas Kuhn, but this has a parallel in how science works. Science gets "stuck" in one way of thinking. During this time, people work on small details and innovate in tiny ways around the edges. After enough pressure builds up for a change, there's a paradigm shift (he was the guy who coined the phrase) and people start working in the new world.

Complex, rule-based systems of people are mostly quantum by nature. Progress is never a straight line. Instead, it stays frustratingly far away, then it jumps. The stuff you read about in school where everything happened in a linear, step-by-step fashion was just a bowdlerized version of things they tell kids.

Hopefully the system does not require an extreme amount of pressure and our next jump is not too far away. (Apologies to students of Kuhn if I butchered his thesis badly. This is what I got from his work)
Wow I'm a little surprised Apple let this one through! Looks neat!
100 Year Starship Initiative
Having been brought up in the UK, I think this is one of the situations where we look at the rest of the world and think they are quite literally insane...

Why would you not have right of way on public roads? Everyone is a pedestrian at the end of the day!

That said, I found California's drivers surprisingly like those at home.

What is also interesting about the UK is how the laws are balanced.

UK:

- no concept of "jaywalking". Pedestrians have right of way.

- but no vehicular manslaughter/homicide laws. They even removed an old law called "reckless driving" due to being too hard to prove (it required proving state of mind).

- there are only specific offenses while using a vehicle "causing death by dangerous driving", "causing death by careless driving while unfit through alcohol/over prescribed limit" and a few others.
This was really fun to make (jQ + Django-Formsets) and I can do another post writing up how I did it, if anybody is interested in that.
MetaCPAN favourites weekly report - the best Perl modules of the week
It is a well written popular article about his own experiences. A candid honesty about his own failings. The decline effect is humour (and a catchy tagline) rather than attempting to be a testable hypothesis.
If Apple is Olivia Newton John, who's the next Joan Jett
And all software has tons.
You can use map with several iterables:

sum(map(operator.mul, [1,2,3], [3,2,1]))
True, if desktop Linux where to become mainstream you can expect many rogue PPAs containing malware as well as existing trusted repos becoming huge juicy attack targets.
Kanban: Is it in the cards?
Sprint Fights for Mobile Market Relevance: First Quarter Earnings Positive
He WANTS the DHS involved? I'm not sure that's a trade off I'm willing to make. Let's hope the thing just dies.
Do you mean to ask them who I should contact over there, or to learn the language?
Semantically, a meaningful class or id shouldn't always need to be qualified by the element type. There are certainly times when you'd want to, though, if the element type changes the meaning.

E.g., An e-commerce site that displays products in both the main content region and the sidebar. Product names use h1 tags in the main content region and h2 tags in the sidebar. Selectors like h1.product-title and h2.product-title have different meanings, and they're more efficient than the alternative selectors #main .product-title and #sidebar .product-title.

From a performance standpoint, qualifying class and id selectors by the element type is probably less efficient than not qualifying them, so doing it unnecessarily makes the selector longer and more difficult to maintain and decreases performance.
>implying average Apple user can even grasp the concept of Tor
> I just don't understand how a business could be held liable for the behaviour of its employees when they're not at work, especially if there's a brief disclaimer appropriately placed.

Yes fair enough, I agree with that completely.
It's pretty clear to those who watch and take notice. I'm not the only one to have written about this several times in the past, a quick search will turn up several discussions about flags and rankings.

With the continuing popularity of HN the audience has become much more diverse, so it may be that the majority of people here quite simply don't agree with you. On top of that it only takes a few active dissenters to cause items to drop, as said earlier.

So you say "categorically that people LOVE Des' posts." Well, clearly not everyone. And with the range of interests, that's only to be expected.

For what it's worth, I agree that things aren't optimal, but it won't change. So live with it, or build something better.
A cutoff is good, but a triggered alarm would go a long way.

For example in Linode you can configure trigger conditions for CPU (triggers in x% cpu for y time) and Network usage (there are other conditions as well)

Very useful for flagging suspicious activity (or just plain accidents)
Domain Names Aren't Irrelevant, But They May Just Become So
this hacker group is affiliated with Bashar Al Asad regime
It is a great app, but I think Facebook overpaid
Computer-related health problems and solutions
I'm sorry, is this a joke? "straightforward"? Why would you use that code when you could implement the same thing more simply like this?

def line_number_mogrifier(f):
num = 0
for line in f:
yield (num, line)
num += 1

The functional proponents say that eventually everything will be functional, I guess I'll wait and see how that goes over. People think procedurally. Functional constructs may have some technical advantages, but if adopting them shrinks the pool of effective developers, it won't catch on.
I use gevent instead of twisted for event-based python. Gevent is a lot nicer to work with and doesn't make your code less readable in the way twisted does with its callbacks and errbacks. It's also a lot easier to do unit testing with gevent.
Why is apple still successful even without Steve jobs?
Even if noone has it open in a browser? Or they do have it open, but haven't interacted with it?

In either case, this seems odd, unless the URL is especially noted as 'volatile', and/or there are other parts of the spreadsheet that might trigger conditional calculations/notifications based on that URL's contents. (And don't S3 resources have last-modified-dates or etags for conditional GETs?)
There’s another one (Covert Browser) that’s been in the store since November that’s got a few issues (lack of cookie support, lack of POST support) that render a lot of websites useless.

Generally I don’t think this is (on the face) any worse than a regular third-party browser app: Other apps (games are a great example) are free to implement custom communication protocols and there are plenty of unsavory / underground / illicit websites on the regular internet. Tor has a lot of legitimate and illegitimate uses, but that can pretty much be said of web-based communication in general.
I don't think it's from a game. I think the pics are all stand-alone paintings from Mark Ferrari http://www.markferrari.com/ He worked on several classic PC games http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,60...
For me it's the other way around. Reading and understanding others code is easier for me rather developing it from scratch in the beginning. Though now i have improved in the later part.
It's the same old client-server model as it used to be done in 1990'ies. The article feels quite wrong with it's claim "The old client-server model involved doing most of the work on the server side and then piping the results down to a dumb client." - that's not client-server model; client-server development model involves smart clients which we abandoned in the last decade because of concerns about portability, installation problems and version update management. And now the cycle completes once more...
"Hungry Hungry Kobayashi" II: Debugging a Distributed Datastore via the Network
Wow, they have a huge, annoying flash video on the bottom left. Good that I use FlashBlock.
I have actually kept most of the original data since I started so I could go back and do that if I wanted. There is about 4gb of raw data there.
It was over blown that Steve is what apple is about
This is a huge improvement - especially the Contributors chart is plain awesome and they finally load fast. On the other hand I still don't see any sense in the Punchcard.
As an entrepreneur/freelancer, I don't have a lot of firsthand experience with Finnish labor laws, but my impression is that in practice such limitations apply mostly to manual laborers in bigger corporations.

Going by the book, the labor laws also allow for paid overtime (up to 2x salary), but that is limited no more 138h per 4 month period, or approximately 8h per week. And even then the employee can decline.

But that's if we go by the book...

Many of my friends working in specialist jobs across various industries regularly work overtime, often without compensation. I guess they could technically decline but if your plan is career progression that might not be a smart move outside unionized workforces.
You might, if every one of those hours was spent perfecting your craft. For most of us, a lot of what we do at work is diluted by secondary tasks - meetings are the most common scapegoat.
I don't know about staff closer to Sheryl (ie, not in e), but there are definitely many software and other engineers working 40-45 hours a week fairly standardly, and I seemingly don't hear enough negative chatter about it for me to recall hearing any.
Cloud providers found to be leaking data cross-customer via dirty disks
SIRv12: The obstinacy of Conficker
Awesome article. I think Facebook did the correct move, otherwise, other big tech company would have acquired Instagram instead.
That is due to the cloudflare service. You can actually leave a note, I do follow up on those.

Edit: It's a good thing I'm using that too, 108K hits from this in the last four hours. CloudFlare saved my site from 800k requests and 6GB in bandwidth.
The Word Processor That Did Not Launch With Apple Macintosh
Actually, most of this "Linux does not have stable ABI" was maybe true 10 years ago.

In general you are going to have mostly same compatibility problems as on Windows with mostly same solution for proprietary software: package known versions of your dependencies together with your application. When done in this way, distributing of binary-only software for Linux is often even easier than on windows, because you don't have to deal with windows-specific ABI compatibility issues (like multiple instances of C runtime in same address space or interactions between SEH and C++ exceptions)
Thanks twoodfin, and point taken. "Science education has no value in Tennessee" is of course hyperbole too. I tried to clarify these with the last paragraph ("I know that Tennesseans really do value science...") with debatable success.

I disagree that the bill is merely a "mild bit of meddling," but I'll remember your admonition about civil debate when writing missives in the future.
Would you say that if I write a colour cycling program and run it in dosbox, it isn't real colour cycling because it is being emulated?
First examples of generators that I've seen that made them look useful. I'd never thought of using a generator as a filter, or for turning nested for-loops into one for-loop. I have some code I can go clean up now.
I've used bugger since the first of the Austin Powers movies. My friends and I used it until one of them married a South African girl and she made us stop being as it was incredibly impolite and rude apparently. I started again last year after watching Top Gear and then recently got yelled at by a new accounting manager who moved into the office across from my cubicle. Once again, I was being crude but in all honesty, for me, the word is no different than saying frag, frell, crude bunnies, etc.
Anyone else trying to build it? Getting an error from the build-libssh.sh after openssl-1.0.1.tar.gz is downloaded:

tar: Code/iOS-OnionBrowser/build/src: Not found in archive
If the ecosystem was as good as that of Ruby, would you claim that lisp is significantly faster to develop in?