skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really enjoy codecademy (I am currently at 930 points and 47 badges). I find its a great way to learn and practice new concepts with a much smaller barrier to entry and instant feedback. It is by no means perfect. There are a few issues that come to mind:
1. Because of the way the code validations are written there tends to be only one or two ways to pass a lesson. This can lead to frustration when a student writes a piece of code that performs the task correctly but because it doesn't validate correctly he/she doesn't pass.
2. I found (for me) that the pace is actually to slow. I have cruised through all the lessons and have participated in beta testing some of the more advanced javascript modules (i.e. introduction to JSON). It would be nice if there was more advanced content to move on to but this should be corrected as time goes by and more content is created.
3. General spell check and editing could be better
4. Currently there is no content that talks about the full stack of technologies in a web application. This leaves the student studying small siloed pieces such javascript/html/css on their own without a view of the bigger picture. How does a web server fit in? How do I communicate with a database? Why is there no talk of MVC or REST? Basic coding skills are great but without a comprehensive picture of an application they are pretty useless.

Even with these issues codecademy has been a fantastic resource for me. I have learned a ton and have gone on to start teaching myself more advanced topics and have been learning different libraries such as backbone.js, node.js and d3.js. Without codecademy I would not have been able to get through the documentation on these libraries. One of the most valuable things that codecademy has taught me is to not be intimidated by technology. From the outside the programming world can seem like a pretty intimidating place. Codecademy makes that first step a little easier...
Jon McCarthy's Elephant seems to be missing from the list.
Done before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg
Omniture and WebTrends are also steaming piles of outdated features and buggy UIs. MixPanel seems like 100% New Hotness (pardon the cliche).
http://beanstalkapp.com/
https://www.dropbox.com/
I never tried Celebrex, as I had surgery in early 2004 that eliminated the need for any medication.

I'm not a pharmacist, but the story regarding this drug is more nuanced. Doctors prescribed the two drugs differently, as folks with other drug sensitivities were not good celebrex candidates, and the risk factors associated with vioxx were not known. Vioxx was the more heavily marketed, "safe" choice.
Evolution's Gift May Also Be at the Root of a Form of Autism
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How are they ostracising anyone? For each language, they are praising it, offering a nice idiomatic API library and following common distribution practice (PyPI, clojars, cabal).
Native apps on Boot2Gecko are web applications, by definition. And you're free to implement alternative browsers on top of that -- even if you're still using Gecko underlying everything, you can give a vastly different experience. Arguing that they can't run their own engine code is a technical issue, not a business/political issue.

Also, one of the key things about Boot2Gecko is that it's intended to be reimplemented. You could make a Boot2IE phone or Boot2Chromium phone; you swap out the low level but keep everything on top of it the same. Everything is built on real web standards that are free to be implemented by all. It's truly open, top to bottom and bottom to top.
Researchers find a planet they can’t see
Web cooperative startup
We have a lot of new business idea but we don't have the tools and the money to realize it. By combining our savings and our ideas, we can see our dreams realized, we can achieve unimaginable goals.
The two ways (C90 and C99) you can create a variable length item at the end of a structure in C are invalid C++. You can't express them at all.

I work around it by making a one element array and using "sizeof(MyThing) - 1" everywhere when I want to reference the size then use placement new and the ::new operator to do the allocation and initialization of my object.

It works, but it's not very straightforward.

In general, I rather like C++, but it does make a few things harder than C.
A lot of religions object to contraception - there aren't many that object to killing people.
Except they didn't choose mysql -- they chose Percona. Bonus of going with Percona is that in the process you get a fantastic company to back you up.
It's kind of hard to "underdress" to a programming interview in the Bay Area - indeed, I'm not even sure what the lower bar would be for style of dress for a programmer interview. It's got to be pretty close to what would get you arrested for indecent exposure. :-)
I've been using CouchDB for the past six months for the internal product-CMS for my business. Its got a great feature set for what I am using it for. MVCC architecture, master-master replication and stored views make it a natural fit as a backend for internal tools. The benefits actually grow as you get more desginers/artists etc working together; each on their own DB.

It seems like all the problems he has are with scaling. I can't comment on that, but I would whole-heartedly recommend it for internal tooling.
This strikes me as being similar to the Coca Cola / Pepsi rivalry. Supposedly, in blind tests, people prefer Pepsi, but does that correlate with them actually buying Pepsi more often? It's not clear that it does.
Bing Unveils Redesign, Aimed At Cracking Social-Network Searching
I found this rather amusing comment on a Russian dental forum a while ago. Sorry for possible mistranslation, I am neither a dentist nor a native English speaker.

----

I spent some time contemplating the future where this tech would be widely available. What this New Dentistry would be like?
Pretty much the same thing we have with implants today. We will have all the same problems with crooked teeth. With lack of bone and gum tissue. Plus aesthetics, and decay of new teeth. Periodontal issues, calculus, etc, etc...

Growing new teeth won't be a real breakthrough.

Imagine a patient missing some teeth. He sees a... what's his name... an toothgrowologist for a consult.

"Hey Doc, what would you recommend?"

"We need to grow you 9 new upper teeth and 8 new lower teeth, correct malocclusion with braces, possibly add some veneers for aesthetics... This will add up to $30-$50K."

"$30K???"

"Might be up to $50K."

"Don't you have cheaper options?"

"Well, you could get implants..."

"Nuh-uh, I don't want implants, I want real teeth. Maybe you could grow me just a few, and put bridges on top?"

"Uh... uh.... Whatever you like..."

Here are some quotes from a future internet forum on dentistry:

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and apparently I didn't have enough bone and gum tissue, now the root is bare and I've got cervical decay... What do I do now?"

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it turned out a premolar instead of an incisor. He told me this happens sometimes, and now I have to get it devitalized, and cover it with a crown..."

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it points toward my cheek. Now I have to get braces. Can I make the toothgrowologist pay for the braces?"

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, it's just erupted and it is already decayed".

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it is loose and bleeding".

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and I've got foreign body sensation in my jaw. I think he's grown me someone else's tooth."
This article explains why I am using MySQL as the DB backend for a site I am currently building. It also explains why I am not using Node.js. New technologies are fun to play with, but they get decidedly less fun when your site starts getting traffic and you realize that your new toy isn't ready for prime time.
Gah, you're right -- I was thinking of something altogether different.

Thanks for the correction.
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Is the project in use? If so, you might want to reconsider.
Not true. Many STL distributions have a compile-time flag you can set to disable all exceptions. Otherwise, there are entire STL distributions you can compile against that are exception free.

See here for many solutions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/553103/can-i-disable-exce...
babarock are you a doormat?

I had extensive experience with bullies in school and let me tell you being submissive or showing fear of any kind only brings out the worst in them. I know you can't throw the boss against the wall (which would get a school bully of your back) but at least don't make it worse.

And no, I hope you will not stay long enough in a place like that. There are better jobs elsewhere. Shoveling shit isn't as bad as that.

Of course if it was a one time thing and the manager apologized (in public) that is another thing.
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If you are literally offended by somebody wearing sensible clothes to the point where you would call them "rude" on that basis alone, I would posit that we're actually discussing your mental state, not anything wrong with their clothing per se.

Yes, you might wear a suit when you want to kiss up to someone. But being gravely offended by somebody not actively kissing up to you is much less becoming of a mature adult than the act of not wearing a suit. The clothes do not hurt you, they do not deprive you of anything — the only problem is that they don't flatter you. But expecting flattery is uncouth, even if you are accustomed to being flattered.
One of the most toxic pain killers (Acetaminophen/Paracetamol) is also one of the most common over the counter medicines!
Web socket push in Akka & Netty
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No, I'm talking about native ports.

Though IE8 and possibly IE9 work in Wine, yes, that's not what I meant. I meant that Microsoft was actively developing and supporting native ports of IE 3 through 5 on Solaris, HP-UX, Xenix, and maybe possibly Linux (I couldn't find evidence, but I remember seeing something about it.)
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Wouldn't it be nice if pharmacies could just publish all these finding and let people decide what to put in our own bodies. I know they argue that we aren't doctors and therefore shouldn't be forced to make those decisions, but with the aid of a doctor and true transparent facts I'm pretty sure I would have no problem going, okay this drug is twice as good at helping with my terrible pain, and the side effect is that I'm more likely to die of a heart attack. I'd go, well maybe I don't want to take that risk since I'm at risk already for a heart attack, or I could go oh I'm young and have no family history of heart failure, I should be alright the risk is worth the gain.

I can't for the life of me figure out why we can't just do that. Anyone around care to enlighten me?
I logged in with Google auth, and it still sent me an e-mail to confirm my e-mail address. That's unnecessary.

I'm really glad a resource like this exists, though. Looking forward to working through the Hadoop Fundamentals course.
great for profitable businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups

And that is how it should be. To build a longterm business, you really cannot rely on catering to startups for whom $150/mo is a huge investment. I lead mixpanel adoption at startup I work for. We're ok funded and the mixpanel cost does not even make a blip on our expenses.

And yet, like you said, when I go home to test out my own ideas outside of work, mixpanel does seem like a cost I have to think hard about before paying for.
FBI Chief dishes on technology, insider threats and cyber criminals
Leica Announces $8K monochrom camera new X2 and $7k 50/2 lens
There is an assumption underlying my premise: that organisations are in competition with one another. I think that's a fair assumption to make.

I would expect that competing organisations would do anything legal to give them a leg up over the competition, including the hiring of workers they consider productive away from the competition. It's too risky otherwise; all it takes is for some other organisation to offer wages, causing both organisations A and B to lose their productive workers.

Do you disagree with that?
False: http://www.snopes.com/computer/program/stroustrup.asp
There's currently high unemployment -- could we not eliminate that by making the minimum wage be zero? I'm sure lots of currently out of work individuals would take the opportunity to work for nothing for the off chance of getting a paying job in the future. Isn't that exactly the same thing?

I don't believe it's a market problem, it's a social problem. You have this pool of ever increasing free labor not because of the market but because it's now necessary to intern to get a job. If an employer has to choose between someone who will work for free or someone who won't because they can easily get a paying job at Starbucks, who are they going to choose?
Then again, maybe an entirely different language, geared towards high availability, such as Erlang or Ada, might have been a better choice in the author's case.

I don't follow, but it's clear from your other comments that you know what you're talking about, so I fear I'm missing something.

His goal is for ZeroMQ/Crossroads to be part of the infrastructure, one of those reliable "3rd party libraries" he wants to avoid using himself. He wants it to be a rock solid base on which a high availability solution can be built. Likely this solution will be built in some higher level language (Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Erlang), and he wants to insure that that language doesn't get tripped up by error handling in the his library.

My instinct is that you need to write the library in something that compiles to a shared library with a C ABI, since this is the only common denominator which the higher level languages can link to. While this is technically possible with Ada, I don't know of any common libraries that do it. And I can't see how it would work for Erlang. I think the only realistic choices are C and a subset C++ with "extern C". Maybe also Go? Do Ada and Erlang fit the bill for this in a way that I don't understand?
When I wore business casual to work for a little over a year (East Coast job), I never wore a tie except for the interview day. I did, however, wear nice shoes, business pants, and a button-down, long sleeve, collared shirt.
His first move should have been to pull out a personal card and charge himself $200.
A downside of being so easy to use is that many people who have no clue what they're doing are probably using Square. I don't know how to solve that, since adding education (hassle) up front would definitely drive away some fraction of customers.
I investigated using Riak for dealing with our metrics a few months ago, but with the data sizes we are dealing with, even the Riak people told us that Hadoop was likely a better solution.

Once you are dealing with more than 500k keys or so, Riak starts to fall over.

EDIT: The 500k key limit pertains to mapreduce jobs, not the overall data size.
Apple launching iPhone 5 in Sep, iPad mini in August: Rumours
Zurker,The Only Anti-corporate Social Network that you can OWN?
Here's the thing: physical processes and failures tend to average out to nice smooth functions with Gaussian distributions. Each additional random variable has a minimal contribution to the average state of the system. Wear and tear tends to accumulate gradually over time until some mostly predictable breaking threshold is met.

With digital computers, however, the size of the state space that the system can occupy grows exponentially with the number of bits of state in the system, and changing a single bit can result in an explosive cascade of changes to the rest of the system[0]. Accumulated random failures of computer software very rarely lead to a nice, smooth, predictable probability distribution. Software failures are not caused by anything remotely resembling wear and tear.

[0] Please excuse and correct any inadequacies in my autodidactically acquired understanding of information complexity.
Probe may delay Facebook Instagram deal
I'm attracted to the programming language because the author and I share the same values. I got into programming to create things. Not to have arguments about indentation or semicolons, or to pop my collar at this month's "conf".
I have nothing "scientific" or explanatory or "insightful" to offer. I've always found dentistry to be barbaric. And I've lived in terror of dentists. As a youngster, I, without guidance, stumbled onto using electric toothbrushes through my own devising. I did not brush properly, on the assumption that the technology I was using, and using it in a way I thought best of it, was the way to properly brush teeth, as opposed to the dentist's recommended methods.

My mistake, whups. But within a year's time (age 10-11), I developed 13 cavities. I was devastated. For years I have lived with a slip-up in my formative years, and am still living with that mistake, stupidity, etc.

But THIS excites me extremely. Daily I live with empty, squishy graves where two upper canines on each side used to LIVE. The "grave" analogy is not mine. I sought sympathy from a friend one day, as I confessed to him my difficult decision to have the teeth removed.

But I agreed with his words. And I felt a kind of bereavement. Daily I feel it, and it affects my work. I feel declawed. Detuned. Constantly I question my competence based on my linguistic performance, as the procedure has re-introduced my lisp. (I wouldn't dare give presentations on HTML5 and advancing technologies to corporateheads in this state now.) I'm sure millions of others would be liberated if they could regain those portions of their minds that their teeth or lack thereof distract them from.

I will follow this science, and try to understand it.
The article sounds like they will be trading one set of problems for another, if they implement SQL on any RDBMS using those techniques.
Check out this picture(#19)......wow
> "Plus, the bay area is very expensive, it attracts engineers who are more likely to jump to the next hot startup, its hard to find good office space, etc."

I disagree completely. Engineers here are no more likely to jump ship than anywhere else - the difference is that in some geographies you can keep people tied to you via lack of opportunities (i.e., "so... who exactly in town is hiring?"), but with mobility so prevalent these days, even that won't hold a skilled engineer for long.

And from my own experience - I was the first one on the ground setting up a satellite office for a company not based in SF. I found a great office space in 2 days.

> "This makes bumfuck Ohio[1] a better place if retaining talent is important."

As an engineer in SF, I simply have no interest in living in bumfuck Ohio. You'd have to pay me considerably more than even SF levels of salary for me to make that sacrifice.

There are many places that may attract tech talent that isn't SF or the Valley - but they are all major metropolises, because they contain the lifestyle that the typically young-ish technology folk are looking for. In the current climate there is no reason for anyone to hole up in a backwater and not live life while they build their startup.

> "Turnover means critical knowledge is walking out the door."

Fully agreed. So who is more likely to stick around: someone who is getting paid a (very high) SF salary, meaningful equity, all the perks you can throw at them, interesting work, a city full of people who get technology, sunny weather, mild temperatures... or bumfuck Ohio, where salaries are severely depressed, and the community of hackers is small, and the people who surround simply don't get it?

> "Bumfuck Ohio may not have the cool meet ups that SV has"

Read: There are few opportunities to network. Meetups are a core part of what makes SV tick, not just between VCs and those hungry for funding, but between engineers. They are an incredibly powerful recruiting tool and exposure to new tech and new products.

> "People are focused on venture capital, not building profitable businesses."

Have you been to SF or SV? Have you actually met the startup folk around here?
This is great news !!!
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Reminded me of the movie Glengarry Glen Ross
Wow, thank you for so many questions :)

1) How often teams released in each of the 4 years

We release new builds every other week. Sometimes more often, sometimes less often, but on average every other week.

2) What is the state of the code-base (i.e. how many parts of the code devs would prefer not to work with, how many bugs are discovered only in production, what is the CC, what is the size of the longest method/class, how many conditionals and static members are in the code, how much time it take for a new team member to do it's first check-in)

Code-base is quite good. There are some parts that are complex (like custom reports), but in general nothing is so bad that anybody hates to touch it. I can't provide any metrics on method/class/static members so far, will try to gather them soon. Usually it takes 1-2 days for newcomer to dig into codebase and start bug fixing.

3) What about collective code ownership ?

There are no owners. Sure, some people are more fluent on some areas, but everybody can change everything.

4) How many time you discovered/learned things only after releasing a feature and how are you dealing with that now

There were 2 major fails last year. One caused by missed requirements in Subversion integration plugin and another one due to critical bug found on production. That is quite rare cases. Sometimes bugs indeed come from production, but most of them are minor. Our testing process is good enough now to catch almost all critical bugs.

5) How much unknowns, uncertainties, unexpected-unpredictable events and changes there are in your domain and business and how you deal with them

Well, agile domain is quite fluid. But there is no immediate changes. In general we should react every year on latest trends in agile domain.

6) What about devops and support and operation of the system in production?

We have a dedicated support team (4 people) and 1 developer almost fully dedicated to support issues. Other developers help customers as well when required.
We provide live chat support, email support and live skype sessions support when required. Support team is really responsive and to be honest that is one thing I proud of.

7) what about the features released, how much they are the right features for the users and for the stakeholders ? how much early the team spot the wrong feature?

We don't have stakeholders, only end users. Product vision comes from various sources, mainly from customers requests. However, we do not implement requests blindly, but try to find root solution. Last year we released only useful features, all of them are used by customers. Previously there were quite many mistakes and software started to bloat. We cut some features off and now are very careful with new functionality.