skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the "obvious" winner wins only by a hair, I feel suspicious.
From Failure To Success: What Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling Have in Common
I guess it's more a question of local tradition than a question of which industry you're in. As far as I can gather, in Sweden unpaid internship are the norm. In France, the situation is a bit more mixed. Some people pay well, others pay the strict legal minimum (0 or 400€, depending on the total duration).
> On my second week opn the job, I commented out, by

> mistake, the initialization of variable $user (arrrgh!!).

> The website crashed on all the signed-in users.

I'm trying to imagine a professional, well run software shop that would actually hold you responsible for this. I can not. It seems to me that for this to have happened, many things must have gone wrong, or many professional practices must have been completely missing:

1.) there were no code reviews

2.) there were no unit tests

3.) there were no functional tests

4.) no one noticed any problems on the development site

5.) there was no QA person, or the whole QA team somehow failed to test this

6.) there were no 3rd party testing services that might have caught this (like Airbrake), nor any in house error logging services (errbit)

I could go on. I'm trying to imagine how a programmer comments out the $user variable and that change makes it all the way to production without anyone noticing. I think a lot of things have to wrong, all through the organization, before that becomes possible.

I read your story and I have 2 quick thoughts:

1.) I have made many worse mistakes (thought I was changing database password for dev, in the config file, but actually changed it for production)

2.) None of my worst mistakes ever made it to production, because the company had some process that caught them before such a change ever got pushed to production.

No programmer can avoid mistakes. That simply isn't possible. To insist that a programmer always write perfect code would be like insisting that an NBA basketball player make 100% of his 3 point shots: the world would be a very different place if it was possible to insist on perfection.

A well run organization has multiple checks that ensure mistakes made in development don't make it to production. Any organization that puts 100% responsibility on one programmer is taking a 100% certain risk that eventually some terrible mistake will make it to production.

Some organizations put more responsibility on individual programmers and some organizations put less. That is fine. A range of strategies can be defended. But if an organization wanted to shift most of the responsibility onto a single programmer, then they would also have to give that programmer broad latitude regarding time, so that the programmer can implement whatever they feel is necessary to ensure the robustness of the code (for instance, unit tests, functional tests, setting up automated uptime checks, etc). I'm guessing, from what few details are written above, that the above commenter both had responsibility for the code but was also under pressure to move quickly and shove stuff out the door. Under such circumstances, management needs to take 100% responsibility if something goes wrong.

Now I will qualify everything I said above with an anecdote: In 2005, when working at monkeyclaus.org, we had a little startup where I was the only programmer and we would push my changes straight to the "live" site. But we hadn't really launched yet and the few dozen users we had were just friends of ours, so the "live" site was really a "dev" site.
Chavez is there because he got elected with the majority of votes, he also have the support from congress and the military. Mel wasnt that popular, so he was not a real threat. The coup was very hurtful for the country.
How to make a simple computer virus with Python
Where I am (midwest USA) technical interns are typically paid at least twice minimum wage; offer anything less than 175% minimum wage and engineering students will dismiss you entirely.
My suit is very comfortable. It doesn't fall apart. I paid under $100 for an entire outfit (I paid $120 for my jeans sans t-shirt). My shoes are super comfy and I've never had to get them serviced?
Windows phone 8 will have the same kernel as Win8/ARM, so basically they're merging their mobile and desktop OSs. This will make it possible, among other things, to run a full desktop on your phone (i.e. via a dock with separate monitor/keyboard/mouse).
>> However there's plenty of that sort of failure to go around in the mainstream of programmer culture at large, in groups that look nothing like brogrammers -- in ways that even affect technical decisions.

All of these articles that discuss brogramming are helping to shed light on the issues of sexism in the programming community. However, too often they read as though this is a new problem. The programmer stereotype used to be that we didn't know how to interact with women. Now we have a programmers objectifying women. I agree with you, the issue is larger than brogramming.

I suspect that the issue could be helped by having more female programmers. It's much more difficult to be bigoted (be it gender, sexuality, culture, etc) toward a group when you work with and respect a member of that group. Of course, it'll be difficult to get more women involved in programming given the current culture.
"My name is Barack Obama, and I'm the guy that got Mark to wear a jacket and tie."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/mark-zuckerberg-wea...
Skin tones in images are very sensitive to lighting conditions. How are they planning to normalize these differences?
Bing’s Puts Pure Algorithmic Results Up Front, Sticks Social In The Sidebar
At last!

There are good reasons, but they're all regulatory, and there are workarounds.

Let's have some proper disruption of the finance industry, please. Now!
So the best response is to not respond to him for a few days at a time, and when you do, assume the customer is acting in bad faith while you fill in some form letters?
No it doesnt make Wall St less asshole and obviously the way they handle business is usually unethical, but still one can't deny - they run the show.

Zuck May not have much value if he doesn't raise the money. Wasn't that the major reason why most investors gave him the money at the first place (or any other company in that matter)? To IPO and XX-fold their investments.
> This seems a bit delicate and involves some communication during the hand-off from the old to the new, but it does work.

MUDs routinely did this back in the day. Here's a README excerpt from Erwin Andreasen's widely used patch:

"Basically, for each playing descriptor, it saves the descriptor number, the player's original name as well as the host name (so we don't have to find that again). Then, it closes fpReserve, and exec's the MUD again. As exec preserves open file descriptors, players do not lose link. The MUD is executed with some extra parameters, so the new copy knows that it should reload some player files. It does that, and puts in the players at their old places."

http://www.andreasen.org/ftp/copyover-7.tar.gz
Interesting - was unaware of that. Thanks.
This is an aside, but many lawyers view it as their job to protect your company from legal liability to maximum extent possible. But any half-way decent lawyer should be willing to take directions like "limit the privacy policy to the page" and "cut out extraneous legalese."
I have a friend who interned with them. They also give actual offers to distinguished candidates, which though it should be relatively standard is often not the case.
I think it's much simpler than that. I think it's just that businesses like having free labor. It's much cheaper than paying people, isn't it?
> This annoys me. The 'dev-uniform' of t-shirt, jeans and sneakers is just as constraining as the 'business-uniform' of suits and button downs.

Have you ever tried to run or climb or do anything physical in a suit?
One thing about California is that state law explicitly says anything developed on your own time with your own equipment is yours (obvious conflicts with your employer aside).

Every employment contract I have seen outside of California has said something to the effect that anything you develop, no matter whose time and equipment is used, or relevance to your job or employer belongs to them. Even if you worked for a software company, coming up with new cat food would belong to them. Many times there is also a non-compete but at least some states require payment during the non-compete period.

This lack of "friction" in California makes for a more vibrant scene in starting companies and getting people to join.
And the government insured AIG. that doesn't move the debt from AIG's books to Chase's books.
I’ve got a bunch of linux boxes, what should I be looking out for in my logs?
I really shouldn't be building this myself. But looking at these prices for mixpanel and kissmetrics, they seem out of whack-- great for profitable businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups. Plus what if you need between 25,000 and 500,000 data points per month with mixpanel? That's a huge gulf and you go from free to $150 a month?

Some startups start with large customer bases but operate at a relatively low margin per customer (because its extremely cheap to serve each customer.) For instance, for $250 a month in hosting[1], I can service tens of millions of customers, but buying either of these services for that many customers would cost a lot more than the hosting.

Looking at real world metrics for one of my apps I'm currently collecting enough data points (for free using Flurry) that to use mix panel would cost a sizable (%15-%20) of the apps monthly revenue.

I'm not saying they're not worth it-- I'm sure they are. I just don't see a way for a startup to onramp here. Our primary burn is keeping us housed and fed, operations are being kept as cheap as possible until we have real revenue. $150 is a lot. (though kiss metrics has a $30 and $80 plans which alone means we're more likely to use them.)

[1] in part because hetzner's XE 4S servers are such a screaming deal- that's about 5 32GB servers.
Just strange that you don't support offline for web apps, only iOS & Android, even though web apps can use websql.

That's probably cause you're used to writing native iOS apps, but we're attempting a web app that works via phonegap across all devices from one source code base.

So for us storing all the data in Backbone collections isn't an option - models add too much memory overhead, versus native JSON objects.

As I understand multiple collections update independently of each other? How do you deal with relational data in that case?
Whoops, wrong first link. https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-... and 3 of the top 10 best-rated smartphones on AT&T right now are Win7 phones http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/p...
I think it's worse than that. Ever been in DC on a sweltering day watching everyone in business suits on the street? WTF?

I wonder what the national savings would be by raising the AC a few degrees and ditching the jacket and ties.
Do you have a cite on the CDSs never getting paid? Not saying I don't believe you, just couldn't find it on my own.

I checked on the projected profit, and it's quite a projection, based on the fact that the gov't is currently selling off from 70% ownership of AIG to 61%. So basically, that seems to me that all of AIG's operating profits are going to buying back stock from the government. Which is great. But the government still ate it on the initial bailout and if those CDSs were paid out and kept the banks afloat, it was done with government money.
Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one.

What's not a worthwhile opportunity for you might be an opportunity to someone else.

Am I missing something? Seems like unpaid internships affect me and my job/economy as much as someone else eating a donut affects my weight.
Clearly a thought provoking article none the less.
MakerBot 101: Mastering the Art of the 3D Printed Part
Realistically many single parents work two or even more jobs to make ends meet.
You mean a sizable subset of workers have decided they're worth their time. I think it's worth bringing up Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. If you can't afford to eat or pay rent, the experience you're getting is among the least of your concerns. If your food and rent situation is taken care of beforehand (and it's almost always done so by someone else), then you get to base your decision on whether or not the time is worth the experience.
Something that takes an URL and returns the tag that displays the media. Is this URL to a jpg file, spit a img tag. YouTube video? Iframe. Instagram link? img with the pictures URL.
Actually a person could be wellknown by wearing a suit to work at Facebook.

After all when all the non-conformist looks differently the same way, you need to do something different to stand out.
A lot of people unfortunately subscribe to the Malthusian ideology that all problems are caused by overpopulation. In fact, I'm pleasantly surprised when I meet someone who does not believe that overpopulation is the cause of most of the world's ills.
Not really - we already have __future__ imports, which must be declared at the top of the file before any other modules.

I think this could be achieved in a simple way in a similar fashion - some sort of a straightforward 'multithreaded' pragma shouldn't be too much of a burden.
django-rest-framework doesn't come with OAuth out of the box, django-tastypie does. ;-)
Heh, I called up once for help with the sandbox and the CSR told me that I was mistaken- there is no sandbox or any way to test transactions on the site. They must have a very rigorous training program there.
> What is it about banking that people find so intimidating and confusing?

The days of being able to walk into a bank and say "Get the sherry out, I'm going to give you some business. I'd like a loan" are over.
I can actually see how this would be difficult to spot. Look at the graph of American death rates from the CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88_fig1.png

If you know where to look, there is indeed a small spike from 2000-2005, corresponding with the availability of Vioxx. The rise in 2000 is barely noticeable, but the drop in 2005 is fairly striking. This makes sense: the drug would have been taken up gradually by the market, but its cessation was virtually overnight.

The reason this would be difficult to spot, however, is because death rates did not really increase. Rather, they stayed more or less constant, when they might otherwise have gradually decreased. In hindsight, this looks plausible -- but at the time, saying that death rates would be decreasing were it not for Vioxx would have been an extremely difficult counterfactual argument to make.
Ask HN: What are some iOS SDK for developers to build awesome apps?
I've found a few, but I was hoping there's more out there to play with. I'll be useful to know which SDKs are out there to make my life easier.
Google search for iOS SDK is not very useful.
Here's what I have so far:

Opentok - Video chat SDK (http://www.tokbox.com/live-video...)

Parse - Backend data storage/push notifications (https://www.parse.com/)

Twilio - Phone Calls, SMS via internet connection (http://www.twilio.com/api/client...)

Aviary - Photo Editing (http://www.aviary.com/ios)

Spotify - Music Streaming (https://developer.spotify.com/te...)

Rdio - Music Streaming (http://developer.rdio.com/docs/r...)

Dropbox - Store/share files (https://www.dropbox.com/develope...)

Box - Store/share files (http://developers.box.com/)
Actually no jit for windows metro apps on x86/64 either
That's why there's more of us and we all get to choose our own path.

One person choosing a path that has a non-obvious net effect does not mean that there is none, it could be negative or it could be positive. We just don't know.

Take the development of the computer, a good part of it was a bunch of guys attempting to get it to play chess, what direct improvement to people's lives could have come from that?

http://www.chessville.com/billwall/EarlyComputerChessProgram...

Indirect effects can launch whole industries and make lots of money, possibly not for the people that start it but still, it makes you wonder what's the best way to spend your time.
I would have just let them hold the money until the chargeback was settled. Who wouldn't? This customer was acting like an entitled brat for no reason.
Mozilla & Knight Foundation Invest $1M In Crowdsourced Translation Startup Amara
Have you ever tried to run in jeans? It sucks. Generally I do it in athletic shorts, but feel free to do what works for you.

Also, by similarly irrelevant logic, flip flops should be a developer faux pas. They aren't.
My best experience by far was on an all-male team - not "bros" in any way I saw, just the best guys for the job. If you ever make such a list, see if you can apply some statistics and get some evidence rather than our own anecdotes.
Momentarily arguments sounds right(perhaps because it's intellectually appetizing) but I think we are forgetting basic philosophy of every layered architecture that "lower layer provides generic api to its higher layer" allowing higher layer to customize its every possible needs using this api. Django ORM does exactly same thing.

author seemed to be concerned about these issues:

1. embedding businnes logic in views:

making query isn't business logic, business logic is in your database constraints or sometimes if db constraints are not enough then by overriding save() and validate(). queries belong in views because all we are suppossed to do in views is mearly fetch data from a data structure(already modeled according to biz. logic) and representing it as we see fit(thus the name views). theoretically this representations(views) could be of infinite types and changes over time so queries would change for every representation and over time but we can't go about implementing all possibilities in models. And this is what's antipattern because we are talking abaout putting views in models(partially though).

2. code reusability:

agreed, some queries could be repeted many a times and if complicated enough may clutter the code. I recommend putting querries into functions and put the functions in views or any similar aproach(I will think of one or you figure out one and share) but they just dont belong in models. although I believe full reusabilty can be achieved but in some cases if we can't- well we are choosing 'division of functionality' over 'reusability'.

and most important of all if django's documentaion does not suggest inherting for eg. queryset class then we shouldn't (even if you yourself coded the django framework) because these implementation details are supposed to be concealed and hence they are free to change it in future versions making our code 'upgrade-ugly'(if that's the right term)
Stroustrup C++ "I did it for you all"
The government did not back those credit default swaps, until they did of course. But the fact that the government stood behind other forms of insurance at AIG doesn't mean that they were obligated to pay back the CDSs. Again, until they did so after the fact.
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Net worth is one way, but not the only way, to evaluate the quality of a "businessperson" any more than "patents" are the only way to assess technical contributors. (And I note that the concept of a "business person" is about as generalized as the concept of an "engineer" -- it's the kind of grouping that's so broad as to be useless.)

There are lots of good "business people" who have spent much of their careers as employees rather than owners. They did their job, they got paid, but even if they were stellar, they probably weren't paid an order of magnitude more than their peers. (As there are many fantastic engineers without patents and/or high profile products.) This may be why they're trying to do a startup rather than switch to a new job.

Try working a few times for some not-so-great business people and you'll learn that the good ones are often undervalued.
Looks like a Mamiya RZ67:
http://inyopro.com/images/mamiya_side_view.jpg

Still in production, but only familiar to pros in their late 20s and older...
Ok, so you didn't exploit that worker. Congratulations.

But what about the other kid who may or may not have been more qualified than the kid you hired, but couldn't afford to work for free?
Narrative? Any company is going to take free labor if they can get away with it. The problem here is the clear contravention of labor laws.
I've been waiting for Linux distributions to pick up the idea behind FreeBSD's handbook (http://freebsd.org/handbook) which is an absolutely fantastic resource that has helped me even as a veteran FreeBSD user make sure I had all my ducks in a row before making modifications to my system.
The policy is clear, and based on other comments here probably mandated by the payment networks, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable.

It’s perfectly reasonable to expect merchants to be prepared for chargebacks and have a buffer for that. It would be reasonable to have a few days’ notice to pay the money, or be able to designate a different account for them to debit the amount from, or submit a credit card that Square can draw from as security.

But if you are expected to have a month’s sales in the Square-linked bank account all the time, how is that different from simply “freezing all received funds for a month, all the time”?
I fail to see how that makes sense. How would a spectrum enable you to skip to specific parts of a song? It only lets you see the frequency breakdown, and offers no benefits (that I can see) from a navigation standpoint.
Hah. This reminds me of a conversation I had with my dentist.

I was there for yet another appointment to work on a root canal and wondered out loud why I don't hear more about efforts to regrow actual teeth as opposed to the gruesome practice of modern dentistry. His take on this was that it just wasn't worth it: teeth are mostly mechanical. They just exist to bite through food, and an artificial crown isn't going to develop any more cavities. His take was that it's much simpler for humanity to just replace teeth with metal and porcelain than spend research dollars and scientists trying to grow teeth.

Then again, he makes his living drilling into jaws.
actually, there's an animation on the side of the page in chrome that's reversible as well
To me, this isn't about microsoft vs. Mozilla. This is about proprietary companies vs. open source companies. Open source is all good, but nearly all of the machines we use to access that open source software is run on proprietary company hardware/software. If apple or microsoft decided one day to bar other OS' from being installed on their systems, well tough shit. Until the people make a movement to make them feel their mistakes, proprietary companies are gonna continue doing whatever they fuck they want.
90% of this thread isn't addressing his core point, which is that even if you use C++ without exceptions, constructors and destructors still make it hard to be strict about error handling, and the extra complexity isn't worth it for projects like his.

Fine to disagree, but respond to the point. So far the relevant objections I've seen are: (a) you shouldn't do anything in a constructor that might fail; and (b) destructors can't fail. Weak. Is there a good counterargument? To be precise: why is the OP wrong to say that, to be strict about error handling, his C++ needs to look like the block of code that follows the sentence, "There's a new 'semi-terminated' state" in the article?

(As for most of the comments, which boil down to "OP is ignorant of basic things about C++ and programming", come on you guys, how likely is that? Who's more likely displaying ignorance here?)