skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can relate to that.
Maybe 70% of the defect corrections I make in our highly complex and optimized code base are less than 10 lines worth of code.

It can take between between 24 hours and a week to figure out what those few lines should be, though. And that is extremely frustrating.
Have you considered rysnc? Dropbox uses it. So lots of people who don't even know what rsync is are now using it. We could all be using it for much more than just Dropbox. And if you have ever used gzip on html you know how well it compresses. The savings are quite substantial. Do you think most browsers are normally requesting compressed html?
When it comes to social media, what type of business owner are you?
Did you respond with anything other than "I asked you to skype me" when they ignored your request? If not, there's your problem.

People do what works. Reinforce their bad behavior, and you have a problem.
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Twitter is tracking you on the web
For our start-up we made a major pivot but it complements the original concept and even expanded it. If a pivot requires significant change in direction and scrapping major elements of your original idea then one really has to think hard before taking the next step.
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Hey, thanks for wrecking page display for me! :)
How we rewrote the Kicksend web app in one month
1337 ftw
I work for a company working on RFID (radio frequency identification technology on the wiki) for the jewelry industry. Some of the biggest wholesalers on the planet have recently bought our system and we have had requests for proposals from Rolex and more. We're currently looking for paid interns in NYC, feel free to contact.
Does anyone know if future versions of chrome will come bundled with ruby runtime? Or is it going to be a plugin download.
Tackling the Massive Data of the Hive Mind
Tim Schafer, of http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-a... fame, has a note on his door until 11am in the morning saying, don't knock, writing. Could you make progress on projectY if you made a deal to not work on projectX until 11am? To not even open your office door?

(FWIW, this is a classic Quality of Service (QoS) algorithm, where traffic on ProjectY is given dedicated bandwidth (2 hours in the day) so that it isn't swamped by traffic from ProjectX.)
_Wide Adoption_ means many platforms, doesn't it? If you use Groovy, you're limiting yourself to the JVM. All the other languages mentioned, i.e. Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and Python, have both JVM and CLR versions. Since Oracle's aquisition of Java 2 yrs ago and its subsequent courtroom behavior, it's important to have a scripting language that runs on both the JVM and CLR, just in case. There's no move whatever to port Groovy to the CLR.

As for wide adoption, Groovy's used in Grails but not many people seem interested in it as a standalone language. See O'Reilly's book sales for the year to March 2012 (http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevY...).
Those are the people that don't understand that "can" and "can't" in this context is just a matter of definition. If you want to try to slow the process of language change in order to make it easier for more people to communicate with each other in English for a longer length of time before English dialects diverge into mutually unintelligible languages, it makes sense to create one official dialect of English with prescribed rules and try to get authors to follow it, a la Strunk & White or almost all dictionaries besides the OED (the OED takes a descriptivist approach to definitions based on how people actually use English). However, the existence of standardization efforts should't mean that people are somehow speaking their native dialects "incorrectly." The fact that some prescriptivist decided not to include the singular "they" in his or her artificial dialect of standardized English doesn't make the singular "they" any more "wrong" in my idiolect of English than the existence of the RnRS standard would make other dialects of Scheme like Racket "wrong," regardless of how one defines "wrong" as long as its definition is held constant. In the same way, every English speaker alive today could be said to be speaking "grammatically incorrect" Old English or Proto-Germanic (an even older language that refers to whatever language existed way back in the day that all modern Germanic languages descend from), but there's no point in making a statement like this.

That's why virtually all linguists take a descriptive approach to language and describe anything grammatical (as opposed to the phrase "grammatically correct" which would endorse the existence of a "right" and "wrong") if it sounds natural to native speakers. Unlike some linguists who love to see language change, I'm fine with people prescribing a standard and sticking to it for most written works, as long as they realize that it's just a standard and not some divine definition of "right" and "wrong." So feel free to use the singular "they" rather than artificial alternatives!

Note: Some far left scholars of gender studies demand the adoption of artificial gender-neutral pronouns (as opposed to using the singular "they") for a very different purpose--to make transgendered and intersexed people no longer "oppressed" by the English language. That is, if you already know the person you're talking about, all natural dialects of English involve saying "he" or "she" did blablabla. However, if someone identifies their gender (haha doesn't that sound so much more natural than "his or her gender"?) as something other than male or female, current English runs into a problem. Such scholars often propose "zhe" and "zher" for subject and object/possessive. But here we are just discussing situations when you are referring to an individual (i.e. a programmer or "someone" in the case above where I used the natural sounding "their") whose gender is unknown. This usage of the singular "they" happens to cover transgendered people as well.
A data driven look at Chicago startups
The traditional definition of refactoring is making well-understood, deterministic transformation of code from one state to another in a way that provably has no effects on the behavior. For example, Extract Method or Inline Variable are refactorings that can be automated by your IDE and by definition will not break anything.

Nowadays people seem to use "refactoring" to mean "changing code without adding new front-facing features." This is bad as it causes large, scary changes to fall into the realm of "refactoring." Refactoring, if you want to live by its original definition, should be a relatively mindless, safe series of small well understood steps.
Disagree with any of this? I'd love to hear your argument.

<tongue in cheek>

Unfortunately, I don't disagree. So, sorry: No argument here.

</tongue in cheek>
Er... great chefs do need cookery books. They may not refer to them as often, but you won't find many chefs out there without a collection of cookery books. They still use recipes for things they're not familiar with.

Besides, skill may beget product, but it doesn't necessarily beget process.
The people who will make money of Facebook going public are making it right now... The idea of having shares in Facebook scares the bejeezus out of me
Then again, hard to argue that strategy is all bad. We have the internet as it is today, which while perhaps not ideal, is quite a thing.
I pay for and prefer KISSMetrics, and also pay for Mixpanel (a separate project).

KISSMetrics, visually, kicks ass. What sucks about it? It's not real-time. No simple real-time data export/querying API.

The latter is nearly a show stopper. I mean, really? No export/querying API?
No, just simple mathematics. It's certainly possible for a company to actually create wealth faster than the average rate, but it's much more likely to be cannibalizing. Were it otherwise, of course, average economic growth would be higher. There is nothing contradictory in saying that most business growth comes from creative destruction (ie, cannibalization) and also that the net sum of business activity produces slow growth.
Yeah, I agree. The first time he told someone "Philip wants this done quickly" and they said, "Sorry, it's policy," the next move -- at least my next move -- would have been to walk to Philip's office and say, "Will you come tell this lady that this change is more important than that policy?"

I mean, they don't have a way to know it's really an emergency. Every engineer thinks everything's an emergency. There's nothing like the guy in charge standing there while they work to communicate THIS IS ACTUALLY AN EMERGENCY.
with a reasonable expectation of sufficient demand for its product.

What determines sufficient demand? It's the chicken and the egg. Or is it: Profits lead to innovation. Innovation leads to cheaper goods. What's left over is new demand? Or demand dries up for product X, and demand is available for product Y?
Any service that can garner 100s of millions of users can find a way to monetize.

I heard people say this a thousand times in 1999. I doubt it's any more true now than it was then.
All this non productive discussion aside, Can Hackers solve this problem ? Entrepreneurs take risk and should be rewarded accordingly. However not all Rich people are Entrepreneurs. Some just keep their money in the bank and stagnate the economy.

How about creating Soft-Tax system, where Rich people are taxed Soft-Tax in addition to regular Tax. Soft-Tax would be a separate bank account where Rich must transfer their capital for Entrepreneurial work. If they don't use that money for funding new businesses Soft-Tax would turn into regular Tax after some deadline.
There's already $1 Billion in minted $1 coins already, but nobody wants them: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137394348/-1-billion-that-nob...
You already can write Ruby as easily as PHP (they are both server-side languages). What this means is that Ruby can be used as a client side language via NaCl, provided browsers support it.
Scratch may be worth looking into: http://scratch.mit.edu/

I've also considered this beginning Python book: http://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Computer-Programming-Begin...

My daughter seemed kind of "meh" on Scratch, but still interested in learning to program. I think she sees me spending most of my day working within an editor or the command line and the highly graphical authoring environment of Scratch doesn't fit the idea she's got in her head of what "real" programming should be. I'm not sure if I should correct her or embrace the fact that she wants to learn "the hard way."
Feh.

For starters, "just hire responsible people" can't be applied retroactively. Not to mention that… most people are responsible, or rather, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Secondly, it's an incredibly difficult thing to scale. That works great in startups, but by the time you have things like "HR Directors" you're no longer capable of having insight into the rest of the organization.

There is a lot to be said about how bureaucracies are the formalization of common sense, and a lot more to be said being able to scale processes out such that you don't end up in situations where stakeholders have no visibility into the work performed.

I just feel that the answer is more complicated than "hire A players".
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https://twitter.com/twitter/status/203255213946187777

"Widget Data: We may tailor content for you based on your visits to third-party websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets. When these websites first load our buttons or widgets for display, we receive Log Data, including the web page you visited and a cookie that identifies your browser ("Widget Data"). After a maximum of 10 days, we start the process of deleting or aggregating Widget Data, which is usually instantaneous but in some cases may take up to a week. While we have the Widget Data, we may use it to tailor content for you, such as suggestions for people to follow on Twitter. Tailored content is stored with only your browser cookie ID and is separated from other Widget Data such as page-visit information. This feature is optional and not yet available to all users. If you want, you can suspend it or turn it off, which removes from your browser the unique cookie that enables the feature. Learn more about the feature here. For Tweets, Log Data, and other information that we receive from interactions with Twitter buttons or widgets, please see the other sections of this Privacy Policy."
Twitter is tracking me like Google is reading my emails.

> The privacy implications of such behavior by a company so large are sweeping and absolute.

Like most articles about tracking cookie this, and tracking widget that, it does come off as overly sensationalist to me and makes me think it's meant to scare people more than they should be about such a thing.

> Is it okay for Twitter to sell your web browsing history to advertisers?

Serious question, where are the people/businesses that buy peoples browsing histories? It's an argument raised a lot of the time as responses to this sort of thing and I've never seen evidence that a market exists for it.

> I'm amazed that Twitter is overtly admitting to this behavior without considering the privacy implications.

This is a bit of a confusing sentence, do you expect them to hide it? Or what makes you think they haven't considered privacy implications?

Edit: According to tech crunch they have considered your privacy as they are having a switch that lets you turn this functionality off: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/twitter-wants-an-interest-g...
Personally I find nginx to be a lot nicer to work with than Apache when it comes to the configuration.
Basically, every time you visit a site that has a follow button, a “tweet this” button, or a hovercard, Twitter is recording your behavior. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use.

Of course. This is likely true for all social buttons, not just Twitter. I've never known a social site to throw away free user-related data.
If you say any change longer than four lines is subject to this process, then people will work on trickling in new stuff in increments of four lines at a time

With proper test automation and continuous deployment, trickling new stuff in increments of four lines at a time is the right way to do it.
So is every advertising network. This really isn't new, but it's certainly over-sensationalized.
The Global Middle Class Is Bigger Than We Thought
What I'd really like to see would be trails going off into the future -- rather than just a +/-% for the +3yr mark, why not just show the whole story for each company (perhaps only when you hover over it to avoid clutter).
This would make the current color-coding much more useful -- each trail would be the color of the company's IPO year.
noooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOoooooooooooo and i thought javascript in my browser was bad..now i'll need noscript and noruby ;__;
But it also Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option[1]

[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/twitter-implements-...
Http://www.writelonger.com/show/7os60
> ideas that are entirely political, and which are ultimately only about engaging the controversy itself.

If you read the same article I did, that's not the reason they claimed, so I don't know where you're getting that from. Here's the relevant portion:

> And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.

It says nothing about the talk being only about engaging controversy, nor about the idea being entirely political. The reason was that it had potential to rile people up. You are confusing an idea that will unavoidably rile people up with an idea that is intended to rile people up. They are not the same.
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This issue raised here is nothing new or specific to Twitter. (Not that it makes it any less concerning.)

Here's an article from over a year ago talking about how Facebook does the very same thing with their like button:
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/facebook-like-button-track...

"Any time the Like button is displayed, information is zapped back to Facebook’s servers. As long as you’ve been logged into the site in the past month, Facebook happily continues warehousing your whereabouts."
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It sure can't be explained by the fact that ad delivery systems are seldom static and are continually being tweaked based on the latest research....oh wait, it can, but you just go ahead and pick whatever is expedient with your beliefs.
Duh. As dumb a comment as that seems, I'm sticking with it.
The logical flaw is equating consumer demand with aggregate demand. There are other economies, e.g. Germany (industrial economy) and China (state economy, albeit transitioning), that aren't as reliant on consumer demand as America (consumer economy).

His entire argument flows from this assumption.
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By three decades of war and Islam.

The sad thing is, I don't see Islamic countries evolve much. They seem to have no drive to get better unless they have oil and are lucky at the same time.
I seriously don't see the problem. The author seems to be assuming that taking 6 days to have a change made is objectively bad.

Does the company run? Does it make money? Do the systems work and stuff?

Well, if whatever you're doing now to keep the systems working and the company running and making money obviously works so I'd say it's objectively good.

The experience may feel bad subjectively but how you feel is of trivial importance when compared with the health of the company as a whole.

It's all about risk right? Like if the company wants to spend $50,000 to change 1 line of code, and it's not going under, then that's obviously the right decision. It's just the same as spending millions of dollars per year on insurance and then complaining when the place doesn't burn to the ground.

The "move fast and break things" attitude of Facebook works for Facebook - it's a different company.

Small startups can break whatever the hell they want because they're not making any money yet.

An established company with a functional system that makes money has to take measures to protect it, because that functional system is where all the value is in the company.
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Coffeescript's `for` loops
Door? Who has those anymore? In the interest of collaboration open-plan offices have become the norm, to the detriment of productivity everywhere.
Probably never as easily as JS in the client. You should look at CoffeeScript if you don't like JS syntax.
DARPA has always engaged in long-range seemingly "blue sky" research. They've pioneered autonomously driven vehicles and they invented the internet. To some degree they recognize that pushing the envelope will result in related breakthroughs that are imminently practical.

Militarily the primary goal is likely improving the lives of soldiers who have been maimed and dismembered in battle. This is even more of a concern today because the improvements in battlefield medicine have resulted in more and more soldiers surviving with wounds that previously would have been fatal, leading to more veterans with very serious disabilities.

Certainly there is a potential to weaponize this technology but you have to keep in mind the reasons why that's not such a big concern at least in the near-term. First, this requires pretty invasive brain surgery. Second, it has a fairly low success rate at the moment. Third, the amount of control available is significantly diminished compared to functional nerves and muscles. Overall there aren't any good reasons why you would want to try to switch to using a system like this for controlling a tank or a fighter jet, so it's questionable what sort of battlefield potential the technology has now. When we get to the point where these systems can match flesh and blood then that will change, but that's a much larger can of worms than merely military applications.
Absolutely, and I think that is its most serious flaw. Is that really the purpose of education?
Thank you for highlighting that section. I'm surprised dcurtis left out this nugget.

> After a maximum of 10 days, we start the process of deleting or aggregating Widget Data

This make is much less nefarious. I guess it isn't much of a story when you have the full context. They are only keeping it for 10 days. Sure they are still aggregating data but at that point it is anonymized data.
the key part of that story is that Tim Schafer has a door.
Yes, it's very sad. I get kind of twitchy and nervous if code that I have written doesn't get tested and into production same-day or next day.
I'm the author of this post, would be happy to answer any questions people have about further stats from this month. There are a lot of networks, so it wasn't possible to post absolutely every detail!

I'll be watching this thread for a while, so feel free to post any queries you might have below.
Is this a story or a real thing that happened?
Of course "admitting" it, can also be phrased as "being fully transparent" and is actually required by many privacy regulations. If you tell a user you are doing something with their personal data, in the US, you generally have the right to do it.
It's great to see how non-Valley accelerators truly measure up to YC.
Funny you cite Germany as not as reliant on consumer demand; one of the things that keeps being cited as hurting Germany right now is that the rest of the Eurozone is its major customers, and they can't afford German goods on account of depression.
Varnish sits in front on port 80 then proxies based on the VCL configuration, you can parse the HTTP headers/path to pass through appropriately.

https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/tutorial/websockets...
What We Know Now About How to Be Happy
case 2 is fine, it just doesn't interest me
Rewrites can either be awesome or a struggle to complete and release. Looks like you guys did well.
How did you run alternate code in parallel in production - I'm concerned about breaking SEO.
"embed the learning in the organizational memory as a story instead of a policy"

That memory is hard to maintain with procedural changes in modern times, as employees move around quite frequently.
>Will open trading at 110 P/E ratio, Google's currently at 18.8.

Well, for some reference, here's another company that currently trades at an excess of 100 P/E.

Amazon, trading at 179.33 P/E.

Is Amazon egregiously overpriced? Or are bets on its growth justified?
Probably never. NaCl lets you embed programs into a webpage, protected by a layer in between the OS and the actual code so that it can't break out and wreak havoc like ActiveX once did.

So this means that any website could embed Ruby code (more strictly speaking, it could embed a Ruby interpreter) to be executed client-side on a browser supporting NaCl.
Iran threatens to sue Google for leaving Persian Gulf nameless
PostgreSQL as JSON Document Store
Surprising someone as experienced in the web would post a rant like this when not only do Facebook, Google and other large/"webscale" sites, but also much smaller ones that participate in ad networks.

When I worked at Glam Media we were given a presentation on the ecosystem related to our ad networks and let me tell you the presenter (a VP or C-Level) couldn't come close to fitting all the logos on a moderately large screen.

Bottom line is unless you take substantial measures to avoid tracking you are going to be tracked by many interested parties, both direct and indirect!