skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.

Is this really a valid conclusion to come to at this point? I expect downtime in any service I operate. It's just how the world works. Does that mean I don't understand the risks and am misleading the board?
The product needs to be cheap enough that small business owners can afford it, simple enough for them to use it (many are not technologically savvy) and the value needs to be self-evident. It's a hard combination to crack.
Anyone in the bay area interested in building better tools for researchers? I did materials research at Stanford and was stunned by how tech-backward most sectors of academic research can be.
Ask HN: Backbone vs no backbone
I want to ask fellow hackers, about the difference that backbone.js makes when it is used as an MVC on client side.

With Backbone.js as MVC there will be a shift of load from server(mostly reduces to an API) to the browser. But HOW MUCH difference does it make, is what i want to know. Will it reduce the load and hence the $$$ on server expenses?

I am comfortable with RoR/django, and have a product in mind. I just wanted to evaluate using Backbone. Is it worth learning Backbone, or going with RoR/django?
Report author:

"It takes years for companies to get traction and get an exit."

"There were not enough exits to evaluate"

Yet RWW concludes "startup accelerator fail" and "a lot of accelerators are just spinning their wheels."

Here's another hypothesis: The lack of exits reflects the fact that most accelerators are themselves only a few years old, and it takes a longer period of time to build a successful venture and achieve an exit.
You are right to extent, however, even in the absence of a lack of confusion, an action can be brought where a third party in using a similar/identical mark to the original takes unfair advantage or causes detriment to the original mark.

In fact, Apple Inc and Apple Records engaged in a long-standing legal spat over the usage of the Apple mark before finally reaching a settlement in 2007.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
I think it's only newsworthy in this space - where, as some of us are the ones responsible for these systems - we are trying to learn why this happened in order to prevent it.

You know, learn from others mistakes and all.
This guy should get an extra bonus for not just having to deal with this level of buggy software, but for handling it so damn well! He hardly even skips a beat.
Accidents happen.

(expanding my reply) No risk assessment in the world will stop a cage monkey from tripping over a pile of 1Us and falling onto the big red button. Figure out what your pain threshold is and live with it.
I'd guess the higher ups at Twitter have run the cost benefit in their head (and probably many spreadsheets) plenty of times, and in most cases spending your limited resource on disaster recovery preparation just isn't worth it. Their site being down does not qualify as a "disaster" - they'll be back up soon, then we'll all be tweeting away again within minutes.
A housemate of mine had a coworker who made footpedals for his Emacs modifier keys.
You can say that about any piece though: "I dont think the author meant what he said". At some point we have to stop second guessing and discuss what was said, not what we think the author wanted to say. At the very least discussing the actual content is certainly not off-topic. :)
My daughter was overjoyed with excitement to help me put a mouse-trap outside by a hole. She didn't even touch anything, but then runs inside to tell mommy "I helped daddy!".
You forgot the second part of the headline - "Twitter Completely Down, Productivity Surges"
Today's Gift
I agree that learning from why Twitter was down will be interesting and when that story comes out I hope it will be high on Hacker News. But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.
"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.
Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

That's called understatement.
the mobile site is still up. http://m.twitter.com/ You can tweet and everything. The streaming API is also still partly up.
s/protocol/abstraction layer/

What is great about Twitter is that it allows both the sender and the receiver to choose if they want to interact over the web, through an app, via SMS or even email (receiving DMs). Take the lowest common denominator across all platforms (no subejct, max 160 chars in SMS) and sit in the middle as an abstraction.
True. It's like a ghost town in there. #failwhale
"Users may be experiencing difficulties accessing Twitter"? Weasel words are so annoying and unnecessary. "Twitter is down." would do.
DIY Biology Standard Operating Procedures
I'm glad this made it to the front page. Is the topic itself newsworthy? Not on its own. Is all the discussion that's flooding into this thread worth having?

Yep. Even the subthread from the person complaining that this isn't newsworthy.
"Creating technology" is pretty broad. I've never used an iPad for more than a few seconds, so I'm not going to try and decode what he was referring to. I'm fairly certain he wasn't referring to art, though.
That was even said in the same interview, which was very interesting in my opinion. Sadly most people will only watch the least interesting 20 seconds of it.
My point was as I said. There are two main definitions of coercion, one of which is stricter than the other. I was just replying to the statement that McDonalds does not employ coercion by pointing out that it rather depends on which definition you choose as if you choose the wider definition then most advertising is coercive to one degree or another. I wasn't really talking about the moral angle, just the semantics.
While all of your points are correct, I think you missed the point.

That line of argument is expressly what the author was trying to avoid. The author acknowledged there were issues with it but stepped beyond them because there's a larger point that he was trying to make. (One I think has its own issues, but that's for another post.)
Are you saying the solution is for Company B to regularly raise employee pay to market levels? Eg, at the conclusion of John Doe's first year, raise his salary 30%. If so, why do you think this doesn't happen? Because employers think the employee will stay without a raise?

I don't work in software, but this happens to varying degrees in many industries. I asked why employers don't simply regularly raise salaries to market levels, instead of giving years of meager 3% wages until the employee finally bails. That way, they reduce their turnover costs. Of course, this won't work, if the poaching company can extract more value out of the employee than the incumbent employer can.

That aside, one answer I got is that many employees will simply not try to get a market wage, so you'd be throwing away money on raises on employees who wouldn't care. I'm not sure that employees are this ignorant or unconcerned about pay.
using the exits as one criteria to judge the overall startup accelerator program and labeling it as a failing attempt is premature.

Even in the article Gilani says "takes years for companies to get traction and get an exit".

I think the success of these programs will depend on who the accelerator program is, type, region and other factors, but for sure it is too early to draw conclusions.
I don't think his behavior was at all out of the ordinary there for Linus, so if he lost credibility for you I don't understand why this would be only after this event.

We'll see if it ends up being counter-productive after all, or if the public naming of nVidia as a bad actor causes them to shore up support even a tiny bit. His reaction certainly will make me reconsider an nVidia card for my next Linux machine: I didn't realize there was so much ire beyond the frustration that nVidia ships a binary blob. As-is things didn't seem to be going anywhere, and there were no signs that nVidia was at all unhappy with that situation.
Have just had to add timeouts to a few requests to the twitter API. Was completely hanging a whole site.
Learn't something though, to never trust an API to respond in a reasonable amount of time!
Your examples describe two entirely different systems. The failover of a software product is drastically different from the failover of a power system. Trying to map everything back to a common best practice under the category of "risk" seems like it would miss out on important intricacies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowups_Happen
It's not a meme. The core of the problem is the forced sandboxing of apps and lack of any reasonable IPC mechanism built in. The individual apps are great, but the lack of ability to multitask holds you back.

That lack of featurism causes app developers to reinvent lots of basic stuff in their apps to get all the features they want. And sure, that happens on PCs too - but to a far lesser extent.

If you're familiar with the unix philosophy of making apps as filters, making them do one thing, and do it well - you'll understand how productive it can make you - and how there's no chance of reproducing that on a (non jailbroken) iPad.

And yes, I wasn't referring to art, but the software itself. Try creating an iPad app purely on the iPad - I wish you luck.
http://downscout.com/twitter.com if anyone wants to track it.
Get started with JavaScript
This link isn't working for me as of now
You have to learn h,j,k,l are not just navigational keys but also can be combined with multipliers like 20h(Moves 20 positions to the left).

You know, I've understood this for a while, but to this day I still don't use it.

I can't count characters that fast! If you're going to lean forward and count out chars, you might as well count them out with presses of 'h'.
Right there with ya. He made computer science seem bad-ass, and I've never been more humbled in my EECS career than by his CS172 midterms.
Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.

That's not necessarily true. People don't die when twitter is down, and whatever twitter's business model actually is, I am not even sure there is a monetary penalty to them being down (unlike, say, Amazon being down which results in lost orders). They may have made the calculation that it was not cost effective engineering-wise to chase that extra 0.001% of reliability.

[Edit: Pedantry shield: Ok, ok, should have said people don't die because twitter is down. Obviously people are dying all the time, and some will indeed expire while twitter is down].
4 letter word dividing dev & ops
Dev and ops are often divided in their priorities as much as their business function. There's a dirty little word sitting between them.
Wow, Twitter is down, I guess I can get some work done today :-)
Don't have one yet but you could follow us on Twitter and we'll let you know when we do. @womenandtech
I don't think what you say contradicts my point and I am in agreement with what you are saying to some extent.

I am not saying there is no understanding going on at all. What I am saying is that when my son uses the iPad or iPhone he does not know what the different things mean (i.e. he can't read that it says Video) he just knows what it do when he presses the icon.

I can't say to him:

"Find the LinkedIn application"

Only if I have done that a couple of times in front of him will he be able to.

With regards to the discussion about language, then yes that is a very complex discusion :)

My own theory is that we are born "pattern recognizing feedback loops" and thus our ability to recognize those patterns and recognize that we recognize them is the foundation of our ability to learn a language. Language is simply an abstraction of our natural ability to do symbolic manipulation.

It's like assembler (our basic symbolic manipulation skills) and the higher level languages (our more developed culturally inherited languages)
People are going to have to resort to [desperate measures](http://nedroid.com/2009/05/people-have-to-know/).
The Simplest Productivity Chart of All Time
How not to get acquired
The quality of these incubators is going down but it is still not so low that I can be accepted (I'm half joking).

Anyway, the key for successful incubator is that they have strong team - with experience, knowledge, and connections.

What I noticed that majority of these second-tier incubators have only connections (ex-Googler, ex-Facebook, ex-bubble-company) but they do lack other two.
Normal Accident Theory
Once the user base is big enough, that's the main draw.
As far as I know Linus' attitude is well-known.
Cool! If he turns out to be more interested in the story than coding from scratch, you might want to have a look at Inform7: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html It lets you save the generated game in several different formats, all of which have free players for multiple platforms.
Same thing. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trebled
I would go with SHA512, and yes, still salt. It makes the user have to brute force instead of looking up the password in a database.

This is how I understand it. Bcrypt uses Blowfish. Blowfish is not a hashing algorithm but an encryption algorithm. This meaning, you can encrypt something, and then, decrypt it back to plain text.

SHA512 on the other hand is a hashing algorithm which should mean that it's impossible to revert. At the end of the day, everything is crack able through brute force. Just try and make it harder for the hacker. You could also add additional salts to a password, defined in code. Or add the salt after the 2nd character of the users inputted password for example. This however is only handy if a hacker hasnt gained access to your source code but only to your database. Additionally, encrypting your sourcecode where the algorithm is implemented adds an additional security layer. There are tons of ways to make it crazy hard to crack a password.
I agree that there aren't some "right" way.

I am simply reacting and commententing to the overall theme of the comments and the OP's essay which is I read as him teaching his kids the fundamentals by playing around with non-GUI interfaces.
If you're debugging webservices that suddenly slow down (timeouts of 10s), this may be your cause if they depend on s.twitter.com, search.twitter.com or api.twitter.com.

As a workaround for those systems, add s.twitter.com, search.twitter.com and api.twitter.com in your /etc/hosts file that map back to 127.0.0.1.

This obviously breaks Twitter integration, but it also makes sure page loads don't explode when waiting for remote resources.
If your slides are like this, sure, it'd need to be a multi-post series or an ebook (though, ebook might not be a bad option) or something like how Seth Godin presented his iconic "Really Bad Powerpoint": http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf

..edit: I like Markdown too much.
I like how on status.twitter.com they tell you you might have issues accessing the site. And then they give you a "tweet this" button.
>this "how to use MS Office" tripe that passes for "computer science"

I have gripes about my CS education but this seems overly hyperbolic. Or, where did you go to school?
Virus specifically targets and mails CAD designs and sends them to China
The Amazon rainforest is not a commercial entity. Associating the rainforest with .com makes no sense.
Facebook 404 page
How not to advertise your start up
The real irony for me is they host their status page via Tumblr, which has at times had a pretty dismal uptime number.
Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. In that sense, we literally did not believe how useful Twitter was. Also, Twitter is almost nothing like IRC in any respect other than being an electronic communication medium.
From Penguin, a Plan to Make Its E-Books Available in New York City Libraries
Microsoft's New Tablet Freezes During Presentation
Thats not true at all. The article made a pretty good case that it is not a thick line.

As for Zynga, everyone hates them, therefore using them in an argument instantly poisons the argument. Its a variant of Godwins law.
I think this is a good set of reforms to investigate, but I think a real problem is simply the PTO issuing bad patents, a large percentage in the realm of software, for the past decade or so. By "bad" I mean failing a basic novelty/obviousness analysis.

I think it's more of an issue in software because software developers are essentially producing tens of "inventions" a day, every day, any of which are potentially infringing due to poor PTO operation. Whereas in something like chemical engineering a patent might affect maybe a few hundred other well-capitalized firms at a single point in their process, in software for any given app/developer potentially multiple patents are implicated in the course of a normal day's work.

A lot of patent trolls seem to be exploiting "we got here first nya nya" patents. That is, they patent solutions to problems that the market has not deemed significant enough to solve yet (like in app purchasing, before the iphone). When the market does move and encounters these problems, the straightforward solution(s) are developed, and then in swoops the patent troll.

The PTO just needs to become more sensitive to the unique industry that is software development: the high natural rate of invention, the high likelihood for multiple independent similar solutions to problems, the fact that a problem hasn't been solved yet doesnt mean the first submitted solution should nor can be patented, etc.

I think if a patent holder can show "but for my solution, you never would have solved this problem in a reasonably efficient manner" then sure, let's protect his IP. Determining when that condition is true is obviously difficult, but the current PTO strategy of giving the benefit of the doubt to the patent applicant has proven a bad bet.
LOL @MattRogish RT I just ate lunch. It was sooo good! [Checked in to Shake Shack, NYC]
The barbell financing market
Fair enough. I can't retract the original statement, but I meant OECD countries.
Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use?

Something the vast majority of people couldn't care less about. Twitter has, in effect, created a new messaging protocol, in the broadest sense of it. It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough. It's integrated with hundreds of apps and sites. Technically speaking it isn't doing anything particularly amazing (although the sheer scale they deal with is), but that's not really the point.
I'd say that most do care about their browser. Chrome wouldn't have sped to such popularity otherwise, nor Firefox before it, nor Mozilla, nor... IE. If users didn't care we'd perhaps all still be using Mosaic.
How we use PiCloud to improve our Bayesian inference engine
So...it's competing with Craigslist by building an OS-limited mobile app that posts items to Craigslist. And they want 10% of any sales.

Craiglist is accessible from any device, and it is free.

They really need to put more thought into their business model.
Ignoring Minified Javascript Files with Ack 2
Please read the author's introduction: "An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi" http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/vi_editor__bill_joy.pdf

I also recommend the O'Reilly "Learning the vi and vim editors" book, http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529833.do and my own course on vi basics, http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi.htm
People don't expect "incredible" to mean "not credible" anymore.
Interesting to see a number around the rate of accelerator graduates that go on to raise venture funding (45%) but what would be more interesting is to compare this number to number of new companies overall that go on to raise venture capital.

I would imagine this number to be substantially lower than 45%, which would seem to turn 45% into an argument for accelerators and not against them.
Previous discussion from this author/blog on this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060
s/bandwidth/throughput/g
Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here. By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures.

Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago. But none of the incubators are that old yet. So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded. Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers.

Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either. Each incubator has a single score: average valuation. The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...) it was $45.2m.

You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now. But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions.
AVI to DVD converter
If it only crashes IE, and you want to punish IE users, why bother wrapping it?
Unit test ( as already mentioned) and build up static json/xml/whatever files to run your code against so that you can integration test your stuff without integration testing the 3rd party stuff.
It seems he's been using it more and more with his house arrest, haha.
That's a good blog post. But "x is down" is newsworthy for sufficiently large number of users of x and sufficently long downtime. That's because consumer experience with this or that online service influences the online service's reputation. A service with few users, or users who have lower expectations, can endure more downtime without loss of reputation than a service with many users who expect the service simply always to be available, at least as available as broadcast television or plain-old telephone service.
xx Next time your favorite waste of time is down, just shut up about it. xx

Twitter is infrastructure for us in media. It's well worth discussion.
It seems like your perspective is that HN exists for the links it points to. I read HN for the discussion, and this thread has many good discussions in it.
Ouch, teaching kids to log in as root. Bad dad, bad! Teach them sudo and explain that you were possessed by the devil when you mentioned root before, and to forget all about that.
Given the exponential returns possible from just one big exit, the bar for success is not that most companies do well but just a couple. It would seem odd then that the accelerator would invest in the others, but since there is relatively little information available at the time of funding, it becomes a numbers game. Given that the instincts of the accelerator are good, there is no reason not to invest in as many companies as possible to catch a few stars in the net. To the outside world however, it looks like a bunch of failures.