skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like you can't really say you're in the green when you still have customers unable to use your service. My instance is still stuck in failover.

"9:39 AM PDT Networking connectivity has been restored to most of the affected RDS Database Instances in the single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. New instance launches are completing normally. We are continuing to work on restoring connectivity to the remaining affected RDS Database Instances."
I hadn't seen that before, and I've sent a batch of photos. Really well done!
I think a savvy, empowered employee would say, "No problem sir" and order themselves whatever side they wanted to eat in a bit. =)
Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds
When talking about screwups I aways say "we" assuming the developer will internally acknowledge that "we" probably meant them. Then again, I always feel somehow responsible for an issue even if it is a totally different team.
Point #2 is also pretty cool. In order to prevent overcome problems of creep, the turbine blades can be made in a single crystal [1] [2]. This prevents much/all of the creep, as creep is associated with grain boundaries. It's pretty phenomenal that these single crystals can be manufactured into jet turbine blades.

[1] http://www.appropedia.org/Single_Crystal_Turbine_Blades

[2] http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6673308.html

*edit fixed links.
The issue was Sparrow would have to handle notifications themselves, which would mean every user's Gmail account (user, plaintext password, and mails) streaming through their servers that likely aren't hardened against attackers nearly as well as Google's. Understandably, this is a risk they didn't want to take.
Tumblr, Wordpress, Facebook, Instapaper, Wikipedia... PHP has a stronghold, an opensource equivalent implementation for each platform would take forever
Bamboo? BAMBOO?! My grandfather was killed by punji sticks, you insensitive clod!
In order to interact with their API, you need a security token. They revoke the rights on that token, and the API rejects your requests.
Same here, age and eyesight wise, but I find that text on screens below a certain size is either too small to read confortably or too large breaking the reading flow. I guess this is a personal thing more than a scientific fact.
On the other hand, kicking out Google apps would be an even bigger incentive for people to jailbreak their iPhones.
That kind of mentality is exactly why it's wrong to have "svn blame" and "git blame" as commands. The very commands that we use to look at code history teach us that it's all about finger-pointing.
Which was one of the original and useful points of (apps) hungarian notation.
New paint turns any surface into a battery
I feel for you :-(

Amazon is not cheap, and they have failed way too many times in recent memory.

But the api, oh the api - it's crack, and I can't live without it.
DCPU-16 Tetris
I thought you said you worked in the industry? If you really did, then you'd know that more and more civilian grade technology is being used by military contractors to build military solutions. For this reason, such a clause would get complicated really fast:

- Is it ok to license audrino code under this license? (yes)

- Is it ok to combine other components with audrino under this license? (yes, for non-weapons)

- Can audrinos be used to build a drone? (yes)

- Can this drone be purchased by the government and it's contractors (yes)

- Can the military use the drones? (yes as long as it doesn't "kill or cause harm")

- Can this drone be used for reconnaissance? (yes as long as it doesn't "kill or cause harm")

ok, so now the military is using these drones all over the place. Pictures are taken, stored in databases, and distributed throughout the military. Eventually, some of those pictures are used to strategically bomb an insurgent encampment. Who violated the license?

Even better, what it were Google who purchased the drones and Google maps was instead used for the bombing strategy. Who's at fault now?
He quit his programming job, not programming.

I code (not very well), but I don't get paid for it. I'm an electrical engineer by day and enjoy writing code as a hobby. I doubt I would ever want to wade into a software development gig. I still like making computers submit to my bidding, however.
> if Google and a few other big hitters publicly encourage people to jailbreak their iOS devices

Why would Google do that? They'd rather people use Android devices.
UAVs are a tool just like any other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#Uses

Some of them are used for war, but not all. I'm assuming the companies that make "good" drones also make military drones.
Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses
I always just blame it on the Boogie
For what is worth, my small website is online again.
This reminds me of Charles Simonyi's classic article on Hungarian Notation. I know that style gets criticized a lot, but that's usually when it has been used inappropriately. If you have a language with a weak type system then a sensible variable prefix convention can help a lot.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260976(v=vs.60).as...
Consistent? There are thousands of commentators here trying to gratify each others' intellectual curiosity. We aren't required to agree on everything, and if we did, hardly any of us would have anything useful to say. For me, value is relative to the status quo ante. The difference between trade and extortion is in what would have happened if you weren't present and making the offer. Is everyone slightly worse off, or better?
Yeah, that's very witty, congrats.

If we were in the steel industry, the right thing to do would be to see that the military doesn't get steel. But we're not, we're mostly programmers here, so I'm saying we should exercise caution and be aware of how the stuff that we make gets used.
The critique was meant for using such a solution in long term or how long do you already use it?
A pity RIM rejected this - still, once their stock tanks further, Microsoft may just buy them out. Combined with a Nokia acquisition, they might be able to put together a strong mobile presence in both the consumer and enterprise sectors.
The New Rdio
Indeed. I downloaded it to try it out, and it is very interesting, but there's no way I'm going to even think about really using it until I have the option to set it as the default browser.
Nope. In this line he's talking about a web app he's writing and how he considered writing it in PHP to boost adoption. Here's it in context:

"I'm starting a new open source web project with the goal of making the code as freely and easily runnable to the world as possible. Despite the serious problems with PHP, I was forced to consider it."
One of the things we learned a lot about at TSF was a beach-head market. It's the first market you take on to get traction (however you're measuring traction). So, I'd suggest talking about "knowledge management and collaboration" as your beach-head and WHY you've selected that as your beach-head...and, possibly most importantly, why traction within this beach-head will allow you to tackle some of the other markets you have on your radar more easily.

Yeah, that's text-book "Crossing the Chasm" stuff. We'll need to narrow down the "beach head" to something more precise than "the market for companies that need km and collaboration," of course. And we have some research we've already done in that regard. Depending on how things shake out, there's a chance we'll focus on finance related firms first, even though my initial penciled-in list of possible target markets did not include finance... due mainly to the idea that finance is highly insular, very regulated, and has a ton of domain specific vocabulary, and none of us have specific experience in the field. But, as things have worked out, we've talked to several finance related firms, and my $dayjob as a consultant actually has me in Chicago now working for a finance firm. And I'm making new connections here, in this industry, so it's looking more and more realistic.

That said, I'm still thinking that "old school" industries like manufacturing, distribution, logistics, retail, etc. might be better for us. But that's the kind of stuff we're still working on settling.
Hah, how'd this get posted here! Sorry.
Thanks, that was a fun puzzle for a Friday morning. Solved using Node.js and Restler.
Do we all agree that we are completely over AWS-EAST now? It's NOT worth the cost savings.
I don't hate Microsoft. I am simply observing that their new design and information architecture are very poor in this specific case.

If you really can't understand that many of Microsoft's brand names are not literal/descriptive or why this creates a usability problem if much of the material on their home page is just links to such names without any explanation or context, there is little more I can say here.

However, straw man arguments about brand names in general or advice that boils down to "Just Google it" because the page doesn't contain any useful information don't exactly help your case.
> Guess what: your customer doesn’t care how your system works.

This, absolutely. I once experienced a long, drawn-out fiasco with a major department store in which they compounded numerous screw-ups and oversights with consistently rude, unhelpful service and constant referrals from one department to another. "No, sir, you're talking to customer service for sales. You need to be talking to customer service for sales and support. Here's the number."

In my final, desperate email to the company's senior management team, which motivated someone with the power to fix the issue to intervene, I noted the insanity of a customer having to learn the company's internal organizational structure and process flow just to get their order fixed.

A company's customer service interface should be a black-box API: customer request goes in, and a reasonable response comes out. I shouldn't have to know or care what you have to do internally to make it happen.
Got to the step with what looks like a hash in the instruction param, no idea what to do with it. I'm not cool enough for these guys :(
Oh I would like to have my hands on one of those! Hours and hours of things to explore with a toy like that. Is Google making them available elsewhere? They have a website with guides regarding working with it but I'm not seeing a page to pick one up.

For starters on the simple alarm clock concept alone, I wonder if the accelerometer is sensitive to isolate motion from the sleeper nearby. Might be some interesting applications in sleep monitoring, etc.
I think Google realizes that iOS has a higher stickiness than Android
I am really excited to see events like this in NYC. The tech community around e-commerce is not as strong as it could be- events like this are great for building the community. There is a lot of growth and opportunity in this field, but I think it is being overlooked by a lot of developers.
I think it may have something to do with parts of AWS being down and Dotcloud apparently runs on AWS.
Disclaimer: I worked on the WebKit team at RIM. Starting in BB6 (two years ago) Blackberry shipped with a WebKit browser which was leagues better than the old Java browser. Maybe this is a marketing problem for RIM as in just about every RIM thread on Hacker News someone complains about their old Java browser not knowing that current RIM OS's ship with WebKit.
1) because AWS East is so much cheaper (and none of us like spending money)
2) AppFog actually is multi region (and multi IaaS as well)
>Brilliant.

Except that, if you're removing nails, there are much better tools than the claw on a hammer. [1][2] I've done demolition, and I've had to pull a lot of nails, and the claw on a hammer is about the last tool I'd use for the job. I basically only use the claw to straighten or remove a partly-hammered nail that's gone wrong.

So yes, the analogy is brilliant.

[1] For really big nails, more leverage is good, and the hole in the flat part can be used to pull longer nails out than you can pull with a hammer claw: http://refer.ly/abwW

[2] To get a nail started, something sharper with points, and that (here's the important bit) can be HAMMERED under the nail head: http://refer.ly/abw2
LinkedIn brings some sanity to the node.js debate
I'm a PHP guy (started in the PHP3 days) and a few weeks ago I decided to finally have a go at building a non-trivial site using uWSGI, Flask, sqlalchemy and mongrel2. I knew a bit of python (from having written a few trivial sysadmin related scripts) but apart from that I was starting cold. I'm now a few weeks in and while I'm not ready yet to jump ship back to my PHP comfort zone, I can say I've been surprised to find that Python (one of the "better, grown up" languages that's always cited in these PHP bashing threads) has quite a few warts of its own:

- Packaging in python seems to have been a nightmare up until quite recently. It appears things are a little more sane now that pip is emerging as the new standard but there's still documentation all over the web referencing easy_install. Of course, then there's distutils2 to muddy the waters...

- The Python 2 to Python 3 transition was and continues to be an almighty upheaval. At the moment huge swathes of the python ecosystem have yet to introduce python3 support (e.g. Flask).

- Virtualenv is a fairly ugly hack in itself but even worse than that, trying to move a virtualenv directory somewhere else on the file system turns out to be impossible unless you use another third party tool.

- The python language has no switch statement. I refused to believe it when I first discovered this but it is actually true.

So, two weeks or so in and those are my main gripes thus far. Apart from that, I'm enjoying python. My favourite "python thing" discovered so far is all the cool list iteration syntax.
Wow. Age discrimination is illegal here in the US. I was a young manager and all of my direct reports were older, some of them over a decade older. Not a problem. Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work anyway!!
Yeah.

That's like complaining a F-22 take a lot longer to start than a motorbike. It's completely true in every way, and yet not something who uses either of them care about.

Simple selects from Wikipedia are a nice demo for this, nothing more.
It is a win for Linux, just may not be for humanity.. But A lot of the software wouldn't be created for offensive weapons and they are going to still be made whether they be run under linux or some other OS.
I'm still seeing issues, some instances that aren't starting, and others I'm still not able to connect to. So I'm not sure what they are talking about.
Graphite on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - Part II: gunicorn, nginx and supervisord
UK Tech City Start-up Strategy Criticised
I think it is still implausible because of the vast difference in scale between quantums and neurons, several orders of magnitude. Quantum effects don't manifest themselves on a macro-scale. I don't know precisely how quantum effects help our sense of smell or with photosynthesis as has been claimed, but I reckon it has to do with localized effects. The idea that quantum effects across the brain work in concert to create a single, global consciousness is quite a bit more far fetched, if not preposterous. But if you have a particular reference saying it's considered more plausible nowadays I'd love to hear about it.
The problem is, not all PHP apps are small rapid prototypes. If I'm going to migrate away from PHP, might as well go all in. Does that mean something like Django?
...Unless they're Canadian
I'm not sure if this was a joke, but I thought it was funny, especially with that username. True too.
I did work in the industry before I developed some sense.

You distinctly miss the point there. Military hardware is controlled heavily. No commercial entities use their data. That chain if events doesn't waist and never will.

There is a wall between the two sides that is rarely crossed.
Meemoo: hackable web apps
Just another data point: Opera Mini also hit #1 in every country when it was released.[1]

Is anyone still using it?

[1] http://www.gadgetsdna.com/opera-mini-goes-rampant-tops-all-2...
The Developer’s Guide to Analytics, Part 3 | 21times
I wonder if the better course of action would be to lobby the major hosting providers to include Ruby and/or Python with their base plans. Really, isn't that one thing that keeps PHP chugging along? In the consulting work I've done, my clients already have hosting plans for their website, so if I'm adding a sub-app, or even a new app, trying to convince them (and their IT staff) to manage multiple hosts/plans/etc is off the table.
That's a well-reasoned but rather lazy response imo.

Ppl who have strong opinions when it comes to language design have strong opinions when it comes to language design. Ppl who think languages are just a means to an end think languages are just a means to an end. These are two differenty species and indicative of their particular worldview, attitude and preferences. To use that as any kind of filter is silly.

Lets not look at CS for a second...If you want to know what a Stieltjes integral is, a probabilist will tell you one thing, a functional analyst another, and a measure theorist will give you yet another more pedantic definition. There's no right or wrong definition here...every one is coming at it with the tools they are more well versed in. The probabilist is the end-user, so to speak. He can't do his day to day work without internalizing it, because his bread and butter, the PDFs and CDFs of all the distributions he deals with, comes from Stieltjes. The functional analyst is going to use Stieltjes when he deals with Banach spaces, but otherwise he has other preoccupations. The measure theorist studies Stieltjes in depth because it goes to the very foundantion of measure theory...but he isn't really an end-user.

Now back to CS...a C++ programmer will think of Java as an interesting toy because you don't get union types and pointers & so forth. The Java guy will think of Python as an interesting toy, and the Python guy thinks PHP is an interesting toy. None of this means any of these people are insecure or being a teenager. If the only goal in life is "languages as means to an end" where end = $$$ in the short term, then yeah, lets just cut to the chase and do PHP. But there are other goals, yeah ?
Yeah, I wrote Tumblr in PHP, but I'm eager to abandon it. You know, it's just an easy to use, broken language that you can scale a site to 15 billion page views per month with. I'm sure my next project will need a better language, because it's going to scale to 400 billion page views per month, and PHP just isn't going to cut it.

Hilarious suggestions contained throughout his post.
How do PHP people handle templating simply?

Edit: Perhaps I worded my question wrong. How do PHP programmers try and keep to DRY (ala layouts and view templates)?
Hey Marco,
Thank you for writing this . This is exactly the situation I am in right now. I love this post because it does not look down on PHP programmers, it beautifully illustrates the situation we find ourselves in . PHP is quick easy , and convenient . We are so comfortable in our current state that we don't want to adapt to a better alternative .

You have built successful and high profile applications in PHP, thus invalidating the argument that PHP is useless .
There may be better alternatives , but we must step out of our comfort zone to embrace them .

This post helped me understand the situation so much better. It does not insult or degrade PHP programmers for their language choice , but it gently suggests that better alternatives exist ,and it is worth the short term pain to explore them .

Thanks again , Marco. You've given me a lot to think about .
+1, would love to play with one of these and experiment with all of the sensor interfaces
This is so much better advice than "fight the system", "convince your boss", "use these talking points", etc.

If the poster really wants to keep that particular job, but wants to also improve the environment, they need to start following all of the rules they don't agree with to the letter. The worst thing that can happen is that it actually improves the team somehow.

It's not always the right way to make change, but in these situations it really can be the best route. Bad rules and procedures can only be (officially) recognized as such when they're actually being used. There's no need to make a mockery of this stuff, either, because time will tell whether the new rule is really helping or hurting.

Like you say, humble, honest, and calm.
> 3. Imperative programming is IMHO a natural fit for Web programming.

I disagree with this, especially in a RESTful world. It is very convenient, and obvious, way to look at a web request as a referentially transparent function for the most part. And the non referentially transparent requests really do change the world. We are moving our backend to a bunch fairly clear workflow of, that has layers that look like:

Get DB stuff -> referentially transparent -> Write DB stuff

And these can be arbitrarily nested. It works pretty well, it's easy to reason about, and it's pretty easy to write.
You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic.

The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users).

There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. It's like comparing the number of millionaires in the US with the number of millionaires in Canada; the US has a bigger population compared to Canada, and all things being more or less equal, it's reasonable to expect that the US would have more millionaires simply because of its shear size.
The few times I've had to use it recently, the search was so awful I had to type in three different ways of saying essentially the same things to get it to show any results. Additionally it's visually disorienting, I don't trust PayPal and I'm always skeptical of sellers.. as in the event that something does go wrong, they don't care about making sure things get handled appropriately or timely. There are certain things that are not their responsibility, but ensuring their customers don't get burned or shuffled through the hell that is PayPal claims seems a pretty obvious one that a competitor could beat them at.
It would make more sense for RIM to go the Android route. A free, mature operating system and development platform with strong market share that runs on a huge variety of devices would give RIM the chance to go for broke on the physical device and recapture some hardware market share.
The importance of mod_php, it's robustness, stability and speed is completely underappreciated. It's not just the language with all it's quirks that people should be focusing on. The php stack is easier to use and configure than any of the other language/framework stacks making the time to publish faster.

Passenger (mod_rack/mod_rails) looks like an attempt to imitate that stack to some degree but so far the results are far from perfect.
No need - they found a really good deal on tablets at BestBuy, they just have to go and buy them at $99 and resell them for $499
even with the old overwriting trick?
The reason you describe your relationship with PHP as an "addiction" instead of using a word that described a more healthy relationship is probably because there is something about it that doesn't resonate well with your core values. At least that's the problem that I had with it.

If you want a nice introduction into the world of developing web apps with Python, I suggest you read the Flask user manual (see http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/). It not only covers the basics of the framework, but also seems to assume that you're a first-time Python user as well. It covers topics such as using virtualenv and pip to setup your environment which I found very helpful when getting started with the language.