skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Former Big-4 sysadmin here.

Most people who become sysadmins are simple the guys and gals who were playing around with from an early age and got good at it. This playing around led them to discover things like the concept of services, the registry 'runas' etc on Windows, and grep, init and symlinks on Linux.

This is wholly inefficient.

Tinkering is important, but structure is better. Learn the concepts behind the systems you administer, the correct way to do things, and where everything fits in and how it interacts. That transforms you from a tinkerer to a professional.

The best way to do this? Easy: Find out what the certifications are, and get the certification books. Read the books, but what you're really after is the Table of Contents - that's your syllabus. That will teach what topics are important, and what can be safely ignored.

Armed with that syllabus, you can do research on the 'Net to your hearts content, at your own pace. The beauty of the profession is that with virtual machines, you can learn the vast majority of what you need to on your own.

I've found for Linux, that RedHat / Fedora has very comprehensive documentation, that will teach you alot. There's also a Debian Handbook that I encountered a few months ago. There are a lot of sites dedicated to Windows as well, and Microsoft's own MSDN is quite good.
I can't see this company being worth $1bn+ so IMO it has plenty more to go down.

The only problem is when I shorted this stock a while back the cost was at such a premium the profit was negligible.

Edit: added the bit about cost of shorting.
Yes, I agree completely that even very technical people often have a surprising blind spot, thinking either we can put the database/facial recognition/cheap cameras genie back in the bottle, or alternately that leaving no digital trace is a Good Idea for the mainstream.

One good thing Facebook has done is demonstrate that most people (arguably with a lot of unethical shifting of visibility preferences) are happy to live portions of their life in public. These people are not sheep, they're happy sharing portions of their identities.

If only we had more nuanced, robust, personally controlled identity infrastructure. Much harder to achieve with Facebook owning a rudimentary, simplistic but very large subset of the social graph.
Even better is to have an automated immune system that detects production issues and rolls back. We push to production dozens of times a day with dozens of engineers committing, and with that environment, problems will eventually slip through your local tests and buildbot.

Bugs happen; it's far better to focus on robustly dealing with problems than it is to build layers of bureaucracy and process in an attempt to pretend that you can avoid all errors. At my current company, dozens of engineers are pushing to production dozens of times a day. We have an extensive test suite that runs on every commit before code can be pushed to production, but there's always something that slips through, which is why we also have an automated cluster immune system that can automate a rollback whenever any metrics go bad during or after a push.

Bugs happen; life is better if you expect it and plan for it. My philosophy is, break production, and keep breaking it until you're damn good at dealing with production failures. Don't let fear of breaking production slow you down.
Interesting point. I looked back at the world where no such regulations existed, and I didn't see a perfect market which quickly and efficiently eradicated charlatans and thieves. No, instead I saw a world where people were constantly being preyed upon by the guiled class. I saw a world where the only people you could really trust were those in your close personal circle, and every transaction with a 3rd party, new or known, was rife with risk.

The "regulatory state" didn't come about as a predicted social experiment, it came about by constantly reacting to an endless stream of malfeasance that constantly stood to wreck any possibility of a functioning free market.

Cities and states regulating measurements and fare mechanisms are generally a -good- thing, even when it affects some darling company. For every darling company that wants us to "just trust them to do the right thing, they're good Silicon Valley-types," there are a dozen would-be scamsters plotting how they can take advantage of similar models to make free money. The constant "free market response" is "Oh, well, people will just shop somewhere else." Yes, after having lost their money (some times many, many people losing their money) AND their trust in any company like the same.

The world of figuring cab fares doesn't exactly need to be "turned on its head," it's a well-established practice of livery that's been going back for hundreds of years (perhaps more - I don't know the complete history). Yes, new technology can make it more efficient, but how inefficient is the current system exactly? Is it worth the risk? This is what local communities ask themselves. Why should one company be granted the permissions to step outside of the decision process and state they don't want to follow the community rules?

Every action by a government, and most especially inaction (failure to regulate) picks winners and losers. Failing to regulate pollution levels, cab fares, food safety, etc. make winners out of moderately unscrupulous types and moderately scrupulous types. Certain forms of regulations can make winners out of either the highly scrupulous, or the highly unscrupulous.

Nothing tastes bad to me about not letting cabs just use their iphones to automatically calculate fares from unmonitored and unvetted software. It makes it harder for Uber to make money? Well crap, cry me a river, it's better than making it easier on the thieves - society has chosen that path over millennia.
That's wonderful, truly noble -- seriously -- but you, OP, and people like you are probably a very small group, at least compared to the masses of people who are paying simply because they don't know how to jump the paywall (or find it unpleasant to). If the paywall is "working", aka "making money for the NYT," it's mainly because of the techno-illiterates.
Seriously? I found it unbearably slow until the big update a few months ago. I simply couldn't use the website. Now it's fine again.
Kooclass
a site generated by Google App Engine.
At this point jigsaw won't even be in Java 8 - it's been bumped to Java 9 - think 2015...
This post seems a little naive. yes, people spend a lot of time on things like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. However, that's only half the story. People also use search engines to find information. Information that is organised in pages, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon. Streams are fluid. Information is there and gone the next. Pages and streams serve two different purposes and one does not exclude the other.
Depends on the degree. While phds in mathematics of physics may be able to find employment as qountas at goldman and sachs what is the private sector market for degrees in the humanities, logic, philosophy, the arts, etc.

Simply because these disciplines don't directly impact the ability of apple to produce new iphones doesn't mean they are with out value and shouldn't be compensated accordingly by society at some level.
Was there something wrong with the old definition?
I prefer the negativity. Gives you an idea of what to work on next if it is your project, or how to do better than them if it isn't, etc..
This is remarkably similar to HDL in concept (though not in syntax).
It's worth noting that many new-ish companies can swing +/- 20% after quarterly earnings. Even bigger companies like Amazon and Google can swing up or down wildly. Sometimes they return to their original prices in a matter of days, sometimes not.

Some recent examples,

FIO: http://goo.gl/tcilJ

OCZ: http://goo.gl/Fac2O (July 10 was the call)

Zynga: http://goo.gl/GkIjU (may not recover IMO)

Anyway I don't want to make a judgement call on Groupon here, I just want to mention that this sort of thing is somewhat common and one earnings call (and stock price drop) alone doesn't spell death for the company. I'd be more worried if it was a gradual but consistent 27% decline than a day-after-earnings 27% decline.
Looking at the response headers, the powered-by header says "Food" (x-powered-by: Food). Is this a new web framework or just a little joke?
This is a good sign that we aren't in another tech bubble - the market is correctly pricing poor performers on their base metrics rather than speculation and hype.
Ok that's a valid negative experience.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I was supposed to be "back in the day". But I feel it is best to just throw it out since it sounds kind of fake.
It's interesting that in a "blog about making culture" that he doesn't address the issue of archival. While a CMS can produce a nice snapshot for archive.org or another mirror to capture, streams are trickier, especially if they rely on the app that produced the stream(s) to work.
There are already about 4 other products exactly like this already on the market. I kind of question how large the third-party iPhone snap-on-controller market size is to necessitate both YC and Kickstarter.
Use command lines. Break things. Lose data. Cry. Figure out what broke from an entire system viewpoint and a code-level viewpoint. Then fix it. Estimated time to proficiency: 2-20 years.
Did I understand you correctly?

3ms vs. 0.2ms

So we might be talking about order of a magnitude here?
It sounds like the author simply took a few trends in the last 50 years of higher ed and designated them casual "steps."
Goldman Sachs was in charge of setting the IPO of Facebook and Groupon...
You can have your account deleted by emailing in to privacy@quora.com see: http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...
Testability and JavaScript module loaders
And look how that turned out...

Just sayin
I think there's some interesting sociology / anthropology tied up in this.

Reading through the MA regs, it looks like they primarily regulate:

-- Scales of all kinds
-- Volumetric measurements for petroleum products and dairy products
-- Taxi meters
-- other commerce tools (grocery store scanners, change machines, bottle/can refund machines, etc)

It's a truism that weight is a much more accurate way to specify products than volume, which is why even liquids like self-serve soup at the grocery store are sold by mass, not volume.

However, we are historically used to buying gasoline, milk and ice cream by the gallon or liter, not the pound or kilo. It's also interesting that milk and ice cream are the fluids mentioned besides petroleum products in the state code -- we give dairy products a very special place in our culture. In Massachusetts, a 1967 law actually makes it illegal for stores to give away free milk!
More specifically...to run Microsoft Office...on a touch screen. The utility of this is still unexplored.
Verizon sells me internet access with different prices for different speeds. I would like to know how those speeds are measured and with what kind of device: theoretical max? average for one minute? average for 5 minutes?
I don't think TechCrunch really understands what's going on here. Views are still being tracked and shared, albeit not as broadly.

http://www.quora.com/blog/Removing-Feed-Stories-about-Views

http://www.quora.com/Views-on-Quora-feature/Which-of-my-view...
Let us know when they stop blurring answers. I hope google bans them - will destroy their prospects overnight.
That was a short, concise, pragmatic, wise and rockin article.
This is not unlike Bret Victor's work - http://vimeo.com/36579366 . Do watch the video, if you have an hour to spare, it's a beautiful demonstration of "programming by tinkering."
This. Exactly. I was really confused. I've been trying to learn JS on an off for about a year. When I was shown the new CS program at Khan Academy today, I was instantly confused because...I was drawing pictures using processing.js. So..was I learning javascript or was I learning this processing.js that runs on top of javascript? As a beginner, I think it's super important you clarify this.
Exactly. And as the trusted middleman, Uber has every commercial incentive to spot check its drivers.
What has this got to do with Burner or the iPhone? You could do the same with Google Voice.

I would've flagged this except that my flagging privileges were revoked recently(don't see flag link anymore), for reasons unknown.
There is very clear pricing posted on their site: https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco
I'm not quite sure I understand your point, but you're disagreeing with the above quote whereas I agree wholeheartedly with the quote.

Compare a language which forces you to write this

ll = []
for x in xx:
if bar(x):
ll.append(x)

This is Python, but imagine you're doing this in Java or C++ instead. Every time you read a for loop, you have to re-derive what the author intended. Are they just iterating? Are they composing a new list? Remember, these loops are often more than just two lines and they are common.

Contrast the above with

ll = [x for x in xx if bar(x)]

Or even (in Haskell)

filter bar xx

When your language gives you primitives to talk at a higher level, you can write more crisply and concisely. The simple, trivial code you've written 1e9 times is replaced by a very clear, simple definition of what you're doing. The important code, the interesting code may now speak for itself.
Take a look at this:
http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html

There are some examples in there, though a few are a bit dated.
I wasn't thinking of hashbangs, which will ultimately be noise in the history of Twitter. (I could get into a debate about why they weren't that bad, but it's all (HTML5) history now, so I'll move on.)

I was thinking mostly about the clean, namespaced, REST scheme for their API, which you can see at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api. And it's not just a separate API, as it corresponds closely to the website URLs too.

Generally, Twitter and Digg were the best examples of real-world REST implementations around that time. That people like Oatmeal are making fun of the crazy-long Plus URIs [1] shows it's not just RFC longbeards pontificating about The Right way to build web apps. At least some end-users notice and care about this stuff too.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/google-plus-the-oatmeal/
I must say I honestly don't know if they were allergies in the medical way. For quite some time I couldn't drink large (>1L/week) of milk while milk products were fine. I always called that an allergy and only learned much later that it's not;)
What stops people from using Office (RT) with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard? They're making Office for ARM, not Office for touch devices exclusively. ARM doesn't imply that you have to use touch screens.
Reminds me of the "oh shit" SOPA backtracking GoDaddy did. Too late, you creeped a lot of folks out.
It was a sequence simple operations (simple as in no 2i or mapred) of read an existing key A, check if a nonexistent key exists B, write a previously nonexistent key C, delete an existing key D, overwrite an existing key A.

All performed in serial over protobuf (python riak lib).
ZSpace Promises Holographic CAD Manipulation
>I use Ubuntu every day and all the pieces are in place for Ubuntu-based fully-functional (as in "you can work exclusively on it") ARM devices

What's stopping anyone(including OEMs) now or later when Windows RT launches from making "Ubuntu-based fully-functional" tablets? Why the obsession with trying to shoehorn Linux onto Windows RT tablets?
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
Fair points. And thanks, by the way, for actually advancing the discussion.

Init can and does manage processes. Somewhat crudely, mostly via the 'respawn' directive. One thing it isn't particularly good at is telling if a process is doing something useful (say, serving out web pages successfully), but it will let you know that it's running. There was a semi-popular hack some years back to run sshd out of init (via respawn) to ensure you always had an SSH daemon on your box (Dustin mentions this). The downside is that while it will ensure sshd is running, it doesn't give you much flexibility over the process (you've got to edit inittab and 'init q' to make changes).

What monit and kin can do, above and beyond process-level monitoring, is check that the service attributes of a process are sane. That a webserver, say, kicks out a 200 OK response rather than a 4## or 5## error, and restart the service if this isn't the case. Checking for correct operation can be more useful than simply verifying a process is running (though going too far overboard in defining "correctness" can also cause problems).

For realtime/HA tools, attacking things on the single-system level is probably the wrong way to roll. You want a load balancer in front of multiple hosts with response detection -- is host A still up or not? Whether or not this ties into mitigation (restart) or alerting (notifications to staff) is another matter.

There are also places other than init you can watch things from. /proc contains within it multitudes, including a lot of interesting/useful process state. Daemons can be written with control/monitoring sockets instrumented directly into themselves. Debuggers, strace, ltrace, dtrace, and systemtap all provide resolution inside a running process/thread. Creating something sane, effective, efficient, and sufficient out of all these tools ... interesting problem.
I'm pretty sure the canonical example should be PHP. Javascript had a lot of things interesting about it and consistent function names. It's actually not a bad language.
Tesla CTO talks Model S, batteries and in-car Linux
Thanks, i think this is the best piece of advice I've gotten so far (I went on reddit and Quora before this). I'm currently working with CentOS VPS (I'm only a dev) and refer to the sysadmin a lot. And I actually like messing with, have liked it for a while so I wanted to start learning it but never really found anything as structure as there is for (for example) PHP, and web development in general. I've got a half-price books right next to my house and they actually have a ton of programming books so I'll give that a shot! :)

Thanks!
This is a disastrously limited view of what it takes to roll out a good service in a different country while retaining a good service in the home country.
cool, mashed up with twitter api...
Point. I'd linked that off another discussion I'd had some months ago and failed to re-read it with full_comprehension bit set.
It's probably not dischargeable in bankruptcy; liens on property one hasn't yet acquired (i.e., income) can't be discharged because they don't exist at the time of the bankruptcy.
Some people certainly do! My favorite examples of how not to write comments are these code snippets from the API guide I was given at a previous job. The other 60 pages of API documentation are just like this- all what and no why.

The problem isn't that these comments are harmful (they're not), but that inserting these comments made the coder feel like they'd done their job of commenting their code well, when in actuality the comments provide no insight to why certain things are called or instantiated, or what certain values represent; critical knowledge one needs to extend the code beyond the specific example cases the API guide presented.

----

‘ A for loop iterates through each row of DataGridView
For Each row In DirectCast(Me.DataGridView1.Rows, IEnumerable)

----

Dim frmTakeBackTask As New TakeBackTask
‘ Public oTaskData of TaskBackTask gets populated from the local object oTaskData
frmTakeBackTask.oTaskData = oTaskData

----

‘ A For loop is initiated to iterate through each child node contained
‘ in the XML document
For Each record In xmlDoc.ChildNodes.ItemOf(0).ChildNodes
‘ A nested For loop is initiated to iterate through each column
For Each column In record.ChildNodes
High end prostitutes seem to be able to get buy without the "benefit" of regulation.

boards exist specifically to ID bad actors and where good ones can build community reputation:

http://www.theeroticreview.com

http://p411.com

Or so I have heard
I work on embedded linux boxes in vehicles and boot times are hugely important to us. The time from when someone turns on their car ignition to the time when our box is usable is critical.

I understand that this feature isn't important to dredmorbius, but to some of us this type of improvement is fantastic.
Curiosity’s looking a little blue
You have successfully gotten me to commit myself to looking into Clojure. Any good resources on learning/setting up, or should I go by the seat of my pants?
How often do you reboot your systems?

What is giving rise to the need to reboot them when you do?
I don't really have a goal with it other than I like messing with it and I do want to have a VPS to host my sites in the future and develop apps. So that'd be a "not right now" for the job, and kind of a mix of "hosting your own site" and "devops guy at a startup". haha :)

I'll setup a virtualbox for it, that will probably be the easiest. :)

Thanks for the exercises! I'm having to use vim (or vi) for the little things I do on a VPS I got. Oh and, I have used SVN, Mercurial, and Git. I mainly stick with Git (or mercurial) because of the free private repos bitbucket offers.

Thanks a ton! :) I really appreciate it!
Men's Health [1]:

"In a British study published in 1953, scientists examined two groups of workers: bus drivers and trolley conductors. At first glance, the two occupations appeared to be pretty similar. But while the bus drivers were more likely to sit down for their entire day, the trolley conductors were running up and down the stairs and aisles of the double-decker trolleys. As it turned out, the bus drivers were nearly twice as likely to die of heart disease as the conductors were.

A more recent interpretation of that study, published in 2004, found that none of the participants ever exercised. But the two groups did sit for different amounts of time. The analysis revealed that even after the scientists accounted for differences in waist size—an indicator of belly fat—the bus drivers were still more likely to die before the conductors did."

This looks like the Morris studies referenced in TRF [2] and BCMJ [3].

[1]: http://my.menshealth.com/exclusive-content/sentenced-chair

[2]: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/iprc/documents/bus_driver_wellbeing.pd...

[3]: http://www.bcmj.org/article/exercise-and-heart-review-early-...
Ycombinator operates HN (as should be apparent by the URL). Neither are related to TechCrunch beyond all having an interest in the tech industry.

Downvote.
Yes, but first you've got to "crack" the egg.
> diagonal screen size between 10.1 and 11.6 inches, weigh between 520g and 1200g, and be between 8.35mm and 15mm thick

Tip for technical writers (I assume tech journalists consider themselves technical writers?): there is a space between the value and the units, whether you use Imperial or metric units.
Why haven't you sold call options then?
Back in England, there was something called the "hue and cry".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry

Bystanders could be punished if they did not help apprehend the thief.
It seems like WePay is still trying to figure out its place in the industry. It's an inferior offering to PayPal and was rapidly passed over by Stripe.
Programatically responding to your B'day wishes on Facebook
A simple python script to thank all your friends on Facebook who have wished on your birthday
Is this common practise, to not provide an option to delete your account except by contacting customer service? Personally I'm not aware of any other product being so sneaky in making it hard for users to quit.

Facebook was one of the first companies that started this trend of burying the "delete account" feature deep inside and making it hard to find. But by removing the option altogether, Quora seems to have raised the sneakiness bar much higher.