skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the risk of professing an attitude that I generally dislike: there's no proper tone to take other than full responsibility. Like Steve Jobs said, when you're the janitor, reasons matter.

Once you're a service provider -- whether your services in turn rely on other services or not -- reasons stop mattering. As a practical matter, you and I know that there's no way you can build a fully scalable, fully redundant infrastructure from the ground-up in your first week. Hell, if you ever build that kind of infrastructure at all, you'll be way ahead of most companies.

But, that's the kind of infrastructure you should be working towards building, all the time. You should have a clear roadmap for ensuring data integrity, then dealing with security, then dealing with redundancy, and finally high availability.

If your service falls over for any reason, ultimately it's because you haven't done something on your roadmap yet. There's no way to explain that to your customers that doesn't sound like you're trying to pass the fault on to someone else -- because that's exactly what you're doing.

So just 'fess up to your customers: "one of the services that our business relies on had some serious technical problems that affected us today, but we recognize that ultimately it's our responsibility to make sure that our service is always available to you. We're constantly working on our infrastructure to make it more reliable, but we clearly still have more work to do. We will be changing some of our priorities so that this won't be a problem in the future. Thank you for sticking with us." (And then do it, otherwise this will backfire on you the next time you have an outage of similar cause.)

As an aside: I generally take a softer stance towards user responsibilities -- of course everyone should have backups, but Joe Schmoe just doesn't have time for that -- but a much harder stance towards businesses. Once you accept money from someone, you put yourself into a position of absolute responsibility for whatever it is that people rely on you for. If you can't guarantee the availability of your service or the safety of their data, then you shouldn't be taking their money.
"The only reason DNT exists is to express a non-default option," Fielding wrote in a post defending the change. "That's all it does. It does not protect anyone's privacy unless the recipients believe it was set by a real human being, with a real preference for privacy over personalization."

Seems to me that it is better to default to privacy, and opt-in to personalization.
cmd is going to output to STDOUT and STDERR, which are file descriptors 1 and 2. In a basic shell command execution, those route out to the console.

Reading from left to right:

cmd

Run command cmd. File descriptors: {1: /dev/console, 2:/dev/console}

> file

Open a file descriptor for "file" and copy it into our first file descriptor (stdout). File descriptors: {1: fopen('file'), 2: /dev/console }

2>&1

Copy the file descriptor stored in 1 (stdout) into 2 (stderr). File descriptors: {1: fopen('file'), 2: fopen('file')}
What did you find to be of a douche nature about it? It clearly looked to me as poking fun at the ridiculous analogies some people use for programming talent (such as rock star programmers).

I thought they nailed it. (No pun intended).
With API controllable services like CloudFlare (free) and Route 53 (cheap) why would you want the headache of running your own server?
Update: it's not so much HN as Techdirt http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120908/02103120318/wikitr... .
Is this really something we want to be encouraging in the development community?
I was watching the film "things to do when you're dead in denver" the other night and right at the end, the main character, Jimmy "the saint" Tosnia says to write down the ten most important things to you.

I thought that was a pretty good list to have.
1. That seems like a great idea and I totally agree. I've been wondering on how to approach an introduction for a while now, I will definitely look at doodleordie.

2. I just got the website into a state where I would want the public to see it, so I should be adding to the content in the coming days/week. That's a very good point though, no one wants to use a barren website.

3. That was actually my next step! I posted this on reddit and HN, but I totally can see writer communities sticking to this idea a lot more. So far, the response on reddit has been absolutely nil, but then again that might be from posting to a small subreddit (/r/somethingimade)

4. Editing/deleting: that's a decent idea. I was originally thinking of letting people edit/delete a paragraph if no one has responded to it. After that, a 'mod' would only be able to edit it. That moderator might be the story owner, I'll think about it.

5. Auto-updating: you are right, this should be put on the backburner for now.

6. Markdown: there was a nice gui editor somewhere that used markdown, I was thinking that would pander to both crowds.

As for the ranting, you weren't! This is awesome feedback, I wish more people would comment like this.

Thank you!
A quick note, the bottom of that script has this section:

if [ "$COMPASS" -eq 0 ]; then
echo ""
echo "Install hiccup: no compass"
echo "Sorry chap, compass wasn't setup because there was a problem with your ruby setup. You can check the documentation here for help: [link to documentation]."
fi

You should probably make that an actual link for when people have problems.

Very nice install script by the way, you clearly had a lot of fun making it.
what? humour? probably not. get back to work.
Looks like the primary server cluster that handles all the incoming traffic at godaddy for all their went down. This caused the traffic failover to secondary servers which where unable to handle the load and crash.

ETA is 6 hours
>The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

- - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

I wonder if he still thinks saying that was a good idea.
The Verge is the best tech site out there. This type of "Higher moral ground" trolling from Marco and Gruber is absolutely unacceptable.
CONCLUSION

---

Always do a Lean Canvas!
Hundreds of people engaging in a question is actually a very good hint that it's Not Constructive (just a hint though). Remember, Programmers and every other Stack Exchange site are about questions and answers, not discussions.
Mruby: embeddable Ruby
I'm saying it's well designed as a car cabin. Not about it's propulsion technology.
I wonder why there was no such furor when refrigerator companies copied each other's designs.
I was but was also able to check out anyway. I emailed a screenshot to gumroad's support address.
Apple has truly become a religion, and one with plenty of zealots.
As someone who has a more insider perspective on critical infrastructure perspective, I think that what really needs to change for the better is the culture of awareness and understanding of modern software in the SCADA world. Right now it's where IT was in the early 90s, IMO.

My personal opinion is that certain facilities and services (say, water management systems or the electric grid) must be federally regulated, with aggressive fines and various charges for negligence and slackness. There must be a real and definite risk factor to being a slacker. Right now, there isn't- not really. The risk is very small for the cost involved in upgrading infrastructure and having annoying security people telling you that the Internet is a source of problems and to stop communicating over telnet. :-)

I used to follow the SCADASEC mailing list which had several excellent descriptions of the culture problem.
Watch Darpa’s Robotic Dog Follow Its Master (Video)
If you have already built a few web apps, wouldn't you already have your scaffolding that can be copied into a new app? And as a bonus, you will have scaffolding that you understand very well.

"You don't have to worry about how any of it fits together..." That doesn't seem like an advantage.
Is it possible to identify certain add-ons in firefox even if they aren't in the user agent string, or is that the only information you get from the client?

Would be cool if it could tell that I use pentadactyl, stylish, ad-block plus etc. etc.
I remember using Compuserve to get their electronic press kit. It was a pretty big download, and then you could run their program and browse around through their presentation. I would love to see that again just to see how well it's held up to time, even if it means running it in a DOS emulator.
Show HN: HTML to SCSS online parser built with Node.
I don't see any value in this as a product. $25 for a shirt is incredibly expensive, especially printing is limited to text in one typeface on one side of one type of shirt. It's pricey and limited. I just don't see why I would want to use it.
> Does anyone know the rationale behind ordering of redirects?

I can't give you an exact rationale, but my old shell scripting books from the 90's use the cmd > file 2>&1 notation. My personal belief is that it was for situations when you would do something like this:

cmd > output.txt 2> errors.txt
One of the nice things about the slide scanner is that it doesn't leave a copy of your whole fingerprint on the sensor (in oil residue).
And massive heat dissipation. Imho that's the real killer. Its going to be a while before we start seeing passively cooled SoCs with Crysis level graphics. Some day, yes. Next year? No way.

I can't even imagine how ridiculous a phone with active cooling would be. I've seen a few wintel tablets with active cooling and they look/feel like garbage compared to their thinner lighter ARM based android/iPad counterparts. The extra size would be way even pronounced on a phone.
I feel like this is an argument that is being irresponsibly being held in public:

1) Do Gruber or Marco honestly believe that The Verge's ethics are questionable? Both have appeared on On The Verge and frequently link to The Verge... I really doubt they've suddenly developed serious misgivings about The Verge's standards of ethics. And if they have, sniping about it in links and Twitter comments is immature at best.

2) Does Topolsky need to defend the ethics of The Verge in light of such sniping? If so, I feel like a personal, emotional and vitriolic response isn't the way to go. Double down with an editorial piece that restates the ethical stance and integrity of The Verge or ignore the sniping. All this does is bring Topolsky down to Marco and Gruber's level.

Either someone has serious ethical misgivings or nobody does. If there's a serious beef here, I feel like full-on articles and some investigative journalism (2 of the 3 parties are journalists and Marco plays one on the internet) is in order. If not, all three need to grow the fuck up and start behaving like professionals.

update: added formatting
SoundGecko Now Turns Your Favorite RSS Feed Into An MP3 Podcast
Either you're being willfully obtuse, you're unaware of what the market for all-in-ones looks like right now, or else the entire tech industry is filled with dummies who aren't as observant and correct as you. Pick one.

(And while we're nitpicking, the iMac hasn't had a white acrylic chin in five years.)

HP has multiple different lines of All-In-Ones that have absolutely no resemblance to anything Apple makes, meaning they haven't ~chanced~ or ~evolved~ into doing this look. Even Vizio (a company that was dinged for -substantially- replicating Apple's accessory design for their first all-in-one outing) managed to use a completely different finish and different foot profile.

The gestalt of Apple's desktop lineup was needlessly duplicated by a company that has the talent and resources to do otherwise. Argue another angle.
If the founders are smart, they will personally earn very little, and funnel as many of their expenses through the business as possible, for tax reasons.

I worked for consultant who had a lifestyle business. He pulled in nearly half a million dollars in revenue per year, but I got paid a higher salary than he did. But I drove my own car, and he drove a company car. He didn't own a computer, but the company had a fiber connection, a server room and several very nice recent laptops. He didn't own a cell phone or a camera, but the company supplied him with a nice world smart phone and multiples of the latest cameras. He rarely took vacations, but the company paid for him to travel the world to visit clients and trade shows. Etc.

It's for this reason that revenue is often a better gauge of success for a lifestyle business, than profit or salary.
Also remember the Jura we had in the office.
It worked well at first, but if it is not used for some days it starts to mold inside :(
Doesn't Django Debug Toolbar bring in itself into AJAX calls if you simply wrap the results in a <body> element?
I agree that both parties (save Ron Paul, if you'd call him a Republican) aren't running on civil liberties, but don't pretend that social "justice" wasn't a theme of Obama in '08. And to Obama, the two are conflated. And to call Obama a pragmatist is laughable, at best. I know you're from Chi-town...so am I. In his neighborhood, no less. But pragmatism is an unknown word to Obama because he doesn't know how to govern. You brought up Gitmo...any candidate with half a brain wouldn't go around spouting nonsense about closing it as a campaign issue. A 15 minute conversation with anyone in that arena would tell you not to make that promise...yet he did.

Also, I'm here to provide a counter-point to your assertion that most people on HN are social liberals. I'm not, yet I live in one of the most socially liberal neighborhoods in the country (save SF neighborhoods?).

I agree with you that closing Gitmo wasn't a priority for him in office, and that health care was the priority. Unfortunately, that's why we're 2+ years behind in fixing this economy. He is so fixated on ideology than pragmatism (in his words) that the economy just slipped his mind.

*edit: pronoun change
Sure someone will post this as a new story, but it appears DNS services are back online. I checked a few of the sites I manage and they are now working.

Now I need to bust a nut and get things moved off ASAP.
It's not clear to me why you're different from any other wannabe entrepreneur trying to go to SW. You should probably describe yourselves more fully.

Good luck.
I have been using Haskell seriously for about two years now and humorously for a bit longer. For some reason I bought the old sales pitch some time ago. Now that I have a clue about the language I would like to rewrite the sales pitch for anyone considering a move.

Here's what happens in the middle of a big Haskell project.

1) Take some existing code.

2) Refactor (Add a feature, change a record element, etc.)

3) Run ghc, then fix all the errors it reports. Repeat this
step as needed.

4) Done.

What would be different in python? For one, no compile errors means very little. How many test cases would you need? How would you find all the places the code must change?

Lesson: A tough, smart compiler can be the programmer's best friend.

Meta-lesson: There is little need to discuss laziness, purity or static typing to "sell" Haskell. They are enablers of ghc. What you need is a big, complicated code base and an urgent need to make changes to it. You won't have that until you get your feet wet.

Is Haskell perfect? No, but I'll save that for an OP that is overhyping the language.
I've found

cmd <(another_cmd)

to be particularly useful in the past for pushing generated data into something that doesn't accept - as an alias for STDIN. I'm not sure if it's a different way of expressing one of the listed items though; iirc it creates a temporary fifo
And a few deleted ones. "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." is one of them (yeap, just that), the whole thread was turning to crap. Closing is only meant to prevent further answers, and this one was deteriorating fast.
Are you trying to say that it is ironic because my post is also snarky? If so, I think you need to a) go do some research on the concept of irony and then b) point out where I claimed to not be snarky...?
It's yet another example of the obliviously anti-female nature of so many tech companies.

Job adverts can be irreverent, but they're still job adverts. It's setting the tone of the relationship between an employer and an employee (and between employees, really).

And if it's inappropriate to put on your blog[1], maybe you should think twice about putting it elsewhere.

1. http://blog.swagsy.com/#mypage-115
I'm also disappointed that this was a real ads versus a full-out lick of sarcasm (and I am not usually terribly fond of these [vanilla.js, etc])

I feel like the early commenters here missed the point. I'm fairly sure that the whole "porn star developer" is epitomizing how absurd many startup adverts are (and frankly some of the YC ones are nearly as bad, I've wondered about a conspiracy of why we're not allowed to comment on the job postings).
It's a joke, right? Please? Please let this be a joke.
PDO and sqlite take care of that nicely.
Thanks for slurring an entire religious group. Does a lot for your argument.
In my opinion, the computer itself looks nothing like an imac. The keyboard, and touchpad however, do look exactly like Apple's equivalent products.
Most of the comments in this thread are about either defending or bashing Obama. I personally only care in finding ways to limit the means our government has of needlessly gathering information on us. I am aware that this is a losing battle but the idea of civil liberties and the societies that they encourage are more important then a tit-for-tat discussion about who did what.
It was back briefly for me, and now it's down again.
Good luck guys. What will you be presenting on the SW NYC?
I'd have to agree with Gruber on this one. The forums on the verge have some very anti-Apple group which complain about anything Apple. One of the features that they have on the Verge is where their writers show what is in their bags and 9/10 of the time, its a Mac laptop and iPhone. That really gets the anti-Apple folks in a tizzy for sure. Unrelated, this seems like a weird article to be discussing on Hacker News.
This isn't intended for production use.

PHP-FPM is, though, and it's been around for quite some time.
I'm assuming they're adding the Verisign DDoS protection service, but this change should make EVERY single Godaddy client very, very, very nervous (from the current whois):

Domain Name: GODADDY.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: A1.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Name Server: A2.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Name Server: A3.VERISIGNDNS.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 10-sep-2012
Creation Date: 02-mar-1999
Expiration Date: 01-nov-2021

Yes, you read that right... they just implemented verisign name-servers. A multi-multi million (billion?) dollar company.
Responding to criticism in this fashion is a waste of time. It degenerates quickly into a "Did not!" "Did too!" argument. Better to simply write good articles and leave the critics to their own endeavors.

EDIT: Grammar
You need pip first, especially if you're on Windows, which I'd imagine is a little more difficult than just installing XAMPP with an .exe.
The ad is discriminating; it doesn't appeal to both genders, does it? Read http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/ and then read the ad again.
We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider.

I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.

Make it so.
So why do they have to be less than $1000? Henry Ford disrupted things and never built a consumer version of the assembly line :-)

There is already use of 3D processes in specialist markets for production parts, those markets are training the people who build these things what is and what is not useful.

The 'home' 3D printing market is wicked fun but I don't know if it will ever be much bigger than the home 'machining' market is either. Time will tell.
> But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.

Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months at a time.

You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down" thread have done).

Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation where all of your DNS goes offline and you can't update your DNS records.

(Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place; this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS, like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.)

(Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)
I love the use of the .st for sites like linkli.st that end with list. And of course for the smalltalk community.
Ask HN: What do you want in a javascript MVC framework.
For a project I'm considering making or extending a javascript MVC framework. What features or design aspects would you want in one? I personally want more robust model relationships and less boilerplate.
That's a very interesting observation. When you say it should make current clients nervous, what angle are you thinking of? The angle that they should be nervous because GoDaddy had to go to someone else for this type of service or that Verisign is now involved?
That helps if your aircraft carrier is a solid block...
Beetil (IT service management SaaS) acquired by Citrix
For those still using PHP 5.3, you can use https://github.com/youngj/httpserver (disclaimer: I wrote it) -- it's a standalone development HTTP server written in PHP that only depends on the php-cgi binary.

Even with PHP 5.4, I find it more useful for development than the built-in cli-server, since it gives me more flexibility to simulate the various directives in my nginx configuration files (e.g. gzip_static).
it always surprises me when erlang is lumped in with the other functional languages. i know it technically qualifies as one, but if i had to round up the "mainstream" fp languages, i'd put ocaml, haskell, scala and clojure in one group, and erlang off to one side by itself.
It would be fun to hear those calls from PR people.

Blogs are a PR man's worst nightmare come true.

As useful as these products are, they also suck in so many ways. Such is the nature of most computers. Cheap to manufacture, limited lifetime, and it shows. They are 1/100th as useful as they could be. Damned if we should have to pretend Apple's or anyone's products are just "perfect", and similar products are inferior, cheap knock-offs (the stuff is all the same on the inside! made in the same factories), or that we should have to "upgrade" whenever the manufacturer (or a TV ad, newspaper, magazine or blog) instructs us to do so.

Warn callers from PR firms their conversations will be recorded and then upload some mp3's of the phone calls.

Now that would be integrity.
Mostly for the knowledge that only comes from doing it myself. I looked into using Route53 but I would have had to build something for my dynamic DNS anyway.
Also, the sheer PITA nature of the .us domain, early on, when it was hard to get a .us address if you weren't a state or municipal government.