skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One other major suggestion I'd add:

Practice writing. Just write whenever you can, in whatever environment, no matter how unformal. Your company wiki, your personal blog, whatever.

Maturing from a "junior" engineer into a more experienced one usually means initiating suggestions, not just following them. As the OP said -- have an opinion! But your suggestions will always be limited to how well you can communicate them. And a lot of your interactions wherever you work will be with non-technical people, so the better you can frame technical situations to them, the more they will enjoy working with you and cede to your judgment.

I've seen so many talented software engineers not find the professional success they deserve because they couldn't write. You will do brilliant things, and those brilliant things will make your employer money, and your ability to write will matter a lot in how much that brilliance is valued. Likewise you will make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes will cost your employer money, and when that happens someone will be upset, and your ability to write will matter a lot in how soon they calm down.

Some of the most important keystrokes in my career were not for writing lines of code, but for how I composed an email. I'm not saying your expertise in software development doesn't matter -- of course it does, and a bad software engineer that's a good writer does not make them a good software engineer. But your ability to write and communicate can be a tremendous force multiplier for your career.
US just loves making friends.
Cocoa: One window multiple documents
It doesn't lack semicolons, it's only using them where necessary.
I'm one of the founders of Virtualmin, Inc. We were a Y Combinator company in 2007. We are still in business and profitable, and growing (though slower than I'd like, of late, but I have pretty good theories on why we have slow growth and we've begun correcting the trajectory). I make less money than I did doing contract work, but I'm much happier and don't often have work-related stress anymore (being an IT contractor is being the guy who has to fix things Right Now!, because for many businesses, by the time it's bad enough to call the guy who charges $1000/day, it's pretty darned bad).
Two bizarre comments on that page. One is (paraphrasing) "we don't do maudlin stuff like this -- that's for people across the pond" and the other "here in the US we don't go to debtors' prison".

From this end of the pond, I would've guessed that Europeans were the jaded cynical ones and USians the heart-on-sleeve maudlin primary-colour-emotions ones. If I had to choose, that is. And startup founders don't go to prison here either.
So it's a voluntary charge, payable by anyone who receives live tv in the UK? Collected by Capita, and paid to the BBC but not to the government?

Call it tax-like, but it is not a tax, and mistaken terminology is unhelpful when campaigning to change the licence fee.
It's the "while (!done)" loop. next(2012-09-24) returns the same date. Not sure why yet.
Instead of supplying another blog of yet another startup's trials and tribulations, compile the many that have been written so far and do a meta analysis of them, perhaps faceting it by category of startup/type of funding/etc. at the very least it will force your blog, hopefully, out of a plain narrative structure. And you can even use this collected data to inform your own decisions, and then write about that analytical process.

A Julie and Julia, about startups
Empirically, water fluoridation is a bad idea
VersionEye can monitor your project on GitHub and notify your dev team about outdated libraries. In that they they don't have to spent time to look for updates. They can save a lot of time and are always up-to-date.
I'm digging the exception messages... really informative :D
I think the Google Plus is much better way and good combination of both world. Everyone should think of switching to Google.
The page is driven via the @balancedstatus Twitter account via a protocol our CEO, Matin, came up with. Here's the relevant section from the README for the repo:

## Message Display Behavior

Messages are fed into the system via the @balancedstatus Twitter account.

Messages take the format

`<SYSTEM>-<STATE>: <MESSAGE>`; e.g.

* `DASH-UP: Everything is back to normal`
* `API-ISSUE: We are experiencing problems`
* `JS: Here's an informal message` _(non-error message)_

Where STATE is one of `UP`, `DOWN`, `ISSUE`

Messages with a state are displayed in the lower portion of the page idefinitely, `ISSUE` or `DOWN` messages will change the icon of the corresponding service. These messages must be followed by an `UP` state message in order to revert the displayed icon to its natural state.

Messages without a state are displayed in the upper middle portion of the page for 24 hours.

/----------------------------------------------

Beyond that we parse and feed our logs from the various services that make up the Balanced stack and then calculate the uptime percentages based on number of 500s (and slow requests) / non-500s.
Since when is New York #2?

I thought that, for tech startups, it was, #1. Silicon Valley, #2 Tel Aviv, #3 Boston/Route 128, and then came some sorting of New York, London, Singapore, that triangle in Virginia, whatever city is in the lead in India, etc.
Another Bullshit FBI Thwarted Terror Plot
Cool! I knew I wasn't the only one out there with this need. I wrote something similar over 10 years ago in old school PHP. I rewrote it recently enough for similar reasons as you (practice project). Mine is over at http://www.gifttracker.net/
You should support Redline Smalltalk
Thanks! I think this problem is in a lot of junior devs as well (not just elite college grads). You get good at one thing and feel comfortable within that bubble, but the real growth comes from pushing yourself out of that comfort zone.
Misses listing the following advantage:

* Does not have date-format endian issues.
A minor point that nevertheless caught my eye right away:

Your undertitle is "...VersionEye
Follow your libraries..."

but right below you have "What is VersionEye? More than just following your libraries."

Considering that these are the only 2 messages I see above the fold on load, they feel somewhat at odds with each other.
My favorite feature is that we can rearrange the selects to enter the date in a culturally agnostic format. Nice.
Sure thing. Keep in mind, though, that this is from the perspective of a small development shop, and design is not our forte.

Whether it's for myself or a client, the first thing I always do is a requirements document. They're not always (read: almost never) complete, but a simply-formatted list of features, grouped according to relevance and what goes where, is a great place to start and often helps to bring up potential issues or required but glossed-over features that might not otherwise have come up until the project had already started (this is particularly important for clients as it helps avoid incomplete estimates).

After that, ideally, we take the requirements to a front-end and/or (again, very ideally) UX designer, if available. They throw our requirements into a large black cauldron, stir in Eye of Newt and perhaps an Honest Politician or two, and later we get back templates that might resemble parts of the final product.

In the case that budget or time doesn't allow an actual design phase, we tend to just build a simple base template (lately on Bootstrap) and jump into code. I'm not advocating this; it's far from ideal. It generally works out if you have a very solid understanding of the project and the relevant design considerations, but leaves you very much open to coding yourself into any of many corners.

From there, most projects are just a long series of build, show 'n' tell, iterate on feedback, feature creep, rinse and repeat.
MSN China Collapses, Loses 2 Million Users
Your date arithmetic jumps through some weird hoops to accomplish something really simple. To increment a date by one day, for example, can be done like so:

d = new Date(base);
d.setDate(d.getDate() + 1);

Changing rel() to do this fixes the loop problem, but something else is surely wrong, because the result page now looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/ZUAJg.png
500px Acqui-hires French iOS App Studio Pulpfingers
What's wrong with wanting to avoid glibc dependencies? The #define approach is not the way to do it, but why not make a udev that works with other C libraries and/or can be compiled with -std=c99?
Another awesome feature is the detail page to any library. There you can see the average release time of a project and how many days ago the latest version was released. In that way you can see if a project is still alive or already dead.
A cursory level of respect for other humans is enough.
> All iPads are unlocked.

Not true. Japan has the dubious honor of being the only country with locked iPads. Of Japan country-coded SIMs, they will only work with the single official carrier in the country due to a software lock. They still get to say 'unlocked' though, but the devices only work on overseas networks, not other compatible networks in the same country.
European vegetable oil export prices Hamburg,Eur/t,FOB - 2012 Nov 20
I am really surprised this is getting voted up and is on the front page.

What is interesting about this? What am I missing?
Your link is broken because you've used < and >.

Innovations on the spreadsheet have regularly failed to catch on. Improv is one. And I learned the other day that Resolver One has been discontinued.
OK. I will think about it.
If you define the payoff matrix as: [I win = 1, I loose = -1], then you'll have a zero-sum game.

The problem here is that this kind of mechanics can suck up unlimited amounts of money for little absolute value, as you're paying for the relative - to just get better than your opponent. It's the same problem as with political campaigns - a ridiculously huge waste of resources with no theoretical upper bound, just to influence how people choose between few available options.
At least you got a number. A company I worked for back in New Zealand had a particularly odd architecture which didn't fit neatly into any of the SQL Server licensing structures at the time.

We asked MS what sort of licences (& how many) we'd need to purchase and were still waiting for an answer months later when I left.
By "problem" the OP didn't just mean a bug or ambiguous situation, they meant plugins, addons, etc, that the community has contributed.

EDIT: Reading his post again, maybe he didn't mean that, but the point is still valid.
> It's a general problem with hierarchies of inheritance.

And what do you suggest to make it easier for you to read, spaghetti code ?
Django makes great use of mixins, mixins you can re-use to make your own views if you dont like the default generic views.
Would love to hear ideas that would be of interest to you
More NY subway stations will get wifi and cell service
Love this idea, perhaps we can chat and collaborate on it
It’s Not Just HP And Autonomy
Unless you're one of the many Instagram-like startups that have higher burn than revenue and still get paid handsomely.
yes i agree with your statement and actually pg's entire article, it's just the " Which in turn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise software." which is throwing me in a loop.

maybe i'm taking it out of context, but anyway, seems i'm the only one, so nevermind ;)
Ask HN: Customer Development? Really?
Disclaimer:

I might be splitting hairs in here. So if you're in a rush please feel free to skip this question. I just need to let it out.

Question:

When I heard the phrase "Customer Development" first, I thought that it's some sort of technique of "developing" customers, i.e. changing, converting existing people's behaviours into those that you need for your business, akin to "software development".

I quickly discovered that it's actually a development of your understanding of customers' needs, or as Wikipedia puts it:

"The concept details a scientific approach that can be applied by startups and entrepreneurs to improve their products’ success by developing a better understanding of their consumers."

Yet when I encounter this phrase in text anywhere I have to make this conscious effort to go from initial understanding of it to the right one.

Admittedly English is not my native language (although I've been living in an English-speaking country for few years now) and this could've influenced the problem.

Although I wonder: does it sound a bit strange to any of you or you have no problems with it, no cognitive frictions, so to speak?

Thanks!
There appears to be only a loose correlation between McCabe complexity and "excessive complexity." It's not clear how the author converts from one to the other.

One would hope that the difference in ordering comes from accounting for the amount of functionality in each project (and even if you prefer bottle to django, you have to admit that django builds in more functionality.)

But, again, it's unclear how that conversion happened. I'm wondering if the author ranked "excessive complexity" however he wanted, and the McCabe complexity is just there to give this the veneer of scientific authenticity.
... and it even has a 31st of February! Awesome. No other popular datepicker provides this yet!
Regardless of whether my business succeeds or fails, if my personal relationships with my wife and kids fail, I am a failure.

Personally, I don't care if everybody in the world thinks I succeeded, if those relationships fail, I am a failure. Priorities are important.
I'm trying to make a reservation but Ferrari F430 Spider seems to be "sold out" even if I pick a date months from now. Can you please help?
What do people on HN think about water fluoridation?
What it should do is motivate founders to 1) read the 'sunk cost fallacy' article on Wikipedia, and 2) set clear lines well before 'mountain of personal debt' and 'ruined relationships', where you call it over.

I walked away from a startup when it ran out of money. The founders were floating a proposal to guarantee a business loan with their houses. That, to me, was a bridge too far, an inability to recognize too much sacrifice in the making.

Yes, there's such a thing as 'too much sacrifice'. Businesses are ultimately, as said in the linked article, run by the math, not the CEO. Overcoming the math with a foolhardy level of commitment is a mistake. It's gambling, not math. You'll learn the same lessons about commitment and failure before maxing out every credit card you can get your hands on.
Dude tries to touchscreen news, gets rocked harder than CNN hologram [vid]
You can. Modernizr will tell you if the browser supports the native picker.
http://modernizr.com/
Google Consumer Surveys is a pretty cool idea, but I've yet to see it in use anywhere on the web. Does anyone know of any websites that actually use Google Consumer Surveys as a gatekeeper to premium content?
By the time you've forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise license

1] This properly fucks us on the 2008->2012 upgrade cycle as our primary machines are 4x 8 core Xeons. So that's from 4 licensable CPUs to 32 licensable CPUs. We have 4 of those machines. Bastards!

But the Core pricing is 1/4 the CPU pricing, so you're going from 4 licensable CPUs to the equivalent of 8 licensable CPUs.
When pairing this up with jqueryui js on the same page, none of it seems to be working. Not sure why, seems to not have the proper name spacing?
I'm sure you are a super smart and accomplished guy. But this opening makes it sound like you don't have much to contribute.

What should you write about? Write about your insights and interesting observations! If your readers need to tell you what your insights are, those insights wouldn't be very insightful.
As the Internet we need to do two things, one start getting our sorry little asses in congress to stop this stuff where it starts.

Two, build better technology that is not such an easy target. If individual keys were required to decrypt messages, then it's hard to take the data without your permission because cryptography prevents that.

This might be a good enough reason to switch off of email, especially email like gmail.
I'm the author and I highly doubt that. They are far from the first company to really focus on conversion optimization.

I paid a statistician to reverse engineer the economy of Dragonvale, Tap Pet Hotel and Tap Zoo. All of the games follow a VERY similar pattern on every stat. Here is an example on XP and Level ratios:

http://www.treylink.com/uploads/xp_leve_ratio.png

We've done ton of research on this and most of these games copy each others economy very closely.

I could go on about that forever, but go play Galaxy Life and then Clash of Clans. You'll see it's the EXACT same tutorial story and setup. I mean, screen for screen. I'm not hating, it's just the nature of the business.

The fact is this:

Innovation is a risky business model. The companies can see what worked, tweak the theme and add to the game content, and have a MUCH higher chance of success.
Sounds interesting. I wonder if you could explain this better:

> No default runtime

> Candor has no default APIs that are doing 'high-level' things with objects and arrays. These routines should be implemented by embedder (like candor.io).

> Removing runtime from VM is good in terms of support, less dependencies - less things to care about, and leaving things out of the core keeps it compact.

Are you saying there is no standard library? And what does "embedder" mean in this context?
The Brain in the Machine: IBM's Compass
The validation should be done on the server. It is documented on the list of things to improve. Please read the documentation.
I often see it on The Big Picture, http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
I've developed in Lotus Notes for about a year and I thought it was kind of interesting. The distributed databases were kinda cool, as was the Designer. Perhaps it reminded me a bit of HyperCard.

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

But that was like 6 or 7 years ago. Wouldn't want to develop in Lotus Notes anymore, but I don't have any bad memories of the software.
But, but this doesn't use jquery. WTH you guys???
So i guess im answering my own question here. jqueryui names their datepicker under the same function name, I have to have jqueryUI and dont have the capacity to install a custom version of jquery ui to remove datepicker so this is basically useless to me.
That's what I was doing, using mixins. In a way it's no different than stacking decorators, but soon enough you get helper methods being called and cooperations between helper methods and you have no memory which class its implemented it.

An IDE can help but that's an indicator that the solution has a readability problem.
That's completely different than what the other poster (Symmetry) claimed -- that they otherwise would have been in the same location.

That politics plays into the decision making process of which site to use isn't too shocking, but Symmetry was claiming that the very creation of that site was political.
Nothing happens on iPhone's Safari
Play Framework 2.1-RC is out
This is only tangentially related: I work a relatively big startup and I'm not not in the technical side of the company. A piece of "simple"* software was built and deployed about 4 months ago, it was a week of one developers time start to finish. Ever since deployment there has been bug after bug after bug, every time they fix one bug they break something else. This is an extremely simple system that should (in my experience as a developer) not have any problems. Does this sound normal, for every deployment to have new system breaking bugs? Does this sound something like they're letting junior developers (in skill) deal with systems beyond their scope of understanding? or is it normal for systems to be breaking frequently? This is the only company I have worked for with engineering that affected my work so I'm not sure if this is unique to this company or is common place in the corporate world.
"Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster."

Really? If you have some pro DBAs in charge you don't need mass quantities of warm bodies. (The problem is that 90% of the folks that claim to be experienced can't tell a clustered index from a cluster f__k.) You can automate 95% of the job and spend the rest of the time helping users do better.

"To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?)."

Bullshit. I'm dealing with clients that insist on writing custom applications to do complex ETL instead of using SSIS or decent third party tool. Or wasting months writing code that reinvents SQL that's been around for decades.
there are so many problems with iOS, you have just become acclimated to them. big ones and details too, like this: even if you have the sound turned off, when you plug it in, it chirps. and the power key and slide-to-unlock clicks. and when i open it, if i have a notification then it chirps. volume is OFF. wtf. maybe that is a big one, what do you think?
While we don't share a complete list of our publishers, the Pew Research Center recently released a methodological analysis of our platform that highlights a number of them.

http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/07/a-comparison-of-resul...
My original carrier is from Brazil, and I can't see their APN settings, but I've used three SIMs in Europe from different carriers and they all worked seamlessly, and was able to look into the APN settings for at least one of them (Wind, I think).

To me this looks like an issue of Straight Talk failing to fulfill their job as a carrier, or AT&T not providing the necessary access to their resellers. If you're going to sell mobile plans you should have the infrastructure to support it (third-party or not).
To just set everything up, several days to a week sounds extreme to me. The VM should hold the code, framework, db, etc.. It's basically a clone of the production environment that lives inside a VM on my host machine. It has a shared folder with my host machine which holds the code. I use an IDE on my local machine to edit this code, which the VM runs. No reason to put the IDE into the VM. This achieves perfect separation and has a total of a few hours setup time for most projects. Literally no duplication of efforts (except setting up the VM its self).
Thanks for the helpful feedback. I guess my goal was to source topics that I should cover for sure. But I agree, the point of any blog is to share MY insights and observations.
It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster.
To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?).

The problem wasn't finding a replacement for MSSQL, but a replacement for all the tools that come bundled. SSIS, MSAS, SSRS are just a few of the products that make MSSQL a powerful tool. The ability to build and process cubes in MSAS that can be browsed as pivot tables using an Excel plugin made data analysis easily accessible to the analysts at my old company.

I agree that licensing is outrageous and I tried hard to move us onto something else, but replacing the other products would have taken too much time.
This phrase is part of the specialized jargon of a particular field. It doesn't matter what it sounds like to someone not in the field; they never use it. And it doesn't matter what one might think it means; the people who use it need to learn what it means.

Similarly, "resistance" in electronics and "bond" in chemistry and "pitcher" in baseball and "election" in the politics of a democracy, etc., etc., have specialized meanings.

That said, as a native speaker of English, I find that most business jargon sounds inane. And "customer development" is no exception.