skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm kind-of amazed at how much this person was willing to spend at the drop of a hat. I see someone carelessly jumping on planes, spending thousands of dollars without blinking, and I start to wonder if the person may be bipolar and experiencing a manic episode.
It's a shame the older stuff has gone out of fashion, but they had to do something to keep going. At one point a few years ago it seemed like they wouldn't survive. Fortunately it seems that the film tie-ins have worked so I'm grateful for that.
How do we know the guy downloaded his plan? It could have been anybody - a deputy, underling, hell, even the secretary that absolutely refused him access. It doesn't matter that the CEO was running a hedge fund, I guarantee you he knows how to type in "how much is my domain worth" into google to get a rough figure for it.

In my earlier and somewhat more flush years, I used to have a saying "just throw money at the problem until it goes away". And you know what.. it worked. Well .. until I ran out of cash that is. This is what this sounds like to me. Flying London to New York on the off chance to meet this guy? One would have been better off finding out what gym he's a member of, which bars he drinks at, where he shops etc one was that desperate. mini-rant over.
3 full papers at top-tier conferences in your field (you are the first author and the papers didn't have a bazillion authors). That's the unspoken standard I've seen in my area (systems). If you have an OSDI/SOSP paper, you could get away with less. I.e. One best paper at SOSP probably gets you a PhD as long as you were the primary person on the paper other than the advisor.
Most people would agree you with you. But that doesn't make you, or them, correct. You should learn to embrace failure as a completely normal and natural part of success, instead of fearing it. This story, and the fact that he is proud of it, is evidence that he gets that.

I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish.
If they were all paying customers they could probably afford to move more coders on to the project and help with scaling issues.
They mentioned that the increase happened after a pirated .ipa was released; plus I imagine that they could look at their sales numbers, and then look at the number of people logging in, and realize that something was amiss.
BitMessage: A Model For A New Web 2.0?
Yeah, except you're talking about PHP Pitfalls and failed to mention and then fell victim to and perpetuated the #1 Pitfall of PHP: Legacy Cruft.

PHP's libraries are full of Legacy Cruft that any other sane system would have deprecated and eliminated during a major revision transition.

The wholly inefficient and unsafe legacy MySQL lib is one of the primary examples.

Good on you for at least mentioning parameterized statements, but you didn't really follow through. You then go on to confuse the situation by talking about the old API.

Instead, you should have just said "Using this old API is a horrible idea. Don't. Ignore every guide or tutorial that does."

PHP has evolved considerably from its roots. The #1 problem with PHP is that it still lives in its parent's basement and hangs out with the same losers it met in Kindergarten.
My niece was given the little red bicycle my mom learned to ride a bike on after my dad refinished it, the frame was great, just the aesthetics needed touching up. This bike is in the running for 60 or 70+ years, which is probably not an uncommon occurrence..
Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
that's the reason I scratch it too :)
One way is to use symlinks to link in your live build. Then your deployment process can upload your new codebase and run the migrations before switching the symlink so that you new codebase is being served.

Where I work, we have a templated Django project that has a fabfile to do this: https://github.com/tangentlabs/tangent-django-boilerplate

If you look in the deploy function (https://github.com/tangentlabs/tangent-django-boilerplate/bl...), you can see the flow is something like:

def deploy():
deploy_codebase()
...
migrate()
...
switch_symlink()
I am baffled about how they communicated it. They just send out a mail and the affiliate page wasn't accessible anymore. I would expected this too be announced with fair notice.

Also, they promised differently. The commissions where promised as payments for the life of the referred account. The mail didn't say anything about that.

This doesn't feel right.
KDE Ships Second Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.10
> "PG knew exactly what I wanted to do, it was the quickest anyone has grokked my idea. I could almost see this divide conquer algorithm working in his brain as he traversed the idea space, it was spectacular to behold."

These PG hagiographies are getting good.
Unfortunately something else tends to go wrong first - so you can stand on a solid Lego structure fairly easily, but if you try to build a bridge it's very hard to keep it from failing when weighted in the middle because the weight tends to push the bricks apart from one another.

There's an episode of James May's Toy Stories on Lego, where he builds a house from it; it turns out to be pretty tricky to build the floor of the upper storey to support him.
I said I was international employee #1. The "co-founder" thing was a joke in reference to the camaraderie James and I shared. Are you really insinuating that I passed myself off as anything other than that?
This strikes me as truly bizarre. They control the servers, yet they allowed anyone who could get their hands on a copy of the game to authenticate and play regardless of whether or not they purchased it? Why on earth wouldn't they track actual payments for the game and check that against requests to the servers? Or better yet, make the game a pay-to-play service like World of Warcraft? Sounds like a huge missed opportunity.
You shouldn't have left Silicon Valley so soon. There are several VCs who would have had a meeting with you.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4870313

Discussion earlier with about 70 comments if anyone wants to read them.

This is my comment from that thread:

Probably the best solution would be to switch to recurring in-app subscription to the online service. This is I think easier to verify and harder to pirate and should align the revenues with the costs (avoiding getting nice sales up front and not being able to sustain the servers in 18 months time).

Some hacks might work if they don't want to go down this route like issuing an update that contacts the server for a unique ID on first run and treating those that don't update quickly as suspicious - request them to email the iTunes receipt or something.

How quickly is regarded as suspicious could be worked out by looking for when there is a divergence between installs (and unique ID requests) and the daily update totals the app store provides. Duplicated IDs should be easy to detect it they access the service later.
I decided to stop reading after the phrase " The blame lies solely with the developers using it".
Real-time crash reports for Windows 8 Store apps by BugSense
Afaik there is no way to verify purchases (since Apple never sends you a receipt for it).

It's trivial to verify in-app purchase receipts server-side, however. And that could be used to allow (or not) access to the multiplayer bits.
Introducing MapBox Satellite
That goes against many recommendations I've read about refactoring and writing cleaner code:

"Good code invariably has small methods and small objects. I get lots of resistance to this idea, especially from experienced developers, but no one thing I do to systems provides as much help as breaking it into more pieces."

– Kent Beck
There is no MP3 support in Opera.
And of course with foreign-language writers there's always the additional dream of learning the language and reading in the original. One reason to hope for radically-extended lifespans eh?

Indeed. I have this dream of learning Latin and most of the associated Romance languages one day, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I was making some headway with Spanish, and then my one Spanish speaking friend kinda disappeared due to marriage, so I haven't been as motivated without anyone to practice with.

And my Portugese speaking friend got deported back to Brazil. :-(

Still, one day...
Try tell that to my product guys. They are doing things properly from the business side of the story. But yea, it's a piece of shit.
I am in deep agreement with the thrust of your argument, particularly parents job in relation to "the tyranny of their own desires".

However, I can't agree with "Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to realize that the way your kids turn out is largely due to how effectively you and your partner parent."

If you mean you as a parent will have an enormous impact on your child's life-arc, I certainly agree. But who a child is is often not nearly as malleable as parents, and especially non-parents think. Parenting matters enormously, but I can't agree how a child turns out is "largely" due to parenting.
If only that worked for paid apps rather than just in-app purchases.
Agreed. Lifehacker's usefulness has diminished significantly over the past couple years. Besides the articles, what made Lifehacker so great in the past was its community of smart people willing to share great tips. Many of these people have left, largely due to the horrible design changes pushed by Gawker.
I am by no means a fan of Seattle weather, but I just can't see it as standing out as unusual in any extreme way. It is exceptional only in mediocrity.
Whoismcafee dot com doesn't appear to actually answer that question.

To anybody not familiar with this: Yes, the same McAfee as that spam/trojan thing that has been bundled with windows for the last decade or so.

I guess he got accused of murdering his neighbor (in Belize) and is now on the run from the Belize government.
This is something I've struggled with for years. I still feel guilt over the projects I've abandoned in the past for various reasons. My first open source project was ringconnect, which would listen on a phone line for a specific pattern of rings and then connect to the local ISP and send an email with its current IP address. I wrote it so that I could connect to my home machine from campus without having to waste a quarter on a phone booth (the quarter is returned if the other side doesn't pick up). Releasing it as open source was almost an afterthought, but the result was a whole bunch of support requests that spanned almost a decade (the last requests I got were from someone in Africa who needed to keep computers in contact over regular phone lines). I felt so bad that I couldn't fix things anymore because I didn't have a modem...

Now I'm plagued with guilt because I am currently maintaining 3 major projects that are building up issue tickets, and I just don't have enough time to keep them all going the way I'd like to, yet I can't bear to abandon any of them (indeed, I have so many MORE ideas I want to bring out!).

What I do know is that I used to love receiving issue notifications, but now that time is really at a premium, I get a sinking feeling instead because I know that I'll have to pick and choose what I fix. I just hope that eventually I'll be able to get on top of things again.
First Job: Small startup or large company?
I disagree with CaveTech's summation that the process was all about securing a domain. It was about the author doing everything he could to bring his intentions for his product to fruition and the original article was about the significant effort the author made to get accepted into YC only to blow it on a single question. I believe a lot of folk aren't quite grasping how or why one guy would go to such extremes with such ridiculously low odds of succeeding.
UX analysis of Buzzfeed
If one took the attitude of "this software works for me and you're free to use it if you like," there'd be no guilt or stress in open source. But we want to help others and/or gain reputation by solving their problems, too, which leads us to feel obligated to maintain it.

This is mostly a good thing, I think; without it, we'd have a lot of one-off projects with limited reusability.

But it's also valid to say "I no longer have time for this, anyone is welcome to take it over." It just takes a bit of emotional strength to do that.

(Dr. Nic in the Ruby community is aggressive about doing this.)
Learning Programming: Interview with Zack Shapiro
Hindsight is 20 20. You would sing a different tune if he was there and let him in!
International coalition calls for withdrawal of Dutch hacking plans
My favorite is the rule of 7:

You're ready to graduate when the number of first-author publications you've published, plus the number of years you've been in grad school, equals 7.

Tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but not a bad guideline.
That's a nice way of saying my writing style sucks, but it's still a welcome (and probably appropriate) critique. I'm open to suggestions on improvements.

It's true that I didn't include a lot of links to more advanced frameworks and libraries, mainly because I wanted to limit the scope of the article to the basics of the PHP runtime. I also think that in order to avoid mistakes people should think more about those basics, even when they happen inside convenient library methods.

If you think there are links to essentials that should be in there, you're welcome to contribute them in the comments.
He did it because it is fun.
All cloud storage providers are created equal
For those who are curious, since there isn't any information in the blog posting, this event is one which is targeted directly at women. I think it's a great event, and it's even better that they can make arrangements for mothers to participate as well. The Software Engineering community could definitely use some diversity, and doing things to strengthen that is a wonderful thing.
Provided the random person in the coffeeshop has a Karma account, then they would be able to use the same hotspot. I believe the product information states that up to 8 devices can be connected to your hotspot.
Actually in this day and age scaling you code (to a moderate level) is maybe not the hardest part, I think the hardest part is to have the ressources to pay for hosting, bandwidth, cpu and ram. Thus if your model was not to provide a free app and have indirect incomes, in this case having non paid users is a major problem. But I think they should have thought about this problem before launching their app and implement anti-piracy measures.
Mistaken has he might be, your 'yawn' bugged me. It comes across as dismissive and disrespectful of someone who tried to share his experience with us.
> Family isn't as important as it has been throughout history and the Idea of Family as portrayed in our culture has become an outdated concept.

I wonder if it's exactly this opinion that yields ``adults'' like Nick Crews' children...
Enjoy! Start big, I'd say :)

Do read throwaway1979 above. Building Lego sets brings quite a different sense of accomplishment to programming (or carpentry, painting, cooking etc.) I think that's why I like it: I can switch off very effectively. It becomes a little like meditation. I'm not an addict though; one set a year since I rediscovered it (only two in total.)
Why not put a notice at the top of the README, saying "I will probably never touch this code again, so feel free to adopt it"?
FTA: "We also had one unfortunate incident where a student started saying disparaging things about transgendered people at the same table where one happened to be sitting. "

Good for them for calling this out...but it's a weird statement where its vagueness just makes things weirder...either an awkward attempt to downplay a really horrific show-stopping comment, or blowing out of proportion someone's attempt at a joke.

edit// I think my problem is with the word "unfortunate" incident and "where one happened to be sitting"...as if it were unfortunate that such comments were made inadvertently where a transgendered person could hear them. Either way, "unfortunate" doesn't seem like the right adjective here when "unacceptable" seems more like it. (i.e. it's strange to describe "disparaging" remarks towards African-Americans/women/any-other-group as "unfortunate")
Holy cow! I've done a ton on SO, and I've never gotten any message outside the site.
Not to sound like an enabler, but did you try the Unimog set? That's educational: transfer cases, gearboxes, portal axles... All true-to-life. You'll learn some mechanics from it.
Good luck! Honestly I think you'll have to make a choice between a high success rate or a large number of people trained.

To use an example, think of no-kill-shelters vs pounds. No Kill shelters can boast a high success rate and a low return rate because they only handle a fraction of the animals a pound handles. Not only that but the no-kill selects animals they believe will be likely to be placed and leaves animals that are not good candidates.

Someone has to be a pound, willing to take in any animal off the street and give it a chance, while at the same time admitting that it just does not have enough space for every animal and that tough decisions will be a result.

Someone else has to be a nokill shelter, willing to select those that seem the brightest and invest to give them the most opportunity available while leaving the others.
let's see more Elon Musk worship, less Peter Thiel worship.

(SpaceX + Tesla) > (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets + lucky VC investments).

As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory.
I love the concept.

One important part that should be added though (I couldn't tell from the website if they already do something like this):

When using it to share your personal internet connection, guest wifi connections should have all their internet traffic proxied/vpn'ed through the service's own internet connection. That way, the service itself keeps track of who was connected when, and if anything illicit happens through the connection they can follow up on the account that was used. Doing so would take away the largest concern I currently have with opening up my home internet connection. I'm happy to share the bandwidth I'm not using, but I don't want my name tied to that traffic.
HA - pitfalls include needlessly using low level functionality when any number of hundreds of higher level (to varying degrees) frameworks and libraries that would abstract away most of these problems, and easily installed/found with composer/packagist. Why most PHP'ers ever need to write a mysql(i)_* function is beyond me. There are plenty of perfectly good wheels out there and you're not re-inventing a better on.
Mary Meeker releases stunning data on the state of the Internet
I don't really agree with that criticism. The first DB example I used was all about parameterized queries. Still, that doesn't absolve people from at least thinking about escaping stuff, that's why this other example is in there. But I get your point, I'll append the section to make it clearer why I'm referencing a legacy library.
To be honest I thought this was going to be the usual YC navel-gazing, but actually found it to be an amusing, interesting read.
I have a 3 month old daughter. It is my secret wish that she'll want to play with this kind of stuff when she's old enough. If I keep the wish a secret then there's a chance she'll come to it on her own.
Twitter's updated share button triggers popup blocker (FF + Chrome + IE)
Yep. Toyota seems to release their Corollas in three year design cycles. I wonder what the distribution of 300 kilomile Corollas is across those years. My guess is that the 300 kilomile population is highest for the rev. 3 cars.
Also serious ethical problem of targeting such solutions for third world problems is that such products are not really intended to be produced in it.

Real third world bicycle is same as first world but with hand made steel frame, because frames are most overpriced components:
http://i.imgur.com/qpw0a.jpg
People use bicycles for decades and can afford to buy or exchange it by parts ever in third world countries. If such conventional bike cost 100 dollars and can last 20 years then cardboard bike must last at least 4 years to be competitive. And people with unstable income prefer long lasting solutions because there is probability that there will be no money in future to buy replacement.
Not to go off-topic, but there are absolutely programs (and some may even be CS programs) which require "3 major papers" in lieu of a doctoral dissertation for award of the PhD. This surely has its disadvantages, but I have known colleagues--especially if they're headed into industry--who feel this is more representative of the type of work they're expected to perform and gives them a leg up on students who must manage both.
If you are looking for a rationale why 3 is a good number, then I'd have to say:

1) It shows you are not a one trick pony. This is essential if you are applying for faculty positions.

2) It is the number employers expect to see. This is really determined by the number of papers had by your competition. In this regard, the reason the number is 3 is because other people have around 3 papers.

This said, no one stamps a PhD on you when you get 3 papers. I actually got 3 papers pretty early in my PhD. I spent an extra year working with a research lab on an unrelated project. I found my PhD committee (full of some famous people) was not impressed by my papers. However, when I had some decent job offers, I felt I grew up in their eyes. So it is really about when you grow up, which doesn't happen by magic when you cross a certain number :-)
Startup culture: from adhocracy to hiring a Six Sigma guy.
No university in the UK has a "paper requirement" that I'm aware of. You're encouraged to publish, but it's not mandatory. Published work does increase the odds of successfully completing the process, because it pre-vets the work, but I've known people to finish with only one paper (or even zero). I'm writing up my thesis now, and have only 1 paper (a workshop, so really only 1/2). I hope that most of my work will be published post-thesis.

Of course, UK PhDs are very different to the US - here, 3 years is a normal timescale to completion, and 4 years is the maximum my department allows. Frankly, in any "deep" subject, that's barely enough time to work out what the state of the art is, let alone advance it.
I'm not looking for a job.
Disclaimer: Self Plug. I wrote an app on Android that allows you to set your and other people's ringtones from your phone via searching soundcloud CC0 music ( ie almost no-rights-reserved). I'm demoing it tonight at "techhub" for anybody reading this in London. Oh it's called TonePush btw.
Go find the Apple API that let's them know if this device belongs to a person who really bought the app. To my knowledge (not saying that is super-impressive by any stretch!), it doesn't exist.

It's the same reason you basically have to "repurchase" IAPs when you get a new device. There is no way for the developer to track that information and get you your rightful bits.

This has been going on long enough that I don't think Apple is going to do anything about it, either. I think they'd rather developers take the hit than have their customers get ugly interactions, even if they deserve it for pirating the games.
hag·i·og·ra·phy/ˌhagēˈägrəfē/
Noun:
The writing of the lives of saints.

:)