skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look. Apple can go buy DID's from any number of vendors and become a phone company tomorrow.

They don't want the regulatory exposure, and frankly, Google doesn't either.

Buying a DID and doing call forwarding is ridiculously trivial to do. You can replicate Google Voice on your own servers in 10 minutes using Asterisk or other Open-source projects.

Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for 2600hz, a company that builds an open-source stack for Telecom applications. You can mirror this functionality in 10 minutes using our stack. You can also do this with Plivo easily. It's not rocket science.
Desktop App for All Your Email
What I meant was that the article was not about MongoDB at all. I think thefreeman summarized it better than me on his reply: the author is talking about his experiences on running more than one DBMS in production, not about MongoDB in particular.

I'm not even saying if the article was interesting or not. It surely has it's merits, it touches a point worth discussing (the downsides of trying to cover one DBMS's weakness throwing in another DBMS in the mix), but I was uninterested. I was expecting to hear why MongoDB wasn't fit for his use case, to better understand when to use NoSQL and when not to, so yes, I was indeed biased waiting for something different—but, in my defense, I say I was biased because the title made me think this way.
Thanks for that bit of perspective. If every thread like this had a comment like that at the top we could all get where we are going a lot faster.

Same goes for the article. The author clearly thinks that these books have helped him succeed but unlike some essays there is no sense of him dissing other approaches. "that meant the most to me" He succeeded. But he didn't lose his perspective.
Wrong Zuckerberg. Randi did not scrape anything off a Harvard website.
Nope, I'm 39 and discovered Rand some time ago. I only wish I had discovered her stuff when I was younger.

Also, just because you don't like Rand doesn't mean you should go around insulting people who happen to enjoy her work. It kinda makes you a dick. Reasonable people can disagree on things, you do realize this, right? If not, come back when you're a little wiser and maybe we can talk.
In addition to all the other patterns books mentioned, Head First Design Patterns is a great intro the subject. I think you will get more out of GoF if read this first.
Moniker. I've used them for years and haven't had any issues. Haven't really looked into it, but at least they give out the impression that security is really tight and that both your domains and your privacy are protected.

I've also used Name.com, but not enough to be able to recommend it to someone else.
I'm the developer that helped migrate the data from mongo to mysql (under mcfunley's supervision). Even a straightforward data migration becomes complicated when you have to do it without affecting the production feature or consumers of your public api (parallel writes to both dbs, snapshot and move the historical data, switch reads to the new db, etc). In addition, we took the opportunity to move the feature to a sharded architecture and to rethink the schema. Anyway, you're right in that it wasn't exactly an obvious or easy port.
Its important to realize that we're looking at this retrospectively. Imagine if the headline was about Nazi POWs escaping custody with the help of rigged board games. I don't think its fair to sort combatants into 'good/bad camps'.

I totally agree about not militarizing groups like this. If you try to turn POWs into combatants, do they still have any protections? Its like having a brilliant scheme to dress a whole bunch of marines as field medics; at best it's unethical, at worst it puts real non-combatants at risk.
No, this is not from "the guy", as all the quotes and tweets in the article are Randi's. Mark is only mentioned as being her brother.
I don't mind paying for gmail calls here in Europe but what i really don't like is that I can't receive calls.

So I only ever use it when there's a problem with my mobile.
How do you tell if someone doesn't have Facebook?

They'll tell you.
Because that doesnt solve the problem properly. Perforce users are still vulnerable, and Mercurial users, and (assuming any still exist) CVS users.

Secrets (keys, passwords, tokens, etc) don't belong in the source tree. If you put them there by default, one day you (or one of your users) is going to "forget" and be in a world of hurt.
Most of the damage I did to my wrist was through hunt and peck. You have to think about ergonomics and treat your wrists right, touch or not.
My friend Julie coaches girls soccer (5-7 year olds). Parents go to the game but sometimes "aren't there". She has resorted sometimes to verbally prompting (play-by-play almost) the parents of each kid/player (e.g. "Go, Hanna! Good cross") to get the parents to look up from their smartphones and watch their own kids.

Smartphones are the ringing bell (Pavlov) embodied.
Thanks for sharing. Now I know not to waste time on the book. If I want to learn about Git, I'm not looking to learn it from a book about "Modern C".
This is a remarkable comment, but within it lurks a subtle assertion that deserves to be explicit: 'knowing' is itself somehow important in and of itself.

I'm growing increasingly convinced that this is wrong. Knowledge has value, but it is a strictly secondary value. It's value comes from the things that depend on it. For example, if you're an artisan and/or business person, then your primary driving force is "make stuff people want to buy". In that case, knowledge is indeed very useful for improving your outcomes (from how to build things to what people want to how to how to reach people, etc). If you are a scientist then knowledge is a critical component to building new knowledge--and subsequently defending it. Even that most basic satisfaction, the satisfaction of curiosity, is only a pleasant, transient jolt. (And that pleasure is, alas, so disconnected from the real world that even false knowledge is sufficient to trigger it, much to the chagrin of the habitually skeptical.)

So yes, I think your model is fundamentally correct, that knowledge is an extraordinarily practical thing, designed primarily to know it's limits and find a specialist when that limit is reached. But you missed the outer context that gives meaning to this conversation - the fact that knowledge is merely the handmaiden to another driving force, and a handmaiden only need be "good enough" to reach a minimum acceptable thresh-hold.
Question from a newbie C developer: How can you avoid using malloc? Are you finding some clever way to do everything on the stack? Or are you perhaps allocating a large block of contiguous memory and slicing it up on your own?

I've heard of both of those approaches and they sound pretty hard, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts/be pointed to good references on the topic. Thanks in advance.
DNSImple (dnsimple.com) (but the backend is enom). Run by two brothers - really great guys!
> I don't think Microsoft or Apply can match the ability for me to give out a number to someone

If they're willing to burn the cash (and Apple certainly has a lot lying around), they could. Google isn't a telco and they're paying CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) for every phone number and for terminating every minute of every call that a Google Voice user makes. This makes Google Voice quite different from their other products - unlike gmail for instance, most of the Google Voice product actually comes from other companies and most of the per-user cost is probably going directly to these companies rather than to their own infrastructure and software development costs. Yes, the Google Voice software and infrastructure is still important but just not to the same degree as their other products. I often wonder if this is the reason why they only commit to making Google Voice free for one year at a time.
I've noticed that a lot more people did it once iMessage arrived, which tends to compound the problem of being one of few non-iDevice users.
Peter Norvig's essay, "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" might be relevant here: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Your post doesn't really define a goal; what level of "web developer" would a person expect to be in a few weeks? I've been a software developer (professionally!) for close to twenty years now, I hand-code all of my web work, and I still consider myself a terrible web developer, especially where CSS quirks and MySQL are concerned. (And people rarely miss an opportunity to tell me how terrible I am!)

I had an intern for a little while earlier this year that had zero prior web development experience, and only a little programming. Teaching basic CSS alone took quite a while, and we never even got into all the quirky stuff.
So you just set everything on facebook, etc. to be public?

I guess that's one approach. Personally, I'm always aware there is a risk that the things I put online will be publicly exposed at some point, but I treat it like any other risk: I evaluate the likelihood that it will happen, and make decisions from there. I don't think that risk can ever be zero, but there are ways to make it smaller, and I think that's the perspective most people are coming from.
To add to what codex said, it's impossible to get really proficient at either Python, Ruby, or any other interpreted language without having some sort of understanding of the underlying platform.
Cash, promotion, merchandise, landscape subscription, bug reports, forum help (I have over 3000 posts on Ubuntu forums), stackoverflow, testing to name a few...
Depends on the industry. I think for software development, this advice holds true. We're at a time where really good developers are at a premium, so to get good work you'll have to pay for it.

There's also another side to this: don't create ultimatums for your employer. I don't know about you guys, but I get contacted by recruiters nearly every day. There is a huge demand for our work. This makes it very easy to "hold your boss hostage" but it only breeds contempt and distrust as they look at you as someone with one foot out the door. The best time to negotiate salary is up front, or while being promoted.
Booting a Modern Linux Desktop in Just ~200MB
I've had a few MMS messages forwarded to my email recently, but it seems to be hit-or-miss as that same person will send me an MMS while I'm standing next to them and I never receive a thing.

I think they're working on it.
When you're using C as a layer under some other high-level language you get those implemented for you. For instance, if you write Python bindings, you will use Python's data structures from C. If those are too slow for you, you'll want a specialised structure - there are many libraries providing collections for C.
Visas can make that difficult, though. You can't just pack up your bags and move in many cases.
That was my first thought. The picture is quite expressive.
I don't set everything to public, but I assume that anything I put onto the internet will be available to anyone who wants it, forever. It's the only sane way to use this technology.
I wouldn't say 'very nice', as much as long overdue. This to me seems like an obvious update that should have been made many months ago.
How much money do you need? :)
You can use liquid soap. And for dry soap I tend to just open the water a couple of seconds, close it, soap my hands and then wash it away again.

There's really no need to let the water run all the time, that's a waste.
Or,since we're proposing changes to Rails* how about the Rails people fix it properly, and put the configuration somewhere outside the source tree?

*(which is much more sensible than proposing changes to git/github in response to a Rails default configuration problem)
> Do give the top 5 list of such reasons.

This is a waste of time.

We all need to start evaluating the problem, taking account for the environment, and use the language that gets the job done.
To place a call to a phone number in Gmail ... http://support.google.com/chat/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
There is a way to fix this madness.

http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
"Unless, in a word, he commands his time. Read the life of a great scientist like Agassiz."

Hmm. 1807 – 1873, Swiss paleontologist, ended at Harvard, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz . Plus, Ezra Pound's take, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_sunfish
question 2.21 in this FAQ from ICANN would suggest that the flood of ".brand" gTLDs should all fail:

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...

that said, ICANN's process has not inspired confidence that these sorts of requirements will survive. that someone wouldn't sell you a name under a new gTLD (e.g. under .apple, .google, .volkswagen, etc) is one of the problems they are trying to get rid of. why people applied for .brand names when the guidelines and FAQ suggest they'll be forbidden tells me one thing: they expect the rulebook to be thrown out. in the end, it's a cheap gamble.

the whole process, beginning to now, has inflamed a lot of ICANN watchers, and while i'm normally understanding and supportive of ICANN i tend to agree. this is careening to a cluster f---.
It is not strictly correct, but it is firmly planted in the trenches of programmer linguistic games (qv the jargon file.)
Thanks for your tip. I was also thinking about trying Debian stable.

There is another option, which would be to change the video card of the computer.

But I don't have much time. This is my parents' in law computer not mine, and when I go to visit them with my wife, I don't want to stay the whole day in their office doing computer maintenance. So I decided to use W7, which was already installed in their computer.
Stopping coders from deploying stuff due to a risk of an unspecified "something" going bad makes for frustrated employees. By that time you might as well give them the days off as they'll have little to strive toward. You don't need to freeze all code deployments and other things that have little risk.

Also, they most likely scheduled this at this time due to the lower traffic, probably the lowest of the year for them. While half of Github was probably enjoying their families the other half was planning for this for a long time. Given the size of the operation I don't think anyone took it lightly.
Ask HN: Opportunities for 2013?
In a general sense what are the best, or still good, opportunities for a developer or otherwise technically skilled person in 2013?

Are accelerators like YC getting more saturated? Will mobile still be good when there's less of a first-mover advantage? Are rents getting to expensive in Berlin? Will there a demand for developers in high paying industries like the mining, oil and financial industries? Etc.

I guess I'm asking not so much for predictions, as what people have seen happen during 2012.
> I don't think its fair to sort combatants into 'good/bad camps'.

What's fair got to do with it? If there was ever a good/bad distinction between combatants, World War II was it.

The Axis powers were evil, don't doubt it.
I love this, this totally demonstrates the hypocrisy of any church. Even the most dedicated cheat when they know they can't be caught.

Smartphones change everything, they are like the wheel. For the first time in human history, we (nearly) all have what Bill Gates said, All the world's "Information at Your Fingertips" - literally. Since humans are pack animals, anything that strengthens the herd will prevail over every other human need.
Take a look at the C++ coding standards adopted for high-reliability areas. For example, the coding standards for the Joint Strike Fighter: http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
Too difficult for me to pick just 3 but I'm up-voting so other people can see the post and jump on the shopping-spree wagon :)
The article mentions that fake charities were set up specifically for this purpose.
Beautiful. I fear this is a story about the OLD America, before The Right took intellectual control. Most Americans now believe that welfare is a handout to the lazy, as though the poor chose to be so, and would rather receive than work.

But these people don't view the cranky old miser in It's a Wonderful Life as a glorious capitalist hero, or George as a socialist. I know these people agree with giving to those they know in need, but when it's broader assistance, like through government, and those being helped aren't friends, they lose interest.

We need to get The Right to have empathy for strangers.
C is a great language. I first learned programming with C back in college. After a few years off, I decided to pick up programming again but there aren't many resources for learning C. Most of the tutorials out there are for Ruby and Python. I have been learning Ruby for a while now and I'm now starting to go back to using C.

I think if there were more educational websites teaching C, more people would use it. I think new programmers will appreciate coding a lot more if they learned C instead of using Ruby.
How are you discerning issues v. details from this post? I feel it's quite clearly about drawing/enforcing boundaries, being able to say 'no', and the like. In my experience, there are a lot of people in SV (men, mostly -- partly because SV is male-dominated) who can learn a lot from this lesson.

First, the author refrains from blaming those who were taking advantage of his "kindness" (loose boundaries, really, but he framed it to himself as kindness for so long). Instead, he takes full responsibility for his own misapprehensions about how the world works -- not his father, not his college-friend-turned-boss, not anyone else. Today, when I read posts about people who undergo this specific epiphany -- "nice guy syndrome" if I can call it something -- it inevitably is accompanied by resentment: other people are cruel and manipulative, women are bitches who don't want nice guys, investors are sociopaths who just follow trends, etc.

Second, and related to the first -- this man did not act simply in reaction to his epiphany. He didn't simply swing the other way, as if to say "well now I'll be a jerk to everyone else to punish them." Instead, he continued to be generous and magnanimous, but he took responsibility for drawing and enforcing his own boundaries. And those boundaries still included room to be generous and charitable, but what he gained was the facility to choose those traits.

Previously, he felt compelled to oblige and unable to resist the impositions of others. Now, he has the power to choose not to oblige, and he still chooses to oblige when he feels drawn to do it. And when he doesn't, he now can turn down the request.

As I said earlier, I have seen a lot of men arrive at the particular revelation that what they perceive as a kind and generous nature is actually compliance and subservience -- and then simply shut off that valve in reaction. I greatly admire this author's example of maintaining the choice to be generous, while gaining the capacity to choose the direction of his generosity.
I feel that it is contextually relevant when I am commenting on FB related stories. It is not as I am bragging as much as it is a disclosure of my perspective.
Holidays are actually one of the best times to be making changes as traffic is significantly lower, and IMO, one should be aiming for an infrastructure where you can always ship changes without being afraid of the ramifications.

Architecturally that may mean many things - hitting "SHIP IT!" might push code into a staging environment for some final testing before delivering it onto a platter in production. Should you have multiple sites, it might involve rolling out the new stuff to just one of them until you see how it goes. Maybe you have feature flags and want to introduce a new change to all servers, but just 1% of the user population?

Fundamentally hitting "SHIP IT!" should be doing just that. Any constraints you put on how fast it gets to 100% of the user population are a risk control, and you need to optimize for a balance of developer happiness and system stability.

When you concede "We can't make changes because we're frozen" outside of a critical systems ('life critical') environment, you should quit your IT job and go become a fisherman or something.
Ask HN: How much of your hiring practice and/or decisions are made from testing?
I don't think anyone underestimates the value of testing candidates to separate wheat from the chaff when finding a candidate to hire into your team. This question just comes from observation and anecdote (with a healthy dose of curiosity on the side), but one of the things I think you can't test-or at the very least test using something other than a computer-is compatibility. The intangibles: communication, attitude, spirit et al yet I've seen so many products popping up to test developers and administrators with coding challenges and exercises.

That prompts me to ask the question in the title: How much of your hiring practices is influenced by test results? Let's go further, how often do you test internally to improve your staff, as well as acquire new talent? Do you see it as adding value? One additional layer of complexity? Have you seen a decrease in candidates but an increase in quality resumes?

Thanks, and happy holidays-whatever you're celebrating!
Can we name 3 benefits of these new gTLDs? The only things I can envision are money for registrars from selling them & chaos.
> They were confident that if i just explained why I didn't owe the money, the collections guys would drop it.

Yes, collection agencies are an understanding and forgiving bunch.
Agreed. I completely agree, but the world isn't as kind. Providers often have funny rules about how you can cable things up in their datacenters, and as noted in #4 of where GitHub goes from here that needs to be addressed.
How is it two factor if you don't also give a password? Is it not just a different one factor?
Recently.
Why would it be annoying to not be able to write invalid code?

Source is not free text, that's provable by needing a parser. Much in the same way the DOM isn't HTML, a lesson already learnt the hard way in web development.
Well, in order to protect the hashes in said cookies you would end up doing something similar to prevent malicious users from just spoofing them. If you use id/hash tables the way you propose the hash is acting just like an id and is then vulnerable to the same issues. The problem is not that the id is there, but that you need a method to make it hard to spoof.
I agree.

When I read this list, my first thought was "I know exactly when you started programming, and the types of apps you were writing".
Failover is meant to deal with hardware failures, which will tend to work just fine. But if the node you are failing over onto was already has 60% capacity and you add another 60% capacity during the failover, things are going to get worse.

The top-level systems probably need to be able to deal with increased latency or timeouts, and properly handle retries and throttling of traffic.

If you have some HA failover setup going but your alternate is already being used more for load balancing than for failover, problems like this will occur.

(I used to work on failover drivers for a SAN).
Try using Google maps reverse geocoding
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#...
Teaching iOS Development to 4th Graders
> I can see why a lot of greybeards hate frameworks, because someone who builds web apps with a much more bare bones framework, (Sinatra, Webapp2, Express, etc) most likely understands the fundamentals of encryption/hashing simply because of the fact that lighter frameworks require understanding the fundamentals in general.

Usually what ends up happening is people build less secure systems because they don't understand those basics. Giving people less tools don't equate in them building better solutions on their own.
I realize that. However she is not a dummy and should know better when she says her privacy's being violated on Facebook. Especially when her brother owns the damn company.