skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A great businessperson must be highly quantitative and analytical. He or she must be attentive to data and proficient in Microsoft Excel. He or she must know how to weave ideas and theories into numbers and benchmarks. A person who is not strong with numbers will be handicapped in running a great business."

I'm guessing there've been a boatload of great companies built by 'businesspersons' who weren't proficient in Excel - what did they do before Excel?

Trite point, I know, but there's more to my critique here, as I think the OP missed a huge point vis-a-vis "technical engineers" vs "business people": a "great business person" can get others to do their work; a great engineer really can't. Yes, the businessperson needs to understand some level of what's going on, but more to the point they can cultivate relationships with trusted advisors who can do deep dives on specific areas of the business and landscape. The 'great businessperson' will have an ability to synthesize that information, at the very least, and to the extent that they can go deeper in some areas, they can augment their advisors' input with their own knowledge and research.

Contrast that with the 'great engineer' - they can't really outsource their work. To the degree that they'd do that, they're now managers, managing others' time and efforts. It's not bad or wrong, but what each party can get away with in terms of using the labor and brains of others and take the credit for the whole is different.
"And even if it is sincere, if done publically, someone else is highly likely to kick the shit out of me if I try to say "thanks" instead of ignoring it or downplaying it."

That's a strange definition of sincerity.
If you register your site with Facebook, you can get that information on Facebook's end:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraphprotocol/

under "Domain Insights."
"All commits should have a message and commit messages should be explanatory."

This is an actual process in my group at the company I work for.

Process doesn't have to be heavy and invasive.

And what's the alternative? Zero process? Everybody has to "wing it" all the time? I can't see any possibility for a perverse environment there!
How to create a jQuery plugin for a basic toggle switch
Why can't you just use the basic video tag?

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_video.asp
A bit confused with some tutorials going PHP, others going MySQL, the rest JavaScript.
You can extend anything to an absurd degree. That does not make it a strong argument.
New sites frequently tell one what to do with their life, or at least how one ought to act or think in a given situation. People don't write things because they like typing, they write things to impress some concept on their reader and influence them to act in some way. I'd even say that life advice is one of the main themes on HN and in writing in general. I don't know why this article particularly incensed you, but it's indefensible to argue that it is NOT OK for news sites to tell one what to do. People can and do frequently tell one to do. It's not outrageous.

Incidentally, they weren't telling people what they can and can't be, but were recommending that people not become entrepreneurs for reasons that aren't necessarily false.

Certainly, there are plenty of assertions that could be contended in this piece, but the fact that the article is making a statement about how to go about one's life is not one of them.
You can still listen if you care to. You just have to enable "show dead". You just can't engage him in back and forth discussion. If you can track down some means to contact him individually, he might be interesting to talk with one on one. And it would be less likely to go to hell in a hand basket. A public discussion in a large forum is a very poor environment for trying to effectively accommodate such a situation. I wish I had some other answer. But I don't.
References To iPhone 6, iOS 7 Reportedly Seen in Developer Log
I believe the requirement of a DUNS number began sometime around June 2012. Before that, they required a company to upload their incorporation documents. My guess is manually validating those documents became too much of a burden, and it was easier to just rely on the same international database that the government uses to identify companies. Basically, it allows Apple to offload the manual labor of verifying companies to a third party at no cost.
> Engineers are doing great, and are making massive salaries with or without an expensive college degree and all the debt that comes with it.

$20,000 in college loans, Bachelors in CS, 3.4 GPA, and I'm still job hunting 6 months later. Don't wanna hear shit. Engineers with 5+ years experience are immune because they are an extremely valuable asset. Unproven graduates still have to fight uphill to get a leg in to the industry if they don't have career center connections.
"Unfortunately, 2 does not work for my goals"

Why not?

"For me, a partial answer is that I need to find a means to get attention off me, personally, and onto a body of work."

I'd suggest focusing more on your body of work, and less on the personal aspects that draw people away from it. From seeing some of your posts, I admit that the confessional nature of many can be distracting and you'd do better to avoid giving persons more information than is necessary.
> Really, we don’t know how to write and maintain software, let alone reliable software, without throwing vast amounts of time or money at the problem. when we come up short we’re left with the inevitably bug-ridden fruit of our labours.

The way to write software efficiently is to have a small team of skilled, experienced and motivated people deliver it incrementally.

The space shuttle team developed a process to deliver software that was not bug-ridden. This was costly.

And there are collections of patterns to improve robustness of systems that are discussed in books about Erlang.
This is the nature of modern technology work (especially software-related work.) The ability and willingness of people to continue to learn throughout their lives is going to become more important with each passing year, particularly as things get more competitive, and technology continues to evolve (and even more so if the speed of that evolution increases, as some predict.) I'd argue that said willingness is now one of the most important things for people to remain competitive, right up there with past experience. Related article and discussion from not too long ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557816

It's a new era of autodidacticism.
Doesn't everybody celebrate New Years?
Based on my experience, if you apply using Apple's form at https://developer.apple.com/ios/enroll/dunsLookupForm.action, you can get your DUNS number within 5 days for free.

I explained my full process at http://blog.metamorphium.com/2012/12/03/apple-duns/
Petition taken down.
Only three, but some are quite big.

Framer http://www.framerjs.com - Modern prototyping tool for web and mobile using javascript and css transitions.

Cactus http://github.com/koenbok/Cactus - Simple static site generator with s3 deployment aimed at designers.

Cavia http://github.com/koenbok/Cavia - Document store on top of sql modeled after bigtable/appengine datastore, and how FriendFeed stored data in mysql.
I'm glad to see Rails supporting Postres more in a world where the future of MySQL is in flux. Postres is solid.
I did not know it. It would be nice if one could travel through graphs by just clicking on nodes, expanding other neighboring nodes, etc. Too bad it seems to only allow browsing up to 2 nodes away from the central node...
Why I'm becoming a Programmer, or "my 'hardest part'"
After reading Nathan Wong's well thought out explanation http://nathan.ca/2012/12/why-im-a-programmer/ of coding and it's power and influence in both his own life and the life's of others I thought it might be useful to someone, somewhere, to layout my, seemingly inverse condition of one who's coming at the world from the opposite side but rotating around the very same access of programming's ever increasing penetration of humanity.

I'm approaching 32 this month and have been trying to become a programmer in my spare time for the last 5 years, so I know very well what got me on this path.

The irony is that it's so opposite to what Nathan put forward as his hardest problem--

"That’s the hard part: understanding requirements, determining what people need and want, and taking it from vague idea to production."

My hardest part has been that which comes naturally to Wong.

From struggles in courses on computers to the discovery of relational theory through a "Dummies" book, from making a simple looking DB front end to realizing I couldn't make easily what I wanted and needed to learn Clojure or a FP language. That which has been so natural has been a fight for me.

And yet I love it as much as Mr Wong. The wonder thrills me and I look forward to a life of frustration and wonder.

Because even if I fail in making the product I want the journey will make me a marketable man if I just keep iterating fast enough and ship.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "proficiency." If "proficient" means "able to use," is anyone not proficient in Excel?
I don't understand your point. Are you saying it is not possible to say something nice publically and mean it? I don't think that's true. I just know it does not work for me to publically thank such a person because it draws ugliness from other people. That doesn't suggest to me that the individual who said something nice was being insincere.
Alright, I did some reading on SparrowOS/LoseThos. See this page (http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html) to learn a bit about him and the amazing work he's done on his personal operating system.

In fact, it appears the nature of his posts has been discussed quite a bit on HN over the last few years. I'm still somewhat new here though, so I imagine as people continue to join HN questions about his postings will continue to be asked. And you can't really blame them for being asked (how was I supposed to know what that prose meant?). I suppose the best solution is that instead of downvotes and ridicule (as I found in many previous topics on here), linking to the same page I have above would eliminate a lot of contention and confusion.

EDIT: Yikes, I'm not sure I'm coming across like I meant to. I'm not implying being different is bad AT ALL. Sparrow, I really like your operating system and will download it tomorrow to learn about it.
That might actually be a good business model. Likely to be very profitable as well as you're selling based on the apprehension of the customer.

In our case, the virus was dormant for several days only to be waken up in the middle of the holidays when everyone was away. Had we had this holiday emergency response team, this problem could have been quickly resolved.

Right after Christmas is a terrible time to be offline or visually compromised since people have gotten their gifts and may want to learn more about the company that made them.
29C3: When USB memory sticks lie
"Another hope might be academia, but much of the focus is on program verification, rather than reliability. Well typed software will eliminate some failure classes, but it doesn’t give you robustness."

For anyone who's curious, academic research into verification extends far beyond "Well typed software". For example:

Klee: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs [PDF, very approachable] http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/klee-osdi-2008.pdf

That paper is a nice example of how constraint based model checking can provide code coverage well beyond what a human developer can accomplish.
If you're interested in Arduino and are familiar with js/node, check out Johnny-Five (https://github.com/rwldrn/johnny-five).

"My goal for Johnny-Five is to create a framework for programming Arduino Robots with nothing more then JavaScript. I believe that JavaScript, inherently asynchronous and the platform that Node.js has built around this paradigm, is the perfect environment for writing evented, streaming programs for controlling the highly synchronous world of hardware." -- via http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-arduino-programming-with...

I don't know anything about robotics or arduinos (though I've done a bit of electronics hacking/tinkering throughout my life), but this project makes me want to jump right in head first.
I have a profound respect and reverence for people who pursue careers (or anything, for that matter) because of an innate passion. Unfortunately, I don't really feel that way about anything that could be considered or performed as an occupation. Certainly not programming. For me— and probably a lot of others— the allure of programming is in the intuitive ease that some find with it, combined with the inordinately inflated salaries.
Most people you'd want to know stuff about later on are too busy to spend much time on 'self recording'. But I'm 100% sure you'll be able to look up what Aunt Gertha ate on the night of the 22nd of October 2017 and whose dog was briefly lost that evening.
I'm going to share the bit of information that finally convinced me to start meditating regularly. I learned it from reading The Willpower Instinct (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10865206-the-willpower-in...).

Meditation produces all of these wonderful side effects, but it's hard, what if I never get good at it? Well, it turns out that trying to meditate is just as effective as meditating! The reason for this is that every time you fail at meditating (when your mind wanders to something for a bit before you realize it and bring it back in line) you are just practicing refocusing your attention. That practice of deliberately focusing your attention is the key bit that brings all of the benefits! Whether you finally manage to focus for a large chunk of time is almost as immaterial as how long you hold up a bar bell at the top of a curl.
Startups to Watch in 2013
D&B are definitely part of the axis of evil.

Along with the rest of the companies in that segment of the market.
Apparently they've got Caesar III running on the emulator too!
Self abasement is still a humblebrag, and thus can't remedy arrogance.

I don't understand this application of self-abasement to the case of rich people talking about the days when they were poor. If it is self abasement, then that implies that being poor is some type of wrong. But it clearly isn't, particularly when at the start of a journey.
You will need the code as data feature for dealing with macros in a sane maner.
Yeah. He mentions implementing Common Lisp for Lisp machines in [1], but unfortunately doesn't go into any real detail. My guess is that it was part of the work he did to help LMI during the Lisp Machine wars.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
It's probably just a hoop they make you jump through to make sure you're "serious" so that they can cut down on app approval times without hiring a bunch more reviewers.
Attempting to answer your stated question would likely fall under the "confessional nature" of posts which you have made it clear you view negatively. So I think it unlikely to be a productive conversation, for either of us. Which is unfortunate.
This historical issue about the nature of a "number" also caught my eye. (In the PDF: "Before Newton, the word number referred only to the natural numbers...".)

Of course, the notion of irrational numbers dates (at least) back to the classical Greeks (the proof-by-contradiction that root-2 is irrational is ancient and elementary, and will be known to some of your intended audience). In the Greek era, there was debate about the status of the irrationals, but sophisticated Greeks were well-acquainted with rational numbers. The statement in the PDF seems to ignore this.

Summary: I think this statement of yours is dubious to begin with, and in any event would have to be so qualified and referenced that its value to a novice is nil.
Web development isn't just one language/tool.
Just like all those pop-up advertisements Google has put elsewhere, correct?
Definitely seems to be recent. I signed up my company back in July and had to fax in identification forms. No DUNS required.
We revise the "right number of instances" every few weeks based on latency and traffic numbers. But sometimes when we release updates, we'll find that we suddenly need a lot more capacity (or a lot less if we improved performance). We have automated tools to help us notice performance regressions. Once we decide that we need to change the pool size, we adjust the watchdog configuration by hand.
abusing binding vectors to add in extra stuff that doesn't, in itself, have anything to do with binding names to values

I'm not familiar with the Clojure examples you mention, but it's interesting that Common Lisp provides directives like &rest for similar purposes.
FWIW, I have a longtime friend with her share of mental issues, and I have a family history of codependency. I've tried dating her twice, and each time I've broken things off with something vaguely akin to "I love you, but we're spiraling down into codependency and this is not healthy for either of us, and so I can't be in a relationship with you or get close to you."

I'm still friends with her, but not particularly eager to try again with a relationship. We try to see each other once every month or two to catch up on each others' lives, but otherwise aren't in regular contact (because when we are in regular contact, bad things happen). Both of us are dating other people.

Also, back when I was a teenager I had many of the same mental issues she did. (Perhaps that's why I latched onto her, and why we have such a tendency toward codependency.) What helped me recover from them was not the people who did the darndest to help and bent over backwards for me, at the expense of their own well-being. That tended to actively make things worse. Rather, it was having adults in my life who served as solid role models, secure in themselves and their own lives, who would interact with me as a person but still set very firm boundaries. And they were relentlessly patient about this. It took about 5 years. You can't be relentlessly patient with someone for 5 years unless you are simultaneously taking care of yourself and carrying on with your own life.
Nuclear also makes for great baseload.

Wind or solar are similar in the sense, that you do not gain by turning them off, but their supply is not stable.
I love this trend. I wonder if the non-dual programmer will be next.
It is not very hard to write you own HTML5 media player. I got this book and found it very useful http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Guide-HTML5-Experts-Develop...
In addition, MSDN also has a bunch of very informative tutorials on HTMl5 Video player.
I deal with this a lot with my work at PiCloud and you very rarely see a lack of capacity in the on-demand pool (across every availability zone).

You actually see high spot prices due to what at first glance seems "irrational"; incredibly high bids on instance types, sometimes 3-4x over on-demand prices. I suspect such high bids are placed by customers of the spot instances who absolutely do not want their workload terminated early by Amazon and are willing to take the risk of paying more to run it to completion.

If you are a webapp though, like Pinterest, you don't have this desire. Hence, it makes sense to dynamically switch.
Well, if you're managing your rails app like that, you're running against the grain. Most rails apps should and, from what I know, are, being maintained at or near the latest stable version (currently 3.2.9). It's very much against rails best practise not to keep up to date, IMO.

Any fast-evolving framework is a bit of a moving target - see android and iOS as well, not to mention HTML5, jquery, apps written in anything fast-moving needs constant minor maintenance to keep up. That said, there's no reason a rails 1 app won't run today just like it always has.

One of the reasons rails can move so fast while avoiding bloat is its aggressive cutting of deprecated code. That has always been part of the rails way and I believe most rails devs are strongly in favour of this policy.
> I tend to recommend 1960s editions of Halliday and Resnick (not the recent ones!)

I'm curious why. I remember reading the second edition back in 1998. Recently, I got one of the new editions (8th) but the new ones seem too verbose. What went wrong?
Don't bootstrap yourself to death
HN has really motivated me to start thinking about side projects seriously, even if just as learning exercise or solving my own problems. I only just started publishing them a few months ago, but I've had a lot of fun these:

Chroma https://github.com/seenaburns/Chroma - Python color handling and manipulation library

Desaturate https://github.com/seenaburns/Desaturate - Menu Bar app to force Mac OS X into grayscale display

Tungsten https://github.com/seenaburns/Tungsten - Wolfram Alpha API wrapper for Python

Open URLs In Tabs https://github.com/seenaburns/Open-URLs-In-Tabs - Port of John Gruber's OS X service to open links in tabs, modified to work for Chrome (/ your default browser).

Desaturate is definitely my favorite. Now for 2013, I have to learn to comment more and write more.
There are many classes of products that require what I like to call "fractal attention to detail." These include most consumer goods (which are usually cost and performance constrained), man-rated stuff that has to work (aerospace, medical), and products with stringent security requirements (game consoles, smart cards).

By fractal I mean that you can have good abstractions, but you can't afford black boxes, and design has to happen at a whole-system level or you're leaving something on the table. It's surprising how often decisions at very low levels affect the high level user experience.

Any time cost, reliability or security are on the line, there will be very few pieces of your product that are mysterious to you.
I'm sorry, but WTF. This is hardly an explanation.
You honestly sound a bit dramatic here. Make sure you don't make the issue bigger than what it is.
I think one's interpretation of "poor" rests primarily on location. This is for two reasons. First, location determines absolute cost of living, and can effect quality of life. 40k might be above the median, but it barely livable in Manhattan. Location also has a bearing on relative perception of wealth. Someone making 40k in a neighborhood populated with people making 100k will make one feel poor.

Ultimately, the word "poor" is too subjective and is interpreted too idiosyncratically, and I try to avoid using it (along with words like "smart" and "good", etc.)
Agree! I did find Startup Grind North Bay meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Startup-Grind-Northbay/

I believe mid-late 20 folks like prefer to live in the city.

Edit: CorpQNA looks interesting :)
TL;DR DynASM is a toned down JIT compiler which directly generates target assembly instead of a more abstract IL. Retargeting and optimizations will be hard.

I'm looking forward the next installment, where (hopefully!) one generates target independent code via LLVM, then uses one of the LLVM backends to generate the final assembly code.
There's something to be said for instructions encoded into structs instead of raw assembly; those structures are parameterized, so it's easy to interrogate them or bind new values to them; without structures, you end up having to invent new assembly language features for dynamic labels and things like that.
I've heard of Taste of Rome but just haven't been there yet. Will definitely check them out. I live up in the hill and the demo is skewed towards married couples with .5 kids.
It was a bit of a loaded question, in all fairness.

Readers unfortunately aren't sophisticated as we should be, to know the difference between journalism and an opinion piece and what the goals of each are.
Yup, the company hero programmer ships and meet deadlines.

While all the "bad" programmers sits there, worrying about stuff breaking in the wild, with only their 1% code-coverage tests to verify that everything is working.
Why do you need to block EC2?