skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is a strong argument to be made that the myth of normal is a socially counterproductive concept -- much as the myth of race. "normal people" maybe sounds sort of close to "those people" which is trigger language that suggests one might not value diversity or might not judge all people as individuals. When I read your comment, I translated it to "adult consumer internet user" but still could not really empathize with your point.
You could always become an "architect" or a "lead programmer". Figure out the big chunks, and the details of the new/innovative little chunks, then delegate the grunt work to "junior programmers".

Probably means a dull corporate gig, tho.
Thanks for removing 'educational institution' from the description. IIPM is probably an educational institution as much as a circus is a wildlife reserve.
Embedded JSON database library Python3 binding
I disagree. You can very often just drop in webgl2d[0] into your Canvas based app and in most browsers see a performance boost, often a significant one.

[0]https://github.com/gameclosure/webgl-2d
In your penultimate sentence you state you only hire sales people based on commission. In your final sentence you state that they perform twice as well as salaried sales people.

These seem contradictory to me. How can you know the latter given the former? Where do your stats for the comparison cone from?

Sorry if I'm being terse, I'm on my mobile at at moment...
Agreed, infinite loops are a little hard to protect using asserts.

When I hit the first infinite loop bug on a code path, I frequently add code to assert that the number of calls is less than $A_LARGE_NUMBER to catch future occurrences of the same root cause.
More importantly, people shouldn't rely on what these wine raters say. This is their palate, not yours. And while it's a good 'nudge' to try one wine versus another, they are in no way the experts on your own tastebuds. I've been working on ways to map your palate and give you recommendations for this exact reason.
The Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch (2007)
The story is misleading. 90 people have either left of their own free will or were let go for various reasons. Those 90 were not all developers, but included marketing, sales, and other non-engineering staff.

All the comments so far therefore seem to be based on the misconception that they fired their entire Presto development team.

I thought HN was better than this.
You can register as a company(LLC), or Corp(S or C). Right now if somehow your service harmed someone they could sue you personally for damages. Register as company, register to fed id number off of irs.gov website. go to a bank and get a business bank account. You can then open a business paypal account they charge a fee but just about anything you spend on business can be written off as an expense and you don't need to pay taxes for it. You'll need to file a seperate set of tax returns for the company at the end of the year but it will if you spend all the money on the business then there will be nothng to tax. if you use an S corp or LLC if your business takes a loss the business can pass that loss on to your taxes.
Back to School – VC Homework Assignments
I would argue that upping the detection rate is a bad thing, given the current status quo of the relationship people have with government. Our system relies upon investing some amount of trust in individuals (law enforcement agents, prosecutors, jurors, etc.) to ensure that laws are enforced fairly, by applying them selectively (or at least that's the ideal case). As for hastening "the day we reduce the number of crimes because if we prosecute we manage to bang up 20% of the population." I'd expect that number to be nearer to 99%, and, it can't happen soon enough as far as I am concerned.
I've spent some time making web-based software while sitting across the lab from the scientists who use it. This looks like an interesting project, I'll email you for more info.
Several of them? Such as?
If a site specific secret is present you would not be able to do that - unless the site will act as an oracle for you and doesn't care about you making several billion requests.
Execpt all 90 were not developers. They were marketing, sales, etc. Some were engineers, but it seems they were a minority.
Neat. This kind of reminds me of something I did a while back: I had a permissions manager that let you drag and drop groups to various actions, but the color of each group was determined by hashing their the group ID into a color.

The resulting colors had no special significance, but the important point is they never changed and it let you easily visualize what was going on. I'm sure this had been done many, many times before. The difference here is that the straightforward conversion from IPs to colors means similar IPs will look very similar, whereas hashing some value to a color results in similar values looking vastly different.
If the problem existed before the code update, why would you assume it was the code update that caused the problem?
What makes you think it will just be a skin on top of Chrome?
No that's right, but I worry about apache2 being down for potentially one or two users or bots that visit/crawl my website during a one-minute reboot. Meanwhile the big boys are down for 16 hours because they do things that any other person would have gotten a decent scolding for. Just look at the points per hour this thread is getting, if I had posted this about my website on my website people would have said I was stupid.

You are right though, making mistakes is human as they say, and nobody dies because of this. In fact, less popularity might be good for the site's content quality. I'm just surprised by how much they care about thousands of hourly users, that what I would dream of having.
Tweetping: Visualize Twitter Activity in Realtime
I appreciate that it's not exactly an earth-shattering problem, but "about 2 minutes" is a huge underestimation. I think "an hour or so" is still pretty optimistic but at least possible. At that point the $10/mo for the Pro plan starts to look pretty competitive to writing your own.
There's a difference between doing something harmful to yourself repeatedly for shits and giggles, and at your own discretion, and voluntarily following something through to its conclusion when somebody else plans the exercise for you. Perhaps the subtle distinction is only in my own head, but I do believe there is one.

The dude doesn't deserve a pat on the back for the meditation itself. If he had been fasting, following a running/swimming program, studying go/baduk life-and-death problems, or playing guitar exercises for 10 days, and he stuck with it to the end and documented it similarly, I feel he would still deserve kudos. Giving one's undivided attention to a new and uncomfortable activity, 10 hours a day for 10 days, is a challenge for most people.

Hell, I'm lucky if I can give up coffee or power drinks for 10 straight days. The 2 or three times I completed a 24-hour fast, I felt some sense of accomplishment. And keeping up with some kind of exercise routine? Forget about it.

And that's why I found his story so layered and interesting. It's not just about the meditation (which was interesting in its own right), but about his dedication, and his privilege, and his turning his mind's eye inward.

Berate him (or me) if you will. You said it best: to each their own.
Sometimes you have to make an idea public to understand how truly stupid it is.

For anyone that doesn't understand why this is such a big deal, when you make bourbon drinks, especially a mint julep, you want ~100 proof liquor because you add so much ice that otherwise it becomes too watery. Makers Mark was basically stating that they didn't care about being taken seriously as a bourbon whiskey and their customers understandably had a cow, man.
So are you saying that it would cause our society to no longer classify certain activities as crimes? If so, then I agree that sounds like a good direction to head, but am not sure that things that are currently crimes will actually be reclassified as not crimes. Especially if it generates revenue for the government through ticketing I can't imagine those going away.

It is a real problem though, because I think many laws only exist so that law enforcement can take action with regard to extreme cases (ie. when they are alerted to an egregious enough example that they have to take action). If we have robots constantly watching us, it will drastically change that dynamic, and I think many of us could be getting ticketed all the time for things that are technically legal violations, but don't actually hurt anyone (the reason why laws exist in the first place) unless taken to the extreme.
Is it me or is this the best post I've ever read on Techcrunch?

YES, I say write about startups that struggle and are failing. That can be instructive and interesting too. And of course not in a mocking way like Color, but to chronicle the journey of the underdog, the journeyman fighter, the also-ran.

Why aren't journalists doing more of this? Is it a lack of good writers? No money in it?
It jumped by 30k followers in a handful of minutes. Huge increases like that seem to trigger an automatic suspension.
Blogging with iPython notebooks has never been easier.
At first I thought this must have been a joke. But then:

> While The Pirate Bay recognizes the irony of the case, they feel that they have to pursue this matter. ... “While The Pirate Bay may have a positive view on copying, it will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright,” Pirate Bay’s Winston says in a comment.

So basically, their stance is copying is good, unless it's done by a copyright organization? I mean, I guess I can see that, that they're anti-hypocrisy, not anti-copying, although it's a fine line.

What would their opinion be of a site copying their CSS or JS, which had nothing to do with anti-piracy -- I assume they would be fine with that then?
As I interpreted the article, it boils down to having emotional buttons pushed and that blocking reasonable discourse - the intent is less important.

I don't think my German friends are trolling me when they freak out at the word "nuclear" before I can even begin to describe the potential of Thorium, but it's still a problem.
I've always been a fan of this one: http://supportdetails.com

But, yours supports a few more details.
What makes you think Opera is outsourcing development to Google? Just because something is using a framework doesn't mean they aren't using it to build their own thing on top of it.

Your comment doesn't make sense. It's wild speculation based on an article with false statements.
Game developers will almost always take more memory over faster memory, as long as the slower one's bandwidth is still sufficient.

Bandwidth of storage is abysmal by comparison.
HN runs on plain files. He wasn't modifying database, but calling functions(I believe) in the repl to change the parent id of the thread.

But that apart, even if there were an admin button to change the parent id of a thread, he would still have made the same mistake.

Unless the code in question was checking for loops. In that case, repl would have worked the same.
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/0Q6G6uc.jpg
I thought the problem with the original Xbox was the nVidia GPU, and that it was nVidia that refused to do a process shrink.
Calling someone Troll on a science related subjects is tricky business. Science is often based on some form of consensus that is evolving over time. On many subjects, especial in social science, it is possible to show studies coming to opposing results. Critic boils ultimately down to opinions on if the sample size, method, research questions were the right choices.

I have my doubts that today Galileo Galilei wouldn't have been classified as a troll as well as those back a while ago who made the wild accusation that smoking causes cancer.
What makes you think they aren't goig to work on Webkit? Out of those 90 people who left or were fired, there were marketing, sales, etc. personell. Only a minority was probably an actual developer.
The sort of debugging seems to have been around since the very beginning: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/05/talking-to-porgy.html
> So what do you do to avoid this in the future?

It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems, there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart, we should be lucky the volunteers run it for us at all.
"But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl."

I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Whether it be running, parking or anything else once you deviate from some regular behavior you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated.

"For some reason I didn't check the comments after the surgery to see if they were in the right place. "

More or less my point. If this wasn't a deviation from normal behavior you would have "checked the comments after the surgery" because it would have either become habit or the shear number of times you tried a fix resulting in an error would have made that more likely to occur.
The problem with the plus sign is that people have a natural assumption about what it means (that is, the addition). Changing that make things more confusing. At least, C programmer are used now to the fact that the static keyword can have strange and different meanings and another one is no big deal.
If you are in the bay area, Instacart is awesome.
That's an even looser definition of trolling though! A comment that might push my emotional buttons might wash over someone else, and vice versa. Many things, including cultural and subcultural norms, will dictate what's emotionally charged.

Why do your German friends freak out at the word "nuclear"?
The kind of assertion he needed could not be ensured by the database. The kind of assertion he needed was there are no cycles in the graph. How would you ensure that in a database?

Also, HN uses flat files, not database.
What assertion would you have used in this case? For every comment you'd have to iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle, which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen (there are other ways that you could check for this problem as you go, but the only other ways that I can think of require holding extra state just in order to perform the assertion).

I'm for assertions when they are simple and don't cost much (especially during development), but it's not feasible to check every condition that should not happen.
Upvoted. This is what I wanted to reply, but then thought better of it and moderated my response.
NYT reporter "unaware that his every move was being monitored"
Would it be worthwhile just to get away from a shared bus (USB) for the Kinect->Console connection?
Related question: what is the timing for the 'Reply' link to show up? I might be fantasizing but sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 10 minutes to appear, leading people to reply as a sibling instead.
Some of the most spectacular airplane crashes are by the most experienced pilots.

If you've ever tried something new as a hobby you tend to be very careful. Once you gain confidence you take more chances and don't do what even a beginner might do.
Normality has returned :-)
That explains something weird I saw.

If I went to Google's cached copy, I could see threads, and then click on them. But the front page was down. But I could see individual threads.

Very confusing.
This is a very important point to understand. Sales people not only make sure you get money for your product, but they also get you the data to build your MVP.
Their GPU will likely trounce that of the 11" MBA most likely. Focus is highly on the GPU in consoles, and that capability will be put to good use.
Deeply nested comments tend to be hot, and so the reply link takes a while to show up to try to give people some time to think about what they're going to say.
I guess it's time for NewRelic to add an Arc agent.
They've done this before against an excellent piece of investigative journalism done by an Indian magazine called The Caravan, called "The Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri made a fortune off the aspirations -- and insecurities -- of India's middle classes."

That article was taken down, but I'd pulled a PDF of it then, so here it is for anyone that wants to know more about the shadiness that is IIPM.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15497688/Sweet%20Smell%20of%20Succe...
Little ado about a lot
> Agreed, infinite loops are a little hard to protect using asserts.

assert(is_tree(comment_graph))

Typically, a composite entity (like an "item" on HN which has many "comments") will define invariants to ensure data integrity. In this case, the invariant is that an "item"'s comments form a tree.

The database layer often contains this logic, but it depends on how you're building your application; NoSQL backends for example typically must put validation in the application layer. Since HN just uses files, a well-developed application layer should be riddled with invariants like this.
It depends on the process. A more expensive spirit could use processes that uses less chemicals, but takes longer to filter.

Some wines are filtered using fining agents that contain gelatin, where some winemakers choose to use higher-micron (more expensive) filters. Or they use sanitation 'preservatives' like Velcorin. Any one of these processes could either trigger an allergy or add something that your body doesn't like processing.

The closest example is decaf coffee: how to strip out the caffeine. There is a chemical way (cheap but uses benzene) vs the swiss water process.

http://www.wisegeek.org/how-is-coffee-decaffeinated.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination#Swiss_water_proc...
The nice thing about surgery with a computer program on a server is that death is not permanent.
There is a line from Futurama that perfectly applies ton a lot of debugging.

Farnsworth: My God, is it really possible?

Fry: It must be possible, it's happening.

Fry: By the way, what's happening?
PG, quick question: Did this impact the server hosting the YC Summer 2013 applications?

When I tried to edit mine, it simply said "Thanks, scotthtaylor"
We do an MVR check--not the same as a background check, but we do double check identities as we have physical hand-offs. Its good to note that the MVR assures that they're a relatively good driver, and that our theft, collision, and liability insurances will kick in if anything goes wrong.
this is a fantastic article. love that you chronicled the entire process.

really a shame that detailed posts like this can so easily get buried in HN's new section...
I actually like my IP's color scheme. I might try to use it for something.
I hate to be "that guy", but clicking your timer more than once seems to be cutting the intervals down each time (ex: click it 10 times, and it goes crazy fast).

I only say this because I love that you actually went ahead and embedded a timer in your post -- knowing that the process of reading and absorbing the content was just as important, if not more important, than the content itself.

Regardless, great post.
"pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart"

Don't think it's a "good of his heart situation". HN provides a benefit to YC and YC companies and attracts people to YC. As another example Fred Wilson has a very popular blog AVC and has said many times that he considers it "his secret weapon" (or something like that) because the value it provides over his competition.
currently your operating a business called either a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sole_proprietorship. Also, check out :
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-between-partnershi...
It makes me feel good knowing better programmers than me go through the same issues I face. :)
I'd say this is a pretty important lesson: you don't need flawless technology and zero downtime to be popular and/or profitable. You need content worth viewing. People are more than willing to put up with technical errors if it's something they want/need.

Focus on providing people what they want/need, and don't worry so much about having flawless technology until you can employ a horde of PHDs.
Funny to see that this happens to everyone. A week ago, while testing some stuff to locate a low-importance bug, I erased the whole user database. Fortunately we have a good restore so the problem was solved in a few minutes, but still, cold sweat here ...
You mean sit in front of my cable box and let me play games between commercials ;)
A smartwatch that actually makes sense
> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate.

Aren't you assuming "surgery in repl" is a deviation? What if it's normal course of action for him?

> More or less my point. If this wasn't a deviation from normal behavior you would have "checked the comments after the surgery" because it would have either become habit or the shear number of times you tried a fix resulting in an error would have made that more likely to occur.

How about the opposite scenario? He has done it so many times with desired results, that he didn't bother checking?
I disagree. Very few companies would think negatively of an engineer if they made such a mistake on a non-essential, non-revenue-generating fun/research project.

How many dollars did YC lose because of the outage? None. (Maybe they saved a few on bandwidth!)

I also predict that exactly zero startups will say, "Man... I'm not going to take seed money from those guys! They had discussion forum downtime."
I like how you blur out the IP address but it could be trivially recovered by sampling the colors :)
Thanks.

Yep, about the mario sprites example, there is something I'm missing happening https://github.com/gre/glsl.js/issues/2

It works for me (tested on MacbookPro and on a Linux with recent hardware)

I have to figure it out.

[edit] It is fixed now! sampler2D in a struct{} seems broken on some WebGL version / graphic card.
Isn't it curious that the comet incident over Russia happened so close to the pass of DA 14. In the intro to the book:

http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/about/#why

is the note about surgical instruments left inside. It seems just like a coincidence that this happened so close to the switch to the new server, but I wonder if it's something deeper in the subconscious mind; the change to the new server is quite a big change (I know I feel that way when I have purchased a new computer (it feels different - even if it's running the same linux as before)) and could have upset the normal checks one has in place when tweaking things.
Crython - A python implementation of cron
If infringement goes to court, the content owner needs to prove that they took adequate measures to protect their property and that they tried their best to alert the consumers of what constitutes the violation.

This is why there are technical updates to DRM systems (they need to be reasonable, but in the interest of consumers backwards compatibility can waive that requirement) and also why there are the non-skippable FBI warnings on discs.
Performance effects of garbage collection tuning on Java
Ask HN: What's the most beautiful and/or useful landing page you've seen?
Lazy Listen: Control Pandora.com with your head movements
Heads up, there's a typo in the first sentence: achieveing -> achieving
Hacking code in the repl without testing the new behavior. We all did that. Don't lie. Once I wanted to quick fix a "gmail.ca" to "gmail.com", which I did.. but to all the users instead of just the one mistaken. Fortunately I realized by mistake really fast ;-)
Some method to recover or change your password would be helpful.