skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said! Could not articulate this better myself, even though I rant about various elements of this matter at least once a week! :)

Seriously, great job summarizing all the different knobs that matter.

Now if only people could manage to follow these pretty reasonable rules of thumb.

Admission: I've actually helped a few friends write better job descriptions for their businesses, a good quality job description makes such a huge difference.
It seems to me that Heroku has chosen to be dishonest:

Heroku's blog response:
"but until this week, we failed to see a common thread among these reports."

vs.

Adam's response to Tim Watson, a year ago:

"You're correct, the routing mesh does not behave in quite the way described by the docs. We're working on evolving away from the global backlog concept in order to provide better support for different concurrency models, and the docs are no longer accurate. The current behavior is not ideal, but we're on our way to a new model which we'll document fully once it's done."

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/heroku/8eO...
What do you think about jquery selectors? Do the same objections apply?
HNs backend isn't very abstract. The site doesn't really use Javascript and resides on a single server.

And I agree with you on the windows issue -- except that ten plus years ago I did in fact reboot and/or shut down my computer.
Job Advert is not the worst way to find somebody. Depending on how you do it, it's perhaps the best way to recruit someone. Good job adverts are intriguing even to non job seekers, for example, a cleverly crafted puzzle or challanging competition or just a pic of some office prank that demonstrates irrestiable cultural aspect.

No HR professional would agree with you that quoting salary on job advert is good idea. For most jobs typically wide range of experience and skills are admittable. Even for very specific jobs 20% variance is very normal. Once you quote a number you risk turning away who are already making bit higher or over pay someone who is perfact candidate but getting significant less current pay. Even quoting range is dangerous because unless you pay high end candidate would always feel unsatiesfied. In addition, current employees can see this number as well causing moral issues if they feel their title is more important but getting less as well as loss of privacy for new hire. One situation when you do want to quote number is when your offer is 2x or more than average market rate and you will pay that regardless of their current pay and employees don't care about privacy issues.
I don't know, I still find them exciting -- although PC hardware isn't as fun as it used to be.
That would have been really cool, and a true hackers machine, but I imagine that the days when LISP needs (or benefits from) custom hardware are long gone.
It will. If X is the max number of requests node can handle per dyno, the router can send >X requests to a single dyno even if you have other dynos which are processing <X requests.

Essentially the router sends requests by random. This results in request pileups. In the original rap genius post, there is an animated image which shows this in action
Yup. Aforementioned satan missile can carry hundreds of warheads, and an equal number of decoys. Two of them, they said, could wipe out all US cities.
150 dynos with Node.js and you are still getting H12 errors?

The issue so far reported is that if we ever get multiple requests on a single dyno then we'll have a queuing delay because Rails is essentially single-threaded. But with Node.js I think it would be a fairly large amount of requests on a single dyno I suspect before we get any queuing delays
Yeah, we're using wal-e in conjunction with streaming replication.

Either of those options would have been awesome (anything but Bucardo, really. Bucardo's triggers overwhelmed an already overwhelmed database)
Mozilla announces Nightly build of Metro Firefox for Windows 8,..
Not the first death of that kind in Singapore:

"Family suspects interference in David Widjaja case"

http://sgforums.com/forums/3317/topics/363855

"However, it appeared the court process was intentionally directed to a conclusion of suicide despite evidence showing a strong possibility of murder, according to David's family and the verification team.

"We have strong evidence that he was murdered but that fact was not brought up in the court," David's father, Hartono Wijaya, told a press conference Tuesday at the National Commission on Human Rights."

[...]

"He added there was a suspicion David's death was related to his research: "Multiview Acquisition from Multi-camera Configuration for Person Adaptive 3D Display".

"His friends said his three-dimensional study could be used for various purposes, either for entertainment or even for military needs."

"And we must not forget that after David's death, there were two unusual deaths at NTU - his professor's assistant *committed suicide' four days later and another researcher was hit by a car 25 days later.""

EDITED: Having read more about the specific case, it seems to me that the official story sounds plausible enough. It's not at all clear whether there was foul play involved.
It's possible that his laptop, with the external hard drive, was accessed remotely, and that the "speaker" was simply removed by the police when they took the laptop. If it was on a corporate network (as it would be if he used it to back up data) then they might well have been exposed to some form of corporate spyware. Of course, we can't know with the computer under wraps.
You can pass the initial data as a json object directly with the server response.

I'm using Rails, and https://github.com/gazay/gon gem does it for you nicely.
Designing Great Feedback Loops
I upvoted this comment, it has been my experience this is the case.
May Itanium Rest in Peace, Almost
The economics of brokers: Could YOU shift nuclear plant scrap?
Udacity teaches you HTML5 Game Development
Remember Emscripten is not the last word, it only demonstrates such translators are possible, and I believe is still the only such example thus far. Given a small team the experience might be significantly improved, especially considering Emscripten works by translating LLVM bitcode, even though a less lossy source translation approach may be possible.

JS might be the first 'architecture' for which standard C's pointer arithmetic and casting restrictions get put to truly good use.
2e2: VC funded acquisition leads to failure of UK service provider
There's a nifty tool called 'cloc' that makes it really easy.

Coincidentally, I wrote about earlier this week: http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2013/02/cloc-counts-lines-of-code...
Can you clarify this:

"But then if you end up not spending that money because you made a boatload of cash the next year and want to take it out:"

Why would you have to pay taxes again? Sure, you can pay taxes on the growth, but you wouldve paid taxes on the growth even if you had taken it out.

Clearly I'm missing something, so please clarify :-)
Amsterdam startup scene: Open knowledge sharing is key
> (1) Shard/tier the Bamboo routing nodes...

This would work, but would require another layer before routers to do the sharding. I'm not sure if Heroku currently has such layer, or is it beyond their control (provided by AWS). But this is definitely an option.

> (2) Enable dynos to refuse requests...

The way I understand the architecture is that Dynos code is fully controlled by a client. They would need to introduce another component that would be responsible for rejecting requests. With such additional component they could also try to reverse the flow: each dyno is assigned to a single router and asks this router for a next request where it has finished processing the previous one. Routers queue all requests and handle them only when dynos ask them to.
Say no more, say no more! There is just the thing for you:

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt

To answer your question, I'm not sure what is the use for this, since you know, it does not compile to coffeescript /sarcasm. But in all seriousness, I did not post this to advocate it's use, but because I found it somewhat strange.
Some might see that as a bit of a head-in-sand perspective; ie. one that conveniently avoids considering the onward effects of one's actions. You could equate it to the situation vegetarians often encounter, ie. people that say eating meat is OK because the animal is dead already, or because it was farmed to be food, or some such. In such cases, the animals are farmed and killed (often under horrible conditions) because some people pay to fund that industry by buying the meat and others work within it as butchers, cattlemen, industrial vets, transport operators, cleaners, accountants, etc. to facilitate the scale and depth of suffering imposed upon the animals. Similarly, working in an industry based around killing, torturing, pressuring, wounding, imprisoning, spying, and other negative activities targeted at human beings also directly contributes to those activities.

One perspective on this type of activity is that of early Buddhism, which 2500 odd years ago summarized that one should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. — AN 5.177 http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...
Thank you for your reply g2bsocial. What avenues are you considering going through to collect on your accounts receivable?
Three examples of the psychology of social networks influencing user behavior
BBC Attacks the Open Web, GNU/Linux in Danger
Elance and Guru have some gems hidden inside - you just have to do a lot of digging to generally find them.

I agree with @sheraz the quality in the Hiring/Seeking post is generally higher then you will find on Elance or Guru.

...on the other hand I freelance and have WordPress experience ;-) [email in profile if interested]
So they don't steal your mail?
Mel?
I see why you never "get" them. It looks like they are pretty good at covering up.
Agency Vs Rails part 1: Action
The Top Raspberry Pi Blogs
Definitely interesting, but from this 'full unedited text' it looks like both you and Heroku had better things to do at the time than investigate more deeply. (At the time you seemed satisfied but suspicious that 50 dynos fixed things; Phil@Heroku shares your suspicions but his followup questions get no response. Case closed, everyone moves on to other things until another complaint or fresh info comes in.)
Wearable tech will be a big thing

Google Glasses will be just the start of things.
Airbnb for Traveling
> But Massoud found activity, again, on several more IME files on the night of June 27, three days after Shane’s body was found. He said someone looked at IME folders – including one labelled “Supervisor” and one labelled “Goal Setting” ... One file in particular was
opened and closed but closed improperly so that a “shadow” file was created. That shadow file was then deleted by the same person. Massoud located the original file on the drive – it was a PowerPoint presentation of the “Layer structure and summary of Veeco grown HEMT wafer”. This contains the scientific formula – a specific recipe – for enhancing a GaN chip. “In that two-minute window, someone is perusing. Something is happening. And it’s not automated, it’s a person.”

Certainly harddrive is again manipulated long after it had been detached from the laptop by police.
Ruby on Rails Patches DoS, Remote Execution Flaws
Yes, let's use some impressive-sounding engineering terms when describing a process that (a) has no connection with either engineering or science, and (b) can't be either quantified or falsified.

Once a social scientist discovers he can't apply real quantitative science to a human process, it seems an overwhelming temptation to use just the words and leave it at that.
To a policeman the explanation is always fairly simple. Murder's not common in Singapore, especially not 'corporate' murder but suicide is.
Test submission.
88% of Businesses Think They’re Safe From Cyber Attack
ابراج اليوم - ابراج يوم السبت 2013/2/16 برجك ليوم السبت 2013/2/16
Google to open retail stores to sell Nexus devices
Observing the 2012 Corruptions Perceptions Index scores [1] and the latest year United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime intentional homicide rates [2], one finds an an exponential relationship between the two with an intercept (homicide rate per 100 000) of 19.9, slope of -0.033, and regression coefficient of 0.25 (N=176). See chart [3].

Murder is the most vivid example without adjustmenting for income, but one can trace similar patterns across ambulance response times, food quality, transport efficiency, etc. Transparency International's report on their metric is a good starting point.

[1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/

[2] http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/...

[3] http://imgur.com/a1N5WXm chart!
That's one I've seen. But there are quite a few -- long period of economic growth, the rise of video games, changing diets, changing weather, changing incarceration rates, changing police policy ...
What a wonderful, pointless, hilarious, inpiring hack.
Micro-benchmarks?

We have had Word Processors and Spreadsheets in Javascript (Google Docs), 3D and 2D games, and even a h264 decoder and a PDF renderer. Heck, they have ported QT to Javascript, and the example applications run at a very acceptable speed. None of the above are slow.

So, no, it's not true that V8 is only fast in selected "microbenchmarks".

You might not do scientific applications or NLE video editing with it, but for everything else it should be just fine.
It's unborked.
I'm not so sure that applying for YC is different from any other VC firm. But it is good advice here.
I guess it depends on the program, but for 99% of cases you should not have to. The very few times you would have to go for it, it's usually already part of some library you can use.
Why not just use something like AWS to have an image that's a snapshot of a development machine?
When a new hire arrives, simply clone and launch the instance and use github and the migrations to bring it up to the latest version.
Yet another Emacs24 theme
Have you been able to find anything that would do this, as this would be quite incredible to feel. You can measure magnetic fields with solenoids with wrapped wire, but this would be quite the impractical solution for a ring.
RESTful backend in Sinatra+ROAR
Well so far it's been unfixed for 3 years.
Sydney Morning Herald: Bounty hunters hound out computer bugs
> This "gotcha" is probably rectified by now

It's not. The guides published on emberjs.com apparently track the master branch on github, so are regularly out of sync with the version offered for download on the front page, and at the moment there's a third version bundled with the starter kit. This completely tripped me up when I tried to get off the ground a couple of weeks ago, because things that were described as working in the guides just didn't, and it wasn't clear what I'd got wrong.

EDIT 'cos noprocrast kicked in at the wrong moment: Add to this a release policy of stuffing new functionality in every minor release, and you've got documentation that, for someone completely new to it, who doesn't know what they don't know, feels like a minefield. The one thing you want as a beginner is documentation you can trust, and Ember just doesn't provide that yet.

To learn enough get off the ground, I ended up writing an "assume you know nothing" tutorial (https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/gui...), which I've submitted back to emberjs.
Ah well, just because you like the "freedom" of doing illegal things and the reassurance that if you're caught there will be virtually no consequences, doesn't make it right.

There are people out there that say "And personally i like to beat my wife and kids" and there are societies where this is accepted behaviour.

After being in Malaysia and Indonesia i felt very safe in Singapore and had not the impression of a state the oppresses its people.

In short words: Every country has its rules to live by. Singapore may have strict laws but gains a lot in terms of overall safety.
Technology Push vs. Market Pull
Well, the question itself is stupid not because something is obvious in the outcome, but because obviously nobody can predict the future. And using simple words is not hostile, at least using the term "stupid" in my previous comment had no hostility intended.

I excuse for any irritation it might have caused and hopefully I could remove now any of these.
Rumors Ripen Yet Again with iPhone 5S and iPhone 6
The market is afresh with yet another slew of Apple rumors expecting launch this year or later. The rumors are more like assertions traced keeping the history of Apple iPhone market. It would be a real break-through if Apple could release three iPhones, to target new demographics like China. Whatever, the case Apple is sure to surprise us by a storm, with its string of innovative, highly functional yet affordable iPhones...
>In any environment where I might currently choose to use Python I also have the option to use something else for parts of the project where Python proves to be too slow. Will FirefoxOS provide such an escape hatch?

Seeing that Python is 10-20 times slower than V8 for most Python/JS native operations, you should have that problem much. Especially considering that the purpose of asm.js is to give you an even greater boost in speed. And seeing that NaCl never got anywhere, not only this is your best bet but it's far better than anything else out there at the moment.

asm.js IS a bytecode format. That it is human readable or that it accepts some tradeoffs because of JS doesn't matter. The end result (after the JIT pass) would not be any slower for it. The only problem with a readable "asm" would be slower load times, but that can be taken care of in the future by providing some pre-compiled format or more control over caching if asm succeeds.
Wheee - currently much faster, although the true test will be on Monday, around 5pm GMT.
As for me, this story excludes Heroku from any future consideration. Why?

There are two reasons for paying a significant premium to a a platform provider: a) you don't want to do this job yourself, b) someone knows better how to do it.

This story showed me that (b) isn't true. Now, I'm all for learning and growing and improving, but not on my business and not on my applications, and especially not while I'm paying a premium for it, being promised "scalability".
Too Big to Fail has become Too Big for Trial
Such a fantastic speech. This woman is my new hero
List of resources about compilers and interpreters
re (2): The router could just interpret a specific response code, or an early-close of the socket, as a directive to try another dyno. (I think the router already treats a failure-to-connect-to-listening-socket this way.) So, it would be up to the client code to optionally send such a refusal, when appropriate. It doesn't require any new Heroku component to decide when to send rejections... only router support for respecting them when recieved.
you obviously never wrote a "fat" client and had to maintain it : at some point you need some kind of framework to make sense out of the "small modules" mess. And CommonJS doesnt solve dependency injection issues.
The UK company didn't miss to exactly take the same international classes (009, 042) the PSF had choosen back in 2004 when they registered the PYTHON mark with the US copyright office. So that's more distinct than what others do, even if some of those two classes also collide with other trademark registrations for PYTHON.
>is a moral question only if "damage" means 'exposes them to things that I morally object to but don't feel I have to justify. (...) For example, I think that exposure to black people and the concept of treating the physically/mentally ill damages children. Should I have to justify that?

No. You are entitled to believe it as a person. But you would have to convince your society about it, if you don't want to be seen with contempt, or if you want that to also have wider appeal.

Notice, though, how you picked a negative example. How about an example that tries (using the same logic) to justify something you already consider bad?

E.g. The same can be said for "racist remarks" or "rape".

One could argue that there is no damage in rape, especially if the victim was drugged and not aware of it happening. Would we be willing to accept that?

How about taking advantage of people to get ahead, including lying et al when you can get away with it? Why would that be wrong "scientifically"? On the contrary, in a game theoretic way it would be totally advantageous for the individual doing it.

At final analysis, morals are things that we don't have to justify scientifically. We might abandon them, or change them, or justify them with regard to other morals and rhetoric, and we might even use some scientific information in the process, but morals are not a subject for scientific assessment.
> I thought the responsible thing to do was not announce it until there was some headstart time?

I may be wrong, but from the report, it seems to be a somewhat difficult local exploit that can lead to privilege escalation. While it's serious in that it allows arbitrary code to run in kernel space, it also seems to pose a low risk due to how hard it is to put all the required pieces in place.

Also, there are already corrections available.
Introducing Javelin: An FRP Library for ClojureScript
Lower corruption just means nobody risks their neck for relatively small amounts. For higher prices most are still for sale. If they offered the officers involved the equivalent of $50K each to cover it up, then it doesn't matter whether it's Germany, the US or Singapore: there is a reasonable chance they would succeed. And if a government (and Huawei, like any other Chinese company, is basically Chinese oligarchy/government property) is involved, money is not a problem.
I'd say its difficult but not impossible, especially over the long term. Singapore seems to have managed the trick, but it is the exception rather than the rule.
Absolutely chilling. What are the odds of being hit by a car in Singapore? One would think that, given so few people have them and that there are so few roads large enough to speed down, with the culture being so conservative, drugs near-absent and surveillance omnipresent, that it would be rare indeed; further, it would be trivial to catch the perpetrator. Were they caught in this case? Not, I suppose. It feels as if western state-assisted assassinations of civilians are becoming a more frequently documented reality, and not just for CIA rendition, UAV or economic sanction victims, either.
If you can, avoid working at companies located in the middle of nowhere. Location is the first thing I consider when working for a company, and if it means a real car commute or living in the middle of nowhere...the better tech companies understand having a decent location is very important in retaining talent!
>> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML.
>Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful).

XML, JSON, MUMPS-storage are semantically equivalent.

XML is not about "<" and ">".
I've used Angular and really enjoyed developing with it. You get results really fast. It feels like a more organized Knockout.js (which is also great).
>The Western world was never that intellectual to begin with.

This statement doesn't make any sense.

In what way doesn't it "make sense", because it is trivially parseable in several ways. One is that the Western world is not that self-reflective and meditative upon the meaning of history and life, and substitutes "expert knowledge" and "action" for those.

>How have you determined that your examples are actually societal standards?

By living in a society. Any look at a book of sociology or anthropology 101 will inform you that stances towards sex and violence are always part of societal standards.