skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Balanced Life is a Total Myth. Here's Why You Shouldn't Buy In.
I really feel sorry for this guy. Accidents happen, which is why development happens in a sandboxed copy of the live system and why back ups are essential. It simple shouldn't be possible (or at least, that easy) for human error to put an entire company in jeopardy.

Take my own company, I've accidentally deleted /dev on development servers (not that major of an issue thanks to udev, but the timing of the mistake was lousy), a co-worker recently dropped a critical table on dev database and we've had other engineers break Solaris by carelessly punching in chmod -R / as root (we've since revised engineers permissions so this is no longer possible). As much as those errors are stupid and as much as engineers of our calibre should know better, it can only takes a minor lack of concentration at the wrong moment to make a major fsck up. Which is doubly scary when you consider how many interruptions the average engineer gets a day.

So I think the real guilt belongs to the entire technical staff as this is a cascade of minor fcsk ups that lead to something catastrophic.
Bold on your part to own up and offer a resignation. (he "higher ups" should have recognized that and not accepted it). From the movie, "Social Network" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bahX2rrT1I
I'd say it's broken beyond repair. They're doing a nice job in some way or another getting the best out of their ecosystem. But ever since I've stopped developing for Windows a few years ago, I never had the slightest urge to go back. Why should I? Even if they make it POSIX compatible, for me there is no reason to go back to windows for personal use.
It is entirely possible for a company to have a great working environment and an incompetent HR team.
A "high-priest class" that has tough salary caps and doesn't call the shots? A "high-priest class" that openly publishes its documents and begs others to learn coding and technology? A "high-priest class" whos majority is obsessed with open source, open protocols, etc? Where is this black box? Oh right, it comes down from upper management who is afraid that anything that isn't completely locked down isn't profitable.

If anything technologists are an unusually egalitarian and idealistic group. We're the good guys here. If you need a badguy here, go against the companies that refuse to open code, spread FUD, and use embrace/extinguish strategies, not the guy running his pet OSS project that he hopes will change the world.

Sorry, but this isn't the middle ages. There's no elite cabal controlling information. The open exchange of ideas, the open market, and letting the best product rise to the top is the winning strategy, and probably will always be the winning strategy. Whining about elitists and conspiracies and having some kind of "I knows a tekkie whens I sees one" attitude is insane.
This could've happened anyone. It's a huge shame for those in charge not for you. Any business letting such operations happen without having backups or proper user-right-management should consider why they still exists, if they really make huge amounts of many as you mentioned.
Wearable open-source VU meter LED tie
Laurie hacked the system available on the room TVs that show your current bill and let you check out, etc. Nothing to do with internet access.
My question is whether or not you personally have paid google for said support and then not received what was promised?
C++ allows to you to

- use safe arrays with bound checking if you feel like to

- use automatic memory management

- pass arguments by reference and being sure they point to valid data

- use proper strings without caring if the null character is missing

C++ is only dangerous thanks to the C compatibility legacy.

Don't use C'isms and the application will be a lot safer than doing pure C coding.
UX Extensions for Twitter Bootstrap: Fuel UX
The Ubuntu You Deserve
Linus does not code much these days, at least not in the kernel. Writing emails and git-merging is most of his job.

If Linus is coding, it is probably more on his scuba diving tool than the Linux kernel.

https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface
We sell middleware to a number of customers with millions of dollars in revenue who don't have backups, don't have testbeds for rolling out to "dev" before pushing to "prod" and don't have someone with any expertise in managing their IT / infrastructure needs.

My experience is that this is the norm, not the exception.
For core services like BIND I don't see any good reason to write them in more than one language (actually anything other than C/C++) and introduce cumbersome dependencies because of that. I wouldn't complain if it was some another DIY name server toy created for whatever reason (how much time it would take..., I can do it!, etc.), but it's software that will become widely deployed in upcoming years (almost) without doubt.

How much more work these 17% done in Python would take to be (re)written in C++? Would it make the code that much worse in terms of quality and managability? Having coherent, one-language codebase, is a good feature on its own too, often improving above mentioned factors.
TIFU
The Jewish Chronicle reference is an editorial at http://www.thejc.com/node/102653 . (Editorials, so we have the same understanding, are essays designed to sway opinion. They are not the same as journalism.)

The Al-Jazeerah source appears to be from recent a debate with Mehdi Hasan, available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Xn60Zw03A at 3m50s or so.

For general context,

Dawkins has said "I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there." http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L... .

Dawkins has said that Islam is "one of the great evils of the world." http://www.scotsman.com/news/arts/there-s-no-god-and-islam-i...

To use the single quote "Well, um, the God of the Koran I don't know so much about" as an indictment against his view of Islam is illogical. To use that to argue that he does not have 'strident opinions' on the Muslim faith is deliberate and even malicious obfuscation.

That you repeat this claim here means that you're trolling.

In any case, the quote seems pulled out of context and made in passing. Dawkins was asked to compare the God of the Old Testament to the New Testament, to the Koran, and to the Hindu scripture. It comes out that Dawkins has studied the Old Testament more than the New Testament, and much more than the Koran. He didn't even respond to the Hindu question.

Using the same logic, did he ignore the Hindu question because he's worried about attacks by defenders of the Hindu faith?
Anything is better than C.
This is a good place to put the reminder; Write a unique resume for each job. Resumes need to be written to match the culture of the company you're applying to.

Try to understand the mindset of the people you expect to be looking at your resume and create something that will get you into the interview room. An example is that the "resume" for my current job was a casual email that didn't include any normal stuff that would be in a resume.
What's so perverse about that? Everybody I know who's tried it claims that VS with PTVS (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) is an excellent python dev environment.

edit: original title was editorialized to to claim that doing this was a perversion
I don't know about you, but I got into computers when I was 7 years old, precisely because it was something anyone could tinker with, if they wanted to invest time and effort in it.

Yes, I know, years have passed and software is more complex and it's a more mature industry. But it's still a hell of a lot easier to teach yourself to program, than to teach yourself to put car engines together.

Other than blatant elitism, I don't see any real reason why this can't be the thing your 286 DOS box has in common with Nexus.
This guy switched to a web application framework, not another CMS.

Whenever Drupal is discussed, I see people comparing it to Rails, Django and other web application frameworks.

I don't get it. The CMS market is entirely different from the custom web application market. Most web sites run on some form of content management system: Day CQ5, SiteCore, Typo3, OpenText, Umbraco, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, eZ, epiServer and so on. This is a huge market.

People who make the above comparison seem to be guys that have started web development with Drupal or Wordpress, and progressed to create ever more complex solutions over time. Then later they discover Rails. Congratulations.

I'm of the opinion, that ultimately, all CMS suck in one way or another, I hate them with a passion, but compared to most, Drupal is a shining beacon of light and reason. Seriously.

From a financial perspective, custom web applications usually do not make sense for businesses who want a complex web site. Most companies are also hesitant to shell out 200k+ on an untested, custom made piece of software developed by a small company. Compared to that, a SiteCore solution with its 60k license looks cheaper and more reliable.
I have a couple friends working at VeryCD, but I'm not entirely sure what you suggest: inviting him to the Shanghai Open Source meetups?
I would love to see some reflection on this story from OP.
What do you think you learned from this experience?
Do you think your response was appropriate?
What would you have done differently?
Are you forever afraid of Prod env?

Many, many , many of us have been in this situation before, whether as 'monumental' or not. So it is interesting to hear how others handle it.
A user of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habrahabr gathered
questions and sent them to Paolo Bellutta. When? Jan–Feb '13.

http://habrahabr.ru/post/170865/ (in Russian)
Point taken. Fixed.
TVRs spontaneously combust as well thanks to the fiberglass which is rather flammable.

As do the latest Ferraris[1], so I wouldn't knock TVR too much.

[1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_458_Italia#Wheel-arch_...]
My impression has been that Mongo has great performance as long as your working set is totally in RAM, after which it craters (due to the use of MMAP'd files as the core storage engine and relying on the OS's paging algos). To what extent is this true on SSDs? Can you get away with a higher working-set-to-RAM ratio?
I don't follow the music business, but I'm certain there are companies that have had this insight and will be major players in the next generation of the industry. Anybody know who they are?
The CEO leaned across the table, got in my face, and said, "this, is a monumental fuck up. You're gonna cost us millions in revenue".

No, the CEO was at fault, as was whoever let you develop against the production database.

If the CEO had any sense, he should have put you in charge of fixing the issue and then making sure it could never happen again. Taking things further, they could have asked you to find other worrying areas, and come up with fixes for those before something else bad happens.

I have no doubt that you would have taken the task extremely seriously, and the company would have ended up in a better place.

Instead, they're down an employee, and the remaining employees know that if they make a mistake, they'll be out of the door.

And they still have an empty users table.
What about missile radar systems?

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2009/03/thales-cho...
This is why you ship
"celebrated for his strident opinions on the Christian and Jewish Gods" I think you nailed it on the head there. Dawkins doesn't delve into Islam much.

And you're right it's probably a survival instinct. Christianity and Judaism are fully established in the western world, they are open to debate. Islam on the other hand is much more difficult to openly debate because internationally it is a religion embroiled in very delicate politics and the cause of many an aggressive reaction. Those reactions aren't unique to Islam, Christianity and Judaism have had their fair share of such things in the past, and still have the odd one today.

I'm sure Dawkins does know a lot about the Quran though, and I'm sure he'd like to pipe up, but not enough of Islam is mature enough yet to handle a constructive debate. Not that Dawkins is constructive 100% of the time himself.
They are? They're just like any other web page...
If we're nitpicking: only the Apple IIGS used Roman numerals in its name. The first gens were styled '][' (Apple ][, ][ Plus), later it was '//' (Apple //e, //c, //c Plus).

The Apple IIGS was released in 1986, two years after the Macintosh was introduced, so that wasn't the model Drew Houston was referring to. (“We’re in the Apple 2 phase of Dropbox,” he said, referring to the time when Apple hadn’t yet made the Macintosh.")

Also, he might have been referring to the OS, not the hardware. In which case it's ProDOS.
Last year I worked at a start-up that had manually created accounts for a few celebrities when they launched, in a gutsy and legally grey bid to improve their proposition†. While refactoring the code that handled email opt-out lists I missed a && at the end of a long conditional and failed to notice a second, otherwise unused opt-out system that dealt specifically with these users. It was there to ensure they really, really never got emailed. The result?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/academia-nuts/

What a screw up!

These mistakes are almost without fail a healthy mix of individual incompetence and organisational failure. Many things - mostly my paying better attention to functionality I rewrite, but also the company not having multiple undocumented systems for one task, or code review, or automated testing - might have saved the day.

[†] They've long been removed.
DuckDuckGo has its own bot: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
All of these points sound like great filters- not for the company, but for me in determining that I probably don't want to work there. A place with thin margins, HR bureaucracy and a cover-your-ass attitude? No thanks. I do say this however as someone both privileged and experienced enough to really not need to scrape for a job too hard at this point in my life. YMMV.
If you want to see monumental screw-up, look at knight capital group (they accumulated a multi billion dollar position in the span of minutes, losing upwards of $440M, and ended up having to accept a bailout and sell itself to GETCO):

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/trading-program-ran-a...
I'm a .NET dev and I literally just gave this a try last week. I've been toying with Python on my Ubuntu laptop but I really wanted to see how this worked on Windows too. Visual Studio is by far my favorite IDE and being able to write Python in VS was pretty amazing!
Show HN: Recount - share your startup stories anonymously. We are not alone
There are times when we just can't have open and honest conversations with people about the things we're going through. Anything we say publicly gets added to our personal brand. Like bubs mentioned in this article/thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5270460, we can start to feel like we're alone.

We don't have to be alone! Recount is a community project aimed at bettering the lives of startups everywhere, through anonymous sharing of our stories. Share your startup high-and-lows, experiences, funny / embarassing moments, things you learned, and even confessions of things you probably shouldn't have done.

Posting is done anonymously. No sign-up is required. We'll never track any info of people who post. (Commenting is via Facebook Comments though)

Start reading here: http://www.recount.it/

Have a good story to tell? Start posting straightaway at: http://www.recount.it/posts/new

Appreciate any feedback! :)
It's is a Clay Mathematics MP problem-

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/
I have done exactly that. Thanks for telling me :-)
AWS vs Google Compute Engine Costs - Google steps up
So the idea here is that someone who can write an entire web app can't do a basic HTML page for a 404?
You did them more good than harm.

1) Not having backups is an excuse-less monumental fuckup.

2) Giving anyone delete access to your production db, especially a junior dev through a GUI tool, is an excuse-less monumental fuckup.

Hopefully they rectified these two problems and are now a stronger company for it.
In the author's defense, it wasn't all his fault. Whoever thought it was a good idea to:

1. Work directly on the production database
2. Not have daily backups
3. Not have data migrations in place for these kinds of situations

needs to be fired immediately. My guess is it was one of the 'senior' engineers and that the author only worked with what they gave him.

I've worked with all kinds of bozos but I've never seen this kind of incompetence. Ridiculous.
There are many more commercial AOT solutions for Java

- IBM J9

- Aonix PERC

- Oracle Squawk VM

- Oracle Embedded Java

- Excelsior JET

- Avian

- RoboVM

- ...
I can't help but wonder if it in some cases it will make sense to 3D print the mold.
It's a nice theory, but not everybody has that much staff. You can get by with proper backups and running against local copies of production.
Programmer's confessions
Normal = OK.
I think it's a bit extreme to say he did more good than harm. He might have done some long-term good by having the company re-examine permissions and environments, but he probably did a lot of long-term harm by alienating current and future customers.
I'm getting internal server error.
They could have their share of that 34.99, but they would lose more money in the process. https://twitter.com/HBO/status/210390531623227392
One of the things I like asking candidates is "Tell me about a time you screwed up so royally that you were sure you were getting fired."

I asked similar, and agree that it's a really useful question.

I think it's an especially great one for startups, as successful candidates are more likely to come into contact with production systems.

For these positions you not only want people capable of recovering accidents, but also people who have screwed up because, conversely, they've been trusted not to screw up. Those who've never been trusted enough to not damage a system are unlikely to be of much use.
It is well-formulated. One could come up with instances of other NP-complete problems that have trivial solutions, like "What if there are only two cities and one road between them? Then the Traveling Salesman Problem isn't that hard!" [1]

If the dean gives you a decently sized list, figuring out such an accommodation is very difficult (it grows exponentially with the number of students).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
Opinionated, but still nice and useful.
Turbo pascal 6 circa 1992 was my first introduction to object orientation. I'd only coded basic and assembly before that. I walked around with my mind blown for a week.

Long live pascal.
Haha its about saving time - as someone who designs and codes, I hate spending time to make these pages. So I was solving my own need.
You can look at the source yourself.

I don't understand either, randomly opening parts of both the Python and C++ and it's certainly not complicated and they write the Python in a C style anyway.

I'm not a C++ coder and I only play with Python now and then, but can't say the code impressed me much. It's actually pretty hard to skim the code because it's massively over-commented and there are far too many tiny 2-line private functions that are called by exactly one other 2-line private function that is called by exactly one other 2-line function. Or Holographic code as John D. Cook called it[1].

And the copyright notice in every source file is extremely irritating.

Far too high noise to code ratio for my tastes, so I got bored before I could really 'see' how the Python had helped.

but I can't judge that well as I'm not sure if that's all just a bi-product of using C++ and being an open source project that comes out of committee.

[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/01/09/holographic-source-...
In what ways are the latest generation of Chinese tech companies different from established counterparts?
As cheesy as this video is they're right. My kids do not learn coding in school. Our area high school teaches kids how to use computers but there is no coding classes. When I went to school in the late 80's we have a program that allowed us to move a turtle on a green computer screen. It was my first exposure to programming. I wish schools would put more importance on this skill. Even if kids do not get into technology, knowing a programming language is an invaluable skill in any industry.
Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2187805/Mandiant_APT1_Report.pdf
Agreed - going to be updating it tonight, sorry for the trouble!
If your senior management/devs are worth anything, they were already aware that this was a possibility. There is no excuse for what ostensibly appears to be a total lack of a fully functioning development & staging environment--not to mention any semblance of a disaster recovery plan.

My feeling is that whatever post-incident anger you got from them was a manifestation of the stress that comes from actively taking money from customers with full knowledge that Armageddon was a few keystrokes away. You were just Shaggy pulling-off their monster mask at the end of that week's episode of Scooby Doo.
I agree with this. When you get to a certain size, while fingers work, pens are much better because the system will placed on a table. Fingers on a touchscreen of certain size will probably stick within the kiosk realm, or game. You can do some typing, but you're largely looking down.

A very large touchscreen PC with sufficient horsepower could be good for drafting, autocad, or maybe solidworks. Things of that nature where you're designing and creating.
It's unlikely that the database had no foreign keys related to users table. And if so DBMS should have prevented deleting all users from the table.

Perhaps the Database Designer also failed his job. As well as the guys who cancelled backups and set up dev environment.
PyPi: Deprecate external links (catalog-sig)
I was in a situation very similar to yours. Also a game dev company, also lots of user data etc etc. We did have test/backup databases for testing, but some data was just on live and there was no way for me to build those reports other than to query the live database when the load was lower.

In any case, I did a few things to make sure I never ended up destroying any data. Creating temporary tables and then manipulating those.. reading over my scripts for hours.. dumping table backups before executing any scripts.. not executing scripts in the middle/end of the day, only mornings when I was fresh etc etc.

I didn't mess up, but I remember how incredibly nerve wracking that was, and I can relate to the massive amount of responsibility it places on a "junior" programmer. It just should never be done. Like others have said, you should never have been in that position. Yes, it was your fault, but this kind of responsibility should never have been placed on you (or anyone, really). Backing up all critical data (what kind of company doesn't backup its users table?! What if there had been hard disk corruption?), and being able to restore in minimum time should have been dealt with by someone above your pay grade.
Its not that they're difficult - its that they're time consuming and delay shipping features.
Agile when you don't Like it
Show HN: Django Ipsum (evening project)
Yes. But in practice we almost never recurse through a data structure directly. We once recursively define a combinator to fold the datastructure, and then always use that combinator for working with the data structure.