skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, this is just false. My high school was run by incompetent people, the result being Photoshop classes being offered to people wanting to program. This is further complicated by people who can't afford their own computers or internet and are explicitly disallowed from programming at the library.

You have a very optimistic view of high schools.
To say nothing of running development code against a production database.

If there were only two junior folks, what were the senior folks doing?
Marc Benioff Talks Up Salesforce.com’s Strategy for the Mobile Arena
Agreed. I have to do things like store large things in Amazon S3 when I'd really rather just stick it in GridFS. The pricing is just way to high to do anything else.
I would fire the CTO for canceling the backups.

NEVER.. NEVER go production without backup.

Backup is not only to 'recover' but to have a 'historical' data for audits, check for intrusion, etc.

And the 'other' guy on Skype?

'You are lucky to be here..'

Seriously?
You are lucky to still talk using skype because I am sure skype has some kind of backup at their user table..
The Making Of Rap Genius with Mahbod Moghadam [video]
Check out Mahbod as he tells us how Rap genius started and what he learned from the Y Combinator family
At one job I went with this scheme for terminal background color: green screen for development, blue for testing, yellow for stage / system test, and red for production. This saved a lot of problems because I knew to be very careful when typing in the red.
Thanks for sharing (and of course, for the product).

It's not just a matter of HN vs TechCrunch, it was that HN led to TechCrunch and other outlets, as they obviously check (or their friends do) HN to see what the community is talking about.

But it's not surprising HN would have more conversions. More people on HN have Posterous blogs than I imagine in other crowds, and probably moreso compared to the average TechCrunch reader.
Finally got through. Mirrored here in case other people get 500 errors. http://pastie.org/6348763
Part of our culture/personality/team fit questions is like this. We also have one that's something like "tell me about a time you failed a commitment (deadline, etc) and how you handled it". Numerous people with over a decade claim perfect records, frequently blaming all those around them as having failed. It's been a real easy way to eliminate candidates, particularly because almost every team member we have gave an example that was within like a month of when they interviewed.
* {
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0);
}

Eliminates the flashing completely. It introduces some weird safari behavior so only include it if you know what you're doing.
In the Footsteps of a Killer
I've heard a lot of people saying this is why Google can't get a lot of businesses to sign on. There's no one for the CEO to call and complain to directly when their stuff is down.
I believe in the future (takeaways from TED day 1)
In my first year as an engineer, I shut off the production application server. It was an internally-developed app server built in & for an internally-developed language, with its own internally-developed persistence mechanism, and it was my first day working with it. I had several terminals open, and in one I'd logged on to production to check how the data was formatted, so I could get something comparable for my dev environment. Unfortunately I forgot to log off, and at some point I issued the `stop server` command, thinking I was doing it on dev. A few minutes later the project leader, one of the most senior engineers, came over and started yelling at me. Fortunately not much was lost (other than a few users' sessions--not a high-traffic site). But I was really appalled at my mistake and I certainly wondered if I was about to be fired. Since then I've taken steps to (1) keep myself off production as much as possible (2) make a production terminal visually distinct from a non-production one. As a sometime project leader myself now, I also make sure newcomers can easily obtain an adequate development environment, and I don't give out the production login to every junior dev. :-)
This is so true. I had to leave my first junior dev position for similar reasons as the OP, though nothing as monumental.

I was handed a legacy codebase with zero tests. I left a few small bugs in production, and got absolutely chewed out for it. It was never an issue with our processes, it was obviously an issue with the guy they hired who had 1 intro CS class and 1 rails hobby project on his resume. The lead dev never really cared that we didn't have tests, or a careful deploy process. He just got angry when things went wrong. And even gave one more dev with even less experience than I had access to the code base.

It was a mess and the only thing I was "learning" was "don't touch any code you don't have to because who knows what you might break" which is obviously a terrible way to learn as a junior dev (forget "move fast and break things" we "move slowly and work in fear!"). So I quit and moved on, it was one of the better decisions I've ever made.
>It's only real use is for pointing at and shouting "look at what new fangled technology is doing to us. we must restrict everything."

Absolutely correct. Tim Wu illustrates this beautifully in "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires." Basically, disruptive technology is nixed because it's cheaper to defend your entrenched method than to sail off into unknown waters, open to competition.

My favorite example from the book is Bell Laboratories, who invented a machine that could answer a telephone and record what the speaker was saying in the 1920s, but killed the project because they believed that people would stop using phones.
In case you just skimmed through the descriptions, the library renders are actually stills from an animation: http://vimeo.com/7809605

It's really quite something. Made a big stir when it was released a few years back. Still amazing.
Is it me, or is the grammar on this page very confusing. I had to reread sentences multiple times to understand their meanings. I understand it's a marketing page, but it seems like the author is more focused on dropping buzzwords instead of explaining the product
When I was 18 I took out half my towns power for 30 minutes with a bad scada command. It was my summer job before college and I went from cleaning the warehouse to programming the main SCADA control system in a couple weeks.

Alarms went off, people came running in freaking out, trucks started rolling out to survey the damage, hospitals started calling about people on life support and how the backup generators were not operational, old people started calling about how they require AC to stay alive and should they take their loved ones on machines to the hospital soon.

My boss was pretty chill about it. "Now you know not to do that" were his words of wisdom, and I continued programming the system for the next 4 summers with no real mistakes.
53 LOL
Coming Soon - How to develop Ruby on Rails apps on an Etch-a-sketch
Life sucks, yep. Low pay, yep. Management that has no idea how to run a business that creates intellectual property, yep.

Here's what you may not know: There are a growing number of small to mid sized IT shops in China that need good talent, know how to treat them right and are willing to pay better. FIND THEM and pick yourself up and things will get better. Go to these hacker meetups and learn to mix and mingle.

All my employees work only 40 hours a week, with benefits and pay well beyond the norm. And I invest in their future by preparing their skill set for what's to come next. I'm not the only person in China doing this. I know the man that wrote this article here is very progressive and invests in his people.
I did the same, it seemed odd to be showing HN as if it were a new launch, but already in NYT and Forbes. Couldn't find any articles anywhere but then noticed on the about page that it's YC/SV Angel backed.
Hey Chris, I'm one of the guys who worked on it. The company name is under Airbrite. We built an e-commerce API and Celery is powered off of it.
2 small instances and storage for free. Its a great offer - we host our bootstrapped node.js application on Azure and it works great - and is net free for us.
Video series about the science and engineering of modern digital media
Is Twitter actually worth $10 billion? We have our doubts
> Do not assume there is a correlation between depression and suicide. The connection is actually very weak, far weaker than most people assume.

Do you have a source for this? I've been searching for a bit, but can't find anything that indicates depression is very weakly related to suicide.
Not so much emphasis with Kickstarter please. A lot of people won't go the Kickstarter route (non-US residents being among them). Being able to take pre-orders is the magic words, and won't alienate prospects.
Tangentially related, but emails are often auto-deleted by 'cloud' email services (Hotmail, Google etc) when the email is sent from a server-side script like PHP mail(), therefore it is not unheard of for emails to be auto-deleted when it is very likely to be spam. I don't know how the iCloud spam filtering works, but I wonder if there is a block filter being run before the check is done to see if the sender is a known contact (to bypass the spam check). 'barely legal teens' seems like a phrase that would almost certainly be flagged as spam. Perhaps this is just a badly implemented spam system at work (which wouldn't surprise me given Apple's reputation for web services)?
The logo looks almost identical to the old celery (task queue) logo. Not sure how the word "celery" relates to payments, but the name of the task queue is not random: rabbits like celery (rabbitmq.com).
Why are Visual Studio's menu's yelling at me?
Well, then go on - list your interests (or skills).

And please don't pick a project that's desperate for people -
It's a classic case of the mythical man month.

Most of the time the core folks will find bringing up a new member up-to speed as a distraction, particularly when there's no commitment from either side to keep working on it (compared something like google summer of code).

PS: if all else fails, pick up a new programming language & write examples/cookbook-recipes for it
I would have to say yes. It's a lot easier to break something that is has the code/methods available then play the hex guessing game.

But having an application which is 100% HTML/JS/CSS/Interest other scripting language here. Without any ability to opcache or byte code it and encrypt it. It's not going to take much to crack it.

If they somehow found a way to compress+encrypt the HTML/JS they may be able to make it at least a little bit more challenging. But that would take a lot of effort.
I've been using it for the past week (on my mac, homebrew is such a joy to use most of the time) and I absolutely love it. Before this I often had to type grep -lir "somestring" *, to recursively search in a project. Which would be often slow (reading huge binary files, ...) and is a handful to type. Admittedly I could've made an alias, but then I still would've had the binary file problem.

Now I can do

ag "somestring"

And out comes beautifully colorized output in the blink of an eye telling me where and what. In short it comes with sane defaults for code searching and is faster than grep, what's not to like?

I fruitlessly tried ack once before and it never worked out for me, but this is staying in my toolbox.

The silver searcher, would recommend.
Tens of thousands of paying customers and no backups?

No staging environment (from which ad-hoc backups could have been restored)!?!?

No regular testing of backups to ensure they work?

No local backups on dev machines?!?

Using a GUI tool for db management on the live db?!?!?

No migrations!?!?!

Junior devs (or any devs) testing changes on the live db and wiping tables?!?!?!

What an astonishing failure of process. The higher ups are definitely far more responsible than some junior developer for this, he shouldn't have been allowed near the live database in the first place until he was ready to take changes live, and then only on to a staging environment using migrations of some kind which could then be replayed on live.

They need one of these to start with, then some process:

http://www.bnj.com/cowboy-coding-pink-sombrero/
It seems like defining it as "personality is a mesh with everyone else's" is exactly the vague proclaimation I am against. While it seems reasonable on the surface, it allows for so much abuse to go unchecked.

Your amazon link seems to be a good way to define "culture fit". All companies should do this instead of keeping it vague.
> The article itself isn't even saying that.

If the title says it, it doesn't matter what the article says. My objection is to the title, and to the sleazy journalistic practice of promising something in the title that can't be supported by the article.

"Cancer Finally Cured!" -> "researchers report modest progress in alleviating melanoma in cockroach fingernails." (just an example, not real)

"Marijuana use leads to psychosis" -> "marijuana use correlated with a higher rate of psychosis" (this actually happened recently, multiple examples, but correlation is not causation)

Link: "http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pag...

Quote: "Cannabis use can cause drug-induced psychosis, trigger the first episode of a psychotic illness, or make a pre-existing psychotic illness worse."

It's entirely false, of course. There is no scientific evidence to support these claims. It's a classic case that confuses correlation with causation.
Actually I've used MongoHQ as well as MongoLab for development, but for http://commando.io it made sense to just purchase three virtual machines on Softlayer and setup MongoDB. Backups we quite easy as well, a few hours later we had a working bash script which stored backups locally, and well as synced them to S3.
I can't stand IntelliJ, nor eclipse or NetBeans. I used to develop with TextMate, these days it is all vim.
It's cool to see AngularJS was used for the templating engine. I'd be curious to see how deeply it's being used.
It's because of Microsoft's historically hostile attitude towards anything Not Windows which rubs many people in this community the wrong way.

That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
Also, if you decide to go with erlang, I would recommend http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content. It is written by the same guy, two great books.
When you bought it one year later, did you pay the full price of it as it cost 1 year ago when you actually played it, or did you buy 2 licenses at a highly discounted rate on one of the frequent steam sales?

If you have 200 game developers slaving away to push out a to push out a 50-EUR game, pirating and then a year later buying it at a 10-EUR sale will not do them as much good.
why? For the data migrations?
If that's the case, then your pants are on fire.
Honey has several vitamins and mineral together.
If not by the weigh gain it is healthier by the vitamins
Indeed, I agree but that wasn't my question. I was specifically wondering what developing on windows, in VS felt like for developers who are accustomed to using *nix based environments and tools like Pycharm/Eclipse/ST2 etc.
> And if those that could afford, by not buying McDonalds for a few weeks for example, torrent it, do they lose money?

This is really insulting. Do you cling to stereotypes for every group of people not like you?
> My niece here in India is around 12 years old, and she is being taught C programming back in school(She is in 8th standard, or 8th grade as per US terms).

I have been in those Indian schools, and it's not what you think at all.

Did you check the portion/syllabus that is to be covered in 8th standard?

In my experience (7 - 8 years ago): Max they'd go is loops, preprocessing directives. I doubt they'd even write a function (not complex ones that return stuff anyway, forget call-by-value, call-by-reference)

> And oh, by the way. Next year they are about to be taught Java. I can only imagine the horror, the way kids of going to deal with the text walls full of verbosity, API dance and the XML mess. And the last time I heard they don't really use IDE's.

Teachers here are fans of "do it in text editor, so that you don't have autocomplete to guide you" (where normally text editor is Notepad (Windows)). I can assure you they aren't going to deal with anything like APIs, XML.

Java courses in India are a lot like "Rewriting this piece of code we wrote in C++ last sem in Java".

Also, computers in schools (state boards at least) are not a marking subject where you score out of 100 or 50. It's a graded subject (falls in the domain of physical education, crafts: generally ignored academically).

Indian education system has bigger problems anyway. Be assured this course is not what these guys at code.org are talking about.

EDIT: I am not being negative, but you'd rather take opinions of a person schooled in India (Mumbai, not Delhi, but more-or-less the same thing leaving out subtle differences) than an uncle of a student who only knows the name of the subject (analogous to courses in college).
I launched into a rant about this in a recent blog post[1]. The maths lecturer I had said, "A group theorist aims to classify and categorise the whole world..." and then he went straight into writing the four axioms of a group.

[1] http://lifebeyondfife.com/the-difference-between-mean-and-me...
I think it's beautiful too. Typing funcionality somewhat breaks if I start to use the "del" key to delete some text.
The site says "no credit card required", but the TOS says:

Each user must register separately and must have an individual account. You must provide certain personally identifiable information during registration. Credit card or other payment information is also required.
Thanks for posting this before me.

>if you are a minority, or from an under represented gender it will work to your advantage

This is part of the bizarre myth of black privilege that's been part of the culture since Reagan's race baiting. It's really rarely to your advantage to be black (or even have a name that sounds black), unless the environment you're being hired for is lily-white and has recently had a discrimination-based legal scare.

edit: to be fair to the article - it is describing exactly the time when being black is advantageous in hiring. But to correct the article - at a lot of business, the only time that they hire black people is when their racial balance has been criticized. So overall, any indication that you are black is not going to work well at a company who would be criticized about their racial mix, unless that company's problem is lack of applicants - if it's in Colorado or something.
This excites us developers, but sadly the gamers couldnt care less. Sure it doesnt require a plugin, but thats not really a dealbreaker for most web gamers.
Flippa Nearing $100 Million in Sales
The author makes mention of using a UI to connect to their db. If i was in a position over there i can see myself writing a script to clear out the tables i wanted. This reduces errors, but not the risk.
Startup Cotton
It looks like there are many, many implementations of Karel the Robot.

I first saw Karel watching the Engineering Anywhere CS106a videos provided by Stanford. That course was in Java but used Karel at the beginning to get students used to writing programs, in this case instructions to the robot. If things like why ; and what is this `public void` had to be introduced before the groundwork for understanding what they were doing, it was done with a 'do this and we'll be able to explain why shortly.' Which to me, is a perfectly valid way of introducing things.

Because the Karel implementation there was Java, controlling the robot was just Java. You learned Java syntax as you played in the sandbox. You used that syntax as you moved out of the sandbox.

FYI the semi-colon at then end of the lines, if I remember correctly, was explained with this is how you tell the computer in this language we're done with a statement. No different then us using periods in English at the end of a sentence, its just the rules of this language.

As an aside, I really liked the Stanford CS106a course videos. I think the instructor did a very good job introducing Java and programing in general.
If I were the author, I would rewrite this and reflect on what was actually wrong here. At the end of the day, you resigned out of shame for a serious incident that you triggered.

But the fact that the organization allowed you to get to that point is the issue. Forget about the engineering issues and general organizational incompetence... the human side is the most incredibly, amazingly ridiculous.

I respect your restraint. If I was singled out with physical intimidation by some asshat boss while getting browbeaten by some other asshat via Skype, I probably would have taken a swing at the guy.

Competent leadership would start with a 5-why's exercise. Find out why it happened, why even the simplest controls were not implemented. I've worked in places running on a shoestring, but the people in charge were well aware of what that meant.
This has nothing to do with VCs. Building a business-any business-is incredibly hard and stressful. I'm not sure if you've been there, but bootstrapping a business, really building something new and unknown from nothing, is infinitely more stressful than running a funded startup.

Raising money at least gives you a little cushion, a little breathing room to experiment and fail and try again. Bootstrapping, the "you don't sell, you don't eat" bootstraping, is constant, unending stress and fear. One single mistake, one bad hire or mismanaged advertising buy can kill the business, and the stress and pressure to stay alive is constant- the sword is always hanging over your head, and at any moment you think it's going to drop.

And that's what bootstrapping a successful, highly profitable business was like. I can't imagine what sinking all your time and savings into a failure would feel like. The sheer carefree bliss of never again having to decide whether you should buy AdWords ads or eat meat this week is worth whatever equity stake you give up.
I was working two years ago in very successful, billion dollar startup. All developers had production access, but then, if you didn't know what you were doing, you would not be working there. Also, we didn't routinely access production and when we did, mostly for support issues on which we rotated, we did through 'rails console' environment that enforced business rules.
In theory you could delete all data, but only in theory, and even then, we could restore it with minimal downtime.

I think it is obvious that CEO/CTO are the one to be held responsible here.
From the github page (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher):

ack blahblahblah ~/code 6.59s user 1.94s system 99% cpu 8.547 total

ag blahblahblah ~/code 1.39s user 1.81s system 229% cpu 1.396 total