skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoever a) gave production db access to a "junior" engineer and b) disabled backups of said database is at fault. I hope the author takes this more as a learning experience of how to (not) run a tech department than any personal fault.

Someone who has to use a GUI to manage a db at a company of that scale shouldn't have access to prod
Virtualenv bin/activate isn't doing anything "wrong". It's just not doing it how the author believes is best. Can the whole "You're doing X wrong" meme die already please?

I like the idea though! From what I see so far the author makes a good argument for using a subshell rather than setting and resetting environment variables. At the same time though, I haven't enough experience with his suggestion yet to see the downsides... and there most definitely will be. Why? Because that's programming, man. There's no panacea, no perfect way to do things, no true "best" way to do anything.

So is this the "right" way? Probably not. Better is probably more like it and using that word instead makes you seem, you know, like not cocky asshole (not that I think that about the author at all, just generally speaking).
... orientated around “visions rather than goals” and “funded people, not projects”

being exclusively goal oriented constrains the originality of the high level ideas that are produced.

on the other hand, being constrained by specific goals (eg: put a person on the moon) can produce a lot of creativity as people's efforts are focused on a narrow domain of problems to solve.
> It's noble of the author to quit

It's not just noble. Considering how everyone treated him, and the company's attitude in general, he had no future there, and neither should anyone else.
Thanks for the feedback. These are all things on our to-do list.
Took me awhile to realize I was playing with myself. And no that's not an innuendo.
Assuming that imgix doesn't have any Vanilla Ice and 90's era Mustang photos, then this offers infinity percent more Vanilla Ice and 90's era Mustang photos.
Are People with “Lifestyle Businesses” Real Entrepreneurs?
Done imgix.com have Vanilla Ice pics? If not, the answer is clear. :D
My understanding is that the research that has been done on music and films suggests that small (relatively obscure) titles are helped by piracy (and significantly) and blockbusters are harmed by it. I assume the same is true of computer games too.
WIRED continues to be rubbish. Every time they report on anything I have any domain knowledge about, I've found that it's full of lies, exaggerations and half-truths. It's best just to assume the stuff they publish that I have no domain knowledge about, such as this story, is the same. It's like they're a tech tabloid.
It's faster than ack (according to their GitHub page), and it honors the .gitignore/.hgignore by default, which is a nice feature!
Make your look better look with Generic Latisse
Bimatoprost stimulates the rate of aqueous humor flow, thus enhancing the pressure sensitive outflow pathway. In addition, it lowers the extraocular pressure of the eye. These measures are beneficial for the treatment of glaucoma. Experts do not know the exact way Bimatoprost works for hyptrichosis, but they believe it affects the active growth stage, known as the anagen stage, in two ways. First, it elongates the length of the anagen eyelash growth stage. Second, Bimatoprost increases the number of hairs that are produced during this active growth stage.
Ah, but he has earned this position of authority by actually delivering. He did not get that position of authority randomly, nor by an act of nepotism nor by making promises during an election.

First, by delivering working code that ended by running the majority of phones and smart devices out there. Also, by revolutionizing source code control. No, he didn't invent (almost) any of the concepts behind git, and by now the majority of the code was not written by Linus. However, he was able to strike a balance between features, usability, speed and working model that DID revolutionize version control. Monotone pioneered a lot, but was too slow and cumbersome; so was Bazaar without pioneering much. BitKeeper had a lot of things going for it, but freedom and price working against it. is more or less on par with git, but it's git that brought the revolution.

Second, by being able to successfully manage more than one huge project with hundreds of contributors, all of whom he can fire at, but which he didn't actually hire (nor can he, if he needs more work).
I admire Alan Kay as much as the next guy and a lot of this stuff in this article looks great, but he doesn't need his lily gilded:

* Laser Printers

Yes -- invented at Xerox PARC.

* Object Orientated Programming / Smalltalk

No. OOP was invented in Norway (Simula) / Yes

* Personal Computers

Um... really? No.

* Ethernet / Distributed Computing

Yes Xerox PARC. / Not really

* GUI / Mouse / WYSIWYG

No (Englebart et al) / No (Englebart et al) / Yes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...
Definitely wouldn't be worth it just for using a Visual Studio plug in for Python development. And I am of the camp that thinks visual studio is the best IDE out there.
Yep, that's another one to watch out for. But I'm used to that, it's when an update or delete that can't be reversed I get surprised.
This is awesome! I've been waiting for a solution like this
Sorry apparently I had Twitter on the mind. I meant Developer accounts. Which I have.
Vanilla Ice? Not having to provide your own photos? No "pricing"?
That's an entirely unrelated tool. This is for placeholder images- visual lorem ipsum. Similar tools are http://placekitten.com/ http://lorempixel.com/ and http://placehold.it/
Did you even go to the site? I don't see how this is really even that similar. I don't know if I just don't understand what imgix.com does, but the site featured here is an image placeholding service that puts pictures of Vanilla Ice
Seo expert seeking lamp cofounder or startup to join
Hi i am Rob.

I am looking for an interesting startup to join for equity share or a lamp/django cofounder.

About me:
I run dealsextra.com.au and dealsextra.co.uk, one of the largestest daily deal aggregators / discount directories in australia.

I am an expert seo marketer. I built up my sites to over $200,000 gross sales per month solely on seo traffic. I hold the top rank for "daily deals" on google.co.uk.

I am experienced in fund raising and full stack product development, having raised angel and seed
rounds before, and built/designed my site on lamp stack.

Education / work experience wise,
I ranked top 60 in australia in my university entrance exam (99.90/100).

I studied a double bachelors of finance/law at unsw before dropping out in 4th year.

I've worked at macquarie bank, a buldge bracket m/a corporate finance house, as well as at groupon australia as their first hire in marketing.

I am 23 years old, and of chinese ethnicity.

I am currently in sf looking for startup to join. About to exit my first startup. In particular i am looking for startups that are
based off of a database driven or directory style website and drive traffic primarily via seo.

Or i am looking for a tech founder to
help me build this concept out:

1. Bit.ly/openboardapp
2. Open-knowledge-society.org/openboard/presentation.php

The first link is a mobile app in the education space that allows students to post questions and add notes to a live wiki in class.

If interest email me at rob@enjoymentfresh.com,
With a link to your linkedin profile and some
information about your experiences / what your startup is about.

Cheers
I'll agree that it's difficult to think about ideas with a rock :)

As for the rest, people believing something certainly does provide evidence for that thing the strength of which scales with the number of people believing, if not nearly linearly. It depends on which people too ;) Fortunately we have plenty of other sources of evidence to base our opinions on (and remember that sources of evidence aren't necessarily independent; one can screen off another). Whether or not those other sources are leveraged in group decision making is one of the things that would appear to be up for debate.
Hopefully prioritized in reverse order
I'd disagree with the last part. The majority of Android apps do no certificate checks, so it's pretty much as easy as Googling "<paid android app> apk" and clicking the first result. You can even do it on your phone if that's easier.

I think you are correct about opening up JS files though. Are there any good security measures against that?
NASA live streaming announcement on black hole observations [video]
I hope that OpenBSD team will fork it (BIND 9).
What's a dead key?
> I also don't completely understand about their being only one possible solution. It makes sense if you know that the signal is a single sine wave, but since in general the signal is a summation of an unknown number of sine waves, it's not clear. I guess this is something he didn't have time to get into more depth for the quick overview :)

I'll give this a stab. Assume you're connecting the dots (samples) with a pencil. You can see that the high frequency filter would not let the pencil go up or down several times between 2 adjacent dots because any movement at that rate would be too high a frequency right? Now extend that thinking: Any movement not along a specific path (the one possible solution) would produce frequencies above the limit of the filter. Even a teeny tiny little bend in that line would result in a tiny few decibels of sound at a frequency above the filter and hence are not allowed. Make sense? Experts: is that accurate?
I had a ghost "a" at the end of my text that I couldn't get rid of in Safari. Also it just ran slowly. Ran flawlessly in Chrome, though.
There's really no way to adequately summarize such a varied and content-rich article. You should really read it in full for yourself. But here are the section headings:

* On Software Engineering

* On Object Orientated Programming

* Tear it down and build something better

* On Messaging

* On LISP

* The Unknown side of Alan Kay
As an interaction designer, I implore you: do NOT screw around with forms. Your conversion rates will fall through the floor. The CSS specification itself says that browsers can ignore styling for forms. This is by design. Overriding it with a bunch of unsupported animated nonsense that requires Javascript and invisible divs and such is a recipe for disaster from a usability and accessibility stand point.
Yah this story made me cringe. What exactly do you mean by:

"Using a relational database as a flat data store? Super bad."

Are you referring to the users table? I am not too accustomed to using flat files, so I am curious.
Know a lot of others have said it, but no production backups? Blame a junior dev for a mistake that almost 100% of the people I've worked with have made at some point or another (including me)? I feel horrible for the author, it's sickening the way he was treated. Now they'll just move on, hire another junior, never mention this, and guess what? The next guy will do the same thing and there probably still aren't any backups. Didn't learn anything, well, other than how easy it is to blame one person for everyone's failure.
ForgeJS launches first full stack JavaScript development school in Seattle
It's not written by the same guy. Fred Hébert for the Erlang one, Miran Lipovaca for the Haskell one.
CYA attitude can show itself outside of the HR department. One of the most insidious ways CYA hurts a company is when departments or people are resistant to trying new ideas because they might fail--even if the potential upside would be a significant improvement.

This is part of the Innovator's Dilemma--people tend to keep doing what is working "well enough" because they can't be blamed for that, and opportunity cost tends to be invisible unless it's looked for. Meanwhile, a competitor with less to lose is more likely to take the risky bet. If they succeed, they eventully beat the former incumbent.

Edit to add: in the case of hiring, CYA can mean hiring someone who's no different from anyone else currently employed in the company--and therefore perhaps missing an opportunity to create positive change.
Easy to replicate. Start typing when the field does it's premable. Things go to hell quickly from there.
> 1) Authorize now but only charge when actually shipping is standard Visa policy. Doing it any other way is not allowed. Your system seems like a workaround for that, which raises my alarm bells.

According to their demo product page[0], your card is only charged when the product ships. Is that your concern?

[0]: https://www.trycelery.com/p/my-first-product
This was my question. Usually the "junior" folks are shown how to do things by the senior engineers. The fact they threw this guy under the bus while letting the rest of the senior guys skate is appalling.

Part of your job as a senior developer is to ensure this very scenario doesn't happen, let alone to someone on your watch.
Ice Ice Baby.
What Killed Borders, Blockbuster and Polaroid and How to Survive
I did a little digging and though the article does not name the other providers, based on pricing, I believe Hosted AWS Provider #1 is MongoHQ [1] and Hosted AWS Provider #2 is MongoLab [2]. (MongoHQ no longer has Replica Set: Small on their Pricing page but I found it in the Google cache. [3]).

[1] https://www.mongohq.com/pricing

[2] https://mongolab.com/products/pricing/

[3] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cj8DBbH...
minification is not obfuscation , obfuscation makes the code larger, not smaller. You can have it both ways. And you can easily un-minify javascript.
I have successfully deployed Django on Windows[1] systems for critical intranet apps and have at least two more Django on Windows projects in the pipes.

No it is not an ideal platform but sometimes factors outside your control make it the best/only option if you want to use Django/Python. I work in a largeish very Microsoft dependent hospital and getting infrastructure support (hardware, database backups etc) from the IT department requires a Microsoft stack.

Being able to deploy a Django project on either Linux or Windows systems from a single code base is a pretty big advantage for me.

[1] Windows Server 2008R2 / MSSQL
Reading those stories makes me realize how well thought-out the process at my work is:

We have dev databases (one of which was recently empty, nobody knows why; but that's another matter), then a staging environment, and finally production. And the database in the staging environment runs on a weaker machine than the prod database. So before any schema change goes into production, we do a time measurement in the staging environment to have a rough upper bound for how long it will take, how much disc space it uses etc.

And we have a monthly sync from prod to staging, so the staging db isn't much smaller than prod db.

And the small team of developers occasionally decides to do a restore of the prod db in the development environment.

The downside is that we can't easily keep sensitive production data to find its way into the development environment.
While working for a large computer company in the late 90s, I joined a team that ran the company store on the web. The store used the company's own e-commerce system, which it was also selling.

The very first day, at home in the evening, I went to the production site to see if I could log in as root using the default password. Not a problem.

Anyone with any experience with the product could easily have deleted the entire database. I immediately changed the password and emailed the whole team.

No one ever responded.
I got the "a" also from trying to do cmd+a to select all.
Having "Largeness of Mind" While Doing Linux Driver/Kernel Development
HN guide: no.

Seriously, I do think Twitter is a great company, but one tenth of Amazon? The same as Nokia? Not to mention comparisons to non-tech companies...

I really don't get these valuations.
Who's up for massively multiplayer Double Dragon?
D+F+LP.
As a programmer I consider myself very lucky that one of the first advices I got when I was a junior was from one of my senior colleagues (and a very smart guy): "one of the most valuable qualities of a good programmer is courage".

Seven and a half years later I make sure that I pass that knowledge on to my junior colleagues. I'm proud to say that just in the past 2 weeks I've said this twice to one of my younger team-mates, a recent hire, "don't be afraid to break things!"
Wow, it was easier than I thought to make you do things.

Is your CPU a 'learning computer'? I gotta test this out:

Tim, buy me a beer. :P
I do not even bother with resumes anymore. I have found much more effective ways to get noticed. If, on your side of the coin, you also find resumes ineffective, I'm curious why you cling to the practice?
Thorax: Backbone + Handlebars framework to build large scale web applications
You don't fill out paper forms with fancy markers, you use black or blue pens. There's a reason for that.
600+ startup ideas from the crowd
I really think that IFTTT could be a very useful tool, but I will not use it for anything but a toy until I understand their business model.

To do anything useful with IFTTT, you have to have a great deal of trust in them. This is a tool that legitimately needs access to a wide range of login & api credential to do meaningful work.

It is not just that I would want to be able to pay them for their services so that I feel like I have a business relationship with them. No it is also the fact that they have been total quiet. Is there has been no activity on their blog (or parts of the site) since last July.

There there is the eternal labeling of the site as being in Beta. I know, that Beta doesn't mean what it use to, but I still take it as an indication not to make anything that is important depended on it.
Miran Lipovača wrote the haskell book. Frederic Trottier-Hebert wrote the erlang book.
Obj-C anyone? Seems to meet all their requirements - OO, exception-handling, memory management via either ref counting or GC, and it's a C-superset so C-based optimizations would be easy. Maybe the run-time is to large and/or complicated? Although how it could be more complicated than a C++ runtime I don't know. Would Apple being the primary driving force behind it's development be a problem?
I think this overlooks all the pluses of this new "medium". How did you get your copy of wolfenstein in 1992? Travel to the radioshack, get a stack of disks, feed them one by one into your trs80? Within seconds this morning I was playing this game - with a 1000 other people simultaneously. Amazing in my book.
This is handing a heart for transplant to the Post Office and hoping for the best.
"Object Orientated"? Really?

How does someone read so much material on Alan Kay and still manage to have "object orientated" stuck in their head? It's like putting together an overview of Edward Said's "Orientatilism".
Neither of those things would have fixed this problem.

1. "Oops, I wrote TRUNCATE TABLE User instead of TRUNCATE TABLE Raids"

2. Transaction complete. ... ... "oops!"
Good article, but I would have liked to see more writing snippets.
Does anyone know of large projects where C++ handles memory allocation failures gracefully? For services that need to stay up and never crash under memory pressure, I would think C is the way to go. It's too hard to reason about control flow with exceptions.
Mm resurrect Poptel then :-)

For you younguns Poptel was a cooperative and an early ISP in the UK.
Some briefing materials are already up,

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/news/telecon2013022...

Spoiler: it's the first measurement of a black hole spin.
I'd like to know the following: can't you already do this with Stripe? They seem to use stripe as their backend, so how is this different than me doing this with stripe on my own (i.e. collect charge tokens, charge later)? Or do stripe's tokens expire after a short period of time, I haven't looked into that yet.

I genuinely want to know because I'm potentially interested.
Woah, easy folks. Completely confused about what the app was. Thought it was similar to Imgix.

Ease up a bit ;)
2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud
text editors are for wussies. sed to write. cat to read.
I've heard that one of the problem areas is that you can't make a perfect, colorless filter - one where 20KHz is allowed through but 20.001 is not. A filter has to slope down at least somewhat gradually. The more steep you make the filter, the more it colors (distorts) the signal around the cutoff frequency. One of the purported benefits to a higher sampling rate is that you can make the high frequency filter with a more gradual slope which introduces less distortion.

I realize any differences in this area would be very slight if they exist at all. Anyone know more about that?

Edit: Apparently no one can dell a difference in listening tests with well made equipment. Theoretically if a device was built using an extremely cheap filter you'd be better off with the higher sampling rate, but I can't find any real examples.
The junior dev was 22 at the time and fresh out of school.

I'm assuming the senior devs were 23 and had a year on the job. The principal devs were a ripe 24, otherwise known as old men. :-)
DHH interview: How and why was Rails created
I kinda agree with you.

IFTTT is a great service, but I try not to expose any "threatening" information on it. That's why I see no harm on IFTTT being able to see my feeds and the things I read.

But, yeah, exposing information always require some caution (but a little bit of risk too).
Looks cool, but $9 for a weekly ~10 minute screencast seems pretty steep. But I'm just a poor student, so I'm probably not your target market.
I cannot agree more. Too many students find the subjects they are studying "pointless." Who will take the time to learn something they think (quite possibly rightfully so) is pointless.
With the exception of SLS type machines (lasers which melt powder) or Z-corp machine (powder with applied binder) many under cuts will require additional support structures to help bear the weight of the part during construction which require manual removal after the fact. Cleverly orienting the structure can help in some cases, but not all. For example, you could create a hollow sphere because you always have a counterweight, but an upright arch would require some scaffold.

The scaffolds are usually easily removed (made of a different material then the main structure), but still require manual removal.
I think that with modern snapshots, it would be interesting to create a 'cloud backup' service where you have a 'do not allow overwrite before date X' parameter, and it wouldn't be that hard to implement, but I don't know of anyone that does it.

Does Amazon Glacier offer this?
Government agencies are THE WORST for this sort of thing. It is usually because it's more important to prove a lack of corruption or bias, than to prove a particular hire was "the best" person for the job.

Government budgets are so awful for a similar reason. A rigid, bureaucratic process exists so that they can always document a lack of corruption. Of course the result is sometimes silly, like when an agency is short-staffed but buys Aeron chairs for everyone--because there was money left in the equipment budget, but they were not permitted to shift it to the contractor or staff budget.
So the iPod killed the Zune? And the old Windows Phone OS?

Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
Show HN: Super Rooftop Chopper Fighter Game
production: noun. 1 the action of making or manufacturing from components or raw materials, or the process of being so manufactured.

I'd say if you make a factory that takes raw materials and creates a series of one-off items, that you are engaging in production.

It seems like what you're really saying is, "this is not how production has been done in the past". With 3-D printing and related automation technologies, this will start to change very quickly. (It's already started, in fact).