skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I reads mixed to me. Pincus can be both a ruthless businessman and a nice, caring person at the same time; it's not what you expect but it's possible. I certainly don't think this guy is lying about any of his interactions.

On the other hand, who knows to what extent the author's medical condition was related to job stress. There was nothing in this piece about Pincus stopping by while they were all frantically trying to meet his deadline and saying "you guys are working too hard. Go home and tomorrow we'll reevaluate when this project can realistically get done".
Aw, come on. I hate "typical corporate cheerleading" as much as anyone, and your comment is totally unfair. This is a kid writing about an experience of mentorship. It's natural for someone to be grateful for that and want to express it, and it's natural to be effusive when doing so.
US private sector hopes to send older couple to Mars
And the beauty of Visual Studio's interface is that it is completely customizable. If you want the Solution Explorer on the left side, all you have to do is click the top of the window, and drag it over to where you want it; it'll snap right into place.
I'm puzzled as to what imgix actually is... And this is after reading their about page.
This is the first time I've read a piece from a Zynga employee that hasn't been a tale of nightmares.

Unfortunately it goes beyond just being a positive story of the experience someone had at Zynga to a nearly comical worshipping of its CEO.

I think the author is either in love with Pincus or is hoping Pincus will invest in his next project.
Mother's Day.
See: http://www.parc.com/about/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

There is no question that Alan did invent the term "Object Oriented Programming" (and was rewarded with a Turing award for his work) and also invented Smalltalk which was well known to be inspired by Lisp, Simula, Logo, Sketchpad.

The GUI, overlapping windows on a bitmap screen, WYSIWIG editor, etc i.e. the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC that later influenced and was commercialized by Apple.
Ugh. When I select text, the selected text does not appear in the same location as the corresponding unselected text, the cursor doesn't line up with the selected text, and the cursor moves to incorrect locations in the text as I move it with shift-arrows.
How much of that was due to your local job market, and how much of it was due to psychological conditioning from the company culture leading everyone to believe that it was hard to get out?
Brazil has more law schools than the rest of the world summed ( http://guiadoestudante.abril.com.br/vestibular-enem/brasil-t... ) it is no wonder that litigation here is very high.
We're massive fans of Blueprint. Richard et al did an amazing job with it. Anything that lowers the friction for use of Chef and Puppet is a great thing. We're looking forward to working more closely with the Blueprint guys with what we're doing as they are definitely fellow travellers in the fight to make the best tools easier to use :)
Freedom on Buses, Computers and Everywhere
"I believe that the tools should be doing more to encourage it."

Can you provide an example of what that means? E.G. What should Jenkins be doing differently to encourage sysadmins to use it? What should Puppet be doing differently to encourage developers to use it?
Have you heard of http://blog.makerbar.com/?page_id=83? I know Hoboken isn't NYC but the path is pretty quick (post sandy) :)
Have you tried (and if so, do you like) F# ? http://fsharp.org/
Betray your friends, scatter your seed whilst fighting paternal responsibility and above all take credit for all around you. If anyone objects, either yell or start to cry. Preferably both. You'll soon be on your way!
I believe the company may be http://www.klicknation.com/games/
Can anyone confirm?
Hahah on the Celery part. Its a play on the idea of a "seller-y" though.
He worked at a company stupid enough to test on the prod databases without tools to safely clear them. The former is stupid, the later is REALLY stupid.

This is a multi-layer failure and almost none of the blame falls on him. Stupid compounded stupid, and this guy did nothing more than trip over the server cord several people who knew better stupidly ran past his cube exit.
I moved mostly from Linux and vim to windows + pycharm. Still deploy to Linux. I use cygwin for commandline work. Its gone a lot better than expected. Pip works, django works, local MySQL works, much to my amazement.
"How I was setup to fail."

Who asks junior engineer to develop directly on live systems with write access and no backup? Are you kidding me?

Edit: No one ever builds a business thinking about this stuff, until something like this happens. There are people who have learned about operations practices the hard way, and those who are about to. They hung the author out to dry for a collective failure and it shows that this shop is going to be taught another expensive lesson.
Show HN: Discreet Twitter buttons
Sometimes this is needed unfortunately.

One of the companies my father owned, he one day went to see something at the police station, and saw open book of wanted criminals, and found half of his employees there, and all of them were in the same criminal group, while inside the company they behaved like if they did not knew each other until they met at the workplace...

But probably I would refuse to take a drug test too. But sometimes companies are between a rock and a hard place.
Show HN: NPR.io - minimal NPR player built in CoffeeScript/Jekyll
11 Great Benefits of Developing an Application with PHP
"I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. laughs We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…"

http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus...

Not to mention the stock option scandal [1], and notoriously horrible working conditions [2]. I haven't met the guy, but it seems to me like the ship he runs is pretty fucked.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-emplo...
[2] http://www.itworld.com/software/228383/more-why-it-sucks-wor...
Nginx in front of Gunicorn + Flask fetching data from Postgres, which is populated by an hourly cronjob.
It's on a small ovh dedicated server, along with other things.
You damn shill. Stop peddling your wares on YC!
Yes, that is certainly the theory. Have you seen that actually happen in practice? Java shops almost exclusively continue to use java, and refuse to allow the dozens of other jvm languages. Every measure I can find shows haskell is more widely used than either clojure or erlang.
I think the "windows" part is the "not stable" one :)

(just a joke, but cannot resist)
Time Warner Cable says there's no consumer demand for gigabit internet
I really wish this was at the top. Everyone will fuck up at some point (even your best engineer). Whether you learn anything from fucking up really determines how bad your mistake was.
It's not that they gave him r/w at all that's so criminally stupid. It's that the required him to clear a table manually, using generic full access tools, over and over.

In reality, this should have been re-factored to the dev db.

If it couldn't be, the junior dev should have been given access to the raids table alone for writes.

Lastly the developer who didn't back up this table is the MOST to blame. Money was paid for the state in that table. That means people TRUST you to keep it safe.

I count tons of people to blame here. I don't really see the junior dev as one of them.
Hipster says goodbye
Obviously it was a positive write up. If it was negative he wouldn't be posting it. The post was useless.
Yep. If you examine the source of this game that's exactly how they handle the game itself.
New ways to advertise on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube
How 10 honest people change your work
To the extent this article might be true about some companies or organizations -- you don't want to work there.

I've never worked anywhere with priorities like this, not even in the Australian Public Service (which certainly has cretinous hiring practices, but not like this). To begin with, most HR departments only lightly filter resumes submitted against a position -- if you get tossed out of the mix by the person in recruiting it's probably for a dumb reason (e.g. your CV lacks a crucial buzzword) but again, not these reasons.
First WiGig dock eliminates cord clutter on your desk
I just bought my son a digital edition of Diablo 3 the other day. It was far from smooth sailing.
I have a hard time understanding why on earth anyone would have semicolons and parentheses in a programming language for kids!

A comma, instead of a semicolon, would be much more natural for kids imo and the parentheses are just there to confuse it seems.

Just keep it as simple as possible and have the syntax as close to natural language "rules" as possible then kids might start to understand things better.
Computer repair westchester ny
Games and learning programs are among the leading titles in retail software sales and they are mainly written in Visual Basic, as they need to be compatible with Microsoft OS. The games market has exploded as PC speeds have increased, and as output graphics have improved. However, on the
technical side, there is generally not much call for a repair associate with game software. Most games work with well-developed pointing devices, such as trackballs and joysticks, as the primary input devices. Although the housing designs of these products can be quite amazing, they tend to be simple and well-proven devices, requiring relatively little maintenance. Likewise, the software tends to be pretty straightforward from a user’s point of view. It simply gets installed and runs. Computer-aided instruction (CAI) and computer-based instruction (CBI) have become accepted means of delivering instructional materials. In CAI operations, the computer assists a human instructor in delivering information and tracking student responses.
In CBI operations, the computer becomes the primary delivery vehicle for instructional materials. As these teaching systems proliferate, more complex input, output and processing devices are added to the system. A basic teaching system requires a minimum of a sound card, a fast hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, and a high-resolution video card. Beyond this, CAI and CBI systems may employ such wide-ranging peripherals as large LCD display panels, VGA-compatible overhead projectors, intelligent white boards, wireless mice, and touch-sensitive screens as input devices, full-motion video capture cards, and a host of other multimedia related equipment.
Thanks for sharing this link. As it related to HN, I think you have to applaud all of the people who go out on a limb and share their work-in-progress side project, new startup, or anything else that they've created---knowing that half of the community will "point out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better."

I still am a relative beginner to the space, and I do find it frustrating when people dismissively point out such "obvious" problems with our project, or things we should be doing, but I think it comes with the territory.
real programmers use butterflies
EDIT: the title of this post has now been changed, to the extent that it loses its entire relevance to HN. It was previously something along the lines of "After a year reading HN, this quote reminds me of the people here"

---

I'm deeply skeptical of any attempts to romanticise "doing a startup".

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"

Running a startup is hard work. No-one disputes that. But if you are in the position to run your own startup you are incredibly lucky. There are a lot of people out there that might be far better entrepreneurs than you, but because they weren't born into a situation that gave them a good education and the ability to take a risk, they never will.

Running a startup is stressful, but don't try to pretend that there aren't enormous upsides. You can do whatever you want, you can work with whomever you want. The industry celebrates failure- think about that for a second. You can try your best, fail miserably, and people will still say that you did a good job. How many other people in the world can do that? The guy earning minimum wage in his factory job, spending all his salary just to keep out of poverty- if he fails, he is fired, and he and his family are screwed. He is the person whose face is much more likely to be covered in actual dust and sweat and blood.

Being in this industry is a position of extreme privilege. Harping on about it as if it's a heavy burden to bear is utter nonsense and only helps the perception of "startup folk" as deeply out of tune with how the rest of the world works.
> That said, the performance on this is too poor to use as is.

Really? I found it to be super responsive (Firefox on Linux).

But yeah, i agree, for things like games this would be really cool.
"I found myself on the phone to Rackspace, leaning on a desk for support, listening to their engineer patiently explain that backups for this MySQL instance had been cancelled over 2 months ago."

Here's something I don't get: didn't Rackspace have their own daily backups of the production server, e.g. in case their primary facility was annihilated by a meteor (or some more mundane reason, like hard drive corruption)?

Regardless, here's a thought experiment: suppose that Rackspace did keep daily backups of every MySQL instance in their care, even if you're not paying for the backup service. Now suppose they get a frantic call from a client who's not paying for backups, asking if they have any. How much of a ridiculous markup would Rackspace need to charge to give the client access this unpaid-for backup, in order to make the back-up-every-database policy profitable? I'm guessing this depends on 1) the frequency of frantic phone calls, 2) the average size of a database that they aren't being paid to back up, and 3) the importance and irreplacebility of the data that they're handling (and 4) the irresponsibility of their major clients).
I believe developers need the courage to do what we feel is necessary and the paranoia to quadruple check our work and assumptions.
I have no idea what Hipster was.
> Honest question: can you point to some examples where such professional discipline lead to a meaningful impact on the plaintiff's firm (it would seem that attorneys are not so scarce that censuring one or two at a large firm would do much damage), or another kind of meaningful reform?

Large firms are repeat players with the court system. A sanction that's even nothing more than a note in a file is a scary thought when that firm will have to go in front of that same court in other cases day after day. For a large firm, it's not worth it to toe that line. That said, it still happens, e.g. http://abovethelaw.com/2012/08/benchslap-of-the-day-judge-co....

The situation is somewhat different for other lawyers. A single sanaction for a frivolous suit is unlikely to get you disbarred. That said, the threat of disbarment isn't illusory: http://www.calbar.ca.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=DPQeNI9Fz.... The California Bar disbarred or suspended 394 lawyers in 2011.

Note that sanctions can include financial penalties for both the lawyer and the client. To pick an example out of a hat: http://valawyersweekly.com/2012/12/21/baseless-suit-nets-san.... If a patent troll is bringing clearly frivolous suits, nothing stops a court from recognizing a pattern and imposing significant monetary sanctions. The problem is, the bar for "frivolous suit" is pretty high in order to avoid deterrming meritorious litigation.
Yes, I'm sure his kids love him.
Inkling HTML5 collaborative authoring environment named Habitat now available
100% false. Always free unless you pay for additional storage.
> But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5

Go in any store that sells video games. Look at the backs of all the boxes. Find similarities.
GitLab.com has free private repo's with 10 users
What we want to see in "DevOps" tools is collaboration and visibility baked in. A tester in an Enterprise is unlikely to start writing Puppet manifests. If they could contribute notes and requirements to one though, perhaps even in a format that could be converted into a manifests then that would be a very powerful thing.
notoriously horrible working conditions? really? I work here, interact with plenty of the teams and it is very far from horrible. Yes things get a little hectic when deadlines are due but thats the nature of things. Zynga cant teach you a work life balance, you do, and that seems to be respected by managers.
Twist, the author IS Pincus
Your words "price discrimination" jumped out at me. Not so much to respond to your comment, but to post my own reaction, I'll briefly observe:

From a U.S. perspective (mine): Increasingly (well, it's a long-standing practice, now), film and television production companies move production abroad to take advantage of lower production costs (labor, et al.).

At the same time, they insist that I not source my viewing material from abroad -- that I not take advantage of lower foreign costs for the distributed media.

Well, this is a loud and clear fail, from my perspective. What gives them the right to access such advantages while denying the same to me? And... by moving their production abroad, they reduce the work and -- supply and demand -- wage levels available in this country.

If they want to "import" cheaper labor, etc. into their production costs, I should be able to "import" the cheaper foreign distribution product.

Otherwise... I'm in the position of an increasing number in the U.S. who have simply decided, "fuck them".

It's amazing how "free traders" suddenly find all sorts of arguments to the contrary, when free trade threatens to cut into their bottom line. Mostly, they're just another set of hypocrites. Dangerous ones, from my U.S. perspective, because of the way they are increasingly screwing us over, economically.

I don't begrudge the rest of the world advancement. I begrudge the self-serving in my own society who sell out a portion of their own population for their own personal benefit. I -- and I think we all, here in the U.S. -- could do with a few less knicknacks in return for a more healthy level of social equity including particularly e.g. access to healthcare, good schools, and livable wages at reasonable quantities of work hours.

And maybe other societies could do with a bit less brain drain and a bit more balanced social development. Less of us propping up foreign dictators past their and their regimes' natural lifespans.

I guess I've gone and gotten all non-technical on HN, here. But... our technical decisions, such as production sourcing, are directly involved in this.

When companies can move their production around, but people stay stuck in place (and as often as not, under repressive regimes), you do not have "free trade".

The labor portion of the equation is not free.

P.S. Sorry, that may have ended up a bit (or more) far afield from the original discussion.

(Continuing with the perspective) Even at the "inflated" U.S. prices I see, I tend to purchase materials I find good and where I am not overly offended at the funding model (as one example, I've been a long-time supporter of O'Reilly press and have not gone out pirating books). But I'm damned well not going to be preached at by these hypocrites, any longer, nor by their hired guns who now think (I hope, still not entirely correctly) that they run this country.

I think the U.S. could do with an overall rousing, depression-lifting round of "fuck them".
I am stumped.

That is the first terrible read I had on svtble, the first so excessively positive view of Mark Pincus that it reads like a PR stunt, and the first time I wonder what the hell happened.

I mean, seriously? WHY? What is the point? Why write a bordering absurd praise of a guy that is so infamous for his own admitted horrible things in the book?

If it was more realistic, I mean, praising the good and the calling out the bad is one thing, but I don't see this sort of treatment even with Steve Jobs (even very positive texts on Steve Jobs mention how he had bad temper and people feared to get fired by just being near him, or how he sometimes got stubborn with ideas that were not necessarily good ones).
mistercow's response explains it better. If it redirected to localhost, and there was a certain filesharing service enabled, then it's possible a browser was listening but obviously didn't have the specific file requested.
Let me know if you have any feedback on the pricing. I liked the discussions around http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5212207
IA Ventures - Startup Docs
Can you explain what you mean by "lose data". I don't know much about mongo, but I thought you could configure the client to wait for the disk write before returning.
I physically cringed at that. Even the mail clerk should have noticed there was a 'big deal' about clean rooms and had some idea what the company he worked for did...
This is the right thing to encourage but I just would like to add always have a backup.

"Don't be afraid to break things as long as you have a backup".

It might be a simple version of the previous code, database copy or even the entire application. Do not forget to backup. If everything fails, we can quickly restore the previous working version.
awesome game...wat did the developer use for realtime updates??
Good to see this sort of thing picking up in Seattle. The Hub is a great space (of which we're members). To anyone going to these, ping me (contact info in profile), and your first beer is on TryPaper (we have nothing to do with this event but love meeting fellow hackers!)
Unicode storage should work now, I just deployed the fix. Tested in Chrome & Firefox on Mac, will do more testing on other browsers later
Independent contractors can get pretty beat up in situations like this- there are really strict rules about the price increases a contractor can ask for from one year to the next- and often it is less than 5% and those contractors aren't able to complain because the alternative to to just not renew the contract- which is the right of the organization- being a contractor in many ways leaves you with less security (especially to do stuff like speak up when a regular employee is doing bad work) and less pay.
It has been discussed numerous times that the people who comment often differ substantially from the people who vote (uparrow, kudos, whatever). I would take it even further that there's a much larger -- 10x+ -- group that doesn't even vote if they like the content.
Ask HN: Is it worth open-sourcing my early stage startup?
It's something I was interested in trying to do at my last job before I quit, but the battle was hand auditing an entire, mature codebase. The site I want to open source (http://www.cameralends.com) is less than 2 months old and could easily be audited. I'm interested in open source because:

- holds me to a higher standard of quality

- reduces the barrier for collaboration (anyone can submit a pull request)

- builds trust with the users

I think I understand the application level risks I'd be taking doing this, but I'm not sure about the business/legal implications. Would doing this make my startup stronger or weaker?
I don't think so. Theory of black hole formation predicts they will spin (although emitting energy slows the spin). They have different predictions for the kind of spin or lack thereof which would produce different observations -- and the data gathered supports one spinning model over another, either of which agrees with theory. Non spinning black holes would be perplexing.