skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is because most people hear the term "hack" for the first time in a context like "Someone hacked my computer", meaning the term "hacking" is associated with say breaching security, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. So he qualifies it with "ethical" meaning don't use those techniques (whatever he claims) for unethical acts.
Really nice! Some things are broken on my iPhone, like the spacing when deleting and typing letters when they overflow the input area
And I never had a prof who didn't describe groups as encoding symmetry. Strange.
It's not the pricing I don't like, it's the relationship between pricing and storage space. I doubt when I go from a 0.5GB database to a 1GB database that they have to double their support team as well.

Heroku's postgres is just as (or more) expensive as mongohq/mongolab, but they don't limit storage at all (except at the dev tier plans).
Sounds like https://www.shopstarter.org
An interesting link buried in the article:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167677/hacker_exploits_ios_...

Does anyone know if Apple has addressed this yet?

In any case, it will be interesting to see if Mozilla can pull this off. When I download an app, isn't it just Javascript? What's to stop me from just diving into the app's source and putting in `function is_this_a_valid_app() { return "yep"; }` ?
i agree with you though, it's an abomination
Then perhaps "insane" is the word we're looking for, not "exceptional." Lack of sanity can be the norm, but that still doesn't make it desirable.
Very cool, but not really related to core internet functionality.

The truth is, Java is viewed as "not Unix friendly" by many people, whether deserved or not. I suspect the ISC folks fall squarely into this camp. My personal and thus purely anecdotal experience is near-universal hostility from network admins.

Despite this, there is a fair amount of network management software written in Java. OpenNMS and Cisco Prime Networks (an absolute beast) both spring to mind.
> It's a bit of a double standard, but they might have been expecting you to be dressed in a suit anyway.

I've encountered this. My current workplace has a notoriously laid back and straight-forward culture. Knowing this, I asked the interviewer who was inviting me to interview if I should dress up, or dress appropriately for the company culture. "I would recommend you dress up a little, and hope it's the last time you have to wear those clothes," was the response.

Showing that you are familiar with the culture into which you're walking is worth a lot in such situations.
Awesomely honest and painful story.

This happened somewhat in reverse to someone I worked with. He was restoring from a backup. He didn't notice the "drop tables" aspect, assuming, as one might, that a backup would simply supplement new stuff rather than wipe it clean and go back in time to a few weeks ago.

He is (still) well-liked, and we all felt sick for him for a few days. Our boss had enough of a soul to admit that we should have had more frequent backups.
Must have a been a tidy eater :)
Obviously I can't speak for these guys, but if I were designing it the fact that Go uses a garbage collector is a pretty strong minus. I like GC'd languages for a lot of tasks, but if I care about performance to the extent that they need to with BIND, I'm not going near it.
it doesn't have to just be about startups.

But we felt this was something that might help (and be fun for) startup people right now since we've seen a number of stories on here that signaled to us that a place to post anonymously might help people open up.

Thus we're building Recount with Startup Anonymous as the main topic right now. We thought it'd be apt for the audience here as well.

If there are other topics / themes you'd like to write about, feel free to send us a feedback through http://recount.it/posts/new and adding a hashtag #feedback to it. :)
It seems to be a bit faster than ack (which is just called 'ack', Debian the package is called 'ack-grep' to avoid conflicts).
Why Geeks Can't Speak, and How I'm Going to Change That
For anyone curious, here is a sample/demo page after creation.

https://www.trycelery.com/p/my-first-product

It looks solid.

I see that you mention that you have had quite a lot of press coverage for this.. by the "As Featured In".

I can't find any related articles though and I'd be interested in reading them :)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Atrycelery.com

Plus site:techcrunch.com trycelery.com doesn't work, and neither can I find any articles on BetaBeat, Forbes or the NYT?

If you are truly backed by YCombinator (which I have no reason to doubt), I'd have expected to be able to read some coverage?
As a college student, this fucking horrifies me. Is there anyway I can guarantee I don't end up at someplace as unprofessional as this? I want to learn my first job not teach/lead.
This pricing is absolutely insane for anyone with a decent sized dataset. It'd cost about a quarter million dollars a year to store a terrabyte of data?!
How much data can police swipe from suspects' smartphones without a warrant?
Boiling a Billion Frogs
According to this matrix[1], no. I use PHP, Python and Ruby on a day-to-day basis and really need an IDE that can support all of these. Eclipse is flaking out on me now as well.

Anyone know if IDEA really the best multi-language Eclipse alternative, or is there something better?

[1]: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m...
Bookmarklet Opens URLs In Any Of 53 Different Android Browsers
I think you meant to write "we shouldn't expect companies to decide to interview based on your CV? What should it be based on then?"
Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science, showing us -loudly- the way forward, and he's largely ignored. I don't know of a more damning indictment than that.
> As five experts on child psychology recently explained to me, toddlers’ irrational behaviors are a totally understandable reflection of their inner turmoil and frustrations.

"... totally understandable"? Not any more. The new DSM (DSM-V) will list childhood tantrums as a mental illness:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5

Quote: "A proposed new diagnostic category, temper dysregulation with dysphoria (TDD), within the Mood Disorders section of the manual. The new criteria are based on a decade of research on severe mood dysregulation, and may help clinicians better differentiate children with these symptoms from those with bipolar disorder or oppositional defiant disorder."

Footnote: "16. ^ Proposed Revision - APA DSM-5 - Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria"

The fotnote's link: http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision...

But if you click the above American Psychological Association link, you will be asked for a username and a password.

Why? Because you're not on the DSM-V committee, and ordinary mortals (and the press) can't monitor the activities of the committee -- by policy, DSM-V is being created for the most part in secret.

The reason? The DSM has been deemed too controversial to allow the process to be carried out in public. One reason for that are new diagnostic categories that (for exaple) turn temper tantrums into mental illnesses. There are many more:

Proposed new diagnoses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Proposed_new_diagnoses

Conditions proposed by outside sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5#Conditions_proposed_by_ou...
Indeed, I was trying to say it is all relative.
Apple has fixed "exploits" for iOS free stuff every single version they've released. If Mozilla becomes big the same thing will happen, and more of it. Apple stuff is compiled and at least sort of encrypted. Mozilla stuff is pretty much free game.
Very cool effects but pretty jittery and laggy when typing fast on chrome 24, too bad.
Thanks! Yes, we think that it would be a great place to get anonymous feedback as well.
>If you are a CEO you should be asking this question: "How many people in this company can unilaterally destroy our entire business model?"

This is a question that the person in charge of backups needs to think about, too. I mean, rephrase it as "Is there any one person who can write to both production and backup copies of critical data?" but it means the same thing as what you said.

(and if the CTO, or whoever is in charge of backups screws up this question? the 'perfect storm' means "all your data is gone" - dono about you, but my plan for that involves bankruptcy court, and a whole lot of personal shame. Someone coming in and stealing all the hardware? not nearly as big of a deal, as long as I've still got the data. My own 'backup' house is not in order, well, for lots of reasons, mostly having to do with performance, so I live with this low-level fear every day.)

Seriously, think, for a moment. There's at least one kid with root on production /and/ access to the backups, right? At most small companies, that is all your 'root-level' sysadmins.

That's bad. What if his (or her) account credentials get compromised? (or what if they go rogue? it happens. Not often, and usually when it does it's "But this is really best for the company" It's pretty rare that a SysAdmin actively and directly attempts to destroy a company.)

(SysAdmins going fully rogue is pretty rare, but I think it's still a good thought experiment. If there is no way for the user to destroy something when they are actively hostile, you /know/ they can't destroy it by accident. It's the only way to be sure.)

The point of backups, primarily, is to cover your ass when someone screws up, primarily. (RAID, on the other hand, is primarily to cover your ass when hardware fails) - RAID is not Backup and Backup is not RAID. You need to keep this in mind when designing your backup, and when designing your RAID.

(Yes, backup is also nice when the hardware failure gets so bad that RAID can't save you; but you know what? that's pretty goddamn rare, compared to 'someone fucked up.')

I mean, the worst case backup system would be a system that remotely writes all local data off site, without keeping snapshots or some way of reverting. That's not a backup at all; that's a RAID.

The best case backup is some sort of remote backup where you physically can't overwrite the goddamn thing for X days. Traditionally, this is done with off-site tape. I (or rather, your junior sysadmin monkey) writes the backup to tape, then tests the tape, then gives the tape to the iron mountain truck to stick in a safe. (if your company has money; if not, the safe is under the owner's bed.)

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. The hard part about doing it in house is that the person who managed the backup server couldn't have root on production and vis-a-vis, or you defeat the point, so this is one case where outsourcing is very likely to be better than anything you could do yourself.
I think it is entirely clear from the writing that the author is a humble being. I feel sorry for him, from the writing it seems he is a much better person and engineer than most of the others at that company, pointing fingers at him.

The guy may be absentminded, but that is a trait of some of the brighest people on earth.
Brightcove discontinues App Cloud product, pivots to native video players
Ah ha ha ah yeah.... I've done that.

Something similar anyway (was deleting rows from production and hadn't selected the where clause of my query before I ran it).

It was on my VERY FIRST DAY of a new job.

Fortunately they were able to restore a several hours old copy from a sync to dev but the wasn't a real plan in place for dealing with such a situation. There could have just as easily not been a recent backup.

This was in a company with 1,000 employees (dev team of 50) and millions in turnover. I've worked other places that are in such a precarious position too.

At least my boss at the time took responsibility for it - new dev (junior), first day, production db = bad idea.
We do, and it is very effective. The interview is really not a problem, it's just the resume selection that is frustrating. I can't imagine having to interview technical candidates without being able to administer a skills test.
Ask HN: Any live coding recommendations?
I just finished watching Bret Victor's talk on Inventing on Principle and wanted to know if you guys can share any links on live coding.

Here is the video for those who aren't familiar:
http://vimeo.com/36579366

I got this link from another Ask HN and it got me thinking as to how I can get this type of development workflow.

Thanks!
We do offer an SSL option if you email support@mongohq.com
I'm getting a 500 error. Anyone else? Anyone got a mirror or able to paste the content?
"But but but but...that item in the expense report is HUUUGE, and what revenue did we get out of having backups lately? Or ever? I say we drop it, nothing could possibly happen."

Some experiences are non-transferable. This identical conversation has taken place millions of times, but noooo: every penny-wise-pound-foolish CEO wants to experience the real thing, apparently.
"You just got iPlowed"

(Scroogle satire)
Tell HN: A few hours on Hacker News gave us better conversion than TechCrunch
We launched http://justmigrate.com to help folks move from Posterous to Tumblr in few clicks (freemium). Our target were people who can't do much with their Posterous backup file and are stuck manually uploading their data into another blogging platform.

We shared the link on Hacker news on Saturday night and picked up some activity on Twitter, by Monday morning we got featured on TechCrunch. Phew a hockey stick, J curve or what ever you want to call it, it was beautiful, soon more websites covered us, our migration signup was designed to think less & do click click click, concluding with a tweet. All this gave us lot of love on twitter, thank you guys. However we were surprised by the payment conversions.

Hacker news - Highest & fastest conversion even though we were in front page for only few hours. Our expectation was very low from tech juggernauts as we thought they would be more comfortable moving to WP using the Posterous backup. They paid without thinking much, and this was amazing. Thank you guys, you are saving our startup.

TechCrunch - Surprisingly faired much lower than hackernews both in terms of conversion & inbound traffic, but they helped us spread across the internet through reblogs & tweets. Conversions took some time from TC users compared to HN. Tweets exploded from 5 tweets in 1min to 30+ per min. The whole conversion effect lasted only 3 days.

Engadget Spain - We got lot of inbound traffic from here but the real conversion spike happened next day, possibly they were evaluating our service. It was fun interacting with them on twitter in Spanish.

Life hacker - They covered us next day, conversions were slow to start with but towards the end of the week they helped us get more stable inbound traffic, ie above average facebook users. Also they score better on SEO.

Hope to get more insights from you all. Lot of users still don't know about Posterous announcement.
Sure, but it's a tradeoff. No need for devops vs no control over outages.
Win8 worse than Vista uptake
The Real War in the Cloud (hint... it's not Forking)
Because the newbies will work for less. They will work longer hours (to learn the ropes.) They don't have families and health issues, so they are cheaper to employ as well. They are less aware of their rights and have less long term outlook, which would steer them away from these sorts of HR miasmas.

Thus they are just the filler needed by BigCo to compensate from the continuous braindrain. Once they have the skills and know the ropes, they'll either get promoted or leave for an employer of choice.
Well, IANAL. I think you already covered the most important point: store backups on hardware/services under the control of your employer/client.

I would document the backup process and communicate it to my manager/client with a mail like "hey, I set up backups, they are stored at <server>, docs are in the wiki".

Other potential issues: causing unauthorized costs ("who stored 10TB on S3?") or privacy violations, e.g. when working with healtcare or payment data.
An interview is a two way street. You too can ask questions, make sure you fit within the team, and that the job is to your liking. That is the time to ask and find out about anything that may be pertinent to your job.

Also, you have a choice of leaving if you don't like the job, and or don't find the practices in place to be any good, or you can fix them.
> Eclipse Python support is lacking

what is it lacking exactly? (using Eclipse with Python daily for the last few years)
This is pretty exciting. Being able to have an open marketplace without lockdown is... erm... well. It's a refreshing change from the iOS land and I hope to see more in this direction.

At any rate, I am starting up a project that I am hoping to sell on the FF Marketplace. It's going to be a trip (never done app development before!).
Compare these two quotes:

> Glass was "flabbergasted" by the Yahoo memo. "This seems to be trying to bring Yahoo in line with corporate America, not high-tech industries," she says.

> Only last week Google's chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said when the company is asked how many people telecommute, their answer is "as few as possible".

What company better represents "high-tech industries" than Google? Maybe Apple? Microsoft? Amazon? My understanding is that these companies do not encourage or permit much working from home either.
easily sell swag on Celery with https://teelaunch.com/ -- simply send us your XLS/CSV of orders and we'll take care of the rest.
Neckbeard Republic — bite-sized python screencasts
Ask about their development and staging process during the technical interview. Ask about how someone gets a piece of code into production (listen for mention of different environments).
1 CH_4 + 2 O_2 -> 1 CO_2 + 2H_2O

So the amount of CH4 and CO2 is the same in number of molecules, which also means they are the same volume of gas (at low pressures). Of course the mass of CO2 is about three fold but that doesn't mean much.
The name "Celery" made me think of the task queue[1]. In both cases though it's a very random name.

[1] http://www.celeryproject.org/
Because "eval `myscript`" is somehow non-trivial?

No, this is just bad. The whole paradigm of having build setup depend on local variables in an interactive shell (which is pervasive, virtualenv is hardly the only bad actor here) is just broken inherently. It's lazy programming. It creates all sorts of failure modes -- builds can magically stop working when people update their .bashrc files (e.g. set PATH explicitly, but OOPS the build system expects to source a script and then spawn you an interactive shell), etc...

Implicit configuration is bad, OK? Just don't do it.
The classroom's flash illumination looks so realistic! Couln't tell it's not a photo..
Counterpoint (with no particular value): encryption standards are publicly visible; does that make them less secure than proprietary and concealed encryption techniques?
Google’s Chrome Super Sync Sports Turns Your Smartphone Into A Game Controller
Perhaps as a "I'm not committing contributory copyright infringement" statement.

Altering a page for a user to remove ads, for example, is pretty much providing a [unlicensed] derivative work. Providing the tools to perform copyright infringement - with the encouragement of a demonstrated technique - could be considered to be contributing to a tortuous infringement, jurisdiction dependent [along with a pile of other dependencies] of course.
Fontastic - A Processing library to create font files
It must be pretty good reporting if that's the worst thing in the article.
This is a really common argument, but I think it's sort of a dishonest one. There are still plenty of great records being made.

Discovery tools like Spotify and Pandora are making it easier than ever for people to find new music. Terrestrial radio is still hugely important, but it's entirely possible now to build an online following and force Clear Channel's hand even without major label promotion and payola.

If you're not happy with the current landscape of Billboard's Hot 100, I think the blame really falls more with consumers than it does with the labels.

Right or wrong, people love "Call Me Maybe".
The magic of C is that no one is making you use realloc() if you don't want to. realloc() is also written in C. You can write your own, and people do, all the time.
That's definitely one side of it. There are also enormous amounts of bombs which were not too sure what to do with, which worries me.

Btw, I don't interpret Einstein's quote as support of the atom bomb (I'm not saying that you are. Just wanted to make that clear).
Show HN: Case Study: Attracting My First 1000 Subscribers - Thoughts?
Hi guys, I recently wrote up this article examining how I used inbound and email marketing to attract 1000 subscribers for a product I am building.

Thought the people here may be interested in the case study.

Case Study: Attracting My First 1000 Subscribers
http://www.swiftarcher.com/case-study-attractive-my-first-1000-subscribers/

I would love to hear your thoughts.
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers. [..] Some tactics include being deliberately obtuse, appealing to emotions, being controversial, intentionally omitting facts and information, being loud, self-centered and acting to obtain attention. Trivial information and events are sometimes misrepresented and exaggerated as important or significant, and often includes stories about the actions of individuals and small groups of people, the content of which is often insignificant and irrelevant relative to the macro-level day-to-day events that occur globally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism
Exactly what you said. Rigor is truly the right word to use here. Cancelling your db backups is basically asking for a disaster. I'm not sure i have ever been at job that didnt require a db backup for some reason at some time.
What language(s) would you want to work with?
Specifically for Python / Django development, PyCharm is very good: http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
Azure is awesome, especially for startups :-) It's really easy to develop for (you don't need to set up everything by yourself, just use the available libraries) and it support virtually every programming language. Furthermore it's really fast (http://nasunicdn.s3.amazonaws.com/images/nasuni_infographic_...) and pretty cheap.

It's a shame it's being ignored by most of the HN community.
Better Google Logo
Why Right Now is the Right Time for Hadoop (podcast)
> If there is no way for the user to destroy something when they are actively hostile, you /know/ they can't destroy it by accident.

Which also means they can't fix something in case of a catastrophic event. "Recover a file deleted from ext3? Fix a borked NTFS partition? Salvage a crashed MySQL table? Sorry boss, no can do - my admin powers have been neutered so that I don't break something 'by accident, wink wink nudge nudge'." This is, ultimately, an issue of trust, not of artificial technical limitations.

> one case where outsourcing is very likely to be better than anything you could do yourself.

Hm. Your idea that "cloud is actually pixie dust magically solving all problems" seems to fail your very own test. Is there a way to prevent the outsourced admins from, um, destroying something when they are actively hostile? Nope, you've only added a layer of indirection.

(also, "rouge" is "#993366", not "sabotage")
To think that people use an IDE for Python is sad news for me.