skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Off-topic of the off-topic but can you explain to me what's cool about it? I'm not a web developer so all I see is that the image doesn't scroll off but appears to shrink. Genuinely (not a troll), can't think why that's useful though ...
If they weren't buying Adwords ads, then they weren't paying Google anything, and thus, it's absurd of you to demand that someone providing you with a free service would also guarantee customer service.
Which ones? I'd say DNS is probably the most important parts. I also don't believe that core routing equipment is running in the JVM.

Apparently you are talking about the "Web", i was talking about the internet or networks in general.. I'm aware that tomcat may have a very large installation base. There is no use for your tomcat if the DNS is down, though :P
Agreed, I believe that the SSD instances made a big difference.
[citation needed] You're mostly talking nonsense. PyPy is usually 20-100x faster on the numeric workloads I measured than CPython, while the difference is significantly smaller on non-numeric workloads. The difference between C++ and CPython is also smaller.
> The starting salary is higher for someone with a bachelors degree in Computer Science then a Masters degree in Computer Science in the US (I'm trying to find the book). In fact it holds true for several degrees. The reasoning is that most employers prefer for someone to have real world experience over studying to receive a Master's degree.

I think this is incorrect (at least in Computer Science). Are you trying to tell me that given two people with no industry experience, the person who has taken graduate level courses which involve building significant pieces of projects, will get paid lesser than the person with just a B.S.? I have rough samples as to what people in my school got paid for B.S. vs. M.S. and I think the M.S. at least gave people a 10% pay rise.
Wow, that's quite a story.
If your company is ever 1 button press away from destruction. Know that this will eventually happen.

I'm quite surprised stuff like this hadn't happened earlier. When I am doing development with a database I will quite often trash the data when writing code.
Or you should use a fast Python interpreter instead of the slow one. The 20/80 (or 10/90 or so) is mostly nonsense in my experience too.
Because the performance would be so totally awesome that it would melt the servers. And we don't want the internet to melt.
The true perversion is that all the screen shots have the Solution Explorer docked to the righthand side of the window. It's hard to describe how fundamentally wrong that feels.
Any manager who doesn't take responsibility for this isn't a manager you'd want to work for. The manager should be fired.
Wow, I'm sorry you had to experience that. I'm sure it was traumatic -- or perhaps you took it better than I would have. It must be of some comfort to look back now and realize that you only bore a small part of the blame, and that ultimately a large potion of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of whomever set up the dev environment like that, as well as whomever cancelled backups.
You don't expect a junior to make mistakes, you expect everyone AND everything to make mistakes/fail. Backups and separated environments is the least you could expect from a company earning millions.
Everything in the working world fails people with mental illness, even at low levels that aren't especially problematic under less pressure. There are very few organizations that actually promote based on excellence. Most set up a war of attrition based on shared suffering and the mountain of pointless work generated by bike-shedding executives. People with depression (or anxiety, ADD, panic, etc.) are not intentionally excluded; they're just the first to crack. Ugly fact: it's how the system is supposed to work. Competition-on-suffering exists to filter out "the weak" and "the slackers". It's a millennia-old (wrong) mentality of work and only over the past 50 years have we understood the biological causes (not personal weakness) that actually make people drop.

The idea is to assess character by generating artificial stress, but the result is that mild (usually treatable) biological problems are misinterpreted as character flaws. Depression is read as lassitude. (It's not.) Panic is seen as "not handling pressure well." (Actually, a panic attack is 3-20 minutes of hell but the disorder does not impair judgment.) Overwork-induced social ineptitude is interpreted as selfishness. Et cetera.

This setup is sad, stupid, wrong, and counterproductive because the modern economy doesn't need pointless effort and tolerance of suffering. Slackers are no more harmful than misdirected hard workers (which is most, because the people providing direction in most organizations are clueless yes-men). What the world needs, now, are creativity, insight, and excellence, which turn out to be positively correlated with the propensity to depression.

The conformist idiocy and pointless sacrifice of corporate life are unhealthy for normal people and debilitating for many with depression. VC-istan, a very volatile form of corporate life that looks meritocratic, is worse... because people work too hard and personalize their failures.

What I'd like to see over the next 15 years is more of an ability for smart, capable people to start lifestyle businesses. Right now, it's not unreasonably hard to found a get-big-or-die VC-istan company if you have the connections, but there's a whole world of smaller businesses that's not being explored because the market to connect the resources with the talent doesn't exist yet. (Kickstarter is a step in the right direction.)
Introducing Elevator, an on-disk key-value store
Hi everyone, I'm pleased to introduce to you Elevator,

A key-value database relying on leveldb backend under MIT license.
It has just reached the 0.5 version, is extensively documented and already awaits for your ideas, recommandations, bugfixes, forks.

Thanks, and hope to ear from you!
The guy that runs VeryCD is in Shanghai. You should get him to come in.
Sorry, but those things are technology and should be worked on by technologists because there's literally no on else who can work on them.

That's exactly the viewpoint that he's arguing against: setting up "technologists" as a kind of high-priest class, the only ones who understand "computers", some nebulous thing that regular people shouldn't bother their heads with, and instead should buy polished, well-engineered consumer experiences. Like Kay and others, he's much more interested in a model of technology that's less black-box. In particular, the thing they object to is the merger of technology/business/design into designing these overarching "experiences" which regular people are just supposed to "use". When such experiences increasingly structure large parts of society, it becomes a bit dangerous of they're all black boxes that regular people aren't supposed to understand or exercise meaningful control over.
Oh, I agree--I got very into databases, which most of my coworkers regard as "boring." But I found that there is considerable beauty in SQL, normalization is an art form, and performance tuning is tinkering that can go on forever. So I enjoy them quite a bit while most developers consider them nothing more than a dull "persistent store."

All of the things I mentioned conceal gems like these within them. But before you can appreciate a concealed gem, you have to learn what gems look like and how to mine them, and except for gaming and web front-ends it does not happen automatically.
I wish ag were on linux boxes by default. Every time I instinctively try to search via ag and am denied I wince as I type in grep instead. :(
Don't forget, MongoDB is webscale.

http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com
I don't think it's useful in a technical sense, but it did catch my eye so much that I scrolled up and down a few times to watch it. Take that and stick it on a client demo and you might help secure another sale.
> Coding can not be learned by copy and pasting other people's code.

Absolutely it can. I would even argue that is the best way to intro into programming, and even learning in general. You, of course, cannot stop after you have pasted it in. You have to think about why the author made the choices he made, but in doing that you will quickly build an intuition to be able to apply similar choices to entirely new problems. With a little experience, you won't even need to draw on other's code anymore.

The distinction you really seem to be making here is that self-taught programmers are able to enter the job market on day one, without that experience. While graduates have at least four years of experience under their belt before they are reasonably able to enter the job market. Of course the people with more experience are going to perform better. As more time passes, the skills between the groups will start to average out (with amazing and not-so-amazing people found in both groups).
I wish the project luck. I have had a lot of good mileage on the JVM platform using Clojure and JRuby, and a very good Smalltalk implementation on the JVM might also be useful.

That said, ignoring the commercial Smalltalk implementations, I think that Pharo is the future of Smalltalk. The Cog virtual machine is reasonably efficient and the UI is in my opinion much improved over Squeak.

I am not sure how widely used the Seaside web application platform is used since the original authors went to work on other things at Twitter. At one point I thought that Seaside would give Smalltalk a lift in the same way that Rails did for Ruby.
I am sorry, i didn't know about your health conditions.

By the way I don't work for MSFT.

I wish you all the best from bottom of my heart.

Take care my friend.
Google’s New Sign-in Service: Should You Be Using It?
This post just made me feel 10x smarter (not that I blame the author - the blame here lies at the feet of the "Senior" Devs).
Because I have to pay bills
You're kind of reinforcing the OP's point though. C does lack easy memory management, unless you're ready to rely on external GC libraries.
The easiest way to test Django 1.5 (and GeoDjango)
Did they consider C with a pool allocator library like talloc? It's a good fit for servers (cf. Samba using talloc, and Apache which uses another pool allocator).
Cloud Foundry faces fear of forking
This is certainly a monumental fuckup, but these things inevitably happen even with better development practices, this is why you need backups, preferably daily, and as much separation of concerns and responsibilities as humanly possible.

Anecdote:

I am working for a company that does some data analysis for marketers aggregated from a vast number of sources. There was a giant legacy MyISAM (this becomes important later) table with lots of imported data. One day, I made some trivial looking migration (added a flag column to that table). I tested it locally, rolled it out to staging server. Everything seemed A-OK until we started migration on the production server. Suddenly, everything broke. By everything, I mean EVERYTHING, our web application showed massive 500-s, total DEFCON1 across the whole company. It turned out we ran out of disk space, since apparently myisam tables are altered the following way: first the table is created with updated schema, then it is populated with data from the old table. MyISAM ran out of disk space and somehow corrupted the existing tables, mysql server would start with blank tables, with all data lost.

I can confirm this very feeling: "The implications of what I'd just done didn't immediately hit me. I first had a truly out-of-body experience, seeming to hover above the darkened room of hackers, each hunched over glowing terminals." Also, I distinctly remember how I shivered and my hands shook. It felt like my body temperature fell by several degrees.

Fortunately for me, there was a daily backup routine in place. Still, several hour long outage and lots of apologies to angry clients.

"There are two types of people in this world, those who have lost data, and those who are going to lose data"
World Wrestling Entertainment: Social Media and Advertising Gone Wild.
Nominet put on hold plans to launch .uk domains
Coincidentally about when I got out of the car-making business :-)
I was echoing the terms used in the post. I thought it was clearer than going into a long comment about how Python is mature, at least in its CPython implementation, but the PyPy implementation is not, and when the blog post said "language" they really meant "implementation" because language is not implementation, yada yada yada.
I'm finding that Cython[1] can be a very convenient way to speed up the critical parts of your Python. Anyone who considers porting parts of their app to C++ should give it a look.

[1] http://www.cython.org
The VFX community sees red in the wake of Oscar protest and on-air snub
Personally, I dislike the argument that recent progress is an "abnormality". A large middle class (post-1925) is an "anomaly". Slavery being illegal is, historically speaking, extremely unusual.
I still remember the all-consuming dread I felt as an intern when I ran an UPDATE and forgot the WHERE clause. I consider it part of the rite of passage in the web developer world. Kind of like using an image or text in a dev environment that you never expect a client to see.

Luckily the company I was at (like any rational company) backed up their db and worked in different environments, so it was more of a thing my coworkers teased me for than an apocalyptic event.
Common Courtesy: Not So Common, Afterall.
I've experienced the opposite but that might be because I'm looking at software development jobs. Most of the mega-corps and the medium-large companies that do software development actively recruit new grads while the small companies are only looking for experienced people.
>in our coding style we're caching begin iterators on the line before the loop

Can you give an example of what this looks like?
I know how you felt. Many years ago when I was a junior working in a casual game company, I were to add a bunch of credits to a poker player (fake money). I forget the where in the SQL clause and added credits to every player in our database. Lucky me it was an add and not a set and I could revert it. Another time I was going to shutdown my pc (a debian box) using "shutdown -h now" and totally forgot that I was in a ssh session to our main game server. I had to call the tech support overseas and tell him to physically turn on the server...
One of the things I like asking candidates is "Tell me about a time you screwed up so royally that you were sure you were getting fired."

Let's be honest, we all have one or two.. and if you don't, then your one or two are coming. It's what you learned to do differently that I care about.

And if you don't have one, you're either a) incredibly lucky, b) too new to the industry, or c) lying.
Wow, that's terrible. Mistakes happen, and for the notion of 'blame' to surface requires some monumentally incompetent management... the exact kind that would have their junior programmers developing against an un-backed-up production database.

The immediate takeaway from a disaster should always be 'How can we make sure this doesn't happen again?' not 'Man, I can't believe Fred did that, what an idiot.'
News flash,

If you are a CEO you should be asking this question: "How many people in this company can unilaterally destroy our entire business model?"

If you are a CTO you should be asking this question: "How quickly can we recover from a perfect storm?"

They didn't ask those questions, they couldn't take responsibility, they blamed the junior developer. I think I know who the real fuckups are.

As an aside: Way back in time I caused about ten thousand companies to have to refile some pretty important government documents because I was doubling xml decoding (&amp; became &amp;amp;). My boss actually laughed and was like "we should have caught this a long time ago"... by we he actually meant himself and support.
meh , VS devs get used to that , like the horrible theme colors in the latest VS. I said good for microsoft if they offer developers choice. And it means opensource is kinda winning. But i'm waiting for the day Windows is POSIX to go back to that os , windows is too crappy for Open-source devs even with ming installed...
Why the dependency on jQuery, if all you're doing is loading html? That's not hard to do with native js at all.

It looks nice, and it works, don't get me wrong. I like jQuery. Just seems unnecessary here.
Steve Jobs on learning to run a company
I think House of Cards probably changed the situation somewhat: if Netflix can keep putting out exclusive content of that caliber HBO is going to lose a lot of customers. The week after that show premiered HBO enabled AirPlay on their iPhone app, which by the way is fantastic. I bet they're already prepared to go the Netflix route and are just watching the numbers for the right time to strike.
Glad to see more support behind MongoDB. I know its popular to hate it, but It still has served me better then any of the alternatives I have tried.

I am hopefully that RethingDB can outdo them eventually, but for now BZ Rackspace team
Alright, I probably phrased it wrong. C++ was written with specific safe guards against a number of common issues than can occur in C code, still it's more than possible to go horrifyingly wrong in C++ but the language has been designed (well, 'ish', it's still C++) to help avoid simple issues. The issues then come from the fact it's still is a fairly complex language and developers are often going to make mistakes.

All languages are safe if you've written perfect code, but no one is perfect, C++ does try to catch some of the lower hanging fruit problems but if you're writing hoary code you're going to blow your foot off eventually.
This. Because of this and the lack of backups.
Or, you know, the less laggy and more functional http://dominion.isotropic.org/

I actually wrote a chrome extension to add a log to goko
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goko-log-viewer/ka...

Post about some of the goko's issues
http://www.roadtolarissa.com/speed-issues-with-gokos-online-...
Blog spam. Actual link: http://tv.yahoo.com/news/-game-of-thrones--dragon-ad-flies-a...
This is beyond amazing!
You are totally missing my point. Yes, I realize MIT programmers make more and you need to pay them well to hire them. However, if you look at average software engineering salaries, you will realize most people do not pay as well as prestigious tech companies. Yet their job openings are used to indicate a shortage. Shortages are just low bids in a market, the fact that lots of people want to buy gold at $1 an ounce does not mean there is a shortage of gold. It's a bad metric if you understand anything about economics, and yet I've yet to see another metric used to argue for a 'shortage'.
> This means a project written and signed off circa 2011 requires mandatory engineering costs just to continue running in a functioning and supported fashion.

Funny (?) thing is, as an engineer at Google, stuff like that happened to me ALL THE TIME. I don't even want to think about how much of my time was spent simply migrating to the "latest greatest" replacement for some critical service that was being deprecated.
The Tyranny of Traction and apparent “dumbing down” of seed investing
This is an important point raised wrt seed investments and the demand for "traction" that's become the norm now. Its less black/white than the article suggests, but nevertheless, a good take on the subject.
There are several reasons why you should not feel guilty. The company was asking for trouble and you just happen to be the trigger. These are the three top things that could prevented that incident.

1) A cron job for the manually task you were doing.

2) Not working directly on production.

3) Having daily backups

And this could happened to anybody. After midnight any of us are at junior level and very prone to do this kind of mistakes.
Afaik they license.
- Add/Remove features

- Install SUA

Enjoy
I used to be a web freelance web developer/tech guy with one client, a designer. What made me quit was an incident where his client's Wordpress site hadn't been moved properly to the new hosting. (not by me)

The DB needed to be searched and replaced to remove all the old urls. After doing so, the wp_options cell on the production site holding much of the customizations kicked back to the defaults for the theme, the serialized data format being used was sensitive to brute DB-level changes.

I had talked to my client before about putting together a decent process including dev databases, scheduled backups, everything needed to prevent just such a screwup, but he waffled. Then blamed me when things went wrong.

I'd had enough and told him to do his own tech work, leaving him to fix his client's website himself. Being that I didn't build it, I didn't know which settings to flip back. I left freelance work and never looked back.

People and companies do this all the time, refuse to spend the time and money ensuring their systems won't break when you need them the most, then scapegoat the poor little technician when it does.

I'd like to say the answer is "don't work in such environments," but there's really no saying that it won't be this way at the next job you work, either.

I certainly wouldn't internalize any guilt being handed down, ultimately it's the founders' jobs to make sure that the proper systems are in place, after all, they have much more on the line than you do. Count it a blessing that you can just walk away and find another job.
that's a good way...since I already use Makefiles to do little tasks in my projects, I end up just setting `PYTHON=.virtualenv/bin/python` and in my targets, using `$(PYTHON)` instead of `python`. Ditto for `pip`, `nosetests`, etc.
This is very interesting. I wonder if other non-English speaking countries have a hard time with OSS?
I think your conversion went up because users were able to easily see a demo of the product.

I personally think that the tour (of your homepage) does is not much useful otherwise - it just goes through all the elements one by one, the graphic design of the tours interferes with the design of the page, and the large amount of text in the tours makes it hard to understand whats different with the information in the tours.

I would love to see you try a couple of things and let us know how the conversion rate changed (it will also help us know the best practices when using your service):

- try the tours with a similar theme as the site (as is currently the case), but do more to separate them - perhaps by adding rounded corners, more shadows, or changing what are the main colors in the tour.

- try reducing the text in the tours.

- try putting in content in the tours that is different from the current site content - perhaps by grouping the features on the site and your tours introduce them as groups, or perhaps by focusing your tours on the benefits (as opposed to the features).
Actually even senior developers or architects make mistakes. Philosophy grad or not, it doesn't matter. That's to be expected.

What's more questionable is:

* Developers have access to the production database from their machine, while it should only be accessible to the front machines within the datacenter.

* Junior developers don't need an access to production machine, only sysops and maybe the technical PM.

* No backup of the production database. WTF???

If they had a hardware failure they would have been in the same shit.
> 3. MongoDB is the de facto choice for NoSQL applications

The point of "NoSQL" systems are to use the most appropriate solution for the problem instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, which was the tradition when relational systems were the only choice.

The notion of a "de facto choice" at all seems to be the biggest mistake nearly everyone makes when evaluating such systems these days. People are so focused on evaluating the available systems that they forget the most important step: to analyse their own problem domain.
Online multiplayer Bomberman game with HTML5