skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree. In fact, the flood of new Usenet users corresponded to an overall flood of new people from all walks of life learning to use the Internet; it wasn't all bad. Also, the structure of Usenet is like that of very-modern Reddit, while the "Eternal September" hypothesis of its demise is premised on an early-Reddit model. I'm sure alt.drugs suffered, but "comp.security.unix" did OK.

The fatal injury from Usenet came from piracy. I ran a competitive† server for the ISP I helped run in Chicago††. The amount of effort it took to host binaries feeds was unbelievable and only got worse as time went on. Usenet is just about the dumbest imaginable way to distribute binaries†††. Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer ISPs offered full-feed Usenet. When an ISP opted (sanely) to go with no-binaries Usenet, their Usenet consumers bolted. Usenet centralized and became less and less available. Usenet software because less and less lucrative to build. Then blogging hit.

This is a little off topic, I know, but I'm bitter about what happened to Usenet, because I really loved it.

† (we hit the top tier of the Freenix list several times; I believe we were one of the first 3 providers to come up with the INN history cache)

†† (EnterAct)

††† (imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world)
If you just want a copy for VirtualBox on Linux, you can download a VM from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools . It's a demo OS license, but good enough for testing.
Great stuff, and I love the concrete example of the ZK failure due to error logging -- a classic cascading failure mode. While it's true that I'm an inveterate disaster porn addict[1] and would therefore love this regardless, I think that Nathan's piece serves as a model in that it speaks to learning from failure rather than gloating about nascent success -- we collectively need much more of this! I also like that Nathan doesn't romanticize other engineering domains, as naive software engineers are wont to do; other engineering domains also struggle with failure -- it's just that their failures are so much more public (and so much more likely to involve loss of property and/or life) that they cannot evade collective introspection the way software engineering so frequently seems to. Very much looking forward to Part 2!

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Debugging-Production-Syst...
What does the success of Pinterest say about that?
Microsoft Should Not Buy Netflix
Looks cool. I suspect a lot of "new" companies will easily adopt your platform, but most large and "old school" organizations will be reluctant to switch from their manual ways.

To give you some thoughts/comments/feedback:

1. Sales people definitely hate doing data entry. So I get why this is useful. However, what does become a challenge is deciding what events require logging. Did the 2 min call I just made to the client where I asked him where his office count as a sales call? etc

2. I know very few people who will rely on the internet and VoIP to conduct their sales calls. The worst thing that can happen is that you call someone and the connection goes out. Your biggest USP (no data entry) is predicated on the VoIP technology being rock solid. I'm still wary of this technology. Anything you can do on the website to build more confidence would helpful.

3. To go along with point 2, how do you log a cell phone convo into your system? This isn't really clear and would be a deal breaker for a lot of sales teams.

4. I know sales forces who swear by SalesForce (I also know some that despise it). You're going need to do everything SF does + more in order to compete.

5. Are you targeting inside or outside sales? First, this should be more clear, or at least market it for both parties. Second, for an inside sales team, this solution seems amazing. And if so, it would be interesting to see how this could reduce costs or increase sales. None of the customers case studies told me (as a potential customer) how this increased sales. It just sounds like it's an easy, new, fun tool to use. Great, but I'm a Sales Director -- I have 1 job, hit or exceed my target in a specific time frame. Tell me how your tool is going to do that for me.

6. Who's the customer here and who does it benefit most? Sales director or individual sales person? For your own sales efforts, it would be helpful to see "Close.io helps Sales Directors manage their sales teams and meet/exceed their targets" or something like that. The platform reminds me of time tracking systems -- the individuals that do data entry hate them, but the managers love them. Even though you remove a lot of the manual data entry, the reality is, just like time tracking software, people lie. Especially sales people. Manager: "Whats the latest on ABC Client" Sales Person "I called them last friday, no answer". It would be good to see who's risk you're reducing and who's life your making better and at what cost.

Good luck!
An interesting thought developed after reading this and the follow up comments. The ultimate translation of the sentiments in this post is simply to focus your efforts on underexploited markets, not some push for greatness in innovation.

Most people end up solving problems they see in their daily lives, which do indeed end up being trifles aka first worlds problems etc given the demographic of start up founders. Focusing on serving third world nations or less developed regions can work to enhance their lives, but its simple a shift in market focus, not a real push to further science or be on the cutting edge of innovation. IMO there is nothing particularly innovating about making a sms based service for Kenyan farmers, it's just a clever use-case of existing technology to serve an underexploited market.

The reason we have a lull in true innovation is because we have hit a saturation point in the larger realm of technology. There is only so much you can do with computers, the internet, and lastly, smart phones. We're waiting on the next big thing.
Prenda lawyers take Fifth Amendment; judge storms out: “We’re done”
How is it a trade-off?

Because it's a single-point-of-failure, and because you're giving one company a disproportionate degree of control over your data.
Exactly :) even more-so given the list is incomplete.
Or a Chrome plugin :)
How to Generate Leads For Your Business…. You have The Answers
So you have no respect for programmers working in the penal system unless they're actively breaking prisoners out of jail? Please.
One thing I didn't understand about your reply (sorry, I'm not an American!) is this: You say Because his premium is so high, I'm guessing GP has a very high deductible, eg $5,000 Surely if his premium is high, he would pay less for each visit to the doctor?
I don't know how Apple didn't hired this guy yet. He should've been running the iCloud and Framework teams!
If you write with ignorance and privilege that will shine through regardless of your disclaimer.

If people take offense to you or your writing regardless of the content of your writing and make assumptions on you based on their perceptions of your sex and gender identification, well, we have a word to describe such prejudice, don't we?
False dichotomy. Paying attention to socioeconomic-racial-gender status doesn't mean you're not paying attention to individual variation also.
How about Volvo Cars, does that count? Sold to Chinese Geely in 2010.
As we are talking about d3 based libraries, you might want to check dc.js (it's even better: crossfilter is mixed in): http://nickqizhu.github.com/dc.js/ .

It allows creating plots using one chain of methods. And it's even possible to link several plots together, so interaction with one of them affects other.
Vegas startup buys 100 teslas
very clever implementation with the flashes! We'd love to see Mosaic used at such a large scale
Try not to hack down at strawmen yourself.

Upon re-reading the commenter I replied to said he was not quite at the point of speaking about it in terms of moral obligation, which I'll admit to having mis-understood.

But even so, I tried very much to phrase my warning as nothing more than that; a warning. It's perilously easy to get caught up in logical loops that take one far away from ethical and moral underpinnings. Nothing I said takes away from the importance of getting to a state in society where persons are completely able to achieve based on their actions and not their inheritance, but that doesn't mean that all such methods of achieveing that end goal are equally ethical. I hope that cllns takes it in the spirit it was intended, instead of as an exercise to bite back against yet another privileged "cis" piece of shit...
Yahoo Mail and Dropbox Team to Make Attachments Easier
You can buy a Foxconn-branded product. See http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...

I have a barebones PC that's branded Foxconn.
Human bias vs. real-time machine learning in audience segmentation
It's the media buying and planning version of man vs. machine. When planning your next campaign, consider what real-time machine learning can tell you about your target audience—you may be surprised.

Last fall, we collaborated with a leading independent filmed entertainment studio to conceptualize an engaging, first-to-market, mobile-rich media campaign in support of a major horror movie debut. The goal was to build awareness of the film among our client’s growing mobile audience.
What Does "Gamer" Mean?
Google Glass is available to rent
The "+ shipping" part amuses me. It seems to sum up the whole "out of touch" reputation that Microsoft has, whether deserved or not. Why wouldn't this just be a download?
Strange error, now if you go to the Chinese version the English button is back!
>You cannot buy a Foxconn-branded product, because they don't exist (yet).

Over the years I have used several Foxconn motherboards. They were clearly branded "Foxconn" on the packaging and the boards themselves. Apparently you can still buy one today [1]. They also sell computer cases, fans and suchlike under their own brand.

[1] http://www.foxconnchannel.com/LatestProduct.aspx?T=Motherboa...
Sometimes you don't have any choice. On Android, for example, you have to follow the design guidelines if you want to get featured. However the design guidelines say your actions should be tiny unobtrusive icons in the action bar. Users miss these all the time in user testing in my experience. If you made them big, glossy, 3D looking buttons people would find them, but then you'd violate guidelines. So often we have to put these tutorial overlays up instead with big white arrows over a darkened screen pointing out the actions.
Are you envisioning a monastic-like group dedicated to turning productive making toward eradicating human suffering and the like?
I think it's a better idea, in some languages at least, to extend the signature to contain general preconditions and postconditions.

public boolean doSomethingFor(int iterations) {
// this is considered part of the semantic signature
requires iterations > 0 && iterations < 10;

// implementation
...
}

Putting it in the types is a good idea, but extremely complicated. You need full dependent types to make it work.
Well, I would argue that during the period where there is a large disparity, that the poor need the help of those most able to provide the help (i.e. those who are already well-off). At the very least they need those they are "competing" against to ease up, otherwise the imbalance ends up locked in.

That doesn't mean "upper middle class white" necessarily, but it does disproportionately seem to affect that group (because otherwise we wouldn't be talking so much about gender, class, race, etc. privilege)
Kalman Reti, the Last Symbolics Developer, Speaks of Lisp Machines
Parts were, but there are tons of gyroscope helicopter shots of Manhattan in the film.
I really don't see how Apache vs Nginx will give you that much performance increase. The majority of the processing time for a request is in the backend (rendering, compiling, db calls, &c). Improved caching would give much better performance gains than just switching a server without any other improvements.
You could say the same thing about Intel, but because of their brand strategy, many, many people purchase PC's because of their ingredient.

Foxconn could theoretically use the same strategy and as an example, be associated with high quality iPhone manufacturing that doesn't negatively impact their employees.

That would make them a brand, the fact that they haven't taken this strategy does not eliminate them from the discussion.
Ask Paul Osman from Soundcloud and Zach Brock from Square anything about startup life.

April 9th, 5PM PST.
Foxconn is also a Taiwanese company.
Yes, sort of. But the scale at which it is happening is not like that. Even a small company still owned that mainframe, and physically stored it onsite. And that Linux account on your webhost wasn't quite as capable as a computer you could own - you couldn't, for example, spin up 10,000 of them and create an ad-hoc cluster to run your giant MPI application.

Organizations will start viewing computers as a utility they subscribe to, rather than something they own. Should we buy another server, or just rent them through Amazon? In the future, I think that fewer organizations will own hardware - to the extent that it will change the hardware market completely.
Linus's comment on understanding pointers explained.
I can't be the only one who immediately thought tsingtao?
Implementing a stack language in OCaml with continuations
Interview about the project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQJ22TLBCiM
AMC theaters is now a Chinese brand!
It's interesting how malware is evolving just like real parasitic organisms. Those that drain host resources too quickly or noticably don't survive. Killing the host kills you too. Here is parasitic software that largely doesn't bother the host, and thus is able to survive and spread more effectively.
The point the article misses is that Chinese companies often make sub-components, or they manufacture goods that are sold under US and European brands. They also manufacture a lot of low end goods where the brand doesn't matter, e.g. the coffee cup I'm drinking out of.

> 37 of 500 respondents (7%) were able to name 5 Japanese brands.

I can only conclude that most of the respondents were idiots.
Where's the Innovation? It's at GDC
Where GitHub Goes From Here
The huge black bar at the bottom is obnoxious.
That quote from Jeff Hammerbacher comes to mind: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

There's lots of genuine good to be done in the world outside of the US. A year or two ago I did a short presentation to students in an entrepreneur class in Monterrey, Mexico. Now Monterrey is rich even by US standards (in fact it's just across the border), but even then there's still a lot of genuine people problems to be solved by entrepreneurs in that country. Think of the problems one could solve in a poorer country like the ones in Central America or poor areas of wealthier countries in South America like Colombia, Chile, Brazil.

The example I gave the students in Mexico was the need to accept payments online in Central/South American countries. Paypal doesn't work in many of them and online bill pay is almost unheard of. Even in relatively wealthy countries like Mexico and Colombia people can spend an entire afternoon in a massive queue outside their bank to pay their cable bills in person and in cash. Internet startups can't grow because there's no easy way to accept payment online. Building an online payment/mobile infrastructure is a fundamental problem that could make a lot of lives better and pave the road for entrepreneurs in the future. It's not an easy problem and it's not really a tech problem either, but it's not impossible!
Pinterest is a stroefront where people are either selling, or they're window-shopping. How do you arrive at assuming Pinterest as a curation tool?

Look at the earlier version of Delicious. It was a curation tool. Look at it now. Do you see a difference between what Delicious now shows versus what you see see at Pinterest? Throw in clipboard.com. They've at it before Pinterest showed up.

When it comes to accessing information, there is a difference between "saving" information and "acquiring" it. Sites like Facebook, Google+ etc are all into serving you means to "save" and not acquire. If you wish to acquire information, they'd rather you acquire first through their Ads infested window-front store. By the time you get to the meat of any substantive information, you have lost the real opportunity.

The RSS protocol was the real substantive engine of a means to acquire information, an ultimate self-curation tool which empowers one with information and not distraction. Again, you must have noticed, the biggest complaints on the demise of Google Reader came from the typical journalist community and the tech savvy people. The know the value of pipes which was serving them information. The mass never cared and still don't because they'd rather be served. Pinterest and window-shopping sites like these are only creating illusion of curation.
Re: Promises: According to the last article that was posted here, the point of Promises is to provide greater semantic information that assists in organizing the dependencies and prevents subtle race conditions, it is not simply syntactic sugar on callbacks. I'm not prepared to defend that position, but the article made a compelling case.
Thanks! All good & helpful feedback. A few comments:

#1 - everything is logged automatically but our goal will be to highlight the more relevant items in the timeline (longer calls or calls where notes are taken, etc.) above the rest of the noise.

#2 - good point. our website could communicate this better (the fact that we have good call quality, though not sure how could we could "prove" it besides allowing people to try it), but it has been a top priority and is the reason we're using native apps for calling instead of web-based calling (+ using Plivo rather than just sticking an Asterisk box in EC2) -- to get the best possible call quality.

#3/#5 - we're targeting inside sales people. agree could be communicated better. though we do have call forwarding to your cell phone so we've got customers who use it even if they aren't at their desk all the time.

#6 - unlike Salesforce it's very much designed to make the individual sales people happy and as productive/efficient as possible. we've got some reporting and tools to help managers/directors, but our primary pitch is that we'll increase a team's efficiency by saving them time in data entry, finding leads, dialing phones, tracking emails, etc.
It's not the language, it's the reverse-eternal-september caused by people who are actual programmers with an actual background in computer science writing node applications on the server and client applications in the browser.

As long as it was just DHTML for doing some form validation or whatever, it was treated like a "scripting" language.

Either that, or the fumes of smugness are getting to people.
German?
I said more. Yes, you will probably trust one a little bit more.
I think in order for a language to gain any significant amount of respect it needs to be used in commerce and more than just illegal commerce.
The allong.es library quoted actually allows:

splat('.total')

But you didn't hear it from me.
thanks!

I can see an ad agency using Mosiac at conference for Point of Sale demo. 100 person ad agency tells their employees, "Hey bring your Ipads to the conference we're gonna use them to create one huge TV for our video demo."

Cool stuff.
This is basically a combination of these four gems:

https://github.com/mattt/rack-in-app-purchase
https://github.com/mattt/rack-core-data
https://github.com/mattt/rack-passbook
https://github.com/mattt/rack-push-notification

That is why codebase looks very clean and simple.
Also at SeatGeek:

Marketing Analyst – A numbers-oriented role for someone who can help us get the word out about SeatGeek.

http://seatgeek.com/jobs/marketing_analyst
That was a typo, I started out writing about "soak," which is to flatMap as "splat" is to map. Thanks.
5k large? 10k large? 500k large?

the real test of a language is when it has all the millions of bug fixes built in over the years. At that point, do you feel comfortable refactoring/rearchitecting it to remove development inefficiencies? I argue that with Javascript there is no way you do once it grows beyond a small team size.
His latest work on NSHipster is great too:

http://nshipster.com/icloud/
Preemptive Equity Based Crowdfunding backlash
Equity based CFPs aren't even legal in the US yet and already the punditry is shooting holes in them. Which CFPs do you think will survive the hype and deliver on the lofty ideals they espouse?
$(".freepass").hide();
So my first question when clicking through was what do you mean by popular:

Popular by number of applications they get.

I understand that this sort of post is promoting the underlying service blogging about the topic. I know it's a fairly common approach on Hacker News, and it's fine, I discover a lot of great blogs and interesting stuff that way. Not sure this really tells me much though. The statistical validity of this sample is definitely questionable so I am not sure it even works on its own terms.

Also, I suspect "Quora is basically an Indian site" might be seen as contentious, though I found the traffic stat interesting.
There is a fine line between industry (cost center vs generating revenue) and startups when it comes to discussing the term software engineering.

I see a large amount of legacy maintenance in cost center based programming. Revenue generating industry channels seem to favor the enterprise aspect of software engineering. Startups attempt to just build, and fix as necessary (cowboy). Yet, each has their own facet of software engineering.

I am still trying to draw the line between too-enterprisy, too-maintenancy, and too-cowboy. At my current job, we assume everything is certain. The uncertainties are not coded for, because everything is internal. This bothers me to a large extent. I love coding for the uncertain. Giving more control to the user and automating a whole department is right up my court. Sadly, it is hard to convert people. Only the 'RU' in CRUD is in the user's hands most of the time. It is pure legacy fear.

The removing cascading failures part needs more emphasis. Remove portions from your cycle/automation/jobs. What happens? I also agree with the measure and monitor portion. Waiting to create analyzers and looking at metrics once the program starts breaking in production is too late.

Looking forward to the next posts.
If you say something like "httpd_execmem" you've already lost me. That is not straight-forward, that's Byzantine.

RedHat has tried to make this thing more usable, but it's still a greasy pig to wrestle. Applications just mysteriously "don't work" without explanation, and there's no obvious resolution to the problem.

Although iptables is an example of an ornery configuration format, at least it's self-contained. SELinux seems to allow applications to define their own quirky rulesets which complicates things severely.
>That's completely backwards. Dropbox started as a consumer tool and is now creeping into the workplace.

You're completely behind the curve. People have been using Dropbox to do their work from its' very early days. This is nothing new, they're just making it more "official".
And yet:

var totals = []
for(var i=0; i<orders.length; i++)
totals.push(orders[i].total);

Now... maybe "splat" and "get" are "jargon", or maybe they're "abstractions" or even "explicit" (frankly I didn't understand that stuff)... But I'll bet good money that bugs in or near this version get fixed faster in the real world. And I'll even bet that truth holds for people who happen to know what "splat" and "get" are supposed to mean.
The Underhanded C Contest Is Back
Intrade Archive: Data for Posterity