skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I just got an email from an engineering prospect who has decided to turn down our offer. We put so much time and effort and passion into recruiting him. He decided he wants to go off and start his own company right now."

I think more and more startup CEOs are figuring this out. At least, I'm telling every one I meet - for technical talent, you are not competing against the other startups in your neighborhood. Or even ones doing the same thing. Or startups in general. You're competing against the awesome developer doing their own thing.

The cost of booting a startup is trending to zero. 10 years ago you'd need massive capital investment (servers, networking, etc.). I can spin up a Heroku server for free (or a series of AWS for nearly-free). I have super-powerful development environments (Ruby/Rails, Clojure/Lighttable, whatever) that are free or nearly so. Great infrastructure (Postgres, Unicorn, whatever) - free!

All I need is a product idea and a vision and I can bootstrap my company. I can charge money on day one without needing a business checking account, LLC, and all that.

What does this mean for you? As a startup founder, you are competing against a person owning 100% and running the show as they see fit. This is a completely different power dynamic and one that is going to be the new normal. You really need to have your stuff completely together in order to get the best people. It's very hard, but possible (I advise founders how to do that all the time).

I'd also caution against "this person needs to be passionate about my idea or we won't" hire them. I see that all the time, too. Look, it's your baby; it's going to be very difficult to get them to love it as much as you do. Figure out what this person wants out of life (their career, whatever) that you can provide that they alone cannot (work from home, presenting/attending conferences, learning new technologies, mentoring, leading a team, education, building their personal brand, whatever). THAT'S how you get them. Constant tending to their needs and giving them opportunities to further their growth is how you KEEP them.

What value are YOU bringing to the table other than an idea and some cash? Those are table stakes now.

Good luck! :D
I'm with you on that one. I wouldn't submit a site to Show HN without at least memcached sitting in front of it. And to run a legitimate service sans cache? That's just asking for trouble.
This is a good point. No one seems to be able to answer why that picture was taken and then chosen as the cover of the welcome to prison booklet.

I bet somebody originally wanted an aerial shot of the prison, but someone else wisely objected because that would be bad security move - giving prisoners a map of the area...
Try typing something (anything!) into the form on the site and you will understand.
> PC users may have to justify themselves

> Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

Yes, this is exactly what you should feel like if you compete for a limited pool of hipster developers in San Francisco.

I know three different guys who can come in and clean up someone else's shit, but they aren't in San Francisco, and they all currently have jobs, so none of them would come cheap. But if you offer a ton of money to someone with 10 years of experience architecting and deploying web apps with 1M+ users, they will do the boring work of fixing your scalability problems.
Ask HN: Twitter/Posterous - The Archive Team needs more time to save 1.3M blogs
TL;DR

Posterous is shutting down in a week and the Archive Team needs more time else 1.3 million blogs will essentially disappear.

--

I've been following an exchange between Jason Scott (Archive Team / Internet Archive) and Sachin Agarwal (Posterous) [1].

It appears that Posterous gave the Archive Team some dedicated servers to hit but it wasn't sufficient to download the amount that's going to be deleted.

I don't know all of the details but saving content to a historical archive is invaluable. Offering the ability for users to download their content is great but it serves a very different purpose than what the Archive Team and Internet Archive does.

Additionally, it's certain that much of the content will disappear because users didn't receive the shutdown email, 30 days wasn't long enough or simply didn't bother to do anything. The public content there is still valuable.

[1] https://twitter.com/agarwal/status/327153883237453825
I wasn't arguing the aliens would treat us well. They very well might not. But they'd probably make some form of contact with us. That was my only point.

I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology.

If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets.

No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
No idea, seriously. VLC scammers, mainly.

The .asc is a logstalgia visualisation bug, because in fact, it merges the few .exe.asc requests with the massive .exe requests
The question is not "why would they want to visit us", but "why are they not here", aka The Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Every issue related to the existence of aliens must answer that paradox first. My favorite interpretation: we are the most advanced civilization in the galaxy.

"Why would they want to visit us?" - this can have trivial answers: the same reasons why we study ants today.
I filled out their 'application' form letting them know they were missing out on me since they don't accept remote workers. Nothing but an automated dismissal message.
But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact.

So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.
*their

I highly doubt 500 different people are upgrading ubuntu every second, but a bug in the software is possible I suppose.
C'mon, you're beating up a strawman. All they said is that you may have to justify the decision. I wouldn't want to work there if the tools were forced on me without any say but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It makes sense to standardize and to have a reason if you want to deviate (said from the perspective of someone that would want to deviate). However, I'd still reword it if I were them, based on this reaction.
You don't really need caching if your back end is fast enough. It's just that the current trend is to use slow architectures with caching, because it's usually cheaper and faster to get version 1 out the door.
This is why keys need foreskin
One of backbone.js's example apps does this, and it was my favorite thing about their docs: http://backbonejs.org/docs/todos.html
Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science
I addressed every point you bring up.

You insist we're nothing special, there's no reason to believe that.

If that were the case and there's human like intelligent life all over the place in the galaxy then we should start picking up their signals pretty soon.

Even more so, we should have picked some up already (because certainly some of them should have been ahead of us.) But we haven't found anything. We are quite possibly alone in the Milky Way in terms of intelligent life, and if we aren't, the advanced aliens are very far away indeed.
Hah.

Realize that wine is made, literally, by farm boys who spend the year picking and crushing grapes from the field. When you visit a winery you realize how far-removed the winemaking process, which is as down-and-dirty as any other farm work, is from its cultural air.

This is my experience with many wine professionals - people who procure, ship, or teach about wine for a living. There is a valid criticism of sommolier culture (which is only one facet of the industry) of propagating pretentiousness. But perhaps you need that air when selling a $300 bottle of wine, but you want to market yourself as "just a beverage" when selling a $10 bottle.

This reinforces my original point! There's more to $topic than your perception of it. There is more to fashion than "pretty people who are arrogant." There is more to IT than "Star Wars references." There is more to wine than "pretentious people with their cellars."
Samsung Rises To Nearly Double Apple's Smartphone Sales
In the U.S., the main deterrent against robbery is jail time. Most houses can be broken into with an elbow. Locks prevent silent entry and make it slightly harder to break in, they don't secure anything.
To be fair to the ad, I think they mean it in a funny way when they say "PC users may have to justify themselves" but even then, it comes off as the usual crap of "if you are a PC/windows user, you are not hipsters like us who are on mac".So the intention might be good but I agree that it probably is not the right place for it. I personally use a dell laptop for dev work at home where I have partitioned windows 7 and Ubuntu and switch to either as necessary.
Twitter: The Medium of the Moment
Really? That has to be the most "sexy" job out of all of them. Anyone, and I do mean that, can build an app that runs off of 1-4 boxes and a single DB instance. Not many people can build a system that scales to 100+ boxes and a DB that spans several boxes (not counting slaves.)

By that time, you're having to solve the "hard" problems. That's where a back-end guy shines.
http://techdiem.com/
I'm pretty sure that's third party enhancement of markdown (maybe github flavoured markdown). Some markdown editors do not support this. See the official markdown guide. There is no entry on nested list. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#list
Marissa Mayer Outsits Yahoo's Chairman
Nit: Marooned in realtime is one of Vinge's pre-singularity novels. Both in the sense that he hadn't come up with the term yet, and in the sense that the technology in the book isn't all that god-like.

(Not a bad read at all, yes.)
> "They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars."

Maybe she doesn't see how this is similar in terms of amazing, but I would say those other women weren't far off.
Installing VMware ESCi
Creating the World’s Best Service and Warranty Program
The reason launching microsats is affordable is because they are piggybacking on someone else's rocket. The delta cost to launch a microsat on a rocket someone already paid full freight for is essentially zero.

There aren't any rockets going to the moon, much less another planet, that they can piggyback on... so, yes, they could send 1000 to orbit the moon, but you would have to pay full freight on the rocket. Ouch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
I liked the article but not the misleading title. A title like "Alien movies have so many implausible ideas" would have been more accurate and not get people so stuck on the one idea implied by the title.

Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider:

Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat.

However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled:

In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:

1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.

2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.

3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.

The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.
Google Tells Devs: No More Updates Outside of Play Store
Enterprises tend to put too much value in conformity and to little value in people's time. I have certainly worked in large corporate environments with lots of projects. Both those who thinks that there is value to optimize for the average and those who understands there isn't.

I think most people that criticize Maven do so because Maven does not help them do their job to the extent Maven should.

Enterprises don't really need enterprise tools but you need an enterprise to use enterprise tools...
Using the label "agnostic" as a philosophical weasel word to give a nod to solipsism every time it is politically convenient is a form of lopsided pedantry. Unless you think a specific religious god is more likely to be real than, say, vampires or Harry Potter, the distinction does not actually add any useful information. People normally just use "agnostic" as a device to try to frame a debate in a precise way in order to put the burden of proof squarely on the positive claim.
how about numl? http://numl.net/

folks on SO also like WEKA run through IKVM (a Java to .NET converter): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1624060/machine-learning-...
Thing is, we don't actually know what the half life of an intelligent species is. Civilisations? Yes, in the case of ours, but simply taking our species as the sample could get us a number that could be magnitudes off.
Username relevant?
As the consumer, it is way easier to be abused by the online service. First let's assume those running the service are perfectly honest. Now let's assume they practice security about as well as the average small online retailer. Now let's assume a hacker breaks into their system and downloads a full dump of their database. Now that hacker has many (hundreds? thousands?) of key photos matched directly to addresses and likely tons of other PII.

D'oh.
Motivation via "Cook & Code Night"
"Consider Phlebas"

http://www.amazon.com/dp/031600538X

"Chaos: Making a New Science"

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113453

"The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't"

http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X
It wasn't an argument, it was a side comment, supporting her approach (similar to one of many of my friends) and to some extent mocking the (culturally implicit) premise that one should align with one's own gender[1], see in e.g. "[...] and how none of the other girls in her class understood anything she was talking about".

Would ever a tall person said "but none of tall people at my high-school can understand my jokes"?

[1] And to some extent supporting also:

"It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT."
Heh. Even though I like fantasy very much (big Robert Jordan fan), I really can't stand Lord of the Rings. It's just so utterly boring. :(
According to the website, they redact your shipping address a day after the duplicated key ships. So no need for a dead drop.

Plus, you could use a VISA prepaid card.
Learn Foundation with interactive lessons
This has been being done for a long time. Saturn V's were thrust vectored too. For any large scale rocked, the fins are far to large to move like on smaller missiles.

This works well to cut down on mass and drag and is especially useful for silo/sub launched missiles where fins don't fit well in the launch tube.
Kindergartner Becomes Mensa Member (has IQ of 147)
I'm glad it's been helpful!
I'm one of the rare programmer-who's-not-IT guy.

My job title is 'software engineer', in the sense that I'm an engineer, whose primary duty is to write software for machines. I'm technically under a different department from IT, which manages infrastructure. It gets confusing sometimes.
I think there's at least some reason to be a little more optimistic. Aliens technologically capable of visiting us are likely to have progressed through much of the same social development we have, and more (assuming that the pattern that has held for our species is common, which seems reasonable). We are still doing terrible things to each other, but not as often as we used to; I think it's likely that aliens would be kinder than we are. Then again, it's also possible that they might accidentally harm us - even a gentle child can crush an ant without meaning to...
Of all the many reasons why our view of alien visitation is radically off-target, that the trip would be meaningless probably doesn't even make the cut. It's hard to imagine an advanced species would have advanced without curiosity.
Simply put, former Posterous and Twitter are being douchey.
This is impossible, seriously. I cannot share the details, but the HTTP headers shows clearly that this is not that case.

And more than 10 millions downloads per day?
Here's a HN comment I bookmarked about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4976893

That guy was reporting a 2% error rate from one S3 server, but there has been additional discussion on that thread which suggests that error rate is an aberration. Personally, I have no hard data, just the anecdote that when I started developing with S3 I wasn't using retries and that became a problem after approximately a few thousand queries. Unfortunately I've never seen Amazon say what error rate to expect, just that you should be sure to retry on error. I think I'll start logging how often I need to retry so I can get some hard data.

Keep in mind that when you're hosting a site on S3, you have to multiply the error rate by the number of resources you're serving from S3 to get the probability an individual user will have problems. www.ismytwitterpasswordsecure.com serves 4 resources from S3. Assuming a 0.1% error rate, 400 out of the 100,000 users would have had problems.

As another commenter has suggested, you can serve from Cloudfront instead of directly from S3. That will significantly reduce the number of hits which are made to S3.
Even in the face of "complete information" from a doctor there is a log of "awareness" being raised elsewhere which is almost uniformly in the battle/fight/beat/win direction.

In such a case it is very easy to see how it would be possible for the patient to choose treatment which is in fact against their best interest.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread the current regulatory/legal climate leaves a vanishingly small upside and massive downside to the doctor who would advise against treatment.
Amazon hints at sales figures for AWS
In Python terms, Lua is "stackless", in the same sense as Stackless Python (http://www.stackless.com/).
Ubuntu does not download a .exe...
Have you seen how fast and easy it can be with bumpkeys? It isn't nearly as versatile, but a ring of properly made bumpkeys can open the majority of locks.
OP here. Contact me today.

I'll do a mock-interview with you to prep-- jason at 42floors
You can say any rationalization would be exactly like the rationalization a spammer would make.

Who's spamming and who is not?

I would argue that the way we're doing this is not spam, as it is clear the people we favorite are getting value by virtue of the fact that they are following us, registering for our service, etc.
They're the ones who built their industry to revolve around hyper-promoted singles.

All iTunes did, was let people easily and economically acquire only the tracks they cared about.

That those people turned out to not be interested in the 'other 8 songs' or the CD single b-sides is hardly iTunes fault.

If the industry promoted albums and bands, maybe they'd get different results.
The premature optimization is evil meme has just been pushed beyond reason, that's all. People blindly insist that it is cheaper to just throw hardware at it then waste "precious developer time" on making things fast. But in most cases, a few hours of time spent up front making sure you aren't doing horribly slow things can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in hosting expenses. I have not met any developers getting paid $100k/hour.

>Or as great as PostgreSQL is for single server deployment why wouldn't I look at something easier to manage, trivial to scale and a more agile schema like a DynamoDB, MongoHQ, Cassandra

That has nothing to do with premature optimization, that is just about using unproven data stores because you didn't bother to read the label.
This is just a bunch of idle speculation.

We can't speculate on the motives of aliens at all. Look at how hard it is to discern the motives of other humans, and now tell me you're going to discern the motives of something biologically completely unlike us? You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires?

As far as the feasibility of star travel: it's hard, but not impossible. The thing that makes it hard really isn't the propulsion problem. You can go to the stars using technology contemporary with the Beatles white album:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...

A thermonuclear Orion could achieve around 10% the speed of light... according to figures computed using 60s assumptions of vehicle mass. With very lightweight materials and more efficient thermonuclear charges higher fractions are certainly achievable. (Though the acceleration would be rough!)

What you can't do with 60s-70s tech is survive the trip. The biological, structural, psychological, and engineering robustness challenges outweigh the challenge of propelling yourself at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. But those are all things that will yield to incremental progress.

(BTW: the same is true for Mars. The Apollo rig could have, with very minor modifications, sent astronauts to Mars. They would have been dead when they got there. The life support tech to keep a human in a can alive that long did not exist. Propulsion isn't the hardest problem.)

The fact is that we simply don't know. We don't even know if there is other complex life in our galaxy, let alone what it might be capable of or what it might do.
'advanced' belies the sort of casual sentientism that is an embarrassment and a blight on this site, the technology industry and entrepreneurship. It's also irrational since it ignores a massive yet underserved market.

Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'.