skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: As a Google Engineer, this is my understanding of Google+.

I think Google+ could be understood better once you realize that Google+ is not a social network in the traditional terms. Google+ is truly a social layer across all Google services.

The average users who are just looking for a chicken recipe (as you mention) would always love to find the particular chicken recipe that their friends have recommended. Even more relevant to me (since I don't cook) is that if a friend finds a todo app useful, I'd definitely want to know.

If Google has this social layer, it'll really unleash more expressive search results that would help the vast majority of users. This is what Google+ is.

Google+ is literally Google Plus More.

Of course, to get these benefits you really have to start using Google+ on different Google services. I guess this is the reason that Google employees who actually use Google+ services continue using it and prefer if their friends do it too.
How do you classify Bitbucket as poor man's github? It has almost all the same features, supports git and mercurial and unlimited private repos.
Agreed. Solving any real problem is a good problem to solve. Cell phones have changed the way Africans communicate with each other, as well as any other developing country/area, but I don't think the initial problem was to solve poor tele-com infrastructure in developing countries.
Exactly what I've been looking for. The original presentation Pike gave was great as an intro, but I was looking for some more applications. Definitely looking forward to more material like this.

Also, I love the tongue-in-cheek reference to what I presume is Google Reader:

Example: feed reader
My favorite feed reader disappeared. I need a new one.
Why not write one?
Where do we start?
How to Find Your Brand's Voice
That is actually surprisingly cheap. Care if I ask what types of services one would get at those rates?

You're absolutely right though, for a company like OP's, if they are so short on cash, it makes a lot of sense to get someone in even if just for the week to address these types of fundamental problems.
This reminds me of ParenScript http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/

Which is basically a subset of common-lisp that compiles to human-readable javascript. It's a good idea.
Maybe it needs to be more clear that there is a simple and a hard way to work with ReThinkDB, and whenever someone finds themself in the "hard way" documentation, that you provide clear instructions that this is the hard way and the documentation for the easy way is somewhere else. The assumption for the novice developer is that "here is the documentation, there's often just one way to do it, so I'd better read this and learn it". It's not clear that "this is the hard way, you should avert your eyes".

Maybe try renaming "ReQL" to ThinkSimpleQuery and the other one to ThinkBigQuery. Something more self explanatory.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I work at GitHub, so if you want to talk more about your experience please drop me a line. It's this username at that domain. Or hit up any other GitHubbers in this thread: We wouldn't be hanging around if we didn't want to hear from you.
A master/slave hard drive setup would have data loss. If the main hard drive died and it wasn't a RAID, surely they would have noticed.
Absolutely. I have been working remotely for many years, with a brief stop in a couple of offices 2-3 years back. I've found that a break of a day or a few can do wonders. Don't push yourself too hard, it's not efficient. Being critical of your output without going overboard and in to the stress-zone is a hard balance to find, but gets easier over time. Another thing: when I was younger I could push myself on financial grounds; now when I lack the spark for implementation I instead push myself on integrity grounds. Not sure if anyone else has this experience? I for one still really enjoy my work.
I love Go and continue to play with it, glad to see another story.

I have to say I always thought Disqus were a cool team, I have been doing websites for over a decade and whenever I needed a comment system they were the first choice. It was a real shame when I came up against their recent decision to push out the 'Discover' feature. It resulted in my having to remove Disqus from most of my clients websites as I received several angry emails complaining about porn links (it wasn't porn, but sleazy celeb stuff like bikini photos etc). Sad to say I have written them off as a commenting platform; what they did, although probably a brilliant business decision and making them loads more ad money, felt like a complete betrayal of trust.
There are two alternatives to what RethinkDB does: parsing the function's associated source file (yucky and breaky when multiple lambdas per line) or disassembling its func_code..

I've looked at this problem before (and ran away screaming every time), but the approach I tended towards was func_code disassembly, pretty much for the reasons you mention. Was this ever considered?
Chances are that most of the information is still physically there, just that it is inaccessible. First thing I would do is physically obtain the drive, so even if it's inaccessible you have the information in your possession.

From your blog post, I'd assume you don't have the knowledge to attempt recovery yourself, so call in an expert to handle the data recovery for you. At this stage, it is a matter of what the information is worth to you, compared to the cost of recovery. Almost any intervention is possible, for a price.
Well, no one has asserted facts, only that "reasonable people" care about area, despite no screens being marketed that way. Nonetheless, MS has changed their imagery and copy, and reasonable people will buy these products no more or less than the previous revision -- probably more.
Mirrored disks are RAID 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
You're right, I seem to have gotten lucky with my unmanaged hosting (3 times over with different hosts). They seem to have some sort of hardware interface to monitor RAID health, of course, this is hardware RAID so maybe that's where the setup differs. I was surprised when I received an email from them one morning about a year ago saying "Hey, one of your RAID drives failed so we replaced it, just FYI".

It's true that a RAID failure may go unnoticed by a sysadmin for a year or more if they don't have proper checks setup for themselves.

I guess the only thing that could've been done in this case was to have a backup cronjob or use a provider that takes care of this stuff..
Have you asked us? support@github are real humans, I promise.
I read that more as they don't know the difference between programming and ops.
The word "VC-istan" has been used a lot in this thread and even elsewhere, I don't understand why you put so much emphasis on not understanding what it means.
They're synergistic roles, yes, and ideally you would like one with a mix of both [either a dev with sufficient experience in system administration or a system administrator with sufficient experience in development] to tackle the messes that crop up, but I haven't seen anyone claiming they're interchangeable - just that most of the population of HN is some overlap of the two.
The best lesson to take away here is not to delete your portfolio, but to delete all the things you do that aren't moving the needle in a meaningful way towards whatever goal you have, monetary or otherwise.
AP article is more detailed: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-swee...
It also isn't a backup unless it's tested.
Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup. It will mitigate certain drive failures, but is not a backup. Period, end of statement. Controllers will forget their info, OSes will eat their partition tables, and will otherwise ruin your data. If you're not backing up your stuff, to a completely separate system, preferably to a completely separate service, you will lose data. Period.
Why would public repos on github effect my private repo on bitbucket?
Inactive bank accounts to be seized in Australia
Ah. Yeah you have a point but a good dev would at least suggest doing backups of some sort.
There's a pretty interesting discussion of this going on over at Designer News:

https://news.layervault.com/stories/4266-deleted-my-portfoli...
I actually like this quite a lot. I might have to steal some ideas.
Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup.
They aren't interchangeable, but there is a significant amount of overlap in the position, especially when you begin operating at scale. The amount and type of automation required when you're dealing with thousands of servers demands a breadth of knowledge that spans both domains.
I was thinking of Daniel Suarez's Freedom (TM) book when I read this thread.
I'm like the guy you replied to. I make a lot of repos in the course of work, play, and learning. Most of them I'd like to keep around, including history. I could fit everything on one CD; storage is cheap. Github would want $100/month to host those repositories. BB wants nothing, or http://repositoryhosting.com will host them all with backups for $6.

I don't have to think about costs when typing "git init", and I don't have to think about scrubbing passwords/keys/personal information when typing "git push"; repo-count pricing and public by default have high psychological overhead. GH's pricing doesn't work for me, so I don't keep my private repos there. Not a big deal, but I also don't think it indicates there's something wrong with how I work, the value of my code, or how I spend my money.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1254683/why-raid-is-not-a-backup-...
Two mirrored disks is technically a RAID level that can survive failure of one disk. I worked at a company in the late 1990s that had mirrored disks, they would "split" the mirror at the end of the business day, backup to tape from one disk and run nighttime batch jobs on the other disk. Before start of next business day they would backup the batch disk to tape, then resync the mirror.
It's very difficult to have your foot in both worlds and remain current in either. I did for a while, but I'm more firmly planted in the dev world now. So I can say, with some confidence, that they aren't very interchangeable.
"And now we will hear some remarks from Sonny Bono (Disney, R)…"
I think the point is when you're starting off you have to wear many hats, and since HN is a lot about start-ups, you'll see that often here. At a certain size/load I think most people on HN would recognize that you need specific talent sets (and they might not be interchangeable).
Gran Turismo Boss Enters Car Race, Quietly Uses Video Game To Help
As someone with a background in programming, it bothers me when your profession gets left out too :-)
You're right and the cosmos has just proved it. I just went in to check my backups and found some that hadn't been running since Nov. 19th 2012. Well, lesson learnt :) - gotta test those backups!
Where did it say these were mirrored drives?
They actually INCREASE it by making your house TALLER.

the taller and pointier a metal object is, the better a target it becomes for static electricity discharges of all kinds...

I'm not disputing any of the above. But how much more likely or "better a target" does the rod make it? I couldn't find any quantitative measure of the increase in odds. Do you have any? If the odds of a strike are increased by just 1%, that statement by the NWS is still correct. Would you discount the use of a lightning rod because it ever so slightly increases the odds of a strike, when you know it also offers the additional benefits of dissipation and a safe path to ground?
Looks like RAID 1.

You probably expected something like RAID 5, well, you are right, it's not.
> you can add an expert admin to your team for $100-200/mo

Hahaha.
I don't think that's what ashray meant. A backup (as in failover) HD, not an HD that stores backups... Because apparently to add insult to injury, in this case they ignored a failed RAID drive and didn't have backups.
To be fair, I wouldn't trust a novice developer who doesn't get the bare minimum of FP anymore.
Since this seems to be the blog-feedback subthread... I don't have a blog yet, but I've been tinkering with a design for a bit. Feedback is appreciated.

I'm aware that many people hate light-on-dark, and I'm trying to find a solution that makes both me and such users happy.

Also, try resizing it or viewing on a phone.

http://qu4z.net/blog/
Poll: When was the last time you worked for a startup?
At one point, HN was very startup-dominated. I'm curious if/how that has changed as it has grown. This includes your own.
0-1 years ago, but not currently
1-5 years ago
6-10 years ago
11-15 years ago
15 years ago
> You should never, ever provide an environment that stores people's hard work without having professionals who know how to safeguard it.

Even if they do know how to safeguard the data, that doesn't mean that everything else is going to work properly.

I had recently taken over IT after working for six years as a developer. In fact, this happened only a month or so in to my new role.

Our mail server died. Three out of four drives in the hardware RAID 10 failed. I'd been seeing bounces to root@localhost from root@localhost in the nightly reports, but the way things were configured made it nearly impossible to figure out where the mails were coming from. Thanks, Zimbra. We speculate that these were constant alerts from our RAID card notifying us of the impending disaster.

Oh, and the only backups for the mail store were on the machine itself, and in the local Thunderbird installs that half the company used instead of the Zimbra web interface. The machine was in a colo downtown, not local, and running backups over our pathetic little DSL connection was unmanageable.

Both of these things were known problems, both marked high priority, but both months away from being addressed when things went south.

This happened on a Friday. By Monday morning, I'd moved us over to a hosted service, manually sorted all of the mail that hit a catch-all mailbox on a VM I'd set up. By Tuesday, I'd audited every one of our other machines to make sure that mail to root was deliverable (it wasn't in about a dozen machines) and that every machine with hardware RAID had both local and remote monitoring.

Some people, including Directors and C-levels, lost up to ten years of mail. It was the worst IT disaster the company ever faced. But that's not the worst part. No, the worst part is that we're in the IT industry, and knew the entire time that what we were doing was wrong... fixing it had just never been prioritized before, because it wasn't seen as super urgent that it be fixed.

That lesson has been learned.
Hacker News Popularity Algorithm in One Line of Code for Rails/Postgres
> a remote backup of your files and databases

Are you guaranteeing that those files are in a good state when you ship them off? (i.e., flushed and synced to disk)

How about the DBs? Are you backing up the *SQL data files directly (and if so, are you guaranteeing that _those_ are in a good state?), or doing an SQL or other export?

Exactly which files do you need to backup -- user generated content, system configuration, logs, spool files? Do those files give you enough information to rebuild your machine(s) from bare metal? Or have you have documented your setup procedures?

Where are you storing these backups? And how many copies of them, and on what frequency, should you be keeping?

Are you testing your backups? Are you testing your recovery procedures? If not, how do you _know_ they're all working?

---

Sorry for the question dump, but there is a fair bit more to even basic backups than just syncing your filesystem to S3 / tarsnap / The Cloud TM every day.
What really impresses me most about what Robert's done is that he's realized that by selling the outcome that most clients want to hear (higher conversion rates, more leads) instead of what designers tend to emphasize (clean design, HTML5 compliance, etc.) he's pitching himself as an investment, not an expense.

"Clean design" doesn't mean "I'll make more money in the long run than I'm spending on this engagement." Sure, better design can lead to that, but it's a proxy.

Many designers and developers can learn a lot from what he's done. Focus on those outcomes that position ourselves as investment vessels, not expenses. This means realizing that — no matter how passionate we are about our hard-earned skills — it usually means diddly squat to our clients. They just want a positive ROI at the end of the day.

So don't think of proposing to a potential client that you'll write "Ruby code." Rather, figure out how writing Ruby code can get your client more customers, more profit, decreased overhead, whatever and sell THAT.
Does your own count?
I agree with your take: There is really a disease to mistake the notion of having "a perfect website portfolio" with actual marketing
For a monthly service, you generally receive an initial:
- System architecture review
- Backup strategy / DR review
- Security scan, and detailed review
- System monitoring design, and implementation

and on-going:
- 24x7 monitoring, and response to outages
- Server patch management
- Ad-hoc system admin time available to be used on-demand

Many more details, and capabilities, but you get the idea ;)
delete all the things you do that aren't moving the needle in a meaningful way towards whatever goal you have, monetary or otherwise

Crap, guess it's time to delete my HN profile. :-(
This is likely because many of us are part of small startups where the roles are often interchangeable in the early days: the same small engineering team is responsible for both "writing code", backups, infrastructure, and everything else technical.
Python 3 ...
Purchasing a Bitcoin: My Journey
The Best PC to Android video streaming apps
All the coin-op IP was held by Midway, which then went bankrupt and sold off to Warner. Is that still the case or did the Atari stuff land elsewhere?
Agreed, and it goes beyond just clients. This is great advice for life: Know your audience, know what's important to them, and use that to guide your discussion with them.
Agreed, expulsion and felony charges are excessive. A girl like this one can understand the stupidity of her actions without career-killing consequences.
I wonder if it still would've happened if they were SSDs...

I tend to think they're safer due to no moving parts.
I like to think of Github as Facebook, Bitbucket as Google+. I use Bitbucket all the time (and love it), but it doesn't have the social network for whatever reason.
Is it a bit like Spotify for your photos? e.g., originals in the cloud, and streamed/cached in a smaller format to your local device? That I could get behind.
Starkiller: a static type inferencer and compiler for Python
Someone please make the BED of the future
Everybody has a bed (hopefully)

It should be another tool for our daily life, not some thing to which people have to dedicate a morning ritual to fix it's layered nature.

I'm sure someone can make a profit if it makes a bed that doesn't need any kind of daily maintenance.
Blowing things up is fun, and kids should be able to blow things up for fun if it gets them interested in science. But they should do it at a safe distance from behind a blast shield. Still fun, but much safer.
Med student starts website for patients with rare diseases
Files are pretty straightforward, especially in a possibly low volume - startup that cannot afford a dedicated sysadmin stage, not going to address that here.

Simple database backup would be to replicate to a slave (just addressing mysql here for a simple case). Stop replication, backup, restart replication. Easy as that. More complicated scenarios need more complicated setups but hey, we're not talking about saving the last 0.0000001 seconds of data here, this is about losing all your data, from day 1.

Obviously I cannot comment on the specific backup needs for these guys since I don't know their app. However, I can still ensure that an app that is running on a shared hosting environment (meaning - it's not that complex..) has a reasonably good (24 hour snapshot ?) backup potential within a few minutes.

I think it'd have been a decent compromise if they even had a backup from yesterday with a few minutes/hours of effort upfront.

Not saying here that a sysadmin role isn't justified, just that there are a few steps you can follow so that while you don't have a sysadmin, nothing gruesome happens to you.
Even in india, I hadn't seen the kind of comparative advertising which is commonplace on American TV. Very rarely, some products would compare themselves against "the leading detergent" or somesuch.
Alternatively, if you don't host your stuff on gist, but instead use raw text files, I wrote a simple markdown rendering site: http://xwl.me

I find it really useful since I can just type out my docs in dropbox, create the rendered link, then pass that around. It's super easy.
The OP is presenting this as if the objective of every startup is to get fundings or to get acquired. It's not.

The objective should be to help a big number of users with something and make profit.

Funding should be just a tool to help you achieve that if you can't bootstrap your business. If there are VCs who fall for tricky presentations, they'll soon realize that it is not that fun to lose money investing in startups with no future.
It's the major technology that wasn't in TNG, DS9, or Voyager, or the TNG movies... Unless you're arguing that the 2009 movie shouldn't be considered to have any continuity with those, in spite of authorial attempts to ensure that it does? But that doesn't seem to have been your argument. :)
Ok for Star Trek, keep the universe. But the point is still valid: movies (and science fiction) do not propose up to date prediction of the futures.
Is that the average or high profile recent hires?
It's what we do -- so I laugh with you ;)
You will get faster. I sometimes eat with one hand and type with the other. I'd say I get 25 to 30 wpm... which isn't too bad. Mind you, I'm not really trying to improve my one-handed typing speed. You just need to let your left hand gain some dexterity and this will take time.
Personally, as long as they stand out from the text and are in color, I don't much mind. Maybe I've gotten used to non-underlined links because many designs seem to use them.

For what it's worth, on my design I've made the compromise of underlining them on hover.
How is a diagonal length a calculation of area? There is no way to specifically determine area given a diagonal.
Am i the only one who thinks making $30k as a graphic designer freelancing in California for 6 months is incredibly low? In fact less than making at $42k annually as a salaried employee once you count in health care and self employment taxes?

Since when did a blog post about being a barely surviving freelancer qualify for the HN front page?

Sorry for being a bit of a jerk on this, but i don't get it. Maybe he got clients by being good at gaming HN?
Did anyone kind of feel bad that this guy is happy making $30k in 6 months? I think I'm excellent at what I do and think I deserve every dollar I make. However, I can't help but feel bad for people that are making so much less than me just because I might have been a bit luckier in my career path.
a pill that would taste sweet foods bitter and bitter foods (vegetables, basically) sweet would be a blockbuster.
Reminds me of the book How To Win Friends And Influence People. All the way back in 1936, Dale Carnegie was trying to teach people that explaining why they should want something gets far, far better results than explaining what you would like about it.
Actually it's been my experience that SSDs are less reliable than HDDs...
I don't recall ever having seen that in the US.
Node is interesting, and frameworks like Meteor are similarly interesting, but Rails is still dominant and it does not look like Rails will decline greatly any time soon.

Obviously, though, any web developer is going to need to know Javascript. On the client side, use of Javascript frameworks like Ember/Angular are clearly the future.