skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another "old person" chiming in...

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

Not really, and not in a negative sense. I did have an experience once where my boss sent me out to help one of our younger consultants on an engagement because, as he put it, the client "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". IOW, my presence was largely not needed in the technical sense, but I was there to contribute "gravitas" and comfort to the client.

Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

I reject your distinction between "trendy" and "entrprisey". Enterprise software and systems rock, and there's significant overlap at the systems level anyway. You may see Scala, Hadoop, Mahout, Mesos, Spark, S4, Clojure, etc. as "trendy, non enterprise" technologies, while I'm spending my time thinking of ways to use that stuff in the enterprise. :-)

Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

I have never had, and will never have, any real desire to be in "management" at someone else's company. Now, being a founder/CEO, that's a different story. I love the idea of building a company, and building the kind of company I always wanted to work for. And I've always been fascinated by marketing and some other aspects of the business world. So for me to now be a founder and in a position to run a company, is a real blast in many ways (in other ways, it's a long, hard, tough, painful, slow slog).
I was really hoping "making more" would be followed with "love". Money's great too, though. :)
I prefer to envision one having a house-boy, or stream-boy, if-you-will that you can send with the rope and pulley.

"Here boy, affix this pulley to that far tree."
Yes I agree. I struggled with how to display the details for different apps in a small amount of space and used carousels. I'll keep iterating on it.
US Gov Sues The Art Institutes for $11 Billion Fraud
51 here. Never really learned how to code, though I always wanted to. I fooled around with AREXX on the Amiga and Python later on, but that's about it.
I think it is because they live in a world where secrets are to be kept no matter the cost in the end. This article is just another step in the progressive revelations that have totally destroyed their credibility yet they do not care.
> If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation?

I wouldn't, but mostly because x-ray'ing is harmful to health.
Linux and MacOS only right now. We have windows on the roadmap.
Juju is a great project and you guys are way ahead of the game but the AGPL licensing is problematic for proprietary services built on that platform.
Even if you don't do something like that a modern C compiler will do all sorts of things behind your back. Like removing null checks[1] or pointer overflow checks[2]

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2009-1897

[2] http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2008-1685
... and, happily, the accumulation of wisdom to direct the remaining sharpness ...
The Federator - WSJ 8-bit game
Sigh. There's a saying about closed-source crypto...
I don't know what caused 9/11, but I know what'll cause the next one: that the first one didn't get investigated, well, not seriously anyway. The way it's now, 9/11 is more an implanted trigger than an argument.
Pointers are easy when everything is working right.

It's when there are bugs in code which uses pointers that the weird can kick in and really give you a headache.
Weathermob wants to be the Waze for weather
You're asking who would pay more for dotCloud vs. DIY on Amazon who themselves have a huge markup on their servers against traditional hosting?
It's simplistic but not shallow.

People are in general far too trusting of commercial labels like "diet" and "fresh" when they should be making healthy choices about their companies they buy from instead of the products.
I don't think those values are always reliable.
Funny stereotypes on each neighborhood in San Francisco...pretty clever.
More like "I'll use the terrorism label when it's to my advantage"
I'd also like to add that we're looking for beta users to try the platform and give me feedback so please contact me - rsingh@distelli.com.
Stacking the Deck by Scripting
You did not read the study I cited, because it clearly states that only 8 options were given to participants.
As someone who practically lives in Emacs running in Cygwin, I can second this, with some caveats: there are tradeoffs. Windows FS access and process forking are still dog-slow, even in native apps. To add to that, there are things I can't run in the native version of Emacs (w3m-el comes to mind), but you trade occasional lockups in Cygwin Emacs. Compare Linux where I run the same setup for Emacs for months if not years with no problems; even if Cygwin Emacs stays up that long, I will eventually (usually every week or so) be forcibly rebooted for Windows updates. If I never have to work with proprietary software again (especially Microsoft products), it will be too soon.
Silly question- do any of these comments count as perjury? If you say you're not doing $thing, then it's later revealed that you indeed did $thing, then you come out and say "Yeah, we do $thing"

How.. how do we not penalize and punish people for this? When they make knowingly false statements in official government capacity?
> Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?

Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it.

I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.
> It seems to me that MojoTech's culture is 'look at us, we're superheroes, look at the problems we're solving, they're ultra-difficult.'

What is wrong with that? If they want to attract people who enjoy finding difficult problems and solving them more power to them. What you see as easy money they might see as grunt work getting in the way of what they enjoy.

The industry needs many different cultures. The practical people who grab easy money when they see it should find a company that does so. People with a lot of pride (you may argue excessive) and think certain tasks are beneath them should a company with simiar views. It might hurt the bottom line but if they are fine with that because it allows them to be more selective I can empathize.
Nice, thanks for verifying that. Was a longshot, but might as well rule out everything possible.
Shocking. SHOCKING
I was thinking mods should have the ability to kill individual threads of discussion in the comments.
System requirements? This is always one of the first things I look for.

Mostly because marketing speak is often far more grandiose than reality...

"Easily Deploy your Code to Any Server".

Really? Any server? There are a lot of operating systems in this world.
Pretty sure free markets are supposed to allow for contracts. "No penalties allowed" is clearly government regulation (one I happen to appreciate).
> The problem is that companies like HTC charge the same price Apple does for the iPhone for what is a lower quality of product, in my experience.

HTC charges a similar price for a lower quality phone that has a bigger display, more RAM, higher resolution display, more internal storage, external storage capability, etc, etc.
Firstly, I like the idea. Its a great application.

At first glance I got a feeling that the website design is incomplete. The hovering on the menu seems a bit too sharp. I am no designer so I am not sure what the exact terms to be used are. I just think you should maybe put some work into the interface and it would look much more appealing.(I am just talking about the look and not the app itself). Good Luck.
Must Win: Design & Development Service Subscriptions
KeyChain.
I agree, we have very much approached the problem from that of service administration/management rather than the "build a PaaS"approach. But, I think the "big problem" behind building a heroku style PaaS, is not getting simple scripted deployment to a container -- it is managing relationships between applications, databases, message queues, and other connected services, and I think that is where Juju could be useful to your project.

I'd also be happy to talk more about this any time.
The article focuses on how their recommended device identifier, the Bluetooth MAC, will become inaccessible in iOS 7, just like the UDID did in a past update.

I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of fraud detection, and I wish the article had delved into why a physical device ID is necessary for it. What is the advantage of the MAC over, say, a hidden ID created randomly by the app on first launch?

There's an obvious difference in that the MAC would allow you to correlate identifiers across multiple apps (which is also a privacy weakness), but the given example apps aren't particularly likely to be used in concert.
Yes, that reply was only regarding the particular phrase "100% time", and the very broad concept of self-directed work.
The popup that overlays the blog post in this site does not disappear when I hit the 'X'.

Fuck me, right?
How do you handle password changes? Download the encrypted ECC private key, decrypt it with the old password, re-encrypt it with the new one, then upload it again? Is there an easier way?
Major Tumblr Security Flaw Discovered
I think it's because you're looking at it like this:

1) BCC (And the AB testing, SEO, etc)

2) Appointment Reminder

3) ???

4) Mentoring / coaching / training

The part 3 was consulting, where people paid him money for 4, but presumably there's some NDAs prohibiting write ups the same as BCC. Appointment Reminder has always been a bit more secretive because of Patrick deciding between taking investment or bootstrapping. By not knowing the middle you think it's a huge change, but it's really not.

Ramit Seethi you can look at a similar way. How did he jump from a book in 2009 to having several products on what basically amounts to life coaching (dream job, earning money on the side, resume improvements, etc)? In only 3 years since the book he's convinced individuals to drop $2-15k on the promise that he can help them get a better job. To me that seems like a bigger jump than what Patrick has done, but I don't know the middle.
Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society (2007)
This is one of my favorite foreign films.
Your text animation doesn't work well on mobile (iOS Safari). When you scroll down, the text keeps bouncing up and down, due to the resize of the text (1 vs. 2 lines).
Think older, think humanity.
Yes, almost certainly. The problem is that the government which endorses these programs is the same government that decides who to prosecute.

This is why nobody involved with the Bush torture programs was ever prosecuted, not then and not now (Obama: "look forward, not backward").
That's not how justice works. Unless you're found with a dead prostitute covered in blood, you don't owe anything to anyone if you're already powerful.
God if you had an original unopened bottle of that it would be worth a fortune.
From direct experience: you can't group by age. Some older engineers are douchebags. Some are the nicest people you've ever met. Some are incredibly talented. Some aren't.
The system requirements are only that you be running linux and python 2.4 or greater on your server.

I agree that it sounds too grandiose but I would love the opportunity to have you as a beta users and demonstrate that are claims are not marketing speak and smoke and mirrors.

I'm a developer myself and I don't like marketing speak.
From a IA point of view, I believe blog should be after How it Works.

Sign Up|How it Works|Documentation|Blog

And the Twitter follow button in the main navigation is really confusing.

Digging the concept!
Thanks for your feedback. We have a lot of work to do and we'll iterate on the site design! Your feedback and detailed thoughts would be welcome (rsingh@distelli.com)
Seems promising. Kind of like a more flexible Heroku.
This author has an incredibly solipsistic worldview:

Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite
these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to
prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time
would have been willing to align themselves actively with
the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy
in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part
to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the
U.S.

After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of
alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples
gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic
development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is
glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has
fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth,
leaving little room for concern with past ideals.

The "past ideals" promoted by Mao included the mass murder of tens of millions of Chinese and almost thirty years of terror and poverty, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution. Not even a single mention or nod to this in the paragraph, which would have you believe that a mass murderer who gave lip service to the US civil rights movement is preferable to a man who brought a billion people out of darkness.

One might even call such a view - that all that matters is a person's professed attitude towards a black American - culturally imperialist. As the author notes in passing, post-Deng China is substantively doing a lot more for people of African origin via trade than Maoist China ever did. But all that matters are the "past ideals". A modern expression of the modern American religion: thou shalt not be saved through works, only through lip service towards MLK alone.
Why doesn't it work to use the hostname of the database server, instead of the IP address?
Jahar's World
Yes, but it shares that property with a Zeppelin, therefore it is not a defining quality of a Blimp.
I didn't think of that. Now that I do, I agree you're right. I'll move that link over to the end.
At the end of the day, both are viable investment alternatives, right? REITs provide liquidity, but you pay for that liquidity through lower returns and less control over those investments.

Our structure provides you the control to choose which assets you invest in, can provide substantially higher cash returns than REIT yields and allows the investor control over where they put their money.

In addition, our structure requires a substantial amount of money co-invested by the real estate operator so their interests are financially aligned to maximize the value of that asset as well. The better the asset performs, the better we all do.

-ah
Yeah, CF is a very powerful toolkit (as you mention with the API), but part of the power seems to come coupled with the complexity. I've seen some scripts/documentation to install on Openstack (this is the best so far http://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/06/deploying-bosh-cloud-foun...), but still, it's a huge, huge pain.
I think you quoted me and posted in the wrong place.

What about a system that had no data retention but could actively scan and compare to a list of plates that had warrants, Amber Alerts or BOLO's. Surveillance is only going to get easier with tech. Rules of use is what is important.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Google collects information on wireless networks for a very specific purpose - determining location to speed up or replace GPS. Skyhook Wireless is another company that sells the information obtained from wardriving.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en

Are you saying this service was shut down despite all indications to the contrary, or are you disputing the method used to collect this data?
Thank the both of you, that explained everything. I'll check it out ;)
You have a little bit of a problem with the beating heart animation -- it's jumped out of it's container and is on the border, and I'm running chrome 28
Yikes! Thanks for letting me know! I'll fix it.
Chances of me implementing this correctly: 0%.

Chances of me implementing a boolean on/off switch for the plaintext passwords correctly: 99%
The words "[not] under this program" are crucial.
Is Python 3.3 ok?
Just to add to everyone's knowledge: this Street View wifi snooping was a) three years ago, b) accidental, and c) only known by the public because Google voluntarily revealed that it had been doing it (and immediately deleted all of the collected data).
Cybercriminals Selling Tools to Trojanize Android Apps
What do you call the iPhone 4 or 4S then? Flagship-but-hundreds-of-dollars-less?
Please contact me - rsingh@distelli.com - and I can set you up with an account.
I think the definition of subscriber could do with some definition - presumably it means the number of sims as this thread suggests prepaid is the majority of the market. If this was applied to me, I'd count as about 8.
Looks totally great! We're using pingdom and were considering using their status page, but it is not customizable enough. For example, we want to show availability, but not response-time. This seems much more flexible. Will definitely look into this.

A couple of questions/comments:

* On the demo/video on the home page when you add an incident, the popup modal says "Report Report New Incident" (report appears twice)

* I'm not sure I understand the pricing, even after reading the FAQ. It says "What is a subscriber?
A subscriber is somebody who gets email, SMS, or webhook notifications about your page. They can sign up to be auto-opted-in to all notifications, or on an incident-by-incident basis. Note that notifications are optional.". Can I have a status page, but limit how many subscribe to it? or not allow any subscribers at all? Does RSS count towards the subscriber limit??

Otherwise, great job guys. Will try to give this a spin soon.
HN does not include the proper metadata to indicate an RSS feed. If

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Hacker News"
href="http://news.ycombinator.com/rss" />

was added to the <head> of the homepage, the discovery would probably work better.
Love the concept. I think the main area with the white rects is too busy. You want to have fewer hooks, that users can dig in to. Signed up for the beta!
I do the same thing, but with Truecrypt and Dropbox.
You said 'we' but I thought you were working on this alone?
Here in Portugal, we have 124 active cellphone plans per 100 people, and the numbers are published by a governmental agency, not the carriers.

It's not that odd: even I, who barely makes calls, have two SIM cards (on a dual-SIM phone), for personal and work related calls. My teenage brother has three (one for each carrier).

Almost everyone uses prepaid, so there's really no cost associated with getting another SIM card - you just pay for what you use.
Unfortunately no. Its python 2.x only. Python 3 is on the roadmap.
You just have a signup for beta button that you are using to collect email address instead of a full pricing page. I understand why people tend to do their for their first version. You're scared that not everything works yet, and you don't want to take the time to setup the payment system if no one even wants it.

However, this does a disservice to you and to me.

To you:
You don't really know if people want to buy your product or not. Collecting email addresses is way easier that collecting money. It's also not nearly as exciting. Don't remove the option for me to just give you just my email address, but also let me give you money.

You'll know I really want your product that way. Also, initial customers are probably more forgiving that you imagine. Worst case scenario, you can just refund the money.

To me:
Without the pricing page, I can't really tell what your product does. For all the description and "how it works" pages in the world, nothing really tells me what you are selling like your pricing page.

Companies tend to charge where they are adding value. If I can see what you are charging for, I can see where you are going to add value to my company. Are you charging per server, per deploy, per employee, per user? Without the pricing page, I don't understand what I'm buying.
People are (slightly?) less likely to do the stupid "let's generate this structure by gluing strings together" thing that produced the need for liberal Atom and RSS parsers.

(But yes, I agree that "turn this already-existing thing into JSON just because" is a stupid trend.)
Its only perjury if you're testifying under oath.
Developers - What are your biggest Devops holdups, issues and headaches?
Basically, what are some things that you find yourself doing that are completely unrelated to coding/development?

I'm referring things such as;

Workflow: setting up your dev environments, documentation, integration, build and issue tracking systems

Infrastructure: setting up your repeatable server deployments (Puppet, Chef via EC2/RAX, etc). Then managing those servers (maintenance, security, optimization, break-fix)

Biz stuff: Marketing, accounting, websites

General research: Choosing all of the above- EC2? Rax? Jira? Mantis?

I'm really interested in those of you who work with multiple developers, but even singular developers- I'd love to heard your greatest hardships that you find wasting your coding time.
It's interesting to see that in all three polls, after the 30 mark, the number decreases significantly. Why is that?
I like the idea of getting off Heroku and moving to something more like this.

How would sidekiq/delayed jobs worker instances be deployed using a setup like this? I glanced through the docs section and didn't see that.
Likewise. Did a double take before I saw the "l". Probably going to be a common mistake.
Well, it is fairly easy to stumble across Eric S Raymond's How To Be A Hacker if one has any interest in writing software (or just FOSS in general). At the end of that piece, he links to a couple of Paul Graham's essays, which in turn link to his other essays. HN is the topic of at least a couple of PG's essays so it would surprise me if sooner or later someone reading said essays didn't visit HN at least once.
RSS is already extensible; the eXtensible in "XML" actually works as designed for formats like RSS. You'd have to name a specific feature you needed to actively replace for this to be justified. (You may be able to, but it's not as easy as just handwaving.)
I would hope that they wouldn't do it that way; they should be sending a GET with If-Modified-Since. The same result, making half the requests.
We at OpDemand wish the Flynn crew the best of luck. I expect more Docker-powered PaaS's to sprout up, so I'm glad Solomon and the dotCloud crew are focused so heavily on interoperability.

OpDemand will be releasing a very similar open-source project called Deis in the next few weeks. It's an open-source PaaS powered by Docker & Chef, with a Heroku-inspired workflow.

We're busy ironing out a few final issues, putting together documentation, quick-start guides, tutorials, etc.. but we are very close to launching our public 0.1.0, which will allow you to deploy your own private PaaS providing you complete control over hosting, backends, proxies and more.
I love this idea :)
> The author of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, reminded the government that the act was up for renewal in 2015. The provisions for phone metadata collection, he warned, have "got to be changed … otherwise in a year or year and a half you're not going to have it any more."

Wait? That's the threat? Shouldn't they have to prove that they have sensible "provisions" before they get to keep doing it? Or how about, we are going to take immediate action and you come back to us when you have sensible provisions.