skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've used a lot of various configuration management systems over the years - CFengine, BCFG2, Puppet and now Ansible.

Two notes-

1)
They all work well for the base cases, and make it much easier to handle hundreds of machines - Being able to say "Ensure libcurl is installed on appserver, and make sure that nagios has these plugins we wrote" is amazing.

But where every system starts to break down, is when we have setups that I have a good reason for, but don't fit into the preconceived notion of how to handle things.

For example, if I want to install a package from source, or if I want to manually wget a .deb from an internal server, then dpkg -i it.

What's nice is that most systems allow some flexibility - You can do 90% of things in the pre-written modules, and break out to do manual commands where necessary.

2)
One thing I'd really like to see, though, is a system which operated with even LESS intelligence.

Rather than using YAML files, or any sort of "user-friendly" config, let me define variables and use pure Python to iterate and execute using them.

I'd love to have people give me pre-written modules as classes I can call, but having that exposed in a way I can get at it with native loops, if/then, etc, would make things a lot more straight forward.

for server in webservers:

server.ensure_perms('/var/lib/somefile',755)

if server.name in qa_servers:

server.ensure_line('/etc/profile','EXPORT RUBY_ENV=QA')

I know I can write modules to do this, but it'd be awesome to do away with the concept of cookbooks, and let me just write everything in a more straightforward language.
How much of our time do we spend managing their servers, security, payment gateways, etc...?
Only 8% Have Started Using Big Data Tech
>The real problem is: comprehensions, folds, monads — WTF? Yet to see anyone from the monad community give a talk to understand monads. It’s typically “you dont need monads” and then the word is used multiple times in the talk. If it’s not important, why mention it so often? Quite often, the FP experience makes normal programmers feel stupid because they don’t break through this terminology barrier. We as a community need to help people break through the barrier of not being formally trained in mathematics for whatever reason (“category theory for breakfast?”) and be productive in FPs.

That seems very inaccurate. Yet to see anyone give a talk on understanding monads? There's dozens of videos of such talks. I don't think anyone in the "monad community" is telling people they don't need monads. It is important, that is why it is mentioned so often. There is a huge focus on helping people learn topics like monads, this isn't an area people are ignoring.
~$130 from ads on YouTube videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover)
The guy I was replying to claimed that one could use it "proficiently" with just those commands. I disagreed, and you didn't contradict that assertion.

> I'd take 6p over Cmd+v-Cmd+v-Cmd+v-Cmd+v-Cmd+v-Cmd+v any time.

Does Cmd+V not repeat? If so, I'll add that to the list of reasons I could never be happy on a Mac. I will happily hold down Ctrl-V for as long as I need rather than trying to think in numbers, yes, absolutely, ESPECIALLY when the number I need is some number between, say 20 and 30. Thinking in exact number of things that I'll need interferes with the (mental) registers I'm using to hold all of the code I'm thinking about. This is also true of the more complex vim commands I've seen, including the ones you've quoted.

Nice trick, though, with the "move var declarations" example you gave. Considering I tend to do the opposite (moving variable declarations to be as late as possible), that particular trick isn't something I'd need, but I see how it could be useful in general.

Thing is, if I had a similar task, I'd create a macro that would do the right thing. There's a skill to creating macros like that, of course, but really learning to use a powerful GUI editor is a life-long experience. It just happens to have a shorter and almost infinitely less painful learning curve at the beginning than vim.

The problem is that some people (such as apparently the developer I was replying to) learn the basics and never any more. That's true of users of all editors, I'm sure. But just because 95%+ of GUI editor users don't ever go beyond the basics doesn't mean that there isn't power hidden under the surface. Maybe more vim users delve deep into its power, statistically speaking. I submit that says more about the kind of person who would use vim than it does about the power of vim relative to (modern) GUI editors.
I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together relatively quickly.

My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon.

I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over the world. I should blog about it.

---

Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about this stuff, leave me your details: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com
Here is a way some of our customers are using OpenVPN on iOS:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/index.php?p=/dis...
To my knowledge, there are 7 companies including OpenVPN who have been granted access to private VPN APIs. I personally use the OpenVPN iOS client for "always-on" phone VPN.
Ansible has two things in its favor (of course, IMHO) when compared to puppet:

It only needs to be installed on the node you're working from, not every node (by default).

Dependency is determined by order in the file, not by a dependency graph.
We're currently number 1/2 for "HR software" (at least on google.co.uk) and so we get a lot of traffic from that. I'm working on getting us to rank for HR Systems which gets just under half the amount of traffic as HR Software.

We have a limit of £30 per day on PPC. It drives traffic to the site but I'm still getting under the hood of whether it delivers real ROI.

We get a lot of interest in our app from the Chrome web store. I think a lot of people overlook that as a (free!) place to market their software. They have a whole section dedicated to HR software and the majority of the time we're featured at the top. We're going to get listed on the Google enterprise marketplace soon too.,

A bunch of other stuff we do includes:

* Advertising on various HR blogs

* Partner marketing - I could write a whole post on just this topic, it's a big undertaking

* Writing guest posts

* We're trialing influads.com at the moment, which is an ad platform. Again I'm not sure if we're getting value from that just yet...

The one thing we've not done to date is press releases. We've performed exactly zero PR for the app, but that will change once we complete a few super cool features we're working on that I feel will set us apart.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Formatting
This would be very useful to make fps maps based on real world places we know, like our neighborhood or make come true a dream of a friend of mine, to play counter strike in a map simulating the university campus
It is quite disappointing. I'm personally very tired of how widespread and acceptable the conspiracy theories have become, everyone's wearing their tinfoil hats and running around screaming like the government's taking away their first born child. I can't say I care anymore. But that's like, my opinion man.
if you like events driven and distributed - that evokes old memories of SDL-88/92 - a product of sober European sleep of reason,a graphical Erlang.
I wonder if people are associating the color options/not metal on the C as making it more teen/younger set oriented? Or just cheaper overall? Quite a few people still find status in the phone they carry.
How are you attracting those visits, ads, word of mouth, etc? I run tubalr.com and have considered ads but am worried it will scare off the users I have. My traffic is a little more than what you're running... but its going down day by day.
Ah yes, you guys refer to it as SMB I believe?
The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager (http://www.holdemmanager.com/). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O
I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss?

http://dressed.so

I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over.

For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page http://drsd.so/15YxDWv the 'shop this look' links earn me affiliate revenue.
This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their
employees first, so that they can keep the best ones.

I agree that employers often act in employees' best interests when there is no more profitable alternative.
I want to echo the recommendations of others: learning about kernels and writing your own would be a lot more valuable.

I'm speaking from experience when I say that trying to provide a userland sucks. You've said elsewhere on this page that you want to write your own shell and such; the problem is that people don't want IanSH, they want bash or zsh or whatever. If you write IanMACS, they'll ask how to run emacs. And I hope the libraries you write can compile Firefox.

Or if you just want to write init replacements, modify how configuration is managed... remember that Ubuntu (and Gentoo, but nobody cares about Gentoo anymore) did a ton of this and everyone I've talked to hates it.

So here's my concerns:

- If you intend to write an entirely new userland, you're going to spend a lot of time replicating existing work, only to have people complain about it.

- If you intend to do a new init, improve configuration management, change how logging works, whatever, your life will be consumed with modifying every program to use your stuff.

If you want to learn about operating systems, I'll echo the others and say write your own kernel and a minimal userland.
I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the visibility. Do you have any tips you can share?

Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.
I like to think of myself as a polyglot programmer and I can't help but disagree with your statement that ASP.NET MVC only looks good because Webforms is so horrible.

1. I am not sure why you have problems testing the wrapper classes. I can't say I've encountered issues unit testing my controllers or other MVC specific components.

2. You test the attributes themselves as you would test any other class. Eg you test that OnActionExecuting etc yield the correct results. On your controller, you just need to test for the presence of the attribute, since you already know that it works as advertised.

3. I cannot comment on your claim about the Layout system, but I have absolutely no idea what you mean with the 'having to hint the view engine'. You need to tell it which parts are inline code, and those parts should be C#. Razor has no interest in your JavaScript code.

4 and 5, again, can't comment on these since I haven't encountered them, even though I worked on a number of sites that had moments of extreme high load. In addition, I have found that the number of 'stuff that just breaks' is minor compared to what I've seen in other frameworks. Sometimes things go wrong, but it really is not as dire as you portray it.

My 2 cents, YMMV.
Why wait until things get bad? That's like being in an area where there's a real tsunami warning and saying "hey, it's calm now ... I'll just wait until the waves get here before I leave!" The waves will come and you'll be caught off guard.

If PayPal buys Braintree it's likely the PayPal culture will rub off and they'll stop being the great company they are now. This is the reason I'd dig my well before I'm thirsty and switch to a company that doesn't appear headed for a beheading by PayPal.
DPI refers to the number of samples in a straight line one inch long, not to the number of samples in a 1 inch square.
Has Google Gone 100% Not PROVIDED & Secure Search?
Thanks for giving it a spin. Yeah - not the best experience I agree. I think the next round of improvements may be settings to toggle desired behavior. Some people may want the menus to remain, others may not, and so on. As always, I'm up for any other thoughts or feature requests!

update: disabled the menu for now, just for kicks.
This article would have been much better without all the hyperbole and foaming at the mouth.
Grid Based is coming back
you need javascript to use the modern web. If you turn it off, stop whining that you've lost functionality. You didn't lose anything, you turned it off.
It's not a BSD kernel. It has the BSD userland, though.
#7 isn't really a subsidy
What types of plugins?
Mach and IOKit and and a gazillion other things are hardly "the same old Unix stuff", if you're talking about the kernel. If you're talking about everything above that level, read Amit Singh's book if you really think there are just splashes of superficial changes at and above the POSIX layer. If you have and you still feel this way, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not saying it's all great, but there's a LOT there.
Did anyone else notice the authors name?
How in the hell is this kind of vaporware garbage on the front page?

Shut up and code.
> So far I have seen no data whatsoever to back up this idea that Asian people prefer gold more than other people in the world.

I too would like to see data that supports the theory that a gold iPhone should be expected to do especially well in China. For example, have other companies benefited from making the same decision for their own product lines?
Looks like you have to ISP program that one, and not even with a standard ISP pinout.
"Cold winters

Not a proven fact, but the cold and dark winters are not exactly encouraging for being outside, something that makes playing games or making games an more attractive alternative."

I have seen a guy on Steam from Norway who had played 2 full years of his time Counter Strike at the age of 15. I was shocked and the winter "downtime" for playing outside was my only explanation ..
It sounds more like Kirk/Linux.
> Which method supports easily templating your configuration files?

But you don't actually use templating. You just copy the file over.

What do you do when you have to edit the configuration file? When it needs to be different on every machine for whatever reason (IPs to listen on, hostnames)? What is the smart way to do that automatically?
It may seem like it at first, and it may actually be depending on your role. I spend a lot of time working on Silly Business Shit and dealing with things in IE-land, in an industry filled with mostly Microsoft customers/users. It's nice to be able to work on both sides on the same machine.
I recall the education session I took at IBM about patentability. If the core idea of their patent is what you have described, I don't think it is patentable. Their method is very intuitive. A setting where teacher sits in the middle on stage and students on each side can be used to deliver anything, not limited to yoga. The protection of such patent, if granted, will be over-generic.

As a patent author (the companies I worked for owns the patents) and an open-source software advocate, I now disagree with software patent.

As a yogi, I disagree with yoga patent.

I can understand online education is a tough business and where they are coming from. I can't help feeling a bit sad about exericising yoga being a pure business practice. I wouldn't feel strongly about a slaughter house patent something like this.

If someone do have a need to patent something related to yoga, please make it more 'genius'.

Lastly, congratulations! Only 3 months and you are already on someone's radar. That means you are doing something right.
Object creation and casting in side your views? Maybe you are just putting too much logic in your view. Use interfaces as your model for partial views and reuse becomes a no brainier.
Live face regonition in Processing
Please do blog about it. Freelancing while traveling is a concept that a lot of us are really drawn to, but most of the current blogs focus on the travel and only briefly mention the freelancing aspect. Maybe if you focused a bit more on the business side of things you could find a niche within the blogosphere.
The thing about throwing rich people in jail is that while they're in prison, and after they get out, they're still rich. They just have lost all pretense to "reputation" and are now infinitely more willing to use their money to enact revenge and illegal means to that end.
Your book site uses the same theme as an old book of mine no longer selling! Nice landing page though isn't it? :)

Also, my latest book sells nowhere near that amount. How are you marketing if you don't mind me asking?
> it's harder to get a high skilled job in the cheaper parts

that's true for any place of the world, including the US, that's why parent analogy was made with SF
You know, what I would love to know is how you attracted the initial audience. This stuff is always so easy to make, but my past attempts never really got enough traffic boost. I'm wondering how you got over the 'plateau' (which in my experience seems to be ~1000 visitors a day.
How did you break into this industry? I've done random work as a freelancer for a few different adults sites, but I've always felt like running my own was the real "money shot" as far as passive income goes. Can you elaborate on how you got started and how you keep an edge in such a competitive space?
Thanks for this clarification, as I'm used to SME meaning Subject Matter Experts (which also applies to the product).

BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.
Yea, we have a global public IaaS cloud that puts a real Cisco firewall / load balancer in front of your subnet(s): https://nacloud.dimensiondata.com/
Telling people that you should blog makes it actually less likely that you will actually do it. Read that on some psychology website once. ;)
While pure python executions would be nice (and are possible[1]), your examples are easily represented in the yaml files as well:

---
- servers: webservers
- tasks
- file: mode=0755 path=/var/lib/somefile
...
---
- servers: qa_servers
- tasks
- lineinfile: dest=/etc/profile line='EXPORT RUBY_ENV=QA' state=present

[1] http://www.ansibleworks.com/docs/api.html

[EDIT]: Dropped names from tasks to make examples clearer.
Might want to wrangle the HTML formatting before it becomes too unwieldy! This looks great. Would be nice to know how our messages are secured, as well.
Same name, different guy.
Err what? Are you not confusing averages with medians?
The chrome web store is a great idea. Does the chrome app provide any additional functionality? Or is it primarily a link to the web app?
Arch Linux strikes perfect balance between usability and learning. I am looking forward to what you have to say.
Where is Lithuania constitution?
New York crackdown on fake online reviews sees 19 companies fined
SteamOS
Graphs of IMDb user ratings of Breaking Bad episodes
Nuevo Cloud: Continuous Snapshots
In addition to being totally unsuitable for hn, there is a bunch of funny math here.

First, dividing the total corporate welfare by the number of families and claiming that the result is what an "average family pays" is highly misleading. Most importantly, because of the progressive nature of our tax system, the median family pays much less than an average share of the tax burden.

Second, business incentives granted by localities in the form of, say, reduced property taxes, are not necessarily "costs". If a city has an empty field, and incentivizes MegaCo to build a factory there with $50M in tax breaks, but the resulting jobs and remaining taxes end up being worth $50M, then the city has gained not $0, but $50M, assuming the field would have otherwise remained empty. Obviously there are questions of how effective different incentives are and whether they're ultimately worthwhile, but simply adding up the dollar value of incentives and calling them taxpayer costs is silly.

I could keep going, but enough. commondreams.org links do not belong on hn. If I had a flag button I'd use it, but I lost it during the Great Snowden Hunt.
Or they like the way it looks.
> That's exactly my point. What if it wasn't a few lines of code, but something with a hefty investment in, then Google comes in with their own and just puts them top of the list because they can. Users don't get the choice because Google prioritise their own.

Even with the google thing that does the function at the top, users have the choice. If it was a "I'm Feeling Lucky" style redirect (but always to a Google service with no search results page) whenever the query fit a format that keyed a Google-provided service, then the user wouldn't have the choice, but giving you a thing that provides what you think you want as well as links to other pages that might either do what you want or have the information you want doesn't deny you the choice of using those other pages instead of Google's tool.
Not really, no. All three were legitimately respected industrialists before getting hit with the villain stick, and are motivated only by money and power. In the one film that involves actual ideological terrorists, the villain makes them his patsies and then has them all killed to tie up loose ends.
Run a consulting firm. Make about $250,000 per month.
form builders, mostly
Problem is sometime platforms differ a bit, so it's better to patch the config file.

For instance (I know there's vagrant and stuff), I develop on a Mac but deploy on linux. My sed handles that pretty well.
He's thinking of averages vs. median, but using the wrong words. You know what he means.
> Silly, lazy, javascript-loving google, it used to work just fine without javascript

It used to not be interactive, either, yet now it is. JavaScript used to not be a core web technology, yet now it is.
Maybe it's me, but I found Puppet very difficult to get started with. To the point where I would happily use a less capable system that was easier to learn.
Since when is 'mean' not a reasonable way of averaging fungible goods like tax funds? They're directly comparable in that corporate welfare and a $6,000 annual check to every household in the US are directly competing goods.
Obscure APIs in iOS 7: Smile Detection, Speech Synthesis & QR Code Scanning
Thanks for the info! Did you ever consider also selling it via a couple of ebook sites?
My question exactly. Ubuntu and KDE are supposed to have nice tablet features. Running either one of them, emacs, and git are my version of Office.
Pretty much any idea I have becomes an available product about 6 months later.