skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read the article he doesn't say those things should be taught as CS degrees. The exact phrase is "They're far less inclined ... to spend their time" which implies what they're doing above and beyond their formal education.

Would you hire a graduate who wasn't inclined to spend their time learning about version control, bug tracking or release management systems (all of which are part of the ITIL standard) ?

A lot of ITIL isn't that much different from what you find in Code Complete or the Pragmatic Programmer books on deployment. Just because you prefer your buzzword to their buzzword, doesn't mean it's any more important.
If Facebook exposes your account information to everyone when your friends tag you in their photos, and you have tagged photos set private, that's a definite leak of data.

However, if memory serves, Facebook does not link back to your account if friends tag you in their photos, and you have tagged photos marked as private.

I may misunderstand your problem, but I fail to see where Facebook is leaking any information.
I have a simple rule.

As soon as any invoice is one day late, all work stops until the account is up to date. There is no excuse for not paying your bills.

I mean it.
How does this compare technically with Microsoft's Photosynth project? http://photosynth.net/ ... looks like they're already doing what Google proposes to do.
Ask YC: Whats the Best Shared Hosting around?
Currently, I can't afford a dedicated or a Virtual Dedicated box, but I need something to speed up my site.

I currently host with Godaddy and over all during peak times they just seem slow to me.

I would like to speed it up a bit. What do you suggest?

P.S. - I require a windows box.
I love that you did this. Good work. I intend to use it, and look at the code as well.

It does raise ethical concerns. Obviously, the folks aren't selling any advertising, if we're accessing their site content another way...

Which, as you correctly state, is exactly what RSS already allows. I've never understood why people put RSS feeds on their blogs. It's insanity. Give people a way to NOT come to my site and view my ads. Fine if ads are not your model, but for 95% of blogs, ads are the model. RSS is a fad, and eventually, saner heads will prevail.

Until that time comes, as you say, you're presenting the same info that an RSS feed does, but with the benefit of having been ranked and vetted by the HN community first.
Aaaaargh! Did the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers just call HTML a "Web programming language"? It's a common mistake, I know, but these guys should know better.
The cops wouldn't have been able to do much, and they probably wouldn't have cared. I once found an 80gb iPod on the street in Brooklyn - brand new. I took it to a cop and he just said "congratulations".
I downvote more than upvote because it's easier to pick on one or two comments to downvote than tens to upvote.
amazing story, I wonder if service like this could be used on other devices.
Mibbit access to freenode disabled and new freenode webchat
Monty Crawl: if you pick the 1st door and the host opens the 3rd door, you have 100% chance to win if you switch.
Because botmasters didn't have access to webserver software before?

Sounds like slow-news-day scaremongering.
Sure.

It's the main subject of Chapter 6 of "The Man Who Loved Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth", by Paul Hoffman. He quotes Andrew Vázsonyi (who introduced the problem to Erdős) and Ronald Graham (who provided the proof that finally convinced Erdős).
By whom? Nirmal, who created the tool, but whose work could be easily copied? Google, who have no control over which feeds people choose to subscribe to? Me, for just installing it?

Actually, I might well prefer just the first paragraph and/or the top 3 three comments - I don't know yet whether I want the full articles. However, I don't think it's as cut-and-dried as you say.

These debates will continue until online publishers come up with a convenient and affordable micropayment system. I'm not opposed to advertising per se, but I am against visual the clutter it often entails. And sorry to HN designers, but the same applies to a lot of websites. Less is more.
How Usenet Got Me a Job (in 1994)
Well, developing doesn't necessarily mean substistence farming. They're just developing beyond the rest of us.

On the other hand, this is probably one of the last countries in the world where you still pay more than 50 euro's per month for 1Mbps ADSL.
A woman, like a black hole...
It means I get to pay for their computations. The intent is to bill them later on that service and other services.
AMI ?
I stopped reading after "Before the iPhone, cell phone cameras were an add-on, something that you used in a pinch when you didn’t have anything else."
It sounds like your talk was partly a sales pitch... in which case distributing it for free actually creates value for you (in terms of this one aspect). By this interpretation, they were reciprocating (in the only way they could, given they have no budget).

"Technical skills make a technical success, but business skills make a business success" - business skills being about how to make your product "easy to buy". For example, a higher price can make it easier to buy, especially if it fits into a category of products that the organization is used to buying - and in the way they are used to buying them. It's part of "positioning" it in the customer's mind. This is all simply seeing it from the customer's point of view. These things don't directly improve your product, but they do help to communicate it to other people, which is also intrinsically worthwhile.

The economy is bad and perhaps also comp sci is finally ending its multi-decade growth phase. There's always a place for anyone who creates value, but perhaps the days of "it's raining soup grab yourself a bucket" are over, and a different strategy is needed (Disclaimer: this is a guess. I'm not yet sufficiently deluded to think I can predict the future).

More generally, I think I have had exactly your dilemma (and still do). I don't have a solution, but perhaps some camaraderie. It's the philosophy of doing whatever does the most good. It feels good (and I think it is good). I believe that if you create value, someone will work out how to pay you. It's a wonderfully inspiring and freeing philosophy - and it makes me feel happier and feel like a pure, innocent person. Also, people want to help you. And for me, it was also inspired by Bucky (his epiphany by the lake - which some spoilsport pedant has apparently debunked as the exact place for it, claiming it's more like a constructed founder's story. Anyway).

The disillusionment for me was in open source: for a developer tool I wrote, people took the help I provided, but didn't give anything back [1] . I did have sales [2], but because there was no pressure to pay, huge organizations would take 3 months to pay [3]. I really hated waiting for the other shoe to drop [4].

Today, I believe that if I create value, it is OK for me keep some of that value. This seems to be right and true... but it doesn't make me happy, and it isn't inspiring or freeing.

I'm currently working on a patentable enterprise developer tool, that I plan to initially sell at a high price to large organizations. As the tool becomes more general, I will lower the price, until eventually it is cheap enough for anyone to afford. I think this is good, and sensible... but it also makes me feel a little sick at heart. So I don't know the answer, but hopefully I've offered some camaraderie. Do let me know if you work out an answer! :-)

[1] which is part of the open source deal - I just didn't like it
[2] dual licensing, like Ghostscript
[3] to be fair: everyone who said they'd buy it, did eventually buy it
[4] I'd much prefer they didn't tell me they were going to buy it,
so I didn't have to worry for 3 months.
But that's tangential.

Maintenance is tangential? Most of the work across all of the fields of programming is probably maintenance.

If you are doing exploratory programming, what does unit testing get you?

It gets you the ability to change your mind and do deep reworkings of very complicated systems with a higher degree of confidence. It's most valuable for maintenance, while duck typing, however.

How can you write the tests before the code if you don't have a spec to work from in the first place?

You end up doing better interface design at a finer granularity than you would have to otherwise. It slows you down, but requires greater discipline in terms of good architecture, so you end up saving time that way. Test first is really just design-up front, but with 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more iterations.

This is best for duck typing languages. Would I unit test in Eiffel, which supports Design By Contract? Doubt it.

you don't need to wait for the unit tests to run on your nightly build!

In the original Extreme Programming, one ran unit tests before checking in any code!
http://books.google.com/books?dq=ron+graham+1998+erdos+bayes...
Hostgator, though it's Windows Hosting is coming soon.
Looks like http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/ seems to be doing that. I need to go through the getting started page.

Thanks.

Igor.
tbh it's unbelievable that the html renderer and the UI were coupled in the first place.
Architects have a subtly different but related problem.

They bill at the end of the month, and the standard, as everywhere else, is to send Net 30 invoices. So it can be 30 days before the client is officially "late", by which time they've done 2 months of free work. In these uncertain economic times, a lot of clients are actually going bust without making a lot of noise, so architects end up exposed to losing 2 months' worth of fees.

There's an even bigger "free work" problem for them, though: a lot of their work is speculative - responses to "competitions" which other architects are applying for too. Whoever wins the competition does get the job, usually, but that still leaves out a bunch of people who worked for free to submit designs for that competition (and often elements of their submissions might make it into the final design, based on client requests, after the competition is lost).

Hard times to be an architect...
The PS3 has a graphics card. SPE's can be used to preprocess some information to increase graphics quality or to crunch numbers for AI code, or do any number of things. The problem is you can either code for the lowest common denominator between the systems and mostly ignore SPE's or build a game focusing on the PS3.

PS3 has:

Cell@3.2Ghz, yada yada
RSX 550 MHz, 300+ million transistors, ~200 GFLOPs

PS: The RSX has a higher GFLOPs than the Cell but it's only really usefull for specific graphics operations.
Open Atrium is an open source intranet package built on Drupal
I totally agree that you've described the ideal.

Unfortunately, with the UI and people's natural tendencies, it's unavoidable that votes be used for quick-and-easy agreement/disagreement.

And there's a certain alluring efficiency to it: once there's a couplet of opposed viewpoints, just weigh in with your "vote". That's what "votes" are for in a democracy, right?

The habit of only using downvotes to signal disagreement when a comment is highly-rated helps a bit, but isn't universally applied and and throws time-of-vote in as a confounding signal. (There are comments that I will upvote if <0, abstain if 1-2, and downvote if >2 -- so it all depends on when I see it. With others doing the same, totals are more reflective of 'the last few voters' than the community.)

These could be addressed by UI changes. One idea I've plugged before would be to offer a separate axis of voting which is explicitly agree/disagree -- so people aren't tempted to use promote/demote that way.

Agreement scores could also be hidden until a user votes -- so each vote is independent. This makes more sense on a pure agree/disagree scale than promote/demote. PG clearly wants to discourage demote piling-on; he first tried through suasion and when that failed now enforces in software the -8 floor. And discouraging piling-on makes sense: demotion-votes sting with a sense of community censure, while disagreement is just a normal healthy part of conversation. My ideal comment would be a +50 on the promote-scale, and a -50 on the agree-scale. It means people appreciate having heard something they disagree with, so some novelty/signal/thought is occurring.
I was an Inform hacker in 1998.

One thing I was proud of was having NPC's that took commands like the player. All I did was change a 'open' action so that it took an NPC argument (or whatever). The NPC really would move, and the door would really open.

Also, you could 'become' an NPC and play as that character.

It was a hack to the library so I never bothered submitting it to Graham Nelson.

However, my friend pointed me to Inform 7 the other week, and I saw they've put player-equivalent NPCs and actions into the code base! I'm glad about that!
Like he really means what he says -- first it was the employee first bull, now this -- so get the f*ck out of the US. None really cares about you and your company.
techie? what exactly are your skills, may I ask?
I doubt Erdős was really confused. The Monty Hall problem is complicated because usually the person explaining it tries to make it complicated by leaving out necessary information. Specifically, they often leave out that Monty always opens an empty door and his choice of which empty door to open is done at random. Without those facts (which some but not all people take for granted) there is not enough information to solve the puzzle.
I'm hoping we will see an open source hardware revolution in many different area's (consumer electronics is long overdue). It's so much easier when you don't have to hack the bios.
Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head and It Is Ugly
to me, this person's rant comes across as whining more than anything else. it reminds me of the old quote about theory being the same as practice, but only in theory. being in a similar situation, i'd counsel her to recognize that being a professional developer involves much more than writing code. sure, we were taught to espouse the pursuit of code nirvana when first learning to program, but when tossed into the world of industry, that pursuit is quickly replaced by pragmatism and understanding that not doing something right doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it wrong... i'd keep going, but at this point i'd just be rehashing edw519's points... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=669163
Furthermore, you are alerted of any tagging and you can choose to untag.

Some of us choose to keep the photos where we look sunburned and drunk tagged. Some of us untag everything that's not pristine. What's nice about Facebook is they make it easy to play it either way.
apology for what?

He's providing a free service that you tried and didn't like.
optional, but on by default so most will end up using it.

They're betting on laziness and ignorance. That's a smart bet! They probably learned it by watching the US. ("No one's ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public.")

I joke with my girlfriend and my friends that my current relationship is fated to last, because it's based on a force even stronger than love: procrastination.
I'm not sure life-size wall stickers would be good swag :)
It does have difficulty with this, check the mailing list. Just because something using s-expressions doesn't mean you can override functions in a namespace.

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...;
Writing a proposal isn't free work, it's marketing expense.

The other things you mention are just the things you have to put up with in a service business. Sure you can lose a bid and have someone else implement your idea.

It's the nature of a service business to have a customer into you for 2 months. I have found that the best way around this is insisting on different terms. If I know a customer may be having "issues", I have insisted on Net 7. They always object, but give in if they can handle it. If they won't give in, I figure that I've just sidestepped a big potential headache. You need to fire your bad customers as early as possible.

I sympathize with your industry. It sure is a tough time to be an architect. Best wishes.
There is a much better (and much cheaper) version of "Find my iPhone" functionality for jailbroken iPhones called iLocalis (http://www.ilocalis.com). It can do things like force your phone to call a number, send you an e-mail when the SIM card is swapped, etc.. I've been using it for months and it's helped me find my phone several times already (although thankfully it hasn't been stolen).
If you're using ruby or python you're ultimately using C anyway, right ;)
Someone should do this for render farms. We'd see more brilliant home-grown sci-fi film making like this:

http://www.starwreck.com/

They had a 3 PC render farm running two years to make the film. Most of the interior shots were green-screened with digital backgrounds, and they look gorgeous.

(Finding attractive actresses who will become the girlfriend and provide free acting to the film effort is still left up to the user.)
It would help if, instead of the ambiguous up and down arrow icons, the ui provided something like a bulb to mark an interesting idea, and a zzzz to represent a waste of time - or something like that.

In the end, people can't help themselves, they want to express agreement/disagreement, so you'd still get some people using the buttons that way, but at least the ui would communicate the desired use.
Downvotes are nothing less than barbaric. You are hurting someone just because you disagree with their point of view.
It's only a matter of time before one of these Mobile Me adventure stories ends in a stabbing.
Good article...seems to come down to visual preference for the author.

But...

To use BING because its not something else (Because It's Not Google) makes my anti-anti self kick in and makes me not want to use it for the simple fact I'm not 12 years old anymore. MS needs to grow up and just release good groundbreaking innovative products like they've done for the development world.
HbA1c is 7.1.

Not polish- 1/4 Austrian.
I think the new GitHub stickers are from http://www.clubcardprinting.com/

They're located in the Castro in San Francisco and the staff is super friendly and the stickers are affordable and have a very quick turnaround. I've used them for stickers for a side project and they had them done in a day.

My friend from Scribd recommended them, so if you go with them, it's nice to mention Scribd as a referral.
Ask HN: ISO of cofounder
Hey all-

I posted a while back with my idea re: a reputation repository of sorts. Here is the original text of the idea:

"Create a site that would be a reputation repository (pardon the alliteration). This repository would be similar to gravatars but deal specifically with establishing "universal" rep as opposed to avatars. Rep could be used for any type of crowdsourced site, news sites like HN or DIGG, blog stuff and I think much more. Obviously these interactions would have to be fleshed out a little bit, but I think it could certainly be a nice little addition to some sites."

In response, some commenters recommended thinking about combining various reputations (ebay rating, twitter followers etc.) into a single metric, and working with that. Bringing this type of concept to fruition would likely need some fairly complex analysis, especially with regards to correctly weighting each component so as to come up with a meaningful score.

Another path might be to start with a simple up/down widget and monitor "karma" type points that way.

In any case, I would like to work on this, but I think having another brain thinking about it would be invaluable. So if anyone is interested in trying to get this off the ground, please send me an email at daftdg [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks!
Absolutely, I agree with you. I suppose I was coming from the 'support the artists' side of things. The majority of music that I listen to is made by artists that probably struggle to make ends meat just making music. This isnt because they are bad at it, its because the music they make isnt main stream and isnt marketed that well. They do it purely because they get a kick from it.

I just think its important to support these people. I always buy the music I like. If I dont like it, its not worth my money and it gets deleted.
In that case, there is nothing really cloud specific here... you just need to build a standard web app or web service that accepts user input and runs some calculations in the background. Any Rails or Django tutorial will be a good start. If you expect large jobs that require a lot of number crunching in the background then running jobs in batches with Hadoop or MPI are good options. In Rails, you can use delayed_job, SQS, or any of the other work queue systems out there to handle the background tasks.
Sad to see this [dead]. Carlin's riff is a classic on media censorship and inconsistent standards.

It is important to note that (thus far) Twitter is uncensored, and all of us who build web systems will face, sooner or later, choices as to whether we allow the full range of language/expression, or some commercially- and socially-acceptable subset.
Either it is a bug in Firefox 3.5 RC or the mime-type provided is wrong. It just renders like text, and not like an RSS-feed I can just click to subscribe to.

Since RSS feeds seems to work on other sites, I'll assume the problem is with the feed. Correct mimetype should be application/rss+xml.

Confirmed:

$ wget -O /dev/null http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi
--2009-06-22 21:01:56-- http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi
Resolving nirmalpatel.com... 207.210.105.86
Connecting to nirmalpatel.com|207.210.105.86|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 211754 (207K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[==================================================>] 211,754 254K/s in 0.8s

2009-06-22 21:01:57 (254 KB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [211754/211754]
I think that is the possible flaw in your interpretation of what this guy said: he's not asking people so much to not do PhDs as he is asking people who are neither PhDs nor code monkeys to become code monkeys.

I may not agree to the guy's agenda. But I see nothing wrong in encouraging more Americans to become programmers. Whether they are code monkeys or PhDs is a personal choice folks make and nothing is stopping current code monkeys to become PhDs.
I expect that a doctor will first do no harm. I expect the doctor will not insist on re-trying treatments that have consistently failed to help. I especially expect the doctor to order a blood test for hormone levels[0] before writing a prescription to correct a hormonal imbalance. I expect the doctor to express uncertainty when uncertain instead of essentially bullying a patient in to surgery when evidence for the condition requiring surgery is weak. Finally, I expect a referral to a doctor who will research an unusual condition when it obviously doesn't fit any of the common possibilities.

I have nothing against the DIY option. The problem is, there are laws in place to prevent it. In Florida, it's illegal for a lab to collect a blood sample and run tests on the patient's say-so, or even give the results to the patient without the doctor's permission. It's illegal to obtain the drug the patient needed without a doctor's prescription.

There were workarounds available in this case: labsafe.com will have a doctor order any test a patient wants, though they recently quadrupled their prices (other options still exist). GNRH agonists are available without a prescription for research purposes, but they're still absurdly expensive, and not provided in a form that's easy to use as a drug.

[0] Assuming such a test is available and affordable, as it is for female reproductive hormones.