skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think memcached was the specific reason Facebook beat LiveJournal, but I think a general hemorrhaging of competitive advantage and failure to secure additional resources was, and I think a large reason for the latter was the former. It's not really any one competitor or technology responsible for it, but the combined effect of it.

Whenever anything went wrong with LJ - server issues, PR headaches, unpopular feature decisions - a large clump of users would often very vocally say "I'm leaving", grab the opensource codebase, and start a competitor. Facebook faced all the same hiccups, but users generally stayed with them even when pissed off, because there wasn't the same option of grabbing the codebase and all your friends and opening a competing site. Moreover, it's just demoralizing to see your hard work appropriated by people who hate you and are trying to compete with you. This isn't really about Facebook, it's about DeadJournal and uJournal and Journalfen and all the other competitors.

It's also much harder to convince investors to back you when one of your primary competitive advantages is given away to anyone. I think this was probably the major problem; LJ wasn't really backable as a separate VC-funded entity, and when it was a subsidiary of Six Apart (itself VC-funded) it competed with the mothership for resources and got little attention.
Good now go to games and just get "free" apps. Not "top free".
Wow, that's alarming.

We need a real post-mortem on this process. The congressional inquisitions aren't getting to the root of the problem. We just need the individual who managed this project to explain, from square one, how the project flow went.

(Believe it or not, I intend no sarcasm with this post.)
With minitest's spec format it's even available by default for ruby 2
This game makes me realise that I don't do 'proper' touch typing - I use some other system that relies on muscle memory to find the keys, I don't look at the keyboard. One unusual thing I seem to do though is that I never use my pinky fingers, only the other eight - am I alone?
Word processors should load instantaneously. Photoshop should load instantaneously. Windows should load. Instantaneously.
"If the purpose of taking the exam is to demonstrate you know the material"

Well, the parent doesn't actually agree that that's the point of the exam:

"The exams were not to demonstrate you are certified in a subject, but rather to show your ability and limits."

But yeah, I think jcampbell1 is exaggerating and a little too proud.
Axial fans, especially those for household purposes do not offer the required pressure drop of approx. 300 Pa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA#Specifications). Axial fans have typically a high throughput but low max pressure difference (see eg. http://www.adrianagarcia.me/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/a...). HEPA filters require radial (or centrifugal) fans for acceptable throughput.

As well, a HEPA filter becomes clogged very rapidly without appropriate prefilter. This means that the pressure drop required increases considerably definitely beyond reach of any household fan.
I especially like this reasoning: "Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism..." (from the "Ports Circulation Sheet" document cited in the article.)

By this token, any kind of lobbying is also terrorism. Hell, any kind of activism in a political space "is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause".

Seems like a perfect illustration of the kind of slippery slope the world is on.

This article seems to also parallel well with the Russian detention of a Greenpeace ship and charging crew with piracy: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-02/piracy-charges-against.... Effectively, "it's piracy because we say so", just like "it's terrorism because we say so" logic in the "Ports Circulation Sheet" document.
I'm in the unfortunate situation where we use Oracle as the backend database on our projects, which South has never really properly supported. I've done without it, and it isn't very nice.

On the other hand, I ensure that every change that needs to be made to the schema can happen at any time, and both new and old versions of the code will happily work. I believe this helps with upgrading in that there is no delay during deployment and migration. Having not used south on a real project though, I'm unsure if this is a false benefit.
>(Believe it or not, I intend no sarcasm with this post.)

that didn't help T.T
Australia has profited enormously from the US Constitution.

Our own Constitution was drafted in the wake of the American Civil War and with observations gleaned from decades of US politics. Take for example section 55 of our Constitution: it requires a tax Act to only deal with taxation, and only with one tax subject. This makes rider clauses flatly impossible.

Similarly, when we held a referendum to become a republic, the model proposed deliberately avoided introducing an elected President as it was seen as introducing a new and destabilising power base that would eventually lead to a constitutional crisis.

Still. I don't think that the tide of crisis in the US has risen sufficiently high to trigger a mood for amendment, especially given the quasi-religious lionisation of the drafters of the US Constitution. They were intelligent men solving a problem, not prophets. Frankly I think a lot of them would be calling for amendments in order to solve the unforeseen dynamics that have subsequently emerged.

Settle in, there's going to more of the same in decades to come. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, as Smith observed, and the USA is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history.
Nope. Schema Migrations are built directly into django (scheduled for 1.7), and includes the runner. It's not just an API for other tools to use.
Did you even bother to look up basics of HEPA filters? They require an initial pressure drop of 300 Pa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA#Specifications), which is beyond reach of any household fan. When the filter bcomes clogged, the pressure drop will increase even higher.

Updated: Grammar
Note that this was written in 2001 when the statement "every piece of software I use is downloaded from the internet" would have been ridiculous at the time. Not saying your point isn't valid, but just pointing out that its not something that should have been addressed by the article.
Lol, I personally would have preferred he wrote it in Shakespearian "tith functioning supercedith thus of thyne competitors"
Regarding your last point, and as pure conjecture, it depends on how old the password is. When I was a student signing up for trial software etc. I often thought such things like "No one will ever guess 'offspring' as my password, that band is so obscure!"

Young me was much less paranoid than old me.
True. I can usually get 60+ wpm, here I only got 45. Plenty of times I'd be trying to avoid the individual letters flying at my, and trying to make out small words to get rid of them.

Still though, very fun game, even if it's not indicative of actual typing speed...
Why was Javascript standardized by ECMA other than W3C?
That is correct, 1Password tells me that for my two accounts created in 2011 and 2012. (At least mine are 12 chars, and I always max them out)
That's not what the word means.

1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating

2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated;

3. Unaware or uninformed; naive.

Generally it is used to mean untruthful on purpose, with an intent to deceive, usually by acting as if you're unaware of something.
Possibility of Eternal Life Through Machine Learning
I drafted a long comment with examples of how you could, perhaps, seriously make s-expressions more readable by not using nested parens.. but decided to see if anyone else had given it a go, and found this: http://readable.sourceforge.net/

It includes both significant whitespace and a special in-fix notation so a factorial function could look like:

define factorial(n)
if {n <= 1}
1
{n * factorial{n - 1}}
It was written in 2001... Software was mostly delivered by CD.
Before you comment please note that this article was written in 2001 almost 12 years back.
>The twist is I'm looking for someone who is currently not part of the WordPress Community, which has made the search interesting.

Can you elaborate on this point?
Is Gregorian chant based on speech (when it comes to rhythm)? Despite having sung a few pieces back in my musical days, this question never came into my head and I don't know nearly enough about Latin to make the comparison. It's late here in the UK so am about to sleep, but will Google around a bit tomorrow..
The author suffers from the common misconception that agile is a process for designing software. It is not. It is a process for implementing a design, while maintaining flexibility to feed implementation experience back up into the design process. It's this feedback that the author's process lacks. FTA: "This [process] will take a few months, but when it is done we will know exactly what we have to build." Most of the time, experience has shown this not to be true; only when you've gotten into the implementation do you know what you 'have to' build (within some reasonable timeframe). That's because large software projects are typically nonlinear complex systems, where small implementation details can sometimes have large design consequences.

There is no prohibition in agile from using UML, and the process is certainly not hostile to design. It may be that some people believe that using agile implementation processes relieves them of the responsibility to design their software, and that it's OK for user stories to be generated off the top of their heads without analysis. Those people are mistaken. Nowhere does agile promise to design your system for you.
German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.

Degrees in Germany were traditionally research degrees (this may have changed when they introduced the Bachelor), and this explains why exams are done the way they are done.

The thesis at the end is substantial (a Diplom or Magister thesis was a year of genuine research), you would hand it in, they would examine you, and if you passed you would be admitted to the club. That's what German universities are, exclusive clubs.

Of course, before you can go and start writing, there are all sorts of prerequisites to be fulfilled. There is sufficient interaction between the students and faculty to spot the geniuses, the good and average students, and the hopeless cases. The hopeless ones would be failed out within the first two years.
If you want to sample a few, University libraries tend to have the major ones on the shelf. But journals tend to be tuned to a topic. So depends what topic you want to know about.
Thanks for posting it on a weekend!
But close enough, if I understand, that an average Greek speaker might have accepted the statement as true, in the way that an average American English speaker might agree that "saw" and "pot" have the same vowel sound, no matter how many linguists' heads explode.

I always wondered if the ω glyph developed when lazy monks sloppily doubled up oo to make the o-mega… but I never investigated whether this is true.
Making AngularJS Windows 8 apps that use WinJS UI controls
"Ohhh. It eats up all your memory. I see. Actually, well, no, it doesn't. Ever since Windows 1.0, in 1987, the operating system only loads pages as they are used. If you have a 15MB executable and you only use code that spans 2MB worth of pages, you will only ever load 2MB from disk to RAM."

This is such a bullshitty argument. The chance that the pages that you need to load to accomplish a simple task (say, adding up 20 numbers) with a program capable of doing many many things (say, excel) will be comparable to the number of pages that you need to load to perform the task in a far more limited program (say, `dc`) is infinitesimal. In practice, it just isn't going to happen.

Using small programs to accomplish small tasks is what Linus Åkerlund was arguing in that post (https://web.archive.org/web/20000305231633/http://user.tnine...). Now, there are very obvious reasons why "the UNIX way" is not for everybody, and why monolithic featureful programs have their place, but Joel is delusional if he thinks that Linus is incorrect in practice on the memory usage point.

I bet I can start and close 'dc' several thousand times in the time it takes Excel to start once. Not a fair comparison by any measure, but nevertheless one that Joel invites by attacking Linus' article.
Not entirely true that the database is the main concern[0]. The overhead of the framework/language has a massive impact.

That said, I'm not Google either, and I'm happily using django and love using it.

[0] http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/frameworks-round-...
Yes, this one has a problem as well: http://hnflood.com/db/6d/774/6d77414a0b6f1c324938a056ddf1eaa...
Yeah, storage is cheap, let's go wild and add some features that might be useful for a handful of people. Reminds of time when excel had simple flight simulator in it...
My Downloads go to /tmp. Problem solved.
I have used openSUSE on my desktop before, and I am running it in a VM again. 13.1 looks great. I love how they cater their GUI to power users and include quick access to things like virtualization. They also include FreeType 2.5, which I otherwise have to install manually. So far it isn't better enough than my own customized desktop to switch, but if things get worse between KDE and Canonical, I'll definitely switch my laptop OS.
The Mono GC has improved dramatically in the past year. It's still not as fast as the CLR's or the HotSpot JVM's, but it's miles better than the old GC.

F# ran okay under the old GC (Mono 2.x), but tended to be a little crashy because it put a lot of stress on the GC (as functional languages tend to do). I haven't had any problems with the new "sgen" GC though (it's now the default in Mono 3.2.x).
His argument "Sounds like Organic Chemistry doesn’t it?" is exactly what I am criticising. Sounding similar, doesn't mean there will be strong synergy effects.

I give that there could be some synergy effects, but I highly doubt there are strong enough that it's better to study orgo rather than what is actually being applied.
I was wondering about the HOA restrictions too. Our condo in San Francisco that we live in came with CC&R's that limit how we can rent the unit out. It's permissible only for periods over 30 days and you're not allowed to offer typical hotel services like changing sheets, towels, etc.

I'm curious if the author looked into this.
The ribbon is not designed to be an edited toolbar with a single row of just 10-20 functions. It's a wholesale replacement for application menus. Every new function and feature should have a placement on the ribbon, or else how would you otherwise activate it?

Organization of the ribbon is important, though, and it may take some time to learn where stuff is, or how it's organized. The first time I used it with Excel, I couldn't find the Pivot Table button. I thought it might be under [Data], but you're [Insert]ing a pivot table instead.
So a few things:

It seems obvious that some types of companies (like entreprise) that have been started in 2010 are not going to be valued at >$1b yet. It takes time.

This information would probably be more valuable if you cut it up by area (consumer v entreprise etc) and did comparables inside those areas.

"Started since 2003 and valued at $1b or over by public OR private markets"

To me, those are completely separate ways of valuing a company - one is realized (in that anyone who owns shares outright can sell them for the value stated) and the other is purely speculative.

It doesn't matter that Fab is "worth $1b" especially as it heads towards the toilet bowl over the last 10 months.

Again, companies valued at >$1b on private is an interesting group to look at, but trying to compare it to public doesn't strike me as very useful.

The one thing this article does is tell me that it's hard to hit $1b realized or unrealized. But I don't think anyone thought otherwise, no?
>Outlook 2010 in Exchange mode usually occupies about 50MB of memory, at least for me. Think of all the functionality Outlook 2010 has in those 50MB.

Ohh I wish my beloved thunderbird only took that much memory. I remember it occupied somewhere between 150-250MB on my netbook. It was impossible to keep it running in the background, especially when you only have 1GB of total RAM. My routine was to open, check for mail, close it.. rinse repeat.
The Debian Wiki might have a similar use case here: https://wiki.debian.org/subkeys

Have a look if that helps you!
I get my groceries on my bike that has baskets on the back rack. Two reusable bags hold lots of stuff, and I bring a backpack for when I go over. I drive when I need larger things, like toilet paper every two months.

Palo Alto taught me that cycling was a viable mode of transportation five years ago, and that knowledge has added lots of happiness to my life since.
Yes, this had me as well. I think Orwell is spinning in his grave right now.

When everything that is meant to change status quo becomes terrorism we will live in a terrible world.
Couldn't agree with you more. I know what choices django makes for me, and I'm entirely happy letting it. I'd really miss a lot of what django has to offer if I were to move to something like flask.
Maybe they could do something like Fringe and get the noise from the walls.
What a flawed, sensationalist headline. So, he looked at all people that used aliases for Gmail accounts (added a +something or . to their address) to register multiple times.

By comparing the hashes for these Gmail users, he then determined that 51% used the same password for duplicate Adobe accounts. He asserts they were "highly technically savvy users" and thus 51% is the lower bound for the population of all Adobe users, thus 51% of the users used the same password somewhere else. Therefore "64 million" user's accounts are compromised on other sites, because they must be using the same password else where.

OK. Here is the problem. You, a savvy user, have multiple accounts, on the same site, why would you use different passwords for your alias accounts? Same password on same site != Same password on all sites.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pubid=ra-4fbc377a720d8046
> 2001 when the statement "every piece of software I use is downloaded from the internet" would have been ridiculous at the time.

Not for the sort of people that he is arguing against in this post, such as Linus Åkerlund who is arguing for using computers "the UNIX way" with GNU/Linux. Downloading your distro from the internet was very old-hat by 2001.
And the way to download these serious work apps is through Google Play
I think both the article and the comments miss the point. If you take a Linux distro, it is actually bloated, in the sense that it has a lot of useless stuff that take space. However, it's built on a solid, stable architecture which allow bloat management. Same with vim: I have seen vim setups that are complete bloat, with hundreds of plugins, and even plugins managing plugins. But this is managed, manageable, because based on a well defined base.

There is a comment about Django: yes, bloated and managed, because it is based on python, which is the same, a minimal and solid set of orthogonal concepts upon which bloat is easily managed.
How about in Round 7 that Python surpasses Nodejs?

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7

Python didn't beat NodeJS in Database queries though.

Yes Go is fast, but Go is also cluttered with its static type system.

Personally I feel pain to deal with flexible JSON marshal/unmarshal, in Python dict() is nearly 100% identical with JS objects in value.
Some sort of disk buffer, maybe?
Just reset my passwords to 32chars, which worked (both setting and logging in). (Now, wether or not all 32 chars are actually being used...)
Maybe I'm delusional, but even as someone who has worked pretty extensively (4 months of full stack Django development) with Django, posts like these things make me want to stay away from Django.

I read this post, and I see bandaids. I see bloat, and I see warts. I don't want to build on a codebase that needs 5 extensions out of the box to be sane.

Granted, I know this is not the real story with Django. It is a rather lovely, if rather rigid and stubborn framework (at least it was when I was writing with in circa 1.3). And it is powerful.

But, and this is my point, it seems to me that there is almost no reason I would use Django over something like flask for anything but the most basic of apps. Any time you need to do "serious" work — beyond cookie-cutter stuff — you're going to need to seriously extend Django (or any other web framework for that matter, in my experience/humble opinion). And then it gets ugly, and you're better off building from the ground up on a minimal codebase than trying to contort an existing one to do what you need it to.

Actually, most of my thoughts have been summed up 5 years ago by one of Flikr's lead architects (iirc) at DjangoCon '08 in a brilliant (and hilarious) talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk
Interesting article, but it seems somewhat disingenuous/self-serving/self-aggrandizing to have the architect of the final plan write the article. I'd much rather see a professional journalist interview and analyze the situation, e.g. the book "Game Change".
Ah, Word 5.1 for Mac.
Why most published scientific research is probably false [video]
I got the impression that they were not really trying to find customers, they instead were trying to gauge interest in the project. Nothing on the site gave me the impression that this was anything more than a web site soon to be a kickstarter page.
This reminds me that I have been working full time on open source projects for almost a decade now. Started maintaining some R packages in an extremely open source oriented environment [1] then accidentally moved to web development. Started an open source project [2] which has been growing in the last couple of years.

[1] http://www.iq.harvard.edu/
[2] http://openscholar.harvard.edu/
I got to visit the StackExchange office in New York a few weeks ago. The development floor is divided into hexagons. Two walls are glass (including a door), the other 4 walls are white and double as whiteboards. Each office is given two large desks which can be raised or lowered electrically.

Essentially it's another experiment in PeopleWare architecture by Spolsky. I liked that each developer had a private office, but I found that without decoration the blank walls made it feel too much like the set of a 70s movie dystopia.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/stack-exchange-office-tour...
Have you looked at FlexRAID? I am not too knowledgeable on the depths of this topic, but I know it can back up over SMB/FTP. It's a very interesting engine as well, and if you decide to roll your own, you might get some inspiration.

http://www.flexraid.com/