skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd pay 1-5 dollars for a digital download to a video file that I can move and put on anything I own in any way that I want. I won't pay 20-40 dollars for a video I can watch in very limited ways or is a physical disk. It is just too inconvenient to be worth it. There is also a consistency problem. I want everything to be from the same source or in the same format.
Counterpoint: Louis CK releases his videos for $5 and says please don't pirate it. People do I'm sure, but there are enough people who see the value. I paid the $5 because I want Louis to keep doing his thing.
I've worked in development in the Big 4 in the US banking market.

Key Issues:

1) Product managers and Product Leads with MBAs (not all bad) and zero tech or design knowledge (bad)

2) Contracting out key roles to people who leave or disappear in less than a year, then just churning a new one in

3) Wildly uninteresting products built on ancient, dry legacy platforms

4) Feature update life cycles that can be measured in years, not months weeks or days.

5) Intense internal political battles between legacy middle and upper management who have nothing to offer the product.

6) Poor pay and even poorer respect

7) Not a creative environment.

I was just recruited for a mobile product manager role at the #1 or #2 bank in the US and I listened until I heard they intended it only to be a 6 month contract. I asked them how they planned to deal with a product after getting rid of the strategic head after 6 months -- to which of course there was no answer. Its this kind of nonsense that keeps them in back of IT recruiting.
Elon Musk is busy trying to change the way cars are sold to the public. And he just lost a battle in New Jersey.
I guess you could load your favorite language runtime. That sounds like a one line change. In your shell script. Which is the point. I'm betting at some point you look back and realize that much of your config doesn't need a secondary language.
If someone wanted assurances, they're going to pay out the nose

This pretty much actively discourages broad categories of potential garage tinkerer apps/startups. I suspect there's an opportunity here.
Hi, I'm one of the developers who built Firefox for Metro.

It's true, we don't know what the usage would have been like if we did some real marketing of the Metro feature. We briefly had a "what's new" page that promoted Metro for users of Firefox Aurora on Windows 8, but we never did a similar promotion on the larger Firefox Beta channel. We had another in-product promotion planned for after the release of Firefox 28, but that's no longer in the cards.

In the absence of that, we have to rely on metrics from desktop Firefox (e.g. what portion of our users are running it on the touch hardware that our Metro app was designed for) and on any data we can get about the PC industry as a whole.

I'm torn about this decision (understandably, I think), and I still think that Microsoft has a good chance of eventually building a much larger user base for its touch platforms. But the improvements we wanted to make to the Metro browser (like making the scrolling as smooth as possible) would have required ongoing work not just from my team but from other groups like the graphics and layout teams, whose energy may be better used on other platforms (desktop, Android, Firefox OS). So we had to think strategically about what's right for us to ship this year.
Turkey Test: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-...
Only slightly related, but I really wish GitHub would add autocomplete=off on the language selection dropdown for Gist. If you make your own autocomplete UI, I would prefer that you disable the browser UI.
Is there a reason to dismiss the question like this? It's a matter of probability: This site just appeared out of thin air as far as most of us are concerned. Yeah, Rackspace could go out of business tomorrow. But that's a hell of a lot less likely -- and more likely to happen with some sort of warning -- than a brand new provider going under (since we all know what the odds are for new businesses).

If the OP is "going for the Digital Ocean of physical machines," perhaps he should be clearer about his intentions. I personally don't think that's a reasonable assumption based on the information he's provided.
I feel the same way. I have to wonder - how much has negative sentiment from the hacker community affected GoDaddy's earnings?
Shell scripts are extremely portable and should be the preferred method for a large set of tasks. Properly written, a shell script can run on a 20 year old Solaris machine, any version of Windows (with installed tools like Cygwin) and any modern Unix variant... claiming Node.js is more portable is ridiculous on so many levels.

The problem is so many programmers don't take the time (or care to take the time) to learn to use the well thought out design of Unix tools opting instead to see every problem as a nail corresponding to the latest trend in hammers (programming languages).

This has led a lot of programming types to create advanced tools for managing Unix systems which largely ignore the design of Unix.
If you really want some fucking shell scripts:

http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/
Employee. For some reason, everyone else gets a large cube that they're going to hang onto for quite awhile, and we've been moved building to building 3 times within a year, all within shittier than the last conference rooms.
The dealer cannot be owned by the manufacturer.
/dev/random should not be used for one-time pads. It's still generated from a stream cipher-based CSPRNG and is not "true" randomness.
It would seem to be a good effort to research the history of cancelled IPOs and see if there are any lessons there that can be put to use here.
Making the world a better place, and making a profit shouldn't be considered divergent goals. You act as if profit motive should be treated with inherent suspicion.
That's the flip side of "it's a service problem". Hollywood only cares if you make infringing more convenient than buying.
The best way to make money with oil companies with tech is to get hired as an independent contractor.

I was an independent contractor! They still balked at paying a programmer more than $100k a year!
Author here: fair point. Ruby is only required for the client that's building machines. Ruby is our primary language so it's on all of our servers and laptops. Less about thought and more about lowest barrier to entry ;)
So what clothes do you wear?
This does not manage a server, it provisions a server. The whole point of configuration management software is to bring your software into a desired state from any actual state the server may be in. This rests on the notion that configuration drifts, i.e. for long running services a server gets misconfigured eventually for a variety of reasons.

Bottom line, if you are just running a small startup with a few servers and a few people, then by all means use FSS, but eventually you will need real CM.
Made something similar years ago for devs. Not nearly as polished though: http://hkjels.github.io/ntask/
Stability. Working on getting my own company/products off the ground, once that levels out, I'll quit. I'm looking to save around 25k to travel + use for rent for about a year and a half for side projects and to build my skills up.
As a bank worker in a no engineering tech role, I think the myopia you describe is IMO a significant factor.

From a retail banking perspective, many banks are starting to modernize their practices and play catch up for mobile. But most banks are stuck in rigid methodology, culture and solutions established in what I call the first generation of online banking. Projects are treated as continuations o this foundation and continue with antiquated development methodologies and back end technology. Since acceptable products get shipped, there's no business incentive to modernize.
> I fully agree with you on that one time pads need more a computationally secure algorithm with an initial seed.

No. One-time pads require true randomness. Any algorithm involving a pseudorandom-generator, no matter how computationally secure, is actually simply a stream cipher.
But even for Linux, Ubuntu is trying really hard for you to not have to go into the command line. They would love for it to be a tinkerer's paradise but also usable. They want it to be a muscle car and a Tesla. Computers have the advantage of being both of those.
Oh how I wish Google would have a financial arm and stomp out corporations like BAC. I mean, banking is all about big data, no?
Thank you for this comment. Let's not pretend we can blame a single person for any atrocity. Genocide requires the complicity of a lot of people. And people can be inspired to comply by speech. Free speech is a worthy principle, but it carries a price we should never ignore.
Other co-author here: I couldn't agree with you enough. We settled on Ansible, but have had our fair share of speed bumps along the way.
If I was the CTO of Walmart I'd fire somebody for doing a deployment on Black Friday.

Even if I was 99% certain everything would go fine that's just too much of a risk to take.

Unless some kind of show stopping issue was happening I'd wait until after cyber monday or plan the release way before hand.
Thanks for sharing this.

Will you be planning a gameplay video? I think it's particularly difficult for viewers to extract value from non-gameplay trailers/teasers involving new IP.

Can you explain an embargoed press release?

Is it:

a) giving your "favorite" journalist(s) an exclusive time period to make announcements,

b) a heads up of when you will be submitting the press release,

c) a firm "time" when you'd like all press/media to hold stories before publishing?

If you're heading to GDC, good luck! It sounds like an exciting conference.
GoDaddy is the perfect example of a company killing it with the mainstream while getting (often unjustified) hate inside the tech community. If you look beyond the common complaints against it, you'll find a company that has made smart product acquisitions that solve real painpoints for their small business customers.
Thanks for this.

Lately I've been researching a way to automate things for a bunch of vps I own (nothing important, mostly self-hosted services like tt-rss), and obviously I looked at Chef/Puppet/Salt/Ansible and the likes. While those are valuable and awesome tools, I feel that they're too complicated for my simple needs.

FSS seems exactly the right compromise between running everything manually and using a full blown management tool.
Hopefully: over https, not from the central repo, and only after verification of the sha256sum
This is why I moved from PNC (nice bank, but too slow to move on new features) to Simple.
You can find jobs advertising 500,000 for programmers in NY with a simple search

You have to have some specialized knowledge for those.
I think there's a line I'm unwilling to cross when it comes to the price. $20 seems pretty ridiculous considering it'd be less to watch it in the theater.

There's also a service problem. Why can't I find my favorite movie from the 80s on netflix? It's pretty frustrating.
I think you wrote a few lines of code. :)

Cool project and neat execution.
Banking is all about billions of little transactions (every single one must go well) and great customer service. Google has a long way to go.
"During a training exercise, an inert Test Variant Torpedo unexpectedly jettisoned onto the wharf." Jettisoned indeed!

Reminds me of the time I brought a model rocket to school to launch during lunch time (try doing that nowadays) and set it off inside by accident. The best part was when the engine burn finished and backfired to deploy the chute, the body popped loose from the nose cone, which was embedded about 3 inches into a ceiling tile, and the rocket sat dangling from the ceiling, with me just staring up at it in awe.

I imagine the look of shock on my face at that moment pretty much matched the guy sitting in front of the firing control station on the HMS Argyll.

This was the good old days, when you could set off a rocket inside your 3rd grade classroom and not even be sent to the principal's office.
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote

EDIT: If you hate your gig enough, email me (email in profile) and I'll share whatever resources I can with you.
Is Justin Frankel involved in this?
I see. Anyway, you don't always have to check laws to do stuff.
The argument about US "control" of ICANN has always seemed a little surreal to me. I took this photo on the roof-top deck at ICANN (they know how to throw a good party!) : http://www.flickr.com/photos/90065267@N00/10056736345/ . That's the Whitehouse, and the US Capitol in the distance, that proximity of influence isn't going away.
The goal is not to properly cremate the body, just to kind of get rid of it.
The name is bad.
None of what you made makes sense.

Why wouldn't pirates just go back to pirating when the price increases for the service? If pirating with RSS feed + torrent client is so easy, why would they move to the legit service in the first place?
It is a pricing problem, but also a distribution and licensing problem. Netflix for example is not available in most countries of the world, and nor it nor anything like it has all the latest shows and movies on time, some being available many years later.

The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web. The problem is it could take 20 years before we get anything close to that at the pace Hollywood is moving. Something like Popcorn Time could've pushed the move to happen within 5 years or less.
It has some interesting details on how Mozilla manages the Rust community.

The title is completely misleading, though.
Daddy, the Baby Killer
I'm quite happy too. I like that you can push to instapaper if you want too, to read on the kindle.
Somehow, I have confidence that Google > BaC with regards to technology.

Agreed on the customer service. Maybe acquire Zendesk?
Bigots are Rejoicing
There's no problem with combining non-entropic (or even malicious!) sources of entropy into an entropy pool. As long as some (and enough) of the input is unpredictable to an attacker, they can't predict any outputs of the system.
That sounds interesting. Do you have a link to more information?
I admit I did not know about the letter from the Ukrainian Jews to Putin. I do not know what motivated them to write such a letter. It could be Bandera followers standing over them, or something else. You can't really deny the neo-Nazi character of the leaders of the rioters. Have a look here, it's an non-Russian source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/the-neo-nazi-qu...

Some quotes:

For starters, Andriy Parubiy, the new secretary of Ukraine's security council, was a co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), otherwise known as Svoboda. And his deputy, Dmytro Yarosh, is the leader of a party called the Right Sector which, according to historian Timothy Stanley, "flies the old flag of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators at its rallies."

The Svoboda party has tapped into Nazi symbolism including the "wolf's angel" rune, which resembles a swastika and was worn by members of the Waffen-SS, a panzer division that was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg. A report from Tel-Aviv University describes the Svoboda party as "an extremist, right-wing, nationalist organization which emphasizes its identification with the ideology of German National Socialism."* Notice how Tel-Aviv Jews do not seem to agree with the Ukrainian ones.

According to this BBC news clip two Svoboda parliamentarians in recent weeks posed for photos while "brandishing well-known far right numerology," including the numbers 88 -- the eighth letter of the alphabet -- signifying "HH," as in "Heil Hitler." This all makes Hillary Clinton's recent comments comparing Putin to Hitler appear patently absurd, as Stanley adeptly points out: "After all, in the eyes of many ethnic Russians, it is the Ukrainian nationalists -- not Putin -- who are the Nazis."

Last week Per Anders Rudling from Lund University in Sweden, an expert on Ukrainian extremists, told Britain's Channel 4 News: "A neo-fascist party like Svoboda getting the deputy prime minister position is news in its own right." Well, except in the U.S.

There are WAY too many unambiguous images and videos on the internet where the rioters sport Nazi or neo-Nazi symbols to ignore or dismiss as Russian propaganda like you do. Just google for "nazi ukraine" for images. You'll see Tyagnibok (one of the 3 leaders of the "peaceful protesters") there among the top results.

> the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services.

Incidentally, this is anti-Russian propaganda. There are neo-Nazis in Russia, but they have nothing to do with Putin or Russian security services. In fact, Russian neo-Nazis would be offended by this statement.
As you predicted, it looks like the new "official" repo is here: https://github.com/isra17/popcorn-app and people have already begun work on getting it working again.
Shell company owning both the manufacturer and the dealers?
There is no requirement that companies maximize shareholder value. At best you might be able to hold them to something in their charter, but generally lawsuits attempting this are thrown out pretty quickly, and even if it's not, except in cases of blatant mismanagement, it's difficult to prove that someone else there would done better with different decisions.

I know this meme is persistent, but it's really not true. If it were, you'd end up with ridiculous situations, like every company with a down quarter would be sued in an effort to get a windfall out of a loss.
Wow! Without your comment I wouldn't have seen that Veronica Mars was released! I was also an early contributor but ignored most of their mails since they have a tendency to spam... (which is okay since that's what kickstarter is about).

So thanks for your comment, I'm just gonna torrent the movie instead of using my flixster code.

edit: I'm streaming in in Flixster right now, I had no problem (didn't have to download a player).
I believe Apple recently started paying dividends. edit: Yes, as of 7/2012
Gridspace for Meeting Conversations
The article lost me at quotes like this one (both for content and persons position when talking enterprise) -- “Why go to Facebook and do PHP when you can go to PayPal and do Node.js”
- Bill Scott – Dir UX PayPal
This has a really good overview of the Multi-Armed bandit approach as it applies to testing and optimizations https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2844870?hl=en
How dare people making a free, open-spurce project not engage in an expensive legal battle in order to keep that product available! The nerve!
That's awfully presumptuous of you since you have no idea what I'm talking about.
While I agree with the spirit of your post and that of Mr. Musk, there's something missing here.

Contrary to Mr. Musk's assertion of conspiracy, what seems to have happened here is that there were some unfortunate laws on the books that weren't being enforced. Various business interests (ie the car dealers) complained to the Motor Vehicle Commission. The MVC created a new regulation to reflect the laws already on the books.

Unfortunate? Yes. Should that law get repealed? Absolutely. Should the Governor get involved and push to get the law fixed? Yes.

Conspiracy? No. Suggestions of mafia-like behavior? Childish and insulting, but definitely gets headlines and attention.
Then I don't get it: According to what we can see, in March 2014 they already should be "hitting it" (1 year after the initial March 2013 spike), but it looks pretty bleak to me.
On the other side the 'Stripped' comics documentary, also from kickstarter got downloads out today. One link to a website, and code for DRM free download. A delightful experience. I'm glad I supported them.
Firefox for Metro was pretty much what you described -- at least, that was our goal. It has a very simple UI, which is very similar in spirit to IE11 for Metro.

However, this meant adding entire new input/graphics/widget backends to the Gecko platform using a combination of WinRT and Win32 APIs, and a long slog to get those stable and responsive enough to ship to millions of users. And designing and build a new UI (even a minimal one) means we don't get existing desktop Firefox features "for free" -- stuff like private browsing, add-ons, bookmarking, password management, sync...

Even minimal browsers have a surprisingly large surface area if you want them to be usable for daily browsing. We cut out a lot of that stuff for the first release, but that also means we had a long road ahead toward a feature set that was competitive with other browsers (including desktop Firefox, or Firefox for Android). And that's not even getting into technical issues with the Metro environment, like the inability to run the NPAPI version of Flash Player...

Just as one example: When writing a browser, you need to do your own text rendering and layout. That means you can't rely on the OS to handle things like select/copy/paste. So you end up implementing your own touch-friendly selection UI, and making it match the OS behavior as much as possible. This turns out to be a minefield of subtleties and edge cases.
I never understood why my dad got sensitive about letting people know he was 50 and over until I got there and found myself working side by side with mostly people under 30. Now I'm careful not to let anybody know when I graduated from college or how old I am. I know I am more expensive than a lot of them. If I were in the shoes of management I would be looking hard at more expensive employees and assessing whether they were worth it. I interviewed at a place I'd have liked to make a move to, recently, but they passed and I have to wonder if their decision was to do with my being older and/or asking for too much money.

Emotionally, it's definitely harder to get excited about the new next hot thing. I'm not sure there's a lot more in coding that I am super excited about. I could see getting out of development. I'd be interested in getting into a related discipline, so if anybody has specific suggestions about that I'd love to hear them.
Google+ post by Research at Google introducing the paper:

https://plus.google.com/+ResearchatGoogle/posts/ZY9CBdChpc5
Web Design Mistake: Display no more than 9 lines of text to your visitors because you managed to fill the rest of the screen with a persistent bar at the top, a persistent SOSOCIAL bar on the side and your clickbait links on the other side: http://i.imgur.com/ruiBvN3.png
I can imagine someone proposing this at some meeting with managers. "For our next product, we're going to use FUCKING SHELL SCRIPTS for configuration and deployment". What would the managers' faces look like...

I wonder if this is what you guys had in mind when you came up with the name
WxPython: Catching Exceptions from Anywhere
I am in agreement with you. If you're $ENTERPRISE, you're most likely not going with OP, but there is a large "garage tinkerer apps/startups" market they should be targeting until they're established.
Congratulations! You are now part of a list of historical events in television history. It is the list of TV stations that drop things because of a worldview which, in retrospect, is totally fucked up.

I'm afraid, though, that you are not No. 1 on that list. This honor goes to the proud but narrowminded people of various TV stations that refused to broadcast the Uhura-Kirk kiss.
Clearly you haven't suffered the misfortune of having to program in PHP recently. Alternatively, you may have Stockholm syndrome.

(I mean, Node's okay, not my favorite, but PHP is still as much "training wheels without the bike" as it ever was.)
Even if they were successful, it's unlikely that they'd earn more from Office by being on the iPad. It's not going to sustain the prices that Microsoft is used to. This is their dilemma, they simply can't win no matter which way they go.
I've seen an account hacked already.
Their monetization strategy is a secret!