skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if it's any consolation, if you use that as a conscious learning experience, you'll come out of it a far more effective contractor than you went in. I didn't let it discourage me, and I benefited from it in the long run.

Another suggestion: do a thorough post-mortem with each client. Go over what you did, what you learned, what you'd improve and so forth. I.e. not a retrospective of the work you did (which is also important and worth doing), but a retrospective of your business relationship with your client.
Your software is buggy. It is choking on bad input.

Modify your software so that issues caused by outside systems or user input errors are loudly and clearly announced as being externally caused.

Until this if your software fails, its your bug even if it is caused by bad input.

Even though the
Define a clear service level agreement. List all the errors they have pointed out so far, do not seem like you are shirking responsibility, and in this (likely spreadsheet format) list the corrective action needed.

Meet them, too. For a coffee, tea, beer, whatever. I say this because by accepting and taking responsibility for what you have created, it is likely the developers of other components have included no support / feedback channel. This is both a risk and opportunity: the opportunity is an on-going chance to bill for services or future development; the risk is being seen as blaming others for your mistakes.
Hahaha I hate to laugh, but the only reason these are sent to you is that you are probably the only developer in the chain who offers to work for free. This is software, stuff breaks all the time for millions of reasons. Never work without being paid.
Overall, this is quite good. Some of it is oversold as "things nobody told you about" and some of it could really benefit from real data. A few things are a little too close to seemingly unsupported folk-wisdom rather than sound advice.
The peachtree is one of the most innovative printers out there. Their drip system to remove one expensive stepper motor and moving platform is genius in my opinion.

The poor man's 3D printer looks to be a bit larger and is probably faster to print.
Great.

So by changing it to a more boring title, you ensure that fewer people read the article.

Brilliant.

Incidentally, "Things Nobody Told You About ZFS" is the subtitle of the article in question, and arguably is a more informative description of its contents than "ZFS: Read Me First".
The same could be said about gasoline taxes, yet they haven't moved at all over the last 15 years.
This is an interesting idea, as it weeds out clients who are banking on you doing some free work.

Still, the "free bug support" idea is a really powerful selling point, as it show confidence. Perhaps offer 2 or 3-months of "free bug fixes" with a flexible ending date so you can't ride out the clock. After which, @ashearer's suggestion could kick in.
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The problem is that it's free. Whenever the client has a problem of any kind with their software, this allows them to toss it at you immediately, at no cost to them whatsoever. Charging a fee, even if it isn't a very high fee, would probably make them think twice about doing this... it would encourage them to look at their problem for a few minutes at least, to see if they can't solve it themselves, before they decide it to hand it over to you and incur costs.
I think it's happened to everyone in this business.
New York, Full Time.

Stack: Python (Flask, Django), Ruby (Rails), Java, C, Haskell

Resume: bgapinski.com

Contact: bgapinski@gmail.com

GitHub: github.com/bgapinski

I'm a fresh college graduate with some practical programming experience. I am looking to challenge myself and expand what I know. Though most my experience comes from web development, I am open to any programming domain. Would be most comfortable with a more entry level position but am more than willing to take on more.
Right, if you need more complex logic, then you write a module in a normal programming language. The YAML is intended to keep the intention and orchestration logic simple and readable.
1. They were trying to prevent the largest states from subverting the Connecticut Compromise and establishing a representative system based only on population.

2. No, but not only because of the "loophole". Godel feared that Article V permitted a legally sanctioned dictatorship, but this clause would be irrelevant in that case. It would certainly be possible to reduce the Senate to obsolescence by limiting the powers of the Senate via permissible amendments, while maintaining the original suffrage in the Senate as required.

Edit: You have edited your comment, so my replies are no longer clear. I am responding to two questions: what was the intent of the suffrage clause, and is it effective?
Thank you for your advice. "Your brain throws a hell of a fit" sounds just how it feels :)
I hate XML. It is a basket of good intentions poorly implemented.
The author's complaint isn't really related to YAML or XML, it's his disdain that Ansible uses a data serialization language, instead of a full-blown programming language.
A text editor that can replace vim would definitely be very much like vim, and it would probably be modal and have very similar if not the same command set. This would be no more a 'recreation' of vim than other text editors today would be recreations of each other just because they all come with very similar actions, commands, and features.
Chrome's tabs are full height when Chrome is in full screen, but not when vertically maximized in Windows 7.

Anyone who snaps windows to the side of the screen might run into a similar problem, though the visual gap is much more apparent since it's much larger than a pixel, so it's far less confusing.

http://min.us/i/2OQX0psw5rP0
This is how I consider it and try to phrase it to my clients. They buy my time. If they waste a lot of it with meetings and false starts, at the end of the day it's their responsibility to use my time wisely. That being said, it's my responsibility to make sure my time is of great value to them and produce quality work.
This is why you don't offer unlimited free support. You should have a limited time frame for them to find bugs for you to fix for free, say 30, 60 or 90 days after delivery. Beyond that they need to pay for support.
Have you spoken to them rather than just sending emails with bug lists backwards and forwards? I find it can sometimes resolve issues and misunderstandings much quicker.

I would speak to them and explain that the issues investigated so far are out of scope, why and how they can identify for future issues. Let them know that you will need to bill for time on out of scope work but that you will waive the fees to this point as a goodwill gesture (let them know the time/cost of time spent so far). Send them the list of bugs with you findings so far with an invoice totalling zero after discount and ask them to let you know which issues they still want you to investigate.

Is there further business that you could offer them in fixing or replacing the other (broken) components.
A friend sold some custom highly specialized software back in the day. He said his secret was whenever a client reported a bug, make them do some work before addressing it. Something as simple as including a log file will weed out the ones who are simply looking for the easiest people to fob something off onto.
Another way to look at it though is the author wouldn't mind using either YAML or XML if Ansible scripts were fully declarative. Once the need for if conditions and for loops comes about, any configuration file language (or data transport) language is going to be a little awkward.
Development of eCryptfs was financed by IBM.
"Log really detailed, invasive things and phone them home. Every user action, all the user's data, etc."

Having all their business data logged doesn't sound like a condition that any reasonable customer should agree to. In some cases, such as healthcare related data covered under HIPAA, it would be outright illegal. Asking for this kind of arrangement tells your customer that you don't understand the importance of confidentiality and security, and also tells them that you think they're so stupid that they don't know the difference between a bug and a user error. If a contractor suggested this condition to me, I'd show them the door immediately.

You'd also be taking on a serious risk. Even if it was legal for you to have the data, it could open you to legal liability if through some error of yours the data was compromised, costing the client money. And if you had possession of the data, you might get blamed even if the data leak wasn't your fault.

Even if you logged the data on the customer's own machines, bad things might still happen, like a bug in your logging code logging confidential data in plain text when it was supposed to be encrypted. It could then fall into the hands of an employee who wasn't authorized to see it.
Yep. Me too. It's funny how common this story is...
>And the premise of your comment is that DoJ investigating it was somehow abusive.

Was it? I don't think I ever made that claim.

I was just commenting that Snowden has demonstrated a prior knowledge of tactics that would be used against him, and perhaps selected Lavabit specifically because he knew Ladar Levison would raise holy hell. I compared it to his selection of Greenwald to report the stories.

I actually think Levison's case is pretty weak, and I'm not sure I support him in his decision. I think he's clearly antagonistic and I don't think his case is a good one to support.

But I can see it from his point of view, too. Having seen the Snowden revelations, I wouldn't want to help the NSA either.

My guess, and this is totally unfounded in evidence, is that Snowden left a papertrail using his lavabit account, knowing full well that DoJ would investigate Levison.
Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.

That's a legitimate programming job. Cool software rarely makes money. Cool software that makes money (game development) doesn't pay very much.

Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.

A book is far more challenging, because in an IRC channel you're a fish in a small pond. Eventually you grow to be the biggest fish, or forever limit yourself to being small. What a book can't give is peer recognition. But peer recognition is a vain motive, and vanity is rarely lucrative. A book also can't answer questions, but you can use IRC or a website like stackexchange for that.

If anyone reading this has personal experience flirting with blackhattery, please carefully consider what you're doing and why you're doing it. (And if you'd like someone to talk to, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'd like hearing about your experiences and your thoughts.)
Titles are called linkbait by people too boring to write titles that people care to click. If the title is generally accurate its a good title.
Hey, leave those guys alone: It's Objective-C who has the biggest names of them all. It's class names that are huge anyhow in Java. Both are huge in Objective-C (class and variable)

--Objective-C Dev who sorely wants namespaces
Yes, upon seeing this I immediately wanted a 'trick' cup that did this but had this, umm, feature more hidden by placing it in the side of the cup not the middle. But then an unsuspecting, but non-greedy, user may spill the entire cup just by sipping out of the wrong side! The central column should make it quite safe in comparison.
The thing you have to understand about laws -- and this is certainly the case with the Constitution -- is that they aren't written for automatons, they are written for humans.

The prohibition of changes to representation to the Senate doesn't work as an inescapable barrier and isn't intended, it works as a red-flag warning.

The enforcement mechanism it relies on isn't law-as-mystic-amulet, is the same one that enforced the view American colonists had of their proper freedoms when it clashed with the policies of the British Crown.
How to Write the Most Effective Cold Email Ever: The Ultimate Guide
How come they aren't using HTTPS in their login form?
Is this real and not just intended to make a point about high frequency trading?
That last line was maybe ill spoke. I just meant to illustrate that Snowden knew Levison would go to bat for him, and also that his transgressions against the DoJ would likely be forgiven by the public, in hindsight.
One of the things I like about Saltstack is that you can build your formulas using any renderers you like. You can try to remain strictly declarative in YAML, or if you like build your states completely dynamically in Python or a Python-DSL. The default uses an inbetween that takes YAML buts lets you template that YAML with Jinja.

[http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/renderers/]
> Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.

Nice justification of criminality. "But I was bored and talented!"

Oh dear, who are we to stand in the way of your genius then?
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely
I have to wonder if they will be able to provide uncensored service to parts of the planet that are not able to get it now. China has their firewall, and other governments have tried restricting the internet as well. Satellites over head can get around the restrictions.

This would bring the internet not only to rural areas, but also oppressed areas.
Best and brightest at 8-15 usually do not end up best and brightest in later career. You can see it even in the fact that average salary of that cohort is only 80k/year - only slightly better than average for ALL college graduates. None of those geniuses are particularly impressive and most ended up doing the same work with the same quality as the rest of us.

There was research that showed that IQ after 120 stops being correlated with success - other factors start being more important.
Natural gas emits 50% less CO2 than coal for any given amount of energy produced.
Very common solution to this is following:

Offer a 90 day code warranty period. Over those 90 days you'll fix (For free) defects in your application.

However, wild goose-chases like you're mentioning above will result in an invoice. Only problems originating from YOUR code will be covered.

IE: You spend 2 hours finding the issue they mentioned.

1) Problem exists in your code.
a) You fix it, and you don't invoice them.

2) Problem is in another part of the system
a) You invoice for the time spent.

This is by far the most far and reasonable way to look at this problem I reckon..
Fitts' law[1] is relevant here; if that pixel was clickable, it would be _considerably_ easier to click on the button.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
365 Tidal Patterns
What happens when a URE is encountered and all the disks are online? It seems that they could be detected early and fixed before a rebuild is necessary by doing a weekly sweep of the entire array, reading every data block.
> I'm going by what the manufacturers say

Are you really? "Non-recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read, Max", say Seagate - that just means it couldn't correct, not that it couldn't detect there was an error.

> are you saying they are overestimating the error rate?

Perhaps not, as a general order-of-magnitude upper-bound on a marginal drive in poor conditions, but certainly if you're interpreting it as an average. Too many people would be seeing it happen way too often to keep quiet about it otherwise.

> Used to be you never got corruption, just success or fail

I wish :/
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Could you please explain why this works? How come int(a) produces 2.5?
There is a great book and audio series by Stephen King, called On Writing.

I was certainly aware, but never much a fan of his, until this, but for anyone interested in writing, I highly recommend having a read / listen.

http://stephenking.com/library/nonfiction/on_writing:_a_memo...
It's not that problem. It's problems like them re-designing their database with new schemas, new constraints on fields, and new column names, and them wondering why their webapp forms report errors upon submission. And after my explanation, they have the DBA work around it (rather than pay me to update the forms). Or, they enter the wrong username/password (and get an error message saying wrong/unknown username/password).
He mentioned in full screen for sure.
Are you familiar with the recommendation that children and pregnant women limit their intake of seafood to one serving per week, because of mercury exposure?

Almost half of that mercury comes from coal emissions.

That's an entire type of food being significantly contaminated across the planet. And that's just one of the many nasty things emitted by coal burning.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that the entire planet is affected by burning coal.
no need to look back in horror - the Chibok kidnapping for example happened a few weeks ago; for religious reasons.
"preventing" premarital sex and even banning gay marriage seem like more of a first world problems when compared with the barbaric crimes that occur with tragic frequency - today.
It's supposed to allow for an internally modifying process. That's the entire point.
Could you elaborate on the level for programs like these? I am familiar with a kid who was writing proofs regarding tensors (this is how it was described to me, my own math skills are extremely minimal in comparison) in the 5th grade. His father is worried about his social life going forward while wanting to nurture his talent. The kid was sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for a summer which he apparently found really boring. I think he is actually being tutored by a professor at a local university now, but I wonder if he'd find peers of his own age group and ability level at these programs?
Loggly, San Francisco, CA (Financial district) - Full Time

Looking for Full-stack, Frontend, Backend engineers. We're trying to make logging, instrumentation, and log analysis simpler for fellow devs and their lives easier.

Back-end: Mostly a java/python shop with heavy use of ElasticSearch and Kafka. If dealing with search, scale, or machine learning is your thing, you'll have a lot of fun here.

Front-end: Django/python, Angular/js, sass is what we use to make mostly single-page-applications. We're looking for generally competent html/css/js/serverside/CRUD devs who can pick things up.

email jobs@loggly.com and mention HN
Nice black-and-white view of humanity. I felt for this guy, because it could easily have happened to me, and my upbringing was probably a paradise compared to his.

Especially in the case of juveniles, we (as a society) should be understanding of minor indiscretions, and look to guide kids onto a better path. Thankfully the German justice system seemed to get that.
The story only covers about community & governance for CF & Docker.
You say that they're not always declarative like it's a bad thing. Personally, I find it nice that we have the playbooks to build out our infrastructure and the playbooks that perform a rolling upgrade of our application using the same syntax, variables, and inventories. If you keep your declarative playbooks separate from your procedural ones, you get more power than a declarative system alone can provide. (FWIW, we chose it not just for this, but because of its lack of an agent - we can use our configuration management to deploy software to customers' infrastructure without colliding with their own CM.)

Further, this (using a data language as a programming language) isn't without precedent. Both XSL and Ant have standard conditionals, loops, etc available for use.
That's such an obvious and disastrous user interface bug that I presume it's the result of some specific process rather late in the software build process (perhaps only on some platforms). Otherwise, I can't imagine any of Opera's user interface testers not noticing this.
Synack, Menlo Park, CA

Hiring Designers and several Engineering roles https://www.synack.com/careers
A pragmatic approach to the situation might suggest that reward is a better deterrent than punishment in these cases.
I'd say leave the programming languages to modules and compose them together with a data language. Forced simplicity for configuration is a good thing.
this is cute. I prefer the way it is implemented in LightTable (for clojure and eventually python) where you don't actually have to click anything. The execution is visualized as you type.
If you're a cognitive 0.01-percenter, being a corporate drone is going to be way more painful than a decent public high school. Trust me, I know both.

I'm well aware. There's a reason I've been independent the vast majority of my career. :)
It said it was delayed by a year before the hack.
I had that and about 10 other examples (supersonic aircraft, hearing a car before it passes through your field of view, etc.). They were eaten by an accidental command-w.

I have a number of technical friends, but also a lot of non-technical friends. Being a nerd, however, I tend to bring up technical topics amongst my non-technical friends more often than is fair. I've found that many of our CS topics (networking, OS, performance, security, etc.) have good physical analogs to at least convey a 10,000' view. Often (like latency) there are some almost perfect analogies that everyone has experienced or witnessed. I'm not turning them into programmers, but they'll understand the terms better.
I feel you. I don't have a solution.
This post is ridiculous.

A very valid complaint would be that Ansible isn't idempotent, which I think is what the author was trying to get at. Nixos would be a great example of an idempotent system, and you might be able to convince me that Docker would qualify, too. As much as I like Ansible, its lack of true idempotence is a weakness.

But that has nothing to do with yaml v. XML v. anything else. You could trivially write an idempotent description language in XML, and you can trivially write a horrible state-based system in a Haskell DSL or Prolog. As far as I can tell, the author is complaining that people think that Ansible is idempotent because it has yaml. That is incorrect, but I don't think that it'd be better or worse if they'd pick something else; merely more verbose. (Look at Maven and Gradle for an example.)
Have you seen https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...? It's a well-known parody, but one could also say it's "obviously written to a high standard", for some definitions of "standard".
I certainly didn't know about it. I had the exact same issue with argparse as the video on the page showed, I always had to look of the documentation to use it or copy and paste it from old scripts to get it to work. This is soo much better, I don't think I'll use argparse again.
Wouldn't whatever spectrum you use to communicate with satellites be governed by the country's government much like how wireless spectra are owned by countries? In which case, I don't think you'd be able to subterfuge like that.
> Both XSL and Ant have standard conditionals, loops, etc available for use.

Yes, XSL and Ant got there first, but what fraction of us would like to see the same decision made again? :)
Thanks, I will look into Pamela Smith's work - I was already familiar with George Parsons, and in fact there was an interesting thread on here about that a few weeks ago.

Your dissertation sounds just as interesting, I'd like to read it when it's done. I'm going to read your Perspecties article on it this evening.