skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UofIowa psych dept did some stats: what applicant-questionaire items correlate to 1st annual review. Was it IQ? Education? Professionalism?
No, the #1 correlation (only correlation of significance) was Conscientiousness.
> commercial airline pilots can be described as a 'Boeing 747 pilot' or an 'Airbus A318' pilot.

I don't think that's a good analogy.

Pilots are operators, not creators. What they do is pretty much defined by what devices they use to do it.

Engineers, in contrast, use tools to create new things, and are defined by what kinds of things they create (e.g. civil infrastructure, electrical systems, computer architecture), not what tools they use to create them.
Fair enough, but if you still want to use it as a server (btw, why?) you'll probably make RAID 1 from them, so it'll still be 500gb max.
It's already $27k/yr for their largest mysql instance. I'd hate to see what they'd charge for an even larger machine, with oracle license fees on top. :)
This seems really coincidental considering that Mark Zuckerberg got a question about what facebook was doing to preserve our data for the next 2,000 years.

His response was "I like thinking in the long-term, but not that long-term". Anyone else get the impression that this is a compromise?
Alexis and Steve are leaving Reddit
Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on localisation.
Simple Flowchart explaining Creately
Concurrency bugs are all the rage
Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.
I think they've been doing this for a long time: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-08-facebook-vate... . But it's a smart PR move to talk it up after the "next 2000 years" question. (Certainly better than waiting for a tragedy, like last time.)
Agreed. I think it's going to take a long time to get the tone just right.

But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things.

Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.
Clean Smells Promote Moral Behavior, Study Suggests
Transactions? Oh, nope, they removed those...
It is always hard to grieve and move on.

And, though I have met quite a few people who have lost friends and family members, I don't recall anyone whose response to losing a loved one was to destroy all the mementoes. One is far more likely to cherish them.
I'm facing this right now.

I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free.

If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money.

Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.
I see this often in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where beginners not only have no idea what they're doing, but they don't even realize how little they know. And being incompetent in BJJ means you're going to spend many minutes with someone literally on top of you. Some people are so overwhelmed by this experience that they don't come back.

But, my experience has been the people who don't come back are those that thought they would do well - the ones that figured "I'm a tough guy, I can hang." When they do just as one would expect a beginner to do, their ego is hurt so much they just don't want to go through it again. I think that for some, being a "tough guy" is part of their identity, and being confronted with the reality is so jarring they'd rather not even learn.

The ones who stick around are the ones who aren't upset about losing.
How To Get Rid Of Your Competition in the iPhone App Store
Hey. That was an honest question.

Seriously, it looks like there's a market for training professionals to do the vocational side of their job.
Meebo - Connecting AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace messengers
I don't think I quite get what he means by "professionalism" (which is a stupid word in most contexts). I think he means "high quality craftsmanship," ie "not amateurish."

My question to the author is: how do /you/ balance the need for craftsmanship against deadlines? Most managers pay lip service to quality at best, some don't even do that. How do you meaningfully encourage your professionals to craft carefully?
i'm still waiting for malware to propagate by a shortened url that goes to a legitimate site, builds up credibility (retweeted, etc.) and then is swapped out on the shortening site to start redirecting to a different page that looks like the original but does some drive-by download or exploits a zero-day vulnerability.

there would be hundreds of inbound links pointing to it coming from trusted sources, and could even use a legitimate shortener like bit.ly but just make the bit.ly link direct to some other shortener that nobody would notice (because the browser redirection would happen so quickly), then do the switch at that second shortener.
I want to offer it in multi-language mode. Ok, but what about the domain?
Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 1)
I know the first time that I tried to set up Passenger with Sinatra- I had some issues, despite following tutorials. I kept having to touch some file to get it to read the new files and wasn't really working as expected. PHP just seems to run after I apt-get the php stuff and drop the files in there.

But yes, generally Passenger does the trick.
Like many editorial decisions, I'm not sure this one can be properly explained in words.

If you did explain it, the explanation might well sound like a post hoc rationalization. Which is okay. Writing, especially about the dead, is more art than science.

I'm willing to give the editors the benefit of the doubt. They've seen more Facebook pages of the deceased than I have.
Do you have what it takes to be a founder?
Mark I think the problem is the 140 character limit.

The HTML markup would be included in that. Twitter takes a website address and turns it into a link when it is displayed on their website.

But if a Tweet is sent via a mobile phone, they are limited by the 160 (I think that is the SMS limit). So HTML markup counts.

Which is why using a shorter URL is key.
Who needs 'em anyway?
you know, i can understand that you are upset. but blaming this on 'sexism' is pretty laughable. i suspect that there isn't a single one of us male tech workers who hasn't been screwed over once or twice. especially those of us who have been around the block a time or two.

part of dealing with adversity is managing your own feelings. yours have gotten away from you right now, and it's causing you to act irrationally. first you had only one problem: some company you were working for didn't act in good faith. now you've got an additional problem: your emotions are clouding your judgement. if you keep acting like this, you could easily make this a far worse problem than it already is.

you don't have much control over how the people at the realty company behave. but you have absolute control over your own feelings. that's the first thing you should be working on.
Considering the trends I've seen toward memorializing the dead in decals on car windows, I don't think it'll be too hard to get the tone close enough to right to last them 'til the Singularity.
Many of the techinical people I know play go, or atleast know of it. I'm not sure if there is a direct correlation, but generally the stronger they are at Go, the better of a programmer and learner they are in general.

If anyone here is interested in learning or playing, I am about 2d on KGS (nickBlake) and would be willing to play or teach anyone.
I don't think you're giving Python enough credit. It's used pretty extensively everywhere from NASA to Google to hard science research.
That's true, but Lifehacker didn't cover us until after we launched publicly. We pitched them with a demo code towards the end of our beta and never heard anything back. Judging from the traffic they've sent recently we probably could have gotten 18k beta signups from them alone.

The biggest hits for our beta were sites we never heard of that found us on smaller blogs and reached out to us. Sites like http://www.dinside.no http://www.genbeta.com and http://www.walla.co.il.

I should write about our experience with non-english blogs later.
Unresponsive. Should prebuffer page in either direction of current position.
A very interesting article by the creator of quicksort on his contribution of axiomantic semantics to programming languages (the infamous Hoare triple {P}Q{S} [1]). What strikes me as most interesting is his idea in chosing software verification in the first place (albeit funny!), and the surprises he had in hindsight. (Which almost always makes for an interesting read, cf. Niklaus Wirth: "Good ideas through the looking glass".)

[1]: Interested readers might want to check out the excellent "The Science of Programming" by David Gries.
What is the lag of twitter compared to paid news services? Probably enough to make investing in building such system totally unattractive compared to aforementioned paid feeds.

So you'll have to make your trading decisions based on sentiment or even insider info... Very risky and not very profitable proposition...

Not that twitter is totally useless for trading, but not very useful for HFT uses you describe.
Someone in my community of friends passed away recently and continually shows up in the new "reconnect with" recommendations. This is timely and appropriate I think.
Really? Python seems to be showing up everywhere I look. I don't think I've seen any largish company in quite a while that wasn't using python for something somewhere.
For me this is the better announcement from Amazon today :)
Technology has not waited. People need memorial rituals. I realized this the other week, when we held such a ritual on HN.

I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.

(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk calling attention to oneself instead.)

Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances on that web, is going to outlive us all.
Sorry, I meant to give the opposite impression. Everyone sucks when starting out with something new. Maybe acknowledging that can help with "first move" anxiety.

Either I didn't express that very well, or it's just not that insightful.
Illustrated Regular Expression Refresher Tutorial
Dell unveils exclusive Microsoft-branded Ubuntu OS
Leaving long after any of their user base over the age of sizteen I would have thought.
Can anyone explain the odd size choices? I've never done any cloud stuff, or even much local virtualization, but I would have expected sized on the low side or equal to an even number (32gb, 64gb) rather than a little higher.
Arab Technology Business Plan Competition 2009 Semi-Finalists
Amazon Relational Database - MySQL in the Cloud
We had a delivery from xkcd store delayed by one month because of few characters with diacritics, which the xkcd store software couldn't handle, and the package was sent back as undeliverable because of the unreadable address. And that was latin script, with just few diacritic marks (mostly just ASCII), I can't imagine what would happen with some non-alphabetic script…

And that is far too common. On the other hand, modern desktop software (either OSS and MS) is, thankfully, quite OK, nowadays.
I think the problem must be a bad interaction between the antialiasing of the font renderer and monitor gamma. Font renderer thinks gamma has some value, monitor outputs it with some entirely different gamma value, meaning the antialiasing makes lines look thinner (or thicker) than they actually are.
Their $450/mo offering seems to have only 8GB RAM.
1 TB of Memory in 1 Minute with 1 Command
Hm:

When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article.

So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer.

---

[1] Only tasteful gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is going to require a very careful touch.

[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press. This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for free.

Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper". Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.
Congrats, Alexis & Steve! Can't wait to see what you come up with next.
Ahh, sweet sizteen, to have that year all over again...
Mouse Cursor Affordance
I think they should allow the next-of-kin to choose what they want memorialized, what they want kept private (or perhaps family-only) and what they want destroyed.

I would imagine most families would want to keep the deceased's status messages, but not all of them (in cases of suicide, for example, as riklomas pointed out).
Been there, done that, lived with the mistake. Would all the stress, emotion and distraction of pushing further be worth it in the end? I'd just call it a learning experience (and a loss), toss the whole thing into history and move on with more interesting things.
I looked up my own book on this site and it is available, but it appears very ugly. The choice of font for reading, the fact that they've lost things like different font height/weight for headings means that it's hard to read.

http://www.bookglutton.com/detail/John+GrahamCumming/The+Gee...

Frankly, you'd be better off with a Scribd or Safari version.
How much less db admin stuff, other than backup and patching, are you actually getting out of here?

I tend to spend most of my time as an application dba (doing schema design and SQL programming using lots of analytical functions for data warehouse apps). So I spend more time doing dba type work analyzing access plans and examining physical storage than mucking around with backups - of course, data warehouses are somewhat forgiving in the backup space since you can usually (if somewhat painfully) reload staged source data if things go completely south.

Looks like a cool service (although maybe postgres would have made me happier than MySQL here) other than that.

Besides, I like all that DBA stuff - it is part of creating apps.
http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
Summary: Dell's web store has a copy-and-paste error in a product description.
If you're going to try to determine which is easier to read, it doesn't make any sense at all to base your reasoning on how the fonts look when they're huge - you need to look at their appearance when they're rendered as they're intended to be used.

As a side note: why is it so common with negative letter spacing? Do the fonts look bad "as designed" on some common OS/browser combo? On my OSX+Firefox it just makes the text harder to read and it looks too cramped.
This is so much what I want to do, but I don't yet have the... gumption... to actually do it.

I also code alone, and probably my income from investments from my lifestyle software product business (about $US 460 pcm) is enough to support it. According to Wolfram, $40 pcm in 1976 is $150 pcm today, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+in+1976+USD

I don't really know how to start (or how to be sure if I'd really like the solitude that much after a few weeks/months...)
My first thought is...what's the easiest way to make a fake obituary so that I can prank my friends and get their profiles marked as memorialized? This is going to happen, and it's going to happen a lot.
Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?
I agree that the great advantage of twitter compared to other social tools is that you don't need both parties consent for it to work. Anyone if free to listen to you without requiring your consent.

It is more like in real life, where I don't need to ask your permission to listen to what you say.
That was exactly the situation in Brazil, 7 years ago, the dark age of the Brazilian internet, some users using Macs and Linux boxes (and also some Netscape fans out there that were using Windows) and web developers, myself included, "took back the web" with a couple of other browsers.
The price is right and their customers use it frequently. They were probably asked about MySQL a ton of times.
Fiesta
And the glasses were emptied,
and the bottle - with a broken neck,
and the door was locked,
a bed - wide open.
I remember the feeling of stumbling into the profile of someone that had passed away, IMO it's better if they'd just allow family/friends to shut it down and have a way to backup the photos/updates.
The Constantine Code and the Missing Standard
Now do you need to buy more print cartridges?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/1/
Apple Has Been Talking To Australia About The Tablet
I know a lot of people who put "Eclipse" and "Visual Studio" on their resumes.
Well, we've been using it for over 3 years. I guess that's a long time in Internet years :)
Some people say social media's made from slinging mud
Reddit's made from users and CRUD
Users and CRUD, and Alexis and Steve
A coterie that loves them and the trolls that are peeved

I write sizteen comments, and what do I get?
A hundred fifty karma, procrastination and regret
Li'l alien don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to reddit/store
>Everyone knows the basic processes of cognitive behavioral therapy

(cough) Um, yeah, of course. Of course we do. (cough) [darts off to wikipedia]
Or he could not and we could all just stop reading Joel. Seriously, I'm done with both him and Atwood.
More:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus
Just curious, is this sarcastic or do you really believe that this is an idea that hasn't occurred to them?
I've been racking my brain and it's a lost cause. I think it was my first dive into websites and I seriously doubt there was anything of consequence (I was in middle school). Certainly nothing I can remember other than I know I had an account and remember having to choose a neighborhood. I appreciate the offer though.
GV is great, but this isn't really worth it. It only lets you use the voicemail function, and since nobody uses VM (at least in my age group), there's really no point to it.

The only VM I've received this year was two seconds long because the caller forgot to hang up.
I guess this is partially correct as Apple doesn't allow apps that compete with core services. Loopt (which I have never used) is an example of my point. Would I prefer to buy a device that is limited to a particular locate-people service or would I like to buy a device which can run any of N competing services?
My post was ambiguous, but I didn't mean to say that engineers don't specialize. The difference is that an engineer's value lies in their understanding of a technical domain and skill in analysis and design, not the particular tools they use.

It's perfectly valid to describe oneself as a 'web developer' or 'systems programmer'. What bugs me is calling yourself a 'C++ programmer' or a 'Ruby hacker'. Emphasizing skill with a tool is the mark of a tradesman - it abets the industry dysfunction of viewing programmers as interchangeable resources who should be slotted into a project with minimal investment.
A lot of interactive webpages break the back-button behavior. However, this one takes the breakage to a whole new level: for each page you turn, an entry to the history is added, but it does nothing.

So if you turn a few pages and decide you want to go back to HN, you'll have to hit the back button as often as you turned the page. Without any visual feedback that it does anything.
Doesn't it depend on JOB or CAREER the company is offering?
I respect that he pumps out a lot of material but there is nothing new here.
Neat. It might be interesting to try this with DrScheme, since it can display images inline in the repl.

http://docs.plt-scheme.org/quick/

http://docs.plt-scheme.org/teachpack/image.html
Grooveshark 2.0 Launched
Ask HN: What's the better AIR development strategy?
I'm a javascript, C++, Java, C, OCAML, F# programmer who is looking to pick up AIR programming.

As I understand it, AIR development allows you to start with Dreamweaver, Flash, or straight HTLM/AJAX (I guess with Eclipse?)

So what would be the trade-offs with each choice? Is Flash/Flex tough to pick up? Full of idiosyncrasies? Is Dreamweaver cumbersome for rich apps? Is Eclipse/JS tougher to set up yet more powerful in the long run?

Any help from AIR programmers would be appreciated.
Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D
I think it's reasonable because there are very rarely any such things as standards in software development. Municipal building codes are standards. Drug testing regimens are standards. Programming languages are not standards. At best they are conventions, and only insofar as certain niche subset industries are concerned.

As for de facto standards, I don't think we should be paying much attention to them. I think it's very important to draw the distinction that software development currently has no standards (you might be able to argue for TCP/IP, where alternatives are only ever used because they fulfill some unique use case not covered by TCP/IP), because for as much as we want to call this industry "software engineering", we sure as hell don't treat it like any other field of engineering, for many of the reasons already mentioned.

I think the first step is to sit down and agree on some terminology. You can't even get two programmers to agree on what "Object Oriented Programming" means. No wonder we aren't treated like professional engineers. We don't act like them.
“Design Patterns” 15th Anniversary
Out of curiosity, what sort of applicant questions and responses did they use to measure conscientiousness?
Always a fan of INTERCAL. Malbolge is a good one, too.