skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this better than what I came up with, but there are parts of it I still don't understand. I'm reading it like this: the new paint represents the growing neurons, and when the neurons grow that's increasing your potential brainpower.

The article says that you learn by pruning connections. I get the idea that as a baby you think anything is possible, and as life goes on you learn that trees can only walk in fiction, and when you touch something hot you get burned. That would be like removing paint.

But what I don't get is this: say you read an article about something you didn't know before, doesn't your brain make new connections (synapses) between neurons? How are those and neuron growth different, and how does the synapse learning fit into the paint model? Or am I misunderstanding how synapses work?
Thanks for the tip. I've been doing the same thing Atwood has been doing. So I just installed your stuff and have it running.

A tip for folks using leftnode's setup: I didn't notice $gpgRecipient hidden at the end of the config file and chased around a bit looking for it.
zero sum? but people take raw materials (e.g. glass and aluminum) and make awesome, valuable stuff out of it all the time.
good outline. An alternative, which I use, is tarsnap http://www.tarsnap.com/.
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

Linus Tolvards

I guess people use Google's cache and archive.org these days :)
Gotta love any article that tries to take on numerous very complex phenomena and package them together into a very simple sound bite.
> I guess I can not link to the blog post...

Well, I sort of can:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:9vLV7YkK14sJ:www.codingh...
That's the crux of the problem, yeah. We're like Tolstoy's line about families: normal people are are all just normal, but geeks are all weird in ways different enough to prevent us from having any kind of collective self-definition. Which leaves the job of defining who we are to others, who inevitably get it wrong.
Thanks for using it!

I use it to backup all of my databases and entire vhosts directory every hour and night.

Let me know if you find any bugs!
I won't link it again in this thread, but check out Warrick. It's a tool to do just that.
How is it pointing fingers if your hosting provider lost your site plus their backups of your site? They were being paid to provide a service, and they failed at it in basically the worst possible way (i.e. total data loss, rather than just downtime). Sure, he should have had his own backups, but how does the fact that he could have recovered better form his host's screw up change the fact that they screwed up?

That's not too far from saying that it's your fault if you get hit by a car while walking across a crosswalk because you didn't jump out of the way fast enough.

They failed, they failed in a catastrophic way, and they deserve to have it made public knowledge and to lose business over it. He should do a better job backing up his own stuff, but he's right to be angry with his hosting provider and to call them out.
I cannot imagine how horrible this must be. Oh, the horror!
For Python folks, check out pyquery (http://www.pyquery.org/). It's really handy.
So you're saying they deserve it? Most programmers I've worked with act like professionals, yet are still treated like children.

It's bad managers that have the stereotype, so programmers continuing to be professional doesn't fix the problem.
Then you missed the part where she says she doesn't water down her marketing messages, because it filters out people who won't be satisfied buying her product. Doing that lead to a < 0.1% return rate on her Javascript ebook.
not quite as much as it did in 2006, but yeah. anyone have memories of what was going on in extremely-alternative browsers around these times?
"tl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, ... still has the house."

I'm having trouble reconciling the "dr" part of "tl;dr" with your concise summary of almost the entire interview. :)

"built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, ..."

Or, built a service that many people on MySpace were very happy to use, promoted that service very effectively within the web and MySpace community dynamics of the time, had lucky timing and benefited from his status on MySpace and the Web to get in the Yahoo ad beta stage when it was was more lucrative ...

"... made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realizing that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, ..."

Or, made more money at peak per month than most people will make at peak per year, ever, blew a lot of money, redesigned a site that had grown organically, as did his knowledge of software engineering and business, made a fatal error not just in changing the URLs but all the text on his site (html, css, javascript, etc)...

"... blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ..."

When, what he should have done is spent a few hundred or thousand to have an SEO expert tell him what went wrong (or hired such before he finalized his decision to switch everything over in seconds) and how long it might take to fix it (if it could be fixed at all). If anyone had told him about redirects by that time (they probably did), it would have been too late because the mistake was already irrevocably "out there" ...

"... ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house."

Still had a business that could be sold for some amount of money, and, he's already dusted himself off and working his way back with what may be a viable and lucrative service.

The guy is 22 (?), and already he's built and lost/sold a million dollar business (based on nothing but tacky MySpace themes!) without, apparently, knowing much about business, and without benefit of any experienced adviser. He learned some very expensive lessons about spending, source control and how search engines see and judge your site, and about how important it is to learn important things before they're important. He did it in the fashion often advocated here: do it, and learn what you need when you need it. Unfortunately he learned a few things a bit later than when he needed it, but it doesn't seem to have discouraged him permanently.

Most of us make mistakes and learn about managing our life and business in our early twenties, we just don't think of those mistakes as "shocking" because we aren't spinning millions of dollars and our own business around.

I thought it was an interesting and useful story, and I liked the "en vivo, open kimono" format.
Mozilla to open - gasp - Firefox add-on store
Ha, that's great. I'd love to know which site that was.

Really, Etsy doesn't have anything worth copying other than the basic idea and well, their success. Their copy and wording least of all... anytime there are words on the site, they are the wrong words.
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html
Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.
As someone who works with XML all day long, I am wondering why people don't use SimpleXML in PHP 5+ for this sort of thing too.
Sounds like a good coding horror article.
Perspective tracking with only a web cam
SimpleXML will choke on invalid HTML/XML while this library claims to support it.
SaaS Vendors Should Learn The Art Of Security - Dropbox Issue
What a nightmare, I hope he has a good writeup on the story when the site is back online. I'm sure there are some great lessons to come out of all this for the rest of us. Specifically, what were his expectations from the service providers he worked with.
A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T
This organization has a pronounced anti-foreign worker stance. Since almost all of my colleagues are not American and are here on visas, I cannot support this organization.
Well, he was right.
It seems intellectual rights for something like music makes more sense, since one can work just as hard on another song and achieve almost equal success. But in technology there is usually a limited amount of ways to do something most efficiently. Each longstanding patent makes alternative efficient methodologies harder to come by. It impedes the process of evolution since there's a definite best way.
"Crunchpad" could also come to mean "The drama is the product".

The saga has the appearance of deliberate, or perhaps just subconscious submarining for the sake of having something sensational to blog about.

(Perhaps this is a good topic for an essay: how blogging twists the mind to make everything you do seem like a blog entry.)
Please read more carefully. I'm talking about possession of currency which is zero-sum except when the Fed prints out more bills.

You can make a billion pretty trinkets with glass and aluminum, and it won't get you any dollars if no one with dollars wants to trade you dollars, and the Fed is not printing extra.
Ouch. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I guess he is just fucked.
The same could be said for CrystalTech
He is right to be angry, but I have to disagree about calling them out while the site is still done.

An analysis posted after the fact can lay out where the technical failures took place, and that is the right time to describe issues with the host.

Pointing fingers in anger is very frowned upon in all organizations I work with. It implies a lack of ownership of your own products and a lack of maturity in handling your business affairs. Organizations that pursue blame before solutions do not have a positive culture -- they have a fear-based culture.

To answer your direct question, nothing he says will change the fact that the vendor screwed up. Your analogy is correct that it is the drivers fault if someone hits you, but flawed in that you cannot absolve all responsibility for your own safety when crossing streets.

When a vendor screws up, the level of professionalism that you portray when dealing with the situation says a great deal about yourself.
Yeah, time to double-check your own backup procedures, everyone. You don't want to be posting similar questions, right?

Remember the old saying: if you haven't tested restoring your backups, then you don't really have backups. (Not that I've ever been good about this myself.)
Ronin: Online invoicing and time tracking
Interesting! The title is a bit vague for me -- when I think browser wars, I think of the mid 90's. This graph kind of picks up in the middle of story. It's like skipping "The Fellowship of the Ring" and going straight to "The Two Towers."
Baking availability SLA into the code
The authors behind the article wrote a book Against Intellectual Monopoly that argues for the abolishment of copyright and patents.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

Heck, they already found evidence that patent systems did not really disclose secrets and actually distort innovation toward inventions whom secrets wouldn't be secret for long.

However, don't take my memory-say and read the book yourself.
I found about 200 of his pages (with images and other dependencies) in the Pinboard archives, and forwarded them along to the guy.

I wonder if there is a nice market niche for a 'panic button' recovery tool that scrapes web caches, internet archive and so on immediately after you lose a site.
Seppukoo - Assisted virtual identity suicide
I wish I could lol, but the thought of this guy getting paid for spouting this nonsense really chafes my hide.

For every nugget of truth in this article there is a viscous slathering of insecurity projected onto what were no doubt highly abused technical teams systematically subjected to abusive middle management by a blathering idiot.

My secret desire is that deep down Tim Bryce really does realize what an utterly irredeemable fool he is.
indeed. Decal was such an amazing technical achievement in those days. Really years ahead of it's time.
Social aspects of chip design
Ditto. Also, for the stuff I don't automatically validate I run a script to check file sizes for sanity.
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. There's definitely not an equal distribution of intelligence across all disciplines. In the 50's and 60's, when aerospace was the rage, all of the best and brightest wanted to work for NASA and become rocket scientists.

In the last twenty or so years, the best and the brightest have been drawn to computers. One might argue this is part of the reason we've seen so much innovation in the computer industry, and so little in aerospace (60 years after flight was invented, we had a man on the moon. what have we done since?)

Given that a higher proportion of intelligent people are attracted to technology fields, it's a safe assumption that programmers are ABOVE average intelligence - and there are more geniuses here than elsewhere. That said, the 'average corporate shop' probably has driven out all signs of intelligent life, especially if managed by people like the writer of this article.
Vector graphics in Firefox
pretty cool
There is no browser as fast as chrome anywhere for javascript, not even safari, not by a factor of 2x. The "omnibar" in chrome is a legitimate innovation, every browser should work that way in my opinion (it's not too difficult to tell the difference between a search string and a url automatically). How many browsers implement web-sockets? Hrm, not too many. The Chrome dev team's amazing pace of development has been spent in the last year putting together a solid, full-featured browser (extension support is almost there, that's the only real lacking element), it looks like they will continue that pace into implementing state-of-the-art features (like web-sockets) before anyone else.
He's not serving any AdWords off that page :-P
Bill Clementson's Blog: JavaScript and Lisp
"What they found was the ADHD people had fewer of these cells, meaning our brains are less capable of processing dopamine, the chemical 'attaboy,' than other people. It’s all gone into the Journal of the American Medical Association."

Those dopamine-thieving bastards.
Does that image look like the Chrome logo, or it just me? :)
I don't think anyone's saying that CrystalTech didn't also fail.
Straightforward enough. 1) Get another host, preferably one a thousand miles away from your present provider 2) Do what you need to do to get a copy of your site running there 3) Refine/automate the process and practice it 'til you can do it with your eyes closed
I have to strongly disagree. First of all, all his statements about how the patent system does not promote innovation are merely conclusory and do not show any evidence or reasoning behind them. (Other than a couple of cherry picked individual cases).

This is an interesting question, but it is unfortunately really hard to show scientific proof either way. Economics is just too uncertain of a science to prove something as complex as this. One thing that is known is that most countries whose economies rely on IP creation usually end up with a relatively strong IP protection system.

Now, as I have said here before, I agree that some patents may hinder innovation. Patenting things that are not new or obvious or issuing patents that are too broad can just create a lot of harmful rent seeking which only hurts innovation. But this is something that should be fixed by modifying the patent system not scrapping it.

This is too big of a discussion to have here, but I should point that a big mistake people make when considering the cost of the patent system is to assume that if patents did not exist things would be just the way they are now, but without the patents. This is simply not true.

I really doubt those Africans would have any AIDS drugs if the patent system did not exist, because nobody would commit the resources of developing and testing an AIDS drug without patent protection.

Furthermore, if there is no patent system, the only way to protect your inventions would be by keeping them secret and companies that do innovate would go through very costly measures of making sure their inventions are secret. These measures probably cost much more to society than the patent system. Also, keeping inventions secret often resulted in the inventions being lost forever. Thus, if there is no patent system one may argue that the ideas would still be kept under lock, in fact they would be more severely locked down than before.

If you study the history of innovations, you can see a lot of interesting inventions being completely lost merely because their practitioners wanted to keep them secret. Also, you will find out about entire secret societies being formed just to keep knowledge secret (e.g., the Masons).

For example considering the kind of buildings the masons built in medieval times, they must have had some pretty good knowledge of rudimentary physics and mathematics. But all this knowledge was carefully kept secret to ensure their monopoly. Thus, nothing was published and nothing could be used by the scientists of the era to develop overall scientific theories.

edit : full disclosure, I am a patent lawyer.
Further edited for spelling and grammar.
Ah ah they call me Big Papa.

Just call me Big Papa.

Just get on the floor with your hos and my knob.

Ah ah Big Papa.
I, for one, do not think that it is expressive enough to cover all of the different paradigms being explored.

You are not alone with that opinion, I've seen it a couple times in similar discussions. Yet I'm missing a concrete example for a piece of functionality that can't be reasonably wrapped.

Browbeating is irrelevant in either direction. What matters for adoption is a sane interface for day-to-day use and that includes proper tooling for interactive use - an area where many of the contenders are still sorely lacking.
Another article on the site had a link to a job board there: http://jobs.whiteafrican.com/ I'm thinking about seeing what kind of candidates I could get. Any suggestions on how payment works? I've never worked with an international candidate before
You don't need to put much time or money into it. The bare minimum of a weekly cron-automated rsync job can be done in a few minutes, even if you've never done it before.
Amen.

The one thing I'll add is that AT&T is now really so only in name. SBC bought the remains of AT&T -- largely for the name, ran most speculation at the time -- a few years ago. And a bigger/worse set of beep than SBC management you'll be hard pressed to find (IMHO).
Since folks here seem to be in the know, if I were after "parsing as close to the browser as possible", ideally in Java/Scala or Ruby or Python (sorry PHP!) -- any recommendations?

I've done scraping (e.g. w/ BeautifulSoup) but haven't looked to see how true the parses are to what IE/FF/WebKit would produce.

(On my list of things to look into: html5lib -- http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/ ... is it any good?)
MIT gestural computing makes multitouch look old hat
Again, one study from 2003, and a lot of op-eds. I might just have to get creative with the data myself.
Success is about equal to (aptitude * hard work * luck)

Luck is not repeatable. So, I think it would be clever for him to finish high school.
'100% Data Loss' as Coding Horror Rebuilds From Caches
Why would you have reason to believe the situation has drastically reversed itself in merely 6 years?

I would be more inclined to believe those congressional reports than the anecdotal evidence you have.
Is codinghorror really mission critical? He will restore from some other backups. Downtime on a blog is not that big a deal other than people like to hate on Jeff Atwood. Now if he lost customer credit card records or something like that, then it would be warranted.
If you search for the article title on Google and then click in from there, you can read the referenced article.

However, if you (I) do the same search at Yahoo or Bing and then click through, you only get the two paragraph teaser. Irony upon irony.
his position as looking down on coding horror has somewhat moved to being part of the team. not necessarily a bad thing.
More speculation... Perhaps it is constricted by the size of the skull? At some point, the skull stops growing and larger neurons could put stress on the existing ones and cause damage.
> Luck is not repeatable.

There is another gem for DanielBMarkhams quote search engine when he gets it finished.

it's interesting how the fact that this guy got lucky seems to imply that he'll do fine again in the future.

I got lucky once, I've been working very hard to see if I can 'get lucky' again, but I'm really not counting on it.

I think the real moral of this story is "If it ain't broke, do not fix it".

Do your experimenting on something that isn't making you a ton of money (yet).
All the management tips in that article make perfect sense:

"Be leery of programmers that are pseudo-intellectual. They are probably hiding something."

If you can't explain something clearly and concisely, you either need to improve your communication skills or really are hiding something (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9sfm5/i_am_a_man_in_hi...)

"Improve communications within the programming staff by developing a standard glossary of terms. This will also be useful to outsiders who have to interface with programmers."

This is the core idea behind Domain-Driven Design.

"Carefully scrutinize technical proposals. Make the programmers justify it from a business perspective."

ROI ROI ROI

"Adopt standards for documenting programs (e.g., graphics and/or text detailing the organization and logic of the program)."

Duh.

"Develop standard development practices emphasizing quality and program re-usability. Demanding precision in development will result in superior performance."

Duh x 2

"Implement a skills inventory to monitor the talents and proficiencies of the programming staff. This is used to determine the need for additional training, as well to select the most suitable individual for a programming assignment."

If only more managers did this!!

"Promote a program of on-going education, such as a training curriculum, the development of technical library, participation in professional associations, and technical certification programs."

How can you say the author of the article looks down on programmers? Again, most coders wish their organization had a program like this.

"Develop security measures to safeguard the company's intellectual property."

This one is agreeable on some level, however that level is CIO and not team managers.

"Recognize outstanding achievement even for the smallest of jobs."

Ok. You need to recognize people's effort and achievements.

"Manage from the bottom-up. Delegate responsibility and hold people accountable for their actions. Teach employees to supervise themselves."

Of course, the author really does think programmers are morons! How else can he recommend something like this?
Mastering Custom Segmentation in Google Analytics