skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article doesn't take that tack; the subtitle does. I'd blame the sub-editor (probably also responsible for the [sic] next to the US spelling of pedophile) rather than the author.
What every developer should know about bitmaps
Anyway, it should cost something to downvote. It seems people are all too ready to downvote comments they disagree with without much regard for engaging in a constructive discussion.
Hi, Didnt read previous comments so someone may have said this or addressed it already.

Design looks a little bit to bland for me. Almost like a off the shelf wordpress theme.

Focus on your strong points:

Easy Setup
List major benefits ( Increase sales, search traffic, etc. )
Easy Administration
Analytics

Cool idea though.
Want to be a programmer in an investment bank?
That's true. The article is more of an overview of the stuff online most people aren't aware of.

It just seems unfair to dump private intranets along with projects like Freenet and Tor together with RBN botnets, under the "dark web" designation.
Google's old implementation of OpenID was within the standard but outside of the spirit. Google would provide a different URI for every website you visited. This makes some aspects of using OpenID less useful (such as federated account meta data and links). Google now offers the ability to have one single URI as a user's OpenID identifier, which puts them in line with every other major OpenID provider.
"... Note, this is from 2006. ..."

Hey this is classic "Wil Shipley". It's worth the read just for the writing style and humour. But it's insightful gems like this:

"... There's an interesting side-effect to this last kind of fight, the fight for good. When you're not doing it for your own ego, you can win just by convincing others to join your side. If you get enough people to fight for you, you can even win without anyone actually knowing it was you. ..."

that make reading the article worthwhile.
"And there's no choice: it's the only way to be a realtor."

Important nitpick: Realtor is a registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors. Not all real estate agents are Realtors. It's yet another racket in the industry.
Joel on Software would be a first recommendation.
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I've read several articles like this lately, and they've all ignored the elephant in the room, which is this:

Professors hate teaching.

The best-respected professors in a university manage large research projects, occasionally doing some research themselves. No-one becomes a professor to teach - if they wanted to teach, they'd have left after their degree and gone to a high school. The way that we select professors works to further this - no-one got tenure at a 'good' university without a strong research record. And since the competition is so fierce, research becomes your only focus.

It may be the case that smaller universities, or less-prestigious colleges, can give tenure to university-teachers. But as far as I can see within the system, teaching is considered a second-rate activity for second-rate minds. Given that, no professor who is considered excellent will try very hard to teach, and students' education will suffer.
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There's a fair bit of confusion about the various forms of "darkness" in the article. It's very easy to get the impression that Freenet is many times bigger than the public web. Incidentally, I wonder if VPN connections to intranets are counted in the 500x figure.
--- Books ---

Tuned In - great book, describes how to really understand user perspectives as opposed to 'inside-out' development.
The book's based on many principles taught in the Pragmatic Marketing prodm course.

Inspired (Marty Cagan) - good cross section of PM, covers People, Process and Product separately. Startups to large companies.

The Art of Product Management - a series of articles, describes software PM in startups to larger companies. More about the role of PM rather than product itself.

Rules for Revolutionaries - Guy Kawasaki's book, half entrepreneur morale book and half how to create a product quickly.

--- Blogs ---

Cranky Product Manager - crankypm.com

Silicon Valley Product Group - svpg.com (Marty Cagan's blog)

--- I would avoid: ---

Value Prop (Jose Palomino)

Will It Fly? (Thomas McKnight)
What is Kosmix and why does this journalist keep mentioning it?
But there must be a justification, a theory borne out by observation, in order to make these adjustments. If you have two data series that do not overlap and you make an adjustment to one you better have a good reason to do so. Now, certainly you may have a good reason (e.g. altitude differences), but the reasoning for that and the scientific backing justifying such changes must be put forth. Otherwise you're just fiddling around with numbers and making it up as you go, which is not science.

Hypothesize. Predict. Observe. Judge the prediction. Refine the hypothesis. That is science.

As for airports, this should be obvious. Many major airports have grown over the past several decades. And have seen major increases in air traffic. And have been situated in neighborhoods that have seen massive increases in development. All of these factors contribute to the urban heat island effect (more traffic, more tarmac, etc.) These effects can cause an increase in measured temperatures over time even if overall the local climate saw no increase in temperature. This is an important effect due to the very high proportion of weather stations placed in urban areas and at airports.
It probably includes the petabytes of data CERN generates too. You can get them over JANET via FTP, does that count?
David Heinemeier Hansson Quotes
On an unrelated note, is there a generic algorithm that can compute interestingness? Maybe some index to follow?
This is getting nastier as we are getting close to COP15, which USA and China will attend, as they officially announced.

An advice: be aware of what's being told, take a look at different sources, consume different media and keep your eyes open. There's a big interest in blocking any climate negotiation.
True - somehow I picture iPhone people always holding their phones in front of them, looking at some location based service (and no, the iPhone isn't the best phone for LBS either, but still).
XBOX 360 Elegant Edition
Qik Will Be Pre-Loaded on Omnia II
Hooray for stereotypes!
That's a lot of oversimplification. Yes, there are niches in banks that would probably fit that profile but then do so many other companies.

Another point to note is that Investment banks are very heavy users of technology and have varied needs , a FX trading platform has different requirements versus an online sales portal. You will invariably find all kinds of technologies being used.
I was once offered a tidy sum to work in New York, cranking out desktop C# applications for large banks. My interviewer was a nice guy, and told me straight up that I should expect very little real code, and more taking a beating from traders on why their green button isn't green enough, and how it's a little too far to the left.

Needless to say I didn't take the job - and I still know some of my peers who went that route. Thankfully none of them really liked programming anyways, and the paycheque sort of numbs the skullcrushing tedium of it all.

I think the lesson here is less "don't work for banks", and more "don't work for a company that doesn't value technology". You will get this same crap at, say, a factory (been there done that)... a lot of really bad code written by really incompetent people, mostly because skilled programmers would never voluntarily subject themselves to that sort of environment.
RealNetworks violates Google Adsense TOS?
When i launched the RealPlayer11GOLD setup exe, the realplayer setup shown me a google adsense ad unit embedded in to the setup program which i bet against the Google Adsense Terms of services (TOS).
This article is ridiculous crap. At the end of the day, Google gives you their freakin' code, damn it. This means that if you're not happy with the way Google is running things, you can go ahead and fork your Chrome OS or Android. And if you do manage to build something significantly better than what Google can offer and people use your stuff over theirs, there's nothing Google can do about it.

Jeez.
Developing bank software is just different. There can be no rapid iteration, because every bug is disastrous. As a result, software evolves at a glacial pace. I'd think that the answer to the question about what technologies you need to know to work on financial systems would include COBOL, possibly before Java.
What a ranting post! Especially when attacking such an easy target, where there are so many good points to be made, it's sad to see this poorly structured, badly phrased "let's just get it off my chest" rant in place of a good, solid post.

Shame.
There can be no rapid iteration, because every bug is disastrous. As a result, software evolves at a glacial pace.

Having spent 4 years building software at large investment banks, both on the coding side and on the managing side, I can affirm without hesitation that the glacial pace has very little effect on the (high) incidence of bugs. The quality of software produced in banks is generally appalling.

The reason it's slow is because the complexity is sometimes very high, the volumes of data to process are often very large, and the communications overheads between bank departments are just insane. Quality (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.
"There can be no rapid iteration, because every bug is disastrous"

I work for a company that handles a lot of commerce, and bugs can be disastrous, and stakes are high - we still iterate. Sure, we're not pushing new versions live every single night, but our cycles are still relatively quick.

I think the "there's too much on the line if a mistake happens" line of thinking is a cop-out. There are ways to mitigate this risk, safeguards and methodologies.
A lot of younger people fancy Java, too. Not saying that is a good thing.

I think Google uses a lot of Java, too.
Ymacs - An Emacs-like editor for the web
At my last job, my boss insisted on Media Temple because they had "good spam filtering and the GridService is fast." Unfortunately, neither of those are true. I had a horrible experience with them, response times were slow, and I would never recommend them to anyone.

The real solution, of course, is to use Slicehost (or any of the other virtual machine hosting company's) and Google Apps for email which has unparalleled spam filtering.

While I'm not glad they were hacked, I do hope that people start realizing they're not all they're cracked up to be, and just because they have a fancy website doesn't mean they're that great a service.
What if I started my reply off with:

"I'm a HN'er. The source of the parent comment is davidppp, who is a notorious crackpot and illiterate fool..."

I just was curious if you understood an ad hominem attack when it was directed at you, because you obviously aren't noticing it when you use it against others.

Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not a popularity test or a beauty contest. We're on an equal playing ground where data and reproducible experimentation is all that matters.
Emboldening tends to improve readability too. If you're trying to optimise screen real-estate you might try a 2pt smaller font-size but use the bold/black/heavy version of the font.
London Stock Exchange trading hit by technical glitch
Trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been brought to a halt by technical difficulties.
I've only every heard good things about them until now. That's usually a bad sign (spin).
Foolish New Slogans for Bad Old Banks
And for God's sake, don't ask for "programming ninjas".
BEdita3 release, a Semantic Content Management Framework
Plenty of banks use agile development methodology.
[Twitter & Air] Thanksgiving on Pandora
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I worked with Ted for a few years on and off on Zigzag. He's hard to work with, but the rewards (like free dinners in restaurants, free candy, priceless signed copies of all his books, and high table dinners at Oxford), make up for the 'difficult' coding (which isn't that difficult).

Also, I have a PDF of an interview with Ted (which a guy sent me and is incredibly rare) in a 1991 magazine founded by Louis Rossetto (of Wired fame), where Ted chats openly to Louis about Zigzag, a big contrast to the demolition piece in Wired a few years later. I might post this to my website and post a link to HN.
10 Things Mobile Technology is Making Obsolete
The history of mobile phone technology reads like the plot from Highlander.
Slam your foot down in the Camry, what happens? Slam your foot down in the Porsche and you're doing 150mph before you know it ... isn't the perceived danger also a large (non-placebo) factor?
Plenty of banks also haven't touched code that's been running just fine for the last 30 years. You just upgrade the mainframe under it...
It really depends on what you're bringing to the table. If you're a rockstar, then the programmer might be willing to take less since she knows you'll bring in massive business. If you're among the legion of "idea guys" who have never actually done anything, and don't have much experience or many connections... well then, she might consider just doing it without you.
News Trends Updates
What's wrong with marking a mis-spelling?
Is Chrome OS just another Ubuntu fork?
In my one job working for a bank, I was hired directly by the head of market risk management. He hired me because he wanted a programmer who would just do what he asked instead of having to negotiate the internal IT bureaucracy.

I threw together a system with Apache and Perl (it was the late 90s) for traders to monitor their positions and that we used to run risk analysis on a daily basis. The traders preferred my hacked together system to the official one from the IT department, because it was easier to use.

We wrote a lot of VB apps, because that was what my boss was comfortable with. Not the greatest development environment, but at least I could just write code that my boss and the traders actually needed to do their jobs, without worrying about internal politics and bureaucracy. I would say that's a lot more important than choice of technology stack.
I agree with your take on the nature of the post, its points could easily have been presented more elegantly!

I do feel that a lot of the points are somewhat valid, though, and because it might act as a catalyst for some interesting discussion on HN, I upvoted it anyway.
Curious then, I was certain I spent the last 2 years building a grid computing system for an investment bank using modern C++... Must be me.

Seriously, what's the point of such posts? You take from two and three experiences and extrapolate to a whole industry?
Ask HN: Is most of your "prescription drug" spam re Pfizer too?
I'm curious... the scams for prescription drugs I find in my spam folder all the time always seem to be about getting Pfizer drugs!

Is that the case for you as well? Or is it just me...

And if there is a pattern...

What's UP?
China's monopoly on rare earth minerals
The less likely a scenario is, the less time you have to make a plan when if it actually happens. The job of the General Staff in peacetime is to make sure that whatever happens, no-one panics, they reach into a filing cabinet, pull out the plan and calmly execute it. Having a plan implies no intent, as you say!
Im not disagreeing but I think your rebuttal fails to note the major point of the article (which I found actually fairly accurate).
I thought MT was good when I was using them, but once the site got a little bigger I moved to EC2 and have never looked back. Much faster and much cheaper.
I spent four years writing Smalltalk (VisualWorks and GemStone) at an investment bank, and didn't look at a line of Java the whole time I was there. We were a wart on the architecture board's bum, not fitting into their Grand Unified Vision of Approved Java Technologies, but the system was--and still is--the only platform capable of pricing and risk managing some very oddly shaped (and therefore very high-margin) trades. It was also good fun to work on.
the free shipping to the UK and the aggressive price point was what got my pre-order. A while back I was looking at the FitBit, which specifically said 'we only ship to US right now'. FitBit should partner with a shipping specialist, since the device is small, and people like me would be willing to pay quite a lot of postage.
Surely wooden wheels came first - fell a tree, voila, wide wooden wheel (aka "log" or "roller"). Also bending a whip (thin flexible stick) into a circle and rolling it ...
Chrome OS isn't built for developers. It's built for Google. And online advertisers.

ChromeOS is built for users. The comparison in this article is ridiculous. Somehow because Google does not provide a developer prerelease they are anti-developer. It seems to me there is plenty of time to develop: there is a a period of time between when Android gets released and when it gets onto the handset of your choice.

If you are writing a development tool that you need early access to releases perhaps it's best talking to google. I'm sure that Google is willing to work with anyone who is supporting their platform.
Plenty of banks have both.

That's the advantage of n-tier systems. You keep your ancient databases, stick some business rules on top in Java and then talk to them from a bunch of clients that you can tweak as much as you like without worrying that you're going to break the important stuff.
Ross Hemsworth Galaxi TV and Media Promotions
Using eBox As Windows Primary Domain Controller
What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?
Anscombe's quartet is cool (and familiar to readers of Tufte), but the correct link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
The quote is "deep web" not "dark web".

The article is a confusing mish-mash of several completely different things.
Plenty of banks want to use agile, because they've heard it's cool, is said to deliver more better software faster, and is attractive to good coder job candidates. How far they are actually getting with it is another question.
Original story of cinderella
Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story by Carolyn Turgeon is not your typical happy after the fairy tale. This is not Cinderella 's history. It is a dark history of problems of aging and the redemption of our past mistakes.
Lil is a old single woman struggling to get ends meet.
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er, getting bugs out early is a major argument in favour of test-first agile iterative methods. You don't ship every iteration, but give it to the testing team. Would you get better results from giving your testing team a new release once per year?
I work in finance as a developer, and I have found there is also a demand for high performance C++/C software people - our development team is composed mostly of ex-telecom engineers from Cisco et al. The performance is a priority when trading latencies are involved.

Large investment banks (like any large company) have many different needs for software, and each of those have their own priorities.

That being said, we have a sizable J2EE team as well.
So I have a really interesting job in the front office at a real investment bank. I have worked here for several years and have used (among others) perl, python and C++. I have touched precisely 3 lines of java in all my time here.

Our development cycle is super fast, yet I work on very sensitive applications and infrastructure (real time trading, pricing, risk etc).

Bottom line: Jobs vary significantly in any industry and within any firm.
i'm not the downvoter, but the device does let you specify limits for when you have to be up.
Synchronized Robot Christmas Dance [video]
this attack was outlined prior to Colin's paper

No it wasn't. This is not the same as DJB's cache timing attack, and I beat the Osvik-Shamir-Tromer team by several weeks.
I was amazed when Google released Chrome (the browser).
One day there was nothing, the other day there was web comic explaining dream about the browser and the next day there was the browser itself.

How could they build a web browser in complete secrecy without anyone spilling a word about it to the public?

I didn't know it was possible in times when even government documents make their way to the web and copyrighted movies are routinely published as torrents days before their premiere.
"In my entire life, I’ve never heard of a company storing passwords in plain text"

He needs to get out more. Happens all the time I reckon. Someone throws together a prototype with plaintext username/password column on the person or user table and 10 years later it's still there. I have personally seen this at two different companies.
The problem with Android is, that the time between when it gets released and when it gets onto the handset of your choice is one week (Motorola Droid and Eclair). And that is the improvement, in past it used to get onto handsets and into the wild first, then released to developers (G1 and 1.1, I'm looking at you).

Basically the development process of Android is closed, Google does not comment on ongoing developments, the sources (or information) are occasionally dumped on developers. The 2.0 is still not fully open. The older releases still do not build for G1/G2 - you cannot checkout the source, configure for particular device and at the end of the process have an image that you can flash.

Or the situation with ADP1 - it is supposed to be development phone, but there was still no communication, whether 2.0 will be able to run at all at the device. Developers outside Google/HTC cannot work on the tree, because it does not build...
> You take from two and three experiences and extrapolate to a whole industry?

If one were to be cynical, we could say that PG's essays about startups, pre-YC, were based on exactly one experience. And yet, they still are very well written and contain good advice. Of course, it's necessary to be up-front about the fact that it's an anecdote rather than some kind of broad survey.
Not amazing at all, when you consider Google's corporate culture.

Not to equate the two, but the Scientologists have been about as successful as keeping their actual religious texts secret.
ChromeOS is built for users. The comparison in this article is ridiculous.

Nothing Google does is for "users". Advertisers are Google's customers. Users are Google's product.
"Hello, this is the front desk."

"Hi, I'm in room 118 and I smell smoke."

"We'll send up some air freshener right away, sir."
I had never heard of JANET: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET
Doesn't mean he knows nothing about leadership. Dude got promoted to General on his merits.
For a good counter counter example to this guy's rant:
Functional Payout Framework used for exotic options pricing at Barclays Capital, developed entirely in Haskell: http://www.lexifi.com/downloads/frankau.pdf