skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I had backups, mind you, but they were on the virtual machine itself" (http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/6577510116).

Sigh. When we will ever learn?
Also, if you don't regularly test backups they might as well not exist.
Wow. After about 30 seconds I can honestly say that I would have enjoyed punching that puppet square in the face.

I can see that using a puppet to get across your opinions could be used as a novel way to avoid your own camera shyness, or just to add spice to what would otherwise just be a normal commentary blog, but the put-on voice annoyed me beyond all reason.

But when it comes down to it, I don't really need a puppet to give me tech news anyway...
His blog gets linked to a lot, for better or worse. That's a blow.
My first thought on reading the article that he wasn't using "blueprint" in the sense of the word that most people around here would.
Another way to get to the DOM, especially if you are using tidy to clean-up your HTML is tidy itself
http://php.net/manual/en/book.tidy.php It is not very hard to get elements using tidy, but you need to write your own functions. However, is almost bullet-proof as it can correct for malformed HTML which some of the other libaries don't.
It's also clearly him talking about his own project. I think it's reasonable to expect him to talk about it positively, or at least in ways that won't harm himself.

If he tried to pretend it was not his own project, then that would be wrong.
If I'm not mistaken the HTML standard improves and updates at a pace that could charitably be called "glacial". And when it does, it rarely seems to be in the direction anybody wants -- for example, web designers have been crying for something near a decade would that force adopters of the standard to follow common sense layout guidelines, that way their work doesn't break in different browsers for different incompatible reasons. Everybody thought CSS would be it, but I've rarely seen a CSS heavy design that didn't rely on a bunch of hacks to deliver the desired layout or formatting. But it was critically important that a "footer" tag was recently included in the spec.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://codinghorror.com/

--PidGin128 via bmn
/runs and backs up everything.
The xPhone
"Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.

I have some backups and I'll try to get it up and running ASAP!"
Agreed—it also seems to unwittingly highlight the perils of judging someone by the aggregate data of their profession, rather than the individual's merits.
Read his newer tweets - his backups were just copies on the same server; they are gone as well, and now he's resorting to using internet caches to restore his content.
Yes, I guess "de-professionalized" is a better term than de-skilled.

I appreciate your general narrative of the processes involved here. I'm a bit skeptical of the "spin" you are putting on the events, however. Indeed, you give a good description of the end of the traditions of "reserved contemplation" that originally evolved in the intellectual professions in Europe over the last few centuries. A process of continuous competition can indeed foster some skills but I skeptical that all intellectual endeavors should be organized in a fashion akin to try-outs for the professional sports (the news is full of sad human cost as well as the cheaping involved in high-level athletics - and the news seldom even mentions the many more "loser" would-be athletes who get nothing after several years of college/minor league basketball/football/etc).
Playing with JooJoo just makes me want an Apple tablet even more
1. Register an Amazon AWS S3 account - https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/...

2. Download my S3 backup script (or anyone's S3 Backup script) - http://github.com/leftnode/S3-Backup

3. Set up a cron to push hourly/daily/whatever tar's of your vhost's directory to S3.

Spend, like, $10 a month. Thats 30gb of storage, 30gb up and 30gb down. Now, I know that may not be a lot, but I doubt codinghorror.com had that much data.
The next Stack Overflow podcast should be quite interesting...
If you fail to audit and test your disaster recovery procedures on a regular basis, then you fail at competently maintaining your infrastructure. No excuses.
I dislike such projects. It's kind of like having a showcase for the "special kids" where everyone can come and look at how "great" they are because they made some useless trinket.

Build by looking people in the eye, talking and trading with them, not by praising some impressive but ultimately useless thing some random people people from some village did.

That's why China is winning in Africa. The chinese do not build websites showcasing how great some african villagers are. They come and say: you have that, we have this, let's make a deal. You win, I win.
Do you have a breakdown by IE version?

It'd be interesting to see if IE6 users are providing any value to you. While web developers may gnash their teeth at the mention of IE6, I wonder if there is a financial incentive to continue supporting it. After all, the time to tell users that they need to use a better browser isn't when they come to your site to buy something.
Does anyone know what the browsers' plans are for implementing this? Hopefully the next major version of Chrome, FF, and IE have it (properly) implemented. Until then, it is hard to get excited as it will likely be quite awhile before it's ubiquitous.
Key Observations:

1. Managers exhibit an average intelligence level, no greater than any other professional with a college degree. They exhibit an average imagination.

2. Perhaps more than any other profession, managers try to impress and intimidate others with their technical jargon. Such language usually masks inadequacies elsewhere.

3. Managers are capable of learning new skills but must demonstrate a willingness to learn.

4. Without basic organization and discipline, managers will become mentally lazy.

See, it's easy to make unsubstantiated, insulting generalizations.
I do the same thing, with a script using ruby s3sync I wrote a while ago (that I should probably update):

http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-bulletproof-server-backups-w...
Automatic validation is done through every backup (and I have my guys do a review of the logs from the nightly cron procedures). Once a month we test our restore procedures.
In the Joel thread, there was mention of "Truly Great Programmers(TM)", what their qualities are and how to hire them. I don't know if folks were putting Jeff in that category or not. But as a skeptic of this True Greatness, I'm perhaps grasping at straws in saying "hey look, anyone can screw up, True Greatness, phooey".
Shockingly, MossPuppet pretty much nailed all of the key elements of the controversy, without really demonstrating that much bias to either party. I happen to love the MossPuppet (ok, maybe he's an acquired taste) and the rude jibe against David Pogue caused me to burst out in laughter.
In some ways WebGL is much less than VRML - WebGL is a set javascript bindings for OpenGL ES2.0. The great thing about OpenGL is that there has been considerable effort over teh years to only introduce concepts that have been found necessary for communicating with graphics hardware. Further, the ES2.0 subset removes a lot of historical cruft. The result is tha the API is pretty much concerted with shipping textures and data streams for the GPU, and managing the shaders to operate on them.

VRML brings a scene graph API, file formats, materials - and does not let you at the GPU. You wind up having to shoehorn your design into this fantasy view of how 3D graphics programs should be written. As soon as you stray away from the very limited design, you wind up implementing your own system, exporting it into the VRML data structures, ony for it to then extract it back out for stuffing into the GPU.

Having myself inflicted 3D scenegraph API's on other programmers, and felt at first hand the pain and horror, I would never endorse that as the lowest level of access to the graphics hardware.
More like, DISASTER PLAN HORROR.
I feel for him.

But I wonder if this eventually turns out as a case study for "How to backup an entire site using the archives and search engine caches"

I know it's hard; but everything is _there preserved_ anyway. So it _is possible_
How do I subscribe?
Within reason I agree, but in large part "technology fads" are actually evolution.

The mood ring was a fad. Nobody knew what it was, then it happened, then it went away again and everyone was fine.

With technology that's largely not the case. What appear to be fads end up being evolutionary dead ends. [Possible HN heresy ahead] I'd put LISP business applicaiton development into this category. Prior to the AI craze, systems were developed in low level programming languages or mainframe business languages. Then LISP happened, but when the AI winter happened, did people go back to C/ASM/{the IBM languages}? No! C++, and later Java happened. For business Java will eventually superseded, but it's foolhardy to think people will regress to the languages of yesteryear -- time is marching forward.

Being too stodgy or unwilling to invest in maintaining the business applications in current mainstream languages can put you in a precarious support situation in a relatively short (say a decade) time when people that are willing to do work in your system language are very expensive and no longer the best people in the industry.

Obviously it's important to see through technology fads but starting from a position of skepticism may not play as well as it seems at first blush.
The Ideal Mix of a Startup Advisory Board
Yes, but I'm not sure if your comment is targeted at CrystalTech or codinghorror?

You can't outsource liability.

If YOU are not testing YOUR backups. YOU fail.
Seriously, this. 1000 times this!

Why would anyone consider a backup on the same VM a backup at all?

All your data should be kept in two places, hopefully geographically disparate in case there's a building fire or horrible storm or what not.

You should also test it on a regular basis to make sure it exists (and so you know what to do when the shit hits the fan)
One side-effect I really hope to see from the sprouting of YC and YC-like firms is a break in this stereotypes of programmers being autistic children that need handlers.

Though, I suspect it will suffer from selection bias. Any technical founders that end up making successful companies will be known for starting a company, and less known for their coding ability. You'll end up with techie founders who appear "normal" because they're successful, and the "autistic children" will continue to be employees for managers like this guy.
I find that it is important to not just blindly copy something, but to truly unpack the principles behind it and attempt to improve upon it. This allows you to be inspired by great work but to (hopefully) take it even further and polish it even more.

If you can't change or tweak anything about the original inpiration then it's a good bet you don't fully understand why it works or how, so you aren't going to grow in the process.
But that's just Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law
Consolelog.node.js - console logging and termcolor modules for node
T-Mobile Users Can Bill Android Market Purchases to Their Phone Bill
"In reality there is only a handful of true programming geniuses in the field who are either independent contractors or are employed by computer hardware/software firms. There are few, if any, true programming geniuses in the average corporate shop."

With managers like that, I wonder why. I wonder if they're working on startups to not deal with people like that.
I, for one, was motivated... thanks!
How Best Buy is using Semantic Technology to define a new trend
"The next step is to see if this is enough to restore the vision of the blind mice [..] Baby mice with the same injury to the optic nerve repair the damage without intervention."

The implications of the research are awesome, but the way they go about doing it...
Neat - though I don't know about the buttons.
MOVIE: Which Countries Own America’s Debt? 2002 - Present
I don't see that you can; as it's a very new project, he may not have added that, yet.
Looks like someone changed something near the end of June '08 that prevented archive.org from storing the site. Gotta suck.
PfSense open source firewall gets a new release
"Ideas kept under lock and key are much less useful than those that are freely available."

That's precisely the point of the patent system. It is supposed to encourage disclosure so that after the protected period the knowledge is made fully available to society.

The alternative is trade secret protection whereby inventors remain secretive about their work product, never disclosing to the public at large how the device works and not allowing follow-ons to build upon their knowledge.

The two problems with the current system are 1) protection terms are too long and 2) the enablement requirements aren't enforced well enough.

Let's say that the protection term is reduced to one year. And assume that the USPTO requires patents with sufficient detail to fully enable readers to replicate and practice the invention.

Under that scenario, I think that the patent system would be seen as an asset to society. In exchange for a year's worth of protection the inventor has to tell society explicitly how to do exactly what he or she is doing. I don't think most people would have a problem with that system.

If you go back to the Constitutional basis for the patent system, it was "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

As long as "limited time" is a reasonable period, I don't know that abolition is required.
Do you really think the one you're borrowing from coded everything from scratch? So who do we credit in the end?

In any case, I mostly 'borrow' when I find an elegant solution to a problem I'm having, and always use it just as a starting point to get it right my way.
I'm a Chrome loving geek, but I'm far outnumbered by the non-technical, non-geeks that I've converted to Chrome based on its superior security and stability.

Among my friends, that's step 1 when you get roped into doing family tech support anymore: remove the IE shortcuts, install Chrome. Only sometimes changing the chrome shortcut to the IE icon...
well its just his blogs, for a second i thought it was stackoverflow.com and the rest of his sites, which would have been funny.
This is SOP in the real world.
The busy Java developer's guide to Scala: Explore Scala concurrency
This is actually just a sample for an open source visualization library. Look through the other samples. They are interesting. Wish it wasn't flash, but still nice nonetheless.

http://www.axiis.org/examples.html
I'm a little unclear about what your proposing but, at first interpretation, I don't think so ... What exactly are you suggesting you should use 'freeze' to do?

As a rule of thumb, you can never trust anything the client sends you - just assume he's a skilled hacker who is manually manipulating bits to do what he wants.
Oh The Irony

This is really bad news for any service, but seriously... codinghorror.com (shakes head)

Rule 16. If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.
I am not disagreeing with that. I am disagreeing with the analogy that a journalist going to a talk show to talk about his book being the same as Arrington using TC to talk about his product.
This is a nice article, but the central lesson is that you almost never want actual randomness - you want variation within useful limits.
Amazon sellers can associate your personal info to bad reviews
got a home phone call telling me seller didn't like the bad review of a bathroom scale, see vid review for audio
Myvideo de movie delete remote link execute by demens crew
ein digger bug bei myvideo. welch ein zufall XD es ermoeglicht videos von anderen usern zu loeschen und das auch noch spielend leicht. (bug ma bitte fixen... (schnell XD))
At a guess, I'd say it suppresses the growth to conserve energy, but that's just speculation. Were that the case, it seems like side effects would be minimal.
Very cool; however if you look at the graph is seems like Firefox is the dominant browser because they did not seperate our the versions of Firefox (or not show versions of IE)
Facebook Pro – Facebook’s Revenue Stream
I've backups of my silly blog antirez.com, this guy ran a business out of his blog and don't have external backups. The data is small, it is easy to transfer. It's almost unbelievable to me.
AWESOME. Less trash on the Web :D
I think you're thinking of Daily WTF. Jeff's blog is/was just a programming blog.

He also frequently said he was the world's worst coder, so...
It's a sad and disappointing article, and too many "observations" seem rather biased and couched in the claim of multiple years of experience; though I highly doubt it's very broad experience, because the views are too narrow.

I strongly suspect this article is based on two aspects:

- one is to sell his services with a type of confirmation bias, i.e. to confirm "what every manager suspected about their programmers but could never prove", which leads to:

- ending up "helping" the same type of companies/clients throughout his career.
Fine, then just pretend I said a journalist who used his own column to highlight points in his book.
how about a google search
site:http://codinghorror.com/

and then looking at cached results?
they have a lag (it's supposed to be 6 months, but they're trailing that at the moment).
Yup jokes aside. If you are not doing external backups and checking it at least once a month, you are doing it wrong. You can blame your host as much as you want, its equally your fault.

I learned it the hard way.
[Waterfall] has NEVER been a practice that ANYBODY advocated.

I don't think you're quite right there. It was mandated by the US Department of Defense for years (DOD-STD-2167). Since they were (are?) the biggest software customer in the world, this was influential beyond the DoD.

Although there are a great many blog posts on this subject, they mostly (including this one) are uncredited paraphrases of Craig Larman's excellent research on the history of iterative development. It was Larman who figured out that Royce's original paper described waterfall as what not to do, Larman who figured out the history of how the DoD adopted it anyway (basically, they didn't read the second half of the paper), and Larman who tracked down the guy who had been responsible for that decision. IIRC, they met for lunch in Boston and his first words to Larman were "I'm so sorry!"
Here's Google's cached version of a post of his about backup strategies:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...

It ends in what is now irony:

"If backing up your data sounds like a hassle, that's because it is. Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
Filing gets you nothing, he has to win the suit which will be really tricky because he didn't spell it out on paper first. Even then what does he have? Less money and no product. Not to mention looking extraordinarily incompetent in front of the public. Simply having a contract in place would have made this cut and dry.
got a home phone call telling me seller didn't like the negative review i gave. reviewed months after purchase
I sympathize, but I have little patience for calling out your data provider when disaster strikes. Sure, there is likely some technical fault on their end, but ultimately you are accountable for your own site.

I'm not going to imply anything negative about him for losing the site temporarily. We all have "learning experiences"...

I just hope that when he does come back, he posts an insightful analysis of how he could have done more for his own reliability, rather than point fingers at a vendor.
Wasn't he using Amazon S3 for images?

Cache of the relevant blog post:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:yE0OdU1q6q4J:www.codingh...
I'd add two more problems:

3) Too expensive.
4) Takes too long.

Getting a patent attorney to prepare and file a patent is very expensive. It takes $10k just to get started. The patent system is so byzantine that you can't reasonably expect to do it yourself and be successful. The cost is a drop in the bucket to a large corporation, but it's a major barrier for individual inventors.

Not only that, but it takes way, way to long to actually receive a patent. I applied for a patent about two and a half years ago, and I'm still waiting.

As an individual without infinite resources, I'm hesitant to built a business around my concept unless I can be confident that it'll be protected. If I'm not granted the patent, then it would be trivial for an organization with deeper pockets replicate what I would have created.

I know that patents typically don't make a business defensible, but in my case I decided to pursue a different business opportunity. If I'm granted my patent, then I suppose I'll figure it what to do with it then. On the other hand, what good is a patent on a technology conceived three years ago, except to make life difficult for others?
The problem is that despite the patent system, "trade secrets" remain and increasingly so in SaaS. Patents are mainly used as a weapon to impede the progress of competitors.

Abolish software patents, now!
Who clearly stole it himself.
I've used this before. It's got a lovely api but uses far too much memory.
[Also makes me wonder how to test my host's backups]

Make your own, don't rely on someone else.
I noticed this earlier on two of my contacts.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=637245065
http://lite.facebook.com/christine.spangler
Somehow it troubles me to see someone calling down programmers who doesn't know

"charade" from "facade"
"verbosity" from -- well, maybe he means verbiage

and whose writing would get a charity C+ at a good high school.

Key observations:

"1. Perhaps more than any other profession, programmers try to impress and intimidate others with their technical jargon. Such language usually masks inadequacies elsewhere."

Read some social science texts, my friend; hell, read any literary criticism dating from about the 1920s on. Jargon has its purpose, and in computing it serves well.

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

If only one knew what "pseudo-intellectual" meant. Is a programmer pseudo-intellectual if he says "Bryce, your prose--res ipsa loquitur!" Is a blogger pseudo-intellectual if he calls his ramblings "theory P", or his observations a philosophy?
Two Approaches to Employee Productivity
Maybe he should have asked a question of serverfault.com for the best way to backup his server?
Determining whether something is patentable or not is currently a process that quite often takes well more than a year. I think shorter terms are the way to go, but they need to be fairly long to justify the cost and hassle of acquiring them. Something in the 5-10 year range is more plausible.

Also, for an article presumably about patents, the author casually conflates copyright a bit too much for my tastes - which is a beast unto itself.

Copyright's primary problems are: insufficiently protected fair use rights, abuse of 'works for hire' and obscene term lengths. But the citizen-facing problems outlined in the article are the result of monopolies that weren't government-granted (MPAA/RIAA) and the DMCA. (Specifically: causing the loss of fair use to make personal copies and publish for non-commercial educational purposes)
You're right, I often confused Jeff's blog with Daily WTF. Jeff might be self-effacing, but at the same time he also dispenses a lot of programming and software development advice.
The New American Dream Home? A Rental
The part you quoted is a quote itself, which could change the meaning for readers like me.
The inside story of Northwest 188