skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Point taken regarding calling them out before the situation is resolved: it would be far more respectful to allow the provider a reasonable amount of time to correct the error before explicitly attacking them. In this situation, I can understand it a little more, as recovering the backups from various internet caches might seem like a time-critical operation, and it would be difficult to ask for help with that without some explanation of what's happened. That explanation certainly could be fairly vague, though. Once the situation is resolved, though, if the resolution is unsatisfactory I think it's fair to say so.

I really took issue with your initial comment because "pointing the finger" has some connotation of assigning blame unfairly or unreasonably; I 100% agree that companies with a culture of blame are poisonous, and that people should err on the side of accepting too much responsibility rather than too little, and do their best to not pass blame on to other people.

There's certainly a line, however, across which I think it's reasonable to call someone else out. Where that line is depends on the situation and your relationship: the bar for doing it within your team is astronomically high (you should basically always deal with those things internally), within even the same company is still incredibly high (likewise), but it's lower when it comes to vendor relationships. Where you draw the line is probably different from where I draw it.

So while I agree that he should have waited, I don't think that publicly expressing his anger with his hosting provider after the fact would count as "pointing the finger" or "passing the buck" or otherwise indicative of a lack of personal responsibility; to me it would be understandable frustration and anger out of having been so dramatically let down by a third-party you were contracting with. And honestly, that sort of negative public publicity is one of the strongest checks we have on companies, be they hosting companies or retail stores or any other type of establishment.

More to the point: even if he did have backups, if they really lost his data and were unable to recover it themselves, I think he'd still be justified in outing their failure publicly after the fact. But again, you're definitely right that he should have waited and given the host a chance to resolve the issue before saying anything.
I thought it looked a lot like the Firefox logo. I suspect it is like a Rorshach test and the resemblances we find say more about use than the image.
It's true in programming and its true everywhere else: don't optimize before you find the real bottlenecks. Otherwise you'll have a 1% gain but all sorts of unforeseen consequences start popping up.
Saw VI - Testere 6
Hmm,

It's a lesson on what can and can't be "just bought".

Security and backups both need some top-down hands involvement. Also US recent experience dikes and air defenses are important too.
Agreed, lose the John Wayne voice and film it in one take. That would go a long way towards me respecting the creator.
Blankenhorn's comments after his post are just as good as the post itself.
Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times
Just give me a freebie when all my stuff disappears and I'll call it even.
You don't think people would buy and use such an app, if it existed?
Yes, though the author's tone was pompous at times, much of this also resonated with me, if (as someone else posted) you put this in the context of a typical corporate IT shop.

He's pretty clearly not writing about a start-up that revolves around software development. He's talking about companies where IT is a necessary cost, very much like the accounting department.
It's absolutely not true that C is necessary to be a network programmer. There are some cases where it will absolutely be the best tool (especially for embedded or proprietary hardware), but just look at all the useful network software being written in Erlang, Java, Python/Twisted, Ruby/EventMachine, and now Node.js (just to name a few).

Memcached, for example, was first written in Python, then ported to C. Dustin Sallings (one of the maintainers of memcached) has also written a Java client, a server port in Erlang, another server in Google's Go language, and yet another in Python with Twisted:

http://dustin.github.com/2009/10/11/ememcached.html

http://dustin.github.com/2009/11/12/gomemcached.html

http://github.com/dustin/twisted-memcached

I hope that inspires you to continue to learn new tools based on what you want to work with, and not think that you "need" to learn one specific tool. On the other hand, I agree that learning C is a worthwhile goal, will teach you a lot, and will help you contribute to many existing companies/projects.
this must be a joke (a dry one at that.)

not worth the read.
This is heaven for marketing, can't wait for it to get integrated into Facebook. I wont use it myself, but it's great to know what people are spending money on.
Please. I'm not anti-geek.

It was a deliberate exaggeration in order to highlight the absurdity of the actual arguments MOST geeks do make. And, for the record, I've heard various forms on those actually used - well, except the binary name one. And that one was a joke.

I totally understand that my writing is not for everyone, but it seems like you are deliberately misinterpreting it. I mean, that phrasing was couched between "tailywaily" and calling an elephant "muscly cookie dough." Surely it was obvious that while the content was serious, the delivery was not.

There is a pattern - yes, even on HN - of saying "I'm bad with names" or "I'm not an artist" -- and then turning around and denigrating those skills that other people have taken the time & effort to develop.

They hide behind a shield of überrationality instead of admitting that they find marketing & other social skills distasteful or frightening because they are hard.

Maybe as a designer/writer/social butterfly in addition to programmer, I have more of those comments directed at me than you do. Or maybe I just notice them more readily.
I think the issue most people have with this is the stark management/worker divide, in which managers are omniscient and a worker's greatest virtue is obedience.

In a modern organization, I don't feel that my manager is superior to me (especially not in a traditional class sense). We are two professionals with broadly equivalent educations and social backgrounds with slightly different job descriptions, I do more code, he does more meetings. His job is not to tell me what to do, it's to handle the planning and logistics of us jointly working towards the organization's goal, just as mine is to handle the technical and operational side.

And I don't feel subservient to the company either. We are two economic entities collaborating for mutual benefit. If either us doesn't like this arrangement anymore, we can dissolve it with no hard feelings.

In short, this dude's ideas are stuck somewhere near the beginning of his career. He's learnt nothing in those 30 years. It's not experience if you aren't learning from it. It's just paper pushing.
FTA: "And because the actual purchase prices are made visible, there are other interesting dynamics. For example, imagine being able to tell if you’re getting ripped off with what you’re paying for a gym membership or on your Comcast bill when compared to what your friends are spending on the same things.

There’s also the potential to have private accounts that maybe a businessman would only share with his assistant to let them know what’s being purchased and explain things a bit better in the comments. Again, yes the idea is controversial, but there are a lot of interesting things that could come of it, if people are willing to be this transparent."

Owning this data is valuable.
It's hard for me to pin down just what it is about this article that sticks in my caw, because a lot of his points are spot on, either with regard to me or with regard to people I've worked with in the past.

If this guy were a programmer, talking about what sort of management structure works for him, it would probably seem thought-provoking, if flawed. We've all met pseudo-intellectual types in our business, or those that are always following the latest fad, or those who have decided that they're too old to learn anything new. In fact most of us (I know I am) are guilty of these sorts of things ourselves.

But because he's an outsider we're put on the defensive, and the whole thing comes across as condescending and insulting. It's especially biting because there's an element of truth to it. We're being judged not as individuals, but as part of the biased sample of bad apples from dysfunctional organizations that this guy has dealt with.

This must be what being a victim of prejudice feels like.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, this is how I felt the first time I stumbled upon http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/, until I realized that a) it's a joke and b) the author is very, very white.
There are many roles in the design of a chip and the staffing depends on whether this chip is a new architecture (very rare these days) or a derivative part. Also, the staffing depends on the phase of the project (a handful at the beginning with hundreds at the end):

- chip architects, usually PhD's in computer arch or really senior engineers + people to run performance simulators

- implementors/logic designers: take the architecture, divide it into blocks (instruction fetch unit, memory interface, etc), create a microarchitecture and code it in RTL (register transfer language, Verilog)

- verification engineers: read the specification and write software+tests to exercise corner cases. verification is usually staffed at twice the number as implementors

- layout/backend engineers: synthesize the RTL into logic gates and/or draw custom transistor circuits where speed requires it

- circuit designers: design phase lock loops, clock paths, pad drivers, etc.

I don't know the breakdown at Intel, but a new chip architecture can take on the order of 500 people. The floating point bug would have been in the floating point unit, so probably at most less than 10 of the logic designers would have been aware of the design.
I'm using your script (plus zipline and automysqlbackup) on several blogs. Thanks!

In case anyone else is interested:
http://code.google.com/p/ziplinebackup/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
What comes after this? A tool for friends to share data about with whom they're sleeping? That would seem to take "making behaviors visible" to its logical end.

(Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that something of that sort exists in the dark corners of the web.)
If comcast publishes a list of their clients and how much they paid, I will make top dollar from Verizon and Cox converting Comcast's clients. Have you ever heard of a thing called list building? marketers make do with far less information. Buying habits are top dollar data, you don't just give that away.
So we have a legally binding contract then? Awesome!
Even if you're a vim god, read this just to skip to slide 52. It's hilarious.
Its not just you, and its not about getting older. Its about being tired of watching a tread (the "social" web) beaten to its death. Its not a "great, controversial" idea, its just silly.
I'd actually go so far as to say that anyone not impressed either doesn't understand what he did, or has a badly miscalibrated scale of what counts as impressive.
Also to be fair the backup process Atwood uses for Stack Overflow proper (et al) appears to be much more robust (regular offsite backups, etc.)

The failures in this case appear to be:

1. Not taking the robustness of his blogs seriously enough (a LOT of people make this mistake, especially with their own content).

2. Being overly trusting of the procedures of his hosting provider. He thought he could trust his hosting provider's "backups" since they are a big company with lots of customers and he paid money for said backups, turns out he got ripped off.

3. Forgetting the maxim that you have to own your core competencies, and existence should always be a core competency.
The only thing that would be interesting about this is if the Blippy card gave you 1% off of every transaction.

Suddenly you'd face a tradeoff between privacy vs. getting a discount[1].

That 1% could almost certainly be made up by analytics and viral referrals. If someone saw your stream and clicked on say an Amazon book, then Amazon easily makes that 1% back. In fact, for some companies the discount could be substantially more than 1%.

[1] Importantly, experiments have shown that privacy is dear but cheap. I recall an experiment where people stood in a busy area and paid people $10 for their username and password. Many took them up on it.
I also don't agree with bundling all types of intellectual property in the same boat, but there is a fundamental difference: physical property is a rival, excludable good while intellectual property is a non-rival, non-excludable good.

The other primary difference, and the real problem with patents, is that intellectual property laws can give you de facto rights over the product of someone else's labor; if I independently invent something that someone else has already invented, they own what I just made and I have no right to it. That's what gets most software developers in trouble.

The problem is that it's difficult to distinguish between independent invention and theft, because the goods are non-rival. If I accuse someone of stealing my car, it's pretty easy to verify that A) I no longer have the car, B) the other person does, and C) it has the VIN number of my car. If I have code that does X and so does someone else, how do you tell if it was stolen or independently arrived at, or kind-of-stolen in the sense that you arrived at it independently but only after you heard that I had done something kind of like X? As it turns out, patent law doesn't bother to try: it just says that if it does X you've stolen it, end of story.

That's why patents are supposed to be non-obvious: the chance of independently coming to the same solution should be low enough that, in the case of some kind of duplication, you should be 99.9% sure that it's due to theft. As soon as that breaks down (as it does with software patents), you have all kinds of problems that don't have any analog in physical property and that the law is totally unable to cope with.

Painting all IP with the same brush and saying it should be abolished is surely ridiculous, but equating IP with physical property is also a fallacy. They're fundamentally different, even if legally they can be treated similarly in many cases, and they need to be understood, treated, analyzed, and justified differently.
Matt Haughey selling Adsense pioneer PVRBlog.com on eBay
Not all unions are like that.

In the IT world, a union could only be used for collective agreements so that the contracts don't include unacceptable clauses. Some people are afraid to say something about a contract because they're afraid they won't be hired or they're afraid they'll get fired if they're an employee.

Start a union that doesn't bring down or limit someone's advancement.
Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG".

Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others.

Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infinite recursion) You have to stop at some stage. You probably don't have enough time, or your time is not worth enough to check that.

He can recover most of his blog from the caches, because it was quite popular. I bet he'll be back with an almost complete archive in less than a week.
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I don't quite understand the complete lack of regard that younger people have for privacy these days, either.

It will all end in tears.

Unless you're an attention whore or a shill getting kickbacks for marketing, I really don't see the draw.
Is more transparency always better? If every moment of your day was videotaped and catalogued for everyone to see, yes, it might be good (people might be able to point stuff out that you could improve upon), but would you really want that despite all the "benefits"?
So you've tested whether your toaster has proper grounding and other safety precautions, in case it shortcircuits?

Nope. I have a fully paid and verified home owners insurance policy though that covers any probable loss from a toaster fire.

It's sort of like having an offsite backup of my important personal stuff.

Your example is really not a parallel to a data backup. It's difficult to fully test all of the toasters failure modes in a non-destructive way. It's easy to setup an automated backup to a remote location. Given the gmail storage limits, you could tar and gzip your files and email your gmail account with the backup data.

A better example in a "homeowner" realm is the flood pans that you can buy to put under your water heater or washing machine. You'd like to be able to trust that the manufacturer made a waterproof device, but at the same time it's cheap and easy to insure yourself against the most common failure modes.

The sound bite is not stupid. People who believe you can outsource all the messyness of keeping a website alive are continually bitten in the ass by EC2, Rackspace, etc. failures.
Is today April 1st? My calendar says 12/11/09 and there's snow on the ground, but it must be April 1st because there's no way this could not be a prank. Nobody could possibly think this could be popular.
> It was a deliberate exaggeration in order to highlight the absurdity of the actual arguments MOST geeks do make.

And that's the unnecessary bit - by caricaturing whatever real perceived problem there is you've both lost credibility and created a strawman where none needed to have been created.

If geeks make these absurd arguments, then repeat them, let your readers be the judge of it. As it is all you have are farcically exaggerated fake quotes, which does little to convince the reader that any problem even exists.

> I've heard various forms on those actually used

I've also heard new programmer hires exclaim "what's SQL?!". This doesn't mean it's a common (or even uncommon) occurrence. I too have met people (from all walks of life, mind you) who are vehemently against product placement and advertisement in any form... doesn't mean they are common, and certainly I do not get the impression this attitude is more prevalent in the geek community than elsewhere.

> "I'm bad with names" or "I'm not an artist" -- and then turning around and denigrating those skills that other people have taken the time & effort to develop.

I agree with you here, but again, this is not a problem unique to the geek community. It's a problem that seems to span all of humanity... e.g., "I'm no computer whiz / What a nerd!" Calling out the geek community on this is unnecessary and distracts from the fact that it's a far more fundamental human issue.
I'd have to agree with this. An edited video or transcript would be much more appealing. An hour is much too long.
Slashdot hits the 100,000 posts milestone
No, this guy is actually every bit as much of a bozo as the article suggests. Check out his guide to hiring a programmer:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/irm-blog/hiring-the-right-progra...

In particular, his example of good C code is illuminating:

int. Table [10] [10]; /* 2 dimensional array */
for (i=0; ; <10; ++i)
for (j=0; ; <10; ++i)
printf("%d/n",table[i][j]);

Enough said, I think.
Thanks!

* log scale: agreed, there's an open feature request for this. Feel free to star it if you want to follow along: http://code.google.com/p/dygraphs/issues/detail?id=15

* date format: You can actually do this now via the "xValueFormatter" attribute. You pass in a function to format the date. It's undocumented, though. I should fix that.

* pan: agreed, see http://code.google.com/p/dygraphs/issues/detail?id=7

* more than two lines: dygraphs can certainly do this. I've tested it with at least 7 and there's no reason it couldn't handle more.
"Reasoning by analogy"

The people who made your car were legally required to test your model of car by crashing it into another one and making sure the airbags work. This is also too expensive to test yourself. One does not modify an airbag system at all without retesting it.

Your hosting provider has no legal requirement to test their backup system. At best, they have a contractual obligation. And they don't know how to test recovering your site, because testing whether it works is a different process for each site. Additionally, it's cheap to test backup procedures. Most people have a spare computer somewhere (maybe not in the data center), and it should only take a few hours to restore a copy of your site. Once a year. For Chris's sake, you could probably do it in the background and put a movie on.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the performance of dygraphs under excanvas. The zoom interaction looks a bit funky, but it does work. The highlighting is fairly smooth on the machines I've tested.
I'm not impressed as much as jealous. Sure, maybe your program was very crude by most standards, but the amount of stuff you did figure out on your own was great! It sounds like you had a lot of fun in the process.

Figuring things out mostly independently, without a teacher telling you what to do next, is among life's most sublime and transient joys. I sometimes regret the knowledge I've obtained the "easy" way, because I know I'll never have the experience of discovering it myself. But alas, ars longa, vita brevis.
I've just posted it there and got good replies, thanks
You must have a tough time reading C code.
Too bad hookers and blow dealers don't take credit cards.
Keep in mind that this article was written by someone who believes that employees should be forbidden to listen to music other than company-approved easy-listening muzak. Which he feels should be mandatory.

In short, this guy is trying very hard to rationalize his extremely controlling nature.
This article keeps mentioning "empirical evidence" yet gives nothing but opinion. Then it mentions some instances where the bathwater is cold and suggests we throw out the baby.

Save your 3 minutes.
Not a problem, you are completely entitled to your own opinion on this.

That said, it's a real charge to say that they have a pronounced anti-foreign worker stance. This organization is clearly opposed to the H1B visa, but that doesn't necessarily translate into being anti-foreign worker.

Is there a specific press release or position that you disagree with? If so, would you be willing to articulate your objections to it?
If you take the averaging period down to 1 (box in the lower left), then the center line is the average temperature for each day. The top of the shaded region is the high for that day. If you zoom in on, say, 2008-05-15, you can see that the high was over 100 degrees that day.

In general, though, temperatures in SF rarely go above 80. When they do, it's newsworthy.
This was posted a while ago on HN and I found it really useful: http://saleseverything.ning.com/profiles/blogs/8-sales-quest...