skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A journalist would never use his own column to highlight points in his book. At least not someone whom you would refer to as an ethical journalist.

Point being, Arrington is not a journalist in any stretch of imagination.
Can't wait until IE9, IE10, IE11 ...
Saw the same on a few of my contacts as well.

http://www.facebook.com/docholly

http://www.facebook.com/Twiceshy

http://www.facebook.com/les.sharp
Interactively Explore Climate Data
The Battle to Preserve An Old Accelerator's Data
What is wrong with trade secrets anyway? It's not like someone who discovered something is obligated to reveal it to the world. If he chooses to do so out of his good will, fine. But if trade secrets remain despite patent system, that can only mean patent system is not fully enforceable yet.
Fairness Perceptions Differ When Money (vs Goods) Involved
Blogu' lui Bibanul
> Their main shareholder, the guy who wrote the now infamous email telling us that we were no longer part of the project, is a chiropractor named Bruce Lee.

Reminds me of 'The Dentist' from Cryptonimicon.
Just my 2 cents here: I encrypt my daily sql backup before sending it in a couple of places. This way I can store it pretty much everywhere - one place is actually on a client's server. Aescrypt for encryption, ssh with expect for actual transfer. Oh, and watch out for expect timing out - it was a fun moment when backups grew beyond the default timeout and expect started truncating them. Yup, backups should be checked often.
I'm speculating too, but I would lean toward cancer-prevention. It seems like some of nature's hacks are related to stopping run away cell division.
I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that before people get drunk on schadenfreude they should put themselves in Atwood's position. If you pay someone for a service you generally expect it to work when you need it.
Ranking the Players In the Private Race to Space
Deglobalization: the surprisingly steep decline in world trade
If anything, I'd say this is a sign not to work with CrystalTech.

After a mistake like this, it may be a sign that they will never mess up again.
Yeah, I knew about the lag, but 1 1/2 years of lag seemed to signify other issues to me.
>I'm starting to think the question "what is a geek" is the ultimate elephant of our time

The very definition of geek tends to include words like "non-conformist" and "totally focused on some tiny tiny niche that no one else knows anything about"
Too many of us have been there. Coincidentally I started my own backup process about 20 minutes ago before I saw this story.
If only being aware of irony (hypocrisy) were enough to excuse it.
Actual title is "Perl.Hacks.On.Vim".
well that didn't take long...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1890914/how-do-i-backup-a...
Jeff Atwood asks for help restoring a site from Internet caches
How Social Media Will Change in 2010
The second sentence was. He quoted it earlier and repeated it at then end as a clear endorsement and agreement of the statement.
I'd say quite different. It suppresses the growth in order to develop a mature brain. Adults with the brains of babies probably don't do well.

To use an analogy.

Think of a blank canvas. Now add tons of random colored paints everywhere. That's a baby. Over time remove the paint that is not part of the desired painting (painting in reverse if you will).

If you make a mistake - no problem, more paint is constantly being thrown on the canvas.

Over time less and less new paint is being thrown on, and your desired painting emerges. Eventually no more paint is thrown on, and you have the adult brain.

This is not a perfect analogy obviously, but it's the general idea.
The Linux kernel seems to be approaching a "singularity" in the sense of a black hole. It keeps sucking in more and more, growing exponentially larger, until eventually it becomes so big nobody can handle it or even get near it.
I thought it was just me, I found these as well

http://www.facebook.com/linda01

http://www.facebook.com/Emerald.Lori
"The numbers are surprising, considering the state of the economy,"

To who? Study after study has shown that H1-Bs are paid less. Sure, the state of the economy leads to local coders accepting less than before, but they still can't match the salary expectations of an Indian or Asian import.

If you're looking to cut budget, or grow cheaply, it's still to your financial advantage to seek H1-Bs.
I noticed it as well... questioned the one guy, he said he was in a beta.

http://www.facebook.com/Linksters

http://www.facebook.com/wolfgangvonfeuerbader
TechCrunch, Fusion Garage -- Tech blog, Singapore startup feud over tablet PC
Typically, the visas get overbooked (sometimes, twice over - leading to the lottery system) on the first day. The fact that there are still opening months later points to a dramatic slowown
I posted this for the "hacker interest" value - there's some cool hacks there. In the broader view, I definitely see your point.
I've never really gotten the "aboot" thing (although there were two folks from Minnesota at the company for a while, and they sort of did it). I get ragged on for saying "sawry" instead of "sorry", however.

PS: we're PBworks now, not PBwiki, chirag. :)
I don't think it sounded like you were showing off at all. It was a cool story. I think a lot of people are just inferring that you were implying that your story was unique (that's a lot of assuming going on there) and it's not, so they were balking at it because they've had similar experiences or what have you. Sure, it may be BTDT to a lot of folks (brought back fond memories for me), but when you're 14 and doing it and discovering for the first time it, it's awesome and that is inspiring. I think we sometimes forget how exciting learning and just putting ourselves out there can be.
Customers are funny, though. People come to us all the time and say, "We love the simplicity of your software! It's just so easy to use! By the way, can you add (feature X) and (feature Y) and (feature Z)?" As a user, it's hard to recognize that the two ideas are actually at odds with each other. It's up to the product owner to keep the product well-maintained as it evolves.

Features that contribute to the core of the product, without interfering with the user experience, are the features you want to implement. In the water bottle example, the funnel and the paper towel interfere with the core offering (a convenient way to drink water), so they're rightly "unfeatures."
Articles which are abridged chapters from books appear in newspapers and magazines all the time. They are clearly attributed, and the understanding is that if you find the subject interesting, you can find more of it in the book.
I disagree - it's a sign that they will never mess up their VM backup system again.

It's also a sign that they lack experience and competence. So while your odds of suffering this problem are significantly lower, your odds of the infinite number of other problems are still troubling.
Now we know why Ritalin works
That option may be superior in every way, as you say. Well, unless you want to close a tab other than the current one. Since that is something I sometimes want to do, I don't like it.
Random people on the internet can be a tough bunch to please...
Don't be mean, if you don't like his blog thats okay, but to say it "sucks" thats rude.

By your definition I would assume you think: http://news.ycombinator.com is ugly and lacks the basic things digg has?
They should look at Linq.
So I tried going over all the emails, docs posted over techcrunch and here are some thoughts. I do wonder why is no popular blogger/journalist out there taking Fusion Garage's side and highlighting these points ?

These are entirely my interpretations and personal thoughts. Happy to be corrected.

- From emails its clear that Chandra is desperate, to be either acquired by Tech-crunch or raise some money. Poor guy is under loan, has to pay vendors, salaries. There is no contract because then techcrunch would have to invest and hence share the risks and put in some real money. If its their joint venture why haven't they done that ?

- Michael is aware of chandra's talking to other investors. He jointly owns the product, but wouldn't let his lined-up investors come and help chandra out. Doesn't he know that when investors come they do have some say in how company should run ?

- The blueprint shit. Come-on. I have a time-machine blue print. Anyone building it ?

- Michael says FG is in trouble, has no money even to defend lawsuit. Now if this was a joint venture started by Michael, how did it come to this ?

- Many are now suggesting Techcrunch to take their blue print and Crunchpad name and get the hardware done by someone else. Isn't this what FG did ? Too their hardware and got a new name ?

To me its clear that Chandra thought of Michael as an potential investor and discussed details hoping to get acquired. He also talked to several other investors, who agreed to invest under some conditions they deemed fair. Chandra, desperate enough, went ahead. Doesn't this happen all the time ? What's the fuss. Its only unfair that FG is being projected in such a wrong light.
As I said in another thread, if you regularly refresh your development environment from your production backups, you get them verified "for free" and your ops people get plenty of practice, you never have to run a "DR exercise" to know you can.
For want of CVS the kingdom was lost.
They should still be compensated for the research they did.

When Apple sues someone, they're still a good guy, but when another company does it, it's "ohhh they must be losing market share!!!!!"
If you push your backups, make sure the account used does not have permissions to modify or delete the files it is creating offsite.
There's also tarsnap, run by HN's very own cperciva.
FWIW, more than half of the content is general Vim.
What proportion of YC startups have the word cloud in their names?
You don't need YC or YC-like firms for that. You just need computing scientists and computer programmers to act like professionals and dump the stereotypes themselves.
Vimana: An easy way to search and install Vim scripts.
Trade secrets remain today, mostly over the things that aren't (or aren't likely) patentable. So even perfectly enforceable patents would make trade secrets go away.
I thought it was fairly stereotypical how it was only after he was making lots of money that he was able to find a girlfriend let alone lose his virginity. Maybe for some people this is part of the allure of being an entrepreneur.

About the business ethics though, there's a reason why the saying "behind every great fortune lies a great crime" is often said. Because the currency economy is mostly a zero-sum game in the sense of total money ownership (barring inflation), the people that have less scruples than you will often rake in more money than the more honest counterparts.
He should read his own article to see how well business people like to impress and intimidate others with jargon.

A programmer is pseudo-intellectual if they believe they do not need any knowledge of mathematics and any knowledge of how to speak and write well in their native language.
It's a blog. How much time and money is worth spending on this?

(I backup my Slicehost account with their official service. If they die and my backup dies with it, that's fine; I don't have the time or money to do anything better.)
Am I the only one here who mostly agrees with the article? Especially with the bad parts. I don't have that much experience, but it's already been over 10 years of programming, freelancing and occasional managing, and I find pretty much everything in this article familiar. From the difference between a programmer and an analyst, the average intelligence level, to the lazynes and lack of motivation which are almost a professional disease among programmers.

If I were employed in a corporation I'd actually _like_ my manager to try and make my work motivating, even though it is fundamentally about "sorting files and making raports". Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.

edit: I'm not one of the star programmers btw. I had to pass 30 to realize I'm actually not that bright, and if I want to make something I have to deal with my lazyness and work and learn.
Thanks for replying. But I have a hard time understanding how filling a captcha can make people willing to signup run away.

Either you're offering a lightweight service with one single and simple functionnality (like instapaper.com for instance, which only requires a username for registration (not even a password !)); either you offer a multi purpuse service like github and if someone begins the registration process on a site like this and runs off because he doesn't want to fill a captcha.. maybe it's better he doesn't register after all.

Anyway what I really want to know is your numbers and how you got them :)
Just wanted to say thanks for the article -- I'm using your script for my blog :).
That's what your parent post is saying. Trade secrets are still prevalent, more successful, and cheaper.
Well, he did make sure to tell us to shut up, stop what we're doing and make a back-up. Because he knows things, you see:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...
Discussion on Computer Programmer's Unions
Programming is not system administration. As a programmer, I learned long ago that I can pay people to keep systems up, and that they do better than me and cost less than me.

Handling a failing disk is the job of a sysadmin, not a programmer.
These all look like scam accounts. (The poster of this article and every commenter on this page).

Also note how shitty the "upgrade to facebook pro" image is. There's no way that Facebook would release something like that.
Google demonstrates quantum computer image search - New Scientist
Chrome has 7% market share? I'm a Chrome user myself but that number is much higher than I expected. What's the source for growth? (those YouTube videos maybe?)
I recently moved some servers over to this for encrypted daily s3 backups:

http://github.com/astrails/safe

Dead simple to specify what to backup, drop the config in /etc/safe and add a cron job.
The site says he has a backup, right? So it sounds like he ... does have a backup.
Redundancy, people. All my really important data lives in at least three (and often more) of the following eight places: (1) my current MacBook Pro; (2) my legacy Linux box; (3) my external USB drive; (4) my personal (Slicehost) server; (5) Dropbox; (6) Mozy; (7) Heroku; (8) GitHub. Wow, that was even more than I expected. Did I mention redundancy?
It's way too easy to coordinate something like this.
And Duplicity, which cperciva claims is theoretically less secure, but which seems to work pretty well for me. (Who cares if the NSA can decrypt my blog backups? They are already available unencrypted...)
She lost me at "Or their cute little taily-wailies."
It's also a paraphrase of a much, much older phrase. I remember encountering it in the 70s. Something like:

This (book|article|thesis|whatever) contains much that
is good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are
good are not original, and the parts that are original
are not good.
Did he? I thought Jeff had some "real job" in addition to blogging and Stack Overflow. I honestly doubt an occasionally-updated programming blog was putting the food on his table.
It's the fault of businesspeople that programmers are faddish. They're the ones selling crap to one another that they force their programmers to use. They use cheap gimmicks and marketing campaigns to move more units at the expense of quality software.
There are tools to retrieve data from Internet caches, like Warrick - http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html .
System administration is not "coding".
Not only do they work cheaply, but they work pretty much all the time... at least the ones in my department do. That's great from management's perspective, but the rest of us like to have a life and side projects and they make us look bad ;-)
I am 24 days past my 512 day... Just saying.
Step 4, most importantly, should be to verify those backups on a regular basis. All too often, people lose data due to a failure and then a backup which was failing or corrupted.
IT workers need a union
Yes, except he doesn't. Hence his tweets and his own recent question on stackoverflow about recovering his content from internet caches.
IE6 is just about the same as Firefox on per visit value, and amounts to 7% of our revenue. We can't ignore it (yet), but we certainly don't optimize for it.
I actually disagree completely, yes an hour is a long time, but that is exactly why I like watching them.

Most "real" interviews are so short, you never get any details, with mixergy you can actually get the nitty gritty details that help you see the actual thinking behind the actions. And since you can ask your own questions, you can actually get your questions answered.

For me the interviews, fall at 2pm, so I just watch them while I eat lunch. Probably the best hour I spend per day, come to think of it.
There's a lot of people on websites like techcrunch who still believe that H1-Bs are more qualified than the average programmer in the US.
I like your blog and brecksblog. The interesting thing about (un)features is that it seems like they are things that often another tool can perform for you.

water bottle:

- towel to dry up spills

- funnel to funnel liquids into it

blog:

- diqus to add comments

- Just go to reddit to share this site (or use their tool bar).
Arrington: [CruchPad] paying a lot of bills... $400,000...

Rathakrishnan: CrunchPad did not contribute code or funding... never agreement on terms of an acquisition... neither funding nor buyout were materializing...

Arrington, November 30, posted on TechCrunch that Fusion Garage and its investors had suddenly decided to dump the CrunchPad team... neither side owned rights to the product.

Rathakrishnan on Monday refuted Arrington story and introduced JooJoo.

Arrington filed suit to block sales of Fusion Garage JooJoo.
Enumerating Dropbox Resources (account # exposure)
I read today a factoid that said innovation was down because patents were being filed less (2 percent iirc).

Interesting that someone would think that the number of patents was a direct way one could measure innovation. My interpretation was that possibly less irresponsible patent grabbing was taking place because due to the recession there was less incentive to spend money patenting, and more incentive to keep businesses alive through real innovation.

Of course, I could be completely wrong.
We actually had our app hosted at CrystalTech until a couple months ago. Earlier this year, they had a critical power outage, which took our site offline. That's one of the reasons we're not there anymore.
Contra Code on Facebook Website
Even my mum uses Chrome now :/ I think it's going to be more mainstream than firefox in the end.
its not really news that Ritalin and other Schedule II stimulants work by increasing the amount of Dopamine in the brain, though the article's point about there being structurally fewer dopamine receptors might be.

That being said, for those with moderate - severe adhd, those prescription stimulants are the difference between a functional happy lifestyle and one which isn't.
> If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered
> lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it
> was pretty useless after all :)

You remember incorrectly. I've just gone and confirmed that the labels and references are all changed.

FWIW, we've had BBC BASIC programs running commercially in the field in a semi-embedded context for over ten years and they are still running perfectly. It's perfectly possible to do structured progamming in BBC BASIC.
Judging by the number of people here who've noticed it in their friends I'd say it's probably due to malware.

Take a look at the font of "facebook" in the images and compare with the header bar - 2 distinctly different fonts.

Edit: Also notice that all of the accounts reporting seeing it on their friends are brand new users.
Bacteria engineered to convert carbon dioxide into isobutanol fuel
I'd say a lot to Jeff, not only is it a popular blog standing alone and probably generates a decent income but it's also very important to him for cross promotion.
I remember he blogging about making more money from the blog than from the work at some time and deciding to blog full time.

I guess I can not link to the blog post...
I trudged through the first dozen or so paragraphs, and finally gave up at this: "Consequently, there is little original source code being produced in today's software."
Not to play down the cool use of clojure here but multimethods already provide a flexible and powerful object system:
http://clojure.org/multimethods
The Programmers Guild, a professional society
FriendBinder – Not Just Another Lifestreamer
MassChallenge, New Startup Competition gearing-up (not just for Massachusetts)
Study after study has shown that H1-Bs are paid less

Do you have a source? A quick google finds one real study: http://www.mygreencard.com/downloads/H1BWages_December2005.p... that was done on data from 5 years ago and a lot of echo.

Personal experience suggests otherwise.
"Geeks are used to being smart and thinking about things, so they assume that if they hold an opinion, there must be a smart and thoughtful reason for it. Everybody on the face of the planet does this little Post-Hoc Justification Dance a million times a day, but geeks are used to being proved right by outside circumstances. So they believe it even more than other people."

I agree 100%, the more you realize you do this the better your company will be in the long run.
That's splitting hairs. What's a backup script? What's a restore if not a unit test?
Ask HN:How to promote a Linux live cd?
Grml is a Linux live system targeted to sysadmins and console users <http://grml.org>. Unique selling points are for example good and powerful zsh configuration, tips and tricks with grml-tips, flexible boot process (e.g. start ssh server on request, download and execute a script from a remote system), persistency features, grml-terminalserver for easy network boot, grml2usb for easy USB boot, and many more.

Even though Grml's default language is English, unfortunately it is mostly known and featured in German-speaking countries (as it is an Austrian distribution).

Any hints to promote Grml to non-German speaking countries?
There are for example already twitter (@grmlproject) and identi.ca (@grml) accounts posting regular tips and tricks. What else could be done?
Firebug would probably be able to "thaw", in any case.
I've learned never to trust anyone else with your critical data. I try and avoid doing sysadmin tasks (I hate it) and I pay for it but I make sure the backups are working and at least some copy is under my direct control.

Sometimes I'm extremely shocked at how cavalier professionals are at maintaining your data and I've worked with plenty.
The question is gone, apparently.

EDIT: Back at http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-a-lost-websi...
If your a one-man show, you have to develop enough sysadmin skills for critical tasks such as offsite backup. I do have sympathy for Jeff, I'm certainly not laughing at him. Hope this is a strong message to the many out there not doing it right.
I've had nothing but problems hiring good people in good times and bad times. This doesn't surprise me at all. Finding good people is very hard.
And do you think Jeff's blog just got less popular?
This is a scam. I've just sent it to our internal review committee, but I'm guessing they're already aware of it and taking steps to shut it down.
How to make a dorm-style, printed Christmas tree
Engadget talks Joojoo, Arrington, 3G, and with Fusion Garage
"It is well known that programmers generally abhor organization and discipline. Their desks are often littered with stacks of paper and other debris."

He got that much right (referring to myself).