skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I'll take the bait...

> highly-scalable

Everything I take from our set of OTS components will have live, verifiable examples of running at scale.

> multicast, real-time, distributed message passing system

For this the choice really comes down to RabbitMQ or ejabberd. An XMPP solution is appealing for the obvious benefits of having a "presence" concept, but an AMQP solution keeps us closer to the current reality of Twitter.

So we start with a large distributed rabbit setup. A few clusters scattered across the world, connected via shovel pipes and using some nested queue/exchange plumbing to wire it all together.

> full-text search

Some queues dump to a FTS setup that keeps recent messages in RAM and migrates them to disk as they get older. SOLR is probably a better solution here, but I know the Sphinx delta/full-index model better and would reach for that first.

> archiving

Dump a firehose queue to disk and send copies/updates out to various services that want it. Pushing it to HDFS would probably be the first choice I would look at, just because it is easy to go from there to various Hadoop analytics.

> deletions

Nothing is ever deleted, it just becomes invisible. This is just a flag to add to the FTS indexes and archives.

> dynamic subscription changes, access restriction

Handled completely by the message queues.

> open APIs with quotas, abuse detection mechanisms, spam fighting algorithms, different authentication protocols, etc.

None of these is particularly difficult once you have the general framework setup, and the structure of the system actually makes it pretty easy to wire in things like realtime abuse and spam prevention once you get rolling. There is only one thing hard about building a better Twitter, getting the userbase to make it worthwhile. If Twitter was in a different market where the network effect was not so strongly self-reinforcing then it would have been cloned and re-implemented better back when the fail whale was our constant companion, but this is not the case so making a "better" twitter is of little value.
I didn't know that different frequencies would affect blocking effectiveness, but it makes sense. My initial design was for some kind of copper mesh, but my friend, practical and cost-cutty as he is, said to go with tinfoil to get a similar effect. Those idstronghold wallets look a touch more professional than my duct-tape wallet.
Starbucks Does Not Use 2 Phase Commit [2004 article]
Don't take it so seriously, I think Crockford is awesome, and has every right to include an alert into his script. I'm just sore from all those times JSLint hurt my feelings sniff sniff
Please stop treating this simple rule of grammar as some piece of esoteric knowledge.

It is common sense that the antecedent of a pronoun defaults to the closest noun.

You don't get through college or even a PhD as Schmidt has (where you write many papers) by repeatedly making ambiguity mistakes like these. A research paper is useless if no one can make any sense out of it. Not to mention that he is a CEO: a job where you live or die by how well you communicate.
Friendster sold for $100M
We "use" this in our circles. It's just understood.
Beautiful, already taking them up on the request for iPhone developer...
Oh noes, accidentally closing a tab! As it turns out, on Chrome simply pressing ctrl+shift+t reopens the most recently closed tab, pressing it again reopens the one closed before that, etc.
Username indicates this is Amy Bennett, employee over at ITWorld http://www.itworld.com/abennett
1+ -- there simply isn't a rationale for auto-appending these disclaimers to emails.

As someone else has pointed out, you'd think the mere fact that someone auto-appends these things to every email diminishes the likelihood that a court would take them seriously.

Consider also the absurdity of the sender using an inherently insecure communications channel to communicate information with a demand that the receiver keep it confidential...
http://www.itworld.com/abennett

No need to suggest anything nefarious. Submitting articles for your own site is explicitly permitted here.
Define "pretty well". I am no sniper, but I suspect these guys are used to hitting targets at distances of 1,000 meters. Wind speed, air temperature and humidity vary over time and space. A good sniper can probably estimate these with some accuracy, but there's still a lot of uncertainty left on what the bullet will hit. If the Coriolis effect contributes with very little uncertainty by comparison, then accounting for it is not going to help much.

Let's face it: without the numbers, we're talking plain nonsense.
Android's unintentional beneficiary: Funambol
Apple tried to fix that by placing the tabs on top of the address bar like Chrome does. People complained. It looked a little funny.

http://www.macworld.com/article/139026/2009/02/safari4tabs.h...
And more people learn their lesson.
> That's not poverty. Not even close.

In the USA even an unskilled person can get a fairly good job (as the above example shows). How exactly do you then have severe poverty (like the thing you talk about) when even unskilled people get work?

In my country you are dirt poor even if you work 8 hours a day. What you label poverty is not poverty at all. They show photos of poor Americans – eating a McDonalds hamburger.

I ate my first hamburger at a shop when it was my birthday. Poor people usually eat staple foodstuffs (not McDonalds).

> What happens if people stop doing their jobs? Shops close down, infrastructure fails, and no one can get any work done.

Shops stay open because the shop owner sells his goods for a profit. An open shop is not a gift from society; it is a shop-owner acting in self-interest by selling things for a profit. The same goes for people working in infrastructure (e.g. those employed by municipal roads agencies, etc…). As soon as people stop doing their jobs (as unionists often like to do) they stop getting paid.

Except in the basic income grant world that many of the left like to live.

> That's because the US put a lot of money into universities/research in the 1940s-60s, which attracted a lot of talent.

Not really. One reason is that the USA has high tuition fees that enable good universities. If people pay the tuition fees themselves they are more inclined to actually work (instead of the 4 years of party in many countries). You also have private universities (which are not government funded) which are very good.
.NET wasn't bad. It was Vista, Visual Studio, that busted Dell, and a mountain of legacy code that made my experience a nightmare.
Thanks for the info. How important would you rate the not scrolling through problem? Important, or it can wait?
In that case, it's not exactly 'hate'. You seem to want to stick with your company because the value of the company as a whole is greater than greater than the opportunity cost of leaving it. You hate a given project, but you want to get it over with because there is a better project (possibly?) waiting for you after you're done.

In that case, it might be called 'Hope Driven Development' as your hope of getting good/not-bad projects exceeds the opportunity cost of leaving the company, and thus accelerates your development.

...or DDD -- 'Dream Driven Development' ;*)
Ask HN:  Fixing the recruiter industry
I hate recruiters, a lot. Inane emails, phone calls, and messages on your social network of choice seem to be common modus operandi.

Has anyone considered this problem/Are there solutions out there? If so, are they decent? And if not, does anyone have any suggestions? I'm not very familiar with the industry, but HATE HATE HATE when they bug me. There must be a better way. I was thinking about some sort of bidding system based solution, but haven't had a chance to really flesh out the idea. Would anyone be interested in working on it?

About me: Completed CS undergrad at a top 10 school, about to complete a JD/Business School combined degree at another top 10 US university. Some startup experience. Comfortable with Java, Ruby, and Scala.

Thanks for reading. If you are interested feel free to contact me at ihaterecruiters [at] gmail
Same thing in Firefox, but very few people seem to know this.
There is also an afordance for this in the history area: "Recently Closed"
Hack this encrypted conversation, win $250,000 (in gold)
A hint is to watch the location bar when you click it.
Wait, he had a #1 result and he changed URLs or something? If so he deserves the loss.
And then when you pull your card out to use it, they swipe your info, since the data thievers are set up there anyhow.

Sexy wallet though!
My interpretation is that IP is something that you have to deal with, even if you don't think it matters. The ways that he suggests you deal with it are to (a) explicitly assign IP early, (b) document external communications of novel ideas and file provisional patents before one year is up, (c) be aware of IP when negotiating with contractors and customers. Those sound reasonable even for startups, and will hopefully keep you out of trouble (or provide unexpected value) later on. IP is unlikely to pay out, but so is your startup.
She's posted one comment...

It would be nice if people who post only their own articles cared enough about the community to participate in a manner more significant than only that. Submitting personal articles and running is borderline spammy.
I'm curious too, so I googled around a bit an I thought this was the best answer:

"As an ex British markman/sharpeshooter, we are trained to take everything into account, the coriolis effect is taught but very rarely acted upon, your generally close enough to see someones face when taking a shot. The Barret M95 has an incredible range, and when your talking anything over 1 click, wind, humidity, spin are all more important than the coriolis effect, but when it comes to taking a shot you do not want to miss, a miss can get you killed, you keep your mind on all variables."

[Found here: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/569190]
And a single, one-time fix takes care of everyone.
Mutt lets you define mailing lists, so if you press list reply (Ctrl-l by default) it will know whether to reply to the address the message was sent to.
An interesting meta-pattern appeared in my thoughts when I combined GPD, DFD, WAD, IAD, CYAE, and DBD. It's acronym is FDD, which stands for Fear Driven Development.

A few other patterns may make appearances, depending on the organization, but the practical upshot is something a former manager of mine kept on about regarding working at large, asshole driven organizations: focus only on requirements. Do precisely what you are told to do, and precisely what you are told to do it on, and do absolutely nothing else to anything else. For developers, this involves fixing or implementing precisely what the bug ticket tells you to, and committing precisely that to the repository. For the tester, this involves testing precisely that feature or fix the ticket indicates, and not suggesting in any way that another related fix could be rolled into this one with little effort. For the project manager, this consists of having endless meetings with people to make absolutely certain the items on the task list are prioritized correctly, and dragging developers and testers into those meetings to project an image that your organization is "engineering driven".

Expect that if you violate this tenet, you will face unwanted consequences, even if things turn out well for what you were working on. It doesn't matter that you made things better for the organzation; you usurped the task-delegation authority of someone else, and it is quite possible that person was hired for that specific purpose. If you show you can self-manage, this person is now redundant, so it is in their best interest to show you can't self-manage by making sure you are scared completely shitless of ever doing so. Vague threats and social politics work well here.

But it's not that the individual wants to abide by these particular patterns; it's that they are wedged into a political canyon. They know that whatever effort they might put in to making things better will result in them being fired for insubordination as soon as someone finds out what they've done. Would they like to keep their job and deal with a horrible codebase, or would they like to lose their job and have nothing but the bitter taste of a horrible legacy codebase you can now do nothing about.

These are all symptoms; the cause I've always seen is that the staff are scared shitless, and want to make sure no one can hold them responsible for anything. It seems to me that if you get rid of that, you get rid of the catalyst behind a lot of these other problems.
I do agile coaching, and this is awesome! Thanks! It's about time we got honest about how these things really work.
This user does nothing but post articles from ITWorld, most (all?) of which she(?) doesn't write. The user isn't a member of the community; they're a human scraping service.
completely redesigned the site

along with what matt said, does this mean they put it on a new domain? why would they do that?
I like it, because it uses less space. Firefox (and others) have redundancy in that the top part of the window has the same text as the tab.
Does anyone know of a Firefox add-on to emulate the Chrome behavior of not resizing tabs as you close them until you mouse away?
The start-up chronicles: Learning to listen to unpleasant truths
I actually wouldn't mind being called a Code Santa, it sounds pretty awesome actually.

Except, given my coding abilities, I would more resemble Robot Santa from Futurama.
Hmm, the document doesn't even validate:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://playground.theseday...

While the importance XHTML validity is arguable dubious, I would hope that at the very least a company trying to show off its ninja skills to prospective web developers would spend the extra effort.
A situation where everybody is able to watch everybody else is an utopia (or dystopia, depends on your point of view). I don't really think it is possible and I am not sure I would like it if it is.

Also let me clarify that I am not saying that Google has an evil plan to become a Big Brother and the aforementioned quote is not about that. My questions are (feel free to replace Google with any other company that collects information or even the government): A. How many googlers have access to my information? B. Am I sure that all those who have access are trustworthy? C. Am I sure that some ex-googler will not leak a big chunk of data just to get back at the company? And answers are always: A. I don't know; B. No; C No.
Bidding system? Hmm...

Like if I put my resume on a site, someone has to bid to contact me? Perhaps as an applicant, you can set a base price and a frequency of contact. Maybe you only allow one recruiter to contact you per week or day. If you want to be that recruiter, it'll cost you minimum $1. If more than one recruiter wants to contact you, they bid up the price.

Applicants could regulate the minimum price based on their current status. If they are employed happily, the price is $1000. If they are unemployed, perhaps it's zero with unlimited contacts until they get flooded and then the price goes up.

The economics of such an idea is interesting. It assumes a shift in power from the employer to the applicant. The best of the best will rise to the top and a natural ranking of applicants will evolve based on the bid. Great applicants could sustain themselves on employer interest for a while until recruiters give up trying to gain their interest.

Could something like this work? I suppose it depends on supply and demand of both applicants and jobs.
Yule Log 2009 TV Schedule 
TV - WPIX presents TV yule log broadcasts every Christmas. The yule log TV tradition has kept the yule log on TV since 1966. This year, the yule log HD comes to yule log cable fans, well as traditional yule log music. Here's the yule log broadcast schedule for 2009. Note: All times are for December 25th, in the local time of the city in question.
I think that if the person gets bored and wants to be elsewhere, then that is not the person you want to hire :) Though I do agree that those terms are annoying (degrading even). I always thought that a codemonkey was someone who coded only for a living, and often in a disgruntled state:

"An affectionate term for a specific kind of underpaid, overworked (often by volition), increasingly underappreciated indentured servant, otherwise known as a Software Programmer." - Urban Dictionary
Smooth as butter in Chrome.
It's good to hear how much thought and effort they put into the UI. Nevertheless, I have my own list of gripes with Chrome tabs and windowing.

1) Closing the last tab closes the browser: Yes, I get that it's a fast browser and restarting a new instance is quick but when I close all the tabs, I am not ready to stop browsing. I am only trying to close the current tabs so I can go to some other site. Let me choose if I want the last close-tab to shutdown Chrome also or not.

2) No warning before 'close all': Seriously. Every browser has this. If I have a bunch of tabs open and by mistake I click the close button in Chrome, it just immediately shuts down. Let me choose if I want this to happen or not.

3) Top-left 'system menu': Every Windows application lets you left-click on the top-left corner of the window to get the system menu, while double-clicking the same top-left corner closes the window. Except in Chrome. Right-clicking the title bar does work but it's not the same.

4) Tiny '+' button for new tab: Sure I can use keyboard shortcuts but it's not always easy on a tablet. There's enough space in the tab-bar. Make the '+' a little wider. Also, use the top infinite space above the '+' icon.

5) Can't put the tabs on the bottom: That would be a nice option to have, though I'm ok with the tabs being on the top.

6) No simple way to open bookmarks in new tabs automatically.

7) No way to set if newly opened tabs (via a-href target=_blank or right-click 'open in new tab') should go to background or get into foreground.

8) Permanently pin a tab: I'd love to always have Hacker News, reddit, gmail, and my todo list pinned. If I restart Chrome, the pinned tabs go away. It's not the same as putting all of them in the startup list.

This being said, I recently switched to Chrome on all 3 of my regular PCs/laptops after 6 years of Firefox/Firebird/Mozilla. Chrome is super fast, finally has some ad-blocking, syncs my bookmarks (though that's not perfect), and is standards-compliant.
I'm amazed by how fast GitHub has managed to become the place for anything git and take a significant market-share from sites like SourceForge and Google Code, in a pretty short period of time.
I'm not a physicist, but doesn't the conductor need to fully encircle the card to make a Faraday cage? I would think that something U-shaped (in one dimension or another) like a typical wallet would just act as a waveguide. Even if it does act as a waveguide, it might make it safe enough. There might be a way to put some sort of flap that closes over the card.
Offtopic, but ITWorld redirected me to a full-page ad before I got to the article. Above the ad, it said "the page you requested is loading" as if this excused the presence of the ad.

Are people really more amenable to looking at an ad if they think it's because they have a slow connection? Why do many sites blame the user's connection speed when (a) showing ads or (b) doing server-side processing?
Great Toolkit if you want to/can utilise the Java Tools echo system and everything else that comes with it and with the newer version the UIBinder allows for declarative UI. I personally haven't used the Code Splitting feature but i can see its uses.

A common misconception is that it doesn't allow writing direct JavaScript - it actually does.
fnid-

I think you hit the nail on the head. As far as profitability for the site itself, taking some cut of the actual payments seems reasonable, no?
People would inflate their minimum bid prices to increase their status, and so everyone would be expensive to contact. So no one would use the site for recruiting.
I kind of liked the Apple take on it, but I think Chrome out did them by making the tab only take up most of the vertical titlebar space. If Apple did that, I think it would have worked out better.
Reminds me of my own - back in 2006 - http://tamersalama.com/2006/08/16/the-dd-way/
I like that the tabs are on top.

If the tabs are at the bottom and your Chrome window is not maximized, the tabs may not be visible. You have to drag Chrome up in the screen to make the tabs appear.
She's not a member of ITWorld's community either with 22k+ posts but 3 comments. :)
One thing that annoys me about Chrome is that on closing a tab with Ctrl + W, it will always open the tab that's on the right of the closed tab. In Opera you have the option to activate the last active tab on closing. That way, you can just click on all the tabs you want closed (no need to hit the tiny close tab button), and then press Ctrl + W until they're all gone. Or you can open a bunch of google search results in background tabs, read through them and easily remove them afterwards.
What I think Google should do is build a Silverlight competitor that is open source.

What's the point of this Javascript hacking with suboptimal results?
I think a service product is a much better option. What is recruiting after all? It's a) contacts and b) a filter.

Programmers deal with recruiters because they have the "exclusives" and companies deal with recruiters because they can filter out the first interview stage.

So create a service, that will let companies find out the quality of the programmer, without shelling out $20,000.

I imagine it as a "testing company" you create a few thousand tests, programmers take them, get their rank, then they add it to their resumes.

Employers see the ranking link, go to your site, find out about your testing methods, see aha, 90% percentile on this tough test, good guy to interview.

Eventually offer programmers the ability to list their rates + languages, and let employers contact them for a small fee. i.e. Search for all programmers under $50/hr in California with Java rank of 90th percentile.

Make one of the questionnaires the usual questions asked in the first interview, you know the script all recruiters follow to weed out people.
I'm really done with tabs only at the top. I use the Tree-style Tabs extension for Firefox and can't imagine going back.

You will notice an increase in browsing/research productivity because you don't spend so much time managing tabs that have gotten too small/short to tell what they actually are. You'll find you can work handily with dozens of tabs open if you have them in a readable list on the left.

Before I used tree-style tabs, I usually maxed out at, like, 10 tabs open. And then I was somewhat sad and started my "tab GC" to close the least needed ones. Right now, I have 40+ tabs open in Firefox 3.5 and it feels just as breezy as it does with ten. More so, actually, because I have all my varied research in different trees that I can collapse/hide if needed.

Give me Chrome with the tabs on the side, preferably in a tree hierarchy, and you've won.

Edit: Link, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
I used to have a canned email that I used to reply to recruiters.

It basically explained (in better words) that I needed the name, website and physical address of the company, because I was very picky about culture and location, and it would save us both a ton of time.

It also said I had no incentive to screw them and go directly to the company, if I was indeed interested.

Worked 50% of the time. Some people wanted me to call them first before telling me the info (I wonder why), and others plain told me "that's not how this works, I've been burned before", but even when it did work, it seems like it caused said recruiter to not send any more leads my way.

So I went back to playing their game. Which I hate as much as you do.
What if there was no status per se or what if status was based on "tests" of some sort and independent of pricing?