skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41684.html

Basically, there's a server that holds state for the cluster. When a scheduler attempts to load a job into the cluster, it grabs state from the aforementioned server, performs its job placement calculations, and then tries to submit its answer to the master state. Since there are many such schedulers, and the amount of time it takes to place a job is non-trivial, its possible that during the processing time to calculate placement, another scheduler might've consumed the requested resources. In this case, the first scheduler will provision whichever services are not in conflict for placement location, and perform a new calculation with the new state to place the remaining conflicted servers.

The general idea is that most services don't have such a high affinity that the components need to be started all at the same time (a MapReduce job on 10,000 nodes can still run with 5,000 nodes while the second 5k are provisioning). The tradeoff here is that you have to manage conflicts, but the hope is that there are few enough that your optimism is rewarded.

Does that make sense?
A CAP theorem for bay area housing policy: Charming, Affordable, Popular. Pick two. And, like Partition Tolerance, you can't drop Popular.
How to Become a Better Writer
Looks really cool, excited to see some more detail on how it actually works!

Why the new custom config file format? I've mostly found that these homegrown formats (logstash? nginx?) suffer from inconsistency and lack of flexibility, and don't have any obvious benefits. Why not use one of the following like other Hashicorp tools?

- JSON/YAML, possibly with support for templating like Ansible

- A Ruby DSL

- A limited, but well-tested and understood format like .ini files
Subject lines from thousands of fundraising emails
Here's the reason for why I asked. You're saying that:

> I've seen the language adding feature over feature instead of addressing critical aspects such as good IDE support or decent build tools

Well, Scala 2.11 hasn't added any features, being a release meant for stabilizing, modularizing and optimizing the compiler and the library, fixing many non-withstanding issues. So zero new features.

Scala 2.10, released Jan/04-2013 (2 and a half years ago, OK?), was the release that added some features which included Value Classes / Implicit Classes (they are linked, for providing extension methods, as a refinement of implicit conversions), String interpolation (any sane language has it, plus Scala can now deprecate the conversion to String that was imported from Java), plus macros as experimental. Besides macros, everything else is minor and macros are meant for library authors as a neater way of building compiler plugins.

Scala 2.9, released May/12-2011, only includes changes to the standard library and not the language.

Scala 2.8, released Jul/14-2010 (5 years ago), introduced named and default arguments, package objects, changes to implicits, type constructor inference and a completely redesigned collections library. This release was so big for its users that it should have been called Scala 3. Before Scala 2.8 the language wasn't suitable for usage and Scala 2.11 is pretty much the same language as Scala 2.8.

So I'm really wondering what "feature after feature" you're referring to. Really, take other programming languages that aren't Java and compare the features added in the last 5 years to Scala's history. You'll have a surprise ;-)

Also IntelliJ IDEA is pretty awesome for Scala, I've been using it for the last 3 years. It's worse than IntelliJ IDEA for Java, but it is better than Eclipse for Java or Visual Studio for C#. There's also Scala IDE (built on top of Eclipse) and Ensime (a pretty capable Emacs / Atom / SublimeText plugin). Other platforms can only dream of such support, including Kotlin, or C# for that matter. I'm not joking.

> Sure, I could name things that I don't like

So why don't you name those things that you don't like?
> If they ask for your greatest weakness

"My wife thinks I work too much, but I love writing CRUD apps. I stay awake at night thinking about the most efficient way to get those little pieces of data into webforms used by by a couple dozen people. So yeah, working too much and lack of sleep is my greatest weakness."
> Google for example has almost no way to reach customer service, even for their paid products. When it works it works great, when it doesn't God Help You.

That's not entirely true, I think it depends on the product.

I've had to contact them about two different Nexus devices and got someone on the phone in minutes. The support was unbelievable and the matters resolved in record time.

Google Apps also has 24/7 phone support for paying customers.
I don't think those are being served by Google which is what the parent was referring to.
feel concerns about their social impact are simply not worth addressing.

Welcome to VC land. The game is: collect everybody else's money and resources for yourself at any cost. It's even easier when laws and regulations are either toothless or only get applied across 8 to 16 year time periods, so you can flaunt them with no repercussions.
Why? If someone else is doing it that probably means there is a market for it.
It would shift upward the overall expected probability for intelligent life at our level. However, since we have no evidence of life beyond our level of intelligence, it also increases the probability that civilizations will not survive long enough to become much more advanced than our civilization.
I'm kind of glad to see this, as I wrote https://github.com/mpdehaan/strider for the reason that Packer and Vagrant used different config files.

This appears to address that.

OTOH, it says it's executing Vagrant and Packer under the covers, so I really need some of the Packer limitations I have (like https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/409
) addressed more than I want glue on top.

Anyway, if people want to hack on Strider, pull requests are welcome.

I'm not using it actively (yet), but it's a very very tiny amount of code to supply both. All the work gets done by boto.

Back to otto - I am curious what otto means when it says it's going to start to talk to infrastructure and means that it's going ot be more of a workflow engine that can also invoke terraform or what.

The DSL changes appear to maybe be a step in that direction?

Would probably benefit from more than one liners on the homepage, to show what is really involved more quickly.
> $10BN companies have laws passed that go against their interests all the time

And you don't see them complaining too much about those regulatory hurdles. Because those same hurdles also create a barrier to entry.

It's much easier to overcome a regulatory scheme if you're a $10BN company, than a $10M one.
Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges
It's possible but there are tradeoffs depending on what you mean by "global" and "state". If the state is strongly consistent (CP) then during a network partition the minority side of the partition will basically shut down and stop working. If the state is eventually consistent (AP) then it will become inconsistent during a network partition and have to be reconciled after the partition heals.
That looks really cool! Will have a look at how we could implement it.

One problem is that we run across multiple services, on multiple machines, so we would have to have some way of passing a customer ID into our AZ level logstash forwarders, and find a way of collating ERROR level logs, and sending those transactions up.

We also have the problem of customers asking for retrospective issue debug, so having all the logs is useful.
As No Man's Sky proves We can also make an infinite world.
I presume because it's an asian lady holding a phone and they didn't check much further than that (although the situation she is in would suggest an unwitting accomplice to a cyber attack in part perpetrated by said phone).
Elixir v1.1 released
Completely agree.

I guess I was more commenting about the fact that is doesn't matter whether the groups are self-formed or teacher-formed, or university-level or middle school-level because the outcome will always be the same: slackers get bad marks.

One of my goals as a teacher was to identify "slacker" students who didn't like to read and then try to help them find enjoyment from reading. Usually the reason for not liking reading was that they hadn't found a subject or genre that they connected with or were allowed to explore in depth.

That is kind of off-topic, but I always felt like the marks were only one aspect of education and even if the student ended up with bad marks, they could still grow and be a different person by the time they were done with the school year.
An additional practical difference is that due to tracking less, that metrics can take much fewer resources allowing you to gain insight that's not practical from logs.

I'd expect in a well instrumented system that a single request could easily affect hundreds of metrics. Trying to get that level of information from logging alone isn't practical due to the volume of data it'd require.

If you want to track overall behaviour of hundreds of codepoints then metrics are good, if you want to track behaviour for all of your events at a handful of codepoints then logs are good.
Matter of taste I suppose, but I find the rought style almost as irritating as ASCII diagrams themselves. Both involve a lot of visual noise which is a huge distraction from the semantic content, for me. With something like Shaky, the combination of handwritten-looking text but the perfect consistency of computer fonts just creates an 'uncanny valley' scenario where my focus is drawn to the artificiality of the textural qualities - like bad CG in an old or low-budget film - rather than the assimilating the basic shapes and relationships that they are meant to present.

When I see something like this part of me always silently wonders 'if you think these handwritten-style fonts are so cool, why didn't you write your whole Readme in the same font? Probably because deep down, you know it's actually hard to read, so why make your diagrams hard to read?'
"Certainly eight text messages are a more cost-effective way of promoting college than offering thousands of dollars in grant and scholarship aid."

I do not understand how in the world the person writing this article came to this conclusion unless they just straight up have zero clue how people that did not grow up with a college fund pay for college. Doubly so when paired with "The effect was particularly large for low-income ... students." How do they think that low-income students pay for college?
I wouldn't exactly say San Francisco lacks high density. It is true that it is not nearly as dense as New York, but it is pretty densely populated compared to other U.S. cities. I think it is right though when people say that San Francisco can still increase its density via 4-6 story housing ala Paris without destroying its charm, and without becoming Vancouver or NYC.
This proves American Intelligence is an oxymoron.
PHP/Apache modules, which are very much environment based.
This would be great for making landing pages with people who are looking directly at your product demo or form.

I've found that using real photos of people makes a huge difference in A/B tests, so maybe this is another way to further improve conversion.
Unfortunately, some of the problem may be the language we use to advance our points. Here's a phrase that I think really does illustrate this:

"Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city."

I really do want to discuss this reasonably, but to me, this is clearly a misuse of the word "share". There is a powerful emotion around "sharing", and to say that San Francisco is making it harder to "share" your home does have a different ring than saying it is making it harder to "rent out your home short term".

I will certainly agree that there can be some ambiguity around the word "share". For instance, if two people both pay equally for a large sandwich, they might say they "shared" it rather than "split it". But when you list your room on a website for a certain price, and someone pays you for it, I don't think we're anywhere close to that ambiguous grey area. This is clearly a quid-pro-quo commercial transaction. They can be friendly transactions, people can get to know each other through these transactions. I'm not even saying it's an undesirable transaction (more or less everyone I know things that airbnb has its place, though there is great disagreement over how these rentals should be regulated).

But I really don't think it's "sharing" by any reasonable definition of the term.
> I recently reached out to Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, to learn more about this.

I didn't reach out to any of the sponsors or advocates for Prop F, such as the political figures and organizations listed at http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbn..., of course. And while this post is full of stats that sound a lot like the kind of thing you'd get from Airbnb PR, nowhere in it am I going to inquire further and link to an opposing view, or really engage with opposing views in any material way. I'll just dismiss them by saying that the solution is for SF to allow more building, as if making that happen hasn't been the most contentious and complicated issue in the city literally for generations.

One could also argue that I myself have helped drive up the high cost of housing in SF, both by running a program that requires the people it admits to move to SF in order to participate, and more generally by being part of a hype ecosystem that aims to convince impressionable young people that the only way to be successful in tech is to somehow jam yourself into this already bursting-at-the-seams city. I'm not really going to engage with that line of thought either, though.
Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human”
You're being inartful :-) but, yes, when I read that comment my reaction was that, at the very least, a conventional business hotel would have been a far more sensible choice.
Specifically on risks of harm? Sure:

Faults in agreement include parties generating agreement that doesn't reflect their values and/or desires, and the illusion of agreement by one or both parties.

While there is potential risk of harm in many other areas of development - including other areas of agreement - the stakes are not usually so high. Getting an illusion of agreement for what movie to see, what restaurant to eat at, or (at a younger age) what toy to play with, will tend to have less severe consequences than an illusion of agreement over whether to sleep with someone.

It is not clear that someone gains the most from risking the most. Why is an agreement over sex the defining developmental step of the skill? Especially since there are so many easy ways to reach such an agreement if you're not particularly picky. (I believe the classical example is, 'You give me money and I sleep with you.')
Sure, but could I compete with free?
> The mean revenue per host was about $13,000 per year

Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. The big difference with Airbnb is that the service is removing potential rooms and roommate situations from the market. I'm not going to say whether Airbnb is a good thing as honestly I'm leaning toward it being a net benefit. But to say it has not made finding a place to live permanently in places like SF and NYC more difficult for 1st time and early in life renters is difficult for me to agree with.

All progress has a price. And often that price is worth the benefit. But let's not pretend there are not people out there that will be worse off in the short term.
This is an attempt to get a refund from AirBnB, right?

Has HN become a back channel customer service platform for YC companies?

Unfortunately since it seems to work so well. I expect we will see more of this.
What size are we talking? I've had no issues with SBT on a 20k line codebase.
Well, a really good question is whether or not ABnB is recording all of these claims. If several people file similar complaints even without "proof" a pattern starts to emerge. If they are not recording these complaints, but ignoring them because they can't "prove" anything, then they are being reckless.
A more private DOES
Wow, press releases from the company accused of fraudulently generating data in the first place -- how could I not be convinced by that evidence?
It's amazing how much of this boils down to "If you make sure people know about things, people know about things!".

I mean it happens over and over in the article "Remember, you can default to double sided", "Did you know about this savings program?", etc.

Still, love the idea, and I hope they keep it up. It sounds like it's had some really positive effects so far and what's the point of the scientific method of testing and evaluation if you never use it?
> I never said Apple invented the concept of a crown nor haptic feedback.

Yes you did. To quote you:

> However there are a number of innovations e.g. digital crown, force touch, haptic feedback and the excellent Fitness capabilities that do put in far ahead of the competition in day to day usability.

Innovation: a new method, idea, product, etc.

So, yes, you did absolutely claim Apple invented the concept of the crown, haptic feedback, and so on. Otherwise that sentence makes no sense.

> They are merely novel implementations when applied to the context of a smart watch.

As I've shown even that isn't the case. I can list a smartwatch which had every feature on your least except one (force touch). Nothing novel about anything else you listed with regard to Apple Watch. Maybe of the features listed can be traced back to the early 2000s on smartwatches.

> And they serve to improve the day to day usability which is far superior to the Moto 360 and the other Android Wear devices I've seen.

Given that both have most of the features, that claim makes no sense. Maybe if you took of your tinted Apple fan goggles for a second and actually tried someone else's products, you would know how inaccurate that statement is.

I've used Apple Watch and a Moto 360. Have you? You didn't even answer my question when I asked you if you had even seen a Moto 360 in real life.

> My point with the fitness capabilities is that it is the best implementation of it both in terms of accuracy and usability. And I have tried quite a few in my time.

So have I. They aren't. Fitbit did it better many many years ago. Apple introduced a fitness product which is like something from 2010. The fitness trackers you can buy today are far and ahead better for anything beyond the basics.
> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city.

This is why Airbnb helps maintain untenable pricing levels. There's more money to go around and rates can keep going up with no bearing on vacancies.

A rental management company with 20% vacancies wouldn't be so quick to raise prices; but, as long as the tenants magically come up with ways of catching up with increased prices, the prices will continue going up.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10232769
We in tech have a disgust for politics. Rightfully so. It's useless at best and harmful more often

Speak for yourself. Uber and AirBnB's businesses are extracting profits by ignoring the costs of complying with regulation, or by pushing those costs onto others. In an apartment building, probably none of the other residents signed up for the additional wear and tear on the common parts of the building, the noise and the security risk of a hotel suddenly appearing in their building - but they quite literally pay for it, and the "landlord" pockets the difference.

Similarly Uber isn't a tech company, they are just unlicensed minicabs, something that most cities stamped out with good reason.
> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.)

I will never understand why most Americans generally favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude for employment, but are in favor of rent control and making eviction extremely difficult.

Coming from New Zealand, it's the other way around (it's extremely difficult to fire people, but there is no rent control and you can evict anyone with 90 days notice).

Not saying one or the other is necessarily better (I personally think somewhere in the middle for both approaches would be best), but strict eviction laws and rent control always seemed very un-American to me.
> It feels to me like a better Java, but still very limited compared to Scala. It stays very much in Java's paradigm.

You've basically summarized Kotlin's design goals. Java was designed to be a simple language for widespread use, hiding an extremely powerful runtime beneath it. The very first paragraph describing its design reads[1]:

Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because I had a very strong tendency to prefer things that had been used a lot over things that just sounded like a good idea.

So: 1/ not PhD thesis material, 2/ familiar, 3/ adopt tried-and-true solutions.

Scala's design is the exact opposite of each and every one of these goals, but Kotlin tries very much to follow them. As such, they are very different languages (even though they share many features) because they are guided by opposite philosophies, and are therefore meant for completely different audiences. Kotlin aims to be exactly what Java would have been if it had been designed today; Scala aims to be something completely different.

[1]: http://www.win.tue.nl/~evink/education/avp/pdf/feel-of-java....
I just upgraded to the iPhone 6s from the iphone 5s. It's pretty good but my only grief, and not a small one though one I could have thought about before buying, is the large size of the phone.

I am not a small guy but I can't reach the whole screen with a single thumb like I could on the 5s. And the problem is that iOS places all sort of important commands at the top of the screen (back button, URL bar, etc), in the unreachable area. So it means the 6s can't be used with a single hand which is not a small UX change.

I hope they will make smaller future versions, or move all the essential functions to the bottom of the screen. Right now even the icons on the desktop are top aligned.
How do privacy laws like HIPPA impact this approach? Can all of the raw data needed to make this work be accessed or is some of it held back by privacy laws?
"Notice that the Appfile makes no mention of OS, memory, disk space, etc. Otto has built-in knowledge of best practices and picks smart defaults for you."

Sounds like a big bag of "nope."
That's somewhat of a plum project thou. I'm amazed that stuff like this is still printed out for reference [shudder].
No, you're not the only one. The policies that keep housing unaffordable are infuriating. Everything from prop 13 to local ordinances needs to change. It's worse than a lack of action ... it's really silly policies preventing any actual progress.

Prop F is another silly policy.