skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The lack of a plugin system

We have many ways to plugin to Prometheus across the ecosystem, the textfile collector you're using is one of them.

> You can't run 23 different daemons, each on their own port, to collect stats from things like PostgreSQL stats or RabbitMQ.

There's no fundamental challenge with this approach. If you've got good basic infrastructure, particularly configuration management, the rollout of each should be a small operational task. If it's a major challenge, then your problem probably isn't with the Prometheus architecture.

> it means if we remove a collector, we also have to clean up its .prom files

There's several problems arising from this approach, this is one of them. You can also expect odd artifacts in graphs.

The textfile collector is only intended for machine-level metrics, by putting service level metrics in there you're missing out on a big win of Prometheus by thinking in terms of machines rather than services.

Fighting against the architecture means you're not getting the maximum benefits from Prometheus, this would be easier with exporters and service discovery.

> which themselves need to be monitored

Are you aware that the node exporter exports the mtime of all the textfile collector files? That's there to make monitoring of them easier.

> If anything goes wrong with its database files, it tends to just crash, and the only way out is to wipe the entire database

As far as we're aware, the only way that happens is if you run out of disk space. If you've evidence otherwise please let us know, so we can prioritize accordingly.

> We've experienced at least one version upgrade where they changed the database format and didn't provide any upgrade tools, so people were forced to start their metrics history from scratch. I know that it's pre-1.0, but still, they knew perfectly well that people were running it in production.

We broke backwards compatibility in the storage format once, and there's no plans to do so again. The core developers who were all running it in production didn't see it as worthwhile to write a converter, and noone else stepped up.

> The alert manager was also written from scratch recently, with a whole new config format.

The old alertmanager has always been flagged as very experimental, as it was a functioning PoC. The rewrite was always been on the cards, and this came up regularly.

This is all part of evolving the system to be better for everyone. If we tried to keep perfect backwards compatibility then we couldn't remove warts, bugs and misfeatures. We aren't afraid to deprecate where it makes sense to do so, and have transition plans where practical.

> The lack of packages (Debian/Ubuntu in our case) is also problematic.

There are packages in Debian proper, and nightlies at http://deb.robustperception.io/

> No syslog support is not acceptable in this day and age.

That's in the latest versions.

The high level problem is that there's so many different ways to do logging that we can't sanely support them all. For every X there is someone who thinks it's essential.
Between this and the ChakraCore news item on the front page I've been wondering whether Microsoft really has been changed its behavior since the 90s, or whether this is just how they play the game when they're not in a position of strength as they are with node.js and cloud services.

It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java" that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much of a cynic and they've genuinely changed.

Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source & open architectures.

But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects where they lost the lock-in wars.

Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing business differently now?

I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their business model has a lot of inertia.
Indeed. Unless there's a promise of migration support once funs inevitably run out or some sort of lifetime fixed price/discount, such that the nonprofits or whatever can make an informed decision about the real cost of their infrastructure once it's no longer free, this is nothing but a terrible trap.

I'd hate to see organizations suckered into this only to find that it has unsustainable costs once the freebies dry up and whatever pains come from attempting to migrate to some other platform/service and/or back onto local servers.
My best-ever CSR experience: buying an engagement ring online from Blue Nile, which was supposed to arrive in time for my pre-planned out-of-state meeting with her family. There were a handful of delays that had me worried. CSR named Sean (how often do you remember CSR's name? Only when the experience is awesome) reaches out to me and says in essence "we had a supply issue and we can't get you what you ordered, so I'm going to look through our current inventory and see what I can get you that's better." A couple hours later he gives me info on a slightly bigger stone with equal-or-better specs, I OK it, and it shows up overnight.

IMO it was the perfect experience. They let me know there was a problem, but didn't overshare or turn their problem into my problem. And then they let me know how they were going to solve the problem of getting me something I'd be happy with given what I thought I had ordered. And then they delivered.
> Just looking at the scatter plot by itself doesn't tell you anything about the underlying data.

Well if that were the case it would be perfectly pointless to make such a visualization... The goal of dimensionality reduction is to provide a useful summarization of the data; it is a valid question to ask to what degree it is successful at that.
Equity Option Implied Volatility Analytics with Python
The biggest change in my life from getting a ChargeHR was realizing that, after 5 years of having a child (and then children) in my daily life, I was wayyyy more sleep-deprived than I realized. The newborn phase was obvious -- you're having to get up every couple hours and getting back to having a "full" night's sleep feels really awesome. But it turns out I _never_ got back to a full night's sleep, because having kids means I wake up earlier than I used to and the result is that I was constantly getting about 30 minutes less sleep than I really needed. I made a change to when I go to bed, and after 4 or 5 days of really getting a lot of sleep it was like going from a foggy day to sunshine in my mind.

(full disclosure: I now work for Fitbit!)
Some hospitals are taxpayer funded. 2/3 of hospitals in the US are non-profit corporations. The rest are either public (run by the county or state) or are for-profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_hospital#United_States
Because automatic refactoring tools are not available for dynamically typed languages, programmers are more hesitant refactorings. So the technical debt accumulates and the code gets worse because of that death spiral.

That's what I mean when I said that dynamically typed languages crumble under large code bases.
Download torrents to your cloud and play them online
It'll be fascinating to watch how time unfolds on the blockchain.

Some will strive for absolute standards, while others maximize the net benefits of relativity.
Neato! Verified with:

echo "H4sICBPHnlYCA2EuYmluegDt0LENQQEUQNHnK7xINF8rLIAVbKH88VU0ZlATK4gt1DQ6vURMoBIDiN4CknOa29/BNrN72U+LZj2eL1fxPDU6EXE+3CbvUTEMAAAAAAAAAODfPfq9/DZfx6petw2B32Z5XZT31mYXH9vDv0RTIwAA" | base64 --decode | gzip -d | gzip -d | xxd
Everything on that site is subscribe-walled (one could use a phony email, I suppose), and even his cookie disclosure has a phony link. I stopped there.
>lobbying

Well it only affects VCs and founders at a secondary or tertiary level. Even early employees at the seed stage aren't that badly affected by it if the founders structure things to minimize capital gains (ex: allow early exercise with a buyback clause).

Who is hits the hardest is the post Series A employee. Those with the strongest muscles likely aren't going to go bat for them in Washington quite yet.
This is the same old strategy of giving students discounts which get them accustomed to proprietary products, then marketing to those same students when they graduate.

Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
> What do you see as the downsides of unity?

Performance is atrocious compared to other engines.
What cloud service would not have those issues?

I think it's a great thing. People already use Azure or some other provider at these institutes (I know my uni does). If Microsoft wants to trade free services for market share, everyone partaking benefits from it -- unlike cigarrets at schools. If you or your institution don't want to partake, don't. I know I won't.
Speaking as a MIRI employee, I can say that MIRI isn't trying to build AI that's mathematically provable to be safe. This misconception comes from the same place the "AI safety engineering, etc." post is speaking to -- the assumption that if (e.g.) we do work in provability theory to develop simple general models of reflective reasoning, then the finished product must fall within provability theory.

Smarter-than-human AI systems will presumably reason probabilistically, and all real-world safety guarantees are probabilistic. But theorem-proving can be useful in some contexts for making us quantitatively more confident in systems' behavior (see https://intelligence.org/2013/10/03/proofs/), and toy models of theorem-proving agents can also be useful just for helping shore up our understanding of the problem space and of the formal tools that are likely to be relevant down the line -- the analog of "calculus" in the rocket example.
What's true of all bugs? It passed all the tests

I don't here about people being bug free with TDD ( though significantly less bugful)

Obviously all about tradeoffs, but my impression is that if a third party lib needs a major version update, the time changing the version in your requirements is dwarfed by the time needed to investigate generally
Posts like this remind me of the quote in N.N.Taleb's Antifragile book, The mind fights yesterday's war, but the body fights tomorrow's war (in the context of biological systems under stress).

Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished in HN comments.
Just Give Up. It’s Impossible to Bug-Proof Your Home
I empathize and care more about my online friends than anyone I know in real life - including most of my intermediate family. While I could be the exception to the norm, the people with whom I interact seem to be similar. Of course, we could all be exceptions to the norm...

The study you linked does mention other causes which seem more likely than device use:

>As discussed previously, narcissism, which is negatively
correlated with empathy, has been rising in American college
students over a similar time period (Twenge et al.,
2008).

The current college generation are extreme narcissists. To a disgusting degree. Even terrible tragedies (such as the terrorist attacks in France) are met with "how can I make this about me?" attitudes. A brief browse through Twitter shows this isn't an uncommon thing.

I have no data on whether or not narcissism may or may not be correlated with internet/electronic devices. (I haven't bothered to search this statement, so if a study shows up on the first page of Google results - didn't bother looking! :) )

Either way - I look forward to habitually living in a gaming ecosystem rather than the real world.
I think the keyword you missed is "automated".

You can refactor anything but refactoring can only be performed automatically and safely with types around. Without types, a human is required to verify that the tool didn't break the code with its refactoring, because it's just guessing at this point.

With types, there is no guessing.
9. Monkey patching instead of good design
10. Don't worry about data integrity
Thanks a lot! I think you understood the problem correctly, I checked your argument and it seems correct to me, see https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/20245/subset-of...

We have no specific plans for this result but it's always comforting to have an answer after all and know that it's in P. Plus this way I learnt about the existence of submodular functions. :)

List updated (http://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#complexity-of-an-as...). Thanks again for making me remove the first problem from this list!
Is there anything you can say about Linux support ? I think you have announced several times that Linux support is active, but I have not seen any port of CryEngine games to Linux so far.
Smart organizations won't adopt even free services without a contract of some kind.
My main takeaway is to not work for any startups that don’t extend the window to exercise options.[1] Employees deserve to get what they earned without having to take on additional risk. Especially with the extended time to IPO these days. Why not do this as a company?

http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-will-let-employees-...
I can guarantee you that any house for sale in Detroit with only an external picture is destroyed inside, by arson, foreclosure, vagrants, or any combination of the above, and you're going to be paying $100K+ to make it livable.
Nope. No ads.
Ok. Let's narrow it down. Does anyone make it to the NBA at a position that requires something other than being able to run up and down the floor at a decent speed and be around 7 feet tall that didnt do so? A non-center position? Certainly no guard, small forward, or power forward I know of. And even those people you mentioned were/are non-exceptional backups or non-starters.
"high intensity" is sprinting, not distance running.
I suspect they A/B tested it and went with what works.
This is what I'm saying. Which is not what the parent (pekk) was saying. Are you responding to the right comment?
> I don't really get the complains about a kitchen sink of predefined functions

If you're running it locally, there's a very practical reason to complain: between Wolfram 7 and 8, the application bundle size went from 29 MB to 2.65 GB. That's not a typo.
I really appreciate this description. Always nice to see the "actual" definitions instead of "it's like a thing you can map over."

I initially had problems understanding monads in Haskell having come from a math perspective.
I think there's some good dialog here, but I wanted to offer my own experience as a volunteer (I've been wanting to get around to writing a blog post about this topic actually!).

First of all, kids love Minecraft. And I mean LOVE it. Its ubiquitous amongst them. I tried to come up with an analogy to my own youth, but I can't. Its not a flash-in-the-pan fad like pogs were and its not Pokemon or Magic. I have met a handful of kids who did not have experience with Minecraft, but they almost always know what the game is at least.

I helped put together a few little Minecraft camps and workshops armed only with my own personal knowledge of the game (I too was an early adopter of the game) and a handful of mods. The first couple of camps I tried were pretty poor execution on my part. The kids usually found ways to mass-spawn monsters or create The End portals and generally stayed unfocused. They were way more interested in dinking around the game than doing anything productive.

But then we put more structure around it and locked some of the features down with mods. They kids were tasked with creating a city, so I plotted out a flat grid of land and gave each of them access to a city block (sometimes 2 or 3 of them would get to share a block). It took a few sessions, but they made a pretty cool looking city. And for the most part locking down the areas kept them on task.

Recently I helped out with a camp that let the kids choose between building structures, creating mini-games, or programming. The programming part was mostly using the ComputerCraft mod[1], which was pretty much like turtle. You could program a robot block to mine or build for you. The potential here is pretty huge for kids to get into programming from a very early age who normally wouldn't since its very accessible (think Scratch, but in a game they already love).

What I keep reminding myself though is that Minecraft is yet another great, accessible, family-friendly game that can help introduce kids to computers very early. There will be a certain percentage who take it to the next level and learn how to create simple java mods for the game. There is potential for some to craft huge sculptures and cities and generally expand their artistic skills. I think there is a very real connection between many people who love programming today who also loved playing games in school like Oregon Trail and SimCity, that's the potential for Minecraft imo. So even when they aren't totally being focused and are just playing around in the world, its giving them a friendly impression of what computers can ultimately do.

[1]: http://www.computercraft.info/
I once tried just 16 miles after just 36 hours of fasting. It was interesting. I don't remember a whole lot, other than that it was a serene kind of experience. I was in quite a different mental state from the run-of-the mill run.
How to make money from your place of comfort
Thats possible.

But tales like Aesop's fable of The Scorpion and the Frog have reverberated with humanity since prehistoric times for a reason, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
One can certainly design one's apps in such a way where the cloud provider doesn't necessarily matter -- docker containers running on VMs, for instance.

If you use a bunch of things like SQL Server, Document DB, etc. that is certainly much harder to migrate than PostgreSQL running on a VM.
> If people demanded that Wolfram were open, then it would be either a) open or b) gone.

That seems a bit like saying that, if people demanded that North Korea were open, then it would be either (a) open or (b) gone. Of course, the lock-in to a software package is less than the lock-in to a country, but at a certain point it is not totally absurd to say that it is effectively impossible to switch.
I didn't, I was hoping to work on the desktop app with offline files.
> * DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

I know what you are saying, but it should work just fine with WINE nowadays. DX9 support is not an issue anymore.
> Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical

Not at all. My very first thought was "this is just good old Microsoft, giving free stuff to schools to catch users early".
I have some experience with their powerpoint library, not bad for sure but I really wanted to make a ribbon plugin integrated into OneNote desktop.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying and you know a lot about the situation. However if the Rouhani administration is strategic and its goals align with not having nuclear weapons then the international community should accept it strategically as well. Rouhani is indeed nothing more than a well dressed Islamic militant, but I don't think the other Sunni leaders are any better, even if they are also strategically allying with the US policies to further their objectives too.

As for Syria I completely disagree, this version that Assad is slaughtering his people as if he is another demon with nothing better to do is just more US propaganda. He was fighting rebels but was just not careful and there are many civilian casualties. We don't need another headless state for radicals to occupy. The US meddled in Iraq, Libya and now is strengthening ISIS even more by destroying the sovereign nation (Syria) that is fighting it. If the US has a problem with Syria, then Congress should debate and then declare war on it. Talk of no-fly zones is ridiculous. We only don't like Syria because they are close to Iran. Saudi has reportedly pumped $700 million into rebel groups. Supporting these Sunni extremists and then claiming to also fight ISIS is foolish. Saudi and their coalition are attempting to establish their Sunni Islam across the middle east. And that is not better than Iran. At least in Congress Tulsi Gabbard is the one congressperson saying we need to let Assad stay and focus efforts on ISIS.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

I remain skeptical that MS has changed its basic playbook.

P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
I got excited when he mentioned "old-school"... then he said Ubuntu. Give me a break. The only thing old-school about this is his wired-only design.
Were those Wolfram's users? And did they reject his app in favor of the free alternatives?

I think your point is missing the point. The market of people who just want a solution to work and be easy to use is much, much larger than the market that explicitly demands BSD or GPL-style freedom. Wolfram serves the former. Makes more money that way, too.
This is getting silly and if this is all you got lets just stop here.

No one is just an astronaut. Everyone who even get to get into space have some sort of profession behind them which is why they are hired to begin with.
> I have a strong distaste for those who are intolerant of the intolerant, even more so than those who are merely intolerant

Wait, seriously? So, if someone says "I don't want my kids ever to meet gay people", and I say "I don't want my kids ever to meet that guy", then you feel that I'm more in the wrong?
They could redo it to make extra stuff download as you need it for a given application.
Our vision is that it gives a group of people a shared perspective. It puts you on the same page. That could be your fiancé and your mother-in-law planning your wedding or it could be your HR team trying to structure your employee onboarding process.

It's not a project management tool anymore than it is a bug tracker or a crm or an applicant tracking system. People use Trello for all of those things but at its core, it is just a list of lists.

The power comes from understanding how that metaphor can help provide structure to some process that you have. (Trello comes from "trellis" - a structure to help plants grow).

Check out trello.com/inspiration for some examples. It's a bit like explaining to someone what a spreadsheet is before they have seen one and why they would use one. Once you grok it, it's very powerful.
Both, in my experience. I feel like the essential feature here is race, however.
I suspect that "heists" have lost their popularity because its easier to steal money with skimmers or by CC fraud.

That said it is always interesting to see people do things like the smash and grab burglaries in Marseilles or the Riviera.
Thats not even true.

Crafts are neither just thinking or just moving things around.