skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been using Kiln for free for quite a few years for my personal git repos. I still haven't grown past just me. I received an e-mail last week saying they will start charging $20 dollars a month, no exceptions, to keep Kiln. I just ran into a Kiln bug due to a change in Openshift. Kiln does not support clones with --depth=1 --recursive and a username and password in the url with escaped characters like %40 in place of the @ symbol. It seems I have been given a motivating reason to leave Kiln at just the right time. Gitlab hosts free unlimited private repos for people like me and they support the url structure I need. It seems hard to justify them charging $20 dollars minimum for how I use it. They no longer have a business model that will bring on new users; I think they are only interested in maintaining the large clients temporarily stuck on Kiln.
The article is referring to "idealism", the belief that world is primarily ideal (ideal = "of the same kind with ideas"
= mental), not physical. It says that the world we perceive is just an internal state inside the fundamental substratum which is consciousness itself. It was in vogue in India 1000 years ago in the time of Abhinavagupta and appeared in many other places, even in Europe. Look for idealistic monism in the wiki.
> Oh and I pay those bills in full on time. So no fees to them. Feels good to score against the banks :-)

It's weird, but the reality is the rewards from credit cards can be ridiculous, whether percent-cash back, miles (for heavy travelers) or signup bonuses. For those unaware, there are people who try to maximize the signup bonuses in particular through a process called "churning", mostly to travel for near or at no cost at all. There's very detailed guides on how to maximize the signup bonuses.

I don't churn, but I do try to maximize what I can get back for things I buy anyways.

* One card gives me 6% cash back at grocery stores. I do eat food after all (I cook 99% of my meals, and rarely eat out). I also use them as my pharmacy. 6% off food and medication -- two things I can't live without -- is pretty good. There is a fee for this card, but the cash back puts me at +$285 back a year after the annual fee.

* Amazon gives me 5% back off what I get through them. Sure, I'll take another 5% off.

* One gives me 5% off gasoline. I tend to need gasoline at the moment. Sure, I'll take that!

* Two have rotating 5% categories, that tend not to overlap. So sometimes I can get 5% off something I needed anyways. Great!

* One gives me 2% back that goes into my IRA. If I had kids, I could put it in their 529 instead. Automatic planning for the future on anything where I'd normally get just 1% instead. Sweet!

* This year I moved and planned on getting a new dishwasher, washer and dryer. So I searched for cards with a cash-back on spend signup bonus. Found one that best matched, which was $300 back if I spent $3000 in the first 90 days... plus 1% cash back on the card. Got $334 back in total on money I was going to spend anyways, which was a 10% discount. Sure thing!

I realize merchants pay higher fees to give me these rewards. If these huge rewards go away, that won't bother me. I'll still use the cards with lower rewards, because something is better than nothing, the issuers fight harder than my bank would if I used debit and things happened, and I haven't ever paid a cent in interest on a credit card.
> Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

Parts of the Cold War were peaceful for some countries (including the USSR), but the period in which the Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1943-1949) was a period during which the USSR was constantly involved in international armed conflict, and was absolutely not peacetime for the USSR.
Could you talk about how do you set this up (and how you use it) ?

I'm assuming that this is LiNux only.
> "NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons"

This is just inaccurate, or at least purposefully misleading. The NSA did not just lose control of its "Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons".

They "lost control" of mainly a bunch of old exploits whose release will not matter because anyone who is running this old junk won't be updating their servers because of this news.
The telescope described in the article is part of the US Space Surveillance Network. They have an incredibly beautiful installation in Hawaii: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Ground-B...
I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in fixing them.

IMHO, if your investors need to be involved in seeking approval for handling scaling pains and on top of that if they reject it - there are deeper issues within the company (management issues, politics, technical incompetence, leadership issues).

So to clarify my point - any team could still screw up technical execution. However there is no reason that given a good team and support from within the company, a product can't be scaled.
An external observer should realize that robots are self replicators (like people) that fend for themselves in the environment (like people, again), by a complex process of adaptation to external situations, moment by moment (yep, like us).
That's right. But the merchants tolerate it because the people with high-end cards tend to spend more money per person compared to a bare-bones cardholder. On the miles cards, the merchant hopes to make out by getting larger sales, albeit keeping a smaller percentage.
> "The <company name> day is typically regarded as 8AM to 8PM."

Did the building have nets under the windows?
FICO makes public what their algorithm takes into account so we done even have to guess!

http://www.myfico.com/CreditEducation/

And even has an estimator!

https://www.myfico.com/ficocreditscoreestimator/estimator.as...
Wish "1day" would somehow make a comeback. "0day" sounds cooler, of course, but it was a lot easier to find 1day FTP warez sites in the wild than 0day sites.
In short, self replication in a complex environment where the replicators have to find resources (energy and nutrients), cooperate and compete against other agents.
I seem to be alone in this, but I actually do about 25-30 hours of actual programming work each week. And that's sit-down-and-concentrate-and-build-shit work. I'm pretty ruthless about declining extraneous meetings and I keep my door closed most of the time.

I think it's reasonable to have 25% of a 40-hour week be for meetings, helping other people, eating lunch, sitting in on interviews, and learning/trying out new things.

And yeah, 25-30 hours is probably a maximum, and it needs to be done in three-hour chunks at a minimum. As a manager you can easily destroy that by allowing an environment where a solid three-hour block of time never happens for a dev.
This seems to imply that the only possible danger would be from ionized atoms damaging DNA. Cellphones and wifi signals are modulated frequencies, therefore they could conceivably come in harmonic resonance with a wide variety of chemical bonds in your body, or have effects on ionized particles within cell walls or organelles. Any HAM radio operator knows that micro and radio waves can cook your body parts.
In particular, widely used systems such as OpenSSL explicitly
use uninitialized data for the generation of entropy.

Uh oh. Another OpenSSL bug.

If you're running OpenSSL in a container or VM, there's a good chance of repeatability.
I wanted to link it but nothing came up in my bookmark search. As is typical. I think my bookmarks are too packed for search to even work right. So, I just described what I read in the past.
Who is 'they' in that case? They for me is whoever is paying us to help them with their business.

If it's the contractors/team members then no. Ive unfortunately had several highly paid (4 figures uk/day) contractors who think themselves above certain tasks, or who refuse to do anything they didn't agree with who seem surprised when they get told to fuck off.

You're an overpaid contract dev and you're refusing to implement your points because you disagree with the architecture even after it was discussed fully, while on a k a day? Fuck those ballerinas. They won't be getting more work with us then.

We are there to help a business achieve a goal, nothing more.
> I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale.

I would say this is because of the simple fact of visibility and adoption. You've probably never heard of these services probably because they ground to a halt with a mere 1000 users, so they never got mainstream enough to be recognised as a viable service. It is a bit like how no one remembers the dozens of people who failed to achieve sustained powered flight before the Wright brothers. Doesn't mean there weren't any, and scalability, technical or planning issues killed those efforts before anyone knew of it.

Some 'scalability' issues are inherent to your initial design, and not just the choice or configuration of your hardware/software platforms.

For instance, what if you were building a contact database of some sort. At first, you may have things like 'Phone Number' and 'Email Address' as part of the 'Person' database. Then, as your service gets popular, you notice people asking for extra contact like Twitter handles, LinkedIn pages etc. So you start adding those to your Person table as extra columns.

Eventually, you realise that you should have though more about this at the outset and have contact details stored in another data table altogether, linked to a 'Contact Type' table and related back to the Person table. This would have been mitigated at the start via better database design and catering for eventualities that you might never have foreseen. Migrating the original database to normalise it is a massive effort in its own right, and probably will take more time, cause more outage time, and cause more bugs in existing code than designing for that eventuality in the first place.

Even if 99% of your users only ever enter Phone and Email contact details, the second option, designed for scalability, will still handle that without a sweat, and 'scaling' to meet additional demands later is merely a matter of adding new contact types in the 'Contact Type' data table so that they become an extra option for all your users.

I am willing to bet that 9 out of 10 'weekend projects' have had to be thrown out completely and redeveloped from scratch when the number of users became significant. Of those rebuilds, I would be interested to see some research into how many users abandoned the said platform when (a) the original one started to grind to a halt or constantly fell over with errors and (b) the new platform came out with new features or a different UX that broke the 'look and feel' of the original.
How about autonomous satellites which cannibalize space junk's orbital velocity to de-orbit the junk, and maintain the satellite's orbit?

Imagine, a satellite is collecting space junk it encounters, and compressing a big spring using solar power. Once it gets enough junk, it launches the junk backwards, giving it momentum and sending the junk into an unstable orbit.
First learning the basics and then creating some projects for fun might help get you the confidence you are looking for. Good luck! And kudos for getting an internship that will open a whole lot of doors. I'm a bit jealous.

Re: Java 8, it's awesome!

SomeCollection.stream().filter(lambda ...).map(lambda... etc is just so cool.
Because you know that you go full throttle for 3-5 years and then you have the possibility to retire.

I would sacrifice 5 years of my life in order to get financial freedom for the rest of it.
Alternative answer: Ensure that the implication that "The IPO" and every individual's "exit" depends on those 80 hours is widely heard and vaguely understood. Hire people who believe that.
When people have money troubles they cut down their spending. Non business airline travel would be an expenses they would cut first. But the airlines are still making money from them even if they aren't travelling because with the cards they still make money from them when they buy food.
> A basic stack these days node.js+mongo, go+*sql can easily handle more than 100k users...

That is making some very large assumptions about application workload. For an application which is purely a CRUD interface to a database, yes.
They might do it for short stints to "get ahead" if their scheduling allows it. If I know I'm going to get that extra time off in the future or I'm getting paid for it (garaunteeing I was compensated for it) I might do it for a week or two to save up for a nice vacation or time off to do my own thing. As a manager or business owner... I'd never encourage it and possibly not allow it. The hours worked beyond 40 in a week often have drastic diminishing returns and increases in mistakes or poor thinking.
Can anyone suggest anything?
> but even crappy options like RDS

Curious as to why you see RDS as a 'crappy' option??

Given the choice of building and maintaining a MySQL box in the corner of your bedroom and hosting it on RDS - I know which way I would go (and I have done both over the years).

If you are talking 'scaling' in terms of the OP's article, then RDS is almost a no brainer, and you can scale your instances (and add replicated instances etc.), hide it behind a VPN, set up firewalls to prevent DDoS attacks all in a matter of minutes, with a few mouse clicks.
When I really like the work that I am doing and there are some real challenges, I can get up to 6 hours of work done before I have to take a break for a few hours. Not every day, but 2-3 days out of 5. It means that there is no point in making an appearance before 10 am or working past 4 pm. But when I am really smoking I can put in another 2-4 productive hours in the evening after 7 pm or so.

Of course, few employers understand this kind of work pattern, and most of them prefer having a developer spend more time in the office, even though it results in less productive work getting done. This is often enforced by people who are unable to correctly assess technical skills or the outcomes of technical work. Since they have no clue who is competent and whether any of the work output is usable, they compensate by forcing people to spend more time doing useless activities that they can assess. Like sitting at a desk, having meetings, raising an issue and setting up a meeting of stakeholders to discuss how to solve that issue. Many of us have to work in environments where these enforcers create a lot of churn to make it seem like the enforcer is a valuable member of the team.

I suspect that there are more such useless people in the workforce nowadays because companies no longer try to hire good competent people who will work for one company their entire career. As a result, there is nobody in the company long enough to identify and get rid of incompetents while at the same time, the truly skilled people give up and find a new opportunity every 2 to 3 years.

By the way, the incompetents that I talk about are not skilled developers who make a mistake or two, or who get stuck in ratholes solving the wrong problem. I am referring to the people that are weeded out with fizzbuzz. Unfortunately there is no fizzbuzz for project managers, business analysts and a whole range of other support roles, including managers.

So my take on how to get developers to work at a high level of productivity is to make the environment excellent. Get rid of the people who waste other people's time. Cut way back on meetings and replace them with a good ticket system and some people who make sure that tickets are properly sized with clear requirements including context and acceptance criteria. This pretty much means a mature Agile shop. Focus on all the stuff around the developers and make sure that the retrospectives are as brutally honest as possible, and follow through on fixing problems that are brought up in the retrospectives.
I would go as far as to say "extremely rare." SJS is also an extremely rare side effect of Ibuprofen.
Anyone who's spent any significant amount of time in political threads in reddit (just for example) would know those acronyms.
It's not so much about "making it look like Russia" as it is about making the current administration look illegitimate. There are literally trillions of dollars at stake, as well as very affluent lifestyles of some very influential people who have been running things for decades. They might end up being replaced by a different group of people, and they don't like that one bit. And they are fighting it tooth and nail. Just goes to show how little power is really vested in the officials we elect (yes, "we", I am a US citizen), and how much of it is wielded by the amorphous Washington DC apparatus that doesn't change no matter who you vote into office. Explicitly going after them, the way Trump promised in the final months of his campaign, is a suicide mission, if he actually decides to follow through on the threat. But I don't think he actually has the power or indeed the smarts to "drain the swamp" in any kind of meaningful way. This draining is long overdue, but there's no way to accomplish this without some world class statesmanship, and without having the intelligence community on your side, and Trump is at odds with both of those things.

And here's some Russian perspective on "draining the swamp": that's actually one thing Putin did when he came to power. Under Yeltsin, the government was basically run by oligarchs, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted. Putin and Russia's security/intelligence community that installed him laid down the ground rules, and made it clear that from there on out orders would be coming down from the Kremlin, not the other way around. One oligarch rebelled (Khodorkovsky) and was put in prison for a decade. Which, by the way, was entirely deserved. Most Russians were disappointed that other oligarchs didn't follow.

The issue with "draining the swamp" is that this creates voids that other people fill. Which they did under Putin. So even though oligarchs are pretty obedient now, there's a much stronger swamp sub-structure of Putin's pals under the covers which is darn near impossible to remove until he dies, and they're all under his control.

So armed with this perspective, I like two features of the US political system that many other Americans (native and naturalized) intensely dislike: the divided congress and the constant Mexican standoff between the executive and the legislative branch. If those guys could agree on anything, that's when we'd really be in trouble. Case in point is once again Russia, where the executive branch can request whatever laws it wants and be 100% sure they'll pass the Duma. The result is predictable: harebrained laws protecting the incumbent regime.
The point of the article is that parking takes up tons of space and costs. These are resources that could go towards more infrastructure, especially public transportation. (buses for example could get their own lane, speeding them up) In my city there are proposals for new bike lanes all the time, but they are never implemented because drivers complain that they would take away parking. In general I feel that the article is mostly talking about cities, but I see no reason why you couldn't have buses and trains in Texas. (sprawl just means that some people might have to walk a bit before accessing these) And I can guarantee you people still cycle in Texas. It just requires bringing ample water and taking precautions from succumbing to the heat.
I'm curious — are there any companies who have their programmers work ~4 hours a day? How does the work output compare to more traditional companies?
Mental Calisthenics for meditation and ice breakers
For their animatronic robots, their numbering system has historically referred to the number of uniquely articulated motors/servos of a particular model.
It doesn't force focus like amphetamines tend to do. In fact after taking it two or three times the entire pronounced stimulant effect is gone.

There are some days I wouldn't even know whether it was working until I looked back at my productivity in hindsight.
Obligatory "Mongo DB Is Web Scale" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
The highest IOPS you can get on RDS is about a single consumer grade SSD.
It comes down to reality vs idealism for me. The reality is that the market has perverse incentives to use these technologies in ways that benefit a few people, but can harm many more along the way.

Automation is a prime example. In an ideal world, automation would benefit everyone: perhaps eliminating scarcity and freeing up time for all humans to pursue other goals than working to survive. In reality, automation serves the needs of the few and will put millions in a situation where survival might not be possible at all.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not demanding they fix this bug. They don't have the resources to prioritize it, and hey, that's their prerogative. It's a free product, after all. I just think calling it a dilemma is weird and makes it sound like there's some counter-argument to fixing the problem beyond "we don't have time."
FICO score in excess of 820 here.

The difference in credit score if I were to have a small balance at a statement is literally < 1% of my score. I've done it as an experiment (having a non-$0 balance on statements to show utilization, not carrying a recurring balance and paying interest), and the difference has been typically 2 or 3 points. In my case, that's a fraction of a percent improvement.

That is not a meaningful difference that would affect interest rates I could get from a lender. I would get the same rates at 828 as I would with 825 as I would with 790 as I would with 770. There is no meaningful positive difference that having a non-zero utilization provides to your FICO score.
One neat property of solar is that a solar inverter can quickly and safely turn down its output by moving its operating point away from the maximum power point. Other generation technologies can have trouble with this. For example, if you start extracting less power from your wind turbine, then it'll speed up due to less resistance from the generator. (I assume you can mitigate this to some extent by adjusting blade pitch.)

It'll be interesting to see of the grid eventually starts giving solar operators a way to get paid to produce less power when needed.

Another neat way to soak up excess capacity would be desalination. Build a big plant and run it when power is cheap or free and store the fresh water that's produced.
SMSGupShup, now known as GupShup.

http://techcircle.vccircle.com/2013/02/06/mobile-group-messa...
I mentioned something similar in a separate comment.

My initial DB schema was pretty bad. We did at 2 schema rewrites and migrations from the launch to 5M users. Each time it took 2 weeks of sleep less nights.

The machines today are really powerful. You can do a lot with 244 GB RAM machines backed by SSD.

Someone who doesn't have the skill set to be able to scale once they get traction - it's likely they will not have the skills to design for scale at start.

My recommendation to everyone would be pick a language and db you are most comfortable with and get started as soon as you can. You will fail on the product side a lot more times before you will fail on the technical side.

And if you are failing on technical side, reach out to me. I will definitely be able to help you find a way out. I am not sure if there is any product guy in the world who an make a similar claim on the product front. However there are at least dozens of technical guys in the world who can make a claim like I did.

So focus on launching the product as soon as possible. Work hard, reach out for help if needed. You will eventually get success.