skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've heard places convert from a Ruby stack to Java

Twitter.

And for good reason.

The problems that Github and Soundcloud have aren't related to their web front ends. Bandwidth, storage and a host of other issues are probably more front and center.

Twitter has these same problems but for a different set of reasons. Their web front ends are doing a hell of a lot more work relative to the amount of data coming and going. How big is a tweet vs a repo vs a song.

Yes they are all on the web but these three companies could not be more different.

> I've heard places convert from a Ruby stack to Java, and a lot of it was just to hide the fact that the programmers didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Why go from ruby to java? Because you want to invest in an ecosystem that is far more robust and far richer. You don't want a pile of ruby programers off in a corner doing their own thing with bunch of containers while you HAVE to hire java guys to deal with the large scale problems that organizations of a certain size face.

At the time twitter made this choice it was the ONLY choice to make. They didn't have a list of good options that we have today (Go, Scala, Haskle). The reality is that they would STILL probably choose java because it is still easier to find talent and it still has a richer background.

Lets make a comparison here... PHP vs RUBY, and lets talk about the devs. I am hard pressed to find a decent PHP dev who won't throw PHP under the bus (or out the window) when they get outside what it is good for. I am hard pressed to find a ruby dev who doesn't fully believe that the solution is always more ruby. There are plenty of good ruby devs (great ones in fact) who swear that ruby is the only way!
The majority of web applications handle far less than 1000 requests per second.

To be fair, two points:

a. The benchmarks do rather easy stuff like fetching rows from SQL and then serving them. No heavier stuff (like compressing a file, etc).

b. On the provided benchmark, Ruby on Rails with Unicorn barely achieves 2000 request/sec.
What if star pupils do better when given a laptop?
Yeah, kids these days have self control problems. Somehow human nature has been fundamentally altered between the previous generation and this one. It has nothing to do with external variables such as the creeping omnipresence of distraction machines like laptops.
All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent.

I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up.

Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes.

That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about.

I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come.

As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been).

IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.
Yeah, the crowds have moved on from Rails/RoR. But the crowd is also always moving with latest fad, almost by definition. That does not imply any sort of hate in my view.
And why is that cost on the founders? Is that true for your investments as well?
The phrase 'have a hard time changing jobs' seems fine. You could even, if you wanted to, make an argument that this has some things in common with what was historically called indentured labor. But to use a charged phrase as a rhetorical weapon in an ideological battle, which you clearly are doing, is the wrong kind of comment for HN.

The same goes for swipes like "you are kidding right?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745448). Using escalating rhetoric on divisive topics causes internet discussion to erupt in flames. Mostly it's negligence rather than arson but the result is the same. If you're going to comment here, please don't do these things.

The guiding value of HN is intellectual curiosity (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). We're hoping for thoughtful conversation, and using the site primarily for political or ideological battle is destructive of that, so we ban such accounts. In particular, it's not ok to create an account here just to do that.
Nice! Is this open source? I'd love to contribute to this.
> Saying you're 'fully against policy X' while cooperating with someone who is implementing policy X is a self-contradictory position.

No it's not. The president has an enormous jurisdiction, and you can cooperate on some issues and abstain on others. And you can advise on all of them.

> there is some objectively good direction for the the economy as a whole which is clear to all

It is clear to all that the economy is best off if the titans of our economy give their thoughts to those making policy and decision. I'm not saying everyone has to help the pres do whatever he wants, but withholding advise from the president in the area of economy because you disagree with his stance on immigration is nothing but spite that harms the country.
Tech boss attacks 'whiners' in angry email
> What is your definition of manual intervention?

I was thinking of autopilot disengaging, but that's not really important here. I'll go along with what you just said.

> Pilots get updated instructions from the tower - the GPS path of the flight within 10 m is not programmed from the beginning

not in the beginning... so it is later?

> due to weather issues, turbulence, traffic at the terminal ends, etc.

Uhm, "traffic at terminal ends" suggests the real problem is that the correct path is not known in the beginning, or that autopilot might not be able to avoid collision on its own... which is quite a bit different from the plane being unable to locate itself accurately and follow the correct path even if it were known a priori. Are we even discussing the original issue at this point?

> Autopilot landings require a Cat III approach.

I have no idea what that means. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I know what that means either.

> The autopilot when landing is not using GPS for final approach.

> The person you're trading comments with has said twice that GPS is not responsible for the autolanding portion of the flight.

> You twice try to refute it. And then in your last paragraph you do exactly what he says the software engineers here do and you take offense to!

I think you didn't read my last comment carefully because, as I already said, I understood this. My problem is whether GPS is accurate/reliable enough to lead the plane to the place where the next system can take over, which to me implies GPS is already certified to be accurate and reliable enough to get the plane near the correct runway. Read it again. There shouldn't be a single sentence there where I "refute" the microwave transmissions or claim GPS is actually used on the final approach.

> If you have a system that is designed to cut out the human component, it has to be all or nothing.

Wha..? Autopilot isn't perfect either, and can disengage in various situations that it can't handle, but they approve it and pilots manage to use it just fine. When it's GPS's turn, suddenly it has to be 100% perfect?

And when did I ever suggest you have to cut out the human component? For goodness's sake all I'm asking for is a little display with a map that shows where the plane thinks it's going. That's "cutting out the human component" to you?
My experience from college is pretty much the same - as soon as I stopped bringing laptop to courses and started using a paper notebook, my recall improved significantlly. If you don't have a distraction device on-hand, it's significantly harder to get distracted as soon as a lecture gets a bit more boring and doing notes forces you to pay attention to those boring bits as well.
I mostly listen to these sets:

https://musicforprogramming.net/

I also like these SomaFM stations:

https://somafm.com/deepspaceone/

https://somafm.com/spacestation/

https://somafm.com/sf1033/
By pushing it out on startups that are supposed to be conservative with spending, and investing only on the product? Seems extremely short-sighted.
Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.
Fun fact: Twitch (which probably had the most ridiculous month-over-month growth in recent years, possibly since TwitteR) is in Rails...

And my favorite, Raverly (~7 mil user accounts), is done by two engineers (or was, not too long ago - it's hard to get numbers on these things). Two! Talk about developer efficiency.
But they should be able to improve the milk technique by using different dipping angles as shown here and in many cases it would probably be much faster then this technique (but in other cases impossible to get all the geometry).
Dear Sam,

I saw your post for last month also and I reached out to you via mail for an Entry level Software engineer role. I have sent a mail again this month for the same. Could you please check your mails ? Appreciate your help.

Thank you.
I always had the feeling I failed to grasp math because I never got good at mid level things.

It took me reeeally long to grasp things like linear algebra and calculus and I never was any good at it.

It was a struggle to get my CS degree.

Funny thing is, I'm really good at the low level elementary school stuff so most people think I'm good at math...
... do you think available memory and CPU time do not decrease when you spawn more threads?
So the rule was delayed by "Homeland Security"...

Does this mean that they are protecting us from terrorists? Because I would have thought the protecting American jobs argument was stronger.
The express <> Rails comparison was not meant to be a feature to feature one. I did not explain myself correctly.

The point on the speed for me wasn't that speed as a whole doesn't matter. Speed in the language level doesn't matter.

If you do stupid shit with rails it will take 5.1 seconds and if you do stupid shit with Golang it will take 5.05 seconds. It simply doesn't matter all that much in the language/framework level for most of us.

For example: In my current job place we are using Flask for all microservices. One of the endpoints was very slow to respond and took 3 seconds. It ended up being a missing index in the DB.

Once fixed it's taking 20ms.

So, Is python slow because it's taking 20ms vs 12ms?
To believe something is possible, you must have some evidence for it. If you believe something without any evidence, you are dealing with arbitrary whims or claims.

If I claim there are tiny, sentient gnomes running around in my garden, I should have some evidence for that claim. If I insist it's possible without identifying any evidence, you would rightly conclude I'm insane.

You evaluation of evidence, or your logical process, could both be mistaken and so you might believe things that are not true. But if your belief is based on evidence, you can test it and revise your understanding.
That's a nice thought, but most software patents are written to be as broadly applicable as possible, not to be a good guide to implementation.
You are an Italian [1], which thanks to its membership to EU and how US green cards are allocated significantly benefits from the current status quo unlike say Chinese/Indians/Mexicans. So please don't pretend as if you went through any hardship or discount your race privilege. Oh and xenophobia against Asians who are rich is also xenophobia.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12491395
My examples were programming, but I also make decisions about processes and tools. They follow the same logic. If I'm unsure, I ask and go ahead instead of sitting and doing nothing.

Only if I'm very, very certain do I not bother asking.

And I've certainly got non-programmers around me that make business decisions all the time. It's their job. I'm not sure how that's relevant?

The same thing applies: They should only be doing it without consultation if they have the experience to back it up.
How about if you're using a compressible fluid?
This has always bothered me. The standard is supposed to be "non-obvious to an expert in the field" and yet they hand out patents like candy for things that are obvious to the most casual observer.

My solution is to cap the number of patents granted every year to, say, 1000. Patents would be ranked from least to most obvious and actual prior art investigation would take place (because the number is manageable). The ones below the cap would be unpatentable.
So basically you're saying that it is a preferred solution to teach kids math poorly, let them develop insecurity and aversion towards it and then spent a lot of money to let them overcome it than just do it right in the first place?

Yeah, I know that's not what you mean, but you're missing a point. The premise of the article is that US has a STEM problem. I merely suggested that they're allocating resources wrong to fix it. I didn't mean they should introduce rigor and discipline or increase hours - I said that the best way to achieve results in teaching math is to fix it early, when it's most commonly broken (in my experience).

It actually helps you if you decide to switch interests, because you got the basics right, which in this case is the ability to think in an abstract way.

If you don't agree with me, you should have provided arguments that math problems do not arise early in education system, but they are introduced later.

One last thought - timing _does_ matter. That's why almost every professional athlete starts as a child. The question is how much you gain for starting early and I agree, that it is usually unreasonable to put too much pressure on kids. Pressure is not necessary to fix the system as far as I see it, though.
It sounds like you should probably just go the whole hog and give each user their own network namespace and bridge them to the main network. Then they can run DHCP and get their own address and do with it what they like.

Wouldn't really work for Internet accessible IPv4 addresses, but IPv6 would be fine.
>> I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive.

SSDs have added a storage tier. You're doing the natural thing; just get better at it.

Intel has created a hybrid solution with 3D XPoint. You can plug a relatively inexpensive Optane module (32GB/~$80) into an X299 chipset motherboard and you'll get most of the IOPS benefit of solid state using a traditional disk in a transparent manner; the Optane module provides a huge cache with lower latency than flash.
The whole body of contract law stands in contradiction of your assertion. We also privilege facts and verifiable events in history and science, notwithstanding the existence of bullshit. I don't share your fatalistic view, not least because any undertaking whatsoever could theoretically be dismissed with the more-or-less similar argument of 'well we're all going to die, so what's the point?'

I agree with you that much of society is based on based on bullshit, but not that it's pointless to do anything about it. I used to smoke cigarettes but gave them up because they were making me feel bad. While I have most likely shorten my life by the time I did spend smoking and won't be able to recover that lost time, I still cared enough about the quality of life that was available to not want to shorten it further. Likewise, insofar as bullshit deems to be destructive of trust and social relations, I'm arguing that we would be better off with less of it.
Again, my comment was about having the experience to make these decisions properly. I'm sure he didn't tell people about every single decision he made, only the ones he needed validation on.

However, I noticed that he only told others after it was completed sometimes, which is often far too late.

Experience lets you know which ones that's okay for, and which ones it isn't.
I would predict that it would be rather difficult to dip-scan a sponge. Might work if it was fully saturated (waterlogged) in advance, though.
Autonomous vehicles need regulation. But who designs the standards?
I've been loving it for the past couple of months. I boot into Win10 and use the ubuntu sub-system to build everything. Upgraded to 32gig is the biggest boost, I love the extra headroom. One this to notice is that I have not been able to charge from the thunderbolt port when almost everything I hear about it seems like it should be charging fine. I have the TB16 w/ 240W supply and still wont. This isn't a huge deal but it destroys the dream of a single cord desk setup.
Picture in your mind the following two scenarios:

1) Underwear models wrestling in an inflatable pool of lube

2) A biker gang and some dudes from ISIS getting in a brawl at a Superfund site.

The first represents a normal b2b lawsuits. The second represents cloudflare and a patent troll fighting it out in Massachusetts.
Show HN: System Tester
Why bother to read the news? (2011)
I love Fedora 25, but according to this thread[1], Firefox doesn't work out of the box in Fedora 26? Seems like a big oversight...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6mjb7j/fedora_26_tor...
What makes you think this version has been edited?
> make it a point to never write down the words I'm hearing unless they're an important quote or something

That's the key I think! The forced paraphrasing (while summarizing) helps process the information better.
People from South America would.

Grass only needs to be greener, not the greenest.
yeah it is a bit rude..sorry! I just get very few opportunities to say it- and I was like yo- this is a good chance. Are you familiar with the history of the term? with pauli?
> As an american, why would I trust the CIA/NSA over the SVR/GRU?

Because one is tasked - in theory - with protecting you, the other is tasked solely with protecting Russians (at your expense as necessary). It's that simple. And if you're going to claim the NSA never does anything to keep Americans safe, it would degrade your credibility toward zero.
What if one relocated to a country with very limited social support? Paying the highest (e.g. German) social contributions and getting the lowest (e.g. eastern European) social benefits. It's like getting spat in the face. Thanks.
In chronological order of professional web experience, I used PHP for 3 three years, Python for 6 years, and am about a year into Ruby. I've got tons of time in other languages and areas as well, but that's less relevant to this discussion.

> One thing I would like to say is that the development experience with Ruby/Rails is by far the best out of all of these languages. By FAR.

So far I find Rails very sane and well-thought-out, but I really, really dislike Ruby. I realize that's a personal preference issue, but it is what it is.

> The way you can start a project in a second is amazing

This seems pretty ubiquitous to me with "batteries included" frameworks. Rails doesn't have a huge leg up here over, say, CodeIgniter circa 2009.

> the TDD experience and Rspec integration with Rails is simply mind blowing comparing to anything else.

I very much like Rspec. One of Ruby's greatest strengths is the ability to define simple and semantically meaningful DSLs. Rspec is a great example of a good DSL.

> Regarding the fast/slow it's simply bull-crarp, seriously. It DOES NOT matter for 99% of us. It simply doesn't.

I agree 100%. Python is my preference, and not because it's lightning fast. It's fast enough that I'm almost never trying to improve performance, and when I am, my project has progressed to the point that it makes sense to scale horizontally instead of trying to make it fit into existing resource constraints.

> I don't get the hate that Ruby and Rails are getting. Really don't.

For me, it's because Ruby is just hard to grok. You have an object that's acting funny? Where is it defined? Here... here... here... some over here... Which one of those have been executed, and in what order? That sort of thing makes me want to pull my hair out.
This is what happens when a train rolls over an iPhone
From the company's perspective, getting more beginner users on the software (and converting them to regularly paying users) is probably the priority.

That doesn't mean they couldn't put an "advanced mode" setting/option that makes the UI streamlined towards users like yourself, though.
Tourist App
>What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??

On the contrary, this means that the episode of Voyager where Amelia Earhart was revealed to be transported to the Delta Quadrant can still happen.
Disagree. If you read the common core standards, they are very sensible and make no curricular or pedagogical recommendations. "Calculate and interpret the average rate of change of a function (presented symbolically or as a table) over a specified interval. Estimate the rate of change from a graph." CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSF.IF.B.6.

The way people are teaching math in the US is baffling and weird, but Pearson's textbook design has little to do with the common core per se. Most common core-labelled material is from something else with a new shiny CC cover slapped on.
I always feel like the most impressive part of these kinds of discussion is, the following question has already been answered: "Can you devise a mechanical process that can, given an axiomatic system in first-order logic and a predicate, decide whether the predicate can be deduced from the axioms?"

The answer is "no."

That people still believe in future self-programming computers in spite of that is just---strange.
Yes, the pilot made a mistake, but no, the cause of the accident isn't pilot error. From the point of view of preventing similar accidents in future, the cause of the accident is whatever caused the pilot to make the mistake.
There are some interesting numbers there on the "memory subsystem: bandwidth" page. Basically Skylake-SP has a pretty low single thread bandwidth (12G/sec) to start with, that is just 40% of what you can get using a single pinned thread on Epyc, but it increases almost linearly when you have more threads.

Wondering other than some sparse matrix applications known to be memory bandwidth bound, what kind of performance impact this is going to cause. Is there any real memory bandwidth bound applications other than ML/AI stuff used by those Internet big names?
Been using KDE on Fedora for almost 8 years now. It's been mostly a smooth experience.

Personally I would recommend it to any KDE fan.
By prison you mean jobs in state government, right?

Welcome to Massachusetts.
Just a guess, but, one factor could be a shorter warranty?
Dart Code v2 – Now with Flutter debugging and hot reload
Also a god send for Visual Basic developers doing their "End If", "End Function", not to mention "End Sub". :D
Siemens and AES team up on industrial-size batteries
>It's just tiresome to rebut opinions with "you can't prove that!" or "does the law say so?"

My original comment is a rebutting of popular opinion with law, is it not?