skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article tries a little too hard to defend Rails. It has very legitimate scaling issues and they are well-documented.

The author is also way too pessimistic about newer stacks and is demonstrating a grumpy-old-fart-like attitude saying that "new stacks will find new ways to jam CPUs or I/O stacks". Might be true, might be not. It's not a fact.

I also get a vibe that the author exaggerates the problems with newer stacks. And it contains way too much assumptions in the case you switch stacks.

So he says that if you migrate to Phoenix or Node.JS, then:

(1) The load on the DB will not change. True, but Elixir has a cache directly inside the VM so the I/O costs for a _separate_ memcached server are almost fully eliminated right from the get go. (EDIT: in my not-so-big Elixir/Phoenix experience so far, Ecto is still faster than ActiveRecord; but I do still admit the DB load is pretty much the same.)

(2) 20k RPM doesn't mandate 50 engineers. I've been in a team managing an app with a 12k RPM with only two senior devs. We were just fine for the 2 years I've been there.

(3) New stacks slows down development. If you don't hire juniors, this is only true for the first 2-4 weeks. I've been fully onboarded in an umbrella Elixir app containing Phoenix and GraphQL endpoints, and a total of 6 apps, for 3 weeks. I surpassed my Rails development speed for 3 weeks. Very, very bogus assumption here.

Assuming that switching a stack means you do cargo-cult engineering is disrespectful. Sure he might have seen it 200 times, doesn't mean the whole world does it. As much as I love Elixir, I was honest with myself and had to write a few small microservices in Go, and I am glad that I did because it was a perfect fit.

I have a huge respect for Nate Berkopec and was following him closely for a while. He's a really awesome engineer. But that essay left me with a bitter taste of "my constultancy might be endangered, time to badmouth the new stacks". Why do I think so? Again, too many negative assumptions about the new stacks. No real argument, just negativity.

Does Phoenix pose its own WTF moments when you migrate from Rails (or any other framework)? Sure! It absolutely does. No tech stack is perfect. The end result however is increased developer productivity -- speaking about myself and apparently thousands more out there on the internet who claim the same -- and less server costs. And these both were measured over time.

If you want to use Rails, do so -- it is the perfect choice for a plethora of projects. But there is no need to badmouth alternatives especially if you don't have a case and your entire argument is comprised of negative assumptions about those alternatives.

I am disappointed with the author.
Interesting contrast to the Carmack school of thought: _do_ build your own game engine and don't even reuse anything you made before, because you'll know better this time.
Something to consider: Trying to hold onto the systems and methods of the past is one way in which people lose relevance as they age.

Personally, I embrace the dopamine rush provided by small tangible units of progress, but I make sure that some of these units include refactoring and reworking design decisions, which also provide a tangible sense of progress. (And improves your skills in these areas!)

I believe this is an overall better system than trying to build a perfect artifact from the start -- too often you're actually solving the wrong problem, even if your solution ends up being elegant.

Scott Adams has some good writing on choosing to do the thing that gives you the most energy, which for me is very often something quick and dirty, and I love it.
But:

- iirc they can only go down one version (i.e. 3.4/3.5, no 3.4.1/3.4.2)

- it's always been a real b@llache to install newer versions on Debian releases where it has not been officially packaged (e.g. 3.6 on jessie). With most packages, you can grab the source from Sid and rebuild it on Stable; with Python it's become basically impossible, the pile of dependencies below and above the package is unwieldy. And this despite tons of policies around packaging python apps, which was supposed to make it easier to run multiple versions.

If Fedora really made things easier in this area, it's most welcome. However, when a marketing page starts with "you can now do this standard thing that actually most people have been doing for years already" (-m venv), I'm somewhat skeptical.
Network Accessibility Analysis with Isochrones
US government removes Kaspersky from approved vendors list
I've worked with Unity from the beginning of my career as a developer. (Used to be a game designer and producer before that). I haven't quite understood what's so special about it before I tried other solutions, including open-source (Cocos) and in-house ones; turns out, a LOT of things that Unity devs take for granted (like asset pipeline and management) are lacking elsewhere.

Sure, a senior developer should be able to write his own game engine from the lowest level - but he almost never should actually do it on a real project.
I can easily answer that question: some do, but you don't listen to them. Some don't because they understood you don't care about them doing so.

You're not interested in why they do or don't do it, in fact. You're merely interested in making a whataboutist point.
Analyzing GitHub, how developers change programming languages over time
>The problem seems to be shitty consumer grade hardware

Partially....

Yes, consumer grade hardware sucks, but so do consumers. When you see a wifi router in a corner, partially covered in junk (or blocked by household stuff), and it's power brick is sandwiched between 5 devices and is running about 150 degrees, it's not really the hardwares fault.

People that tend to install pro-sumer/commercial equipment tend to plug things into UPS's with proper ventilation and center of the room mount their AP, leading to a far reduced number of incidents.
Does the employer have a say on how purportedly superficial your solutions seem? I mean, if your "partial" solutions seem to work and don't incur some extrisnic penalty (e.g. technical debt for your colleagues, legal liability for the company, shaming during a salary review, etc), perhaps the satisfaction you seek won't be found at work?

Perhaps this isn't a risk for you, but it is a problem when employees overthink or over solve a problem (e.g. bikeshedding, premature optimization, etc). At the least, maybe your current inclinations aren't a net negative to your employer. What kind of problems do you try to solve that aren't work-related, and do you find that you have that same kind of ADHD as at work?
I wonder if it is a bug perhaps?
Pavlok allows you to add a slight punisher (uncomfortable negative stimulus) when you do activities like load up Facebook/reddit, use your phone, or sit for too long. The whole design is structured around removing instant gratification.

Bias: I'm the inventor.

http://pavlok.com/break-habit
You should look at https://github.com/joelgriffith/navalia which can automate this
Apparently bikes are really bad for the environment being slow, low occupancy road vehicles? I think if are taking upon yourself to advise people you should advocate greener forms of transport such as existing public transit links, walking.
u.com doesn't resolve for me?

Funny that z.com redirects to trade.z.com - it's like, someone realised that actually, a single letter is too short to build a brand.

If we weren't excited by silly things like single letter domain names, x.com could be owned by whoever makes the 'xcom' game, and it would just be a mildly 'good' or amusing domain name, like when .io, .sh, .ly, etc. work out particularly well.
Sure, and no Indians ever lived in America before white people arrived because the land wasn't called "America" and its inhabitants weren't called "Indians" back then.

Does it really matter whether the Israelites migrated to Canaan or Palestine or Judea or 31°47′N 35°13′E or whatever as long as we all know roughly which part of the world we're talking about?
Said and done ;) -> https://www.botengine.ai/pricing/
I remember NewtonScript had symbols too. If I remember correctly they worked quite similar but it's been a long time so I am not 100% sure.
Science and the Compulsive Programmer (1976)
Glenn Greenwald: If this be treason (2006)
MTA Closed the Doors on This Developer's LIRR App
Here's another take on how much of the web is HTTPS:

https://truemarketshare.com/report?id=https
Interesting, it still loads when I try.

It's on bandcamp as well, though: https://thelifeandtimes.bandcamp.com/album/tragic-boogie
Interesting post. I clicked thinking someone had coined a clever new "NASCAR Dad" moniker about parents who read and parrot their Facebook echo chamber at Thanksgiving, but was pleasantly surprised.
The title is likely inspired by the title of a book by Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report character, Stephen Colbert: I Am America, and So Can You.
Without preloading, HSTS and HPKP still have the trust-on-first-use problem.
A bit larger than the US state of Delaware.

(5800 sq km is 2239 sq mi. The land area of Delaware is 1949 sq mi per Wikipedia)
Corollary:

"Any module written in JavaScript will eventually be ported to Go."
I think a lot of developers who come into game dev have a mistaken view of Unity as the "budget" choice based on the poor quality of many of the indie titles shovleled out with it. But Unity is probably the most advanced game engine in existence today. Far beyond Unreal 4 in terms of both performance and tooling.

The reason the average quality is so low with Unity titles is because of just how easy the technical aspect of making a video game has become with modern engines. The barrier to entry for creating a game with AAA graphics is now a $20 shader pack and the ability to hack together some C# scripts.
It's the same thing, when it comes to the problem I'm pointing out, no matter how we describe it - medical providers charge different rates for the same products to different insurers, and insurers pay different rates for the same products to different providers. And the range of variation is not actually large, but we introduce tremendous complexity to the system in order to achieve it. It's not "competition" in the classical sense, and doesn't provide the benefits of competition to consumers, providers, or insurers.
There is a very simple solution for this issue. Create a Facebook Page for yourself as a brand, post links to your articles on that page, then share it from your personal Facebook page.
> 90% of customers

I'm probably being pedantic here, but shouldn't this be 90% of devices? If I have three wifi devices at home, but then I go out and buy a fourth one -- and I find out it can't reliably connect. I've just fallen into the 10% zone. So I order a new router - I get it set up and now my new device works. Yayy!

But now one of my older 3 devices has stopped connecting. I'm still in the 10% failure zone, even after spending a hundred bucks on a replacement for a router that was "mostly" working. So I keep both routers, assigning different SSIDs so the wireless devices will only find the routers they like. Have I now decreased my overall reliability because I'm now running in the "And" case with it's 90x90 multiplication, not the "Or" case? Most likely.
Is there any reason we should be guessing at this when the experimenters could've chosen some other incentive (or none at all)?

And yes, I'd expect weaker students to be the more likely to spend their time / privacy on extra points.
This argument by in the article is silly. One of the founders of Blackbird came from Kirkland. Kirkland's profit per partner is $4m per year in the last year. So the Blackbird lawyer is forgoing the opporunity to participate in this income to pursue this case (and may others). (Granted, income is not distributed equally in most firms, but to imply that the next best alternative for these lawyers is zero income doesn't help the article's credibility.)
Also problematic for numeric code in Ocaml is the lack of native interoperability with C data types and native arrays and instead having to use time-consuming abstractions such as BigArray or marshalling via FFI. Unfortunately, solutions like as CTypes only seem to compound the problem by not addressing a particular issue with a runtime, but finding clever ways around the limitation.
Sure they can. You ever see someone drink too much tequila, get sick, and never want it again? Or go to mcdonalds, see a cockroach, and never go again?

It's called an aversion, and aversion therapy was a common method of habit cessation through the mid 90s. Check out this study on how >50% of 2-pack a day smokers quit smoking after just 6 sessions:

https://www.schickshadel.com/documents/Commercial_Stop_Smoki...
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Perfect thread to mention AnyDesk, our remote desktop application. We practice minimalism as an art form, the size of the Windows executable is 1,8 MB. [0]

Disclaimer: Currently working at AnyDesk.

0: https://anydesk.com/platforms
Article without WSJ paywall > http://www.cetusnews.com/business/From-Harvard-to-Goldman-to...
> If it was for the public good, the patent would be filed via a non-profit that Google can't control.

Couldn't they just publish the techniques by some other means? E.g. some scientific journal. I mean, a publication is strong evidence of prior art.
News industry decries Facebook’s “digital duopoly,” wants government help
But you should be one to tell someone to take medication.
And that argument would have worked better if Ubuntu 14.04 had not been released in April 2014, before Debian made its decision. It was only Debian, by the way, not everyone else. Indeed, everyone has has not shifted to .service files even now.
Buying a Home in Mississauga, Selling a Home in Mississauga
I took a class on ES6 and curated it in a github repo:
https://github.com/JacobWylie/ES6

If applicable there are examples of both before and after conventions as well as links to more technical external resources.
It would be interesting if Facebook allowed personal users to access the brand tools that pages get (impressions, distribution, etc).

This won't happen because facebook wants you to think everyone is seeing your posts. People would be livid if they knew just how low of a % of friends were actually viewing their stuff due to algorithmic meddling.
Peek Inside Slack’s Multi-Million Dollar SaaS Growth Strategy
OMNI Magazine returning to print this fall
I'm not sure if being forced to view content through the censorship and malware-insertion machine that is the great firewall of China can be considered any sort of independence.
A year is nothing in the grand scheme of things. If you can't invest a year into building tools that could be your foundation for the next 3 decades, then what you are building is just a quick-rich scheme that doesn't matter. Use whatever you want because it doesn't matter...and your game probably isn't going to sell anyway. Those are the odds.

But as they've pointed out, you kind of need to know that stuff anyway, so it's time well spent.

I don't have a ton of gamedev experience, but at least graphically that game isn't doing anything you can't do in a few hundred lines of C++. Maybe that's part of their problem. Why use Java if you want to make a mobile game and it isn't well supported on one of your primary platforms? That sounds like a bad fit.

Unity and Unreal are super cool but they are also bloated with features that you don't need and lacking in others you do. For the longest Unity required you to use 3rd party modules for a camera. A camera....something that takes a few lines of code for a basic implementation. Why didn't that come standard?

If you really want to hurry to market yet another game by all means use one of the existing engines. It might even work really well. But if you want to do anything interesting, you're gonna be doing custom stuff anyway.
> it would have had different protocols by now than just HTTP with a poor mans JSON API.

Sure, but now you can't control the gadget from the browser and the vendor needs to write an application or something for whatever shitty OS you want to use.

> Use locally resolvable DNS names and wildcard certificates signed by commonly trusted (public) CAs. It's been done before (Plex does something like this IIRC).

Not that simple. Public CAs will likely only give you certs for domains you own (like plex.direct) and your users generally don't have nameservers authoritative for such domains on their LANs (maybe you could pull it off if you are a router vendor, but not with IoT light bulbs) so they have to query your public nameserver and the system fails without Internet connection.

And there is no easy solution: if your light bulb could register an xxx.philips.com domain via UPnP on your router or via SMB on your Windows box, it would be very much unclear what exactly should prevent it from registering philips.com as well.
Storage nodes are probably fine being directly accessible, it's metadata that needs protection from sybil attacks.
Before seeking these prescriptions, please be evaluated by a sleep lab (diagnostic overnight polysomnogram) to rule out obstructive sleep apnea.
In theory yes, but it's less effective than filing a patent app, letting it publish, and then abandoning. Patent examiners tend to spend more time searching patent prior art because the prior art disclosures tend to be kitchen-sink exercises that make it easier to hit all elements of a claim relative to more targeted technical publications.
How We Built an iOS App to Shoot a 3D Video (Case Study)
Along these lines, I switched my book-reading back to paper. It really helps.
70% of global carbon emissions are produced by just 100 companies, mostly fossil fuel producers.
Triggering deploys through webhooks and markdown magic
The paper is entirely anecdotal. It's a small, self-selected group who also selected when they would be tracked. I do believe that the group's worse performance was related to their laptop usage, though. So a third variable, perhaps a quality of the students, caused them to do the observed behavior (have a laptop, sign up, log into the process and then) and do worse in their courses.

Finally, doing slightly worse on two hour gen eds is also not the same thing as doing worse in general. Those classes are ones students are forced to take, often with professors who are forced to teach them. I know my gen eds were lower quality classes, with more people, less participation, worse teaching, and worse assignments.
This is why I like to program in front of a whiteboard rather than in front of my computer: to be more productive.
That depends what you're going for. Moving web sockets elsewhere are pretty simple regardless of whether you're using Erlang/OTP or not because it's a frontal layer. If you do that all you are doing is creating another layer to hold connections that needs to relay to the rest of the application. The application behind it still has the responsibility to receive and relay everything from those web sockets, determine what message goes to who, etc.

You can move it out just the same as you can elsewhere, you just add an unnecessary layer of complexity and lose a lot of the capabilities already built into the language. It boils down to a simple question of, what would be the purpose behind that decision? What improvement would you get from deciding to move any of that elsewhere? Do you gain speed at the cost of complexity?

Clustering is a non-trivial problem. It can't happen naturally in any language that includes mutable data without explicit oversight and thus most of the needed tooling can't be built into the system and guaranteed to work everywhere. As soon as some part of the system goes from "send message, get response" to "send message, change variable referenced in memory on this machine, get response" you break your ability to naturally cluster.

That leads to a dependency in central relay points for things like setting up web sockets and then having code behind them communicate. The code behind them in whatever language is usually going to be talking to other central relay points like load balancers or pub sub databases rather than directly to other specific servers.

As soon as you have central relay points, they become something else that you have to monitor and scale even if they are very high volume.

There's nothing wrong with this approach and it will certainly work but if you want to avoid that and build a distributed system in another language, you've got to invest a lot in other areas.
Not sure of your intent, but:

Even the latest MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc are all running decades old chunks of code. And yet, they still run well.

Old code is debugged code. It's (mostly) proven code. It's aged leather. It feels good and it just works.

Everything doesn't have to be "modern".
Birth-rates by country
Will this work for me in China when the Chinese ISPs ban VPN in the next year?
> we should work out why that decision was made

Good luck with that. I'd be amazed if you got a response.
THE INTERNET IS FUCKED (AGAIN)
Unfortunately, you are correct, it's all bullshit. It will take a technology revolution or divine/alien intervention to stop the coming climate apocalypse.
I've been wondering this, and I'm not a lawyer so I have no experience in this regard. But!

If you patent something, and don't have a licensing fee or anything like that, I would imagine that it would deter some patent trolls from getting a false patent and suing people using that technique. Fighting in court costs a lot of money for people like me (and probably you) so anything that keeps me out of court is a good thing.
You're not the boss of me
http://engineering.twitch.tv/ says: "Powered by Go" with zero mentions of Ruby.

Saying twitch "is in Rails" in 2017 is disingenuous to say the least.
Like I said, the copyright law makes an explicit exception for "translations". Copyright also covers translations, despite the fact that they share none of the "expression" of the original.
Sans-comic-sans version: http://cs.brynmawr.edu/content/the-beauty-of-programming
Federer vs. Raonic live stream [pdf]
Well that's what the S in HTTPS stands for. I am pretty sure that anybody who knows the difference between HTTP and HTTPS also knows that "security" is not binary.
Cheeaun.earth
There's the fact that anything hosted within China can be altered by the great firewall of China for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government. Like when the Chinese government used the great firewall to slip malware into the Baidu analytics javascript for every visitor outside of China to every website that used Baidu whether located inside or outside of China to stage a DDoS attack on github. All because github dared to host open source projects that let mainland Chinese read the New York Times uncensored. Given documented activities like this, is it possible to trust anything that passes through the great firewall of China?
Great piece for showcasing the security and practical uses of a VPN, but I feel it's skimps on the best reason, which is privacy. Using a hosting provider with your VPN will allow the provider (eg Amazon) to see all traffic leaving your server. Even if you're using https, they can gather domain information. If you are the only one using the VPN, then all the traffic leaving the server is yours.

While I agree that third party VPN providers are not necessarily to be trusted, if they are deleting their logs as some claim they do, then no one knows which traffic is yours. Your privacy is protected from end to end only in this case.
> when I learned what pH actually meant

potential (for attracting) Hydrogen. I had to look it up.
As stated above, anything hosted within mainland China can be weaponized by the great firewall of China and used for DDoS and other malware attacks like China did against github.
Romania's medieval remedy for divorce was staggeringly effective
Is there an easy way to filter out extensions from the Coverage tab, besides opening it in incognito mode?
GPU miners
> Does not install Tor, OpenVPN, or other risky servers

what's risky about openvpn? (or tor, for that matter)