skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is your definition of an app server? A aws ec2 instance? I think understanding the throughput of a rails application is very simple. Rails is not thread safe so to concurrently serve 10 requests you must be running 10 processes. Thats not to say you will serve 10 reqs/sec, it depends on how quickly the application responds.

The key is knowing where the bottlenecks lie and what gives you the greatest gains for the least amount of optimizations.

Run unicorn for your rails apps. It runs in a master/worker setup in which the master distributes the requests to workers. Benchmarks have shown it to be much faster than competitors. In saying that you may want to look into phusion passenger lite 3.0. I have not seen any clear benchmarks against unicorn so I cannot give a definitive answer but have heard good things.

Make sure static content is not being proxied through to your rails apps. You'll be wasting request processing on js,css,jpeg and gif in rails where it could be done by apache, lighttpd, nginx or even varnish if you'll levelled in some caching. A bigger advantage to that is to serve the static content from a second domain from a different web server so that parallel connections are made to retrieve that content.

Enable caching in rails so that classes, views, etc are in memory. It'll help to not have to reload a class or view every time a request is made.

Look to find the most efficient templating engine for rails. Erb was 3 times slower than erubis last time I checked.

Are you IO or cpu bound? Run top and vmstat. If you are IO bound then cpu utilization will be lower and its most likely wait on the db. This could be for any number of reasons. Rails is notorious for selecting everything. Limit your queries, select on fields that are required. Index columns that are used in your where clauses and on join fields. If your entire dataset does not fit into the buffer pool then your mysql might be hitting disk which is orders of magnitude slower than ram.

Set noatime on all your servers so that file access times are not updated, huge performance differences. Can be done on your database server too.

I hope some of that helps.
I'm in a similar situation, but I haven't always been like that. I linked it to stress (in the broadest sense) - very occasionally I get a great night's sleep if I'm completely relaxed and happy. However, eliminating stress to this degree just doesn't seem feasible. My optimum amount of sleep is 8 hours, and even a half hour either way has a very noticeable (negative) effect. However, a lot of the time even sleeping exactly 8 hours doesn't work well. I really wish I could find a solution!
Not to sound bitter or anything, but I suppose this as the silver lining of losing the 1st and 4th amendment is better than nothing.
Somehow, I'll take that "I have an unusual toolkit" theory over the "he's just super-smart" theory, especially since the later theory isn't really a theory but a "throwing-up of the hands" - and also, Feynman might know Feynman a little better someone else (though that's never certain either).

One thing I noticed in the Feynman book I read was that he seemed good at being willing to going for an outcome without engaging in the usual activity people think of as leading to the outcome - his safe-cracking involved a lot of social engineering rather than insight into the safe's mechanism. He got the safe open without "cracking" it.
> "There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store."

Right - and putting something up for sale on ebay and sending people the link is different... how?
Maybe you should stop trying to be sarcastic, then?

Please don't take that the wrong way, I've got nothing against you personally (I've read some good posts from you, IIRC), or even with that particular post - it's just the straw that broke the camel's back. I just read a large thread on programmers.stackexchange asking whether IT job requirements are customarily exxagerated, and the answers were distressing. Firstly because most replies painted a bleak picture of HR practices, but secondly because most had a jaded, cynical tone which made it impossible to guage the sincerity. Or whether all the upvotes were from genuine empathy/agreement, or just amusement at the sarcasm. It gets really unclear.

It's like having two angels on your shoulders, one saying 'these sagacious persons have just offered a terrific insight, you must act upon it,' and the other saying 'these people are just trying to sound cool, of course the real world doesn't work like that - ignore them.'

/rant
Actually, most of the software he describes was not developed by the GNU project.
I started a company that sells to enterprise customers and we thought we could differentiate ourselves by making our pricing public, simple, and affordable. It was VERY easy for anyone to figure out how much we'd charge them without having to call. There were no hidden fees, nothing tricky or weird.

This has proven to be a mistake for two main reasons: Firstly, everyone expects huge discounts (since all their other enterprise contracts give them big discounts off of the list price). Trying to explain that we're already the cheapest option they're looking at does help. They all want more off. Secondly I think we're losing opportunities because we aren't making people call us. Those phone calls are missed opportunities for us to really pitch our advantages for their specific situation and needs better than our website ever could.
The $100k Taxi Ride [Oct 2010]
> Set the Tone. Everyone - your co-workers, your customers, your partners, your investors, the press, your Twitter and Facebook followers - takes their cues from you.

Great advice for any new leader.
Right, but even the Windows unit itself is probably at least 7 or 8 layers deep, due to the sheer number of people working on it. With such a massive product, I'm amazed they release it as often as they do, let alone at all.
What woult you ask Jason Cohen if you had the chance?
Hi guys,

I run a blog - mixRead-Blog a place for startup lovers!
A couple a days ago Jason Cohen agreed to interview him about his startups and entrepreneurship in general!
I want to know what would you ask him if you had the chance!

i think this is a great opportunity to learn interesting leassons about startups and other entreprenorial stuff!

*questions in the comments
But aren't those manager doing engineering work as well?
New Type of Drug Kills Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
Don't get me wrong, it is a zombie movie after dark. I just wouldn't worry too much about getting there or lunch.
After OS X, the Xbox, ActiveX, DirectX, X Windows, the owl on Mr. Rogers, Ecstasy, Xanax, and now SpaceX, aren't you getting a little tired of X yet?
Strange because the ocean is not a source of food?

Or because containers are not potential sources of concentrated toxins?

Who ever said I was trampling your vegetables? I'm merely making transit through your garden.

The effects of my analogy are likely more extreme than what is actually occurring. But like all analogies, its purpose is to emphasize a particular characteristic.
A Unified View of your Customers
Exactly. This is more for technical writing, not sales copy. That being said, a sales copy equivalent would be nice.
Based on the description in the article, they need the manhole questions more than we do :D

Which is to say that since the Indian education system as described in the article doesn't teach problem solving, and since you want people who have some problem solving ability, you must ask them to solve a problem in the interview.

But, I find the article confusing, it is about how a call centre company is struggling to find people who can't think outside the box... why the heck does a call centre company want people who can think? Aren't they just going to follow the same script day in and day out?? Wouldn't the ability to think for yourself actually be a curse at a company like that???
The effect iAds so far has had on me is to buy the Pro version just to get rid of the ads. Too invasive and they keep drawing my eyeballs to them and gets in the way of using the app. Probably not what Apple had in mind, but the developers are probably happy.
NO THNX LOL
Another insight into his process was all the talk about envisioning math problems as "ok you have a sphere, and now the sphere has hair on it", and things like that. I think Feynman's brain was wired in a way that he could use strange pathways to come up with an intuitive solution.
Outsourcing Core Business
You can find my Haskell version under https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/Div7/
People managers rarely do engineering work as well - it's very hard to both manage people well and contribute significantly to the code for a project. It also sets up a sort of perverse incentive where you want to look good as a coder by taking on the glamorous, high-profile programming tasks, but this can actually demotivate your teammates because they're left with the drudge work. You don't want to be in competition with your reportees.

They're often drawn from the pool of former high-ranking engineers, or at least the good ones are. It's a very different skillset though; part of being a good manager is knowing when to step back and let your reports handle things, and the worst managers are those that haven't managed to separate their engineering ego from their team building ego.
I started using Poweramp, then upgraded to the Pro version. It's solid, and looks good too.
Remind me where CS came from again?
Lunch options probably aren't a concern for most Twitter employees given that Twitter has a fantastic (both times I was there) free catered lunch.
A guy I worked with ~10 years ago had done an overseas move. Unfortunately for him, all of his family's stuff was in a shipping container that fell overboard. It had happened two years before I met him and he was still dealing with the aftermath...

So while it's a minor miracle overall, it still sucks for some unlucky individuals!
> Perhaps they've been burned by missing concepts from purely task-oriented learning, or perhaps they find having some big picture understanding makes finding practical applications easier.

Or we just like to learn, or we've been told by people we respect that we ought to be better grounded in theory. (Both are true in my case.)
I'm interested to hear how that professed dedication to customers squares with the experiences of sites like reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
Glasgow is much larger, and was more industrialized, than Edinburgh and is usually portrayed as suffering from a post-industrial malaise. However, it's a great place and the University has an excellent reputation.

Edinburgh is ridiculously picturesque and historical but it does have a reputation for being, when compared to Glasgow, of not nearly such a welcoming place.
Thanks so much for making these! Doing IS truly learning.....
The best programmer I met in college quit after 2 semesters because he already knew the concepts.

However, aren't we really talking about IQ? From what I can remember, companies really started using degrees when testing for IQ became illegal. If a possible employee has an IQ of 120, then you can be pretty certain he's going to pick most of the concepts you throw at him. The college degree filters (beginning with the SAT, ACT, and high school diploma) a lot of low IQ people out the process (at least, in theory) and if not, it at least filters out those individuals who don't work hard improving their mental capacity (for instance, cognitive abilities may be improved through the study of music).

What an employer really needs is the ability to quickly filter out bad candidates. In reality, it is HR that does the culling. They don't know how to filter technical candidates, so the first thing they use is the college degree.
An interesting example from the past is the LiveJournal "Express Lane":

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=74

I wasn't a LiveJournal user, but saw one of Brad Fitzpatrick's excellent scalability talks years ago. I think he had a special flag that could be set for paid requests that would give them priority in perlbal, the load balancer he wrote.

Obviously it doesn't do much when something big is broken, but Brad did have a way to make sure paying customers' requests were processed first, and had realtime stats on average request latency for paid vs. free accounts.
It's great to see a Canadian start to make it big in the Valley.
Sure. I think its definitely worth getting a loan if you're really determined that's what you want. Most schools here (private ones included) give rather significant scholarships. You don't even need to apply for most cases: they just base it off your SATs and essay, and they usually give more if you go tell them about your circumstances.

I was actually one of the first ones in my country to get approved for such a large amount ($60K+ for five years (bachelors+masters)), and it helped that my dad was an employee of that bank. However, it was a really long process and many people were very dubious. My dad actually had to go all the way up to the CEO of the bank in order to get the approval, and those people were constantly behind my parents all this time checking up on my progress. Needless to say, it is very important that you not slip up.

But this was five years ago, and I've heard from my parents that a lot more students are been approved now after the banks saw its not that big of a risk. All in all, be prepared for a lot of bureaucratic hassle.

My recommendation, in retrospect, is that it is not generally worth it. You can learn more from the classroom videos MIT and Stanford have put up, and if you participate in open source projects, you can pick up the programming idioms and practices fairly well. Take advantage of what the internet has to offer. Most companies, atleast from what I've seen on HN, value your github commit log more than your degree as it says more about what your interests are.
NBC Prepping for Meredith Vieira's Potential Exit
Potential heirs apparent to Vieira are said to include Today’s Ann Curry and Natalie Morales, Washington correspondent Savannah Guthrie and CNBC’s Erin Burnett.
I don't think it matters how or where you get started in the business, so long as you keep hungry to learn more.
Web Development & Web Design: Must-read
Stealthy Bottlenose Hopes To Fulfill The Unkept Promise Of Twitter Annotations
Thanks. Why are you interested in the issues?
If there are any old HN thread on this, I'd love to read them too.
Patent Troll Going After Alzheimer's Researchers
Did you pay for any of it, or is your entire library pirated?
Eep! Skipping compression before you encrypt is a bad idea. Using it saves bandwidth, & makes attacks much more complicated.

Can Node.js do some compression before it hands off data to OpenSSL?
This works, sometimes. The other one that works even better is when explain the problem to your dog.
Hmm, you have a good point — aside from people in the US being paranoid about crime, they're also unbelievably intolerant, to the point that they're not comfortable around teenagers talking loudly, drunk people, or people with different political views.
@mw63214 You're right. It's definitely a minimal overview. Just trying to keep thoughts concise but frequent - allowing others to pull from it what they will.
The team could also quit en masse and go found a startup to do what they'd been doing before, if they really believed in it. It's happened to more than a few big companies.
I'm a university dropout, but the level of linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and discrete math that I did take before leaving school is so far above and beyond what Khan academy currently offers. With the exception of Calculus, Khan academy is up to about where my public high school curriculum left me. Its calculus offerings are impressive and definitely cover my first year calculus courses. I've never been able to make much use of OpenCourseware because it doesn't fit my learning style. Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding anything against Khan academy. But it's quite impressive that it will eventually cover all the material in university that I had to pay to learn.

There is a huge collision that's about to happen: increasing costs for post-secondary education; a middle class that will no longer be able to afford said post-secondary education for their kids; and free, quality, ubiquitous educational content like Khan academy. I'm not quite sure how things will play out. But things like Khan academy could pop the educational industry bubble, at best forcing lost cost quality formal education, and at worst, resulting in ubiquitous access to informal education to those that put in the effort.
Of course, I fully agree. Please don't read any implication about space tourism into a simple FYI calculation. But a 6x cost reduction is a big deal, and this figure illustrates that very well. See the follow up comment I'd already posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412096
New website for Squirrel is online.
Isn't Apple targeting more of a niche than the general market, though? They service that niche very well, but it's easier to understand a niche than it is to understand the entire body of consumers.
Baydin Closes Its $375,000 Funding Round (In An UberCab, Per Our Suggestion)
Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style
Wouldn't matter according to the original ruling, if it was ever listed in a file sharing program as available for distribution.
I think such an attitude would seriously harm SpaceX's future space tourism strategy. Also the environmental damage caused by failed launches could be disastrous, and outweigh the cost of the payload.
Solar Storm Nearly Wipes Out NASA's Messenger
> I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.

Could you elaborate on that? I can think about only two potentially innovative products coming from Amazon.

1. Kindle. The business model is definitely innovative, but the device itself had a cold reception. The modern versions are much better, but still don't reach the Apple level of polish.

2. AWS. Extremely innovative, but targeted to a relatively small population. This is definitely not a mainstream product.

I intentionally skip the innovations in streamlining the shopping experience, because I don't feel it's relevant to the comparison to Apple.
I think that many such great thinkers have, due to circumstances and early on, have developed

(1) a unique, uninhibited way of looking at problems, i.e. not different from what's generally prescribed to entrepreneurs: Consider every possible lead, even if people say it's stupid/has been done, etc. Einstein, famously had difficulty at school as a kid, so he actually thought about many concepts that we take for granted or find silly ("what would happen if I shine a flashlight while riding a bike").

(2) power to concentrate on a problem. When asked how he came up with his solutions Newton said that he thought on the problem until the solution came to him. This sounds simple but embedding yourself in a problem like that is beyond most people's focusing skills (I can't go by 10 minutes without checking HN, for example).
The principles listed here are sound and helpful. If you follow them, your writing style will undoubtedly improve.

But do not adhere to them as rigid rules or you will suffer in your ability to express yourself. Passive voice exists for a reason. Long words can add variety, rhythm, and color to your prose. Elongated sentences can help give your writing a flow that a mere parade of short sentences can never hope to achieve, not even after a thousand rewrites. Or not. All such items can be misused as well, and the books are replete with bloated forms of expression used by lawyers, politicians, educators, administrators, and the like who would not know a simple word or sentence even if it stood before them doing somersaults. The key is to know sound principles for clear and concise writing and then to apply them with a rhythmic ear for balance in your forms of expression. That means, yes, use passive voice, long words, and flowing sentences as needed to add grace to your prose but always with the baseline in mind: that is, to communicate in ways that are clear and concise and that people will readily understand for your stated purpose (formal style for formal settings, casual for casual, and whatever fits for anything in between).

I note all this because, years ago, I consciously and diligently set about to attempt to master writing and stumbled upon the rock of "simplicity" during such stretches in my learning process where I had assumed that all one could do was follow such rules. Any attempt to apply such rules one-dimensionally is a mistake, and you will regret trying it. Follow sound principles, by all means, but not dogmatically.

The other major keys to good writing are depth of language skills and extensive reading. No one will read your work unless you have something helpful to say. You get this by working hard to develop your skills, and lots of writing (and reading) is vital to this process.
If you get the chance, read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
Helping The Experts Get Answers
That's only true for women. And it doesn't mean that there aren't still evolutionary incentives for women. If they are successful because they don't need to sleep, they can probably find a better mate (which will lead to an evolutionary advantage of the no-sleep gene long term).
Wouldn't be surprised. That'd probably be enough for a sizeable unmanned sample-return mission, though not nearly enough for a manned mission.
I think a huge reason Feynman seems so brilliant is because he didn't learn physics or math in a traditional way. He explored. He had passion for it.

Not unlike the manner in which many successful hackers learn.

Nothing kills your interest in a subject like taking it as a class and getting grades.
This feels a little late to the game, but many of the comments here (as well as the original post) have crystallised some ideas I was writing: http://scrumpy-jack.com/post/4374327890/learning-should-neve...

It's a slightly different slant on the topic, not taking up any one side, but perhaps self-taught people (in any field, not just programming) are inherently more passionate about learning?
I'd guessed either New York or London.
"Learning should never end."
I once had this taped to the wall of my cube when I worked for a small internet company. One of the C-level employees saw it and loved it.

In company meetings when we would be talking about a genuinely hard problem, this exec would say "well what I think we need to do is write this problem on the white board, think real hard, and come up with a solution". Silence + confused looks. This happened multiple times.

He ended up being fired within 3 months.
I think that this is a fair assessment. It would be nice to be able to set up SLAs for a premium, but I honestly can't see any major ad-based providers offering this (breaking the SLA would be too costly).

I also appreciate the restatement of "You must own any data that’s irreplaceable to you." It's suprising how lost that simple fact is today.
... and lots of Abstract Algebra (and some Category Theory if you go deep into Hyperelliptic curves) if you do Cryptography.