skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let us know when you've built it!
Pirate Party UK are currently having an open policy consultation where anyone can propose and debate policy -- http://www.reddit.com/r/Policy2011/

I have added the Science Code Manfesto to it -- http://www.reddit.com/r/Policy2011/comments/lddvh/adopt_the_...
Wouldn't it be more pleasant to drink fresh water and take salt pills separately?
Internet Story
(Some definitions for this post: "Stress" == bad, harmful, something to be avoided for everyone. "Pressure" == not harmful, enjoyed by some people.)

Possibly not relevant to you but: In the UK your employer owes you a legal duty to protect you from stress in the workplace.

The duty is clearly defined in law, and has been tested by the courts and employment tribunal many many times.

But - so what? You need to be able to turn that protection into something that helps you.

Seek advice; and then gather evidence of what things are too stressful, and if anything could be done to reduce that to a manageable level. Then go see a line manager and ask to talk. Present these things, and see if you can work something out. Realise that you probably can't, but at least you now have some protection if you decide to leave.
I'm very very reluctant to call those mistakes. From the author:

> I didn't get too upset here; I expected us to do poorly. After all, we'd spent all of our development time in actually building something people want, not on scaling up for thousands of imaginary users.

Perhaps it would be relevant to the conversation if the author could chime in with how many projects or ideas they went through that failed. Perhaps they had to do consulting on the side for income.

Premature optimization is a mistake. It's time wasted on delivering minimal value to you or anyone else.
Is there any freely available demo site of that theme?
Cars 2 was a Pixar failure, though.
Sound can be music. SoundCloud is a very good platform for professional and amateur musicians to promote their work. The interface is slick and for the kind of music I'm interested in (reggae, dub, electronic music, drum'n'bass, dubstep...) there's a vibrant community of musicians regularly uploading great sound. I like the fact that SoundCloud does only one thing and does it very well.
"I actually have an advanced degree in economics,"

If this were true, you'd be able to comprehend what I said, and you'd be able to repeat my argument correctly, and then you'd be able to present a counter argument based on the science of economics. Your appeal to authority just tells me you made a really bad economic decision yourself.

I'm not going to debate your political ideology, because, why should I? The current economic state of the USA proves that endless government and consumer spending does not produce a healthy economy.

Your ideology is disproven by reality. The "stimulus" resulted in higher unemployment and a worse off economy. Bush's handing out "stimulus" checks to the people did the same thing.

Reality has already disproven your ideology.

Now, I know, having seen your ideology before, all the standard excuses. "The patient died because we didn't apply ENOUGH leeches!"

But they are not economic arguments. They are ideological ones. They are based on trying to rationalize a particular set of political positions. There's really no point in attempting to debate your desire to rationalized. I can't stop it.
Ask HN: How do a website's costs scale? Where does money go?
Just starting off and realized we have no idea how upkeep costs usually scale. Currently we envision paying for hosting (either Heroku or EC2) and analytics, but what other costs are there when running a web business (assuming a content site)? How do they scale as you go from 100 hits/day to 1000 hits/day? What about 5000 -> 10,000 -> 100,000 hits/day?

Thanks!
I'm doing client side includes for personalised content. So, the main page is served with no personalised content and with all the heavy caching that this allows, and the html has place holders for the personalised content. Then, upon page load, an ajax request is fired that loads the user-specific content and injects it to the page. It works quite well and since this is specifically personalised content, I'm not too afraid of having to support non-js clients (Such as crawlers etc.).
This is the classic excuse to not implement encryption: "but we need a web of trust and certificate authorities and central management of identities and a million complex things that'll never work right even if implemented."

Encryption without identity validation is a worthy goal in itself, especially when we're talking consumer grade stuff.
Because they'll sell more hardware that way.
Indices on a database aren't "premature optimization". They're part of understanding your data model, how it will be requested, and--more in a SQL database than a MonogDB database, but still--constraints on the data stored in your database.

Claiming basic development practices to be "premature optimization" is a fantastic way to paint yourself into a corner because of stupid decisions in your haste to "get it out the door." Your MVP isn't V if it still takes a second to render your homepage to users, because they'll leave. (Site responsiveness is a huge factor in bounce rate, even for sites that people actually want to look at.)
The invisible depth
>Premature optimization is a mistake.

Wholly agreed and I often say the same thing. But I do not consider basic indexing on a database to be "premature optimization". I do consider it to be a a mistake since you almost certainly find performance issues (unless the table is small enough that indexing is a mistake), then you'll have to track down the cause of the issues (commonly called "a bug") and then will have to add indexes.
Managing a Facebook Development Project
I like how they conveniently left out the fact that Amazon lost money hand over fist for years before finally becoming profitable.
some forget that the future is not built on closed formats, closed markets, etc

We are still in the early history of popular computing. It may be that openness tends to win in the end but I think this is far from established as fact at this point. I think you put this in unnecessarily black and white terms too. The future may favor hybrids of open data models and closed, native clients.
Free Javascript benchmark for all Internet devices from Futuremark
Yeah that was very impressive too but I was actually more impressed with was the fact that he gave the first 5 employees a million dollars worth of his stock.

see the second to last question in the founders at work article:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
Yeah, I guess it was a little off-topic. I realize they're different things, but shutting down Google Labs made me think of the state of R&D in general.
Why not plain old HTTP 301/302 redirect?
The ideas behind templates are brilliant but, yes, as implemented in an already big & complex language they seem like a kludge. But if you designed a low-level systems language from scratch with clean generics as a top priority I think you could come up with something pretty interesting and a lot simpler than the OO mismash you tend to get with C++.

Think of something like OCaml but with a less intrusive runtime, for instance. C++ got a lot more functional with C++11 but there's too much baggage for the simpler statically polymorphic language inside C++ to emerge cleanly.
I'm having more fun with rage than I did with crysis 2 or CoD campaign.

vOv
> 1. Encryption really was expensive in 1996 or so, but in the age of multicores, its questionable if there's a real cost now.

A lot of "budget-priced" hosting services are near-free for http and heavily-surcharged for https. - Pricing it to make it seem as if there were some huge cost difference. Makes a difference when shoestring clubs/nonprofits want to throw up a cheap static site.
As others have said, really you need to try to leave. Bad companies grind on because people stay there, getting dumped on.

Unfortunately there are many idiots in the workplace, and that translates to many bad workplaces. ( Office Space Dilbert etc are not funny because they're off the wall; they're uncomfortably close to real life.) But don't let this put you off from leaving. No-one should be put in the situation that you're in.

You could try adjusting work / life balance:- get more exercise, drink much less caffeine, get a self-help book or course about dealing with stress and use those techniques at work (and remember, it's just a job), remember to take regular time-outs (you're using a monitor, so you should be having at least 5 minutes every hour), don't get pressured to do silly hours, etc etc.

FWIW I have a lot of sympathy for you. Bad working environments suck, and suck hard. Employers need to learn that treating the workforce humanely is in the best interest of their business.
This is my personal style. I don't really use the OOP much. I get as much work done as possible via STL. Use RAII for resource cleanup. Completely avoid new/malloc/throw etc. If forced to use pointers use smart_ptr (possible use case - polymorphism) and don't forget about enable_shared_from_this.

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/libs/smart_ptr/enable_s...

My C++ code is typically 3X shorter than corresponding C with fewer bugs and faster performance. The main issue is avoiding memory corruptions and getting away from pointers and memory leaks by leveraging the STL heavily.

I do use objects and make sure the members are C++ types rather than some C-style pointers, so that the copy and equality semantics are well defined. The key thing for me is avoiding pointers at all costs as pointers complicate memory management immensely. Use STL vector, set etc and in the worst case smart_ptr.
IS Twitter down for the count?
Did twitter just go down... Again? They were doing so well there for a while. Who goes down more? Twitter of the Blackberry Network?
For some odd reason this doesn't suprise me at all... The Freedom of Information Act is really a blessing in cases like these.
Indexes can most certainly be premature optimisation. There's a cost associated with an index.
this is actually like https://mozillademos.org/demos/globetweeter/demo.html

which has been released a few month ago
Apparently: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter.com
Cue #occupyeverywhere conspiracy theories.
I thought it wasn't working at first because I didn't notice anything happening... after clicking randomly for about a minute I started seeing colors. Simply stunning result :)
>I believe this is called the "Robert Scoble"-effect.

Heh, I love that. I'm going to use it.
What would it take to port to a 3GS?
Thanks! What we really need is a Ryan Bates for iOS...
Some people's reasoning is just fascinating.

"In order to get my hacked accounts back, I had to spread the word about their revolution via social media."

And now she is thankful for having been hacked because she now knows all about -how that revolution Wallstreet thingy works-.
twitter.com is down
You need to break this out into course collections as well. For example, the only thing I'm interested in is the mapkit and web services stuff in the advanced course. I already know everything in the basic and intermediate courses. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy the advanced courses only without getting the complete package?
I consider Indices to be premature optimisation. Moreover, they're very low level, potentially dangerous premature optimisation. Imho, they should be the very last trick you use to optimise.

First, you try and figure out if you can reduce the number of repeated queries. Then you try and figure out if you can get rid of chunks of code that spawn lots of queries altogether, by tweaking the algorithm to do things differently, without needing that data. Then, finally, once you've used every trick to make it all faster, then you apply indices to speed up that handful of remaining queries.

If you apply indices first, then you won't spot the other potential optimisations, and when your indices stop covering up for your poor coding it will be much later, and much harder to fix.
WP7 apps have to be approved.
There's no absolute color. Color is what we humans see when photos bounce off objects. The spectrum of light bouncing off isn't absolute. You have no idea what those objects really look like. The lighting in the room matters. I have both CFL and old fashioned bulbs in my house. If I took a photo of something you knew in both rooms you'd be unable to tell me which is more accurate, because only I know the lighting in my rooms and you don't.

You may be able to say "this photo looks right" but that's pretty darn subjective. Turns out we humans are kinda useless for tests like these. Past a few megapixels this stuff really doesn't matter because things like focus, lenses, and lighting are so much more important than resolution. The photos are "sharp" enough and none of these phones support mounting lenses or lights on anything. So its kind of arbitrary. Unless one of these phones has an especially shitty lens or focus or bad software, they'll probably just look mostly the same. I consider these long solved issues and don't expect much difference.
I'm sorry you feel demeaned by my advice to read Hazlitt's book in order to learn some basic economics. I didn't think that it would be appropriate to advocate that everyone should go to a university to learn economics, especially given, as as you later made clear, that some universities don't even teach economics to those who get degrees in it.

You have no theoretical base. You are regurgitating a political ideology that is, quite frankly, nonsense. You focus on demand, when it is irrelevant to this discussion, and your argument presumes that "advising people to save is bad" because "if everyone saved there would be no demand".

Obviously, when people run their lives prudently, they don't eliminate all spending (and thus all demand is not eliminated). Obviously, consumers are not the only source of demand in an economy. And obviously you can't really defend your point and that is why you spend your time characterizing others -- and in fact your "economic" argument is really just disparaging a savings plan with a fallacious -- but oft repeated by political hacks-- story.

So, of course, I was dismissive. Your "argument" was easily dispatched.
This is so beautiful. I love it how such samples of beauty can be created so randomly (more or less)

worked in Ubuntu 11.10 Chrome 15 Beta
And the $50 starting price is why I'm not interested. I prefer the model of "micropayments" -- being able to purchase smaller increments for a lower cost. I need $50 too much to gamble it on a video. I can't be sure it'll be worth it.
It's fairly basic stuff this, but important none the less.

Kudos for recommending Yslow (or PageSpeed) - it's indeed brilliant. You didn't mention much about http caching, which I think is probably as important as the other things you mentioned; Not only does it improve performance for the user, but it also reduces load on your server and it enables you to put up an edge side cache for extra performance.

As for the problems mentioned with the load balancer - You could have simply provisioned a new instance and installed your own load balancer. There's dedicated packages like haproxy, but you could also just put up nginx or lighthttpd. This machine can later double as your edge cache (Squid).

Btw. 1.5s to render the front page? That's way beyond acceptable, in my book. But I suppose it depends a bit on what the web site does.
C-x C-c -- Exit and kill Emacs
The website is, though I seem to be getting new tweets through twitter clients like Tweetdeck.
throw rocks at them
That's not quite as polished and visually stunning, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
If Google's Management Doesn't Use Google+, Then Why Should You?
music yes, but not necessarily all sounds. However, if they'd pitched it as 'music', people would say 'myspace, been there, done that'.

"Sounds" are one of those things that have to be consumed synchronously and as a whole (generally speaking). Long and short form text, and pictures, can be compressed, sliced up, moved around, and we may get the gist of it - and can easily share.

Videos... not as much, but we can still take a small segment of a video/movie and get value from it.

Songs, probably similar to movies, but sounds as a broader topic, not so much. At least, not to me.
Well, this completely crashed my MacBook Pro. Although to be fair, I think it has to do with the fairly unreliable graphics card/drivers than anything else.
I think it would be paranoid to encrypt all Internet traffic. A lot of traffic isn't sensitive enough to warrant disabling that benevolent man in the middle, the proxy cache.
Reverse osmosis takes more energy the more polluted the source is, because osmotic pressure increases based on the relative concentrations on either side of the semi permeable membrane. So don't confuse the costs of filtering contaminated fresh water with sea waster.
I knew what you meant. I tend to use ∗ when I can't get * to work.
Can you make it call you Rumplestiltskin? What's the longest name?
That's because SSL is a shitty protocol, it has nothing to do with CPU.

Turns out that you can only have one SSL applied to one IP because browsers* can't tell the webserver hosting 1,000 sites which particular site you're requesting, because of, you guessed it, encryption.

Essentially, you're paying for a dedicated IP not CPU.

*theres a fix for this supported by several browsers, but it will never be backported to legacy browsers and the millions who won't upgrade for many years so its unsafe to assume you can use this method, thus one IP per SSL for the foreseeable future.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115536
Unfortunately, that is typical of Robert Scoble. You should have been warned before you clicked on that link.
Therefore, if you have the best story in the world, take it to potential users first.
It would be interesting to also see activity per capita.
The most useful modern-day knowledge you could gain from this is here: http://www.sosmath.com/calculus/diff/der07/der07.html

(Newton-Raphson Method)
"I suspect though that if they had even a fraction of the paying customers MS did for any even minor MS product, that they'd end up with a long sunset period as well."

I'm sorry, I must have been unclear: it has been my experience that MS /does/ pull the plug swiftly and unambiguously when they do intend to give up; they "double down or shut it down", as I tried to describe in my post. It is Google that I find tends to just give up on something, but leave it there, as if it still works, as if it will always work, and goes on to do other things while it rots.
I must confess, I immediately started thinking about a similar slide for my startup, with each of the areas which had been successfully conquered in the past, and then a last one for us.

It's kind of an easy formula, at least for what we're working on.
Aima-python - implementation of algorithms from AI:MA
Twitter goes down regularly (insert innuendo joke here haha). It's usually short-lived downtime however, just like this time. It seems fine to me.
I can tell you this, last night while playing with Siri we had several periods where it "couldn't connect to the network" - these were not networking issues, everything else worked fine.
Apple Stores to close for one hour on October 19 to watch Steve Jobs’ memorial
Same install here - I max on CPU but get nothing.
What non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post
12 Most Absurd Laws Used to Stifle "Occupy Wall Street."
Your story closely resembles the challenges we had scaling sommelierwine.ca before a media event at our latest launch location. I knew that our site would receive an increase in traffic, and the increase would only be temporary.

As a rails site hosted on Heroku, this gave us the ability to scale our site using the gambit of widgets that Heroku offers; but, we didn’t want to spend the money and cheat ourselves from the satisfaction of scaling our site.

Using New Relic (a gem available on Heroku) I identified our first performance bottleneck - database queries. Certain queries were taking over 30 seconds to complete! These database queries all involved a table of BLOBs (on the order of 20MB) that needed to be searched and sorted. I tried adding indexes but that only marginally reduced the query time. The solution we found included moving the BLOBs to their own table while keeping an index to them in a table of their attributes [1]. Doing this, we were able to reduce query times down to less than a 100ms.

The remaining bottlenecks we found using YSlow has helped us reduce the overhead in loading pages substantially.

Even though we were able to weather the storm of visitors to our site, we did leave some tasks for the next one including implementing caching, background processing, and remote file storage. All in time.

Does anyone have other wallet-friendly Rails/Heroku scaling stories share?

[1] This is database 101 stuff - a class I never took.
My biggest issue is that my wife's name is "April" every time I say something like "call April" or "text April" it try's to set a reminder for April 1st.
Funny that you mentioned WoW, was just thinking that myself.

IMO farmville is its (and its unofficial predecessor, Diablo) direct evolutionary successor - the same stuff, refined to its essence.

Surprising that the next evolutionary step in that dynasty (the slot machine) came first!
The hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around Newton, which caused a backlash when it turned out to be just a computer after all.

The problem is deeper than recognizing what you said or wrote. Newton's "intelligent assistant" had the same sorts of trouble with meaning, like having to use literal text from your data ("When is Dentist?" vs. "When is my dental appointment?") Apparently while computers are better at determining what words you said than they were in 1992, there hasn't been a ton of improvement in understanding what you said, even at this apparently simple level.
works fine with opera 12alpha
Steve Jobs, a Genius of Store Design, Too
Agreed, so he's using this job as a means to become a better engineer? One he's not? (Just alluding to your point, not saying he is or isn't a good engineer)
The open web is dead. Get over it and do something.
Why do you say that Bethesda is a terrible company? They always struck me as one of the few in the game industry that sort of "get it".
Unfortunately, at least in the current environment, such endeavors would be shut down by "privacy" advocates.

I was a student at UC Berkeley when we wanted to offer every student a chance to sequence their genes. However, because of the efforts of the vocal minority (I certainly wanted to sequence my genes), that was cancelled.

I'm afraid of similar cultural artifacts limiting society's advance. I would have loved if everyone got sequenced so we'd have tons of meaningful data to do more genetics research.