skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gotcha! I'll have to check out Black Sands, too.
>You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic.

Yes, me and all Analytics and SEO guys. You either sell ads or stuff. In both cases you want as many eyeballs and wallets as possible.

>The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users).
There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes.

Yes, but your logic is circular. The question is WHY are there "more websites with foundations in PHP", and not just trivial amateur personal stuff but highly successful ones too.

You seem to assume PHPs expanse as just a fact of life, totally arbitrary, and thats why you say we must not draw conclusions based on it.

>You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success.

Sure I can. Here are some ways:

- Php is easy for newstarters, so got more adoption.
- Php is trivial to deploy, so got more adoption.
- Php was there, targetting the web specifically (with libs and features), in 199x, while Haskell, CL, what have you were not yet.
- Php, because of the above, had amassed a huge ecosystem of projects and engines (Nuke, Wordpress, Drupal, EE, etc).
- Php, because of that, has alo got huge adoption.
- Because of th adoption it built a huge ecosystem of programmers, projects, tools, books, etc.

And, putting it all together, what makes PHP more likely to power most high ranking sites, is that you can easily find components and engines to base your site on, AND you can easily find tons of programmers to employ, AND you can easily find support for it, etc. All those make it a no brainer for a lot of uses.

And all of those are interdependent, based on some initial language attributes, not arbitrary like the US vs Canada population argument (which is not that arbitrary and size based itself, but thats another story)
I can't believe that guys at heroku are not ready for such situations!

They rely ONLY on virginia's instances because its the cheapest, without caring about customers.. or thinking of replicating their services in multiple locations for such issues!
do you really think blatent patent trolling of competitors is all just a defensive move?
It's not factually correct.
whoa thanks for the compliments!

re: focus -- yes, that's key. but of course, it's bad to be blindly focused down a bad direction, too. don't put too much pressure on yourself early on, since nearly everyone flops and flounders.

re: what to do over the summer -- i don't know if there's much you can do to prepare :) maybe reading your professor's past papers? again, i wouldn't stress about it too much.
I've done customer development on things along these lines and I basically have the following to share with the class:

Any app that is at its core assisting people to hack their current behavior is inherently asking people to change their behavior beyond that point at which it would be reasonable given the difficulty of such a task to attempt this feat.
8:40 PM PDT We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia)
It sounds like you're arguing that morality and ethics should have no bearing in a purchasing decision.
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Clearly Amazon hired Baghdad Bob as their PR guy when he was looking for a new gig.

Apart from Apple's legendary secrecy, Amazon's EC2 is a solid #2 in terms of impenetrability.
Don't stop with this post. I think the girl with blog of the school lunches in Scotland showed a modern method to solve any similar customer service issue. Start a blog and continually update it with whatever your issue is in a factual non-opinionated way. Wait for them to try to shut you down, then go to the media and social avenues so that it becomes hot topic, and they'll fix it. Then they may screw you again and you'll have to go to the media again and then they'll fix it again. Perfect solution.
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1 out of my 6 instances in the region was affected. It took me about an hour to get it back up (which was me clicking once and waiting). I wonder how much of that is fallout from instances being sent to other availability zones and bottle-necking.
This is the kind of weather conditions that spawn very electrically active storms. I don't doubt they could cause the issues. Last night was probably the most electrically active storm I've ever seen up here -- virtually non-stop lightning strikes for an hour or two, and there's another just like it over Virginia right now.

http://i.imgur.com/d5pEP.png
I just read the first chapter. Very insightful.

Especially early on, I was so personally attached to my work that any problem (eg, an upper bound not working out right) was devastating. But then, when it did work, ecstasy. And then, uncovering bad algebra in the derivation caused despair. And then, error corrected, euphoria. Round and round.
Because Twitter and Facebook's search features are so great? Twitter doesn't even allow you to search your own tweet history past a certain point.

Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful.

This is a matter of execution. I think BrowserID is making this a lot easier. Also, we have an example of a decentralized communication system: email.

If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?

If it's decentralized, I have more control. I use gmail, but I can keep a backup of my email and change my email provider whenever I want. Not so FB or Twitter.

I think Wikipedia's great, but I think its governance system is pretty whack, and I wouldn't want my communications to be subject to anything that capricious, undemocratic, or otherwise not in my own control.
The whole Heroku site is phenomenal. I am constantly amazed every time i see it.
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If you mean GAE, its even worse...
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Black sands by Bonobo is amazing. The song 'Black Sands' on the album is wonderful[0].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua2loiGHZ38
It's funny because it was precisely how I learned programming: first a bit of Visual Basic, then PHP.

I want to warn people against it, because I think I lost a lot of time along the way doing stupid irrelevant things.

You see, instead of learning the basic stuff like algorithms and data structures, I was writing visitor counters and guestbooks. As a result, in a few years, those who started with Pascal or even plain old BASIC, were already coding circles around me :)

Maybe it's not as much about the language as about having a wise teacher who can push you in the right direction. I didn't have one, unfortunately.

P.S.: on the other hand, I was able to sell my skills much earlier than my peers: I made my first money on php. But I don't think it's important: it's about being a good programmer, not selling you code as early as possible.
Their current VM performance is incredibly bad. To be fair they are in some preview mode.
what an absurdly wrongheaded statement, do you really think that Google depended on patent protection to stop others from using PageRank, and even if they did, how could it ever be conclusively proven that PageRank was used by somebody else?
C'mon.

http://osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/tablets-befor...

We can argue whether or not it's right for Apple to fight to protect this design, but let's not pretend that these tablets were developed completely independent of the iPad's design.
HP I-forget-their-catchy-name-for-their-service anyone?
> nanny state app store

It's not the state.
"He was an ardent pragmatist who cared more about achieving compelling results than demonstrating theoretical 'interestingness'..."

Are those people actually rare in academia?
Hey, sorry for scooping you if that messed something up :)

I heard you'd graduated, so I wandered over to your site today. Didn't realize you'd put up this article so recently.
I thought both Heroku & Netflix had fairly robust multi-AZ deployments, so I'm hoping they share any of their learnings from this outage.

Either way, that quote is ridiculous.
I think you either missed or are glossing over Michael Sippey's blog post today where he said "in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used". People aren't upset about the old "stricter guidelines" you are quoting, they are upset about the new ones.

It was poor judgement and poor PR to lob that out there before they were ready to actually spell out what these new "stricter guidelines" are. It creates fear, uncertainty and doubt among Twitter API developers and they are getting sick of fear, uncertainty and doubt, its been going on for a long time now.

Twitter's message bus, API and identity system have become valuable Internet resources. But Twitter has never been particularly great at thinking of innovative uses for it or developing great clients. There are a lot of really interesting and different ways to use those, regrettably they are trying to kill most of them and inflict a homogonized, boring, monoculture on their user base they can monotize, which will make the experience progressively worse.

At this point I imagine most API developers are wishing there was a new message bus they could move to but its a daunting challenge to field one, even more daunting to get a critical mass of messages moved over to it to make it interesting, and really daunting to fund it without resorting to all the lameness Twitter is now knee deep in.
This is not fair, Amazon publishes surprisingly detailed postmortem reports for AWS problems.
Heroku doesn't. They are on US-East.
You certainly mean bad weather, don't you?
us-east is at least partially in Equinix facilities not far from Dulles airport in Ashburn, VA.
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Ironically, the top result for "How do I use the Hartree-Fock approximation on toluene" is now your comment saying this thread is now the top result! [1]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/8EiBm.png
This is a perennial problem. It's a form of insecurity that can cross into intellectual bullying. Often (usually? always?) the person doing it is unaware that they are doing it.

I think you and your friend are exactly right that the solution is to make a conscious choice not to be that kind of person. That's what I did when I was your age, and I've tried to stick to it. But the key word is "conscious". If you're not conscious that you're doing it, you can't make a conscious decision to stop. What determines that? I think it's a matter of growth: when someone is ready to grow in that way, they will. It can't be forced from the outside. But if you do it, you get good at setting other people at ease, and this helps make your environment more welcoming.

The feeling of constant inner intimidation is common. I have it all the time. You have scott_s's evidence (edit: among others) as well (and you should stick around here long enough to know that scott_s's evidence is significant!) It varies in intensity. One has moments of crushing self-doubt. For the most part, it's a background process. It seems to be normal for some value of "normal", like a wry playmate one is stuck with who never goes away. It's so common among creative people that it may be connected to the creative process. The solution seems to be to know that more or less everyone feels it and get on with one's work.

I really like Hugh Macleod's line: "Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside." We all do that painful comparing, but it's an illusion because of the fallacy involved: we experience our own inadequacies acutely and downplay our achievements, while doing exactly the opposite with others'. (Actually it's worse than that because we have access to our own streaming self-critical monologue and not theirs, so we're not even considering the same data. That's the genius of Macleod's phrasing.) It reminds me of a hilarious fortune cookie a friend used to keep on his office door: "A wise man can see more from the top of a mountain than a fool from the bottom of a well." We're the fool in the well and the other guy is always the wise one on the mountain.

Finally, if you think the know-it-alls are in a stronger position, observe them more closely. If they truly felt they were that smart, they wouldn't be trying so hard to prove it. It's a weak position and not a good place to be in the long run, regardless of how many people they overpower in arguments and status matches.
Amazon is in a much superior position than Google in this competition. They didn't gain significance because of better tablet product or ad monetization; they are significant because of all the credit card information in their database before they entered the digital content delivery business. The friction from buying content on Kindle Fire is minimal, which is a deterministic advantage Amazon and Apple have over every other digital content provider in the mobile device market.
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. It's not surprising at all.

The converse (inverse? I always mix them up) is true too. What would the jocks do if a nerd tried to come out for a sport? Generally make fun of, pick on, and possibly try to hurt them. This mentality exists within all groups.

I'm sure there's something really interesting to discuss here about sociology and the human psyche, but unfortunately I'm not well versed in those subjects.
They do have a red icon if an event impacts an entire region. If a customer is correctly utilizing multiple availability zones, a failure in one zone should only impact the customer until they can fail over (Should be within minutes if they are automated).
The part that hit home for me was his description of the Prof's frustration with the speed at which he was implementing the enhancement to Klee and the fact that most grad students are not as smart as their advisors.

Most grad students are exhilarated to work with a brilliant researcher but it can crushing when one learns his or her own limitations.

Like the author says, probably 1 in 100 are the equal of their advisor and capable of becoming a professor at a comparable university.
No. In fact, as I already mentioned, I started in PHP myself.
The thing that annoys me is that "Meh, PHP is good enough" attitude, which a lot of people seem to share. With that kind of thinking, your progress will be seriously hindered.

On a side note, why the hate on Pascal? It's a lot better than PHP as a starter language, it teaches structured programming from the ground up.
The iPhone is five years old
UIWebView runs in-process. There's no way for "part of" a process to be able to map executable pages without other parts able to, so either they let any app run whatever code it wants, disable Nitro, or rewrite large chunks of the UI to move WebKit out-of-process.
If Pinterest is down, then there may be a net gain for the internet.
Funny to post this here, but I'm actually planning on migrating from Rackspace to AWS purely because of price.

Rackspace's prices are insane. $1,314/mo for a cloud server with 30gb of ram, compared to $657/mo for 34gb on AWS.

Plus with AWS you can use reserved instances to get that cost down to $286/mo. Rackspace has no way to get the cost down.

That makes Rackspace cost over 4.5x more when comparing based on ram.
I assumed the Lytro device was a proof of concept for the technology so they could embed the technology in cell phones. I cannot fathom a billion dollar use case outside of cell phones.
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Yes, that's what Act of God means in the US legal system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God
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>Adobe famously continues to release worse and worse experiences with their products, and still have a popular costumer base.

Famously? Really? As in "some random non professional designers/adobe users complained on the intertubes".

Care to mention how, say, Photoshop, Premmiere or Lightroom CS6 are worse than previous versions? All have been praised as substantial updates.

Bonus points for not using non-technical catch-all words like "bloated".

I would aldo like to hear about the worthy replacement, with feature parity to those products.

Abode products, due to the custom UI, have some odd look&feel issues in some controls. They also have bugs like any program has (far less than most, though, especially considering scope and complexity).

That said, they are the industry leading products, with no substitution that has the same breadth for professional wokflows. So, no, its not about "tolerance", its about being the "best game in town".

People jumped ship from Quark to inDesign in a heartbeat, when the option emerged.
If one availability zone is down, there will be suddenly be ton of extra people trying to start new instances in the other availability zones. Could there just be a shortage of available instances in the other availability zones? Perhaps Amazon don't keep enough spare capacity for this eventuality (nor would I expect them to)?
Not to judge a book by its cover, but the wording of the title telegraphs the fact that the author has no idea what he is writing about.
Why are people so scared of void*? Are there any VM's that don't resort to some form of pointer tagging when implementing dynamic typing?
I thought it was pretty clear - he used "complect" because it shared an etymological root with "complex". The whole talk is about drawing distinctions between superficially related concepts, and using specific definitions based on words' etymological histories to do it.

The word "complicated" is generally synonymous with the word "complex", but that doesn't matter - the word "simple" is generally synonymous with the word "easy", after all. If Rich Hickey had said "complicate" viewers may well have asked whether he meant "to make complex" or "to make complicated", and perhaps wonder whether he was trying to draw a distinction between those concepts as well.
> Apple has undeniably pushed the entire cell phone industry forward, and in the process had a tremendous impact on the software, entertainment, and game industries.

Here's what I wrote a couple weeks back on the topic:

-----

"...Apple won the smartphone market, and certainly raised overall ease-of-use standards in the market, but that doesn't mean that smartphones would have been objectively worse otherwise - just different, possibly better or worse. We would possibly have much more freedom in terms of app stores.

The fact that Apple stamped its mark on the global phone market and is making huge profits is absolutely not an inherent reason to be thankful for them. They won most of the market and now enjoy a massive network effect advantage (larger market => more developers developing for iOS => improved and cheaper app offerings => larger market); why respect them for doing the equivalent of what Facebook did in the social networking arena (make the most popular UX in the market)?

To be sure, a few companies deserve actual respect - for me, those are the companies that treat their customers well, are highly socially responsible, encourage openness, and play fair with all. Even better if they go beyond immediate profit goals to genuinely drive innovation. Most companies just want to make a buck by winning the market - nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't inherently deserve respect.

-----

Ultimately, the innovative value of the patents in this case is very little, and people were doing similar things before the patents were granted. Apple's "impact" and massive success and dominance are not things I think we should be thankful for.

What disproves your argument that "all we get are clones" is that all manner of tech startups are clearly innovating all the time despite not receiving patents for their ideas. The market is simply too rich, and the network effect too rewarding, for developers to give up innovation simply because they can't patent ideas.
Also for me (former jazz saxophonist), find a lot of similarities between using and transforming data structures and thinking about how chords are related and how they resolve and transform through a progression. If only jazz paid better...
Someone needs to be fired over this.
Obviously it's true that people bust stereotypes every day. I'm in th same boat you were... Computer/math/video game/comics "nerd" who also was vp of the class, captain of the wrestling team, very popular, and accepted by every group.

Just because there are people who violate the stereotypes doesn't mean that my original observation doesn't hold any water.
Not sure about Facebook since I never use it but Twitter's search feature is crippled because Twitter wants it that way. I think they are planning to monetize access to full history, though I dont remember exactly what was being said on this a week or two ago. When it comes to your posts and your stream I think you should be able to search it any way you want and cache it any where you want.

I cite Wikipedia only for the foundation model, funded by contributions, to free us from corporate control, being bombed with ads, and having our personal information harvested for profit.

With a message bus foundation you wouldn't have most of the politics associated with group editing of articles which is where Wikipedia has its worst problems. The only places there would be a risk of politics at the Message Bus Foundation is in terms of use, abuse mitigation, spam filtering, censorship issues and interacting with intrusive government requests. When it comes to privacy and freedom of speech it should be designed to be as private and free as possible.
Remember Heroku have to support millions of users on the free tier on a permanent basis, all of which costs very real cash money compared to your average freemium web business.

AWS only have a temporary free usage tier so collect money right up front even on the smallest projects.

For that reason, these relatively large step functions in pricing at the low end are reasonable from where I'm sitting.
Would be interested in a followup article on how to find niches/markets. I like his About page - keeps it real.
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I have a newfound respect for Reddit.
Netflix does, but considering the time, running out of capacity after loosing a zone might have been more of an issue.