skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. But, for instance, is Django as tied to the active record pattern as is Rails? And yes, I know you can swap out persistence layers in modern Rails, which is good (because active record is utter bilge), but who does that?

&c.
He did none of those things. None of the code he suggested requires root. Some hardware information collection may require root (though darn little of it in Linux, at least), but that's entirely independent of the question of how to expose it to the provider.
He has an opinion.
Stackdriver’s Izzy Azeri on Creating an Open Culture
I don't think the author is saying his old-fashioned phone is chic... just economic. As a college student, he doesn't have a lot of disposable income, and to him the benefits of a smartphone don't justify the cost, even though he admits his feature phone is “not sexy” and “looks funny”. A lot of tech trends are really about fashion, but that couldn't be further from the case here.

Edit: also worth noting, you can go the iPod Touch route and have all the wonderfully geeky benefits of a smartphone, but only when wifi is available. If you usually are in range of wifi, it could make sense... see my other comment about how a friend of mine does it.
For me, it's just been a habit since immemorial times. Growing up in the 90s, I had access to Win95 from the start, and I can't remember not doing this.
See comment above. There was another interview or blog post where he talked about his preference for young people more extensively, but I can't find it. Do you happen to know how many people over 50 have been accepted into Y-Combinator?
I don't know. I'm a skeptic of most things but this seems plausible to me.

http://www.space.com/5037-nasa-baffled-unexplained-force-act...
Fair point, I think all employees need some kind of motivation to get their work done.

>If it encouraged you to bite off more then you could chew, and you failed then it was bad.

The management wasn't consistently in touch with me, no clear direction on the project, etc.
Quite frankly, I ended up sitting at my desk for weeks at a time doing absolutely nothing because I was so in over my head.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond, thank you :)
Based on what people are saying here, I think there are a lot of different styles.

For instance I have a friend who frantically selects and reselects small portions of the text the whole time. I on the other hand just highlight a line and hold shift then down arrow at the end of each line I know exactly which line is next to be read.
Looks like the system is available now, but I've noticed that the shipping lead time has increased from the 5-6 weeks (1pm) to 7-8 weeks (5pm)
Its true that people dont always need a data connection, and an ipod would be one alternative. However, there are ways to get smartphones for cheap.

I discuss a few options here: http://www.zappable.com/2012/07/smartphones-for-cheap-ii/
Given the massive increase in productivity any SSD provides over mechanical drives ~$250 is more than worth the price if you don't already have an SSD.
The great unbundling
The growth was pretty steady, but I was always extracting the maximum from the hardware I had to save money, so for a long time I had intermittent issues. I also had my own server colo'd for a while, which I do not recommend for a one man shop. It nearly broke me a few times having a server go down and spending all day trying to fix it. I had a sever go down hard 2 days before I got married, but I had to let it go until 2 days after the wedding. I didn't think the site would recover from that.

The hardest part was to scale it economically. I have always been a big fan of SSD's, which are instrumental in scaling a site that doesn't have the resources to put data they need fast access to in RAM. For example, a site with more money might use redis to cache all the pics for each user (sorted, unique lists), plus all the tweets that point to a pic, but there is too much for me to do that in RAM without selling organs. Also, redis is not very memory efficient. But the advantage is that technologies like that are easy to use and easy to scale. If you have money.

The Twitter rule changes freak me out every day but I have not seen any specific moves that make me think they are after me. It is probably a matter of time, but then you need to think about what form that will take. Will they just cut off the Streaming API? That would be a big move. Will they remove pics from the streaming API? I doubt it. Will they make moves to single me out? That would be weird. Will they come after me with lawyers for caching tweets? I don't see that either. But, while I don't see anything specific, there are a lot of what ifs.

My advice is to use Twitter to get off the ground and then move away from Twitter altogether if at all humanly possible. That's the strategy they are forcing with their stupid rules, so maybe they will see the light at some point and rethink their strategy.
You're not getting it. This was my general train of thought:

-Dustin said he just got back from a few months in Asia. What'd he do for money? Maybe he's a startup geek and lives lean.

-Hmm, further down he says he bought flatware at $50/5pc, and everything he's purchased is of like quality. Kind of contradicts the 'living lean' thought, so scratch that.

And that got me to thinking of all the bits and pieces I've picked up about DC that I can't reconcile:

-He claims to live in SF and NYC. OK, maybe he's got some big projects? If so, I can't find any evidence.

-He claims to be "a designer", and also claims to "advise early-stage startups on design". Where did he learn these skills, and what startups has he advised? There are no forthcoming answers.

-He seems to have no trouble onboarding writers for Svbtle. He could be paying them, but with what funding? Further, his reputation pre-Svbtle is what enabled Svbtle in the first place; where did that come from?

In sum, the guy is an enigma to me. His stuff gets frontpaged all the time here, and so I (pretty naturally) assumed someone knew something about him... but it seems like nobody does. It's an odd thing because technology circles are so notoriously meritocratic.

You think I'm being flip about Dustin, but I'm really not. I actually agree with most things he writes, and found the AA articles to be very fascinating (and pertinent -- at the time I was going through my own version of the same thing). If all he's done (imagine finger quotes around 'all') is a markdown logo and a kudos button and Svbtle, that's fine. I'm not judging. But he illicits such strong reactions -- your replies are a great example -- that I feel like I'm missing something, that there's some great Secret of Dustin Curtis and I'm missing it.
For calls and texting, why would you need anything more advanced than a 3310? Altho I do like my N900.
Have they updated their security and disclosure policies ? If not they can remain in my "dodgy vendor who you can't trust" list.

For those that don't remember hackers managed to get root access to several VPS via some Linode vulnerability. Didn't bother to let customers know. Didn't bother to update their status/website. Didn't bother to tell anyone what they've done to fix it. Compare that with CloudFlare:
http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparen...

Linode continues to be a recurring example of how not to behave as a vendor.
Thanks for pointing that out (not sarcasm).
I think part of the reason is because in software engineering there are several "big problems" that come up time and time again, but in different flavors. For example, when AJAX was the buzzword of the day, there were many engineers I knew who worked during the 90's cynically complaining about how we were just revisiting the "thin vs thick client" issue once again (much like their 'ancestors' felt like they were revisiting the "dumb vs smart terminal" debate in the 80s.)

The problem is when these problems re-appear, problems that you personally grappled with for many years, it's easy to just want to throw up your hands in frustration because you thought the issue was settled. But of course, in reality its not about the issue being settled or not, it's about the capability of technology evolving and macroscopic design patterns falling in and out of favor due to the particular tradeoffs available with the state-of-the-art. But it's hard to see this objectively when you had a lot of emotional investment into any problem, developed some expertise, and see your entire way of solving problems being thrown out for what you perceive as a fad.

A contemporary example that I've mentioned already is the recent abandonment of the relational model/ACID in databases. A cynic will tell you the people doing this are stupid because it's an inferior solution. But they fail to mention the reason people are doing this: it's because the relational technology has not caught up with the scalability requirements of many problems faced by engineers today. An experienced engineer with the right attitude can have an excellent perspective and hedge their technology bets accordingly: the people deploying NoSQL are not stupid, they are just getting their jobs done. But at the same time, this too shall pass, since the relational model and ACID are fundamentally good ideas, and eventually someone will swing the pendulum back that way once other problems are solved. So, for the experienced engineer who takes a longer view, certain types of NoSQL databases can serve a role but are likely going to be considered a transitional technology and systems should be architected accordingly. The inexperienced engineer will not recognize this and will go all-in with NoSQL and fall right into the traps that relational modelling and ACID are designed to solve. Lo and behold: Google Spanner paper is published -- but we're not on the other side of this cycle yet until this tech is commoditized.

This tendency of cynicism is particularly worsened because engineers are naturally repulsed by the idea of reinventing the wheel, particularly a wheel as giant as these "big problems I thought we solved already." It's also worsened by the fact that within any new technology cycle, there is often more noise than signal, and so it's easy to latch on to the noise as evidence that there is no signal if you're biased to believing it's all noise. It's also much easier to tell yourself that there is no new innovation happening, it's all noise, when the people building the new stuff are all younger than you and many seem to be unaware of history.
I am curious about your site, if you want to share via email you can reach me at chris at twicsy.youknowhat
China's First successful landing of a jet fighter on an Aircraft Carrier
The article confuses two issues, one illustrated by Arrow's Theorem which is more relevant to parliamentary procedures (where any set of more than two choices has to be resolved as a series of binary choices, and the voting population is small and its preferences well understood) and first past the post electoral systems which are completely hopeless, especially when tiered, as in the US.

Most of the article is essentially discussing an example of Arrow's Theorem where if you know people's preferences and can present them with binary options in an order of your choosing you can obtain any outcome except the least popular option. This is very artificial and not a real flaw of preferential and proportional electoral systems where (a) individual preferences are not known and (b) the entire vote is done in one step, not in a carefully chosen series of binary options. Great for gaming a committee, lousy for elections.

As others have observed, the chief purpose of voting is allowing government transitions without violence and with the appearance of procedural fairness, but the fact remains voting works just fine when the population has a clear cut preference ("throw the bastards out").

Well, modulo corrupt redistricting.

Americans who want to talk about voting really need to understand that there are other voting systems than the horse and buggy system used in the US and UK.
I've been with Linode for just over 2 years now (I think my monthly bill is just north of $300, about 10 instances with them) and I'd highly recommend them. I've had maybe 4 or 5 servers down over my life as a customer, normally due to ~10 minute network issues and I once had a server go down due to the host machine and I had it back in 30 minutes.

The best thing about Linode is the support: if an issue happens they open a ticket with me and if I reply with questions / clarifications I'm replied to within a couple of minutes. Their pricing is a bit higher than elsewhere but after having shitty experiences with another company (vps.net) I decided to bite the bullet and switch and haven't regretted it since.

The billing isn't as flexible as EC2 (but then I guess they're different markets) however you get pro-rated payments to the day. So a server up for 10 days will cost 33% of the monthly cost and they refund the amount to you in account credit when you remove the server. Flexible enough that it can be helpful when you just need a server for a couple of days. Oh and their nodebalancer product is great.

I have seen complaints about one of their datacentres having some issues (Newark) but I can't comment on that as I use their London datacentre almost exclusively.
I was shocked that none of the top-voted comments mention this aspect of the matter. The attitude of founders is one thing, and possibly worrisome, but the attitude of funders is predictable: they'd like to maximize some index that combines "likely to start a company that goes huge" and "likely to be much better at starting that company than at negotiating how much of a stake we'll get in it." There is an obvious economic incentive to be balancing those, not just looking at the first. With respect to pg, VCs clearly vary in how they construct that index - but a cold look at the matter through the lens of economics should tell anyone that it certainly is an index, not just Most Likely To Succeed.
Age based cultural separations aside, I think a lot of people, have a really hard time grasping that experience isn't directly related with skill. There are tons of 'veteran programmers' who are worse than the majority of 20 year olds in the valley.
Oh, the Steve Jobs argument again. The omnipresent Steve Jobs, with his golden fingers and eagle eyes.

The same Steve Jobs that launched Mobile Me. The same Jobs that launched Ping as the next big social idea. The same Steve Jobs that allowed iPhone 3G to be upgraded to iOS 4 and become an expensive electronic brick.

Every CEO knows the worst thing you could do is to micromanage your team. And while every now and then you do have to step in, look over the shoulder and do course correction, even Steve Jobs knew he should spend time on the big things than to second guess every little decision of his team. And Tim Cook has a dream team, probably the best in the industry.

Yes, they will screw up eventually - as they did with maps, as they did before during Jobs era, and will certainly do it again in the future. When that happens, you take full responsibility (like Tim Cook did), make the changes internally (which may or may not mean changing people), and make them clean up the mess.

Certainly the Maps brouhaha somewhat impacted Scott Forstall, but I doubt anybody in their conscious mind would fire the most experienced sw guy in the company (and arguably in the industry) just because ONE mistake on a by-product feature. People simply don't buy an iPhone because of the Maps. And there's 200 other apps, some much better than the Google/Apple Maps anyway.

It's a well known fact that Forstall was a divisive guy. Love him or hate him. And over time people get tired of managing conflicts. It was time for a change. And as of this guy in charge of maps.. well, he f'ed-up. As Steve Jobs once said, "When you're the janitor, reasons matter". Sadly for this guy, he wasn't the janitor anymore.
I don't think you have to apply the same philosophy to absolutely everything in life. You can buy cheap cutlery and have nicely designed, expensive plates. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have two sets of dishes - a "best" and a "worst" because there's a time for each.
I am consistently surprised how many VM hosts refuse to tell you what your CPU guarantees are. EC2 at least gives you a general equivalence to a specific hardware. Rackspace refuses to go into detail. Others I've spoken to will only commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is. And even then, actually making sure you've got a commit of that CPU is a whole other issue. I think EC2's compute units are a commit, though.

Linode's "priority" seems like ex-Slicehost's way of saying "hey bigger machines get a higher proportion"... nothing really useful for figuring out exactly what you're buying.

And you can't ever really figure out what you have: things could be severely over-committed, and you'll never know until you get starved. So you can't just benchmark your way out of it.
There's the rub -- dent/paint repair costs dealerships next to nothing. They often have a guy on staff to do it. So dealerships won't sell scratched/dinged luxury cars, they'll repair them for pennies and mark them up.
Yes everyone here hates mongo because that is cool and they are all irrational, not because up until, well ... now, it had been calling itself a 'database' product while specifically defaulting to doing the least possible to make sure your data actually hits the disk. But hey, it looks good in benchmarks, and it is WebScale(tm) and anyone who hates that kind of thing is just an irrational hater.
I have to respectfully disagree. I think it makes sense to assume that if the user can touch the screen to change the volume, they can touch the side of the device too.

That assumption is enough to justify the move. It also plays into the constraints of a smaller screen, lending more space for the UI bits for which there are no hardware controls.
Hey, 'nknight, you appear to be hellbanned (starting 3 posts back). It seems to happen randomly to some people; you should just ping 'pg about it.

Edit Don't blame you. The hellbanning system Does Not Seem To Work.
I need to vote 3 times! I'm a yes to position reading, and place holder for sure... contrast issue is dependent on the regular contrast it doesn't happen often but I do use it that way.

Now I'm a self-confessed habitual selector I feel compelled to say that in no way, shape or form do I select text like some kind of nervous tic. I rarely select text when reading HN comments for example, they're mostly short enough so I'm not going to have to scroll or have time to get pulled on to something else before finishing.

I voted for reading position because that's the one I use it for most.
Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know it was an option.
Do you have keyboard shortcuts enabled?
I think of the "middle" as a place where I put in enough energy to learn and do my research, but settle with what fits my needs both economically and ergonomically. For example, the "best" burger is the one I've learned to make on my own because it contains my favorite type of bun, meat I've ground up myself, etc. Other times I enjoy the quick fix at Carl's Jr because I'm in no mood to cook.

I've also learned that I prefer the "best" when it comes to hiking/hunting boots. The ok ones at $100 work well for a while because of their high economic value, but great ones are $300-$430 for a reason, such as having a higher heel, very aggressive tread, having lasting leather that dominates cheap boots, and being a perfect custom fit (Schnees Granite or Whites Smokejumper for example).
Given the difference in reputation between OCZ and not-OCZ I couldn't imagine buying them on anything other than a "way cheaper than everything else" basis.

Unremarkable benchmarks plus no cheaper than models that have been on the market for some time? Double-pass.
This is true, though you still have to be lucky enough for a civilization to be existing at your destination in both space and time. Perhaps a civilization could exist at your destination in the perceived time when you depart, but upon arrival you end up at a time when they do not.

I think the point of my comment still stands regardless of this revision. If you could choose exactly the position in time at which you'll land, then we have a different story (though this would likely require unreasonable travel speeds).
I make strange DNS and connection requests constantly and have never had an issue with OVH, I think there's more to the story than that
It's funny because I thought I'd do it less with the trackpad, but I've done it twice while reading the comments of this post on my laptop.
Continues? I've been a happy Linode customer for a long time. Their boxes are snappy. I rarely have issues, and when I do, they are pretty quick to respond and help out. I've also had my fare share of free hosting thanks to their referral platform.

Aside from the issue you mention, what else have they been doing wrong?
I never bought there
http://www.everbuying.com/Wholesale-Smart-Phones-c-38.html?o...

Google should be able to find you a lot of websites like this one
I'm a programmer and in one of my first jobs the sales guy (who was a nice bloke) double clicked on everything all the time.

This made me think about how he demo'd our windows app, I had to also test double, tripple clicks, double click + drag etc. So I added a feature that on the 'About this product' page added the clicks and double clicks. When it reached over 100 I displayed an animated bunch of flowers.

Many months later I get a phone call from the sales guy, "Hey, monk.e.boy, I'm rehursing a demo and some flowers are showing." I was like, Jeeeesus, 100 double clicks on the most obscure page of our app?! WTF are you doing!
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)
You are correct of course. The author is very clear on this (which is one reason I upvoted the article). However, I do have many friends with this opinion who CAN afford smartphones.

Even worse - I have friends that have expensive smartphones with the expensive data/text plan plan and would be better-served with an old dumbphone with a keyboard (for texting) and a iPod touch!
> I thought paying over $100/month for a smartphone didn’t make a lot of sense.

I pay $10/month for mine (including the cost of the phone).

> but my assumption is that you are like me, and constantly near a wifi hotspot

No, I'm hardly ever near one when I need to use my phone.
It's subconscience speed reading that we all learned naturally. If you look up the techniques around speed reading, it's basically what we're doing out of "nervous habit".
If you're a broke college student, yeah, you probably don't need a smart phone.

Of course nobody needs one in the way they need oxygen or food, but if you're an average professional adult with a reasonably good job, the $100 a month is not that great an expense for a combination music player, camera, GPS, social networking, and, oh yeah, a phone too.

I went with the unlocked phone and prepaid SIM route, so it's only $50 a month. I feel like I'm beating the system.
Interesting point. I think I'm above average in a couple but below average in others.

Thanks!
I agree. I believe their performance increase far out-weighs their high failure rate and high cost. Just make sure you have good back up.
It helps me focus.