skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Homebrew on OSX is unusable without Github.

Rubygems is kind of unusable without Github.

Several ppensource projects documentation is unavailable without Github.
What about other people posting photos of you? The problem becomes a lot harder when everybody is posting photos of everybody else. It gets even harder if they do so in a malicious manner. e.g. ex-boyfriend posting naked photos of you that you didn't know he had. old frenemies posting photos they took of you and tagging it with 'cheating bitch'. etc.
Times might be attempting to build durable online content from time to time instead of the daily news stories that fade away quickly. Interesting durable online articles can last a long time on the web and will generate a lot more eyeballs down the road. One advantage the online media has that the paper media cannot replicate easily.

They can afford to put in a bit more expense in building an impressive article.
Note that the paper you cited measured protein byproducts, not strength. Running six miles a day will not radically improve your 100m dash time. Low intensity, high rep walking 15 miles a day isn't likely to help either.

If you want to get better at something, do the something you want to get better at.
Pretty much every test we run has the potential to effect user engagement, so I would suspect unless isolated it's a lost cause. What's more interesting to me is how to measure perhaps how bad branding has lost consumer confidence and the effect on sales thereafter.

It's easy to measure drop off in a funnel, but harder to measure customers who refuse to even enter the funnel due to bad brand. Is there some way of capturing that?
I didn't even think about dishwashers. I've only lived in one house with a dishwasher out of the ten that I've lived in. Are they that common place?

I have two Belfast sinks in my house.
For launching websites, there's Launchlist: http://launchlist.net/

(free lite version: http://lite.launchlist.net/)
I just realized that the Sys. Admin/Prod. Ops to Developer ratio here is crazy low. Everyone assumes I am talking about code changes when the article is about prod switching and network transit device changes.

MLAG or any LAG technology, LACP, bonds whatever should never impact the deployment of code. It should be invisible
when it is working. Obviously it is very visible when it breaks though.

My heart goes out to the Github guys!

Sorry for the confusion everyone.
chc is right... I got to the link through facebook and then shared in through a browser plugin... wasn't paying attention to the extra fluff that got added to the end of the url.

Will pay better attention to that in the future.

Thanks for pointing that out!
For #1, the issue is actually that even the awareness of Test A might effect Test B. I'm curious if there's anyway to capture that then.
If your audience is developers, they understand 'whitespace'. 'Negative space' is an ambiguous term that can mean a few things to developers.
Marvell was essentially trying to recite the incantation to get a patent invalidated. In order to get a patent thrown out, you need to show that it is not substantially different from prior art, so Marvell unsurprisingly argued that there was prior art which was substantially the same as the patented invention. Assuming they agreed that their products used the technology in the patent, AFAIK this is pretty much the only defense they could have made.
I'm a fan of foot controlled faucets. I'll talk to my plumber about the possibility of getting some tomorrow.
Or right click and "Open link in incognito window" (the front page of nytimes.com isn't behind the paywall obviously).
I think the level of disruption will have to be matched with the level of benefit, both measured subjectively. Most of the changes that people are describing here are different, but not objectively worse. You have a choice in how you relate to the world and how much technology you want to put between yourself and everyone else.

There is, and will continue to be, a huge market for wrapping new technology in familiar clothes. If you can make a revolutionary product, good for you, but making an old product revolutionary again is much better.
>Don't be a jerk and cut people off just before their cliff.

Saying that it sometimes takes more than 6 months to really evaluate new hires in specific roles is not the same as saying let's cut people off just before the cliff.

>Do the right thing and reduce the cliff

It is not clear at all that reducing the cliff to 6 months is "the right thing".
I don't know anything about the merits of this case, but there is something disquieting about a taxpayer financed non-profit entity, supposedly pursuing truth in a disinterested way, doing this. If CMU wants the freedom to pursue its self-interest, it should not be accorded any special taxpayer funding and be stripped of its non-profit status. You cannot have it both ways.

Next time a venture capitalist tries to talk me into taking venture capital because "our funds come from University endowments" - it is sacred money because you know it is sprinkled with the holy water of "education" - I know what I would say.

CMU should be at liberty to pursue its self-interest. Let's just not allow it to claim a sacred disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

Let me disclose my bias here. I have come to believe that the University system as it exists today is not true to its original mission. This case serves to reinforce my bias.
A lot of the time, the nature of the data and its lifetime makes specialized allocators easy to use. Not infrequently they can actually be more convenient than malloc/free when you have a bunch of allocations (think nodes in a parse tree) with the same lifetime, so their storage can be released as a single operation. For that example, you can get the same usability with a more traditional malloc/free interface using something like hmalloc, but if the parse tree nodes all occupy the same contiguous block, you get it automatically. And of course it's a lot faster to release a single block (if you release the storage back to the OS, the page manager will still have some per-page work for a virtually contiguous block of memory).

Basically, once you have a nailed down system design, it's usually not any significant extra work to use custom allocators. Where it can suck away your productivity is during iterative design and development where you're still figuring out the different kinds of data, what subsystems exist and who owns what when. But in that scenario, garbage collection is even easier than malloc/free, so it's not a mortal sin to use Bochs or just leak memory (heresy!) if you can get away with it--only temporarily, of course, while you figure out the design.
I never quite understood fitness. I bought some weights 2 years back and found a light exercise routine I like enough to do it daily. Works like a charm.
It definitely is a vicious circle. There are for sure many other effects at work, but I'm pretty sure that this is one of the most important ones - and one which is incredibly difficult to break, because moralists and "furbi" (sly ones) both work to keep things as they are :(
Working with free weights is amazing. After college I decided to get in shape and spent some time doing this: http://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5-beginner-strength-tra.... It's just one of many perfectly good programs you can find on the internet, it just has the advantage of being free and pretty simple to follow.

What's really shocking about lifting free weights is how little time it takes to stay "acceptably fit" (not "ripped like Jesus" fit, but "looks pretty good in clothes" fit). It just doesn't take a long workout to work all your muscles to exhaustion, and since it's often counter-productive to work the same muscle group on consecutive days, you don't need to go to the gym every day.
Switch modifications should never stop work.

Prod code push != prod infrastructure changes. Which is what the article is talking about. Specifically the agg. switching layer.

My reply is not about code deployments. It is about managing network devices with high visibility and impact.

I still stand by my original comment with a critical detail added:

Freeze prod ~infrastructure~ changes two weeks prior and two weeks after major holidays.

Push code all you want.

The RFO that they provided addresses link aggregation changes which are a part of an infrastructure change.
Funny that you said Pennsylvania that's where I was and where I was thinking about when writing about cheap US booze.

I'm so used to government run liquor outlets I never even thought about it not being a private store.
Yes, I have read it now. It was a nice article. I did not find out that everything I know about fitness was a lie. I found out that I don't know much, but what I did know was correct (and I learned a number of new things). No reason to hide a nice article behind a rude, condescending and incorrect headline.
The only features I need an email client to have is extreme speed and nice search. No desktop clients for mac have both right now. This isn't fast enough but i'll keep it installed and check for updates in a month.
An amazing free ebook called Brain Over Brawn is one of the best things I've ever read on this subject, and continues to include all the big conclusions articles like these come to: http://brainoverbrawn.com/get-the-book/

I highly suggest giving it a a read or scan. It's very well written (fun to read, he's a great writer), short, and very to the point. He applies the 80/20 rule to working out, your body, your diet, and so forth.

My favorite section is how to build what he calls an "engineer bag", which costs a total of around $10 and replacing pretty much all gym equipment.
Iron Man is real?!
Wow, I'm very glad our company chose a routed design with an interior routing protocol (OSPF.) I've never been able to push the limits of a layer two network as far as GitHub. A routed network helps segment the network so when systems fail or a re-convergence mistakenly occurs only a few racks are having problems and not the entire system. It's also very helpful for us to push routes to our exterior routing protocol (BGP.)

I also find it interesting they don't use any additional out-of-band network for heartbeats/management especially as unstable as their layer two network has been. It sounds like file servers need a secondary stable heartbeat network even if it is only 10/100. No judgements being passed here it just seems like a lot of eggs in one basket. That being said, Thank you for this write-up and sharing so openly and honestly. Happy GitHub customer here!

EDIT: Yes, I know routed networks can have similar problems but they are designed for routing, pathing and redundancy with a lot less overhead on the broadcast domain.
In my experience it works like this: you go to your boss as part of the review cycle and ask for a raise and your boss goes off and talks to the people that make those decisions. They say no. You tell your boss that you are going to look elsewhere, as you are on good terms, they ask you to at least see if they'll make a counter-offer before you hand in your notice. You end up getting more money than you wanted in the first place, your boss is happy that they've kept you.

Any sensible manager should know that if your staff is underpaid, they are very likely to be looking elsewhere. Personally I've always been supportive of my employees looking elsewhere, do you really want people that only work for you because nobody else will have them?
I think the automatic 3% raise is so important because our salaries are worth less every day. If a company isn't even willing to keep up with inflation then they are creating a very strong incentive to leave. I think most people stick around at jobs like this because they don't want to put forth the effort of looking for a new one.

Personally, once I've gone to the effort of getting my resume out and interviewing, I'm going to take the new job rather than listen to a counteroffer from the old one.
How I stay productive and sane doing just 3 things a day
Addresses and URLs seem to be timestamp strings that change every microsecond, with the URL code being generated just before the email address. This makes it trivial to read someone's mail if you know their address.

You can verify this by repeatedly clicking 'Delete this address', which issues you a new mail box. The address string can be thought of as a number that is always incrementing, with the 'digits' drawn from [0-9a-zA-Z]. (So base 62.)

The URL number is always (sample size ~100) just a little smaller than the email number, but not by a consistent amount. Often about 20-30 steps away, but sometimes as much as 600 steps away (depending on server load?).

The number seems to be generated by a clock rather than a counter, since the rate at which the counter increases is very steady. The 5th digit from the right increments every 15 seconds, suggesting that there are (62^4)/15 ~= 0.99 million unique strings per second. Maybe the counter is just using the time in microseconds, and converting it to a string?

Issues raised:

1 - If I know your address, I can now guess the 'secret' URL to read your mail in a trivial number of guesses (certainly less than 1000). There doesn't seem to be any throttling of attempts on server side (I was able to manually cycle through ~30 invalid URLs fairly quickly).

2 - Email addresses 'leak' the time that they were created. (Not a clear security risk, but could be problematic in some cases)

3 - As Sami_Lehtinen says, addresses are guessable based on signup time, but given that these are disposable addresses, I'm not sure that's a big problem (who cares if a spammer guesses it). Also, even if there is a new user signing up every second, the success rate for guesses will be 1E-6.
I guess we have differing viewpoints, I see absolutely no fundamental reason why infrastructure should be treated all that much differently to code. It should be possible to fire off a test suite, to automate its deployment, etc.

I would agree that is not where most folks are at today.

I would argue the far more interesting discussion is how we develop and mature tools to get more folks there in future.
While some are able to extract valuable benefit from gyms the vast majority are wasting time and money. In addition to that, most of these articles are very thin on reproducible facts and true research-based data.

This is, by far, the most interesting and useful resource I have found when it comes to fitness:

http://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Program-Results/...

The author covers cellular biology and debunks ideas such as "cardio workouts", treadmill bunnies, jogging and walking around your neighborhood to loose weight with plain-old science. Here you'll learn about the cellular metabolic process, Krebs cycle, Insulin resistance, fatty acid synthesis, glycolitic cycle, Cori cycle, Bohr effect, glycogenolysis, amplification cascade and whole host of other topics that are important, relevant and reasonably well understood.

What's more important is that everything that is proposed in this book is backed by science and scientific studies. It's like open-source software. If you care to dive deeper into why something works the way it does the scientific references are provided. The book has over 25 pages of listed references (about 10% of the book is reference data).

Anyhow, one of the claims of the book is "12 minutes a week" every seven to ten days. In other words, that's the actual time under load you need every seven to ten days to affect significant changes in your body. This does not include time walking around, watching TV or resting. Time under load.

I have to say that it works pretty much exactly as advertised. After reading the book I tried it and had a friend try it. We'd spend about fifteen minutes under load at the gym once a week. For me it changed to fifteen minutes every 9 to 12 days (you track your data in order to determine frequency). I got stronger with every passing week. Something that I was not able to do without a ton more effort in the past.

If you are interested in learning about this, start with Dr McGuff's (the author) videos:

http://www.bodybyscience.net/home.html/?page_id=2
Master Trick Photography Cool site.
You can for sure create a nice design without using any texture, but still from UX point of view, depending on the complexity of the user interface, buttons with shadows will be more visible and easy to recognize for a user than flat rectangles.
It is especially important when designing UI for buying things and making payments.
I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question. My best first approximation is to just jump into an open-source project and try to fix bugs. It gets you to both read code by those who are (presumably) more experienced, while also working your problem-solving skills.

Classical CS education is also important; I went to a school with a fairly math-heavy CS program so that's how I learned it. Our algorithms text was pretty good, but it's on my shelf at home, so I can't recommend it by name.

The lecture notes for CS 182 are reasonably good for the really basic stuff: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/raof/cs182-f12/schedule.shtml

[edit] Not quite as complete as they used to be; it was previously all taught from lecture notes, but they now have 2 textbooks they use as well
tl;dr: Read more, learn more, and do more programming.
The pseudo-C used in the Quake 3 VM had no malloc()[0] and they wrote a frigging AAA game with it. I suggest you check out their source code[1].

[0] http://wiki.ioquake3.org/Getting_the_most_from_Quake3_C#No_M...
[1] https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena
glib is not bad. you can even use vala, which is c-like, but has built in glib and gobject support.
There's a large block of memory that's easy to slice up on your own. It's called the BSS section, which is where global and static variables without an initial value are stored. BSS gets zeroed before main() is called.

This isn't possible in all cases, but for embedded software especially it's often possible to create all data structures as global or static variables. The compiler takes care of alignment concerns for you, and you're guaranteed not to have heap issues because you never use the heap. Of course, you can run out of the objects you pre-allocated in BSS, but that's an easier problem to diagnose and fix.
That's the first thing that struck me too. What magic is present in Toshl's ecosystem that allows people to spend more than they earn?

Stay away from this financial assistance software written by people who can't do math.
The 5 Minute Rule
You can bench without a spotter pretty safely up to about 75kg, at which point the roll of shame starts getting challenging. It's different for women though, because rolling a large amount of weight over breasts is apparently quite painful.
database.yml is also placed in config-directory.

secret_token.rb is placed where it is, because it is a initializer.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#locations-for...
It is bizarre when companies operate this way, but, without defending the practice, you need to understand that few middle managers have the power to change this situation. Moving up the ladder, owners and executives will simply say "this is how we do things" and leave it at that.

Personally, I think this situation exists because many corporate leaders have simply decided to preserve their compensation/authority pyramid at the expense of keeping their best potential employees. There is less short-term risk and disruption to the pyramid, the theory goes, to hiring a new wave of employees than to augment the more experienced staff.

Remember all of this, though, for when you have the power to influence the compensation of others! This understanding can become a competitive advantage when you're building teams of your own.
Ethanol is being operated in the same engine as gasoline.
Good idea, done! Thanks for the feedback :)
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns is one of my favorite books, my copy is incredibly beaten up. I just really like the way Kent writes.

I picked up my copy because I love Smalltalk, but I use a lot of those same patterns in Delphi, C#, and Python.
False promises by promises
I'm excited about Mozilla's rust. I hope that once it stabilises it can fill the evolutionary niche mythryl [http://mythryl.org] was aiming for.
Re: information density: you can actually change the font size in the message list to get more rows visible. You can also opt for a paginated UI where the message list takes up the whole screen, and you only see the preview pane when you drill down.
> Is the overhead of an extra db read the only reason people don't do this?

Yes, and using secret_token.rb is also way faster.
This article is largely rehashing what everyone I know already thinks. BUT, if you are going to claim to contradict widespread views, you should appeal to evidence.

If I disagreed with anything in this article, there is nothing here that would make me change my mind. The author cites how bad he felt that some trainer calling him "little girl weak" as a reason we should lift heavy weights?

Honestly, I couldn't care less about the author's insecurities.
"There's a recent paper refuting this theory..."

One academic study of 18 untrained athletes.

Mark Rippetoe (author of the Starting Strength book recommended by the original article) actually says that an untrained subject will improve their performance by doing any exercise.
Learn both. :)

Python has a less steep learning curve and has a more vibrant ecosystem.

Haskell has the potential to change the way you think about programming, and its ecosystem is maturing quickly.

I used Haskell for my university honours thesis. Spent a whole year on it but still haven't had the chance to fully grasp the concept of monads yet, but I'm not sure its because they're complicated or because I didn't need them.

I use python + django at my day job.
Here are my first impressions as a keyboard-heavy email user:

* Created account and added my google apps account. Detection worked well.

* Tried to switch to my google apps inbox by pressing Cmd-2 like twitter clients and other apps with a left bar. No dice.

* Pressed '?' to see a hotkey popup. No dice.

* Pressed 'c' to compose a new message. That worked.

* Tried to figure out how to get back to the inbox. Had to use the mouse.

* Scrolled down, it was slow.

* Closed and reopened inky, and apparently it's not taking my password (20 characters long and containing the characters ";*{~?").

I have no idea what my password is actually set to (it seems to have accepted the password but modified it before saving?) and can't log in anymore. Which is fine, because inky's not for me. Lots of promise I think, but the UI is just not responsive enough yet, and I'm pretty happy with GMail's web UI.
I thought you missed it. That's what I use tagging for. Am I doing it wrong?
E911 is complicated when it comes to VOIP. With providers such as Flowroute or Vitelity, you basically fill out a form with your current address/location and it takes some time to propagate to whatever system the dispatchers use. Basically, you can kiss E911 good-bye if you're using VOIP on the go.

Re reliability: VOIP, especially over a data plan, is not as reliable as conventional networks. I wouldn't rely on it for emergency situations. I switched from landlines a number of years ago at home and I've been at the mercy of my cable company outages.

FYI, I run a dedicated Freeswitch box and my providers are Flowroute and Vitelity.
Startup Idea Sweetspot (Venn Diagram)