skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that people tend to overestimate the difficulty of debugging crashes and memory leaks. A lot of C++ code I've seen has tried to move heaven and earth to ensure that mistakes are impossible, at the cost of introducing a lot of rather expensive (time to write, time to execute, time to maintain) infrastructure - or baggage, if you're unkind - that also make things unclear in the debugger.

This isn't quite a waste of time, but it's been my own experience that it's cheaper to just make things as straightforward as you can, then simply ask everybody to try not to make mistakes. Often you can build in systems that make it easy to diagnose problems when they occur, or just rely on people's debugging skills. Some programmers consider this a total cop-out - they're right, I should be ashamed - but I've found the overall TCO to be lower.

You might have to find this out the hard way to believe it.

The worst thing is that some people think the alternative should be C ;)
Thanks! We definitely want to be open about what we're doing to help demonstrate the safety we're offering. Making that dialog intelligible to users of different sophistications in terms of security knowledge is a major challenge for us.
10 Weird Gadgets that Never Got Off the Ground
Can you offer an example of the creators claiming that it does something that it really cannot do?

Also, while MongoDB does have its faults and some sharp edges, it is far from poor. For the most part, 2.x MongoDB is solid, performs well and generally without issue.
Admittedly I haven't used older versions of Cassandra, or under as much load as I have Postgres or Mongo.

My point was that it is designed for being distributed and it doesn't hide that fact. Mongo's replica sets and sharding are much less transparent and much less predictable.
As an avid FB/Twitter/Instagram/everything user, privacy is not a hard problem to deal with: if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone will see it and know it's you. It's as simple as that.

This applies to your job search, family photos, embarrassing music, nude photos, and just about anything else. If you don't want it to be seen by the world, don't share it. At the end of the day, your privacy is your responsibility.
Apple will have to respond to this, I think. This is really what the possibility of mobile computing is, not just our information anywhere we want it.
I think you and the GP were making the same (valid) point.
How, concretely, do you do that?
Did you read the article? Was the photo not reposted to Twitter? Was this done using a common Facebook feature?
No, and I actually used to work for a company that made a similar type of search engine!

That probably would have worked as well (don't think I considered that specific solution). Mongo came up on top because of it's wide use (among other things), ie it's pretty easy to find support and lots of stories about how to scale it under different scenarios.
hm i never got it :(
and i tested the address too since i don't use it much!
i'd definitely love to chat though. an alternate just in case is jwb [at] tu [dot] nr
I always love to read post-mortems like this. It's fascinating to see how a simple event can trigger a massive failure & we can learn a lot from them.
The plain answer is it's painful using newer technologies. If you use node.js and mongoDB be prepared for working without a net and stumbling across errors that no one has encountered before as it comes to fruition. Be prepared for putting a question out to the community and hearing nothing back. But honestly I've seen the same thing with almost every technology at the beginning of it's life span. If you are a pioneer recognize it and plan accordingly.

And if you just chose it willy-nilly because it's a hot tech, well.. You made a mistake.

PS - linking to a couple paragraph blog with come conjecture and a link to a google search? That deserves a bitch slap. Try harder.
Sit on the floor and play with their toys.

Then take a nap.

Repeat.
Probably you prefer to life in a world where the US of America creates wars so they could take the oil and gas of some countries, and millions of people die because of that.

A better world when minimum wage laws exist in your country but people buy Walmart items manufactured in a country where those rules not apply, so you could actually feel better.

The maximum disparity between top and bottom was not in the 1920, it is now, with CEOs getting 50x the minimum pay of their workers and growing, and central banks printing money ad infinitum.

I agree with you helping people that actually could help theirselves, is overrated.
This is especially true for people with strong opinions.
Because MySQL is owned by Oracle.
Feel free to edit wikipedia, Qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience ... Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia But, I think you might be thinking of something else.

Some people object to saying Subjective Experience the same thing as Brain State. But, I have never seen an argument that does not at some point presuppose the difference. AKA assume a p-zombie exists...

PS: The Chinese room is a thought experiment is a great analogy for consciousness, they only reason to suppose the room is not intelligent is if you presupposes requirements that's the vary existence of such a room disproves. A computer or person following the instructions may not understand Chinese without the instructions but by following them they create something which does understand Chinese. Just as neurons are not by themselves conscious, but together and in the correct arrangement they can create consciousness.
Pure CSS Menu Generator
Keeping it on the phone means that we don't need to re-generate a new one or transmit your old one when you change computers.

You're absolutely right that keeping the data safe on the phone is an important challenge and it's something we're working hard on. PIN-based encryption is the solution for now, but an invisible attack could be dangerous (though the attack's you mention through the USB key require a rooted phone with permissions allowed, which is not common- privilege escalation attacks are one vector which we still have to work against)

We think what we have right now is a big improvement over the status quo, and that we still have a lot of room to keep getting better. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks, that's awesome.
What do you use for basic data structures in C? Stuff like hash map, priority queue, sorted set, etc.
Twitter has added new (and very nice) background formatting options
> rather than good beer or tea

I don't know what exactly you're drinking, but there's plenty of good beer and tea in SF and other large US cities.
Modern c++ can be as safe as any language given rigorous guidelines and methods. But X project put together with "programmers off the street" is likely to involve some portion of crashes through sloppy coding.

The thing is that you have to clarify safety and danger. In more application than people would like to acknowledge, slowing down to the point of unusability can be as much of a dangerous result as crashing with a null pointer. Slowness has been standard quality of Python and Ruby development as much as null pointers have been a standard quality of c/c++ development. Either can be avoided with proper care but these all somewhat different failure modes.

The one thing is that c++ do present a different kind of security risk than Ruby/Python slow-downs or even Ruby/Python crashes. Despite this, a some point you still have to consider the tradeoffs.
GitHub had a switch-related outage earlier in December, too: https://github.com/blog/1346-network-problems-last-friday

I've seen some really wonky behavior in Cisco equipment even in a really small ISP network, but I have no idea if this is normal or not. Maybe one of the very few people that's responsible for a network of GitHub's size could chime in; I'd be interested too.
It's complicated because advertising companies profit from networks that are open and visible.

Facebook's privacy controls used to be very straight-forward and easy to use. Starting with Beacon, etc. Facebook's strategy has been to make it as complicated and time-consuming as possible in the hopes that you will just acquiesce and allow them to profit from your personal information and online social interactions.
There is more than one famous Bernoulli. This is the work of Jacob Bernoulli; Daniel Bernoulli, of Bernoulli's principle, is arguably better known.
For point 1, I would call that the use of white space rather than negative space.
You could always get involved with any open source software project.

You might check out the High Priority Free Software projects at: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
to see if any of those are up your alley.
GitHub as a sysadmin/system engineer I feel your pain, I understand it completely and know the horrors of failures leading into multi-hour recovery. That said, you need to do better. This is a heavily relied upon resource for the open source community. Perhaps you didn't estimate this sort of growth but now you are here I'm sorry but the weight does fall on your shoulders. I heavily commend you guys on the service you've provided thus far and what you've done to actually pull all the varying language/library communities together. I honestly want to see this scale and serve 5 9s year round. You need to take a good hard look at the architecture of the stack and find a way to get it multi-homed.
Isn't it extremely hard to get a visa to move to the US from the UK? What was your experience with that like?
I don't think it's too much to ask for someone to be polite and decent.
Exactly. One of the first people many Italians think of when they hear 'entrepreneur' is Berlusconi, whose 'big idea' wasn't something new or clever or otherwise particularly innovative, but a sneaky way around the state television monopoly. I think it's an example that shows both sides of the coin: the oppressive state, and the "entrepreneur" being not an innovator, but someone good at bending the rules. So yeah, that's probably where that comes from, but it's a vicious circle, because people look down on those who are doing something new and creative as well.
Interesting feedback ... I agree on the log messages that look terrifying yet, when googled, are like "oh, that's normal, don't worry about that." I also agree that the 2.x versions of MongoDB have been a great step forward for stability and performance.

On the logging, not sure what you mean by the old logs get clobbered. Is this, perhaps, some house-cleaning job that you have on your server? When we stop/start processes, the logs are appended and keep going.

On the issues with primary/secondary and state changes, do you host your databases on Amazon? We have often found that when we have this issue, it was pinpointed back to some temporary intra-zone networking glitch with AWS ... either with their name resolution or a blip in one zone being unable to see another zone in the window of time that MongoDB has set for the response.

These often (if not all the time) go unreported by AWS until you get them to dig a bit and report back. We effectively utilize priority to keep the member we want as primary and if a state change does occur, it moves back once the full set is healthy again.
Public Telephone users need to show valid ID in Mumbai
Agreed. At my last job I did most of my programming in Lua. We used C++ & Cocos2d-x with LuaC bindings for our game engine and wrote all of the game logic in Lua.

I really like a lot of Lua's features, especially closures and the way metatables work. Although Lua doesn't support true classes, it's possible to implement them nicely through metatables.
I'm not sure what the intent of the article is.

However, we can see that it has again sparked the age old flame war. It reminds me of the online flamewars that start once someone voices their opinion on some hot topic like mac vs pc, ios vs android, etc.
I'm in the process of moving all of my domains from GoDaddy to DNSimple.com. They have very definitely nailed the "straightforward and easy to use" aspects of a registrar.

Two additional things that I hadn't really heard about them until a friend recommended them:

1. They have DNS Setup 'templates' - basically one click setup for things like Heroku or GitHub Pages.

2. They offer two-factor authentication (via Authy) which when you think about just how bad things could go if somebody got hold of your DNS Settings seems like something more registrars should do.

Biggest downside is that they are a little more expensive than GoDaddy or Namecheap, but I guess it's rounding errors in the scheme of things.

https://dnsimple.com or https://dnsimple.com/r/1d932aeba20283 if you don't mind a referral code.
50s is a mid-life of an adolescent in the Western world. You are not adolescent when you are infant, toddler or a teen.
Came here to say the same thing. This is Mark Imbriaco's wonder twin power. It really is something to generate goodwill from an outage writeup. Part of it is just unflinching transparency combined with nerdy details; you never feel like they're hiding anything, and you get to learn about all the operational doodads they're working with to run at this scale.
So how much did you contribute back in these 5 years ?
+1 to gnaritas side here. I'm in the military, home of record is Texas, grew up in Kansas and Nebraska (what got me to read this thread), spent 95% of my adult life south of the Mason-Dixon line. Not all Republicans are crazy, but the disease of "Republican crazy" is rampant. See XKCD #1127 for another perspective. https://xkcd.com/1127/
Since that's not what happened, you're wrong.
The professor for my software engineering class mentioned it briefly at the beginning of the semester, but it was never brought up again. If you don't do a lot of learning on your own, you're probably not going to encounter it.
Sometimes I meet people who follow this advice, and it usually doesn't go very well. Yes, egotism and self-centeredness is common, but it is a vice, and I try not to be that way. I really don't appreciate it when someone tries to encourage me to be egotistical. It is manipulative and harmful to me.
Backbone-relational model solves this problem with a few additional features (and last version it's compatible with Backbone 0.9.9): https://github.com/PaulUithol/Backbone-relational
I hate to sound so negative, but that tweet just reeked of wanting attention. If you are genuinely upset your friend posted a photo, CONTACT THEM, don't make a fucking public reply at someone and start a dialogue that gets this on some blog. Seemed like of the ways to handle this, her chosen method was very near the bottom.
All very constructive points, thanks for this.

On the point of slow queries, nailing a slow query is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. I've found that Dex (http://blog.mongolab.com/2012/06/introducing-dex-the-index-b...) and NewRelic help diagnose trouble queries pretty well.
Apparently reading comprehension isn't necessary when commenting about Facebook.
Facebook's made a lot of mistakes but I disagree with you pretty completely here. It doesn't help your case that Facebook just last week released a new dedicated privacy menu that is exceedingly nice, simple, straightfoward. It goes out of its way to summarize your privacy settings for you.
"Find your spark" an essay by Dutch designer, Kevin Anderson
> This is wildly inefficient

You need to have context before you say something like that. Just ONE of our engineering machines probably takes two or three weeks to setup from scratch due to the amount of software and configuration it requires. It has some 600GB of valuable data, without counting the OS and applications installed.

So, in that context, taking the time to make multiple redundant disk images is invaluable and, yes, very efficient. If the system drive dies and no other hardware failure is present, you can be back up and running within an hour or two. That's worth money.

> over kill for most people

Absolutely true. Every situation is different.
This is likely the reason the large cloud companies all do testing that actively causes outages. I'm over-simplifying on purpose here: this is something that requires a lot of thought.

At first glance that seems foolish, but to quote you, "complex network topologies" are very prone to falling over badly. Since they all seem to be a one-off custom setup these days, how can you be sure it won't fall over?

Here are the testing approaches I know about:

1. Netflix Chaos Monkey: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in... - but that doesn't mean Netflix has it all together. They still have outages.

2. Google does it. They have a team that goes around unplugging network cables and monitoring how fast the engineers can find and fix the problem. I can't dig it up but it was only a few months ago - hey, Google, your search engine can't find an article about you. :)
This is by far the most overlooked feature of being a part of the Google ecosystem. I don't think Microsoft or Apply can match the ability for me to give out a number to someone, not a special username and not something that requires you to have a particular device, Just a plain old phone number. People can call me on that number and I can pick up on

1. My Phone
3. My Tablet
3. Any Computer I am logged into <- This one is special

In addition I can call other people using any of those devices and pay nothing for the privilege.
GitHub and CloudFlare are my two favorites in this regard; if you like GitHub's post-mortems, you'll love CloudFlare's: http://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/postmortem
They don't use Cisco for their Aggregation switches.
Pshaw. What a wide canopy you throw, "Journalism!" Are you talking about BuzzFeed's brand of linkbaity lists? The NYT's high-class reportage? National newsmagazines (Newsweek, RIP)? Television news-style storytelling? Or the financial press... or the regional publications out there (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle come to mind)... or industry publications -- heck, Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting embarks on journalism, no doubt.

"No follow up article is going to be written in the views are low," you write. Says who? You've proven your ability to cite sources, why not cite this one? Professional editorship is dead? What an assumption.

You mention big media in your edit. Good of you to get more specific with your straw-man, I appreciate that. However, if you're sick of the perceived decline of what you think to be "journalism," call me sick of people who lump the worst of this world of reportage and writing in with everyone else.
You can't predict what you can't predict. This is what makes the Chaos Monkey experiment so interesting. And yes, HA is hard, and with many things it is hard with respect to latency.

The more latency you can tolerate, the easier HA becomes. At an extreme, if you can tolerate 1 minute latency than each request can come in and compute a most likely way to complete a request with the most authoritative set of actors. Few people though are willing to tolerate a commit taking 15 minutes, much less a couple of hours.

This was one of the most insightful things about NFS and the whole stateless design. By burdening the client with the state the server could be much simpler.

Once you get above a certain size the problems change becoming both easier and harder (easier in that you can disperse your data further, harder in that your confidence in agreement between copies takes longer to compute and thus increases latency). It would be interesting if Google shared their work on Spanner (they seemed to have tackled this problem at a large scale) and given Netflix's experience (Chaos Monkey's dad) it seems like Amazon still hasn't quite gotten the recipe right.

It is a deliciously thorny problem with subtle complexity and unexpected inter-dependencies.
But wouldn't Volkswagen still want to maintain all of those domains? I highly doubt they're going to give those all up for either competitors or domain squatters to snatch up.

So really in the end, a custom TLD is just /more/ money they need to shell out for protecting their name online.
They don't have garbage collection. C++ is still the most capable no-garbage-collection language.
You don't sound very experienced. I mean that factually, not as an insult. For what it's worth, I've been in "key" roles (lead engineering, founder, and m-team) since 1996; I've spent my whole career in startups. I am not making the horror stories up, and they've happened in places with extremely good "lawyering".
What do you suggest as a replacement? Heartbeat is in use at many big players.
Why doesn't rails add this to the .gitignore generated from `rails new myapp`? And maybe include a rake task to generate a new secret token. That's why I've been doing ever since I found out about this.
Deliberately firing people on the eve of their cliff is immoral. But the solution isn't to reduce the cliff.
The Charisma Myth is a very good book on charisma that goes into this in detail. The author, Olivia Fox Cabane, claims there are essentially three types of charisma:

1. Power

2. Presence

3. Warmth

Power translates to respect, warmth translates to being liked, and presence translates to making people feel that you are "there" when you talk to them.

These 3 types of charisma are orthogonal. That's why you can find powerful jackasses, wimpy "nice guys", or people who are both powerful and well-liked.
Not in the US. I have never seen such a thing.In any case, most people who own homes have dishwashers.
I was brought up to only use stonith via serial or other non-switched network connection. Running over the same network is bound to cause problems. But its not a great solution anyway.
I don't think I need to spell out that Italy's laws and government are probably not what most people think of when they think of "perfectly functioning", right?

Markets often work well even if they're not "perfectly functioning". Governments certainly solve other kinds of problems decently even if they are not "perfectly functioning" either. I'm pretty happy with the health care here in Italy, for instance.
That's an easy if weak way to deal with a human reality and the failures of tech design to accommodate it. How does it work for information about me that other people gather? Like medical records? Is that my responsibility as well?
It's not a gray area at all. As has been asserted many, many times in the past, if you're not paying for a service, you're the product. In this light, a product bears no ethical responsibility to its manufacturer. It would be quite insane for a company to blame one of its products for being faulty. "Don't look at us, it's the product that killed those people."

This is just products acting the way they do. Per #1, it's not our responsibility to divine (or even respect) what the real meaning of "Friends Only" is. #2 is irrelevant, if the subject matter wasn't as it is, a (minor) celebrity wouldn't be bringing the Streisand down on it. People reshare all the time, and in fact there are pages on FB entirely dedicated to the phenomenon that enjoy hundreds of thousands of reshares for their posts.
Lending and Borrowing Video Games: The End May Be Near
My god, as someone who wakes up at 7, starts working right away and doesnt usually stop until around 7-8, this rang pretty true to me. I really need to going out of my way to help people because I never get as much out of it as I give. I do recruitment for a startup and constantly have people asking me to help them fill roles at other companies. I wonder how many extra hours I'd be able to give to my girlfriend or current job without those. Need to work on shedding some excess.
They're Jewish.