skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even they - 37signals - have agreed http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-to-punt-on... they solve their scaling problems throwing bigger and faster machines to them.

I think the problem here is that they choose a technology that is difficult - but not impossible - to scale, and they didn't have either the in-house know-how to solve their problems neither the money to hire someone with the knowledge to do it.

I think RoR could have been a good decision a few years ago, when the web framework landscape what atrocious, but nowadays there're a lot of good options based on other programming languages that have already proved could be scaled without finding untraceable bugs. Heck, just a few days ago an acquaintance showed me a webapp running over a perl - Amazon, IMDB, Slashdot... use perl heavily - async framework 20% faster than node.js.
A ‘frighteningly ambitious’ way to improve email
Before the rewrite did you consider using Go too? I bring this up because you left it out and since it's a statically typed language I'm surprised you guys ignored it given your Scala background.
Google is a terrible example for discussion here because, as you point out, they also ship a popular browser and are actively contributing positively to PKI security in several ways.

Perhaps if you were to mentally s/Google/that hospitality company customer of Trustwave/ perhaps you could see my point more clearly.
Amen bro. If a site has tiny tiny type, I leave.

My pet peeve is low contrast font colors.

If you think you're cool because you have #ddd font on #fff background, YOU'RE NOT. JUST STOP.
Humans like having relatable protagonists in their stories.
OK then. Don't buy one.

Are you married to my wife's sister? Did yours pour a full glass of orange juice into your HP calculator? Nearly had a heart attack. Took the batteries out. Dunked it in clean water and put it out in the sun to dry. Still working like a champ many, many years later.
It means you'd have exactly the type of "tablet" that Micrsoft has gone nowhere with, for the last decade-plus.

How is the Surface any different than a straight-forward iteration on a Win7 tablet?

A neat keyboard for the slate form-factor?
Marginally more touch-friendly software before it dumps you into an interface built for kb/m?

For the last decade or so, some people have been well-served by such devices. This one is no different in that respect.

But it is simply not a step forward. It's a stubborn refusal to step in even the same general direction as more-popular tablets.
Tests and Builds are Made to be Broken
Is it OK to break the build?
The downvotes are not because of a "random drop-in" (by definition, he's asking here first - politely - so it's not random) - the downvotes (at least mine) are because of the tone. "lol". So the guy asks to visit some startups, and the answer here is, literally:

'No, and I'm laughing at you, because we run a tight ship and are above this nonsense."

Everything about that response embodies the sort of negativity that folks are trying to avoid here.
Move the goalposts around much, Marsh? You're the one bringing Google up. I agree, that was a bad rhetorical strategy.
Seems like school has had an influence on his grammar that numerous college graduates should envy.

Having been educated in France and lived my adult life in the US I can say the US education system has an advantage that other countries' may not have:

- In the US, one has the opportunity to get a college education at any age.
It's interesting to see how this might be the opposite experience of many founders. Some founder/technical CEOs wish they could just hunker down and code half or all of the time and are too afraid to go out and do the marketing, writing, and customer service thing at full steam. Seems like Danielle was in that position in Twilio and has dialed back to what makes sense for her current position.
UI of Twitter's new 'Vine' app: Subtle Evolution
Now, let's talk about tiny, tiny type.
I haven't tried it, but I've heard good things about the experience and the performance. It didn't seem very functional though when I first looked at it which is what I was interested in at the time.

There's something to be said though for being able to write programs that will already be doing real work before the pinky finger has released the return key that launched them, I like the feel of that and I've missed that with the JVM.
A "history"? Does your history consist of a single patent lawsuit 13 years ago? Also subsequent to the lawsuit Jeff Bezos went on public record as identifying that as a mistake. http://oreilly.com/news/amazon_patents.html. After which he spoke to congress about how to change the US patent law to fix it.

As an author on 25+ Amazon patents (not the one referenced by the post) I will tell you three things:

1/ The US patent system is broken. Everyone knows this.
2/ Every company has to protect itself by filing patents. This is just a reality of the system that we have.
3/ A company that turns its focus away from its customers and instead focuses on other companies is either a parasite (hello patent trolls!) or has lost its way.

My 0.02.
Take a step back and think about what you just said. Many startups can be launched without any specific qualifications or experience. You can learn as you go, fumble around, yet still find product-market fit and grow. I've done it and so have many others.

Maybe I'm taking crazy pills, but once you enter the realm of teacher/speaker/mentor/workshop-runner, I thought it was sort of assumed that you've previously put your knowledge to the test and at least tried to build something. Hell, even if you tried something and it was a huge smoldering failure, that's better than jumping on stage as soon as you close your copy of the Lean Startup.

Sorry, I really don't mean any disrespect. I just don't want to see an ecosystem of "startups teaching people how to build startups that teach people how to build startups" I've seen it in other industries and it sucks.
I had not seen raygun, but it is essentially the same as our approach: make an app and then clone it.

My app.rake is approximately the same as the executable in raygun: https://github.com/carbonfive/raygun/blob/master/bin/raygun

In fact this command is almost exactly the same
raygun: shell "find . -type f -print | xargs #{sed_i} 's/#{proto_name}/#{new_name}/g'"

app.rake: grep -rl #{find} #{directory} | xargs sed -i '' 's/#{find}/#{replace}/g'

I think this approach works for us and Carbon Five because we've picked one type of stack and go with that.

As to maintenance, I tend to add/test new platform features in the template app and use that as an example to how to upgrade the existing ones. If you do that and update all the gems in the process, it tends to stay up to date.
People will care where you went to undergrad, people will care where you got your MBA, but nobody will care about your high school (barring making old-money connections at a place like Andover or Exeter).

Some people will care about that stuff. Many won't.
Enjoy what a federal judge hearing CLS Bank v. Alice thinks:

> Judge: Why don't we actually look at a claim? Why don't we start with claim 26 of the 375' patent. It begins, "a data processing system to enable the exchange of obligations between parties, the systems comprising: a communications controller, a first-party device coupled to said communications controller, a data storage unit having information stored, a computer coupled to said data storage unit, said communications controller that is configured to do the following"

> Judge: That doesn't just sound like somebody saying a "method" with maybe a computer, I mean there are four separate physical tangible components of a system articulated.

> Lawyer: Your Honor, you're right. There's a computer, a hard drive, and a telephone.
Let's remember this line of thinking when we have things like GNU violations (ex: the shit storm that happened with the thesis wordpress theme):

GNU violations don't hurt the original author or the 'freedom' of the code. It only adds to it and makes the world a better place.
Developers use the RFCs to write implementations. That's what RFCs are for. In this case, GlobalSign is issuing certs that are noncompliant in a direction that reduces the security experienced by users of compliant implementations.

I think this is wrong both in principle and in practice.
Danielle, I'd be delighted to offer you a complimentary WP Engine account if you would like. lmk ben [at] wpengine.com
It's Easier (For Some) to Read on LCD Screens Than in a Paper Book
Because Crockford's viewpoint in the hands of a beginner is at best dogma. I think you need a solid base understanding of Javascript and some experience under your belt before The Good Parts comes into its own.
Weak sauce because it was a bit incoherent and the counter example didn't seem much better.

I've never really seen any poser CEOs at the conferences I attend. Usually genuinely successful founders or legitimate hackers. Maybe I'm going to the wrong events.
So basically, “main” is not an impure function. It’s a pure value representing an impure function. A monad is essentially a data type that represents computations in some domain-specific language, using data (return) and code (>>=) from the host language. The only thing special about the IO datatype is that the impure Haskell runtime can evaluate it.
Recommending Javascript the Good Parts to Javascript beginners is like recommending Effective Java to Java beginners. It is assumed you know some js/java and preferably have written some of it so that the patterns and antipatterns described in both books (Crockford's to a lesser degree, it's after all about the good parts) would make sense.
Silicon Valley shouldn’t fear China, Atlantic Monthly writer says
Yes! Looking at the sites I frequently visit this site is the worst offender. Me personally browse HN with a zoom of 150%.
Yes, this is a perfectly good class C network wasted. What a shame.
I think the inventors listed should be matched with likes of Edison and mocked. If society mocks them the social pressure might work better than legal means to avoid such non-sense.

So better make a web page with Amazon's hall of fame of inventors and add them to this list.
Center aligned is too easy: http://www.ioccc.org/1987/westley.c (sorry, couldn't resist)
James Stevens | How Can External Links Lift Your Sites Ranking?
I think the kid probably should transfer to a public school instead.

The workload is probably considerably lighter there, and he should be able to get a diploma while keeping his concern ongoing.

The business is making an OKAY income, but nothing gangbusters, even for the middle of nowhere.
Wow, thanks. You took the time to write all that. That is awesome.
As my cofounder and I like to tell people, Kirsty is one of the world's foremost experts on startup formation / founder issues. It's hard to imagine finding someone who helps more startups with as wide a range of issues as she does. This article is definitely spot on and well-deserved!
So wrong. And its like - we know better how big letters you can read. You don't. I zoom almost all sites on my iphone, on 13" mac and on my work's 27" imac. Its all the same - I need at least some font increase to read it comfortably, because every time I sit on different distance from the screen. Or I maybe need glasses (although my doctor does not seems to think so).
The RFC may or not matter, but what does matter is doing the right thing. For example, if critical Name Constraints are not universally supported, does that make it right to use the non-critical ones? I don't think so.

If Name Constraints are indeed important, I'd much rather see the CAB Forum first work with Apple until support is universal (or reasonably-well supported; whatever that means), and then start to use them.
8 Easy Steps On How To Fundraise Online
It's typecasting, basically. You perform well in one role and that's the role everyone will ever see you in. Until you grow a beard, wear tons of makeup or go completely avant-garde in your next role.

Which, ironically, is what a lot of founders of startups do and sometimes the world doesn't except that role, or you clash with your co-workers, or you approach with the wrong method (unsuitable for what's at hand anyway) and the project suffers. Which is why most fail.

Do what works for you. Which sounds easy when you really know you, but when you only know you through others, things get a bit more complicated.
The way adults treat teens is often unfortunate. It's often caused by the way teens treat adults, but then again, the ADULTS are the one who are supposed to be the bigger person in the exchange and break the cycle.

Sadly, while there are some great educators, there are some very lackluster ones as well.
http://www.jsdb.io/search?q=closure

:(
And then read this too (if you wonder about the origin of the domain name): http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html
While your last sentence may be true-ish (I'm not really qualified to answer with authority), your first sentence is very much not.

This relevant link gets posted a lot, but is worth posting again: http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves...
That is so true. I even remarked to my cofounder/husband recently that I finally understand why developers/founders I know tend to want to go into their code caves and just build, even to the extent of getting disconnected from customers. I've never been able to truly relate to that before, so it was pretty cool and made me feel closer to several friends. The pendulum has swung, as some might say.
Runs Android, not a full OS with access to the kind of stuff the surface has access to. He's talking about $1000 laptops running a full-featured OS.
An actual milkman would be great, Berkeley Farms makes the best Eggnog (my opinion) but trying to find it in stores is getting harder with the Safeway monopoly. I emailed their bizdev team in hopes of establishing a way to get deliveries but alas, to no avail.
Questions to ask during developer interviews
So we're at the point where the actual patents are entirely pretext. The words written on them are now completely irrelevant. They're just proxies for money.
Google Chrome browser blocks websites with malware warnings, including YouTube
Not at all. Once the OS and webserver (and whatever apps you need) are in memory, it's just as fast as a hard-drive.

Non executable data (the majority of data served by webservers) can still reside on magnetic media or on a NAS.
He is succesfully managing a Minecraft hosting company. I don't think he is lacking in the problem solving skill.
China Passes U.S. to Become World’s Biggest Trading Nation
Show HN: Orion - An alternate front end to graphite (Open sourced)
You can already get almost exactly that on Android, which has convertible laptops such as the Asus Transformer Prime already available.
So like the tiny type and low contrast colors of Hacker News...? Everyone seems to be complaining about other sites but the default font size on Hacker News is difficult to read as well. So much so that I use a custom stylesheet.
It is spoken of internally as a liability, and the executives want nothing more than to get rid of it for many reasons, not the least of which being their current investors care only about user numbers, and don't seem to count third-party users.

Trust me on this.
Show HN: RapGenius-JS, a querying API for rapgenius.com
Flying squid outruns Usain Bolt
Simple: they close the account without appeal and there is no way to contact a human.

http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...
I read the letter twice. The first time naturally, and the second time from the viewpoint of a parent to try and compensate for my natural bias. It would appear to me that your natural bias lies on the other side. Try to reread the letter from the point of view of a kid who is making $350,000 a year (I realize that he personally isn't pocketing the money, but he is responsible for it). I feel like you are too quickly dismissing his point of view entirely because you are not able to sympathize with it. I have not a few friends from my college days who would agree with a few of his sentiments. They are now working at low paying jobs despite their high levels of education.

> It's definitely a goofy, pompous, rambling letter written by someone who doesn't know what he doesn't know yet.

Here, you are quick to come to the conclusion that he is simply naieve. In that case, I too, may be naieve because I cannot quickly point out what it is that he is missing. Neither do you in your comment point it out. If you get around the language, which may seem pompous, it appears to me that this kid would actually like to know the answer to this very question that you have dodged.
I refuse to write anything with less than 18px default font size, for this very reason. It's so infuriating when text is small. I have silly old screens and I still can't read your content!

I've read comments in this about differing DPI sizes, so I'll see if I can take that into consideration as well.
A government agent or a federal agent is an agent of a federal law enforcement agency.

They're a federal agency, but not of law enforcement (AFAIK).
No, we're still at the point where alarmist headlines from people who don't know how to read a patent get lots of karma. We've been here for a long time now.
Reference, please? If this has been challenged in court, I'd love to see some evidence so I can stop worrying about it.
Entrepreneur, You Must Realize It’s Best To Live With Your Doubt
Oh, you can set up and test a Linux cluster on Android? Can you use snapshots in the middle of a GDB debugging process and then restore it when you've "stepped past the bug" and need to go back?

What kind of Virtualization do you have to use to get that?

Come on, real computers, with real virtualization is an absolute boon to programming productivity. Toy systems like Android and iOS just aren't there yet. I don't think there is any virtualization platform available for ARM either.
Y Combinator Opens Applications For New Class
Check state laws. Since he is a minor, there may be compulsory attendance laws. Also, until he is of legal age, he may have to do as he is told by his parents. Look at the state laws. Look at homeschooling laws. Look at the possibility of attending college part time. Getting him enrolled in college part time may go over better with the parents and the school system/general bureaucracy while freeing up time for him to sleep and run his business.

Since he is clearly intelligent and strong willed, I think the best role you can serve is as a mediator between him and the system/powers that be. Our laws generally are not designed to account for someone so young and so competent. Most adults will think he cannot possibly know what is in his own best interest and, legally, he has little right to decide for himself. Btdt, got the t-shirt. I managed to advocate for myself anyway, but it was via a form of emotional blackmail since, as a legal minor, I had no legal right to look out for my own interests. Emotional blackmail is probably not the best route to go for a budding entrepreneur. Dealmaking is a better path forward if he can get any cooperation.

You could also search for laws regarding emancipation of a minor. When I was 14, California passed laws allowing for emancipation at age 15. This means essentially claiming adult status early for purposes of signing rental agreements and other contracts. However, it is probably reserved for cases of abuse. Given his age, I wonder whose name is actually listed as legal owner of a lot of the business assets. Most businesses will not sign a contract with a minor because they legally cannot be held to it. If his parents signed for everything, he needs to keep them on his side. Until he is 18, there is a legal and practical limit to how much he can tell the adults around him to go screw themselves. (In cases of abuse, you can stretch that limit because ending up on the street may be an acceptable alternative. But that hardly seems to apply to this situation.)

If he were 18, that would be a completely different situation. But he is not. So legally he likely has no right to just do as he pleases. So if you wish to help him, you probably need to help him find a reasonable compromise which is palatable to all parties. If he really wants to be an entrepreneur, this negotiation process (in which he legally has no real say) will be an excellent advanced course in dealmaking. If he views it that way, perhaps he can view it as a challenge to relish instead of just a bunch of pointless obstacles from idiot adults. If you haven't already, you should both read "getting to yes" and "the heart and mind of the negotiator".
Careful: two different arguments here. One is what Google is doing, the other is what GlobalTrust is doing.

While I'm not alarmed by what GlobalTrust is doing, I think CA's should not be in the business of selling CA=YES certificates to other organizations. No matter what X.509 allows them to express.
If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value.

Even after just using a little bit of median filter it looks better: http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg
That's the first one I can recall as well. Any others around that same time? Perhaps the social networks? Friendster / myspace / facebook?
I like the company I'm working at and I'd like to contribute by taking our in-house solutions based on FileMaker to a web application. Furthermore I want those skills as a backup - in case I want (or have) to look for another job, FileMaker isn't going to impress. Also, while the music is certainly my passion, it's unlikely that I (or most other musicians for that matter) could make a living with it.

However those reasons sound rather career- and money-centric. It's not all that rational though - I like making and creating things, whether it's music, software or design - but I value doing things right and with care. Learning a "proper" language/framework and being competent with it would help a lot and I'd consider it as essential.
No, that's just the abstract. Claim 1, for example, reads as follows:

1. A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of
products, the method comprising performing instructions under the control of
a computer system for:

receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and
a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of
the one or more list items identifying a product, a quantity to deliver,
and a frequency of delivery;

periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having a date
and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the delivery slot, the
order being generated in advance of the date and time for delivery such that
the order has a period of time of pendency prior to the delivery;

creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order
based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each
list item in the recurring delivery list;

receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item of the
recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency of the order;

in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system,
whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item;

in response to determining that the order includes an order item corresponding
to the first list item, modifying, by the computer system, the order
item corresponding to the first list item based on the change made to the
first list item of the recurring delivery list; and

providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment system
capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered
substantially on the date and time for delivery.

Now, I consider myself a creative person. But I would have a hell of a time trying to read that claim on a fucking milkman.

Learn to read patents, people.

edit: Formatting is really hard apparently.