skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A firm that began offering the same healthcare at lower prices would be overflowing with customers (the current hospitals

I have a lot of problems with what you wrote, but will just focus on one thing. You base your argument at least partially on the idea that hospitals overflowing 'with customers' is a desirable thing. First, hospitals are already overflowing with patients. Demand is not an issue.

Secondly, hospitals and other health care providers are in a different market - the better the service, the less their customers need them. If they are motivated by maximizing profit - they have two ways of doing it: keeping you sick, or getting more sick people. Neither of those strategies are good things.

You might argue that this isn't necessary, because there is always a supply of sick people. I would refer you to my first point - demand isn't the issue, and the point of the different healthcare providers are explicitly to reduce demand.
Here's what I don't understand about firing. Why not give any warning? Why not give people time to find another job? I mean if they were good enough for you to hire them and sit through the 2-3 week interview/hiring process - it should be fair to give them say a month of warning to tap their network, and hop over to another company. It seem unnecessarily painful and arbitrary to just say - "Your fired. Get out" - especially if they are great people, and all you are doing is shutting down their project.

Acts like these remind me of the old courts held by Kings during the medieval times.
iOS Devs: Let's stop making our users type "gmail.com"
As msy replied there are for sure some informations the seller wouldn't have from a credit card. But more generally this is a good question, I don't know how much informations the merchant obtain from VISA when I purchase something online. I would expect none, just that the transaction is authorized or denied.
...it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.

This division between researchers and everyone else is exactly the kind of elitism that broader access to research is supposed to reduce. People fighting for open access aren't necessarily responding to an existing widespread demand, but anticipating the future benefits to society.

They are trying to be ahead of the curve, somewhat like the oft maligned RMS was ahead of the curve with his understanding of and fighting against DRM.
I think this analysis and simulation does not account for one important thing: random routing is stateless and thus easy to be distributed. Routing to the least loaded Dyno needs to be stateful. It is quite easy to implement when you have one centralized router, but for 75 dynos this router would likely become a bottleneck. With many routers, intelligent routing has its own performance cost, the routers need to somehow synchronize state, and the simulation ignores this cost.
One book I would recommend on the subject of death and its place in society is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Although it uses a Freudian (or rather, Rankian) foundation you can appreciate its thinking and conclusions without buying into that whole framework. Its concept of individual "immortality projects" (which are exactly what they sound like) is especially helpful.

Here's part of the notes I took while reading it:

http://tdod.pen.io/

Please excuse any grammar and/or spelling mistakes since these were written very quickly on a cell phone keyboard.

P.S.: To feint: please fix your site. Trying to publish material on Pen.io under an the custom URL "tdod-notes" I got someone else's page and couldn't even go back to edit what I had posted. Also, using a custom URL "tdod" didn't work at first, and I couldn't change the title to "Partial notes for Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death" afterwards. It seems like the safest way to use the site now is to create a short "asdf" post and then edit it to add the content.
Somewhat unrelated:

Does anyone else think that RapGenius makes a great blogging platform? I'd love a plugin that enabled similar annotations on any blog, even if they're just by the original author and not crowdsourced.
Git's strength is with source control and it sucks at dealing with image/music/video/binary data. It's OK for a basic few assets that rarely change, but it takes effort to make it work properly.

Consider the problem of people trying to work on the same image file at the same time. An easy/naive solution for most version control software is to stop multiple people from editing the same file at once, but AFAIK this is impractical in git; the antithesis even. Others might do something complex like allow different people to edit different layers of the same photoshop doc and try to merge them.

There are version control solutions such as Alienbrain and even Perforce that are much more efficient at handling assets out of the box.
They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.
It doesn't appear that running on Heroku is free for them in terms of time.
we just switched 1/3rd of our infrastructure off our existing host (engineyard, which uses AWS) onto raw AWS and saved about $2500/month. You can do it too!
Looks like Cloud 66 couldn't have picked a better day to announce their service: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5213862.
you are infinitely more likely to take a flight if you know everyone is being molested.

Speak for yourself; I for one don't like being treated badly. It's security theater at best, and runaway government power at worst, and either way it's at the cost of human dignity.
Correct, but I'd say now's the time to get your questions in if you've got one.
PtP volt in a pretty package
Even their own docs were wrong on this for a long time. It bit me in the ass back in 2011 and I got them to clarify and update the documentation just a little.

http://tiwatson.com/blog/2011-2-17-heroku-no-longer-using-a-...
Given how bold the claims are, I'd say it'd be best if Heroku reacted quickly, indeed. Cause right now, it seems that the author is either not understanding how Heroku works or ignoring important specifics/nuances inherent to their "secret-sauce" algorithms. Whether the analysis done in the article is sound or the author is actually pushing an agenda remains to be discussed and the sooner the better.

I'm also quite wary of the incentive a 20K monthly bill would give you to try and shake Heroku down for a rebate. By the way, the figure in itself seems very high, but out of context it's impossible for me, the reader, to evaluate if that's actually good money or not. Maybe other solutions (handling everything yourself) would actually be WAY more costly, maybe Heroku actually provides a service that is well-worth the money or maybe the author is right and it's actually swindling on Heroku's part, no way to know.
Question from a non-Ruby-expert: does Thin, which uses Event Machine, help with this at all, or do requests still block on other IO like database calls, etc?
NGees – another Android-powered gaming console
Dismissing these discussions and ignoring your male privilege actually creates more distance between genders. If we ignore it things will continue idly on their course. Everyone needs to talk about it for any sort of fundamental change.
As other's note: Assembly and Pascal were the original system languages for the Macintosh. As I recall, C was not used until a year or two after the launch of the Mac when Lightspeed C was released. (Lightspeed was later renamed Think C)

Apple did not use C heavily until the OS was re-written in C++ in System 7 in 1991
I can see it now: montage with Python classes being extended and nested ternary operaters being crafted, github pull requests, opaque shots of stackoverflow code scrolling over Owen Wilsons face as he slams caffeinated drinks.
I agree. The art doesn't have to be good or hung in a gallery to be of value.

The paintings represent an new, and perhaps candid insight into the thoughts and feelings of a former president. They might reveal something we wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to observe. GWB may not even know what he's revealing about himself.

My take on the paintings is that they project a sense of loneliness, separation, and introspection.

very interesting.
Should be fixed now.

I plan on making a better detail view for individual movies (TBD)

In the meantime I removed the Read More
A mining pool significantly lowers the volatility and yields a more consistent rate of return. The difference in expected return isn't much: an effective fee of approximately 1%.
How do they know what algorithm Heroku uses for randomization to stimulate the results?

The differences in simulations are astonishing, I would not think Heroku's engineers were fine with this approach.

'Let's push this random balancing out.. 1000% increase in resources? Oh well, just update documentation!'
Why an Apple TV SDK Excited the Internet
You're so right. With Dell, you get twice the computer for half the price:

Dell Precision Series M4700

Height: 1.29" to 1.44" / Width: 14.80" / Depth: 10.08" / "Target Starting weight": 6.33 lbs

Apple MacBook Pro 15"

Height: 0.71" / Width: 14.13" / Depth: 9.73" / Weight: 4.46 lbs
Wouldn't the bad tails of random routing be an unpredictably long length of time since long running requests times are unpredictable?

Even if you work on narrowing the fat tails, shouldn't you still need to be upfront and clear about how adding a new dyno only gives you an increased chance of better request handling times as you scale?
I spent four years developing Ruby full time. The last few years, I've been doing iOS full time, and there's no way I'd add a third-party layer to my app.

If you want to ship a high quality iOS app, you need to understand Objective-C inside and out. If you are using RubyMotion to avoid learning Objective-C, you will ship at the the cost of massive technical debt.

If you already know Objective-C, Ruby gives you a more concise syntax. Having used both languages for a while, and now that ARC exists, I'm comfortable using Objective-C as a high level language. Objective-C is wordier than Ruby, but when I return to the code a year later, I can still understand what it does.

As much as I hate Xcode, Apple expects you are using it. Sometimes features land in Xcode a version ahead of the command line tools.

For the handful of benefits I see from RubyMotion, I see a mountain of risks. Will Apple change its policy on accepted languages? Will the translation layer blowing up when you need to ship a hot fix the day before the iTunes store shuts down for Christmas? Will someone acquire the RubyMotion team and sunset the product?

Maybe I'm a different target audience. If an industry-changing platform appeared, I wouldn't leverage what I already know to dabble in it. I would do things the idiomatic way. Even if it takes longer to ship my first app, I think it's the faster path to mastery.
Don't the "less qualified" people also drag down the rest?
It helps to distribute accounts between one major bank and one or two local credit unions.

The only problem is that you need a fair amount of money in each to get 'perks' and reduced fees.
Data Dep't here. Postgres scales great on Heroku, AWS, and in general. We've got users doing many thousands of query per second, and terabytes of data. Not a problem.

The issue with the number of connections is that each connection creates a process on the server. We cap the connections at 500, because at that point you start to see problems with O(n^2) data structures in the Postgres internals that start to make all kinds of mischief. This has been improved over the last few releases, but in general, it's still a good idea to try and keep the number of concurrent connections down.

*EDIT: thanks. not a thread. :)
Like I said, it may have changed. It's been a few years. It was very difficult to use compared to Pivotal Tracker. Lots of fields to enter a story card, no live updating. I had to constantly remind my team to go in and update their cards, because they hated doing it. It would time out after a few hours, so they couldn't leave it open all day. Navigation was also cumbersome. You had to go to a bunch of different pages to see everything.

When we switched to Pivotal Tracker it was a breath of fresh air. Everything updated in real time, so if two people were making changes, they would see them immediately. Everything was all on one screen, and it never timed out so they could just leave it open all day. I never had to remind them to update their story cards again.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but wouldn't straightforward Round Robin routing by Heroku restore their "one dyno = one more concurrent request" promise without incurring the scaling liabilities of tracking load across an arbitrarily large number of dynos?
Better avoid making any online purchases whatsoever, or credit card purchases altogether. Every merchant gets this information.
> The problem you'd have to solve here is basically the subset sum problem: given a set of transfers in an out of a mixer (let's say you already know which addresses it uses, which is not easy since it can make new ones for free) which subsets of the transfers out have the same totals as which subsets of transfers coming in?

This isn't even the right problem, given the usage model that I posited and to which mootothemax replied; if you keep a balance stored in the mixing account, to which you make deposits on a regular payments, then it's highly unlikely that outgoing payments will match incoming payments in the first place. How often do you currently deposit checks into your bank account in exactly the same amount as outgoing payments that you immediately write after making the deposit?

There'd be no conclusively correlating information here; payments into the mixing account would have different amounts and timestamps from payments going out of it, and in order to use inferences taken from patterns as identifying information - e.g. someone orders a pizza from Mario's Pizzeria every Tuesday at 7 PM - you'd have to already have identifying information about the person you're trying to find in the first place, e.g. that I live near Mario's and happen to enjoy their pizza.

It's not just that the complexity of the problem increases with scale, it's that the reliability of the correlations you can make also decreases with scale.
I'm constantly missing calls/texts when I'm on the move/walking about with my phone in my pant pockets - can't feel the buzz, especially during winter season. Having a buzz on my wrist seems like a neat solution and w/o having to fish for my phone constantly.

It's definitely going to require some practice to fight the urge to simply glance at my watch (than fishing out the phone) when engaged with something/someone else.
Most of those things were not allowed on airplanes before 2001 as well. Not sure what you are getting at really if this is an attempt to justify what TSA does.
Jr. System Admin / Operations engineer, Full time, Triggit

Join a growing ad tech start-up. Be our 2nd System person!

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There's also the outage hell. It's been ok for a month or two, but getting killed whenever AWS has a blip in US-East (there's no cross-region redundancy, and minimal resilience with an AZ or Region-wide service has serious problems) isn't great.

It probably doesn't hurt RG as much as lower overall performance during normal operations does, though.
It was an episode of a Dutch documentary series from over 5 years ago so I don't think I'd be able to find it.
For those of you looking to migrate to other, barer hosting solutions like AWS or another VPS provider, I've put together a Capistrano add-on that let's you use Heroku-style buildpacks to deploy with Nginx doing front-end proxy. I use it for half a dozen apps on my VPSs and it works swimmingly well.

https://github.com/peterkeen/capistrano-buildpack
I have a Capistrano config that I can slab in my Rails projects. I can then do a:

cap deploy:setup

cap deploy:cold

cap deploy

And now my app is running on my server, I then add routing and I am good to go.

It is less fancy than Heroku if you want to play with some new technology, you need to install it, and get it configured, and get it to run properly.
I do make those purchases sparingly and when I do so I consent to giving the merchant that information. Never have I consented to giving my information to developers.
This is not a new revelation. I got them to admit to it 2 years ago.

http://tiwatson.com/blog/2011-2-17-heroku-no-longer-using-a-...

and specifically:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/heroku/8eOo...
Buying gas does. At least at the pumps that require you to enter your ZIP code.
Aside from the Heroku issue, this is an amazing use of RapGenius for something besides rap lyrics. I didn't have to google anything in the article because of the annotations.
As an Israeli, you see the "easy" side of Israeli security.

As someone who has flown to Israel for work, I can tell you that if you're not Israeli or Jewish, you don't get such a great experience. And according to one of my Arab American coworkers, it can get much much worse than what I experienced.

I just don't see how the profiling that takes place in Israel would ever work in a multicultural society like the US.
Its telling that gamasutra can write a paragraph about each one of them - meaning they weren't exactly code monkeys. Valve on CV and some random website knows enough about you to write a paragraph. They'll be fine.

Also, I count 10 not 25. So someones numbers are wrong.
If they do it gradually enough, I bet they won't.
Why not get yourself ONE beefy server? (or two) That should be able to handle your 150 requests per second, simplify your architecture a lot, and buying it would be cheaper than 1 month on Heroku (at $20,000/month).
It is bad behavior by the states, high income earners explicitly avoid ever residing in certain areas that are notorious for long term harassment -- even when they have zero problem with the tax rate itself.

Several states are playing the all in card on their expenses, because they know when there is a real financial crises its much easier, politically, to purge excess expenses (The Federal government is doing this too I think.) The more they spend today the quicker that day arrives.
It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge.

That's why it's imperative that there be only 1 round of layoffs every 5 years or so.

One round = shit happens, this sucks, but it's impersonal, so let's get back to work.

2+ rounds = people get paranoid, and typical corporate politics set in.

Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one?

Open allocation doesn't mean "people work on whatever they want". It means they're individually responsible for making their work useful to the company, and choosing projects that have this effect. It shuts down the traditional middle-management extortion of "you work for me or you don't work here" and gives everyone the same "freedom of the castle" in their choice of projects, but it's not a free-for-all.

suddenly people are back to feeling like they have bosses and assignments they need to fulfill to keep their jobs, only it's even worse because those aren't transparent...

Actually, that's a false security, in that you can do all your assignments well and please your boss and still get laid off... I know what you mean, though. I agree with you: it's going to be hard for Valve to preserve its culture. These are the kinds of times that test people.
Quite a few Americans know things are broken. Just many that do tend to adopt an apathetic or indifferent attitude about it (i.e. "It sucks, but what can I do about it?", "I don't like it, but how can we make it better?" or the worst one "It doesn't affect me really.").

disclaimer: I'm an American Citizen.
It might enable money laundering, but it isn't itself money laundering; and people use Bitcoin for a variety of reasons, including its ability to offer enhanced anonymity in electronic transfers, which this method would further in some circumstances.
"For a Rails app, each dyno is capable of serving one request at a time."

Is this a deliberate design choice on Heroku's part, or is this just how Ruby and Rails work? It sounds bizarre that you would need multiple virtual OS instances just to serve multiple requests at the same time. What are the advantages of this over standard server fork()/threaded accept designs?
They are. It's in their DNA to criticize (seamlesswebsucks.com)... But they're also correct. So many reasons to hate them ;)
You should read the article in the comment below yours to understand what I mean by "profiling". I did not mean special treatment by race or religion - crazy fanatics and terrorists come in all shapes and sizes.
It would be hard to say without a lot of assigned resources (money) and proper testing.
Nope, requests could still get queued behind a dyno that's busy with a long request.
I think this can happen when its been erroneously flagged as having been voting-ringed.
Github repo/mirror of source code, for those so inclined:

https://github.com/mqudsi/photoshop
Maybe when Tesla becomes a more global brand, they'll start using heat pumps for heating.

It takes some effort to make a car that works in different conditions. Some brands that might work great in Central Europe have bad reputation in cold climates. Failure to start, puny indoor heating power, door insulation freezing shut, water lodging in concave spots and freezing. It is common enough that it is probably a conscious strategic choice to just not test / fix it. Then again, locally built houses also often fail in the weather. I guess humans never learn.
Don't be so sure. According to TFA, one-third of people surveyed said they would be okay with a cavity search before being able to fly.
There's a bit of a killer tool that's relatively well known in geospatial data circles (and has been kicking about for a few decades) called FME from Safe Software [1] that I've never seen referenced in the non spatial database circles.

It's got some of the best table visualisation and table/tool/translation/QC intergration visual design tools I've seen.

It's essentially built with the goal of starting with multiple table sources in various ASCII / <some>SQLDB format and displaying all tables, building filter pipes to merge and translate data on the fly and produce single or multiple coherent databases and table sets (or even more ascii tables) as output.

It has it's quirks but it's a solid bit of kit ( I used it some years back to read in and unify data from several million leases (geospatial boundaries and related metadata) from multiple sources (Australian, Canadian, South African, etc. land departments) - from whoa to go was about four days, once running it chewed through the data on par with normal copy speeds (eg: it imported cleaned & filtered data in a time ballpark to just copying the data from A->B).

I'm not affiliated, but on the basis of that job, yeah, I'll spruik it.

[1] http://www.safe.com/

[2] http://www.safe.com/fme/fme-technology/fme-desktop/overview/

( See desktop demo video from overview section )
I assumed people were running multiple rails processes on their dynos.

http://michaelvanrooijen.com/articles/2011/06/01-more-concur...
Doesn't that require root or at least sudo permissions for your deploy user?
The cost of New Relic on Heroku looks really high because each dyno is billed like a full server, which makes it many times more expensive than if you were to manage your own large EC2 servers and just have multiple rails workers.

New Relic could be much more appealing if they had a pricing model that was based on usage instead of number of machines.
I don't think the wording's great. It's not throughput that's important, it's throughput at an acceptable latency.

You don't need 50x as many dynos to get the same throughput, you need 50x as many dynos to get the same latency characteristics at that throughput.