skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're looking for me to defend the U.S., you're going to be looking for a very, very, very long time. I'm as anti-drone, anti-police state as you will ever find a US citizen.

BUUUUUT, I will bite on one thing.

How many Americans have been killed by drones? A handful? How many of those were actively fighting for terrorist organizations? All of them.

Now I do think it's only a matter of time before the US turns that power inwards and starts flying drones over the US. The NYPD already has drones and no one is quite sure whether they're able/willing to equip them with "non-lethal" weapons very soon, but it hasn't happened yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapore

This guy above me loves the fact that people are executed for marijuana possession, which is almost completely harmless physically, of negligible harm to society, and largely beneficial to health if not abused.

LOVES IT.
This isn't corruption if they're following orders from above.
If there is a particular data model that you want, there's no shame in just passing it directly inside the container of the view. Given a Handlebars template on the server like:

<div class="profile-widget" {{#if serverEnv}}data-model="{{jsonStringify profileModel}}"{{/if}}>
<span class="name">{{name}}</span>
<span class="phone">{{phone}}</span>
</div>

They can share the same template with some minor conditional statements. The JavaScript could simply load any model(s) required from the JSON in the data attribute and re-render the view in "enhanced mode".

It comes in handy for progressive enhancement.
Performance and reliability has never been their forte. They probably have the worst up time in the industry.

Scalability... yes until the point you really need to scale.

The main/only advantage I really see to heroku is the ease of deployment and how they managed to keep it simple.
A Review of 3 Hacker News Jobs Listings
I'm watching all this debate with great interest. The company I'm consulting for has ~150 dynos, a paid support contract, etc. We're on Cedar... NodeJS latest (which just got upgraded to 0.8.19 after being ignored since October), with Mongo, Rabbit and Redis hosted by third party addon companies.

After a ton of H12 errors, they helped us find out some slow points and optimize some things that were relatively slow. On our own, we did a huge amount of work to make things as fast as possible. While the H12's have gotten better, nothing has gotten rid of them completely. It really points to something fundamentally wrong with the routing layer because at some level we just can't optimize our code any further. There is definitely quite a few times in the logging where we just can't explain how things are insanely slow and we certainly can't explain why we get H12 errors anymore. To the point where we just gave up with it.

The thing that bothers me the most is that we have been complaining for a month now behind the scenes through our paid support contract about the things that are now being semi admitted in public. No PaaS is perfect and certainly hard problems are being worked on by smart people... the real issue here is the way that Heroku has pointed fingers at everyone but themselves until finally someone had the time and balls to get a posting to the top of HN.
Trolls? Like Apple Corp. that patented bounce back scrolling? The problem is not trolls, the problem is the deep mental retardation of the current US patent system.

And it's not just a reform. All the issued patents must be revised and a lot of them must be revoked.

The solution seems to be simple, isn't it: don't patent trivial things, and only patent the actual methods, not just ideas of them.
If the project's budget matters, the results will not
Ah yes, his one page letter where he says "We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive."

That's being awfully selective. He also says "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world." and "We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." Is it absurd to draw conclusions about someone's intentions based on what sorts of actions they deem to be "a moral imperative"?[1]

You might as well accuse him of distributing child porn and being a terrorist, because decriminalizing child porn and overthrowing the government were also things he advocated in his writings.

You've got the argument precisely backwards. Aaron wasn't being charged for his writings. He was being charged for his observed actions. His prior statements are only being used to show that the government's interpretation of his intent is not (as you said) "completely without merit".

[1] http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamju...
Ask HN: Your stack of choice for web development?
I would like to know what stacks are you using for web development. Things are changing fast and new technologies are emerging every other day so it's interesting to watch what comes out of it.

Node.js + NoSQL?
Go?
LAMP?
...
Hi. Could someone please explain to me why it is necessary for a service (e.g. HN) to go down while people play with the (increasingly amorphous and abstract) back end? Is it 1990?

Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.
I really hope this includes QtWebKit!
Proudly still using lamp. I don't see the benefits of switching to something new outweighing the enormous learning curve. But lots of people who choose these new technologies are brand new to development, so they don't have a learning curve.
You start off by telling us that you've been to Singapore just a few days and go on claiming superior insight into the country's cultural and political landscape. Then you wind up with a trite statement that contains a bunch of vague terms, is free of any meaning, and condescending to boot.

You're free to stay in your bubble, too.
While these aren't good, they don't refute the commonly held belief that Singapore is essentially free from corruption.

Human rights is another issue and on this they do very badly. They are among the worst places in the World to get arrested for basically anything and they have harsh laws that restrict all sorts of personal freedoms. But that's not corruption.
Why do they use strings as function using to-function
(https://github.com/component/to-function).
Like .select("age>10").map("adress.streetname");

While to-function is cool and your code is shorter and more readable. You must be aware that you miss

- static code analysis such as synax checking
- compile time optimizations (because the AST is missing)
- static code analysis tools
- code coverage checking tools

I would recommend using real functions, or using clojurescript or coffeescript in order to get shorter code.
They apologized in the last post. Also, self-critical language like "fallen short of [our] promise" and "we failed to..." is a de facto apology and acceptance of responsibility even when the word 'sorry' only appeared earlier.

I can understand how this developed. Things worked well for most customers. Many of those with problems got them under control with more dynos or multi-worker setups. Heroku's Rails roots biased them towards a "keep it simple, throw hardware at it, or look for optimizations in the app/sql/db" mindset. Well, many of their Rails/Bamboo customers complaining about latency, even in the presence of this growing issue, may have also (or even primarily) had other app issues too. (When supporting developers, especially many beginning/free-plan developers, it doesn't take long for your conditional probability P((we have a real problem)|(customer thinks we have a problem)) to go very low, and P((customer app has a problem)|(customer thinks we have a problem)) to go very high.)

Even when Heroku had a unitary (and thus 'smart') router, they surely got latency complaints that were completely due to customer app issues or under-provisioning, so they stuck with the 'optimize app or throw dynos at it' recommendation for too long. And, when they habitually threw more hardware at the Bamboo routing mesh, they were unwittingly making the pile-up issues for Bamboo web dynos worse. Some key data about the uneven pre-accept queueing at dynos was missing, which combined with habits of thought that had worked so far gave them a blind spot.

Despite the growing issue, adding dynos at the margin would still always help (at least a little) — as well as adding to Heroku revenues. Even without any nefarious intent, a 'problem' that fits neatly into your self-conception ("we give people the dyno knob to handle any scaling issues and it works"), and is also correlated with rising business, may not be recognized promptly. That's just a natural human biased-perception issue, not incompetence or dishonesty.
Nope, Markus Olsson.
I'm not sure if the grandparent post really meant it that way. It's not that you don't see anything bad while you are in Singapore, it's that you get a feeling for Singapore's situation. I've only been in Singapore for a short bit and I've met ethnic Chinese who were plenty happy to live in safe Singapore now, and not in the neighboring countries anymore (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_13_Incident)
Actually, didn't the customer find out the problem? They identified random routing as the culprit. Also identified that new relic does not report these metrics.

Also heroku told them that "requests are queued up at the dyno level". So how can they now claim that they didn't know?
The rules of war on a battlefield are not and cannot be the same as the rules of civilized society. The problem is that today the two have become far too mixed, and the boundaries of what is a battlefield during a time of war have become indistinct and blurry. To the extent that basically anything outside US borders can fit the bill at any given time, depending on the circumstances.

I would say that this definitely goes way too far and we'll probably need a constitutional amendment to fix it.
While I agree with your point here, I'd like to question the statement that a creation can be no smarter than its creator.

This may well be true if we're talking about real-time creation, but it's absolutely possible to put in more brain cycles into offline, pre-processed creation and get better results.
That all sounds so familiar. Just like what Phil was telling us too. Get a New Relic account. "Why do we need a $7k/mo NR account?" Oh, because you have some slow requests...

We go fix all of our slow requests, but we still have H12 errors.

Can you tell us how many dyno's we actually need to serve our requests and not get H12 errors? No.

Hey Rappgenius... thanks for having the balls to call Heroku out in public on this stuff. We are in the same boat.
This was a great explanation of how Heroku routing works. And a terrible explanation of why anyone would use a service with such a brain dead router. Seriously is this company run by 16 year olds? Consider your allowance revoked. Rookies.
2 years of bootstrapping and our iCloud for business is feeling special
Ember is object-oriented, angular is functional(ish).
If you're using a mac http://selfcontrolapp.com/ works pretty well.
Have you guys considered suing Heroku to get some of your money back? Given the nature of Heroku's deception and the resulting ill-gotten gains across its entire customer bases,
it would seem like you could work with an enterprising attorney to form a class-action suit against the company and get money back not just for yourselves but for the entire effected customer bases.

Just a thought. ;)
I am using my own web site since the late 90's, never repented it.

Hosting companies come and go, do whatever they please with your data.

Nothing like having as much control as possible.

Sadly this is not possible for non-technical users.
The smoking gun is H12 errors and they occur quite a bit on our NodeJS app. The key is to get the instances to serve requests as fast as possible, which is a good thing, except at some point you can only get responses out at fast as you can and there is quite a few mysterious unexplained things that cause responses to happen slowly. The routing layer is fundamentally designed incorrectly. H12 errors should never happen in a random fashion and they do. A request can sometimes take 10ms and other times, timeout after 30s. Even if it is just returning 'ok' and not doing anything else.
Death in Singapore - FT.com
Sounds like this is a moot point, but I'm still curious: How would you legally distinguish between programmer-written assembly, and assembly disassembled from compiled machine code? Without doing that, it's pointless to require source code, since disassembler-generated assembly is no more useful than the machine code it was generated from. And it seems like no matter what rules you set for how the assembly should look, someone could change it just enough to comply with those rules, while still not being very useful.
Ah, no. Being single-threaded isn't the same as blocking on IO wait, because threads can switch tasks. This is the essence of the classic Unix select(2) loop and most of the higher-performing variants; poll(2), kqueues etc.
A Y-Combinator company suing another Y-Combinator company. Now that would be interesting.
I convinced my ex-girlfriend to marry me. Kind of like "High Fidelity".
compilation of different videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5...
They also have a fundamental cultural problem, and don't appear to have recognised it.

In short, they went for ~2 years with documentation that advertised features that the implementation didn't have, while receiving a string of support issues that they wouldn't acknowledge as their problem.

Yet, the blog posts show no indication that they are interested in working out why they offered such terrible service to their customers and how they can fix the company culture to take this issues seriously in the future.

There's a chance they'll come up with an architectural solution for their routing problem. But unless they do some serious introspection and work out why they (as a team) stuffed up so badly, then there's no chance that they'll fix that problem.

And if they don't fix that, then why would anyone have confidence that this sort of issue isn't going to be commonplace?

(Disclaimer: Not a Heroku customer)
i heard you like browsers...
> And just look at how successful those "free countries" have been in addressing those categories of crime!

The crime rate in Western countries, including the US, has been falling steadily since the 90s. Given the differences in cultures and legal frameworks ... nobody is really certain why.
I don't think their laws are necessarily brutal, but their enforcement of those laws is. They view people who break the taboo of law as people who should be handled with the full force of the state.

And personally I like drugs.
Math can be fun
Thanks to Vic Gundotra for pointing this out
I think you can use SELinux to prevent this attack. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SELinuxDenyPtrace
It is effective, but not without problems.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=78...
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=57...
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=78...

Needless to say, it is VASTLY better than Heroku's router. You'll never see an H12 error with GAE.
Oh well then that totally makes it okay.
I'm not paid to write Go ATM but would certainly be very interested in any opportunities to do so. Equally happy to just meet some interesting new people for beers, so count me in :-)
> 1) Releasing a press release at 7 AM in the morning on a Saturday (CET)

I think they aimed to put out a response ASAP.
How to Create Custom Social Media Icons in CSS3
To begin creating our CSS3 social media buttons we will start with creating the actual buttons. Let's start by adding the simple HTML code for the buttons.
I was responding to his statement "This is the difference between the west and the east. It is a chasm in philosophy that will never be bridged."
By what logic do you think the police are prevented from using helicopters to collect ordinarily unobservable areas? The main relevant Supreme Court case I could remember was Kyllo v. US [0], but in refreshing my memory, it seems that that case only applies to intruding the privacy of the home, especially with technology that is not widely available. In fact, two cases linked from that article [1][2] directly support the ability of police to perform aerial surveillance, but only for things officers can see with the naked eye.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Ciraolo

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley
He doesn't, and I was, or working for a YC company.
RED HANDS - (Behind the Scenes) - Walk off the Earth
I love how their first suggestion is upgrade your db $$$ .
Come spend a few days in China and you will find that it is a modern country that values human rights with no corruption and lots of social harmony.

Of course, the truth is a bit more nuanced than that.
I guess that means "no, I didn't read it."
Nice work on the new site, the design looked great!

It's nice to see you acknowledge that things were rocky with Posterous but you are now moving forwards in a new direction based on your past learnings.

After all, isn't that one of the great things about being human? We can all learn from our past mistakes and strive to better than the person we were yesterday.
Well, the article in no way actually implies corruption.

If the men in power decided that Shane's death needed to be covered up, and the men in uniforms followed orders - then that is exactly how a non-corrupt police state works; you have strict order but that order doesn't neccessarily favor the people.

A corrupt state would have the relevant police officer be bribed individually and/or extracting favors from the relatives; corruption requires weak structure, where the system is centralised in theory but decentralised in practice, as decisions are made or changed by corrupt officials. But if the authority decides to do an evil thing and the system executes it without question - then that's a perfect example of an efficient, noncorrupt police state that achieves it's goals and spits at the costs.
Not sure what you mean by "equivalent terms look the same". I'm not clear on how e.g. ##(2 1) and #1 look the same. Going by your remark about name collisions, I must ask if you are thinking of alpha-equivalence? (Which certainly is rendered unnecessary by the notational system.)

And thank you for making/hopefully fixing this!
Thanks for your reply.

I still feel you're ultimately defining a DAG ("I want 20 web servers, 3 database servers and 2 load balancers") and relying on some compare-and-repair (health checks and replacement).

But you've moved your unit of management from packages etc to machines. I've previously argued that this is the key thing that will change web hosting economics. I was sorta wrong, but I can see now where you were coming from.
Amen, my friend.

Money: not fuckin' worth it.
It'd be like suing an airline for a delayed flight.
FWIW, I overstayed my Chinese visa by one day and had to pay a ~90$ fine. I was on my way 5 minutes later.
> How many Americans have been killed by drones? A handful? How many of those were actively fighting for terrorist organizations? All of them.

(American born) Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year old son was killed in a separate drone strike, 2 weeks after his father was killed. No suggestion was made that the son was guilty of anything, but that 'he should have had a more responsible father'.
Western educated engineers are a dime a dozen in Asia for companies with large bank. White folks probably have a very confused view on this when they head out to Asia for work.
Not trying to invoke Godwin's law, but AFAIK both Stalin and Hitler had police states with rather little corruption; certainly far less corruption than nowadays Russia or mid-Africa.
Ask HN: Cofounder signed off on Sales Agreement and has disapeared. What now?
I was involved in a prior start up over a year ago, which to make a long story short, I sold my interest in to the founder. Now, the founder (who relocated overseas) has become non-responsive and unreachable by any means of communication, and has yet to fulfill the obligation of the sales agreement.<p>1) Has anyone else been in a similar situation?
2) What are my options?<p>Any and all advice is welcomed, thank you for taking the time to read my post.
Heroku was acquired by Salesforce, so I guess it's not really a YC company anymore.
Shane Todd worked for the IME, a globally regarded research organisation based in a country that scored higher in the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index than the U.S. (87, #5 versus 73, #19) [1]. If he worked for the defence industry then so would an Oracle engineer deployed at Northrup Grumman or a SpaceX engineer in competing with Lockheed Martin.

[1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/
What a garbage site. So glad they are gone. I guess now they get to sell all the personal information they collected without permission at bargain rates.
I would suggest a slight variation on the first. Have initial routers pick a random appropriate dyno then pick the router for that dyno. The second router picks a random appropriate dyno from the list it is in charge of.

If you make sure that the dynos for a given app are clumped behind few routers in the second layer, then you effectively get the old behavior. But you get it in a much more scaleable way. The cost is, of course, that you add an extra router to everything.

(I emailed this suggestion to them. I have no idea whether they will listen.)
Not recently on the suicides, mate, always. The only recent thing is the rockstar status of these folks where it hits the news.
I think apologies are over-demanded by our somewhat hysterical media that likes nothing better than to enhumble/humiliate a public figure (because it sells papers); and this flows through into expectations of private and corporate behaviour. But I've never had much use for apologies from other people. Years of abuse make "sorry" an entirely debased term in my lexicon. I've seen statements of regret that omit the word and are all the more sincere for it.

Much more useful than an apology is an acceptance of fault (which is not the same thing); an expression of desire to improve, and a sincere and demonstrable commitment to doing so.

[NB: don't mean to imply that Heroku have necessarily achieved all of that here]
Actually that's the only bit confusing part of the documentation (which now everyone is quoting to troll Angular).
There are many, but they don't get the publicity other malware gets. One example of Mac-malware would be SabPub: https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193467/SabPub_Mac_OS_X...
Compensate for Google Maps inaccuracy
Oh, but Singapore is a police state (a state where the government exercises rigid and oppressive laws).

It is also a dictatorship. It may not be the worst of its kind in that it actually has (the thin conception of the) rule of law, but it's not a free country and it lacks decent human rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law_doctrine_in_Singapo...
wondering why didn't the person possibly looking/cleaning the evidence from the harddrive take it with him in the first place?
Isn't Suspense theory indicating something deeper?

> Hours later, in the middle of the night, someone went into Shane’s hard drive and accessed five folders, all labelled IME. ... Since the time of Shane’s death is uncertain, Massoud could not say who looked at the IME files.
> But Massoud found activity, again, on several more IME files on the night of June 27, three days after Shane’s body was found. He said someone looked at
IME folders – including one labelled “Supervisor” and one labelled “Goal Setting”

Edit: Usually the actual suspect would want to remove the evidence itself – in this case, the harddrive is carefully tampered with. Still the contained information is enough to put the blaim on a party – or the actual accuser is more profound than it is semed?