skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I became homeless at the cusp of 14, escaping from sleeping with mice on a bare mattress from a Sunset District garage - where my crack-addicted mother (she, a Stanford engineering graduate) put me. I lived on the streets of San Francisco, almost exclusively the Haight until I was 17 1/2. The horrors of my story paled in comparison to the kids I crewed up with in Upper/Lower Haight, and there were a lot of us.

There still are. For many years I have done active outreach work to the homeless youth there as well as risk reduction community mediation meetings between homeless kids, their outreach service workers, and local residents (some of these meetings have taken place at The Booksmith).

I am currently very successful in the tech arena, despite never having returned to school after having to find a place to live and food to eat when I was halfway through ninth grade; I never graduated and have no formal education. I am a very lucky exception.

Why do I tell you this? So you can begin to understand why I have to tell you that if this article is claiming to be about life for, or about, homeless youth in the Haight, the article is so inaccurate it ought to be considered harmful.

This article is the biggest lie and mischaracterization of homeless youth in the Haight I have ever read. I'm too astonished at the moment to be outraged.
I don't understand the language but I hear lots of "yeah boy" in these videos. They seem less concerned than I'd imagine myself to be.

Edit: haha, thanks for the explanations; that changes my interpretation of their reactions.
Seconded. If you're a programmer, you will fall in love with Spacechem. Not exaggerating when I say it's the greatest puzzle game I've ever played.
Yeah, given the crowd it operates in this could be a PR nightmare. Someone seems to know what they're doing.
I don't know about "taking it out" per se but an air defense system designed to hit ballistic missiles in the terminal phase could also hit an inbound meteorite. It is within the performance envelope of those types of systems. That said, against a meteorite it won't do much good since it is an inert mass.

It is plausible that the Russians launched an interceptor just to be safe. If it is a meteor, it neither hurts nor helps. If it is a man-made structure, it will do some real damage to it. Either way they can always argue "better safe than sorry".
Critical Cloud Computing-A CIIP perspective on cloud computing services
My thoughts too! On #2, budget travel I absolutely cannot do without. Also:
4. Avoid paying retail. Use Goodwill, craigslist etc.
Developers are smart and capable people, but boy, what spoiled brats we are.

> It can't be that hard to give a basic overview of it before they release a more comprehensive post

Well, actually it is very hard to give a basic overview of anything complicated, without leaving your readership with their heads scratching. The person that wrote the blog post might not even understand the whole stack to be in the position of giving that overview and if he did, you'd probably be here bitching about factual errors.

> People are paying for this service based on what Heroku claims it does

Dude, this is a service used by developers and devops. You aren't meant to trust what they say. You are meant to measure and see for yourself if Heroku fulfils your needs or not. You know, how the author of the original blog post did it. And don't get me wrong, because I would agree with you, except for the fact that their website is not lying about what they provide. It's just out of date, sometimes describing details of the now deprecated Bamboo stack, a stack which also suffered through deprecation ... but hey, errors happen, we are human after all.

The response itself is an example for what other companies should do. They acknowledge sincerely that they have a problem, with a promise that they are going to fix it. How many other companies you've seen that do that? Amazon and Google sure as hell don't.
Funny to see two different S12 teams tackling Kickstarter fulfillment in complimentary ways - the other is Backerkit:

https://www.backerkit.com
Right? While everyone's arguing about who's right, I can't help but think this is THE LAST car I'd ever want to take on a long trip. Ten minutes at a station is far longer than I could humanely accept, let alone hours (in a best case scenario no less!). If I ever buy an EV, it'll be a simple grocery getter, and that's it.
Google App Engine Training Videos
I don't think this only affects a small percentage of customers. Maybe only a small percentage will notice.

This will affect any user with a high standard deviation in their application's response time.

Lets take an extreme case as an example: An application that has an average response time of 100ms, however 1% of the responses have a 3s response time.
They have relatively small load and they only have 2 web dynos running.
The admin thinks: We have this occasional slow response, but it should be fine. When one dyno is chewing on the 3s task, the other dyno will pick up the slack. Wrong.

With random routing, when one dyno is chewing on the slow task, 50% of the incoming requests are stacking up in that dyno's queue. The other dyno may be able to easily handle it's load, but half of your responses are still getting hit with 3s+ delays.

This is an extreme example, but this is not a rare issue. As the admin, unless you know about this issue, you will be perplexed by the seemingly random slow response times your users will be reporting. You won't see the problem in your logs, or your New Relic performance reports, but your customers will notice.

As others have pointed out, a major selling point of Heroku is it is supposed to "just work." These sorts of issues are supposed to be intelligently handled by their super-slick infrastructure. In my opinion, this is a serious issue. The fact that this has been biting users for 3 years now and Heroku is only willing to address the problem after they get major bad press is disheartening.

I have always been impressed by Heroku, especially how they constantly step up, admit their mistakes, and appear to be as transparent as possible about how they will fix their issues. This situation is seriously disappointing.

I am sure this is a very difficult problem to solve at their scale, but this is really what we as customers are paying them to solve.
In answer to "who cares if the explanation comes today or tomorrow", I care if the explanation comes today or tomorrow. I use Heroku and have hit scaling issues in the last few weeks very similar to this. More information on what is going on behind the scenes will help me immediately.

As for discrepancy in documentation, this is one of the most major parts of their infrastructure and directly relates to how well applications scale. To claim they have intelligent routing and then not having so, that is completely misleading and not just a minor documentation discrepancy. This isn't a tech document that got out of date, this is straight from their main "how it works" page... http://www.heroku.com/how/scale. Read the bit on routing.
I don't get why everyone seems to be running out of (what appear to be) fairly sturdy concrete buildings and into the street. Sure, a building won't protect you from an incoming meteorite of any size, but being indoors might protect from fragments if an incoming meteor hits something else.
I'm with you on preferring underscores.

I noticed that one of the 'benefits' of CamelCase was that it's easier (aka. faster) to type however I'm not convinced that's a benefit. In my mind, each line of code should involve spending some time thinking about its content and structure both as an individual line and within the context of the broader codebase. Underscores force you to slow down and consider your variables and to me that seems beneficial.

Maybe if you're hacking together some fast script that you want to rapidly test and debug then coding speed would be beneficial but I have always approached coding as a slower, more deliberate step-by-step process. This may however stem from my mainly doing code in Matlab, et. al. for computational analysis, where considering how the maths is performed is just as important as laying down variables.

(Disclaimer: Unless I'm doing a night-before homework assignment in uni, at which point my variable names become 'fuck', 'fuckfuck', 'fuckitall', etc.)
Need job to save my relationship
Dear HNers
I have been reading HN for a while and I've never thought I would reach out to this community for this reason. Guess what, I want to save my relationship, and I'm sure you guys can help me. Here's the problem: my girlfriend can't find a job.

She is very smart (not only because I say she is, she is actually really smart) and has all qualities to be doing awesome work in a startup as a multi-hat talent. She has been a product manager in the valley for a couple years and has project management experience, well appreciated by customers. She is also perfectly trilingual and has a real gift for communication.

But, it's not that simple. She is not a US citizen. She needs a visa to work, and the more we try to understand why she doesn't get any traction after the usual first round of interviews, the more we are convinced that doors close automatically when HR people get to know that they will have to transfer her H1-B visa.

I have been trying to help her myself with my network of friends and acquaintances, but since I'm not particularly well connected, I wasn't able to help in promoting her search. So this is my best bet, probably the last one from my side before she has to abandon her job search and leave the SF Bay Area to return to her country, forgetting me, her nerdy boyfriend who thinks he's gonna "save" her by posting on hacker news. Anyways, I can't believe there are no companies around San Francisco who wouldn't benefit from a person like her to manage in an elegant fashion things related to product / project / customer / partner management.

Any piece or help or advice is appreciated. Thanks!

PS: If you guys feel like reaching out privately I have setup this gmail that I'll be monitoring: jean.felkerat@gmail.com
Really cool related project: A re-implementation of the original OutRun engine in C++.

http://reassembler.blogspot.com/

http://reassembler.blogspot.co.uk/p/cannonball-open-source-o...

https://github.com/djyt/cannonball
I'm sure that's it. There are also people who follow tornadoes for fun. I'm just saying I'm not one of them.
...provided you know it is a meteorite attack. Apparently, no one did.
You know, everyone, in the developed world or otherwise, has a human body... You know what you really need to compete though? Professional writing courses. Forget coding, just teach kids how to write a proper business proposal. I don't see anyone suggesting that they be mandatory though.

Since we are on HN after all, I think you should keep in mind that it is very easy to ascribe undue importance to what you know and do. You can code, so it is inconceivable to you that anyone could succeed without that. I am sure accountants are just as baffled that any adult can get through life without accounting classes. Should we make those mandatory too?

But by all means, make a required "computer skills for the workplace" class that actually targets what computer skills the majority of students will actually need.. It will be a complete waste of time for everyone involved.
Cool analytical approach to an interesting data set. I wish there was a better way to see income for films, how they enter the business, and where do they end up after. I realize this is in practice and for privacy reasons this is nearly impossible to get.
I happen to live 300km from the epicenter. The meteorite was seen in home town as well. I made a list of all the videos I could find: http://say26.com/meteorite-in-russia-all-videos-in-one-place
This is what patent laws should be everywhere.
They are basically cursing.
"Dude, this is a service used by developers and devops. You aren't meant to trust what they say." that is ridiculous. I use their service and I have trusted what they have said. They are the experts on their own service, why shouldn't I?

Also, the reason I chose Heroku is because DevOps is not my area of expertise, if I wanted to measure and analysis the inner workings I would have hosted elsewhere. Heroku is meant to alleviate that pain for me, I pay them excess over what I would pay elsewhere for that luxury.

As for the website not lying, yes it does. Go to "how it works" and click on routing. It's plain not true. Is it too much to ask that they update this in the last 3 years since the change?

I think the response is purely PR. Actually give something that will help their existing customers with this problem.
OMG... That is scary!
This has all been solved previously. In Google Appengine the scheduler is aware of, for each instance:

* the type of instance it is

* the amount of memory currently being used

* the amount of CPU currently being used

* the last request time handled by that instance

It also tracks the profile of your application, and applies a scheduling algorithm based on what it has learned. For eg. the url /import may take 170MB and 800ms to run, on average, so it would schedule it with an instance that has more resources available.

It does all this prior to the requests running.

You can find more docs on it here:

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/in...

For eg.

> Each instance has its own queue for incoming requests. App Engine monitors the number of requests waiting in each instance's queue. If App Engine detects that queues for an application are getting too long due to increased load, it automatically creates a new instance of the application to handle that load

This is what it looks like from a user point of view:

http://i.imgur.com/QFMXeT1.png

Heroku essentially need to build all of that. The way it is solved is that the network roundtrips to poll the instances run in parallel to the scheduler. You don't do:

* accept request

* poll scheduler

* poll instance/dyno

* serve request

* update scheduler

* update instance/dyno

This all happens asynchronously. At most your data is 10ms out of date. It would also use a very lightweight UDP based protocol and would broadcast (and not round-trip, since you send the data frequently enough with a checksum that a single failure doesn't really matter, at worst it delays a request or two).
How does one go about looking for an employer who will be able to arrange such a visa? I'm not from the US neither do I live there, but would like to (I'm a Junior Developer).
Something in same lines, recent xkcd strip, http://xkcd.com/1174/
Offended? It's about time somebody brought some order in to that chaotic world. He shows a lot of assumptions are actually just that: assumptions not backed up by facts. Now we know. And why would someone seeking knowlegde offend you? Were you forced at gunpoint to click the link? Or do you feel uncomfortable discussing sex-related topics? Well, most people do and thats what brings us back to those assumptions other people use to create official policy.
Maybe this will help people appreciate that space is not some other world on TV, instead we are in space right now. Yes, it can reach out and touch us.
I don't feel it's unfair to call it a bait and switch. Even if they didn't intend for it to be a bait and switch, it's still a bait and switch.
> one thing’s for sure: most women don’t quit after one film—in fact, the majority (at least 53%) do three or more.

Well, I guess that depends on how accurate the database is. To the extent that it might miss performers, it would certainly be biased towards those who have fewer credits, or whose credits are for smaller outfits.
He's making a joke. The punchline is the last word: Excel.
I'm spared, it doesn't yet work. Guess I best get back to work.
I agree that this is what journalists do. It's also why the public stops trusting journalists, especially after they've personally experienced this. It's what the rest of us calls "lying".

This may not be an example of individual malice, but it is definitely an example of why journalism that still uses practices that pre-date video, let alone the internet, no longer commands any kind of respect.

Broder lied "because that's what journalists do". Think about that.
Err, did you read the comment? It was clearly a (cheap) joke poking fun at excel.
Sorry, but it is.
yebat (ебать), loosely translated and depending on form, it could mean either 'oh fuck' or an explicit description of a strong impact ;) we slavs have infinite possibilities of cursing.
There's a video of two guys driving by the zinc plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnGvd0dmLI
Russians have scientists working on the meteorite problem, but I doubt the military would do a hail Mary launch on this. If anything, they would much rather let it fall intact than risk having it break up and spread damage to a much larger area. But that still assumes they can respond quickly enough or had missiles on standby with weapons that can affect a meteorite (not specifically ballistic reentry capsules, but actual meteorites). There's a worrying thought.

It may be hot enough for infrared seekers, but it's no jet. Jets are fragile by comparison so, unless they had purely kinetic weapons... but that's still speculation at this point. We still don't know what the Russians did or if they did anything at all.

I doubt they even knew this specific meteor would enter the atmosphere. It's already hard enough detecting much bigger rocks in Earth-crossing orbits.
> damaged zinc plant?

Yes, that's what it says
Even more so if it's incoming explosives, which by their nature generate a lot of fragments (more than solid impacts). Generally, if I hear explosions, running out into the street is the last thing I want to do...
I work at a company that has a mean age of probably 35-40. It has the great effect that 9-5 is pretty pervasive. I can take a half day without giving notice, work more or less than 8 hours a day. Doesn't matter as long as I get my stuff done. Honestly, if I'm having a productive day, I can't get more than 8 hours of work out of my brain anyway.
Look closer, I think he's referring to the "filth" of a popular spreadsheet program. ;)
Well, for marketing purposes, random doesn't sound as impressive as intelligent. It's a discrepancy but it does appear to be disclosed.

On the page you link to, it says: "Incoming web traffic is automatically routed to web dynos, with intelligent distribution of load instantly as you scale."

When you click on "Read more about routing..." it says: "Request distribution - The routing mesh uses a random selection algorithm for HTTP request load balancing across web processes." https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing
Ask HN: How do you handle sudden suprise scaling?
You have a nice stable community for your underfunded Web 2.0 startup. All of a sudden, it grows - exponentially. The key word here is underfunded.

Your running on low end VPS and your on your own.

How do you handle this without breaking the bank or loosing your sanity? What's the first thing you do?
I'm almost certain that's a sonic boom. The upper atmosphere is several miles high and it would take the better part of a minute for the sound from a sonic boom to reach the ground from the stratosphere.
This one is much better, it actually shows the incoming meteor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUqmS35REY
That's stupid, because some people just don't get programming. It can take several tries before someone can grasp what programming is.
I can't get over how long it takes for the sonic boom to hit. This video has the meteorite trail on camera for 27 seconds before you hear the boom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_mpGYSBSA

How fast does something have to be travelling to build up a delay like that?
One, maybe two. Self employed and self pay.
A large collection of free templates for LaTeX
haha, no it basically means fuck in Russian.
FYI, if you see photos of a burning crater, those are fake. That's the Door to Hell, in Turkmenistan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell
@bitcartel (not sure why I couldn't reply to your comment)... I believe from my discussions with Heroku that the "random selection algorithm" is also not true.
"me·te·or [mee-tee-er, -awr]

noun

1. Astronomy

a. a meteoroid that has entered the earth's atmosphere."
I don't think farming is what you think it is these days.

No-one thought forex trading was like that those days either.
Wow, do you know how lucky we all are? Silly little shit like this could easily start WW3.

We need complete ICBM disarmament. They can keep their bombs and we can keep ours (for now), but we should restrict delivery systems such that there is a built in lag (bombers taking many minutes or hours to reach their targets), and can be recalled. ICBM's can be launched in a moment, and it is impossible to recall them or disable them once they are underway.
I get this in the context in which it was initially studied: repetitive work that nobody would be passionate about, but I would theorize that with passion and variety you can extend this. In other words, you can only do 40 hours a week of factory labor, coding, sales calls, etc. However, you can do networking breakfasts at 7, alternate between a variety of tasks, do lunch meetings, product discussions, sales calls, and network until 7 Monday to Friday, then check email intermittently totaling an hour or two over the weekend.

So this is something like 60 hours and it sounds pretty sustainable to me, particularly if you have resources to avoid doing non paying work, such as chores. Anyone know if there is research to support this theory? Obviously that is relevant to startups.
Good catch, thanks for the additional data. Could be I'm too eager to see a pattern where none exists.
There is a perverse conflict with platform service providers - the worse your scheduler performs the more profitable your service will be.

You replace intelligent request scheduling with more hardware and instances, which you charge the user for.

How much investment is there in platform service providers towards developing better schedulers that would reduce the number of instances required to serve an application? That answer, in this case, is "not a lot"

The incentives between provider and user are not aligned, which is why I am more inclined to buy and manage at a layer lower with virtual machines.

Edit: AppEngine went through a similar issue. Here is an interesting response from an engineer on their team:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/y-LnZ...
Google is a big place. There can be multiple people working on similar ideas (see Chrome OS and Android). If the projects are small it would be common for them to not even know about each other, at least for a little while.

If you tried to enforce that everyone who wanted to work on similar things had to work together you would burn a lot of energy arguing about "similar" and relatively minor differences in direction.

Sometimes it is easier and better to just let there be separate efforts and the market (both the internal attention market, and in extreme cases, the external actual market) can decide.
I created a self-reliant social enterprise that has helped 150+ at-risk kids.
Except this was a much, much, much, much smaller object(s) ;)
you might want to repost this at a different time. perhaps 8-10 hours from now if you want to get better visibility.
Looking at these videos it doesn't look like there has been a defense missile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUqmS35REY. Such missiles would leave a visible trail in the atmosphere, wouldn't they?
That a New York Times journalist would fabricate data in an automobile review in order to wage war on the electric car industry seems beyond belief as well. We really don't have enough info to resolve these discrepancies, but Occam's Razor suggests to me that John Broder legitimately believes his claims and Elon Musk believes Broder to be a liar. One or both of them has incorrect data. It seems unlikely that either is deliberately lying.