skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Queuing theory is cool, but I'm not 100% sure it actually applies here in a meaningful sense (although, disclaimer: I'm no more experienced here than you). A lot of queuing theory assumes that you must route a request to a handler immediately as you receive it, and that reassigning a request is a very expensive process.

This intuitively explains why queueing theory is very big in router design - imagine that you send a packet through 10 hops and at the last hop experiences a significant delay, does the packet then turn around and go back through another router? Which hop does it pick to look for a different path through? What happens if the packet gets delayed going backwards looking for another route? Does it reverse _again_ looking for a quicker route to another route? Answer: it doesn't, routers deliver messages with the "best effort" (in protocol terminology) they can, and high level latency trends are adapted for through the routing algorithms themselves (read: not adapted for each individual packet). This keeps transport much simpler and therefore faster.

In the case of load balancing, if the "(re)assignment cost" (my terminology) of a request is sufficiently small, then it doesn't make sense to pre-distribute requests until you can be 100% sure a worker is ready. If a request takes 40ms to process and 0.5ms to distribute/assign to a worker, then waiting for feedback (which would also take 0.5ms) from a worker would incur a slowdown of (40 + 0.5 + 0.5)/40 versus if you pre-assigned before a worker was finished. This seems like a no-brainer if it would keep the width of the distribution of your latencies down.

Edit: thinking about this more, if you have an asynchronous worker model, Queueing theory comes back into play. If a worker stops processing Request A to wait for a network response and takes up Request B, and then the network responds while Request B is still working, moving Request A mid-handling to another free machine may be very hard/expensive, if not entirely impossible. As themgt brings up, it sounds like Heroku enabled an asynchronous model in a recent stack and may have dropped the feedback loop that allows for intelligent routing because there's no obvious way to implement it in an asychronous model.

That being said, you could still have a feedback loop when a worker is completely idle. It's certainly very hard to reason about a worker currently executing any task, but it is very easy to reason about a worker that isn't executing anything. Therefore, it should be straightforward (theoretically) to do intelligent routing to empty workers and then keep the random routing for busy workers in such a way that if there is an idle worker no request should ever go to a busy worker. A more advanced version would keep track of the number of open connections to each worker and simply distribute to the worker with the fewest number of active open connections.

I just checked and nginx actually has a directive (least_conn) to do exactly this, but it's not enabled by default! ELB apparently does something similar (see: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=135549&#...).
A emacs package improves Emacs window system with window moving commands
I understand that a new layout engine could be an order of magnitude more work, but I'd like to be optimistic.

The problem I see, is when we start talking about projects that require 100+ men at 5+ years of work, on a project that in particular has no real viable intermediate stages, history seems to suggest to me that it just doesn't get done. The difference with gecko, is it was being advanced with the state of the web, rather than spending 10 years catching up.

A very large part of the problem is that you can't just render part of HTML5 and expect to be in a shipping, and major browser. What do you do with a half done layout engine?

Does a project like Servo really have any hope of completion if that's the case?
One habit I developed was save often - meaning saving when it's not really at a version state yet. Why? Cause PS crashes every so often.

So when I'm saving for a version, I save it as a separate file.

The problem with detecting a save and treating that as a version, is going to net a me a ton of versions that I will not need.

There should be a plugin that has a shortcut key within PS and lets me save it as a version when I dictate it and not every time time I hit Cmd+S. Cause when I Cmd+S != new version.

I've been told to learn Layer Comp in CS6. Apparently it's Adobe's new feature to version control.
Alternative Way to Organize Your Download Directory
Still needs polishing but I would like some comments on it.
Wow, that's resilience.

Also, now I wish I were in the market for a new car. I'll probably just get a Tesla in a couple years, which CarWoo can't really help with.
You're right. The Dell is better.
The Germans murdered all children and pregnant women. How could a newborn survive?
It doesn't yet, but that doesn't really change the situation if you've already got long-polling/SSE. I mentioned it because we support it and it seems like a big part of the model the the web is moving towards (which is significantly less request-response based).
> Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix. We've had to put back several of these as users reported problems with the beta. It's starting to feel like oldIE all over again, but with a different set of excuses for why nothing can be fixed.

I am fairly new to web development, but this consistent droning (whining) about having to develop for a myriad of inconsistent platforms seems like braying from rather entitled web developers. I don't understand when in the history of software development developers weren't forced to dick with platform and legacy problems. Can someone explain what, if anything makes web dev different? And if they can't, can we please just stop bringing it up like it's ever been a new problem?
So Ender's Shadow shows that the teachers running the game behind the scenes were playing a much deeper game, one designed to bring about the insights that Ender developed. That further, it was important that Ender developed them on his own so that he realize, he can never depend on doctrine handed down from the past, and so develop something from a fresh start.

Besides, Ender's Game is simply the setup for Speaker of the Dead, a much more interesting book.

To be fair. I read Ender's Game multiple times when I was younger. I have not yet read it again now that I have a better understanding of Sun Tzu's Art of War and the John Boyd biographies. I have no idea what I'd find if I read it again.
huge chunk?
Of course it's a money grab. So are .ly domains, which are over $100 USD. That doesn't stop every other startup from buying them however.
Iceland may ban online porn
Birthday cards for slackers
Apparently Adam is one of the founders of Quora. Depending on what online communities you are part of, Paul Graham's comment may be confusing as he is directly addressing the founder of Quora, not Scott Hanselman who is the author of the article.
Q/a event at Stanford--founder guilt: do entrepreneurs need to give back?
The iOS version should be easy since they actually send all the answers to the client and hide them. This works with my pretend iOS 5 iPhone (via Chrome):

javascript:(function($) {
$(".app_promo, .app_install_dialog").hide();
$(".answer_text").css({'margin-left': '110px', 'width': '88%'});
}(jQuery));
this is the trouble with ORM's though - mapping things into complex graphs is anti-relational. SQL wants you to work in sets. ORM's are trying to bridge that impedance mismatch - but the real answer is to not fight it.
Klout says "over 30% of workforce is female." Yep. The office admins and HR.
.io does have some good names available, though it's pricey. billy dot io was my little splurge (but is just an alias to my full name dot com)
A second "feature" of Quora that is an absolute deal-breaker for me is that they require real names for the accounts. And I imagine that I'm not the only one who doesn't want to use their real name on just any site on the internet.

And am I the only one who finds the whole interface totally confusing? Navigating the site is anything but intuitive, and I never even found a list of topics/tags.
I hope the solution will not break the possibility for multithreaded apps to receive several requests
How does someone merely creating an account contribute to the community?
Vinylfy is finally here
The problem with this model is you'd need to re-engineer all existing web applications to work with the new service. If I just want to boot up an open-source Rails/Django/node.js/etc app on your service, how would I do it?
Scout security system monitors your pad without compromising your feng shui
Google BigQuery Tour
"I don't think I'd be able to find it"

Rather ironic comment, coming from the technical founder of VideoView ;-)

Seriously though, many thanks for sharing that story - it illustrates just how far advanced some cultures are about death and dying. Western Civ seems incredibly immature in this regard by comparison.

If you (or anyone else reading this) can offer any more details about this series or episode, by all means please share!
Quora's terms of service allow for republishing[0] of any amount of content posted after April 22, 2010, so long as the user didn't mark it as not to be republished. There are a few caveats around attribution and a requirement to update content on request if Quora's copy changes, but it's actually fairly liberal.

0: https://www.quora.com/about/tos (search for "Quora's Licenses to You")
I get your point.

But isn't meditation more like "You don't get it, until you get it" kind of a thing?

I mean I haven't read anything so far that describes the process of mediation as do Step 1) -> Step 2) .. All I get is description of what meditation can do and even that too more or less put down like- "You will not know how it feels, until you feel it".

How to Meditate? I hope someday I get some clear answer to this question.
YCombinator does not solve the credentials trap, it simply replaces one arbitrary set of credentials (i.e., test scores) with another (social hacking skills).

That is, after all, the point of credentials--having credentials indicates a safer risk but it does not guarantee the likelihood of success.
You reach a certain point where the weight of the evidence suggests that the received wisdom of imminent collapse isn't correct. With North Korea, we (should have) reached that vantage point in about the mid-90s.

The NK regime has survived, to date: two major power transitions, the financial collapse of its protecting superpower state, the worst famine in modern history, a full-scale ground and air invasion by a world superpower, a widely-known and well-documented human rights record that would shame Nazi Germany, openly kidnapping foreign citizens to be trained as spies and other major diplomatic kerfuffles in the same league that have previously started wars, and I think the longest and most severe economic isolation in the history of the United Nations.

We're told breathlessly with each new development for the past 50 years that collapse is surely just around the corner. But I can think of very little that would seriously test the regime beyond what they have faced so far.
The only good thing about not using .com is that the US government doesn't control it (or so I've heard).
A few years ago, I did some health IT stuff (implemented 5 RHIOs which included 80 hospitals plus various partners comprising roughly 300 data feeds).

I played with VistA. Thought maybe I could steal some of their fire. At the time, the VA was getting a lot of props for turning their act around and VistA was considered no small part.

MUMPS.

I will never willingly work on MUMPS.

I had to do a bunch of Intersystems' Cache, Ensemble, ObjectScript work. Inspired by MUMPS (the communities overlap). Complete garbage. Remember how a coding error can bork (brick) a SmallTalk runtime? Welcome to Intersystems. But without the benefits of a debugger, undo, version control, real database, an actual grammar and compiler, or rational people creating and supporting the product.

I mention Intersystems because as bad as it is, MUMPS makes it look slick.

Please understand that I am completely, utterly committed to universal healthcare with a single payer in the USA. Medicare/VA for all.

But if it means the infrastructure running VistA + MUMPS, I'll probably vote against it. (And I don't know if I'm joking.) I just can't imagine an IT migration to VistA finishing before the heat death of the universe.
Ah, good nit, I'll double check. Maybe I've met my limit on all my browsers.
The way this is going WebKit is the new IE.

Blogger like to refer to WebKit as if every browser in this planet would be using the latest version, which sadly is not the case.

So one ends up coding multiple hacks to support several versions of WebKit.

Even with help of jQuery, there are CSS and HTML rendering issues to work around.
Distributed load balancing is a tough problem with two pieces to it. One is the queueing theory part.

The other is the systems side to it. If you have multiple customers and multiple checkout lines, and if your customers act independently without seeing the lines (no feedback from servers, network failures and delays, implementation complexity), what do you do?

It isn't a trivial problem. The easy route is paying Cisco's load balancers millions of dollars, but those only scale so far.

The bigger internet companies spend years of development time trying to make distributed load balancing work, but the issues there are a bit more complicated than a few customers walking to checkout lines.
What makes the Microsoft Surface Pro tick?
VFA requires a college transcript (though an unofficial transcript is acceptable if an official transcript is not available). http://ventureforamerica.org/faqs/. Ergo, it is using credentials as a weeding mechanism.

VFA selects the startups their fellows work for based on recommendations of people they know. Ergo, they are using credentials as a weeding mechanism.

VFA may be doing something commendable, but it is most definitely not eliminating the credentials problem.

EDIT: Furthermore, VFA requires a bachelor's degree (or more advanced), a 3.0 GPA or higher in college (but grad school does not count), and green card or residency status. Unlike the factors originally discussed (pre-edit), these are mandatory requirements. All of these are standard credentials filters for companies hiring students straight out of college.
And every so often, they do actually create a useful article. However, it's true. They're like a smooth looking eHow nowadays.
Geesh! Crack a book once in a while! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
Here comes the mob. Really? Are we all gonna throw up our arms because of this? We use their service, we consume, read and digest their content like blood-suckers and now we get mad they're asking us to sign up? PG you've been reading Quora for "several years" and you think it's unjust they are asking you to sign up?

Quora has let us eat at their house for years and now all they're asking is we take off our shoes before entering. Let's not forget, we're in their house!

As an entrepreneur, how will we ever convince users to actually pay for products when the mob and pitch forks come out when they ask us to sign up?

We are so entitled it's sad. Really hope Quora doesn't bow down here. They aren't asking for your first-born. If you wanna be a member of their community, then be a member. Nothing unfair about that.
15-Year-Old Student's Ed Reform Plan
Because A will be used more as its closer to the users hand?
From the Quora link: "The advanced states gets weirder and weirder, and you run into risks. "

Can you describe the risks.
The concentration camps weren't uniform, and even within the camps, some people were able to survive for a while and transfer. The system also varied a lot through time.
I think he is arguing that most browser vendors don't fix common bugs as much as they add features.
How to Work When You Feel Like Crap
It's understandable. When someone tries to stamp out your identity, the natural reaction is to double down on that identity to emphasize that you will not submit to that sort of subjugation.

I think in fact this has a lot to do with the stickiness of religion -- it's completely mixed up with family identity.
I'd consider over zealous mods as somewhere along the ass-hattery spectrum.
Because they obviously did not. Camps varied in cruelty quite a bit. It's worth learning about how a modern society like Weimar Germany could have been influenced to take the course of action that it did. Similar things continue to happen all over the world, and education is important in combating it.
Quora is a horrible site.
Let's assume that it is unacceptable to have each dyno tell the router each time it finishes a request ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217157 ). And also that the goal is to reduce worst-case latency. And also that we don't know a priori how many requests each dyno should queue before it is 'full' and rejects further requests ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5216771 ).

Proposal:

1) Once per minute (or less often if you have a zillion dynos), each dyno tells the router the maximum number of requests it had queued at any time over the past minute.

2) Using that information, the router recalculates a threshold once a minute that defines how many queued requests is "too many" (e.g. maybe if you have n dynos, you take the log(n)th-busiest-dyno's load as the threshold -- you want the threshold to only catch the tail).

3) When each request is sent to a dyno, a header fields is added that tells the dyno the current 'too many' threshold.

4) If the receiving dyno has too many, it passes the request back to the router, telling the router that it's busy ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217157 ). The 'busy' dyno remembers that the router thinks it is 'busy'. The next time its queue is empty, it tells the router "i'm not busy anymore" (and repeats this message once per minute until it receives another request, at which point it assumes the router 'heard').

5) When a receiving dyno tells the router that it is busy, the router remembers this and stops giving requests to that dyno until the dyno tells it that it is not busy anymore.

I haven't worked on stuff like this myself, do you think that would work?
Except that in practice, he actually is a role model for a large number of people in the military.
One problem I've run into is not being able to submit bugs because my own codebase is relatively huge.[0]

For whatever reason, the bugs I see manifest as edge cases in Chrome's new compositing system, but only under "load". I've tried to get small examples that show the bugs, and failed.

But since the developers will only accept tiny programs that demonstrate the problem, I'm SOL.

UPDATE: Also, there's no such thing as "WebKit", as though rendering issues, once fixed in "WebKit" are suddenly fixed as long as everyone updates to the last release. It doesn't work like that, because there are numerous rendering implementations built-on top of WebKit -- the ones I run into have to do with Chrome's compositor vs. Apple's compositor. They behave quite a bit differently, and those aren't the only two in use. The same is true of WebKit JavaScript engines and the APIs supported.

There's just no way, as a developer, to treat "WebKit" as a platform. You have to deal with every browser using WebKit separately.

[0] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom
Hm, I looked into this, and as of recently you could get around it just by changing the QueryString: http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard-new-york-tim...

The cookies are for the number of times viewed, yes.

The HTTP Referer header is used to tell if you came from google or twitter: http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywal...

They definitely look at IP address for geographic reasons: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times-pa... but you are correct, they don't appear to use it for the paywall.

Thanks!
This is not a "proper" use case. I am not able to understand why one would want to "view" Markup in Markdown?
> And yet we're supposed to believe that "hey, strategic and tactical movement is pretty great" is a new idea?

Well, no -- I don't think that point was really argued anywhere in the article. The tactics of movement are perhaps only recently being formalized, but I think most students of history would agree that all modern military strategy has historical precedent ... assuming that you generalize the tactic broadly enough.

> Frankly, most of the time, size and power win the day.

Hmm. There are two ways I can see to parse this: one is historical -- "most of the time, size and power have won the day" -- and the other is theoretical -- "most of the time, size and power will win the day". I would readily agree with the first, but I'm circumspect about the latter.

I avoid computer games because they're a time sink that I can't afford, but I did get introduced to Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, and I still set aside a little time for it now and again. It is a game that depends very strongly on relative sizes to determine victories. But, my favorite race is militarily also the weakest one. I have the most fun trying to break the game, coming up with less obvious tactics and strategy.

I think there are enough exceptions to the rule of the mightiest throughout history that it's somewhat self-defeating to assume that force size will decide a battle.

> Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here.

Although there are some parallels, business is different from war. We shouldn't use businesses to make points about military strategies.

> The reason Card writes about weakness combined with movement and agility and brilliant insight is the same reason we are all fascinated with startups---because they're all counterintuitive (read: loses most of the time) and therefore fun to watch.

Well, sure. That doesn't mean that it can't also be a good example of a subject.

> Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done.

I would counter-argue that WWI in particular was such a messy, horrible, ugly disaster particularly because of the use of non-fancy maneuvers combined with new technology. Trench and chemical warfare was direct force-on-force conflict, and because planes were relatively new inventions, they were de-emphasized despite being exactly what each side needed to win the war.
YC solves that problem since it's now a huge brand and people tell you in the first sentence that they are YC alumni but actually any angel or VC who invests in you (or even cofounders) is gradually solving your credential trap.

For those without the YC credentials, this description of YC is exactly the credentials problem in a nutshell. In fact, it sounds exactly like the "old boy's club" mentality that still pervades companies run by Ivy league graduates. In both cases, once you've acquired the credentials your string of success (or failures) is not meaningfully taken into account because people are willing to accept the credentials (rather than your actual track record) as a proxy your chance of success.
I used to work for a content filtering company. Yes child porn exists, and it's one of your worst days when these sites start popping up in what you're reviewing, no, we can't send the links to others to "prove" it exists. I no longer work there and I'm glad I don't have days like that anymore.
The downside, of course, is that someone else controls it - .ly comes to mind.