skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As with all these stories, need to be taken with a nice handful of salt. Owning a business in MA would make it seem like you would qualify for state taxation (on that part at least).

The US taxes its citizens even outside of their own jurisdiction. It wouldn't surprise me if MA taxed people that still made money in MA.
i don't think some details of the argument hold. it alleges that you need more dynos to get the same throughput. but that's not true once you have sufficient demand to keep a queue of about sqrt(n) (i think - someone who knows more theory than me can correct me) in size on the dyno (where you have n dynos). because at that point all dynos will be running continuously, and the throughput will be the same with either routing.

the average latency will be higher, though (and the spread in latency larger).
It is being tested. This would be a very interesting (if difficult) time in which to be at Valve.

Ultimately, companies have to do this. Businesses can't expand indefinitely and, at some point, contraction becomes part of the process.

The hard part, assuming the best of Valve, is how it will describe what it did to preserve its culture while being respectful of those who are affected.
I wonder how much they thought about a 10% company wide paycut. The "we're all in this together" can (imho) protect a lot of that culture. I can imagine people leaving anyway. But they would leave because they're shutting down specific platform development, not that there's no room for them to contribute.

Layoffs are crushing regardless. I hope for the best for everyone involved.
Well when they quit molesting old ladies, we'll stop pointing it out.
It might make sense for the state to negotiate a license for widespread free distribution before agreeing to incorporate a document by reference.

While I support the end result of this petition, and think it's better than the status quo, it is a little weird to think that something I wrote could automatically become public domain if the state incorporates it by reference into a law. What if I didn't want them to? It'd be a lot cleaner if the state acquired the rights to the document before writing it into a law.

Alternately, we could have truly public bodies, rather than quasi-public-sphere but actually private organizations, coming up with these model regulations.
People invested too much time/money/energy into Heroku and get defensive when a problem needs discussion? Just guessing.
It's also partyland for employees who work at customs. They claim that they take the abandoned products and sell it in auction...
All the money obviously spent elsewhere. And then, open space -- not even cubicles.

So sad.

Well, Google's quite successful, so who am I to judge? But... not my cup of tea. And, somehow, it puts me in mind of the crap customer support for "end users". I guess, in my experience, the more internal distraction, the less outward focus and attention.

So far, gains through automation keep Google on a winning pace. But, I wonder...
Isometrify: Photoshop plugin for isometric projection
I understand it was more anti-Java than pro anything else, I just saw functional as his solution to this problem. I'm already fluent enough with Java that I see absolutely no need to switch to a different imperative language as my main workhorse, so I looked at Haskell as a sort of "go big or go home" approach to weaning myself off of mutable state, etc.
Personally - I prefer Linode to Heroku, sure there is more of my time consumed with sys admin, but I like having full control over my platform & setup, rather than having it virtually dictated to me. I'm always open to change but this strategy has served me very well for almost 3 years now.
Agreed, by mediocre I meant "ordinary." My original question being, if it's basically the same as other solutions, why would anyone use it now that we know what Twitter is doing with it.
Usually people I talk to about this seem to think things are broken, and yet learning from other countries would just make it worse.
But then it would lose all the features that make it an excellent device, such as security, always being up-to-date and fast boot time.

It was the top-selling laptop on Amazon over Christmas.
http://www.chromebookblog.com/2013/01/samsung-and-acer-chrom...
I was really intrigued to learn about Israel's approach to airport security, especially given the relative threat they face. Here's the article that I read a while back: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2009/12/30/the_israelifica...

Seems like the US could stand to learn something.
So I guess if someone comes on Hacker News and posts an image, and it kind of looks like a phallus, everyone should just keep quiet about it?
MailChimp Adds Multi-User Accounts and Permissions
So the issue here is two-fold:
- It's very hard to do 'intelligent routing' at scale.
- Random routing plays poorly with request times with a really bad tail (median is 50ms, 99th is 3 seconds)

The solution here is to figure out why your 99th is 3 seconds. Once you solve that, randomized routing won't hurt you anymore. You hit this exact same problem in a non-preemptive multi-tasking system (like gevent or golang).
It doesn't sound like these layoffs were prompted by money problems, so asking people to take paycuts for 'the good of the company' wouldn't solve the problem of there people who no longer fit into the company vision of what they want to be doing.
What makes COBOL such a hated language?
A friend of mine had a large internal component come loose in his iPhone 5. AFAIK he hadn't dropped it or anything either (there were no marks on the outside, and he wasn't fessing up to anything). You could move the phone and feel and hear the internal component moving a few cm inside the body. It was very odd.
That word does not mean what you think it means:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
Randomized routing isn't all bad. In fact, if Heroku were to switch from purely random routing to minimum-of-two random routing, they'd perform asymptotically better [1].

[1]: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/mythesis.p...
But I like boring news that get straight to the point. Often the "getting an angle" style just makes the story longer, incoherent and boring.

I don't really like to write. I am only doing it because of a desire to express an idea or concept. Maybe journalism could improve with that spearhead.
Hmm seems to be back on the homepage again, not seen that before
Silk road.
Marginal cost for a software copy isn't high enough to make a $10 price bump and some DLC result in twice the profit. I don't think DLC is that big a factor except on the mega-hits that people play online for a year after purchase.
Mac programming in that era was a mix of assembly and Pascal.
How to find the publisher of 'How to find the next Steve Jobs', by Nolan Bushnell, by Chris Taylor.
A lot. The problems should be quite apparent to any developer who has used any mainstream programming languages aside from JavaScript and PHP. But for those who don't have such experience, a few quick Google searches should turn up more than enough information indicating the problems with JavaScript. There's no need to rehash it here.
Given that ElasticBeanstalk has support for rails now, does Heroku still have any advantage over AWS for a new startup?
[Firebase founder] I would caution against comparing our pricing to S3 or any other non-realtime storage service. Firebase's use case is primarily for serving structured data (the type of data that lives in a database). For most apps, this is a small piece of overall data usage. Your site probably spends most of its bandwidth usage on downloading static content -- HTML, CSS, images, videos, etc -- which you don't need to store in Firebase (you can, but if you're looking for a cheap way to store big video Files, Firebase is not the answer).

Also keep in mind that for most apps, 90%+ of infrastructure costs come from running servers, not bandwidth. So while we may seem more expensive than other services, we eliminate your costs for servers and backups. The only thing you pay is the per-bandwidth/storage price. Also keep in mind that Firebase apps can often use less data per-user than traditional apps, since they push data only when it changes, rather than polling.

The vast majority of the apps on Firebase today will fit nicely in our free plan.
The Atari 520 STe and 1040 STe had four RAM slots. 4MB was doable, using four modules. The developer version (4160 STe) came with 4MB RAM preinstalled. [1] [2]

I can't find a price list for those models, but Atari sold 4MB memory upgrades for its ATW800 workstations at GBP 1450 [3].

[1] http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=24&st...

[2] http://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/memory.php

[3] http://atw800.complicated.net/pricelist.html
If you're just realising this now I feel like I have some bad news for you. The whole hardware market (as green as it tries to be) is a big landfill creation machine.
Time waits for no one, we all suffer tragedies
You're definitely right — nil / NSNull is confusing to newbies, but Ruby is just as bad. The way it handles UTF8 is somewhat backwards, and the fact that symbols and strings are different (but sometimes used interchangeably) can cause 'gotchas' for newbies too. I'd argue that your language of choice is really dependent on which set of baggage you've internalized :-)
This explains why some of my benchmarking tools gave very different and sometimes weird results when figuring out how many dynos our application needed.

As this blogpost also states Heroku really need to keep their documentation up to date. I sometimes stumble across something old referring to an old stack, or something contradicting.
I wondered about that, too. That's what HP used to do: pay cuts offset by time off (with top brass taking the cut but working a full week). It seems like it would be better.
Typing in "Forest Gump" and "Scrubs" doesn't do anything?

What is it supposed to do?
I did miss that— thanks for the rerun.
rails server -p $PORT
rake jobs:work
Webrick and DJ

No procfile? No Unicorn or Puma? No worker process or threads defined
I suspect there's an implied "of other people" there. Or maybe they think that the backscatters have an ultrasound in them somewhere.

Latex up the butt would be a great way to get people pissed enough to do something.
Rap Genius is employing a classic rap-mogul strategy: start a beef
It has to deal with the number of open connections to postgresql, not disk IO. You don't want to have 4,000 connections open at once (unless you were using a connection balancer, but that would only work in transaction mode).
Wow. I suspect Rap Genius has the dollars now where it's totally feasible for them to go beyond Heroku, but it still might not be the best use of their time. But if they have to do it, they have to do it.

OTOH, having a customer have a serious problem like this AND still say "we love your product! We want to remain on your platform", just asking you to fix something, is a pretty ringing endorsement. If you had a marginal product with a problem this severe, people would just silently leave.
I definitely see that. I also see him grappling with identity, likely the result of his years with (relatively) carefully managed presentation. In the mirror painting, we don't see the front of his body directly, only a limited reflection that he chooses to show us. And we're given a peek through is eyes in the bathtub, but with only limited parts of his body exposed from out of the water. It's like he's trying to express that there's more to him as a person than what we saw.
"Liar Liar" shows results, but the "Read More" link is broken and it doesn't tell me Where I Can Watch It
One reason to promote more open and universal access to academic materials is to allow journalists and interested laypeople to read the actual papers referenced in news articles and press releases, deciding for themselves whether the press release was accurate. The idea is that more exposure to how research actually works will improve general scientific literacy and put an end to the constant barrage of states wanting to outlaw the teaching of evolution or cosmology.

Having a few academics e-mail an author to ask for a copy might be acceptable. Having thousands of educated laypeople constantly e-mailing authors simply doesn't scale.

Another reason is to permit anyone and everyone to do wide-scale analytics, instead of having to rely on the analyses that big, well-connected entities decide to run.
How does this compare to EngineYard/AppFog/any other Heroku competitors?
Much of Photoshop's interface came from Apple's own MacPaint which shipped at the launch of Macintosh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacpaintWP.png

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
But you never want to have a queue on any of your dynos! A queued request means that a user is waiting with no response. If your goal is to have 0 (or less than epsilon) requests queued, it takes far fewer dynos if the requests are routed intelligently

If you have 10 dynos and 1000 simultaneous requests, the difference between naive and intelligent might well be reduced, but that's also a scenario in which your end user response times would be horrendously slow and so you'd need more dynos either way
I don't see how that would work unless you already had a priori identifying information for the person who performed the transaction.

If I deposit 500 BTC every Friday, and immediately transfer it into the mixing account, then order a pizza for 10 BTC on a Tuesday, paid for from via mixing account, how would you confirm that I was the one who ordered the pizza? All you can determine for certain is that (a) I am a subscriber to the mixing account, and (b) someone who subscribes to the mixing account ordered a pizza. If there are a million subscribers to the mixing account, without access to their internal records, there's no way to conclusively associate outgoing payments with specific subscribers.
Interestingly, Valve's hiring policy is that you should aim to hire someone who is better than you. But what if you hire someone who is better than you, then Valve has a round of redundancies and you're the one who gets the axe?

Here's what Valve's employee handbook [1] says on the matter: '"With the bar this high, would I be hired today?" That’s
a good question. The answer might be no, but that’s actually awesome for us, and we should all celebrate if it’s true
because it means we’re growing correctly. As long as you’re
continuing to be valuable and having fun, it’s a moot
point, really.'

Well, not so moot now.

[1] http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Low...
Fear, depression, anxiety, misplaced energy, clouded perception, debilitating ego...

Yes, psychedelics can alleviate these problems. I could've told you that when I was 14, and I'm sure that many intelligent, creative, productive people will agree. Anecdotal evidence, I know.

Although I haven't touched anything stronger than caffeine for well over 7 years, I AM advocating the use of tryptamines and phenethylamines
cacilda!
I do perf work at Facebook, and over time I've become more and more convinced that the most crucial metric is the width of the latency histogram. Narrowing your latency band --even if it makes the average case worse-- makes so many systems problems better (top of the list: load balancing) it's not even funny.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing
From a massive steel combination safe they removed a bottle containing one gram of synthesized psilocybin, the psychoactive agent animating the 200-member fungus family commonly known as “magic mushrooms.”

The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong ‘shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety.

The article said 20 to 30 milligrams of psilocybin which is the hallucinogen in shrooms.
Ugh. These guys are so cocky.
You can reach the same insight by doing enough vipassana meditation.

If someone posted an article about a new supersonic jet that takes you from New York to Sydney in under 4 hours, you could make a comment about being able to do the same by foot. You would be technically correct however it wouldn't be a very useful comment, given the difference between several hours and a lifetime.
Hi,

I can't help you with a job or a visa, I can only say that I feel your pain and sympathize with you. You seem like a very talented guy, and you deserve better.

Do not despair my friend, keep on looking for a way out and eventually you'll get there.

--
On a different note, it seems that the site is ba_n_ ning me for some reason. I can't even comment. Really annoying.
It seems like it would be really hard to keep up, but I have no specific first-hand knowledge. Can an open-allocation philosophy really work if you can be fired for choosing an allocation that turns out to be the "wrong" one? If that becomes the expectation, 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...

Perhaps more problematic, there's an incentive to try to get yourself into an "indispensable" position that's core to operations. My read of the existing Valve policy is that they wanted you to ignore those kinds of jockeying-for-position considerations and pick something you were passionate about & good at, as long as it was helpful to Valve somehow.
> My personal and business banking is done at Chase. I've found them to be fantastic and managed to avoid pretty much any fees by following the guidance of very helpful employees. I know everyone loves to bag on big banks, but Chase has been great. Bank of America is another story - their website barely works.

Nice try, Jamie Dimon.
And he worked on Tintin (which they label as Tin Tin - which makes me cringe like anything!)
Why not hire a devops guy & rack your own hardware? Or get some massive computing units at amazon (just as good but more expensive)?

This reminds me of the excellent 5 stages of hosting story shared on here from a while back:

http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/
Ahh I used itunes search API to search, and Forest Gump isn't actually in their search results...
Try flying into or out of Israel. Israeli airline/airport security is far and away the best in the world.
Rap Genius is limited more by time than by money if anything. It would make more sense to throw money at the problem instead of people.
Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number?

Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.
randomized routing is not necessarily bad if they look at 2 choices and pick the min. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-choice_hashing and http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20...
Heroku implements this change in mid-2010, then sells to Salesforce six months later. Hmm...wondering how this impacted revenue numbers as customers had to scale up dynos following the change...
Github extensions for Git
I agree with this point. A lot of RubyMotion fans seem to be trying to build an app for iOS while learning as little as possible. While that's great if you're on a tight deadline and want to play to your strengths, Xcode is an incredibly powerful tool and features like the static analyzer, visual debugger and core data visualizer shouldn't be thrown out because some command line utility will let you Build & Run.
I opt out every time that I fly, and I always request a public screening, because I want people to see me being patted down. It's amazing how many people still aren't aware that they have the option. I've talked to a few folks in line about it, and even convinced one guy to opt out after me. Set an example and be obvious about it.

Funny story - on my last flight, the patdown resulted in an alert for some banned residue on my clothing, so the TSA took me aside to a private cubicle, re-ran the patdown, came up clean, and then left me to pack my stuff up and go on my way. In this cubicle with me were two 5-gallon buckets filled with confiscated lighters and pocket knives. Someone thought it was a good idea to leave me to re-pack my luggage unsupervised in a room full of contraband with no additional security checks. I didn't take anything or do anything untoward, and I wanted to point it out to the agent who'd patted me down, but I'm sure that would have just flagged me as suspicious and I would get to expend extra time being thoroughly searched. If that doesn't tell you how hilariously bad security is, I'm not sure what will.
Certainly the iPad with its casual gaming (read: free) changed the landscape.

Even Nintendo cut its forecast for WiiU:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/30/nintendo-cu...
Khan Academy signs twice as many female as male interns for the summer
Postgres has a limitation on number of open connections. This is because 1 connection = 1 process. MySQL uses threads, which scales better but has other downsides. The thread-based approach is also possible with Postgres using 3rd party connection pooling apps, e.g. pgbouncer.
Transactions have to be done at the common ancestor of the data being modified, so it's best to use them for data that's nearby in the Firebase data tree. You /can/ do a transaction on a large chunk of data (e.g. the entire user list), but the client would need to sync the entire data and there'd be a greater chance of contention.

If you need atomic bidirectional friendships though, you can do it if you structure your data a little differently. To turn a friendship between a pair of users on and off, you could set /friends/user1/user2 to true iff user1 and user2 are friends. Then you can write security rules that are based off of that to allow and deny access to the users' data.
I tend to vote against this type of security by opting out of the scanners. If even one quarter of the passengers opted out they would need to reexamine their security - one that would likely not include the expensive scanners or intrusive pat down tests. I just get to the airport 10 minutes earlier. They do seem to intentionally penalize you with delay, and often question why you're opting out.
Wow. This is explains a lot.

We've always been of the opinion that queues were happening on the router, not on the dyno.

We consistently see performance problems that, whilst we could tie down to a particular user request (file uploads for example, now moved to S3 direct), we could never figure out why this would result in queuing requests given Heroku's advertised "intelligent routing". We mistakenly thought the occasion slow request couldn't create a queue....although evidence pointed to the contrary.

Now that it's apparent that requests are queuing on the dyno (although we have no way to tell from what I can gather) it makes the occasional "slow requests" we have all the more fatal. e.g. data exports, reporting and any other non-paged data request.
Wow.

Normally when I read "X is screwing Y!!!" posts on Hacker News I generally consider them to be an overreaction or I can't relate. In this case, I think this was a reasonable reaction and I am immediately convinced never to rely on Heroku again.

Does anyone have a reasonably easy to follow guide on moving from Heroku to AWS? Let's keep it simple and say I'm just looking to move an app with 2 web Dynos and 1 worker. I realize this is not the type of app that will be hurt by Heroku's new routing scheme but I might as well learn to get out before it's too late.
I'm not familiar with minimum-of-two-random routing, but it does seem like assigning request to dynos in sequence would perform much better than assigning randomly (ie in a scenario with n dyno capacity, request 1 => dyno 1, request 2 => dyno 2, ... request n => dyno n, request n+1 => dyno 1, ..., repeat)

That'd be probably significantly better than the case of (request i => dyno picked out of hat) for all i