skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience the Hacker News icon is one that gets confused with icons on my tab bar. Colored squares are only easily recognizable if they have a unique color, which obviously won't happen with the billions of sites out there.

Try opening http://blogsofnote.blogspot.com/ , http://www.homedepot.com/ , and http://8days.nl/ at the same time. See the problem?
Sounds like Jeff Dean :-)

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160173-the-tail-at-scal...
Chrome 24.0.1312.57 on OSX 10.6.8 MBP i5.

I've had crashes and blank screens running some ROME demos in Chrome here. Pretty sure it's the fancy shader use.
You're in for a rude awaking once you realize that there are various forms of micro-controllers spread all throughout your system and has been that way since the original IBM PC.
Here are my two favorite pixel art resources which are much better than the photonstorm link:

http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 (Tutorial by Cure)

http://forum.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32273 (Great article by Jetrel)
You neglected to mention that since 9/11, it would be almost impossible to do now what the hijackers did then. If that were attempted now, a whole plane load of vigilantes would rise up against the hijackers.
Setting up SSL on Elastic Beanstalk was very easy for us. The documentation explained the entire process. It is easier if you get a wildcard SSL cert, so then you can use the same SSL cert for your various deployments under the same domain.
Why Apple, Tesla, VCs, academia may die
> I'd gladly take a 12 hour train ride over a 2 hour flight just to avoid this treatment.

To add to that, three times now I have driven straight across the country (3 thousand miles) instead of fly. I can't say TSA harassment was the only factor (fun and desire to have a car on the other side factored in), but I would be lying if I said it wasn't a major point of consideration.
Save Nate Now - Helping Nate Battle Cancer
Edit: Just so that we're clear, I think the dogfooded blog post demonstrates poor proofing in both U.S. and International (U.K.) English.

One constant I’ve recognized in my writing is how much feedback I like to have.

The constant is not in your writing, but in your writing process. Alternatively, choose a more appropriate preposition, such as "about." This is a subtle error, but one that a US college graduate would have caught.

I’ll write an email, and I’ll send a draft to a colleague to see if it’s right. I’ll write an application to something, and get feedback from friends to see if it makes sense. I’ll write a blog post, and send it to my wife.

While this is technically correct, it is poor writing. The second phrase in each sentence is logically connected to the first as a continuation of action, so the second phrases should not be set apart as independent clauses. Either eliminate the ", and I'll..." or make them separate sentences.

But being a solo entrepreneur and working alone at home, I often find myself stuck, not being able to get a friend to look at my work.

It is permissible but not proper to start a sentence with "But" when you are discussing the immediately preceding sentence. It is not okay to start a paragraph with "But." Use "However" or "In contrast" or some such similar word or phrase. Alternatively, move the sentence to the preceding paragraph.

My wife can only take so much.

A single sentence is not a paragraph.

Especially not when it is logically part of the previous paragraph.

Unless you are doing it for emphasis.

But you already had a single-sentence paragraph, so the emphasis is lost.

I got bored of proofing the blog post after that, but it definitely gets worse from that point on and if I were to continue I would have further edits for every single sentence remaining in the post. The level of proofing is perfectly acceptable for a personal blog where you aren't too worried about it being read professionally...but why would you bother pay to have a personal post proofed? If this is the level of quality that can be expected from Draft, it is simply not adequate for any professional purpose.
Jeff Dean wrote a paper on it for CACM:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160173-the-tail-at-scal...

There's a relatively easy fix for Heroku. They should do random routing with a backup second request sent if the first request times fails to respond after a relatively short period of time (say, 95th percentile latency), killing any outstanding requests when the first response comes back in. The amount of bookkeeping required for this is a lot less than full-on intelligent routing, but it can reduce tail latency dramatically since it's very unlikely that the second request will hit the same overloaded server.
Indeed, and dual fans to keep quad core CPU and GPU cool. MBP roasts under load, no? ;-)
I did not say it was brand new, but it is the youngest and that's inarguable. It's pre-webkit state also was not exactly much to write home about, and I say that having been a user of Konqueror back in the day.

Google seems to be replacing the AOSP browser in Android with Chrome, btw.

I think you underestimate the non-technical cost of entry of a new browser by a lot while overestimating the technical. I'm not saying that it's a small feat to make a compliant browser by any means, but if a non-Google company were to attempt to market a new browser the way Google did (including ads of equivalent value to links on Google's front page), it would be absurdly expensive. There's a reason all the dominant and growing players in this space are massive corporations: a plucky underdog stands little chance against Google, Apple, or Microsoft. So who else's browsers would they have to hold off exactly?
If that story is supposed to be an analogy, Jonah Lehrer is the FBI. The Muslim lawyer wasn't the one who made mistakes that had consequences, and the Muslim lawyer wasn't the one that needed explicit procedures to decrease the odds of it happening again. That was the FBI (and Lehrer).
Oracle Announces Open Source JavaFX for iOS and Android
I believe routing is not random, but round robin. I'd like Heroku to confirm. It's still a problem. If you are looking to run Unicorn on Heroku, use the heroku-forward gem (https://github.com/dblock/heroku-forward). Works well, but application RAM is quickly its own issue, we failed to run that in production as our app takes ~300MB.
On further thought, Heroku users could probably even
approximate the benefits from the Mitzenmacher power-of-two-choices insight (mentioned elsewhere in thread), without Heroku's systemic help, by having dynos shed their own excess load.

Assume each unicorn can tell how many of its workers are engaged. The 1st thing any worker does – before any other IO/DB/net-intensive work – would be to check if the dyno is 'loaded', defined as all other workers (perhaps just one, for workers=2) on the same dyno already being engaged. If so, the request is redirected to a secondary hostname, getting random assignment to a (usually) different dyno.

The result: fewer big pileups unless completely saturated, and performance approaching smart routing but without central state/queueing. There is an overhead cost of the redirects... but that seems to fit the folk wisdom (others have also shared elsewhere in thread) that a hit to average latency is worth it to get rid of the long tails.

(Also, perhaps Heroku's routing mesh could intercept a dyno load-shedding response, ameliorating pile-ups without taking the full step back to stateful smart balancing.)

Added: On even further thought: perhaps the Heroku routing mesh automatically tries another dyno when one refuses the connection. In such a case, you could set your listening server (g/unicorn or similar) to have a minimal listen-backlog queue, say just 1 (or the number of workers). Then once it's busy, a connect-attempt will fail quickly (rather than queue up), and the balancer will try another random dyno. That's as good as the 1-request-per-dyno-but-intelligent-routing that RapGenius wants... and might be completely within RapGenius's power to implement without any fixes from Heroku.
Think the main challenge would be writing a compatibility layer for the Mac OS APIs circa 1990. It might not be so hard to compile the Pascal source.

Edit: Maybe it could be built as a 32 bit Carbon app for OS X with some modifications. That's all a little before my time, so I'm not sure how much was changed by the time OS X came around.
Yeah- he's still selling the book, btw
www.<hisname>.com/books/imagine/
The most significant bias in media isn't variation in individual opinion it is the systemic bias present in corporate media.
I think this is unfair to the parent. Comparing web standards to the OSI model is really not the same thing, in my view,, at all. Web "standards" are much more specific and prescriptive, as well as detailed than the OSI model.

It's hard to say whether the parent is correct about the dark age but such a thing clearly has been the case in the past with regards to standards. There was a time before in the not-so-distant past that browser vendors, particularly MS, did not care much at all about conforming to any sort of standards and created mess for which things like jQuery were partially created to solve. So I think there is real ground the parent's point. The issue is whether it is really getting worse, still.

One thing I think is different from previous years is that the programming community is less accepting, I think, of totally non-standard, even weird, proprietary implementations.
Not to mention the "pocket knives" and "lighters" plots are foiled by the new policy of "beat the shit out of terrorists and then sit on them, or you all die".
I think the problem is that any servers which can handle concurrent requests now need to decide how many requests they can handle. Since most application servers seem to have concurrency values of "1, ever" or "I dunno, lots" this is a hard problem.

Your solution would likely work if you had some higher level (application level? not real up on Heroku) at which you could specify a push vs. pull mechanism for request routing.
It can't cost more than $10 to ship a video game from the US to Australia, if you ship in bulk.

So make a startup that buys video games at retail, in bulk, in the US, ships them to Australia, and retails them there.

Everybody'll buy from you because you're so much cheaper, but you'll still have enough margin to make a good profit.
Startup Act 3.0 would permit 75k immigrant founders to the U.S. for 3yrs
So who is the real terrorist in this story? Who is the one causing people to be afraid?
Citizens can be prescribed (meth)amphetamines for medical usage. Also, the air force has moved to Modafinil IIRC.
You know, I flew quite a bit before the TSA appeared in 2002, and somehow those flights were free of the "gun toting idiot" you are so afraid of. Must have been magic, since apparently the TSA is the only thing standing in their way.
This is something I've read in networked game literature: players react far better to consistent and high latency than to inconsistent and low latency, even if the averages are lower in the latter case. (It might even have been a John Carmack article).
Smart Google Glass used skull to transport voice
TSA employees lack the intelligence to profile effectively. Probably the standards in Israel are higher.
Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app
I don't believe those polls. In fact I don't believe the mainstream media anymore.
£585

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/04/government-...
Does anybody know how to build this, or if it's even possible on the current Mac architecture and OS?
I wrote a production COBOL program in 1967. I swore that I would never write another one. So far I've managed to avoid it.
Single request per server? What year is this? 2003?
All true stories become distorted through repeated retelling. So the true stories are the one that is told the earliest. Better is the one that is told on camera since computers do not have mechanisms for distortion.

That's not our fault, but simply how our memories work. Here's one article on memory distortion. http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/how-memories-are-distorted-...
Yeah, that and the the "It may not be distributed to third parties" bit at the top of each file.
Honestly, in my view "guidelines" is even a strong word for what Microsoft did with the browser and "standards." This is not to hate on MS at all but honestly, even though you could, I suppose, argue IE has gotten much better, I don't really see a reason for it to exist anymore. It's been such a bad boy and has so few redeeming features that I really think the "blue e" on the desktop should be made to be like simply a shortcut to whatever your default browser is, be it Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or whatever (but not IE because it's development, in my view, should stop).
Even if the core logic were left in Pascal, the assembly language would need porting to x86/x86_64 and the GUI code would need to be ported to a modern GUI library.
At least in the US you're not responsible for collecting sales tax for a location you don't do business in, and i'm pretty sure there are minimum thresholds or exceptions to prevent people from having to collect sales tax on yard sales or fruit stands, for example.
Doesn't necessarily apply. Courts have ruled that the 4th amendment can be limiter or suspended in certain situations.

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2010/11/20/how-...
I've got a 23" LG monitor that I travel with (6.5lbs) which it just so happens is 1920 X 1080 -- plenty for coding.
A decade ago I worked with someone with the most amazing personal story. He was born in a cattle car on the way to a concentration camp in WW 2.

He was a very, very religious Jew in all respects except one - he didn't believe in God. It was an interesting combination.
I think that goes with the whole rap deal. They should have challenged them to a dance-off.
Good lord!!!!!

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)

50% 844

66% 2977

75% 5032

80% 7575

90% 16052

95% 20069

98% 29282

99% 30029

100% 30029 (longest request)

Those numbers are amazingly awful. If I ever run ab and see 4 digits I assume I need to optimize my software or server. But 5 digits?

Why in the world would a company spend $20,000 a month for service this awful?
It would attract a wider range of developers. The idea is to crowd source the task.
> That's one reason customers are throwing money at you to solve it, Heroku.

People are throwing money at Heroku because it's really easy to use, not because it's the best long-term technology choice. Seriously - what percentage of Heroku paying users do you think actually read up on the finest technical details like routing algorithms before they put in their credit card? Heroku knows. They know you can't even build a highly-available service on top of it, since it's singly-homed, and they're still making tons of money.
Banks and networks (Visa etc) don't share the customer information with the merchant. There was a class action law suit against merchants asking for Zipcode.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/16/business/la-fi-0216-...
Here Google is acting like a network and the developer is the merchant. There is absolutely no requirement (from a legal perspective) to pass on the customers' information to the merchant.
Visa and the issuer bank don't share any personal details of the customer with the merchant, which is what Google and Paypal (and probably square) are promising the merchants, if they use their payment system.
"Soldiers" here might not be a technical term.
If you're concerned about "rehoming" then it's worth pointing out the balance of payments for Mexico and China. In the past year, Mexico's has been REDUCED by 3b (so even though Mexico's exports increased by 15b, their imports increased by 18b). Compare to China: an INCREASE in the imbalance of 20b (so +25b in exports to the US vs +5b in imports).
Seriously. I have to wonder if he even considered why the 9/11 hijackers had to use box cutters of all things. As we learned that day, box cutters only work if everyone expects to live if they cooperate. No adult flying today would have such an expectation.
Right, OO vs functional is not either/or. It's an ever-present duality (data and algorithms) in any language. The problem is that discussions about achieving the optimum balance for a job are too subtle and non-sensational. Bloggers and commenters prefer polemics, so instead you mostly see die-hards who enjoy combative flamewars for an acclaimed tribal superiority.

Thankfully, a while back I saw an enlightening wiki page on c2.com.[1] Recognizing the yin-yang relationship where one cannot exist without the other gives a much better understanding of both.

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."

Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

1. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent
A Stylish style to make HN feel less raw
> its statistically less likely to die from terrorism then it is from a normal plane crash, consider that.

From a purely passenger point of view this might be true, but if you include the total deaths from WTC/Pentagon I bet it comes out in a wash. Normal plane crashes do not occur that frequently in the US, I doubt the total deaths from commercial flights is much higher than ~3000
Respectfully, it's not that hard to search Wikipedia for Jonah Lehrer.

Link for the lazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer
The TSA is experimenting with behavioral screening of this kind. I was screened at Logan last time I flew.

http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/expanded-behavior-de...

There are two problems with it, I think. First, it requires a fairly well-trained interrogator or it's no better than window dressing. Second, when it's effective, it's almost always perceived as rude. U.S. border guards have been doing it for years, and it's one reason they get such a bad reputation vs. those friendly Canadians on the other side. Deployed on a large scale, I bet more folks here on hn would be complaining about it than about the nude scanners. "What do you mean I have to tell an agent of the government what I'm planning on doing in LA?"
yea, I had another presentation today and that's what I did. Nowhere near as convenient though.

I'd like a software switch in the menus for the current version and the next version to have a physical switch.
A relatively easy fix, for read-only or idempotent requests. Also, if long-tail latency requests wind up being run twice, this technique might accelerate tip-over saturation. Still, this 'hedged request' idea is good to keep in mind, thanks for the pointer.

The 'tied request' idea from the Dean paper is neat, too, and Heroku could possibly implement that, and give dyno request-handlers the ability to check, "did I win the race to handle this, or can this request be dropped?"
Not only that, but an OOP version of Pascal created by Apple with input from Niklaus Wirth.

I love Pascal. Clean, concise, rigid, fast. Haven't touched it in 10 years though.
Doubtful. Valve has higher revenue per employee than Google or Apple. If there's anything Valve lacks, money is last on the list.
You would contact your Wifi product manufacturer about the lawsuit threat. If you are sued by the troll, you would then implead said manufacturer as a co-defendant or third-party defendant to the lawsuit.
Mature adults don't pretend the world is a bouncy castle.

Regardless, I made no mention of what exactly the scissors did look like (though everyone else didn't waste time projecting) and the rest of the post was praise for the work and my longing for there to be more.

And most of the pople on HN post, retweet and favorite a lot worse on Twitter, but I guess hypocrisy does fit very well with the recommended behavior for mature adults. That's not to say HN should turn into Reddit, but let's not pretend we're all saints.
The Most Important Interview Question of All Time - Part 1
Not necessarily. Heroku claims that a global request queue is hard to scale, and therefore they switched to random load balancing. The comment above shows that a global request queue is not necessary. Lets say that minimum-of-n scales up to 10 dynos. If your application requires 40 dynos, you can have one front load balancer which dispatches the requests to 4 back load balancers, each of which has 10 dynos assigned to them on which they perform min-of-10 routing. This gives you routing that's almost as good as min-of-40 but it scales up nonetheless.
You mean besides the fact that pocket knives and lighters pose no real danger?
Best thing we can do is follow through on the article's call-to-action for emailing support@heroku.com:

"After reading the following RapGenius article (http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics), we are reevaluating the decision to use Heroku. I understand that using a webserver like unicorn_rails will alleviate the symptoms of the dyno queuing problem, but as a cash-strapped startup, cost-efficiency is of high importance.

I look forward to hearing you address the concerns raised by the article, and hope that the issue can be resolved in a cost-effective manner for your customers."
I found Elastic Beanstalk had extremely serious latency and performance problems for PHP5, that didn't occur when setting up manual EC2/Load balancer. I intended to investigate it, but never had time.
Crawford vs. the RIAA
> There's a relatively easy fix for Heroku. They should do random routing with a backup second request sent if the first request times fails to respond after a relatively short period of time (say, 95th percentile latency), killing any outstanding requests when the first response comes back in. The amount of bookkeeping required for this is a lot less than full-on intelligent routing, but it can reduce tail latency dramatically since it's very unlikely that the second request will hit the same overloaded server.

Your solution doesn't work if requests aren't idempotent.
The first part of your message is a rather dangerous misconception. Many, many drugs can and have been dispensed on blotter paper, often as LSD mimics. For dozens of examples, see DEA Microgram bulletins passim (http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms.shtml).

The point about bitterness is absolutely correct though, and certainly any purported LSD blotter that tastes bitter should be suspect.

Interestingly, at least one non-psychedelic has been found distributed on blotter paper: alprazolam (See http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms/2008/mg0508.pdf), for which I'd tentatively expect the bitterness rule also to work.
vipassana meditation

== another nit: the first word is a useless adjective.
Very few break the silence because the far majority of human beings will submit to authority without question, if the conditions are right. It's well documented that they will even do so to the point of hurting or even killing someone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
It's as it should be: http://marketingland.com/why-im-glad-google-play-gives-devel...
Arduino CI traffic light
Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism