skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Easiest fix: moving to EC2 next week. I've wanted to ever since these issues became evident but it's hard to make a good argument from handwaving about 'problems'.

Of course, then you need to solve all these problems yourself. That sounds pretty easy, you'll have it done next week no problem!

That was sarcastic, but this isn't: good luck, let us know how it goes.
I just founded that as well!! And I just started going through it today!
Great project - really easy to use and works well. As other comments have said there's tonnes of potential / additional functionality which could be added, but this is a great start.

For anyone interested, here's my play: http://cmx.io/#4949114
What happen to iOS Engineers? I don't believe this infograph 100%.
Eh, I wouldn't recommend going this route. I'd go down the pgbouncer road instead.
Isn't this kind of a step backwards? Is Rails really that great that people are willing endure these kinds of limitations just to use it?
If you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, they have a PDP-1 running Space War.

The day I played it, the docent giving the demonstration was Steve Russell.
My bad if that wasn't clear in my comment: the sensationalist bit wasn't directed at you but at the general tone of the thread. In fact, I actually upvoted your comment for providing two links highly relevant to the article.
That's essentially round-robin, but it still requires syncing the data of which dyno is next, which is probably what they're trying to avoid.
I'm curious, how does this compare to something like The Gimp, which I've always considered comaprable to Photoshop in almost every way)
For python / Django you can use a Procfile specifying gunicorn (rather than stock manage.py) with multiple worker threads, eg.

web: gunicorn myapp.wsgi -b 0.0.0.0:$PORT -w 5

Then you will have 5 parallel "single-threaded" instances on each dyno rather than just 1. This will partially ameliorate the problem, but probably not 100%. (NOTE: This is speculation since Heroku hasn't weighed in yet)
Often, air travelers either have to pay for a new ticket at an expensive "walk-up" fare

Wait, what? While I'm sure it can't be 100%, I've missed dozens of flights over the years and never once was it ever suggested that I might have to pay a dime to the airline. Usually it's the next flight on the same route unless its full or a long way off.

imho you don't speak up against the TSA because it's designed to be a dominating experience. you don't speak up in prison either.
I've got an inPulse watch^h^h^h^h^hpaperweight. If you want to see the effect of the Langolier spammers go over and look at inPulse's website http://www.getinpulse.com/hack/forum/ (not recommended). You can also see folks crying in the corner for any information at all. They never followed through and made it work with 64bit versions of Windows, the Linux support was sub par at best, mostly unusable. Just checking they at least have finally turned off the page where they would let you order one.

To say this left a 'bad taste' would be an understatement.
DOB blotter is sometimes a little thicker/larger since dosage is about 10x heavier than the equivalent of LSD. Bad mistake to make by the way since DOB is less tested, lasts considerably longer and takes around 2 hours to kick in.

I didn't know that LSD wasn't ever supposed to taste. Figured the bitterness was just from the ink on the blotter. Took three tabs, felt it a little (comparable to 100ug), figured it was just weak acid and so redosed five more tabs about two hours in. Even on heroic acid trips the longest I'd been away was eight hours. On DOB I stayed out for a solid 24.
I was looking for something like this! Thanks!
Well, it's an unofficial shirt and we used a different font. Just a 'Y'. I mailed it over to PG in hopes he enjoys it.
Hey! You are at U of T! I am from UBC. I have taken few grad level psych stats courses already. I have learned how to conduct basic regression, factor analysis using R. If you have questions about doing basic survey analysis using R, maybe I can help you out a bit. My contact information is in my profile!
But for my own research, doing basic analysis in R probably won't be enough..I want to know more about how to write functions in R, etc.
This has a weird habit of happening - or getting noticed at least - when the discussion concerns YC companies.
Mindful coding.

Would you mind elaborating on that? I would have thought mindfulness (being aware of the present and being alive) would sit at the opposite end of a spectrum from coding (being deeply focused on abstract constructs). When I'm good, I remember to use mindfulness in the breaks between coding, but I can't imagine them in parallel. (Maybe you meant the former?)

PS: great comments.
This is true - unicorn masks the symptoms for a period of time but does not solve the underlying problem in the way a global request queue would.

Also, if the unicorn process is doing something cpu intensive (vs waiting on a 3rd party service or io etc) then it won't serve 3 requests simultaneously as fast as single processes would.
The Pirate Party wrote a good rebuttal of this:

http://www2.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_pharmaceutical...
> But really, throwing in the towel at intelligent routing and replacing it with "random routing" is horrific, if true.

The thing is, their old "intelligent routing" was really just "we will only route one request at a time to a dyno." In other words, what changed is that they now allow dynos to serve multiple requests at a time. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound as horrific, does it?
They want to force the issue with a public spat. Fair enough.

But, they also might also be able to self-help quite a bit. RG makes no mention of using more than 1 unicorn worker per dyno. That could help, making a smaller number of dynos behave more like a larger number. I think it was around when Heroku switched to random routing that they also became more officially supportive of dynos handling multiple requests at once.

There's still the risk of random pileups behind long-running requests, and as others have noted, it's that long-tail of long-running requests that messes things up. Besides diving into the worst offender requests, perhaps simply segregating those requests to a different Heroku-app would lead to a giant speedup for most users, who rarely do long-running requests.

Then, the 90% of requests that never take more than a second would stay in one bank of dynos, never having pathological pile-ups, while the 10% that take 1-6 seconds would go to another bank (by different entry URL hostname). There'd still be awful pile-ups there, but for less-frequent requests, perhaps only used by a subset of users/crawler-bots, who don't mind waiting.
Given that the vast majority of repairs turn into motherboard replacements (since the motherboard includes pretty much every electronic component and port), making the motherboard more quickly accessible seems higher priority than getting at the fan.

Anecdotal evidence: I've gone through multiple keyboard, motherboard, and screen replacements for the last 3 thinkpads I've owned, but never a fan replacement.
It's not a question of learning something new. It's that there's a fundamental, philosophical split between people who hate IDEs and people who love them.

It's one of those long-running holy wars of programming that goes back way further than iOS development.
> Of course, then you need to solve all these problems yourself. That sounds pretty easy, you'll have it done next week no problem!

I agree with this, actually. I know it's not simple to do your own servers when you're growing. Yet I'd rather improve my existing ops skills a bit than have to setup everything as async APIs (on EC2 anyway). That's the only way I can see that I can solve this.
Interested in how you achieved this. Did you change server setup significantly from the default EY stack?
Link to paintings: http://www.blackbookmag.com/art/george-w-bush-s-paintings-re...

I couldn't figure out what the heck everybody was talking about.
It's easier/cheaper for them to maintain and you have to pay for more dynos. A lot more.
It's different to this one http://www.utsalumni.org/news/how-one-man-escaped-from-a-nor...

The latter tells the story of how he betrayed his mother and brother. It is omitted from the posted link.

Also in the latter story, he discovered Park died before he escaped, not the other way around.
While I agree that Google's cut should be thinner, it works out way better as a buyer when you can ask a developer directly for a refund or about payment issues rather than deal with a huge company with automated customer service that doesn't work.
Could you not just disable Bluetooth on your phone for situations like that? Just curious if there's a downside.

Would love a Pebble but haven't ordered yet so I'm going to wait until they catch up on the backlog.
> Americans are apathetic when it comes to making things better (healthcare, education, poverty rates, incarceration rates, living standards, etc.), because they think it's already "the best".

A great many of my fellow Americans are worse than apathetic. If you point out areas where we can improve, some Americans will actively attack you through accusations of treason and verbal abuse. (Seems to be 10X worse in Texas than any other place I've lived.) It's as if they're willfully trying their best to ensure they won't ever learn anything.
> 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?

Given what we know about human nature, it probably doesn't work this way. The person who ostensibly worked to hire people better than themselves probably mutters "well, the manual doesn't say anything about firings" and swings the axe, being careful not to cut themselves.
U.S. Patent Nos. 6,714,559, 7,386,002, 7,535,921, 7,548,553, 5,740,366, 5,940,771, 6,374,311, 7,457,646, 5,546,397, 5,844,893, 6,665,536, 6,697,415, 7,013,138, 7,710,907, 7,916,747, 7,873,343, and 7,536,167

Source: http://morrisjames.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/cisco-systems...
I don't get this. While it's cool that you don't charge based on bandwidth or TCP connections, it sounds like you basically do when that bandwidth is associated with an "attack".

Doesn't this make CloudFlare customers more vulnerable to attacks, since an attack will result in a monthly fine for the rest of the site's lifetime? (whereas a normal site just pays a one time cost)
SSL pain can be a major pain to set up. Is the process of setting it up remotely easy compared to Heroku?
While it may have been accidentally implied, I never stated that hospitals overflowing with customers is a good thing. I merely stated that if you offered the same care for lower prices, you would have no shortage of customers. In addition, when there is competition between hospitals, a patient can choose one that has a lower incidence of return visits, for example.

Demand is always an issue - in this case, high demand and a tightly limited supply have resulted in astronomical pricing. We can't really affect demand, other than to cure various diseases, but we can easily affect supply by easing the intense regulation and government-mandated licensing monopoly.

I also never said that hospitals ought to be for-profit (though I wouldn't suggest outlawing for-profit hospitals, either). There are many advantages to a non-profit approach, and non-profits do not have to have the government's support to exist. I am only arguing that the government should get out of the issue, except when it comes to judicial matters of crime or civil suits. An organization can have a motivation other than profit - many do. Many organizations (the Red Cross, for instance) would be more than happy if they were unneeded and obsolete. I realize there are certainly some corrupt people who would try to use their position for unjust personal gain, but this is always the case, and would become harder to do than under the current model, not easier.

(As a very firm Christian, I tend towards the idea that the best model for hospitals is to be managed by the church (e.g., the numerous and beneficial Catholic hospitals around the country), which would be in line with what I previously said about non-profits, though I realize I am probably nearly alone in that opinion on this forum. I don't believe that secular hospitals should be outlawed and all hospitals should be required to be church hospitals, merely that church hospitals are the best model.)

Regardless, my point wasn't really to argue the free market position in this case. My comment was more to point out that the OP doesn't actually engage with the arguments he claims to refute, as he doesn't look at what a free-market advocate would actually say.
An example with AngularJS would be fantastic, if anyone has something to share. I'm doing some teaching at the moment with AngularJS.
If this is such a problem for you, why are you still on Heroku? It's not a be-all end-all solution.

I got started on Heroku for a project, and I also ran into limitations of the platform. I think it can work for some types of projects, but it's really not that expensive to host 15m uniques/month on your own hardware. You can do just about anything on Heroku, but as your organization and company grow it makes sense to do what's right for the product, and not necessarily whats easy anymore.

FYI I wrote up several posts about it, though my reasons were different (and my use-case is quite a bit different from a traditional app):

* http://justcramer.com/2012/06/02/the-cloud-is-not-for-you/

* http://justcramer.com/2012/08/30/how-noops-works-for-sentry/
Why would you need to port it to anything? Pascal is still a useful language.
The response wasn't that great: https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/301833037979729920
A minor nit: Many people can reach deep insight by meditating intensely for a week or less, not a lifetime.

Testimonies of Deep Insight or Knowledge of the Arising and Passing - http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/12/if-this-is-in...

To reach the end of seeking and seeing that everything is already non-dual, many people can accomplish this in 18 months to 2 years.
What if you realize, like many, that they're too busy molesting people and confiscating shampoo to be doing anything useful?
It's interesting, because initially the way that queue time detection worked within New Relic was via timestamps.

Currently, though, I believe it's just fed as a number of milliseconds: https://github.com/newrelic/rpm/blame/master/lib/new_relic/a...

This solves the issue of the application seeing out-of-whack queue times if there's clock skew between the front-end routing framework and the actual dyno box, but misses all the queued time spent in the dyno-queue per rap genius's post.
America is a pretty good place to be above-average. Our good schools, for example, are pretty expensive, but they are really good. Same goes for high-end medical care, and, for that matter, taxes. It's a pretty nice place to be above-average, even though, yeah, for the average and below, you are probably right.

The thing, I think, that most of us miss is that, well (and I am in this category too,) most of us think of ourselves as above average.

As Steinbeck said, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

From my experiences, even just looking at my own feelings, this is absolutely something built into the American culture. I go on like I'm wealthy, and I do own a company with a very high revenue, but profit? what I actually get paid? well, I'm barely above average. But I still see myself as 'above average'

I think this explains most of the very American phenomina of poor folks voting for various policies that disproportionately favor rich folks.
Rails server is mostly for development mode. When deployed I think most people use either Unicorn, or throw their applications on JRuby that runs on the JVM with some kind of appserver.

JRuby have this advantage of being multithreaded, so you can parallelize within a single process, and don't rely on forking. Stock Ruby with MRI have a GIL, and as far as I know only runs on one core.

The limitations of stock Ruby is being worked on, but there is still a long way.
We were very surprised to discover Heroku no longer has a global request queue, and spent a good bit of time debugging performance issues to find this was the culprit.

Heroku is a great company, and I imagine there was some technical reason they did it (not an evil plot to make more money). But not having a global request queue (or "intelligent routing") definitely makes their platform less useful. Moving to Unicorn helped a bit in the short term, but is not a complete solution.
He's still at the top of the Valve staff page.
IMHO, the license is pretty clear that you can't even post the source on GitHub.
4th Amendment. Use it.

(To wit: the US government is forbidden from searching people without a warrant signed by a judge for that particular person and situation. Creeping judicial decisions have in effect destroyed that restriction.)
Who is hiring? (Intern Edition) - Spring 2013
So it's around the time that startups are looking to make their intern hires for this summer, so use this thread to post if you're hiring interns for Summer 2013.

Be sure to post your location, a brief bio about your startup, and some kind of contact information.

Happy hiring!
Mozilla is doing this with Gecko. Google is sort of doing this with Chromebooks (AFIK). There is little to no incentive for Apple or Google to do this on their flagship products of iOS and Android since they already have dev ecosystems using objective c and java respectively.
Stripe Beta open for UK
Hey all

Just got a notification that the Stripe beta was open for people in the UK. A quick Twitter[0] search seems to confirm this. If you signed up for the notifications, check your email!

[0]: https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%40stripe&src=typd
That party is only implied if you bring a lot of biases to your judgement that I do not share.

Why do I not share it? The same statement, with the same reasoning, could be made about tort reform. And yet now when you look at voting records, Republicans are the ones you'd associate the issue with.

Ah, but you say that the statement as provided implicitly mentions large corporations as a problem? Yet concern about the power of large corporations is not a uniquely Democratic issue. For instance Rand Paul has taken a pretty strong stance on the issue.
d
As a generality, most Americans are happy to say that most politicians are corrupt and reflect the vested interests of those who brought them to power. And this unanimity lasts exactly until you ask them about the politicians that they voted for.
~8 years for me - definitely agree about the sluggishness, but i can't say i've noticed any problems with the sync feature.
Getting Started With Ember.js (written for 1.0.0-pre.4)
What is clean code?
Curious: Does anyone have any sort of information that the TSA has even prevented a single terrorist attack?

As in: Terrorist was going to board a plane, and the security that we all go through stopped him/her.

You get some surprising results if you google it... just wondering if any of you have any futher knowledge.

Spoiler: The answer seems to be "No".
Rails is commonly run as one or more application servers behind an http server that proxies requests to them. Rails itself doesn't manage threads or forked processes for accepting requests, so the only way it fits into Heroku's dyno model is as an app server per dyno.

> What are the advantages of this over standard server fork()/threaded accept designs?

It's simple to build and manage in that you don't have to worry about thread safety and can use the already built and tested proxy capabilities of existing web servers to distribute traffic.
Reminds me of the saying: "If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. If you place a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will boil to death."
The Purple Curtain: Or, Why You Need to Stop Hanging Out With Heroku and Friends
Sounds like the $200/mo is really worth it...?
I went to an Ivy League school, and I spent a bit of time working for the office of Alumni Relations. About 90% of the alumni members of "The Greatest Generation" I spoke with seemed to be convinced that the country was going down the tubes, and my sense was that this was something more than just the bitterness of old men.
If in death there is no experience, then all you have left is experience. So far in my life, I only have evidence of me being conscious and experiencing. I find it unlikely that my consciousness will cease to exist permanently especially if time is infinite.
So many people here are acting like nothing happened to justify the existence of the TSA. Yet, there were two buildings destroyed in the one of the most iconic cities in the world, the pentagon was damaged, and the Whitehouse was almost also destroyed, with more than 3000 civilians killed, and all of this can be directly attributed to the lack of airport security.

Yes, the TSA does a questionable job, but the constant whining and calls to demolish it without the acknowledge of the need for changes from the "good old days" before 9/11 is not only sophomoric but downright dangerous.
If Heroku had the data needed to do minimum-of-two random routing, they'd have the data needed to do intelligent routing. The problem is not the algorithm itself: "decrement and reheap" isn't going to be a performance bottleneck. The problem is tracking the number of requests queued on the dyno.
Laura Huxley's Letter on Aldous' Passing
how does it decide to queue at the dyno level anyway? Does it check for connection refusal at the TCP level?
How to Report Alleged Scientific Misconduct - Some advice
How much of the TSA's budget is secretly diverted to the CIA?
Sephora is running some kind of voodoo on your phone.
How does the nginx fit in? Do you install an instance of nginx onto every single box? Or can you elect to use a web server box as your frontend nginx and proxy request back to a set of separate servers running instances of passenger?
Right if the apps internal queue is full and it stops accepting connections I'm assuming it will still queue at the dyno level anyway.
SubjectLines – Find the perfect Subject Lines for your e-mails
Interesting article but every time I read something on RapGenius and move my eyes from the screen, I keep seeing white lines, very annoying. White font on black background is bad. Off topic I know, but still.
not if you use elastic load balancer... it's incredibly easy
Sometimes it's nice to at least know they are passionate about something, anything at all.
Just because something is functionally acceptable, does not mean it is well designed.
This is a knee-jerk reply. I know, because my knee jerked as well. Think about the problem a little more: if you have the data necessary to pick the min-of-two, then you have the data you need to do intelligent routing.
I think that shower painting is just brilliant, in a Spike Milligan sort of way.

It seriously does make me like the guy more.
It's fairly straightforward to get a refund from Apple for an App Store app — we see about 2-3 refunds a week processed for our main app ($9.99).

The thing is, as developers, we don't have to deal with it. The customer is unhappy and gets their refund, Apple does it, not us. We simply see that a refund happened and move on.

It's a far better system for all involved: consistent refund policy for the customer, developer doesn't have to deal with it.
this is a bit hyperbolic. "Heroku Swindle Factor" just seems rude.
IPad Mini Keyboard Shootout
I just read this whole story, and I can scarcely comprehend it's real. I just don't quite know what to say. What are you meant to do when you read something like that?
I would assume that study was sponsored by KY.
This is pretty exciting. Unknown Worlds seem like a great bunch of guys, and this only makes me think better of them.