skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It didn't say "router queue time" or "dyno queue time shown elsewhere".

I can tell you that personally when I was writing the code that calculates that queue time value, several years ago, we didn't think such time existed. It was either router time or nothing.

> The tools were basically hiding the one problem that was solely Heroku's responsibility.

Right, absolutely agree, but the problem is their current queue time measurements do not make a strong argument for this due to the issue of clock skew. They're essentially picking a more-or-less nonsense number and saying that it demonstrates that Heroku is bad. The only numbers that are fundamentally reliable are the total request time from the javascript side.
I am but an egg, I have two questions.

One, if the data were held in a database, should a change like this be captured in the database logs? I am seeing more and more situations where I want these, I notice that they are by default turned off for mysql and wonder if this reflects a de facto judgment that logging slows performance more than is usually worthwhile.

Two, if the data were kept in a database, wouldn't something like this be prevented by a constraint preventing a comment from making itself an ancestor? But I suppose there is a slight performance hit in checking such constraints, and the case arises so rarely that this hit isn't generally worthwhile.
Neat project! This got me thinking - Why are QR codes black and white? Couldn't they transmit more information if they used colors?
That's how a lot of it works.

You'd be surprised at high the conversion rate is from google -> your download page -> app download

Getting a lot of people to do that is a lot harder than just being front paged though.
It's hard to know what they think. Maybe they expect to lose, which would reinforce the right for parody websites.
no, you just leave it alone, it would have sorted itself out if nothing had been done at all.

failing that you put a cap in the code that generates the page. Simple stuff.
I know PS3 doesn't really use OpenGL ES 2.0, but I heard a rumor they might use some native OpenGL 4+ for PS4. We'll see in a couple of days, I guess, if they even intend to give that information now.
I would say such things to the author in person. I have said such things to people who've professed to me special insight from such benign activities. I think they're kidding themselves and bullshitting other people when they do it.

I responded to everything I read in the original article. The author claimed humility but what I read was not indicative of someone whose motivation is to be humble. The author claimed to have learned something from the experience and draws eir conclusions from eir own bias.

I would consider my response aggressive but not uncivil and certainly not undeserved.

Now if you meant to point out that my criticism was not constructive then touché. Here's my suggestion then: don't let your personal bias influence your writing, author, draw your conclusions from your observations. Share what it was like to be at the centre. Everything you described indicates cult-like activity: what about it indicated that it was not a cult? How can you argue that is true?

I think any sort of spiritual experience is best kept to oneself. No matter your intentions you will come off as humble-bragging if you try to explain your experiences and insights to others. I don't appreciate the new-age, spritiual, self-help "industry." I think it's a scam and intellectual fraud. Anyone who offers spiritual insight is probably lying for one. And if they're offering it at a price then they're scamming you.
I think that salesmen always have gimmicks. Often, the best way to sell a product is to lie. Also having a sliding commission scale gives incentives to push sales through at whatever cost, just to get to the next tier of commission-- the difference is substantial. I've seen how this can lead salesmen to sell to fraudulent clients who use demo service or products (at a cost to the company)
Reducing or eliminating tiered commissions can help. If possible, applying penalties to salesmen who don't conduct due diligence to verify clients' identities, or penalties for cancelling a service before rescission periods end could help, too.

Yet, at the same time, I'm making a switch from tech to entrepreneur and I believe that sales is a lot about telling a story. In general, you have to make your clients believe your product or service is a great deal and that you don't make any money on the deal. (which is impossible)

So, how do you sell a product or service at a decent profit without becoming slimy? Or how do you run a company and give incentives (and disincentives) to employees that lead to both short and long term growth, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and sustainable profit?

Good question. I've come to believe the answer isn't a one size fits all. Most businesses (especially tech businesses) are businesses of scale. Short-term growth is especially important in the beginning of a company, but sustainable growth is the ultimate goal.
As you note the article does really a very poor job examining that connection. Interestingly, your assumption differed a bit from mine.

My assumption about that line was this: the availability of drugs for depression, and thus likely drug reps and salespeople, increased, providing greater incentives for profit through prescription, and thus increased diagnosis.

Our biases at work.
Well we are in the process of starting our Kickstarter which you can find out more about here: http://duo3d.com/articles/detail/duo_ks
Is this the forward time machine episode??

I love futurama more than any man could love any tv show.
"This is actually some of the strongest evidence yet that psychiatric medications are connected with the sharp rise in autism that began in the 1980s."

Couldn't possibly be the huge rise in awareness of Autism in the 80's, Rainman anyone? Or the rise in parents age could it? Nah obviously pharmaceutics in the water. There are detectable levels of many things in all water including say arsenic: http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/sdwa/arsenic/index.c..., it's all a matter of how much, which his sources seem not to mention.
Thank you so much. I'm particularly grateful that you bundled different file types in the same zip, so I don't have to be like, "let's see -- should I download the MOBI version? Or the PDF version? Or maybe ePub? Wait a minute, I don't have even have a tablet -- why am I having this debate?"

One fewer decision to make.
Useful link: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog (note the blog - it is the same! note the days - they are every! note the comments (when present) - they are like "this is bunk!")

I'm beginning to flag these posts.
It's too late in this cycle to be a fanboy. It is very well established that the cell processors are bandwidth starved and it's hard to feed them. Not impossible, but legitimately hard. This is an architectural fact, not something to be debated anymore.

The PS3's internal architecture was poorly balanced. This really hasn't been a secret for a long time, for anyone who can take off the hype goggles. It sounds like the PS4 will not have this problem. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes the same mistake; it really won't be a console-gaming win to stick 8GB of slower RAM in the box, then suck away 2 or 3 GB for other purposes. (Probably still won't be as poorly balanced as the PS3 though.)
Good point. I was thinking in terms of going through the code line by line, which if anything would lead you away from the trail.
I think that's because they added OpenGL ES 2.0 later on top, to make it easier for developers, but developers just preferred to use Sony's own custom API's.
The cynic in me would love to see this as a savvy marketing strategy! First time I've thought of BK in a long time, so I guess it worked! They should capitalize on their new dose of attention by giving away a "hacked" coupon on Twitter to get people into stores!
The DUO Kit 3D motion sensor
Naked scammers seduce, blackmail men on Web
There are certain classes of autistic people who are very good at always following the rules and finding people who are not. And in certain places they are exactly what you want.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism-advant...
I've been doing transcendental meditation. I imagine its roots are from a "religious background", but I don't feel like there are any religious elements. There are only a few dogmatic rules such as don't eat 2 hours before/after meditating.
“No matter how dark it gets, you should never, ever take your own life.

I'm sure this will be an unpopular position, but I question this. If an individual reaches a point where the pain and misery they are experiences outweighs the joy, or even the hope for joy, in their life then maybe the rationally correct thing to do is to take your own life.

I mean, if you reach a point where you can look forward and reasonably say "I'm never going to achieve my dreams and accomplish what I want to accomplish, and being here hurts" then why is one obligated to keep suffering until chance claims you?

I'm not saying this is a decision one should make lightly, and obviously one of the negatives is that it's an irreversible decision. But I can see circumstances where it is a reasonable choice.
Don't get me wrong, I think they've done an awesome job and I can see the use in other fields, absolutely. I'm just not sure this is one of those "we need top talent" type businesses... I'm not even really sure software is their real value add.
This is a type of FI (read: a bank). Don't believe in any comment you will read in this thread, you need to seek legal help. (I own a bank/credit card company)

There are state and federal regulations regarding the type of service you want to provide. Don't even try to open a company without completely understanding the business and having extensive legal help.

Those type of companies have very strict guidelines and it is harder to adapt an existing company than trying to open another.
Well, that said just about nothing at all.
My pet peeve: You made an arbitrary change while debugging a problem. NOW YOU HAVE N^2 PROBLEMS!
There is an increasing timeout on deeper-nested replies. This is to cut down on the extent of flamewars.
Show HN: My site for teaching organic chemistry
That's just because its young. The same could have been said for C in the long long ago. And honestly compared to most of whats out there, C is a tiny language. Give go time, it'll bloat ;)
graduates only start paying back their student debt once (and only if) their income crosses a certain threshold

Interesting, I had missed this (but I'm not British, so haven't been following closely). It looks like the new scheme defers repayment if you earn less than £21,000 (US$32,500), and then it further caps annual payments to 9% of your income that exceeds that amount.
To be fair to the Swedish government, they can't offer a guarantee like this. Assange and his lawyers are taking advantage of this fact.

According to Swedish law, any application that comes in in the future has to be dealt with in court.

The government can't give guarantees that it will ignore the law in some hypothetical future situation. After all, the US hasn't asked for his extradition (yet).
There is also a point where misguided attempts at political correctness drag you down the rabbit hole into a land of pure absurdity where instead of communicating, perpetually offended people are just engaged in a cyclical exchange of trite phrases.

I recognize it might well be an expression of a cultural divide between us, but this is the way I see it: HN is populated by a huge group of very diverse people. While we are diverse in pretty much every aspect, we are also bound together by being hackers and by living, at least party, in whatever hacker culture means for each us. That's not normal, it's a subculture. Almost every single human being is part of at least one subculture, and many are members of several, and there are millions of overlapping points that defy categorization. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it would be considered wrong to express this fact.

I can say for sure that I am not normal in many aspects, and then again I am normal in a lot of others. It's not somehow evil to recognize and talk about this. I think before dfc's comment, the number of people who misunderstood my original comment was very low, but my point is tainted now, subverted and burnt beyond recognition.
Patrick McKenzie had a great horror story on his blog a couple of years back. He runs a service that provides appointment reminders to businesses' clients (e.g. "Don't forget, you have an appointment to get your hair colored at Best Little Hair House tomorrow at 3"). Long story short, an attempt to manually correct a hangup in the live system resulted in his product spamming his customers' clients (that's right — not just his customers, but their customers) with up to 40 phone calls back-to-back.

So, how many customers do you think he lost because of this? The answer is two, and one of them signed back up because they were impressed by the great job he did in handling the fiasco.

Moral of the story: As long as you really are making your best effort, you might be surprised how willing people are to deal with human error. Yes, they might be be mad, but a mistake is (usually) not the end of the world.
There probably aren't.

Right, but somebody made those products. If that had not happened, those sales people would be useless. My point is that you simply can't disconnect one side of the equation from the other.

No products == no sales

No selling == no sales

product + selling == sales
Yeah, it's ridiculous. Same thing as pointing to Pete Best and saying "see, had he been a bit better, he would've been the fourth Beatle instead of Ringo". People should start realizing that hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe reading "The Black Swan"?
At first I thought this was just a great definition of entrepreneurship. However, as I started thinking about the challenges we face everyday as we build our company I realized this simple idea can serve as an important daily reminder. We often think of quality and scale as binary and focus our attention on one or the other at any given point. However, as you point out Nivi, if we do this we will fail. Even if it seems impossible, we have to figure out how to get both quality and scale right if we want to succeed. Thanks for the reminder Nivi!
Ah OK, thanks for pointing it out.
"No deflecting blame"

Who were they going to blame?
presumably the happen soon enough is the reduction of statutory crimes, not banging up 99% of the population (although that too might ... No.)

Actually increasing the detection rate is IMO a Good Thing.
I would like it if violent crimes were caught on CCTV, then the MIT-derived algorithm to pick individuals from stance and gait is used to follow them through the streets out and the taxis, to their front door where a cop car pulls up.

Add to that all the white-collar crimes, the lax banking departments that move billions around for terrorists, tax evaders and criminals.
Brazos is already faster than Atom, so Jaguar should be much faster than Atom.
I agree.

http://imgur.com/a/MQR8d
ANNs were build with the assumption of point neurons as nodes in a network and many of their training algorithms are biophysically unrealistic. While ANNs can be good function approximators, they are a very inaccurate representation of brain neuronal neurons and networks (which have intricate dendrites and biophysics). We don't know yet how fundamental processes like memory storage work in the brain; it's one of the great mysteries of neuroscience.
Turning out the lites on a client who doesn't pay their bills
Research and victim phishing reports tell same sad story
I can confirm. Perhaps this is a bug? As per the C99 standard [Clause 6.7.5.3: Function Declarators, point 7]:

A declaration of a parameter as "array of type" shall be adjusted to "qualified pointer to type", where the type qualifiers (if any) are those specified within the [ and ] of the array type derivation. If the keyword static also appears within the [ and ] of the array type derivation, then for each call to the function, the value of the corresponding actual argument shall provide access to the first element of an array with at least as many elements as specified by the size expression.

Since that's a 'shall' declaration, shouldn't it at least throw out a warning?
Dumb companies, maybe.

The goal was reasonable. The action was reasonable. What are you firing somebody for? Making mistakes? Good luck making that a hiring criterion. "Ok, tell us about a time you made a mistake and what you learned from it. What's that? You never have made one? Great, you're hired!"

The solution from a retrospective should never be, "Let's make people more scared to do the right thing." Or "Let's fire people with bad luck." Firing people of PG's caliber isn't a solution, it's just another problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Water-Distiller-Countertop-Enamel-Coll...
Great postmortem and good lessons to learn here:

* Don't manually modify database without a well-tested procedure and another pair of eyes

* Don't leave persistent problems (e.g. memory problems) uninvestigated so that you miss new problems with similar symptoms

* Don't push new code to production while operational problem is ongoing (unless it addresses the operational problem)

I'm pretty sure I've repeated this exact same sequence before with similar results...
Tearing Grunt Apart (Grunt v0.4 released)
Creating Voxel Volumes Quicky in Python
Seriously?

How much does Rhino Horn go for?

And, since its matted hair, and since it does not actually increase male virility when mixed with water, why do the criminial syndicates not just stop poaching and hand out ground up hair. I mean, they are criminials. Its not like they are opposed to lying.

Edit: 60-80K/kilo it seems - in bitcoins.
No, if the product never shows up, you haven't done "sales" you've committed "fraud". A lot of people in this thread are really bending definitions and stretching logic to try and make an argument that sales can exist without a product, but it can't do so in reality, at least not sustainably.
Yes. I'm just telling you what the attitude of some members of the public was when Prozac was introduced. (I'll edit to put it in quotes.)
Or to record gameplay from a PS3.
Have you tried setting up a new Tumblr (they throw in a minimalist theme to start) and use its bookmarklet to gather the links? Bookmarking cannot be more minimalist than that.
What's happening to the YC blog?
Masking the complexity of the machine
Tick, Tock, Tablet Time
Pur claims to remove 99% of pharmaceuticals and Brita something like 97%.

Whether autistic fish have implications for human children or not, getting unnecessarily dosed with hormones, antibiotics, and psychiatric drugs doesn't seem like a good thing.
High Hanging Fruit
> I've always wondered if people who go out of their way in trying to appear to be humble are reacting to the disgust that they feel when others aren't appearing humble.

I can’t speak for Don, but for me it’s always been an attempt to communicate three things:

1. I am not inherently smarter or more talented or in any way “better” than you
2. My accomplishments come from long hours and hard work
3. Even after taking #2 into consideration, I probably wouldn’t be where I am without all of the dumb luck I’ve stumbled upon over the years

> in other words I'm no different then you are we are all equal but I got lucky so don't hate me..

It’s the opposite for me: don’t make me a hero! I’m just a guy who had some ideas and saw them through to the best of my abilities- something you can do too.
>Moreover PyPy doesn’t kill my CPU as CPython does so in a meantime I could normally use my laptop

You're not supposed to "use your laptop" during a benchmark.
I of course was being flippant, but if you want to bring reality in to the mix then your answer isn't complete. I believe you are only talking about international waters.

For example, Boumediene v. Bush establishes that the US has "complete jurisdiction and control" over Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, even though Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty. And US jurisdiction in parts of Antarctica is .. complicated. http://219mag.com/2011/03/23/u-s-government-fails-to-protect... .
Scalability: it's the question that drives us
I thought part of the original reasoning was that by dropping to a slightly lower proof they could also sell in locations where the current alcohol level was too high (states with tight liquor laws), but I'm not hearing any of that now.
Yes. If they do, what might happen is you might choose a different ISP. Its simply not in their business interest to censor content, hence they dont!

Typically, if they have to censor, it would have to be based on an agreement with the customer before hand, else it would be a violation of consumer rights!
That's the joke. They know they'll at least get a good laugh from using the same rhetorics as the anti-piracy groups use, even if they win or not.
At a conservative average of $40K pa per employee

Well that's extremely conservative. I don't know whether you speak from personal knowledge of Norwegian market but I can tell you that it's about 1/4 of what a intermediate/senior level engineer in the bay area would make. In fact it's about at the level of what a senior engineer (from a top level school) in India would make.
Don’t get too attached (and be ready to pivot)
I'm not defending BrainVoyager as a product. It was just an example of the type of business model the academic market requires.
There is a dedicated Kinect In though.

It seems more likely that they are trying to push xbox towards being a media hub, and to get people used to always consuming media through their xbox.
Its not pointless at all - I can think of situation where this idea would be very useful:

When looking at client (request) logs full with IP addresses, the colorful visual cue would give you an idea which requests group to a single client.
FWIW, we don't have salespeople yet at Fogbeam Labs, but I'm leaning very heavily towards the idea of adopting a Fog Creek / Thoughtworks approach when we get to that point. I tend to think that going salary + regional bonuses + companywide profit sharing (or something along those lines) is more compatible with taking a long-term view and ultimately generating the most profit.

Now time might ultimately prove me wrong, but it is encouraging to see other firms exploring this approach.
I'm not even finished reading yet but I love this line

"called a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (but just as plausibly called Wishes for Space Signals from Judges on Alpha Centauri)"
I agree with the main point of the article.

However, I can tell you that your $1M in affiliate revenue on 1.2M UV for a literary blog is way off. Your assumption of 10% conversion is off by at least an order of magnitude.

The more likely rate is probably less than 1%. This would bring the total amount to around $100K in your calculation.
HackerMonthly guys: Buy Now does not work: http://hackermonthly.com/store.html
"I am my own grandpa"
Why do "self posts" like this show up in the same light gray as posts with negative vote counts? My eyes aren't great and I find it hard to read
>>I caused an item to be its own grandchild.

Please forgive me. I know you folks tend to hate jokes on here. Don't waste your time if you're immune to corny humor. "I'm My Own Grandpa- Ray Stevens" ( with family tree diagram) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlJH81dSiw