skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It still happens with -k but I haven't tried the other tweaks.

I gave up micro benchmarking because once you factor in sessions and database access then everything goes in the gutter.

I've had a Go server outperform a Node server (same box, same data, same headers) by 5x when returning large amounts of json or returning large strings in general.

As soon as I had that data get returned by a database instead of hard coded strings using both language's best drivers for that database then the reqs/s evened out, in fact Node ended up performing slightly better for both latency and reqs/s.
Google glass already connect to your phone AFAIK
Fair point re: whoring, so far as we might have to agree to disagree.

Let me explain differently by saying that when I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get paid to program. I loved to code, and I needed to get paid — professional coding was the obvious answer.

The problem was that by my mid-20s I was really sad all of the time, and my work was at the root of it. I was programming and getting paid, yet the more work I did the worse I felt. I thought I had fallen out of love with coding.

One day it hit me like a lightning bolt: the reason you do something directly impacts whether you enjoy doing it.

Being a prostitute seems like it would be awesome. You get laid constantly and people throw money at you, right? Well, only if you ignore that you don't have any control of who, when, how, why or where in many cases. Awesome becomes terrible.

I get the same joy from coding that a painter gets from painting. A painter that can paint what, when, how, why and where they want is likely happy. A painter that has to paint what other people want on a schedule is often just struggling to pay the rent. They develop a toxic relationship with their art, and that's sad.

So yeah, I have had some great programming clients and worked on some really interesting code projects for money, but in the end it wasn't worth the sadness that my body was literally fighting back against. I was fat and sick all of the time, everything seemed like it was getting worse. I was disconnected from the chi.

However you want to describe it, everything started getting better as soon as I stopped doing it for other people.
"And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled""

Exactly. "Dozens". Apple isn't building products for "dozens". They are building for the people who literally stream into the Apple retail store (non techies who clamor for their products) at all times of the day when other stores sit idle. I can walk into the Apple store near me (and it's not in Manhattan but in a suburban mall) and while the other upscale shops are idle, say, Tuesday at 10am the Apple store is quite busy.
there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.

If we're going to be bikeshedding, why bikeshed RapGeinus' rails app, surely Heroku's request routing is a more meaty and exciting problem to talk about? Or is it simply because rails is a known quantity it is easier to fling shit at RG for not having the foresight to make exactly the decisions that are obvious to people with hindsight and an incomplete view of their application?
Besides lag, computerized vision could be seriously distracting. People already nearly get hit by cars staring into their smartphones.
What you're saying is true from an engineering standpoint (serial vs parallel), but has to be placed in the customer's context.

In this specific case the quality is bad, operation is unreliable, and the price is high. Consumer devices accept HDMI as input. Serial to parallel video (Lightning to HDMI) is tough without some heavy-duty hardware -- hence the exorbitant cost of these adapters.

The SoC design introduces a massive amount of complexity. This has yielded unreliable operation. And it introduces that complexity at a point of physical vulnerability -- people don't treat adapter like tiny fragile computers. They treat them like, well, adapters.

End-to-end serial communications would be nice, but that's not the world we live in.

Lightning isn't that much smaller than HDMI or Micro-HDMI. Reversibility is a very minor feature, and not worth the price being paid.

And that's not a $30 adapter. It's a $50 adapter. Did you think it was $30? That was the old one -- parallel to parallel.
I guess we are the very last to still use Google Tasks.
Each to their own!

I happen to really enjoy my "work" and I don't imagine I'll ever stop, so your strategy doesn't have the same payoff for me. As I state in the article, I'm not optimizing for a financial reward but somehow the money keeps getting better as I push it further off my priority list.
Thank you! And yes, I don't use (and never will) BetaList to build content.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/31/this-dog-can-send-you-...
Run OD Like a Business
Everyone should learn to think. But the basic problem is that critical thinking can't be divorced from specific content areas—in other words, you have to teach it through drawing, or coding, or Sonnets, or whatever. It is also, quite simply, hard to teach. That's Daniel Wilingham's research speaking; he describes more here: http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thi... . His book Why Don't Students Like School? is also very good.

I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/why-dont-students-l... .
Pingdom reported an hour downtime on my site too.
> This is the reality of asymmetric warfare, where doing
> your job walking down the street in Baghdad can get you
> killed.

And this was unknown prior to wikileaks, right? Right?
You do know that the video you linked is "edited" to put it mildly?

> There are 1000's of such incidents we know about thanks to
> Manning.

Yeah, sure. Nobody else knew.

> If anybody actually looks at the material, you'll grasp its
> significance immediately

Yes, it is easy to grasp the significance — next to none. That's why nobody talks about those cables any more.

My cynical view is that wikileaks was just a tool for Asange to make a name for himself. Manning? Just colateral damage.
There is, apparently a twig plugin. I couldn't actually get it to work though.
Organization Design For Startups
Spoons inspired by Screws
I'm having a hard time understanding your justification for your sympathy going to Heroku.

RG is paying for PaaS from Heroku based on documentation, sales pitches, etc. They're also paying good money for the tools necessary to make business decisions based on data collected from that PaaS. Just given the realm of customer service, why wouldn't you expect "hand-holding" from your vendor? Why is it unreasonable to have that expectation? Why is it acceptable for your vendor to have a fall down response in "optimize your web-stack"? How do you expect them to "fix" this problem without the vendors involvement? What did you expect them to do, change platforms? How are they supposed to "move on" when the issue hasn't been resolved?

Have we gotten so far away from customer service with the likes of Google, that we don't even know what that means anymore? Are we to settle for mediocrity from any PaaS because our expectations are just too high?
IT Failures as a Function of Poor Programming Languages
> And Node is perfect because it'll be working with Javascript on the clientside, and not dealing with the http protocol.

I'm confused. What?

On the results, node didn't budge from 30 to 1000 concurrent connections, while the Lua servers just plain crashed, despite being faster at first. Conclusion: Lua is perfect for servers (?).
I'm not going to go much further because this debate is useless without a context of limits and expectations. No one is discussing simplicity. LINX's operation is not simple. A specialized provider is offloading a difficult function as a core competency in return for simplicity. As an end-user, the difficulty is a non-factor. Just make it happen. Couple in "reasonable" with expectations and then we know what to expect. If it costs the moon to never make this happen again, then charge accordingly. If this happens once in a blue moon, then charge a lesser price.
With that logic, shouldn't we be frowning at violent video games as well? Normalizes murder as well?
I saw this guy talk at TED. What a humble guy for all he has accomplished. Bottom line, it has to about the love of the game, because in the end, that's all you have. Not the glory, not the spotlight, just the passion.
"Right Brain" people stil believe in the dichotomy of "creative" people and "non-creative" people (they still use the outdate terms "Right Brain" and "Left Brain"), probably because they associate technical work with mental computations and algebraic manipulation ("doing math").

It's true that technical people will are already less burdened by the heavy lifting of "doing math" or organizing complex technical systems, but that doesn't mean that they are going to be "replaced" by the "artists". It only means that the "soft-technical" aspect of, for example, engineering, is going to be more present (less time focusing on technical details and more on the design and articulation of the mathematical models themselves).
except for the very many cases where meeting the challenge results in more complications.
From the docs (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/queries-with.html):

> A useful property of WITH queries is that they are evaluated only once per execution of the parent query, even if they are referred to more than once by the parent query or sibling WITH queries. Thus, expensive calculations that are needed in multiple places can be placed within a WITH query to avoid redundant work. Another possible application is to prevent unwanted multiple evaluations of functions with side-effects. However, the other side of this coin is that the optimizer is less able to push restrictions from the parent query down into a WITH query than an ordinary sub-query. The WITH query will generally be evaluated as written, without suppression of rows that the parent query might discard afterwards. (But, as mentioned above, evaluation might stop early if the reference(s) to the query demand only a limited number of rows.)

In other words, something like:

with x as (select * from users) select * from x limit 1

will be executed identically to

select * from users limit 1

However, a query like this:

with x as (
select * from users
join images on images.id = users.image_id
)
select * from x limit 1

will incur a huge overhead compared to:

select * from users
join images on images.id = users.image_id
limit 1

In my test, the "WITH" query had a cost of 97840 and touched 8881 buffers, compared to a cost of 132 and 41 buffers for the second query.

In other words, the planner pretty much considers the "WITH" subquery separately from the outer query, and plans them separately.
I'm not even sure exactly... the Manning case has confused me since it came out.

The biggest question was always why. His supporters claimed it was about war crimes, but it couldn't be that by sheer breadth of unrelated information he leaked.

The motive of getting back at the Army at least made sense, but he makes fairly clear that his NJP was the last thing that happened, not the first.

So an idealistic quandary? Perhaps he wasn't yet sufficiently jaded but he had to have known nothing would change going that route. By leaking indiscriminately, at such sheer scale, and information that's not actually pointing to a war crime or other government malfeasance he opens the government up to many defenses against what the information contained.

But either way, he said he wouldn't. He said further that if he did uncover evidence of wrongdoing that he would report it properly.

I mean let's put it a different way. You provide a SaaS/PaaS /what-have-you to a Fortune 50 enterprise.

What, ethically, would stop you from snooping at their data and leaking it? If you contort your logic enough, as happened to Manning, you could easily flip it around entirely to claim that you had a moral imperative to look for wrongdoing in the emails and documents of these large multi-nationals that affect so many lives across the world.

Presumably we can rely on the tech startups incubated at HN not to do this, but why? Why would it be OK for Manning and not your cloud provider? Why would it not be OK for the cloud provider and OK for Manning?

I guess in the end that's what I wonder most about, even now. Why?

I and probably millions of others have had the opportunity "to start a public debate" if that's all we were worried about, but we didn't. Why did Manning? L'appel du vide? The stress of being LGBT in the military? And how can we balance the need for transparency in military and government with the very real need for INFOSEC to protect the same?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, it's a good point well made (it also made me laugh).

That being said, if you can't handle being called an idiot on the internet, you unfortunately probably are an idiot (on the internet).
Sounds great, but let's be realistic here: it's the N years of consultancy that allow this fantastic lifestyle, because it is the network built then that is being leveraged now. In other words, as fantastic as this lifestyle sounds (and it really does sound fantastic!) it's not something you can just jump into.
Nobody's bikeshedding anything.... Heroku have admitted it's a real problem, they have begun addressing it and increasing visibility and awareness into it. There is no news or data being added at this point, it's just RG retelling the exact same story.

And the story includes an application where visible parts of a second are used to construct their pages one very slow request at a time (regardless of what Heroku adds) which is interesting for a lot of us because that's not how many other platforms work.
>If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex

Who said anything about choosing?
> Couldn't you have the keys on a device

An issue with those is that's just one more thing to keep track of. And, hardware costs money, and that's just one more thing to keep any solution from being adopted.
I'm confused first he says, "I’M DONE WITH WRITING CODE FOR OTHER PEOPLE.", but two paragraphs later he says, "All of my work comes by referral now, and I have an agent". So what exactly is he saying? That he just does other kinds of work besides software development now?

If that is the case then why is one 'whoring one self out' and the other is not?
The article assumes only people that want to start their own will have this problem but have you heard programmers complaining about the hours and its not even their own company. It becomes a way of life that you become addicted to and like anything else being a "hard worker" can become an addiction with all the praise from your boss or co-workers and in the end family has to pay the bill.

The article sums this up well where the son is now asking "was it worth it"?

A question for everyone not just those who want to run their own business.
Thank you! I vaguely recall reading about these, a long time ago.
I loved Black Mirror (so happy it's getting a 2nd season!), but most of the issues in that episode are due to the main character's shitty life. The neuroticism about his interview, the issues with his relationship, his wife throwing his poorly chosen words back at him, all those would be possible with regular memory. The removal of the grain and "play it back for us!" reaction to his bad interview seem like unusual cases, although I think only time will be able to tell how social norms will form with the second part.
> The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley
> Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and
> narrow is what is really frightening.

We don't. The world would be the same without him. Just less talk about some guys sexual adventures in the Northern Europe.
> Even though some data centers came back online initially, they fell back over again because all the traffic across our entire network hit them and overloaded their resources.

I know very little of networking, but this seems to be a recurring pattern that aggravates many major outages. What surprises me is that this so often seems to be a scenario not accounted for.
The classic JavaScript TODOs app, in ClojureScript
Designing with Site Speed in Mind
One of the biggest challenges for designers and developers is to balance the many requirements of a website. When a website is the front for a brand or business, it needs to be in great shape. Good sites should be easy to use/understand, load fast, and visually appealing. Unfortunately, site speed is often overlooked, and it shouldn’t be, since load time directly affects your bottom line.
Search "how's it made" for full range of episodes about almost anything.
FizzBuzz revisted in Rust
7 hours was the toted number, 5-6 hours was what he said he got in real-world usage.
There's a difference between secret from US citizens and restricted from public (I.e. worldwide) disclosure.

Classified material is kept from US citizens as a side-effect of it not being public. Believe it or not there are certain limited exceptions in practice to those classification requirements, since the exceptions don't translate to full public disclosure. E.g. a military spouse knowing the week to expect their spouse's return home, something which is normally classified from public disclosure until after it's already occurred.
Yep. He calls coding for other ppl "whoring".. but he seems to forget that people pay you to do EXACTLY what others won't or can't do. If other people enjoy it as much as they enjoy sex, you wouldn't get paid a ton
Google couldn't care less about some abstract notion of whether results are "correct". They want to provide the results that people are looking for, and that's it. I'd wager that most people searching for "stack overflow" are after the site, not the concept. By putting stackoverflow.com at the top, they are providing most people with the result they seek.

Your site should rank high for queries about that thing if people routinely search for that term while attempting to find your site.
Not necessarily because it is functional, but Erlang makes this vastly easier.

I find the "oh you changed tiny piece of logic, you should totally have to refactor every line of code that follows it" very strange. It obviously sucks, there are far better ways to handle it and they are slowly making it into the language.
And if you're on Linux, Nevernote can sync and then export in a format.
Yes, I know of this one and it's precisely the sort of wishful thinking I was mentioning, particularly the sheer disregard of energy related problems (obviously, everything will be easy for ever if finding energy and getting rid of waste heat has some magical solution). You should study some posts from this for a contradictory POV:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

I particularly like the discussion between the "exponential economist and finite physicist":

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...

Or see also "Galactic Scale Energy" for a quick use of math to kill J. McCarthy arguments:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
> Look at the popularity of decentralized private/public key trading with (e.g.) PGP. NOT.

Haw. At a previous employer, in 2001, we started a project to deploy PGP to everyone. The idea was we could encrypt our work, email, send files to customers ... the boss was _keen_ on the idea. Our customers liked the idea, some of them.

We were acquired and our new owners were lukewarm to hostile about the idea and it was dropped.

> but there needs to be a killer UI that's simple enough (or maybe just smarter than the user) before people.. will... post to facebooks with it?

I think that's the key, right there. Make it simple, easier to use than userid/password.
The Five Easiest Ways to Get Your Identity Stolen
Facebook doesn't show content to your subscribers unless you pay
These learning websites never work for me.
I know starting with basics (operations, variables, string manipulation) is the sensible thing to do, but they bore me.
I always find easier (well, harder but more engaging) to read real code running a real simple application and trying to figure it out by breaking it.
(it's not a critic of learning sites or this one in particular. It's just they don't speak to me.)
Here's an article on that topic and some excerpts I thought were interesting http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/9_3%20The%20Legal%20...

>The Stepan Company (a $400 million American Stock Exchange company) of Maywood, New Jersey imports 175,000 KG of coca leaves into the United States each year. The leaves come from some of the same farms that supply the Columbian drug cartels.

>Flavor scientists say that the mysterious essence has no significant taste of its own , but acts as an 'enhancer' PepsiCo Inc. does not use the coca leaf. Flavor scientist Nicholas Feurstein thinks that the average guzzler might well notice the difference if Coke stopped using it.

>The leaf is ground up, mixed with sawdust, soaked in bicarbonate of soda, percolated with toluene, steam blasted, mixed with powdered Kola nuts, and then pasteurized. The Coke-Cola company, forever fearful of the DEA and the drug lords, is a stickler on security and quality. Drug lords have a less formal way to extract cocaine: they use kerosene as a solvent; the drug leaches out like tea from a tea bag. Cocaine is then recovered by evaporation.
The more you understand, the more you realize that most people aren't very good at what they do. Not that they are bad at what they do, either. It just takes the magic away.
This sounds very disrespectful. I would flag this comment, if I could :-/.
Yep. In the mad rush forward towards progress and profits, it seems some,
possibly many, forget why they started and forget what made it fun.
It's definitely not the lowest clearance you can get. The clerk shuffling HR paperwork at an admin office for military technically needs to be screened as well (since they'll be handling PII and responsible for pay system updates), but they certainly don't need access to TS info.
I'm not surprised at all to find out Thad's been working on Glass, considering I never saw him on campus without his personal creation. Also, taking a special topics mobile/embedded computing course he taught when I was there was definitely worth it.
What does callback hell means in JavaScript?
so i did a clean virus and malware search and nothing was found. i don't think this is on my server.

i know they are doing drive by injections but i just don't know how to find out which page on my site they are using to do the injection
Djs Home And Landscaping: American Meadows Seed Company
I would tend to agree wrt HN nitpicking except in this case nirvana is presenting himself as the paragon of objectivity setting the story straight against the unwashed rabble of knee-jerk Apple haters, when in fact he is nowhere near objective when it comes to Apple, and shooting ignorant fish in a barrel is not good enough to validate his points. He needs to be held to a higher standard.
Two comments:

1) Really? This is on the front page of HN?

2) why aren't you printing to stderr?
No, not at all. I'm saying that the elistist attitude described by edw is what got the field in the situation that it is in. Dismissing these new initiatives is, in effect, saying that the status quo is acceptable.
Scout Security System Wirelessly Protects Your Home
haha yeah, people can be odd sometimes. I just had a -4 on a post saying that a particular thread (is so good) that it should go front page on HN, apparently it did, but oh the irony.
Its Sunday, frontpage tends to be quite dead.

(No idea why not stderr however)
"Same with life. The more you understand, the better you appreciate it."

fair enough. "learn farming" is not necessarily the next logical step though.