skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why did go "win" over erlang, scala, and clojure? Because it's becoming trendy and "fun?"

And, why are "fun" and "joy" terms ruby bloggers use for languages? Is this code for "easy" and "familiar?" As in, "this language is easy to learn.. It does not require us to learn difficult but mind-expanding concepts to become proficient."

Replacing ruby/rails with something (just about anything!) results in far fewer servers. Isn't this obvious to all? Is this really news to the average HN reader?

If that's an I/O bound API server, bet those two servers could be brought to one in a language/runtime that's more productive but a little less "fun" to learn.
A tiny Racket #lang providing a few Clojure idioms.
Horror Fiction: A Date with a Serial Killer - Part Deux
I guess, if you prefer the Kafka version of reality. Meanwhile, a woman tells one 20 second story in one video, and then every day for the two years hence, people fucking can't stop bringing it up and berating her for it. Then whenever she bothers to defend herself, a thousand clueless fools get to say that she's the one who won't drop it.

You know why she talks about people being mean to her all the time? It's probably because people are pretty fucking mean to her all the time. I have no clue why, if you aspire to be even a halfway decent human, you think she shouldn't be pissed about that and shouldn't talk about it. Might want to examine why that is.
Switching between Firefox and chrome will happen often for at least few years to come. Chrome was a good thing because it brought some real competition in the Market.

Webkit is supported by Apple as well as Google which happen to be worlds largest companies. Firefox on other other had is open, non profit organization giving a tough fight to both of them.
I don't think that I am confusing things with value, but perhaps I did not explain my meaning well enough.

The problem with cheap AI and robots is not that people will not want to create things for each other and do stuff - sure they will still want to make stuff.

The problem is that hardly anyone will pay them for doing stuff, and therefore it will be impossible for them to make a living. So, the non-rich people (who don't own the robot corporations) would not be able to afford food and shelter.. (and they'll die as a consequence)

Unless government or benevolent fellows decide to help the destitute population and provide for them, which I don't really see happening as the plutocrats would probably treat the poor just like white slave owners in the US used to treat their black slaves, or like people treat cows. Even though resources will be abundant and it won't take much effort or sacrifice to help us, they would rather spend their resources on building faster spaceships or go ride space slides or ski on Mars or something.
Well put. I don't know one way or the other if it ever ends. I hear it does for some, but in the meantime, you're right, it needs to be coped with.

That being said, my own experience was similar at time. I was extremely busy and most importantly, I was taking on too much responsibility. This is a typical symptom and wether it applies here, only you can know for yourself. Suffice it to say, I crashed hard into depression and ended up with a lot more responsibility than I should have taken on, depressed or not. I think this is what people say when they use the expression "running from depression."

In retrospect, I try to be realistic. I realize that depression was the _cause_ for my overloading myself with needless responsibility and I try to take on things that I can handle and can handle in the worst of my depression only.

Just my experience. There is hope. There are breaks. I don't mean just hours or days, but weeks, months, maybe even years with minimal symptoms. These I have all experienced.

The end really doesn't matter, IMO. I agree with another poster and research I've read that depression (for most people) never truly goes away. It can be easy to fall in this trap and even if it does, what good will that do 60 years from now?

Coping and dealing with it is all we can do, indeed. The OP has a very good list of some of these techniques.
> test-driven development

`go test`.

> Does Go provide an ecosystem that supports agile refactorings that are common in lean startups?

Go has a compiler and is staticly and strongly typed. Which automatically makes it at least an order of magnitude easier to refactor safely.

Not really sure about the other stuff you mentioned. I've never even heard of BDD before.
Who is your role model?
This is a great effort. But it makes me furious that the founding team can be so disparaging to their users.

Sachin Agarwal, you used this community to enrich yourself and further your own career. In return, at the very least, you owe an explanation for why such a convoluted effort has to be made to get this content off the servers.

It's also exceptionally discourteous to ignore emails from upstanding community members, but perhaps you missed these. But I know for sure that you will read this thread, so I'd love to hear why a database dump can't be provided, or a couple of IPs whitelisted to just rip through a scrape.
> You can always do FP in Common Lisp

I really wish this were true because I write a lot of Emacs Lisp (closely related to CL), but it's not.

If you don't have immutable lists and strings built-in to the language, you never know whether a given library function is going to assume it's fine to just bash the data in place. And that's not even getting into fundamental equality issues: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ObjectIdentity.html
In the USA as of 2013, everyone already has their basic needs taken care of--or at least what Bertrand Russel would consider the basic needs, of course we have redefined them since to mean things which in his time would have been considered luxuries.
As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis.

EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was released.

And since the Xbox 720 'leak' fiasco I take these 'sources' with a pinch of salt, regardless of how reputable the site is.

http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-l...
Thanks waterside81. Can anyone explain the difference between Mozilla and Mozilla services? A cursory glance seems some of the Github repositories overlap.
I work in an area that requires a lot of high performance computing and there is a reason people in this area like code simplicity. Stacking layer upon layer of complex algorithms is a lot more difficult to reason about than having a simple and elegant system that's close to the metal.

There is a recent trend of building more and more complex systems, have less coupling and 'good oop'. That's all good and nice but simple code is:

- more maintainable (a complex nest of objects & function calls all loosely coupled isn't)
- a lot more readable
- easier to optimize
- better for your sanity

Some languages have build a culture of extreme complexity and are notable for building huge structures and systems to do simple tasks. Having a 50K lines of code dedicated to just inversion of control or O/R mapping makes a problem a lot more complex than it probably needs to be.
Yeah, I absolutely love O'Reilly as a consumer. The prices are great, they use all 4 or 5 major ebook formats, no DRM, "early access" to works in progress (really useful when the current print is on a dated version of the language, but the new edition is not quite done), and they let you "upgrade" a print edition to an electronic version for a very reasonable price.
On the iPhone

http://imgur.com/dXwEHeN.jpg
If perf is that much of a worry, you can look at JRuby, that will get you a bit (or a lot) farther from what I've seen.
> Both the web and NaCl are great, just for different things.

Well, now we're getting to the core of it! :)

I agree! I think the web should stick to rendering documents, which it has always done reasonably well, and leave applications to technologies such as NaCL, which people can use to produce the next web browser.
Also see Etherpad, ShareJS and Hackpad
HN is undergoing the transition that every community undergoes, from ultra-exclusive and underground to more populist. There's always gnashing of teeth from the entrenched userbase as a site becomes popular.

Well yeah, and in my IMHO the teeth gnashers are right. Every community that undergoes this transition turns into a wasteland, at least by my elitist tastes. I'd hate to see Hacker News go the same way.

A full-time programmer could try to design new features to stave off the decline. For instance, maybe up-voting power could be adjusted based on karma, so that the mob has less power to up-vote the nasty comments to the top of every thread. Maybe a better flagging system could be put in place so commenters could be warned when they are breaking the guidelines, but warning a way that does not create a long thread discussing the flagging. There are many ideas, it would take a lot of time to figure out which ones actually worked.
We've currently saved about 2.1TB in total.

I can assure you that you will not use up very much space nor bandwidth :-) It's mostly text and all. Feel free to stop by the project IRC Channel which is #preposterus on EFNet for specific questions (if they aren't answered in the FAQ or HN thread already)

jacquesm's a member of the ArchiveTeam now by the way ;-) And so are you, since you're helpin'!
In a single page: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html
Well, it's plausible seeing as how multiple people have reported to be able to play the game while lacking internet connections for up to 20 minutes. Additionally, the methodology of the code seems to fit with several of the changes made by Maxis to improve performance (disabling cheetah speed for example).

Regardless, Maxis has stated they will respond shortly to the article. https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561
Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.
Sleep coach company Zeo is shutting down
I have yet to meet someone whose depression was not made worse (in the long term 6++ months) by SSRIs and SSNRIs. These medicines cause more numbness and depression. I'd be very wary of them or any doctor who rushes you on them (or any medicines). The black box warning is not just for teens. When you are in that space (SSRI / SSNRI space), it's easy to see why anyone, even the strongest minded, would want to commit suicide.

Like William Styron says in "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" (one of the best written personal accounts of depression, highly recommended: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible_(memoir)), depression is an inappropriate word.

The correct word, for him (and I agree), is _madness_.
From the article: And that was Turntable’s fatal flaw ... the additional effort involved in using the service.

HAHA. Um, no. I use it while biking, while driving. You can join a channel and leave it at that.

Turntable isn't going anywhere because the social network designed to support it, the DJ's that were supposed to be showing up, injecting new life, have failed to deliver what was needed: interesting music selections that met diverse genre tastes.

Which, from an entirely different much larger societal dimension does fit with nirandfar's synopsis: it wasn't that individual users were overtaxed, it's that the service relies on it's social network to be keeping it fresh, yet the service was unable to promote sufficient diversity and to keep injecting different and better enough tunes to keep people coming back.

I'm largely back to smaller shoutcast stations these days, but I probably do a day and a half a week on average of Turntable.fm listening. The DJ'ing, imo, has gotten fairly routine, tends to hug some staple pop favorites, which can sometimes be mitigated with judicious channel flipping, and some times just feels terminal.
I'm getting the same experience here by entirely rewriting an old PHP web application [1] in Haskell using the Yesod web framework.

I've been using JMeter to benchmark both versions of the application. On a 10€/month dedicated server [2], the Haskell one was able to generate 220 dynamic pages per second [3] whereas the PHP one tops at 35 pages per second on a equivalent page.

Moreover, concurrence capabilities of Haskell are also pretty sweet : while I was benchmarking the web app using 2,000 concurrent connections, the application server was only using around 90MiB of RAM. I was not able to increase the number of concurrent connections as the client application I was using started to kill my quad core desktop, I suspect Haskell to be able to manage A LOT MORE concurrent connections as I didn't see any decrease in the throughput of the application as I was increasing the number of concurrent connections.

[1] http://files.getwebb.org

[2] http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/

[3] Static content has been ignored as modern servers like NGinx seem to be able to carry the static content (CSS, images, ...) at more than 5,000 req/sec on the same machine.
It really seems like this is the point they decided that social play is core to the gameplay. I imagine the conversation is something like 'how hard would it be to implement regions locally?' 'a lot of work' which gets translated into nothing works locally to the press.
I use Apache too (it's all I've ever known), and run a few Go web apps. Everyone lives quite peacefully together. With Apache, I just set up a simple reverse proxy.

Here's an example of one I use to run my own `godoc` server:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@burntsushi.net
ServerName godoc.burntsushi.net
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://burntsushi.net:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://burntsushi.net:8080/
</VirtualHost>
This isn't really conjecture. There are firm claims here (e.g. an inside source provided this information, players have been able to play without a connection to the server) that are either true or false. It may not currently be within our power to prove all of them one way or the other, but that does not make it conjecture.
our representatives and their representatives are much more concerned with watching each other's backs than either us or them.
“the entire process started up with only a few hundred KB's of memory (on startup)”

There is no way this could be true: last time I checked, a bare minimal Go HTTP server requires at least 2.8MB of memory on 64-bit machine. Are you using the default net/http library?
Unless working weekends is a business necessity and asked of all applicants, it is illegal/inappropriate to ask in an interview.

Source: http://www.gsworkplace.lbl.gov/DocumentArchive/BrownBagLunch...
Dave McClure TWiST Mashup
If I saw this on the street I would have no idea it had anything to do with HN.
How insurers, publishers, police and dating sites detect photo manipulation
Alternatively...

why we needed 30 servers: Rails
Thanks, glad you like the blog. I've been doing Android fairly heavily (roughly 50% of the time) for a year or two now. As for NSBlog-Android, only if and when I ever get to the point where I feel like I understand it as well as I understand the Mac/iOS side of things. Which will probably be a while.
Boeing uses potatoes to simulate people for Wi-Fi testing
I wonder how far they could have got going more of a bare-bones Sinatra app using JRuby. It's still not nearly as fast as Go obviously, but take away Rails and some of the more dynamic usages of Ruby on a faster VM and I'd venture to guess you might have been able to go from 30 servers to 10-15?

That's still not 2 mind you...
Tony Fadell is revolutionising the thermostat
I'm going to tell a story that describes why I don't like "Sunday tests".

Before I became a professional developer, I was a professional pilot who programmed as a hobby. Right after graduating college in 2006, I got a job right out of school working for a flight school. The school specialized in training Chinese people to fly.

Anyways, this was back before the economy exploded. There was a shortage of instructors at my school. I was assigned 4 students that I would be teaching mostly one-on-one. Three of the four students were really cool and very likable. The fourth I didn't like at all. Lets just say we didn't get along well. The guy was very difficult, and hard to communicate with. The other three were a joy to work with.

If I had the luxury of dumping that fourth student onto another instructor, I would have. But this was back in 2007, and the economy hadn't tanked yet, so there was an instructor shortage, and I had to grit my teeth and deal with this guy.

Fast forward to a month later. The tables have turned completely the other direction. The fourth guy who I hated at first was my favorite student. The three students I had liked at the beginning now were the ones giving me the most greif. The extroverted easy to work with likable guys were pleasant to deal with, but they weren't very smart, and I had a lot of trouble teaching them stuff. The fourth guy was hard to deal with, but he was extremely smart and I barely had to teach him anything, he learned everything on his own.

Once the economy got bad, the student/instructor ratio fell. The flight school hired a bunch more instructors and got less students. Every instructor got 2 students instead of 4. I made it a habit to go around to all the new instructors and ask them if they have a student they they don't really like working with. 4 times out of 5 the instructor would tell me "yeah I have this one guy..." My last 6 months at that job I had 8 students that basically taught themselves. That was easy money.

I've found the best way to deal with unlikable people is to just let them go off and do their own thing. The act like that (unconsciously) because they resent you getting in their way.
Not quite three stripes simple, but still a pretty solid logo. In terms of apparel, the block graphics reminded me of Hilfiger. As an image, it reminds me a bit of Albers, Itten, and a similar strand in mid-century painting.
Well, you have to choose your level of trust. I don't think RPS would post this unless they were reasonably sure. "Complete conjecture" isn't really an accurate description, I think, although "unconfirmed and incomplete" is certainly something you could say.
Skrillex is more like a ghost that hangs around keeping the corpse shambling.

That said, serving well a pop music base is probably what drove away the cultured, eclectic sound seekers. There ain't much for nuance in the top channel listings.

That that said, the long tail still sometimes has some amazing yet small rooms, for those who don't mind the exploratory deep diving.
That's how you gauge the experience of a programmer: how much of the field she/he's terrified by.

EDIT: I originally meant this as a joke, but seriously, if someone accurately knows where the gotchas are, that's valuable. Also note if they're biased to false positives and/or false negatives, and by how much. Are their heuristics for dealing with unknown territory efficient and likely to converge on good approximate results?
For some reason this thread makes me think of this old HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2030433

'iamelgringo (who I miss!) is telling me that just because I feel like I get a good night sleep on 5 hours or whatever it is I get, doesn't mean my sleep quality isn't horrible due to apnea, and that maybe over the long term the apnea might kill me.

I think it's the same with hiring. Everyone thinks they do it well; you look around you, feel like you like everyone you work with, and then write up the process that got you there. What's dangerous is if your current success is a fluke, and the process you set up is a recipe to become insular, or a stepping-stone job for SFBA people, or (worst of all) one of those companies you can't work for if you're a mom --- and I know you personally don't want to be any of these things!

You are awesome and I'd love to work with you someday. I just hate the way you say you hire. :)
How did you convince them to hire you when you had no professional experience? Did you have to take a pay cut to do it?
"Step and wait” model outperforms industry rules of thumb, e.g. Moore's Law
p.s. come disrupt our business: with nearly no hardware, no costs, and no maintence burden you too can pass OMG huge amounts of message traffic.

this is one bold as fuck post.
Well, we cannot assume that people cannot learn. Snippets are smaller piece of codes compared to controllers, and logically making more sense. All you have to do is to train people. Isn't it the way people learn MVC too?
Learn Sinatra in 5 Minutes [video]
> Rust and Go are not similar or competing.

Rust is more "kitchen sink" (done as elegantly and cleanly as possible) and Go is more minimalist.
Anybody would recommend Eclipse instead of Emacs? Or maybe other IDE? I don't want to learn Emacs and its keybindings, but if I have to, better tell me now. :)
Awesome response.
So is Google now more appealing to academics than academia?
I doubt that. Learn a language's syntax and semantics, perhaps, if it's not C++. Learn its standard library so one uses it aptly rather than re-inventing, less likely, depending on the size of that library. Become proficient in the language's idioms, know its gotchas and what are the more efficient of the choices it presents, less likely still.

Code in it, yes. And I agree with the polyglot.
sustainability is more important than culture and technology.
The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before.

Two servers?

It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to move them between servers.

Was it all intertwined? Did the regions, stats, achievements, and DRM all run out of the same database? Were they not separate services?

They had to know this game would be popular, they've been pushing it for months (to great effect). It's a major property and the first release in about a decade.

Then there is EA. Even if Maxis couldn't figure this out (and I doubt that), EA has online experience. They're the publisher for Mass Effect, Madden, Fifa, NCAA, and more. They should have the resources, the people, and the experience to have prevented this.

If you completely ignore the DRM or the seemingly unimportant always-online requirement, it this whole thing still seems botched. There were multiple groups who should have known better and prevented this. My understanding is that they got some warning signs during the beta.

I would kill for a postmortem blog or article on Gamasutra explaining why they couldn't scale out faster; to know what decision was the lynchpin that held them back.
I guess gmail isn't a "real project" then...
You are correct. Using Firefox 19 w/ HTTPS Everywhere extension.
Ask HN: How do you get unrestricted cash?
I have a bunch of ideas but no money to implement them.

I'm looking for unrestricted cash to try out a few of those idea. I have an idea on how to build it but the idea uses such "eccentric" business methods that it would give anyone who believes their MBA class or have typical financial knowledge a heart attack.

What options do I have besides moonlighting? Where can you find people who aren't typical investors and who love unlimited "risk"?