skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that while the average time is going to converge - users aren't interested in the average time!

Consider the following scenario:

- Two types of requests, A and B
- Request A takes 200ms to process
- Request B takes 10 seconds to process
- Each dynamo can take 4 concurrent requests

If you are receiving 1000s of requests per minute, it is very likely that you will eventually allocate more than 4 request B to a single dynamo. One this has happened, that dynamo is now locked for 10 seconds. All of the request As that we route to that dynamo will take over 10 seconds to return.

If request A is a credit card transaction, and request B is just some data lookup with a loading UI spinner, then every time this occurs our poor app has lost money as the user has navigated away from our app before the transaction (request A) can complete! Ouch!

Intelligent routing solves this by ensuring that request A will only go to a dynamo that is open, thereby ensuring no user will have to wait 10 seconds for their quick credit card transaction.

The take away here is that the important measure is the slowest user facing request, not the average request time across all requests.
Chill Stefan, then just get to work doing something you like. You've got skills to work in a great industry, living in a great place. Drop the negative inner voices, work hard, enjoy the fact that you've already got it made.
Little thought: Wouldn't it be great to lazy load a JS live input console to actually try out the demo scripts on the frontpage? I'm missing those out for several language sites (eg Ruby).
Lenovo to modernize ThinkPad brand with redesigned T431s ultrabook
Then you would need another level of HTTP routers that would route to this application specific router. Also the router becomes a single point of failure and possibly a bottleneck: if a backend returns large responses, all of them go through this single router.
> I was working at NASA. On the Hubble Space Telescope. I was paid to scuba dive with astronauts and build hardware that would fly in space.

In comparison, I worked lowly office jobs at Swiss insurance companies and banks. But your point is well taken. I put too much drama into my post.
> Today, news and blog content is relatively open and parseable because of RSS and Google Reader's leverage

Isn't the other way around? The way I remembered it, having a blog was the hottest thing, and RSS is the solution that bring the blogs to the customer. Desktop clients are spawning everywhere (like Twitter clients a couple of years ago). It was a big when Firefox added support for RSS, and then my favorite email client back then, Thunderbird also had RSS reader built-in.

IMHO, it was the rise of _Web 2.0_ (oh boy, that term sounds so corny now) and uncontested Google domination of the web that made Google Reader the RSS client.

The article is right about one thing though, it's Flipboard and other "smart" reader apps killed Google Reader. Had there not been so much innovation on the reading side of things, Google could have (and probably would have) revitalised Reader like they did Gmail.
It's good that you're not satisified with what you've now and reailze some of the important things missed out. Everyone feels it in the same way at any point of time in their life.

This question reminds me of another interesting post I came across Quora. Must be worth reading - https://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/I-am-in-my-late-20s-and-fe...
I am done pretending that the diversity you're alluding to is valuable. It's not; it's toxic and stupid. Let this "minority" go crud up some other forum.
Stefan, I operate an online school to teach people web development. Send me an email and let's see how we can help you. If you have the desire, I'm confident we can teach you to launch a product.
Or you could use DNS to map each app to its assigned router. (Of course, when I say "router" I mean at minimum a redundant active/passive pair.)
Django Settings File Tricks
for me it was really good
Either way it is probably too late, there will be a bank run. If I had any money in there you'd bet I would in line at the bank first thing in the morning to get it out.
I can't tell from the front page or the documentation, but which version of python does it install? (I have a bit of a fragile setup at the moment and too lazy to spin up a VM)
You should probably disclose that you're a former colleague and a friend of the guy behind this poor attempt at privacy invasion.
Nike+ Accelerator program, "powered by TechStars," is another example http://nikeaccelerator.com/
I'm asking out of complete naïveté in matters of global finance, but what's to stop Cyprus from pulling an Iceland?
Ask HN:  What are the best examples of MVP pages?
I'm in the process of building a MVP page (minimal viable product), and I'm looking for inspiration. What are your best examples?

Personally, I like www.simple.com - what are some others?
Because you don't want to scale up just by adding more shards that consist of a single router. The distribution of the traffic to each shard isn't random, some applications are more popular than others. Additionally, you don't have any redundancy if a router goes down.
It's not your last chance. You are not a loser. That dichotomy (the one between losers and winners) is false.

There is no such thing as 'losers' and 'winners.' Life is not actually a competition, despite what the marketplace and Western culture want you to believe. Every single one of us dies - we all lose in the end.

Don't pile the stakes so high. The more pressure there is, the more stressed you will be, and the less likely you are to succeed. Just do your best and hopefully things will work out.
A related point about learning -- pointers, data structures, etc. -- tough concepts are tough because they're unfamiliar.

For whatever reason, some things will come easy and some won't; that does not mean you should avoid the ones that don't come easy; they are often a signal to you of some foundational skill you need, or an underlying concept you haven't really grasped yet. Don't avoid that stuff to focus on the easy things; that's like oiling the wheel that doesn't squeak.

If you want it, keep poking at it, keep circling back around and picking it up again; get familiar and comfortable with your questions, confusions, problems, and then they'll melt away.
I loaded the page in other browsers and saw my comment, but now there are like 20 others saying the same thing but my comment id is the predecessor to the one that's at the top (so i was first ;] ). what symptom tells you I was hellbanned?
All IBM Stories are True (1992)
Debugging rules
What happens if your single router catches on fire?
From the sound of it you need to focus on getting your life together and worry about programming and starting a company later(if at all).
This is pretty subjective, or?
I personally find it very good. You should learn to give feedback and not complain.
What worked for me: Zen Meditation. Find something that works for you - CTB, Meditation, Therapy, etc. etc. - there are a lot of resources out there.
This should be used as some sort of case study in CS/IT courses. "How to be incredibly friggin' awesome."
I believe in the US the government insures up to $250,00.
I still used Google Voice some; like others mention it's a safe number to give out for calls and txts when you're not sure how contentious the receiver will be with the number.

I've switched to RingCentral for my main forwarding number as it has more features, though there's a monthly cost for that service.
This redesign is amazing.

Having a snippet of code presented to you is nice.

However, I wonder whether it'd be possible to provide a more hands-on feel, possibly through something like <http://repl.it/languages/Python>.
That way, one can interact with the snippet of code.
Beware Bitcasa Cloud Service
Upon purchasing a Google Nexus 7, I signed up for a few cloud services that were offering free GBs. One such service was Bitcasa (Bitcasa.com). I installed Bitcasa on my N7, and then on my laptop and desktop in order to sync data. A couple weeks after signing up, I checked my online account only to discover that my entire laptop's hard drive had been "mirrored" within the cloud service. I tried to delete the data but there was no delete option. What concerned me was the fact that a) I never allowed/optioned Bitcasa's "mirrored" service, and b) that I now had lost ownership of my very own data.

I immediately deleted Bitcasa from all devices less another device become "mirrored" (or should I say "mired") within their cloud service.

I checked online in the support community and found this was a huge problem among many users. Supposedly all you have to do is remove the mirrored option (which I never set up) on the drive that is being mirrored and this will remove the mirrored content in the cloud. Doesn't work. Then there is an issue with two different versions of Bitcasa being used: a legacy version and a current version. It's a big mess that Bitcasa has not addressed. Here is a link to one of the ongoing issues; it may not be accessible without a Bitcasa login account:
http://support.bitcasa.com/entries/23086582

I submitted a help ticket, but to date there has been no action whatsoever.
> I don't have too much time left. My 20ies are gone.

In the first decade of life, you are who your parent want you to be.

In the second decade of life, you are who your friends want you to be.

In your third decade of life, you discover who you want to be.

In the fourth decade of life, you become who you want to be.

You've got all the time left. You've only just started.

I'm also 30, and only now do I feel that I'm emotionally and intellectually mature enough to claim my life as my own.

Good luck.
So that is they prefer to instead skim a little bit off the top slowly through inflation. In the end it doesn't matter, but it just prevents people from revolting.
Funny, I looked up the people that discovered mustard gas, and all of them seem extremely well respected and have had illustrious scientific careers.
hey stefan, fellow swiss guy here - not sure what your intention with this post is. I can wish you all the good luck you want, though I'm sure that's not gonna be much of a help to you. If you wanna chat, just contact me - you'll find my email, etc. in my profile.
It could have been a gift not a loan. But Europe is not willing to do this, partly as it would set a precedent, partly as half the depositors in Cyprus were not Europeans, partly for other reasons...
Obviously insufficiently large riots, events like this could generate numbers that even make the police wilt.

It won't help if they are victims of this loss as well.
A civil war over 7%?

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=1&chds=1&...
I can't edit my comment anymore, but if I could I would replace "objectively" with "measurably" - there are "formulas" on the wiki page that I'm sure are applicable to programming languages and program sources.

And I don't disagree with you. Coffee is less readable than JavaScript: "->" is less readable than "function", for example, and "@" is less readable than "this". It's a matter of trade-offs, these shortcuts make the language harder to read, but easier to write; the assumption here is that people will be able to deal with this level of brevity when reading.

I went and googled for a bit for articles talking about code readability, I found a few interesting discussions:

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=957782

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=592616

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

Worth reading.
Dale Carnegie?
Here you go:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.3 :: Anaconda 1.4.0 (64-bit)

It installs to a directory so you basically just add it to your path to get it working it doesn't change anything else on your install.

Beware though that you don't use virtualenvs with it but you use their tool conda to create your environments
Making Sense of AngelList #1: Investors
They havent introduced it outside the US yet AFAIK so it cannot be a high priority.
It's the price you pay to subsidise others who use those services for free. I don't disagree with you, this is a horrible trend. The "race to the bottom" with apps will leave them in a similar state (Oh, wait, they're already like that - Airpush style intrusive advertising, etc)

However, quite a few websites have options in their paid plans (Grooveshark comes to mind) where they disable all ads on their website for you. All we need to do is show how important privacy is to us, and to prove that there is indeed a market for paid webapps (regular webapps like Mail, RSS readers, etc)
I know DARPA has done some good work in the past - they are still mostly famous for their involvement in the early development of the internet in the late 1960 and early 1970s.

But does anyone have hard facts of how effective they are at applied problem solving? Or do they just get lucky every once in a while and have good PR? In particular have they developed some better way to run R&D programs?

I don't know but my limited interaction with their program managers did not impress me but this is purely anecdotal.
As a follow-up comment to my own post: I have given Bitcasa Support permission to nuke all of my data, but have received no response. This seems to be an ongoing issue that they are not addressing, at least not publicly, but users of their service need to be aware of this potential issue.
Kriesi – best Envato Marketplace seller
Envato is the place whici thousands of designers and developers are calling ‘home’. Each of them is selling themes, templates or graphics. As they sell they get new achievements and in top of it is a first class ticket to Melbourne, where Envato headquarters are located. Envato Levels are starting structured like this:
I created a little python script to install my dot files, see https://github.com/b52/dotfiles
From your link, it's quite clear they intend a political statement — about privacy in the age of search engines and social networks and the economic underpinnings of same.

Why is Google free? Because you are only the user, not the customer. The customers are the advertisers who pay Google to show you targeted ads. Of course, Google has to please both its users and its customers, or else it won't have enough of the former to satisfy the latter. Same for social networks, media sites, and pretty much everybody else who publishes free content or offers free services that cost money to produce. That's how the internet is paid for.

I get the impression AOS is less than pleased with that arrangement. Clearly, it frustrate them that so many users are pleased with how the internet has evolved to work. They're hoping their outrageous offer will wake up, er, raise the consciousnesses of those users. "Users of the world, unite: you have nothing to gain but your privacy!" Or something like that.

If it's art, it is performance art, where the performance consists solely of the business proposition.
Multiple concatenated SMS messages are not MMS, should be able to be done without full MMS support at all. Even old Nokia phones years ago had that supported.
dude.. your link was Awesome.. I'm on my early 30s and have some difficulties, as well. It gave my hope back
E-mail is just a terrible mess of insecurity and spam no matter how you look at it. Rather than worrying about my e-mail provider I've been focused on eliminating e-mail from my life as much as I can. (I'll admit it's not easy and progress is slow.)
You shouldn't let lack of experience or knowledge discourage you from programming. I think too many people fall into the trap that they have to know every arcane detail of the API to become an "expert." Making something cool, start small, and learn as you go. There are a lot more resources than when you were 17, like stackoverflow. Anything you really need, you can learn. And choose a language with lot of resources, like python or IOS. Any problem you run into while coding has already been encountered by someone else.
Have you gotten the Data link hardware to work? I've been trying to install it into my spinal cord, but I'm getting Neurons_Out_Of_Bounds exceptions all the time.
There was a fairly persuasive simulation posted on HN awhile ago that shows that random is the worst load balancing algorithm.

There has to be some happy medium between "embarrassingly parallel but shitty performance" and "intelligent routing that can't scale".
> I dismiss "free market" on the premise that it doesn't exist and it never existed (and furthermore: that it can never exist). As soon as you have a government and regulations you don't have a free market.

That's silly, freedom is a matter of degree. A market with some simple rules governing violence and the enforcement of contracts is certainly more free than a Soviet style planned economy. You can neither have a perfectly free market nor a perfectly controlled market. Even North Korea has a black market. Generally when talking about about the 'freedom' of a market, the measure which matters is not the arbitrary number of regulations which exist but the ability of players (both individuals and firms) to freely and knowingly enter into contracts and transactions. Laws which prohibit coercion, theft, and deception can aid in making the market more free in the ways that matter.
This guy analyzed the problem in detail: http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics
Just saying, this would be a great way to embarrass someone. I could think of a few friends I'd love to humiliate by posting to HN -- "I'm a loser. { } My name is _____."

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/gaboman/Perry%20Bible...
Google Analytics uses first party cookies, not third-party cookies, so it is unaffected by Firefox's changes.
This also is a problem for python and others stacks, or only for ruby?
I think the most likely way to successfully land on Mars and stay there is to allow for frequent trips back and forth. Obviously I think Musk and SpaceX are taking this approach. Ensure complete and rapid rocket re-usability, make engines that take fuel that Mars mostly provides, and ensure a constant stream of supplies, growth, new people. If your colony is growing, and expanding, and there are frequently (every 2 year) opportunities to come back home, many of the psychological issues can be mitigated. Also, you'll be improving your technology as you build and expand, so you'll be able to fix problems and ensure reliability and safety too. It'll be risky at first of course, and for a long while after that. But I doubt it would be much riskier than we're currently living our lives here on Earth.
Actually have read Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. I'll look into the other book that you recommended too. And personally, I have nothing against people being religious and wasn't belittling that sentiment. I merely think that many people are indoctrinated into a religion at an early age, and "know" that they are right, and use various ways to rationalize the belief their parents instilled in them, instead of exploring their beliefs on their and coming to their own conclusions.
I want to give you hope but to be blunt, if your 30 an not an established coder your not going to be. I started coding when I was 11 (dumb stuff of course, but actual coding), went to university and got a CS degree, now I'm in my late 30s and I have been coding for a good ~25 years, ~12 professionally (as in day job).

You have to compete with people like me, people who enjoy coding, people who go to work then come home to work on their own stuff. It's just not going to happen. Granted you can get a more "noobish" job BUT your going to have to compete with people in their early twenties who will work longer hours, less money and complain less. And these are people that want this as a career and are willing to learn/endure considerbaly more bullshit.

I'm not saying don't go for it, but it's going to be a hard road. And if you fail, which is likely, your going to be 40 with no "life track" as you put it.

Think long and hard. Don't let the non-programmers here who are "social-hackers" and every unbelievably stupid variation of the now-ruined word "hacker" tell you that you can do it. Seriously, your against the odds here, not impossible, good ideas are VERY important, but if you cannot do them yourself don't bother.
3D-printed gun maker now has federal firearms license to manufacture, deal guns
From what I understand (and I may be wrong because people who are advocating rising taxes are not very good at explaining their position), the idea is not to increase government income/spending per se. The idea is to redistribute wealth and the government's income is irrelevant (hence the GP's saying it "won't do anything" despite the obvious increase of this income).

For all we know a tax increase may decrease the total money collected by the government as the wealthy flee into more favorable tax regimes. This is all right from the point of wealth redistribution (it happens anyways as the local wealth decreases even through different means) but would be unacceptable from the income/spending point of view.
Look. Becoming a programmer is NOT going to give you a satisfying life. Being a programmer is fucking boring. Companies do not give a shit what cool stuff you've built once they hire you. They want you to spend your time figuring out why their automated build system is broken and optimizing their databases. Sitting in front of a screen for 8-12 hours a day is a terrible approach to achieving satisfaction in your life.

Starting a company is different, and if you are massively interesting in solving a problem, that can be a great way to go. But starting a company is completely unpleasant a lot of time and if you want to pick a job that is going to fill your plate with bullshit, that is a good choice.

The best advice I ever received in regards to this topic is still pretty worthless, because almost all advice is worthless. You cannot learn wisdom that way. You learn it through experience. But here it is: Pick a problem that is meaningful to you and work on it. Optimize this by working with people you like and who share your passions.

That advice was given to me by one of the most famous computer scientists alive who also happens to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Note that his advice did not involve becoming a good engineer, getting papers cited, or starting a company.

I keep an index card in my pocket that says: "Never again have reason to regret." This is not "live without regrets". I think that attitude is mostly contemptible. Rather, spend your time -- all of your time -- on things you will not regret having done when you climb into bed at night. If nothing else, every day that I have obeyed this rule unfailingly I have slept well and awoken excited and optimistic in the morning. That's all the wisdom I have. The rest is just get damn lucky.
However, the more concurrency your stack can do, the less this matters. Assuming the probability of a node getting assigned a long request is 1/5, the probability of a node getting assigned 4 of them is (1/5)^4 = 1/625. If your stack can do 20 concurrent requests, it's (1/5)^20 = 1/95367431640625.[1]

Note that this overlooks the fact that a node that has requests queued only drains them at a certain rate, as long requests tend to pile up. However, if your framework is truly concurrent and your nodes are not CPU bound, but rather waiting for other services, it's possible to get much higher concurrency than just 20.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281%2F5%29%5E20
I'm not sure that you should pursue your dreams.

Happiness is the gap between results and expectations. The greater the gap, the less satisfaction people feel. If you need, I mean really NEED, to start a technical business, I'm sure that you will strategize, break the goal into tangible pieces and accomplish it.

But if you haven't started a business by now, maybe there's a good reason. Maybe your personality, interests and talent aren't in line with that objective. And, if that's the case, it's okay.

In other words, I support your decision to strive for different results if that's what you really need, but I think it's also important to calibrate your expectations.