skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am working for a fairly large heroku app running Node on ~50-100 web dyno's with another 20-50 backends. Here are the problems as I see it:

We get H12's all the time. Randomly. The only suggestion we get from Heroku is to make the requests process as fast as possible. Thus, we've spent considerable amount of time going through everything we can possibly do to make all requests respond as fast as possible. I've given up. I see this as a fundamental issue with the routing system. If you are going to use Heroku for a large production deployment, H12's (and your users getting dropped connections) will become a fact of life.

There is no auto scaling. We have no idea how many dyno's we actually need. So, we over do it in order to handle peek traffic times. This must be a great money maker for Heroku. There is no incentive for them to build auto scaling into their system because that would mean they wouldn't make as much money. Yes, auto scaling is a hard problem to solve, but there should at least be a plan to start on it and there is none that I have found.

Up until someone bitched loudly, nothing was happening to fix any of this. We have an expensive paid support contract with Heroku and before this whole routing issue blew up in public, their only recommendation was to tune the app more and buy into NewRelic for ~$8k / month. We did both and found NewRelic to not give any relevant information to help us. We did a NodeTime trial for ~$49/mo and that actually helped a lot in identifying slow spots in our app. We fixed all the slow spots in our app and still see an endless stream of H12's. Regardless, it shouldn't take a public bitch slapping for a company to listen to their customers.

You log into a dyno and see a load average of 30+. Who knows if that number is accurate or how big the underlying box really is, but regardless, I can't imagine that number being good. Am I getting H12's because I'm on an overloaded box or is it because the routing system is fundamentally broken? I don't know and nobody can tell me. This is not a good position to be in.

I have heard from several sources that Heroku isn't happy being on AWS and has been wanting to migrate off AWS for a while now. So, if your hosting provider isn't happy on their hosting provider, there must be a reason for that and in the bigger picture, you the customer, is getting screwed.

Given these things, I will never recommend that a company use Heroku. It is great if you know you are going to never have more than one dyno, but if you think you are going to go into a large production system with it, it is far better to find something else. Which brings me to another rant... how come none of these other PaaS solutions are as easy as Heroku? The git deploy is seriously the one thing they got mostly right. I'd love to see someone build a layer on top of all the PaaS solutions so that I can just deploy my code to any one of them (or event multiple).
That (and the linked article) was the nicest "fork you" I've ever read. These developers have class.
I know it might be an unpopular comment, but I really don't like this. I had hoped every browser would eventually use the webkit rendering engine. I have a hard time feeling sorry for those engineers that have to maintain compatibility, when I think of the many frontend engineers that now have to test a different rendering engine :(
A number of people were complaining about how not enough common implementations on the web was a bad thing; and how everyone using webkit would lead to complacency. Google forking webkit to make it its own might be just enough to keep them all different enough to keep standards going :)
Wouldn't a fork lead to decreased value for everyone...?
Awesome. Thumbs up!!
This is addressed in the FAQ:
http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-just...
http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features

Additionally: we have had experimental Dart+Chromium builds for a long time, they use a different approach (V8 bindings layer) that doesn't require WebKit changes. However we only use these builds for fast development edit+refresh, for deploying Dart code you should use dart2js (it's just like deploying CoffeeScript, C code via emscripten, etc).
I'd love to see one of these for the other planets in our solar system. Maybe even Pluto!
If true, this is a sad day for the industry. We're currently in the phase of the industries adolescence; and of the longer struggle of the culture at large to deal with gender imbalance.

That some men can engage in this sort of behavior for years before it comes out into the light is a shameful thing for all those who enable them.

I expect this story to be filtered into the memory hole, but we should be asking the question of why it is so plausible; and what could we do to prevent, end, and remedy such situations.
The mobile war is over and the app has won: 80% of mobile time spent in apps
Finally!

Before anyone starts moaning about incompatibility, let's face it: developers start to rely on new features the moment they're added. Differentiating between different implementations is pointless, since CSS's design means you can specify a property multiple times and your browser will only use the one it understands. The current system also excluded other rendering engines who web developers didn't consider.

So this is a huge win for us, the developers.
Thanks. Both really good resources. I suppose the degree has a longer term value than a boot camp and opens doors for future educational opportunities. The best way to combine them might be to go to the boot camp and get a job, then complete the degree as a working developer. I'm leaning toward the degree though. Much to think about.
No one loves Mt. Gox, but it's the biggest exchange...which is why it stays as the biggest exchange, because everyone wants to use the biggest exchange.
So which Chromium will Opera be based on now?
I might be mistaken here, but isn't Bitcoin the currency with an ultimately fixed amount, with a known, predictable rate of growth (of the number of Bitcoins in existence)?

How can this volatility then be attributed to Bitcoin, and not the other currencies it is valued in? I freely admit, I'm less than a novice when it comes to ForEx, but a statement like

> "The value of bitcoins, it turns out, is highly sensitive to media coverage," wrote Reuters' influential financial journalist..."

seems to me to be exactly the opposite, i.e. media coverage is causing other currencies to fluctuate and the Bitcoin valuations are just a reflection of this.
I spent a week porting a Java game to JRuby and I must admit.. I wouldn't actually mind a mixed syntax like this, but it did make do a double take ;-)
CyanogenMod reversed opt-out, but still tracking you with Google Analytics
Ask HN: What types of systems do you use to convert information into knowledge?
I’m guessing many of you out there may have a great many interests and consume a huge amount of information from many sources everyday. Do any of you have formal or quasi-formal systems in place to convert that information into knowledge instead of having it just passively wash over you and remain as trivia and tidbits? Find bigger themes, connections, etc…

Note-taking systems, active reading, Evernote/Onenote, mind mapping, essay writing, blogging, whatever… What works for you?
I don't know the history of aether theory (that spelling is easier to google), but I bet someone wrote something equivalent to InclinedPlane's comment about it at one time. Even if aether was contested and later disproved, the history of science should continue to enlighten our modern views of how we as humans interpret the universe.

There are several ways to interpret ttrreeww's comment:
- Dark matter is a bunch of mumbo jumbo just like we know the aether theory to be. IP reacted to this meaning.
- Dark matter is vaguely reminiscent of aether theory in that it was built up from observed effects without knowing what the stuff actually was. I like this one better, but we won't know if that's what ttrreeww really meant unless we ask yo.[1]

If a statement is so short that it is easy to misinterpret, why react so strongly to one of the interpretations?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5481430
Opera will be using Blink: http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/
Not sure if it's a bug or a typo, but the "width" (diameter) of the Earth is 12,742 km, not 6,371 (which is the radius).
Can we just chip in to a graph in the top-right corner that shows the exchange rate of BTC vs. USD, and leave it at that? I'm sure someone could write an extension for that.

Saves us a lot of this. :P
Hmmm, how about paypal linked to a bank account? Just as bad probably. They have a two factor authentication available with your phone, but perhaps even that is a bad idea.
Rendering engine monoculture isn't a good thing though. If a single rendering engine dominates, then there is less reason to write standards-compliant code - after all, everyone uses WebKit, right?
Awesome info, thanks. This has been exactly our experience.

In theory, clever load distribution algorithms (of which one can imagine many variations) are very compelling. Maybe like object databases, or visual programming, or an algorithm that can detect when your program has hit an infinite loop. These are all compelling, but ultimately impractical or impossible in the real world.
On the way to Mars, there was a flash and the screen went white. I guess I didn't make it.
Everyone, sell your bitcoins, quick!
What's frustrating is how much better of a candidate Venus would be, if it weren't for its atmosphere. It's closer than Mars and larger too.
http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features has some detail about how we plan to add features to the platform. We're certainly hoping to be pretty transparent about how things get into Chromium.
Starting today new dev work will go into Blink repo. So, effectively, today.
They already are different: Chrome on iOS uses whatever version of WebKit UIWebView uses on the platform (which, until relatively recently, was an old fork of WebKit), whereas Chrome on Android nowadays uses a version almost as up to date as Chrome on desktop.
How much do you want to know about your gut?
If you look at the value of a bitcoin graphed over time, it looks an awful lot like a bubble. I sure wouldn't keep any assets in bitcoins. I've seen a lot of bubbles in my 44.5 years on this planet and this looks just like all the others (right down to the claims that "this time it's different"). The biggest difference here is that there is no underlying asset behind the bubble. Heck, even the lowliest failed dotcom had, at the least, some aeron chairs to liquidate when the share price hit zero.
I like to imagine if Mars and Venus were swapped would Venus then be habitable?
A month or two ago, I spent $100 on Bitcoins. I figured this was an acceptable amount to 'gamble' like I was in Vegas. Might go up, might go down- but I found the risk to be acceptable for the amount.
Too bad it's not relevant to the situation.
Well, we're getting to energies where colliders are approaching some pretty expensive limits and space provides much better natural accelerators for us to study.
MtGox seems like the weakest link in Bitcoin.

I don't understand why a Magic the Gathering site is the big exchange still, and yet people keep creating wallet providers (which is kind of cookie cutter and inessential), vs. an exchange (which is inherently centralized, very technical vs. UI/UX centric, security sensitive, technically interesting, and a natural monopoly). There's some value in being a wallet provider with great funding/redemption options, but that's a hard business which touches a lot of regulation and legacy banking.

I think the big opportunities in BTC are: hardware/trusted wallets, trusted cloud-hosted wallets, an exchange provider, and most interestingly, derivative issues (currencies, instruments, contracts) with BTC as the underlying. Not "yet another web wallet provider".

A wallet provider is essentially retail. An exchange is where wallet providers should be going to offload risk, ideally with the exchange itself taking zero risk; let market makers do it. The only thing the exchange needs to do is publish prices and handle execution/settlement (which is trickier due to the lack of a "bitcoin-USD", "bitcoin-JPY", etc., but can be approximated by retaining USD, JPY, etc. balances on account.
Presumably because the purchasing power of the other currencies isn't fluctuating anywhere near as much. If Bitcoin were stable, you'd expect it to be able to buy basically the same amount of oil, gold, food, etc., no?
Chrome 28 will be the first blinking release.
Immediately, presumably. They just forked it, so it already works, yes?
Parallelism is listed as something they are considering, whereas with Servo it's one of the biggest (if not the main) reasons for it existing. From this announcement I can't quite tell what it is with this project that they hope to achieve but I'm sure that will become more clear over time.
Nicely done. A biology scaled version would be cool. Like if a virus was 100 pixels wide...
The argument is essentially: "It took up lots of engineering time and effort to maintain compatibility with other platforms, so this allows us not to worry about other platforms and only focus on our own and that will allow us to move faster."

Hopefully this is easier for everyone. If the chrome multithreading architecture really was the pain point then does that mean that webkit will also be deleting thousands of files and become easier to build, just as the chrome team is removing compatibility for other webkit targets? Or will WebKit remain the mess it is now because it strives to work on all the other platforms?

What if Apple decided to do the same thing? WebKit is this wonderful open source success story in part because it runs in so many places on so many things, but isn't a large part of that only enabled because the main contributors took the time to make sure that their work continued to run on the various different architectures? Will Google turn away patches that enable Blink to be compatible with platforms not their own?

This is an interesting move.
related: interactive scale of the universe http://htwins.net/scale2/
They've put together a FAQ about routing: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/2/routing_and_web_pe...
Except that the value of goods and services in those currencies have not fluctuated the way that they would if it were the currencies changing value and not bitcoins.
Opera will be using Chromium+Blink under the hood.
And if you get into any sort of slowness (like say mongo decides to pull something from disk instead of ram), it is instantly H12's all over the place and there is nothing you can do about it.
There's a lot of buy-in right now with bitcoin. Because people are seeing the price skyrocket so much, it's made the entire market fairly unstable. People are running huge orders at prices that have never been seen before this week. Since bitcoin isn't backed up by any real-world entity, its valuation is purely what the community thinks it's valued at. Since it's value is tied directly to public opinion, media coverage has huge influences on the price of bitcoin. If forbes does an article stating that bitcoin is the most lucrative investment market, thousands of new orders get placed for bitcoins, driving the price up. If the media says that the bubble is about to pop, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't understand how your proposal is tenable. There's nothing preventing the fraudulent party with their blocked Wallet A to just create a new Wallet B, transfer funds to that, and then use it.

If you're a merchant, you'd have to do origin tracing of the funds in all the wallets you accept. It's not as simple as just creating a blacklist, that would be very easily avoided. The only thing that might work is getting all miners to refuse to accept transfers from the "bad" address to ANY other address (good luck, that's never going to happen).
This demonstrates perhaps the largest real threat to the bitcoin ecosystem right now: the exchange markets are heavily concentrated. Confidence in the system is, right now, heavily based on the perception that Bitcoins can be traded readily for something (pizza, drugs, dollars, quatloos...). Anything that alters that perception will, of course, have a big effect on the price.

In fact, exchange risk could lead to something akin to a bank run - the exchanges only keep a small reserve of national currencies and Bitcoins to handle orders and are essentially acting as market makers. But a big swing in the demand for either Bitcoin or real currencies could push the exchanges into a tight spot. If they don't have enough Bitcoin, obviously, the price rises until the demand for Bitcoin subsides. But if they don't have enough (say) dollars, then the price must fall. And there's a natural death spiral: as the price falls, particularly after such a big run up as has happened recently, people might suddenly decide that it's time to get out. But that only increases the demand for (scarce) dollars. And so the value collapses.

Here's the real Bitcoin security question: can someone precipitate this situation? Maybe someone who benefits from a collapse of the Bitcoin price (say a law enforcement agency that wants to affect the Silk Road business or, if you don't like that, then say any entity with a significant short position on Bitcoin exchange markets). This is not a question I've seen previously addressed in Bitcoin literature or even musings on the various Bitcoin forums. It's a security economics question. I'm interested in the answer.

By the way, my current favorite term for such a situation is the "Goldfinger attack" on the theory that while Goldfinger wanted to steal the gold from Ft. Knox (in the novel version), such an adversary wants to invalidate the coins in Mt. Gox.
These are the games that have remained on my phone (sort of in order of favorites):

plants vs zombies,
middle manager of justice,
minecraft pocket edition,
plague inc.,
tiny wings,
ticket to ride,
carcassone,
flight control,
textropolis
They're following them to Blink.

So we'll have Trident in IE, Gecko in Firefox (OS), WebKit in (Mobile) Safari and Blink in Chrome/ium and Opera.
It wasn't better as in more secure, it was instant and easy. It was a low-security wallet designed for trying out bitcoin.
I think hiring existing developers and training them up is a fine plan. And a lot of companies do just that.

But it works best if you have an existing team, trained in the technology, of sufficient size that it can afford to spend a little time mentoring, and with a long-term outlook.

There are teams like that who use Rails. But, as it happens, Rails is also a favorite tool of brand-new startup teams who are already critically overworked and who probably won't be around in six months. And it's a favorite tool of one- and two-person teams: When a one-person team loses a developer, the new hire has no mentor available. So there's plenty of openings for pre-educated Rails developers.

Mind you, there's also the cynical explanation: It's more "efficient" to advertise for "rails devs" because you can screen the resumes so much faster. Those who can't answer trivia questions about ActiveRecord syntax are out! This would, of course, be dysfunctional. But the whole job-ad system is already so dysfunctional that this particular bit of dysfunction may be lost in the noise.
In Search of True Process
Help Honza finish his studies
Now "Sign up" looks better. One more thought: I think that you should try to make that homepage looks better. Maybe different image, or even slider, and better order in general. It looks a little messy, like you created it in five 5mins or so.

Just because of the design DeskAnything leaves better impression on me.
Making your homepage better would definitely improve the general impression of users.

Keep up the good work, I like the idea :)
Yes, Healthful Fast Food Is Possible. But Edible?
Yes, thanks, this makes a lot of sense.
Just like everyone used IE6 back in the day!
The elegance of the Flat Tax idea is not the flatness of the tax, but the fact that it's a straight line tax.

There's no reason why this essential feature can't be combined with a progressive (read: more humane) system by adding a gentle slope.
Or.. an electron is 100 pixels wide..
I think this is all true, but you could also make a viable argument for working more. I personally love the satisfaction you get after working those long days. It's like a high you get after an intense run. It helps that I personally love the work I am doing, so working 16 hour days feels like 5 hours. I am only 21, maybe it catches up with you the older you get, but for now 16 hour days are fine by me.
Shouldn't it be something more like 20,000 km, since the equator is about 40,000 km long and we're looking at half of it? Anyway 6,371 can't be right though.
Those simplistic-seeming explanations are subtly different, which turns out to be quite helpful when dealing with the conceptual difficulties of TNT. Of course, some more accessible language than TNT would make the book more approachable, but Hofstadter's objective is to demonstrate why you will not be able to circumvent the incompleteness theorem by adding syntactic sugar.
A statement of grammar? A picture? A string of characters?

What would a thought in print look like? And what print with any meaning at all would not "be a thought" in ordinary parlance?
Swartz Incidents Prompt MIT to Boost Network Security
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 outlines the technical differences between the architectures pretty well. Suffice it to say, the model runs deep, and has real impact on the way things like WebCore are put together.
If it were to be used, how would advertising factor into this? Not saying $7/season is viable but could a low price be buffered out by advertiser sponsorship?
Or you can turn off Javascript and hit the "End" key. Alas, there does not seem to be any real-life equivalent to that.
This is a nice demonstration of where HackPad shines.

Also, here is my favorite HackPad easter-egg:

If you want to create a hackpad with a nice url, just go to
http://hackpad.com/<AnythingYouWant>, and it will create a new pad
with that URL instead of an [ugly] random hash.
REMOTE
Successful business owners seeking a full-time Rails developer with strong back-end coding and testing skills to join our development team for a new business venture.

We are looking for someone who:
- Has experience building and deploying production applications in Rails 3.
- Confidently embraces unit testing and integration testing in daily work.
- Considers application architecture and refactors regularly to that end.

You might be the right fit if:
- You Love Ruby and have significant experience with Rails.
- You know your way around RSpec and/or MiniTest, and can converse knowledgeably on the pros/cons
of TDD.
- You've heard of Turnip and Spinach and know how they differ from Cucumber.
- You're not afraid to write raw SQL.
- You can explain HABTM vs HMT.
- You're comfortable with git, branches, merges, etc.
- You know your way around a Linux server, and have a notion of how you might deploy a Rails application from start to finish without using Heroku.
- You understand that "skinny controllers, fat models" is only a partial solution, and you can name several ways
to keep a growing Rails application object-oriented while preventing the models from becoming jumbled bags of methods.
- You understand the concept of writing some unit tests without Rails as a dependency.
- You've at least thought about ways to treat Rails as the delivery mechanism rather than as the application, and you are open to exploring this further.

We are open to flexible work arrangements and you will be part of a team that includes a designer, a front-end developer and another Rails expert. If you would like to learn more about the opportunity please send an email to diananicholson@mac.com.