skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He seems to present a polarized interpretation of work. Either one can race towards burnout by working 100 weeks or they can enjoy 6-hour days, frequent vacations, etc. Both of these are untenable for most people. The majority of people work fairly diligently and their jobs take up the preponderance of their time, but aren't necessarily working hours that are unhealthy. People who work 40-70 hours per week generally fall within this category.

He also doesn't confront the fact that many if not most time commitments are immutable. Most people have certain tasks and obligations need to be done periodically and take a relatively static amount of time. This time expenditure is stable and unlikely to change or disappear anytime soon.

For instance, I know that, between school, various scholastic obligations, and the occasional bit of freelance or personal work, I put in roughly 65-75 hours per week. Obviously, this takes up the majority of my time, but is not all consuming; and I don't believe that it is having any substancial adverse effects on my health. Moreover, these hours are unavoidable, and I couldn't circumvent them even if I wanted to.

In its essence, this post is advocating for the right things insofar as it is encouraging work-life balance and discouraging subjecting oneself to dangerous working hours, but takes a fairly myopic view of work and makes suggestions that aren't really tenable in many situations.
Recently it's been crashing for me left and right. This seems to happen with chrome over the years, ebb and flow of functional non-functional. I just switch back to Firefox during that time.
Ah, another web rendering engine, some more years with a buggy Selenium alpha driver which doesn't work so people need to do manual tests. Progress!
I call this "paying my rent". I'm HAPPY to pay for services. I want my local businesses to prosper.

There's an opportunity here. Starbucks popularized the notion "third place"; even if they didn't quite execute, many others did.

If a cafe served real food (not just treats), even prepackaged, and sported a printer (charging per copy), I'd never leave.

In my neighborhood, there's a postbox + copy center joint with unused square footage right next to an espresso cafe filled with laptop campers and scarce seating. Both have plenty of customers. But a combo would rule.
What does Dolphin use? I don't even bother opening Firefix Chrome on Android, they just aren't up to Dolphins level.
Going back around 15 years, I was mostly in VB5-6, some VBScript, some JavaScript and some SQL. 10 years ago that expanded to include C#, VB.Net, ActionScript/Flash... most of those used at least a few hours a week, and often switching between the two... Today, it's about 1/2 .Net web projects C#/HTML/CSS/JS and the other half NodeJS backend code (JS), with more movement towards full-stack Js (NodeJS, MongoDB, web front end).

I like looking at different languages/tools/platforms, and am a bit into different languages. I've actually liked JS for a long time. The nature of web based apps make it a requirement, so it is nice to see decent frameworks take hold server-side that use it.

Just pointing, that for me personally, if you add all the web stuff, more than half my time is in JS these days, and a decade or five years ago, I could not say the same.
The title is misleading, to say the least.

I occasionally suffer from lower back pain. From experience, tight hamstrings seem to be the cause. If I regularly stretch my hamstrings, I am without back problems. If I stop stretching, then, after a few months, I'll suddenly develop severe back pain. It's happened 3 times already, so I'm seeing a pattern.

So I guess my point is: stretching can help in other areas; it just may not help you improve one specific aspect of your performance. It can keep you injury-free.
Awesome! Wish everything was this short and sweet.
i wonder if those numbers they post as loss are actually real loss or creative accounting loss. 18 years is a long time to keep losing money...
My wife learned about the book Natural Flexibility

http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Flexibility-Risk-Free-Alternat...

by Charles Kenny, M.D., and has found it helpful for maintaining injury-free flexibility for a variety of exercises.
Agreed.. I don't recall seeing SQL variants in there either. I do think that HTML/CSS could be removed, or lumped together. There's a lot of growth/movement in server-side JS between NodeJS and MongoDB alone.
I have seen this book recommended 1000 times but never did more than skim it. Help me out: what do you like about it?
I was doing just this with a German foreign exchange student in Missouri once. He commented about halfway there that, if he were at home, we'd be in Poland already.
Thing is, few will do the hard work necessary. Too many think "follow your dreams" means little more than "show up for class". Is it a dream, or is it a vague response to "what is your dream?" Is it his free-time choice?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Adam. FWIW, I think you guys provide a very valuable service & I wish you the best as you work through these issues.
Lucasarts' Closure Convinces Developers To Release Awesome Star Wars Source Code
Breakthrough Allows For Cheap Hydrogen Production From Any Plant Source
To seriously colonize other planets would presumably mean we've solved the LEO lift problem (elevator? even easier on Mars, the Moon, etc.), have some nuclear-powered shuttles running around the planets, etc. At that point I think there would be at least as much contact between worlds as between continents in the 1500s. It might be largely one-way (Earth to Colonies), though.

Shipping reproductive material (either as information, or embryos, or frozen eggs/sperm) would also be fairly realistic.

The main reasons I can see for colonizing other planets are political (Earth is dominated by a certain kind of nation state, I'd happily live in a remote part of Earth if it would get me out from under that, as long as the right 5k people went with me...), or the spiritual/moral/whatever drive to do it because it can be done.
Americans will continue to drive automobiles more than Europeans if gas prices were to go to parity. Our mass transit infrastructure is laughable by comparison. Also, we're way more spread out than Europe is.
My biggest issue with heroku is the general slowness with the API - maybe I'm just impatient, but most simple commands like listing releases, viewing logs etc take at least a second, sometimes five before anything happens. Pushes also take quite a while, even the Git push part is much slower than pushing to github. It's just a general sluggishness which gets annoying after a while.

If they could get all the API requests down under 500ms I'd be much happier.
This is very cool. Thank you!
I'm not really opposed to using different languages in a project.. but what you just described seems to mean a lot of unnecessary complexity for a given project. Given that you could use a subset of two of those to reasonably accomplish what you need, it seems to me like you are dramatically increasing maintenance costs in favor of toying around.
It seems like a lot of this has to do with how much you charge. Everything I've heard about freelancing is that you should continually raise your rate and never sell yourself short. So if you're doing that, why would you ever run into a tight financial situation?
CompJournWin8Pro by znmeb
Is there some software where the packaging on Mac OS X isn't a mess?
From the article:

> Q. Did the Bamboo router degrade?

> A. Yes. Our older router was built and designed during the early years of Heroku to support the Aspen and later the Bamboo stack. These stacks did not support concurrent backends, and thus the router was designed with a per-app global request queue. This worked as designed originally, but then degraded slowly over the course of the next two years.

From Adam's message on Feb 17th, 2011 (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/heroku/8...):

> You're correct, the routing mesh does not behave in quite the way described by the docs. We're working on evolving away from the global backlog concept in order to provide better support for different concurrency models, and the docs are no longer accurate. The current behavior is not ideal, but we're on our way to a new model which we'll document fully once it's done.

It looks like random load balancing was already the expected behavior 2 years ago? The "slow degradation" part seems a bit dishonest to me.
The combination of Tinderbox (eastgate.com) for notetaking/brainstorming/storage/retrieval and DevonTHINK Pro (devontechnologies.com) for storage and (intelligent) retrieval of article-length text (mining it for ideas and specific content, which then goes into Tinderbox) is killer.

Unfortunately for some people, these are both Mac-only applications.
That's a really interesting point, I hadn't considered that before now. There are a couple that I still really like, but I also think many of them legitimately were more interesting than they would be now - not because their information is dated, but maybe just because people have more connected knowledge bases now...?
So, you might not read this in a while... But after thinking about this some more, I think Go's decentralized approach to package management is actually a great model. So, expect something very similar in the future :)

Always happy to discuss further on #docker@freenode!
With Google, Opera (and probably others) leaving, is WebKit going to be able to sustain itself as an entity separated from Apple?
> I mean use the monopoly

In what market relevant to this issue does Google have a monopoly?

> to take the tech, clone, tweak, and then don't contribute back.

Its all open source, so it is contributed back. Google just isn't constrained to not change things that WebKit users rely on in future Blink work.

> A "fork you" to apple that would make the web suffer.

WebKit and Chromium both being more free to try different solutions isn't going to make the web suffer, its going to make the web better.
Getting a latte at a small coffe place that actually puts effort into it is like night and day vs. the big chains. There are quite a few shops around Portland, but I still end up hitting Starbucks at times because it's everywhere and easy to get to.
No, it has only 24 chapters. Version 2 has 27.
Bringing a little power strip can make you the most popular person at the coffee shop, especially if you're sitting at one of those long tables with one measly outlet nearby.
Been running Android. Couldn't be happier. Whenever I use an iPhone i keep thinking "wow compared to my android the screen is tiny" and not to mention my android costs a lot less.
I think knowing a given language can help a lot... for example the addition of generics and lambdas to C# has dramatically changed how I may approach a given problem in C#.

I know there is often a cost to using, for example the linq extension methods, it will look cleaner a lot of the time than the loop syntax.

Beyond this, simply using a new framework in an existing language can shape your views... for example, the differences in using JS with say jQueryUI, NodeJS, or AMD modules.

Knowing a language, and some platforms/libraries/approaches can greatly shape how you use that language. I once saw a VB app written by a COBOL convert... well, it ran in VB, but definitely looked like a COBOL application.
Extensively modified WebKit, I believe (at least compared to the system WebKit on Android). That being said, given that their customized engine targets Android, I suspect it is more likely than not that they'll switch to Blink.
I have had many horror stories with Airtel. I blogged about one here: http://hatwar.org/epilogue/2010/06/why-buying-an-iphone-in-i...

Soon, I had to stop paying my bills because they couldn't resolve my issues and kept logging the tickets as solved. But they didn't want to end it there...

They leaked my call details to their recovery agents - and soon my friends and customers were getting calls asking about my whereabouts, while I was always accessible via email. Total breach of trust and privacy.

They prefer to speak rather than write because what is spoken on the phone can't become evidence while mails can. Besides, India doesn't have a semblance of tort law.

India's largest and the world's third-largest telecom company runs on marketing. That is all they do. They do not own or operate their network. It is outsourced, just like their stores. Don't touch Airtel with a barge pole.
Again, I'm no expert on Heroku's architectre. Just thinking out loud here,
and feel free to tell me to RTFA. :-)

> the number of loadbalancers per application is usually very small. I.e. the number is <1 for >99% of sites and you need quite a popular site to push it into the double digits (a single haproxy instance can sustain >5k connect/sec).

So most Heroku sites have only a single frontend loadbalancer doing their routing, and even these cases are getting random routed with suboptimal results?

Or is the latency issue mainly with respect to exactly those popular sites that end up using a distributed array of loadbalancers?

> Assigning pooled loadbalancers to apps while ensuring HA is not trivial, but it's also not rocket science.

To me the short history of "cloud-scale" (sorry) app proxy load balancing shows that very well-resourced and well-engineered systems often work great and scale great, that is until some weird failure mode unbalances the whole system and response time goes all hockey stick.

> Dyno-presence per application is very slowly-changing data by zookeeper standards.

OK, but instantaneous queue depth for each and every server? (within a given app)
Does this mean that Opera wont get sandboxing and "tab isolation"?

My understanding was one of the reasons Google forked as to rip out the webkit2 versions of those things, in favor of their own, which are fairly tightly tied to Chrome.

So either Opera is going to be more "chromey" or...they are going to reimplement those parts? Maybe they already have them (I am not that familiar with Opera these days)?
The current history of video game sales expectations has been "expected too much", "expected too much", and "expected too much".

I'm willing to bet that they did not expect to make more than X by selling the game.
I've always thought that if everyone had to write out a tax check 4 times a year, there would be a lot more pressure on the politicians to be more responsible with the money.

The government isn't silly though, that's why they get first cut at the paypacket. They know they'd be forever chasing tax arrears.

Still, having the government beg for the money instead of just pinching it up front would rebalance the equation nicely in my humble opinion.
Despite the American oral fixation, flossing is not all that popular over here. The guilt about not flossing is, however, huge.
Bitcoins have at least some value on the Deep Web, the stock market is the ultimate castle in the air investment. That doesn't mean people shouldn't use it, but it's a pretty poor investment.

I continue to watch the Wall Street bubble unfold, fascinated, popcorn at the ready. In the end it'll be like sending herds of cattle through a cheese grater.
Great comparison, thanks.
Title should probably have "Prediction:" prepended.
> So to answer your question, there was never some crazy-awesome implementation of a distributed global queue that we got rid of.

So it was an oversimplified system that worked great but wasn't scalable and was at some point going to completely fall over under increasing load.

IMExp, this is not a wrong thing to build initially and it's not wrong to replace it either. But the replacement is going to have a hard time being as simple or predictable. :-)
> Last time I measured (late 2012) the entire mozilla-central repository was 4.488 million lines of code.

Mozilla isn't WebKit.

> I don't believe that by simply streamlining things they'll be able to remove anything like 4.5 million lines.

I suppose you could compare WebKit repos against Blink repos once the latter is live to see exactly what is cut, but I'm going to say the people working on the code that are the source of the count know how many LOC are involved, and that there direct count is more reliable than a third-party estimate based on a different browser's repo.
Startup stories: What I learned in a year with WisePricer
Combining the vulnerabilities of NFC with the non-security of thumbprint reading on a device not controlled by the party wishing to verify your identity?

This is the kind of speculation that The Fonz might have engaged in after that incident involving riding a motorbike in an airborne fashion over a captive chrondrichthyes.
Fancy Some Three-Dimensional Wellness?
I built http://resume.amccloud.com/ for myself.
In the very same vein, behold: The Krugman Times - The NY Times by its only columnist

http://krugmantimes.com/

My site takes the current view of the NYT and replaces all the material using text extraction. This op-ed generator appears to use mad-libs with defined templates.
Does anyone else find it painful working at coffee shops? Non-ergonomic chairs, weird table heights, poor posture inherent to using laptops (no external monitor). I'd much rather work from home or an office.
we paid in $-equiv: the Internet Archive calculated the price of bitcoins on April 1 and use that (rounded down to $100/btc). seemed fair.
Which Countries are Most Dangerous to Visit?
Is it at all plausible to set up a tank with jellies that breed and sustain their numbers? I'm remembering a friend's fish tank that was perennially full of snails, because the snails laid eggs on the walls of the tank much faster than they died out.

Could the jellies be captured and shipped in polyp form to cut down on the cost?
I think the 5S will be as underwhelming as the past S releases.
That works right up until somebody says, "God, that cheap jerk makes me crazy," and puts up a sign. Or moves the cream behind the counter, slowing down everybody who needs it. Or switches from the pitcher to the single-serving thingies, increasing cost and waste, so they can more easily refuse to give you one. Or just says, "Man, I've had enough of those cheap-ass internet guys. Let's turn off the wireless and remove the power outlets."

If you want a cappuccino, buy a cappuccino. If you want a sandwich, buy a sandwich. Commerce is a collaboration between buyer and seller. Both sides are responsible for making sure that the value exchange is sustainable.
yeah, well, c'mon that's just good grammer.
I can appreciate that it isn't viable today. But looking back on the history of our species, things that seemed useless or even harmful frequently turned out later to be indispensable resources. Sometimes they did turn out to be simply unhelpful and harmful and I can appreciate that this is the current state of knowledge with Venus, and that it isn't especially economically meaningful to hammer on it further at this time. I just don't think it's safe to consider the matter settled for all time.
The Architectural Origins of the Chess Set
I was like that at 21 (10 years ago) -- sad to report it won't last!

My theory is, at the hormones of late teens to mid-twenties, anything is awesome. A stoner with a PlayStation and 3 boxes of donuts all day at that age has the time of his life! A DJ feeling out new tunes has. A coder doing 16-hour days has. An athlete does. A bro at a sports bar, too. Everything is just amazing at that age because pretty much nothing affects your well-being in any way, or rather, recuperation from any kind of abuse is at its all-time peak.

Enjoy the ride! And yeah, take a day off every once in a while to ride bikes with friends and travel on the cheap. Better to burn out at 28 than at say 23 ;D
The Internet Archive is holding on to the bitcoins to keep the currency experiment going. I bought $1,000 worth of coins so I could make the bitcoin converter box at the Internet Archive and be able to give my friends 0.10 BTC when they got an address so they would ahve something to play with. the sushi place might cash in their BTC's into our converter box (honor based ATM), but maybe not. For me, the key to make a currency is to have it trade around before getting redeemed. We are in this for real.
He didn't mention trying to find health insurance, probably because he is a country that provides it to everyone.
Why quantum computing is hard and quantum cryptography is not provably secure
Over the last 10 years I've done a mix of freelance development, developed my own products and also been a salaried employee.

I can honestly say on reflection that the overall stress level is about the same, but what stresses the self-employed (income variation) is different to what stresses the salaried (deadlines and dependence on others to get things done). I've come to the conclusion that a persons stress level is something in their nature and there are deeper questions to answer if you're feeling stressed.

Having been on all sides of the fence, I can definitely say that none of them have the greenest grass, but all the grass is eaten in a different way.

Freedom is awesome and liberating, but that type of freedom denotes a level of success (and lifestyle/workload design). It's also a slippery beast to capture. Because if you fall short and end up working for bad clients on short deadlines for not enough cash, then you're going to be twice as stressed as a salaried employee getting ridden by their boss for TPS reports.

What's it all mean? Don't do anything without looking at it seriously, and don't assume the other guy is having a great time of it.

And don't get into too much debt, regardless of your circumstance.
Id Software fate uncertain
If you want some bitcoins to play with and you are in San Francisco, then just come by the Internet Archive and use our bitcoin converter box (honor based ATM). If you are not in SF, then please set these up in hacker spaces. It is fun, and currently it is going up so it is even profitable.
We all have many horror stories but still I hesitate to change. All these ISP's are cheats who make glowing promises but don't deliver. I remember how I was being charged daily for some service I never used and never subscribed to. This went on for years and I wondered how my balance was depleting even when I hardly use the phone.

Finally, one day i began getting SMS's that I was being re-subscribed to some Hindi tunes or poetry. When i called up I was told they had been charging me a rupee a day for 2 years for this service.

Funny thing is that even if I had subscribed, I never got anything. So they charged me everyday for something they were supposed to send me, but never sent me.

They do the same thing on the internet, where they promise you some bandwidth (speed) but never deliver. After the allotted 10 GB my speed is supposed to half. But it comes down to a crawl. After i touch 80% of my bandwidth, every time I open a URL i am taken to airtel's page to buy more bandwidth. This goes on an on. (To be fair , this harassment has reduced recently, but they cheat you on bandwidth to get you to go to a higher scheme).
I just don't see it. Thumbprint readers aren't actually secure, and they add a large amount of friction to usage - and friction kills adoption.

Not only do you have to pull your phone out and hold it against some thing, you have to scan your thumb too. And that last part doesn't gain you any significant security increase.

Remember when they started integrating thumb readers into laptops and the marketing departments invented dozens of contrived use cases that sound great on paper (and only on paper)? How many of those use cases ever got adopted? I don't see how this one is any different.

I do hope for NFC though, Apple has the market presence, the mindshare, and the "screw you all we're doing it our way" to really enable adoption in a way Google was never able to pull off.
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