skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can make yourself happier by deciding that you want to be happy. Our brain can manufacture happiness.
Listen to this talk by Dan Gilbert:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...
Sorry for the brain dump, but here goes, I guess it depends on how large your company is, and the size of your admin team, along with how many emergencies you expect to have (is there is history you can look at? X emergency per month, etc?). We have 4 sysadmins, and we each have a cell phone, where we can communicate via sms in an emergency. We are all on call, but no one is required to answer, so there is no schedule! Our emergency rate is low, one page every 3-4 months (if that). When your emergency rate is low, by stabilizing your environment, and clearing defining what an emergency is, we have a culture where emergencies are really emergencies, like HVAC outage, uplink outages, etc. Personally, I like to be in the loop, even if I'm not helping. This does not happen often, as I said, so there is not really a burden.

First let me give you some advice about "what an emergency is" and "how we are alerted". You need to define what an emergency is in your company, and notify everyone (with clear guidelines on "how to get help"), so that you limit pages to critical issues, post this on an internal wiki (you have a wiki right?). What is really worth getting woken up and coming into the office for? Alerts are issued like this, nagios alerts go to email, these are not generally emergencies, a couple checks do fire sms alerts, so I consider these email alerts issues for the workday, and I do not check these on the weekend. An automated system scans syslog for alerts that might be an emergency (based on prior experience (i.e. db errors about a disk subsystem, etc)), we also have our apps log emergency issues to syslog, and if one is triggered, a sms goes out to the group. We also have any helpdesk tickets (you have a helpdesk right?), with "emergency" in the title issue a page, users know to do this via the "what an emergency is" wiki page.

When a page comes in, if you can take it, you simply issue a sms "ACK" to the group, this tells everyone that you have Accepted this page, and you are the owner. This helps us load balance across everyone's lives. If you need help, you pull in other people as needed. You also issue a sms "All Clear", when the issue is resolved, this will typically go alongside an email to the group with an issue summery.

This entire system does not need to be complex. Start simple and iterate as needed. There also needs to be a process to find out what happened, do we need more monitoring, additional syslog triggers, etc.

ps. our UPS, HVAC, and security systems can issues pages via sms too as needed. I didn't mention this because it highly dependent on our environment. We also use a modem and landline to issues these pages. We have a linux server with qpage [1] running on it, which issues the pages by dialing a landline at a telco. This allows us to issue pages if our network link goes down too.

pss check out my website @ http://sysadmincasts.com/ where I plan to cover issues like this.

[1] http://www.qpage.org/
I submitted this because I thought it might make for some good discussion, but:

> This post is my attempt to be fair, objective, and, by consequence, unrelentingly negative about Rails :)

To me it seems arrogant to assume that you are being fair and objective when you only point out the negative attributes of something. I'd be more inclined to assume that there are positives I'm overlooking, that might even outweigh the negatives. Especially for something as beloved by developers as Rails.

What evidence is there that running a process per core has a significant negative effect on throughput and/or latency in practice? Benchmarks? Data from developers who tried both approaches while holding all else constant? (The latter is probably quite difficult in practice.) Also, JRuby supports real threads without a global interpreter lock.

I think I agree with this post about the benefits of static typing, though.
Mikey Adds Mega-Useful Files, Links, and Images Tabs to Gmail
I must be an exception, planning something I know I'll have much better information about once I'm in that distant place makes me less happy when I have to do it before, based on the information I know it's at least incomplete when not plainly wrong.
>>>>All you need is a friend that works there, or to take a picture of their key, or even a picture of the key hanging off their belt.

I'm wondering how you can replicate a poorly taken smartphone camera image into a key that would unlock a high security lock. If you can't see the grooves clearly on the key from the photo, how does the software or printer know where the grooves should go? I feel like this is quite a stretch to think you can take a photo of a lock several feet away and get an exact duplicate from a 3D printer.
Deprecated base absorbed by SBC/AT&T in the US and 92% market share in Mexico as Telmex according to ever-reliable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_%28ISP%29
Thanks. I actually started using Loom [1] recently and I'm really liking it so far.

[1] http://www.loom.com
I don't like Rails, and I don't like Ruby, but this wasn't a particularly enlightening piece. He doesn't explain why using something like Django in place of Rails makes sense; he handwaves a bit over Node. There's some statically typed language dogma, and that's it.

I'd love to read a good hit piece on Rails, written by someone who spends the time to lay out a strong technical justification for their opinion. This was disappointingly Twitterish.
Basically the post just says:

1. Rails is slow

2. Dynamic languages are bad
Why hasn't anyone made the case that "Hacker Tools" are simply arms, covered under the 2nd Amendment?
"For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy."

The implied assumptions, such as the above, are more than a little suspect, sending the resulting calculations based on them off the rails.
Its not clear if it is third or fourth now. MIPS may be third after ARM.
Relevant, for anybody thinking of jumping aboard that sinking ship: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-ibm....
In Google We Trust — or Not
Why oh why isn't this an ARM device?
It's sad that in my country, where prisons are currently run by the government, there exist plans for privatization. With privatization there's almost no benefits, and a lot of opportunities for trouble; it the Dutch government feels the urge to repeat the mistakes of others.
The process that's in use and what you consider to be true OCR are very similar, differing mainly in the last step (where OCR maps to a standard character set, but JBIG2 creates one on the fly along with a corresponding font). However, the errors at issue arise from part of the process where JBIG2 and OCR are doing pretty much the same thing, so even if the analogy is flawed, it is still highly instructive. Saying this has nothing to do with OCR is quite simply wrong, since this is clearly very closely related with OCR even if it doesn't meet your exact (unspecified) definition of OCR.
"Causation creates correlation."
So should I not throwout my powerbook G4?
We've seen recently from some of these systems that the POWER processors are much more effective than x86 processors. They consume lower power and generate less heat.

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have its own niche in the market.

Look at that Top500 list again and compare #1 (x86) and #3 (POWER). #1 has about double the number of cores, performance and power usage. I'd say the high-end Xeons are comparable to POWER in all aspects.
any chance to have a parallella sort of SOC, a cheap HPC contender out of this consortiums?

imagine a PowerPC HPC SOC for less than $99 :)
I have my fair share of issues with Rails, but I think this is a bit extreme.

When I look into other ecosystems, the amount of library support for building modern web applications just doesn't compare. I think it's this aspect of Rails that really helps get from zero to viable product so quickly.

That said, the performance issues do start to take a toll after a while. And forget it if you want to do something counter to the way Rails want you to do it.

Everything is a trade-off.
Thanks for your help!
Definitely having fun looking around and researching new things.
Just because you mentioned the internet and "everything must be connected with Snowden," I wonder if the NSA is tapping all short-wave comms? You'd think yes, because that is what spooks on all sides used for encoded messages. But then again, with the focus on internet, maybe the SW-recorder got neglected in a back-room (unlikely, probably just another pipe into that Utah data center).
Considering extensions are the #2 reason (behind Flash) that Firefox crashes/beachballs, perhaps one would be wise to audit the (presumably) tons of extensions they have installed locally, to see if they conflict with other extensions?
A Storm of Servers: How Facebook Weathered the Leap Second Bug
Ricky Roma & Roger Sterling Sales Academy
Why do I care if my simple CRUD app can only use a single CPU core? Because someday I might have millions of users and then I'll have Twitter's old problems? I'd love to have to Twitter's problems.

Use the right tool for the job. And claiming that Rails is never the right tool is just silly.
Holacracy is an instance of organizational democracy, but it's not new - I took a holacracy seminar 6 years ago. Kudos to Medium for using the framework though - it's one of the few that lays out, soup to nuts, how to run a democratic company.

There are many companies that operate using democracy as an organizing principle - Semco is the great-granddaddy of them all (two books - Maverick[1] and the 7 Day Weekend[2] - were written by Semco's founder, Ricardo Semler, about how Semco operates).

Other well-known democratically-run companies include Zappos, WL Gore, DaVita (a $12B company), and Dreamhost.

If you're interested, take a look at WorldBlu[3] for more - they've been building a community of these kinds of companies, have tons of resources on their site, and even have a conference on organizational democracy.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Works/d...

[2] - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0446670553

[3] - http://worldblu.com/
2.1.x and forward has settled down a lot. They're still doing a lot of work under the hood to improve HTTP pipelining and other fun things. Worth reading their future roadmap.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OEt6gZ3a-daSkNXqXGAM4jBs...
I'll share my personal opinion and experience.

For reasons like this, and I would add, scary security history, I decided against using Rails.

I've experimented with Django and lightweight Python frameworks, Node.js and Java 6 EE, among others.

What has worked best for me was C# + ASP.NET MVC. The C# language has several features that I find appealing and lead to clean, efficient code (such as dynamic, lambda, LINQ and async, among others). The modern incarnation of ASP.NET running under IIS is quite efficient and productive both in development, profiling & diagnostics, and in production.
Rails is a tradeoff, quick dev time, slow execution.

It's not designed for low-profit per request applications. Recent benchmarks suggest about 400 req/sec on a $10 digiocean server suggesting if you max your machine 24/7 that you'd need to make at least 1 cent per million requests, if your profit margin is below this then rails would not be a good solution.
If only used at twitter, this is useless. They went through the effort and security risk to develop a custom protocol that doesn't involve shared secrets. Good for them. But if your shared secret only allows access to Twitter and is only stored on Twitters servers, its compromise probably entails their severs getting owned. In which case, the authentication schemes don't matter.

Where this is somewhat more useful, however, is if you want to provide third party systems with two factor auth and not store a secret per user/service pair. Then twitter's severs being compromised and revealing the shared secret might expose other services. Of course, given how small HTOP/TTOP secrets are, I don't think thats much of a problem.

Note, the usability issue is orthogonal to the protocol. You could easily make an app that does TTOP/HTOP but has the response codes sent by the app with confirmation instead of being entered into login prompt manually, just as you could manually have people enter response for the twitter auth challenge.
I hate rails and everything it stands for, but it's often the right choice for a business. The choice to develop faster in exchange for a heavier maintenance burden later on (which is what a dynamic language gives you) is often a good one. I don't see the concurrent request handling of node or django outweighing greater library availability and ease of hiring (often the hardest part of any business). True, any great engineer can learn a new language - but it takes time, time you may not have. (To say nothing of the inconvenient fact that many businesses can get by perfectly adequately with mediocre programmers).
Considering his age, he'll likely be in prison for the majority of the rest of his life (if not the entirety of it).
Maybe my glass is half-full, but furloughing everybody for one week may have prevented them from cutting a number of individual positions completely. The thing that I find interesting is the statement about efforts being made to return the business model to sustainability: "new product launches, investments, acquisitions, changes to its go-to-market, new client centers of competency for Linux and flash memory".

Did I miss something or is this a list of things on any viable business model. I would have liked to see them make "out of the box" moves, but alas, this is the IBM we all know and love.
This is a really cool project from my former PhD lab. It's a camera kit that teaches kids how cameras work by letting them assemble one themselves. The website [1] includes a lot of educational material describing how and why each component works, along with interactive animations.

The camera itself is also interesting in that it contains a few different "computational imaging" lens-systems within: normal, wide-angle, and stereo, "all-in-one". See [2] for a description of what computational imaging means in general.

I'm happy to try to answer any questions (this wasn't my project, but I did play around with one).

[1] http://www.bigshotcamera.com/experience

[2] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/what_is/
That would be Valve, the company, not Steam, the product.

Also, mentioned countless times in this thread alone.
Short-term happiness and life satisfaction are two different things, and any discussion on happiness really needs to include both.

You can exercise, meditate, walk to work, have 100 close friends and family you keep in contact with regularly, and take every other step happiness gurus preach, but if you aren't actively working towards goals that increase your life satisfaction, you're in trouble.

The hard part is figuring out what you need to do to feel satisfied at the end of the day.
Take a look on http://swappa.com/. It's an online marketplace to buy and sell used mobile phones. Swappa is the official XDA Developer marketplace and only allows to sell phones in excellent condition.

I would go for a Nexus device (Galaxy Nexus perhaps).
As my phone provider is not supported by Twitter this new method has a major advantage over SMS, it works
A bit of research says that the F-22 uses a pair of Raytheon CIPs, which are PowerPC based.

http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/f22_cip/
Have you tried F#? To my eye it takes those features you mention liking, and goes further with them. (Scala guy myself)
I can agree to a point.

But my question is, what if the app doesn't, and isn't ever meant to, support a large number of users? What if even with the concurrency issues, it's fast enough?
Completely agree here. This isn't about providing a sense of security as much as making it more difficult for co-workers or even friends to steal each other's passwords.

Just because I forgot to lock the door of my house, doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to hide and secure some valuables I don't want stolen that easily.
So because RoR encourages unit tests, it's bad?

You should be writing tests for all code - Not just dynamic languages. Compilers catch things like typos and type differences as you said; but there's so much more to test suites than that.

Your last 3 points have nothing to do with the post; they're just essentially more information added to other headings.

So your main point in the end is "Rails is slow" - I personally haven't dug too much into the performance of rails compared to others - But in general: It will improve - as all things do.
Like a statically linked HTML document? I know you're talking C code, but I could imagine some kind of HTML to C "compiler" that could you then statically link into an executable. Then you could have a full website that ran as a single static executable, including CGI-esque calls.
"He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution."

I'm not sure who else other than the families would get that.
Sorry for being crass, but this is naive. Your ability to process between the value of a product and the perceived value of a story is blurred at best and zero at worst.
Objectivity is a separate thing from the topic of the post. He came into it wanting to write an explanation of why he thinks you should never use Rails, and attempted to be objective about it by including data and describing some caveats to his argument (i.e. scenarios where you might be able to get away with it).

A post that says 'why you should or shouldn't use rails' is a different post and no more or less implicitly objective. Objectivity does not mean 'covering two sides of an argument'; sometimes one side is less or more supported than the other and sometimes you simply don't have the knowledge to cover both sides fairly.
Not a crypto expert so tell me if I'm wrong but isn't the one downside of this the risk that a user will click "Allow" when he should not? I.e. a phishing site stating "if your Twitter mobile app prompts you to Allow, click Yes to receive your free pr0ng/game/claim your inheritance?"

The benefit of sending up the user a code to enter ala Google Authenticator is that we understand secret keys as digitally valuable. The social context of Allow, meanwhile, is that computer users are sometimes trained to click it constantly, e.g. by a desktop app installer or location based app.
It's worse than that. He links to a set of benchmarks to demonstrate that rails is slow without even considering the caching utilities that rails provides.

Who bases their sole criterion for a web framework on speed, and then ignores the baked-in caching functionality that a framework provides?
The next step, IMO, should be for Twitter to extend this to let third party websites and apps authenticate using Twitter's new protocol. Ultimately could be worth more than Twitter's core business. Essentially Facebook Connect done right, in a privacy-protecting way, with higher security.
Not so, check out the results for tornado (python), and php, in the graph he references:

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

I'm building a site in rails (will never need to be high throughput, and if it does i'll be rich as fuck), so this is interesting info to have.
Yes, basically his claim is that you shouldn't be using anything that's slower than the fastest thing in existence.
There's no way you could serve 400 req/s with Rails on a $10 server for any sort of complex web app that requires data lookups and html rendering, partials, etc.

Maybe possible if you cache everything, but that can be quite complex.
This is nothing but link baiting. At the end of the post he adds the qualifier.

>If you already know how to get things done in Rails, you’re in a hurry, you don’t need to maintain what you’re building, and performance is not a concern, it might be a good choice.

This is exactly why Rails will remain as the goto framework for many developers.
Money Now - The Off Rockers
funny rap video of a guy trying to get a loan
I'm assuming the author posted this. Thanks for doing so! I love to see inside perspectives on startups, especially Y-Combinator startups.

The tech industry has this bad habit of hero-worship and name dropping (well, I guess it's probably every industry). I think it's good to see that the entire process is not as glamorous as it seems, and that just being associated with a huge pool of talent/success/prestige does not guarantee your own success or future prestige.

Kudos on the experience and the lesson learned, good luck in finding a job :)
This seems to be the latest version: http://download.openx.org/openx-2.8.9.zip with time stamp 2013-08-05T18:00:31.000Z.
Usually when "restitution" it always seems to be significantly more than the amount actually taken. In this case, not, and I wonder why:

"...received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care. In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution..."
(in 2011)

looks like one of his latest appeals was denied recently.
There are simple APIs on iOS (and I believe on Android) which allow you to protect private keys and other data in local storage. Once the iPhone 5S with biometrics comes out (90% likely in September), this will be even more meaningful.
Oh god, please don't slight Go, we'll have tptacek in this thread in no time
Please let us know if there is a new version. This is very interesting to me.
... also, the evidence for the performance is the benchmark image in the sidebar.
Thanks this is alot of great information. We've been using baby center and its been great. We've also done the birthing classes and maternity tour. We're also set with a pediatrician.

Thanks for the tips regarding what to get. That's been our focus the last couple of weeks and we appreciate the insight.

Good luck with your baby!
I've done some web dev with node, python (GAE) and php. I ended up using C# + mono's web server for a recent project and was pleasantly surprised.

ASP.net is showing its age but there are some solid libraries, reasonably comprehensive documentation, and some nice new frameworks like MVC out there to use (I didn't even use a framework, just wrote 500 lines of wrapper logic so I could expose some REST services that handled JSON input/output and then built a connection pool for my Redis connections). If you know C# (or another .NET language) well enough, you can lean heavily on the type system and write automated tests for everything else and get all your errors/red tests displayed to you in your IDE. I hit very few runtime errors while building the services.

It's also pleasantly surprising how easy ASP.net deploys seem to be: rsync your app folder to the web server; the app.config and bin/ folders inside ensure that all your dependencies and configuration move over to the target machine. Mono's ASP.net server seems to support almost everything Microsoft's does, so I think I only ran into one behavioral difference (and it was documented, albeit a little hard to find).

ASP.net also has some of those same code reuse benefits you get with node.js, just in a different direction. Now if you have any native C# applications or libraries for doing interesting things, you can expose them as a web service trivially. JSIL's online sandbox (http://jsil.org/try) is literally just the compiler libraries deployed to a linux box with a 100-line shim over them that does compilation and caching and error reporting.