skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
5 Key Capabilities for Real-Time Analytics in Extreme Transaction Processing
Not only the fluff, but the folks that put dozens of languages and technologies that are unrelated to one another. Being a polyglot myself, I still end up focusing on one or two languages to the point that I'd be comfortable putting them on a resume (t spec). IMO, if you are not able to field extremely deep questions on a language/tech you shouldn't list it.
Ask HN: On the Bench
Hi, I needed some advice. I work for a large company and due to slow down at work I have been put on the bench along with a few other engineers. My options are to start looking for alternative jobs or to wait on the bench.

The dilemma is that they pay decent and I am in need of the money now, so this could not come at a worse time in life. For people who have gone through this, do you have any suggestion/recommendations.

Desperately need advice. Thanks in advance
Right, that's one of the more embarrassing pieces of this whole mess, to my mind...
Ask HN: What are most important things for happiness in life?
Hello HN,

I am a recent graduate working at a tech company. I was wondering - according to you, what are the most important things to living a happy / peaceful life?

Seems like an odd question - but i am interested in your views :)
If you turn off everybodies fax machines right now, it's a bit of an inconvenience. If you turn the internet off right now, it's a major global disaster impacting the economy as well as every other activity of modern societies.

Adjusted for inflation, I'd say people do have something to say to each other, as well as that the economic, social and otherwise impact of the internet is enormous.

Ironically, this written on the internet...
Using Named Parameters for Constants
By "Is that fair", I meant: Is that fair to say? As in, is that what it means (?).
Fighting between cofounders: one of the main reasons that startups fail
This is a little like saying that the guys who played in the NFL in the 1960s wouldn't cut it there today. In some cases, perhaps not. But the guy who played center at 220 lb. in 1967 didn't have the weight training the 300 lb. center of 2013 will have had since high school. The child of the SAT taker of 1975 who took the Iowa tests three times from 1st grade on and the PSATs in 11th now has the opportunity for drill baby drill.

Also, when we consider the admission rates, remember that kids apply to a hell of a lot more schools nowadays. A dozen seems to be routine; one kid I know of from the high school class of 2005 applied to 18 schools.

(High school class of 1973 here: I applied to one school, which in hindsight wasn't necessarily the best method, but it's a bit late to ask for a do-over.)
They differentiate themselves by offering SSDs for all instance sizes + offering a very cheap level ($5). While SSDs won't improve all workloads, I think "high performance" claims compared to the typically IO-weak alternative isn't unreasonable.

Also, they're popular enough now that I'm surprised people haven't heard about them (especially after recent funding)...
‘Revenge Porn’ Could Be Criminal Offense in California
The Allure of Small...
"are kind of like free marketing campaigns"

While people might laugh at what you are saying in the mid to late 90's many of the well know dot coms of today (ebay for example) got publicity because of bad things happening. People trying to sell things they shouldn't on ebay "my virginity for sale" etc. Always made the news.

I don't believe this was the intent here for sure but I do note that they say: "There is an on-going DDOS attack against digitalocean.com. No hypervisors or customer virtual servers should currently be affected by this attack."

But yet it is on the front page of HN. And now more people know about digitalocean (which has gotten a fair amount of press on HN it's where I heard of them).
I would really like to see some login feature that allows you to keep the code private (in case someone guesses or discovers the url). Otherwise, its a pretty neat site and I would definitely use it
Why is this being downvoted? It is just a restatement of the comment I'm replying to.
Well. I have just come across this one which says Unicorn to be the best performing one. Apparently, Puma proves wrong even with multiple workers.

https://gist.github.com/pbyrne/5218411
They're talking about people who replied years later (i.e., today, apparently as a result of this post on HN or other sites).
Take 5 minutes to help your superfans help you grow
Since GHC is bootstrapped by a lower stage compiler I'd imagine there are some limitations to what kinds of language features at least parts of it can use as well. I haven't looked into all the details, but last time I did look into building GHC from scratch I remember there being an initial step where you built an initial minimal Haskell compiler that was written in I think C--, and then used that to build the rest of GHC.
logstash + elasticsearch are pretty amazing. however, if you are generating a high rate of log entries you may want to consider using mozilla hekad instead (http://hekad.readthedocs.org/en/latest/). on our servers logstash was running around 20% CPU during quite periods while hekad was running around 1-2% CPU. while during busy periods i think logstash was going up to 100% CPU while hekad was sitting around 20-30% CPU.

hekad is written in go which compiles down to native code while logstash is written in jruby which is not the most performant runtime.
It's why I'm liking the Stanford Algorithms course[1] being taught by Tim Roughgarden: it's all pseudocode. I thought about taking the Princeton one being taught by Bob Sedgewick (author of the book you're linking to), but I don't really know Java very well and don't have a pressing need to learn it right away. The pseudocode approach has so far been great to get this self-taught programmer thinking at a higher level.

[1]: https://class.coursera.org/algo-004/
And if you rely on someone elses code which you don't understand, you won't even be able to fix the critical bug. At least you stand a chance with your own code.

Experience a couple "framework emergencies" then you'll hate them too. And I thought they were supposed to make things faster and easier, not the reverse.
What reason do you have to believe it's inaccurate? What would Facebook gain by posting juked numbers of government requests? Seems pretty honest to me. We'll see if they stay true to their promise to scale deeper and show what kinds of requests they receive.
Really? IMO, there are many reasons why you would want to ditch Rails, but factories of factories is not one of them.
Not necessarily. I think I've fixed my lion's share of other people's code that I have embedded in my own systems. In fact, I've never been up on a Saturday night due to my own bugs. In the afternoon when I'm trying to fix my unit tests sure, but not Saturday at 1am.
Comparing frameworks to hammers is the completely wrong analogy too. A framework is, you know, a framework. Like insetead of buying 30 different hammers to build a framework, you buy a framework. Then you don't need a hammer. And the framework has slots for your fixtures that use standard fasteners so you can rely on fewer hammers and screwdrivers. Put up some siding and your house is done.
What I learned from a McDonald's Manager
You should start with the question of why do you need someone to be in an office in the first place. And if the position is indeed so valuable and necessary, why can't you just hire and pay this person, instead of voting for him and asking him to take money out of you and others by force?
The real anti-pattern is "My application is simple, so I don't need a framework". Simple applications are ideal for frameworks. It's the crazy hard stuff where frameworks break down.
>All projects written without frameworks are destined to re-implement framework-like features, but not as well, if they succeed.

Of course they will implement framework-like features, that's inevitable. You'll still need routing, authentication, etc.

The win is that they'll implement them for their SPECIFIC use case, and only as much of them as they need, instead of having to accept the whole garbage that comes with a framework.

And you can cherry pick the best libraries for the cause, enging with even better ones that what any framework offers built-in.
It's not just the factories of factories thing. It's actually the amount of cruft that I don't think is really necessary. I find that the pattern for programming with Rails is to find a gem that more or less does what you want and drop it in, at least, on most developer teams I've seen use Rails. What ends up happening is the creation of this bloated monstrosity that performs like crap for a number of unknown reasons.
MSDN and Technet subscribers get screwed with Windows 8.1 RTM release
Every Stop and Frisk in NYC in 2012, in 2 Charts
Rails. Now it's as bloated as the frameworks it used to mock for not being nible enough.
(I love how you can just kind of say whatever thoughtless thing you want, as long as you call yourself out for being an asshole first.)

Perhaps I'm a jerk, but I don't feel bad making fun of people who write dumb comments on Hacker News.

Or.

Perhaps I'm a jerk, but I don't feel bad when non-business people get take for a ride when hiring people to help them run the business side of their tech-startup. Why should I feel sorry for someone who feels that he can make a go at something that requires highly talented, seasoned workers who understand the details of how to run and grow a business?

Anyway:

Not everyone knows everything. If you are hiring someone because you're aware that you lack the skills to get something done, that's fine. That's why you hire experienced people. And when you hire them, you expect that they'll do a good job at what you're paying them for. Businesses require teams of talented people who can trust one another. Not everyone knows everything -- and if you think that everyone should just take advantage of each other, well, remind me to never hire you. Or work for you.

Perhaps I'm a jerk.
Guy challenges hacker to steal identity; hacker wins
I don't think I've had an issue like that over the past couple of years in my Rails career.

I'm sure you should have probably understood why your code 'no longer works', perhaps some bad Ruby/Rails programming practices?
Hey, Bulgaria, want to trade?

Here in Canada, the government goes to the party with the most seats, and each seat is handed out in a small regional FPTP election. What this means is that our elections go through two first-past-the-post filters instead of one. In 2008, the Conservatives faced all the other parties aligning against them to throw them out and, through a trick of procedure, they managed to keep control of the government. They were elected with only 38% percent of the vote - the minority ruled as a majority.
Dodgy newspaper pop-sci interpretation involving past lives in 3..2..1..
I've had this conversation before in different terminology. I was concerned that a majority of service based businesses were building castles in the clouds and creating a bubble. Naval of Angellist recently tweeted something similar [1]. Essentially, it comes down to this: the more layers of abstraction you build, the farther you get from solving real problems. I guess this is the epitome of consumerism though.

[1] https://twitter.com/naval/status/360890615896092673
Asynchronous Scheduling Options in a Rails Application
How is this any different from running Johnny-Five (https://github.com/rwaldron/johnny-five) on an Arduino? Do we really need a board dedicated to JavaScript? There are SO many Arduino compatible boards out there already...
Yes, god forbid a blog post has any humor to insult puritan values...
There's always something to learn and there's always somet technology or company we don't know (yet).

Of the three, you should at least could have heard of ElasticSearch: it is a general purpose search server based on Apache Lucene like its cousin Apache SOLR (maybe you know it), but with REST API, JSON support etc..

You can use it for searching stuff and one (but not the only one) scenario is logging. In this case you use some other software (like Logstash but I think there are others too) to collect logs from different sources (i.e. syslog for operating systems, ruby apps via gems, raw tcp etc..) and according to a friend of mine that uses it for this purpose it's very good for its speed, easy to use, to scale etc..

N.B. I invite anyone more expert to elaborate/correct what I've said, I've just used Apache SOLR in the past and never tried ES
You should only see the ad once on YouTube. We do apologize for this. Did you try clearing your cache?
The concrete implementation of it is contained as open source (not free, but as in "you can look at the source and change it") in a commercial offering, which was the 'normal' back in these days. Yes, it is great that it is made freely available and is backed by an open source organization, no doubt. However, given the amount of time in-between, on a fundamental technical level though it seems slow progress at best.
I can see why trust their people and their vetting process. They get to read your email and snoop through your browsing history before they hire you.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why does Javascript require new hardware? Can you not run whatever software this is running on another µC... say the one on an Arduino board? Obviously the drivers are different but you have to write them for this hardware anyway.
She should be Microsoft's next CEO.
From the article:
"
Web Components promise to open up a new realm of development by letting web developers write custom, reusable HTML tags. Think of them as JavaScript plugins without the need for additional code initialization or boilerplate markup/styling.
"

So it sounds to me that is solves for use of jQuery datepicker plugins in a framework agnostic way. I for one would like to move away from using javascript, which depends on a framework, to create styled interactions on my web pages.
Break into programming: customer development and landing your minimum viable job
7-second delay: Lawsuit may hit Snapchat
Open Source OpenFlow Switches
Your comment is misguided for a few reasons:

Under your logic, any compilation of functionality can be reduced to vanilla, long-hand, zero-abstraction, blocks of HTML, CSS, and JS functions --> Ok everyone, dubcanada has figured out that all the packages on NPM, Bower, and Component, and all the frameworks for UI and CSS, etc, along with many of the other APIs in the DOM, are not reeeeally necessary technically speaking - why did we all waste our time on all that?!?...ugg, what a ridiculous argument.

"If you want a rapid HTML5 development look up Emmet and add bootstrap or some other giant framework" - <x-massive-sarcasm> Oh yeah, duh, why didn't I think of that - wait, there are already giant frameworks that try to provide similar functionality, with less ergonomic interfaces, that are more of a management hassle, all for the low low price of 10x the wire size! Gosh, I love things that provide less utility and weight exponentially more, sign me up! </x-massive-sarcasm>

"I just don't see any reason why we need to create a whole new set of HTML elements that are not part of any HTML" - yeah, you're right, because lord knows we have this fantastic solution right now: <div><div><div><span></span><span></span></div></div></div> - who in their right mind would ever see value in lightweight, tightly encapsulated, auto-instantiating, semantically inferred, components like this: <x-switch role="input"></x-switch>, le sigh.

"Me thinks that is what people don't like." - me thinks you're going to be eating those words by the beginning of 2015.
If I had the money, I would buy this.
A friend of a friend just offered to give me a house. They have several in depopulated areas that are basically worthless for sale and decaying if no one lives there. Some areas are so deserted, there could be hacker villages.
I wonder if this is my midlife crisis…
Define "on the bench". That term usually implies that you're still drawing your full salary, but your description makes it sound like you're not going to be paid during this time. Naturally, it makes a difference in how you proceed.

Either way, since you have plenty of time on your hands, it seems to make sense to look for another gig.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Redis have a thread pool?
RDBMS's, such as MySQL, have thread pools, then why doesn't redis? I've found it to be a bottle neck on more than one occasion, are there specific reasons why redis isn't multithreaded and what are interesting work arounds?
That is certainly a possibility. Unless that customer comes from a state with privately run DMVs, and is used to a 5 minute wait without scheduling. Further, it may be that that customer has been greatly impressed by the efficiency and wealth of California's private industry compared to his old state, and was not entirely prepared for the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of California's government.

Jessed, I can tell that you love your government. I'm going to suggest something that you can listen to or not, as you choose: Part of loving your government means examining critiques and saying "how can this be improved?" rather than wearing your heart on your sleeve about it.
I'm hoping that after one or two well-publicized and catastrophic breaches, management will realize that it doesn't make business sense to let critical infrastructure rot. I can't wait for the incredible improvements that would follow from no longer depending on applications that were frozen in time 14 years ago.

This might finally be the end of IE6.
Is passenger the most popular? Is there any reliable statistics available somewhere?
"general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" Heh.
Considering all the upvotes OP has earned for his nice little pile of racist poop, actually, it’s starting to smell awfully reddity in here.
It attracts startup businesses, most of which will fail, but some of which might turn into profitable and paying customers later on. A big winner there can easily pay for all the lost ones - esp. since most startups will probably fail very early, not using anywhere close to the 1 million.

Yes, it's a loss leader. However, if they have the cash to support it for a time they might tie some very profitable businesses to their infrastructure.
Really cool product. What's the vision behind since this does not really cut it just yet for actual team work?
To go down the car analogy rabbit hole, this is not like using obsolete technology (wagon wheels) but instead having a car that uses a completely non-standard size of tires and a bolt pattern that no other manufacturer uses so you need to get your rims custom made.

You see this sort of engineering all the time. Why does that device you just got use a non-standard power plug? What is it doing that's so special that any of the half-dozen standard types wouldn't work?

When you go and custom make something, you better have a good reason for it.
I did not! Do I have to watch it all the way to the bitter end to finally be rid of it? Because I have not done that.

Nice potential-customer-service btw. Thanks! Although I did rather imagine you lot would be all over this thread :-)
I'm not familiar with the ORM here, but is it really just an increment ("update posts set ctr = ctr + 1 where id = 9") or a select, add one in code, and then an update? Also bear in mind that one operation in an explicit transaction like this is quite slow, at least prior to WAL.
New Facebook report shows over 25,000 government requests for user data worldw
Interesting perspective! Ignoring the funny-but-silly analogy itself, it seems that at the time of the article, the industry accepted best practices as determined by veteran architects with eight times the experience were bad for a lot of the software being made using them. I'm all for deference to experience, but I think there is sometimes a dangerous temptation for experience to believe it is right because of its experience, rather than to use its experience to be right.
It might require adding yourself as alternative to the ballot (using the defined processes, not by writing yourself on the paper, which merely invalidates it).

I was considering getting myself on the ballot for some local elections if only to be able to vote for someone else but the two politicians that, from experience, are equally bad.
Hi, I'm the guy behind it... Just wanted to stand up for it a bit - the -uino postfix is really because of the hobby electronics association. I wanted to do something a bit different by adding the prototype area, and I found the Arduino form factor was too big for any sensible hand-held projects. The board is still small enough that it can sit on a simple adaptor PCB for Arduino shields though. I'll try and put one online when the campaign ends.

Also port initialisation is automatic so pinMode is not required - it's a huge potential gotcha for learners, and it seemed wise to remove the need for it. You can still use it if you want to though.
I attempted to do some generic benchmarking of just this question and found Puma way outperformed Unicorn under heavy load if your request processing are largely io-bound.

Didn't get much attention when I tried to post it to HN when I did it a couple months ago:

https://github.com/jrochkind/fake_work_app/blob/master/READM...
Cockpit Automation
Polyfill != works back to the stone age, it just means providing backwards compatible functionality. Aside from that, there are some polyfills that aren't even technically possible, or would destroy performance, in older browsers
Juju Charm Championship expands with more categories, more prizes
U.S. tech sector feels pain from NSA PRISM revelations
Learning To Program – A Beginners Guide – Part One
I tried that in my attempt at benchmarking a standardized app on heroku, and, yep, it works great:

https://github.com/jrochkind/fake_work_app/blob/master/READM...
Sports are seldom played with any kind of secrecy - the only exception being games likes Chess or Poker and even in those cases, everyone is on a level playing field with access to the same information, it's only the individual players strategy and their bluffs that's kept secret.

Maybe you are not familiar with American football; replace "players" with "coaches" and that's exactly how it works.
This is a great step. The analogous Google page seems to be here: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/co...

Can anyone confirm that these include National Security Letters?

CSV export would be nice. I immediately wanted to compute requests per capita by country.
I don't see why it's a paradox. Lots of things would offer fitness - why can't all animals talk? Why can't plants move? Surely these things would offer greater Darwinian fitness.
I'd say lock up everyone and let the juries sort them out but I wonder where we'd get juries in that case....