skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is preparing for the slashdot effect even necessary?
I'm writing on some articles I wanted to publish on a blog. Additionaly that site will act as my portfolio. Nothing fancy, a lot of those are out there and a lot of those never get many hits.

I often come across blogs with interesting articles linked here, on reddit or similar. By the time I try to visit them they are often overloaded and I can't help myself and think "It can't be that hard...".

I have a small vps (the $5 digital ocean one) which isn't doing much most of the time. It handles mail, sometimes runs my code and I thought about setting up a teamspeak server. Because the blog will be static anyway my inital choice was S3, but having trouble getting a credit card and the only other option beeing to get a prepaid card I wondered if it's worth the hazzle. And hosting analytics or even a non-static site would be possible with no additional cost if I chose to use the vps instead.

I assume such a machine can't handle more than 1000 requests per second (or probably a quarter of that with heavy frameworks), but that's still such a large number.

I wonder if that is enough to "stay alive" even if someone decided to find one of my articles to be worthy of HN/reddit/e.g.
Why not add:

sudo -K

to .bash_logout
There are different types of reviews. Not all reviews require that you use a product to review it. Hence the reason for specifying a hands-on review as opposed to merely reviewing a product.
Plenty of VCs have funded pre-product startups, but generally such investments are based on factors such as the team, track-record, expertise, strong customer demand, etc. rather than just an idea.
So what happens when Pressy is pushed when it's inside my pocket? Make a photo? Call mom? Flashlight? The latter may be dangerous even, with the heat that it can produce.

Not quite unthinkable since the button is sticking out if the phone.
AngularJS Video Tutorial: Animating the Angular Way
the app you are looking for is called a video game
Good for them, but seems like an odd choice for #1.
Ban crypto and then only criminals and governments would have it. Same as guns.
The rumor was that it had been rewritten in 100% C++...
This is not a review. A review actually reviews the product.

This is a dude who saw something on the internet he didn't like.
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's bad.

"this is the worst new keyboard possible."

Is it? Really? The worst?

"first, it's PC standard from. Not ergonomic. And from there on, everything is wrong about it."

...which is fine if you need a PC keyboard and don't care for split keyboards. Also, the Alt and Windows/Command key can be swapped via dip switch, and WASD sells any custom keys you can possibly imagine.

"Non-ergonomic, wrist problems in a day."

I've been using standard keyboards for over a decade, with no wrist problems to speak of. I'm even usually using my MacBook Pro keyboard with chiclet keys - gasp - and I'm doing fine. Again, it's personal preference.

"Slanted arrangement of keys."

I don't know what this means.

"The left Alt key is between x and z, way too left. This means, you can't press it with a thumb curl."

The Alt key on my MBP is entirely under the Z key, and I have no problem hitting it with my thumb.

"Space-hogging space bar. 〔☛ Tiny Space Bar on Japanese Keyboards〕"

I hate tiny space bars. Once again, personal preference.

"No multimedia keys. No other app launch keys."

I don't want either of those on my keyboard. I can use Alfred to launch anything instantly, why bother with needless extra hardware?

This really feels like trolling to me. Poorly written, absurd claims backed up by half-assed points, at best. How did this make it to the HN homepage?
> Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.

This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.

I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."

I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.
There is a Wizards product called Duels of the Planeswalkers that includes an updated Magic AI. $10 on the consoles or Steam. It is targeted as an entry-level way to learn Magic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_–_Duels_of...

It focuses on premade decks with limited means of customization, rather than open freeform deckbuilding. (Of course they want you to start buying Magic proper to do that.) But it is the only official way to play modern Magic against an adequate AI.
I disbelieve that ulimit is a real fix. If you disagree, save this shell script, set a reasonable set of ulimits then run it:

#! /bin/sh
sh $0 &
while true
do
perl -e 'push @big, 1 while 1' &
sh $0
done
Because this isn't an essay, it's a clarification, and it deserves to be seen.
This would have eliminated the backlash. However, I like that PG seems to live by what he wrote about in "What you can't say" and strives for perfect accuracy in his observations. While problems in communication might be the root cause (I'm almost sure they are, why is it surprising that if you can't communicate you'll do worse? Change "accents" to "can't speak English - the language of the country they are in" and no one would argue), PG was perfectly accurate in describing his observations in the data. Isn't it better to be open about this, along with him noticing his selection bias? Being aware of biases is better than ignoring them.
It was a review. A review of the features. A review is not limited to merely being one thing. One can, after all, review the features offered up by a product without using those features, as was done here.

> I was looking forward to a real review.

A hands-on review, one would say.
The tactics they are using basically mean they are dead. It's expertssexchange all over again.
I think some people are just generally a bit suspicious of the motivation behind Jeff Atwoods's blog posts. Like he writes "here's my thoughts on a bunch of products" and then every one is Amazon affiliate-linked. This keyboard thing is just kind of like the ultimate version of that.
I don't think it's that people with money NEVER stress about spending money - it's a matter of degree. Most software engineers are good earners by US standards, and as such, going to the water park for $40 doesn't really register. Buying a $1 soda isn't even worth thinking about. However, buying a $20,000 car would certainly lead to some thoughts like "Can I afford this? What won't I be buying because of this car?" The advantage that a good income provides is that you're not stressing about daily purchases - not that you stress about nothing at all.
Stephen Hawking and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston (aka "Mumbles") are examples of people who have experienced difficulty making themselves understood (either through medical conditions or strong accents), yet are leaders in their respective domains. In entrepreneurship, one example that springs to mind is Charles Pfizer, who started a successful chemical company a year after arriving in the United States from Germany in the 1840s. I assume he spoke with a heavy accent which may have been difficult for some employees and customers to understand, yet his company flourished.

Let's not equate "poor English" with "likely to fail at X". There are other factors, ranging from domain knowledge to soft skills, that come into play as well.
No, I was thinking about the same keys. I didn't notice them from the first glance and believed the comment I've replied to, that there aren't any. Sorry about that.
Agreed. I've found him to be startlingly ignorant in declaiming on real world stuff I'm a domain expert in; he just doesn't realize it when reciting generic talking points.

In this article, he made a very clumsy attack on the current Internet ecosystem; there's a good case to be made for it (see other comments in the topic), but he didn't make it and sounds like a generic anti-business crank.

Which might be the truth, the really startling omission in this article is the ultimate fate of Joseph Nacchio, who was convicted of the very nebulous crime of insider trading. Even if you think government was or might have been right about him, you ought to accept that a lot of executives will assume in this Three Felonies a Day legal environment that the government will get them some way, some how if they resist like Nacchio indisputably did.
If you browse this blog you'll see he likes to troll sometimes…
Your thinking at to low a level, the choices that have real impact are things like:

Where should I live? (Buy? Roommates?)
What kind of car should I get? (Make? Age?)
Sould I learn? (To cook, draw, lisp?)
What kind of Heath insurance do I get? (none?)
What cellphone plan do I get.
What do I do for entertainment?
Should I start packing lunch?

Each of these can be with 100,000+$ at retirement should I get a soda while at I get gass may be habit forming, but it's got little long term impact. Edit: Getting a Starbucks coffie every day or bringing from home is also one of the 100,000+$ choices but only in terms of the habit not crap I forgot to buy beans what do I do?
by U.S websites do you mean government websites?
Quantcast is a direct measurement provider for more accurate mobile app demographics and provides six categories of demographic segments: Household composition, Income, ethnicity and education, while Flurry has only age, gender and interests.
I get the feeling that you didn't read what I wrote. I made no such assumption.

Mattl likes to use open source software because he thinks it encourages software sharing. I actually agree with that, and have non-trivially contributed to and consumed open source software in my work.

However I don't agree that all software should be open source because that discourages people from sharing money with programmers.

What I object to is not the idea of open source, which is a great thing. It's the fundamentalism and moralizing against anything which does not completely fit some idealogue's definition, and yet which also provides great value.
Now that's way too ergonomic for my taste. It also requires huge space that I don't have right now.

I am happy with a split keyboard in two pieces and no numpad.
Also there are media. Hey didn't really look at it closely. This also has Cherry MX Clear keys and the dip switches really make it convert platforms easier.
Personally I work better when I put breathing on the top of that list.
I know, and back when I tried it, which was probably years ago, the problem was .vimrc line execute pathogen#infect() always errored out. Couldn't figure out why at the time, then found Vundle, it worked perfectly, been using it since.
I don't know about that. I don't know you from heck but I am prepared to bet that my depth of knowledge of the English tongue is as good as yours ( Presumably you are one of those 'native speakers'). English was the first language I learnt. However, the people around me that spoke it were all non-native speakers. This means that most of the way I picked up words came from books. Again, I was never a child obsessed with phonetics so my pronunciation of things is weird.
Yeah, sure, it's more like throwing out luggage, and some passengers bring huge amounts of luggage.

But critically low memory situations aren't unavoidable. Not overallocating is one very easy solution.
Ha, so this is expected behavior?
$199*

* assembly required.
WHatever. you are missing the point. Copying ebooks cost no money at all, there's no reason an ebook should cost that much in the first place. Dead Tree books were heavily dependent on material and inventory costs, ebooks do not suffer any of those yet they are still sold at similar pricing while they should be at least 90% cheaper, if you just kept the margin at the same level. It's pure profit for the publisher.
Maybe you don't configure a single click to do anything?
People underestimate the level of skill required to speak a language well enough so that it is not a chore for a native speaker to listen.

The chairman of the English Department of my local community college (College of Marin in California) told me that it takes an immigrant an average of 7 years to get good enough at speaking English for native speakers to actually want to listen to them talk.
A friend of mine got hung up by a vendor because the friend said they were being ``asinine''. (No, it wasn't because they offended at being called stupid, but rather they thought it was a naughty, posterior related word...) Good times.
Author here. Thanks for the recommendation! There’s already a reading group in London (http://lanyrd.com/series/compbookclub/), but that may not be of any use to you.

If anyone else is interested in the book, there's more information at http://computationbook.com/.
True, but I think he's just saying it puts them at a disadvantage. It can indeed be overcome by the factors you state.
Fair enough. I think everyone agrees that the "download and execute a random gist" method of installation is not great.
Building the Crushpath Google Glass Integration
That's fine just as long as what he did wasn't the following:

see some small number of founders with a fairly strong accent, say < 30 or < 50 or < 60, then observe that those startups happened to do poorly and then extrapolate a theory from those observations to explain what is happening. I am not necessarily disagreeing with his thesis, but in statistical data analysis you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions from small samples when the underlying distribution is non-normal, with fat tails
Love the pretzel to illustrate "soft"
I don't even know how that argument makes any sense.
>I can say, from experience, that native Texans and Australians can have difficulties understanding each other.

(On a pedantic note, I did specifically say US accents.)

I have to wonder if this is purely caused by pronunciation or other aspects of dialect. After all, the stereotypical Australian 'accent' (Ex. "Shrimp on the barbie") is usually accompanied by more than just a change in pronunciation. Obviously the international case is different than the local one. It's probably more accurate to say that somebody who has trouble getting people who speak a dialect of English to understand them doesn't know the dialect.

>See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChqXqvvmg8 for an example that I enjoy of a song, in English by native English speakers, than many English speaking people have trouble understanding.

Music is something of a special case. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many lyrics sites out there to help people who have trouble understanding.
Look, I respect PG as much as the next person so this is not a slight against him since I feel HN far too often comes to his defence as if protecting their newborn. Having said that ...

I don't understand how a man of his stature and someone in his position can allow himself to make those statements about accents (or anything that sounds remotely xenophobic). I say that because even his blog post says the following:

"A startup founder is always selling. Not just literally to customers, but to current and potential employees, partners, investors, and the press as well ... there is little room for misunderstanding."

That statement doesn't just hold for startups but for anyone in business. His initial statements left plenty of room for misunderstanding. Furthermore, I would also find it very difficult to believe that his inclination towards avoiding "excessive" accents does not also subconsciously lead him to have a slight bias against founders with a "slight" accent. That's how biases work - the threshold for when your brain decides to evoke that bias is not black-and-white.
Funny statement coming from Brom Rector, 2011 Thiel Fellowship finalist that wasn't selected. Bitter much?
This is the WORST review I have ever read.
Hi Angry -- Sorry that I came off as cold. At this point, though, I really do need half or two-thirds of the students to drop this course.

You raise an excellent question about why no notification went out before. Indeed, for the last two months I've been asking the department to change its policies so we can get some more TAs in class. These efforts were still going on Wednesday evening -- the night before the first class (and indeed, they are still going on this morning!)

I also tried to stop the process of allowing so many students to register for the course when we didn't have TA support.

If you'd like to talk about this more, please come see me.
And the even more dangerous noun form of those words, "Niggler" and "Niggard".
It Is Not Evil, Per Se, to Send Your Kids to Private School
Sysadmins are supposed to reset passwords...or I'm sure there is some central auth service in place that allows access to hosts one has been determined to have access to.

The people you trust to admin systems are going to easily be able to abuse their power and it is very hard to stop them from doing so, without making their job so cumbersome for it to be near impossible.
"I'm neither interesting, nor engaged in anything interesting"

You are missing a word: yet. You are not interesting yet. You might become interesting some time in the future, and discover that what you thought were uninteresting conversations today can be used against you. Here is a famous example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fisher_%28lawyer%29
Jeff's keyboard doesn't leave much to be desired.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wireless-Comfort-Desktop-500...

I'mm stick to my Microsoft Lazer 5000. The slight curve in the keyboard makes my hands sit in a more natural position and i don't get sore wrists from typing on it like I do with those straight keyboards.

Backlight? Meh, monitors spill so might light its not funny. I can't not see my keyboard with the monitors on.
> And from there on, everything is wrong about it.

> - Slanted arrangement of keys.

I'm curious how others on HN type with their left hand. The "standard" way is to type "Z" with your little finger, "X" with your ring finger, etc., which is awful. Makes your fingers bend in the complete wrong direction.

If you instead type "Z" with your ring finger, "X" with your middle finger, etc., you suddenly have a slanted layout that (like the right side) closely matches the angle of your hands laying on the keyboard. Seems like a very easy fix for the problem that "column layout" keyboards are trying to fix.
> - No multimedia keys (because really -- they're a pain in the rear)

I don't know why people keep saying this. It clearly does have media keys: http://codekeyboards.com/img/code-mediakeys.jpg

That being said, I don't know why someone who wants media keys would put them behind a stupid function key.
Much respect to Paul here. I've been impressed with his willingness to engage the press in rebuttals and elaborations (and in a polite, clear way). I've made it a personal rule not to be quoted in anything controversial just because, even if the reporter is well-meaning, the editor may not be. I suspect Paul is even more aware of this and so his willingness to communicate is a sign of how important he believes his message is.
Ooh yeah I forgot about this point. If I were in state I wouldn't mind as much.
I've used the HHKB Pro 2 for a few years now and have really come to liek the fn+;['/ arrow keys, so much that I use an a program (KeyRemapForMabook...or something like that) to enable this same kind of behavior on my other keyboards.

The ability to use just two fingers and not move them very far (for those times when you're not in something with vim bindings) is something I like a lot.

That said, I recently switched to this guy at work:
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/k750-keyboard

I'm a bit of a keyboard nut, (www.geekhack.org is a good forum for those interested in keyboards, though sometimes it's a bit to caught up with rare custom keycaps), and have found that the best thing to do to find a board that works for you is to try a lot of different switch types and layouts.

A few other boards that are IMHO worth trying (in case some are interested):

I can recommend www.elitekeyboards.com with enthusiasm, I've ordered many boards from them and they have always been great to deal with. They have a good selection of different Cherry MX swich boards in a variety of types as well as topre switch boards. They even have beuatiful 'otaku' boards with non-printed key caps.

Good boards can also be found on amazon and ebay (KBC races, Ducky boards and others).

Lenovo w/ built in trackpoint http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0B47189/460/60AC6A0...

Kinesis Advantage (I have the Linear Force Model with Cherry MX RED switches, which do not provide any tactile response for activation, but require very little pressure) - http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

The IBM Model M, these guys make great bucking spring boards if you're not able to find a real old Model M - http://www.pckeyboard.com/ (Unicomp)

I've never used the Cherry MX Clear switches in the CODE keyboard, but I'd be interested to try them. The CODE board has a caps-lock control which is good, but other than that it doesn't seem to offer much more than what most of the mechanical boards out there provide, and IMHO the font they've picked is pretty ugly.
The Best Standing Desks
This is exactly it. Practically everyone has some legitimate financial concerns but when your financial concerns get to the point that every single purchase feels like it's effecting your bottom line in a meaningful way is when there's an extra layer of stress on your day-to-day thinking.
Yes, but in PG's example it is his list and his comprehension we're talking about.
So for grins and giggles I got one, (of Jeff's) and its fine but it isn't all that "special".

The one thing I really liked was the ability to convert capslock to control with an on board dip switch as opposed to xmodmap or other keyboard mapping. I have had issues with mapped keyboards when the OS call gets bypassed and suddenly the mapping is not there for that app.

If you wander around the WASD site you will see that you can "build" Jeff's keyboard using their keyboard designer tool (the base keyboard is their V2 model). So it really boils down to an interesting marketing/affiliate play on a tool that pretty much everyone uses (a keyboard). it isn't quite a replacement for the IBM 13H6705 I use but I like the key action relative to the Logitech G15 a bit better. I had not realized Logitech makes a cherry switch version of the G series.

It may be that Jeff really likes the PC keyboard layout, it may be that it was a way to raise money on his blog, it may be that after a while he will want different things. Can't really say, I think it is a fine keyboard for the price (these sorts of things all seem to go for $120 - $180.

[1] http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/items.main/paren...
No. Those numbers above are ill-informed.

But yes, the average print costs for a single-color book per unit are in the 2-4 dollar range (that is, manufacturing alone, no design, marketing, editing).

And how would it be possible for Amazon to "keep their lights on" selling physical books at 40% off list price, if they pay O'Reilly $36 for a $40 book? Amazon buys from O'Reilly and most other pubs at 60% off, non-returnable. So the math for the publishers' take from Amazon on physical books looks like this:

[list price] * [.4] - [print costs / overhead] - [author royalty]