skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The differentiation here would be that this guy doesn't have inventory risk (or benefit, for that matter). This guy doesn't own the customer relationship, or the supplier relationship.

It's the difference between owning a pizza restaurant and being the pizza delivery person.
We use capistrano at Shopify for our main rails project and countless smaller projects. Thanks for your efforts.
Name sounds like you're cracking people in the posterior with a wet towel.
I don't know. I notice that I am confused, so I know that between my existing beliefs and the details of this story, something important is fictional.

My strongest guess is that it's the stones. In any base > 1 the algorithm is efficient. In unary (counting stones), it inefficient to the point of being nonsensical.

So my guess is that this was not used by counting stones, but with some form of positional number system, and that in the retelling, stones have been added as a way to make it sound more "tribal".

Edit: Alternatively, it may be the idea that they're doing this exactly. If the doubling side is done by rough estimation (eyeballing the size of the piles), it might be faster.
i need background story on who this guy is and where he came from, to better understand if his "insights" would be applicable to a hacker like me, or if it's only for top biz-school douchebags who already know VC's and are starting the game with $250k in the bank.

i.e. how did he get picked to be a founding member of BantamLive and how did that get bought by CC for $12MM?

i.e. start at the bottom rung of the ladder if you want real world hackers to learn something from this. otherwise it gives the impression that it's unreachable if you are starting from zip.

i tried to ask on the blog, but it appears my comments get deleted if they are not 100% supportive surfer-dude talk. so at least I'm getting an idea of what type of "transparency" is being given by these blogs. i hope i'm proven wrong when the next blog post comes out.
I guess I've never known the really sad people like the ones he describes. A lot of my friends smoke, and they tend to come in two varieties:

1. Those that smoke every day, who will skip on other luxuries to pay for weed.
2. Those who smoke very casually, and typically go for months at a time without smoking. They'll usually only buy more when an opportunity presents itself.

I know very successful, highly skilled and well paid people and I know people who aren't very ambitious - in both categories - and I know those same types of people who don't smoke, or drink at all.

I guess I should count myself lucky that I've never managed to fall into a group of people for whom smoking is a problem, and an addiction, and a weight holding them down.
Micheal, just once make a post without VC'istan or whatever new derogatory term you've come up with. There's plenty of great stuff out here, and I'm sorry that someone didn't fund your dream, but saying stuff like "Bay Area tech startups are the conservative choice" is silly, and betrays a lack of awareness about a lot that is going on here. And that's fine - none of us know the whole landscape, but only you seem to assume the kind of hubris that suggests you do.
I love ruby and rails, but yeah, I'd switch to any framework in any language that made deployment stress-free. Except php.
i didn't think that was the focus on the piece but rather the collusion in pricing (as found in the anti-trust court decision on this point with apple). while i have a home library that's bursting at the seams, i buy physical books because they're cheaper. if i could get a used ebook for one cent, i would.
I can state without a doubt in my mind that the original purpose was not to monetize the platform. If it happened to be possible, sure, great. But Google would absolutely have considered Android a rousing success even if it had not been possible.

I hope i'm not really that delusional, considering I was involved in the decision making and strategies so that I could ensure they could be defended legally.

None of what i've said is actually even confidential. Andy Rubin has stated the same things in interviews over the years. I guess people just assumed he was selling them a line?
Cool. Stories like this are why I'm building a marketplace for freelance programmers that have contributed to open source.

Of course, it's open source- https://github.com/CodeDoor/codedoor
Cleaning and re-coating an 8 m telescope mirror, from the VLTA in Chile
Yeah, we are in NorCal for all practical purposes; actual geography be damned.
Some unsolicited advice from someone who's never run an open source project as popular as Capistrano:

* Ditch v2 ASAP (seems like you've already decided on this). It's pretty obvious you aren't motivated to work on that codebase anymore. I've looked at v3 and it's much better thanks to relying on Rake tasks.

* Be selfish. It's your project so if you think v3 is the way to go forward, go with it and who cares what the "community" thinks.

* Seems like you already have a few people helping out, so continue and maybe make formal "core" team. There's nothing with yourself taking a step back from the heavy coding. But I believe that Capistrano would be better with your guidance than without it.

codebeaker: There was no mention of Harrow in that post. Are you still working on that? I'd assume that if you were you'd continue work on Capistrano since it's based on it.
As always, it bears repeating: rvm/rbenv don't belong in production. They exist to allow developers on Macbooks to sync their version of Ruby with whatever is packaged in the Linux distro or BSD variant that runs in production.

If I had a Mac I'd skip the ad-hoc Ruby environment switchers and skip straight to Vagrant.
Industrial lens and mirror making is surely not a purely manual process. The method described is clearly meant for use with minimal infrastructure. The lack of jigging and tooling then is actually a feature in this instance.

The substrate requires sufficient hardness and dimensional stability to hold its shape. While glass is certainly not the only material that fits the bill, it's probably the cheapest.

High-end (read Industrial) 3D printers can probably -not- get a precise enough substrate, at least as designed right now.
There's a number of problems, but foremost is that there's no good way to "roll back" assets, and there's no concept of keeping assets that might be used by old versions of pages cached in CDNs, when they have been replaced by newer assets. This is a problem of the manifest system, and of the `assets` directory always representing the current newest state, not the collective state since the beginning of time. Maintaining state from the beginning of time would bring it's own problems, thus many of the workarounds about tracking old, and new assets are time consuming and sub optimal, and unfortunatley people need them. There's a cap task which touches `mtimes` of all referenced assets, which can typically take 5 minutes to complete. It's naïve, and stupid, but it's the only solution (that we could come up with) to a real asset pipeline problem.

I'm also of the opinion that compiling assets in production as a part of your deployment process is insane, there's so much magic in the Rails asset pipeline that it's not uncommon to turn up bugs where tables don't exist, and the rails app can't initialize, or some javascript runtime environment isn't found which can leave your deployment in a broken state.

I'm firmly of the opinion that assets should be compiled and checked in, but then of course you run into problems with rails serving those in development mode, rather than the development files.

All these issues are fixable, but they're all indicative of tools that aren't quite mature yet, and as Capistrano sits on the boundary of where these problems come to light, it seems to fall to us to deal with it, and to educate people on what they ought to be doing.

Education is no problem, I really believe that the de-facto standardisation of Rails-like deploys (i.e timestamped releases, with common linked directories, and a symlink to the current active timestamp) is an excellent result for knowing what to expect in an environment where there's hundreds of ways to get Rails apps running, but it's still not as smooth a process as it could be.

I'm familiar with at least one project that's been re-written in Scala and Java because the previous version was prohibitively difficult to deploy as it was in RoR. (GrayLog2, to namedrop them)
Don't hide behind the law, it won't help you here. If you set fire to a building with people inside and they are killed that is murder because any person knows what can happen when you set fire to a building full of people. Such it is with launching drone strikes on family homes or town streets or marketplaces or restaurants. It is murder. No sane person bombs a home without the expectation that anybody inside or nearby may be killed. Calling those deaths accidental is a sick joke.

The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.
That's not true. You get fined if you receive ANY broadcast TV without a licence, regardless of if you watch the BBC or not.

That said, I don't see what relevance this has to the topic.
There seems to be a consensus here that all big corporations are inept and the all that you can learn from them is what not to do. Only ~5% of startups are successful while 100% of big corporations were at one point. If you can't learn anything from Big Corp you aren't trying.
Rails like web framework for Elixir with websocket support
I think somewhere along the way my brain started processing %20 as a space, because I don't even notice anymore.
There's a valid point in here about the way the structure of the Thiel program, with its strain of radical individualism, might blind new entrepreneurs to the idea that most of them shouldn't be CEOs. I think more entrepreneurs should try to grok this idea. Even people who are "born leaders" don't necessarily belong in the CEO role, because CEOs need to be more than leaders. They often also need to be moderating influences, level-headed, execution-focused, and accountable. I've been in startups since I was 18 years old, and have started multiple companies, and would not hire me as a CEO.

Unfortunately, the article makes that point by inflating the importance of management theory and by suggesting that college is somewhere you go to pick up a trade. So, someone else should try to write the good article that makes the CEO point.
https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki/Upgrading-to-R...
That is different level. I was very proud for dropping the mirror only twice during the grinding :-)
Kickstarter ?

I mean for something as operationally critical like Capistrano, why dont you seriously raise money on Kickstarter, outsource some of the testcases, etc. and be more productive overall.

And please feel free to raise money to fix RubyGems as well ;)
I've been thinking about structuring servers around FRP [1] and declarative programming for a while now. FRP is based on the notion of events / signals as first class objects and the ability to compose those; it has been gaining popularity for client programming in recent years [2].

For example, on a very high level, an HTTP request signal function might look like this:

request :: Signal Request -> Signal Response

And a database request function might roughly look like this:

requestDB :: Signal Query -> Signal [Record]

Having the basic building blocks, one could imagine building a function to e.g. extract all users:

extractUsers :: Signal Request -> Signal Response
extractUsers = request . createUserQuery . requestDB . showUsers

Similar signal functions could theoretically be constructed for routes, system functions, static files and so on. And since all signal functions are pure, composing those and creating ever more powerful abstractions without having to worry about system state and environment context may be a nicer way of doing server programming.

[1] Functional Reactive Programming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming

[2] http://elm-lang.org
The worst part of Google software is the included always running updater program which in addition to using unnecessary resources, probably does other unknown tasks (spyware related).
Speculating Apple's future through its present
Age of Internet Empires
We can't even agree on the meanings of words, so I think the prospects of us productively debating politics are dubious.
Pretty good idea, indeed!
How to create a natural baseline in CSS
The US 'threatens' nuclear war as well. There is no point in nuclear weapons if you don't threaten to use them.

>they have not indiscriminately bombed (or even threatened to bomb) civilian populations

That is pretty disingenuous. We both know that the US government counts any adult male in certain countries/regions as a militant rather than civilian. If you claim nobody is a civilian then of course you never kill civilians

Also, I would like to hear your defence of the Iraq sanctions. You can hardly claim that was accidental or poor intelligence or that it wasn't indiscriminate. Much like in North Korea those excess deaths can be (and were by the US government) attributed to natural causes.
My first thought was "I owe this guy, Capistrano is the main reason why I have spent ~ $100 per year on VPS servers and not $100 per MONTH on Heroku et al.

I'd suggest Lee runs a Kickstarter type thing and I'd very happily throw in $100. But I don't think he will because it doesn't seem quite right.

So here's a (wild and completely off the cuff) startup idea - a pre-emptive Kickstarter. Someone creates the project "Lee Hambley, continue working on Capistrano." and we all pledge into the pot. If Lee agrees to do it, he gets the money. If not, we don't pay anything.
Regarding Harrow [1] bretthopper, I absolutely am, and this is where I want to focus my work, and to be able to build a company around deployment best practices and Capistrano.

Regardless of frameworks, and of technologies and platforms, I believe if I can take the load off myself with Capistrano, by turning it into the open source component of a best-practice company, and build teams of passionate, skilled support engineers, then I'll be where I want to be.

Unfortunatley Harrow would suffer if I give up on Capistrano, as part of the promise of Harrow as a SaaS is that it's all guaranteed to stay compatible, and work as we've all come to expect, just with improved workflow, etc...

([1] http://www.harrow.io, please excuse the missing graphic placeholder I've not updated the landing page in some time as I've been focusing on building the product, and the landing page performs really well without that graphic in place)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." --Isaac Newton
> You are not gonna be able optimize it as much as GCC. No one will use.

If LLVM were used as a backend for a C11 compiler then optimizations would be for free. Since C is has such a small surface area, and since LLVM is very much designed for C-like languages, it would be quite easy (e.g. 1 person-year) to implement a production quality C11 front-end for LLVM.
Absolutely nobody on this thread has made the argument that the US doesn't kill civilians. That's a straw-man argument.
Was also recently available on BBC Radio Four Extra. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jtyf) Sadly, not still available there. (But probably available on Usenet or in a torrent.)
Aye, I did similarly, though for some reason I did >= 0 instead of > -1. I wonder what % of people choose one test approach vs. the other?
Python with virtualenv and pip has been fairly stress free in my experience.
"Most companies fail without hiring a single non-founder! How can management be a factor in these failures?"

Most young startups fail because of founder disputes. Working closely with another person is a skill gained with time and experience, and has a lot in common with management.
Revised the game above: http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6857334
The real fix is not to use Facebook in the first place.
Not at all what I expected. But this feels like the very definition of a power law problem: the few people out of the human population who fly regularly have so much more impact than the rest combined.
Or just give them money on something like gittip. Things like this need to be sustainable, not just a flash in the pan of $10k, then going back to having nothing.
A Less Risky Path to Entrepreneurship in Software Development
Yup. If I had infinite time this would be one of the things I'd be building.
I am a bit sad that he feels this way about it.

I have used Capistrano a lot, I built my "default" setup, compiled it into a gem, and released it here: https://github.com/kaspergrubbe/simple-capistrano-unicorn and moved on with my life as a developer.

I know of at least two bigger organizations that depend on Capistrano (and my gem) for their deploys. I feel like Capistrano is the way to go if you manage your own servers, and need to deploy to them.

Capistrano started my Rails experience, and I am very grateful for the work put into it. But I never wrote and said "Thank you" or "Great job", maybe we need to be more vocal to the people that put in time and energy to build the software that we use a lot.
Indian Streaming Music Dhingana Claims 9 Million Monthly Unique Users
I don't believe most of these claims, but I am linking to this:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497

An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested.
The Twitter Documents You Didn’t Hear About Last Night
I suppose you know Mint is basically Ubuntu repackaged and with a different default window manager.

I'm more interested in keeping my productivity up than in experimenting with installing various window mangers in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu caused me problems only when I run it in a VM. If you install Ubuntu on a decent physical machine it will run OK.
It's not necessarily a fraud. The key is it only works in cases where the fair market value of the house is below the value of the mortgage. In that case, the city only has to pay the FMV. Now, there is always going to be some question about what is actually the FMV of a property. But this is true regardless of whether the city is in cahoots with a property developer who wants to put up some expensive shopping mall where single family homes once stood, or in this case where Richmond is proposing to seize by eminent domain houses which are underwater.

Why are the banks against this? (1) they believe they could get more at auction than the FMV determined by the eminent domain process, and (2) the seizure happens at a time outside of their control, where as the bank might be holding off on the foreclosure process since if they were to actually foreclose on the property, and discover from the auction that they could recover significantly less than the mortgage, they would then realize a loss which would screw up their capital holdings.

Either way, as far as the homeowners are concerned, they are effectively going to be foreclosed against. The only difference is that they will be offered a chance to continue to live in the house, and pay rent (which might or might not be at FMV; it's not clear from the description). Maybe it might be a rent with an option to buy, but basically the main goal of the city is to preserve the neighborhood instead of letting speculators buy the house at foreclosure.

So I wouldn't necessarily call it a scam. Will the banks lose out? Probably. But I don't know that they would necessarily lose out that badly --- that is, unless you don't believe that people who lose their houses due to eminent domain when a city is enriching some real estate developer isn't paying FMV to people who are turned out of their homes to build a shopping mall or a new stadium....
Climate change is alarming enough, and has been for long enough that I don't get responses such as these. Wikipedia says a 747 rates 91 passenger-miles per US gallon. We need big changes to the energy supply system that will be incredibly difficult to attain. We don't need irrational responses. The hard problem is to de-couple energy from coal and oil from wealth. Without accomplishing that, air travel won't matter one way or the other.
Why tablet magazines are a failure — Tech News and Analysis
8:11 for me - as it sounds like was the case with others, the majority of that time was searching for how to check for specific types in Javascript.

For the "is this actually a string?" check, for example, I started looking for the existence of the match method on the object, which of course would have failed if they passed some random object with match defined so I cheated a bit. I'd like to see the full breadth of test options people took out there.
Yeah, I encourage people to go work for one for a year or two to learn all the stupid things they do and the ways they are vulnerable. Also to understand why you should love what you are doing now.
Very cool, but I'm happy with Arch.
Sorry but that's a pretty outlandish statement. dogs may occasionally act like people, and they may require management, but they are not people. It doesn't follow that if you can't/haven't managed dogs you have no hope with people. I've done both and it's a different ball game.
Technology News For Geeks (and other Caged Animals)
From the article:

every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users

Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, not users. So benefiting users only helps them if it increases their ad revenue. That might happen indirectly if an improvement to the FB user interface gets them more users or keeps existing users on the site longer so they see more ads. But FB already has a billion users, and many of them already seem to spend most of their available free time on FB, so the relative benefit to FB from improving the UI is going to be pretty small.

Finally, I think it's worth mentioning a historical parallel that seems relevant to me. I believe pg mentioned in one of his essays that many companies who made third-party Windows software ended up basically doing market research for Microsoft: MS just took all the popular features from third-party apps and added them to their own apps. Developers of FB apps like SocialFixer seem to me to be in a similar position. Caveat programmer. :-)

[Edit: I see that the "End of the Power User" article that was linked to hits some of these same points.]
Tom `seenmyfate` Clements has been helping to support me over the last three months when I've been very burned out, and has really taken my vision for v3 and made it reality where I wouldn't have been able to. He'll always be around taking care of Capistrano as his company grants him some 20% free time to work on it, I trust him implicitly, and he already has deploy and unregulated commit access.

Tom, if you are on HN, you're the only reason this project has been able to come as far as it has. Thank you.
The beauty of being human
Does anextio's reply here help? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503669)