skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are people being honestly exploitative better or worse?

Generally, I'd say worse.

Your average small business with one IT guy isn't going to blow sunshine up your ass about what a magical, special place it is to work, which is why they won't pay you what you're worth and expect you to work stupid hours while demanding high-end qualifications. They'll know that they're hiring a generic IT guy and be happy with somebody who just got their associate's degree and likes playing with hardware. They won't be expecting you to run a high-volume website with 24/7 uptime and being eternally on call. And if they do expect too much, it's not because they've thought it through; it's just because they're generally demanding people who are kinda clueless. Often, a good conversation with somebody like that can get you some space, or an assistant, or a raise.

Here, though, they know that they're asking for a unicorn, and they know they're going to treat them poorly, and they just don't give a shit.
Apple is flatlining. They are staying consistent with new product updates and still are competitive in their markets. I don't see much growth if any, though. So no, Apple is not going downhill.
Yes, it is quite obvious that what is "non-PC" to one person is "absurdly offensive" to another person. I know that. What I meant was "non-PC" shouldn't be taken to mean they will abuse you and make your life hell- unless, I guess, you consider offensive remarks in your presence to be abuse.

Non-PC: some people like, some people hate

Abuse: nobody likes
You have a decent enough point you're trying to get across, but the 'bud' and 'tiger' really cheapen it. I mean, you're responding to a grown man and father of (almost) 4 here, not some pre-teen kid.
Much lighter weight. Instead of hosting an entire operating system you just host the application.

Imagine spinning up your db instance vm, your web tier vm, your load balancer vm... etc.

Unless you have a ton of ram it isn't going to happen. With docker you can run containers that mimick a very very large infrastructure on your laptop.
It strikes me that Zed has been on the receiving end of way more bullying than he has given out (including being called a cock by you in this very post)
> Hey, other comments are going to give you a few lines telling you to not quit, that you should hang in there, and that it'll be alright.

You got to know when to shoot a dog...
This is serious mis-interpretation of reality.

Do you think that if cricket players formed a union (maybe they already did, I have no idea), they would be paid as much as NFL players?

Of course not. NFL players are paid so much because the league can afford to pay them and still stuff their bank accounts.

The same goes for TV/Movie writers - good, proven talent is in low supply and there are millions at stake, so it makes sense to pay well to get the best. The 5th box office hit on a given week usually makes a fraction of what the 1st and 2nd does, so it makes sense to optimize for hitting the 1st spot and you do that by getting the best talent and you get the best talent by paying them more than others.

We (programmers) don't need the unions to be paid well because there's still more demand for talent than supply of such talent.

If it ever happens that we need unions to be well paid, the unions won't help much because you can't pay high salaries if you don't have high revenues.

Also, given that software companies are generous with stock options, as part owners of the business, we should be very much against overpaying the employees, even if they are fellow developers.
I read the ad before seeing Marco's comments, and I had exactly the same reaction as him.

A friend in the gaming industry posted the Penny Arcade ad to Facebook, and I clicked on it out of curiosity. I was appalled. When I went back to FB later, 4 different people had commented about what a terrible job it was.
Mtgox had millions is USD daily volume at that time.
No. Like if you have a debt in a deflationary currency.

Start with this: you owe 10% of your income this year as payment for debt. Suppose this is a mortgage and you'll be paying the same amount for the next 15 or 30 years.

Assume that under either inflation or deflation your salary/income changes each year with the inflation/deflation rate. [1]

Inflation rate of 3%
Deflation rate of 3%

So year one you pay 10.00% of your income to debt.

Year two: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 9.70%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 10.30%.

Year ten: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 7.66%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 13.05%.

[1] We already know this isn't true for many people under inflation, though it hopefully averages out to better than inflation over several years (between bonuses, pay raises, pay bumps from changing jobs). The same will likely be true under deflation.
Yes, Dan is an incredibly skilled teacher. I really love this too.
I'm not sure that your assertion is correct. Employers are required to pay money into a super fund of your choice (or an employer default if you don't specify).

You can of course contribute privately to this balance as well, and in fact in some cases the government has matched contributions.

Super is not taxed*, though you can't withdraw till you're over 60.

It does have a lot of flexibility as well. It's possible to set up a 'Self Managed Super Fund' which can be used to buy property, or invest in other ways (though this is fairly tightly regulated).

This is of course not connected to the availability of a pension, should that money ever run out. Which makes it all feel pretty far left.
Do you need some real, immediate help, as in food and other necessities? Do not have millions to spare, but can help with some things. How can I contact you?
aria2 integration makes one of the fastest package management tools out there... faster.
If you're interesting in learning Processing, I have some notes and a couple projects that you may find useful.

https://github.com/taylorlapeyre/csc/tree/master/2700
Keep your head up dude! I haven't been where you are but I have been in a position where I had no clue how my rent would get paid or how my lights would stay on.

Reading this hits close to home for me. You are are more than the sum of your assets. You are more than a set of skills, and ultimately you still have the ability to go out and conquer. Lean on family, lean on friends, and once you get through this never forget where you've been and help others in the same predicament.

I can't offer much, but if you need a few bucks for a couple bags of groceries email look@mewhenimtalkingtoyou.com and I can send some Paypal your way. No strings attached.
gwf. if you, and salesforce, really believe it was an improbable series of poor decisions and not malicious intent, tell your bosses it is time to build the redemption story. and we can speak about how to reboot this together, the company and the contestants.
> The server is temporarily unable to service your request

Performance is apparently not Rails' only problem.
> Twitter was in a nice position to better Ruby in terms of performance, though they chickened out and escaped to Scala.

Actually, they escaped to the JVM, and if their job reqs are any indication, they hire massively for Java engineer positions and hardly at all for Scala ones.

I wouldn't call that chickening out, more common sense.

Rails is great for prototypes and toy apps, but once you start needing scale, it's simply not up to the task.
> somewhere would love nothing more to work with the people behind that legendary comic

Yes, and exploiting somebody like that is wrong. They could hire them and treat them well, but because they're famous, they couldn't be fucking bothered.

This shitty behavior goes on all the time in fashion [1] and in the movie industry. I'm sad to hear it's coming to tech.

[1] e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Wears_Prada_%28novel%...
I can't wait for AngularIPvNode.asm.js
I meant fixed costs, i.e. the cost of purchases needed to provide your service/create your product (which you may not have control over).
If it hadn't favored early adopters... there wouldn't have been early adopters.
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"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"

You do what you need to get and your family through this. That's only only game that's important. The rest of this is just icing. If you are in Europe or the Bay Area feel free to reach out to me @kzhu. I'll help if I can.
The kind of troll that tricks people into becoming decent human beings...?
> I think that all the metaprogramming magic that Ruby allows is at odds with speed.

I don't think so, Java and C# also have metaprogramming (reflection, class loading, bytecode manipulation) and they are still plenty fast.

Ruby's liability is that it's dynamically typed, and this puts a hard limit on how fast it can be (and also on how toolable it can be, but that's a separate discussion).
But when you say "freedom", I guess that doesn't include "the freedom to buy and sell meth"? To clarify my position:

* I agree that specialization increases productivity.

* I agree increased productivity is good.

* I agree meth is bad.

* I agree people have moral obligations to society.

* I agree ethics should influence macroeconomic policy.

* I don't see how Capitalism (an economic system) imposes (in top-down fashion) a moral obligation on what a company can and can't sell. My issue is one of scope resolution.

I think you're confusing "good" with "demand". Per pg, Capitalism tries to supply people with what they want. But what people want isn't always the best for them. E.g. I ate a doughnut the other day. Given I could have eaten a healthier yet equally tasty apple, eating the doughnut probably wasn't the best possible decision. But I wanted it, so I ate it. When I ate that doughnut, not once did I think "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't eat it." Nor do I imagine that Dunking Donuts ever thought "Capitalism. Therefore, I shouldn't sell it."

A subsequent comment of yours suggests you didn't intend to imply an intrinsic between capitalism and the common good. But the way you originally framed your sentence strongly suggests otherwise.
best of luck. If you want to fall back on security, I personally have good connections in the stable large companies in the South East US. If you need a stable income for awhile and are willing, please let me know.
The worry with deflation isn't that all of a sudden everyone will literally stop spending money ever again. It's that it creates enough incentive to delay purchases and removes enough incentive to invest savings (rather than stuffing the money under a mattress) to shift the economy as a whole to a lower gear. The last time the USA experienced a period of significant deflation, for example, unemployment jumped to 25%. People tending to hold onto cash is the same thing as people tending to not be willing to pay others for work.
Shopify has now fully integrated Bitpay
As of a few weeks ago, Shopify only accepted Bitcoin as the primary payment method. As of today, you can now accept credit cards AND Bitcoin. With Black Friday coming up, it's perfect timing.

Feel free to give it a test whirl on Outgrow.me. It's pretty slick.
If you're in Kansas City, my company name is databasically and my first name is wes and I use a dot com. Shoot, if you're not in KC; email me and let me know how I can help.
> Frankly, there's not really that much to know

Sure. A couple of blog posts and everyone is an expert.

Physical products encompass a very wide range of disciplines. You would be monumentally wrong to think that component purchasing is the most difficult aspect of bringing physical products to market successfully.

It's almost like saying that money is the only variable in building good websites, or the choice of a language or framework. The fact is that software development is a very complex art, often requiring expertise in a wide range of disciplines.

Yes, I know, in my prior post I said "software is easy" and now I am saying the exact opposite. I meant it in relative terms. An individual or a team with the right skill set can hack away and create a world-class software product with free tools, in their bathrobes, in a dorm room. They can deploy it to thousands of people, modify, fine-tune, fix and even pivot the product with little if any cost. College kids right out of school (or even before) can develop and offer significant software products.

Hardware or physical products are not like that. It is rare to have recent grads or drop-outs have the necessary skills to complete such projects. They require a lot of money and multi-disciplinary expertise. These days this generally means expertise in mechanical, electrical and software engineering as well as manufacturing, supply chain management, quality control, testing and more. Depending on what you are doing each of those disciplines often require domain expertise in sub-specialties. For example, electrical engineering ranges from analog and digital design to signal and power integrity --crucial for high-speed designs.

In addition to that, hardware products require expensive specialized tools and often years of expertise using them. Laying out a 12 layer circuit board for an FPGA board with signals ranging into the GHz range isn't something one is going to do with a free PCB layout tool and a handful of online tutorials. The machine I am typing this on has somewhere close to $50,000 in software tools installed --EDA, CAD, CAM, FEA, Field Solvers, Compilers, etc. The cost of the PC itself is a rounding error when compared to the cost of the software, the annual licensing and support agreements as well as the training costs.

Outside of that, depending on what you are doing, you might need tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in standard and specialized test equipment and tools.

Let's put it this way. YC funds startups to the tune of $15K to $20K to develop the first incarnation of a software product. Just one of our DSO's (Digital Storage Oscilloscope) costs nearly twice that much. The point isn't to boast --we are small potatoes-- but rather to try to impress upon you that the hardware game is very, very different than doing software and the variables involved go far beyond how and where you buy your components or whether your Excel spreadsheet with your BOM is formatted correctly.

I could go on. The point is that in relative terms software products are easy. And that's what I meant.
Arnold's 6th rule. giving back to the community.
Ruby has some great tools to isolate and fix performance issues. In particular, ruby-prof and kcachegrind (or qcachegrind) are tremendously valuable resources for tracking down and eliminating performance bottlenecks.

I did a writeup on it a bit ago here: https://www.coffeepowered.net/2013/08/02/ruby-prof-for-rails...
Thanks Aaron. I imagine I'll probably spend Thanksgiving weekend trying to dig further into what is newly slow on our 3.2.15.

The trick with pinpointing a cause is that when I look at the data NR provides, every partial rendered and every action called is slower than it had been previously. Combined with the immensity of our codebase, it's going to be time-consuming to put a finger on a single repro-able cause. But we'll do our best to isolate and report back.

FWIW, have you guys ever considered creating a performance suite test app? With such sparse Google results around Rails performance changes over time, it could be useful to compare the performance of Rails versions on an apples-to-apples basis if we could see how the performance of the test app changed over Rails versions. If we're lucky, it might even catch some of the performance regressions that have happened in the dot releases previously. Even if not, it would at least demonstrate that performance is an important consideration in Rails' evolution. I'd sleep better knowing that.

Maybe take a popular mid-sized framework like Spree and see how it performs on 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc.?
But I don't want those things to be public or tied to my real name in any way. Or use Google+.
It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.
Fan of your work... now an even bigger fan! :) Thank you making this world a better place.
Awesome, Zed
Unions make lots of sense when there is a cartel of employers, as in sports and entertainment. This is not true of programming.
>The reason why I bring that up is because I noticed the same pattern here; this job ad is screening for desperate people lacking a spine. I can't imagine any decent developer with a good job applying for this. Only someone desperately looking for work and having relatively low skills would willingly take this job, assuming he's not an idiot.

Hey, 17 year old kids, and people who have been out of work for years need jobs too, you know. (actual skill correlates... much less than it ought with employment desperation, in my opinion.)

And it looks to me (and apparently, to you) like the penny-arcade folks are being pretty clear about what they want. And that's fine. Some people (usually very inexperienced people) really like the "hero ninja rockstar" rhetoric, and that's fine. I think many intern level folks respond better to thinking of themselves as rockstar ninjas than as interns. And as we're all clear on what that actually means, hey, if it makes them feel good, who am I to complain?

The other thing you need to understand is that most of the rhetoric about 'heroic work schedules' is empty. My experience has been that the people I know who actually work the most, I mean, once you take out all the time on hacker news and facebook? they don't talk about how much they work. In fact, they usually worry that they aren't working enough.

When I hear people crow about a ridiculous work schedule? I hear "I put in 45 hours a week at the office, but half that time is on facebook or chatting with co-workers" People who actually work a lot are constantly concerned that they aren't working enough.
> I don't accuse them of not saving the world, but Ruby and Rails lost a great opportunity to dominate the web community.

They didn't lose this opportunity because of Twitter, they lost it because the fact that Ruby is dynamically typed puts a hard limit on how fast it can be. Twitter tried very hard to make it scale before making the decision to switch to Java, and they just couldn't do it.

The task was just impossible, switching to Java was the only reasonable decision given their constraints.
Cricket players do have players unions. They're not paid as much as NFL stars because there's less money overall in cricket.

Pilots' unions in the US are an example of a skilled profession milking the industry. You can't have an airline without pilots, and the union knows exactly how much the airlines make - and pitch their wage demands to just below 'breaking the bank'.

The value of IT staff is harder to quantify - a commercial plane needs two pilots (generally). An IT department needs... ?
The thing about controversial subjects? They are so often a waste of time. People are set in their beliefs. Most of the time the best outcome I can hope for when the subject turns controversial, is that no bridges were burned and no one is particularly upset. Forget about actually changing opinions.
Employer vs. employee mandatory contribution is an accounting gimmick: The money's all coming from the same place, your employer's bank account.

The difference between the U.S. and Australian systems is that you own an account from the mandatory contribution, while an American owns nothing, it's just a tax to fund current and future benefits that are at the whim of current and future governments.

It's often hard to map political positions across nations. Most recently, George W. Bush was a big proponent of moving toward an "ownership society" with a Social Security system that looked more like Australia's and it was our left that fought the idea.

Australia's system is terrific, performing well and should be a model for the U.S.
Perception/Reality: Design Thinking vs Systems Thinking
Very Cool. A couple of neat additions I can think of to make more realistic.

If two drops touch they become a large drop.

Drops over a certain size run down the window and consume any drops they touch.

Drops "dry" through decay at a set rate.
This seems to me to be more a problem of rampant abuse of forfeiture laws rather than a failure of structuring laws. The many stories I have read recently of "forfeiture corridors" in the USA would seem to reinforce that.
Farewell, Disqus
Right. And this real BOM is what I would call the absolute minimum requirement. Once you start thinking about revision, tracking, defect management, end-of-life management, costing, EDA integration, versioning and other real-world factors and needs of a hardware manufacturing operation a BOM becomes a crucial and far more complex document. There are a bunch of specialized software solutions dedicated to dealing with BOMs. Excel isn't a BOM management system.
That is a great way to establish an aristocracy, where only people who are already wealthy can ever start or maintain a business. What do you think venture capitalists are? They are creditors, whose loans enable people to start businesses they could not otherwise afford. Your great idea for disrupting some old entrenched industry will almost certainly need to be funded, and if you are not already wealthy that will mean taking on debt.

Not only that, but there are plenty of people whose businesses need to take on short-term loans to remain competitive. Maybe your business is profitable but you do not have enough capital to fill a really big order -- which could be a great opportunity for your business to grow. If you are not going to take on any debt, then the really big order will be given to your competition, and eventually your business will fail.

Debt is not universally bad; there are a lot of cases where debts make sense. Debt is bad when you cannot repay it, which is why deflation is bad.
sacramento might be a good comparison for that perspective.
While I'm new to the rails scene, and can't speak for the 2.x -> 3.0 performance change, what surprises me is that this post is upgrading because of newer gem support.

It this purely a rails upgrade? Or is the OP upgrading other gems at the same time?

You're using newrelic. Use it, and figure out exactly where it's getting slower. Do an entire stack trace. You can figure out exactly where those pages have gotten longer responses. Then you can suggest to the rails community what's slow for your application.

The platform is only as good as the community makes it to be. Maybe it's missing your case's optimizations because you haven't given specific feedback?
It sounds like now is not really the right time in his life for "don't give up".

It's time to get things stable again, and then if he still wants to give it another shot he should do that once the other parts of his life (and his finances) are settled down a bit.
Here's a detailed analysis (just under 1M BTC; I'm not sure why I remembered 1.5M): http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo...
http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-...
Worlds first full sized electric helicopter
I'm not so sure. He seems a bit too enthusiastic to me; slightly artificial.