skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Docker really replaces the need for Chef in a sense. You don't need Chef for configuration of your container, because ideally your container should be saved in an image which you use to deploy. This keeps things consistent between your dev environment, staging and production.

Chef is based on re-running the same commands with various different options depending on the environment, and even without any thing in the cookbooks/attributes/environments changing, Chef still cannot guarantee that this run will produce the same results as a run that happened yesterday, simply because it isn't like an image.
Isn't it a given that they did? They strengthened DES's s-boxes against it 10 or so years before it was publicly discovered iirc.
Lobster: Sell your Instagram & Flickr
Not sure about PHP (I develop on Ruby), but I'd definitely use an open source library to do the authentication and authorization. Too many places to be able to mess up if you do it on your own.
> to give you a real world example, we use mariadb for storing everything persistently. however, a lot of data like "number of teachers in school A" is aggregated and too difficult to run in real time when we render paged results. to get around that, we use mongo as a document store and use its SQL like querying to generate the paged search results. this lets us sort/filter on the data without having to do everything in SQL.

This use case should be possible to solve with the JSON type in PostgreSQL. The indexing in PostgreSQL is just as advanced in 9.3 and will be better than MongoDB in 9.4 if a couple of patches land.
Thank you very much for the information. I, too understand why that would be the default configuration. It's very good to hear that it's not a pain to change.

Do you know if you can set that FritzBox up to just act as a DSL->Ethernet bridge and pass through packets to another device that does all the routing? (Sorry if that doesn't make sense. I'm not a professional network nerd, so my terminology might be confused.)
I think there is an argument to be made that newer developers, who might not be familiar with hiring practises, and see this job from Penny Arcade might leave thinking that's the norm.
Your claim that it isn't true is nice and all, but actual evidence that it isn't true would be better.
Yes, it is so sweet they expect that you will find it offensive:

"- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment."
- We are quite literally looking for a person that can do four jobs: Web Development, Software Development, Sys Admin, and the (dreaded) GENERAL IT for us here that need help configuring a firewall for a dev kit, etc.

- [...] and don’t mind having a really bad sense of work-life balance, this is the job for you.

- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment.

- It’s rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24/7.

That's four pieces of the puzzle already.
The PR Paradox
The skills don't seem to be a stretch. Basically a devops guy that used to be a full stack guy.
I can't release any of our traffic numbers, but I can tell you that 1M req/s is an enormous number. For some context, here's a post from Netflix from the end of 2011 where they state that their API received 20,000 req/s at peak: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/12/making-netflix-api-more-...
you know. When I read the story, I thought it was a little too harsh. Then I read Penny Arcades job post.

(the title blog post's title is a link to the job posting)

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov

That's pretty horrible.
No. You did not.
GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/).

1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.
So how does a developer determine their own value? For example:

1.) I do web development every day. I'm not a spectacular designer, but I can put a work flow together and I'm comfortable on both the client side javascript (JavaScript proper, jQuery, Backbone, AngularJs) as well as the server side (Ruby, Node.js, PHP 5.5 (Laravel mostly), C#).

2.) I do development in the form of sysadmin/devops type tasks (bash/powershell/vbscript)

3.) I currently do IT related tasks with regards to servers (not desktops) such as building servers from parts, loading them in to racks, setting up firewalls/routers/networking, etc

4.) I'm not perfect with attention to detail. Things fall through the cracks, but I know when to skip details (because they can be easily rectified if missed) and when not to (because the work really is mission critical, or rectifying the mistake would be particularly painful)

5.) I'm self-educated with minimal college. However, I devour books about algorithms, AI, language references, etc

6.) I have terrible work-life balance. I love my wife dearly, but if there is a problem to be solved, I can't let it go. I often dream about problems that are on my mind.

7.) I work well in teams, but I prefer solo work as I can often get in the "zone" easier when not distracted. I am not socially awkward, but I prefer smaller groups. I won't do sales, and while I can do direct customer service, I find it exhausting and my day is often shot afterwards.

8.) I understand how to deal with, and juggle, multiple "number one" priorities.

9.) I generally don't do on call, but if there is a fire, I'm always available to work on it.

10.) I'm constantly on the lookout for techniques to enhance myself, and the team as a whole. I often do presentations on up and coming software stacks, or training on technologies that I think would be worthwhile to implement.

11.) I live in Portland, Or. Relocating to SV or SF is not an option.

Given all of that (and more since it's never binary), how do I go about valuing myself in the market without wasting a ton of time?
My opinions are formed by witnessing friends getting fired/being pressured to quit because their company had run out of money, or because they had to take care of an ill relative and the company felt that their performance wasn't as good as what it used to be, or because of some BS office politics. Those companies include small trendy startups and big fortune 500 companies alike.

At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful everything is, if the company is having a hard time and they need to fire you, they'll do it. Your boss is not going to sell his car or house to pay your salary.

If the company is doing well and offers a nice work environment, it can be fantastic, as you described- in which case, enjoy the ride while it lasts. But don't delude yourself in thinking that the wind won't turn if bad times hit. Believing anything else is setting yourself up for major letdown when it happens.
> you should always prefer private to protected and protected to public

It's well known that protected is not any safer than public. Anybody can inherit and use it.

You can still make members private in structs. It's only less redundant:

class X { public: stuff; private: other stuff; };

vs

struct X { stuff; private: other stuff; };

> Another reason to use "class" is because it's OOP terminology. There's no notion of "struct" in OOP

That's cargo cult programming. Using "class" doesn't make your code OO. The language we are programming in is C++, not OOP.
Here's what interviewing is actually like: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/new-hire-part-1
money changing hands != generating wealth
Ask HN: What's going on with YouTube embed parameters?
Suddenly showinfo=0, modestbranding=1, etc. don't work anymore.
Caltrans testing Barrier-Transfer Machines on I-15
People can see everything you've ever done by skimming your Google+ profile?

I've avidly avoided this stuff in general, how does this work?
Dispatch-proxy: Balance traffic between multiple Internet connections
Thanks for providing some information. I'm aware that uPnP is a large standard. Frankly, the only parts of the spec that I or any software that I run cares about are Service Discovery and IGDP.

> ...if I can execute code from any device on your network, your phone, your Smart TV/fridge, your PC, then I can forward ports to wherever I like.

Yes and no. The uPnP daemons that I've worked with are based on miniupnp. They all have a setting that only allows a machine to forward ports to itself. Other uPnP daemons might not have such a setting.

> I know, I've accepted the risk...

What risk? I'll ask yet again. :) How is having an automated port forwarder (even one that will forward any port to any machine on your LAN for any reason) more risky than having a publicly routable IP address assigned to each and every machine on your LAN?

If you've already answered this, I apologize for not catching on.

> NAT is a hack...

So you'd rather manage firewalls and/or running services? That's the path that I like best.

EDIT: I've read Rapid7's report on the miniupnp & etc. vulnerabilities that they found. The fun thing there is that they found implementation bugs. The issues that they raised have nothing to do with uPnP itself.
The visible trend in the data provided, 2011 was the worst with over 40 injuries and 1 death. While, the preceding and succeeding years have be rather quiet.

Besides, marketers creating trends is neither a new phenomenon nor is it localized to the US, for example, marketers in India have popularized a holiday tradition in the past few years, Akshaya Tritiya, where purchasing gold is supposed to be auspicious and brings about good luck. Though it is loosely based on a religious occasion, it isn't a real holiday. Besides, the surprising bit is the prices aren't shot down to boost sales as in Black Friday, instead the prices shoot up as a result of the demand caused by the shopping frenzy.
Thats because you can't really use the tools the kernel provides which docker uses while in an OpenVZ container.
I take the Mark Suster position that engineers are terrible at negotiating, and they're eventually going to find out their market value or their peers' compensation, so just offer them a market, fair salary and equity to begin with, especially if you've found someone who you think will be a great fit.
I only skimmed the gist with the instructions for reproducing the test [1], but in that skimming I could not figure out what the request and response were in this simulation. Were these responses 100 bytes, 1k, 10k, 100k? I guess small responses, but I'm not certain.

I know the goal of the test is to demonstrate how capacity can be scaled upward in very little time and with comparatively little effort. And for that this demonstration is impressive!

That said, the requests per second number is not especially impressive given that a modest single server can easily saturate gigabit Ethernet with 100-byte responses (and it's even easier to do so with larger responses) [2]. I am left wondering, does the $10 cost cover the cost of server instances and bandwidth? If so, that is a very good deal. The bandwidth charges for exceeding the capacity of a gigabit Ethernet connection (1M RPS with even the most trivial requests requires more than 1 gigabit) would be substantial with many hosting providers.

[1] https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724

[2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...
19 Years with Breast Cancer- A Son's Story
Moving piece about a young guy telling the story of his mother. He has written a book and needs support with funding it towards publishing. 19 years his mother fought and he's telling every step! Amazing, Moving and unique.
I find the criticism of research papers on the part of Bitcoin supporters a bit ironic. Have people forgotten how poorly researched the original Bitcoin paper was?
I don't even need to read the article. Obviously, they have a point. And obviously, most of the comments here are along the line "THIS TIME IT'S DIFFERENT!". Lol.
Yes, in that sense a developer wishing to work for PA is no different than the young actor who wants to work with his Hollywood idols and is willing to do anything for even the smallest chance at making it big. I get that if you're really into video gaming and love PA, you may be willing to work like crazy for a low salary just to be with your idols and be a part of it.

The fact remain that if you do that, you're doing yourself a major disservice as a professional.
Why would you want to be logged in while searching via Google?
There's really only one person behind this job listing and that's Robert Khoo. He's got great business acumen, but not a great nose in determining the job expectations for a position like this. That being said, it seems like poor form to insult the business manager of a small company without offering advice first and it is unseemly to use such excoriating language. Does this blogger fellow know Khoo?
It's even worse than what cdawzrd says. In some cases the advertised parts don't even exist on the drawing board, and the manufacturer is simply fishing for interest. When you express interest, a ridiculously long lead time is quoted (which no one will actually commit to meeting), and your interest is duly noted by whoever makes the go/no-go decisions at the company. They get their marketing data, but you don't get your parts... not anytime soon, anyway.
Google may finally end developer restrictions on Chromecast
This passive aggressive tone permeates a lot of PA's comics, postings, and general presence. So I'm not surprised to see it. They've built a community around the over all nerd thug mentality that exists within their forums.

I stopped reading PA after the controversy about the rape wolf and their dismissive reaction to it.

I wouldn't want to work there. Not because of the hard work aspect, but because I can imagine that the overall attitude that informs their public work would inform their internal political structure as well.

Lets face it, you're not curing cancer here. You're making events and media that appeal to a certain sub-culture. This shouldn't require repressed nerd rage to get right.
That is... shocking. Especially considering that it's way cheaper to buy in Santa Clara than in Mountain View.

I've checked out trailer parks in the area, too... (I'm totally the kind of guy who would live in a mobile home if it was a good deal) but we're talking like $800+ per month for space rent, then you have to buy the mobile home on top of that. Add to that, well, most mobile homes are not particularly mobile, and you have all the problems you expect from owning a building on land you rent. (Note, not lease, rent. Most of the time, they can jack up your rent year over year as much as they like. I have locked-in rackspace for my servers for five years... as far as I can tell, I could not lock in the space rent for more than one.)

But yeah, I would totally have bought into a mobile home park if it had more of a 'condo' ownership model where the land was owned in common.
Not everyone has the same criteria for what content they want to read. Nor does it really help the world for all HN visitors to read the same content.

Would love to see ideas that broke from the model of a single ranked list: let folks tune their personal penalty amounts and gravity; add random jitter to rankings and throw a couple random new stories onto each list; classify/cluster users by their votes, so people who vote for jokes or NSA articles or their neighbors' articles (automatically) see more of those things.

It's maybe a bit much to ask PG and co. to architect radical alternatives to HN, because HN is a handful as it is and, besides, I hear they have day jobs. It could be cool to let a thousand flowers bloom: publish most of the now-hidden ranking data (maybe not all, because it can be useful to obscure how anti-spam algorithms work); let users opt in to publishing anonymous votestreams for clustering, etc.; then let other folks use all of this to make their own homebrew HN frontends within certain limits.

I suppose that, too, is kind of a pipe dream, because opening HN up for people to easily build their own frontpages is far-from-trivial for both tech and policy reasons. But it's a nice pipe dream.
This seems to contradict earlier reports in this thread, so there's probably a lot of volatility due to Time removing what they see as fraud. I stand by my original prediction[0], however.

[0] http://predictionbook.com/predictions/22251 (I feel 80% certain but am correcting this to 70% for obvious reasons)
Import/export don't require a shutdown, but upgrading does.
Like you said, you cannot connect two nodes with different versions for now.

The versions will eventually be backward compatible (probably as soon as we'll be production ready). But for now, you will have a downtime.
Sorry for that, we'll try to hit the production ready milestone as soon as possible.
The point here isn't necessarily about the actual elasticity of the instances themselves, but the load balancer in front of them. With ELBs, they can only handle so much traffic so quickly. You literally cannot just point a million requests per second at it, even if you have 200 instances supporting it, and handle them all right off the bat. The ELBs themselves scale with the load, and currently, that scaling is slow during spikes.
Unless you are the one being hunted and have to stop your life to explain yourself and hope they get it before someone on FBI believes on it.
What every hardware startup needs to know about hardware startups is that if you need to read a blog post to know about these issues you better get someone onboard who has hardware experience.

Actually, someone who carefully studies Bunnie Huang's blog will end up with a better knowledge of these matters than many practicing EEs have.

Frankly, there's not really that much to know, other than "Don't pay full retail" and "Don't believe any promises that don't come with a FedEx tracking number and/or a report from your own incoming test facility." The rest of the details simply expand on those two admonitions.
Everyone has the right to voice their disagreement. It is, after all, a free country. I voiced my opinion, you're voicing yours. I am confused where my logic "fails" here.

The point I am making is that there is a community that is taking an outsized response to his very honest and open job posting about the type of person he wants on his team. As many people mentioned here, this isn't very different from other postings in other desired fields, like game design, acting, etc. or in many startups.

I will agree I am cynical but I am hardly misguided. I doubt anyone reading that job posting will think they are joining a highly lucrative, salary-competitive role. They are doing it because they love PA.

What if we wrote the "real" job descriptions of other desired positions like being an engineer at Apple, for example? Apple is notoriously known for working their employees. Where's the outrage?

You and the author of this post has every right to say the job posting is not competitive or in your opinion, unethical or exploitive. Where I find disagreement is the manner in which he argues his points. There's no need to use language that can be misconstrued as aggressive to makes his points, but he does anyway.
Your company will not hesitate one second to fire you if the output you produce is deemed less valuable than the input you need to function.

Labor hoarding is well established empirically.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-040.pdf
Try PivotalTracker - http://pivotaltracker.com
> How do I go about valuing myself in the market without wasting a ton of time?

It takes a ton of time, but interview people. Seriously, you would not believe what the applicant pool is like, even after resume filtering and phone screening. After interviewing 20-30 people you may have a very different perspective on which decile of value that you fall into. If you are in the top 10% of developers, then your value is the top 10% as well.
Cool. Sounds really hard though. To look realistic, the drops would have to merge into one another and also follow down previously established paths. It's pretty cool that you did this in just css but I think we have veered into WebGl territory.
If You Shop on Thanksgiving, You Are Part of the Problem
I've been flag free for over two (three?) years now. No big loss.
If you're familiar with the webcomic or the blog, you'd recognize that this is probably a reference to off-color language and humor that undoubtedly is typical of their work environment. This doesn't actually offend me at all, but the rest of the job posting does.
GrantTree is a pretty cool and relaxed environment. And it's occasionally offensive. That's part of not being a boring and uptight environment.
"When you have a single racial slur repeated 85 times even an idiot should know it's not conducive to decent conversation."

cough...
Almost none of the above matters (except the location).

Offers are made based on your past experience and interview, before an employer can do a full psychological profile to see if you're a good fit.

So number one priority is to have a good resume.

Then you just "feel out" the current rates based on what you currently make and taking in other signals like glassdoor, salary ranges in job postings in your area (jobs listed on AngelList are most transparent about that) and talking to your peers.

The best way to get good salary is to get multiple job offers and increase your demands with each successive offer.

Yes, it is time consuming, but much less than writing code and with much better long-term effect on your salary.
At risk of sounding pedantic, why would someone want to work at PA?
This sounds really good. I think the issue definitely needs more attention, because these kind of toxic environments are becoming the norm for the software and web development industries. I remember a conversation a manager had with me once because he felt I wasn't putting in enough overtime (being salaried and not being paid for overtime, I felt this was wrong). His issue was that the other developer who I worked with, who had no girlfriend or wife or kids to spend time with was staying until 9/10pm every night of the week and he lived a 2 hour drive away whereas I lived 45 minutes away by train or 20 by car.

The problem is if you refuse to put in the overtime, there will always be someone else who is willing and able to put the overtime in, as a result they are presented with more opportunities. The mentality in every development industry is if you are the first to leave, you'll most likely be the first on the chopping block if the business hits a rough spot. You are perceived as not being a team player, not working hard enough and putting pressure on your peers.

I understand overtime is part of the job. We as developers know when we signed up to be developers that there will be late nights, but when companies expect overtime as part of the normal job for no good reason other than to get more for less, that's not right. People are afraid to leave at 5.30pm on the dot at most companies, especially as the economy gets worse.

Sadly I'm in Australia, otherwise catching up and discussing the state of the industry would have been awesome. I'll most likely be in the US sometime next year though, my partner and I are currently trying to get some funding for an ambitious idea.