skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peak is more like 2600-3000 requests/sec on most weekdays. Remember that programming, being a profession, means our weekdays are significantly busier than weekends (as you can see here: https://www.quantcast.com/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc).

It's almost all over 9 servers, because 10 and 11 are only for meta.stackexchange.com, meta.stackoverflow.com, and the development tier. Those servers also run around 10-20% CPU which means we have quite a bit of headroom available. Here's a screenshot of our dashboard taken just now: http://i.stack.imgur.com/HPdtl.png We can currently handle the full load of all sites (including Stack Overflow) on 2 servers...not 1 though, that ends badly with thread exhaustion.

We could add web servers pretty cheaply; these servers are approaching 4 years old and weren't even close to top-of-the-line back them. Even current generation replacements would be several times more powerful, if we needed to go that route.

Honestly the only scale-up problem we have is SSD space on the SQL boxes due to the growth pattern of reliability vs. space in the non-consumer space. By that I mean drives that have capacitors for power loss and such. I actually just wrote a lengthy email about what we're planning for storage on one of our SQL clusters...perhaps I should echo it verbatim as a blog post? I'm not sure how many people care about that sort of stuff outside our teams.

Nick Craver - Stack Exchange Sysadmin & Developer
By way of a friend-of-a-friend being one of the TNG writers, I was given a pretty cool explanation for what happened with Wesley. Upshot: It was the writers' strike.

What happened was this: The TNG team had regular meetings where the writers and producers got together and reviewed the state of the series - what kinds of scripts and stories they were looking for and what was in the pipeline and what sort of course corrections they wanted to see. At one such meeting the producers said "we've got this character Wesley but we haven't really DONE anything with him - the audience doesn't know much about him. We'd really like to see some stories that let us connect more with that character." Then the dozen writers all went home with that thought in mind: let's get to know Wesley! And how do you "get to know a character better" on a Trek show? Have him save the ship! So the following week, a dozen writers all submitted their own independent "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.

...and right after that the writers' strike happened and nobody could write any NEW scripts, so to keep the series going they had to film and show any decent scripts they already had handy, far too many of which (by pure chance) featured Wesley saving the ship. If they had had a choice, they would have filmed fewer of those scripts at all, sent a few back for rewrites, and staggered them out much farther apart between runs of episodes in which a little kid DOESN'T manage to make everyone else on the ship look stupid or redundant.
Kenton Varda's (Protobuf and Cap'n Proto inventor) LAN party-optimized house
I agree but it depends what you want the surface for. If you don't care about using it for outdoor stuff like sports, kids playing, picnics, etc., then ivy is totally the way to go. Periwinkle is nice. The ultimate in hardy and tenacious but also potentially invasive is English ivy. Not sure what to grow in warmer climates but visit a garden centre and you'll be set.
Is there any way of getting this to work with Syncthing or BitTorrent Sync so I don't have to use a 3rd party server at all?
These video game players just won $5 million
Forget SK and MO for the moment: how about San Francisco? It's got some of the highest population density in the country (18K people per sq mile), which is 208 times the density of MO. But the city government of SF is more than happy to pass on the buck to ATT, with its shitty "Uverse".
Bitcoin currently is very good at eliminating counterparty risk and providing anti-censorship for payments. Many people are hoping this leads to other benefits like low transaction fees, micropayments and privacy. The blockchain doesn't seem like the best solution for these other features but it may provide a foundation for innovation. I have hope that new layers will be built on top of bitcoin to solve these issues (see open transactions for example).
I was in IT 30 years ago, and this was never the attitude. What's different today:

1. we know a heluva lot more about human factors design

2. we have a heluva lot more excess computer power that can be devoted to human factors
Well you can look at how the US has done in the middle east for an example of the economic cost of asymmetric warfare. Though I generally agree with your point that it's not going to work out well for the invaded country either unless another state actor comes to their aid. It's also worth noting that the French Resistance was considered important not just for the acts of sabotage and intelligence it gave the allies as they advanced but also in the rapid growth of the FFI after the allies invaded.
This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal. This is a big enough issue in Australia that we've had retailer associations complain about it on occasion. Overseas money transfer is not at all difficult on a consumer level.
The bike is the starship of the past and it is still a starship. You might try riding a bike around SF. It is an amazing super power.

Update: dalke above wrote "I thought it was going to end up that the author decided to ride a bike around the city. The starship of the past is still a starship." You seemed to ask for clarification about when you talked about a starship from the past. You didn't. dalke did. I clarified what he meant. You should reread this thread, take a step back and climb out of your own head. Read.
https://imgur.com/ZGi6NzX Perfect
Also that BTC has no chargebanks, fraud detection etc. Once its gone from your account its gone.
I think this is partially due to the informality that many GitHub users tend to have with respect to managing their projects.

It's rare to see a GitHub-hosted project that offers proper releases, proper planning for those releases, proper documentation, and the organization and project management efforts that enable such things.

The lack of such basic project management structure leads to projects that see very erratic development, or outright abandonment. Many GitHub-hosted projects are barely more than a hobby, rather than an ongoing concern. Their code may be somewhat usable, but it's rarely comparable to what we see from more organized projects.
> ...

> Combined these rules force municipalities to compete with for-profit corporations, but with none of the benefits of being a municipality.

> ...

What an incompetent and one-sided summary of the laws! After reading all of these, point-by-point, all I am left with is the impression that these are all good laws, and are good for the fairness of the market. Why the hell should municipalities get kick-ins that are not afforded to the businesses?

Keep in mind, I came in knowing that most of these laws are very one-sided! So, to have such an effect...

Is the author getting funding from the big telco and cableco?
That was exactly my thought when I read the comment. I would be very curious to know if I'm missing something here, but it seems obvious to me that if a publicly owned company can do something better and cheaper (cheaper not only just for these people but also for the taxpayer, I don't know if that's the case here) then how is that a bad thing?
ctrl + q very appropriately quits the application. If this came as a ticket to me, I'd close it as working as expected.
6 events that spooked the market in 2014
This is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment may be entirely appropriate - one of your responsibilities is not to make such mistakes, you failed at it, you're fired.
Bandwidth doesn't grow on trees :)

Verizon's position is that simply adding more cards within the free peering agreement will make it even more unbalanced in level 3's favour, hence their suggestion that level 3 pay for bandwidth through a different agreement.
Albumarium: Beautiful Stock Photos
City Lights and Countryside
Generating Code Documentation with Pycco – Real Python
Another alternative is confirmation fatigue.

As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again.

Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession.

Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that everyone eventually memorizes.

But even today, Windows 7 only makes you click that one button in UAC, and most people probably do it without even thinking about it.
Actually, they are changing the laws and adding regulations.

And time is money. I don't have enough of either.
Have you considered using Draft? They have a "Ask a Pro" button that will give you reviewer for a modest fee: http://docs.withdraft.com/#uber-for-copy-editing
I merely pointed out one recent example that I could demonstrate quickly, because it happened to involve some of my comments and those of somebody else who happened to express similar ideas.

It isn't the only instance, of course. Mis-moderation is quite frequent here. Some of the discussion under this submission is a good example of that. I see I have once again been targeted by people who find it easier to downvote than to bother discussing the matter at hand like adults.

I wish that people here were more willing to discuss stuff that they might happen to disagree with, rather than engaging in censorship.
IMO the fact that we have multiple examples of these kinds of accident-prone key pairs does partially exonerate whoever did this particular F6/F7 bit.
Lazily converting UTF-8 (or latin1) to UTF-16 as needed is indeed an old trick employed by many string classes.

It's even a bit surprising that a codebase as popular and performance-critical as SpiderMonkey hadn't picked up such as a simple and high-yield optimization several years ago.

By the way, other implementations are even lazier: the string is kept in its original encoding (utf-8 or 7-bit ascii) until someone calls a method requiring indexed access to characters, such as the subscript operator. At this point, you convert to UTF-16 to for O(1) random access.

Indexing characters in a localized string is rarely useful to applications and often denotes a bug (did they want the N-th grapheme, glyph or code-point?). It's best to use higher-level primitives for collating, concatenating and splitting localized text.

Granted, a JavaScript interpreter must remain bug-by-bug compatible with existing code, thus precluding some of the most aggressive optimizations.
Marc Gravell added in the ability to put in pretty much any custom type without adding any dependency weight about a month ago. You can see the commit here: https://github.com/StackExchange/dapper-dot-net/commit/e26ee...

Look towards the end at the tests for example of how to hook up a custom type (it's pretty simple).
Dammit. Edited. Thank you! :)
And then conspiracy theorists latch onto this kind of shit, but believe that it must be malicious silliness...

Why didn't Reagan respond immediately? Well, he was waiting to hear from Chancellor Gorkon that the KAL flight had been successfully beamed aboard and was en route to Pluto, of course... Clearly they'd have their shit together better so it couldn't have been a 23-year old rebooting all the computers accidentally and wiping out hours of critical work -- that would just be ridiculous...
The difference between the Forbes article and the Economist article is the Economist article cites facts and figures.

Economies tend to be more complicated than you think. For example: ATMs may have led to an increase in banking activity, and a perception of greater value for bank accounts, which may have actually led to a greater demand for local branches and thank tellers.
I never said that the bike is the starship. I said that Uber is today's starship. Tomorrow's starship will be a starship I hope.
Addendum: the interesting takeaway to me, from the Verizon data, is how over provisioned the rest of the network is. Operating well below capacity. What piece of municipal infrastructure is built with that kind of headroom?
Does a copy editing service like Draft do fact checking too?
Looks awesome! Thank you kind internet stranger!
Creative Honeycomb Drawer Dividers
In defense of whiteboard coding
Function first, failsafes second. Or fifth. Or twentieth.
PEP 471 – os.scandir() function – a better and faster directory iterator
So in other words, taxi drivers should not be afraid of Uber.

Thank you for making that clear. :)

Please go tell them that. I'm sure that will put them at ease.
You know what's totally plausible? That hitting F6 and F7 prompted for confirmation, but using the same prompt - and he just hit "Y", "Return" as he'd done 1000 times before (just like everybody does with the UAC dialog in Windows 7 today), and that bit didn't make it into the story because it's totally irrelevant to the point he's making. Heck, it probably wasn't even F6 or F7. If he's a normal human, he likely can't remember.
Thankfully, Chrome has a built-in feature to prevent this from happening (on OSX at least). Just go to Chrome > Warn before Quitting and make sure there's a checkmark next to the option.

Now, if you accidentally press Cmd + Q, it should prompt a "Hold Cmd + Q to Quit" instead of actually quitting.
I wish SSH had a narrow kind of delegation capability... E.g. if instead of ssh-agent having access to the key, it used the key to sign a tuple like {time-limit, [host-ip], ephemeral_pubkey}, then forgot the private key, and used the ephemeral key to actually authenticate to hosts— but they'd only accept it from the listed host ip set and during the specified time limit.

Obviously if the attacker has access long enough they'll capture the passphrase and private key eventually, but it would be nice to narrow the window.

Right now the best you can probably do is use a gpg smartcard with the ssh-agent/gpg-agent shim stuff, (random tutorial here: https://github.com/herlo/ssh-gpg-smartcard-config/blob/maste...)
Different approaches to responsibility and how to treat others will kill a partnership; Different TV tastes, not so much.

Perhaps I listed way too much TV. The broader (and bold) hypothesis here is that our passions and peeves play the strongest role in determining success of close working relationships.
The homepage implies they do more than just serve booze:

At Hackers Bar, you can observe live application and product development by our current team of hackers. We can also take orders to create systems for daily duties, new businesses and applications that will make your life more convenient.

The opening hours seem pretty limited:

The events run four times a week — the bar only opens at 8pm on weeknights.

At least it's located in Roppongi:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview?ll=35.664375,139.730543&...
Interestingly, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) introduced an amendment that the House passed banning such local broadband efforts, which require explicit approval by the FCC: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/house-republicans-are-killi...

If startups had a Chamber of Commerce equivalent, as Chattanooga's Enoch Elwall has been proposing, our community could effectively push back in a unified political voice through a local organization.
I have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory.

Anyone using the app would hate me.
There's always the RequestPolicy plugin, though it does not appear quite as nuanced.
I think the exodus from Slashdot has been beneficial. It has shown that the various problems there are in fact severe enough to drive a large number of users away.

It may not be an ideal situation, of course, but it's better than the problems continuing to build under the surface, and users remaining miserable.

Now that the discontent is much more visible, there's at least some hope that real improvement may just happen there. That would not have been the case if people had remained, even if they were merely just vocal about their discontent, without acting upon it in some measurable way.
but they lose 100k or more they paid for their medallion. and will have huge competition instead of a monopoly.

on the other hand, uber price will only go up. until only the rich is allowed to be driven in the city.
Cryptocurrencies are no different in that regard.

The maximum amount of each cryptocurrency is hardcoded into their design, but nothing stops people from "printing" new cryptocurrencies. There's bitcoin, litecoin, peercoin, darkcoin, namecoin, primecoin, and of course dogecoin... Gimme a few hours and I could cook up xiphiascoin in your honor.

And when something happens that makes people migrate en masse from one *coin to another (perhaps a security flaw in the reference implementation), you might wake up to find that your old coins are now worth less than a Zimbabwe dollar.
>I actually just wrote a lengthy email about what we're planning for storage on one of our SQL clusters...perhaps I should echo it verbatim as a blog post? I'm not sure how many people care about that sort of stuff outside our teams.

I'm sure some DBAs and devs here would find it interesting.
Link to paper: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140721/ncomms5449/full/nco...
IMO cleary he is not telling us the entire story.
Hello Market Economics Fairy. Shift perspective a bit: What's one step above the concept of money? Any government (or in Hong Kong, any bank) can print FIAT currency, arcades trade cash for gameplay tokens, parking structures sell vouchers to park a car for some set period of time (which employees might get for free if they work in the building). What establishes the value of each, beyond trust, reputation, and demand? How could someone go about designing a wallet full of wallets, that could hold any type of money from any country or organization, where no value was established implicitly, but that simply allowed any organization (or individual) the technology to print money that could not be counterfeit? What is a dollar bill other than the signature of the US government? What is a Euro other than the signature of the EU? What is the exact value of the signature of Michael Jordan? What if your wallet, instead of holding money, simply held any type of signature?
The one that I did only a few months ago was something like

$ cp -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
$ (run some commands to verify copy did what I wanted)
$ rm -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory

Of course, all I had meant to do was delete `path/to/some/directory`, but I just pressed 'up' in my history and switched `cp` to `rm`. Of course I hit Ctrl-C in an instant, but my FS was already hosed...
Terminal Value
http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index....
That sounds like typical CEO BS speak.
Rickmote Gadget Hijacks Google Chromecast
My team would definitely be interested to read that. Please do!
Ahhh....the days of sharp tools, no failsafes, and young programmers or admins.

I recall that time I wrote a batch manager for the VAX 11/780 at Caltech High Energy Physics. It consisted of a program to monitor the batch queue and start jobs as scheduled ("BATch MANager", or "BATMAN"), and a program for users to submit jobs ("Run Overnight Batch INput", or "ROBIN").

The configuration file for BATMAN was stored in /etc/batman.

During development, I occasionally had to "rm /etc/batman". Of course, out of habit, as soon as I typed "/etc/" my fingers would automatically type "passwd", and once I did not catch this in time. Oops. It happened to be a Sunday morning at around 7AM, and I had to call the other admin, who handled backups, to come in and restore that file. He was annoyed.

The second time I did this, he was pretty pissed.

The third time, I fortunately had been working at the terminal we had in the machine room, and managed to shut down power to the machine before the write buffers were flushed, and the file was OK after fsck. I didn't have to deal with an angry co-admininstrator that time. Just angry physicists.

The other admin (Norman Wilson, in case anyone knows him or he reads HN) then made a link named /etc/safe_from_tzs to /etc/passwd to stop my nonsense once and for all.

That worked until the first time I wanted to overwrite /etc/batman instead of rm it.

That led to a cron job that maintained a copy of /etc/passwd in a separate file, and periodically checked to see if it were missing or misformatted, and restored it if so.
This is now on the Yahoo Tumbler:

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-fl...
I know that to be the case, I was cribbing something I read from Moxie on the F-Droid Forum where he presented his view of Cyanogen, which was pretty inaccurate.
It happens automatically when you use the same account on multiple SE sites.
You might be surprised. What I observed during that time was that a lot of, if not most, senior people were clueless about what computers were actually doing. The potential "reach" of that intern might just not have occurred to people.

And we still have national security / diplomacy disasters resulting from relatively low level people having access to vital computer systems beyond anybody's imagination.
I don't think he'll be in the Bay Area by then, but I'll make sure to tell him about Play-i. I might show up and play with the bots though :)
TIL more competition and lower barriers to entry drive prices up.
Kenton didn't invent protobufs- he was the maintainer.

The house is still amazing.
Remember that malloc is a least-common-denominator interface. It needs to work everywhere. In a lot of places, it could be hard to justify the complexity.

Anyway, on glibc systems, you can use malloc_usable_size. On Windows systems (Windows gets the heap very right), you can use the HeapSize function.
The idea that Rails' popularity came from managers hearing buzzwords doesn't match my recollection of history. Rails' early support came from backend web developers who hated working in enterprise Java frameworks. Ruby on Rails offered them a pleasant and easy-to-jump-into alternative to that environment.

I remember Pythonistas at the time raised similar complaints about how Python already had all this stuff — but the thing is, Rails did a nice job of packaging it up in a way that was easy for disaffected Java jockeys to get into and start having fun, while the Python approach at the time was more along the lines of "take this thing and that thing — or maybe one of these five other things, we can't decide — then make this other piece yourself and stick them together with chewing gum."

Rails did come to prominence largely through social channels rather than technical superiority, but it wasn't a marketing-driven hype train targeted at nontechnical managers — it appealed to hackers who wanted to have fun but did not already have a homebrew Perl stack at the ready.

That's how I remember it, anyway.
Declassified footage shows 1st ever nuclear explosion in space
Curiosidades sobre Apple – Teciber
Firing the intern means that the story you just spun to your boss about how this all occurred won't be contradicted by the intern and you might not get fired.