skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps not the best choice of problem to use as an example - a Database server disk is bad problem has one real solution, and will cause a whole flood of seemingly unrelated problems.

Knowing immediately that it's the server disk (more realistically a raid array going into recovery mode) will save you a lot of time and effort troubleshooting what would appear as a sporadic slow response issue. There's dozens of potential causes for poor response times, of which a raid array in recovery mode is just one.

And once you know it's a raid array in recovery mode, you can then take immediate action, something you can't do if you are still busy troubleshooting a sporadic response slowness issue.

I feel that ultimately, there's no problem with monitoring for high level symptoms, but they should not be the goal state of monitoring. The goal should be to monitor all possible causes of problems to limit the troubleshooting the SA has to do at 3am when woken by a page.

Plus, you should be using a tool which properly silences high level symptoms if there's a problem with a system which is clearly identified as a parent. That is to say, a server being down will silence "db is not responding" alerts.
Hi,
I'm applying this batch.

Is there a way to print-preview my application to see how it'll look after submission? I'm mainly concerned about some of my answers which look lengthy. And does YC have bias against explanatory lengthy answers if they add substance to the meat?

I've read somewhere that each partner gets only 2-mins to spend on an appln. With a 1.5 minute video and two founder profiles (which they seemed to have made out separately this time) how do they even skim through these apps?

Or is it the alumni who reads deep and based on their comments (say if we are already pizza profitable, yes we are!) our app gets bumped up in priority queue of partners?
> I don't subscribe to the calories in < calories out = weight loss philosophy.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the laws of thermodynamics either.
And the problem is that Socialists use the word "Socialist" because they believe the Free Market leads to centralized power and monopolists enforcing their viewpoint of the world upon everyone else.

I've talked to _real_ socialists, and I do believe myself to be ultimately a free market capitalist kind of guy... at least by default.

But unfortunately, the world isn't a simple place, and there are simple mathematical proofs in Game Theory that prove pure liassez-faire capitalism to be wrong. The free market fails in cases as simple as "The Stag Hunt", so it is ultimately the point of a capitalist government to intervene in any of the documented cases where the Free Market fails to work.

No anarcho-capitalist has ever given me a clear answer on how Cell Phones would work today if it weren't for government regulation enforcing the 2.4GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi, and also enforcing the licensing of spectrum. I like the fact that it is illegal to disturb other people's cell phones.

The Licensing of Spectrum is neither socialist, nor pure anarcho-capitalist. It is a mechanism Americans invented to avoid a market-failure cornercase. Without licensing of spectrum, competitors would create cell phones that disturbed cell phones from other companies. Without government intervention, it is impossible to create property-rights and "ownership of spectrum" that leads to today's cell phones.

And all anarcho-capitalists I know of also understand that a consistent viewpoint of "property rights" need to exist for any form of captialism to work. If you're like other anarcho-capitalists I've talked to, you'll go on about Dispute resolution organization and how they're different from judges.

The main problem is that if two Dispute resolution organization have different viewpoints on property rights (ie: one likes the concept of licensed spectrum and another one doesn't), then property rights ultimately fail to exist at all, and then capitalism breaks down entirely.

The socialist approach to solving the problem is to have the Government own all cell phone companies. This is _very_ distinct from the American solution, where the Federal Government created the concept of "spectrum" that different companies can then buy and sell to each other.

So seeing the world as "Socialist vs Anarcho-capitalist" is extremely naiive, and absolutely frustrating to those who like to discuss policy matters. The world is not binary, there are many different solutions to a single problem. Calling everything you disagree with as "socialism" simplifies arguments into a "them vs us" situation and stigmatizes debate.

Honest, learn to call _real_ socialist things as socialist. Not every single government intervention is a socialist plot.
The real trick, in my experience, is to treat every page as an actionable item, even if, no, especially if the action is to change alerting thresholds.

Doing this has taken us, in the past, from 400 pages a day to under 100 a day, over the course of a week's worth of effort.
Google invests $500M in VR startup Magic Leap
Why and How You Should Support Startups?
We use a variety of escalation techniques. As mentioned down thread, pagers are actually very unreliable. Some SREs carry pagers and mobiles. Most SREs carry phones with escalation via SMS, an actual telephone call from an automated system (after a delay), and/or escalation via a network connection over the data network. Phone calls are way way more reliable than pagers.

Unacknowledged pages escalate to a secondary oncaller (e.g. if the oncall is out of range/in a tunnel, under a bus) and tertiary depending on configuration (and then it loops, or falls to another rotation, again depending on configuration). The code and services that do escalations is deliberately and carefully vetted to have minimal overlap with production systems (who's failure they might be alerting people to).
Satiety is a completely different issue. I have no problem with those who differentiate, but there are legitimately a lot of people who think the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to human biology.
>examples of extremely successful entrepreneurs that were known to be extremely kind?

It's kind of hard to say how kind people are without knowing them but the good Arthur of Market Basket seems an interesting recent example

( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/market-basket-f... ).

Also Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines perhaps. I don't know if you'd consider Warren Buffett an entrepreneur but he's done well and has a good reputation.
The hurricane comparison is a good one - but presumably some of the people who did buy batteries did so because they saw the warning on the shopping bag - and would not if the bag was blank.

I am pretty sure the lessons of crowd behaviour is that the difference between mass riots and calm management is to be measured at the margin. So almost any drills that can prevent a nation breakin down have a lot of value, which is my not very hidden agenda here.

I am also fairly sure that fire drills seem not to evolve with time and experience, makng it hard to believe that just because we cannot measure how effective a drill is in staging off national disaster - the essence has not changed in twenty years by my memory. Despite a down thread comment it seems that preparedness is considered a good thing in itself by fire services.
Dienstag iOS App Development Postmortem
I think Manning's choice of Assange also demonstrates a lack of 'due regard'.
Singular they is one thing, specific-person they is another. I haven't actually checked, but I suspect that most-if-not-all of those historical instances are referring to a person in abstract, rather than a known person of unknown gender.

Regardless, I'm not necessarily expecting to win this usage fight, but for the amount of effort it costs me, I don't mind throwing in anyway.
Product Video for the New $2.75M Patek Philippe Watch Is Most Incredible
How long did it take these three different fields to fully separate and have their own concentrations in universities? That may give us a timeline on how long it could be in the computer science, software engineering/architecture (does such a concentration exist involving architecture?), and software development methodology (project management... which is almost no existent in academia) fields.
Show HN: jss, a jq-like CL tool for manipulating JSON files using CSS selectors
Sometimes it's nice to skim a transcript when a video can't be watched or when deciding whether to invest the time into watching the video. Some way of hiding the banner would be useful here.
The problem is measuring calories out. Often it is recommended to use an average value for your build and call it good. But this is not a very good model imho, and involves a lot of guesswork.
If you remember in 2010 China hacked into Google's infrastructure and gained access to the interface and databases set up for US intelligence surveillance.

China can and does filter content at a packet level and TLS 'strong encryption' doesn't protect you when CAs are both owned by the government, proprietary Chinese drivers run on Operating Systems, the large companies provide hardware backdoor access to the government (US bans Lenovo for government use for this reason), and networking companies likewise provide all hands access.

Just like any other internet service, China can filter FB/Google content directly - though it is easier with partnership and alas FB/Google has allied themselves with the US.
What do you think of things like ostatus and technologies around http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SWA...?

There are a couple of considerations for me:

3rd party (particularly commercial entities) vs personal ownership of user data and identity seems like a nail which is quickly coming into focus a) with the ways that people are wanting to use social media and b) in light of recent privacy and monitoring revelations.

The kind of use cases above in SWAT, combined with p2p network effects seem to offer a glimmer of far more powerful functionality than any closed platform, however large, could ever keep up with (just as we see open source eat proprietary competitors through sheer scale and subsequent pace of innovation).

My instinct is that the federated technologies suffered from being ahead of their time and will get picked up again at some point.
I get good mileage out of a similar Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.caramellab...
Hey thanks a lot for this, will check them out. Pitch went great!
as mentioned in another comment this only works if you know the height. Your example is exactly the issue that the original comment was talking about.

Your intention is to align both centers. Why do we need to be dealing with 'top' and 'margin-top' to achieve this? It is a poor way to describe your intention.

It's much easier to say:

box1.center == box2.center

The cassowary solver allows you to specify exactly your intentions in relation to the edges and centers of boxes. It's easier to reason about and doesn't require the bag of weird tricks that are needed in CSS (eg. margin: 0 auto; to center??? wtf?)
How I completed 6 MOOCs
Listened to this 3x today, this is an amazing insight an helped me with my pitch today. We got an offer: ]
Logs are typically fairly unstructured and complex to parse. For whitebox monitoring (i.e. where you have access to the code and the code can report state) you are far better off exporting state in a very well defined format to minimise parsing overhead. It also tends to make you a bit more focused on defining the characteristics of the parameter you are monitoring.

You want blackbox monitoring (for close-to-user experience) AND whitebox monitoring (which provide diagnostics of internal state for debugging). True blackbox monitoring is often pretty unreliable so you are usually better of alerting on whitebox reported state of end user perceivable variables, e.g. HTTP error codes, latency and so on.

State of the art is to report a staggering amount of data about the internal state of a server. I mean a lot. 10s to 100s of times the number of parameters you are probably used to seeing.
Just because it's related and it's one of my favorites, Another rant about "real world" software developement: http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
I think it's a three-part problem. One, it is a flow problem, and by removing congestion at one bottleneck you mostly deliver traffic more efficiently to the next bottleneck. Actually increasing traffic flow is much more expensive than the cost of any single project. Second, over time, you end up with induced demand -- if you actually do get rid of all the congestion, longer commutes will become more practical, and traffic will increase until the marginal-next-commuter is discouraged from adding his car to the scrum.

Third, economic arguments are a little dicey for driving because driving is filled with externalized costs, subsidies, overoptimistic assumptions, and dependent utility. Driving creates noise and pollution (and it appears that the pollution is more deadly than crashes) but drivers don't pay that cost. There's personal crash risk, but people tend to assume that they are careful drivers and hence less likely to crash than the norm. The cost of the roads themselves is currently subsidized from the general fund; it's not a huge external cost, but it's a cost. Driving also creates (perceived) danger to people biking and walking; that tends to encourage them to also drive for their own (perceived) safety, even when they otherwise would not, and the congestion costs of driving also delay bus transit, making it less useful (it's already slower because of all the stops; traffic jams make it slower yet).
Measurement is a different problem altogether.

Again, my problem is not with speciality diets or finding good habits / regulating eating through macronutrient partitioning. I get it; trust me. But these diets show few benefits beyond "tricking" the person into eating fewer calories, period. There are other variables, but not when it comes to pure weight loss. Thermodynamics cannot be defeated by human biology. Otherwise we could hook up people who are not subject to these laws to treadmills with generators on them, and bam. Free power for the world.
This is definitely the biggest problem in where I'm working now. We have a lot of monitoring via Wily Introscope, but the biggest thing is relating failures of different components together. E.g. one service layer fails so some queue gets backed up so some application server starts timing out.

The amount of noise that starts coming in when there is some major outage (say some mainframe system fails) is ridiculous.

Right now where I work they solve it by throwing manpower at the problem tbh.

It takes a lot of work by the application owners all working together to really get a coherent picture of how the services are interdependant, but the applications are so large, old code, etc - normal problems I guess a lot of companies face, that its almost impossible to find people who have a complete end to end understanding of most transcations.

Side note: my only monitoring experience is with Wily - anyone have opinions to hare on it?
It might be time for software engineers to unionize
Good! I look forward to seeing the lack of method applied by Newsweek shown in court documents. It was a phenomenally irresponsible thing for them to publish, and I hope they pay for it.

edit: a friend pointed out that I should probably say that I write for nbc news so I'm kind of trashing the competition. This is really just my personal distaste speaking, though.
Aweber Affiliate Program Is a SCAM Don’t Send Them Traffic
I'd argue that what the person desperately needs is not to be told they are wrong, but rather to have someone patient listen to them figure that out for themselves.
The Scion xB isn't discontinued; it's expected to see a redesign for the 2015 model. Also, the Kia Soul is a very "azteky" car introduced more recently with some success.
What about utility? Do people or businesses have an increasingly apparent incentive to own their data and online identity?
I see it as over thinking simple stuff. Maybe I think about performance too much but constructing a dictionary and then defining functions to do simple signature thing is imo just over designing things. Too much abstraction for expressing a simple concept. Performance aside, you need to go find the dictionary once you see code like that while with chain of if-else statements it's right there in front of your eyes.

As to 0 and 1 thing... Python has C'ish boolean (basically an integer type). Using True and False as numbers is completely standard as PEP 285 indicates. I tend to agree that maybe here using True/False is a bit more natural but it really is type-purity nitpick in my view.

Could you point out which part of PEP8 the code in my original post violates? While I don't really like a lot of currently popular style I see a lot of values in following the PEP's and long established conventions.
Love the article. I'm a university student, bored with the lab and into coding SSRS reports as a job. Luckily, I enjoy my work, constantly fighting the SQL queries and arranging the datasets in ever complex fashions the client needs, or decide they want to change drastically.

I found though that my enjoyment in code is I like the challenges I face, not how I got there. I have tools in front of me, that may be good or may be bad, but it doesn't matter. Using these tools, learning some tricks, or asking (even helping) others is what I find enjoyable. I enjoy the code because I challenge myself. A client will give me a new task, but ultimately it's me who has accepted it. Make the best of it.
I've been a loyal subscriber for years, also. But, I'd say that for every one or two great issues, there's one that I just can't get through. It must be whomever is editing that month.
"For me it is the same as forcing people not to use sharpen edges on knifes for their own good. Yes, it is better in the sense that people wont cut themselves with knifes."

People cut themselves far worse trying to use a knife that's too dull for their task than a knife that's too sharp. Sharp knives are only safer when you're not using the knife (more likely to be cut by a sharp knife in a drawer than a dull knife in a drawer, &c).
An incredible amount of engineering for what's ultimately an obsolete plaything of the super rich.
How to (and Not To) Do What You Love – Dyske.com
"...you might love photography but photography as a business might not be viable for you. Instead of giving it up and getting a job as a salesman to finance photography as a hobby, think deeper about why you love photography, what aspects of it you love. ... After all, photography is a relatively modern invention. What would you have done if you were born 200 years ago when photography did not exist? You cannot be so inflexible."
> Does anyone know if the statfs() syscall is what df uses? There is no call to statfs() in the df source I found here [1].

Yes, it looks like df uses that:

# strace -e statfs df /tmp
statfs("/tmp", {f_type="EXT2_SUPER_MAGIC", f_bsize=4096, f_blocks=4128490, f_bfree=4084457, f_bavail=3874742, f_files=1048576, f_ffree=1048564, f_fsid={1972973117, 2058115910}, f_namelen=255, f_frsize=4096}) = 0
...
“Did you mean?” experience in Ruby
Train Your Roommate
"Plaything" is generous. A yacht is a plaything (and far more functional). An expensive watch is a status symbol -- the "classy" way of wearing a sign that says, "I can burn [thousands/millions] on something pointless. That's how rich I am."
Is there a way to create a self-contained Pandoc? Surely it doesn't use the entirety of GHC. I've seen this done with some Python programs which are distributed with a stripped down Python interpreter and stdlib.
You win some you lose some. Hacker News is literally 100% spam, that's what a link aggregator is by definition. Some stick and some get called out.

Something gets called spam just because you post it yourself, but if "someone else" posts it then it isn't spam anymore. Magic! Just like your past submissions

I've been on these boards lurking for many many years and I've seen posts come and go, all of them are what you would call spam. Just people pitching their products
CreateProcess is complex because spawning a new process is essentially complex.

The brilliance of fork/exec is in the realization that the tasks you do during process creation are the same as the tasks you do during normal execution, and therefore you can just re-use those functions. For example, CreateProcess has a parameter for the current directory; fork/exec doesn't need one because you just use chdir on the child side of fork.

The proliferation of exec* is indeed baffling, but these are just dumb variants trying to make the exec call itself "easier." They don't reflect any essential complexity.
Doesn't Locomotive help you acquire new clients?
I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My start-up (also roughly a CMS) is considering going open source to increase awareness and the size of our target market. We were also considering continuing to make money via a hosted solution, although their revenue numbers don't get me too excited about the prospect.
We are the Zappos/Newegg of 3D Printing
There's no rightful place for a multiple-day build that hasn't been finished yet, though. You can't build complex stuff if you have to start from scratch every day.

The solution when I was a kid was a loft bed, it really saved a lot of space in my fairly small bedroom.
Well, Condorcet and Borda do fundamentally different things with people's preferences.

There's no real way to simplify it beyond "here's a set containing the rank order of every voter" if you don't know in advance what election method will be used. In fact, you might argue that the rank order is insufficient, and you also need to know whether the voter would approve of each option in an approval vote, or 0-10 rankings for range voting, or whatever.

Condorcet cares most of all about people's preferences between pairs of options, so that's why you'd summarize it as a matrix made out of those pairwise preferences. Borda cares most of all how many times something is "first place", "second place", and so on, and cares nothing about the pairwise rankings; Borda advocates claim that pairwise rankings will just confuse the issue.

(Opinion: I happen to believe that Borda is garbage for anything where politics is involved. It might be okay for the kind of contests where it's in use, like the baseball MVP or Eurovision, except those are probably secretly political too.)
Leave the world better than you found it. Amongst the madness of silly business requirements and broken APIs, there are always opportunities for your code to stand out as a small piece of beauty to your fellow developers.
Startup school is the reason I have an awesome cofounder (now working together 4-yrs) – thanks Jessica!
being broken does not mean it's the cause of the virus industry.
The Morphological Evolution of the Violin
"this is what I wanted" - Yukihiro Matz Matsumoto, creator of Ruby
https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/516798113676148736
It's $40 for a tiny OLED screen with a microcontroller attached to it, in a moulded plastic case...? I wonder if there's a specific name for this apparently recent trend of products that are ostensibly for people wanting to learn electronics, but are really more consumer-focused toys and priced far beyond what they actually cost.

0.66" OLEDs are in the <$3 range, the MCU used in there is <$4, and I don't think any of the other components are any more expensive than that. PCBs are extremely cheap too.

When one can buy a fully-functioning GSM phone (complete with OLED display) for a fraction of the price, no wonder it makes electronics look like an expensive hobby...
> One-time bindings – by prefixing an expression with "::", it will only be interpolated once, and then no longer watched.

Does anyone else find the DSL(s) in Angular to be maddening?
I think we've exhausted this branch of this topic, but I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to discuss this further on other Snowden articles and I look forward to doing exactly that.