skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best method to track/monitor beta testers?
Hi,

I've been working on a project for the last 4 months (video streaming/web app) and we are coming very close to the point where we're looking for beta testers to do a few rounds of invite-only testing. Feedback is going to be very important over the next few months and I looking for a great ticketing system, place to log issues or make suggestions...I've been looking at customizing a few simple Wordpress systems as well as services like ticksy.

Any recommendations on a good platform to do this or some best practices in monitoring early beta testing?
I have over 25 years programming, have invented, marketed,and sold several products, have run teams, have significant IP on github, and I get treated like somebody with no experience with a BS resume.

Sure, I should get over myself, but I end up exhausted, we spend the day doing these stupid things instead of talking about what the job is and what I can do to help, and so on. Not to mention that I cannot remember the last time I had to delete a node from a red black time (grad school?), but I'm expected to be entirely fluent at that and potentially dozens of other things that I don't do, but no one can be arsed to ask me about the stuff I have done, because it's not relevant or something.

And, oh, give up 50K+ in salary because options.
Not sure about the rest of Europe but in the UK it's standard for Amazon and many other online places to keep your card details on file.

Halifax, a bank in the UK didn't require 3d secure though did encourage it. Recently I used a site I'd not used before and they declined the transaction on my credit card and sent me a SMS which I had to reply to in order to use my card at that site.
$90k is not good, especially for 1% in a 5 person firm. However, I wouldn't throw around numbers like $270k as if any developer off the street makes that in New York City. No firm, especially Bloomberg, is going to pay someone new to finance that.
I just find it hard to believe a bank can be absolved of any liability since fraud can still happen electronically, just like signatures are forged. Most Internet users aren't savvy enough to look for SSL or legit looking URLs. There's still the possibility of a MITM attack. Does case law actually allow credit card companies to shift liability just like that?
NPR's Terry Gross: Asking the Smart Questions (2000)
Anyplace.io – find remote jobs
The toxic person was hired by the CEO and predates his manager.

The toxic person was likely valuable early in the company's history (he's great at throwing together prototype-quality code), and that reputation makes him hard to fire.
16 Hair Myths You Need to Stop Believing
I've definitely seen the first - probably the first major performance issue that everyone runs into when using an ORM.

By "N rows", do you mean having a view that only renders a constant number of rows, but your database query returns an larger collection that's then filtered in Python code? That seems like an obvious bug that can be usually fixed with a LIMIT clause.
Hey there - author here. Somebody emailed me this thread. I'll just make a couple points:

1. Yes, I am biased toward determinism in this case. But that's largely because of the methodology used by proponents of indeterminism (I don't believe their conclusion necessarily follows from their data. In fact, I think it's an entirely unnecessary conclusion). Determinism is my default, unless a more convincing argument prevents itself.

That being said, if indeterminism is true, I'm fine with that - so long as "superposition" doesn't include mutually exclusive states. If the theory can avoid logical contradiction, then it's possible.

2. I'm fine with the MWI. However, I think it's unnecessary and have difficulty getting around Occam's razor in this situation. If the choice is between a) believing a practically-infinite set of real-universes exist (all requiring explanations) or b) remain skeptical for a more compelling theory preserving the simplicity of one universe, I'll take the latter. (Given enough time, the highest levels of abstraction about reality seem to be universally simple, so I'll hold out a bit longer)

3. I also have a difficult time accepting that there's logical proof that hidden variables don't exist. Mathematical proof (satisfying a particular, non-necessary set of mathematical theories) does not sufficiently qualify as logical proof. And, indeed, Bell's theorem has likely already been proven invalid.
I do not know my password. It is senseless to know it as it does not provide more entropy as the backup mechanism to retrieve the password.

To retrieve the password, I have to enter 4 fixed digits of my account number and my birth date. As I have quite unique name then also my birth date is not very hard to find.

That leaves 14 +/- 2 to 4 bits of entropy and makes it pointless to actually somehow keep track of the real password.

So I just generate a temporary password.

Edit: This is of course how my bank has implemented it. Your experience my possibly vary.
I've never heard of either of these projects. Context? What are they?
Modern Doom source ports like ZDoom and Zandronum even have a simplistic scripting language built in. It's called ACS, and was taken from Hexen.

http://zdoom.org/wiki/ACS

Granted, it's a very limited scripting language (up until recently it didn't even have support for dynamic strings), but I imagine it has served as a gateway to "real" programming languages for at least one mod-maker.
Also bonuses. They can easily be salary in London.
Is Go a particularly safe language (moreso than, say Python or Java)?
What's in your UX Toolbox?
If you haven't heard of them, you haven't used them, so why comment? If you want to know what they are, you could just as easily Google them as post.
>No wife means not only a lonely existence, but also no children to care for you in your old age. If that isn't failure, I don't know what is.

This line of thinking just seems juvenile to me. Do you really believe the pinnacle of human achievement (and the only one that matters) is being in a long term relationship and having children?
It's amazing how many people don't understand as simple a concept as supply and demand.

There are lots and lots of people not only qualified to be academics, but actively trying to break into the field. There is relatively little demand for academic work. While tenure track professors can earn a decently reliable income, the fact that it's possible (however unlikely) for a given Ph.D to get that level of job security fills thousands of grad students and Ph.D's with false hope. So, just like people trying to break into Hollywood, they race to the bottom to accept shittier and shittier adjunct jobs. This is the world's way of telling them that maybe they should go find something else to do for a living.

The only sustainable solutions will address the supply and demand issue:

1. Create more demand for academic work. For the sciences, this is actually a decent idea. I'm sure we could triple public spending on basic sciences and get enough socially useful return on it to justify the expenditure. A little harder to justify for the humanities.

2. Reduce the supply of academics. Produce fewer Ph.D's. Then the remaining Ph.D's will have the leverage to dictate better compensation, because they will be harder to replace.
> Python is Very, Very Slow compared to your database

I never actually tried to measure this, so I have 2 questions:

1. Have I understood correctly that author implies that webapp and DB are running on one server? But that's usually just not the case!

2. Does anybody have an idea, of how we could compose more or less realistic benchmark for this, preferably in language-agnostic manner, so I could write a few scripts, connect few databases on multiple hosts, run it and see, how expensive all this stuff actually is, app-code/db performance wise?
I wasn't confident and said I wasn't sure.

Maybe the rules according to those weights aren't wrong.
Use olive oil for dressing. For adding flavor in a broil look to lard, tallow, schmaltz, or whatever juice is poured off the meat in the main course (assuming a non vegetarian diet here). Might look to coconut oil in the case of vegetarian or vegan, though it's no sub for lard.
It is mostly people not taking time to cook due in large part to a rushed lifestyle. Fresh vegetables are ubiquitous, diverse, and cheap. Also, in most parts of the US, you have to drive a significant distance to the grocery store; it is much easier to cook interesting food if you only need to walk down the street to get fresh ingredients.

One thing to understand is that the typical American diet tends to be regional and varies considerably across those regions. For example, where I currently live (Pacific Northwest) people eat relatively little processed food, in part because they have unbelievable access to fresh ingredients. On the other hand, when I lived in the central US, it was a blend of heavily processed food and fairly limited central/eastern European cuisine. This reflects what is available locally as well as the ethnic history of a region.

In my experience, some parts of the US have a much more diverse and widely available fresh vegetable selection than Europe. This is particularly true in the western US, which is where many vegetables come from. If you are lucky enough to live on the west coast of the US, you can buy a very wide range of fresh vegetables for almost no money all year long. What is available locally is seasonal but augmented by vast greenhouse operations and vegetables shipped in from other latitudes, which is simple in North America. In fact, the lack of vegetable diversity at any point in time compared to what I am accustomed to is one of my complaints about eating in Europe, especially in winter.
Do you deploy in clusters? That's my main gap with Docker, and I haven't decided how to cover it. Deis[1] is the frontrunner at the moment, but a DIY solution is more appealing to me. I like to understand all the parts of my stack that I can.

1. http://deis.io
The Crowdsourced Company Building Elon’s Hyperloop Is Going Public
I'm a mid to top tier programmer in the bay area. I got into a pre series A startup for 90k a year (on a W9 rather than a W2 so -20% after taxes and computing no vacation or sick days) + .1% equity per month to make an iPhone app. I had two co-workers who were sub par. They left the company. I'm currently taking over the rest of the programming (backend/web stuff).

The system I'm inheriting is pretty bad. Security holes, bad EC2 setup and the web front end is unmaintainable.

I can handle the work but the time required to fix everything is significant and I feel underpaid. I got promoted to VP of engineering but my pay and amount of stock I get didn't increase.

We're in the middle of raising series A. We are strapped for cash until series A is completed.

I'm meeting with my CEO soon and would like to talk about a significant pay increase as well as more equity. I don't want to seem like a jerk and say I want at least $175k per year as well as .2% equity per month now or i'm gone since we're in the middle of raising series A and I'm the only programmer. I also don't want to keep kicking the can down the road.

How do I go about asking for fair compensation? How much money and equity would you guys ask for? Anyone have any ideas like get 120k now and after series A raise it up to 175k?

Little more about myself. Came from a top 15 CS program, placed in a couple programming competitions, was part of a company that previously exited as a back end dev, been programming for 17 years and I'd I've been at start-ups since I graduated in 2007.
Türkiye LGBTİ Birliği
One who gets shit done.
The incentive for an employee is his/her salary and to do their job well.

They have very low effect on the success of the company other than doing their job well.
I love my ridiculous Neptune Pine
Can someone please provide a text mirror of the article? *.torproject.org is blocked here.
> Have I understood correctly that author implies that webapp and DB are running on one server? But that's usually just not the case!

no. Please see the benchmark suite where I ran the async/threaded performance tests both on the same machine as well as on different machines. As for the PyMySQL example, I can assure you, running it on the same machine, different machines, whatever, you'll see something very similar as far as that Python profiling result.
How to say thank you at work: a guide for managers and employees
It's a woman
one very curious design decision is to allow type aliases either before or after the type. so, from the examples, you have

> setIdThenSave(newid Num, Bool recursively) { ... }

i like the idea of letting a type do double duty as a variable name if it's obvious in context, and being aliased by an explicit name if wanted/needed, but letting the order be irrelevant sounds like unnecessary flexibility to me - it makes writing no easier, and reading harder.
So looking through the link, the value add appears to be in the plugins. For your use case what is the main benefit of using dokku-alt?
There's only one company that's announced a long-range electric car other than Tesla - not much sign that everyone gets it! Awesome if that's really happening, but ... as an example, the only announced competitor is the Bolt, and there's no announcement for large-scale battery supply for it.
I volunteer as the backend rails dev at http://balloonchallenge.org/ and ended up doing our ops, using Dokku to handle our main site's pushes. I'm terrible at devops and Dokku has been bulletproof so far. It's been flexible enough that when I needed to do things like edit some nginx config, it wasn't an issue.

I've hit some issues with docker and server restarts, but that's mostly due to my own incompetence with docker.

Overall it's a great tool that I recommend to a lot of friends. Paying the ridiculous Heroku prices just to be able to do a code push via git is silly, and Dokku largely solves that need among others.
If you like procedural generation check out [0]. His recent blog posts have been about his Minecraft-like voxel engine (currently being used for Everquest Landmark I believe) but he has a lot of great gems in his archives.

Two recent articles about his language to randomly generate architecture, and two older ones about city generation:

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/cantor-city.html

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/life-without-debugger....

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/screenshots-of-buildin... - Builds a city over rocky terrain.

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/city-lots.html

The video in the second one is really cool from a programming and debugging perspective.

[0] http://procworld.blogspot.com

ed: Added more city-generation links.
i like the thank you page
http://pastebin.com/qHsUHBsH
And I thought of Introversion's posts on their now-cancelled subversion game http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/. Particularly the early posts, though I think this is the last one they did about the city generator: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=41634
My solution : act like a even big time jerk, justa reasonable one looking after your self-interest and double your equity demand and make it iron clad so you are not shortchanged after the fund raise.

there will be negotiations to dial down your demands invariably and you can keep your "jerk" like demands as the absolute floor...
I TA'd for Graham's Discrete math class at UCSD. He's still quite the character! His last lecture he juggled a handful of chalks in class and brought his deck of cards to do magic tricks.

He once made me pull out a 1$ bill from my pocket in his office and then asked me what the serial number was, he shot out a question like: "what's the probability that you have n consecutive numbers on the bill".

You could tell Math was legitimately fun for him, he treated open math problems like brain teasers and that fun rubbed off on the people around him as well.
I use Dokku-alt but have previously done most of the groundwork for implementing my own such system: https://christine.website/projects/flitter

It's been mostly untouched since December, but it is 100% Go and runs on top of CoreOS.
Was he joking?
I've just started using Deis at work recently. Dokku looks like it was a small project sponsored by the company behind Deis. I haven't looked much at dokku-alt.

The thing that I really like about Deis is it supports deployments off of docker images in a private repo on top of git push deploys.

One of the things we do is host a REST service backed by data we generate. We can have jenkins automatically build and publish a docker container to our internal repo, then it's two REST calls to Deis to update the docker container that is running. We generate the data in Hadoop through a longish oozie workflow weekly and we can make two REST calls to repoint the REST service to some new database tables.

I also like that each layer or part of Deis can be swapped out. Want to run haproxy for the load balancing layer instead of nginx? Someone probably has a container that can be dropped in instead. Want swap a more advanced scheduler for etcd, you can swap in Mesos, YARN, or even Flynn's scheduler.
Excellent tools for setting up new services without mch effort; I found it ideal for microservices and even hackfests.
Schools by EDU domain
Dokku-alt lets me use a Dockerfile to build applications.
The ability to take selfies is actually an official feature of the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD. There are lots of clever messages being shared online through the medium.
Jason Calacanis: Apple will buy Tesla for 75b in 18 months
Interesting to see that engineer's get paid less than content and happiness heros.

The blame for that rests with the senior engineers and not the graduate or middle level ones...
Is that true? I'm living in West Europe and it's pretty hard to find decent 50k+ jobs, even with a University degree and years of experience. Where are those remote jobs?
https://google.com will help you
LIMIT/OFFSET isn't the optimal way to do pagination either, because the database has to scan to offset before fetching the limit. I'm having a hard time trying to find the particular resource that dives into it, but here are the basics:

SELECT *
FROM t
OFFSET 1000 LIMIT 10; -- does not use index, scans table

vs

SELECT *
FROM t
WHERE id between 1000 and 1010; -- uses index

Edit:
http://www.slideshare.net/Eweaver/efficient-pagination-using... see slides 12-16
For the parsing aspects, reading about parser generators or the like would be super useful
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052672
We started using dokku just before 0.2.0 released for hosting our apps. One place it initially lacked was process management. If you wanted anything outside of your 'web' process in your Procfile, you were out of luck. I wrote a couple plugins[1][2] to handle that.

It worked alright for single sever deployments. When attempting to scale to a multi-server setup, dokku wasn't the right choice. I went down the rabbit hole of docker orchestration on top of CoreOS, but eventually backed out to go with Cloud66[3].

[1]: https://github.com/statianzo/dokku-shoreman
[2]: https://github.com/statianzo/dokku-supervisord
[3]: https://www.cloud66.com/
Feds May Finally Ditch Cholesterol Warning
Using dokku for a few BigCo projects since late 2012.

I want to do what another commenter (renegar) mentions, and simply use Docker/machine/compose, now that that is a viable option. For my next green-field project, I probably will.

Dokku doesn't try to realize all of the benefits of containerization by a long shot, but it's the most frictionless way to get started with containerization for small projects. The stack is a pretty common one (ubuntu, nginx, git push to deploy) and everything residing either in bash script or a docker image means it's almost as easy to extend as an ordinary, non-containerized server would be.
Show me your application and I'll tell you where it's either calling select() or is limiting connections to keep itself from locking up the OS.
>>The science isn't the hypothesis, it's the experimentation.

Its both! Without a model we don't know what an experiment is testing, indeed a pure experiment is unconvincing for example Ohm's eponymous law were ridiculed as a "web of naked fallacies", and only accepted after a model was proposed.

Or consider my theory that Canadian Geese take summer with them when they migrate south. My experiment shows that after they leave it gets really cold, but nobody believes my model!

>>in broccoli that are unhealthy

Quite possibly, what is your hypothesis?
I saw the title, and thought it was rather philosophical:

How 'big' is zero? Can zero be quantified? If it can, then how come zero divided by is zero, but anything divided by zero is undefined?

I think it is time for another trip out west, California, baby!
Not at all— any feedback is appreciated :)

I'm beginning to have doubts about String mutability. Fortunately the only actually mutating method at the moment is append, which is redundant with add but for the mutability, so I might just tear that out.

Required parentheses on functions are pretty unfortunate. I'm mainly trying to avoid the situation in Ruby where trying to access functions as first-class objects requires all sorts of weird syntactic overhead. Possibly I could have some kind of prefix operator, so (say) &obj.method would return the function object, and obj.method would call it?

I agree about the ':' 'do/end' ugliness. Originally blocks were delimited by braces, but I think the Ruby-style delimiters look nicer. Frankly I'd prefer to get rid of the ':', but for single-expression functions that looks pretty awful. I could do Haskell-style '=' (Haskell of course being where the 'function-body-is-single-expression' thing came from), but

fn foo(x) = do
...
end

is also pretty weird-looking; kind of like Scala's function definitions, which I find really abrasive for reasons I can't fully explain.

Binding 'self' is also basically a compromise. Originally it was stored in the method, but that required copying each type's methods (and each parents' methods) into an object on instantiation, which was a pretty much unacceptable performance hit. My thinking is that, whenever you'd want to pass a method 'obj.method', it's equally possible to pass 'fn (x): obj.method(x)'.

I need to rework the 'try...catch' statements in any case; their current semantics are incredibly horrible (it wraps, then immediately calls, the try body in a temporary lambda). Maybe I will just incorporate them into blocks— thanks for the idea!
Multiple CPUs don't help for a single request, but the majority of deployments use processes (and threads within the processes) to run multiple requests in parallel. You can definitely saturate all the CPUs with a single Django application, provided the application server is running multiple processes.
yes, the statement itself is inaccurate, but in the mechanism, there are 3 separate gears which can be adjusted to make a continuously variable ratio.
>The idea of rockstar and 10x'er are both mostly buzz words to make developers feel real good about themselves.

Specifically in the former case, young naive developers.
I was reminded of Substrate [1], which spawned mrdoob's version [2] and led to a WebGL 3D version [3]

[1] http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/i...

[2] http://jsdo.it/mrdoob/xI3u/fullscreen

[3] http://www.jabtunes.com/labs/boidsnbuildings/
That's true for everything by your definition.

"But wait a minute, Assembly is not type safe!"
But yes it is, just every type is a binary number. It's not Assembly's fault that you're trying to use binary numbers to print characters to the screen or point to regions of memory and somehow get the two mixed up.
An interactive video of the Chelyabinsk asteroid event
It's weird that they lead off with Android sales. Android sales aren't a 1:1 comparison with iOS sales. Google makes money on services, not devices. And they don't own the supply chain like Apple does.