skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers."

Given that they've produced some impressive things, Etsy always seemed to be the example of a shop that was overdoing it - but I had actually assumed they were overcomplicating it with 20 engineers or so. Looking at their github now, and hearing those recent numbers, it feels much worse. That level of work is great, but for a company that does what Etsy does, much of it seems like overkill. (Managing 1000 instances should be the same as managing 100, this is where automation kicks in. Architecture enables that.)

Ultimately, that's a tremendously large amount of engineers, to where I can't really mentally assign what all but about 20 of them might do. Let's be generous and say 30 - or even 40 :) All of that eats into the bottom line (and also makes adding more staff harder, as your tech becomes more and more custom).

Really, at the basic level, it's a CRUD-based storefront website. Yes, it has scaling needs. But it's not really novel in that regard.

Yet, they've built more automation around their automation (lots of things in the Chef ecosystem) and probably made things a lot more custom.

I can understand some of this for say, multiplayer gaming or video streaming infrastructure maybe, but I would suspect Etsy could have been run a lot easier with less wheel reinvention.

Startups should really strive, IMHO, to write as little of software as possible, that's outside of their line of business. When wheels are square, build better wheels sure, but what I see from that number looks like MASSIVE levels of maintaince costs for being that custom.

So anyway, thanks for producing things that other people use and that are useful - YES - but from the startup accounting / efficiency perspective, I wouldn't want to see my company run that way.
Before the days of GUIs when regular office workers used the command line, the database was an all-in-one application. Stored procedures were created by the DB admin so that the non-techies could run reports with simple commands.

I've found it interesting that all of this functionality has remained in databases, but is almost never used in modern web applications.
Etsy & Slickdeal are in PHP.
> "In 1997, I started in Perl. In 1998, I switched to PHP. In 2004, a rewrite in Rails. In 2007, back to PHP. In 2009, minimalist Ruby. In 2012, client-side JavaScript. Each time I’d have to re-write all of the logic around the database: how to add a new person into the database, how to verify an invoice is correct, how to mark an order as paid, etc. But that whole time, my trusty PostgreSQL database stayed the same."

And what if during that time instead of switching programming languages, it was the storage system that had to be switched? You could easily invert the argument "Don't keep the logic in the DB! I had to switch from Postgres to MSSQL which meant I painstakingly had to convert all my db-logic, I wish it had been in the code instead!"
I was sceptical when I read the headline. For one thing, employees may not believe the confidentiality. For another, if only a few people attend, and then office is in the building, these visits aren't all that confidential.

But it looks as if that's not a problem because so many employees are actually using this service. So the benefits seem to outweigh: More employees are seeing "any" therapist at all, they are taking their own mental health more seriously and early interventions are more likely.

They also seem to see the therapists as helping them get "better" rather than just fixing some flaw.
I know it is computationally a bit of a pain, but if you have points v_1,v_2,v_3 does the Jordan Canonical Form of the matrix [v_1 v_2 v_3] not satisfy your requirements? I believe that the original matrix is similar to both its permutations and rotations, so the JCF should be invariant. My linear algebra is a bit rusty, so I might be wrong
That has nothing to do with open source. Winamp is not actively developed, but I can still use it as long as I have the binary. So by your definition, is Winamp dead or alive?

The point is - a software is considered dead when there is nobody to maintain it, if maintenance is required. Licensing has no bearing on demise of software.
> The word “diaspora” refers to the dispersal of seeds (or people) over a wide area. That’s why our motif is the dandelion, and the asterisk in our name represents a fluffy dandelion seed. We refer to individual accounts on diaspora* as “seeds,” and the servers in which those accounts are collected as “pods.” You’ll get used to it soon!

https://diasporafoundation.org/getting_started/sign_up
Note that the "mayonaise" mentioned in the video is not actual mayonaise, but frietsaus. Frietsaus is 20% or 10% oil, water, and some binding agent. The taste is very similar to mayonaise though (I personally find mayonaise having a much fuller taste). Nowadays, only more expensive restaurants serve mayonaise.
If someone is already willing to go to an external therapist, then that's good. If not, a company therapist may be a good first start.
I'm talking about opensource web projects in general, like Wordpress,Magento,Drupal,Piwik and many many others.I'm not talking about how one can build something in language X or Y but about open source webapps.
How do you like my new personal page?
I wear them over my normal glasses and I'm fine for hours, my only problem is if my head's inclined too much they'll occasionally slide down and pinch my nose a bit. Maybe some padding would solve that. But I don't know how representative I am since I play a lot of video games for hours, too... I'm sure some people will notice strain.
How do you eat well and not cost a ton of money? I imagine you don't get the opportunity to store food or cook it effectively.
To provide another data point, I don't use mustard in my homemade mayonnaise — just oil, egg yolk, salt, garlic, and lemon juice — and when I use olive oil, the mayonnaise comes out slightly green.
Hey,

I just finished building my personal website. Any suggestions to improve and make it better?

Thanks!
Take a look at books like yours on iBook, compare price etc.
If you self published = you get it all, less the 30% to Apple. If you have a publisher he will not use iBooks because their profit will be larger than his or yours.

Attracting the eyeballs to consider buying your book.
That is what AMazon and iBooks does well, as do publishers. Eyeballs cosr $$ per click, 5 cents and upwards.
Publishers usually give away a number of paper books to hope for good reviews. What does Amazon or iBooks do?

See if you can find some self publishing sites, with near zero fees and see how popular they are.
No one else is required to cater to your religious beliefs, no matter what those may be. Also, this is an article about evolutionary biology, not creationism. The part you object to is easily overlooked. I'm sure this issue is very important to you, but I believe the best move here is to simply turn the other cheek.
WordPress is PHP, and licensed GPL, too. Last I heard roughly 20% of the web was running it.
Oh I thought your point was popular web projects in general.

So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now?
I think you misunderstood the article. American Creationists are believers who reject what science has figured out in favor of biblical literalism. They even built the Creationist Museum, whose exhibits depict "the coexistence of humans and non-avian dinosaurs, say that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and dispute the idea that life evolved into its current forms." – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum
OP's profile says analytic number theory
OP missed some more development on recent gradual typing efforts in dynamic languages.
I collected those links below when implementing gradual typing for perl5. perl5 is more lucky than ruby, since perl5 supports syntax for types in lexical variable declarations for decades already, and more via attributes.

http://www.typescriptlang.org/Content/TypeScript%20Language%... (microsoft's javascript with types)

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1505962329687926/flow-a-new-... (facebook's javascript with types)

https://github.com/rwaldron/tc39-notes/blob/master/es6/2015-... Soundscript, google's javascript with types

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/ (planned python with types)

http://www.mypy-lang.org/ (existing python with types)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8620129 (ruby 3.0 planned with types)

http://crystal-lang.org/ (a good existing ruby with types)

http://hacklang.org/ (facebook's php with types)

http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/in-favor-of-rfc-scalar-typ... (php 7 types overview)

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/scalar_type_hints (php 7)

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/return_types (php 7)

https://github.com/rurban/perl/blob/master/pod/perltypes.pod (perl5 inofficial)
I didn't mean that it should advocate, as in try to sell itself. I mean that a book should probably be enough to go from zero to hero (?). Which means that you can just use that book to learn about the tool without first doing any background legwork, like in the scenario that I described in another comment.
Yes! I should have said that it's great that this company is thinkin about mental health and is actually doing stuff. It's really nice to see.
> "they wanted a clear seperation between health care and employment"

Couldn't the company let the employee choose their own therapist and then the employee can claim the money back up to a certain amount?

It would provide the necessary separation that the employees wanted whilst still allowing for the employer to pay for the treatment.

And, it wouldn't be that difficult to implement seeing as a lot of companies already do something similar with benefits like travel/petrol.
I disagree. It depends on many factors.

There've been numerous times in my life, and in the lives of close friends, where having a few sessions with a therapist could have been beneficial. But the situation didn't seem extreme enough to go through the hassle of finding a decent therapist and making an appointment – probably for weeks in the future with a good one. Sure, I could be proactive and find one before I need one, but let's just add that to mountain of things I should be doing in my copious free time while running a business, being a husband, father, etc.

My point is the availability and low-friction this setting provides could be hugely advantageous.

To your point about conflict of interest, I think it depends if this person is a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, clinical social worker, etc. If so, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) contains privacy rules about psychotherapy and mental health. At your first visit, the therapist should give you written information explaining privacy policies and how your personal information will be handled.

If they don't do that and/or if they are some type of uncertified "life coach", I would be more concerned about conflict of interest.
For competitive reasons, they rarely share information on new products. It's a brand new market and they don't have to share information, so they don't. Analysts are estimating around 2 million sold, but feel free to take that with a grain of salt.

It's worth noting that before the release he said that Apple wouldn't release numbers, this isn't a reaction to poor sales.
I lived and cycled in London the last 3 years, and there is a steady drumbeat of cycling improvements at all levels. Whether it's the congestion charge, cycle hire scheme, bike lanes, or even physically reconfiguring junctions with an explicitly stated goal of improving bicycle safety, there are major changes happening there.

I'm not sure how much change is happing on the continent, but based on some stories I've seen, there are many cities pushing the envelope, I think even within Germany (probably depends on the city?).
This really only applies if they cold-called you, doesn't it? If you applied, then you started the game and chose to play white.

To follow your other analogy, if you walk into an open house, a realtor is totally within his or her rights to ask you about your budget.
I'm not saying we couldn't, just that it would be harder. Right now votes are thought of as something inherent to a person, similar to a soul. If votes becomes something people speculate in buying, isn't it likely that they'd start to speculate more than that?

Then again, it does sound like an interesting system to try, but maybe to be used for smaller decisions and groups first.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=portal.aws.am...

If your TLS client tried stronger cipher suites before weaker ones (which only MSIE does, and it considers only RC4 weak), you can get TLS 1.0 with RSA key exchange, AES-256-CBC encryption, HMAC-SHA1 authentication with that server. That's not secure (only TLS 1.2 with PFS and AEAD is secure).
RE: hashing files and whatnot:

FreeBSD with a high enough securelevel allows you to set files append-only or immutable so that not even root can touch them.

But then updating the index becomes problematic, you would need to create delta files (which themselves are also immutable) that contain the changed information and combine the data.

Even then, I'm not convinced you could get that much valuable information from a full filesystem hash (or whatever) scan. The amount of information would probably be overwhelming. You would need to apply heuristics or filters. Checking filetypes with libmagic would work, mostly. You could only alert on new executables or whatever, etc..
CakePHP, Codeigniter, and Laravel are all PHP frameworks, so not sure what you mean by "downgrade" your knowledge of mySQL and PHP. These frameworks simply make it easier to build applications using PHP and to interact with mySQL (along with other databases) using a MVC convention. If you understand the concepts behind MVC really the only challenge is mapping functionality between the frameworks. While initially it may be confusing to figure out that mapping as each framework does not have the same function names or implement a concept the same way, once you get the general idea of using the new framework it will seem much easier. My recommendation is to find and work through a couple sample applications in CakePHP. Get an understanding of the functions and how they are used before trying to dig into the actual code of the site. I would avoid converting entirely to a new framework though if you don't have to.
Why is the headline "Linux and BSD" servers when the exploit here is some weird mail software called "DirectMailer" and Joomla/Wordpress ?

There's never been any confusion about the risks of installing big monster bloatware PHP systems on your servers - your eventual owning is a "when, not if" proposition.

A unix server running "DirectMailer" is like a desktop system running the Ask! Toolbar. Pure cluelessness.
You know you do not have to provide a P45 to your new employer

Just say "sorry I lost it put me on the emergency Tax code"

I Have started jobs with out a p45 and unless you have complex tax status its not a big deal.
Yeah hired was a complete joke. All the companies I got offers from required you to live and work in either SF or NY. That's at least how is was a year and a half ago.

My biggest requirement from a company is remote work allowed. Coming is second would be compensation. Half of the offers I got from companies requiring you to live in the Valley were barely over 6 figures. That's the hilarious part.
What about something like the size of the up/down buttons? Should mobile browsers also automatically upscale those?
I think their big ongoing mistake is not focusing on a protocol. As well if they'd focused on Javascript we might have a browser based peer to peer system by now
I see databases in general get a lot of flack from developers for this reason, when on the other side of the fence I see a lot of really smart people misunderstanding the tool (as your example alludes to.)

I have often come to a stored procedure and not returned 100x, but more like 50,000x by simply changing a few lines of code.

tl;dr anyone can write slow code in any language.
They want to match all strings with Diaspora as a prefix?
I don't think it's particularly weird, if you phrase it slightly differently:

PHP is a better choice for web software that users are expected to host themselves.

Using PHP lets your users tap into the absolutely ginormous ecosystem of PHP hosting providers out there, and makes deployment dead simple ("FTP these files to that place, now you're done"). No other platform makes these steps as simple and inexpensive as PHP does.

If you're writing an app that you're going to host for the users, it doesn't matter much what you write it in. If you're writing an app that users are going to host for themselves, it matters a lot.
Switching programming languages is far more common than switching databases.
I find it totally cringeworthy.

I read it, mentally, as "diasporastar." It's like if someone types "I <heart symbol> you," I read it as "I heart you," which is cringeworthy.

Do some people not do this?

Also, their URL needs the star, too. Diaspora(asterisk)foundation.org. I just can't stand in consistency. How you do it matters less than being consistent. If you can't put a * in a URL, don't make the asterisk part of your name.

Finally, it made me look for a footnote. That symbol already has a meaning in that context---you can't just re-appropriate symbols to mean whatever you want when they already have an established meaning. I mean, clearly, you can---but it's considered bad form, and for good reasons.

I bet the Diaspora* people are sick and tired of hearing this shit over and over, but you know what? They deserve it.
Kind of makes you wish he watched a couple more Rich Hickey talks, like any of the ones around Datomic. The solution there is not "stick more business logic in the database", it's "split up the part responsible for writes from the part that queries it".
Sure, this still happens. That doesn't change that the experience is less nice than if the website had been designed with mobile in mind. Or if it had been and app.
Actually I wouldn't, because I've built a non-trivial app using IndexedDB :)

But don't believe me, believe the results of the W3C test suite: http://w3c.github.io/test-results/IndexedDB/all.html

And don't just look at the headline numbers, look at the tests that actually fail, because some are more important than others.

The only test that fails in Chrome [1] is only marginally meaningful. It would be nice if they got it working, but all the tests that actually use IndexedDB pass in Chrome. 100%.

Firefox is almost as good as Chrome, but it fails on tests of error handling for a few edge cases that are very unlikely to occur in the real world.

IE and Safari have many failures for tests of core functionality (Safari is even worse than IE if you look at the individual tests that fail, rather than the overall %).

[1] https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/blob/master/Indexe...
Software dies when the last developer stops looking and even then software is reborn with every new observer. The visibility of the source code affects the potential developer pool size but private institutions can be as effective as public ones in carrying property forward and sustaining its life.
To be blunt that is the sign of an amateur HR department and possibly in need of being put on a PIP plan.
I couldn't agree more. Lots of social institutions would have to be built up around it to make it work. That is why we are starting on a small scale with market research.
Salesforce CEO examines 16k workers’ salaries to make sure women are paid fairly
> I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project

I think it does if you expect people to install that project.
How can you tell it was deleted by ycombinator and not by the user him-/herself?
Those arn't head-hunters just lower tier recruitment agencies.

Real head hunters will want to meet candidates - as will serious agencies.
I don't understand the down votes. In 2010 Facebook and Ruby on Rails were both still hot, so it's understandable that they chooce Rails. But, and that's the big "but" that not everyone understands: Hosting a Rails site wasn't that easy in 2010 than it is today. AWS and specialized hosting providers where rather new, and most normal people still used (crappy) hosters that only supported CGI and PHP4/5. We are talking about a web software that should be easy to run on many servers, and PHP5 would have been definitely a better choice back then. Installing a PHP based software is a no-brainer, simply download&extract the zip archive in the www/htdocs dir. In the age of shared hosting and before the advent of language package managers, this was a big benefit. The biggest problem with Diaspora was that it was a big fluff, a great idea with a big media coverage - but it took the developers 2 years to get the software to beta status (2012): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network). A sad remark, one of the developers died: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy
The line between polytheism and monotheism isn't all that clear. The veneration of saints shares a lot of features in common with the worship of lesser deities in the Greco-Roman pantheon.
> So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now?

I don't know any popular p2p social plateform written in PHP. All I know is the one written with Rails isn't as popular as it should have been.
imo, it invalidates the following:

2 - the platform is not stagnant, be it Windows or .NET - new things are coming out;

3 - there is a proper direction, less towards Windows/Office as desktop apps and more towards services;

5 - the updates do happen more often, and at least for .NET they're done in a transparent way (being open source and all)
I'm currently reading Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture"[0] and I think that one of the main points that stuck with me is his recommendation for separation between the various layers and functions of a software system.

Basically the whole system should be a layer cake of smaller modules/systems, as "opaque" as needed to one another, but interacting with each other solely through a well defined "internal API".

I think the approach proposed in the article is good when starting or prototyping projects, but the object oriented and layering approach, even if it's a bit more challenging to visualize correctly at the start of the development of an app, is worth its weight in gold as features start piling up.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Ad...

later edit: for clarity.
Building a culture of objection
"Hellman's doesn't resemble the real stuff"

That's a little exaggerated, don't you think? I'm no mayonnaise expert, but those lists of ingredients look pretty similar to me.
It's really an exception if you can work/study at another country without a visa/residence permit. A more relevant question is whether you can make a business trip, or act as a journalist, without a visa. For instance, ESTA for a tourist in the USA is an easy thing, but if the same person wants to come for a few weeks and work as a journalist, e.g. make interviews, then the visa process is very very different. The USA does not offer that much freedom for foreign press, really.

A zone of visa-free exceptions has been created in the Schengen area, but even there you'll need to apply for a work permit for longer stints (and the host country is obliged to give it to citizens of other Schengen countries, with some exceptions).
I grew up in Utah, where "fry sauce" is the norm: ketchup mixed with mayonnaise. Fortunately I never really liked it (I prefer my fries unsauced, except as part of poutine or doused in malt vinegar for fish&chips), but it's always amusing to hear friends and family complain about the lack of it when they visit other states.