skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at Etsy when we made statsd, and I'm currently working on fixing the same problems at Stripe. This is super interesting and relevant to me personally, thanks for writing it all down!

There are some details of how Etsy uses statsd that are not well-communicated. Etsy samples metrics aggressively to limit the amount of total traffic. And they monitor the packet error rates on the statsd boxes like hawks to keep the loss rate in check. Back when I was working there, if you added a high-volume counter without sampling it, the alarms would sound and you'd have an ops person tapping your shoulder pretty quickly. If you use statsd and skip either of these steps, the 40% loss that github experienced is what you get.

AIUI Etsy's moved to a consistent hashing scheme that's at least vaguely similar to this.

Node was not then, nor is now Etsy's area of expertise. We were going through an adolescent "let's just use every language" phase when we built statsd. I think the problems outlined here are solid supporting evidence that you should use a smallish set of tools and master them (a point of view which is very on-brand for Etsy engineering as it exists today).
So a screwed up favicon can eat a wireless user's whole bandwidth for the month with them knowing it. Great...
I would argue that the vast majority of people on here have very little interest in YC. I'm here for the interesting content and people.

Therefore there are two brands (in my humble opinion).
No:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Number_of...

imglorp's understanding of the past is basically just wrong
This is awesome, and more choice is definitely good, but I'm curious if Github tried out statsite[1] at all in this process? My guess is that these two tools were built at the exact same time solving the same problems.

[1] https://github.com/armon/statsite
Paraphrased due to 80 character limit. The full quote is:

"Most smart people I know have decided to just not discuss anything sensitive because of the internet lynchmob looking for any slight mistake.

This seems unlikely to be a good development. At some point the conversations will only have the extremists left."
We show an ask for donations in place of the ads for users who block our ads (Simple, subtle, using the same colors and fonts as the rest of the site so it isn't distracting). A handful of users do donate. The vast majority do not. Interestingly, the users who donate are also the ones most likely to whitelist our site.

Most (but not all) users today feel entitled to content, games, music, etc for free and get mad when it isn't granted to them and turn up their noses at things like ads that support the content for the price they're willing to pay (free).
Hey, I've been there!

I ran my fastest marathon ever while being tailed by the paddy wagon, suited up and bowed down before the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, locked and loaded to shoot at chickens, and tripped out in psychedelic halls of mirrors in the DPRK - North Korea.

Here's how it all went down...

http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-kor...
That wasn't directly targeted at you - but more the "pro-ad" people who support it as a business model. Many of them (not all, as you yourself prove) will uncheck the "install this" for bundleware. Which hurts that business model for software developers.

Now the main difference is that users can uncheck the bundleware in most installers. Few sites offer a pay-to-opt-out option against ads. So what options do users have to disable ads? They're forced to use an Adblocker to opt themselves out.

People turn to alternatives because it provides an easy-access alternative. Netflix soared in popularity and put Blockbuster out of business because you didn't have to visit a brick & mortar store to rent movies. Many people will pay to use Netflix rather than torrent for free, because Netflix provides a no-friction way of consumption.

Provide a way that's frictionless for users to disable ads. A once-a-year payment for $10-$20 does the job fine and likely makes you more per user than ads would. Give them a little flair badge or something trivial and cosmetic and you might convince even the Adblockers to impart some of their money to you.

There are other business models other than Ad Revenue. Many of those business models have been time-tested and work. Ads are the "lazy" way out that shows a lack of care towards your audience.
Yes, instead of being married to Boostrap, you'll be married to Material Design. Equally frightening.
Introducing Moments: A Private Way to Share Photos with Friends
Drone rescue
Engineer possibly found MH370
>> You won't make as much as you make in the private sector.

But the overall benefits package may very well be competitive, assuming they're bringing people in as government employees or contractors. The federal government is legally back-stopped on how limited it can allow benefit packages to be (contrast with the package in some startup companies, though of course the possibility of massive windfall profit sharing is supposed to make up the difference).
blog is not mine.. just thought it's worth reporting.
A 17th century writer. More importantly, a poet.

Not sure how I feel about the point of the article, but this sheds no light on it - Donne's work is pretty different from modern prose. Different best practices apply.
Agreed, but it can be balanced. Dedicate 1h/d to learning, no more. Balance that 1h w/ new vs current tech. Some technologies really _are_ a major investment; while others are smaller improvements than is worth sacrificing your expertise, as you pointed out.

I've had "1h learning" as a daily task for many years now, it's how I transitioned from PHP to Node. Shiny and hot, yes, but more importantly it's one language across all the work I do, and that saves me _tremendous_ amounts of time from when I was on PHP. That was a worth-while investment. Now I'm using Angular while React is getting hot. I'm not convinced that'll boost my productivity substantially, but I have that 1h/d to learn so why not? If it turns out to slow down my productivity compared to my Angular expertise, then I'll veer that 1h/d towards something else instead (VR + Unity is sounding super interesting, or maybe I'll explore this functional programming stuff everyone's raving about).
Read HN ;-)
http://jasonevanish.com/2013/01/17/25-things-i-wish-i-knew-b...
Really great observation.

This is a really interesting phenomenon - existing enterprises taking lead roles in open source projects in such a way that they almost look like they "own it". Not the first time, I mean, RedHat did exactly this with Linux in some ways, for example.

Teradata recently made a similar move with PrestoDB - which had Facebook as the owner but no hardcore platform technology development supporter. And MapR did the same with Apache Drill.

I have been telling everyone I know my opinion for a long time - open source is not just a movement - it is a strategy. It is amazing the potential for change and/or disruption that open source causes.

And, that potential may not always be good - just look at Hadoop fragmentation as an example (although there is a lot of good in that fragmentation as well).
They should have had Snoop be CEO: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/12/snoop-dogg-ceo...
Good idea https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500639&t... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174811
Many sponsors and partners will not accept log-based self-hosted stats as they can be easily faked. Many will only accept a 3rd party stats site like Google Analytics as they can be provided with a read-only view into it and know that the underlying data isn't faked. It could be gamed, of course, with some effort (botnet of IPs loading pages from the site, etc) but it's much more involved than faking a Piwik report. Of course, many of the blocklists that block GA also block self-hosted Piwik anyway.

There's sympathy for ad-supported sites because that's the vast majority of the internet's content. And micropayments, paid memberships, etc have almost universally failed with the exception of a few very large publishers and a few very specific niche publishers.
If it works well, I'd like to see these in LA or other big cities too, not just long distance. Would be great to get on one of these and end up at the beach in Santa Monica at high speed instead of suffering through traffic.
Way to ruin the fun for the rest of us ;)
That's a good little mailing list. The biggest issue seems to be keeping tcc working across all supported platforms when changing stuff for a single platform.

tcc can actually be made to build Windows executables in the 'old-school' "Programming Windows" way, which is quite fun.
Obama had some structural advantages in 2012 because he was the incumbent.

Obama already had a lot funds in the bank, and names on his lists, from his huge 2008 win. Romney is rich, but was starting from essentially scratch in building his volunteer army and voter database.

Obama was able to start investing in his national campaign infrastructure way before Romney because he did not have to win a primary first. Almost every early dollar Romney brought in had to be spent right away on short-term ads and organizing to make sure he won the primary.

And Obama was able to access the national Democratic party infrastructure from the beginning. Romney did not have access to the national Republican infrastructure until he won the nomination.

The effect of all this was that Obama was able to take his time and build all his software custom, while Romney had to wait until the last minute and buy things from external sources.

By the way, 2012 also demonstrated that shortcomings of Super PACs. They can spend a ton of money on TV ads, but they're no help at all with the (increasing important) data operations, because they are forbidden from coordinating with the campaign. While Romney was supported heavily by Super PACs, almost all of Obama's fundraising went directly into his campaign--where it could pay for core technologies.

---

As for lasting progress, the U.S. Digital Service is not going to last beyond Obama, at least not in its current incarnation. It's housed under the Executive Office of the President and it is a political operation--their job is to make sure that the President's policy priorities have good technology. Obviously a new administration (of either party) is going to have different policies and priorities.

There's also the ephemeral "Obama magic"--he's just built a good reputation for using and appreciating technology. Pretty much no other candidate in the 2016 race has that (at least yet). Alpha geeks might not stick around for a more "old school" president like Hillary, Jeb, etc.

Things look a lot better for 18F because it is housed under GSA and it is intended to be politically neutral. And there's also a push on right now to get agencies to hire more digitally savvy people directly into staff roles--those would also be more likely to persist into the next administration.
I would pay the premium for newspapers without ads. In fact, I do -- I support news organizations that aren't driven by advertisement.

If you can't find a business model that doesn't antagonize me, then you haven't found a business model that I care to support. If capitalism is failing to provide us with even basic methods of producing quality works, then that's a problem we should tackle at a larger scale.
Bug Writing Season
Flagship.vim by tpope
It's not just a matter of implementing "enable_ipv6 = yes" on a cisco router.

Here's an enterprise perspective:

It's IP address management. it's massive reconfiguration of every node and network endpoint. It's auditing and completely redeploying security measures that are network based. It's training every IT employee on network basics from the ground up.

It's millions upon millions of dollars in man-hours and infrastructure and tooling for something that might have marginal benefit on an internal network. I agree the new world will be better with larger subnets and many of the features of IPv6, but it's more complex.

Fiber-optic and hardware level upgrades touch a lot fewer devices, and are transparent to users and applications.
Just tested on Safari 8.0.6, doesn't seem to download the favicon at all. Weird, even after closing the tab, Chrome still keep downloading the favicon.
I think what's missing is "F5".

That's what gave us the web: a bunch a yahoos (without knowing the formal rules) kept thrashing on that key until they got something to work.

My 2cents: we need more yahoos and we need an quick and reliable F5 - a test to see if the hypothesis is verified.
The Netflix Website Gets a Major Upgrade
Depression's Upside (2010)
And yet there is a private body that certifies helmets as meeting their private standards:

http://www.smf.org/cert

ETA: the article you link mentions ASTM maintaining a more stringent standard!

It also has this gem, given our discussion:

There may never be an improved government standard for bicycle helmets. Experts may never come to a consensus on a standard for testing the forces most closely associated with concussions. But one test can be administered now: the market test. After all, new technology costs more. "Adding that upcharge to a $50 helmet," Scott Sports designer John Thompson told me, "is a harder sell."
Wholesome Products, Wholesome Prices
Eating users' bandwidth has its uses as well as filling up a network with communication. This works with JavaScript disabled too but yeah I agree it's not a huge priority.
How about you just stop trying to do that, because it's a bad idea, and let email continue to be plain text...?

I don't want a web app delivered to my inbox, ever.
Cost. A full-scale hyperloop needs to be on pylons, but a 1-mile test track can be built directly on the ground, which would be a lot cheaper. Why pay for pylons if you don't have to?
Not to be snarky, but isn't that what you're doing on HN? ;)
It's built using ReactJS, NodeJS, and FalcorJS

Source: https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/610506318860783616
Kickstarter: Practicing Ruby Contributors Fund
While I agree almost entirely with the article...

> Seriously: fuck wikis. They are bad and terrible. Do not use them. Take the time and effort to write some real documentation instead.

As a counterpoint, a well-maintained wiki in the right situation can make the difference between confusion and enlightenment. A wiki isn't a substitute for proper documentation, but it can be an effective supplement for things like "the docs didn't cover this particular corner case very well, so here's what I did to resolve it, and if anyone can improve on it, have at it".

I also disagree with the assertions that wikis as documentation (instead of as a supplement thereof) are inherently bad in and of themselves, but I do agree that they won't magically populate themselves; the authors of the system in question would be wise to produce the wiki's content themselves and be actively monitoring for erroneous edits, at which point - as the author suggests - said documentation might as well be checked into version control alongside the rest of the code.
You're talking about the newspaper like it somehow has a right to exist. It doesn't. It is a business and whether it succeeds or fails depends on the value it adds to its customers. In this case its customers aren't the consumers, they are the advertisers, and from what you're saying, it sounds like the consumers are prepared to go to great lengths to rid themselves of the adverts, which suggests that the customers aren't getting much value from the newspaper.

If you're telling me that disabling ads is bad manners then I put it to you that attempting to deceive the advertisers about the value of their ads is also bad manners. In fact I'm starting to wonder if it isn't my moral obligation to block adverts in order to help advertisers save money they would have otherwise wasted.
I'm using standard [1] for style. I love semicolons too, but am giving it a go without them here. TBH, it feels kinda weird, and I'll probably end up on semi-standard [2] in the end.

[1] https://github.com/feross/standard
[2] https://github.com/Flet/semistandard
Sounds like you've come up with a nice comfortable rationalization for creating bad experiences for your users. How convenient for you. You don't seem to think very highly of your site's visitors.

> Most (but not all) users today feel entitled to content, games, music, etc for free and get mad when it isn't granted to them and turn up their noses at things like ads that support the content for the price they're willing to pay (free).

This is an obvious generalization and an opinion you have. People who block ads do so because ads have been and continue to be annoying, exploitive, invasive and vectors for viruses. I am not sorry I block them, and you're not going to make me feel bad for making decisions about what my computer does or doesn't do.
If you'd started out your comments in the way you're presenting them now, I think you'd have gotten a better response. It's still a hot-button topic, not least of which because as mentioned the main people that benefit from such distinctions are the companies writing software that users don't want (e.g. Lenovo's attempt to use the term "Potentially Unwanted Programs"). However, what is HN coming to if you can't argue about nitpicky distinctions? ;)

Also, the Ask toolbar is not the only thing SF is installing; they're also installing much worse software. And sure, it's less harmful to change a user's search engine or waste a few dozen vertical pixels on a distracting toolbar than it is to turn a user's system into a botnet node, but "less harmful" is still harmful.

For the record, I also think there are some bad actors in the "identity protection" and similar security spaces; not only is it ridiculous to need software or services to protect you from other software and services, but many such services are scamming novice computer users who know enough to be afraid. And the entire consumer antivirus industry is a bit ridiculous as well, not least of which in the sheer amount of resources such software tends to take up. I much prefer the portion of the security industry that's pushing for a sandboxed-by-default, principle-of-least-privilege world.

But at the same time, adware, malware, or whatever you want to call it (including the vast majority of IE toolbars and such) are good examples of software that needs to go away and never come back. I'm not interested in shady ways to scam and "monetize" users; as has been said many times elsewhere, "your failing business model is not our problem". And the existence of even worse software doesn't excuse slightly-less-awful-but-still-awful software. The only question is how much damage such companies will do in their death throes before they finally die.
Why avoid the sites that track if it's trivial to visit those sites without getting tracked?
http://fetching.io does something similar.
It's basically impossible to overfit to the leaderboard in some Kaggles like Avazu where both the train and test are massive in terms of unique observations.
When some part of jQuery can be replaced by native APIs so easy, it only shows how good jQuery was designed.
> `tar` up an entire WordPress install, save it as `favicon.ico` and then easily pull the files from the server.

assuming I have access to the server to create the tar and save it, what's the difference between downloading the archive as favicon.ico or any other name?
Civil engineering is fairly rigid and defined by applicable building codes. There isn't any real room to innovate in the industry, at least in the public sector. "Mastering" civil engineering just entails becoming familiar with the code and then it becomes a game of politics and liability.

More likely, he would just hire a civil engineering firm. Laws throughout the country are such that you can't really buy your way into the industry the same way he has with Tesla and SpaceX. Practicing civil engineering requires licensure everywhere in the USA.
MyWebIntelligence: A tool to understand the web around you
Speaking of Google, GChat supported XMPP at one point too, and we could have had cross-service federation if all the big companies would have played ball: http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2015/02/google-finally-ki...

Why not work on pushing an open standard instead of locking users into your proprietary client? I already know the answer (ads and user data collection; see also: G+), it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth #dontBeEvil
>.@sama when you said "smart people," did you mean "people in positions of privilege, esp. white dudes"? bc it's p cool if y'all shut up tbh

This person managed to not only be the exact type of person Sama mentions, but also classist, racist and sexist at the same time.

But if I pointed that out outside of a pseudonym I'd probably lose my job for pointing out that yes, it is possible to be racist against white people (and sexist towards men).

Redefining the words to somehow exclude your viewpoints isn't how the world (should) work - but is increasingly becoming so.

There is an entire group of extreme leftists who hate "white males" by default. Because they've somehow reasoned to themselves that white males chose to be born that way and it is impossible to be racist or sexist towards them based on how they were born.

I have no idea the mental hurdles they jump over to reason about their beliefs.
But this isn't about you choosing to pay for a source without ads, this is about people choosing the source with ads, and then removing them. Those are entirely different things.
I have user vbezhenar. I run browser under that user. I have system storage for sensitive data. Its data available only via API which checks permissions. E.g. only Chrome can access its data.

Chrome must be able to read its cookies, so cookies file must be readable/writeable for user vbezhenar. And there are high chances that I'll run malware program under this user vbezhenar too, so it can read cookies file, but it won't be able to access encryption password.
Not to minimise this issue but there are other ways for websites to silently waste user bandwidth. I think the real issue here is that it crashes Chrome and can render the computer unresponsive.
> There's no reason you can't concatenate jQuery with the rest of your JS.

True and most applications should really do this. In reality I've seen far too many production system still including sometimes over 50+ files.
Use 2048 bits, not 4096. I'm kind of paranoid and always try to use the highest recommendations, HSTS, all-SSL, etc. But in terms of SSL connection setups / second, your CPU will be the bottleneck, and having 4096 bits will limit you to about 1/4 of the connection setups / second that 2048 could have handled. So if the site has low traffic and a enough CPU resources, it could be ok, but if you ever need to handle a lot of connections: use 2048 bits! (I learned the hard way ;)
Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo. I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for the first few months of the site)

Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653) :D