mattlanger

For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.

There's something so profound about that.

To think of how many jobs I've held in my comparatively short life, how many minor career changes I've had here and there, how many massive shifts in interest and passion I've had over the years, and to hold these up beside someone who has been wholly dedicated to the same singular goal since before I was even born--that's just mind-boggling.

And it was selfless! This one singular goal to which he's dedicated himself, every one of the fifty years of work that went into it, ultimately ended up becoming--at least when boiled down to a headline--a footnote to someone else's greatness.

Five decades. I can't even begin to fathom what sort of drive and passion and commitment that must require.

Bravo.

You're selling yourself short though--at the lowest it's actually free, just like, you know, every other freemium model on the web.

Agreed, I was just trying to jocularly comment on the Things That Don't Exactly Belong On Hacker News aspect of it by pointing out that those conversations always end up in the same place.

Godwin's Law, HackerNews edition: as a non-tech policy discussion grows longer, the probability of a comment thread devolving into an argument between competing ideas of libertarian vs. interventionist market theologies approaches 1.

As Merlin Mann so brilliantly put it, "Yelp.com: Explore Where Local Illiterates Have Recently Stopped Eating.™"

http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/1453581139

Amazing! I run a coworking space for entrepreneurs in Brooklyn, which means every month I'm running around gathering up a dozen or so checks from tenants--so this the most exciting tool I've seen in a long time.

Thanks, oojacoboo. You're a lifesaver!

TL;DR: http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/1516687187

The website is still intermittent, but as of now command line access seems to be fully operational.

You're right, Paul, there's no evidence of any of this at all.

There's no evidence of pharma companies lobbying for more lax FDA regulations.

There's no evidence of the automative industry lobbying against higher CAFE standards.

There's no evidence of utilities companies lobbying against net neutrality.

There's no evidence of the last midterm election cycle seeing an amount of private spending nearly double the previous record.

Meanwhile there's an abundance of evidence that poor people are successfully lobbying for a higher living wage, longer unemployment benefits, and access to quality healthcare.

Regarding your first point: since you already stated you're sometimes in favor of publicly subsidizing things like vaccinations and criminal incarcerations, your opposition to publicly funded education must result from this distinction you draw between public good and "private enjoyment". But I think rather than just assuming a position on college degrees a priori there is a rich and valuable debate to be had about whether higher education should be considered a public good and not merely a private enjoyment.

And your second: this seems to be both a distraction (I don't see how arguing that an educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient of democracy implies that one should necessarily agree with denying participation to those deemed incapable) and somewhat misguided (seeing as we already do deny the right to vote to a certain class of people unable to make correct judgments--we call them felons).

Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."

His project reminds me of this great passage from Colson Whitehead's Colossus of New York: "No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now."

I suspect that same sentiment speaks to quite a few HN'ers as well.

Memory and recall are not matters of direct lookup; our brains are not key-value stores. We usually don't request a memory by timestamp, but rather, memories more often than not make themselves known to us--absent any request or intervention on our part--after being triggered by other associated sense perceptions (consider the memories invoked by the smell of leaves on an early fall day, the sound of a song you haven't heard in a decade).

Anecdotally, at least, I very rarely (if ever) recall the details of a text by attempting to actively recall some specific fact, date, historical accident, or the like, but this by no means suggests that I have no memory of something I've read because it is so often the case that details I'd completely forgotten about return at the most unexpected times, triggered by the most unexpected stimuli.

If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million from Elevation Partners just three months ago.

It's actually not at all uncommon for wildly profitable companies to take an additional round so they can continue to ramp up at accelerative rates.

In what way was this a tutorial? Seemed more like a parable meant to drive home the line about how "When they have questions, they ask the mailing list or read the faq again."

Each problem poses different challenges, and it doesn't seem fair to attempt to invalidate a given example by theorizing about hypothetical complexities the original authors never alluded to.

I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover...

This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization...

Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.

Preamble: I'm not being negative! I always appreciate any effort to elucidate complicating matters--especially those on matters I happen to have a vested interest in--but seeing as this is A Really Challenging Engineering Problem That Lot's Of People Like Myself Spend The Better Part Of Our Careers Trying To Solve and it's being offered up in a pithy, bite-size, 1000-word blog post on "Designing Web Applications for Scalability", well, I'm going to have to get out my red pen.

The entire subsection on "Choosing your data storage setup" is completely inconsistent precisely because it attempts to tackle such a huge problem in the space of a few paragraphs. Couch and Redis don't even partition out of the box, Tokyo Cabinet only does so with the help of Lightcloud, Mongo's auto-sharding is still unready for production, and Cassandra and Voldemort are fully distributed clusters for whom replication and partitioning mean very different things (and, incidentally, using "partitioning" and "sharding" interchangeably is one thing; doing the same for "shard" and "node" is very different).

And of course by muddying the waters with respect to the datastores themselves the entire treatment of designing a schema is similarly inconsistent. How can you have a universal keying strategy when you don't even know the terms of your discussion? Are you hashing to shards or to a ring? On the client side? With Zookeeper? Or with a messaging service?

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with the author's spirit of building for customer acquisition while also building for scalability, but I guess my advice would be "do plenty of homework and never expect to learn everything you'll need to know after reading a hundred blog posts--much less after reading just one."

Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get with folders. What if I want to categorize something as "must read" in addition to "technology"? What you describe here is a useful trick, but it means I'm stuck labeling my feeds in a manner directly related to my need to be able to mark-as-read.

Got definite plans for this in the pipeline, in addition to filtering out dupes.

What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a reader without any concept of an unread item count.

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf. Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list of things I haven't accomplished (and probably can't accomplish), a list that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been thinking so much about this stuff.)

Heads next to the Ninth Circuit, which will doubtlessly uphold the ruling. Then it'll be on to the SCOTUS, which is a very different court from the '03 bench that ruled on Lawrence v. Texas.

I guess I don't see this being a problem "all the time" the way you do. Sure, every so often you start seeing lots of articles about the same contentious debate happening in a pretty tight echo chamber (or sometimes you start seeing nothing but Erlang articles at PG's behest), but save for the occasional dud most of what rises to the top around here seems pretty well worth my time.

But downvotes just as often (or more often, I'd argue) create exactly the tribalism you describe. Restrict users to only a positive input mechanism and you'll drastically reduce bullying and other gang behavior.

Whatta week! Like the startup gods put out an RFC for the SF/NYC rivalry!

This is a truly valuable contribution to the startup community--as inspiring as it is devastating. We should all aspire to such courage, motivation, and good intentions in the work we do ourselves.

Baader-Meinhof alert: just yesterday I was googling around about fair use with regard to logos and insignias when I came upon this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos

Considering how impressively thorough their policies and guidelines are the FBI's action comes as something of a surprise.

I'm curious why people link to a summary of an article that actually resides elsewhere--a similar example was just submitted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568011.

In both cases the summary bore a headline which significantly altered one's initial understanding of the article at hand, and in both cases it led to a more difficult and/or unrewarding read.

Actually, I should amend this in the interest of not being a hypocrite, seeing as I'm building out a side project right now on top of Cassandra, which is arguably much slower to get out of the gate with than SQL. But in this case I know from the get-go that I'm going to have massive data on my hands and that I'd have to be sharding a SQL implementation almost immediately, so in the long run it's worth the outlay now.

Otherwise, as much as I'd love to toy around with node.js or Tornado or some such, I've got no good excuse and I'm sticking with Django because a.) I'm already familiar with it, b.) batteries are included, and c.) I can move very quickly with it.

Not only should you roll with LAMP, but you should get yourself a framework, too. The top comment in this thread from about a year ago says it all, particularly the first bullet point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773447

As a general rule of thumb my unease with a line of code is proportional to its distance from the left margin. There are exceptions, naturally, but that's generally how I judge myself: if I open a file and see 16 or 20 spaces on a line I'm probably Doing It Wrong™.