codinghorror

I just want to be clear that in the original referenced article, I am not anti-ECC per se, I just found myself caught in the massive cognitive dissonance between "you must have ECC in all your computers otherwise they will constantly and silently corrupt your data + crash" and "statistically speaking, most computers in the world do not use ECC". How can both of these things be true?

The argument for ECC is credible (I personally think rowhammer is the best example of this actually mattering, but ironically a) you can rowhammer ECC memory just fine and b) DDR4 has hardware features to mitigate rowhammer -- which shows how quickly things are changing), but it also seems to hinge on whether you have hundreds to thousands of computers all working together, e.g. the positive effects of ECC only seem to matter enough statistically at a _very_ large scale.

Are they still advertising on porn sites? Sounds like a one time publicity stunt to me.

Terrible tragedy. I can definitely see the argument that Airbnb hosts should carry insurance for freak accidents / deaths that occur on their property in cases like this.

People still use spinning rust for databases?

This does seem a little extreme. I don't know many parents that are so child centric that they "have nothing left to say to each other".

On the other hand if you compare parenting in th 1970s there does seem to be something to the argument that parenting went from an occupation to a professional sport, where people compete at it. I object more to the tiger parenting where kids have to be at the top of their class, get in to MIT or Stanford, all that pressure. It's not healthy.

Interesting. Due to the seed explosion (which is absolutely a good thing, more entrepreneurs trying new stuff) Series A has indeed become very challenging -- extremely challenging, even.

Rather than raise more seed, we decided to buckle down and try to fund through paying customer growth. Slower of a curve than a 2 or 3 million dollar injection, but no strings attached either. And I figure you need to develop your billing and customer chops eventually anyway, so why not start building those skills now?

I do not feel this belongs on Hacker News?

That seems like a super high limit.

Rate limit EVERYTHING. I learned this lesson the hard way early on at Stack Overflow. ;)

The point of most cloud servers is to abstract away the kind of low level architectural details you are looking at here, so kind of opposing goals.. why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? It is not expensive, maybe $800 tops and you get a nice development rig in the process.

I just think it is super weird to be completely, categorically opposed to remote work when a primary goal is diversity. It is a severe constraint on hiring, and you want super flexible hiring to maximize diversity.

Absolutely zero remote work, yet I built Stack Overflow with a team of entirely remote developers, and do the same with Discourse today.

I guess every company culture is a series of choices, but it is very hard to be diverse -- which appears to be one of Clef's main goals -- when you only recruit in a tightly limited geographic area.

It doesn't; 1GB is the minimum. We have to fit Redis, Postgres, Ruby, Sidekiq, and 2 Unicorns in there. There are a bunch of fairly active instances on 1GB RAM, which works fine. If your community grows a lot you'll need more resources, of course.

Vagrant's only intended as a development solution, though, not for production deployment.

I'm sorry it was difficult to get Discourse up and running!

If it helps, I'd be glad to throw in a free Digital Ocean $20/month droplet -- I can set it up following our guide at http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under... and then hand it over to you for everything else. We also have a special Mandrill reseller code so we can give you a Mandrill account with 50k emails/month as part of the package. Just email us at team@discourse.org and I'll make it happen.

(Obviously I am a fan, because PHP fractals, man.)

Yes, this will require Docker, which means a 64-bit OS and a modern Linux kernel. We initially tried supporting arbitrary Discourse installs but it quickly became a support nightmare for our small 7 person team. We adopted Docker because we saw it as the only way forward to have sane support both internally (for hosting) and externally. We are all-in on Docker, for what it's worth.

I'd argue Rails has historically had very little incentive to support super easy server installs; how many large open source Rails projects can you even name? Certainly 37signals nee Basecamp isn't too concerned about how hard it is to install their webapps on a server...

Long term, the only real solution is VPS and Docker. I think that has a lot of other benefits for the whole hosting ecosystem, too -- it opens the door to not just Rails deployments but all kinds of alternatives.

Well, it is possible to install Discourse in 30 minutes:

http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under...

This does require Docker, though, which means 64-bit and a modern Kernel.

It's absolutely true that Rails is a very tough stack to install (and let me put my tinfoil hat on: do you think 37signals nee basecamp was ever incentivized to make it easy for people to install Rails apps?), but it needs to be competitive with PHP in the long term if we want things to change.

Docker was the only sane way we saw to move forward and support the community with our small (currently 7 person) team. We're all-in on Docker, all our internal hosting uses Docker, and it's the only officially supported install method for Discourse.

So never let it be said that we don't eat our own dogfood. Because we do, and it's goddamn delicious.

Regardless of whether you feel these numbers are "impressive" or not, this kind of financial transparency is amazing and exceedingly rare. Kudos to the team, I personally use Ghost for my blog and love it.

( Also the quoted number is from April here is the latest https://ghost.baremetrics.com )

This is the truth. Nobody will increase your pay as much as someone willing to compete with another company for you.

The trick is to make companies where money isn't the only motivation for working there, because those kinds of companies will always lose in the talent wars anyway.

Looks like they depended on these 199 dollar chromebooks

http://blog.codestarter.org/how-we-turn-199-chromebooks-into...

Was this a business, or a charity? I am not really following here..

Hmm, you make a really good point. Then the system requirements become super low, at the cost of requiring stable / reliable / reasonable internet connectivity.. seems inevitable longer term but not sure about the kids and schools that were targeted.

This is a beautiful, well written, and clear explanation. The web needs much more of this, please!

Excellent to hear from a confirmed source, this initially read very tiny print Dr. Bronner bottle to me as well, but I wasn't sure.

So the author was... kind of an asshole?

This is such a pain in the butt for us on a weekly basis. Being able to search commit messages would make my life a lot easier.

I think it is very unlikely any of that will be solved in a few years.

For example resolution, arguably the easiest one to attack, when we are talking 4k res at 120fps, that is barely possible on the highest end PC rigs today with 2 or even 3 video cards in SLI.

I do not think Far Cry 4 would look very good at 640x480. Imagine it full screen on even a modest 20" monitor at that resolution.

There are tricks, yes, but big pixels are a fundamental problem until you reach a "good enough" size. Sort of like when the iPhone 4 and retina was released. We are very, very far from retina resolution in VR.

I have three kids for the record. And trust me, if VR isn't doing a good job of making a believable aliens-are-destroying-your-house game, it isn't going to be any more believable when it is just rendering your house with bigger rooms.

That's the problem.

As alluded to later in the replies here, no discussion website ever tried to be fully decentralized like NNTP was from inception.

It is a super hard problem, and as the declining popularity of NNTP itself illustrates (and the tendency toward mega-centralization on the web like Facebook, too) maybe it was solving the wrong problem for today.

déjà news acquisition was in 2001, lifetimes ago in web time. And it does fit with Google's stated mission of putting everything online, in easily searchable format.

The "let's put a thin web veneer over X" approach has never been a great one, perhaps sufficient for Web 1.0, but not these days.

Sort of, voting rearranging the chronological stream of conversation makes it significantly different IMO. There is also the phenomenon of funniest image tending to win the votes, too. (Barring excellent moderation, but Reddit does very little to make moderation easy, or even set goals for moderation.)

That's not great for discussion, but then Reddit was always designed as more of a system of briefly commenting on URLs than actual discussion.