Hacker News Reader

disbeliefon “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

There are more options than just "Entirely Open Concept" or "Individual Cubicles"! There can be a mix of the two, or other things. My ideal scenario would be majority open areas, but with plenty of more secluded rooms/areas where people can work in a quiet, distraction-free atmosphere if they choose. You don't need to have a dedicated desk, and can roam freely between the two.

disbeliefon Meerkat is dying

That actually makes the argument stronger imo.

disbeliefon Meerkat is dying

or Advertorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)

disbeliefon Announcing MongoDB 3.0

I've used Mongo in two large projects and have mixed feelings about it.

Pros: It's great for building your MVP. Super easy to get up and running, super easy to work with at a superficial level (I'm talking about storing data and querying here more than ops and administration), dataset can grow to a fairly large size without you having to think about your database at all, freeing you to think about your business. Mongo was my first brush with "schemaless" and that's a big advantage particularly for early-stage projects where things are in flux. I also enjoy using JS as the query language, because I like JS, but YMMV.

Also for certain use cases, particularly the single document case, it's probably one of the best solutions available. However, in my experience, this ends up being a limitation if your data doesn't fit nicely into a single document, and the types of data that do fit this use case are rare.

The cons you've probably heard before: no transactions, no joins, not ACID compliant, until very recently writes locked the entire database, scaling/sharding just works until it doesn't.

disbeliefon Announcing MongoDB 3.0

I'm actually surprised that MongoDB saved your write-heavy app. In my experience, it's Mongo's poor write throughput that causes the most headaches. This 3.0 release finally begins to address that with collection and document level concurrency control (locking).

disbeliefon Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports

I think you're equating all sports with American Football. Which, granted, is more or less what the original article did as well. I totally agree about the military displays, the nationalism and religious overtones that get mixed in with Football in the US. But that's one sport. There are many others, and aside from probably Nascar, none of them come close to Football in those terms.

disbeliefon Prisoners Read More Library Books Than Do Non-Prisoners

Exactly, this is the opposite of news. Other things they probably do more than non-prisoners: stare at the wall, push-ups, chess and/or card games, walk in a circle.

disbeliefon Material Cools Buildings by Sending Heat into Space

I'm probably missing something in the definition of "thermal window".

disbeliefon Material Cools Buildings by Sending Heat into Space

So if, in the future, this material was in heavy use atop buildings and dwellings across the planet, and the heat is all being radiated out the same thermal window, does this mean that at some set distance from the earth, there's a ring of extreme heat being generated?

disbeliefon Benchmarking Phoenix vs. Rails vs. Sinatra vs. Express vs. Martini

Is it therefore possible to use Erlang libraries in an Elixir application, or to "drop to Erlang" in places where it could be advantageous?

disbeliefon Trailblazer: A new architecture for Rails

Trailblazer looks interesting, and there are a lot of good ideas in here. One issue I have with it after reading the documentation is that the code is organized around "Concepts" and at the core of each Concept appears to be a single Model. All of the Form, Presenter, and other Operation objects live within a Model's namespace where often the @model is implicit. This works well if your business logic only applies to CRUD operations on individual Models, but in reality that is rarely the case.

I tend to use a service object abstraction based around concerns, or "business stories". My service objects map to specific scenarios or pieces of business logic that often utilize multiple underlying Models and/or other entities (eg. third party interactions services).

It wasn't clear to me whether such a scenario is discouraged with Trailblazer, or maybe not even possible.

disbeliefon Trailblazer: A new architecture for Rails

JSON rendering performance is a major concern for most of my Rails apps, and I'm wondering the same thing. I've not used Roar (https://github.com/apotonick/roar) before which is what Trailblazer uses for JSON serialization/deserialization. It seems to be full-featured, but I'm interested to hear how it performs compared to other gems. I currently use OJ + Jbuilder + a ton of fragment caching and it's not great but better than anything else I could find.

disbeliefon Yahoo Mail moving to React

Sounds similar to Node.js in that regard then. Lots more boilerplate and conventions you need to develop yourself.

disbeliefon Yahoo Mail moving to React

So does this mean Erlang only makes sense if you work for a big company or have a large team to implement it properly? (I'm responding in light of davidw's edit which you may not have seen).

disbeliefon AWS Lambda

Currently the only services supported are S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis. Seems like a no-brainer that they'll be adding other services though.

disbeliefon AWS Lambda

You can't, yet. They have plans to add "other languages" on their roadmap.

disbeliefon Refactoring Ruby with Monads

From the conclusion:

> Now, to be clear, I’m not saying you should immediately refactor all your Rails applications to use monads; I’m just using Ruby as a tool to explain an interesting idea about programming, not giving you a best practice for all your Ruby code. However, it’s good to know about techniques like this! And in some cases, by applying the power of monads wisely, we can untangle nested callbacks, make parts of our code more reusable, and generally make our programs better.

disbeliefon Ask HN: Hackers who cook

1. I cook mainly for convenience, but also because I enjoy it. Due to where I live and the kinds of products I buy, I wouldn't say I'm saving much if any money cooking at home as opposed to eating out. Quality and organic/local groceries are expensive in SF, and there are thousands of delicious and affordable restaurants and delivery services.

2. I rarely if ever plan ahead. Maybe if I have guests coming over for dinner I'll plan a day in advance. I typically have a rotation of staple dishes which I go through, but it's very flexible, and I come up with random new things when inspiration or boredom strikes.

3. All sorts of things, but typically Italian, French, Tex/Cal-Mex, some Thai/Chinese style and the odd curry.

4. Nothing strict, but I'm very low carb, low sugar, high protein and fat with tons of veggies.

5. I use cooking as an escape, and thus don't care too much about my productivity. That said, I can get stressed if things look like they aren't going to turn out well, or when I feel like I'm scrambling to maintain my timing. One tip: it typically pays off to do most or all of your prep work before you start cooking. A little prep+cook multitasking is manageable but I find cooking a lot more fun when I have everything prepped and ready and can focus all of my attention on the composition.

disbeliefon From the startup who allegedly stole software and raised $2M with it

My extensive experience of being a PayPal seller is quite the contrary. People request a charge back, PayPal "encourages" them to contact you, which essentially is just an extra step in the charge back process that they can skip, then nearly every time the money is returned with nothing the seller can do about it.

disbeliefon Something is amiss with the Interwebs: BGP is a flapping

Sorry I'm not well versed in BGP (or bitcoin for that matter). I was hoping for someone with more domain knowledge to confirm or set me straight. Probably wasn't very clear by my terse initial comment.

disbeliefon Something is amiss with the Interwebs: BGP is a flapping

Slate article on using BGP hijacking to redirect mined bitcoins from an hour ago. Relevant? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

edit: I'll take it by the downvotes without responses that's a "no"?

disbeliefon Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

> What's your definition of sane? None of those countries have the scale, frequency and volume of demand that resembles anything like the US.[1]

The most relevant statistic in the link you reference is "Pct of population" with the US at 14.3% and Germany at 11.9%. Two and a half percentage points does not seem like such a big difference in scale.

My attitude isn't "why not me" but "why is this so absurd"? I got in to both countries, but one was a total clusterfuck and one wasn't. Obviously one of them is doing something better than the other. I'm positing that the ultimate solution to demand (if one exists), is more in the direction of the German system than the random lottery of the US.

disbeliefon Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

Trust me, EU countries have their own immigration demand problems. Especially a place like Germany which has one of the few functioning economies in the block lately. People flock there looking for work. Other countries with huge immigration demand include England and Spain. There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability/urgency and randomly select a few".

disbeliefon Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

Though as long as demand for H1 visas remains high, this cycle will continue with new recruits replacing those qualifying for L1. Inevitably some of these people may wish to remain in Canada, or form their own startups there. Seems to be a big plus for Canada regardless.

disbeliefon Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

> in some cases it's that the people coming from overseas are willing to get paid less for the same job.

Agreed that this is the case in a lot of industries, but the problem in Silicon Valley and the tech industry generally isn't the cost of workers, it's finding enough highly-skilled workers to allow companies to grow and achieve their visions.

disbeliefon Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles

Countries in the EU (and elsewhere) have more sane immigration systems. As a Canadian having immigrated to both Germany and the US, I can say that the US system is at least two orders of magnitude more difficult, costly, needlessly complicated, and in the end a lot of it comes down to luck (most of it bad). Germany has no lottery system, and renewal is very straightforward. I applied for my visa while in Germany as a tourist, I was issued a "temporary visa" while the final decision was made, and after I was accepted, the renewal processes every couple of years was essentially a formality. There is also a straight-forward path to permanent residency after X years working in the country. Contrast that with how things work in the US (which I don't have time to get into in an HN comment), and you'll see why it deserves to be singled out for this.

disbeliefon University of Wisconsin to reprise controversial monkey studies

The ends don't justify the means for me. The study hopes to gain a better understanding of the early causes of anxiety and depression. We're not saving the human race here, we're not necessarily even saving lives.

Even if a new treatment for depression were developed due to this research (which it probably won't), and you were clinically depressed, would you want to receive it knowing it was came about after the torture and eventual deaths of 20 baby monkeys? I wouldn't feel comfortable with that.

disbeliefon University of Wisconsin to reprise controversial monkey studies

Must I have a degree in the field of research related to this study in order to have a valid opinion on the torment, suffering, and eventual euthanization of 20 innocent monkeys?

disbeliefon University of Wisconsin to reprise controversial monkey studies

This is pretty sickening. I have spent a lot of time around various monkey species, including the Rhesus Macaque, and the amount of emotional awareness and sensitivity they have is comparable to that in humans. To subject such intelligent and sensitive animals to such fear and cruelty, at such a young age, and then to euthanize them afterwards, in a reprise of past experiments, is beyond senseless.

disbeliefon Jazz and Rain

There was a site like this I had bookmarked a few years back that was just rain (no jazz). I loved it and wish I still knew what it was. Anyone else remember it?