wulczer

I don't think there should be a HN submission every time Twitter/Google Talk/AWS has a short outage and I find this submission in particular to be of low value - that's why I flagged it.

Linux version http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/download.html?product=...

Great article! Small nitpick from someone who just tried this on his server logs :)

  * on my machine xargs -I implies -L1, so you can drop that
  * use gnuplot -p or the graphic will disappear immediately after rendering

I'm pretty sure a project as widely used as FFmpeg can't just choose a single compiler (and you'd actually have to choose a single compiler version since for instance new versions of GCC can introduce new warnings).

On top of that, sometimes warnings come from parts of the code you don't control, like a scanner generated by flex.

I think it's better to have a strong policy of not introducing warnings and fixing them whenever a particular compiler is foud to emit them, but having -Werror in the default Makefile can quickly inundate the project's mailing list/IRC channel with "doesn't compile" complaints from people with exotic compilers.

All this drama reminds me of this excellent phrase:

https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

  Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better
  while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape.

Would serving attachment previews from a separate domain, like fastmail-usercontent.fm, help?

That sweet map in the background was made by Vizzuality, keep on rocking! (no affiliation on my side apart from knowing them and being a fan).

It didn't work out of the box, but I have a UX31E and it works flawlessly now (meaning: it behaves exactly how I want it to, all peripherals work), with Debian testing.

I tend to treat the effort of making a new laptop work perfectly with a Linux distro as a one-off cost. If you're using the machine 10 hours a day for two years, spending three days on making it work right is barely noticeable.

In that vein, a friend of mine bought a Mac and spent a similar amount of time making it work flawlessly. That included buying software that minimises and tiles windows, figuring out that if you resume it with a large screen plugged it, the DPI will change and fonts on the laptop display will look weird and first googling and then working around this:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3336420?start=0&tst...

I'm sure someone with a new Windows laptop would spend a similar amount of time to make it work just right.

There are no silver bullets.

Perhaps other things worry him and I don't think you should assume they are the ones you mentioned.

Your comment struck me as snarky and unfair and I have downvoted it and upvoted its parent.

First of all, as mentioned below if the server advertises PHP support, it's considered that the page is made with PHP (so a standard Apache install that comes with mod_php will make it think you're using PHP).

And second, I put my company's (admittedly not YC, but hey) homepage there just to try and since we're using a hosted Wordpress for the landing page so that business people can change the copy easier, it thought we're using PHP when in reality the app doesn't have a single line in it.

Ooops, I might have obsolete information. The grammar on json.org does not define a date type, but ES5 seems to define a Data.prototype.toJSON function. Oh well.

JSON does not define a date type.

There were some very sketchy plans about making this multilanguage... The best we could come up with was writing a small C module that would call Python code and that you could wrap in other languages.

If anyone has a better idea on how to keep the logic in one language, but make it accessible to everyone (preferably without inventing a whole DSL, that would end up being just like a real programming language, but worse), please speak up!

That would be awesome! Hit us up on contact@ducksboard.com (or my profile email)

The lowest common denominator of SaaS APIs is HTTP. Apart from that, everyone does it different.

Some use JSON, some use XML, some use SOAP... Sometimes you authenticate with Basic authentication, sometimes you use OAuth 1.0 and need to sign each request, sometimes it's OAuth 2.0 and you just need the token. Oh, and the actual GET parameter for the token is different, too...

There are APIs where you need to set a 'X-API-Version' header to something, or you'll get weird results. The list goes on...

The goal here is to hide all that crap from developers and focus on achieving the desired result.

It's not a real key, just a random hash to make the example feel more real. Seems we hit the Uncanny Valley of code examples ;)

What? Relational databases and functional programming are very much aligned, see http://thoughts.j-davis.com/2011/09/25/sql-the-successful-co... (that's the second time I link to that post [I'm not the author] on HN, because I think it's awesome).

I'm not sure about long ago, but the recent version of libpq has NOTIFY working asynchronously (you can stick the connection file descriptor in a select(2) and you'll get woken up when a notify is available).

It's not exactly new, 7.4 was the oldest version I cared to check, but I think it goes back more :) http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/sql-notify.html

A recent addition to NOTIFY is the ability for notifies to carry payloads (which makes them even more useful)

I have no idea, but I find it easy to find plausible reasons to raise money. Hiring a team of engineers to implement all the great things they have in the pipeline? Getting a sales team to get big deals with content producers? Buying lots of ads?

While the idea is nice, please note that the official name is PostgreSQL and Postgres is an accepted alias. "Postgre SQL" is just plain wrong.

Looks like it's similar to using deferToThread in Twisted (where you get a builtin threadpool implementation): http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/thread...

> Reminds me much of channels in Go: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#channels

Or producers and consumers in Twisted: http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/produc...

Clickable:

https://app.ducksboard.com/signup/hn/

http://dev.ducksboard.com/

http://blog.ducksboard.com/2012/04/introducing-the-ducksboar...

We launched with billing code, but did not have code to actually do something with accounts that did not pay until they were into their 35th day of a 30 day trial (a slight estimation error, you know how software development works).

"Hey, you lucky guys, we're extending your trial period by five days! Ain't that cool?"

Wow, looks just like the one we made for Ducksboard :)

https://ducksboard.jira.com/wiki/download/thumbnails/262169/...

Props for open-sourcing it!

Ducksboard (http://ducksboard.com/), Barcelona, Spain is looking for a full-time frontend engineer.

I'm one of the Ducksboard founders and I approve this message:

Recently funded, we're making beautiful real-time dashboards. You should know the HTML and CSS specs as the back of your hand, treat Javascript as a programming language (modular, documented, tested code) and know what SVG is. Ducksboard is gorgeous and you'll help to make it even prettier.

Competitive salary, relocation to Barcelona preferred (we'll help you with everything, one of the founders is an expat as well) but we'll also consider remote hires.

Email jobs@ducksboard.com or me (email in my profile).

I'm really sorry, but this ticked off my code-review OCD and I couldn't help myself.

You could use "Bla bla bla {0}, because {0} and {0}".format("women") to avoid using a tuple of "women". Or, if you're stuck with old Python, just use %(noun)s three times and format with {"noun": "women"}.

> Edit: Climate could play a part too. I've never boosted a car, but I imagine it's more appealing in a balmy 60 degrees than sub-freezing.

It was raining cats and dogs that night, terrible weather for someone conducting their trade outdoors.

Not sure if people who break into vehicles care much about the weather, though :)

We (hope we) did learn.

First of all, pay closer attention to the usage patterns. We saw increased activity for a few days before the beta signup, but never investigated in depth. We only learned that something's up when the heavy traffic started and monitoring alarms went off.

Second, get the scaling-up procedure more automated, we had everything planned, but it took too much time to get the extra infrastructure ready. Pressure and precise operation don't work well together.

Third, we uncovered a previously unknown memory leak in one of the components, which got evident during the Guild Wars 2 event and forced us to restart a subsystem a few times.

All in all it was a nice (if a bit stressful) experience, hope you guys enjoyed it a bit yourselves too :)