Hacker News Reader

Not that it makes any difference, but Berkeley isn't an Ivy League school.

mattybon Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service from AWS

What are some of Riak's shortcomings?

mattybon Big Data: principles and best practices (new book)

Just worked for me (at 2:43AM PST). Thanks for pointing that out!

mattybon Migrating away from Puppet to cdist (Python3)

At least for (recent versions of) Ubuntu Server, a C compiler isn't available on a bare install, so it'd need to just be Bash.

And what's with the aversion to dependencies? Installing Ruby is just an apt-get invocation away from a bare server.

mattybon It’s time for Python 2.7

I suspect sneak is implying that you should build packages on a build box, then your other servers can just grab those instead of compiling themselves. It's a good idea.

mattybon How to define custom, colored labels (like TODO) in VIM

Type "cache:http://dtuite.github.com/define-custom-vim-tags-and-labels.h... into Chrome's address bar and hit enter to see the content.

The repo is no longer visible (http://davidtuite.com/define-custom-vim-tags-and-labels.html), so I'm guessing it was either deleted or made private. The CNAME file in that repo probably inadvertently pointed to "onlyvariance.comdavidtuite.com" and GitHub is still caching it.

mattybon Linus Torvalds now on GitHub

I find it hard to beleive your company can't spend $100 on offloading to a managed resource such as GitHub.

Oh, we can. We just haven't needed to yet.

mattybon Linus Torvalds now on GitHub

I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

Huh? My $7/month plan comes with 600+MB of storage, and my job's $50/month plan comes with 6GB. Where are you getting these numbers?

mattybon How Heroku is using Redis in distributed Erlang systems

He used Scott Chacon's excellent ShowOff:

https://github.com/schacon/showoff

mattybon Zed Shaw: The wonderful Rob Sobers did a great job translating LPTHW to Ruby

How can we help? I can't find the source for this on Gitorious.

Edit: nvm, it's here folks:

https://gitorious.org/learnrubythehardway/learnrubythehardwa...

Cheers!

mattybon Zed Shaw: The wonderful Rob Sobers did a great job translating LPTHW to Ruby

This looks like an approved translation to me:

http://learncodethehardway.org/

Also, from the linked page:

The prose in this translation is nearly 100% identical to the Python version with the exception of a few paragraphs that have been modified to be relevant to Ruby. All of the code exercises and required libraries have been completely adapted for Ruby. In other words, Zed did all the really hard work.

mattybon Ask HN: Hacker Fair Stories and Feedback

I attended as a candidate.

I think the deposit is a great idea. If you have a better handle on how many candidates will be there, space can be allocated much more efficiently. I was surprised to see how little space I was supposed to get, and even more surprised when I was the only candidate (out of 6) at my table.

A deposit also helps you accept more candidates, which decreases the load on those of us that show up. I saw two companies that I really wanted to speak with (Mozilla and Yammer) seemingly lose interest because my line was too long. By the time I had a spare moment, they were gone. I might apply through normal channels, but I might not.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

-Make the name tags for recruiters and candidates different colors, if you can do so without completely losing legibility.

-Tell the candidates about the technical/non-technical dots (I may have missed the memo; if so, no worries). Either way, this was a great idea.

-Tell Garrett to get some sleep!

Personally, I had a blast. I came from Long Island, NY for the event, and it was more than worth it. I got swamped with interest and I'm literally sitting here juggling interview requests as I type this. I originally planned to leave Sunday morning (silly me), but my stay has been extended until late this week.

For future candidates:

-If the recruiter gives you something that doesn't have their name on it (like a printed job posting), get their contact information and write it down. You will never remember it later, and you want to be able to refer to that individual in your future correspondence.

-Preparation is pretty crucial. My experience was much less stressful because I worked on my stuff (poster, projects and their elevator pitches) for tens of hours. To that end...

-Do not stay up late the previous night hacking on your project. I know of one candidate who didn't attend because she stayed up all night working on a demo, and was then too tired to show up. The fair itself is actually draining; you stand up for hours on end and talk constantly. You don't want to start the day tired. I got an absurd amount of sleep (10+ hours) and was still beat by dinner.

-Test your demos beforehand on the laptop/server(s) that you plan to use.

-Print lots of resumés before you get to the fair. I printed 32 (power of 2, hee hee) and had to tell about 10 people that I ran out. Printer availability at the Dojo is spotty. Also, put your GitHub URL on your resumé. Not sure why I forgot to do this. My (printed) resumé is in Markdown, and this earned me brownie points. Also print it on heavier (but not too heavy) paper, too. 24lb. maybe? I'll stop rambling about resumés now, they're boring.

-Make a cool poster. I had a neat poster, and it ended up being a conversation starter. The posters exist so recruiters can size you up while you're talking to someone else. Why not make a good first impression?

-Brush up on your knowledge before the fair itself, as you may have a technical interview (or two, or ten) that day.

-If you're coming from out of town, find Katy on Airbnb. She is awesome.

For future recruiters:

-Do not walk up to candidates and ask them to describe themselves without first introducing yourself and your organization. I did a lot of unnecessary talking...

This turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, so I'll probably turn this into a blog post once the dust settles.

Bottom line, you guys did a hell of a job! I can't thank you enough. Consider me a permanent future volunteer.

mattybon GitHub for Mac

And here are the docs for Git hosts who haven't yet implemented smart http:

http://progit.org/2010/03/04/smart-http.html

mattybon Hacker Dojo's project to connect devs and awesome jobs is back

How can I contact you?

mattybon The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop

2.6.38:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Release_N...

mattybon PHP Hacking aka trying to push PHP internals forwards

What do you mean by force update?

mattybon PHP Hacking aka trying to push PHP internals forwards

Well what project would he fork? The (apparently) official PHP mirror is way out of date:

https://github.com/php/php-src

mattybon PHP Hacking aka trying to push PHP internals forwards

Well I wasn't sure what you meant by in a batch. I agree that it wasn't well done, but I wasn't commenting on that.

It's especially interesting considering he says this in the comments:

...I don't want to leave it as a stand alone project. I modified PHP as proof of concept in order to get these changes into one of the next releases.

mattybon PHP Hacking aka trying to push PHP internals forwards

That's what was done.

https://github.com/infusion/PHP/commit/790d551ac9ef8e204b44f...

mattybon When can I have a big server in the cloud?

GoRuCo 2010 - James Golick - Scaling to Hundreds of Millions of Requests

http://vimeo.com/12814529

mattybon Deploying Python WSGI applications with Puppet

I'm pretty sure Puppet uses Fabric for its fundamental foundational layer.

Hmm, doesn't look like it:

  $ git clone https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet
  $ cd puppet
  $ grep -r 'fabric' *; echo $?
  1

EDIT: Puppet is written in Ruby.

mattybon It's Time to Drop the "F" Bomb - or "Lies, Damn Lies, and NoSQL."

Is this the episode?

http://thechangelog.com/post/3742814720/episode-0-5-1-mongod...

mattybon Sane Vim Plugin Management with Vundle

http://chrisjean.com/2009/04/20/git-submodules-adding-using-...

mattybon Play Git Like A Violin

You may find this useful:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob_plain;f=contrib/...

It can tell you if your working directory is dirty, if you've got staged changes, what branch/tag you're on, and of course does completion also.

mattybon Easy Rails Asset Handling with HTML5 & S3, from Harvest

Expanded URL:

http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2011/02/easy-rails-asset-hand...

mattybon Putting the Science back in Computer Science

Is that book available anywhere? I can't seem to find it.

mattybon Rietveld - code review Google style

Rietveld has been open source for years.

mattybon Engineering a Compiler, 2nd Edition is out

Yep, that's one reason I submitted this URL. The other is that it's available now from Elsevier, whereas Amazon has the release date listed as March 1st.

mattybon Get Ruby and Rails running on Ubuntu with one command

A few questions:

-Why Ruby 1.8.7 and not 1.9.2?

-I've installed 1.8.7, 1.9.2 & 1.9.2-head via RVM without having libyaml-dev or libffi-dev installed (I see they're listed in `rvm notes`). Any idea what's up here?

Thanks!

mattybon Heroku: Resolved Security Vulnerability

It was a serious question, I didn't mean to sound snarky.

I'm asking if you think it'd be a better idea (from a security perspective) to keep customers on separate VMs. My understanding of this vulnerability is that it relies on several customers sharing a filesystem; if Heroku simply spawned a new instance (they're already running on EC2) for each customer, wouldn't this be mitigated?

Also, I was looking up info on Pivotal Tracker yesterday (after the announcement that they were going paid) and saw your comment.