jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
A few of these options are good in principle, but are not necessarily informed by the reality of operational experience with the more-common failure modes of AWS at a medium to larger scale (~50 instances +).

The author recommends using EBS volumes to provide for backups and snapshots. However, Amazon's EBS system is one of the more failure-prone components of the AWS infrastructure, and lies at the heart of this morning's outage [1]. Any steps you can take to reduce your dependence upon a service that is both critical to operation and failure-prone will limit the surface of your vulnerability to such outages. While the snapshotting ability of EBS is nice, waking up to a buzzing pager to find that half of the EBS volumes in your cluster have dropped out, hosing each of the striped RAID arrays you've set up to achieve reasonable IO throughput, is not. Instead, consider using the ephemeral drives of your EC2 instances, switching to a non-snapshot-based backup strategy, and replicating data to other instances and AZ's to improve resilience.

The author also recommends Elastic Load Balancers to distribute load across services in multiple availability zones. Load balancing across availability zones is excellent advice in principle, but still succumbs to the problem above in the instance of EBS unavailability: ELB instances are also backed by Amazon's EBS infrastructure. ELB's can be excellent day-to-day and provide some great monitoring and introspection. However, having a quick chef script to spin up an Nginx or HAProxy balancer and flipping DNS could save your bacon in the event of an outage that also affected ELBs, like today.

With each service provider incident, you learn more about your availability, dependencies, and assumptions, along with what must improve. Proportional investment following each incident should reduce the impact of subsequent provider issues. Naming and shaming providers in angry Twitter posts will not solve your problem, and it most certainly won't solve your users' problem. Owning your availability by taking concrete steps following each outage to analyze what went down and why, mitigating your exposure to these factors, and measuring your progress during the next incident will. It is exciting to see these investments pay off.

Some of these:

– Painfully thorough monitoring of every subsystem of every component of your infrastructure. When you get paged, it's good to know exactly what's having issues rather than checking each manually in blind suspicion.

– Threshold-based alerting.

– Keeping failover for all systems as automated, quick, and transparent as is reasonably possible.

– Spreading your systems across multiple availability zones and regions, with the ideal goal of being able to lose an entire AZ/region without a complete production outage.

– Team operational reviews and incident analysis that expose the root cause of an issue, but also spider out across your system's dependencies to preemptively identify other components which are vulnerable to the same sort of problem.

---

[1] See the response from AWS in the first reply here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=239106&#...
Good stuff. Just last week I had a young lady interview for a sales director position with my startup. We offered her shares in the company equivalent to 5% of total shares available, on a 4-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff.

She countered with 30%, no vesting schedule. I asked where she came up with that figure and she explained she felt that since we're still in the seed stage of development, she deserves an equal share as my partner and I. Translation: 30% was completely arbitrary. I politely thanked her and sent her on her way.

After doing some additional research, I realized the 5% was probably too generous for a person responsible for nothing more than networking, which is essentially what my partner and I should be doing ourselves anyway. Besides we can pay people commission for acquiring customers direct while retaining full ownership...which is key.
Don't put all your infrastructure on a single cloud provider... spread your eggs in different baskets.
Everyone talks about SLAs but I believe it doesn't consider the fact that the EBS vols are still up (not on fire, and available) and are phantom writing or that the network is queued up the wazoo so writes don't even happen in a timely manner as you'd expect.
And it'd be fine if I didn't track your location, but simply timing data you are receiving from a few GPS satellites?
Yeah, cute idea, but I don't think it would actually work.

Failing to post the canary message would cause people to know that you received an NSL. This is the definition of "disclosure."

If you can find an instance of such a scheme being tested in court, I'd love to see it though.
I'm flagging this as I'm getting feed up by everyone and his mom who have read "how to get your product mentioned on HN's front page". Or; write an anaemic blog post about your new product, submit it to HN with a discussion friendly title.
I agree, and it's certainly what I want as a developer.

But, if I was building a web service that was supposed to be widely used (maybe some like the Yelp or Facebook API), I might think about REST. You know it's going to be immediately understood by everyone, and you don't have to worry about weird dependencies. And, being able to show examples using just curl is kind of nice, too.
Yes it seems to be just erb templates, but instead of spitting out HTML it spits out CSS.
Completely agree - Mozilla's scaled-back implementation, which appears to be closer in line with the standards track - is much safer and marks a better approach anyway (several at MS have been openly recommending against using dynamic attributes for some time now).

It's moves like this among vendors that force us to think about that line between "experimentation and innovation" vs. implementing "proprietary features."

As NathanKP mentioned below, we'd all do well to push vendors to come back together toward standard implementations across all popular browsers. Here's hoping.
The layout is a bit ambiguous, but this chart may fall under reason #1, whose description contains the text "comes pre-loaded with". Perhaps Dell is claiming that this functionality is available out of the box.

In the chart, Dell includes "Microsoft Office" under the Windows column, but you can indeed order a Dell with MS Office preloaded, so that would be fair.
Exactly. And the blog's explanation of beign used for game scripting as a minor feature falls short: can anyone imagine what Half Life would be like without scripted events?
This is quite similar to the way things work in India as well (or at least the parts of Northern India I'm familiar with).
Can you boot to a btrfs yet?

From your link: Btrfs, when complete, is expected to offer a feature set comparable to Sun's ZFS.

It's as silly as the politicians in my country. About three or four years ago, they paid an absurd sum of money for a super computer that would be the third of the world when complete. Big surprise: three years later, once completed, the machine does not make it even into the list of the top 100.

Also, dupe.
At least two actual western style democracies do something similar.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/new-yorks-am...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124603593605261787.html
If I had to guess, they probably cache as aggressively as their contract with ITA allows because Kayak gets charged per search by ITA.

*edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.
Most of the feedback here is focused on what are the ends of this program. The important part is the means. The world has unlimited space for great innovators. Ycombinator is a great program but no program has unlimited resources. These students are codifying activity that would be happening on their campus anyway, and cutting through the bureaucratic steps that are usually inherent in anything that happens on a university campus.

I expect to see more collaboration in the future. Right now most of the 'seed accelerator' programs don't collaborate with each other. However, many of these programs will eventually become friendly with each other just like rival fraternities and universities literally play ball with each other. At this level of investment I believe the higher wisdom is that the rising tide lift all ships vs a zero sum game.
Put contact details in your profile, also please drop me an email.
I didn't know about Rake until now, but I agree -- having seen a few examples, I like Rake's syntax much better. I will definitely keep it in mind for the next time I need a build tool.
You can fix most encoding problems with doing

Encoding.default_internal = Encoding.default_external = "UTF-8"

but as JEG states in http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_three_defa..., this throws warnings and may still not fix things.

Encoding issues rank up there with Array.to_s pains when moving to 1.9
It is not a theoretical concern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Oh god, please just shut up. Seriously, you're getting drool everywhere.
A salad before a meal, particularity 20-30 minutes beforehand, will start the enzyme processes that eventually render satiety.

However, most American salads are loaded with decidedly non-healthy items, so a 200-300 drop in meal calories would be offset by the salad itself.

Better just eat them to increase vegetables, then. (No iceberg!)
How would you handle the mixed content e.g. on a secure forum where some content sent by the users contains non-secure elements like images?
Or perhaps they were more focused on getting the people inside to safety than they were about the actual physical building.
I should have patented it. I'd be a billionaire!
Not necessarily gift cards. But $3 million in revenue is right about the time a small online business can afford to move from the garage to a dedicated space with staff. I would expect that Ebay/Amazon/etc all have many resellers in that $1-5MM revenue range.
The practical power of "that's offensive" is so much stronger than "we should allow free speech". I'd love for a better and more succint method of conveying the threat that putting "offensiveness" on a pedestal puts to science and democracy. Do you have one?

It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.
It seems like Apple listened when people talked about how all modern processors bottleneck on memory access and decided to focus heavily on getting those numbers better.

Of course this leads to the question that if everyone in the industry knew this was the issue why weren't Intel and AMD pushing harder on it? They already both moved the memory controller onboard so they had the opportunity to aggressively optimize it like Apple has done, but instead we have year after year where the memory lags behind the processor in speed improvements, to the point where it is ridiculous how many clock cycles a main memory access takes on a modern x86 chip.
I think you have to be in a really bad place mentally do what they are doing. They're either incapable of seeing the consequences, or they're happy to be martyrs for what they think is a just cause.
Some acceptance tests for a software engineer:

- Should know many tools to the level where they know their strengths and weaknesses. This allows them to select a useful collection of them for any new piece of work.

- Should produce incremental project changes which all either improve the value or reduce the cost.

- Should balance all the improvements to produce useful, working software with a reasonable cost. For example, producing super-secure software with no useful features, featureful software with a bajillion bugs, or bug-free software with a gigantic cost are all bad.
We definitely recommend everyone make their own benchmarks, reflective of their own use-cases. Kevin (who was deeply involved in OrmLite) made a great contribution to this community effort with that post, but we still see many people on iOS — and on Android — experiencing massive speedups when moving to Realm. Hence us saying “usually faster” because that’s reflective of what people tell us in aggregate, although some microbenchmarks will always disagree. As always, your mileage may vary, and we trust people to make their own opinion of Realm’s performance, ease of use, and anything else we try to focus on.
I'm going to be mad forever at WD for pioneering the approach to distributing drive firmware & tuning parameters over both stripe 0 and the drive's on-board ROM, making board swaps impossible for small shops.

But I'm really disappointed at what's happened to Seagate. I've gone from total confidence in recommending their products to actively recommending against the brand in just a couple of years, and our experiences roughly match Backblaze's. (Though on a much much smaller scale.)
This blows my mind, but I guess I'm naive when it comes to how sleazy people can be.

I love Android, and I don't want it to be known to the general public as the virus and spyware ridden OS on smartphones.
I find the description of which image to choose confusing. You need the a 64-bit image to handle processes over 4GB, right? Why is the x86 version recommended for "most machines with Intel/AMD/etc type processors and almost all computers that run Microsoft Windows." (That's from the server description, too.)
>> I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim.

That was my first thought when reading that option. You'd definitely need some legal coverage if you decide to enter into that kind of agreement.
Ha!

Just the logistics of _handling_ 1.5B docs would keep six people pretty damn busy.
Serves you right. Pushing advertisements in the notification bar. Thumbs up for Google quick reaction. And thumbs down to you and your low grade methods.
Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that if I know the key to a WPA-PSK secured network, I can listen in to other connections accessing that same network?

Does this apply to WPA2 as well?
For starters, even full AJAX apps should work without JS enabled if you care about accessibility.

This should be just about possible using Node.js these days: You can run your entire client-side templating system—and even the <canvas>—on the server, and then server static HTML and PNGs to the browser. Unfortunately, quite a bit of elbow grease is still required.
I never understood why notion continued to use notion.so when they own notion.com and you don’t have to worry about countries (ccTLD) doing things like this.
How is this different from paparazzi and celebrities? Why should Facebook executives who work hard to remove privacy from their users, enjoy the same from comfort of their home?
Obesity is vastly more complex than people “just” making bad choices. Tell someone who is addicted to cigarettes to quit smoking while everyone around them smokes all day and there are cigarettes cheaply or freely available everywhere.

Oh, and modify the scenario slightly: you have to smoke a little to live. And while smoking is making one person sick with cancer, other people have different genes and can smoke as much as they want with no side effects.

That is what it’s like trying to “just make good food choices” today, especially if you are genetically insulin resistant, in which case you not only need to eat “good food,” you need to eat less of it than other people or you’ll still gain weight. Oh and don’t get me started on stress and cortisol.

“Just eat healthy,” is the ignorant remark of someone blessed with good genetics.
Good point, I think they've borrowed the terminology from goldbugs without really understanding it.
> The mods don't do anything about off-topic rants.

Mod. There is a question of how much one moderator can do against the tide. HN really needs a couple of full time paid moderators, with their salaries covered by the zillion dollar YC bank account.
"If people could just choose X" has been a losing strategy on everything from drug addiction to climate change to boycotts of products with child labour.
The difficulty is that we need to have different terms for different levels of atrocities. Forced sterilization of an ethnic group is an atrocity. Mass murder of an ethnic group is also an atrocity. But they're on different levels. Both of these are crimes against humanity. Both are deplorable. But they're not equally deplorable. Both are bad, but they're not equally bad. Clearly, mass murder is worse than mass sterilization. It's a crime that should be treated differently, just as we treat rape and murder differently.

If we call what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uyghurs a genocide, then we should come up for another word to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews. Or, heaven forbid, if they really do start murdering Uyghur families in mass.
Why are you treating pointers as floating point numbers?
One of my first jazz albums was Time Warp. Little did I know that it would remain one of my favorite blends of classical and jazz. I recommend listening to the whole album, start to finish. Play it on a good pair of headphones or speakers.
There are multiple versions of 5G. Some are fast and have a short range (think 1gbps) others are slower but have longer range.

I’m in a rural/urban transition area and we have a solid 5G signal that gives me 200mbps on my phone.
Aren’t there other shops in the US that will repair your MacBook for you? It’s not as if you have to go there, at least not if you are out of warranty.
Agreed. Web tchotchkes are so much less satisfying than physical ones.
You can use inkscape from the command line:

inkscape --export-png=x.png x.svg
Actually, even if your goal is to simply count jumps in the memory hierarchy, it can still be tough for several reasons. For example, the set associativity of a given level of the memory hierarchy can make analysis very tricky. Somethings that would ostensibly be efficient w/ respect to the memory hierarchy could actually have a whole bunch of conflict misses. Modeling this is possible, but not easy. Especially for non-trivial algorithms.

Another example of a complicating issue is garbage collection. If the GC uses something like compaction you really don't have a great idea of where your data is. We used to do all these tricks in 'C' to map data and move it around to get the best locality. This isn't nearly as feasible in C# and Java.

And there really are kind of two related questions:
1) How does this algorithm perform for a given memory hierarchy?
2) What is the best parameterization of this algorithm for the memory hierarchy?

Question 1 is a fair bit easier than question 2. And you'd be surprised at how much faster you can make the same algorithm, by changing certain parameters (chunk size, etc...) for a given architecture. And these things are hard to answer by simple reasoning. And a local maxima, may in fact be far from the global maxima.
Then share with friends and create a multi-player platform. =)
If what you have is truly worth preserving for that long, transcode it into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA (several times over to allow for mutations) and splice it into sperm/egg/embryo cells at fertility clinics. Let your "progeny" multiply across the planet with Nature taking care of replicating your data through space and time. For retrieval: I suppose that in the distant future, DNA databases will probably be preserved for easy lookup by sequence and thus so will your data.

The human genome is ~6B base pairs = ~3B bits = ~357MB. Only 1.5% constitute protein-coding genes. Let's say some of that "junk DNA" is actually useful, we could still get away with ~200MB of payload per human cell. Further scaling can be obtained by targeting other organisms with large populations (bees, rabbits, cockroaches, mosquitoes, bacteria) or even synthesize new viruses or parasites that hitch along to humans for an evolutionary ride while preserving your data at the same time ...

(Disclaimer: I'm in the middle of an X-files marathon)
As you can see below, this post was timed perfectly for me. I was at the Apple store to get a harddrive replaced 10 minutes after this was posted. I did a little digging and wrote a blog post on the same issue, which I'll post here to prevent 100 apple stories from taking up the front page.

I'm angry because I think apple is earning money from product failure!

http://pathdependent.com/2010/06/12/apple-owns-your-harddriv...
I don't get if your is irony or not, but I think that having high standards for the partner we want (especially for life) is a good thing. I don't think that this is something that has something to do with "being cool".

Why should we settle when the world is full of girls that could match our preferences? When people start their own startup, they have high aims. Why should we aim low in our relationships?
farmville, mobster games, etc etc which are all flash.

Both Farmville (60+ million users) and Mafia Wars (45+ million users) have been ported to iOS.
It would be useful to either have your code up somewhere or to write up a blog post about your experiences and frustrations. Otherwise two missed opportunities here: a) Getting feedback from more experience Clojure developers b) documentation on pain points so the paradigm can be improved / altered to better suit real world use.
Family bonds do not last forever.
The logic is impeccable: why do we search pilots when they get (access to) a gun once they have been cleared.
Prolog is not a general purpose language, it's more like a database query language. Many common tasks would be painful in Prolog (it's really awkward for procedural code), but for rule-based systems, parsing, constraint satisfaction problems, prototyping interpreters, etc., it's an outstanding tool.
Farbrausch made the first demo I ever saw, a 2007 one called debris (fr-041):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg

Super cool, and in an executable of 177kB.
thank you for the advice, it's very appreciated
I have a hunch this could be usefully mashed together with the Facebook's React approach... so the space-pen DSL builds a virtual-DOM, and dirties/invalidates for a later batched real-DOM update.
A few things bother me:

1. The documentation clearly mentions only cmd-key based shortcuts, implying Mac-only support.

2. They say they will be sending out invites, and that they've released a bunch of libraries as open source. This implies that the editor-as-a-whole will probably not be open source.
> Gentrification is something that happens primarily to predominantly African-American neighborhoods in the US

Gentrification is something that happens to primarily poor, and primarily urban neighborhoods. These also tend to be disproportionately minority neighborhoods (of a variety of ethnic minorities, but blacks are prominent among them in pretty much every region of the US, while the mix of the rest varies from region to region), but its more about economic class than race, which is mostly a distraction.

> Think about this, and you can see the resistance to gentrification. Historically, it's been nothing but trouble for the people already in a neighborhood.

Its nothing but trouble for current residents for reasons that have nothing to do with the history of the racial history you recount (which is generally accurate); bringing rich people and high paying jobs (already filled by rich people, or for which the poor current residents aren't qualified) to where poor people are doesn't help the poor people, it just pushes them aside.
Lots of work to be done in the vim department: https://github.com/atom/vim-mode
That is my only concern, and i hope that doesn't disappoint me :).
On point.

A friend of mine is a producer for a big music studio. He said more than 80% of Spotify listeners are completely passive - not even changing tracks or adjusting the volume.

The percentage that actively chooses their music? Less than 2%.

It’s a vanishingly small audience and discoverability is the key feature.