skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once, I had to evaluate for rewrite a program that was written in a naive "object-oriented" style. The program built up a large graph of objects, did a few transformations, and wrote its stuff out. It ran out of memory on small subsets of the data it needed to work on.

I evaluated the program's data usage and rewrote it with the metaphor that I had to process the whole thing from a tape drive. It was still object-oriented, but the memory needs were now bounded.

tl;dr: I don't see the dichotomy.
If you're playing around in Ruby, you could give Heroku a try (http://www.heroku.com). They have a free plan for small projects.
Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing by K. Eric Drexler
Linode's backup feature is currently in beta.
I've been a happy Linode customer since August 2007. There were two minor issues with DNS (not their fault, I believe) during that time. Once I had to do an emergency RAM upgrade on a Sunday -- it was the best customer service experience I've ever had.

I run two servers -- Gentoo and Ubuntu. I recommend Ubuntu.
But this license doesn't prevent that from happening, anyway. Anyone truly evil would just ignore that clause.
No, grandparent poster was off on pricing, but his intent is correct. AWS is several times more expensive than the other 'lighter' VPS solutions out there, which is why is isn't brought up/suggested more often.
Heroku, hands down. It's free unless it gets serious. (ruby only, though)
To the general hosting question:

blog: Nexcess.net

small project sites: HostGator.com

Old ASP.NET site that I'm going to discontinue: DiscountASP.Net

"Real" web projects: roll my own using VMWare or Xen
Media Temple. I absolutely hate it, but moving to a new host is a bitch. When I get some time to move I am either moving back to Slicehost or Linode and built my server up from scratch.

Note to everyone, don't ever use media temple. They are absolutely horrible. Every week, either the servers gets hacked, servers goes down or something is wrong with their admin panel and they won't let you access it. And of course its slow as hell. I have used their both dv and gs setup, just horrible. Their customer service is decent, but what am I going to do with good customer service when the server has so many problems?

They do have a good marketing and design team. I have to give them that.
Been using prgmr for about 6 months, can't beat it.
I'm using hosteurope.de (as I'm in Europe and want decent ping times). They have pretty good deals, starting at €13/month for 1GB RAM and 5TB data. I'm still on an earlier plan, 256MB for €10/month though.

They have pretty decent service, but their English (understandably) isn't that good. They've been down a few times in the last few months, but otherwise have a pretty good track record.

I think for the money you pay them, you get a very good price, but don't expect 99.99% uptime
linode++
Really? The menu bar at the top is basically the same, albeit squishier than before. They added a dock, and a ton of chrome. I'm not seeing how anything was "a step back" by any means. The only irk I really have is lack of keyboard navigation on dialog boxen. I should be able to hit tab or arrow keys or something to switch between buttons on dialogs (example: the shutdown menu) - but that's always been the case, it's nothing new. Care to elaborate, or even take to task some of my assertions?
Thanks, she is!
Yes, not there, but I seem to remember it.

Update: Ah, it's here: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Wow, that brought back some memories. I wrote a commercial app for the Mac in 1984/85 but I had forgot how the original Mac screen looked.
On Being the Right Size (J. B. S. Haldane)
> "Atheist cult"
That's quite an oxymoron don't you think?
Gads! Those shots of Explorer 5 gave me some horrible flashbacks. My first mac, Mac II System 7, fond memories
My guess is "Sharepoint that doesn't suck".

Facebook is all about the flow of information in a personal setting through the use of your social graph. Apply the same thinking to business and collaboration. Sharepoint is microsoft's fasting growing product ever (more than office or windows). It's also a 10 figure revenue stream with 100 million+ users. Like most MSFT products that sell well, it absolutely sucks balls like you could not believe. I spent 2.5 years working on this problem, and it's a pretty big one. I really hope these guys tackle it and succeed to their fullest extent.
A polite way to do it would be for the assistant to say: "Hello, my name is Bob. I'm calling on behalf of Alice who would like to speak with you on the phone. Might you have a moment to speak with Alice now or may we schedule a phone appointment for later today?" Of course, if the matter is not urgent but can't be handled by email, an even better solution is for Alice to send email requesting a phone appointment in the first place.
Actually, the System lineage died with MacOS 9. Rhapsody and OSX are really direct descendants of NeXTSTEP and, thus, are a completely different family. OS 9 lived on, for some time, as a subsystem of OSX for PowerPC.
Top Five Bugs of My Career - Solved
I was with a company who used Linode from about 2003 to 2007. It was awful. We had a one-day outage when someone kicked out the power cord. Another outage with some routing mishap by Linode. DDoS floods destined for our VM due to irc bots or whatever running on another VM.

Linode would start an upgrade without notice during normal business hours, and then only admit they were messing with things if there was a crash.

Get a dedicated machine. The lost productivity alone makes it worth it.
If this is your level of personal use (experimentation), yes, Linode might be fine.
Indeed, I thought suicide was implied. Not so much tact, as it just didn't occur to me that it needed spelling out.
As a scientist (who was forced into a sordid life of programming :-) I wish it was.

From the horse's mouth: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484&filen... refers to the first incident while talking about the second (search for "It's one thing to lose").

And for another telling quote, see http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419&filen... where Phil Jones says "I can't see either of these papers being in the next [UN] IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !"

Pielke, BTW, is not a denier, he just doesn't agree with the CRU crowd on various details.
Technically true, but it doesn't stop my client from being upset that their user claims my client's site is down. :)
Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free.

It probably does make the software non-free (e.g. according to the DSFG); more importantly, such a clause is utterly idiotic. Rather than bitching about Google Code, the JSMin author would be better served to get rid of the arbitrary, subjective and probably unenforceable clause from the license. The original JSMin is only 200 lines of C, so the simple solution would just be a from-scratch rewrite.
The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
github ftw
vpslink.com

Pretty cheap, and only down two or three times in the last two years (since I started with them). They are somewhat less communicative than I'd prefer when something happens, but they did tweet updates last time.
Original post listing the bugs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877310
>Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm.

This is simply not the case. It has the best OO system in existence. It has the loop macro (mini language). In actual practice I think lispers tend to not program so functionally because they're instinctively afraid of consing.
> But, Haskell has no answer to LISP macros.

Lazy evaluation. Template Haskell. Quasiquotations (EDSLs). The GHC API. (Liskell.)

I believe between them anything Lisp macros can do they can do, though it may not be so easy. (Strangely, we seem to have little need of them, but I will leave it to the reader as to whether this is a Blub situation or regular Haskell is just that good.)
That is probably not the norm and you probably should have asked to be moved to another machine and seen if they could investigate the source of the problem.

From my experience Linode (2-3 years) has been excellent especially if you want a server just to mess around on and learn how to host and make projects work while being able to stop and change distros very quickly.
The Year Of The Affair: Who Cares?
Another entry in the growing 'startups as self-help' file.

These values statements are a form of self-expression similar to putting bumper stickers on one's car, and have about as much to do with the success of the business as bumper stickers have with the correct operation of the vehicle.
I'm still wondering what "andrea" was:

http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...
"Science" is, loosely speaking, a process for formulating and evaluating predictive models of the behavior of systems with unknown characteristics, based on empirical observation.

Theoretical "computer science" is, most of the time, a matter of building abstractions from smaller concepts and making analytical, not empirical, observations of the characteristics of those abstractions. This is much closer to what is generally thought of as "abstract mathematics".

The closest you're likely to get to scientific methodology when programming is when you have to write test code to figure out what the crap this freaking third-party library you're stuck with is actually doing because clearly it isn't what the documentation says it should and... at which point we've moved away from "computer science" and into why "software engineering" is such an embarrassment compared to real engineering disciplines.

If you want to hear someone smarter than myself expound similar ideas, look up some of E. W. Dijkstra's work--the man was a genius, a "computer scientist" par excellence, and he expected software engineers to act like engineers.
I don't agree. I think that we understand what drives success. It's not always the exact same recipe, but it's always a combination of:

- Good idea(s)
- Good execution
- Hard work

It always seems that a startup that is lacking or is unsuccessful (what is "success", anyway?) is always missing or lacking in one of the above three areas.
Many universities have alumni "library" programs, where you pay a certain fee to gain access to the university's library. As a student, I've never had to use it though and simply showing up to a site with my university's domain name (VPN) pretty much lets me in anywhere.
Avatar Is Like The iPhone Of Movies
The Noughties
No package management?
TH does a lot of the same stuff. On a practical level, it isn't as good, though. The implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For example, I once tried to use TH to check XMonad configurations at compile-times (specifically, that their keymaps were sensible), but turns out TH cannot operate on anything defined in the same module!

See http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2008-November/006723... (if you don't like context, scroll down to 'I had to admit failure').
For Palm, Yet Another Wrenching Crisis
Ask HN: Review my App - Freeciv.net
I use amazon ec2 for http://freeciv.net/
The example was a contrived one to illustrate my point. While I understand that the license statement is there because he doesn't want "giant corporates" to use it without permission, those kinds of licenses are in general hurtful. We only take this lightly because we trust that the author is a good person. The author could however easily take any corporation, startup or not, to court because just as you say – good is a point of view. It is unlikely that any judge would take it seriously but because there's (probably) no precedent it can still be a very large hassle for a small company, forcing them to hire lawyers and avert them from their core business.

These kinds of "licenses" are more likely hurtful to startups than large corporations.
I have two instances at prgmr.com, 256mb and 1024mb, and they're more than enough for me.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS#System_1.2C_2...), System 2.0 is from 1985, not 1987 as listed.
It's an unfortunate aspect of IBM's legacy that they supplied the Third Reich with computer supplies (those numbers branded into people's arms are IBM database ids), and they also partnered with apartheid South Africa to supply them with technology.

See http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/ and http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM for starters; the last one has a rather distressing paragraph:

One of the medals Watson received was from the Nazi government in 1937, honoring him in his role as the President of the International Chamber of Commerce. During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, Watson and IBM’s German subsidiary had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM's punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust.[8] Only after Jews were identified—a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately—could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
Pseudocide, if you will.
Promoting this internal link, an interesting analysis of AT&T's possible packet buffering/congestion issues.

http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-c...
Thank you for picking up on that half of my joke. Everyone else went for the type system part...

Not that it isn't easy to make a candied Lisp dialect with "friendly" syntax more appealing to non-Lisp programmers, but anyone who actually learns a Lisp quickly realizes that it just gets in the way...

If I were to personally try creating an "ideal language" to match my tongue-in-cheek plea, I'd probably start with a terse Lisp-like syntax and a HM-like type system and go from there.
Poland was in no way responsible for the holocaust and it was a monumentally stupid thing to say but there was, and is, a very nasty streak of anti-semitism in Polish culture. I've spoken to Poles who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis but didn't think getting rid of the Jews was such a bad idea. Some years ago, the New Yorker magazine carried an appalling article that documented how the people of a certain Polish village, with little more than a nod from the Nazis, rounded up their neighbours, locked them in a barn and burned them alive.
Harvard's toxic swaps
Yes. A phone call is an interruption. More people should treat it that way.
Stross directly explained what my startup (Avecora http://avecora.com) is trying to work towards.

The current mobile telcos provide two major things: the a) network infrastructure and b) the network experience. The infrastructure is the physical satellite/cell tower/everything supporting the mobile experience. The mobile experience encompasses the use of the network: phone numbers, SMS, digital downloads, WAP, etc.

However, the aspiration for Google (and my startup Avecora) is that the mobile telcos transform themselves into a strictly infrastructure play, essentially becoming the backbone NOT OF wireless telephony/texting/etc., BUT RATHER OF wireless intercommunication. Indeed, we want them to become completely hands-off in terms of the wireless experience, because they're good at infrastructure and making communication successful, but they're less good at innovating in the experience.

One of the reasons we don't want them controlling the wireless experience is that they have to support so much legacy stuff. My startup's big selling point is in the Avecora Network: there are no real "phone numbers," but rather it operates on a more convenient structure: the mobile network is a social network. You call a person, not a phone number.

We both do want the internet to eat the phone system, and I think it'll offer a much more enriching and integrated mobile experience than it is today, especially when so much already works over TCP/IP (VoIP, for example.) However, with phone companies already making an absolute killing in costs (my bill this month is $90) I don't see this happening anytime too soon, especially the idea of VoIP replacing voice. The carriers will take a huge loss and there's no way in hell they'll sign off on that. (I'm skeptical of T-Mobile's $30/mo data-only plan—I can just grab that and hook up my $0.021/min Skype account to it.)

The best idea, and how we're approaching it, is to price it as one Connection Package and have it be on par if not a bit less than current prices. That's the only way it will really work for both the consumer and the telcos.

Google will get there first, perhaps with the killer product, perhaps not. Indeed, we are competing with Google, and we don't have a prototype right now—but in this space, it seems like, at first, it's more about the strategy than what we've got. (Wish me luck.)
Hyperbole is like the bread and butter of journalists.
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate Avatar?
Why does anyone believe that a carrier will sell cheap no-contract unlimited data-only service (probably at a loss) in exchange for a non-exclusive on a phone that isn't even the best in the world? I guess it's appropriate that Stross is tackling this topic since it sounds like total fiction. :-)
i think the idea is to restrict it to advances in the last 10 years?
RootBSD has been very reliable for us, and good service.
I'm slowly working on a similar app. It's not polished enough to even call it a beta yet, but you can check it out at [1]. I've got a nice tool plugin API, but my graphics system needs work. Improvements are in the works.

[1] http://www.steveasleep.com/splatterboard
Here is the previous discussion of this at hacker news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328833
I know some folks will say "no matter what the proof you're never going to believe"

If there was proof, you wouldn't need to believe. Anyone who says "you're never going to believe" isn't looking to convince anyone, they're looking for others to have blind faith in order to have their own faith validated.
I've read through the article, and what it all says to me is that there are more questions on answers, and a lot of speculation as to the divergence problem. While there are some sound suggestions as to why, it would seem to me that these are all enough to discount tree rings as a useful proxy until they are better understood. To me, the use of statistical methods to blend out the divergence from a specific date seems like a real fudge.
I haven't seen the movie yet but I saw the trailer a while ago and I just rewatched it then and from a pure CGI point of view it looks pretty meh. Like comparable to the first Final Fantasy movie perhaps but not much better. The first time I saw the trailer (at least two months ago, maybe an early cut?) I actually commented on how bad the CGI was before realising it was Avatar. Added to this story just sounds like an old retold story as Arrington highlights. I'm sure the film is actually really clever and the little I know of Cameron has led me to think he is a passionate and down-to-Earth guy so I'm sure it's good but I'm really not getting that impression so far. In fact, this has to be the most marketed film ever (I see adverts everywhere even online and in the App-Store as well as tie-ins with multiple TV shows (Entourage, South Park come to mind)) and this kind of marketing always makes me instinctively wonder why it's so heavily marketed. I've avoided learning too much about TC/Arrington because it seems there's often controversy but is this the kind of site where sponsored reviews ever appear?
8 for me. It's a very good sci-fi/fantasy movie, but I was probably more impressed with the CGI than immersed in the story. Star Trek was a better movie in terms of story and I actually felt fear, suspense and other emotions while watching it.
So policy makers get the dishonest graph unless they have the wherewithal to dig through the references at the back? I don't trust my representatives that much.
9. Went in with high expectations, and they were exceeded, which is rare for me. Most of the criticisms of Avatar are for its somewhat trite storyline, but for me, it definitely worked. The movie runs long at ~2h40m - it takes its time to develop characters and show off its fantasy world, but never does it feel like a drag. I can't recommend it enough.
Hyperbole is the iPhone of (trash) journalists.
The comments I've read so far present interesting POV's backed up by data and observations. I don't see how that qualifies as "angry emotional quibbling".

I don't see the problem with discussing science either. Newton's law of gravitation has been around fot 322 years, and it has been shown to be just a very good approximation (like everything else in science). Also, it is still an open question (AFAIK) whether it holds at very small distances. Climate research is not physics. The number of variables and the complexity of the system is of such magnitude that I am pretty sure there will plenty of room for scientific discussion for years and years to come.
When I saw the title, I thought the comparison was going to be that it was beautiful and polished, but the storyline/features weren't too amazing.
Looks like I am the only one in here that uses dedicated servers. Mix of theplanet, colo at level3 and gigenet.
I use a server at The Planet. Probably more costly than what you want for your needs.
"I still would call you immature if you spent time ranting about it while making comparisons to how much better you were, though."

I think the message would have been better delivered by someone who isn't a colossal asshole with an overinflated sense of self-worth. There was definitely something highly inconvenient about what _why did, but my attitude toward these things is "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away."
I use Linode. It's inexpensive, reliable, and easy to set up and use. The company also makes significant contributions back to the open source community. On my rating scale they get double bonus points for that.
My theory, as someone admittedly inexpert in both Lisp and Haskell but having used both on occasion, is that both are so ridiculously powerful in different ways compared to "normal" languages that very few people ever even reach the point of being comfortable Blub programmers in either, never mind hitting the wall and wondering "what's next?" [0]

Really, how many programmers are out there who simultaneously 1) spend enough time with either language to master it 2) are smart enough to not only realize the language is limiting them, but to invent a new language to surpass those limits 3) aren't heavily tied to their current language 4) have enough spare time to bootstrap a new language with all the associated scaffolding (libraries, &c.) needed for anyone to want to try it?

[0] Feel free to substitute Scheme, an ML dialect, or other related languages into that sentence.
I've managed to keep my university affiliations since graduating so I still have access to most archives for free via my university library.

Once that stops working I guess my next approach would be to mail a friendly request to one of my friends still in the academic world and have them download the pdf for me.
So you haven't seen the movie and you don't know much about Cameron, Arrington or his site, and of those four things the one you are most interested in learning more about is TechCrunch?