skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your math is flawed.

Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month.

You forget that disks fail. You forget that you always have to buy them in pairs for availability. You forget that someone has to be there (physically) to swap them. You forget that storage arrays that can truly scale seamlessly (akin to the experience EBS gives you) cost a fortune, not to mention the accompanying fibre channel infrastructure. You forget that maintaining a large scale Xen deployment is non-trivial (hint: there are companies making a living only of that!).

In short, you forget many things that bite large chunks out of your imaginary generator/party budget.
My guess is the reason heroku hasn't done it yet is because of latency issues between availability zones. Ping times can be 6x between availability zones, vs. within it. http://orensol.com/2009/05/24/network-latency-inside-and-acr...

More and more cloud services are running on AWS deliberately so there is very low latency. I can host a SOLR index on one service, a MongoDB on another service, and still get reasonable performance.
Well, depends on the religion.

(As an atheist, I'm still looking at my screen and waiting for my app to self-generate...)
Ooooh. I may just finally get around to buying a nice phone. I'm horrible with receipts, and this looks perfect for my needs. JoelMcCracken commented that it would be awesome if you could integrate with mint, but even if you don't, this still is awesome.
Yeah, that's one of things to consider. All of the logic for this was originally developed for another purpose, and it got applied to HN for fun. The human connection element makes it very cool, and so do the possiblities for applying it to so many different applications.
Very comprehensive article, but if you have to delete properties, you're almost certainly coding wrong. Set the property to false, or null, or a null object.

Deleting properties also messes with the psuedo-class optimizations in V8.
Except Apple's approval process really wouldn't have prevented this. Most iPhone apps phone home without almost any user being the wiser. Who knows what most iPhone IM apps or apps like 1Password (basically any app that allows the user to put in any type of freeform information) are doing behind the scenes.
Thanks for sharing the data!

I'd love to see correlation between age groups->downloads, obviously what you mentioned; PR->downloads and any other vertical data for the specific campaign...
avi@
It's called 'post-and-beam' and it is a very nice and traditional way of putting up a building.

I considered using it for an addition to our house in Canada but eventually settled for the more common 2x6 sandwich construction.

The building was fairly large (42x27, 2 stories with loft) and I didn't feel like taking my chances on something that I didn't have enough 'working examples' of all around me.
Something seems to be off here. Their frontpage claims 45k running applications. There's no way to do that with only 22 instances. One of these figures must be wrong.
That's a pretty cool program that's evolved with other NGO's using SMS messages to cell phones. The proliferation of mobiles and utility of cheap cell phones has been a massive boost to productivity in rural areas. One of the key market barriers continues to be consistent logistics given the shelf life of agricultural products which means some of these middlemen still have a significant upper hand.
Yeah, one potential solution is lists of users.

Another route might be clustering ('technical', 'political', etc.)
The Golden Girls Seasons 1-7 DVD Boxset
Thanks. Most of the comments of those users are about programming which I don't often discuss here. Erikstarck doesn't really comment in the programming discussions but his comment style is definitely different from mine.
You're right, my math was flawed, though possibly not in the way you were implying, because:

I added a T1 ($250/month) to a building rental ($2000/month), and then said that they'd have $10,000/month left over.

Why would I do such a thing? Why, so that:

They could upgrade to redundant DS3s (or better!)

They could buy extra drives!

They could pay someone to live within a few miles and carry a cell phone that accepts text messages!

...etc.

Doubly funny, to me, is that "disk failure" is being mentioned in the comments on an article about how all of their disks failed all at once. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances.

As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? Because you could deploy 67TB every single month and still have money left over. [1]

To get to the meat of my argument: I think that what's both great and horrible about EC2-like services is that they allow programmers to deploy Really Big Things without having to employ or deal with system administrators.

As a result, it's a solution that's being misapplied in some cases.

[1]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h... -- it even has pretty pictures
I'd love to see a hardware keyboard. It's a chore typing on the iPhone screen. In particular, I think you could mount a keyboard on the back of the device, so that half the keyboard was on each side with T, G & B being the top keys on the left side, and Y, H, & N being the top keys on the right side. If the keys were touch sensitive, a transparent soft-keyboard could be displayed on the front of the device showing your finger positions. That should make it easy to adjust and allow you to touch type while giving you visual confirmation of your keypresses.
Probably true. There's one or two other tiny embedded Objective-C web server designed for that purpose out there.

We've got just such an app, but we're running our backend process in JavaScript.
BerliOS has been OWNED
Not sure how you reach the less secure than C conclusion, unless your claim is that the Cocoa frameworks specifically have a lot of security holes.
How does colins_pride compare with riffer? Aren't they the same person?!?
If you think this doesn't happen in America, please read up on the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Yards#Controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Develop_Don%27t_Destroy_Brookly...

The whole premise of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's argument is that the Government is taking from one private owner and giving to another. The argument is that eminent domain should only be used for the Government, not to benefit a for-profit company.

It's a little too late now, since Ratner has already bulldozed the neighborhood, effectively ruining it before the argument can be settled in courts.
I think it needs to be a two step process, one GA to create loops and a second to create the arrangement from the winning loops. If done with well known samples it could really be listenable and interesting-so many good project ideas-not enough time:(
GMail has 100+ million users[1]. Imagine how many they could have if they actually did ship something. Crappy development model or not, does it really matter? The thing is widely successful and any insight into how it came about is valuable as a learning experience.

[1]: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc3d8a86-02a0-11de-b58b-000077b076...
I'm a little cautious about this post. He is exaggerating by stretching the definition of "patent troll", if I am reading correctly. A true patent troll is a company that produces nothing except lawsuits. With a company that produces something and also sues over patents, there is at least the possibility of a countersuit / crosslicense / armed truce.

I assume their portfolio companies pool their patents together for the common defense. If not, that might be a good idea.

Still, with 26 portfolio companies, he's claiming 8-ish concurrent lawsuit threats... that's alarming. On the other hand, their portfolio is pretty high-profile (Etsy, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Indeed, etc).

Also he doesn't put this claim in historical context: is this normal for a maturing (and very nice) portfolio? Are they going after the tender young startups or the bigger ones?
Great Highland Bagpipe
I think that you are the cynic, not he.

He spent probably multiple hours to show a kid he would possibly never see or hear from again a very valuable lesson.

There is a good chance that this is not the only time he's done that.
Very good points.

Many of the companies I represent face this same resistance to such notes from early-stage investors, and for the reasons you note, and in such cases I tell them just to do a Series AA if they want to keep it simple while still accommodating investor concerns.
Love the fact that I got de-karma'd for this for some reason.

It's totally true, the London Post Office Railway was modeled after Chicago and it was useful.
AFAIK the correlation is anecdotal and no more. However, I've had enough bar discussions of "why do musical and programming accomplishment go together" that I was glad to find an answer that made sense to me. I'd love to see real research to confirm or deny the correlation.
Ah I see. They give an estimate of number of impressions and number of uniques, so you can get a rough average viewings/person. I believe that it never shows more than once per show (or 30 minute slot), so it's just an estimate of viewer return rate from showing to showing, I believe.
Me. Well maybe not, but I am a freelance Rails dev in NYC :) Lots of experience, worked on many sites, and have great references. Some of my code on github - http://github.com/conorh

Drop me a line.
The article itself is fluff but it seems to have generated good discussion of how people search. If I upvote it, it will be to find the discussion again, not to give applause for the article.

(Of course now that I have commented, I don't have to upvote it to find it. I can get to it via my comments. :) )
The good news about psychology is that a counterexample does not invalidate the thesis the way it does in math.
Ok so
l = map(ord,message)
for i in l: a = f(l)
And now hat? a is a big integer, chr(a mod 256)? nothing..
:-/
This is a cool question. Two things: the first is that I stopped using the colins_pride account and subsequently started using the riffer account, so the co-commenting commonality is not particularly high. The terminology score is substantially closer. The other thing is that because the dataset is tilted towards the recent, the colins_pride user is only lightly represented.
For those of you (like me) who suspect that one's programming education is incomplete without some taste of assembly language, the third edition of Jeff Duntemann's Assembly Language Step-by-Step is out now, focusing on Linux and NASM:

http://www.duntemann.com/assembly.html
WebMynd - A better way to search: Add-ons for Firefox
If studios wanted to preserve that balance, they'd release keys to decrypt the movies for personal use on a set schedule after release. As it stands right now, users need to hope that someone will manage to "crack" the next BD+ revision (ie: building up the BD+ emulators to a point where they can pass the next set of checks) in order to back up or transcode their disks. At times, the cracking community is further behind than a few months, making these movies useless outside of the standard player. I can't watch Blu-ray movies on my MacBook or iPhone at all without ripping them, one of the reasons I haven't bought a single BR disc to own.

If users knew that a key release is coming on a set date, it would remove a lot of the motivation for people to work on cracking BD+.
Yeah, it's expected that you're going to get microsecond pings within the same building and millisecond pings to buildings across the country. I guess I can admit that they may have had their reasons, but they can't be good enough to justify this lapse. If it's as inexpensive to run this setup as the article says, they should be able to afford two completely separate stacks of servers, one in each availability zone. It's not going to be easy to figure out how to sync the data across each one, but the fact remains that you have to exist at n+1 at least if you're going to deliver reliability.
Asus A42-V6 90-NAA1B1000
At least Microsoft and Apple produce some useful applications. Macrovision is nothing but a preventer of entertainment consumption and fair-use.
the lack of chance of massive payoff is probably balanced by a stable income.

I got a feeling that if you are the kind of person that worries about any job, you'll worry about all jobs.

(For certain values of "worry".)
ASUS A42-A4 70-N9X1B1000 90-N9X1B1000 laptop battery 
ASUS A42-A4 70-N9X1B1000 90-N9X1B1000 laptop battery
I returned to university to get a 2nd degree in Computer Science after realizing how poor my job options were with my philosophy degree. The benefit of a 2nd degree, at least in the Canadian system (I'm not sure how it works in Ireland), is that you don't need to fulfil all of the elective credits, so you can complete a second degree in 2 years.

Having been through the degree, I am glad I did it, but I'm not sure it's the best and quickest path to a career as a developer. There was a lot of time spent on learning theory and history of the discipline, that may have been better spent on doing. Programming is definitely best learned by doing.

It is a tough decision to make. Many employers still hold the degree up high as a hiring requirement. You already have one of these.

My advice would be to explore your options. Try out some self-learning. There are many great books and online tutorials out there to learn from. Play around with the field a bit before committing to another degree.
He just means the hard drive with the OS would be in the tablet.
@ barbie.com, yes probably. It's an image thing.
Well, I've been doing the infrastructure thing for a living for a while and it's always half amusing, half worrying to see comments like this.

So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances.

I was mentioning disk failure as part of ongoing maintenance, which is a different thing to a once-in-a-year blackout that you (as the reseller of the service) don't have to debug and recover or actively protect against.

As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you?

See, that's where the amusement starts. A service like heroku it would probably carry not very far. Their service is not about storage. The backblaze gives you 45 spindles for cheap. 45 spindles translate to roughly 4500 IOPS. That's a significant rate. It's also a rate that a few database intensive customers can exceed with ease.

Now you're suddenly in an entirely different game called "Storage Engineering". It's about things like balancing IO hotspots, redundant data paths and many other pesky little details that were not exactly your core business in first place.

You sure can scale out with backblaze, but it's rather unlikely that you can do it for cheaper than what amazon has on offer (economies of scale, y'know) because scaling IOPS is quite a bit harder than scaling capacity.

Here's a quiz for you: Why do you think none of the cloud providers other than amazon has an offer anywhere near the flexibility/price of EBS?
You're right, that's not all they have. 22 is the number of m2.2xlarge nodes they run. There's no mention of how many other nodes they have running.

That being said, given how many toy, no-traffic apps are likely running (for free!) on the platform, I think we can safely assume there's a very high degree of multi-tenancy.
While all of these are true, I find that they usually derive from a simpler rule: Have a laser focus on the users you're trying to reach, and everything you do should make their lives easier in some way.

When I find people breaking these sorts of rules, it's usually because they're thinking of themselves or some non-customer stakeholder.

edited to add a corollary: until you've done the sort of testing patio11 advocates, you don't know who that customer is.
It may be unfair to candidates trying to get a job at Facebook if they didn't come from Stanford or Harvard, but it's completely reasonable to focus their hiring efforts on those two schools. It makes it less work for them.

As a plus for non-Stanford/Harvard grads, it means if you don't want to work for Facebook, you have less competition from Stanford/Harvard grads!
m2.2xlarge are High-Memory Double Extra Large instances.

34.2 GB of memory
13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High

Which means each application has 16MB of ram. Does chroot (or whatever jail mechanism they use) allow shared memory for standard libraries?
They would not have approved an app that was pretending to be written by a different company.
I do think that patents hold a valuable place in certain
areas of research and development, but there are also
areas in which patents are crippling development.

I hear people say this but they never give an example.
Can you name an area of research and development where patents hold a valuable position? I myself have trouble coming up with any and I'm curious what others think.
I wanted to come back and thank you for the link to Taubes' lecture. I watched the whole thing (on an exercise machine, ironically) and it was definitely worth it. I'd never heard of Taubes, but he's an unusual and formidable character. Whoever heard of a science journalist thinking for himself!? I got a lot out of both his talk and Lustig's and am going to try out what they each say (they both agree and disagree).

I don't find it hard to believe that Taubes is the only person who ever bothered to go back and thoroughly read the last hundred years of literature on this subject. Most specialists already "know" what's true, so why would they bother. Besides, it takes a very long time; Taubes spent five years doing it, and that only because he got a huge advance for his book. It's interesting to me that it took someone outside the scientific establishment to do this.

Incidentally, there's a clip on youtube of Lustig asking Taubes a question at one of his lectures. Whoever posted it gave it the asinine title of "Lustig yells at Taubes about fructose". He doesn't in the least "yell", he simply asks a question politely (it's clear the two know each other). Kind of a fun crossing of streams.
"Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to."

With gems like that, one can't help but deduce that, if anonymous employee IS a Stanford grad, Stanford is the best CS department in the world. I mean, they seem to have invented the zero-latency, infinite bandwidth internet, where all network operations are CPU bound!

The average Stanford Kid is about the same as the average MIT kid is about the same as the average CMU kid. The most brilliant Ohio State kid is likely about as smart as the most brilliant MIT kid.

[Edited to be less snarky :)]
Everything in here sounds believable and I have no doubt that things like that have happened and do continue to happen at FB.. My only problem with this interview is that it seems very scripted..

Either this person had the questions in advance, the interview is an elaborate hoax, or she just happens to be really articulate and alert after a few beers.
Baidu.com the Latest Victim of Iranian CyberArmy
How to select your Search Engine Optimisation Company?
Unlike selecting your other service providers such as your web design company or your web programming company, selecting your search engine optimisation company is not that easy. The nature of SEO industry is such that you cannot see tangible results as fast as you would like to see. Quantifying or measuring the success of your SEO efforts is also not that easy. All these make the entire selection process complicated.
Any one of those mentioned in your question are bad. If it's all of them it's still bad. No matter what meaning of the word "is" that you choose it's bad. That's kind of the point of the article really.
Conventional wisdom says that pharma qualifies. Labs wouldn't spend the resources if anyone could come up with generic drugs once the hard work of finding out which drug works is done.
She's not a woman - "her" word choice was totally male.

That detail is just a really poor attempt at anonymization, IMO.
When Can I Stop Saving for Retirement?
Godin sold his startup to Yahoo. He is now 'acting on it with his bootstrapped 'user generated content'-startup Squidoo. I doubt as a millionaire he needs the revenue from his books and speaking gigs to make a living.
Eastfilters - Leading Filters Manufacturer
East Filters Manufacturer Co., Limited is one of the leading factories of filters, fuel water separators, oil filter pumps and filter brackets. Our company covers 20000 square meters with over 100 employees.
While one could argue for PHP being a "language" upon which frameworks are built, it really is just a framework. A low level framework that is. Frameworks built on top of it are just higher-level more abstract frameworks.

I come from 4+ years of using it professionally and most of the higher level frameworks I'm talking about (Kohana, Zend, CodeIgniter, etc...) really only exist to overcome a lot of PHP's more abstract weaknesses (even though they can't really do much about the interpreter implementation).

I can easily say that something written in Python, Scheme, or whatever-you-choose will run a lot better, take less time to build, and be easier to manage down the road.

The primary problem in this industry is that the majority of web application programmers grew upon PHP and are running their own IP Consulting shops or startups by now and have zero experience with other languages, therefore making them much less interested in trying to adopt a different web development paradigm when an aspiring web developer with Python/Erlang/Scheme/Ruby skills under their belt try to build something with that tool chain in their employ.

The less knowledge and/or experience with other languages you have, the more rooted in what you are comfortable with you are. Education is a good thing, that is what I love about Hacker News; the people here experiment with new languages and trying out new technologies for their projects/products - which is much more progressive than the enterprise situation.
Another commenter addressed the point about 1TB drives. I'd like to help on the bandwidth side.

A T1 is simply not adequate for a web company for two reasons: 1) it is a high-impact single point of failure (any issue here results in 100% outage); 2) it is limited to 1.5mpbs. I guarantee you Heroku is beyond 1.5Mbps at peak.

To make this a fair comparison, you need to look at burstable bandwidth. Unless you want to manage your own redundant BGP routers and multiple carrier lines, you'll want blended bandwidth provided by your datacenter or a specialized company (InterNAP, etc). This bandwidth will run you $50-100/Mbps/mo (let's say $75) and is billed at 95th percentile of usage. A year and a half ago when my company's EC2 network transfer costs were ~$8,000/mo (with a total EC2 bill of ~$30,000/mo), I worked out a bandwidth need of ~60Mbps (at 95th%) - this would represent a bandwidth cost of $4500/mo. Let's assume Heroku's EC2 cost breakdown is similar, and that their needs are 2/3 of what ours were then - we're left with $3,000/mo for bandwidth.

Yes, you're still paying a premium, but the cost savings of colo hosting are quickly offset by the additional manpower required to maintain physical servers. Whatever difference still remains is easily justifiable given the amount of flexibility the cloud affords you. This is exponentially more important for a startup where agility can make or break you.