skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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There are dozens of sites that do exactly this and they're all equally worthless. Alexa rank? .edu backlinks? Totally irrelevant information.
To what end?
Clojure Bot - Google Wave robot that evaluates Clojure expressions
Really nice picture. Subpixel anti-aliasing looks like a bad idea when you look at the edges of the font in xmag, but it looks like an amazingly good idea when you look at the actual display.
Mabe he should read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708

Direct PDF link: http://lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

One thing this presentation says: while working more than 40 hours a week eventually lowers your productivity, your self perceived productivity is still higher.

Now, every individual is different, and I understand that he may have a productivity peak at more than 40 hours a week. But 95?[1] 4 hours nights? That is superman.

[1]: He took the example of 19 hours a day.
I absolutely understand the principal there, but the reality is that it took me less than 30 minutes to be fully up and running with aC, using hardware that was already online running our subversion server. A light bit of tinkering for a Sunday evening - I don't anticipate any further ongoing investment in maintaining it. It's just PHP, so it should run and run.

That said, this wasn't directly a cost-saving exercise for us. That's just a nice by-product.
His perceived performance drops off in such a linear fashion. As long as we don't have a way of measuring our real performance, we are stuck with that perception.
Cheap Columbus Life Insurance
How about we suggest some features instead of pointing out that similar sites exist?

I would like to see better explanations on how to fix some of the problems on a site. Right now it mostly links to wikipedia in the help section.
Ask HN: Best practices for server redundancy?
The server for our e-commerce website went down during a recent holiday and we lost a significant number of transactions.

What redundancy procedures have you implemented to protect against these kinds of issues?

After doing a bit of research on this topic, I'm left with even more questions. DNS propagation would still leave our website down for up to a day or more for some users and we operate on a relatively tight budget (using a $50/mo. VPS).

Hoping someone can shed some light on this and that I'm just ignorant to the obvious solution.
Sure, but the big cost is generally consistent across phones. A $30/month difference definitely adds up over two years, but not enough that someone deciding which contract they're going into is going to make a different decision.

The costs are put off over a long enough time that people with ok incomes will go for the best phone instead of the $30 saving. It just isn't enough of a difference to elicit a gut level "let's look at alternatives" reflex. Margin whoring killed the Macintosh, not openness.

All this leads to where I think Android can actually get a beachhead outside of the geekier open source crowd- price conscious teenagers.
web2.0 fail in terms of UI.

Presenting a page full of loading spinners, which all load at different times, moving the page around while you're trying to read it, isn't helpful.

Either have each section collapsed as default so when it loads it doesn't change the page layout, or just load the whole page at the same time.
This is very similar to Website Grader, albeit with a bit more information.

Personally if looking to do analysis in any more depth than just a single website overview then SEOBook's Firefox toolbar plugin and MarketSamurai software are much more comprehensive.
Do early applications ACTUALLY get an advantage?
I've read Paul Graham's post about how they would like applications to be sent in earlier, and how they would begin reviewing apps earlier and "interacting" with applicants. And thus, those who send in their apps early get an "advantage".

But is this actually true? I mean, theres no real incentive, only a promise that by making their lives easier, we increase our chances somehow.

I know in psychology, the lastest impressions are the strongest. If your a strong applicant and you apply 2 weeks before the deadline, your impression diminishes as other stronger applications come in. Whereas if you apply last minute with a large lump of applicants, you don't necessarily lose impact, your just one of the bunch. Some would argue that by applying early, you're on their mind longer and get some sort of benefit that way. But I'm not sure thats true.

I think an interesting study would be to look at applicants submission dates, and compare those who got interviews / accepted against one another. My hypothesis is that a majority of those that made it in had last second submissions. Might provide for some interesting economics.

(On that note, anyone ever read Freakonomics?)
Online Radio Stations Still Relevant?
Surely more CPU power often equates to shorter battery life. Which really is very important to most people, considering just how badly batteries still suck.

So personally if it's a difference of battery life, I'd choose the one that uses less power and gives me more time.
Simple mocking and stubbing for Clojure unit-tests
Little app windows?
The article is not discussing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, rather it makes a case for why understanding the sub-pixel properties of AMOLED screens can decrease power consumption while increasing screen life.
Mr. Edison's Kindle, & 15 Other Inventions Way Ahead of Their Time
Why It’s Pointless to Debate Which Language is the best
Bexer bie bu gundi tahlava. - Signup
Yeah, an SEO is exactly what he needs now. sure.
I don't see how this differs from a physical good in this way, say I don't like your price so I'm just going to take it can be applied to anything. I think if piracy was completely stamped out people may be willing to pay a price point that they previously wouldn't have.
30 * 24 = $720. People may not fully realise this the first time they sign up to a plan but after that they do.
To die from blood loss, you have to bleed out at least 40% of your total blood volume, which would be approximately 2 liters (normal blood volume is 4-5L). The paramedics reported very little blood at the Kelly scene. The knife, which was alleged to belonged to Kelly, had no fingerprints on it.
If they make a compromise, they should drop Flash and support H.264. I would prefer THAT choice. Flash is buggy, slow, unsecure, proprietary from a single vendor. H.264 is much more useful, has a standard, multiple implementations (hardware and software)...
A difference that makes no difference isn't really a difference.
I find there are plenty of people with extraoridnary natural talent at this kind of thing, looking for equally talented programmers to team up with. You don't even really need to find them because part of their talent is finding you. The trick is choosing one grounded enough that you can work with them and who isn't swept up in their own schtick.
In my mind, justifying piracy just because their products are superior is like justifying theft just because the commercial versions are crippled.

Besides, piracy is observed in other industries where there's no such difference (games, books), so I don't think that's the driving force.
The official lemmings is sadly down :(
http://www.xs4all.nl/~crisp/lemmings/
That same argument has been made about tons of companies/products, e.g. Google and Wii.

Think about the fact that MP3 became a household word. Granted, it's an improvement over MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, but it's not exactly catchy.
Placebo bomb detectors
Autoclave: Most Preferred Sterilization Equipment
It boggles my mind that a video codec, whose name consists of two actual human names can be continually ragged on for its name when the competitors are things like mp3, AAC [+|HE] LC, MPEG-4 part 2, MPEG-4 Part 10, H.264, Advanced Video Codec. And those last three are all the same thing!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1455224
I don't think this argument really holds.

Saying that you couldn't afford an item and therefore wouldn't have spent any money on that doesn't really mean you'd never spend any money on that given a free pirated option wasn't available.

The point being we do have the money, and we do can afford it. It's just that, when you can pirate it, you end up spending your money on other things instead. But its not like you'll never have enough money that you'll ever be able to buy one game.

It's interesting to observe the Playstation 3's market, because they've so far done what was unthinkable since way back the times of the PS1: a console you can't pirate.

So I have a loooot of friends that live on Brazil, and that pirated all their PS2 games. And that pirate music and movies too. Some even have an Xbox360 and pirate games on it too. But all of them buy PS3 games. They don't just leave their console there hanging, playing demos, as you'd expect.
Handful of countries? More like a handful of people in a few countries.
Somehow I think Bill Gates will do just fine, SEO or no. When you're a behemoth, people visit your blog whether or not they can find it on Google, and in time he'll naturally migrate to the top of any relevant search. He's a voice that people want to hear, and that's several orders of magnitude more important than how your blog pages are titled and what you put in your meta tag.

Probably useful advice for those that actually need to worry about traffic and findability, though, if they aren't using off-the-shelf solutions that already do most this stuff for you.
DNS propagation doesn't have to be that long if you set the TTL for your records to be the lowest your nameserver will allow.

Your problem is severely limited by your budget given that at your level, redundancy will at least double your hosting bill. If your site is that important, I think you should spend a bit more on hosting.
There's still plenty of options to "try before you buy" in the legal market. If its a game, you can rent it, or borrow it from some friend. In many platforms games will have a demo for you to download before you play. Most magazines and websites will have reviews, maybe even video ones, about that game. Most movies have a trailer you can watch before watching the movie, ebooks have sample chapters, etc.
have you separated out your database?
How much traffic can it handle?

Upgrade your hosting budget.
> When the music industry can offer a product superior to piracy

Problem there is that the vast majority of people - be they pirates or normal consumers- cant tell the difference between the quality.

(also, TBH it's complete bull because a large amount of ripped music is of pretty poor quality in my experience)
This depends a lot on your software design. You have to shed a lot of assumptions before you can even begin to consider redundancy. If your software can only run on one computer, then nothing much matters.

It would be a worthwhile experiment to see what it'd take to get your site running on GAE or perhaps heroku. In both cases, you are sufficiently constrained such that front-end scalability is trivial, and backend redundancy is managed for you.

Of course, many of us have done this ourselves, but these days I'd rather just get it in a box where I'm doing something fairly small (i.e. could even run on one computer).
Are you suggesting that a codec known to be patented is automatically immune to submarine patents? Or just that paying for a patent license somehow protects you from submarine patents? Because as far as I know, neither is true. Submarine patents are a threat to use of virtually any technology, unless you get some sort of protection agreement when licensing it.

I think you're correct about the psychological effects, though.
Really? I assume all 20,000 people aren't close personal friends.

I work at a company that's an order of magnitude bigger, and I interact with about 5 people on a daily basis and maybe know the names of about 20 people there. (We have a big building, so the team I'm on mostly has the floor to itself.)

I am sure there is groupthink among the 5 of us, but I'm not sure that there's an opportunity for us to think like the other 280,000 people. If we do, it's a coincidence.
Facebook | Konfirmasi Permintaan
This is meaningless. Due to software problems, my blog has been dead for a few months. The title is "It works!". But if you search for "Jonathan Rockway blog" the default Apache2 "it works" page is the first Google result.

Google's algorithm is more than just looking at the <title> tags.

(And wow, it's been months now? Time to fix that bug...)
HTML5, H.264 and Free Software: it's the wrong game
According to his logic, an audio cd should cost less than a dollar.

Yes, this is exactly what pro-piracy people are saying. They are saying that content has always been free and the medium is whats being charged for, hence you sell papers instead of news stories, CDs instead of music tracks etc etc.

The problem is that its often easier (certainly easier on the wallet) to pirate than to buy. Since its so easy, people are going to do it - regardless of what you do - so you need to adapt. Sure, you can rely on laws, but when a majority of the population does something, how can you make it illegal? Eg, even Lily Allen, who is completely anti-piracy, herself "pirated" to get her music out there. She claimed she did it because she didn't realise it was wrong. Well, most people don't! If most people don't realise that piracy is wrong (cause its just sharing, right? and most people are taught from a young age that sharing is the right thing to do), then how can we really make it illegal?

Its a tough one. If we did say that piracy is Ok, then business gets very difficult because where do you draw the line? If its fine to pirate music, then its also Ok to pirate movies and games and business software and.. just about anything thats convenient or easy to copy!

The general consensus on #startups seems to be that SaaS is the way to beat this, but really, SaaS is just a (currently hard to bypass) form of DRM, when you think about it.

I don't know the answer and I'm not trying to guess. Personally, I'm trying a mixture between the conventional business model and adapting to the fact that if my software is popular, it will be pirated - I need to ensure that between legit sales and alternative revenue streams, I make enough to be able to ignore the piracy..
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Opera only uses the system gstreamer on Linux, on Windows (and probably Mac when they get around to it) they bundle their own gstreamer that only supports Theora.

I can see Firefox doing similar on Linux, so if it's just (ironically) the Linux geeks that are desperate for the patented codecs then I wouldn't worry too much about it. For the 60% of Firefox users on XP though, Mozilla aren't going to rely on system codecs that aren't there.
Personal Security Issues on the Rise
Personal security is a serious issue in all parts of the world. Increasingly, there is no guarantee that we will always be safe whether walking outside, driving in our cars or even relaxing in our homes. Though law enforcement tries hard to protect the public, it is not possible for them to be present in all places at all times. As a result, it is a necessity to use personal security products that are easily accessible and powerful.
Part of the problem is that there's a cap on the fees. Google/Youtube and other large conglomerates are already paying that cap ($5 million per year is a figure I've seen thrown around) so they get a pricing advantage compared with smaller startups.

This makes sense for those collecting the fees because the big players could move the market by themselves if they switch so there's no use squeezing them for money, when you can use them to lure in large numbers of smaller players.
its a very small detail for why it is hard. there is about 100 - 150 more other things you need to worry about just as much.
Eyes: ... SEO ... Bill Gates

Mind: Bill Gates is worth 40-50 billion, doesn't care about revenue

Mind: Bill Gates is known world-wide, doesn't need promotion

Mind: Bill Gates' blog received widespread media attention

Mind: What could this be?

Hand: Click

Eyes: searchengineland.com

Mind: Never heard of it

Eyes: Quasi-intelligent comments

Mind: Relates more to the age of te website than anything else

Mind: SEO is like change for the poor. Close.
Nanotech breakthrough: get ready for graphene
This thread is a good example, for one of the reasons, why I try not to read HN comments anymore. (Failed this time though, as I'm very interested in serious discussions on this topic)

There's a lot of information out there for anyone who wants to actually try and understand the issues, instead of dismissing people who have though about them and claiming everything is bullshit, econ101 and stealing. How can you even have a discussion with someone that can't even differentiate between physical property and intellectual property?

Either we try and work around the issues and find solutions, or give up civil liberties in the name of stagnating business models. Incomprehension and ignorance must be the lobbyists best friends.
I'm surprised Dirac hasn't come up more in this discussion. It's as free as Theora - perhaps freer, since the BBC can guarantee there are no submarine patents - and it's miles ahead of Theora, comparable to h.264.
Cooks make food.
Musicians make music.

Just because you can't record food on a CD doesn't mean musicians are special and should make millions without working for it.

The only ones I'm the slightest bit worried about are writers.
DNS rarely takes a day or more to do anything. The only place I have to wait on it is when I change my name servers at my registrar. If you set your TTLs low, the greatest amount of time you're looking at is probably an hour. Another option is dynamic DNS load balancing.
Long Bets
I find it interesting that you can now buy music in FLAC format (from well known digital pioneers such as Metallica!) yet you can't play them on your Apple devices, instead they push their own home grown format, which they don't seem to licence widely and so generally undermine the whole concept of lossless audio.

Kind of shows up their stance of we want to use the best and most widespread format (as does the crappiness of their H.264 encoder compared with the x264 encoder that they could just adopt).

They never made any official announcement, but there were reports of Apple employees claiming that the ever handy bogeyman of patents were preventing them implementing FLAC.

Shortly after they implemented their own ALAC (note that's the exact same name with Free replaced with Apple) which reverse engineering showed to be built with the exact same technology they claimed was under a patent cloud with a few extra bits which were actively avoided by FLAC because of patent worries.

Having experienced that, and been quite disappointed as an Apple fan and owner, I can't take their stance of H.264 seriously.
The issue with heroku and/or GAE is that they are single services. They have and will continue to have unplanned downtime. The issue here is mitigating a single service's downtime by having redundancy. Redundancy almost always involves duplication of resources. Essentially, you could switch to GAE or Heroku, but you haven't gained much, and possibly lost, since GAE apps can usually ONLY run on GAE.
But Hacker News is about hacking, startups, politics, philosophy and much more.

So why constrain it? Call it 'Pink News' and open it up to everything that women might find important.

My wife would never go to 'Workaholic Wives' out of principal (she sees herself as "my wife" as much as I see myself as "her husband"), but 'Pink News' she might get into. Good work; best of luck!
Back when I was working for an ISP, we discovered that sbcglobal was ignoring the TTL for some domains.
Should "It will take place in Mountain View, CA from July through August 2010" actually say "June" rather than "July" given point #4?
I think its because a lot of people on HN run businesses themselves which could or are negatively affected by piracy, because software is easily pirated - so they (we?) are naturally hostile towards the idea that we're doing business wrong and that our hard work should be free.

Honestly, I don't know what I think of it. On the one hand the pro-piracy people do make some sense, but on the other hand, a world of free everything is impossible to sustain and messy to do business in. Unlike OSS people like to think, support is not enough to.. err.. support all businesses. It works in some cases, sure, but it doesn't scale very well and for some businesses simply doesn't make sense.
Infibeam Dreams To Become Amazon Of India - To Launch E-book reader named 'Pi'
Paid Search Clicks Competitor Reaches New Milestone
Sure - but - copyright was created (for the same reasons as patents) to drive innovation. To motivate people to put time and effort into creating something. When it fails to do this, then it should not be a real thing anymore.

Now, I'm not saying that copyright doesn't do what its meant to (patents are another story however...) and I'm not arguing that copyright should be eliminated.
And all non-major video platforms, since you pay fees on that side too. You'll note the current drama is around two major video platforms who can easily meet the (capped) costs and probably don't want to encourage people to host their video elsewhere, or even host their own video themselves.

There would be no Wordpress equivalent if putting text on the web was taxed.
Oracle and Sun Clear a Big Hurdle
Pirates go after the multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters moreso than art school film projects. Revealed preferences seem to suggest that people often prefer media which has a non-trivial cost of production. Pirates dig Avatar, too. And there will be no Avatar when they can no longer charge for it.
Delhi auto expo 2010 review
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There are a couple of options for making your front-end redundant: round-robin DNS, or a CDN.

In either case, it still leaves you with a single point of failure in the backend. Your best bet there is probably to get a second VPS through a completely different provider -- and figure that you'll never lose both at the same time -- and then set up replication between the two databases, along with a monitoring process to switch the front-end to the backup database in the event that the primary becomes unreachable.
1. Monitoring; if you lost a significant number of sales, it was mostly because you didn't know your site was down.

Solution: nagios running on a pc in your office. Or use one of the many external monitoring tools that will send you a page if your site is unavailable for more than 90 seconds.

2. Separation of concerns, the server that handles credit card transactions should be a different machine than the one that delivers static media. Databases shouldn't depend on webservers and vice versa.

3. Load balancers don't need to be fancy, you can distribute high impact loads across multiple backend servers using nothing but free software.

4. Eliminating single points of failure is a good idea, but it gets expensive quickly. Try to identify which bottlenecks are actually giving you grief before you charge into building complete multi-tier architectures.

All that aside, if $50 bucks is the limit of your hosting budget you are in trouble. To run a relatively high traffic site you should have at minimum separate web and database servers, and your database server should be on dedicated hardware.