skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At work, a server that I am responsible for the software on, but not the general IT-type management, was becoming increasingly flaky. It kept powering down at odd times, once managing to corrupt a MySQL database pretty badly. Shortly after a firmware update, it ceased coming up. I honestly did assume it was something in my software update, as updating this server was often the next step after QAing the software. Once I realized that I couldn't even ping the device (which I am 2000 miles from), I had to send in the local IT personnel to log in physically.

This is when they discovered that the device would no longer physically turn on. Next step is to de-rack the device, at which point some strange discoloration was discovered in the holes in the case. Next step was to open the case, where it was discovered that the entire machine was full of mold. The roof was leaking, and this was on the top of the rack directly under the leak. In Silicon Valley, leaky roofs can apparently take a while to discover, but they will eventually make their presence known.

Now, this was in a local office, albeit a relatively well-equipped on that holds in the hundreds of rack machines, not a colo. But you know what? Shit happens. And you don't really have a guarantee that shit won't happen just because someone has magically slapped the word "data center" on a building.
I had the exact same idea a while back as well. Jotted down some rough notes, came up with a name for it, ran it past a couple of journalist friends. It has merit but it's the usual chicken and egg problem.

Perhaps come up with something niche or location specific (or white labelled so it could be run out as niche/location oriented by someone else) and try a focused launch.

Another option, and this would be easier if you started min-viable-product-style with a few niches, is if you listed some "experts" then ran it past them (explain the idea and that you've added them, but can remove them if they like - make it very personal rather than spammy) and then pitch it to journalists and bloggers once there are some experts listed.
Currently the only advantage Google Buzz has over Facebook is it lives in Gmail.
Sweden and Norway has very non-uniformly populated areas as well. Don't blame your land mass, blame your telcos. They are screwing you over.
Huge pipes to supply 600Mbit wireless stations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11n-2009) would be a reasonable stopgap until faster wireless tech becomes available.
Great practical advice. I still pipe cats though because it's just more intuitive to me for setting up complex pipes.
You reminded me of this episode of the NPR radio show This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=2...) entitled "A Little bit of Knowledge". In the third act "Sucker MC-Squared" an electrician and amateur physics enthusiast thinks he has disproved Einstein.

He finally gets an academic to meet with him to hear his ideas but won't accept it when the academic points out the flaws in his reasoning. Throughout the story the electrician insists that the math isn't important, that he's right even though he can't express the math behind his ideas. He thinks the academics are being elitist (or, as you write "anti-amateur") just because they insist on using math.
How to use Facebook chat with iChat on Mac
What is it worth to you?

Have you already been in touch with the owner? I ask because from my experience - they typically already have a price in mind. So, if you get that from them you will have a starting point.

I wouldn't wait for it to drop either. Take some action up front, to at least find out what they would sell it for.
How many people involved in this actually have any idea about how computers work?
Shells are one of those things that I find you should basically just plan on reading the man page every couple of months. Every time you do, you are virtually sure to discover something useful you'd swear you never saw before, even though you're pretty sure it's the exact same man page as before....
well for the most part, the US has no market for utilities - it is all monopolies
To keep the entertainment going, lets all do our part and promote the article's link up in google's search results for 'facebook' and 'facebook login' :)
This was more in response to Calacanis' blind optimism that it is going to cut Facebook traffic in half.
Yeah, I know, I was sort of joking.

The hard drive certainly quickly becomes an OS-managed cache though like ram is for hard drives now though.
Being honest, I'm not particularly enamoured by any of those in the main link or singularly any in the second.

I'd probably go for the hat in this: http://99designs.com/designs/3702194-original
Combined with the monocle and text placement in this: http://99designs.com/designs/3682895-original

Although not with those particular fonts. Something deco and 20's would be nice. Cicle or even Futura would work at the right weights.
God I feel like I'm being trolled here, but I'll bite.

Let's assume Google Buzz is undeniably better than Facebook.

Let's also assume no one is really invested in the 90% of Facebook functionality that Google Buzz doesn't address.

Hell, let's assume any user who tries Google Buzz will instantly declare eternal allegiance to Larry and Sergey and immediately delete their Facebook account.

Even with all those dramatically dubious flamebait claims, how the hell is Google going to get everyone to try Buzz. Since when do better products automatically win in the tech marketplace? If Calacanis is going for pageviews then I say well-played, but if he actually believes this tripe then he's dumber than he is arrogant.
You can get around this some of the time with hg pull; hg up (instead of hg fetch). This works as long as you don't have a conflict. If you have a conflict you have to check in and merge at that point.

I do agree that git stash is superior to the hg alternatives.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116108
(I thought I had a deja-vu, but the top post is a duplicate :))
1) http://thinkexist.com/quotation/you_will_not_be_punished_for....
2) I blog at zacharyburt.com and am enthusiastic about this stuff.
3) I am also in NYC, we should meet up. zackster@gmaîl.com
I love Buzz (and Reader). Wave was oversold and seems just like realtime message boarding. There is an intense amount of hate being generated for Buzz. <anecdotal>It seems a lot of people seem to dislike the intrusion into Gmail, maybe.</anecdotal>
China can sell it's US debt just like any other party that holds a claim on the US, how and when they do so is at their discretion.

If the US would do what you say then it would knock the bottom out of the market faster than any Chinese sell of ever would.

The dollar would go in to freefall just about instantly.
People aren't compeled with the presence of a paypal button, to click it and give money. That's because money is a cognitive barrier. People don't want to spend anything unless they have to.
This is even better: http://cancelgoogle.com/
and integrates nicely with Reader.
Not many people in my "social circle" use gmail [that I know of] where as _everyone_ uses facebook...

Also, in general, no one ever likes facebook UI updates, yet they never leave.
Are you sure you're not confusing the phonology of Chinese with that of Japanese? Because I have studied both, and what you say is true of Japanese, but most English-speaking people seem to find the Chinese consonants represented in pinyin by zh, ch, q, x and r quite challenging. In addition, the tones have no English equivalent, and are a bit of a bear for an English speaker to keep straight.
It depends on what the rest of the site design is as well - it's hard to judge the logo in isolation. It's the same concept as pairing wines with cheese.

For example, A is the most neutral and could go well with a modern layout, G is minimal while still having an old school flourish and can match up with a similar design if the designer had the chops to pull it off, and the rest are bit crowded and overdone, which means they probably wouldn't sit well in a cluttered interface but could look good if they were showcased on a simple site.
How do you handle security when replicating across data centers? It's my understanding that MongoDB supports authentication, but not encryption.
You can get the first eigenvector through power iteration, just take some random vector then repeatedly normalize it and multiply by the adjacency matrix. So no giant matrix inversion needed.
There are all kind of presentations and special events. I'm just talking here about individual conversations. (I'm not sure what you mean by "all at the table.")
The "send me feedback" area took all my first attention. Maybe it would be beneficial to reduce its attraction a bit ?
This kind of thing makes me feel the same way I do about lisp: I've tried both, and I'm still struggling to understand what the hype is about.
The main advantage Buzz has over Facebook is that it will most likely be scoped to Google Apps for Your Domain.
It's already in Gmail.
Actual link to code + detailed description that doesn't spend 3/4 the post describing what bittorrent is and instead discusses what the project is: http://github.com/lg/murder#readme
Although you really have to question the effectiveness of the FDA if their people were duped by such an obvious fabrication. Did no one just bother to run the numbers themselves?
Can't find the link, but flikr recently had a post somewheres (maybe highscalability.com? I cannot find it for the life of me...) about how they handle unique IDs. In essence, they have one "ticket server" that only runs a single database, with a single table, with two fields -- `id`, and `a`. The `a` column doesn't really do anything, but it allows them to issue a mysql REPLACE INTO, which just increments the auto counter, without expanding the table size. Then they have a mechanism to retrieve this next ticket.

Found the link -- does this concept work for you?
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2010/02/08/ticket-servers-distri...
There is this dumb-ass meme in the world, that you have to suffer to be happy. Yes, it's good to be able to find happiness beyond suffering. But to seek or embrace suffering, as if that were the goal... To "sacrifice" and "do without".

The happiest people I know spend significant time and energy seeking and doing things that make them happy. Maybe not always easy things, but inspiring and joyous.

I don't think they view what they skip or discard as "sacrifice". If and when the word is used, it's with a small "s", not "Sacrifice". It's more like the person who gives up TV, and some months later comments that they "don't miss it at all". Or the parent who takes great pride and pleasure in their children's accomplishments.

If you have to fight yourself to do something, you're in a losing battle.

It's not a matter of "sacrifice". It's a matter of learning what truly matters to you, and what doesn't.
Judging from my group of friends, most people who use Facebook do not use Gmail. I'm not sure how well this transfers to the rest of the world, but for almost all of my Facebook friends, none of them will hear of Buzz through Gmail.
Perhaps one way to think of it is that people who are all about sharing pictures will prefer Fb, but those who are all about sharing ideas will prefer Buzz. Which target demographic has more income?

A very good question. That's about what I'm thinking as I consider making Buzz my primary channel for interacting with my friends. I'm considering "ideas" more than "income," but I'm not looking for games or cute pictures.

AFTER EDIT:

As I just posted on Facebook, in a thread discussing the New York Times article about Buzz, "rebuilding a whole social graph is a bother. But MIGRATING a social graph to a site that is at least as useful and less annoying might be something much easier to do. I am glad to see some thoughtful competition in this space, the better to kee Facebook honest."

I see some other comments on my Facebook threads and here on HN along the lines of using Facebook to first establish a network of friends, and then using the Next Great Thing in Social Networking to winnow that group of friends to get a dense network of closest friends. That might work for me.
Just check the instructions for iChat it clearly says to uncheck SSL.
The article actually says:

Never fire. We constantly emphasize you can't get fired for lack of productivity or being stupid or foolish. You can get fired for ethical reasons. We should strive for openness and honesty in all matters.

So they will fire people, but only for "ethical" reasons.
There a a number of logos on that page I like a lot more than the ones in the survey. Personal taste, of course, but I guess that's what you are looking for.
I'll second that - for 2 customers, we're just back to SVN, actually (despite I'm using Git for my own projects, because I like to commit offline, mostly).

The learning curve of Git is way too steep for non-technical participants in particular, at least in my experience, whereas they seem to handle SVN without much difficulties.
App Engine SDK 1.3.1, Including Major Improvements to Datastore
One of my friends had this as an interview question "What was the last thing you programmed that wasn't for work or school?" He was looking for any answer and some enthusiasm. Might not work for everybody, but it was a neat question.
Phase Change Material Could Cool Houses
Runcoderun ending private builds
Agreed, money typically is a cognitive barrier - but remember we're talking micropayments, and the internet is a BIIIIG place. I think that works in favor of overcoming that barrier.

And maybe, just maybe, the paypal button is out of date. Paypal buttons are little more than a dressed-up hyperlink from 1996 that will take you to a form with stuff to fill out and even more buttons to press (no novelty, redundancy, paperwork, etc). It's also a solitary activity.

This is inviting in that you get to see a count displayed from people who have already clicked it (much like the digg button), and invites you to participate in that community. I think that community force is a very strong thing that has yet to be tapped in to.

Who I see this working really well for at the Seth Godin-types, where they have really developed a whole tribe of followers who hang on to their (and truly benefit from) every word. These people will want to participate in their online community, and this will be a very tangible and easy way for them to do so.
That seems like a flaw in Google, to be honest. Surely Facebook.com must be one of the very highest pageranks possible.

So it's the preferential treatment Google gives to "news results" that moved this page to the top.

But how many people who google "facebook" are looking for anything other than facebook.com? I know that people like us it seems no one would logically go to the site that way, but those of us who watch people use the web know better.

So this seems like a case of Google returning results on what it imagines people want rather than what I'm willing to bet the statistics overwhelmingly indicate people want.

Interesting.
"... Moral of the story: If you get an interview, be really nice to Jessica ..."

Bad idea.

I can't tell for sure, but what Jessica is most likely interpreting is sub-conscious gestural leakage. A fancy term meaning you exhibit both facial and gestural signs that can be read. For example if you are be probed to check for flexibility, a necessity in "fog of war" situations in Startups, and you exhibit a "fearful" or "sad" facial micro-expression ~ http://face.paulekman.com/aboutmett2.aspx this could be how Jessica is determining a flake. You can tell a person maybe showing certain emotions but you cannot be sure if they are "conscious" (lying) or "unconscious". Judgment is required. Conscious lying can also be masked by certain types of pharmaceuticals which can mask these feelings.

YCombinator could improve themselves in the selection process by getting better at recognising the fundamentals of faces, emotion and deception ~ http://www.paulekman.com/micros/ Naturals such as Jessica interpret but not fully understand the science of it meaning you can get false positives.
Locking it to the gmail account is a bad idea. It might make business sense for Google but for becoming a Facebook or Twitter killer, it is not with that limitation.
Look at the sick amount on activity on this thread.... and this is day one of Buzz.

http://bit.ly/daBl66

100+ people like it.
~200 comments from quality people.

This is game over for Facebook for everyone who doesn't play Farmville.

I've never seen pickup like that, and that is with just 2,000 followers.

I have 25k followers on my fanpage on Facebook and 5k on my normal facebook page.

in fact, i've never seen pickup like that on my blog with 250k uniques a month.

the only thing close to that i've seen is Twitter, but those responses are limited to the 90k followers i have and 140 characters each.

Also, it's not just this thread... scoble is having the same experience: more activity than ever.

it's a targeted network: people you've spoken to + 100% reach for your comments with that network since they HAVE TO go to their inbox.

this really is unprecedented: the reach of email with the power of social networking.
behave.... no threats please
I am prone to doing this. It's about being a serial entrepreneur but also being easily distracted by the next idea. End result is being spread too thin, but it's very hard to avoid given that the drive to find and build ideas is so strong.
Doesn't hold over in my group of friends. We're on the young end of the spectrum (16-19 years old), but among people our age in our area (east coast, near DC but in Maryland), I feel like two assumptions that are commonly made and are usually right are a) everyone has a Facebook account and b) everyone has a Gmail account, except for the 1 out of 100 people with a Yahoo account.

I mean, I might be exaggerating, but among my friends I can name at max 10 people who don't have a Gmail and a Facebook. I'm guessing that the true proportion lies somewhere between the extreme situations we're in.
I hate FaceBook. It's like living in a college dorm. Without the intellectual bits.
I'll buy that Buzz might create a new niche. Or rather, fill the niche that FriendFeed was aiming at.

But that's not the same niche as Twitter, and it's certainly not the same niche as Facebook.
sounds like TipJoy (former YC company)...
Care about balanced copyright? Let US Government know
Old Hack Never Die
this really is unprecedented: the reach of email with the power of social networking

My Android phone email alerts me every time someone comments, likes, or writes on my page on FB. This is not unprecedented.
I've tried Buzz, and it doesn't look like anything special to me. Google are going to need to do more work if they're hoping to take on the likes of Facebook with this.
apparently, yes.
I think it's noisy and useless. The UI isn't innovative or fun (or pretty), comments can't be threaded, the follower/friend model is too difficult for end users, it's not importing tweets at all, it's got massive delays for importing other media, it's pure clutter.

Moreover, most of us who want to use microblog platforms to communicate with friends already do, and we have established networks for those things. Google doesn't integrate those tools at all, neither by using FB Connect/Twitter OAuth to find Buzz-using friends nor by using those services' APIs to centralize posting, the way more successful clients have done.

Google reinvented the wheel, badly.
Thanks lots. Encouraging to know, based on responses, that I'm thinking in some of the right directions.

ocean large, boat small
myspace also had lock in.
Similar things could be said when moving from despotism to a democracy. No system's perfect, but some are demonstratively better than others.
well alerts are one thing, but having your address book become your social networking instantly AND having your social network updates threaded into email?!?! that's hot.

don't know of anyone ever doing that...
agree... and i bet they will make it part of your google profile and available for just that.
Ah, the lazyweb at it's best.

Have you thought about a rename? That's a hell of a mouthful for a company that's not the result of some kind of international M&A event.
I think for some people they have opposed so many UI updates on facebook that they no longer remember which UI they considered good.
This was discussed here, too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114338
But clicking a Flattr button does not cost anything, it only distributes money you've already paid.

I wonder what happens to your monthly payment if you don't click anything that month..
let's remember the the -p option is cool, but could cause pain if you mis-type one of the directories. for example:

$ cd
$ ls tmp
- some files lists -
$ mkdir -p tmm/a/b/c

oops (remember your esc key)
especially if your using a test file instead of the program you might eventually use
I think you're overestimating the resources of the FDA
Also, I should point out that his reasoning for betweenness over eigvector centrality was given in a link in the article: http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/its-betweenness-that-matter...
First, I have to acknowledge the points I agree with. You do have to love your business, and you do have to have systems for tracking the correct financial measurements (backwards and forwards).

But I have to wonder if, at some point before he drops dead in his office, George will realise the connection between treating your vendors as interest-free loans and staff as unlikeable, and his experience that "Getting good people is 100 times more difficult than conventional wisdom says".
The solution to this is technical. Countries like Iran or China can censor the internet because users traffic goes through centralised bottlenecks called ISPs. If we had longer range wireless networking, and enough people using it, mesh networks could be created where there is no central point of weakness. In such a network any attempt to censor individual nodes just gets routed around.

We need to be working towards a situation where this kind of internet censorship is not just antisocial or unethical, but is also technically impossible.
Ask HN: $10 Giveaway Investment
I was given $10 a while back to give away to a random stranger as a gesture of kindness (it was a class project). Being the entrepreneurial type, I wanted to invest it in something and give away the dividends: $10 here, $10 there. I'm still trying to figure out a good way to do this. What can I invest $10 in that has some simple returns that I can give away? I'm open to any sort of idea. Thanks!
I've been having fun discovering myself as an extrovert, actually, and doing more things like public speaking. But thanks for playing. ;) (I am the author of this post)
An encrypted tunnel that isn't initiated at the database level should work fine.

Addendum: I'm more than a little puzzled that someone would be aware that a particular nosql database didn't support encryption natively and yet wasn't aware how tunneling works.
"quality people" is the problem. Facebook has already broken out of the insiderish valley echo chamber and has mass appeal. That's a really tough thing to overcome.
New GitHub status site
Pastebin - collaborative debugging
Google to Test Ultra-Fast Broadband
It's a great idea in light of Facebook incorporating more email features into it's services.
I also fail to see the value add in networking threads being updated in email. The gmail/email interface sucks for that type of interaction. That's pretty much why the social network sites exist, because email threads just aren't the right face for those types of interactions. Especially when you have tens of general purpose messages interspersed with your social stuff.
it's been scoring very well among our current users

Sampling bias at its best :-)
The grayscale one will give you fits when/if you need to use cheap printing in black and white.

Similarly, the ones with a lot of fiddly detail will be harder to render well on paper.