skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Easy High availability for websites?
I run a webmarketing/webdesign firm but i guess this is applicable to everyone running a web application/site too.

I read about rsync, i read about replicating DBs... but I'm still a little confused, is there anyone willing to talk about the easiest way to obtain HA on a budget?

Since I'm in Europe and i couldn't find a managed hosting fast enough in my continent i was forced to go with managing my own small VPS (currently linux hosted on linode.com UK datacenter).
By the way if you know of any fast managed hosting (that enables you to push subversion and/or git repositories on the server) I would like to know it too.

Linode offers a way to have IPs turn up on a second linode if the first linode isn't taking the IPs, but how do i keep them synched?

So here's what do i need to replicate at the very least:
-ext3 stored files
-MySQL databases
I think, maybe I'm missing something.
Join the Boycott Facebook movement
http://fightskillz.com/2010/05/boycott-facebook/
"Care about your privacy! Get free farmville points for doing so."

That might just work.
Remind HN: Not everyone here is in the US.
I happen to know for a fact (because I was just there for a week), but today is Mother's Day in Japan too.
G-LOK Megasounds Presents The Best Of Dancehall And Reggae Vol 2
Victory Day is a very big holiday in the post Soviet Union countries.
I suspect arrhythmias are commoner than you think. A large proportion of us will suffer from one at some point in our lives.

Failure scenario: you're having a mild heart attack, but you can't call an ambulance because your phone doesn't recognize you!

(If this biometric is routinely used as a password-substitute, what are the odds that by the time you really need it, you've forgotten the password you used when you set up your account?)

Yes, a workaround for emergency services is feasible, but your average first half attack has a duration measured in hours, comes with a variety of symptoms the victim is unfamiliar with, and many folks' first response is to try to self-diagnose or ask someone about it, rather than to instantly realize "OMFG, I'm having a heart attack, ER now". Way to go if they're locked out of all the possible online sources of information that might tell them what's going on!

(And I really don't think Apple will be wanting to jump through the medical device certification hoops for OSX and the iPhone, given what the regulatory regime is like ...)
Easy enough: require that any computer using biometrics (of any kind, not just this one) also have the guest account enabled.
Thanks for the slime.mov link, I learned a couple of nice things about Emacs UI from that.
That was very carefully crafted in order to not answer the question at all. Nicely done.
Over 70 other countries celebrate it on today as well. Besides the US, also Canada, India, China, South Africa and a large part of Europe is in this list; represents a decent number of HN'ers here, I thought =)
Amusing Typo in Android On-Screen Keypad
World hottest news: Tories and Lib Dems to hold more power-sharing talks
great tip. yebol has passed me by. thanks
Not all 3d printers use plastic, there are processes for most metals including titanium. They work by depositing layers of metal dust and fusing it with lasers. The resulting parts can be very strong depending on the process.
Can I just have support to draw a pattern on the homescreen for authentication? This is pretty ridiculous.
I think this would be better targeted at Amazon Mechanical Turks. Its demographic is mainly made of people that do little tasks for little payments.
For the moment (at least until HTML 5 gains mainstream adoption), this type of ad is a good reason to install FlashBlock.
The sad thing about MPI is that it's entrenched. To run it on the biggest iron such as Blue Gene they have to use a mechanism called OS Bypass to get the bytes on the wire fast enough because the Linux kernel takes an age. One of the other teams in Sandia work on alternatives to running Linux; see their use of Plan 9 in "Using Currying and process-private system calls to break the one-microsecond system call barrier, Ronald G. Minnich, John Floren, Jim Mckie" - http://iwp9.org/slides/usecsys.pdf

However, obviously the actual users want to maintain their investment in their MPI based Fortran software so it's one of those situations where merely matching the current systems is not enough unless you can demonstrate heaps of potential.
Notably, the StarCraft II beta is almost twice as large on OS X as it is on Windows. (At least, last time I checked.)
Not sure about the US, but it's Mothers' Day in Australia today
There's a big problem with all bio-metric identification. If your signature is stolen, you're stuffed. Unlike a pin or password you can't change it.
That reminds me of bismuth crystals:

http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=...

I think that is a result of it being one of the few substances other that water that has a liquid phase that is denser than the solid.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own" would fit well here. FWIW, I am not sure who this quote can be attributed to and some Googling didn't help.
No, it won't.

Everything that you just mentioned, at best, protects the server environment from Wordpress vulnerabilities -- and that's assuming that a novice could set up a dedicated server as tightly as good hosting companies set up shared hosts.

None of your recommendations do anything to make Wordpress itself any safer, and if the Wordpress db gets compromised (which happened recently to a lot of folks), then you still don't have much of a site left.
> our API responses and the innumerable clients and scripts that use these methods aren't currently designed with this state in mind

Well, you could just return the original URL when it is already shortened and this way there is no new "state" to worry about.
So if I came back from a long running am I still able to unlock my heartbeak signature protected device?
Mobile Tech as a Participant
No, it's because an evil person will cut off your finger in order to gain access. He can't rip out your beating heart and all the sanguine system so this is a much better biometric from a personal safety viewpoint.
That's interesting. The guys at reddit previously compared various database systems including Amazon's SimpleDB, and found that PostgreSQL was the fastest (see 'Scaling your Python application on EC2' from PyCon 2010: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/ )

Appearently Reddit switched over to Cassandra in March 2010 (http://blog.reddit.com/2010/03/she-who-entangles-men.html)
Isn't that exactly what they do? Some URL shortners that don't allow modifiable destinations (like goo.gl) are whitelisted - others are not.
Hippy crap. Moving right along...
Hah, I had a "oh, crap" moment before I thought about it :)
I can hardly wait until this prat gets his.
Ask HN: Easy High Availability for websites
I run a webmarketing/webdesign firm but i guess this is applicable to everyone running a web application/site too.

I read about rsync, i read about replicating DBs... but I'm still a little confused, is there anyone willing to talk about the easiest way to obtain HA on a budget?

Since I'm in Europe and i couldn't find a managed hosting fast enough in my continent i was forced to go with managing my own small VPS (currently linux hosted on linode.com UK datacenter). By the way if you know of any fast managed hosting (that enables you to push subversion and/or git repositories on the server) I would like to know it too.

Linode offers a way to have IPs turn up on a second linode if the first linode isn't taking the IPs, but how do i keep them synched?

So here's what do i need to replicate at the very least: -ext3 stored files -MySQL databases I think, maybe I'm missing something.
or you can use a synthetic copy of an eyeball or finger.

for online or remote authentication all bio-metric identifiers are as bad as each other. you can simply "play back" a stolen signiture. if a human is present to observe then maybe it's a little harder. nevertheless, your signiture is effectively worthless if it does get stolen - and when it is you cannot change it.

I'm strongly of the opinion that bio-metric id is a disastrous concept. As well as the issue of having signitures stolen, such systems will evitably result in further erosion of privacy. Plus of course, with possibly the exception of your DNA, you change over time, meaning that, I beleive, such systems can never be that reliable.
CSS Tools for ASP.Net Developers
Enjoyed it. Nice video.
And with tesseract level API access you could do so much more than time travel, like begin a large computation of all possible computable universes.

I think we'll probably get time travel and teleportation before we get the superpower of the hypercube.
Will work fine till when you are having a heart attack and need to find the address of the nearest hospital.
True believers are well-trained in filing any obvious contradictions between what scripture says God wants and what is observable in the real world under "ineffability", and fervently ignoring them.
I wonder how much could be achieved if random people actually started trying to fix stuff.
Allow me to be a bit marginal here and ask you, what was not-so-obvious in this annoyingly long talk?

I scrolled to random places a dozen times, read through a few paragraphs each time, and found nothing that would be surprising to me.

You can't get rich by following his "worldly wisdom" alone. You need (a) at least a 7-figure initial capital and (b) extreme intelligence and courage in order to get a miniscule chance of becoming a 9/10-figure rich.

Any counter-arguments are welcome.
Most netbooks that have come out in the past 6 month have a 64-bit CPU. Only the old atom N2xx series is 32bit, and they are rapidly being phased out.
yep, 1% would be insane, I started trading actively for the first time on friday & I would certainly not be in the game with my money with a 1% trade punishment
> This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months

Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem?

Interviewing is a two-way process, it's the candidate's job to back up everything that's on their resume and make sure they present an honest view of their ability but it's also your job to decide if someone is a good fit for your team before making them quit their comfortable job and move to your start-up. By firing a THIRD of all people you convince to join your company, you are both incompetent and irresponsible. Precisely the kind of harmful deadwood people enjoy see getting fired.
Then copying them with the double deck to give to friends :)
I've been raptured and my pets are here.
Some of the Canadian/American computer-scientists I've spoken to say it as "tuh-ple", including Stephen Cook. I count them as mathematicians.

Honestly the only person I've known to say toople is, uh, me.
thanks for the comment, i tend to agree!
I may be wrong but I think the Hell Banning system contributes the sanity of HN. I know many people (including me) don't like the "Our way, or the High Way" approach but if you think of the end and not the means it does work.
thanks for the comment, i tend to agree.
Google the way it's supposed to be
Remind axod: Only you care.
Web Laureate Classic: "Craigslist: Wanted: table with a view"
Facebook checks pages once they hit a certain threshold of subscribers. Otherwise they would have to check every little page.
Without understanding the language, I get the impression that the author prizes a low line count over readability.
I think the one good thing about the google design change is that it may open the door a little bit for other search engines with different interfaces. The fact that we all like the old google design so much show how much everyone has gotten used to it.
Offcouse that IS a new state. If I call bit.ly's shorten function, I expect a bit.ly link back, not the original URL.
I can imagine, for example, not saving the bit.ly part in a db, only the identifier. That breaks (without proper checking) if the original URL is returned.
I don't understand why Google, and many other companies, change things that aren't broken. First they did it with Youtube, and now with their SERPS. Can someone explain the point of that? All it does is piss off users.
Huh, whatever CMS he's using didn't enter in his HTML comment as, well, a comment. Up near the top of the article: "<!-- If what I write makes me look like the grim reaper of CEOs.-->"
When you sold the site to Condé Nast they became your customer. Looking after your customers is the number one priority of any business. So it is totally correct that you made sure they received a good product and got the best from it.
Dear Mom, A Mother's Day Letter
Because it's more cost effective to de-normalize then to parallelise in this instance.
Marriage License
Marriage-Law.com offers simple solutions for people who are researching about marriage laws or to people who are interested in getting marriage license and wants additional information. If having marital doubts and not very sure on what to do next, this is the site you need to check out.
Cooking Tips: Types of Pepper Mills
Really? I thought this was a quite good lay description of BGP and BGP hijacking. The example about driving with no road signs seemed particularly lucid for someone with no technical background.

Edit: What /is/ physically painful is reading the comments on the story... face palm
I must be the only one who likes the new Google interface.
No, you're not.
Honestly as long as I get my relevant, quick search results I don't really care that much. Obviously it is also important to have a reasonable UI that stays out of your search result; none of the design changes that Google have been through is disruptive enough for me to complain. There might be minor annoyances, but its still much much better than the second and third best options out there.
> * RMAIL now uses mbox

Wow. Never thought I'd see that happen. Been wanting that for 20 years.
Ok after watching that link and reading these comments i'm starting to understand a little. I installed Aquamacs (other emacs clients were too ugly IMO). I can see that emacs perhaps had a lot of features Visual Studio had BEFORE vs, and that it's a stable, multi-platform, multi-language environment. I can see also that some of the text editing/formatting functions would probably work better than what I currently use Excel for. I can see the attraction of an uncluttered dashboard/interface too. And extensibility. But as a beginner I can't yet relate to this 'context-switching' problem and the appeal of running all sorts of applications inside a text editor.
This sort of reminds me of the quote by Henry Ford, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Sure the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality makes a lot of sense, but at the same time if companies aren't innovating, changing things and pushing the limits, we'll never know what else is possible!
"magic"... ;-)
Heavy smoker?
Perhaps that says more about the person than the method.
ACTA Treaty Abominations on "Coast to Coast AM" Radio Tonight (Sunday)
A hope for those who ordered a Zenpad ?
http://www.chinable.net
This is an interesting counterpoint to the the idea that an MBA is worthless in a new venture. Smart hackers will claim that ideas are $0.10/12, but an idea that is validated by market research, takes into account distribution with a well thought out marketing, is fundable, etc. is worth a great deal more.

Not saying MBA idea are good or even better on average, but the market for ideas isn't a "Dollar" store where everything is one price.
Pretty innovative I think. I imagine it wouldn't replace a password (unless it was super reliable) but just be like a shortcut for the owner. Would it detect your pulse through just your hand as you hold it normally? That's be great.
The "Hot Seat": Solving Problems & Passing Them On.
I happen to think that the new YouTube is much more consistent than the one of the past.
I see it like this: No single person (or specific group of people) can definitively decide if the old Google design is broken or not (which in this case probably means, being worse or better than the new one).
The (arguably!) best measure if the new design is an improvement is how many people perceive it as such. My guess is Google itself has the best understanding if that is the case and wouldn't have changed it if it didn't think it was better (based on the data they gathered).
Also, if company A doesn't innovate, company B might come up with something better and steal A's customers.
It would be very nice, if it can be centered vertically too!
Ahhh geez! I'm in Australia and I really could have used this a few hours earlier...
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 10.04 [ISPConfig 3]
well they only blocked the appspot.com domain.

Set your project to use an alternative domain within app engine, it would work fine.

more discussions at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...
Excellent post. I had no idea how similar the Bing and Google result pages are now. What is up with that? It couldn't have been unintentional, could it?
A la rerstaraunt-learn french for beginners
I haven't noticed any problems with it. Would somebody care to list the worst 3 horrors of the new layout in order of ruining-my-life-ability?
This is a refreshing alternative to the "better to turn away a superstar than to hire a dud" approach that seems so common. I've always felt that it was caused by risk aversion anyway.
Linux-ready, open-platform ARM9/DSP SBC costs $89
I loved this quote: "One guy acts like it's poison gas when we come back,"

Gee, ya think?
In the youtube comments he says he made it himself.
I don't think that covers it. Imagine you're living in a house for years, one day some guy comes in and changes everything subtly.

The walls are just a different shade, everything gets moved around a fraction. Nothing dramatic, just a lot of small changes.

You'd walk in and feel like you are in an unfamiliar place.

Unfamiliar ties right in with 'danger' on the reptilian brain level and that manifests itself as a feeling of being uncomfortable. Give it four weeks, change it back and people will be arguing the exact same thing.

Change always leads to resistance of this sort, even change for the better.
That didn't sink in for me right away. I was like whoa, this is all live javascript how the heck is Matt Nowack pulling this off in something like slideshare/etc. Then it clicked.

Very cool stuff.
If you are convinced that someone is the perfect fit for you based on a few interviews, then you've either discovered a bullshit artist or haven't dug deep enough. Interviewing is a terrible way to make a hiring decision. We just haven't discovered a better way to do it.
I'd fire you and find someone that is better at judging fit beforehand.

A full third is really very high. Consider apprenticing yourself to someone more experienced for a while to figure out what it is that you are missing while hiring, especially if the absolute numbers are high. If you've hired six people in all your time and fired 2 of them then we'll take it as a statistical anomaly.

Out of 25 people hired I've had to fire exactly 1, but I rejected almost 95% of all applicants to open positions, not limited to the engineering department.

I think one big difference in the way we look at this is that if you hire someone you also have a responsibility to them, evaluating fit is something that is your responsibility, and failure is up to you to correct, through teaching, training and mentoring.

It seems you think that you have no responsibility for them other than to fire them when you've decided your 'extended interview' is over.

In most countries there is an agreed upon 'trial period', which allows an employer to terminate a contract without any penalties, depending on the country these periods last from 30 days to 6 months. But it is actually pretty rare to have to fire someone within that period, even if there does not have to be 'cause' a high firing rate during the trial period reflects bad on the hiring manager.

The reason for that is simple economy, hiring people and firing them within 6 months is a very bad investment for the company, that person cost almost as much in time spent getting them up to speed as a person that is productive for multiple years.

If you're hiring someone that is out-of-work and down on their luck then you could argue that something is better than nothing and you gave them a chance, if you entice people to leave a job where they've worked for years and you then end up firing because of a mis-judgment them you've caused a real problem.
I'm not sure it's possible to make the right choice every time when hiring - and even if he's firing a third of his hires it means that he's getting it right two thirds of the time.

Given how lousy interviewing is as a method for discerning quality employees, I'm not sure that's a bad result.
Putting more information in the same space, makes it harder to consume. The minimalist approach that Google has always had to UX, is part of what made them good.
That is so very true. Great companies know this and have the guts to go ahead and make the needed changes anyway.

Your point also hints at the fact that asking users isn't always the right thing to do - often they don't know exactly what they want. Either because they can't imagine it or because of the friction you describe.
I had this same idea a few years ago, but was going to do it as a parody site. I was going to use certified vegetarian atheists for better effect.
Some people buy (a small number of) stocks for dividends. But that's very rare, since dividends are taxed twice while capital gains are taxed only once.
It's still missing the dictionary links to word meanings for the query on the results page.
While I agree with the essay (will write on that next), firing a full 1/3 of those you've hired is going to be very debilitating for the organization. And not something I think most startups will be able to afford.

And if you report or have to answer to anyone, they're not likely to be impressed that you hired that many duds/people who just didn't work out.
Interviewing can definitely give you an idea about a person, bull shit artists exist (in vast numbers), but they're not that hard to ferret out at the interview stage, presuming the interviewer knows his stuff and is not some HR flunky.

The trick is that during an interview you can choose to concentrate on the person or you can concentrate on their technical skills. If you manage to concentrate on the person instead then you'll find out soon enough whether they'll be 'good' for your company. The technical stuff is the easy part.

I've never had to resort to 'trick questions' or 'test assignemnts' to find out whether or not someone is capable.

Discussing their past has been much more fruitful in spotting trouble early on.

Interviewing is an art, not a science. There has been a whole lot of fuss about google and other companies getting on the 'metrics' bandwagon. I think that only works because they can datamine tens of thousands of applications and spot interesting trends.

If you're in charge of a start-up or a mid-sized company with maybe 10 to 50 employees the number of people you will be hiring will be much lower and the hiring process itself will consume a disproportionate amount of time.

Keeping your turnover low (as in: hire the right people right away) has an immediate pay-off both in time spent as well as in keeping the peace within your organization, and not investing months of time in to the wrong people only to fire them.
My main problem with it is that it's hard to gauge what the community thinks of a video at a glance. Instead of the 5-star system, the likes vs don't-likes are hidden away and you have to find the right button to click to show them.
Ask HN: is Apple approving apps from non-Flash app creators?
Has Apple rejected apps from Appcelerator, PhoneGap, Rhomobile, etc due to Section 3.3.1?

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331