skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[i got permissions from Lachlan Donald at 99 Designs to post his email to me here - jm3]

We [at 99 Designs] actually don't have a huge number of instances, although we are steadily adding more and more.

We have at present:

2 x Caching Proxies (Large)
8 x App Servers (Large)
3 x DB Servers (High-CPU X-Large)
2 x Workers (Large)

We started out with a lot more small instances, but found that the disk performance on the small instances is extremely variable and often terrible.

We also use RightScale for management and are at present looking at using server arrays to scale up and down the App Server layer to deal with load spikes.

The biggest thing that reduced our need for lots of servers was moving as much functionality to asynchronous tasks as possible, which are queued on each appserver via Beanstalk queues and then consumed by the worker servers. Additionally we have as many pages http cache-able as we can, which are served directly from the squid cache at the front of the app.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Lachlan Donald
CTO, 99designs
Rails 3 - Building a Blog - Part 1: Test Setup & Generators
Sample em from Ti. They send the chips out free of charge, they can easily be used for breadboarding. Use a goodFET (http://goodfet.sf.net/) to program it.

I've been having plenty of fun that way for a while now.
Playing devil's advocate:

This isn't about data ownership but about computer ownership. If you're going to access Facebook's servers, then you need to do so in a way that complies with Facebook's rules. Power Ventures ignored robots.txt, and circumvented an IP address block. In concept, this is no different than bypassing the password of a password protected web site.

That said, I'm with the EFF on this one.
Why not research a few stocks you like and divide the money up into a few companies? Might be a fun learning experience.
One can distinguish "tough" from "mean-spirited." There is a middle ground between skipping over faults and delivering ad hominem attacks.
Lean Startup for Established Businesses?
Sign Up link should be most visible item on your page. Actually you could offer Google OpenID/OAuth Hybrid connection and grab user's Google Reader data while you're at it.

I prefer Akregator but I'd like to ask where did you get the idea for such personal captions on buttons? (“I understand what is happening”, “I will check my email” etc.) Do you actually have some data as to whether it makes people read messages more carefully?
Do you know of a good guide for setting up all of this? I see Gizmo5 is not accepting new customers, but perhaps there is some other free SIP provider that will let me cut my land line.
When I'm busy, I usually skim through the front page and click on links with titles that are very relevant and interesting to me (things that are related to programming languages I use, etc). If I notice a story has been getting a lot of upvotes and I keep reading the title because it persists on the front page (for a day or two), then I will finally read the content. Throughout the day, I look through new submissions and vote up as necessary.
That's not Facebook's argument. Their argument is that a contract exists with their user. In that contract, the user agreed not to use 'automated' means of access.

Then, when the user has Power perform automated access, Facebook claims that a criminal law violation has occurred, because that's unauthorized access under their terms. They want that to be treated just like other California Penal Code unauthorized access -- access like exploiting a bug or stealing someone's password to view or change info never intended for you.

EFF says only a contractual violation has occurred; violating some arbitrary company-chosen 'terms of use' shouldn't be enough to trigger criminal enforcement.

It's an interesting and difficult distinction. So many of these systems and terms are defined by the arbitrary choices of coders and lawyers. At one level of abstraction, it's against the will of the system provider -- Facebook -- so it could be seen like a break-in.

But at another level, it's just a contract, and Facebook has other contract-enforcement options short of criminal prosecution: cancel the account, sue for actual damages, and so forth. If Facebook can define what's a 'crime' via arbitrary clickthrough terms, suddenly users and Power staff could wind up in jail for a terms-of-use violation that had no other economic damages.

So the issues are tricky, but important.
I have no problems with ATT. I started with Sprint in the DC area (they started there, and tried to corner Baltimore & DC when they first went mobile). They sucked bad. Moved to North Shore (Boston), still sucked. Switched to ATT and never looked back.

Having said that, we have three generations of iPhones in our family, and when we go to remote regions everybody has to use my Motorola. I think that if Apple switched to Verizon, everybody would realize it's the phone and not the network.

Having said that, every iPhone has gotten closer and I'm hoping the 4th is a ringer, 'cuz I'd like to get one.

I've always been impressed with RIM's phones, though; they have impressive transceivers (I say that anecdotally; I don't know any specs).
It's possible to apply for grants without being in a university, though the bar to have your application taken seriously is admittedly higher. But, if you convince people you're legit, there are a good number of "businesses" whose revenue is mostly NSF grants, e.g. Cycorp: http://www.cyc.com/

Depending on your area, I'm not sure the overhead costs come out to less, though. If you're independent, you not only have to pay for the overhead of physical equipment out of that money, but also of a bunch of salaries and benefits (including your own, lab staff, etc.). You're also probably going to have to pay your researchers more than a university pays its grad students.
I'm not sure I understand the confrontational tone.

So maybe developers are advertisers, but they are not buying ads, they are selling ad space in their app. The numbers for iPhone and iPod Touch devices from last September should be interesting to developers (http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/admob-is-approaching-100-mi...):

In September, AdMob served up 10.2 billion ad requests across 15,000 mobile Web sites and apps. About 28 percent of those were from iPhones and iPod Touches, with Android growing fast, making up another 7 percent. And if you look at only smartphones, Apple devices accounted for 48 percent of ad requests, with Android coming in second at 17 percent.

That's nearly 3 billion iPhone/iPod impressions in a month, just from AdMob. There are some key pieces of missing information - like the breakdown of the 15,000 request sources, especially web app versus native app - that would enable some more interesting analysis. But just saying that the iPhone reach is small doesn't really address the usage patterns of iPhone users versus other smartphone users.

Maybe you can't make decent money on ad-driven apps. I don't know. I haven't tried. The closest I can come to any information are a few anecdotes from usenet posts that claim anywhere from 10's of dollars to 100's of dollars a day in ad revenue. Not useful at all. But that doesn't make saying that iPhones are only 3% of the market a "full analysis."
Another important question to ask is: if you're not using clojure, is there a clojure-specific reason for that? (ie. "I would use clojure but...")

In my case: I reported a bug in the clojure.contrib XML library, on the google group. It's a trivial fix, but not worth the hassle of signing a contributor agreement. So although I'd fixed it myself, I couldn't send a patch. All I could do was report it - and the report was ignored.

Some time later, I reported another, deeper bug that I didn't know how to begin fixing (but did know a workaround for). It got ignored too.

I like the language, and I'm not going to say my experience was typical of the community. I spent some time hanging out on the group and the people there seemed friendly and helpful. But that's one reason I no longer use it. (Another reason is "no reason at all", and I don't know the relative weights of these reasons.)

This feels a little like whining to me, but feedback should be both positive and negative.
I have the same experience with my 3G(S). It is speedier and snappier. I like the experience a lot more now as well.
But if you don't access it in a manner they are happy with, and thus violate the agreement to use Facebook, then shouldn't Facebook then terminate the agreement and its obligation to service you (aka, delete your account)? Of course facebook does not want to do that, so it seems like using criminal law to enforce their will is a bit unfair.
Indeed. Further, at the risk of soun
ding too phiosophical, this invention/discovery, Platonist/constructivist debate hinges on the fundamental notion of existence. And, as with most fundamental notions, the obvious soon ceases to be so.
making the Back button in Safari take you back to a cached, post-rendered view of the previous page

This behavior is extremely frustrating. It is similarly annoying when Safari reloads a page because the previous copy has been reclaimed due to low RAM. Rather than flushing the previous version entirely, it would be much nicer for Safari to write the old version to flash. Reloading from flash would be much faster, and would also prevent the page content from changing on reload (e.g., Google Reader won't reload "read" items on reload).
I used clojure to build http://elev.at

Clojure code services the HTTP service calls (multimethods are very nice here) and also does the job of converting spreadsheets or CSV files into XML.
This is mentioned near the bottom of the linked page.
Nice start. More intelligent syntax awareness would be nice (auto indenting in HTML, auto completing " < ', highlighting CSS within HTML, etc).
I think he is an idiot. What a way to ruin a child.
IPhone 4 unboxing.  Buy one now.
So do I. Waiting patiently to be notified when size small is available. :-)
So they're making $2.50 per user per year? Nice one.
Try Maxalt. You'll need a prescription, but Western medicine kicks ass, and this is a fabulous drug that saves many days of misery.
problem: use SQL or NoSQL?

proposed solution: use SQL or (SQL and NoSQL)
The science states that they don't understand empathy until age 7. I would hazard an alternative explanation: it takes years of training to become empathetic.

Most skills do take a long time to master.
I don't understand this bit about automated access. Isn't anything using their "Open Graph" accessing it automatically then?
It's worth mentioning that when you do an upgrade, the Spotlight process must go out and re-index all of the content on your phone. This is a background process that might take a few hours to complete, especially if you have a lot of content and email.

Most people are saying that after a few hours the phone is noticeably faster or at least back to normal.

I think what is happening here is this background Spotlight index is killing performance right after the upgrade, and people are mistaking this for terrible long term performance.
You're probably quite right. I didn't give Clojure a stronger endorsement only because I don't know it very well yet myself... I'm just starting with it. I wasn't aware of either Incanter or Cascalog, for example, until you mentioned them.
I think my iPhone 3G goes super fast with iOS4!! Rolando 2 goes Like crazy, its 2x faster (some bug idk), Safari goes faster and Apps load slightly faster! I don't understand how this happens, but it's way better!
I can't believe that Facebook is attempting to go after people through criminal law, rather than civil law.

Wasn't the CTO of Facebook just saying less than a week ago that : "users have complete control over their data, and as long as [the] user gives an application explicit consent, Facebook doesn't get in the way of the user using their data in your applications beyond basic protections like selling data to ad networks and other sleazy data collectors?" [1]

I sure hope I'm missing something here.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154
SMOB - Open & distributed semantic microblogging (integrates with Twitter)
It's both beautiful and meticulous. Its aesthetic merits aside, I am fairly skeptical the presentation actually offers any improved elucidation of or insight into The Elements
This is what I learned too. No longer have my reference book, it was like 20-years ago, but situps tug at you lower vertebrae and increase the risk of lower-back injuries. Crunches exercise your abdomen without that undesirable side-effect. Since it's harder to isolate your lower abs, it's best to target those first (leg-raises with bent-knees and pelvis, or easier knee-ups) and then hit the upper abs which by now have already done some work and will really burn.
I'm more interested in seeing the number for profit.
If I had known what the usenet was at the time I would have really found useful. I was super ignorant of those types of things until I was about 14 or 15.

I'll consolidate our discussion into this one thread, in saying that I did use the internet to learn but I used it rather poorly. My Google-fu was rather terrible when I was younger. Tackling a large subject like programming was not easy for me when I basically had no footholds or easy ways to enter that body of knowledge.

I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to learn how to program without the internet though I think that as we build more powerful consumer-grade computing systems, the hurdles involved in getting into programming get higher and become more numerous.
> You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.

That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations. People are not crash-test dummies that can be produced identically in quantities and experimented on. Different people respond to experiences differently, but that doesn't mean you can't say that those experiences are generally harmful or generally beneficial.

Nobody claims that psychology has the predictive power of physics, but that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say.
The iPhone is the only reason I've stuck with AT&T. Reception is bad at my home (in MD), I have few conversations that don't drop at least once during any given 10-15 minute call. Worse though, I take classes part time, and the phone shows full signal on campus but calls typically go straight to voicemail and the 3g connection is completely non-functional. Attempting to call out just gives me a network error 95% of the time.
The problem is that hardware is becoming somewhat easier, but the software is not there yet. Apple definitely did a lot of work on iOS and it shows.
This was the best guide I found. It's a bit verbose but covers all the key parts you need.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ae8glDUXDsh9ZGR2eG43cjRfMz...

There are definitely alternates to Gizmo5 as well, but none integrate with Google Voice now unfortunately. You can find some very cheap however.
I think reviews overstate the battery life matter. Mine drops to 40-50% after a day of use from 8am to 10pm. I don't use any fancy app killers or anything like that, I just only turn on 4G and GPS when necessary, have my 3G radio set up to activate on-demand, and rely on Wi-Fi for my data needs (My apartment, favorite bar, and office all have Wi-Fi).

The first few days of ownership I was actually struggling to wear my battery down to <5% so I could do a full charge cycle.

Note: I have a "Rev B." Evo.

My biggest complaint is that 4G service indoors is awful (close to non-existent unless you live in a house made of paper), and outdoors it is very latent even with a strong signal ( 200+ms)
I realize it still has its die-hard supporters, but are there really new developers joining the perl community these days? I'm not trying to start a flame war here; I would be genuinely interested to know if anybody is starting a new project in perl -- who hasn't been doing perl for, say, 10+ years already.

(And yes,I realize that's what this project is trying to fix)
I'm an soon-to-be-undergraduate just learning the language and Lisp.

I found this great series by Rich Hickey last night: http://clojure.blip.tv/
So I'm an old guy who is hard of hearing and stubborn. But I'm also a programmer.

Being who I am, I write a bot that scans my FB profile and checks for birthdays in the family. If one is approaching, it flashes a light, yells at me, and calls me names until I buy a present.

According to FB, I'm a thief, no?

What if I'm a blind guy who made his own browser-helper because the standard tools don't work so well for me? Or I wrote a special FB access device that helps people with ADHD? Or I just like the color blue and want to see everything in the world in blue? Or what if i just write my automation on top of a standard browser that highlights any text that has my friends' names and downloads the surrounding paragraph to my desktop. Just because? Seemed like fun? What if I filmed myself (or a trained monkey) accessing my Facebook account? What if I took the film and extracted data from it?

I would argue that I am accessing FaceBook via HTTP and GET and POSTS. I use standard nomenclature and the standard stack from the O/S outward. Anything beyond that is none of their damn business. (Not trying to play to the crowd, but this is preposterous. The entire purpose of HTML is to separate the data from the way we access it)
Considering the ultimate doom of the universe is very possibly infinite entropy, sometimes it bemuses me on a philosophical level that we try so hard to accelerate the process.
Compensation is more a side effect of the issue discussed in the link. Shareholders are unable to even make a nomination for the board of directors, so the very people who own the company are unable to make decisions regarding how the company is run.

There's more info in this Motley Fool article:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/06/18/dont-let-wa...

Even huge pension funds typically hold no more than 0.3% to 0.5% of large and medium-sized companies, so it's impossible to picture that happening very often.
The moment after I upgraded, the phone was completely useless. I restarted twice and it picked up a little speed. Its now 24hours later and its still extremely slow and laggy.
A Private Social Network for Cell Phones
Just curious, why did you decide to do this? I raised a similar idea a little back on HN and I would say overall the response was negative. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401914) The space is in fact, very very very crowded, and there are already a lot of "dead simple monitors" out there. Where do you see an opportunity? Congrats on putting this out, either way.
How much are they making per employee?
http://startingstrength.com/index.php/site/core_stability_tr...
Good question. The profits will be interesting to see, anyway.
Delicious Founder, AOL Exec Launch Hacker Angels
Not only that, but web-pre orders are actually getting the phone early as well, 2 days early for some people. This hasn't happened before, Apple had usually been very strict on when fedex can deliver the phone.

Possibly Apple is trying to move these as quickly as possible, since it seems this will be the biggest seller yet. There is already talk of delaying the international releases for next month.
It wouldn't surprise me if they included Engadget to pointedly NOT include Gizmodo.
I disagree that it's evil. If you're a company doing business with other big, powerful companies (telcos), you can't just attack their business model and expect to keep doing business with them unless you're in a really strong position. Say Google removed this restriction, and AT&T et al just stopped supporting Android phones due to some unspecified "technical issue". Then where are we?

It's undesirable, definitely. Evil, I don't think so. Evil, IMO, is if Google can remove the restrictions, and doesn't.
You seem to have a much better handle on things than i so i'll take your word for it.

> I have no idea about the hurdles Clojure on top of .NET is facing, but if it isn't ported by now it's more likely because Rich Hickey and the other core contributors don't have a strong interest for it.

found a quote that i was thinking of when wrote that first comment

rhickey: cemerick: depends
cemerick: erasure is the best thing ever
cemerick: yeah; I caught a glimpse of what D. Miller is having to deal with
with ClojureCLR, and felt bad for him.
rhickey: cemerick: yes, people don't realize the huge tradeoff involved in
the CLR approach. It greatly complicates life for everyone, and is
a poor fit for dynamic langs

-- http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-06-01.html#i30
Accepted papers for ICML 2010
I think most of morality can be learned or deduced by applying empathy. Morality and empathy are closely related.

Like the Golden Rule, for example. Do I like being slapped? If no, don't slap. Do I like to be stolen from? If no, don't steal from others. And so on. Empathy towards others goes a long way towards being moral -- even if one has to "fake" it at times.
Warning: irrelevant grammar nazism below.

> Many fewer lines of code than

This grammar bugs me. I feel like this should be "Much fewer" or similar, but I'm not totally sure it's wrong as posted. Opinions?
I'm all for protecting our children from the harmful effects of entropy, but not our children's children because I don't think that kids should be having sex.
The SBIR program is kind of like what you're proposing:

http://www.sbir.gov/solicitations/

It's walled off so that larger entities cannot propose to it (somewhat contrary to "free market" principles, but whatever).

I've managed proposal reviews for SBIR, and the average quality is noticeably lower than NSF proposals I've reviewed. Of course there is significant overlap between them, but that's the average.

So I'm not sure your idea would accomplish anything new.
I read that Guava is a fork or a simple copy of Sipdroid, which probably explains why Gizmo was ashamed to market it.
I've tried all the triptans. None of them work. Neither do muscle relaxants, blood pressure medicine or anti-convulsants (at least not Topamax; it made things worse).

Only things that help are narcotic pain-killers and Migranal (aka DHE). And they only reduce the pain, not break the migraine. Alcohol helps a bit when I'm drinking it, but then there's the hangover to pay (on top of the migraine which has come back by then... >:( )

Seriously. My neurologist has given up on me. I've got an appointment at the Mayo Clinic, but until then, I'm on my fucking own.
Work at a Startup archived video
the trick for me is to not call it exercise. everyone is short on time and noone likes to do 'extra work' even if its good for you.

find something you enjoy that is active and do it. hockey, basketball, skiing, biking, boxing, swing dancing... there is no law that says it has to be some boring uninspiring task.

personal method is road bike to and from work + evening rides time/weather permitting. i'm down 70lbs since 6 years ago.
Le Monde on the Brink
Do you have kids?
I can't help but think that a similarly phrased argument supporting Apple and denigrating a competitor would not be down voted so rapidly. I mean 'everything else after that is bullshit' seems a little opinionated as well.

> I thought for a moment how to rephrase that in a nicer way, but I couldn't.

Apart from the 'fan boys sorely in denial' I can't see what's so bad about putting your own view forward on the aesthetics of the physical device. Especially if you have actually had the opportunity to see and feel it as the author implies (I don't know if that is true or not). Apple fans are notorious for assuming their aesthetic sensibilities are synonymous with 'good taste' or 'good design' so I don't see what is so bad about a non-fan doing the same. To me the pictures of the device make it look a little 'odd' or 'cold'.

I'm not saying the post is hugely insightful or anything but there does seem to be a bit of a double standard going on.