skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only imagine the horror of running a hosting company. If you want to do it properly, there is no end to complexity. Not to mention the money part.

I've always dreamed about running my own niche hosting business, running on dead-stripped Slackware custom boxes for actual serving/hosting and OpenBSD for routers/firewalls/spamd daemons (actually I would not deal with email at all as it is a separate business in itself) etc. All it takes is few seconds thinking about it and then realizing what a crazy talk that is.

So hats off to providers with a clue! As for the 99% of cookie-cutter companies/resellers, do a favor to everyone and close your doors.
If you're doing thread-per-request, than no. If you've got an event-driven I/O system backed by a thread pool for executing parallel requests, than yes.

I set up a Rack adapter through Jetty 7 on JRuby that works exactly like this. The SelectChannelConnector is event-driven I/O, and the QueuedThreadPool handles requests in parallel.

The result? 6k req/sec on my laptop for a simple Rack app, basically the same as what's shown in these examples, since my machine is quite a bit slower, and I've clocked 10k/sec on faster machines.

(By the way, if you're interested, the Rack handler is in a gem called 'mizuno', and is at http://github.com/matadon/mizuno)
It's a win-win. OMEGA's brand values are all about it being the watch of choice for pioneers and explorers. This is a great way to reinforce their brand in an authentic way. What's Rolex doing, golf tournaments?
Hmmm, yes, how do the courts in the Netherlands do this? That wouldn't be true in the US but I gather very few if any other countries follow our model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule).
RADclock difference clock (FreeBSD, Linux) measures RTTs to under a microsecond
Not to be cynical, but how are you going to be top of the world in anything practicing only 3 times a week?
Ask HN: Do you A/B test on your sites?
Do you have some type of A/B test on your site?

Do you use Google Optimizer, something else, or have you coded your own?

If you're not currently using A/B tests on your site, why? If you are using A/B testing on your site has it been useful?
Node uses a thread pool also. From Ryan's JSConf slides:

"Blocking (or possibly blocking) system calls are executed in the
thread pool. Signal handlers and thread pool callbacks are marshaled back into
the main thread via a pipe."
Thanks! I didn't know about defn-

Time for refactoring :D
Did the media help to pull the trigger?
Well this is a given right? I've seen this tip given time and time again, dont scale before you have to. Some may completely object to that but if you are a startup and just trying to get going, grab a server or some resources in the cloud, write your minimum viable product and launch. If you cant handle the load, then scale. Yes you should have a "plan" but that doesnt mean you have to execute it until necessary.

I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree.

Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture.

1. Have a plan
2. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily
3. Use the minimal resources necessary
4. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware.
5. Be Lean
I have copies of 2) Speech and Natural Language Processing - Jurafsky & Martin 3) Statistical Foundations of Natural Language Processing - Manning that I'm willing to sell. I tried to bite off more than I could chew and moved on to a different project.

peter at pchristensen dot com
get independient
LOL! I suppose you would say the Wright Brothers were wasting their time, "it's not even strong enough to hold two people" indeed!

All exciting new technologies start out too feeble for practical use, just like human babies...
Node uses Google's V8 virtual machine, which they built for Chrome. JavaScript is single-threaded, so yes, unless you spawn a child process it'll be limited to a single core.
John Nash?
San Francisco is pretty good: doesn't rain often, relatively compact, lots of traffic.
Agree. Also, I liked this book: http://www.amazon.ca/Math-Primer-Graphics-Game-Development/d... a lot, even if it's quite basic and not hardcore (i.e. many applied examples rather than formulas and proofs).
My favorite tip for potty training two year olds is to wait until they are 3.
This sounds really ambituous. I seriously hope your plan will succeed! Just be sure to document the whole adventure in a.series of blogposts. Project like that is bound to top HN's front age in an instant.
What have you done to bring this to fruition?

While not insurmountable, the current situation seems to be "I want to build space-based solar panels. I don't know anything about building them, I have no way to get the materials, and no way to turn the materials into the product once I do." Can I ask, given that, what led you to want to do this in the first place?

Is the idea here to beam the power back in microwave form? I would add another hurdle, if so: Regulatory approval. You can't just aim a microwave laser at the surface of the Earth from space without anyone noticing or caring.

This certainly is an interesting aspiration, though.
Nixty launches today
Do you know about Drivers Education (DE) and track days? I just got my $1500 "race car" running and am planning to do a DE event this fall with my local PCA (porsche club of america.) There are also Solo2 and autocross events everywhere you can do in your daily driver.
Wait, if you're abstractbill, does that make the kid AbstractBillImpl?
Solo II autocross is a really good (and super cheap) way to improve your driving skills.
Congrats on the launch!!! I have to agree on the feedback - the website does not look very 2010 to me, it looks like a 'professional' web template from the late 90's. I understand wanting stock photography to have the 'human' element but I'd take some ACTUAL pictures yourself :)

'Unified Platform Management' is kind of a boring name :\ Very generic and 'corporate' sounding but maybe that's what hotels need to trust you.

Finally, the text on the homepage needs some spice! Some headlines, bullet points, and bold/italics would really help to guide people's eyes to 'We have a solution for you!'
Demo HN: Natural Language Twitter Experiment. Beta2 released.
Notes:

The 2nd Edition is better than the 1st Edition, because it does not have the distracting analogies to quantum physics. For me, the best part of Samek's book was Chapter 5, State Patterns. However, he also covers Standard State machine Implementations (and their flaws) in Chapter 3. Chapter 6, Realtime Framework Concepts, covers WHY you want to take special care in implementing a state machine, such as avoiding corrupting the current event in order to preserve RTC semantics. You will not get a more coherent presentation of these issues anywhere else. You could spend years of your life reading CS papers on the subject, implementing state machines, etc. and not come to the mastery Samek has. My favorite quote from the whole book has to be pointing out deviating from a simple Moore FSM,
by introducing guards, can cause big trouble. He says overuse of guards is "[the source of] architectural decay" in complex reactive systems.

The one thing I disagree with Samek about is that transitions have any state context associated with them. For me, transitions occur between states. This approximates the design of Mealy actions going between Moore actions., and is closest to the semantics of object-orientation, since the sender does not need to know the receiver directly. Samek presumes actions are dependent on the source context, but if there are two outgoing transitions from a source context, they probably will not have the same action. You move to a state before entering that state, and you move out of a state before moving to another state.
Skype's encryption procedure partly exposed
That was a terrible movie. I'm sorry. It started out good, but then just went on and on and on. Why would you subject someone else to it?
It uses Google's open source V8 JavaScript engine. (http://code.google.com/p/v8/) It doesn't support multiple cores AFAIK. To use multiple cores, the server would need to spawn subprocesses or run multiple servers behind nginx.
Here's a good article you might want to read I just discovered on the Parenting Reddit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/familyadvice/3355719/Idle-...

Of course, a new born obviously requires a lot of attention (I have a 3 month old), but let them breath as they get older.
A valid point about how they count Silverlight users, but this case is different because you won't have a single user "downloading" multiple instances of the phone hardware.
Someone from the Joel on Software forums has actually copied his bingo idea.

Twice.
It traded higher individual risk for higher systemic risk.

There are ways to deal with systemic risk. I think the best defense is to simply stockpile 2+ years of food for every person in the US by saving a portion of the increased yield.
If you're serious about building a business around this (i.e., if you're into the business side of this rather than the pure research side), post a way for me to contact you - we should talk.
I spent nov/dec 09 in thailand trying to do the digital nomad thing. I was travelling while studying though, not working for money. Few things to consider:

(1) Peace and quiet costs money. You may find it difficult to work if you stay anywhere that the backpacker crowd congregates.

(2) The longer you stay somewhere the cheaper it gets. An example from my experience - I spent a month in chaing mai in northern thailand where I rented an apartment. Per night it would have cost £18 if I was staying for a few days. Staying a month meant they gave me a tenancy agreement and it worked out as about £8 p/night plus electricity which was about £15 for the month.

You might want to try spending a few nights at different youth hostels in the city you intend to stay, then find an apartment for a month or two in the area you like the most.

(3) Food is both massively over-priced and pretty crap if you buy it in the hotel or nearby restaurants to where you are staying. Try and go further afield to eat where the locals do. Don't be put off by street food - it's good and cheap.

(4) Take plenty of time to just relax and go with the flow. try and put yourself out there and make friends. Avoid tourists attractions and guide books. I went to thailand intending to do exactly this but somehow didn't quite let myself go as much as I should have done. I've regretted it since.

Above all, actually go and do it. Most people who say they want to never really do.

I'm currently trying to build myself a money making web app that will allow me to get back on the road too. Good luck :)
Get back into amateur bodybuilding and compete in another show.
Unfortunately my experience is that if 1) is the question and there's multi-guess answers then the correct answer will be D) All of the above.

Or to put it another way, here's the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team: "No one can give more than one hundred percent. By definition that is the most anyone can give..."

In time you'll get some of your life back, but it can take a while depending on the baby. It's worth it though as you'll be amazed by how much you come to love the little pup.
I think I have about $1600 in my autocross (and sometimes daily driver) car. It really isn't that expensive if you find something cheap (like a BMW E30 or Porsche 924) and do all the work to it yourself.
Credit Card Connoisseur
I'm pretty sure you could release the code copyright and the code to the FSF, and let it go. I think it's important to struggle against software patents, now more than ever!
This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works.

In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem.

It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost.

If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive.

Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.
Yes, that's a big problem for me too as the Jams attract a similar audience. Any chance you could move this one?
Great advice! I stopped trying to get dates, and focused on enjoying various activities in life. During that time I had more dates than I ever previously had. Doing something you love leads to happiness, and people seem to generally be attracted to happy people.

Also, why the tight time frame? You don't get married to become happy, you get married because you're already happy.
Fluent in Japanese.

Roadblock: Day has 24 hours. Need 27.

I blew past the JLPT 2 last year, so this year it's just a matter of finding the time to work on it every day.

Would list my marathon training, but that's too popular as-is. ;p Farthest run has been ten miles so far; I'll get there...
You would never need to refuel. You could set down anywhere there was a runway. That massively lowers the barriers to entry of "being an airport".
Thanks! Didn't know about these.
I have no problem believing Gruber believes it. And I have no problem believing whoever told Gruber believes it. And no offense to your gut... but there are just too many ways for numbers like these to be messed up. Maybe it was 503 on opening day. Maybe it was 503 for the state of California. Maybe someone at MS who wanted to politically annihilate the kin team and leaked some false numbers to someone honest who took them at face value. But 503 never seemed remotely plausible to my gut. As others have said, it seems like MS employees would have bought more than that. 8,000 kins on facebook - ~2,000 display models still seems like an embarrassingly small number, but at least it exists in the realms of plausibility.
I found Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley to be a great intro book. Yes, it's a textbook, but it's one of the better written ones. I like that it also teaches you how to code the algorithms, not just the math behind them. It's not OpenGL-focused though.
Facebook on its way to Global Domination at the expense of ... Google?
but how much "warmer" could your fingers really need to be to manage hotkeys and control groups?

Just a guess, but I would think that it has more to do with maintaining a psychological state of flow than an athletic 'warmth' of the fingers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Has anybody every done (non-fictional) mining somewhere other than Earth?
The right way to do iPhone 4.0 OS Backgrounding . . .
I am currently trying to get back into programming. I haven't touched code in 10 years and way back then I was still writing little-- applets I guess we would call them today-- in QBasic and cracking out some crappy VBasic stuff. I was completely self-taught which meant that my code was as sloppy and inefficient as you could possibly imagine while still successfully getting the job done. I had been writing BASIC for about 10 years at that point and was pretty competent with the way I hacked things together.

Here I am, years later, vastly more knowledgeable than I ever have been, yet code dumb. I have a few things I would like to develop solutions for, and Java seemed to fit my needs. I started on the "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" book and I've enjoyed it, but I'm starting to feel that maybe Java isn't the solution I am looking for.

A few solutions I would like to have implemented quickly and I am heavily considering refreshing my limited knowledge of VB and cracking out some hack code.

I'm torn right now. Learn a new multi-platform language and proper coding practices or just settle for some Windows only solutions that I could complete in a vastly shorter period of time.

edit: spelling

tl;dr - write code again (learn a language)
Same. The KeePass iPhone app is very convenient when used in conjunction with the Dropbox public folder.

However, I will occasionally need to set a new temporary password for an online account when I do not have r/w access to my KeePass file. In this case, I tend to use the same simple password until I have the opportunity to change it, so the Password Card / Chart can still come in handy.
Disclosure: author of Dropfuse fs http://github.com/arekzb/dropfuse . I wrote it to solve a personal need for fetching shared files by command line.

Yes, FUSE is indeed fun and poses an easy entry barrier to writing a user-space filesystem. Many projects that are based on it are listed on their wiki page as well and a lot of them have source code available.
Others have gone before me, so there's lots of assistance out there. But it should be fun documenting it. Look for my first blog post soon.
Not exactly.

They said:

"Once improved battery efficiency makes it possible to reduce the weight, a two-seater is envisaged to make a non-stop circumnavigation."

Uh hu. We've been waiting for improved battery technology for decades. This is cool, but utterly impractical. Solar power plus batteries simply are not physically capable of doing a better job.

They are going for high profile, but low impact projects.

High profile - what's cooler than a perpetual plane? But low impact - if they actually wanted to help reduce hydrocarbon usage this is not good way to do it.

I totally see the coolness. But my response was about the practicality.
My first thought was "Hackers" (the movie). I am appropriately ashamed :)
Why trust this website with your passwords, when free utilities for randomly generating and encrypting your passwords exist and run on your local machine?

http://www.google.com/search?q=KeePass
I will second your advice about peace and quiet. I was a nomad in San Francisco for a little while and cut it short by getting an apartment.

It was fun, but it was difficult to live cheaply and work in a quiet place.
learn as much mathematics as I can. Currently enrolled in undergrad summer classes at Berkeley, but I already have a CS degree from another school back east. Some obstacles: paying tuition out of pocket, navigating the bureaucracy of being a non-matriculated student, finding inexpensive housing near the university that's not utter crap; struggling to keep up in classes because I am older and my brain doesn't work as fast, etc.
Probably not. So far we have not settled on a regular schedule so hopefully we'll clash with something else next month ;). Join the group and we'll keep you posted.
It's time to move to Japan, if you don't live there already. It's the closest you'll get to studying 27 hours a day, and the only sure path to fluency, given the level you're at.
The problem is with the (utterly broken IMO) US legal system (that unfortunately tends to "colonize" more and more foreign legal systems). Because they have a patent, they can efficiently scare away many hobbyists or commercial developers who could compete with them with litigation costs.
What proportion of those searches are people following hashtags? Or checking for replies from people they don't follow?
heh... mine is an '88 924S. For anyone who's interested, there is a ton of support for DIY'ers out there who want to build a car. The bmw and porsche forums are awesome. I imagine there's a great forum out there for any car worth racing.
According to the Engadget articles linked above, Verizon changed the pricing late in the development process because they smelled a rat on Microsoft's side and didn't trust them to deliver a product that would sell well. By all indications, they got wind of Microsoft's political struggles and at that point were as willing as Microsoft's managers to just fulfill their contractual obligations as quickly as possible and let the thing die quietly.
Flattr, and Why It's Brilliant
It might be interesting to just learn how to be a great information architect and product manager. Head a team of offshore developers to make your ideas happen.

Just an idea...
I'm interested in this too and also for monetary reasons rather than the eco thing.

Mostly what I've looked at so far are cob/straw houses. With these you are basically looking at a rubble/concrete base (which you can hopefully scavenge for free), clay/straw/sand for making the cob, and wood for the roof/window/doorframes etc. The best budget option for a roof seems to be turf, although that cuts down on the amount of rain water you could collect if you wanted to independant from a water company.

The biggest obstacle in the UK seems to be finding suitable land and getting planning permission etc. I don't really know any solution to that.

Over the past few weeks I've been reading 'building with cob: a step by step guide" which covers both the technical and legal aspects of building one of these structures in the UK. It's a great book.
1Password works well also.
Huh. My answer (as a father of 3) to how much time they'll consume would, only slightly facetiously, be "all of it."

Your math about sleep cycles is way wrong, and the idea that you'll still have half the free time you used to is laughable. Assuming a more or less 'normal' work schedule, most of the time they're sleeping, this guy will either be at work or will be sleeping himself.

My advice is to assume that for a few years you're going to have very little downtime unless you don't sleep much or don't feel the need to see your wife much.
"There are No Panaceas" meme: panacea for "[X] is No Panacea" headlines?

</self-referential-irony>
I'm writing this from my tiny apartment in Saitama. :)
Cellphone Crime Solvers
or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.
Awesome stuff. I have been juggling for years (self-taught) and it is all about practice practice practice. Also, having a juggling partner is an awesome thing. Just being able to work out the details of a trick and visualize them with another person is a vast improvement upon self-study.
Yes! Absolutely. The phrase "the exception proves the rule" is a tired, worn out, clichéd contradiction in terms that must have meant something at one time I'm sure but can only be superfluous in most cases now.
And ironically, this is the same Google that is sworn to do no evil. I guess its clear they pay lip service to it only.