skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Selectively Ignoring Reset Packets From Your ISP
"we just can allow for our service to break down because of an inflexible and limited initial architecture...when it grows, it will grow exponentially!"

It's not when, but if. The vast majority of startups never have that problem. Start out with something capable of handling the traffic from a Techcrunch article (maybe one or two visitors per second for a few hours). Spend a couple of hours thinking about how you would scale up and have a plan, but no more than that. Scalability can be very expensive so investing on it without knowing that you will need it is a case of premature optimization.
It seems like FP is an ideal candidate for the Python Paradox. If, at this point, you draw in programmers who are genuinely fluent in a functional language, you know they're almost certainly smart, and you know they're almost certainly dedicated to their craft.

All you really need to figure out then is whether they'll crank out shipping code for you, instead of producing a really fascinating paper on the calculus of arrows or something.
How tech wars end
There's also a command line search and web service which searches only Hacker News. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183706

There's also www.searchyc.com and http://y.soho.lt/
Nice. Could you also do a Hacker News only search?
It's funny, but internet access is a lot easier to find in the developing world than it is in the US or Europe. In the States, it's all private and corporate DSL with the occasional unsecured wireless router to be found.

In rural Cambodia, it's a little building in the village with public terminals. These get used by the locals since they can't afford a machine or connectivity of their own, and by tourists who are happy to pay the equivilant of a dollar an hour to check their email.

Generally, they don't mind if you push the keyboard out of the way and plug the ethernet cable into the back of your laptop.

All in all, it's about 1000x easier than trying to find a pub in England with functioning Wifi.
This question doesn't seem to be addressed on the rdiff-backup site, and is the main advantage of the posted solution: How much time do you waste getting a system with a dead main disk back online?

Regardless of your backup strategy, you're going to have to replace the physical disk. If the disk you are backing up to is compatible with the broken disk, you 1) already have a disk to put in your computer, and 2) you can already boot off it. So the time wasted is the absolute minimum.

Even for people using rdiff, it's probably best to have a ready-to-go backup as described in the article. His recommendation of having a bootable backup is still valid, and is not limited to the "My house just burned down" case. That's what the third disk is for :-)
Hypothetically speaking, if we develop a sufficient understanding of analogue information processing, couldn't we build either (a) some kind of analog co-processor that operates in this manner and interfaces with the computer, or even (b) a sufficiently precise digital simulation of a system that can use analogue processes?
Here is the problem I see with open-source tools in the not for profit arena.

The person who knows how to use them, administer them, whatever, quits.

Specifically with web sites (my arena) We (Servee) work with a lot of non-profits. We give them organization, communication and web-management software, and they pay a subscription for us to be their web dept.

They're paying a subscription for hosting anyway, and they are usually willing to pay a little bit more to be able to call me when something is awry, and to be able to have full control themselves.

As far as the physical infrastructure of IT, I'd suggest that all non-profits go to Dell or Apple or somesuch. Again, your on-board techie may save you 25% by going through newegg and putting them all together himself, but when he leaves for college or decides that his other job is taking up too much time you are stuck.
Finding a lead is one of the hardest parts.

Many methods exist to generate "leads": from advertising, SEO to email marketing.

In this new world where the Internet has become important, your website is a crucial part.

7 out of 10 business deals start with an Internet search, thus most of your potential customers have been on your website long before they address to you.

All of your advertising will mention your website.

Thus try to get the business customers from your website, by identifying the company name of the website visitor.
Next qualify the companies by the website data on company level: search terms used, pages visited, click path, returning visitors, ..

Several web services exist providing this information, however these are not web analytics as the data needs to be about the visiting companies, not about your website.
Google: "Website visitor identication leads" to find these services.
Cold calling
If you cold call on companies who have visited your website, the cold calls won't be so cold anymore.

Identify the companies visiting your website, and qualify them before calling.
Well, if anyone had any doubts that the brain's capacity is too limited to support the extended lifespans that we will perhaps be able to sustain with improved technology (200...300..1000 years anyone?), that should solve them. A bit of tidying up, and there's plenty of space for well indexed memories.

Daniel
OPENdeals - Submit to 400+ Angel groups with one click
Often, actual cash in hand is more of a limiting reagent than your own time. Since the OP was about minimizing cost, it seems fair to assume that cash in hand is the appropriate limiting reagent.
I'm in Canada (and have lived for a spell in the U.S.) and not watching television in both nations does strike many people as 'odd'.

For the idea of doing more of something "out of spite" in reaction to a preacher's recommendation that you avoid an activity to be 'better' in their eyes, check out this commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhS65wyWnA8

It's apparently running in the U.S. and seems to do little to deter smokers from continuing in their habit (the YouTube comments seem to bear that out). As the commercials are funded by U.S. tobacco companies as part of a legal settlement, that may have been the intended result.

In a similar fashion, I doubt the linked essay will do anything to positively change the behaviour of those who watch television shows to excess.
There are also a lot of more specialized communities where you can promote an idea for free amongst the appropriate target market by simply joining a particular corner of the blogosphere, joining certain forums, etc. So this idea may still be applicable.

Then again, if you are producing a website targeting automobile tire wholesalers, no amount of free online promotion is likely to have the desired effect.
Ask YC: What is a good (and cheap) domain name registrar?
I am looking for good registrars. The standard seems to be about $10 for a .com for a decent registrar.

I am not concerned with exotic TLD's, but having the option is nice.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561

I use GoDaddy, but as others have pointed out, there are some frightening stories about them floating around.
'For the idea of doing more of something "out of spite" in reaction to a preacher's recommendation'

I mostly get that bit, I was just curious about why the linked article was being interpreted as "preachy" when I personally didn't see it as such. (You're right about the ad you linked: truly awful. I clicked away.)

I live in a country where the government has banned smoking in public, wants to tax "unhealthy" food, and is subservient to an EU which is making noises about banning alcohol as well, so we're well versed in ignoring moral messages from on high.
yeah you cant beat $7 a year @ 1&1...it used to be $6 but they upped the price. grr.

funny, I thought their hosting was actually quite good.
I have already asked them all those questions and more explaining that the evolution of the product should be guided by its usage/userbase and will almost certainly involve at least one complete/major rewrite (due to change of direction/platform) as it develops as it is hard/impossible to get it right straight away and their perception of what people want and what people actually do want may not be the same.

I have also suggested the stack/path to follow in alignment with thier goals and which scales well yet allows rapid dev. but honestly think until they start building seriously they won't appreciate these issues. This advice has been from my own experiences and that of others, many of whom have failed as well as succeeded, but is contrary to what some consultant friends are saying.

I am not an expert in building large scale web apps by any means, but have worked on enough to know good practice/paths from bad, atleast at the early stages.

They do have software dev experience themselves (e.g. CEO, who is doing PhD at Oxford, has ~2yrs commercial software exp in electronics company) and have done some research into those areas (the MBA guy did most of it).

Anyway Sumon I will try and get them to attend the talk on Tuesday and ask you/panel questions during the Q&A as I am sure talking to more people who are doing this will help them no end.
its also assuming your site is well-liked enough to get modded up.
Animations a little bigger on this site:

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/staerk/algorithms/SortAnimat...

I don't know who was first ;)
Merlin Mann: Attention Sinks and Time Burglars
True, but they do have some networks they can use to gain good intial traction and a decent user base. Some stacks allow you to scale fairly easily but the focus shoudl be really on the core product value/service initially.
better to use one that has a good support, trouble I have had in changing registers is unbelievable. I now use omnis as they are quick, but not cheapest. Still not great support from them either. But at least there system works. Dreamhost were bad as was 1&1.
Ignore standard (and popular) BS of "promotion through blogging and social networks", that's a myth. A successful blog is a business on its own. PR companies have full-time bloggers, Facebook "friends" and even wikipedia editors to spread the word about their clients, and it will cost you serious money: on par with several full-time yearly salaries. And don't expect to become a Facebook after spending that much. Building a brand in consumer-space entertainment business costs millions of dollars (and some luck, still)

That is a bitter truth, assuming you're after building a sustainable business. That doesn't apply to you, however, if all you need is to get a couple thousand "early adopters", living mostly in Bay Area, create some awareness of what you're doing in SV-circles, hopefully reaching an ear of a potential acquirer so you could flip it for a few million, then hire a good SV-connected PR firm: that will cost you $10-20K/month or get admitted to YC and their PR machine will do the trick.
Fair enough. You're probably right. I don't play online poker (and am a poor casual player) so I don't know what the level of skill is on those websites. I was just making an assumption based on how difficult I imagined it would be for a computer to play very good poker.
Namecheap.com
How AT&T spilled the Starbucks beans
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561
You can do this by adding the tem site:news.ycombinator.com to a regular Google (or Yahoo) search.

Yahoo claims to have about 600k indexed pages from this domain, Google about 166k.
I disagree as I think the real difference is mainly in the design process. If there are too many bugs or things start to get complex an expert hacker will ask himself what I can do to improve the design? To make it simpler, more modular? If I've this problems probably I've a design error.

Actually most of the times like an expert chess player an expert programmer just using "pattern matching" and his experience can tell what the right design (right = simple, modular, scalable, ...) is among all the different possible solutions. That's the difference not testing or ways to avoid pitfalls.
If you want to have more than one version of your backup, rsync gained support for that somewhere in the past few years.

You want to look at the "--link-dest" option. Essentially you can keep parallel trees of backups but they use hardlinks to share unchanged files. In practice, backing up web/mail/misc servers I find each extra copy I keep takes about 5% of the first copy's space. rdiff-backup is more space efficient, but 5% isn't much and this is simpler.

If you name the backup trees after the day of the week you don't even have to worry about rotating names and purging old trees, they just overwrite.

(note: you lose the ability to just flop the drive back into the original machine. But I wouldn't do that anyway. I'd use the opportunity for a clean install.)
The Ultimate Unit Test Failure
So this got
53 points on hacker news, 2 points on reddit.

35 comments on hacker news, 2 comments on reddit.

39 links on hacker news, 3 links on reddit, all of which were already in the hacker news thread.
Wow! It's frightening how little people learn from history. Scheme/Lisp is much better for that use now and has been for, oh, decades. [But, then again, that's coming from a guy at that little community college on the peninsula. :-)]

It's truly sad to me that Berkeley and MIT seem to have dumped Scheme as the introductory language for the "job skills" approach of using less flexible but more popular languages.
The best keyboard I've every used is my ThinkPad keyboard -- great feedback, everything within easy reach including both pointing devices.

If I ever went back to using a desktop again, I would probably buy one of these, which is a pretty awesome way to get a TrackPoint for your desktop:

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
He probably meant the other tulip.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tulip
This is a very odd reaction. The reason that the Model M is so great is that it allows the user to not pound the keys:

- It has a force—travel-distance response curve with a distinct “click” which gives clear tactile feedback as soon as the key has been actuated (this is when it has been pushed about 2/3 of the way down). As it is pushed near the bottom, resistance gradually increases, so that it is in fact quite difficult to smash the key all the way down—it takes deliberate effort.

- It gives clear auditory feedback along with the tactile feedback (those buckling springs).

You should not be driving the key as far as it can go, as that will cause RSI. Fortunately, this happens less on a Model M than on any other keyboard I have ever used.

IBM designed these things based on decades of experience making the most popular typewriters among secretaries. Good typists can type faster on a Model M than nearly any other keyboard, with much less risk of RSI.
Thanks for the links.I saw the latter on hacker news a few days ago but missed the former (made me smile because that sounds like me, er, yay!).

Anyway, I am not investing money but have been approached to (help) build it. I have declined the offer as although the guys are super smart etc. etc., we are not a good fit (atleast from my perspective) and I think their approach is wrong. I am a believer in organic growth strategies and agile dev practices.

I just want to help them out as I hate to see people fail for such reasons.
Its not the worst source of funding suggested on this forum. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132400
I recently used http://domainsarefree.com/ for the first time. It was easy, and their email support is pretty quick.
Yes, I absolutely agree. It goes without saying, but in this case I was curious to see thoughts on the vs issue i.e. if you had to go for one or the other what you would base it on.
This sounds slightly different than Kim Peek's condition (the "real Rainman"... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2T45r5G3kA&feature=relat... ... fascinating video)

He remembers information he reads or otherwise acquires, rather than events that occur throughout the day (or at least that's the focus of his abilities)
At my university they teach you ML as the first language. It's a pretty cold start, but I think it's worth it.
Facebook doesn't "know" that concert ads are better for me (although it can tell from my profile what music I like, where I live, and maybe even what concerts my friends attend, etc), but it can try different ads and see what works because of the large number of page views in a typical user session. In Google, you search, get the results, then leave the google.com. In Facebook, you can easily navigate to dozens of pages before logging off. This gives Facebook the opportunity to try different ads and see what works and what doesn't.

I agree with your main point, but the bottom line is that even if Facebook's CPMs are lower than Google, it doesn't mean that Facebook can't make a ton of money from advertising or that advertisers can't get good ROI on Facebook. You don't need to be Google to be a successful advertising platform. Also, don't forget that Facebook is still young and I'm sure many advertisers haven't yet adopted it. I have a friend who does internet marketing and he says that, at least in his niche, Facebook CPMs have been increasing by 10% a week.
I like Yahoo domains. Fast, simple, and from a company you can really trust. GoDaddy is annoying, too much ads.
Seconded.

Also, if you want to save a buck a domain or so, do a Google search for the current coupon code before you check out.
> Libraries are key

The last thing you want is to use a library that segfaults now and then, relies on a bubble sort and occasionally allocates a couple of gigs of memory. Unfortunately, a vast majority of libraries are exactly of this kind.

I'll give you two real-life examples.

1. netsnmp - de facto open-source standard library for working with SNMP. This piece of engineering marvel makes close to a one million calloc() calls when handling SNMP requests for certain kind of static data. The kind of query that technically does not require even a signle memory allocation.

2. I used to work with a fanboy of ACE, who decided to replace two pages of trivial C code with 10 pages of ACE goodness. Which is fine with me, whatever gets the job done. However then his code, running on a production system, deadlocked deep in the guts of ACE. He spent a week troubleshooting it and in the end he still requested we'd hire "ACE consultant" to help him out.

The point is that even mature libraries have bizarre problems. With a rare exception of super widely used libraries (such as libc, openssl, etc), the library code needs to be reviewed prior to being included into a production code. Caveat emptor.

Vacuum or not, it really comes down to whether you want to debug someone else's bugs at 4 AM on a live server :-)
Wow! Thanks.
Well, there are plenty of people with experience but no talent, and you'd want to avoid those at all costs. But talent with no experience might work.
I use GoDaddy. Their ads are annoying but their nameserver & DSN changes are fast.

Also, do a quick Google search for "godaddy coupon" and you'll find coupons for $6.95/domain coupons.
I have had great experiences with Namecheap.com but when buying in bulk (100+) I strongly recommend Team Resellerclub, where I've being able to register domains for several dollars.
https://www.NearlyFreeSpeech.net/

Good guys. $8 domain names. Hassle-free interface.
Me too. No problems so far.
How friendfeed killed your privacy
Hey, I'm posting this here, so that there'ssome fruitful discussion on how to model real-world friend. HN is a great place, but I have to say this: don't turn this into a friendfeed love/hate war.

Let's look for answers; not zealotry. Thanks!
http://www.1and1.com
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/npo/
In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
There's about 186,000 posts and about 7,000 non-lurking users. So, Google is incomplete and Yahoo is doing something odd. Alternatively, both figures maybe the result of approximate counting artifacts and both could have complete and current indexes.
I use register.com. It's pricier than some of the others, but the interface is excellent, unlike the other two providers I've used (GoDaddy and 123-reg, which both have awful user interfaces).

Worth the extra buck imho.

Daniel
What about the loss of page rank and search due to content not being hosted on your server? Could disqus perhaps allow you to use a custom subdomain (such as disqus.yourblog.com)?
Couldn't agree more. Rather than spend time posting your link to 1,200 social bookmarking sites and writing press releases, spend your time on SEO. This is the #1 way people will find your site.

Basic SEO is very simple. Choose good titles first and foremost. Make sure your homepage links to all of your most important content. Make sure google can spider all of your content, and create a sitemap.xml to help with this.

Secondly, setup google analytics, and keep an eye on how people are landing on your site from search engines. A high bounce rate is sometimes inevitable, but try to build you pages in a way to entice the user to keep clicking to other pages.

Make signup super simple (I'm sure 90% of people on Hacker News disagree, but OpenID is going to confuse 99% of internet users).

To really get your SEO kicking in, have links to your site from other sites. A good widget strategy can help with this. If someone puts your widget (and you build the links properly) on their blog, and their blog has 2,000 posts, you instantly have 2,000 links to your site. If this blog has high pagerank, great! Some of that pagerank will trickle down to you.
> Glue has been noticed by a few commentators (e.g., TechCrunch), who mostly see it as response to Google's Universal Search (or Ask's search interface).

I'm glad that someone else has noted that Google intends to copy Ask. If you want see want Google's interface will be like in two years then switch to Ask.Com today.
I suppose I wouldn't bet against you.
Company Hosts “Reality TV for Nerds” Competition
When did Berkeley dump Scheme as the introductory language?

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp08/
In another post they had an interview with one of the researchers - apparently each of the test persons who comes in should have a goal (one of them was learning a new language). So this might not be so bad an idea after all.
Extraordinary mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck celebrates his 80th birthday in self-imposed isolation
Disqus comments are included via javascript, so you don't have outbound links that diminish pagerank.

Comments won't be indexed by Google but your article text and links to the article from other blogs will have a bigger impact on where you appear in SERPs.
why not just use a separate branch for doing those experimental changes ? it just seems too complicated.
Which open source stuff -- that's what I mean. I've used ActiveRecord in Rails and a few other open source data access technologies, but nothing I would consider to be a direct precursor to LINQ.

There are a lot of things that Microsoft makes that are derivative of open source -- ASP.NET MVC is effectively yet another Rails knockoff, for example.

But AFAIK, LINQ is something new and different, which is why I'm genuinely curious what you would consider to be similar to LINQ but predating it.
Godaddy has never let me down but, I'll admit, some of the stories floating around about them are frightening.
"a man isn’t ready to live until he accepts that he’s already dead."

That's a good rule to live by. Not so sure about the rest of the article..
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181392
A more active discussion of this topic is available by accessing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178748
Could be interesting to investigate what new (or old) approach to programming might act as a filter if functional programming ever goes mainstream.