skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
programmers? While I hate the word I would agree some basic working knowledge is necessary. But if you post a job description looking for a php programmer, and then you bring people in and start asking questions about schema design where even a correct answer isn't correct because now you also want your programmer to be a software designer who does requirements gathering as well it's your own fault for expecting to be interviewing architects instead of programmers.

If you are looking for someone to do schema design, that damn well better be in the job description given to candidates before they apply, and your software engineers damn well better be compensated for the extra required skill.
Something smells here. You don't forget about a contract with the guy running a company this big for seven years. Come on, as popular and overused as this site is? I refuse to believe that this guy has been sleeping under a rock and one day just stumbled upon a contract.

And this is just unbelievable. It's sort of an implicit admission that the lawsuit's a money grab to him and nothing more:

“If at some point in the future I start running Facebook, I guess I’m going to have to hire him to keep running the company,” Ceglia said. “I really don’t have much interest in it.”
What do you mean by subsequence?

Don't normal numbers only have to contain every finite string often enough, not every infinite string?
It looks like both those are users that got killed, their comments after that point may be 100% on-topic and legit but if they don't do something to ask for re-instatement of their accounts anything they do will be automatically killed as well.
WikiLeaks will fund itself via Flattr
Believe in it? This is math, you can check.
Or perhaps they should aim at the non-smartphone market.
30 Stunning Examples Of CG Artwork | Bloggs74
I wasn't implying that it's used like utility patents - just that it's very subjective whether someone is infringing - just like OP was describing.
You're possibly double counting the bandwidth costs if he's also using the connection for his workstations.
>For most intents and purposes, interim storage of electricity is science fiction. Batteries are woefully inadequate, and the solutions that we do have, like pumped storage, have so long turn-on times that they might as well not exist for spikes that fast.

Maybe the wind farms should install their own buffering systems. If they built reservoirs on hilltops then dumped their excess electricity into their own pumps they could avert this "all or nothing" issue by delivering power to the grid on a more consistent basis with fewer spikes.
Western civilization runs on the mainframe
How to win Rock-paper-scissors every time
You can try places like HNHackers, techcofounder.com

Feel free to add me on IM too.
Because in any ecosystem diversity is a good thing (as biodiversity in nature).
Yeah, it is annoying; they do sometimes have specials where the setup fees are waived or reduced. I have to say their service has been excellent for me though (I've used them for years).

Note that you might want to check if hosting in Germany has any legal implications for you - German data protection laws are vastly more strict than the US, say.
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Lenovo used Haskell to glue packages and configuration pipelines with great success.

http://cufp.org/archive/2006/slides/CliffordBeshers.pdf

They used Haskell's strong static type system to safely glue things together.
Way back in 2007 I launched my first successful Facebook app on a shared server from asmallorange.com that cost me $3 a month. Said Facebook app was making $50 a day when it outgrew that "server". I upgraded to a dedicated server with Softlayer that cost $400 a month. Said app was generating $3k a day in ad rev when it outgrew that server. Also I'm not some rockstar coder. Back in those days I didn't even know to index the join columns in MySQL. Had I done that I could have squeezed more traffic through one box. After this experience Ive decided that the majority of web apps can be launched for free.
So that would result in immortality, right? How else would people die? The obvious problem here is overpopulation. What's your stance on that?
I completely believe him. Whenever you see Branson in pictures he's always got this boyish grin on his face.

That's more proof to me than anything else, he can't be in control of himself that much that he could fake that consistently. He's done some very dumb stuff knowing full well that it couldn't really hurt him just for the heck of it.
Well, holy cow. If he can cook a frozen pizza cheaper than ordering from dominoes maybe he should be in the restaurant business instead of the software business.
Except that the children haven't aged and are wearing the same clothes as in all his images of them, meaning that he is still dreaming. The top spinning without falling is just to make sure the audience realizes that Cobb does not make it out.
> why should we care about Solaris?

It's the only OS that can boot from a ZFS volume and that also has a sane package management system.
That's possible, but the 'hack-potential' of a non-smartphone is quite limited. Once a fully open sourced phone with that sort of gear on board hits the market I'm fairly sure that hackers would flock to it.
Its too early for you to need to scale, but it seems to me that a service like App Engine eliminates:

1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 that would probably cost you nothing if you hosted it with google.

2- The administration time - why spend any time configuring or administering servers? It doesn't benefit the product when you get this essentially for free.

3- The concerns about security, reliability, single point of failure issues, etc. These may not be critical now, but eventually they will be important and that means you'll have to move. Why not start on App Engine where this is taken care of?

4- Scalability. Again, not something you need now, but rather than re-architect your site and move it later, why not use App Engine from the beginning?

From my perspective, App Engine is such a compelling value proposition that there's no reason not to build your site there. If google somehow becomes untenable, you can host app engine sites on unix using open source software.... and the appengine SDK is open sourced itself. So you're not locked in, other than the "lockin" of providing free service until you get big and a great platform.
Probably the startups that do something like this, don't really talk about it.

The negative replies here are one reason. Competitive advantage may be another.

Personal example: I had a dedicated rackspace server for about $650/month. I was doing basic web hosting, but also streaming video via Flash Media Server.

Now the video server and web server need not be on the same physical hardware. No more than 50 users simultaneously stream video. However, bandwidth overages pushed that monthly fee to over $1600 several months ago (and that was only two weeks into the month).

So, I switched from rackspace to some commodity php/mysql all-you-can eat webhost. I then set up additional video servers on Verizon Fios Business package, with a 35/35Mbps connection.

Now the video is not crucial to the success of the website, more like icing on the cake, so some downtime is acceptable in my case.

However, I do have a UPS that can run the server for approx. 14 minutes underload, which is enough time for me to manually switch to a backup generator.

Of course, I had all these things already (UPS,generator).

For me, it was a no-brainer. $150/month with 5 fixed IPs and I provide my own physical hardware PLUS unlimited bandwidth, versus $650/month.

The momey saved can be spent on hardware or software. As traffic increases beyond the capabilities of the Fios connection, I may consider rackspace again.

OTOH, I have several buddies that would be willing to colocate additional hardware at their FIOS enabled locations.

It simply depends on your needs.

Be careful with Comcast business, though. I believe they have some pricey install fees for business accounts, unless you sign a 3-year contract.

BTW, it is not in the garage, it is in a sideroom w/ it's own unit AC.
Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
I didn't realize this was underground mining.
So, you're really working on driverless trains, not cars or trucks, correct?
Scott Brinker: Data as a new marketing channel
This isn't so much a challenge as a "sell your (successful) software to us".

It is still interesting, but it needs a more accurate title.
Meet Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival
With C.F.O. Hire, Zynga Looks Closer to I.P.O.
Core competency ESP?
Will 99% of osol developers stay with Oracle for long?

Sun looked like the ultimate geek-cool environment to work. Oracle is pretty much the ultimate uncool company to work for as a developer.
What an outstanding idea. Generally, finding book recommendations is a serendipitous process of happening upon a page where someone knowledgeable has put together a list of books they like on a topic they happen to know something about. Or clicking around on Amazon hoping to find something good.

I see myself going to this site often, either looking for recommendations on topics of interest, or just looking at recent recommendations to find something I didn't even know I was interested in.
So writing my app in <your preferred language> automatically makes it elegant?
Who will get us out of this mess?
So writing my app in <your preferred language> automatically ensures my database will be up and all exceptions are handled correctly?
"there is no sense to plan for scaling when you are small."

Agreed. And what's the marketing strategy? If there isn't one, then the business will stay small.
Has anyone else noticed that in the article photo, what appears to be the Statue of Liberty behind him and the woman is leaning at something like 30 degrees?
I read the book 2 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy... My biggest takeaway from that book is he took an approach to entrepreneurship which emphasized low risk / high uncertainty ventures.

For example, he started his business selling Virgin records by mail and used pre-orders to limit any real inventory risk. That gave him the cash flow to fund the eventual opening of the Virgin Record Store.

Then later, when he decides to open an airline, he purposefully chooses to lease rather than buy planes. That lowered his initial capital outlay and made the risk of the airline going bust not so bad on his wallet.

I think I also remember that he was really good at setting up his different companies using a holding co structure. I think that allowed him to segment out each business and made it so that the failure of one would not affect the others (esp. re financing).

I also got the idea that he took a lot of small low risk bets. Taking his Virgin brand and simply applying it to pre-existing products (maybe even cola? I cant remember too well). Even the airline was already another airline I believe. So by applying his brand to a wide variety of products he was able to circumvent having to do a ton of R&D or heavy capital investments.
This is how the great management guru Dr. Ram Charan used to develop mastery:

"In the lulls between customers, Charan studied. Using a system of his own devising, he condensed onto a single unlined page the essence of what he had learned that day in each subject. (Today he provides similar one-page summaries for his CEO clients.) "Am I going to get good grades?" he would ask himself, knowing there was only one right answer. "Am I the master of this subject?" He knew from Sanskrit teachings that "fear, anger, laziness - these are the downfalls of human beings"; that peace of mind alone is worth striving for; that dedication and mastery are their own rewards.

More at: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...
That you will have to be too many things to too many people at the same time. By going 'niche' you can concentrate on a subset of the problems, while at the same time validating the method. Once you've done that expanding from your niche will allow you to capture the larger market much easier than if you were to try to start that way.

It also limits the exposure of your 'gaffes' to the audience in the niche.

Also, you ask opposite questions in your title and the text.
As opposed to some government agency taking a hosting provider's server, and you happen to be on the same VPS as the "suspect"?
Can you please explain this or link to something that does? I mean, I've been 'floating divs' and 'clearing both' for a while because someone/some article told me that its better, but tables are so much more predictable. The only reason I ever use floating divs in practice is when I'm worried some designer friend is going to view source on my pages and laugh at all the tables.

Also, if I am expected to use floating divs all the time, can someone just link me to a floating div table generator already? :)
Google, Bing: A hacker's best friends
It's been a few years, but I used to do some webhosting from my house on "business class" cable. It wasn't that much of a sysadmin task once I had things set up. But what killed us was our connection's downtime. I think over a year we were disconnected at least 5 times that we noticed, from a couple hours to a 2 day stretch over one weekend.

One tip: if you're not a cable TV customer (just data), when they connect you, see if you can get the tech to physically label your connection in the junction box out at the street with something like "Business Broadband Customer". We were disconnected at least twice by random Larry the cable guys working on neighbors' stuff. He'd see us connected, but we wouldn't show up as a cable TV subscriber so he'd disconnect us. After the second time, I got our guy (same company, but different division) to label our connection and it stayed connected. That solved our longer outages, but we still had shorter ones.
Very interesting-its hard to believe that an embedded device manufacturer would release a device with debugging enabled and baked in-when I worked in industrial embedded electronics there was no way to dump the memory across the network (well you could read/write bits in memory using a backdoor that was implemented for setting the serial number but you had to poke the bytes in the right order and it only triggered a function builtin to the firmware to write to NVRAM..)
Why live your life if you're not doing what you love?
i guess that means that assembly, C, etc are all terrible languages because they don't have a clear design with system security in mind.
Partner Selection: The person I chose to partner with on my startup is a great human being, but not cut out for being a startup partner. Not everyone is cut out for this and even people like pg have trouble determining who's got the determination and who doesn't. Next time I'll pick somone who is technical (this person wasn't) and determined and who loves this stuff as much as I do.

Industry Selection and (effectively) going it alone: My first startup was something I could code in the evenings myself. The good news is that I actually got a functioning freemium service to work on my own with (too few) real customers. The bad news is that the ease of coding also meant that a lot of people had written similar sites. The barriers to entry were just too low. The good news: Coding the whole service from the CSS to the SQL taught me a lot about coding that years of corporate work never did.
Flagged. Nothing new here, literally. No new breakthroughs, nothing newsworthy. You could replace this article with a link to Wikipedia.
About that one fatal mistake
The contract part smells fishy, yes. But the admission is refreshingly honest.
This happen often in sailing :-)

Mast bending over due to the wind, photographer compensating for this by tilting the camera.
Although they say Iron Man was patterned off of Elon Musk, the first person that came to mind when watching the movie was Branson.
Ask HN: how do you handle passwords in your startup?
Hi,
I'm the cofounder of a startup and I start to worry about our password policy. Currently we share a protect file where all the passwords are stocked in clear. Everybody can access, every password and to keep everything sync we put it in the dropbox.

I use keepass at home, but it's not perfect when multiple employees have to open it and modify it.

So my question is : How do you manage your passwords and do you have differents users permissions levels ? I would love to hear how you deal with that in your startup.

Thanks for your tips

tl;dr : how do you deal with passwords and users permissions in your startup?

EDIT: I'm of course talking about the password that we use everyday to manage the startup (gmail, twitter, google analytics,tumblr,...) not users' passwords.
Using quantum memory to dodge Heisenberg uncertainty
Yes, it's a little disappointing. It's like saying the Unix cat is a self referential program since it can be used to display its own source code.
Is someone going to email pg? HN is all tables.
I found the requirement of conversion rate of 10% quite funny. The conversion rate is never an absolute metric to worry about. It depends on so many different variables: product type, intended usage, sales and marketing effort, etc.

In fact, you can artificially push up this number by having a team of sales people profiling potential customers and then persuading users to try out the product. Even though this will result in a large cost of customer acquisition (remember: you have actively persuaded potential customers), conversion rate will be much higher than 10%. On the other hand if you are relying on SEO and get lots of passive and active interest in the product, your conversion rate will be much lower. (But you paid close to nil for each additional potential customer)

Ultimately what matters is if a company can make cost of customer acquisition less than life time value of the customer. Hard to measure as compared to conversion rate, but that's what really matters.

If you want to measure something related to conversion rate, measure how much you can improve it. Not how much it currently is.
The Best Startup Incubators Have the Best People
Pumped storage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity) is the most cost effective form of mass storage for the electric grid. The difference between a dam and pumped storage is you store energy using electricity to pump water up when you have excess grid capacity. Ideally you want to replace peaking power plants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant), with base load power and every night you pump water up and use it the next day with some reserve capacity to deal with issues.

Now traditional hydroelectric http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric get's "free" energy with short bursts (floods) that's gets released over several months, but other than that it's almost identical to pumped storage in that you can release more or less energy within minutes of changes in demand. In the past they tended to be used for base load power, but they all have a capacity factor which is average output / max output and in the USA it averages out to 42%.

As to the mechanics: Worldwide, an installed capacity of 777 GWe supplied 2998 TWh of hydroelectricity in 2006.[1] This was approximately 20% of the world's electricity In theory if you add 2998 TWh of wind power on average, and can release 2x base load hydroelectric on demand then you can replace 20% of the world electricity generation with wind power and have little impact on the grid. Realistically, wind power over large areas is not going to drop to zero, also hydroelectric power is not setup to produce zero energy one minute and 2x that energy the next and not all hydro has the ability to store energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-of-the-river_hydroelectrici.... Plus you have transmission losses ect but hydro + wind can become very close to base load power especially if you slightly overbuild and accept the loss of some of your peak power aka 10% extra generation 3% of the time = 0.3% wasted capacity. For comparison Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission

PS: Also the transistion is a fairly slow process, so we have several years to get things working.
Well, this would explain why nobody is floating around in the snow mountain fortress.
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We were discussing OpenSolaris, not Solaris 10.

I looked it up and it looks like they have gnome 2.30 since their 2009.06 release[1] which is actually the latest version.

[1] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris
Thanks for trying my domain.

I tried searching for "Mixergy" and only got one response. Then I saw a message that said, "did you mean Mixergy." I clicked it even though I didn't know what the difference was between what I typed and the response.

I think the message could make it clearer that you're asking about a domain. Like this:
"did you mean Mixergy.com"

And I love the site. I bookmarked it.
Besides fire/flood/theft/etc, is the garage clean and climate controlled? I used to run a server in a basement during college, and burned through 2 disks and one motherboard before I finally figured out that warm, damp, and dusty basements with dirty power supplied by 1920's wiring weren't a great place to run servers.

For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware.

Also, read the fine print on that Comcast plan. Their residential service is now capped at 250GB (not sure about business-class). In my experience, Comcast is the last company I would want involved anyways. Our service goes out frequently enough that I now have a backup WiMAX modem for my laptop.

Edit: thanks olalonde
On the other hand, 10k+ iterations likely isn't anything you normally experience, and may incur abnormal GC cost due to the sheer number. Though that's typically detectable by doing multiple sizes of tests.
China to build giant buses that cars can drive under
How m-commerce made Amazon $1bn
It's not necessarily true that the beginning of the plane ride and the end of the plane ride are the same level of reality.
How to pick a company name
It's important to separate the decisions he made, versus the decisions his McKinsey & Co Trade "business manager" made.

I get the impression from the book that people would call Richard up looking for money, and if it sounded like fun Richard would say "Sure", to which all the other Virgin stake holders say "Are you nuts?". Then Richard moves forward with it one way or another, and its up to the other employees to make it work.

That, at least, sounds like the story behind Virgin Atlantic, as well as a few of his big adventure trips.
The load times are an issue, check out nailgun, -Xbootclasspath , java -client, javaRebel. There's a few other tricks i've seen mentioned, anybody else?

http://blog.headius.com/2009/01/my-favorite-hotspot-jvm-flag...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1316056/how-to-reduce-sca...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/33f...

http://groups.google.com/group/leiningen/browse_thread/threa...