skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some good points there. Here is my POV on a couple of them:

Everyone I've encountered online who has used both Perl 5 and Perl 6 says that they like Perl 6 (the language) better.

My heart loves perl6 whereas my head prefers perl5 :) Fortunately the syntax and semantics between them are so close I don't think I'll ever have an issue switching between them (in fact this maybe become a good consultancy requirement, ie. job opportunity, for the future?).

re: future of perl5 - There is good momentum behind perl5 & CPAN at the moment that I doubt it will be deflected at all by perl6 for quite a while. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if perl6 draws a bigger attention from outside of the perl5 world.
When you're in a restaurant setting the quality will suffer if you want more ingredients than the budget will normally allow. The end-result of that is McDonalds. In a software setting it is also the quality that suffers, the end result of that is visible all around you.

Software is rarely sold on quality, most of the time it is on features.

In the end, if quality software is your goal you'll have to open your own restaurant...
You're forgetting something. A shared host is inadequate for a bunch of applications not just because of the number of visitors. It might also be that it's too restricted for you.

If you need to run some form of daemon for example, or some custom app in the background. Anything that requires more control over the environment, you won't find in a shared host.

I use and like both the linode and slice host libraries.
Except, you know, not having sold my soul to the devil.
Yeah, fair enough a lot of those posts are a bit old (although Linode/Slicehost seem to be dominant still). Removed the link to YC archive, it won't add much value to this discussion.
In some cases everything is equally bad, but not in others. In France, for example, the stock market was wiped out, but lots of other assets survived the war, especially property (land ownership wasn't generally interfered with), and portable valuables like gold and jewelry. So if you were picking places to put your money in 1935, there are definite winners and losers--- buying land was a good option.
I didn't start the thread, but here's a tweak of this idea:

"You enter a URL you want to monitor."

OR - I copy/paste a line of javascript of your service on my site, like google analytics... your service then figures out which are the competitors of my site and how popular they are with my visitors (from their browsing history). The list of competitors should be updated with time. I think this could be quite useful if packaged well. Let me know if you'd like to collaborate on something like this or just further iterate the idea. My contact is in the profile.
Oh, I got it now, you use the tags attached to the link.
First I thought that you use the individual bookmarking of each user which would be a HUGE binary, sparse matrix, however, that could really be reduced with PCA and it would give a
"people with similar tastes to those who bookmarked your site, also bookmarked ... " effect, possibly an even richer source of information.

Your service is great anyhow, got to love a site that says that my site is similar to paulgraham.com and joelonsoftware.com

http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/lkozma.net/Top_10_Sites_L...
Runs smooth in Chrome
First, as SwellJoe pointed out, a couple of times a year is not a big deal.

Blacklists have also proven quite effective in pressuring ISPs to clean up their act - they can still ignore bots/spammers/assorted morons, but they will soon find themselves unable to send e-mail, and hence, without legitimate customers. I admit there's some burden on the well-meaning, but it makes life a lot harder for spammers and spam-abiding ISPs.
Well, I'll admit, that is one risk that Japanese salarymen don't have to deal with. That said, are you sure that is realistic, and not just engineer-is-totally-terrified-of-confrontation talking? It is a seller's market for engineers, even at big megacorps. A manager would have to be insane to threaten firing over "We're going to miss that deadline if you add this", especially because firing guarantees that the deadline gets blown and everyone in the room knows it.
We have half a rack at a colo in Portland. All our public sites live on a single fast box.

Before that, everything was running off a fast desktop machine sitting behind a Business DSL line at Sam's house. I'd highly recommend that option, since it's so cheap compared to VPS and you get to use as big a box as you like (and as many too). You only really outgrow it when your bandwidth starts to max out the line, which is a lot later than you'd expect.

Twiddla survived it's first few Reddittings in that garage. It was only for SXSW and the simultaneous TechCrunching, RRW'ing, LifeHackering, and Mainstream Pressing that followed that forced our hand in moving it someplace a bit more professional.
He's one of the developers of Birdhouse, which he started as a side project from doing Hollywood VFX work. Now he's working on making these kinds of promotional videos full time — he's mentioned that he's done internal stuff for companies, and he just published a new one for an iPad app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vpvEDS00o

Y'all should hire him, he's the new Stan Freberg.
Frankly, when compared to Intel, Reddit surely looks like something that
was just "cobbled together".

Like any other large company, Intel regularly buys some of these, so called 'cobbled together' startups. Those startups have business plans of their own and technology of their own, but no interest in taking on Intel, Motorola or any of the other giants. That's a valid business proposition and not a sign of weakness.

They don't have to deal with quantum effects, current leakage, and that
kind of stuff.

You're either romanticizing hardware or you're underestimating software. I'm an experimental physicist: I fully empathize with your respect for the engineering problems a company like Intel deals with. However: software startups mostly aren't solving engineering problems. That's not their goal. It's like criticizing the Los Angeles Lakers for not winning the Super Bowl.

are often not it's just too easy to disregard the problems each distinct piece of software faces.
If it's Ruby: Heroku

If it's Python: App Engine

Anything else: Linode
Cluster In The Clouds
Back when DabbleDB was new, hot and for testers, they posted some videos on what DabbleDB is. Those videos were so good. This application was everything you wanted spreadsheets to be.

Take a look: http://dabbledb.com/demo/
The average lifespan of a baseball is something like 1.7 pitches. They bring hundreds of them to a game.

Pitchers go out of their way to mangle the balls in specific ways before they throw them, so even the ones that last a few tosses are in rough shape. You'll often see a pitcher simply throw a ball back to the catcher to have it replaced.

The math, by the way, is something like 10k fans @ $50/seat vs. 120 baseballs @ $0.75 wholesale. If there's any chance whatsoever that giving one to a kid in the stands will make him happy enough to come back for another game at any point in his life, it's well worth it.
Linode. The only issue is my app creates subdomains on signup, and it takes about 5 minutes on linode to become active.
I've got dedicated servers from the french companies OVH and Online.net (previously known as Dedibox) since four years. The price is cheap including unlimited free reinstalls and a rescue mode. The service is great IMHO. I've also had one server from LeaseWeb but they are more expensive and comes with less services.

I'm interested in cloud hosting like Amazon EC2 or VPS like SliceHost, especially because I want to have my servers in more than only one country but so far all the solutions I found were not as great and/or cheap than the ones I use.

Here are some links for specific low cost servers:

http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/ - OVH, great and cheap little servers!

http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/rps_offers.xml - OVH, great too but no disks, they use iSCSI which is better because it removes hard drive failure risks but with bad disk performance costs.

http://www.online.net/serveur-dedie/comparatif-des-offres-de... - Online.net, the other good french hosting company for dedicated server.

BTW until now most of my servers were hosted at my home but I'm moving to another country, this will not be possible anymore, too bad! Independence is one of my top priority so I don't want to be stuck with any hosting company if I find better somewhere else, like in my next basement!
Is the user of your service the person with the mailbox, or the people running the mail system? Spam is a massive problem for email administrators.
GET Your WEBSITE ONLY BY PAYING.JUST PAYING.
don't know how to create a site? Don't worry DIFM is here. Make a Website only by paying some money. You just have to give money and details and the site will be in your hand in 1 week only.Its cheapest ever.
So you noticed the supposedly wrong typeface, but did not notice that the sign was in the incorrect language.
I find this introduction to Cloud Computing very nice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms

Though not a product demo, but the way of explaining it in simple words and illustration makes it stick to my mind.
At first, I thought we had a misunderstanding but now that I see your point, I have to disagree.

Survivorship bias basically is a sampling error and, in this case, leads you to underestimate the risk of your investments, both of which are never a good thing. Moreover, in almost all cases, it's a tad fatalistic to say "there's nothing we can do about it". I mean, maybe if the world goes under, but anything short of that, I'd like to think there's always sth I can do about it (even if that's just trading one bias for another... ;)
Couldn't you use wildcard cnames?
Microsoft to Release Emergency Patch
I can recommend http://hetzner.de/en for root servers in Germany. For example the EQ-4 package (for €49 per month):

* Intel Core i7-920 Quad-Core with Hyper-Threading

* 8 GB DDR3 RAM

* 2 x 750 GB SATA-II HDD (Software-RAID 1)

* 5 TB transfer; €6,90 for an additional TB

* 100 GB backup space for free, nice control interface (incl. reboot), NS control, good support
Why don't you catch-all subdomains in your web server and handle them on application level?
Can't u google it urself?
‘Top Things To Invest In’
I use Slicehost and am very satisfied, although I always hear wonderful things about Linode.
http://cliniccases.com
With all due respect, I think he failed horribly. How can you accept a project due in two weeks, and then afterwards learn about the basic requirements? If you're so obsessed with 'clean code' (a concept i doubt if it even exists), how can you miss out on software engineering basics like requirements gathering?
Linode doesn't say how much CPU you get, where other hosts (like vps.net) tell you. Isn't that an important info?
Ah right, of course, why didn't I think of that angle. That should have been obvious. To my defence I'll say I wrote that before my morning tea while on a holiday. Will try harder next time.
if you read well, you see he already knows how to get it to work, using the tools he mentioned. the only thing he asks here is why and how those tools work.
Another suggestion: on the result page make the main link for each result go to the "moreofit" page of the given link, rather than the actual external websites. (just like you do for the top pages). You want to keep people on your site :) and it's probably better for pagerank also.

Have instead a small arrow icon for the actual external links (that would be useful for the top pages also, there is no external link there at the moment).
but simply algorithms behaving in ways their creators did not expect

That's possible, but if the owner of the algorithm doesn't monitor it or shut it down, someone should and the owner should be punished for the behavior of the algorithm. Currently, that doesn't seem to be happening, which means this becomes a pretty good excuse for letting your algorithm behave like this on purpose.
And there are unknown words (words that are not covered by the lexicon).

But the top-poster is right: the linked website does part of speech tagging, not parsing.

Providing a wide-coverage parser for the web is still hard. The number of possible parses for long sentences is enormous. Even if a sentence is not ambiguous to us, grammars allow all kinds of ambiguities.

There is a web demo for a Dutch system that is developed in our research group[1], but heap size and time limits are used, to exit gracefully if parsing takes too much time/memory (and sentences with more than 20 words are ignored, since you'll really want to do offline parsing).

[1] http://www.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/bin/alpino
hehe, yeah i was in the same situation.
I used to use Slicehost, but moved to Linode once they launched their backup service. The admin UI isn't as pretty, but IMO the service is better (and they have VPS hosts in London, which shaves a few milliseconds off for me).

At Fantastic, we recently moved from Slicehost to The Rackspace Cloud. We're pretty impressed with them so far.
UAE 'moves to suspend some Blackberry services'
Well, the comments are extremely mixed. There are often a few good comments, but the majority varies from unnecessary to complete crap. Zerohedge has a lot of decent articles, but they are all gloomy, which attracts a lot of conspiracy theorists. Conversely, they also have some articles that could be considered fringe/crackpot. And the majority of commenters seems to be in the last group.
WP Gold-free WordPress Themes
Good Themes
A classic, but it's interesting to read alternative ideas to:

>> During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be.

such as from Jason Fried who recommends against working all the time.

Overall my experience has been: work as much as you can while not burning out and still enjoying your life overall. You never know how long you'll be at it, this could be your lifestyle indefinitely especially if you enjoy startups and may do another even after a big success.

For me so far this has meant incredibly long hours come in spurts, maybe a burst of 3 days every couple weeks, and otherwise, hours that approach "normal" (10-12 hour days, take at least one weekend day completely off).
Very true.

I already have a shared host for my crappy little blog, so I was just going to develop this new thing in a restricted subdomain to see if I could get it to become what I want. I figured could create a minimum viable product there, maybe have a bit of a private beta to figure out if anyone wants to use the damn thing, then shove it on a VPS.

That said, I noticed after I made this post that both Slicehost and Linode are month-to-month no commitment type deals, so once the site/app (what qualifies to be called a "webapp" exactly anyway?) is sort of ready, I'll likely just throw $20 at the problem and start on the VPS and see where it goes.
How's this? Got any tips?

http://www.losethos.com
The two media companies I've worked for (Fairfax and News) both have manned security gates that will snap shut if someone tries to tailgate. They seem to work quite well; I've been caught by them when going through after another person too quickly.
Speak for yourself.

Women are a significant minority in software development. This in itself means that a woman's experience of the field I work in every day must be different to mine. You're more likely to learn something new from someone looking at the same things you do from a different perspective than you are from someone who shares your POV and is more likely to just tell you things you already know.

The blog still has to be interesting, but "girldeveloper" is as good a hook as any.
Slicehost for my personal box. AWS for gazehawk.com (crazy architecture, looking forward to blogging about it)

Used to be on VPSLink (was one of their first customers) but they sold recently and everything quickly went to shit. Don't think I'd recommend them anymore.
Did you develop the underlying POS tagger or the web interface?
And shortly, node.js: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...
WOW that's cheap. You don't say anything about service/support though?
Sure, it is possible, but what does it add? It's not as if a Hidden Markov Model tagger takes that many server resources. Or if you are really worried, you could build a unweighted finite state transducer (Roche, Schabes, 1995) ;).
I use LiquidWeb, expensive... but I am a server management noob and they are quite excellent.
I hope it was a pleasant reason to be having trouble :) Thanks and keep up the good work!
Basic legal docs + london startup lawyer
Can anyone recommend reasonable and helpful london startup lawyers. I've read that
Chris Grew at Orrick and Barry and Danvers at Winston and Strawn - come recommended. Anyone have any comments or suggestions for others?

Also we're looking to have basic legal docs drafted: NDA, Employee Contract (no equity just standard employment terms) - I have used the gov't resource http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ in the past but looking for something a bit more serious. Has anyone used a reasonably priced lawyer for these standard docs or know of any good template resources online? Thanks.
Did you try a link shortening service? Maybe one without 301 redirect
It does speak volumes, but not about her site or her blog post.
Google App Engine. :-) Download the SDK. Write your app in Python. Click one button, and deploy it to Google's cloud.
Twitterfall.com is mostly run off a dedicated server from Rapidswitch (one of their base specs I think), though we also have a couple of VPSes from before we had the dedi. One from xeneurope.co.uk and one from Gandi. Both are reasonable. Rapidswitch is awesome.
I'm envious. Looks like something that could really take off. Congratulations.
Making Gaza a 'European ghetto'
+1 for the Simon Sinek link, that was great!
The question is, was it worth it? Did he get paid enough to feel well compensated for his frustration? If yes, then why all the venting? And if the answer is no:

You should always be ready to walk away from the deal. You don't have to accept unrealistic deadlines. If you choose to accept them, though, you don't have to allow massive spec changes midway. If you choose to allow it, you better make sure the money is good enough to compensate you for the massive horrible burnout you're going to put yourself through. And if you don't -- well, who else is to blame here? When you take a lot of risks, you get burned sooner or later. Don't make bets if you can't afford to lose them.
Do something not listed here :)
Unless the film is supposed to be a faithful historical reproduction of a specific period in time; I don't think it matters.

Postmodernism is very difficult to achieve without liberal use of anachronisms. I think many of the films referenced have postmodern traits.
They have 24/7 english and german language telephone support http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/kontakt/telefon-support/ (all the root servers are in DC 10/11/12). In over a year I didn't have to call them once, therefore I can't tell you about my personal experience. They answer emails very quickly.
Google Trends: Common Lisp
Interesting peaks.
You want to B2B this.

Developing an anti-spam system isn't something you can just hack up though, being any better than the rest requires post-doc grade research backing your algorithms and bayesian filters.

Unless you're some kind of latent super genius you're going to want to do a lot of reading of white papers on bayesian filters and how modern systems currently work before I think you really want to start hacking up code.

I don't mean to discourage you, and it's good that you're doing some preliminary market validation, but the market is B2B, and the task is far more difficult than most.
i also use these guys; in the past it has helped to have a german speaker around...
Except that it's a weight, so it should really be 800lb :-)
I can understand how something like that jumps out for a person who really knows his typography. But still, the newspapers says things newspapers would say, etc. IT people has sat through two decades (if not more) of computers being fully magical devices, both in appearance and function, with filmmakers not taking the slightest step towards caring if what they put in the film is realistic.

OK, I just sounded like a bitter parent that had to walk uphill through the snow to get to school, but these are really minor points.
Tricorder or Paperweight?
The Google TV introduction is fantastic, note the use of simple graphics and the clear, simple language:

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

In a similar vein, the famous "Twitter in Plain English":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
Ah that's what I was wondering, how cheap a baseball they use at that level goes for. Had a feeling that it must not have been much.
UAE to suspend Blackberry services from Oct 11
Summer of Startups: Love your users
Yes it was trivial. As I said, it's delicacy of handling the situation was the hard part.
Black Berry is going to be banned in UAE from October 2010
What's the difference of this torrent with this one ...

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=site%3Afacebook.com%2Fd...
It doesn't have to be an outright firing (GP never used the word 'fire'), it could be that you'll get passed over for promotion or just given maintenance work until you leave.

Being taken off a project and being replaced with someone else isn't going to look too good either way, especially not if the someone else manages to do what you said couldn't be done (you're obviously sure enough of yourself that that would never be the case).
And you are already working those extra 15 minutes without the compensation.
It doesn't seem to be handling multi-word proper nouns as I thought it would:

"Pride and Prejudice is a good book." becomes "Pride/NNP and/CC Prejudice/NNP is/VBZ a/DT good/JJ book/NN ./." I would have thought "Pride and Prejudice" would be lumped together.
Using my own tagger[1], trained using the Brown corpus:

go/VB fuck/VB yourself/PPL

It's very much in the amount and kind of training data and features used (assuming that the methodology is sound).

[1] http://github.com/langkit/citar
How do you "visit" facebook? You get a login page.
My favorite variant of this phenomenon is the time-honored tradition in consulting of the new guy throwing the old guy under the bus.

"I've had a chance to look through the existing codebase, and I'm sad to report that it's in pretty bad shape. I'm afraid we're going to need to rewrite a bunch of it before we can even move forward."
... and some profiles in HN are searchable...

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator...
He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died
Is Starcraft II bad for your graphics card?
I've used both prgmr.com and linode.com and my experience with both has been excellent. I currently use prgmr.com to host all my projects (which are only hobby projects) because they are very cheap. There is no fancy admin system, but I don't need one. Their SLA isn't any worse than linode. I have had no issues with downtime. My one experience with support resulted in a very good outcome.
Rackspace Cloud -- Is it true that it's overpriced? I'm really happy with it and I don't use many resources ($11/month right now, maybe) people have been telling me that it's actually really expensive when you're running something real though. Hrm, I'm considering a linode since everyone's seems so satisfied with them
I've been with them for I think about three or four years. I havn't thought to rate their service on cordiality, but they've been perfectly competent and fast the few times I've needed them.
People get excited about CL, so they use Google to search for some tutorials. Then they notice all the parentheses and quickly abandon it.

On a more serious note, i'm quite interested in hearing a realistic explanation.