skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on.

Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects.

I'm trying to teach myself some things that really need more than my local dev machine (puppet, backup strategies/more resilient code, learning cassandra). I've been running a bunch of VM's on my laptop, but my dev machine is a weakling and can't hardly handle it.

It almost seems like I could just spin up a dozen of these little instances for $2.88 per waking day and teach myself under substantially more "real" conditions on the cheap. That's something I'd love to have as an option on linode, given that teaching myself is a large part of what I use it for.

Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?
Thoughts on Abstractions: Part 1 – Abstractions Everywhere
That just blew my mind.
So does this mean they'll actually follow their own review guidelines or is it going to mean you can read them but @#$%!, you're still at the whim of whomever gets your app?
Get on the Optical Bus
We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

I really like this. So much of success seems to be just showing up, day after day.
I'm taking about apps that provide WISPr functionality.

The customer is the one paying for said app and they can't test it since the built-in WISPr gets in the way.

I think everything should be in public documentation. I don't like knowing that if I can visit Cupertino I might find out about some API I just really-really need, but not if I search the documentation.
However, they can be great to help fill out your server cluster with things that don't always need to stay up (like Mongel servers). Buy some reserved instances, then put out several spot bids as well for things you can load balance to.
Any chance someone can make that available to non-developers?
So, how about all those people that were supporting apples' right to run their app store the way they see fit and who said that there is no point complaining about it?

I think this proves that complaining about stuff like this is well worth the effort, assuming that that - and not some backroom pressure - is what caused them to back off. They mention it in their release so I figure it must have been a major factor.

edit:

the plaintext version of the appstore guidelines:

http://ww.com/appstore.html

I've been reading through the guidelines while fixing the markup and it seems to me that it's very reasonable the way it is worded and those terms that are left.

I'd feel pretty good developing under these terms.
"Thinking first, writing later. When practicing for the ACM programming competitions in college, I discovered that when writing code before understanding the solution, I eventually needed to start over. I have never seen a counterexample."

The thing is. Some times writing code is how you best come to understand the solution. One of the things that have made me a better programmer, was exactly realising this. If there is something I don't understand, I now try to program it, rather than thinking too much over it first. Call it prototyping if you want. It's a fine line of course.
Only one way to know, try.
None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right
Agreed. You give a mouse a cookie, and then he'll want a glass of water. By giving up this ground it would be near impossible and close to PR-suicide to commit any future retraction. About time for sure.
Physics Projects Deflate for Lack of Helium-3
I've tested

http://nightly.mozilla.org/js-preview.html

with my simple benchmark loop (two floating point additions per pass) and it's really better:

300M passes of loop, time in seconds:

0.88 Firefox 4b6

2.26 Firefox 3.6.6

which is approximately 2.5 times faster.

Now that particular loop executes at the same speed as ActionScript 3 (in Flash 10) with explicit typing. That's the big achievement for Mozilla.
Is the average college grad earning only $7-$8 an hour?
Household income (in principle) should also increase with inflation, so the positive slope should always be there. The significant part of the graph (if there is one) is that the slope is not 1 (which would mean that tuition and income are growing at the same pace) with periods where tuition grows significantly faster than income.

There's also the added complication of comparing an average with a median. Averages are much more sensitive to outliers than medians (when Bill Gates enters a bar, the average income increases significantly, but the median remains the same).
Code Readability: Quick, Millions or Billions?
TeX does a pretty good job with that stuff. Knuth gives a clear and concise explanation of the algorithm in a chapter of Digital Typography.

I don't think you need to get too fancy with kerning and scaling, the way Hz does. It's a web page, not a printed book. Put the hyphens where they need to be to optimize each paragraph, and you'll probably get decent results. Knuth's algorithm will do that effectively and efficiently.
What's the point of such a comment. It reminds me of the pundits talking about how it was "About time" copy & paste was devised. Be glad that Apple isn't so prideful that they aren't able to make changes like this. A lot of people and companies wouldn't be able to admit things like thing to make the right decision.

Whether it was fast enough for you is entirely besides the point. They couldn't have just opened up the whole deal could they? They make careful decisions. They started out with high restrictions and have become continually more open. How often is the opposite the case?

Every "death knell" for the App Store and the iPhone is being chipped away; not by Android, but Apple itself.
"Real life doesn't have a theme. Or if it does, it would be amazingly incredible and preposterously improbable if your book matched up with what was going on with my organization." - what a gem.

Regardless of the Agile theme (that I know little of to comment) this sentence applies to almost all the business books (specially the biography type).

I've read a lot of them and they are basically a collection of feel-good stories with some themes. Selection bias. A typical book will have a chapter like "Never give up" describing some story where the author insisted upon something far-fetched and finally got it (never mind the time he spent on other objectives he didn't get and never mentioned). Same with a lot of other typical themes.

A more objective book like "Founders at work" shows that all of them (from what I remember) got lucky not once but at least twice to have their break. Of course insert here the usual disclaimers that you cannot rely on luck only, you have to work hard etc to be ready when opportunity strikes.
Probably not, NDA and all that.
They have a distinct advantage in being able to test/modify/adapt their games faster than everyone else, because they have 700 employees & a huge warchest of cash.

It is unfortunate that copyright protection doesn't kick in till much later (according to the article) in a game's play. Can't say the world is much better off with a bunch of farming simulating games.
Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.
Checkout by Amazon now works without leaving your site
That said, keep in mind that if you need to keep at least one instance up, you need to put them in multiple availability zones, or vary the max spot prices - if there's a load spike that leads to your spot instances being terminated, it'll likely hit all of the spot instances at a given price in the same AZ.
I saw it on a few tech sites (AppleInsider, Gizmodo, etc.) this morning, but linked to the source, since most of their articles were just a copy & paste of the Apple press release.
Any idea what kind of budget is it typically required to create and then run a TV campaign? Just curious.
The thing is most of the complaining about this was not the constructive "hey, Apple have you considered so-and-so", but rather the whiny "waaaa... Apple are Nazis" kind.

And as you point out there is no evidence that it is the complaining that made Apple reconsider. It could very well be something entirely different, e.g. the FTC probe.
First Look: Dell's  New Modular Data Center
This puzzles me. Why did they change them after a couple of months? I'm really wondering.

Maybe now they will raise the bar for quality rejecting apps that do not follow guidelines or do not provide enough functionality? Sounds strange, but I cannot think about any other reason.

EDIT: reading through the just published guidelines, it is exactly like this.
Here's some more data from Mozilla's own testing setup:

http://arewefastyet.com/?machine=5

Where JM+TM stands for "Jagermonkey + Tracemonkey". It looks to be gaining on V8 and Apple Nitro pretty fast, considering the timeline involved.
Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user.

Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?
hehe, all software documentation should come in 3 forms: Reference, Tutorial and Pop-up Book
Plenty of it was very constructive, it pointed out why the choice of tools should be left to the developer and how not relaxing this restriction would make it easier for people to develop for android than for the Iphone.

If the FTC probe (or the rise of android) has anything to do with it then I doubt we'll ever know, but I'm all for taking this on face value and believing them when they publicly admit to listening to their devs. It's a nice thing to be able to hold them to at a future date.
There is an active FTC investigation into the terms of the developer agreement, I believe. No idea if it was a direct influence on the change.
10 * 0.00001 is still pretty miniscule.

Uproar from developers is meh. End users don't care. Apple can do what they want with the app store. If a few whiney devs decide to not play any more, there's an infinite supply of other devs who will.
Of course. But which one is far more niche? At least the large market share of Flash means support won't disappear overnight.
Does anybody have the links to the actual rules, since this press release, through welcome, is extremely light on details.

If not, can we please not post something this light on content to HN in the future? Maybe instead wait for somebody who knows something to blog about it? I would hate for this to become a place to just post press releases.
A solid rule if you care about karma. Except as regards to the iOS app store policies. Then you'll even find agreement when criticizing.

I think all Apple criticism will become more well-received over time as people have their Animal Farm moment and realize the pigs have become indiscernible from the humans.
To be fair, you were using the net worth of the church as a supporting argument for taxing its income, and the reply pointed out that much of their net worth is extraordinarly illiquid and uncorrelated with their income.

Limos and $30K hats certainly don't sound like priceless historic artifacts, though.
I got my N900 from Vodafone UK on contract and it is not locked. And it is paid via contract, not bought separately. (i.e. I did not pay the full price of the phone, only 30£ or so at the beginning)
Making My Site Sing (Designing with Music)
True; expulsion (or leave) from a monetary union will also effect the euro considerably, and those issues (mistrust, bond revaluation, etc.) can quickly evolve in an avalanche effect. No sane person in the EU wants that.
Apparently Javascript is given an explicit exception.
The point was that Apple could have avoided much pain and suffering for all concerned if they had done the right thing in the first place.

Now we just need to be able to run programs not purchased through the Apple store and access my iPod without having to use Windows, and I will have to take Apple of my "somewhat evil" list.
Since I'm still in the early stages of learning to program (past the "durr what are for loops" stage, but still not good at a language), I've found that it's nearly impossible to really plan anything out.

I can plan out what I'll put stuff in and the names of the classes and methods that'll work with data, but I'm clueless until I start trying to implement the idea.

I suspect that once I've done enough things, it'll be easier to plan. I know when I go back to any of my old C# projects, I keep slapping my forehead and am able to see other (often better) solutions.

So I think the better advice is: Try until you know what you're doing, then toss it out and plan around all the terrible mistakes you made.
>>>There are any number of scripts/gists/pasties around the web that will give a simple script to download your posts.

So, Tumblr is a site where you can press a button to put stuff in but you have to deal with the stuff you just listed to get it back out. You've made half my own point there.
Yes, but only if the nodes are in the same region and availability zone. From amazon's pricing page [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/]:

There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and
other Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e.
between Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data
transferred between Amazon EC2 instances located in
different Availability Zones in the same Region will be
charged Regional Data Transfer. Data transferred between
AWS services in different regions will be charged as
Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.
It was actually a poor segue, I meant for the two points to be unrelated, I googled a bit and found the link to the article and thought I'd posted it, as it shows that the church's argument that they're poor is false. I should have better clarified the wording, really...

Bear in mind that they rent much of the property to others and generate quite a bit of income that way. It's not just monasteries, they own whole blocks of buildings in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities (I have no citation for that, sadly).
The rules and app store review guidelines are both protected by the developer NDA so no one's going to be eager to post them.

This mostly affects registered developers anyway (and I'd say there are a fair few on HN), for whom the rules are just a click away.
I am not sure I follow you.

Apple's iPhone is still unique in its niche. Of course Android is commoditising the smartphone market, so if you are in the market for a smartphone then iPhone/Android/WebOS/etc... are all comparable.

But if someone actually wants an iPhone or an Android in particular then the view is different. In that case the carrier can get any manufacturer to build what they want or they'll choose a different manufacturer for their Android phone. But you can't get the iPhone anywhere else than Apple.

Apple does not need to bow to carrier pressure because they are the only game in town (if you want an iPhone, if you don't care about the OS then I agree with you).
Then they should offer to do the damned export on their end with their Macs. I don't care if I have to wait a week or a month. I'm not using Tumblr anymore. Just give me my damned XML.
that lifted my spirits.
I regularly use a cheap netbook as a terminal to an m1.large instance for development work. My scripts use spot instances to keep the price low--typically around $0.13/hr. Not for everyone, but it's saved me maybe $500 over buying a fast laptop. Unlike a laptop I can easily let others log into the system, leave it on for long compute jobs when I'm out of town, and don't have to worry as much about losing important data.
my guess is the FTC investigation into Apple's practices got them nervous. better to just cave than deal with anti-trust issues: http://voices.allthingsd.com/20100611/ftc-to-investigate-app...
Computer science major is cool again
Comics have the bad habit of generating very little useful discussion (this one is no exception) and of being generally fairly shallow examinations of any topic.

If you want to talk about the issues discussed in this comic, how about writing a blog post that links to the comic instead?
What makes inequality bad? People aren't born identical in every aspect, is it bad that I was born smarter than much of the general population? Should I be dumbed down to make things more equal?
OnLive sounds cool, but it's a little hard to believe, since latency is a common issue in regular gaming already. Demos are invariably carefully orchestrated. The other thing that gives me pause is that it is such a compelling vision for publishers. It's an absolutely magic idea. However, this enthusiasm is not technology-driven: it's not about what has become possible, but what would be really amazingly cool if it was possible.

But latency isn't such an issue for compiling etc. Someone was saying in the instant google thread that 250ms is imperceptible for search (and I've heard 200ms for the command line, from Rob Pike on Go). That's much lower hanging fruit than for gaming, where 250ms latency is far from instant but unplayable.
What can we conclude about the performance comparing with Linode and Slicehost smaller offers? I'm curious if anyone has any conclusions.
Does Siegler ever make any points or does he always ramble on like this? Is he upset that people are buying android based phones or is it that the carriers are customizing the os too much and google won't force any strict guidelines? That was the appeal of android from the beginning. Basically anyone could take the os as a starting point and do some cool stuff with it. The fact that the carriers are using their monopoly to force certain conditions on their users is not really the fault of whoever produced the os which happens to be google in this case.
The key here is the unavailability of non-carrier branded unrestricted Android phones in the US. If I get subsidized by the carrier when purchasing the phone, dealing with crapware and restriction is part of the cost of getting $400 or so off the price of the phone at purchase time.

Ideally I could make a choice to buy an Andriod phone from a manufacturer with no branding and no restrictions, pay full price for it, and accept that the additional cost is what I'm willing to pay for an unrestricted, unbranded phone. The inability to purchase a phone like that is the real problem, not the restrictions placed on carrier subsidized phones.

Two years ago I bought an unrestricted HTC Diamond with Winmo 6.1. I paid over $600 for the phone and the privilege of being able to do whatever I want with the phone. The $400 extra over a branded/restricted phone, spread out over 24 months, is $17/month for the privilege of being able to doink around with a phone.

Having done that once, I'm leaning toward putting up with the crapware and restrictions and saving the $400. I figure that in two years, I probably only really used a couple of third party apps. Most of the rest that I tried were annoying memory leaks and crashes waiting to happen - barely better than carrier provided crapware.
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guid...

You need to be an iOS Developer to login. Unclear if it's under NDA or not, but I'm sure this document will leak out eventually.

There are 22 categories of potential violations, and most rules end in "will be rejected."
Fashion & Weight Loss Information
3 Ways Going with the Flow Will Make You Fat - And What To Do About It!

Wanna know the truth? If you?re going to be slim, you?re going to have to swim against the current. You?re going to have to take charge of your body and make your own decisions?cause if you go with the flow today, I guarantee that you?re going to be fat. Here are 3 reasons why: #1) Rampant Portion Sizes ?Supersize it?, ?Biggie Fries?, ?Value Meal?, ?Super Big Gulp? ? phrases that we use so commonly, it?s hard to believe that we?d have to explain what they mean to someone from another era. Restaurants have blown their portion sizes so big in the name of providing ?value? that one meal could feed a small soccer team. Considering that your stomach is roughly the size of your fist (but thank goodness it stretches!), the portion sizes you get today in the average restaurant could probably fill 5 or more stomachs. But we?re told to get our money?s worth right? So go ahead and eat up. That way you can spend your money going to the doctor for obesity related health problems later. That?s truly getting your money?s worth! #2) Diet as Religion Diets boast a stellar 2-5% success rate (that?s a 98% FAILURE rate by the way). And yet if an alien landed in North America, he (or she) would be convinced that our society must be built on the value of dieting. Billboards, magazines, books, television shows, ads, even restaurant menus?everywhere you look you?re inundated with the latest diet, diet food or diet plan. Diets are touted as the ONLY solution to weight loss. We have more diets on the market now than ever before. We have more people on a diet now than ever before ? and yet we continue to get fatter?is there ANY POSSIBLE connection here? #3) Escalator Generation Go with the flow and you?ll enjoy a multitude of worldly conveniences. You can microwave your dinner in 5 minutes, load your dishwasher in 2 and pay the dog walker in 1. You don?t have to walk to the store - just hop in the car. Your kids don?t have to go swimming ? they?ve got a new Xbox game. Don?t bother taking the stairs because there?s an elevator. You can sit at a desk for long hours without even getting up from your chair. And when you do come home from work ? you have the luxury of flopping on the couch and watching ?Friends? while eating takeout. Go with the flow my friend and you?ll expend less energy while eating more. Oh - and you?ll also be told that taking a pill is the only way to solve the problem of your ever-increasing waistline. One of the best photographs I ever saw was of the front of a gym. There was a staircase leading up to the gym with an escalator beside it. And you guessed it ? people were taking the escalator UP to the gym! The only guy on the stairs was walking DOWN them. That pretty much sums up the problem. Unfortunately, if you go with the flow in our world today, chances are very high that you?re going to get fat. BUT by knowing what you?re up against, you can take steps to go against the flow. By taking a stand, taking charge and making positive choices for your body ? you can live slim and healthy in a world skewed towards weight gain.
Nice initiative.

I posted the link to this on 2-3 college sports message boards that I'm a part of ..
I believe they're using chunks of RAM on each physical server to hold S3 objects. This might help explain where the "buffer/cache" is going to.