skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Data Center Hardware - Start Up Idea
I don’t roam around data centers much anymore, but one thing I recall
from the emergancy visits is a “Crash Cart.” Basically a keyboard, mouse
and monitor on a card that you push down the row, plugin and off you go.

Configuring a server now I’ve got a monitor and keyboard plugged into it,
but I’ll have to move it soon and I started thinking about what a pain in
the rear it is to move hardware around when you need to see what’s going
on with a headless server.

The idea:

Imagine a laptop. Now instead of ports that you plug stuff into, imagine
retractable cables in the back.

A VGA, DVI, PS2 (maybe?) and USB cables that you plug into a server and
the laptop essentially becomes the monitor, keyboard and mouse. All running
off a battery.

Of course there are other methods to manage this type of situation from a DRAC
card to just a normal ethernet port and a VNC client, but from a pure hardware
standpoint, I imagine this might be very useful to some data centers.

What do you think of the idea?

If you build it... give me one. :)
"This is OK advice if all you want to do is finish a PhD as quickly as possible (ignore course work and any studying not directly related to your dissertation), but it's terrible advice if you want to (a) become a broadly smart individual or (b) do research later on anything else besides the tiny topic of your dissertation."

The article is not titled "How to become a broadly smart individual" -- it's titled "Easy ways to fail a Ph.D." And the advice is exactly correct.

You have your whole life to become "broadly smart", and grad school is not the only time in your life when you'll have the freedom to learn stuff (it's not even the best time). The point of a PhD is to finish. If you forget that fact, you will fail.

Nearly every grad student wastes a little bit of time doing unrelated learning, and to some extent, that's expected. But you're perceived as wasting your advisor's funding, you're ruined. If you're on a TA-ship, you're wasting time and opportunity cost. If you're not funded, you're wasting (a lot of) your own money.

If you want to be a broadly smart individual, finish grad school as quickly as possible, become a professor, get tenure, and you'll have the rest of your life to study whatever you like. But if you take 10 years to get your Ph.D., you won't have the chance.
I love hacker news.
Twonz -- better passwords
I just got back from two weeks off of my PhD studies due to burnout, and did some serious thinking about quitting in favor of entering the small business and/or startup world because I still felt burned out. I realized that we've got some projects in flight that aren't finished and that I want to see through, because I stand to improve my reputation considerably if things go well, but if I leave now, I'm throwing out all the investment in those projects to this point.
The title of the book is perfectly suited for its benefactor's ego. As interesting as this is, it was certainly /not/ what it says on the tin.
We're building a machine that will be proud of us - Thinking Machines
"The philosophical difference between socialism and capitalism, is the willingness to accept violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific vision."

I am fairly certain violence and coercion is orthogonal to socialism v capitalism.
Snow Crash was originally going to be a graphic novel, and Stephenson once said that he 'spent more time on the project hacking code than writing prose.' (loosely paraphrased as I'm on my iPhone and can't find a citation at the moment)
> Yea, well, for their PhDs, Bekenstein's discovered black hole thermodynamics, Feynman came up with the path integral, and Hawking proved the singularity theorem. Yes, you can go on to be successful after a modest thesis. But you can also kick ass young.

Sadly, most grad students (and most professors) can't hold a candle to Feynman, Hawking or Bekenstein.

"Oh, just be like Feynman," is not a repeatable strategy for success for most folks.

> Frankly, I just don't know very many grad students who come close to "shooting too high". I'm sure this professor has met a few, but is his concern really that they are shooting themselves in the foot, or is it that grad students who take chances for big breakthroughs (and hence, usually fail) are not very useful for advancing the career of professors?

My advisor used the term "doctoral Vietnam" for the really hard topics.

He talked about the severed heads and charred skeletons that line the paths to the top of what look like "hills."

It takes a tremendous amount of arrogance or foolishness to charge up those hills and think you're going to make it to the top.

For example, tangoing with P v NP is a classic way that brilliant students in computer science leave grad school completely dejected.

They probably could have made a good contribution had they focused on something achievable.

But, you raise an interesting question: if Ph.D. students aren't going to challenge the hard problems, then who will?

I don't have a good answer to that question.
Absolutely.

But seriously, this thread has already devolved into criticisms of state socialism, which are legitimate. State socialism sucks. You and I are talking about something else, but will inevitably get drowned out by 'the s-word.'
That wasn't the thrust of this essay, though. I think you're assuming to much and jumping to conclusions. This was just a simple essay to future students, that doesn't mean this is all he has to say on the subject.

It amazes me that he can make a point of mentioning the tough competition from China and India (where degrees are more “skill oriented”) and then go on to suggest students spend their college years pursuing a “liberal education” as he calls it.

It doesn't surprise me at all. The classics are probably the best place to discover a philosophy of work and strategy that is useful in this environment (and any future environment).

Also, people in developing countries work like hell because they have to to survive. They were given nothing. We were given everything. We're not facing nearly the same risks. You can't just tell these students "Hey! You will have to work hard because those other guys are." and expect them to jump. You have to change the way their mind works, and the classics have the material to do so. Otherwise, people who have grown up with an easy life have a tendency to squander what they have and become fat and lazy.
Loopt partners with Virgin America for Check-In Deals
Let's not forget "democratic socialism", which actually works fine as a modern, free society in about a dozen countries which are still very much anti-communist.

And of course there's "glenn beck" socialism, which is mostly an ad hom accusation.
If that's true (and it seems likely) how can you avoid writing blub in lisp? How can you ever know to what extent you're writing blub in lisp?
My essay justifying paying programmers a standard hourly wage is right next to the place where I wrote words advocating the practice.

Since I don't advocate that practice, there is no need for an essay on the subject.

I cannot read your mind, but are you making certain assumptions about what I believe based on the fact that I quoted certain sections of the wikipedia article about Socialism?

Please keep in mind that my words in this essay are quite explicit in stating that my beliefs are not Big S Socialism. I state that at the top and the bottom.
It had a purpose in the context of the novel. Why did it strike you as being cheap?
In that case, good teachers will avoid such students, and bad teachers will seek them out. This is actually quite a highly desirable result - we won't waste a good teacher on hopeless students, and a bad teacher can't harm them much.

That might be the case in a world where there was perfect information, no barriers to entry, and no significant asymmetries. In the real world though, a brilliant young teacher may get her start working with children damaged by, say, lead poisoning, and get no results. As a result, she'll be branded as incompetent. Since she's been branded as a bad teacher, she won't be able to get jobs in high performing schools with better students and will never get an opportunity to demonstrate her brilliance. Or she might be so discouraged by her failure that she leaves the profess altogether. You can imagine the equivalent problem faced by teachers of well-off children.
but I am wondering, are there many people out there who found their years of a PhD helped them much on their start-up?

sorry for the snarky comment, but i'm pretty sure 10000% of HNers will agree that a Ph.D. is definitely an anti-prereq for doing a start-up; in fact, it's probably the worst use of your time if your goal is to found a start-up (UNLESS you want to develop your Ph.D. thesis into a start-up, which is hard, since what is popular in research and what makes $$$ are largely uncorrelated).

that's like spending 3 years earning a law degree and then complaining that it didn't help you with your goal of becoming an Olympic swimmer
which has generated over $150,000 for charities

Wow, I had no idea. Serious props!
No, I say, "Live by the sword, die by the sword." With the benefits of patents come risks, and if you are not willing to manage those risks, then don't go get a patent in the first place.

How much time do companies spend putting patent numbers on their products? They can spend just as much time removing them. I say it is a simple cost of doing business.
It might work better than King's experiment, I would guess that Stephenson's natural audience is more willing to read things online.
Hiking!
I get exercise, I get fresh air, and most importantly I'm far away from my computer!

For any hobby, look at meetup.com. Getting out with other people keeps me motivated and its an easy way to learn new things.
Borders to Cut E-Reader Prices
Debt? What they have are assets (real estate priced out of the range of their kids) and pensions (gold-plated final salary, paid for by their kids taxes). The Boomers are unbelievably good at running this kind of generational heist.

Probably the kids of Gen X and the Millenials will still be working off the Boomer's debt (i.e. government deficit here in the UK).
Here's a new brain teaser. The warden is a mathematician, and instead of arranging them randomly, he ensures that there is a cycle of at least 51. However he's not too cruel, so he tells the prisoners that he has done this.

I'm pretty sure that since this is less random than the original version the survival rate would go up, but I haven't figured out how to do this.
First of all, I didn't say that I agree with Reginald. I'm just trying to make sure we can draw the line between respecting pg and hero-worship. If that's not where you're coming from, great!

To go back to your previous argument though, I don't view agreeing with pg (or even having read pg) as a pre-requisite to fitting in on HN. Quite the opposite in fact. I think someone who blindly accepts everything that pg writes is likely to not fit in to HN. Perhaps I jumped the gun in assuming that you feel otherwise. In fact, I hope that's the case!
It depends on your definition of violence.

Libertarian socialists and other anarchists would say that private property is violent; it requires that there be societal hierarchy to work, and for few to hold power over many. (oh, and don't forget that their definition of 'private property' is different than yours, because it's more narrow. They separate 'possession' and 'private property' into two different things.)

Captialists could describe the state control of hardcore statist socialism to be violent, as it's also few holding power over the free association of the general public.
That would actually be a decent application for StickyBits on UPC codes for popular products.
Things could well have changed - my experience was in the late 80's and 90's. Of the people I knew RAs usually took a bit longer to get their PhDs than full time students - say 4 years rather than 3. However, the prof running the lab I was in was pretty good about giving RAs time to do their thesis while getting paid from a project.
A Holodeck for deployments?
When you work out the consequences, "Libertarian socialism" is a terrible name for the concept described by Reginald. It feels more like a Capitalist hypothesis:

Hypothesis:
A group of workers jointly shouldering the risk and rewards of a venture
is more efficient than a "traditional" company.

This is true at small-scale: startups seem to be structured like collectives, and they regularly outperform large companies within a niche. However, large companies never take this structure. That suggests either there's a point where this becomes impractical, or nobody's been crazy enough to try before.
Indeed. If I recall correctly, Marx spends the first part of the "Communist Manifesto" speaking of forms of socialism that had existed beforehand (even if they weren't called as such).
PG Got Twitter So I Made Hacker News For Tweets
Not sure how practical it is, but it was fun to make!
I would imagine most serious data centers have either rack-mounted KVM's (the one that fits in a 1U) or some IP KVM.
I would hope so. Otherwise that tweet is telling Alexis, "you're cool and all, but that thing we're announcing next week is what I'm really excited about", which wouldn't exactly be the warmest welcome.

But I'm sure it is.
Congrats, YCombinator and Alexis! Great news.
Marx didn't coin 'Socialism,' though he did coin the word for a stateless society in which people work for the love of working and share things implicitly. It's 'Communism.' :)
Matt, I understand that you are writing primarily to your graduate students, but I also have to object to your first two points in general. I am a counterexample, as I took 12+ unnecessary math classes (getting A's in them) on my way to a successful PhD in theoretical computer science/crypto. I've found that my background in math has given me some tools and perspective that improve my research (I recognize when we are constructing a finite field in a round-about way, or when the abstraction we really want is a group action, or when Borel-Cantelli is really needed to make an argument rigorous, etc etc). I wouldn't have obtained these tools without a huge investment in time at some point.

Actually, I still find myself reading and learning unnecessary math papers most evenings as a hobby. I think it makes a huge difference.

Perhaps this is unique to mathematics, where theorem proving skills are portable. I certainly wouldn't use my situation to argue that PL grad students need to study French. But maybe the PL students should take an extra distributed systems course - and TA while they do it!
I am just discovering this website. Pretty slow (I guess something related to the HN effect maybe ?). The number of metrics they have is pretty impressive.
I think you'd find quite a bit of support from us Europeans, actually – even the ones, like me, who are probably a bit to the right of you politically. I'm not a card-carrying member of any political party, but the American rhetoric on socialism is just absurd.

(Full disclosure: my sympathies are on the market wing of mainstream European liberalism.)

Socialism as used in Europe means social democracy, means free enterprise with regulation and a robust welfare system, and includes the cooperative movement – and you'd be hard pressed to call the third largest private company in the UK (the John Lewis Partnership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership) some kind of entryist plot.

Obama a socialist? Don't make us laugh: he's barely a liberal. In Britain he'd be a Tory...
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Why do people believe that the iPad can't be used to create anything? There's apps available for all kinds of creative endeavors, and more appearing every day.
Most people - like 90% of people - don't know the difference.

Upmodded. Wouldn't it be nice if a by-product of our discussion was for one or more people to say to themselves, "Hey, Socialism isn't a single monolithic thing, there are shades of grey involved. The next time someone says that re-organizing health care is Socialist, I will ask them what kind of socialism is involved?"
You're right - http://twitter.com/Harjeet/status/22722432968
Ah, the only viable use for an iPad.

Except of course you can't write software for the iPad without spending money so screw it.
Are they ever going to fix their iPhone app? You cannot favorite a video, and keeps crashing.
With no disrespect,

I would be curious to know which side you would go with.

What exactly would you do to throw your lot with whichever side you would go with?

What would you be ready to sacrifice personally to make that side win?

would you be ready to give up some time? how much?

Would you be ready to give up some money? how much?

What if you were to look back deep into history and find out that the symibotic and parasitic (both going both ways) relationships between the two parties, the corporates and the people, always existed simultaneously?

Just curious.

(btw, what, why, how, they are my favorite words, sorry to bore you all with them1)
Are you aware of the history of the term 'libertarian?' It was originally used to describe anarchism, which is socialist. Statist and stateless socialism are very different beasts, and the term 'libertarian socialism' has a pretty long history of use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
Short Answer: Yes
I probably shouldn't be admitting it here, but I quit my job, got started and the whole bookkeeping, accounting thing is still a mess. But everything else, getting customers and delivering them what they need is going flawlessly. I am much more stressed out than I was when I was working at a job, but this stress feels good in a strange sort of way.

I need to get my paperwork side of things in order. Any recommendations for a good bookkeeper/accountant in Bay Area?

Basically my point is that you don't have to have everything aligned and perfect to get started. I think there will always be chaos and a bit of disorder, but you just have to keep ploughing through and things will fall in place.
Came here to point this out aswell. Google would not have been possible to grow out of a socialistic country.
Very interesting, although I've now had all thoughts distracted after checking out Trendrr's pricing page: the only options are a "Contact Us" enterprise package, and a $999/month option. Is there some reason why they don't offer something like a $100/month basic option for small companies?
how does this work? Tweets by ppl following pg?
"But I don't want to have that coffee-house argument where we spend all our time arguing definitions."
Mark Waid is Right
"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society"

How do you measure merit and the amount of labour one contributes to society? The only fair way I know of is capitalism where people get to vote with their money on whether or not you are providing value or not.

I would posit that merit is the amount of value you give to another. Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society.

It is also necessary to separate capitalism from corporatism. The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. There is no such thing as a corporation in terms of capitalism.

There is one flaw in capitalism that I am aware of but I still think it is the best system. That flaw is that it tends to reward those with capital. To have capital is to have an advantage over someone of equal ability. Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals.
Massinno is a good event close to you. Webinno is the biggest. There are tons of other small meetups and projects, especially in Cambridge.
The majority of data centers that I visited generally does had a 1U KVM in the rack.
I don't have the right to curate the direction of a discussion on my post any more than Big S Socialists have the right to tell me that I am not allowed to write code because the collective would experience a greater benefit if I were to stick to writing educational pamphlets about writing code.
Hey, I wrote the piece so I'm happy to address your question. First off, the training data was completely separate from test data, which was painstakingly gathered by hand. We wanted to make sure the data we were testing against was classified as accurately as possible. For training data, volume is more of a priority. Your other point is very well taken-- we'll probably use some metrics like that ourselves to look for improvements! Let me know if you've got any other questions, I'm happy to clear things up.
Patents are very specific so at worse you force your competitors to lookup the actual patent. In which case I find it hard to believe the actual damages exceed 10,000$ per product and patent combination.
I agree, except that (a) this should lead you to TA for longer in order to spend more time doing classes, but that is exactly the opposite of what grad students are told to do ("get to research as soon as possible") and (b) you should push the bounds of how much non-directly-thesis-related learning you can do while on your advisor's grant. You're a grad student, not a research technician, and only bad advisors will require you to do nothing but work directly toward immediate publications.
yes this is what i meant, am very excited to have alexis on board
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It's true. I tend to think of HN as being very America-centric, and while I know that's not true, it's easy to forget.
OK, but the title is "Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist" (big S) then you go on to make the distinction. So I am confused about what you are actually advocating here.

FWIW reading the rest of the comments on this page I guess you'd be more like a syndicalist than a socialist.
To be fair, note you're (accidentally) pulling up a subtle strawman: the original quote said "amount of labour", not "hours".
> Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces

`sys.excepthook` is how you can do that.

Without:

x = {}
def f():
print(x['foo'])
f()
# ...

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "stack.py", line 6, in <module>
f()
File "stack.py", line 4, in f
print(x['foo'])
KeyError: 'foo'

With:

import sys

def short_err(exc_type, exc, tb):
sys.stderr.write("error: tracebacks too long\n")

sys.excepthook=short_err

x = {}
def f():
print(x['foo'])
f()

#...

error: tracebacks too long

So don't worry about catching exceptions if you're just printing errors.
How much "throughput" do you need before stats like this start to mean anything? For example, if you only acquire 5 new users per month, can you really calculate a meaningful churn rate?
pg and YC have always been upfront about their goals and investment philosophy: If founders can get life-changing wealth ("solve the money problem"), YC will be successful. Nothing in that mentions local tech scenes.
If that were the case, I wonder what would be more exciting?
> The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil.

Many would, but a libertarian socialist would reject capitalism outright as being hierarchical.

> Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals.

Spot on.
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We're in the process of relaunching our platform, which is why we've temporarily blockaded signups. The sentiment engine described in the blog post will be used on our new version.

When we relaunch in a few weeks, there will be a more affordable option than $999 / month.