skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A VM is a constant time investment, doing it for every language is linear with the number of languages.

Unless there's some serious increases in clock speeds, I'm not sure doing it for every language is worth it. As it is, VMs are a great, general purpose system that are easy to set up, use, and replicate.
Thanks! We do what we can (we're very busy these days!), and only hope to be able to do more of this sort of thing in the future.
What kind of traffic are you getting so far?
Agreed, spent the last couple of days doing exactly that with Compass/SCSS and to be honest I hate the thoughts of ever having to hand-code CSS anymore.

A couple of snags I did find with Compass and gradients (and SASS/SCSS specifically) is that 1) it doesn't support multiple backgrounds curently e.g. adding an image and layering an RGBA gradient on top of it. It's not widely supported by browsers anyway but it can be used to great effect. 2) the mixins currently assume that you are using your gradients as backgrounds only but they can be used in other ways.

Despite these minor hiccups you're still far better off using Compass/SCSS for your styles than doing it by hand, and the author Chris Epstein is incredibly responsive and helpful.
Well, the other big advantage being that the OS has no idea about the particular kinds of data you want to store, whereas Redis has quite a bit more data to work with. But yes, vmtouch looks useful for these types of situations (thanks).
Thx for the kind words!
We need an "Ask HN" for cool tools. Maybe there's already a SO question about it. I hadn't heard of vmtouch and probably tons of other things people here use.
It also depends on your algorithms. Some algorithms are amenable to "running tallies," so a third possible approach would be to store and update various values based only on the aggregate past data plus the incremental data, instead of looking back through the entire history and recomputing when a new piece of data comes in. This of course depends on whether or not this is even theoretically possible with what you're computing.
Anybody know what it is about the pro account that makes it worth paying for?
Strange Maps: The Great European Shouting Match
But do it right.

People who have never used a diversity of web APIs (>= 20) should never be allowed to design them, or I will personally fly to their dungeons and strangle them with their own lousy documentation strings.

Test your "API" with a variety of languages, that are not C++ clones. If you can respond with a header value, don't make me parse a body (i.e. responding with 200 when the body says "error".) Accept whitespace liberally. Space should mean \\s+. Not just a particular " ".

Version your API. Don't obsolete stuff willy nilly. Even if you're clueless, it's not too hard to run three instances of the endpoint app, and route requests to a per-version instance with URL rewriting proxy.

Anybody who has ever sat in the specification committee of a "microformat" should never EVER be allowed near APIs that others might use. Specification-creep is real; one draft spec by 3-guys in their dorm room creeping into another spec by some other guys. I can cope with IETF and W3C pulling stuff out of thin air, but I will NOT tolerate being told to read several draft-0.01a.txt specs from 2003, for a myriad of "social identity" crap that no one, but those whose name appears on the first page, cares about.

Also, offer a sandbox, and dummy instances with mock data. Otherwise I will rape your live servers in a tight, unrolled loop (Srsly, I am on a fat pipe, running native x64 code; your instance of Jetty or WEBrick will never know what hit it.)

Can you tell I have been debugging?
We also sell vanity tiny URL shrinkers over at http://tinyarro.ws -- revenue is light but there are a good number of people who want control over their own domain shrinker.

The hosting costs for high levels of redirection are obviously quite light overall.

TinyArrows was more of a silly/fun project to see what we could do with unicode-based URLs. But we figured we might as well let people run their own domains off of it since we already supported so many domains.

We've also discussed with some marketing firms the idea of getting into meat-space advertisement. Basically where having a tiny URL people can visit with a smartphone (to see videos, etc) could over time become a great backup for stores with reduced retail salepeople or for home virtual tours, etc. QR codes aren't as universal as URLs are, so there's some mild opportunity here.
While my brain agrees with your position, my heart tells me that it's more likely that you never make it to 500K users if you focus on security.

I'd welcome a counter-example: can you name a succesful startup that died because of lack of early security?

The way it seems to work today on the Web is succeed first, get the money, then fix whatever needs to be fixed.
Free Photoshop Express App from Adobe
I agree completely about the complexity of monitoring solutions for small teams with fluctuating applications. However, something as simple as htop running on an extra monitor would have alerted you of this issue long before downtime resulted.
Reading this – all the precision and thoroughness – inspired the same wry admiration as learning the story of Operation Babylon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera

The press sensationalism is, as always, exhausting, so it's great to read Schneier's balanced account. I am dying to know, for real, who set all of this up. Meeting the team who put it together would be a blast, too.
This is an answer to your request for "good places to look" rather than learning user interfaces: I've been curating a list of "clean sites I like the look of" since '06:

http://www.delicious.com/jashmenn/cleansitesilikethelookof
But continued Linux support is clearly a possible cancellation.
I am a vi bigot and I loved it.
While the details are very interesting, there are still many questions to be answered (on both sides):

- how difficult would be to bring up read-only replicas? (hopefully that should take much less than 11 hours + 6hours)
- why the 3rd shard could accommodate only 5% of the data?
- how can you plan capacity when using the "wrong" sharding? (basically leading to unpredictable distributions)

I have posted the rest of the questions here: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1265191137/foursquare-mongod... as I hope to get some more answers.
If you have a programmatic way of determining the best match for an arbitrary long tail query, then haven't you already solved your search problem?

I suppose if you had a large enough (more or less hand crafted) sample set you could use machine learning techniques to optimize the weighting of each field, but I don't know if that would get you an answer any faster than tweaking human-designed weightings.

Crowdsourcing search result feedback might be another way to make this scale.
They still have to ship something successful by themselves after spin off to see if it was a successful spin off.
Mind sharing the rest of your tools? :-P
At this point with the Flash debate there'd be no culture fit.

Also there was a ton of tension between these companies early in the decade when Adobe was dragging its feet to do Photoshop for OSX.
I am glad the mobile world is blowing up in global thermo nuclear patent war. I hope that it will be so bloody that it leaves a bad taste in everyone mouth for a long time in regards to software patents. I am happy to see a little guy win who was actually trying to push software based on his patent rather than a patent troll or Apple but I would have rather he had not had a case due to software not being patentable. I think the mobile space highlights the damage that software patents do.
More like failed entrepreneur who turned bitter. First blamed Microsoft, now Apple. Maybe he should blame himself.
SendGrid - sends emails with high deliverability http://sendgrid.com/

Braintree Payment Systems - charges credit cards http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/

Server Density - monitors our servers from the inside http://www.serverdensity.com/
I've spent more money through Envato sites (Themeforest specifically) than any other web site except for Ebay. I am glad to pay for the quality products they provide (through the designers of course). Keep up the good work.
The funny yet encouraging thing is that I'm just passing the wisdom: I've heard of vmtouch here on HN :)
Better alternatives to node.js?
Is there a better alternative to node.js? Something that still provides server side Javascript, but has built in HTTP compression, built in SSL, and built in support for multiple cores? You know, the essentials. Kind of tedious to have to code that stuff into an application - it's meant to be handled by the web server, not really the business of the application.
Interestingly, he was a victim of the Unabomber.

From Wikipedia:

In 1993, Gelernter was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, who at that time was an unidentified but violent opponent of technology, dubbed by the press as "the Unabomber".[2] He recovered from his injuries but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
Are you sure? I can't find any confirmation, for example, they are listed as MS subsidiary on wikipedia.
performs insanely well on FF. even after doing it for like 60 seconds the performance never degrades.
A slightly less positive tagline would be appropriate...
This, at first sight, sounded like a brilliant thing
Awww come on, it's easy to say from an outside perspective. Regardless, the problem was handled well in the end, and we all get the benefit of understanding these limitations better. I think us tech people got the good side (information) out of this ordeal :)
Really excited for this. I didn't apply for Startup School so this is a great consolation. See you guys there!

EDIT: They're also going to be in Boston. Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769801
aresant's last link is very interesting. I have a suspicion that a lazy lawyer posted that thread, and never bothered up to follow up on licensing.

$625M later...
Ahh, nostalgia.
Does ROR deployment deprive YOU of your sleep?
This makes me very happy, thanks!
Posts like this misunderstand how decisions about corporate logos are made. You need to back-stab the ad agency and cozy up to the marketing VP to change the logo.

Posting like this on the web just invites the marketing VP and the account rep to go out to dinner and laugh at your feeble attempts, over a couple of stiff drinks.

It really is exactly like Mad Men.
Spies Like Us
How is creating the local server environment on RoR or Python/Django easier than PHP/anything?

I've been developing locally for years and while I can't mimic the exact hardware of the live server, I wouldn't be able to do that regardless of stack I chose.
I work on a team of 2 where I'm responsible for a handful of servers. I chimed in because I'm in a similar position, I've been looking for a monitoring solution for a while now. Things like nagios and zenoss are over kill, but lack of time has prevented me from finding an ideal solution. That said, I keep htop open and running at all times, and its saved my ass on more than one occasion. I say htop because of the color coding it provides, if things start going red it attracts my attention.
Value advantage and cost advantage are a comparative advantage. Strategy is usually about competitive advantage.
If you were going to compile it yourself, it's just missing M4, autoconf, automake and OpenSSL. Otherwise you can use it's Appbrowser (ab in micro, the CLI version) to install Ruby in about five minutes.
25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems
Three words:

Pepsi Gravitational Field
There's getting to be so many patents that it might be harder to determine if original software you've written is patented than actually developing it.
Not that it is ready yet but, I and a few other developers are working on an invitation only site where existing members can invite new developers and designers. They will amass a reputation score based on projects thy complete from project sponsors as well they will have a recommendation score that will be calculated on the reputation score of developers and designers they invite.

If it gets too low we assume that their opinion on other talent is not that good and remove their permission to invite people. It is our hope that it will promote a community of the best of the best.

Anyway, the reason I post is that we had discussed providing location based searches that listed people based on their reputation. It does not help you know and for that you could use http://www.hnhackers.com/ .

They allow location search and it is a site composed of freelancers that frequent HN. I don't know if that is a substitute for reputation but there are a lot of talented people that frequent this board.
Actually if the rumor from the front page is correct Microsoft want to buy Flash (and the rest of Adobe).
It's not pretentious, it's just what happens with a big budget rebrand. I don't know if I can explain my take on all this that well, but I'll try: You can either do something at one level, playing off gut-feel/fairly safe assumptions and get it 80% right, or spend 10 times as much, do research and maybe get it 95% right.

That said, in an argument, designers will talk about all those lovely theoretical things they were trained to do. Then, most of them will just sit down and muck around with fonts, shapes, etc until they have something that fits the bill.

Same is often true with web design (my gig). You can use your experience, gut, etc to create a $10k site, or you could spend $100k to get something not miles dissimilar but involving actual usability testing (instead of gut feel decisions), buckets of documentation, etc. You could spend $100k on a single page microsite if you wanted to take everything to the extreme with endless focus groups, eye-tracking tests, etc. Or you could just put the branding in the top left, use buttons that look like buttons, remember what worked from last time you did some A/B tests, make the text legible, etc.

It's a funny game. Most of the time I estimate/quote by rolling dice rather than spending hours trying to guess the budget of a client or the level of polish they want to pay for with a site.
TiVo successfully defends patent for "time-warp" DVR
I think he's using a bit of hyperbole and sarcasm against the processes that would actually be conducted. As per other feedback - all of the activities presented here are pretty reasonable for a decent design project. He's just added a bit of snark to fit the context of the response.

It also ties in with other items here re: Design <> photoshop. Creating a graphic is to design what fitting a tyre is to performance motorsport - an element, an important one, but hardly the entire scope of what goes into it.
Plus white-labelled services.
In 10th grade, we had some security software on our computers in high school called 'Fortress' (circa 1998). I had a multi-media project due for a class that I never did. I compiled eofspresentation.exe in VB that did one thing:

Popped up a dialog, "Cannot run due to security"
> how difficult would be to bring up read-only replicas?
> (hopefully that should take much less than 11 hours
> 6hours)

Bringing up read only replicas would have been easy, but our appservers are not currently designed to read data from multiple replicas so it wouldn't have helped. We hope to make architectural changes to allow for this sort of thing in the future but aren't there yet.

> - why the 3rd shard could accommodate only 5% of the data?

The issue wasn't the amount of data the 3rd shard could accomodate, but the rate at which data could be transfered off the 1st (overloaded) shard onto the 3rd shard.

> how can you plan capacity when using the "wrong"
> sharding? (basically leading to unpredictable
> distributions)

We weren't really using the "wrong" sharding. And even the uneven distribution we saw (about 60%/40%) wasn't totally horrible. Not 100% understanding your question here.
Developing in the exact same environment as you deploy in should be standard practice.
shitty C++ ... really?
Chargify ( http://chargify.com ) -> recurring payments.

Campaign monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com )-> email campaigns.

Github (http://github.com ) -> vcs.

Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) -> bug tracking.

Tender ( http://tenderapp.com ) -> customer support.
The development suites: Visual Studio, plus those all CAL licensing fee.
Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...
A lot of the reactions to entrepreneurial success online remind me of the response to criticism of contemporary art:

Contemporary Art = I could've done that + Yeah, but you didn't.
The "give a crap" factor at 10gen is nothing short of amazing. The company I work at has been using Mongo for a while, and anytime we've had an issue, Eliot has been right there to help us. Mongo is a great product, but like anything, it has its limits. Learning those limits and taking the time to plan your infrastructure is a mandatory part of adopting any technology, and Mongo is no exception.

On a more technical note, it would be nice to have a way to compact indexes online without having to resort to doing so on a slave, but Mongo is a minimum two server product to begin with, so it's not the end of the world. Overall it's a great datastore, and it's only going to get better in the next few years.
Brand Devolution: what do logo changes (like the Gap's) mean anyway?
Nearly all of the technical merits (writing, acting, production values) are better with The Social Network, though the leads in Pirates do well. Pirates tells a much broader story, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates make more interesting characters. (Woz and Paul Allen are played straightforwardly, and Ballmer is recognizably Ballmer.)

It's quite notable that Pirates tells a broader and more interesting story than The Social Network despite The Social Network being far more fictionalized.

If you're looking for parallels to contemporary startups, The Social Network is a bit more on point--Pirates goes farther back into the founders' backgrounds and forward into the lives of Apple and Microsoft as established companies. But both are still great.
I didn't add anything to what's already out there (I don't exactly have the patience for reverse-engineering). The most comprehensive overview of the replay format is the wiki[1] for Lauri Virkamaki's phpsc2replay project. Head and shoulders above everything else I found, which were mainly random forum threads.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/phpsc2replay/w/list
I'm curious to know how the technology is used after a patent suit like this. Do companies like Apple usually license the patented technology or do they remove the offending code?

I imagine there could be a lot more money involved if the appeals are shot down.
I just don't get that. It's not like MS have the superior computer scientists and the rest of us are little children. Adobe has the money to pay people to solve those problems. The Flash situation on Mac and Linux is just ridiculous.
Also worth a quick look: the new Gap Logo sulks on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/GapLogo
So I do some consulting for an equity research group and was at an event they put together for a bunch of investment banks, hedge funds etc. These guys would keep asking "what about HTML5?" "I hear HTML5 is the way to go" "Is HTML5 going to kill Adobe"? Much of this was hot on the heals of the iPad announcement.

I kept wondering "Which damn part of HTML5?" the Canvas element? Web Sockets? Video? I think this is where the confusion lies HTML5 isn't a single technology as much as a collection of cool HTML enhancements.
A Generic Server-Side Google Analytics PHP Client
Adobe Updater wanted to be updated the other day. I had to laugh.
Program or Be Programmed
I think what you are looking for is called "memoization" and is common in many functional programming languages such as Lisp; however many other languages have this readily available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization ; see the list of implementations at the bottom - there are ones for Lisp, Python, Perl, Java, etc.
Stupid tiny iPhone arrows... Sorry I downvoted you when I was trying opposite. I upvoted 2 other post to rectify.
"Node.js is an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine. It is intended for writing scalable network programs such as web servers." [1]

Node.js is not a web server, and therefor it should not have web server functionality built in to it. You are able to build a web server using Node.js if you so desired. What you are looking for is a Server Side JavaScript WebServer which there are a few of - none that I have tried.

Ones to look at include Firecat [2], Appweb [3], EJScript [4] and jsws [5]. These were found with a google search for
"javascript web server".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodejs
[2] https://launchpad.net/firecat
[3] http://appwebserver.org/
[4] http://ejscript.org/
[5] http://code.google.com/p/jsws/
Did you ever get a grade?
I see it now, much better! Thanks for being so responsive.
Another Youtube Concept Site To Hit A Million Mark in 10 days?
yeah, that was also my first association when I read Gelernter. remembered him from the movie Das Netz:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Netz
Wow, that had me worried for a second ...
you don't need to keep their entire history in ram, you only need to keep their check-in history of places that they are on the verge of becoming mayors to in ram, (you are one day away from becoming mayor of xyz) and that you can calculate offline, and all you need to do is see if onedayaway:xyz:user_id => true on checkins, which you can keep in memcache
I didn't mean "wrong" in the full sense of the word. What I actually mean is that sharding based on user id will most probably not give/guarantee predictable distributions of the writes generated by users (basically there can be no guarantee that chunk#1 of users will always generate the aprox. same amount of data as chunk#2 of users).
Does anyone have any legal knowledge on what this means for software products like Windows Media Center?
I would not count Rare as a good acquisition: Microsoft bought them for $375M, and they haven't produced a single hit since. To put that in perspective, Bungie (a much smaller studio than Rare at the time) was acquired for less than $40M, and their games and IP generated over $1B (and counting) in revenue for Microsoft.
I agree. Microsoft shouldn't be concerned about the fact that no one likes their products because they make so many different products that no one likes.
The argument that the designers (/entrants) benefit isn't anything other than disingenuous posturing.

Crowdsourcing doesn't give many people an 'opportunity' to try something new - it provides the client with cheap design.

There's a very clear motivation behind providing design in this way, and the designer is always going to lose out.
Just like how there are a million lines of code that could be improved, there are always a million design tweaks that can happen. Nothing is ever perfect the first time.

As a designer, I often have just as much work as the engineer. I also implement a lot of the front end including css, html, and JS so it's not just pure photoshop.
Is Microsoft running out of steam?
Carsonified team actually put up the original video of Fred's talk from FOWA 2010 Miami, with the same points: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/fred-wilsons-10-golden-prin...
Ask HN: What's the link to that flash CDN/Cloud host benchmarking tool?
I remember a while back, somebody posted in the comments of a thread a benchmarking tool for various CDNs and Cloud hosts, based on a 1mb download file.

Does anyone remember that link? Thanks.