skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compare the specs on your dedicated servers to the VPSs you are looking at replacing them with. Keep in mind that you can always switch one portion of your infrastructure to a VPS to test performance, if needed -- for example, switch your database server to a VPS and see how it goes.

For general admin information, http://library.linode.com is a pretty good resource. One tip on using a VPS, if you aren't interested in expending extra effort as a sysadmin, is to get a Xen-based VPS (not OpenVZ). Linode is a popular choice around HN.

Be aware that using Amazon EC2 brings its own unique set of sysadmin challenges. It sounds like EngineYard might fit what you're looking for.

Also, take a look at Hetzner - http://www.hetzner.de/en/ for dedicated servers at dan order of magnitude less expense than you are currently paying.
I agree. Too much time worrying about fractions of a point. Get your business running to the point that the 1/2 a percent makes a recognizable difference.

We use Paypal and Chargify and they work well together. It saved us the time and additional expenses of setting up multiple payment accounts.

One observation, AMEX really doesn't play well with Paypal. We've had $25K payments and the next nothing from a $17K day. Amex is spotty in what they'll accept from PP.

If you have heavy AMEX usage then go with something else. The fees are also high for PP acceptance of AMEX (3.5%).
That's impressive...I guess. But can it build itself? :)
Agreed. With ReSharper, I don't recall a time where syntax was incorrect at compile time. It immediately indicates any syntax errors at coding time.

However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. The two closest features are:

1) Visual Studio has a 'Code Definition Window' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%...) that dynamically displays the contents of a method in a separate window pane. Although it is not inline, at least you can visually see the code without navigating away from the current source file.

2) In ReSharper, you can sort of fake it by calling the command 'Inline Method' and unchecking 'Inline all usages' and then Undo when done inspecting the code. However, that is a hack with its share of problems. I'd prefer a feature to toggle the inline method content in a preview mode without actually modifying any existing code.
I feel like this article and others which mention Tim Ferris start with a premise that isn't true for all people. They assume that 100% of our time is our own and we are free to use it as we choose.

For myself, I find that large portions of my time belong to someone else; my family, my job, my church. And once I carve out that time for others I am often left with only a couple hours here or there. And it seems laborious to fill that time with what would otherwise be considered work.
Nobody can blame a school which says that, I agree. Which law school was this?
JSConf Live 6: Docco, CoffeeScript, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js
Plone 3 was horrible, but I've heard better things about Plone 4. Post when you get started on it. I have a list of features that you'll need to get in the door of most enterprises, and a list of new features that will get you $10M in licenses your first year, virtually guaranteed.
The challenge of the entrepreneur
I don't see a meaningful difference between someone who says "RTFM" or "UTSL" and "just get used to the <x> way."

Asinine responses are asinine responses, regardless of who does them or why.
I spent a summer interning at a large financial data company, and I was surprised to see javascript was used quite a bit internally, so I can attest that "enterprise javascript" really does exist.

My coworkers wrote very good code, however the quality of my JS was terrible. Of course. I only knew C++ and Java at the time, so I treated javascript like it was "Java without types"
Many government jobs allow you to accrue vacation and sick time without limit. If you're retiring and cash out 30 years of unused sick leave, that's a big lump payment.
There are a few questionable statements and conclusions in this article, for example her belief that we shouldn't worry about students who score at the 'basic' level on NAEP is highly questionable, although admittedly it's a bad test. In general though I think she's correct that the idea that the free market will fix our school system is absurd. But she wildly overstates both the quality of public schools, as well as the possibility of improving them.

All in all though it's probably the best analysis of the movie I've seen so far, which in itself is kind of sad.
I've used one, but I don't own one. I do plan on owning one soon though. I was anticipating owning a 7" iPad early 2011, but now it appears that it'll likely be a 7" Android 3.0 device. I have owned a 10" iPad though.
5 Pillars of Rails Cluster Monitoring
Because the costs are way out of proportion to accomodate that single piece of #%@$%#, besides how would you like it when almost finished with your work that some boss's interpretation of your work is way of bounce causing you to have to do the thing again for a large part within even less time. It will make you hostile, just like most of us web programmers are towards IE.
Oh yes, IE has nothing to do with personal preferences, they refuse to stick with international standards and till recent get away with that behaviour, they will not in the future and you will hear less bitching from us when that future becomes today.
I was looking at adding Groupon to my daily deal mobile app but Groupon seams to be very specific about no aggregation. I wonder how yipit figured that out?
Some school districts aren't moving towards this methodology even though that's what's being pushed at the national level. The district my wife teaches in doesn't do this however the school she's stuck at this year is doing it to an extreme. They use a scripted curriculum. The teachers read from the script, the children provide a choral response and they repeat until every student gets it right. There's no need for teachers in that kind of a system since they aren't allowed to deviate from the scripts or supplement the scripts with other methods or resources. It's really depressing to see what some schools are resorting to to make AYP.
Classification Essay Approach in Writing
If you are assigned to write an essay that targets the process of grouping things, the best essay type is the classification essay. A classification essay can be written only if you know what things go together. With this knowledge you will be ready to write a good classification essay.
To what extent is this predicament a function of the mismatch between his understanding of the signal sent by the BC brand and BigLaw's understanding of the signal sent by the BC brand?
I am an "endurance athlete" that regularly rides my bike 60+ miles. It's not a serious physical pain, like when you twist an ankle - I know when I am doing my body harm. It's pushing past a major amount of discomfort in order to achieve a goal. Granted, doing so without proper nutrition and hydration can cause injury, however your body is better off when you push through your concept of "too much".

Seriously, my body used to tell me "oh god stop stop stop this is too much" after 30 miles of flat riding. Now it take 60 miles of hilly riding to experience that, and it's not nearly as strong.

I guess to sum it up, it isn't normal pain, it's more of a mental wall that you push past.
Indeed, Eclipse for Java is just unbeatable. I just recently started using it for C++ and it also works surprisingly well. I find myself much more productive than in a text editor, especially in a large code base I didn't know before.
Here are some better places to get real stats on browser usage:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

http://gs.statcounter.com/

http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/

Your own browser stats are skewed at this moment, I wouldn't base any important decisions on them.

One interesting tidbit from Statcounter:

In Europe FF usage has caught up to IE, they are both around 40%.

In North America IE has double the usage of FF, with IE at ~50%.
What's a better place to get real stats on usage than your own analytics?
b) why on earth would i want to avoid a chance to spend my money on a local mom n pop instead of sending my money directly out-of-town to some conglomerate?
Good question... From what I'm seeing, one of the things they do is connect potential patients with prescription writing doctors. Maybe this is a revenue source. Also they seem to list prices of current strains. Maybe they are taking a listing fee from the dispensaries.

These are just guesses, but it wasn't immediately clear how they generate revenue (at least to me).
You look like every other cyclist I've ever watched climbing a hill :) shameless plug while on this topic, you should check out my cycling site, http://ridewithgps.com - really cool if you have a garmin edge 500, 305 etc.
I'm assuming you're talking about web-based startups, to which I would have to answer "no."

However, in the more general definition of startup, "yes." Before I moved to SF two months ago, I ran a "home IT" (http://tylerthetechie.com) company in Minneapolis, MN and it was successful (especially considering I was in the heart of Geek Squad territory). I started it in June 2008 after graduating college. Empirically, the key differentiator among small businesses -- especially small businesses during tough economic times -- is service in its truest sense: the customer is #1.

There are plenty of tactics that will be more successful than others, but those will depend more on your business and product strategy. And a key component to your business strategy as a startup should be phenomenal customer service. If you truly listen to your customers, heed their feedback (and separate the wheat from the chaff), and build a product that solves a real problem, it's pretty unlikely you'll fail. (Unless, like me, you secretly wanted to so you could just move to SF already.)

So then. Are you looking to start a startup? If so, what?
This would be fine if it were obvious to all of us that GUIs have advanced as far as they can, and the remainder of the problems we see in them were inherent to the complexity and nondeterministic nature of the systems they manage.

But it's not like that. My IDE occasionally gets confused and forgets how to rename a file. Eclipse takes 3 minutes to refresh a source-file tree. People still use vim and emacs for things! There could be no clearer sign to me that IDEs are rubbish pieces of software than the fact that people keep falling back on tools that have barely evolved in 30 years.
Submitted?
Did ya submitted YC app? When?
It seems nobody paying attention uses it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807517
That's just an imperative program using "blocks" instead of "lines."

An innovative, usable visual programming language will introduce a new programming paradigm (probably based off of functional languages) that provides deep integration with the GUI and plays to its strengths, not just do a linear line->block transliteration into a graphical environment.

Although, Scratch is great for teaching kids about programming.
I can tell you this is also true for historious, Chrome is at 46%, Firefox 27%, Safari 20% and IE 3%. Opera is 1.8%, but that's probably all me :(

We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers and just bookmarks stuff. It's ugly, but it works, if our users want a better experience we recommend switching to a better browser.
I would probably bet most people approach JS like that. Which is probably related to the fact that there is so much bad javascript. People who don't really learn the language and just assume that they know [insert-statically-typed-language-here] and therefore can program javascript.
It's like trying to understand people who are incurious about technology.

Lego are joys to hackers! We like to think, modify, and build things.
The Best Lady Bug House
They may seem contradictory, but they aren't. Pain is wonderful. Pushing through new thresholds brings new truths.

As a person who regularly runs marathons and ultramarathons, I often get asked "Why?".

I usually offer the "joking" response "I like suffering" with a chuckle. Except it's not really a joke, I DO like the suffering. When I'm out there suffering on the trail, I learn many truths about myself. There's no facade or BSing. I either press on, or I quit/fail.

But you can't explain or rationalize this to a layperson who doesn't seek similar ventures. They aren't of the right mind. So you make it a "joke".

I love the quote "Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness", but I suspect it's for a different reason than what Dostoevsky meant.

You don't need to be an "elite athlete" to experience this or push past the pain. For some people, it's running a 5k.
Programming languages can't all be picked up that quickly, since semantics may differ a lot. You can't say "Give me any programming task and I'll pick it up".

What if you're a Web guy and the task is a C++ medical application? What if we're a finance company and the language is Haskell or ML? There's no way someone with no experience in a related language could become proficient without a fairly long training period in the company. What if I'm a hardware IP company and the language is Verilog?

To pretend that what takes many years and domain knowledge to become proficient in, you could just "pick up" on the go, is what sounds a bit entitled to me.
Semantic Services and Interacting Data
I just came here to post about it.. there are a lot of Opera engineers there replying to questions, so this may get interesting =)
They forgot to mention 42
The controls are really sluggish. Is that from the game or the underlying tech?
Weighted GPAs can be higher than 4.0: A+ grades in advanced courses are often given 5.0 points, and so on.
Thanks. Did he identify what he could have done differently so as to mitigate the risk?
Ride the inbox zero train
You'll note, that isn't what I was arguing.

You can have code that is not 100% correct, it still runs and generates reasonable answers, without crashing, and is very useful. Even code that has been worked on for years still has subtle bugs lurking in it.

Take the Linux kernel. It has bugs in it. Somewhere, there is a bug! I'm 100% sure of this. Same with Windows, OSX.

A non-trivial piece of software with a bug is a tautology. We don't say that these products are broken, because then all software products would necessarily be broken.

Sure, in software development we are doing our damnedest to approximate correctness, but we never get there.

A tool that writes approximately correct code would be very useful.
Yup. However, from MarcoPolo's page:

There are known issues with Snow Leopard:

WiFi evidence source and ToggleWiFi action do not work

Bluetooth may not work, or may cause crashes
Dear OP, it's not so much about what you know. It's about who you know. Had I spent half of my programming hours networking with people, I'd be richer, healthier, and happier today. And I say this as someone who really loves programming.
...part of it is the fact that non-school factors play a HUGE role in achievement.

If this is true (I believe this is likely to be the case), we should invest vastly less in education than we currently do. Rather than trying to find good teachers, we should just aim for the cheapest warm bodies we can find, not to mention speeding up the process (e.g., graduate at 14).

This belief lies behind the signalling model of education - education adds little value but signals to employers that value was already present.
You shouldn't be playing shooters at work ;)
The cause of Obesity
I'm the founder: ask me anything.
They might be basic, but I think the stock iPhone apps are a long way from being shitty in the same sense as Sprint's bundled NASCAR app.
Do you think Chrome usage at 40% is not bogus?

I agree that your own stats are the best source, but not when you've only been public for less than a month and half your audience is coming from the likes of HN and Techcrunch.
How about the fact that I'm not interested in paying you to learn - in either time or money.

I might invest in that if you are worth it, but you need to prove that to me first. Assuming that I either am or that I should be paying for you to learn a new language when there are thousands of applicants that I don't have to do this for is the sense of entitlement that I'm talking about.
I've been using Opera for many years. I'm so used to its features that I have a really hard time using any other browser.

Some people think it has site compatibility issues. That was certainly true back in versions 7, 8 and even 9, but with the latest 10.6 builds, I rarely, if ever, find a site that doesn't work. If it doesn't it's usually due to browser sniffing rather than actual functionality problems.

My favorite features are:

(screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/114028/OperaScreenshot.png )

1. Left-side tabs - I have a wide-screen monitor, why waste the vertical space on tabs?

2. Visual tabs - thumbnails of the pages on the tab. I can't get along without tab thumbnails!

3. Speed Dial - My top 20 sites sitting right on the new tab screen. If a site isn't on my speed dial, I probably don't visit it

4. Address bar - type in anything and it'll search bookmarks and previously visited sites, including the site's CONTENT, not just the URLs.

5. Custom searches - Just right-click in any search text box and create a new search. Assign the search a shortcut (g=google, i=google images, wi=wikipedia, tv=tv.com, etc)

6. Built-in IMAP/POP3 client - I use Opera's built-in email client exclusively for personal email. The email search engine is extremely fast. Type in any word and get a list of emails in less than a second, despite having 25,000 emails indexed. Also, whenever I get email I get a notification right in my browser window. The sidebas constantly shows me the number of unread emails, so no need to open Gmail in a tab to see if there's new mail. I can also click on mailto: links and they work =)

7. Mouse gestures - Although I only use one, I can browser with out it. I use right-click to left-click flip gesture to go back a page all the time. I find myself doing it in every other browser and it takes me time to figure out why it's not working

8. Opera Turbo - I travel a lot and use a lot of crappy hotel internet, so Turbo is great because it compresses all the pages before downloading them, making my browsing much faster on the slow connection

9. Built-in RSS reader - Any page that has an RSS feed shows an icon in the address bar. Click it to add the feed right into the Mail panel. I have a whole list of RSS feeds I read right in the browser every day

10. Built-in ad-blocker - Right-click on any site and choose "Block Content" then click on the content to block. Easy.

I think most of these features are unique to Opera, and if not, many were copied or implemented by as extensions to other browsers. Does anyone else do visual tabs on the left?
How do you know whether it was not supporting IE and a broken bookmarklet that caused your IE numbers to be so low? If I used IE and your service had a poor experience I'd probably use another bookmarking service.

edit: also, if the service is still new, you might largely be getting early adopters and not supporting IE could inhibit growth.
Your own are going to be best right up until you hit a site that skews them - like "we had a few posts on Hacker News".
> Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal...

I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...
Ah, that's true. I didn't notice it skimming.

See you in North Carolina!
"I think Ravitch should be applauded for arguing an unpopular position with vigor."

Technically her position is actually the more popular one, it's just that you'd never know it because the media has teamed up with silicon valley and wall street to push charter schools and standardized testing. Anyway there is some more analysis on the previous thread linked below, but the fact is that though both Ravitch and the movie make a lot of valid points, neither is fully correct and you're never really going to understand why without reading books. Hacker News is fun and all, but there's no way you're going to understand the last 50 years of educational research after reading a few dozen comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774156
Personally I have found that if I relax and enjoy life when I can, I get a lot more done when I do decide to work on a personal (or work related) project.
On a somewhat related note, if you haven't read it yet, "Born To Run" is a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...
I'm not sure you'd want to do that. Here's why:
It would surely require some fairly severe changes in the Lua runtime.

In VisualWorks Smalltalk, I'd just start off by setting objects immutable and using a top-level exception handler on the mutation exception. Alternatively, one could also use forwarder proxies.

This avoids the dependency update chain but adds an extra layer of indirection, which will presumably be a hashtable or so, which could impact performance quite severely and take up a lot of memory.

For building application servers, there should be a mechanism to handle this sort of eventuality efficiently. Such mechanisms are also very useful when building things like Object Relational frameworks. This may be counter to Lua's design goals towards being small and highly embeddable.
Not trying to be mean, but looking at the resume, I went straight to the 'projects' section.

Everything else can be so much hot air - but projects speak for themselves.

The first project promises an online development blog - but the link to the blog is dead, and google doesn't find it.

The second project claims he architected and implemented a full game engine. Having a quick play of the game (http://www.andrewhorner.com/sds/ ) reveals it doesn't really work.

It looks pretty, but it doesn't really do anything, its not playable, its not finished, even though the resume implies it is.

That doesn't look good.

The reverse job application was a great pitch to get people to look at your resume, but then you have to make sure they've got something to see. Its great to be able to get attention, but you need to capitalise on it when you do.

And if you are going to be unemployed for 2 years, at least get a finished project to put on your resume, that'd go down a lot better.
While that method of teaching (direct instruction) is boring for teachers, and makes them easily replaceable, it is highly effective.

Some info: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml

Remember, the goal of schools is to educate children, not provide enjoyable high-wage employment for teachers. Or at least, that is the stated goal.
Groan - reminds me of the PEDs issue in baseball. Perfect grandstanding issue.
Definitely. :)
Sluggish in what way?
I've spent my career mostly at startups, and I see a pattern in which some critical piece of code is written by one person. Over time, or because the author doesn't value (or recognize) clean abstractions, the code becomes impenetrable, and only the author can maintain it.

But I can see how a series of owners can produce the same situation.