skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't creating striped RAID arrays of EBS volumes add to the cost and remove the ability to do snapshots? How do you get a consistent snapshot of multiple striped EBS volumes?
Another control panel complaint: DNS. For some reason beyond me you have to choose a server just to configure DNS. Added on top of the fact that the control panel is really slow, it just becomes a pain to use.
As a heavy user of EBS, I heartily concur. The ability to move EBS volumes around is handy but you pay it back in inconsistent, poor-to-mediocre performance. Good luck.
There are a ton of these. Here is one of several times HN has talked about them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700143

Actually, "site:news.ycombinator.com swoopo" goes on for a while on Google, and that's just one such site...

Edit: Ah, and from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978097 we get http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/ . Yow.
The pseudocode programming process (PPP) described in Code Complete strikes me as quite similar to the concept of literate programming.

In PPP the idea is to start with pseudocode in the form of source code comments that start with a very high-level overview of the task being accomplished, written in plain English (or whatever human language), which is then broken down into smaller and smaller constituents.

When the explanation can no longer be decomposed, the actual code is written.

That approach seems like it would suit the literate programming style very well, and in particular would make the documentation generated by Docco easy to read and comprehensive.

That said, I've never really used PPP and prefer TDD instead.
CPU is a major bottleneck for Rackspace Cloud. All instance sizes get the same 4 cores and about the same compute resources. CPU performance is roughly the same on a 1GB cloud server as an 8GB cloud server, you are just paying for more memory. Rackspace also uses ONLY Opteron 2374 2.20 GHz processors. EC2 on the other hand offers linear CPU performance improvement on larger sized instances. EC2 also uses a heterogenous hardware ranging from Opteron 2218 or Xeon E5430 for m1 instances; Xeon E5410 for c1 instances; Xeon X5550 for m2 instances and Xeon X5570 (hyper-threaded to 16 cores) for the cluster compute instances. EBS on the cluster instance is also much faster than local disk IO in the Rackspace Cloud based on testing I've done (due to non-blocking 10G network). Here are a couple of references for this:

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...
I don't know; they keep that data pretty close to their chest. You wouldn't get up into the eye-watering RSU/option grant territory until you made director, but the engineers (and team leads, &c.) are well compensated. The stock going berserk has changed the equation, of course.

EDIT: Oh, how about I answer the question? Compensation is highly discretionary, so it varies pretty widely. But the real cheese is in equity grants, and those are heavily weighted towards management. A common complaint is that there's no realistic path up out of being an "individual contributor".
I am not sure that it is completely honest to label this as a horror story about 'outsourcing' per-se. I take it as a horror story about lack of skills, unprofessionalism, and mismanagement. After all, who picked the QA team?
While this is disconcerting, I wouldn't make any business decisions based on such a claim. The idea that EC2 is "owned" without Amazon knowing about it is closing in on absurdity. I've worked directly with Amazon as an outside vendor and they are very security concious, to the point of near paranoia.
I'd love to hear more about this...
Indeed. Moving up by starting a company and being acquired back into the fold is a great way to go.
Yup... 31 here.
Battlestar Galactica Online
Big Cable Is Bleeding: 500K+ Subscribers Lost In Q3
If you're not excited about something, don't do it - even at Apple.
<quote>Amazon has a CDN and servers distributed globally. This is important to Mixpanel as websites all over the world are sending us data. There’s nothing like this on Rackspace.</quote>

Actually, Rackspace cloud offers CDN services with Cloud Files through Limelight, although it does not support some features that CloudFront does like CName and streaming.
I got 21. I have a feeling that if I took this test a bunch of times (with different faces) that I'd probably get better at it.
World's First Twitter
Just to note: Mercury is incredibly hard to get to, and it's almost impossible to maintain a stable long-term orbit there, at least in terms of our fuel technology. Forget Lagrange points, even just orbiting it is hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mercury

The U.S. has a probe on the way:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html
The only real measure is benefit - cost. Sometimes quality costs more than bugs. Take a simple editor macro. You record some simple set of actions and have the editor apply them en-mass. They may not be correct, but just getting the job done likely outweighs the faults.
I've worked with Amazon Web Services security people in the past, and while they're not perfect (nobody is) I have always had the impression that they take security seriously. AWS has many very large customers, including the US government and companies handling HIPAA-restricted data; based on the assumption that Amazon employees don't want to be thrown in jail for 10 years, I think it's safe to say that if EC2 is is "0wned" as you claim, it's certainly not well known within Amazon.
A bit of a weak blog post, but I found this interesting:

"No quality applicants from Craigslist - Even if they were qualified, every email came off as spam. Needless to say they did not receive a response."

Eh, what? Care to explain what made the inquiries spam-like? I've been responding to a select few CL job postings for part-time and/or telecommuting gigs, trying to drum up a little extra work. I know it's par for the course in this economic climate, but I'm getting virtually zero responses back. If you're gonna request an email response, at least have the damned courtesy to send a response (even an auto-responder would suffice), so I at least know my message didn't get eaten somewhere along the way.

And speaking of methods used to weed out applicants... there was one shop that gave me a login/password to some testing site, and I took this online evaluation that was some bizarre hybrid of a Mensa exam, the SAT, and a Myers-Briggs personality evaluation. I was like, WTF?!?

Still, it's a little disheartening. I don't know if my resume sucks or there are a bunch of really high caliber people pounding the pavement these days, but sometimes I feel like a total schmuck. I acknowledge that there's the non-zero probability of me being a total moron and nobody's been honest enough to clue me in, but I'd like to think I'm pretty damned qualified some at least some of the jobs I'm inquiring about.
What does he do for marketing?
Why do you think Google launched Chrome? They certainly don’t want to let another company have too much power over their unique source of income.
Show HN: Spreadsheets using Python - Have you seen this?
Looks like Apple enabled non us/uk iads for a day or two and then turned them off. I presume they were testing for a later launch.

$6 for 400 impressions is $15 cpm which is amazing. You can't complain about it just because you have a low volume app. If you add default ads from other networks u can fill your intentional inventory now but the Cpm will be much worse.

Its like saying I just sold one book in my online retail store so online retail is a joke.
I haven't done controlled experiments, but anecdotally it makes absolutely no difference.
(Too late for an edit, but I'm going to roll back the Disqus integration - at least until I settle on a community involvement strategy.)
Schematics. Now! ;)
Well getting a Visa in the USA was really hard, and I just gave up, in the meantime I was working as a contractor and flying in and out of the country every third month to renew my Tourist visa. This is the worst scenario, but it works. I also use this technique during long trips to Thailand and China. If you do this try to hire a medical insurance that cover hospitals and medicines outside of your country. It also a good idea to look ahead and see what vaccinations you are going to need.

I am a EU citizen, so I can work in any country of the EU (Schengen countries actually). Romania was not a full EU country at that time, so I applied for a visa, it was quite easy, but requires a lot of paperwork, in my case the girl I was dating at that time did it for me.

Anyway the first thing that I always do is to call the embassy or consulate of the country that I want to visit at ask for information, each country has its own laws. In some embassies they would provide you the contact address of law firms that are specialist in this.
I'm not sure there is any proof Rackspace Cloud is any more secure than EC2. AWS offers a Virtual Private Data Center service (VPC) which is highly secure. Rackspace Cloud has nothing like that. AWS also offers firewall management functionality which Rackspace Cloud does not. Amazon.com is run out of the same data centers as AWS.
This is a rather unpleasant review of a service we were about to move over to.

For companies that have moderate performance requirements (e.g. visitors in the range of 30k or 40k per day across a range of web apps and sites), reasonable but by no means expert level server administration skills, the need for a redundant environment to satisfy SLAs with clients (e.g. two app servers + load balancer + master/slave db servers), and the desire to focus mainly on software development instead of server admin, what companies does the HN community recommend?

We've been considering Rackspace Cloud and Linode, but are open to any suggestions. We also have a quote for a standard, managed four-server + hardware load balancer deployment in front of us but it is pricey ($3000+/month).
Wow, that's a brutal under-the-bus-tossing. But well deserved. Most of the points are spot-on.

I've operated a several dozen machine fleet for 2+ years on EC2 and I can tell you that the number of times boxes have gone down never to come back (which most people tend to think happens regularly on EC2) is incredibly small.

We actually run a Hadoop cluster (including DFS) on a spot instances. We never lose the spot bid. We pay way less than the going rate for the compute time. Less than the reserved instance rate. It's awesome. Yes, you obviously need a plan to deal with your cluster vanishing in the blink of an eye. It's not too hard.

I would second another commenter's caution on EBS though. We never put it into production. Personally I never experienced an ephemeral drive failure that had repercussions - when they (rarely) occurred, the drive was RAIDed or in our Hadoop cluster (e.g. redundant). We made two experiments into using EBS with our DB's, and both times, literally within 24 hours, we experienced a catastrophic failure of the EBS volume, one time unrecoverable. So that put me pretty well off EBS.

I can't say that the performance is necessarily the best, and we do experience the occasional odd asymmetrical inter-machine latencies (e.g. 300ms to establish a tcp connection in one direction, but normal <1ms in the other), but for the most part AWS is just awesome.
I'm a not-very-technical (I can do some coding) co-founder, but I've always been pissed off that Excel doesn't use a normal programming language because I think I'd pickup that language so quickly!

Anyone else interested in something like this? I just stumbled across it and wanted to get people's thoughts.
Title is overgeneralizing. A lot depends on how teams and communication are set up.

I have had success in outsourcing QA. The key is to either have people onshore who can communicate with them over phones or someone offshore who is a good communicator and have him/her explain things in person.

>Matthew/Chicago: I think I’m in the Twilight Zone.

Can't 'Matt' fathom that his message might be confusing to a non-native speaker? Couldn't he have put it in plain words before just firing someone over IM in a rage?

There is a proper way to 'let go' of people even if you think they are morons. Maybe it was a show-off to the '20 very concerned UAW workers' in the room?

'Hey, looks like we failed at outsourcing properly, but I just fired the guy responsible for this mess. That should make it okay, right?'
It just makes it more complicated. You have lock and snap all of the volumes at once. The ec2-consistent-snapshot tool makes this easier to manage.
And his friends account that it is typical of the environment, and I have a friend who had an internship with Apple. The first rule of his startup was sane working hours no matter how passionate you are, which wasn't a rule he had before working at Apple.
The odds of EC2 being owned and Rackspace not being owned are astronomical.
I can only say "Holy hot tamales, Batman!" Heat batteries chargeable using sunlight is a huge breakthrough, on par with the discovery of how to store electricity. If they can find a cheaper material to do this, the potential implications are staggering. I wish them the best of luck in their quest.
This is what I came to point out. The 555 is a horrible waste of electronics for something as simple as an oscillator. (Also, iirc, 555 timers do nasty things to your rails.)

You can get a better (50% duty cycle) out of a comparator/op-amp, a capacitor, and a few resistors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Op_Amp.E2...

555 timers are much more useful as one-shots, since that functionality is much more difficult to implement with a comparator.
For what it's worth, accidentally (or even negliently) violating HIPAA is fantastically unlikely to get you charged criminally.
EBS costs are pretty low. And my above post was directed to someone who is deploying a database on top of EBS. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

In our case, we replicate to set of non-RAID EBS instances where we pull snapshots.
But not physical servers which is really what I am referring to.
I used to work for a company, the Chicago Technology Cooperative, where we focused on building websites (and apps) for non-profit organizations. Maybe you could start a company with that intent?
While I agree it is hard to believe, it would be even more surprising if Amazon did know about it. The fact that they do not use AWS internally suggests that---at least with their level of paranoia---they seem to suspect AWS themselves.
Christ, how many sites did you steal the design from?

http://bettermeans.com/front/pricing.html
https://github.com/plans

http://bettermeans.com/images/static/dashboard.png
http://a.gaborcselle.com/blog/uploaded_images/pivotal_screenshot-708013.png

You didn't even change the class and id names. Gah!
We need the elasticity. I can't wait 24 hours for new boxes to come.
Amazon Introduces 70% Revenue Share For Kindle Magazine And Newspaper Publishers
Women, Computers and Engineering: It's Not All About Bias
Check out Tristan Perishe's beautiful 1-bit symphony. He also builds minimal circuits by hand, and I'm always surprised at how rich and complex the music is.

http://www.1bitsymphony.com/
Certainly agree. Perhaps it would be better to suggest moving to dedicated servers, depending how security-paranoid you are, anyhow.
I really like this because I can see the evolution taking place, including all the strange mutations. Reading synopses of genetic algorithms is often somewhat boring: "after 2000 generations, I had a fitness ranking of 54, but after another 3000 generations it had settled around 56!" The frustration boils down to the fact that they lack a story of how the algorithm arrived at its answer. It just has an answer, and it happens to work, and it's inscrutable. It's cool, because it works, but its opacity makes it a poor spectator sport.

Here, I get to see an entire story. I see innovation, progress, bold new ideas be attempted and fail. Of course, the story is all in my head, but I feel like I can see how it works, and what it's trying to do. My browser can't handle enough generations, but maybe after watching it more I could see what it's good at and what it struggles. Never underestimate the power of visualizations.

(aside: link got borked?)
Matthew/Chicago: Srini did you skip everything that was not working and just mark it passed?

Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt

Overseas QA: Same results as domestic, now with 70% more honesty.
"...told me that engineers at Amazon were generally forbidden from using AWS due to security concerns."

The opposite is the case: there has been a huge push for some time to move (significant) parts of Amazon retail to AWS. It's extremely complex and service quality is paramount, so it takes a while to make it all happen.
oops, couchone has gone down. The source is on github at https://github.com/peterbraden/genetic-lisa
Could you expand on your comment?
I like SearchYC.

I've never used the Ask YC archive, but I trust Gabriel Weinberg.

I'm not advocating an end to all add-on apps. I'm saying that there is no principle that animates Hacker News that requires Graham to bend over backwards to accomodate APIs. It's a simple, low-drama point.
This is a key response. I am more interested in why MSFT would spend more resources creating more languages than on streamlining the facilities for creating languages. Maybe dog-fooding these things over the last 8 years or so has spurred, or will spur product groups and/or MS Research to put as many man-years of work into the meta-tools so that languages can be launched with much less effort.
I am impressed, needless to say with F# itself, and I have learned a lot from this thread that I did not know about it, but "what is F#" is not the point of my question.
Yeah, they weren't in Silicon Valley ... but it took them six years to find a good CTO. I have no idea how much of that was on the demand side (they weren't good at choosing them) or the supply side (not many available), but one has to wonder, there's always a shortage of really good people.
Both you and your friend are misinformed.
Where are the HN Designers/UX folk? GazeHawk (YC S10) wants you!
What? An HN job posting that isn't for an engineer? Madness!

If you're passionate about UX, come work at a company that aims to revolutionize the field!

GazeHawk is looking for someone to join our 3-person team. We're a well-funded YC startup making eye tracking affordable and commonplace. We have a patent-pending technology that lets you run eye tracking studies without custom hardware or software. The biggest challenge now is figuring out how best to expose it to our customers (and who our customers are).

====

You'll get to pick your own title, but here's a subset of your responsibilities:

- Design things: reporting panels, tester experiences, landing pages, our website, etc

- Provide input into the interaction design of new features/workflows

- Help us figure out what UX folk such as yourself want (and help us build it!)

====

Two challenges we're currently working on (there are more we can share offline ;-) ):

1) Eye tracking gives you a ton of data with a lot of dimensions. We want to show that data to our users in the most effective and actionable way possible.

2) We have a lot of potential customers: from designers to big agencies to small business owners. Their experience with eye tracking ranges from intimate to non-existant. How do we effectively communicate our value proposition (and what differentiates ourselves from the competition) while not boring the experts or confusing the inexperienced.

====

Things that make you seem awesome:

- A rocking portfolio

- A desire to be at a startup (and acknowledgement of the stress that comes with it)

- Love of the UX/design communities and a desire to get paid to interact with them

- Appreciation of a solid UX process balanced with the ability to "get shit done" when need be

Bonus points (in descending order of importance):

- HTML/CSS

- Javascript

- PHP

- Ping Pong

====

Job nitty-gritty:

- Full-time position (though we're open to you consulting first to see if there's a good fit)

- We provide benefits (health, vision, and dental), equity, and a competitive salary

- We're in Mountain View (on Castro St)

====

Email jobs@gazehawk.com with whatever it takes to convince us you're awesome (A resume and/or portfolio are a good start)
and back up. I have no idea how much load I'm sending them, but apologies in advance!
An unofficial guide to the Facebook Engineering Puzzles (beta)
Blog posts like this are self-congratulatory wastes of time.

I would suggest an alternate title:
"Opinions on something I don't know much about yet."
Rackspace cloud's DNS stuff stinks. No way to add TXT records -- you have to open a ticket! Sure you can host it yourself, but every other cloud provider has this in their UI.

I get the feeling they're just in "maintenence mode" over there and don't have anyone working hard on improving the offerings.
Ask HN: What notable companies are in the Founders Institute?
Are there any notable Founder Institute companies or entrepreneurs that come to mind?
I've also seen highly variable io performance (ie, slow/stuck) on EBS volumes. Sometimes, all reads/writes block for several second or minutes, with iowait going to 100% on an m1.small.

example: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?...

However, I've decided that the other benefits of EBS volumes are just to important to give up on (snapshotting, lazy-load, re-attachment). Instead, I plan to monitor for such situations and blow away the node when I detect it.

But really, I don't understand why Amazon doesn't fix this. It's happened to me 3-4 times in a relatively small installation. Surely their monitoring can detect this?
I taught English in Brazil. I got a TEFL certificate through Bridge-Linguatec. If you are going to teach, I cannot say enough good things about Bridge. It was 40hrs/week for 1 month in Rio De Janeiro. I've seen people attempt and teach English without a TEFL and they dont do a good job. Also immersion is the best way to teach
so you do not need to speak the local language.

It will be hard to support yourself by teaching. Through a private company you will earn ~11USD/hr, but they dont pay for transportation time or cost, or the time it takes to create the lesson plan. So the actual figure ends up being more like 8.50USD/2 hours.

You can do much better through private lessons (up to 40usd/hr) but they are hard to get - you usually find your privates by teaching through a company and stealing their clients. (They pay the company about R$75/hr, so if you are good you can convince them to drop the company and pay you R$50-R$60/hr - which is about 25usd-30usd)

I went down there by myself, without speaking the language or knowing a single person and 6 months later I had a big social circle and was somewhat of a group organizer/leader.

It was easily the best 6 months of my life and I realized if I can flourish in Rio De Janeiro - one of the most dangerous cities in the world - without knowing the language, or knowing a single person, I can do anything I want.
I have 50+ instances on another cloud provider. The service cost benefit on going to a dedicated server is a fair bit but the management cost goes through the roof. We also prepay to save some expense on the monthly bill.

I can easily manage those servers, spin up new ones as requirements change, drop ones I don't need anymore, etc with very little hassle.

We also have a few dedicated servers(one actually with Xen on it for running smaller instances) and the time and effort to manage instances on it makes it pretty much not worth it for us without a dedicated sysadmin.
My friend from Amazon works in the supply-chain side of things, and he said he really wants to use it, but everything has to be encrypted and some stuff is off limits.

I take it you work on the retail side of things? I'd be interested to hear any more details that you can share.