skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
filesystem user error can be just as deadly on aws as it can on your own hardware. either way, you need good backups.

While I agree that amazon itself is unlikely enough to go down that you can pretty much bet the company on it, any one server at amazon may go down at any time. Now, amazon has the huge advantage of being able to give you another server at any time, but you need to be prepared for that. any data on your local disk would be gone, and you need to be able to re-connect to your EBS store from only one instance. (many, many of the 'admin error' cases of data loss i've seen stemmed from mounting a network block device read/write on two different servers without a clustered file system.)

My point is just that amazon doesn't free you from the need for (and mistakes of) *NIX admins (like heroku, app engine and engine yard should.)
This is the best site I have found, http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
This is absolutely what is going on.

My brother had an interesting experience with this. He grew up with Caucasian faces. Then moved to Taiwan. After several years there he came back to Canada. What he quickly realized is that he had learned how to tell Chinese people apart, but had forgotten how to tell Caucasians apart. Given that he actually remembered a lot of Caucasians, a large fraction of the population looked like (but wasn't) someone he knew.

He found this very confusing.
Ask HN: Are there ways to raise small capital without huge expected returns?
I have a few friends who have plenty of high-quality ideas for websites and media apps. They wouldn't require a lot of startup (if any) but wouldn't be able to raise a large amount of money, either. I have been looking at them as great projects to make a comfortable living off and not return 8-10 figures.

I always read about VCs and Angels looking to invest into the next big app, help it go public, then earn 10x their investment in 5 years. This is well and good for those who have such large ideas, but what about the smaller guys? What if a web app only pulls in $350k/yr? That's certainly not chump change, but it's not high-yield VC returns, either. Is there a market for this aside from bootstrapping?
Fantastic article, though the analogy to the Eiffel tower is a bit weak. It's a good exposition into the argument as to why "code is data," is a relevant and valuable argument. Lisp is a wonderful language and I love those damn parenthesis. :)
What are they like for CPU usage? I have been looking at VPS.NET and other such providers to ensure I get a reasonable slice of CPU which I can use for other things.

Most VPS providers I have come across dont like it if you start working out the millionth digit of Pi, but sometimes you have a task that takes a while and you can't run offsite.
There's an incongruity between animal and human anatomy. In humans, dorsal does indeed mean back, not top.

Wikipedia has a wall of text by way of explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location#Wh...
This has been the best tip I've ever gotten. Thank you kind sir for having changed my life so drastically in just a second!

+1
Room77 has been recruiting heavily at MIT and are "working to bring a unique twist to hotel search"

They seem to have quite the team: http://www.room77.com
Nadia: Inferred Beauty
Dedicated (rented) offers similar performance improvements and cost reductions without the extreme upfront cost (obviously costing more over its lifetime as a result). But these days it really seems like a blind spot. Maybe it's just that I never completely jumped on the cloud bandwagon (or was running servers far before it got rolling), but I really haven't found a generic use case for cloud hosting. Planning infrastructure upgrades isn't rocket science; you'll have more than 10 minutes' notice to get a new machine. There are certainly many specific use cases for cloud hosting, but as a generic hosting tier I find it incredibly overused—and companies waste money and are forced to deal with unreliable performance (EBS i/o anyone?!) as a result.
"Smart Food: Diet and Nutrition for Maximum Brain Power"
Except, as far as humans are concerned, "dorsal" and "posterior" are synonymous.
The incredible shrinking grocery store
Most browsers warn you if you are about to close multiple tabs.... I guess chrome doesn't? Weird.

That would be an implementation problem for chrome - every other OSX application tends to properly warn you if you are about to close multiple context windows with cmd-q.

EDIT: Just researching a bit- this seems to be a conflict between the Chromium design goals and the OSX UI guidelines... the Chrome team absolutely refuses to add a warning dialog if you try to close multiple tabs, but it would be the expected behaviour on OSX.

I tend to fall on the side of OSX - part of what makes it great is UI consistency - and this is one case where Chromium is making things worse, not better.
That doesn't change the fact that I get mad and lose time whenever I accidentally close all my tabs.
Determining User Need Through Innocent Questions
Seriously. C# syntax looks too much like Java, python and ruby have much better syntax IMO and they have way more libraries than C#. But again, to each his own.
There's an emacs mode for that. (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UnParenMode)

It hides the parentheses, and emacs by default will indent your lisp correctly. Just like the real thing (except you can't edit while in UnParenMode...minor issue).

I do enjoy the irony in commenting with "can we get rid of the paretheses" on a post explaining why the parentheses are not important. When you truly understand lisp, you will no longer see the parentheses. They aren't real.
If you're looking into a serious reference check out iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual (http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-App-Development-Missing-Manual/...). It covers so much and then some, it's truly the holy bible of iOS development work.

Otherwise try checking Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=develop+iphone+apps
Yes, I agree. Maybe I was unclear above, but what I meant to say was that not being photographed was one of the main motivations I had for consenting to being patted down, despite the discomfort.
19. I thought the test was a joke until my wife took it and got 31.
I thought this was a really simple, powerful idea with a lot of merit.

Even if you don't follow the premise that people who have a need will reply rapidly, you can still discard their request (with discretion) because clearly they're not good customers... They Want but won't work with you to help you Give, they just want to Take.

Ooo, Metaphoric.
What's really needed here is not more distance between hotkeys, but instead universal lightweight undo for user interactions.

The most precious resource is the user's time. There should be no interaction that irreversibly discards the user's work. We have fairly universal undo for editing operations; there should be just as much undo support for closing windows, tabs, or apps -- carefully constructed artifacts of the user's workflow.
The current batch of flight search startups (ie YC backed Adioso & Hipmunk) are disruptive in a space that has long stagnated. First using them I felt like I had been unchained, the incumbents are so restrictive and clumsy whereas the new kids on the block are fresh and flexible.
It's not just protecting the idea, it's about creating a user base and rapport to go with it. I can go out and create a worse version right now, but market it immediately and create a community around it, and then boom I have a thriving business. This has a great potential not only to grow as an app to plan your machine ahead of time, but it can also easily become the go to place for hardware reviews and articles on DYI computer integration, and the number one spot for hardware searches.

This can become the Google of PC Hardware searches and as such MUST be protected and monetized by means of an affiliate program ASAP!

By the way, not a big fan of the name. Something like PCHardware.com seems like a better fit.
You wrote the "Cracked Screen App". I installed it and love it... it is so realistic. Haven't really had to install it and I didn't notice any ads in it - oh wait... that's probably because I have an adblocker installed on my phone.
> That they now know what to look for is better. But they're still searching. There's no breakthrough.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breakthrough

3a : a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique

That they know what to look for now is very much a breakthru, just a "knowledge" one rather than a "technique" one.

> Let's get real - Ruthenium is about US$5500 per kilogram. You can buy the best lithium batteries on the market for significantly less.

Doesn't matter. They actually understand what's going on to some degree, well enough that now they can just throw supercomputer time at it for a while. Maybe they'll find something useful, maybe they'll show that there isn't anything useful.
Unless you're broke.
I imagine that it is terrifying for a person when another person proceeds with contact of a sexual nature after being informed that it is not welome. 100% of rapes begin this way.
But this is different - they have done long term studies following the total life health of 1000s of pilots who have been exposed to these scanners 10x a day for their whole careers.
Man all the hype about Lisp just suddenly made sense to me. Why do we need all this other stuff? Loved the simple exposition and backronyms, contrary to some other opinions here.
I forget where I saw this tip, but after making this mistake several times I remapped command-Q in Chrome to the "Zoom" command. (Keyboard control panel -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts). It's already saved me lots of time. And of course, any harmless menu command will work in place of "Zoom."

Edit: after I RTFA, I see this is much like what the article suggested. The only real difference is that my approach prevents you from quitting from the keyboard at all.
Pointless Firesheep countermeasure, BlackSheep
That's a hell of an allegation to perpetuate based on hearsay.
The copy doesn't make it clear enough, but we're actually doing our best to adjust for small samples with a little empirical Bayesian magic. As the number of samples (inspections) goes down, the result is closer to the mean for the whole city.
There is a gay rights group who are planning to protest it by turning up at the airport in costume insisting on a special pat down and pretending (or not) to enjoy it very much.

Sounds like a great day out - especially if you are into uniforms!
The Nexus One has a completely different type of screen, unless the only thing you mean is that they're the same resolution, but I know you're not that ignorant when it comes to mobile phone technology.

Odd that you can claim that the Droid has a much nicer keyboard, when you've never used this keyboard. But in anycase it's a slider portrait keyboard, while the Droid is a landscape keyboard. Different stroes for different folks.

And I'm not sure what you mean by a real software library, but on launch day of WP7 there are already 2000 apps, and its relatively small game lineup already trumps Android in quality (although not the iPhone's game lineup).

But lets be clear rbanffy we already know that even if the WP7 device made you stunningly attractive, gave you eternal life, some decent dev chops, and $5B in your bank account, you'd still hate it and get an Android phone :-)
Notes on Mercator's Projection
I really do not see how this all proxy thing makes it "most valuable secret"
Surprised that there's no mention of Django, which came from Lawrence, KS, only 40 miles away. That makes me think this is an MBA-led/business plan/top down startup scene, rather than a techie-led scene.
Hell No There Will Never Be a TechCrunch Canada
Once you get wherever you are going, find an expat community. Yes, I realise you may be trying to get AWAY from your fellow countrymen, but someone who speaks your language and knows their way around will be invaluable, especially when culture shock sets in.
biblo-ref: Journal of Ironic Internet Postings 1 April 2011
I don't think you can compare every ones case equally though. In my case it would be a lot more expensive to go with co-location even ignoring the upfront costs.

Right now I pay $4K a month for ~93Mb of Ram available per hour. Averaging 2gb per server for web, bit more for caches and application we can fit a lot of servers in our 93Mb.

Could I get a couple beefy colocated servers setup Xen and run my own cloud? Sure, but then I have to pay someone to run that cloud and I have to manage and worry about the hardware and those costs are a lot more for me than a small monthly markup.

There are a few things I don't host in the cloud(master db, and primary load balancers) but even those I pay a bit more to have them be managed hardware wise.
On Ubuntu the first thing I do with a new install is rebind quit to Command W. (System -> preferences -> keyboard shortcuts.)

If you're using Firefox you just make sure browser.warnOnQuit is set to True (out of the box, it's set to true.)

As far as Chromium goes, near as I can tell ctrl-Q does not work at all, which is something Firefox would do well to imitate.
Who else thinks Canada should rename their top level domain to .eh as in canada.eh
I wonder. There still are quite a few empty spots though, and like the poster above me said, white lights were present since 1992 and the red ones are 2002+. Why wouldn't ISRO or someone release a pic ? Would be all the rage for atleast a couple of weeks one would think.
This ups the pressure on entrenched CDNs. I love it. For static object delivery and streaming there is no longer any excuse for usurious bandwidth rates, opaque pricing, utter disinterest in smaller customers, and terrible control and monitoring interfaces.

Now AWS needs to focus on CloudFront geography and performance. These go hand-in-hand to some extent, but CloudFront does not fare well even in single node latency tests. I know Amazon has the knowledge and drive to get there, and when they do, I hope they eat the old CDNs' lunch.
I've yet to find Lisp any more or less readable then anything else I write day-to-day (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, HTML). In all these languages I find myself constantly fighting to find a readable and reasonable formatting. I certainly won't argue that I find myself doing this less in Lisp, but the readability argument is just something that continues to be bandied about by people who haven't spent much time programming in Lisp.

Here's a DSL I'm working on for CouchDB:

(defmapping post
:pre-commit timestamp
:fields {:author-id :string
:title :string
:created :date-time
:modified :date-time
:body :string
:tags [:string]
:meta {:copyright :string
:href :string}})

I wish my work in other languages had this kind of structural clarity all the time!

In constrast my favorite Python lib for CouchDB work looks like this:

creators = ListField(DictField(Mapping.build(
name = DictField(Mapping.build(
name_authority = TextField(),
name_authority_id = IntegerField(),
display_string = TextField()
)),
user_id = IntegerField(),
roles = ListField(TextField()),
attrs = ListField(TextField()),
xts = ListField(TextField()),
)))

Just look at all those parens!
If this could do a basic scatter plot and/or Line graph. I would never need another spreadsheet.
Is Facebook Ruining Human Friendships?
It's not any less invasive, you're just being abused in a different way. The difference is that they don't want you to make more work for them.

Request a supervisor and or second agent be present for your screening to ensure you waste as much of their time as possible.
My guess is that what people complain about isn't really the parentheses, but rather heavy nesting of Lisp programs compared to other languages. If parentheses were replaced with something else, they'd probably complain about that something else.
If you're interested in bidding for lunch w/ Paul Graham...
Apparently, Bing Nursery is being swamped w/ inquiries about bidding remotely so they want to post clarification, as below:

"If you are seriously interested in getting the lunch with Paul Graham that will be available for purchase at the Bing Nursery School Auction, please note the following...

In order to bid on the lunch with Paul Graham you must attend the auction. If you cannot attend the auction, you can ask someone else who is attending to do the bidding/purchasing for you. The auction is open to the public (tickets are $20/person and can be purchased at the door, or in advance at the Bing Nursery School office. The bidding on this particular item closes at 7:30, so you will need to be there before then, and up until it closes in order to ensure that you get it. Item must be paid for at the auction."

Thank you for your time.
The bigger problem is that CAR and CDR actually mean something without the silly anatomy analogies.
Python 3 critique
'Matt' doesn't sound like a very pleasant guy to work with, outsourcing aside.
I think squishtech's first clue that they changed one of the consistent features of all OSX applications was when they went to the control panel and changed the feature.

I think it'll be OK.
LawPivot Closes Angel Round For Quora-Like Startup Legal Advice (for startups)
It is indeed to close, but it's not worth it modify it since it's a system wide standard.
I thought for sure that this was going to be about Pivotal Tracker, which I love to death, but frankly am nervous about its future since Pivotal Labs makes no money from it. I would feel a lot better paying them a subscription fee.
Parents should parent
Why the Blackberry Playbook has a dual-core processor
I think it's because Flash needs one core all to itself.
Are you kidding? Mandating whitespace is possibly the single worse feature of python. Lisp editing is an extremely mature topic, and rarely does a lisp programmer have to actually deal with code formatting. To turn that on it's head would be madness. A complete step backward.
> open, democratic, decentralized social enterprise management

6 words and you've already lost me.

This is followed by a complicated screenshot with arrows pointing in various directions, then a manifesto in typefaces that jangle like a political donation chain letter. Then a quote from Albert Einstein. Then a bunch of diffuse conceptual words in different sizes and orientations. Seeing floaty words like "Distributed" and "Emergent" only solidifies the feeling that this product is hot air -- even if it isn't.

You're making it extra hard to understand what it does or why I'd want it. Smart HN readers will pore through and analyze what it does, because they are looking for product ideas of their own, but the rest of the world is damn busy and unlikely to spend that much time.

Perhaps try to cut your initial presentation down by 10x. If I have to scroll at all to figure out what you are talking about, you've probably lost me until I hear from someone I know that it's awesome. Do you already have users raving to everyone they know about how awesome it is?

Not trying to be harsh, just honest! I completely respect the challenge of what you're trying to take on, and I doubt I could do any better.

Edit: Having spent a bit more time on your site to try to find more constructive advice to offer, I have to say I am impressed with your ideas and development of them. I feel myself rooting for you to succeed. But the initial impression you offer is more opaque than it should be. And it seems like your system offers an entire architecture for project management that you'd have to buy into, making that a steep first step. Do you guys use this product internally? Is there anywhere you expose how you're using it?
I'm curious about Giles Bowkett's comment on that story - is he really blocked on HN? If so, why?
Quitting emacs should be a fairly rare task; just remap C-x C-c to something harder to hit by accident in your .emacs file.

(I would do this myself, but I keep putting it off.)
Bitbucket: Iteration 1044 brings you user rename
GoGrid lets you mix and match dedicated and cloud servers, which offers the performance and value of a baseline of dedicated, and the flexibility of the cloud. I find it to be unparalleled.
Nit time! In html5 ≠ exclusively in html5.

As a full match database may well weigh in at a few hundred megabytes (pure speculation here), schlepping it over to the client would make for a must less impressive showing and a higher hosting bill.

(As fun as it would be to "view source" for it, or have it work offline.)
I do colocation as well, but if you don't have someone there to babysit your server, sometimes it can be nightmarish. It's nice to not worry about if a disk fails and you need someone to swap out one of your raid spares and hopes he doesn't swap out the wrong drive bay.

With colocation companies, everyone is sending their own custom built servers to the data center so nobody knows the exact configuration per server. If a drive fails, or a memory chip goes bad, you need someone there that knows the layout of your hardware config to debug the issue. I have a bunch of servers at RippleWeb but I'm sure the guy there has to deal with 1U servers from Dell, Tyan, Supermicro, and all kinds of other manufacturers.
Ask HN: How do you deal with all these passwords?
Nowadays everyone of us has so many electronic accounts(Facebook, emails, websites, forums, work, finance, e.t.c.).

What is the most convenient and secure way to deal with that issue? It has been a long time since my memory was sharp enough to remember all of them.

P.S: Sometimes I even forget my username :)

EDIT: my initial post was focused on passwords from the user's perspective. But, how do you deal with passwords in your websites as developers?
So when you call them first and rest, how do you destructure lists of lists?

Actually, now that I think about it, "fire" is much cooler sounding than "cadr". But not as cool sounding as cadadr.
Linux: Does Being Competitive with Windows Matter?
My real problem is that M-w is too close to ⌘-w, especially when I have meta mapped to ⌘ on my external keyboard.

I would really love to have a consistent set of shortcuts across emacs and everything else I use.
http://agilewebsolutions.com/onepassword

I use it on the Mac and sync over dropbox across my various Macs. Looks like there's a Windows version, never tried it.
The reason it's not normally a problem is that if you're working on a document and you hit ⌘Q (or ⌘W for that matter) you will be prompted to save your changes.

However, this does become a problem in web browsers and file browsers where there are no changes to save.

Apparently in the early days of OS X the NEXTSTEP guys wanted to add a ⌘Q shortcut to Finder, which would log you out of OS X. As the story goes, some people at Apple really hated that idea, so after some lively debate they settled on ⌘⇧Q instead. (As a bonus, it's now a global shortcut, so you don't have to be in Finder to use it.)

Similar problem with web browsers. You can give it a different shortcut, or you can enable a prompt to warn when closing multiple tabs. Most people opt for the latter.
Fedora 14 vs. Ubuntu Maverick: Distinct Differences
yes, anything that's cross platform? Too many solutions seem to only work on a couple, not all.

The closest i've seen is keepass. I've seen implementations that read/write the keepass db for linux,windows, mac. The only android one i've found so far is read only :(
I had hoped that Apple would make Python or Ruby a scripting language in iWork. Then again, I thought Numbers would be a real spreadsheet (no linked sheets, no data sources, etc).

I do use Google Docs quite a bit. I could see Google releasing a Python-esque DSL.
The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics
That honestly looks more like a failure on the part of the Python library maintainer to create a pleasant way to create record prototypes.

I mean, all you're doing in your list example is creating dictionary and list examples of the mapping you want. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that in Python.