skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to get a rails job - github: a social network for hackers
We use The Planet (http://www.theplanet.com) along with EC2 from AWS. I've used The Planet for about 7 years now, for both business and personal use. Good prices, decent support and a top notch network.
Slicehost. Love them.
Thoughts in no particular order:

- Know the limits of your knowledge. This is probably hard. The less of a programmer you are, the harder this will be. The people you're managing probably know more about a lot of the detaily that are part of the project. Try to keep track of who is the expert on what. That's okay, that's what they're there for. Try to make sure you know your limits, and whenever you hit those limits, get the experts involved. Hence leaving alone/bugging. (managers at my last job got that right almost all the time) If in doubt, you probably don't know better. That's not to say you shouldn't make decisions, just genuinely use input from the experts. One of the best ways to do this is to openly admit that you don't know everything.

- It should be clear to everyone what it is you do and why you (need to) do it. If the positive impact your job on the project isn't felt by the people lower down, they won't respect you.

- Actions speak louder than words.

- Meetings without substance should be rare. The occasional "you're doing great, that is all" probably is appreciated, but at my last job it was way overdone. (daily to weekly) If you expect only you to be doing the talking, 9 times out of 10 you don't need a meeting. Of course, if people are likely to be asking questions relevant to everyone, it's acceptable.

- Don't lie. It builds resentment, no matter how smart it seems at the time.

- Unless you're handing out equity, overtime should be the exception rather than the rule. For some people, longer periods of overtime (1-2 weeks or more) won't actually get more work done anyway, they'll just get more tired and unhappy. Some people do get more done. It's a tricky subject, and I can't offer any great advice despite having been on the receiving end of death march orders. In my case the reason was constant orders from waay up to keep changing key parts of the project combined with bad QA handling of the project early on, causing bugs to accumulate because no time was scheduled for finding or fixing them.
The ability of human beings to find a justification for anything never disappoints.
The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
Kedrosky: Worst Dow Jones Junes Since Depression
Me :)

1U Dedicated server (BYOS) for $50/mo.
I use vpslink. I paid for two years in advance, and got a vps with 256MB of Ram for ~$10/month (about half the cost of slicehost).

Had no problems with them so far.
Yes, but it's expensive as hell. $60 a month for a VM with 384 MB Ram. That would be $20-$30 a month anywhere else.
I have a VPS from WiredTree (wiredtree.com) and I can't recommend them highly enough. Good guys, great support. The only negative is that the intro VPS (with only 256MB of RAM) is a little weak, and can choke on cPanel. If you're looking for a fully-managed VPS, go with WiredTree.

For smaller-scale sites, Media Layer (medialayer.com) gets nothing but rave reviews on the webostingtalk.com forums, though I don't have any first-hand experience with them. I've used EngineHosting (enginehosting.com) for a couple ExpressionEngine based sites for clients, and they're great, too.
Who are you? If you held yourself to your own standards you'd link to your full contact info and biography in your HN profile. Otherwise you're just, by your own criteria, another anonymous spammer with no credentials, not to mention a hypocrite.

This blogger explains that he wants to be as honest as possible with his blog, hence the anonymity. In one of his posts he details the deterioration of a previously close friendship due to differences of understanding about business risk and reward. In that context his anonymity can be seen as a form of consideration.

This guy's blog is one of the best reads I've come across on HN for quite some time. I look forward to reading his future posts, and ignoring your future objections.
Seconded.

Just started with them too. Steep learning curve getting everything done myself (other hosts really pamper their customers!) but dang are the servers fast.

And besides, every true web hacker needs to know how to set up a server from scratch!
linode.com, slicehost.com, servintvps.com

I recommend all 3, just depends on what you need.
* a schedule is to measure progress not to dictate progress. When deadlines are missed it is a failure of planning, not engineering.

* Deadlines will be missed and don't always expect me to have a clue either. Together we can nearly always work it out and account for it in the future.

* don't make me update the schedule when there are changes. It's not a good use of my time

* don't change the numbers I give you for time scales

* don't merge the tasks without telling me.

* don't change the order of my tasks without a conversation and realise that by changing the order you may lengthen the overall time it takes to complete the set of tasks.

* don't be afraid to challenge the order I think is best, you understand the entire project, I understand and focus on my code and sometimes little else!

* don't move deadlines without telling me, move them after we've had a chat though.

* don't fear me, although I can at times appear to be a right royal pain in the arse I will respect you more if you are straight, consistent and honest with me. Honesty is a big thing with programmers.

* there is no compensation for late nights. Over time the late nights build up and I get slower, less creative and less willing to compromise.

* when I fail to deliver ask me why and don't accept any bullshit from me. Learn how I, as a programmer, talk and learn to detect the odourless bullshit that comes from programmers at times. Warning, late nights increase the volume of bullshit you will have to wade through over time.

* It's difficult to know when to talk to programmers so encourage me to come to you regularly. In general your work
has a lower cost for interruption then mine.

* realise that I love to code but that there is some code I love to write more then other code. Make sure I am getting through some of the shit work and not just screaming through the 'cool' stuff first.

* Coders may seem like robots but there is a lot of ego in code and breaking this ego barrier down will make code teams work better together. If you can foster an atmosphere where programmers are grateful for bug fixes/reports you are doing well.

* Read Peopleware and understand it. Good programmers have all read it and will respect you for seeing them and the project through it.

I've worked as a PM and Senior Coder so I've seen both sides of this. Above everything be honest and polite. The fact that you are even asking this question puts you in the top 10% of managers already!

Good luck.
What a strange introduction to Twisted.

Ruby's equivalent is EventMachine. I like it better than Twisted, but mostly because Ruby's block syntax dovetails really nicely with callback-driven state machines.

Both Twisted and EventMachine are screaming fast.
Starck designed several buildings wich are famous in France because of the complaints of the people who have to work inside (one has a facade with no windows at all, for "design" purpose). He designed many properties and led a project wich theme was "One house for everybody" where he designed the cheapest house possible so that "everyone could have one", packed in some residences, and sponsored by the governement. You couldn't actually get more totalitarian than this.

You don't hear a lot about this side of his work because most of them were fiascos, a french TV (Canal +) even dedicated an investigation to the building he designed, because of all the people complaining. I tought it was obvious that Starck wasn't an architect stricto sensu, but "Architect", "Designer", "Urbanist" and even "Modernist" are just labels, the only thing that matters is what people actually do.

Ask the people who have to deal with his creations on a daily basis, or read about these fiascos. This will be more interesting than playing with labels.
1) Use vim instead.
I have a dedicated server from Liquid Web. I can't say enough good things about them. The service is really top notch.

a) Communication: they actually speak English, you aren't forwarded to some call center in India

b) Response: If you call someone, will pick up within 3 rings. If you email you'll get the first response after 5 minutes. They really are around 24/7. I once needed something done at 3:30 am, I got a reply to my email in less than 10 minutes.

c) Its all managed, you really don't need to know anything about servers. Need a library installed? Just drop them a line, Can't figure out how to setup your server? Drop them a line. And there are no support ticket fees or any other crap like that, that other managed hosts charge.

I mean honestly, if Rackspace is any better, there better be some sex involved while I wait for them to fix the server. And with the higher prices Rackspace has, that better be the case.

Note: You should really only be using them with dedicated servers, their shared/virtual is a little bit pricey

And to those that complain about prices, think to yourself, would you rather get a problem resolved in 20 minutes, or 20 hours.
I'd much rather see this done on the server side.
Woah, expensive. I've had way better-priced dedicated servers from leaseweb, vectoral and layeredtech for the same price as some of those VPSs. Unmanaged, but still way cheaper. Think terabytes of transfer and better specs..hmm.
Regular expression search and replace is also killer.
I'm of the opinion that operating systems form a natural monopoly. The average computer user doesn't thrive on diversity. She wants to use whatever her friends use, so they can help her when stuff breaks, they can all share documents easily, etc.

I'm not crazy about the stranglehold Microsoft had on the industry for so long. But I think if it hadn't been them, it would have been somebody else.
My first programming job was at a small contract programming house. When my paychecks started bouncing (the company was about a million overdrawn at Citibank) I kept working when the president of the company paid me through his wife's checking account. There were two main reasons:
1) I didn't have another job
2) The project was about 90% done, and I didn't want to leave the customer stuck (AND I was subconsciously hoping to be hired on there).
Incidentally, Craig Silverstein is one of the few winnings of the ACM programming contest to launch themselves into eminence.
I've used VPSLink on and off depending on my needs since they started, incredibly cheap service and I've yet to have any major problems. Minor issues were resolved very quickly, great support.
If you're looking for cheap dedicated hosting, I liked leaseweb, ovh and vectoral, and if a .us based host is okay, layeredtech and softlayer are excellent. Support ranges from amazing to nonexistant, but they're all _really_ cheap (except for softlayer, but you get what you pay for..) for lots and lots of transfer - I blow through a few terabytes a month on three servers, think $100/month for 3TB transfer, 250gb hdd, 1.5gb ram which slicehost can't compare to price-wise.

Otherwise for me it's a tie between slicehost, dreamhost (because i had a free promo code..) and asmallorange (i have a lifetime account). All of them meet different needs of mine, sooo.
For Rails/Merb projects that can afford it, I love Engine Yard. They're way more expensive than VPS hosts, but you get a support team who specialize in Rails/Merb deployment. It's like outsourcing your sysadmin team, too.

For lower budget, I love Slicehost.

I either want full control, or someone I trust in control.
Does your employment agreement include an NDA? If you "blow the whistle", you're going to get sued. If it's a real ethical problem for you, quit.
Lawyers will generally write into contracts with customers that the written agreement forms the entire agreement, and that the customer will not be relying on anything other than the text of the agreement in making their purchasing decision.

This isn't water-tight, but the reality is that verbally telling people you have more employees or offices than you actually have, within reason, are really not going to get anyone into trouble.

Nearly all startups pretend they're more established than they are.

Nearly all startups pretend they have more customers in the process of signing up than they do.

I hate to see everyone acting like these kind of exaggerations are the same as dishonesty or fraud.

People that make these kind of exaggerations can definitely be trustworthy.

There is a very big difference between exagerrating the position of a startup to break out of a catch-22 and being a liar and untrustworthy.

I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as I do - it's just that they'll not comment with their established usernames, and advisably so because that'd be a stupid thing to say on record.
Posterous (YC summer 08) Beats Tumblr In Simplicity
Twitter's weakening pulse
Blizzard announces Diablo III
No Twitter reply: users simply move to Friendfeed
hostmysite.com

never had a problem.
We've been with Rails Machine for over a year and loving it. If you need some extra support and sysadmin knowledge (aka more hands-on then Slicehost) Rails Machine is absolutely the best we could wish for.

And of course additionally we also use EC2 and other AWS services.
It's on torrent, thank FSM. I'm reading it right now, it seems well written.
Very funny: tech support guy and business user
Can't help but share this, it is very funny!
I ran a consulting company that did some work for large "name brand" corporations. I bid on projects for companies we should have never had access to and I didn't have to lie to do it. Its a positioning game, you position your weakness as strength. For an excellent contemporary example of this see Barack Obama's campaign. Whether you like Obama or not, he has managed to position his relative inexperience as a strength. Similar tricks are possible within a company, NO LYING REQUIRED.

It sounds like you're trying to convince yourself that lying as a means to the end is OK. Its a pretty weak argument, or rather excuse to not work hard and do things honestly.

The suggestion that what this founder is doing is "spirited optimism" is sickening.
Maybe the SearchYC guys have the data logging tools to make this necessary. This could probably be implemented as a greasemonkey script. This would be much easier if the exact timestamp of the comment was available in the source of the site itself.
HTTP is Hazardous to Your Health
No. Posterous is really cool and I think it will be a big hit, but sending an email is not simpler than using the Tumblr bookmarklet, which makes blogging practically unconscious.
NASA to Attempt Historic Solar Sail Deployment
Agreed. Their tech support is also great which is more than you can say about a lot of hosting companies.
Standards are one thing, monopolies another.

I guess as the complexity of our systems grow it will be more and more important to keep the technology minimalist and easy to change.

Hmm what was i gonna say. Think virtual machines for example. There could be several different but still compile to bytecode so you could run all kinds of languages on different VMs and different hardware by making layers.

Hmm I will try to get this clearer and post again. But I stand by the first sentence.
Err.. seemed kind of odd to throw out "unit conversion" as an example to discuss.

Async programming is basically about doing other things when you would have been waiting for the result with a largely idle CPU (when you would otherwise be blocking).

In the context of a single program or Twisted, the blocking times would be primarily related to I/O.. the machine on the other end of the network connection, or potentially your storage system. Using an example of "unit conversion" that is largely assumed to be CPU bound is a poor choice since the blocking code does not leave you with free CPU.

In the context of CPU bound problems and larger system, like a render farm or image processing done by picture hosting sites, async programming is about farming out work to other workers without waiting for the prior worker to return. You could use Twisted implement it, but the situation is orthogonal to the first situation.
and really, i think the chap meant "Fu" anyways...
This advice is correct on every level. Get out now. (I've been in this situation as well, with painful results.)
Media Temple. They are great for the price.
State of the Twitter, June 2008
The better known book is of course, Blink http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/031601... . It is very well written, but (IMHO) not as heavy as it should be on references.
This is not a matter of consciousness.

It is a matter of speed between the read and the write abilities of the brain. The brain writes faster than it can read, thus creating a latency.
Webfaction. Simple, cheap, and good support.
we’ll give a free TechCrunch Tshirt to the first person who manages to do a fake post on our Posterous blog

Look's like there are already two fake posts: http://techcrunch.posterous.com/ using http://deadfake.com
I'll think of this study the next time I find myself overthinking a decision.
Run when someone says to think outside the box
Sweet, I <3 Blizzard because their games work on my Mac.
Two more quick tips:

1. The "kill ring" (what other interface cultures might call a clipboard) is a circular stack, not just one slot. If you try to paste ("yank") and discover you cut/copied over what you meant to paste, you can hit alt-Y (or M-x yank-pop) to replace it with successively earlier things. When you reach the end, it loops back to the newest.

I think it has a stupid name, but it's really useful.

2. Learn the terminology. Emacs came of of a very different user interface culture, and sometimes feels like it came from a parallel universe. The documentation (info pages, apropos, etc.) become much easier to search when you know what various parts of the interface are actually called. I don't know of any "Emacs to vernacular Windows/Mac/Linux interface cliche" glossary, but reading through the documentation, even what should be the really basic parts (e.g. "how to open a file", the tutorial) will help you acclimate. ("find-file", buffer, mark, "major mode", etc.) It helps that the Emacs manual is available on the web -- that way, people don't need to figure out how to navigate info pages first. :)
Things haven't changed that much from the past, networking with other people (or with other hackers) will always lead to more opportunities. Except now, there's the extra online networking like github.
Other commenters have said it but it bears repeating: the single most important thing you can do is be honest and straight. Programmers can detect bullshit, and it's about the worst thing possible for morale.
Thanks for the support from EVERYONE, YC, Hacker News, and all our friends. We're hoping to get better every day, and you guys are such an instrumental part of that.

As for the fake posts, we're patching those bugs up as we speak!
I loved the first two games. Blizzard is such an amazing company, every game is so high-quality.
Same, but I wish they had a 'green' option. I'd gladly pay a bit more if I could get renewable power powering my site.
Thirded.
Incomparable value for money.
xlhost, some of the lowest prices on dedicated servers, no contracts, setup fees, etc.
Oh the bookmarklet is coming. Oh yes, the bookmarklet is coming. ;-)
Suddenly, deadlines are silently postponed for a month.
Slicehost: For the Rails apps I write. They have a great range of tutorials and how-to articles to sysadmining isn't too much hassle.
Dreamhost: For various Wordpress blogs, Redmine (Rails) bug tracking, Subversion repositories, WebDAV -- basically the stuff you don't need to waste money on a VPS for.
Sexy legs
"There are a lot of ways to interpret "putting your customer's interest before your company's." You could make the software cheaper, for example, but you probably won't."

I have to agree on the interpretation problem here. But, I think an important thing to learn in business is that sometimes lowering your price is bad for your customers. You may have more of them because of a price drop...but you'll almost certainly serve them less effectively. It took me way too many years to learn this simple fact (and Joel Spolsky hadn't yet written his very good article on the subject when I was learning it).
http://www.aiso.net/

They are carbon free and have provided great service since 2000. They use 100% solar power and have bio-diesel backup generators. Have used them for 4 months and have had a great experience.
it certainly is a very, very convenient way to create a new account.
Hysterical...I love the Monster.com site in the background...
My own.
Want Some Facebook Stock At A $3 Billion Valuation? We Know Who To Call.
Shouldn't be hard to fix that - they just need to keep track of the originating SMTP server of the first e-mail.
I'm not saying that lying is good, but in any small company there is (or should be) a collective belief in the success of the company and its product. If we wanted to be rational we could just look at the numbers and realize that over 80% of startups fail and mention that when on the phone with prospective clients!

My point is that it's not a good idea to get overly worked up about someone in sales stretching the truth a bit. Sales is the part of the organization that responds to customer needs, and so if they promise a feature to a client, you as the developer are more likely to end up building that feature than if it was never promised and the sale was lost.

It's an imperfect system, but at its core it's not any different from Ford running a commercial that suggests that its operations actually benefit the environment. People believe what they want to believe in order to give themselves an excuse to buy what they want. If the founder in question is outright lying, then he's just not very good at helping customers rationalize the purchase.... :)
yeah that's it
If you really believe that public corporations make bad economic decisions, you're investing in the correct decisions and are going to make a killing.

You are betting your own money on being correct, aren't you?
I'd buy at a $3B valuation...

Facebook is reasonably valued at $5B-$7.5B, right? And by reasonably I mean as a strategic acquisition.
Heh, that's amusing given that I just commented on how unsatisfying Gladwell's meta-narratives are in the end (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230782). I have the impression that he could just as easily have written an equally seemingly brilliant book about how people who make spot decisions usually get it wrong.

So no, what I'm looking for is more of a survey of the experimental research on consciousness and identity, the kind of thing that this latest study would fit into. There are a host of such findings and the area seems ripe for an overview. The closest thing I know is "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders. It's a good source on some of this material (e.g. fascinating results on priming which demonstrate that our thinking is conditioned by subliminal perceptions). But it's out of date and also rather shallow (the inevitable tying in of Gödel and all that).