skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked up some of the original numbers for Cloudkick, and while it doesn't look like it made it into the article, we did try to estimate the actual number of machines running on EC2 (we mostly stuck to US-East) at any one time. In short, based on the incrementing IDs we knew the total number of machines that had been launched. By looking at EC2 machines we've monitored at Cloudkick (at the time, a good portion of the well over 1M servers we had seen were on EC2) we were able to get an idea of what portion of all machines launched on EC2 are still running.

I don't recall the actual numbers off the top of my head, and surely there is some selection bias in servers Cloudkick monitors, but we eventually worked up some estimated revenue numbers and they were right in there with the $500m-$750m (independent) estimates mentioned in the article, so at least we seemed to be in the ballpark.
That seems in-line with how much developer consultancy firms charge.
Your goal when you start should be to work on the concepts and to stay motivated. You need to go in-depth when you first start; jumping languages slows that process down.

I would try splitting your program into two six-month blocks instead. The first six months you spend mining university CS courses for some kind of curriculum and assignments; most will be in Java but JS, Python, Ruby or Racket are all acceptable replacements. Try coming up with "fun projects," even if you can't quite do them yet. Other people can tell you what you'd need to learn.

The second six months you spend specifically on your application domain. If it's a web site, you'd learn about database layout, running login and authentication, building a UI, and building the payment mechanisms. All the while you're building prototype code for the final app.

The reason to spend such a large period on the app is because tons of things only come up as you build the app, and they don't appear in general CS, so you can't plan for them, and no book, lecture, or forum post can tell how they're resolved; you have to hack your way through poorly the first time, and then return with better solutions later as the problem fully reveals itself.

You'd also work on getting the other business aspects rolling in the second six months.
People aren't uniformly distributed among the different types either. I accept your point though; the distribution of programmers across Meyer's Briggs types isn't the same as the distribution of all people across Meyer's Briggs types.

Correlation is not causation either though (not that you said it is).
(I know this was not your point, but...) Actually, many areas of law are very rigid (in the logical sense) and, imho, quite appealing to the analytical thinker discussed in this post. The practice of law may not be like that (although I don't know for sure (yet)), but the same can be said from the 'practice' of the corporate MS Access programmer or the cookie cutter CMS web programmer.
I get what you are saying and it makes sense. I made the plan I did because I didn't know where to start and figured focusing on a sequence of languages would be a good way to get a solid foundation.

But I agree, once I have the basics down, I should just start executing and learn new languages and frameworks as needed.

Thanks
I did that (shared with myself), but all that happened was that a .dropbox file showed up.

edit: figured it out. Thanks.
Damn. I thought the fact that it was down was part of the puzzle despite how silly that seems now.
Showing this kind of respect to noobs is admirable.
contact me at eretzdd at gmail.com
Thanks for the data. Seems like its a relatively underutilized feature.
Have you looked at companies like Social Gold which provide micropayment ecosystems for online games ?
How many pycon attendees don't already know python?

I don't think I'd drop $300 + travel to attend a conference where I didn't understand the subject matter.
Use an eyedropper in GIMP, PS, etc. to get the digital value (don't read off monitor)
Ask HN: YC for non-consumer technology startups?
Most of the high profile YC success stories seem to be consumer-facing, web and mobile startups. Others, like Heroku, are still tightly bound to that same business community, serving mostly agile web based startups.

What do people think about YC for other business types? I'm particularly interested in disruptive technology innovation in established, well financed industries.

Questions:

* Has YC been interested in opportunities like this?

* Would YC be as helpful for opportunities like this?

* Are there any notable success stories?

Thanks!
> > there's a finite amount of fame

> I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a finite amount of fame?
I appreciate the thoroughness of your comment. I also agree with some of what you said. For me, TDD is not so much about testing the code as it is about effectively writing the code. The only point that you brought up that I would like to make a counter argument to is the idea that you should get the design right on the first try. I don't agree that it is a good idea to design the system thoroughly up front. For me, using unit test to allow me to refactor throughout a project is very useful and allows me to become better at design everyday. It's an excellent way to prefect your skills as a code designer. It also leads to a code base that can be explained without any "well it used to..." sort of talk.

But again, I emphasis that I found everything else that you brought up to be perfectly valid.
Japanese.
it's quite frustrating when you know about the asian cuisine but cannot open the page!!!
I created a folder named the hex code of the color, shared it with the email address hidden in the picture, and nothing happened.

Maybe their servers are overloaded?
I was studying the code intently for the CSS animation... sad.
They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired.

If managing an enterprise is not "work" then what is the job of "writing down my opinions on stuff"?
Why you should intentionally impose scarcity
Funny Acorn didn't work but PS did. Go figure.
VCs generally look for a 10x return on investment and will take whatever percentage of equity they think will get them that return.
Sounds interesting. Is an overview of your new method available to the public?
Good luck Kyle. It will be interesting to hear if you get any takers.

One thing I wonder is if the kind of people that would take up an offer like this have the means to pay for it. As in: do the "idea guys" that can't find technical guys have enough money?

One angle you might want to consider is the sanity check - going over the technical merit of an idea/early stage product/architecture. This could be for both the idea guy and technical guy. A company that is a bit further along would have more cash.

And for those on about the rates: that rate for two hours is not bad.
There is another closely related field that has plenty of real applications: formal verification. Essentially the task is to ensure no reachable state violates some property. The problem is the same as in chess, the reachable state space is enormous. There is probably more funding available for this take on the problem than chess, but it has been studied for decades and there are no easy answers.
I would start out lower. Gain some feedback (testimonials) then ramp up the rate. As it is, I don't know you from adam.
Hint: you can sync up and collaborate with Dropbox :)
Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Don't include the # in the beginning.
Chinese firms are riding a huge wave of growth driven by wage differentials. In this macro context, it's easy to make a lot of money with poor management.
> FF does let me put the tabs back down where I like them

I don't understand how putting tabs above the location bar can be equated to stripping the browser down. It just makes more sense, because the location bar is specific to the tab, so it should be contained "within" the tab.
Two things:

1. Jung (whose typology the MBTI was based upon) was very clear that his methods went into the areas that research couldn't go (often referred to as "depth" psychology). Thus, research based on the MBTI and other tests based on Jung's typology is a bit difficult to agree with. Bear in mind that I'm saying this as someone who finds Jungian typology very useful.

2. The point of Jungian typology can be summed up with the old cliche "You're a beautiful and unique snowflake, just like everyone else." Thus, although you do more than likely see certain types attracted to programming, those types are far from being exclusively programmers as there are many fields that attract them (including other engineering and scientific fields). Conversely, these types aren't the only programmers out there. I've met plenty of good programmers who were of types that weren't traditionally associated with programming.
Just the slides in book form. Bad typesetting and lots of white space :)
Zed is a Jedi Master.
For what it's worth, this: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html speaks a little bit to your first question. It seems that they are definitely interested in areas other than just consumer-facing web and mobile applications.

As to the rest... I'll be interested to hear those answers as well.
languages and db experience?
Definitely didn't include the #. Simply created a folder named 1F75CC, shared it with dropquest@dropbox.com and...nothing. Can't imagine what I'm still doing wrong, so I'm chalking it up to a bug on their end now.
honestly not many, but:

they have to do it sooner or later, the sooner the better.

it would be an example to other people here deploying their websites (may be this is to late to little but some people really would follow their example)

because it is the right think to do.

because contrary to css vs tables, ipv6 is not backward compatible with ipv4.

and because i could add their website to my experiment, but that it is more in my benefit than in theirs =).
Simple and clean, both the offer and the site; I like it.

You might want to think about some kind of satisfaction guarantee. I for once might have a problem shelling out $400 for a 2h talk with a guy I never worked with without one. I'd actually make it a "money back plus a beer on me" guarantee.

If you had a stackoverflow account I'd definitely link to it; too bad it's not possible with Forrst.

I'd also publish your HN karma. Seriously. A big, automagically updating number, showing that you really are about community, sharing, brainstorming and all that jazz. :)
<shameless plug> try zeromq.node for your interprocess communication needs! </shameless plug>
I've used Node.js to power a little "social doodling" pet project I made: http://letsdrawit.com and I find it a useful way to think about concurrency because there are certain types of race conditions you don't have to consider (for example any critical regions in memory)

It's extremely useful for the "evented" part, but I get the sensation of using node for hosting webpages might be overkill and not the appropriate tool. Instead, I've got the node.js core proxied behind an nginx server hosting static files and ruby rack (for when dynamic content is necessary).

Does anyone see an advantage of using Node to host templated webpages?
This comment by coffeemug is the most relevant advice I have every found for anyone wanting to become a competent programmer/hacker : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747713

Also from http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html :

"So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:"

To follow the path:

look to the master,

follow the master,

walk with the master,

see through the master,

become the master.
Pretty much. Of all the excuses people make to judge themselves superior and better than others, profession must surely be one of the most asinine.
Too bad it doesn't show local time :-)
It's a reasonable rate, but it would normally require a better resume presentation than what's there at the moment. Great to know that Kyle did all this stuff, but what's more relevant is what he did exactly. Did he draw the ranger guy for Forrst or did he plan the server hardware allocation or did he just hack on some code... that sort of thing.

I've seen my share of product consultants, and they primarily specialize in invoicing. There are some exceptions, of course, but generally the amount of BS/hour is very depressing. The site needs to do a better job to explain that Kyle is not of their kind.
How to Make Stuffed Young Zucchini - Swagbucks TV
Test-prep company Knewton takes online courses to next level: university
Much Ado About H.264
How do you determine "market salary"?
I thought about adding that but didn't want to emphasize one technology stack over another, at least not on the one-pager.

That being said: PHP, Ruby, some Python; Mysql, Postgres, Mongo.
Hey guys, I'm totally stuck on 39.. any advice?? :S
False conclusion, as usual.

Yes, people are more inventive when the going gets rough. They -have- to be. And the market is willing to reward them for doing more work. Because there was no way without it!

However, if you impose 'scarcity' and force people to work harder and be more inventive, what you get is a product that took more work, but isn't any more valuable. The market won't reward that... Especially since someone can come in and do it right, cheaper.

I'm going to give the opposite advice: If you want to start a business, take a look at why something is scarce and remove that limitation. People will pay for that.
Thank you. I actually already have about 15-20 hours scheduled (most prior to launching the actual one page site), plus a couple entries on the MVP form.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to angle this, but my ideal customer is an "idea guy" who does have the means to pay, an interesting idea, and "gets it" with regard to what it actually takes to build a product.

I do like the idea about involving some kind of idea sanity check, though I'm kind of doing that as folks contact me — I'd rather tell them that it's not really a viable idea as is, and spend a little time working through that, vs. take their money for the 2 hours or MVP product just because I can.
I'm not talking about my income or your income. I'm saying that, when spending is constant and Google doesn't pay as much in tax, you have to pay more. If spending decreases and your tax is held constant, you get less back. Either way, Google wins and you lose.
you mean 29?
Thank you. I think that's a great idea — I'll update the site right now. Neat idea re: karma, though not sure how much weight that would have for the types of folks I (think) I'm targeting. Couldn't hurt, either way though!
I'm so happy to live in a world where I can stream a talk like this that happened yesterday at a conference I'd not be able to attend.

The motivation at the beginning with the punchcards and the following PDP-10 "poem" for computing the sin() function left me skeptical about what was to follow, but it turned out to set an excellent stage for the remainder of the talk. By the time he got to the "big deal" ideas at the end, I was well prepared to accept his thesis.

Don't miss this talk. Take the time to watch it.

One nice bit: he admits that if he knew 7 years ago what he knows today, Fortress might have started with Haskell and been pushed 1/10th of the way towards fortran, rather than starting with an object-based foundation and writing side-effect-free functional domain-specific-languages on top of it.
help with 29?
Thanks. I think that it's likely a combination of both. Also, I'm looking to help so-called idea guys - folks who probably don't use HN, but have an idea with potential, and a little capital to throw at it. FWIW, folks who turn to HN for guidance and feedback probably aren't the target demographic anyway, and they certainly wouldn't need my help :)
NYC may be an anomaly - I've had some people not reply promptly (that's pretty much to be expected and their loss), but never yet seen an attempt to cut out AirBnB. My experience has been pretty uniformly positive.
to become a competent programmer by the end of the year. My plan is to learn a new language every two months. Jan-Feb: JAVA Mar-Apr: Haskell May-Jun: PHP Jul-Aug: Python Sep-Oct:HTML 5, Javascript

This is about the programming equivalent of saying "I want to become a UFC champion in one year, so I'm going to learn a new martial art every 2 months". The reality is it takes years to be a competent programmer in any language.

You would be much better off starting with Python and HTML/JS and begin building your project immediately. Just learn how to program as you go along. Why Python? Because Java and PHP are probably nearing the end of their shelf life. It would be a waste of time to learn Haskell if you don't plan to use it to build your project.
Use google cache :P
They could be trying to make this seem more impressive by standing the hard drives up instead of laying them flat.
I would never had imagined that Batman had so many different batmobiles. I do not want to imagine the amount of different gadgets that he has used.
When I was younger, I erased a harddrive by covering it with burning thermite. It was pretty impressive, melting the drive, turning the sand underneath to glass, and burning through the asbestos pad into the cement.
Another "Twitter Revolution" (Yawn)
Most Stylish Otaku Room?
wow, this brings back memories of alt.os.development and the nondot (http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/articles) etc. I think I still have a floppy about some place with my dos debug hand written boot loader (anyone remember the magic code?) .. I passed it off as an OS to my class mates in college back in good old 98'.

I also remember having this awesome idea of an OS that had two kernels, so if one crashed the other would taker over it's processes and restart the crashed kernel and pass the processes back .. good days.
I agree that I'm not exactly selling myself well enough. Wondering if it's worth showing that on this site, or just discussing in more detail with interested parties. I do agree that I'm not doing the best job of setting myself aside from the invoice pros.
Whiteboard Accounting
Point certainly taken. I actually (surprisingly?) have a bunch scheduled, so presuming all goes well, I'll have some real feedback and hopefully folks vouching for what I'm doing.
Officially giving up. Level 21 seems to be buggy - I've shared the folder multiple times with dropquest@dropbox.com and nothing shows up.
What about getting 500's from the blog?
Whew. That was exhilarating. And damn OS X Preview and Color Meter for not showing the right colors. (I was too late for any of the prizes but I’m very happy about the 1GB. Oh, and the scavenger hunt itself was also fun and cleverly designed.)
Just to save everyone else 90±30 seconds…

It doesn't change. There is no slick transform of the flipping numbers, just a static display. But it is pretty.

(In a related, but not interesting enough to post, bit of geekery. On Apple's home page you will see a "billionth app" counter. They drive it from a triple of ( timestamp, basecount, rate) so it updates in real time, but once in a while (hourly?) they resync it to the actual number and rate. Nice compromise between accuracy and server resources.)
Dropbox <3 You
;)
Ah, a good question to ask your non-technical clients then: what community sites like HN do they peruse?

Anyway, I know that if I'd seen a "karma" number over 1k, I'd be impressed even if I had no idea what it meant.
"In this paper we assume all forces are ground-based and beyond any hope of air-support or resupply. Historical analysis of battle-field circumstance will reveal numerous instances--even in the modern period--of such occurrences. A more general result is beyond the scope or intention of this paper."
Ask HN: How do I contact pg or an administrator about Hacker News?
I have a question to ask pg or another admin of HN, but can't seem to find their contact info.
Tom Forsyth's OffendOMatic
Include a link when you plug! https://github.com/JustinTulloss/zeromq.node
What Google can learn from John Sculley
Disclaimer: I've been doing Erlang now for a handful of projects for a year and a half, and I love it.

The syntax is a little jarring at first, more-so than most languages, but it's really not that bad. And as long as you stick with OTP, generic servers, and the like, you get to avoid some of issues that can make Erlang code harder to follow (naked bang message passing, spawning processes directly, etc).

Frankly, I think the syntactical warts (ending line variations, record syntax, if-statement construct, etc) are well worth it for the benefits of message passing, lightweight process spawning, pattern matching, code hot-swap, and particularly locational transparency.

At the very least, Erlang is an interestingly different enough language that I recommend it for anyone to spend a few weeks to learn at least the basics.
There are several companies that will "write" arbitrary sequences of DNA, to order. One is http://www.mrgene.com , but at $0.39/bp it is still much more economical to isolate and amplify desired sequences using PCR.
I'm hitting the paywall with this link for some reason.
Comeback for Blackberrys
Wikipedia Wales says Apple's App Store is a threat to openness online
Right, so this is a book review. All of a sudden the author has woken up to trying to live more healthy! And he does that through a book I would consider to be a horrible option to anyone who is just starting out. We'll see where he is a year from now.
I wouldn't cross the hackers out. People who hang out here are usually aware of all the technical/organizational challenges of building a scalable website with great UX, but lots of us could use some one on one guidance from someone experienced every now and then.
Show HN: node.js downloader
That's a great point. Duly noted.
I credit the UOP with providing me with the platform to have all of my awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing moments on stage in a format that no one cared if you screwed up. For me becoming a public technical speaker was worth every penny, I ever paid to UOP.

For people that don't understand why degree programs (regardless of school) require communications & speaking classes, this is it. Public speaking has probably gotten me further along in my career than any other skill I learned in school.

Most people groan in their normal classes when they have to give a speech about their project, but I think it's invaluable. You can also see immediately the difference between a brilliant student who is otherwise a lousy speaker, and students who may be so-so in the subject but great speakers -- and think about the future prospects of both students. I'd be willing to guess that 9 times out of 10, the speaker gets into higher positions in their career and makes more money.
Definitely a great question to ask. Re: the karma - couldn't hurt to throw that up there then.
I stand happily corrected if this is true. Though I've heard numerous UoP grads complain they can't get their credits transferred to their school when they go back for an M.S./M.A.

(but I'm perfectly willing to accept that it could just be sour grapes for not being accepted to get in)
That's enough, Tim Ferris.
To be frank I listed those just as examples: no idea which of those have their equipment installed at Beltelecom, but they are commonly used in similar setups. There is little point in being accusatory: the surveillance features were developed as a part of legal compliance to their respective jurisdictions, then spread worldwide.

IMHO it is best to treat corporations as a force of nature, which however can be loosely directed by legislation. People staffing them might be all fine as individuals, but the requirements of market and governments can produce socially unwelcome outcomes.
Many edits were now being struck down by Jesus's loyal defenders because they're "NPOV" —a Wikipedia term for "non-neutral point-of-view."

Incorrect. It actually stands for "Neutral point of view". ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Neu... )

Nonetheless, a small detail in an interesting article.