skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short explanation: network effects and backwards compatibility.

When the SMTP protocol was designed/evolved, spam and other malicious uses did not exist. They didn't even exist for many, many years afterwards.

When the spam really became a problem, everyone was already using smtp and switching the whole world to an alternative wasn't (and still isn't) possible.

Designing email protocol that would eliminate spam is not hard if you start with such goal in mind.

The people who designed smtp were very smart (it is being used decades later), but they were pioneers and unsurprisingly didn't anticipate all of the consequences. When they were designing it, there number of people using the system were in thousands. I doubt anyone in early eighties was anticipating the magnitude of smtp's success and the abuses of the system only became profitable when email started being used by millions.
He doesn't run it himself. Reddit has two sysops and Amazon AWS staff. I won't pass judgement on Neil's performance or compensation -- we shouldn't speculate, but it'd be surprising to see a developer of only 4-5 months get a big raise.
That's a bit unfair to jedberg, who actually runs the site with his operations team of two (one of them a new hire). This article and the comments are putting far too much weight on the developer, as if Reddit is a site that's constantly iterating new features. That's not to downplay his contribution, but:

* He was hired in November.

* He works on code, and didn't get woken up during
the last major downtime until the end (from their post
mortem, presumably due to the DB eating itself). The
word 'even' in "we *even* woke up spladug" is telling,
that indicates to me that he doesn't wake up often.

* Reddit is pretty much a done product, and the last
features I can think of were meta (Gold comes to mind)

He has a positive outlook[1], anyway, which the TechCrunch piece didn't seem to notice.

Doing operations for a site the size of Reddit with a staff of 2, on AWS, is far more impressive to me. Keeping an operation like Reddit afloat in front of that many uniques must be a pretty significant challenge. There's not a lot of depth for on-call, so I feel for their sleep.

On top of that, jedberg is the sole voice actively fighting for Reddit's reputation in public, since (let's be honest) the exodus looks a little suspect. Watching his comments[2] in the face of a perceivably sinking ship -- not to mention former employees who are saying quite a bit in front of an impressionable user base[3] -- is interesting, to say the least.

They're definitely undergoing a challenge, and I'm interested to see how they come out of it. (Aside: Today has apparently been discuss-Reddit day, looking at my threads.)

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g6d7i/three_form...

[3]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
I wish the TC article had done more than merely mention that keltranis is "joining Alexis". Hipmunk now has both reddit cofounders, their first hire in keysersosa, and their most senior programmer in keltranis. I wouldn't be surprised to see jedberg join them before too long, and then hipmunk would have almost all of the old reddit team on board.
I'd have to heartily agree with this sentiment. While oftentimes I think we do see engineers get marginalized in favor of "business" employees or designers to disastrous effect, it's important to recognize the importance of UI/UX, especially on consumer-facing products. While Apple and its extreme focus on UX is the most prominent example, many web startups have seen success due to a combination of good marketing and design (Tumblr, Facebook (vs. Myspace), Instagram, and Flipboard come immediately to mind).
Time Management Tips
The master only job flow is designed to let users play around with the instance and discover things without having to pay for a full cluster. A single node versus multi-node cluster is configured way differently and that is why you can expand a single node cluster. If you had started with a two node cluster you would have been able to expand it.

Also, if you want Pig you should complain about it vocally on the EMR forum. That is the best way to get them to listen to you.
I believe it is. Perhaps you're referring to the old standard of black background terminals. If you look at mainstream desktop editors, the popular trend from the late 80's through the 90's was ever lighter backgrounds. Now, it seems, the popular trend is toward various dark shades.

Incidentally, I'm at a loss as to why I received downvotes for asking about design.
I assume the quotes implied sarcasm.

And in fairness, Wave and Android are hardly perfect examples of engineering. Wave was buggy and never added significant features, Android is still sluggish compared to iOS on similar hardware.

Google tends to lack clear direction/leadership/vision at a product level, not just UI design.
Sorry! I accidentally downvoted while intending to upvote. Tricksy fingers...
I don't know, both the Winklebros twins and Saverin seemed to have done quite well (financially) out of 'co-founding' with Zuckerberg
Count me as one of the guys miffed at everybody calling every little hacked out Rails website as a "startup". But in the case of a moon colony, I'm willing to let it slide.
Swinging For The Fences
Local AZ Tech Darling Jawa & Jason Hope a Big Scam?
This is not good given that they just had a recent 6 hour downtime. Why would folks at Conde let this happen ?
Spam is a numbers game. If you make it harder for spam messages to be sent out, spammers 1. send less spam by default 2. increase hardware. (realize 2 can also include increase cost if not using a "free" bot-net)

If all SMTP servers were required to receive and send back a token/packet before their original message was delivered, the bandwidth/cpu etc... required to send the message will have increased.

Send original to recipient server, receive from recipient server, send to recipient server. Then the mail is delivered.

Example: A single spammer can send out 50 million emails / month on current system. Introduce a 3-way & that number drops.

If the spammer wants to get back to sending 50 million / month, a significant increase in hardware will be required.
Wow, sometimes companies are just out of their minds with the hoops they put up.

I would definitely not invest that much time into a job application, especially before an initial interview to know if I even want to work there.
Just some formal clarifications:

Logzilla's formal name is ZIL, ZFS Intent Log. Generally these are SLC flash SSD's, mirrored as losing the ZIL on a ZFS pool can lead to "interesting" recovery situations.

L2ARC is basically an extension of main memory used to cache data from the drives. If you lose L2ARC, there aren't any serious consequences. Usually L2ARC is implemented with less expensive MLC flash SSD's.

On a related note, Seagate sells a Hybrid SSD+rust drive called the Momentus XT which uses it's 4GB of flash a similar manner to the L2ARC.
Reddit's sysadmins neither have to maintain DC racking (nor travel), maintain hardware lifecycles, nor maintain vendor relationships. They certainly appear up to their teeth in working around AWS (EBS) deficiencies. They're not going to control a lot of their hardware, and most "fixing" of AWS pitfalls are going to come in the form of software.

Now if we are talking devops, I can agree. Engineering teams this small need to wear many hats; I think jedberg has been said to have helped in development efforts, if my memory of past blogs serves right.
That's why they need someone from the start-up world -- both a systems guy/girl and a hacker guy/girl.
Being totally new to AWS, why does everyone skip right past using ZFS?

http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton/entry/a_brilliant_argument...
"Cloud Storage Will Be Limited By Drive Reliability, Bandwidth ... The key feature of ZFS enabling data integrity is the 256-bit checksum that protects your data."
Because he works "from coffeeshops and client meetings pretty often, so it’s nice to have a reminder of my remaining battery power to know when I need to plug in". Didn't you read it?
I wanted Hacker News external links to open in a tab
So I spent 2 minutes and wrote this Safari extension using the built-in Extension Builder. I'm sure it is as simple in Chrome.
Identified | Use Your Facebook Network to Land the Perfect Job
OT but I found this amusing:
competitor Digg (which has 42 employees and has raised over _$40_ in funding)
Small is Small
I think a large company such as conde nast has a problem with engineering talent retention -- hence the move to AWS maybe?
Tim Wu: A critical period for the Internet
From one college student to another, if you can find any internships for start ups in your area do it. If you can't then get involve into any business our entrepreneurial clubs. The people in those organizations are usually are looking to engage themselves in business oriented projects. Be willing to learn as much as possible.
ZFS will ensure that what was written to disk comes back to memory consistently, or with errors spotted. It wont ensure that the right thing was written to disk, or that the database IDs which were written leave your database relationships in a consistent state, etc.

ZFS will do nothing about this "More recently we also discovered that these disks will also frequently report that a disk transaction has been committed to hardware but are flat-out lying.", for instance, other than tell you the data you want isn't there to be read - like any filesystem would.
Hi guys, I worked with Julie in writing this article. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the work. I was indeed inspired by the Drake equation in coming up with this interpretation of our results :)

If you'd like to learn more about this experiment, the Wired article is based off of: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/CACMSpam09.pdf
GCJ is an AOT Java compiler. http://gcc.gnu.org/java/
really? World changing how?
pg seems to have said something alex'ish elsewhere:

"I once sat in a crowded hall and listened to Paul Graham give a keynote presentation about going big, doing it quickly, and getting tons of funding. During Q&A, someone asked what was wrong with instead of trying to go big with big money backers, you just went for profit and kept ownership to yourself and Graham said something like "you want to run a little business? Go run a shoe store then"

Matt Haughey
http://dashes.com/anil/2011/01/mom-and-pop-at-web-scale.html...
Basically, Paul Graham taught nerds how to be rich. So now they are suave.
Nuclear Meltdowns 101
I wonder if it's time for AWS to open a development office in a more startup-oriented city (i.e. SF). It might help them attract and retain more talent.
I fact he was the sole-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921
HN seems to be doing fine with just one awesome developer :-)
What area of physics do you want to know about? There are some free books (for example I know of one on small angle neutron scattering that you can find at NIST)--also there are many lecture notes online. For texts, though do you think it would be better to have a static PDF, or a wiki, where an author could add what they could and the community could improve it?
They still won't be able to bend reality to their convenience. When this can of worms is opened, it will be nasty.

The only thing that may come to their aid is that telcos have a power over the phones that connect to them no PC OS maker has. Well... Maybe Apple will get there...

And, BTW, once phone manufacturers realize they need to provide security updates for the life of the phones, they will trim their lineups down to very manageable levels.
That is... odd. I'm pretty sure that was an exception, not the rule. You must have caught the customer service rep on a good day :)
I was not really involved in the article but in the follow on book she put words in my mouth (presumably from someone else, but who knows) that I never said, without any attempt at verification.

In an ideal world, she should not be working. But hello, Techcrunch.
The Inknet is a T-shirt printing machine for the internet.
Japanese disaster could leave Apple with shortage of five key iPad 2 components
The reddit blog linked to in the TC article says the recently hired a new sys admin, which "doubles the size of our systems administration team."
and here's Ivanovich(middle name),
in his rocketship,
spinning helplessly up above the earth,
and though his heart is splintered,
all the girls of winter,
are buried in their coats anonymous....
That's how you reach out to inexperienced devs. And frankly, if they're posting on Reddit, they know what they're getting into. They have to set up a pretty serious mediocrity filter.

If your resume identifies you as a badass programmer, you just toss them a copy of your resume. You know how it works, and they know that insisting that you do a programming challenge before setting up an interview hurts their chances of landing you, so they'll give you an in-interview test instead.

It's the same with Facebook and all the other places that have programming challenges -- they're there to qualify leads.
"The Asocial Network"
Interesting. This sure is boosting their pageviews/developer ratio.
I disagree that it's difficult to secure. Rather, it's that it's too easy to compromise manually.
Comparing Recurring Payment Solutions
Always offer your worst, most embarrassing moment -- the exact time you and your company were nearest death: the board meeting where your lead investor tried to have you deposed, sending you crying and running into the bathroom where you fall down, smash your head on the toilet bowl and end up in the ER for 19 staples and a CAT scan. The next day, an epiphany struck you, allowing you to patch things up with your big investor and send the company sprinting toward fortune.

A lot of people just talk about the epiphany. Don't forget about the tumultuous board meeting and the concussion in the bathroom. The bad times are as interesting--or moreso--as the good times.

Good stories will be told. Boring ones will go wanting.
Dutch Court Rules WiFi Hacking Not a Criminal Offense
This application is the initial interview. You now know that you don't want to work there. Saved both you and Reddit a lot of time.

From the application:

Well, first off, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't see the joy in either of these puzzles, please don't apply.

Seems fair to me.

Set high standards. You can always lower them later.
Using Windows 7’s Windows XP Mode to Run Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer
It would be nice to have this and Rapportive integrate. I use Rapportive as personal CRM, but definitely some of the stats offered by Xobni are very interesting.
How many developers does hacker news have?
I think this is really smart on their part. I got super nervous about their viability after Microsoft launched Outlook Social Connector (which seems to not be as good, but is free and natively part of Outlook).

I've tried using Rapportive and Etacts at various times, but never really derived enough use to keep using them.

Also excited for an iOS app, their Blackberry app is really nice.
Bummer, this is the first time I heard of Dabble, the demo video was impressive. Why did they have to shut down?
Well i agree this is really touching.Indeed Something really brave.
There is so much agony in that audio.
If you go to your companies website, Bank Simple, it has an article entitle: "BankSimple Wants to Shake Up Banking with Cutting Edge UI Design".

It seems Freckle isn't the only one who wants to use "this month's CSS trends".
I am not sure why I was downvoted - I wasn't suggesting as a course of action... it gives a large speed increase and I was suggesting that possibly this was done as a performance measure.
It would have required both sides to agree to that mythology. As the article points out, we knew when things went wrong with them (via the NSA), and chances are sooner or later they'd find out when things went wrong with us (via the KGB). It would have required not only secrecy on their half, but secrecy on our half.
hey Davide, which one stat would you say is most interesting?
Learn Excel/MySQL/Another programming language, find out where you can get small grants for start-ups just to build a prototype and just get people using the product.

I'd recommend joining a start-up as well. Currently I'm employed at a hot start-up and every single day I am being given several projects which are essentially building/architecture projects using excel, mysql and other programming software/languages to make things useful to the business that people can use.

building is what it is about.
Checkiday.com - Daily holidays, most of which you won't find on a calendar
Ways to Build Awareness for New Businesses
File this one under "stupid data mining tricks."
This incident sounded familiar so I pulled my copy of James Bamford's Puzzle Palace[1] (1982) and managed to find it on page 215:

"Another high-priority target for the signal chasers at Karamursel [Turkey] is the Soviet space program. On April 23, 1967, a number of analysts were routinely copying the return of Soyuz I, bringing Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov back from twenty-six hours in space, when problems suddenly developed on re-entry. Recalled one of the intercept operators:

'They couldn't get the chute that slowed his craft down in re-entry to work. They knew what the problem was for about two hours...and were fighting to correct it. It was all in Russian, of course, but we taped it and listened to it a couple of times afterward. Kosygin called him personally. They had a video-phone conversation. Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero and that he had made the greatest achievement in Russian history, that they were proud, and that he'd be remembered. The guy's wife got on too. They talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids. It was pretty awful. Toward the last few minutes he began falling apart, saying, "I don't want to die, you've got to do something." Then there was just a scream as he died. I guess he was incinerated.'"

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-Or...
Good to see someone gets it :D
Pearls Jewelry
Find out the best jewelry manufacturer at online for buying the pearls jewelry at low cost. We can give you the absolutely lowest possible total cost per order, since you only get what you pay for.
Because this is based around notions of geography w.r.t economy and society, it might be worth trying to simulate it in Minecraft (one would have to set up constraints to mimic scarcity of resources, etc).
To be fair, a lot of Wave's problems could've been nipped long before it got to the designers. The app was just plain slow. Speed is a quality all of its own.
Lost in Space: the Judica-Cordiglia brothers eavesdrop on Soviet cosmonauts.
This part of the argument feels strange to me. The average self employed person works more hours and makes less money than their employed counterparts. Building a business that covers a mortgage is one thing. Building one that throws off enough cash and spare time to disrupt an industry seems like an order of magnitude harder. As PG said in the one of the other threads-- empirically, we just don't see this happening very much at all.
For me it is because he did it for his friend. If he didn't go, Gagarin would have been sent.
He's still not an HN caliber programmer and it wasn't his primary contribution to the company...which is the point.
In-car computing, smartphones, and the future of cars
I don't think you need XCode for that. Check this out: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

In last instance, like "mechanical_fish" pointed out, you can always use Linux (or event Windows) and run them on a VM.
More on Baking
I'm sorry, but using an ongoing tragedy with thousands of dead people as a way of 'scoring points' in some little battle of the debating geeks strikes me as at best enormously insensitive and in bad taste.
To be fair this would've worked for the US military up to the Mercury program or the very early Vostok program. We know that the USSR did indeed hide deaths[1].

[1] - http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1302/lost_in_s...
Yeah, but look who he is.
i didnt even know u could do that. just wait untill their wifi is hacked we see wat they say...
Ask HN: What's the best terms one can expect for seed funding?
With all the standardized term sheets out there these days, what's the most ideal terms one can expect, within reason, from a seed round of financing?

Insight from other entrepreneurs who have recently closed or are in the ongoing process of a seed round would be much appreciated.
>My guess is this may have repelled some experienced devs that, otherwise, might have applied.

I told them as much too.
You mean you've actually managed to escape working in retail at some point in your life? How did you pull that off?
Hey Steve Jobs, a Few Survival Apps Japan Needs
Not accurate.
Reminds me of the article I read about a couple Italian kids listening in on the Soviet's [lost] space missions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342986

Not sure how much they sensationalized their efforts but quite interesting look into the history nonetheless.
I like Eliezer's take on that regarding science and cults - scientific knowledge is given away so freely it must be worthless, at least with cultish bullshit you have to work hard before they tell you about each bit, so it feels really substantial and valuable.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/p0/to_spread_science_keep_it_secret/
Videos cristianos
If you've got all your space-wasting menu bars on auto-hide and are just using Gnome-do/Synapse/cmdline/etc. to run stuff, it would be useful.
Is space like a chessboard?
Xcode is not FOSS. (Cue the world's tiniest open-source violin.)

And if Apple ever were to charge $1k for Xcode -- an event which has not happened and almost certainly will not happen -- it would work approximately like the Windows ecosystem works today. (Have you priced Visual Studio lately?) Casual programmers and many (if not most) pro web developers would promptly switch to Linux or to FOSS development packages on Mac OS; professional Mac OS/iOS devs would pay, just as they pay for tools like Photoshop or Flash. Meanwhile, the signal-to-noise ratio in the App Store might actually go up. (Which is the only reason why I think the idea is merely crazy, not too-crazy-to-contemplate. In the past, I believe I have heard various professional iOS developers state that they would be happy to pay Apple $999 per year for app-review privileges, if the result was faster, better app reviews with better feedback.)
Its not often I agree completely with all the points in an article, but this one made me think there must be more to PG than I've given him credit for. Well worth bookmarking.
The Top Ten Signs the Valley is on Tilt Again
There's a thing that happens a lot with tech company growth stocks. Digg is a case in point, where they grow fast, and on the way up they get several offers, but they keep holding out for more and more... until suddenly their exponential growth crashes to a halt, and the big offers suddenly dry up.

The trick is to sell on the way up, not when you're at the top. You're at 'the top' for such a vanishingly small period of time that the odds of selling at the perfect time are vanishingly small.

I seem to recall Digg over the years while it was still growing getting (and knocking back) offers of 30, 60, and ~100 million before the famous Google 200 fell through.

I understand the urge to push hard and get everything you can for a deal, but if at $200 million the other guy feels that there's nothing in it for him, that it is strictly break even, then maybe at the last minute the deal falls through, and you kick yourself a year later for not selling at $180MM or even $150MM.

Yes, you should negotiate hard, but you should always leave something on the table for the other guy. Even if you're completely screwing him over a barrel, you should still leave him something for him to brag about to his buddies or board of directors or journos.