skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What sort of traffic do you push through this infrastructure? Micro instances only have ~600MB of memory and I found them to be severely over-sold cpu-wise -- doesn't windows require like ~300MB of RAM to just boot?

And Windows is only a penny more per hour on micro instances (although that is 50% more than Linux) -- but quite a bit more on larger instances should you ever have to scale up: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pric...

Re database choice -- http://xeround.com is totally down right now... Thoughts?

I dunno, just seems like a world of hurt should you actually have to scale up -- but presuming you do, perhaps you'd have the funds and/or resources to cover it anyway.

Additionally, How on earth do you hire people to work in this stack?!?
Perhaps "But the valuation ended up lower. Why?"

is answered by this:
"Speculation was that they’d hit $100 million in revenue this year. Our best guess based on discussions with sources is that revenue will be more like $30 million in 2011. But this is still largely a guess."

A valuation at 133x revenues is, well wow.

I say this as big fan of dropbox as a service and a business but I'm not a fan of these monster valuations on the come.

Also should point out there's a lot of speculation in that article and those which preceded it.
How StumbleUpon uses their own ad system
Why, because it is retarded and can scale to a mom and pop shop. That's why.
Entoforms | Future Fossils by macouno (evolved 3d printed creatures)
careful submitting to HN. My submissions are now all marked dead automatically for the past 2 weeks... Even one of my blog submissions got 10 upvotes before being marked dead.. No idea why this is happening / how I can stop it.
HP TouchPad Goes Zombie: Final New Production Run
Apple iPad News Reader Zite Sold to CNN for Just Over $20 Million
Several of my iPhone apps interact with a web service.

As for your situation, my cable company's upstream is so slow that I wouldn't host anything on it. But if yours is fast and you like dealing with your own hardware, go for it. Maybe you'll be the next Rackspace :)
This is just a press report from more than a year and a half ago. There is more information about the article mentioned on the Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles, under the heading "The 2009 APS Critique".
aren't micro instances heavily throttled?
Thanks for the info- The Ornilux glass shown on that birdsandbuildings site is a really great idea:

http://www.ornilux.com
I had the same reaction to CFML. I too run my site on IIS, but I use ASP-JScript, which is similar in syntax to javascript. I haven't used CFML in a decade, I remember it being clunky and limited compared to ASP 3. If you really want to go modern, there is of course dot-Net.
HTC EVO 3D launched in India
I'm not sure, but my submissions are being marked as dead automatically now.. So I guess HN thinks I'm a spammer. What's interested is one submission that got 10 upvotes before getting dead'ed
Indian Politicians(MPs) get iPad Lessons to cut Paperwork
I thought the problem with wind wasn't the cost, it was that all the places with both consistent wind and no migratory birds that will get your project killed have been taken?
I think we was just trying to differentiate between advocating a particular technology versus discussing a fundamental idea. Using the examples that other people have given from hobbies and sports, it's like the inclination to discuss gear instead of the activity itself.
I wanted to give them a try but if a scalable database company can't handle HN traffic, it makes me think twice.
It looks to be a per-image effect and not intentional. Most images I tried, there was no apparent difference. Then again, most images had only about a 30% savings. For an almost 80% savings, I'm not surprised if there's no free lunch.
Happy to answer questions, btw.
Play By Play - A Live Feed For Dribbble.com
Basic plan is $200/month.
This would be interesting if it was not web service. I would like to have an executable with command line access, in order to run batch commands. I don't want my images stored/processed on their server. Surely they can think of a license price.
City Gets its Due: Sex Tax Machine Introduced for Bonn Prostitutes
I respect that you may not like this technology. I think you are perhaps overestimating how hard it is to quantitatively or qualitatively judge what customers think of it.

Qualitatively: ask your waitstaff if they keep getting called over by customers saying "I pressed the devil box and it didn't work! I hate this!"

Quantitatively: you get credit card numbers and email addresses. See who comes back. (Bonus points: if they don't come back, ask them why not.)
CNN Acquires Zite(Personalized Magazine For The iPad)
Holy fucking shit.

Back of the envelope maths:

6% investment, diluted three (two rounds after seed according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dropbox , plus the current one), that goes down to about 2% (diluted by 30% each time).

2% of $4b is $80m. That's a 4000x return over what, 4 years?
The author answers your question in the article:

"In the real world the physical book has a meaning of its own: it's the book your wife gave you as an anniversary present, it's the book your late father got part way through and you dare not remove the bookmark he left in place, it's the children's book read and read until the pages are torn and worn. These physical remnants augment the book with personal meaning."
Not I. And I only spotted it because I brought the course up in a meeting at the office this morning.
Cold Fusion? No, no... no.

> CFML. I really like programming in CFML (a programming language, “ColdFusion Markup Language,” as opposed to ColdFusion, a commercial CFML interpreter made by Adobe). I know it’s not "cool" like Node.js or Clojure or even RoR.

Doctors used to bleed people with leeches to get out the "bad humors". They stopped using that "tool" for a reason. It was a bad tool, and better "tools" came along.

Not only is CFML not cool, it is hard for most people not familiar with CFML to understand [1]. The syntax mixes in with HTML markup in such a way as to make it very difficult to distinguish the two apart. With a syntax highlighter your mind still has a hard time as there isn't enough of a difference to make a subconscious context switch easy. Also, the need to cram logic constructs into HTML/XML-like syntax makes for some screwed up code. My understanding is that you can put the attributes for the tags in any order, and that means that things you'd always expect (in other languages) to appear in a certain order, like conditions for statements, are instead a matter of style [2].

> It’s got an old vibe. Not just because it was the first made-for-web programming language (tho it’s modern & updated frequently), but because whenever I meet other CFML coders, they’re always old dudes.

My experience with CF developers is similar. This is not a good thing. This is nothing like the C and C++ graybeards you occasionally meet and develop immense respect for. These old CF developers are, in my anecdotal experience, the kind people that learned one type of development and stuck with it for a long, long time. They've not really improved their skill sets beyond what was popular practice when they first learned Cold Fusion. These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right.

Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")? The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance.

A lot of "you're a developer, but you really should learn about business" stuff gets posted to HN. This case looks to be turned around and we have a business person doing double-duty as a developer. My advice is to learn something more current, and not because it's cool. More current technology has business value in that it's easier to find people who can work with/on it, and you will be able to find more of those kind of people for longer. The underlying tech will also (usually) be supported for longer, and by a wider range of companies. The reasons are too many to comprehensively list here.

I wasn't laughing at your back-end, by the way. It made me a little sad.

[1] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm

[2] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops....
Emergence of Formula One A Dawn of A Nations Glory |India
You need to click on "divine (verb)", third on the list of "entries found". Or the direct URL: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divine[3]
this appears to be far more anecdotal evidence than research. I was thinking a published study, not simply consumers noticing price differences on checkout, haphazard sampling to say the very least..
For me, the main benefit of a framework is scalability of new developers.

That's one, and it's a big one.

The other, even bigger benefit is that other people will do things for you. They'll write plugins for you. They'll develop new versions of the framework for you. They'll do crazy experiments in corners of the framework design space ("Hey, can we make Drupal work with a CouchDB back end through a series of proxies?") and report the results in obscure Stack Overflow posts that will get indexed by Google. They'll find and fix bugs and security holes for you. When you ask one of them about some problem in your system, they'll have a fighting chance to give you useful advice -- even if they've never actually seen your system -- because, hey, all Rails apps are kind of alike, and all Drupal sites are kind of alike, and all node.js installations are kind of alike.

The fact that this is the major benefit of using a common framework is also the reason why the poor OP feels so lonely. The whole point of a common framework is to have lots of meetings and rallies and beer bashes and hackathons and IRC channels so that everyone can swap ideas and recruit each other and basically work in a big team. They generate their own buzz, because the buzz is part of the value. But hand-rolled personal systems don't get that kind of buzz, because -- to paraphrase the ever-paraphrasable Tolstoy -- all standard web frameworks are alike, but all nonstandard web frameworks are nonstandard in their own way.
I'm confused with the math used here. I think exponential is something like you double the height, and quadruple the costs. And that doesn't sound unrealistic to me.
To do this, wouldn't they have to effectively block SSL and SSH connections as well? SSL is used in OpenVPN and some Cisco implementations. And we all know that you can tunnel any port over ssh.

Or is the plan that the punishment for stepping outside the lines be enough to keep people from experimenting with these technologies?
Phillip Longman spoke at the Long Now Foundation about the coming depopulation problem. Developed countries have fewer children (near or below replacement rates) and increased life expectancies. So much of the world population growth is from fewer deaths, not more births. This trend will pose new economic challenges for health care and social security because a shrinking workforce will be supporting a growing elderly population.

If families in developed countries continue to have just one child, few children will have brothers, sisters, aunts, or uncles! In Phillip Longman's talk, he says that some developed countries like France and Australia already have subsidies and programs encouraging couples to have more children.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr...
A couple of weeks ago for me. from what I understood the museum is struggling very much financially. Such a shame....

Perhaps a couple of wealthy hackers reading this can donate in his memory? It's a legacy worth preserving.
Sounds like an awesome project to work on. Curious whether Java will make it into the tech stack.. The careers page mentions "A broad range of software development in C, C++ and C#"
Large areas of China, Egypt, ect have been under continuous irrigation for thousands of years and they can still grow just fine. If California is having issues with irrigation over what 100 years then it's a separate issue.

They probably do have issues due to the amount of rainfall vs. irrigation and their crop rotation etc. But, it's not really an issue with irrigation just their approach to irrigation. Desalination also gives you the option to have much lower salinity than river water which should allow areas like California to cope with this issue.
College plagiarism on the rise.
What Does Your Website’s Color Scheme Reveal About You?
Where do you get your batteries?
If they don't come back you can't ask them why not. That's the point. It's a function of the level of competition. If it's a competitive location and you lose that customer, they're practically gone forever.
I'm sure it's monthly. The price tiers are the same as the full Heroku platform (http://heroku.com/pricing), which is billed monthly.
> After an hour or two, I decided never to write about this subject.

I have to say, you made the right choice. You would have probably ended up with a visit from Secret Service, FBI or other such organization.

Someone I know wrote about a similar hypothetical scenario and ended up getting a visit from FBI at their workplace, in front of everyone, then also at home. You know, just a friendly "chat"... They ended up lecturing him about 1st Ammendment rights, oh the irony.
TextOnly for Tweets - Removes unwanted clutter from tweeted articles
Webhook Testing Made Easy
How does this beat having a scanner?
I think the key words there are "But this is still largely a guess.".
From the article, it sounds more like Pakistan has banned all encryption than VPNs specifically - VPNs were just one example cited.
> "Why is the market failing?"

There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't (and pretty much can't) be true of academic publishing.
Is there a way around the 5MB local storage limit yet?
If you don't subscribe to WSJ (like me), then you can pull the full article by clicking on it from a google search results page: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
A Quick Demo of VMware’s Virtual Mobile Phone
You're paying for other features... let's say the cost of Spotify not being P2P increases the price by N dollars per month. The "free" users pay N, paying customers pay $5+N or $10+N. I think it's different to complain that they don't offer a "non-discounted" payment plan to opt out of P2P.

(I suspect N is rather large)
Right. Well, with a digital camera you can probably figure out all of that on your own just by futzing around with the camera for a weekend.

The difficult part comes in understanding light and understanding composition, neither of which the course really seems to talk about.

No one has ever needed to know about 3d colourspaces ( http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs178-11/applets/locus.... ) in order to take a good picture. However, good editing is about 30% of the effort behind a good photo; you might come out a better PHOTOGRAPHER but your photos won't necessarily be that much improved.

Anyways, the secret is to look at what other people are doing and to take as many pictures as possible.
this stack is... interesting. but the real problem, i think, with what he's saying, is that it is basically "i refuse to learn anything new that is not tightly bound to what i already know".

it's true that the laughter is unnecessary, and the trends and hype can be obnoxious, but it is somewhat about the excitement of always learning new things and new ways to think.
Discussing software tools as a programmer is nothing at all like discussing lenses on a camera. As far as I'm aware, there's no lens out there that can increase your productivity as a photographer by tenfold. Choosing Ruby over assembly language for a webapp could _easily_ increase your productivity by tenfold (probably more like a hundredfold).

Obviously not every software tool discussion is as exaggerated as that, but even if you're arguing Django vs Rails, there really are significant differences that could affect your work in dramatic ways (e.g. one framework has a plugin that would take you a week to write, while the other doesn't).
This is ridiculous, but I would love a REST interface to a SQL server. I do a lot of AppEngine work and although I love the datastore and write super-optimal queries, I would really love the ability to pull a SQL datasource in every once in awhile.
I read through this, but I didn't understand enough. It seemed like they were new to this - what did I miss?
Sounds like a great suggestion and I am glad that you posted the example too. It would need to be integrated well into my existing page and based on the example you showed, it looks like that wouldn't be too difficult. Thanks!
Microsoft Windows Worm Abuses Weak Password Practices
You do realize most wind turbines are installed in land that's already cleared, such as farmland or the ocean, right?
Does this number tell us how much the bubble burst will hurt? A whole lot!!
If there is anyone from heroku reading, please pay some money to http://www.sequelpro.com/ developers to develop postgresql compatibility. All GUIs available on OS X for postgres are horrible
Shot this video last night. Pretty seamless.
Using Google Auto Suggestions to Predict M&A Activity
Has anyone noticed if you can get insights into secret events (like M&A deals) by searching for a company name + "buys" or "sells" and checking what comes up in Google's auto suggest?
Copy. Modify. Repeat many times. Pretty soon you'll be doing "original" work that's really the sum of everything you've learned copying other people + your influence.
Energy production is one of the purest of the wealth producers.

Extractive energy production where you can dump negative externalities onto the public or hide your subsidy in a part of the budget that is not directly traceable to you (e.g. Marines in Iraq and destroyers in the straits of Hormuz) is surely one of the purest wealth producers, but if forced to actually compete on its own the equations would look a bit different...
I think you are all right that I should not try to re-invent the wheel and instead focus on great content. Although writing my own would be fun and worthwhile, you are right that time can be better spend working on something else. Thanks for the comments.
Paraphrased:

> Some people write crappy code in CFML.

Yes. But people write crappy code in [your preferred language] too. There's nothing inherent in CFML that forces people to write bad or hard-to-understand code.

> OMG can you believe some people still use TABLES???

view source
Amazon marketplace. The 9 cell lithium ions give 5-6 hours. The one I'm using currently is from Energy+.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
I wonder what are they going to do with the money. Build datacenters of their own? I hope they don't bloat their service with some expensively developed value-add stuff that nobody wants, but are force-fed nevertheless. One would think they're would be too smart for that kind of failure, but you can never know what big money does.
If they don't come back you can't ask them why not

If you're collecting their email addresses to give them their receipts, this is probably not as problematic as you think.
I don't think you read me right. There's nothing wrong with debating the pros and cons of a language (or whatever else), but there's a difference between discussing and preaching. I'm always open to a nice chat, but I've got little patience for preachers. That's all I'm saying.
pg has been on record saying that financially, YC does better if the YC companies go public, not if they sell out early for $XM or $X0M. But he supports those because it benefits the founders, and when founders win, YC wins.
Http://blog.superfeedr.com/node-xmpp-server/
I would extend this to just about anybody who could be considered a "geek". Photography, Programming, Writing, everything. There is so much discussion over tools and process that everyone forgets to actually make stuff.

Which reminds me, I should stop reading HN and get back to work.
>Sex: what happens when pornography becomes the default means of getting sexual pleasure.

i stopped reading that rubbish here. If he can't distinguish between sex and pornography ....
So, your answer is actually yes, even though it looks like a 'no' - i.e. they have banned SSL and SSH along with VPNs.
Zite sold to CNN
Why Firefox Could Own Browser-Based Gaming
I suspect this wouldn't work for well-covered companies, but for less well-covered companies (e.g. investment funds), it seems possible.
My web app mockuptiger is exactly what you say html/jquery/php/mysql

look at wordpress, joomla, drupal
HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads
Researchers discover origin of the Black Death
Yes. Their main use is for really wimpy applications, or for apps that need occasional bursts of CPU -- the throttling allows bursts up to 2 compute units, but you get very little on average.