skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems too expensive and I'd like to try and help, so I'm going to give you an idea of my hosting bill and why it's low and then suggest something for you:

I pay around $3k per month. I own my own servers and lease a full rack and I serve roughly 1 billion page impressions per month. My bandwidth consumption is measured in Mbps rather than amount of data transferred because I get billed using 95th percentile billing. I average around 130 megabits per second of transfer - constantly, peaking at 150mbps I'm transferring roughly 40 terabytes of data per month. 95th percentile billing and owning your own servers is they key here.

To give you an idea, for one month of your hosting bill you can buy 1, possibly 2 servers from Dell and put them in a half rack that will cost you around $800/month including power, secure access, bandwidth, etc. Those servers will last around 5 years with a possible drive replacement or two during that time for a few bucks.

But I think you have another problem that's making things worse. With 15,000 active users you should be able to support them on one or two small Linode servers using round robin DNS. That's a relatively small user base and the number of requests per second can't be anything more than 10 per second? So I'm guessing something about your basic app architecture is off. It could be that you're not using Nginx to reverse proxy to Apache and you think you need more apache children/processes, and therefore more memory, than you actually do. You could have a DB that doesn't have indexes in the right places and so you're IO bound.

I would suggest first looking at your app and seeing where the bottlenecks are in performance. Fix that first, then look at hosting.

Questions:

-How many servers do you currently have and give us a rough idea of config.

-How many app requests per second do you get at peak?

-What's your peak bandwidth throughput in Mbps?

-On your servers, is lack of CPU or lack of disk throughput the bottleneck?

-Have you had problems running out of memory that caused you to buy more servers? Which app ran out of memory?

-Give us an idea of your server config. e.g. nginx -> Apache -> MySQL & Redis. Do the servers talk to each other and if so what do they do?
Would you say the same is true for, eg, the «heavy lifting» done by a Google search? I certainly wouldn't, so I don't think your statement is true in the general case, though it is certainly true for a large class of software.
Firefox Heatmap
Shweta Verma doesn’t need Shahrukh Khan’s help
I use a kind of combination. I would probably be drowning in post-its scattered about my cube at the end of the day. Outlook ToDo's are kinda strange to use, so I picked up a steno pad and I write down all my tasks for the day every day in the morning. I go through and put +/*/- next to each one (after I'm done) for priority. As stuff comes up I add it to the list and assess its priority then.

When I start to work on a task, I open up onenote and break that task in to sub tasks that are more bite sized (a la pomodoro) that I can strikethrough when I'm done. Strikethrough you can add to your quick bar in Office 2010. Using onenote I can expand subtasks if I find they're too large, and if I have to stop working on task A to go to B I know approximately where I left off. Inserting text is difficult on paper.

When all the subtasks are done I delete it from onenote and strike it through on the paper.

Pomodoro is a bit too rigid for me in the office where anyone in the cube farm can interrupt you any time of the day, but it certainly did help me crunch through my 10 page paper during my last semester in college.
Well, my own data point is Mibbit. And I can tell you I certainly don't spend that much on hosting.

Still, easy to criticize without knowing the full facts...
Considering even Apple doesn't get any meaningful profit from its app store, I don't see Android Market being a profit center either. They need Android Market just to be competitive with the App Store.
Hacker Rattles Internet Security Circles
This is pretty fascinating stuff, despite the limitations and obvious bias of this article. Are there any Open Source libraries or papers which cover toy implementations of this sort of thing? (Assuming, of course, that it is not simply a bunch of if/else constructs applied to templates, which would be far less interesting.)
The answer to your second question is covered here:
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/08/a_short_rant_about_hosting/ ("Why not go with Linode/AWS/[other virtualized hosting]?")

tl;dr - I/O performance
Postcard Marketing – Precisely How To Uncover Ones Future | Create The Future
You're right, poor choice of words. :-) Proof read damnit ...
That might be true, but where ever you go, there is always bash installed. zsh not so much. Knowing the tools, that you will always find, is a pretty useful skill.
But doesn't work with Firefox.
A lot of cross-posts from Reddit lately. Could this mean Reddit is improving?
Saturdays. Jews don't work on Saturdays, schmuck.
I Don’t Care About Your Profits, And It Enrages Me That You Think I Should
uh, why wouldn't you just actually paste the url into your terminal at that point instead of typing `xclip -o`?

and yeah, typing the actual command into the terminal is always going to be 'simpler'
That assumes, say, users not inheriting ~/.ssh/config files, or having one configured for them by a site administrator.

Just because a configuration needs to be added to a file doesn't mean that everyone using that config has added it themselves, or understands the implications.

Seems that an agent notification of auth requests would help mitigate some of the risks here.
I thought it was insane rather than to deal with issues like that on a case by case basis, they decided to just fire ~ 30 people. But then again, I'm not a corporate muckety-muck, so what do I know.
First, there is nothing wrong with you. I, and it sounds many in HN, have similar time management issues, and I choose to believe we all rock more than not.

Second, you've chosen a path that aggravates your seemingly short attention span. I was in a similar situation, working alone and producing very little. After much trial and error, including trying therapy, medication, and numerous self management techniques, hiring an assistant proved to be the simplest solution.

My assistant helps with everything not directly related to what I do to generate value. She schedules appointments, nags me, runs errands, and a wide variety of more complex things. It took some practice getting used to working with her, but my productivity shot through the roof my and more than covered the costs of paying her. The most important part is that she works right beside me, and I sublet a small office space for this reason.

My email is in my profile if you want more info.
Interesting also that the physical design now exactly mirrors the iPhone now - a single real button in the middle.
Take note. This is actually a useful response that people benefit from reading. As opposed to the several one liners already posted that all say variants of "your hosting is expensive". Thanks for taking the time to write this response up.
Curious, what do you mean by "target non-consumption"?
If the hosting costs are high because of inefficient software, or bad architecture decisions, then those should be changed.

If anyone here believes this, make your best estimate as to how many man-months you need for a re-architecture and how many hundreds of dollars you'll save in hosting costs, then do the division to get your effective hourly rate. I'll pay you that plus 50% for contract programming work.
Just for another data point, a while back one of my customers' sites got really popular overnight, and peaked at around 25Mbit/s sustained traffic, with Apache handling around 800+ requests/second, on a Linode 768. No RAM issues, the server wasn't stumbling at all, and the site was still loading nice and quick.

No nginx magic in that configuration, either. Just straight Apache, with a few tweaks.
Psychopathy excepted.

C.f.: certain violent criminals, backstabbing co-workers, banksters, and the like.
No, it's just knowing the right subreddits. I found this one via http://redditdirectory.com/856/Programming
RDP has file sharing too actually, go into the Drives tab on TS client.
The guy writes like a typical stock newsletter huckster, and his to-the-month predictions are shysterish at best, but... the problems he addresses are real, not overblown, and we're more likely than not heading for another downturn at best, crash at worst.

Much of the trillions of bad debt that caused the crisis of 2007-2008 was never worked out or resolved, despite the govt and Fed buying a few years to do that (with TARP, stimulus, and QE).

It's still there on balance sheets being marked to model rather than market. We're more or less right back at square one, but with the Fed and Govt having used up much of their ammo this time. Fewer options this time around. Imho best we can hope is a managed decline for a while, no abrupt shocks.
Chris, I did read it. But then I don't see why you posted it to HN.
I'm sure by me saying "dumbing it down," will alienate some folks but I think I got my point across. I've worked with designers and developers who swear by their code. If you try to explain to them that a button was hard to find, they'll tell you it was designed that way for a reason. I used to work for an e-commerce company and every design decision we made for the site was based on one of two ppl's opinion. We would often use A/B testing, but I would say 80% of the things we put into production was because the VP of Marketing wanted things his way.
New PHP Framework aims to make MVC easier for beginners
Just Buzz About Mesothelioma
It's no different from the SGS (1); physical button flanked by a capacitive button each side, with physical power and volume buttons on the sides.
A lot of the problem isn't so much the stress in particular, as it is your endocrine system's response to it. You go into fight or flight mode and start pumping out cortisol, and most of the rest of your system goes into standby.

Serious research into it is pretty young, but things like regular exercise can help control the process a bit more. We're starting to find compounds that can reduce cortisol response as well (eg. a couple of cups of black tea a day seems to noticeably reduce it.) As research progresses, we should see more advancement.

In the meantime, most of the 'good for you' stuff tends to reduce the problem. Eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, and so forth. They all work to minimize your body's response to stress. Avoiding stressful situations is ideal, but they aren't the root of the problem as much as cortisol is.
Don't you think web crawling (for users with archival accounts, where the full text + associated images/resources for each bookmark is stored and indexed on Pinboard's servers) is probably using up more of those resources than actually serving up pages? I don't think 10 pages per second or whatever is really the relevant metric for this app.
Also see Visual Panel by Zhengyou Zhang. The problem basically is to find correspondences and then fit a planar homography between the input and the output surface.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/zhang/VisualPa...
Did you not read the preceding paragraph?

Maciej was mocking Paul's use of the same name-calling he professes to despise.
Pure CSS3 Spiderman Cartoon using jQuery & HTML5 – No Flash
I would tend to agree actually, I always cringe at the words "grassroots" and "innovation".

The Garage is all about some people who are frankly way more like the HN crowd than most inside Microsoft, trying to bring back Hacker Ethos, DIY code culture to Microsoft. If it doesn't exist, hack it out and make things more awesome.

Trying to release what comes out of it externally is trickier, many of the things that come out of it just don't make sense outside of MS, but for the things that do, they should see the light of day (ideally, as Open Source, but that's trickier).

The point is, there are folks inside Microsoft who Get It, and they're trying to turn the battleship around, even if it seems like small beans to the rest of the world. Whether they are successful or not will determine whether anyone will care about Microsoft in ten years.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the people who was on the Garage Council)
This is a generous offering of expertise, but supposing you were to help him out and he were to take on implementation costs, wouldn't "Here's what I'd do to get you to a billion impressions a month of customer demand for your product" be a higher-priority task than saving a few hundred bucks?

The most common failure mode in scaling for startups is to have no scaling problem at all.
The new design is ugly, dysfunctional and reads to me as an online apparel website.
"copyright means they have control over it"

No, copyright means that they are entitled to be the only seller of the work, for a limited time, to ensure their livelihood. It does not mean that they have control over it. Notably, there are strong consumer rights, such as the right of first sale, which limit the ability of the copyright holder to restrict buyers from reselling the work. There are also exceptions to copyright, known as "fair use" exceptions, which permit copyright to be waived in certain situations.

Copyright used to be short. 28 years. It was anticipated that it would get shorter and shorter, as methods of distribution improved. It is not intended to ensure profits.

The big studios keep gross profit from leaking into net profit by cooking their books. Most of the blockbusters of the past 50 years haven't turned a net profit; they've been carefully rigged so that they appear to be in the red, to keep as much money in the studio as possible. They don't have any qualms about financing bad movies. (Pluto Nash is my favorite example.)

"It's like complaining you have to pay to get into the Louvre."

Most of the artwork in the Louvre can be viewed for free, online. Copies of artwork hosted in the Louvre are quite cheap, and you could make your own for free. Your payment goes towards upkeep of the museum, not towards the artists who created the artwork hosted there.

Can you draw Mickey Mouse? I bet you can. Most people have him etched into their memory, because he's so ubiquitous. Mickey is a character that, over the past century, has become a cornerstone of American culture, in TV and film. I'm sure that you know Mickey quite well. But, according to current copyright and trademark law, you don't own him. Nobody does except for Disney. So you can't have him, despite having grown up with him and having known him your entire life. You can't have a piece of culture. Do you really think that's okay?
In the very long run, could OS-specific CFI enforcement toolchains and runtimes merge into a single standard, usable on the web?

Maybe, but that is beyond my prediction horizon. Either OS vendors or browser vendors (if there's a difference) would have to standardize a butt-load of APIs.

Since the '60s, researchers have dreamed of universal object files (ANDF, e.g.). It would be too funny if far-future JS merges into this single standard too!

("too funny" in my experience means this will definitely happen...)
Apple's app store revenue is around $2 billion. If Android market can generate a similar amount of revenue for Google, it should a good share of the total Android revenue.
I know I'm venturing a bit off topic, but...

From what I've seen, 5 years is about the amount of time for major changes in trends to take place. A lot of companies can rise and fall in 5 years, which is the same amount of time it takes for a startup to come out of nowhere and then dominate the scene.

We haven't really seen China and India explode yet. I would even dare to say that a lot of people on HN haven't taken a close look at Chinese websites. Rhygar's comment not only applies to Samsung, but a lot of other companies we haven't even heard of in other countries. There are Chinese travel websites (e.g. qunar and huochepiao), auction sites (taobao), search engines (baidu), social networks (renren), made by really smart engineers who understand their local markets and cost a fifth to a third of what US software engineers cost--and when those companies make boatloads of cash in their own country, guess where they will start pushing out to?

I laughed when I went to Shanghai several years ago and saw all the urinals and toilets in the airport with the American Standard brand. Now, I see a lot of Toto (Japanese) branded toilets in American restaurants and public restrooms.
I suppose you'd be in the minority if you found relevance in my specific concerns, or if you found it pertinent to your situation. But I didn't think that should forbid me from posting it.

I can understand why it seems pointless, and I suppose HN was not the best venue.
They won't; not directly. They don't need to either. Google is in the business of knowing their users. They make money by:

A) Knowing the make-up of your daily online life

B) Presenting ads that are relevant based on that profile

Android keeps you inside the Google ecosystem. Google search, Google mail, Google docs, Google RSS reader, Google shopping. Each of these utilities feed the core purpose of knowing you, which is beneficial to Google's bottom line. The better they know their users, the better targeted the ads can be, and the better they can convert.
Panda Security (Pakistan domain) hacked by X-NerD
In the example, the current hosting is $24k/yr.
If that can be slashed to $2.4k/yr, you've saved $21.6k a year in hosting.

For $21.6k/yr I'd say it's worth a week or two re-architecting.

Yes, it's a different game if you're profitable and $21.6k is negligible, but if you're a startup you should be spending time to optimize things.

The other point is one of scaling. If you're paying $2k/mo to support 15k users, when you scale to 15m users, you could be paying $2m/mo unless you fix things early on.
Being able to get (almost) the same model in the next many years might be important too: they don't need to update all their training, and system administration is simpler long-term with only a single type of phone.

Apple is the new Microsoft, who was the new IBM.
> When you reconnect to the server, just ask your P4 client to "synchronize offline changes" (in P4V, I think)... I'm sure these operations could be easily scripted, too.

p4v does have a lot of added features and conveniences. Maybe I'm an old fart, or maybe I'm just too used to sd (which didn't have an official GUI client app when I used it) but I don't actually like to use p4v, preferring to use the p4 command-line tool. So, yes, I've gotten used to automating certain operations via shell scripts that wrap p4.

> ... or just checkout your entire clientspec and ask your P4 client to revert unchanged files...

If you do that, though, the server will tell everyone else that checks out any file that you have it opened for edit too. This can be really misleading when they want to delete or integrate to the file. I don't like that Perforce implicitly discourages merging branches through "who else has opened this file" notifications, but that's how it is and I'd rather not abuse the system.
I'm not so sure that's true.

"Still, the opportunity to attend schools was limited. Formal schooling was largely restricted to those who could afford to pay. Even "free" schools often required payment of tuition, and primary schools required entering students to be literate, barring children who had not been taught to read by their parents."

Here's a link with period testimonials from actual early 19th century private school instructors.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...
Quick comment: lower-level APIs can be harder to standardize than higher-level ones, depending on the diameter of the API-set and the implementation dependencies. Running native binaries requires a new compiler and a bunch of runtime API support (Pepper).

OTOH adding typed arrays or binary data to JS is narrowly targeted and pays off for higher-level API builders. And the typed arrays and binary data specs are being standardized.
Birthdays and the Lunar Effect
I think its the other way: 2k/15k = 13 cents per user. Given that I just paid ~$10 to join, my guess is that I just bought around 6 years of storage.

That said, it still looks quite expensive.
Google's dealsmap acquisition as well as their rollout of Goolgle offers do connect some dots. Also, location and context based ads are going to be important for the mobile ecosystem.
I really hope Google goes beyond just advertising. It's great that their services are free but I would still pay a premium for a polished, distraction-free environment. I'd rather pay a fee than to be surrounded by advertisement everywhere I go, especially on smaller screens.
The Need for More Transit APIs
They want people to come in and periodically wind the peripheral parts of the clock. That's kind of incompatible with building an Indiana Jones dungeon.

Actually, you know what? Forget about clocks. I want to know how we can make elaborate dungeon traps last thousands of years.
Costs that are that out of whack with expectations would usually indicate some very low hanging fruit. If you can save $800/month by adding a couple of database indexes and tweaking your config file, then yeah, it's worth it.

That said, from what Maciej has written in the past, he sounds competent in these things (i.e. has his databases set up for remote replication and failover), so it would seem that the culprit is more likely over-engineering than under.
The problem here is you rely too much on models. I'm not saying you're wrong but you're certainly too sure of yourself.

Economic Models, by definition, have to make assumptions on psychology. Those assumptions can often be wrong and that invalidates the model.

To put this in real terms lets look at the construction worker. Say the government, as the spender of last resort, starts a bunch of construction projects. The economic theory here is the construction worker will get a job which will put money in his pocket. He will then go out and spend that money which will cause the places where he spends his money to hire more people. That starts a virtuous cycle that gets the economy out of trouble.

The problem with that is, in my experience, the construction worker doesn't think that way. He's been unemployed for a year or more already so instead of spending he takes every spare cent and saves it for a rainy day. Because the construction job is finite. Since he was already getting government subsidized aide as an unemployed person the money he spends on food and other essentials is negligible. So if he saves his extra money then the government spending has no impact on the economy (until he's forced to use that money by a crisis)

Again there are valid arguments on both sides but your certainty that your side is right seems naive (and that's being polite to you)
"The market did not create the housing crisis. The government fiddled with the market all to hell, with the Community Reinvestment Act, the regulations surrounding the ratings agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's unmarket-like backings of loans, and a hodge-podge of other lesser interventions."

Right, which is why it only happened in America, not in other places like England, and Ireland, and Spain, which had neither CRA nor Fannie nor Freddie. Oh wait...

For a different, and for my money, substantially more accurate diagnosis of the crisis, go listen to William K. Black [1]. He was one of the regulators who prosecuted many of the corrupt bankers who perpetrated the savings and loan crisis.

[1].http://dailybail.com/home/dr-william-k-black-the-great-ameri...
Bitcoin Password Hashes May Have Been Leaked