skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, Dziuba's criticisms of startups have always been on technical and design points.

Not really. Dziuba's rants had a self-pitying aspect. He seemed to be really bitter about the success or inordinate attention given to people he considered less talented than himself.

It was like a kid who joins math club and is deeply distressed to find out that even in math club, there are the popular kids who get away with everything. I sympathize -- I've been that kid. And the Web 2.0 scene was, IS, ripe for satire. But I think Ted (or at least his blogger persona) tended to be more about the rage of the child prodigy that, as an adult, is no longer the center of attention.
The reality of the situation: When I was in china over a few months in 2007/2008, I spent a lot of time in internet cafes. What would happen is that I'd go in, and ask to use the internet. They'd ask me for a passport. I'd say I didn't bring mine. They would then take out a card with a chinese persons face on it (i.e, an already registered internet card with some random person on it), and type those details in. I could then go do what I wanted. They had several of those cards with various people on them. This was true in 4 or 5 different cities. I never showed my passport and they never insisted that I leave.

So, even though they build in these mechanisms, there is little enforcement, and the internet cafe owners are more interested in making money than in following some government regulation.

By the way, when we say internet cafe here, in china, it's not usually like a 10 seat cafe. It's usually a pretty big hall with 100-200 computers, you can smoke in there, and it's usually packed with people.
the last poll on this showed that the vast majority (90%+) of posters here are running Debian on their servers.

That would be a self-selecting poll and highly unscientific. I don't remember it. But, I'm confident it was skewed, even amongst the technorati found here at HN. CentOS is dramatically more popular for web hosting (ask any web host you know that offers both).

I think Debian is awesome, and you definitely won't go wrong choosing it for a server (or any system, really). I'm not at all arguing that Debian is a poor choice--it's a great choice. I just wanted to point out that 90% seems ridiculously high for Debian market share on web servers.
That's a fair way of putting it for the most part. Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish.

I don't think it is any secret that Gentoo is not meant for the inexperienced. On that same point, it is clear that by its design most Gentoo configurations are not officially tested. From this, it becomes clearer how to properly manage Gentoo servers: the same way any diligent admin would - stage, test, stabilize, deploy. That is the beauty of Gentoo as a meta-distribution.

It is far from point-and-click and I hope it stays that way.
Except the economic crisis is not an invention of the CIA, as far as I know.
OMG Britney On Twitter
There was a really nice discussion in the comments, and it seems like the message was received:

> I will try to come up with a new plan for free student projects. Our old way of approving each project took too much time. However, maybe we can make arrangements with universities or find some more automated way to approve them.
Debian and Ubuntu are both rock-solid, excellent choices for a server of any kind. I have all of the servers I work with running Ubuntu, with my own personal screw-off slice running Debian Etch.

I have a great deal of experience with the older versions of Fedora (the consumer Redhat distro) and slight experience with CentOS. I'm fairly certain that majority of Linux webservers out there are running some Redhat variant. I personally prefer the Debian/Ubuntu approach and stick with that.

Off the top of my head I know that all of the Mediatemple servers are running CentOS, and Digg runs Debian.

I think like SwellJoe said, if you're thinking about FreeBSD for the sake of going with FreeBSD and not really knowing why, then you don't want to be choosing FreeBSD. The same goes for Gentoo. Gentoo is a great distribution, but it's not for the mainstream plug-n-play let's-build-a-webapp! type of person. Gentoo, although featuring a pretty nice 'emerge' package management system, is going to require more work from you in the beginning to get it to a desirable state.

I guess there is no real answer to your question, Linux is fantastic in general as a web application server. Any distro with the base binary packages for a typical LAMP stack or even a (Rails|Django|Etc...)/Nginx configuration will treat you very nice until you reach the proverbial land of scalability. Once you see problems with your app, fix them. Don't worry too much about that right now. Also keep in mind that 99.99% of the time your application is going to be "distribution agnostic" so later on down the line if you decide you'd rather go with CentOS over Debian, or a BSD variant over Linux, you won't have any issue with that.

I'd focus more on writing a solid application and getting a solid product out the door on any of the distributions that were mentioned by the wise hackers here on HN, learn what you like as you go. As you learn more about the way Linux works and you configure things to suit your needs, the various unique characteristics of each will become more clear, and your "distro of choice" will become more evident.

Bottom Line: Go with CentOS or Ubuntu, and worry about these things as they become worries.
Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish.

You're right. I'm not entirely politic sometimes. At least folks won't think I'm ambivalent about the issue. And, I pretty much do only intend my comments for the kind of folks who are asking strangers for help in their selection--obviously, people who've been using Linux for 10 years, or whatever, can use anything that suits them, and they'll be able to make it work really well. They also need a lot less help (so popularity doesn't matter), and have far better grasp of how things actually work (so they can see through the differences between distros and not having a standard initscript or rc script for some app doesn't matter because you can write it yourself).
I respect the candidness and thorough responses.
"It's also the internet, take the joke, it's not serious business."

That looks like a non sequitur to me. If it's a joke and not "serious business", fine. Same might be said of a person yelling profanities at you on the street. But what does the Internet have to do with it?
"Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you'd have to be retarded, or hate yourself, to choose Gentoo for a server."

Oh my hosting provider is retarted :) They use gentoo only, no other stuff.
Maybe it's they the same thing as with FreeBSD, the know they want Gentoo and they know why.
I didn't just mean that people submit the application on the last day. That is certainly common. But from talking to founders I've learned that a lot only decide to apply on the last day.
I doubt that's a factor. Few are doing Facebook apps.
heh you sure were cutting it close, getting to the point where you couldn't select.
We have a lab for experimental economics at our university. The let people play little games for money.
Isn't the Dollar already getting debased? (At least compared to other currencies. The FED's interest rates have been low for quite some time.)
Do you have 16 boxes?
of many examples, Sony (created after WW II in a bombed building) reminds me of how great innovators are not affected by transient disasters. I guess we should feel lucky that we only face economic crisis, and not the terrible destruction the world has faced before :)
Yeah, you're right, I'm probably wrong. There probably wasn't a poll, maybe I'm thinking of the comment thread that got voted to the top or something.

I'll make a poll about it later today, unless someone else makes one first.
How To Install OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 On Ubuntu 8.04
There are thousands of little corner shops, newsagents and market stalls which sell pay-as-you-go SIM cards for a few pounds with no questions asked in the UK. Basic mobile handsets can be bought cheaply off markets or car boots, again an anonymous cash transaction with no questions asked.

This will do nothing to stop those with nefarious aims from getting hold of unregistered mobile devices and will simply increase the surveillance of those of us who obey the law. The trade in mobile phones and SIM cards via thousands of small outlets simply can not be regulated. It'll be the same as buying TV equipment: buy from a big shop and they require your name and address to pass on to the TV licence company to check you're licensed. Buy from a car boot sale or out of the paper and they just hand over the TV.

What precisely are they on here? The fact that some criminals use unregistered pay-as-you-go mobiles is practically irrelevant. This is just another step towards total surveillance.
I guess what I'm looking for are works with a strongly empirical basis (doesn't have to be popular). Stuff that, at the very least, deals with the wealth of research on collective action problems and economic psychology. I'm hoping David's book does some of that.
competitors at last
i'd say it was a hell of a hack, just don't forget no to be evil
i think this was the last thread, from 191 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160288

(From Gabriel Weinberg FAQ collection)

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
This is an outstanding analysis. There is a non-scanned version of the PDF (but alas minus the humorous comments) here http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf
"Some of my colleagues at Yale have developed an online service whereby you set a goal and agree to put up a certain amount of money to try to ensure that you meet it. If you succeed, you pay nothing; if you fail, the money is given to charity—or, in a clever twist, to an organization you oppose."

Anybody have an URL?
"... Once again, I apologize for missing that out ..."

Hey adityakothadiya , thank mate - one of the good guys :)
I think they should get the hang of not loosing the data they already have before they start mining more.

This kind of thing makes me sick to be English, we have no choice but to let them take all this information yet they can't even secure it properly.
I think we should go back to single-threaded, non-parallel. Those were the days.
Television ratings inside the US.
Interesting. Why did brushes break? They can last for hundreds of hours on motors?
Angelpitch.com
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We already have several hundred Investors across the U.S. and are aggressively growing our international network. By the time we launch in December, Entrepreneurs who upload their video pitch will be seen by a vast global population of Investors.
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I'd say pick the distribution you know best, with a few provisos:

- It's one of the major distributions
- It's not Gentoo

I used to use SuSE on servers because I knew SuSE best, and before that Redhat for the same reason. Now I use Ubuntu. All have been fine. Worst case is getting something on a server that you don't know how to configure.
I'm seriously irked by login-required policy of NY Times :-(
Tutorial to Create DTree Menu
I have a book called "The Art and Craft of Problem Solving" which uses climbing terms to describe various techniques and tools used in IMO problems. It wasn't a very forced analogy at all.

Also, for interest's sake, a few years ago a physicist (http://insectnation.org/projects/nightclimbing/) even scanned in an old book on climbing; t'was pretty nifty! (but slightly off topic here probably).
Google monetizes start page, vocal minority gets vocal
The Stupidest Answer In The World
FriendFeed to add Realtime APIs next week
It also demonstrates a minimum level of competence.
Map of Social Networks' Popularity Around The World
Sounds like it doesn't qualify as a hack then, though the article certainly presents it as if it is. (I've never watched a game of American football, so don't ask me.)

As always, the greatness of a hack is in the eye of the beholder. A joke is never as funny the second time you hear it.
One Mystery of Jet Streams Explained
House M.D. 5.05: Lucky Thirteen
Two clips from “House” 5.05 titled “Lucky Thirteen” are available. One clip shows Thirteen confronting the woman she has a one-night stand with and the other one on House interrogating Wilson’s life post the death of his wife.
I second the recommendation of linked paper: It is a very good explanation of why threads are problematic; every programmer who consider using threads ought to read it.
As far as the stock market goes, the US has pretty much lost a decade already: both the Dow Jones and S&P500 indexes have bobbed up and down 50% since 1998. (The same goes for the NASDAQ, by the way). This indicates the the markets have priced in the shenanigans already: there has been economic activity, but broadly speaking it hasn't been based on wealth creation. You have produced as many useless things (houses that no one will live in, for instance) as useful things.

When you've been living a lie all this time, some pain is bound to follow. For philosophical purposes the difference between recession and debt-fueled boom is small: the only real difference is that people get paid..money which must be paid back later. It is, weirdly enough, an economic zero-sum game. But now it's over, and there's just one way to go on. Maybe there will be a hangover, but these things are temporary.

I think it is wrong to draw parallels to Japan. Extrapolating trends and learning from history almost never works with economics. There are too many random (i.e. unknown) variables. For all we know, the US could get its act together in half a year. You've still got the most powerful economy in the world, it has just been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I'm with Buffett.
Try http://search.yahoo.com/
Much better in my opinion.
ASUS may ship two-screen Windows 7 notebooks in Q1
I know a few physicists who are serious mountain climbers. But I know more who are serious drinkers. Where's the article about that?
https://www.stickk.com/login.php i think
These are both good points. I was wondering why the supposed trend was so flat. The answer is that there are so many other random factors pushing in both directions that there probably is no real trend.

It would probably be more reliable to predict the bottom by looking at the ratio of house prices to income. That shouldn't change too fast.
slackware?
Japan has its own issues that have kept it in a virtually stagnant economy for the last 10-15 years. The entire country's natural tendency is to fold back into itself and create pockets of isolation from the outside world - a tendency that has repeated itself for most of their history. It's difficult to draw large scale economic parallels like this without discussing the underlying DNA of the culture supporting the economy in question.

The US also has some serious issues, culturally and economically (duh) but I honestly think we're in better shape. There is of course a very real possibility that we're heading into a time of depression that could last years, but the spark of innovation seems alive and well to me. It may be a little misplaced at the moment but the market has its own ways of correcting that.
EBay improves parallel efficiency by over 60%
RIAA agrees to accept $200 per file in "innocent infringement" case
Concerts are up!
Concerts are now available.
I'd recommend Ubuntu too - especially if most of your work is "vanilla" - e.g. Apache, MySQL, etc. The assistance around this is both high quality and accessible (not that it's not with Debian... I just find it better for Ubuntu).

Once you get running you might consider a switch to Debian, but I've never reached that point.
Joe the Plumber Lashes Out at Media | TechJaws
Why Apple Won't Get Crushed By The Recession
Concerts are now available at TicketStumbler.
http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/2008/10/18/oh-the-horror...
Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking
Concerts are now up:
http://ticketstumbler.blogspot.com/
The abrogation of responsibility by the many for their own lives and
the arrogation of authority/magical-ability/etc. by the few[...]

That's a collective abrogation of responsibility by the public at large, not one by individuals within it. The constituent members of the public do not have (or feel they have) the responsibility or power to effect any sort of macroscopic change to the economy. In that sense, it's not surprising that the public nominates someone to have that power and responsibility.
Self-fulfilling rumours which trigger bank runs can be a distributed phenomena

If we were to get rid of the physical token of our monetary value, it would be impossible for a run in one bank to negatively effect all of them. After all, an electronic 'withdrawal' has to go somewhere.
I've used Centos a lot with no major difficulties. I've also had great luck with SuSE, where I'm a big fan of AppArmor to help prevent zombification (assuming you're running any standard/open source web apps).
bugmenot doesn't work on nytimes?

edit: it does - http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com

install this extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349
Am I the only one who finds the notion of (for example) Seth Godin on a list of "Greatest Living Thinkers" to be terrifying?

And would it be to much to ask to see, maybe, a philosopher or mathematician or two listed?
Under 9000 and Starting Up
Cloud Computing and Vendor Lock-In
Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War
Wow - cheers to Fred for admitting his mistake. It takes balls to do this, let alone blog about it to thousands of people.
Customers never call (they can't) and a partner, at least one of my partners, would never be upset. I see what you're saying though. Just different businesses & people associations.
This is one of the few interesting articles on the current economic situation.
If it makes you feel better I'm 25% Danish. :P
that didn't help.
>we have no choice but to let them take all this information

I thought you guys in UK were a fellow democracy, can't you vote your rulers out of power?
"...before they die." Or... just before they go dormant for the winter.... your metaphor is kinda confused there. Especially considering 5% sounds more like natural loss of leaves at any given time anyways, more so than a period of stress.
The updates at the bottom feel like a game of some sort.

Facebook gains Bahamas from Hi5
Facebook gains Belgium from Skyrock
Facebook gains Cuba from Hi5
Hi5 gains Cyprus from Facebook
Hi5 gains Luxembourg from Facebook
Debian also has the advantage that you can run Ubuntu on your desktop and use the same package manager as the server. It's a huge advantage to have the same deployment & configuration procedures on your dev environment as in production.
I haven't read his books so this may be in there but what did he do before releasing these books that makes him different from the other "gurus"? From the sounds of it in your comment he was a successful businessman because of this then decided to write a book about it and became famous but what business was he in before? Wikipedia nor Google have offered any insight into this.
Kudos on spreading the word, but it's still ridiculous....
Yes. I hope they people responsible are hanged.
Does Varnish require the system to have a C compiler?

Yes. The VCL compiler generates C source as output, and
uses the systems C-compiler to compile that into a shared
library. If there is no C compiler, Varnish will not work.

This terrifies me.
Right here. [http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2008/03/19/who-says-czech...]
SuSE makes me cry. I mean, it's a great desktop distro... but I'm not sure how stable it is for servers. I could be completely wrong, but I'm completely biased from the dep-hell I had to go through with SuSE a while ago.
Who says Czech scientists have a drinking problem?
Quit Helping Small Business
This is ridiculous. Just how stupid do they think criminals and terrorists are?

I am ashamed of my country :(

How many people die to terrorism each year? Hardly any. The government should spend it's energy protecting people from the real dangers not just the "media reported dangers".
This article does not give an even account of the user discontent.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...

Gives a more balanced account.

I think Google is trying to roll back. I'm actually stuck in between the releases. Mine has the old container (no left side bar) but the new gadgets so they don't work at all.

This is a massive screw up by Google.

I also think it's funny that this story is also current on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336736
They will be out at the next election, which is good.
The current Labour government are a lot more likely to do this sort of thing than the incoming Tory government will be.
Labour is for society over individuals, whereas Tory is the opposite in general.

Perhaps they'll reverse much of this nonsense.
My Name Is Earl 4.07 : Quit Your Snitchin
Earl finds out that he is no longer covered by the criminal code of ethics when someone steals Randy’s birthday present from him. When he learns that the law of the underworld no longer protects him
Pointing to Sarah Palin as an example of a libertarian is, much like the rest of this article, ludicrous.
I would choose whichever one you are most comfortable with, or the one that you want to learn. If you don't know any, just choose one that sounds the most interesting. This is one of those "religious" choices between computer geeks and is of little consequence in the long run. If you hack with other people, you'll get experience with several flavors anyway.

I personally use Debian, and highly recommend it. It's very easy to get started out-of-the-box and there are tons of tutorials on how to get your typical LAMP setup or Rails or anything else set up. Ubuntu's also great, and probably has an even more supportive community than Debian.
The idea that there is ever a bad time to do a startup is ridiculous. There are horrible times to attempt an exit. During the crash would be one of them.
I like the way it is. Thank you pg, I love this easy.