skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need a SysAdmin. Now, this SysAdmin can be you (really, knowing the basics of server janitoring helps you as a developer and as a web designer, and as the guy who makes hosting decisions. Learning at least the basics of Linux is a good career move for almost everyone) but if not, you need to find someone you can depend on.

The other option is to find a host that specializes in hosting drupal sites and is willing to take care of all that for you. The biggest problem with this is that you can only use the features they install for you. Of course, they will also charge more than generic hosting, but it's still cheaper than getting a SysAdmin.
He seems to be saying that air-travel went from nothing to 2/3 of the way there, and he's sad b/c some startup hasn't yet made it fun and easier.
Microsoft Stake in Facebook Begins to Bear Fruit
30 seconds in Google finds him mention it in http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/6/300
> that's really ancient news that has already changed.

Yet you still don't find it in e.g. ubuntu-desktop, unlike Perl (dependency: libgnome2-perl) or Python (recommended: gimp-python). Gentoo Portage was written in Python when I ran that, so Python was always installed there. Java wasn't. The underlying reason may have changed, but the effect remains.
This reminds of zero knowledge proofs...
People have overwhelmingly chosen cheap, above fun or easy.
Shareware has a price attached. With a price attached (and presumably some sort of marketing) it would show up in these results. Those people who still buy software are already well past worrying about lack of a hard copy, and the rise of iPhone and co. has ensured that this distribution model will become the norm. All of the software I've purchased in the past few years has been without a hard copy.
Now that I read the replies, I wish I had thought twice about uploading the "one of those three" comment. You're right, HN deserves better.
We no longer rely on managed shared virtual hosts as application servers. Consider:

Setting up your own server:
- Pay for the Mac Mini + Time Capsule
- Set up Amazon account with credit card
- Sign up for AWS/S3 service, with auto-billing
- Configured with Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5
- Place behind your firewall on DSL connection, enabling TCP on port 80
- Set your domain's DNS records to point to Mini

Capabilities
- Box handles 500-1,000 visitors per hour (no monthly cost)
- Backup Drive automatically backs up all content hourly, saving older versions for disaster recovery
- S3 stores all heavy content for distribution; handles HTTP serving of content to unlimited clients simultaneously at up to 500 KBytes/second (delivery of 100GB content costs less than $20/mo)
ceteris paribus == all other things being equal
Agreed.

"hit Sudan" is not as precise as "hit Earth this morning, Oct. 7th, and exploded in the atmosphere over northern Sudan." http://www.spaceweather.com/
I think this is one of the most important areas to have innovation.

I think the part of Adwords is played down in the commentary (now becoming history), unfairly. Google created a great tool(s). Popular, useful, valuable. Their contribution t corporate culture is (on the whole) positive. But all that is dwarfed by the fact that they were able to find a way to create value for businesses. There are today many businesses from laundromats, mechanics & TV repairmen to online businesses to everything else that are either built with adwords at the bottom of the stack or adwords is a substantial leg.

In doing so they found a way to monetise spectacularly. I'm not saying we can expect that trick again, but more of the same (even if in much smaller slices) is needed.

The obvious area to explore first on video is linking ad-2-content in a more meaningful way.

The first thing to stop doing is taking painted buses as a role model.
How unnecessary...I assumed it was one of those Latin idioms that takes a sentence or two to explain.
That I know. I would never depend on a command line command to execute something months from now. Not on any system.
Widgetbox Teams Up With Yardbarker for Yarbarker Network Widget
<Idea> why don't more companies have sit down and write a customer day </idea>
Please send me a link where i can see what you talking about and maybe that is true to use what you talking about thanks!
Is it the swearing that gets the downmods, or the contrarian view? Either way: Any of the downmodders have further thoughts now that the Dow is taking a beating despite the bailout?
Since digg has no money at all and microsoft is funding digg, I assume you meant microsoft should buy stumbleupon?
This is an example of the difference between "Good" and "Great".
I've heard people cite this as a reason from Islamic terrorism as well. Since it's common to take multiple wives in religion.
is that http://aws.amazon.com/s3/?
Maybe we'll see this ... obviously we all thought of this feature before and would enjoy this. Maybe they are listening?

Also, if they are listening I would like to be able to Twitter within Gmail. Have an inbox tab and a Twitter tab; spend all my time in Gmail & refresh Twitter a few times a day, why not consolidate?
Where to find full spectrum light
Full spectrum lights give a host of benefits for your eyes and health.
"Finding a mentor" is good advice. So is the other advice, but most of it has been stated many times by many people (read code, write code, think about code you have written, etc).

I personally have had two people that I would call "mentors" in the time that I've spent learning about programming. One was my high school comp-sci teacher - we learned using C++, but he did not teach the language, he taught general concepts - and did a very good job at it.

The other is a friend of mines older brother. He's one of the smartest people I know, and a brilliant coder although he doesn't really code much anymore. I have a printout of code he wrote for a TI graphing calculator that is a 2d rpg engine, including NPCs that have semi-generative text dependent on "important" plot points, and smooth-scrolling. A lot of the code is code-writing code and memory management - it's incredibly impressive given the limitations of the platform that it's written in. This guy is one of the only people I'm around on a semi-regular basis that I can really "nerd out" with, and he's always got good advice on improving system designs and performance - mainly because the vast majority of his experience is building non-trivial systems really close to the metal.

A mentor can come from anywhere, I suppose that people on newsgroups or forums would work as well if you work well with that sort of communication / exposure. There is something to be said for face-to-face conversation with someone who is a lot more experienced than you are though.

I remember one time I was playing around with a sort of image transformation algorithm, and this guy took a look at what I was doing, picked up a pad of paper and scribbled out about 20 lines of psuedo-C which did the same thing, did it faster, and did it with constant memory use. I probably would have arrived at the same solution after a while of thinking, but seeing someone identify something that they've seen before and spit out the optimal solution can be a very enlightening (and humbling) thing.
Interesting - there was a post on the same lines about this recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324502

Think the same issues still apply. Microsoft is notorious for locking their offerings together - which adds value in one way, and diminishes value in another...

So maybe facebook lets you schedule meetings with your friends (great!), but you have to use Outlook/Exchange (yay! or bleah! depending on your perspective, but mostly bleah! because only x% of your friends have Outlook).

I wonder what form this will eventually take.
I'm paying for a dedicated server at the moment with 1GB ram for 39 euros/month, an upgrade to 2gb ram (total) is 10 euros/month extra from LeaseWeb (http://leaseweb.com), which has half decent routing. I know the exchange rate sucks (being in the US myself), but an option to consider, perhaps.

I've always been partial to Slicehost, but my main need uses a lot of bandwidth and disk space and they absolutely can't compare to overseas hosts for bw/$. slicehost's most generous plan is 1600gb transfer at $280 and our 4000gb for 79 euros from leaseweb is vastly cheaper, although you have to mix and match some of the other specs.

Honestly, do not go with midphase dedicated servers. If I remember correctly they're just reselling softlayer(.com), and softlayer is a LOT better in every aspect compared to midphase. I've had some friends use midphase and have so much trouble with their customer support when something goes wrong...softlayer in my experience has been everything great about a company providing these kinds of services.
Interesting. I see it's finally out of beta. I would even try it if I were still stuck in win32.
Like What You See? Then Click-to-Buy on YouTube
I wonder what the correlation between procrastination and punctuality is? This works if you're a procrastinator and punctual....
Decision Making for Startups
Interesting. The real issue question may lurk here:

Did the developer do it because its in his job description or because he felt strongly that he wanted to communicate with the client in that way?

And how does that change things?
My first thought was of "Snowcrash" as well. My second, less pleasant, thought was of my favorite local Chinese restaurant, Mr. Lee's. (General Tso's Kitten, anyone?)

By the way, didn't Steve Wozniak try something similar? Wheels of Zeus? (WOZ)
His self-description was not completely accurate. Chris Campbell is a co-founder of Wufoo.
Or for women & wine
I once had to deal with a hosting company that had a ticket tracking system that would mark tickets as closed if there was any kind of customer reply, and they had a fat fingered support person or two that also marked tickets as closed..and of course, if a ticket was open for too long they'd automatically be closed, so any ticket I send on a Friday gets closed by Monday morning. I HAD to open a couple dozen tickets and replies to tickets before someone finally replied to me and apologized for the whole thing :) Needless to say that was one reason why I am no longer with them..

But I can sort of commiserate with the OP. Midphase support is not exactly the best...I've spent hours trying to get them to understand the most trivial things, like when a friend's website wouldn't work because the mysql server was awol and the support person didn't understand what was wrong with nothing showing on the website. Yeaaaahhhhh.
It's not very common in practice though. Not enough to create demographic problems.
What exactly has happened? This is more a tweak then anything.

But I think there are some issues with copyright etc. Once they're using the content of a video to sell something related to it, maybe they run into legal issues.
Advice On Partnering With The Big and Powerful: Don't
You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here:

http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/

Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.
this is another example of why you always need offsite backups (even if it's a server on your DSL line)

People make mistakes. web hosting providers are run by people. Data loss happens.

I go even further and say that you need to make sure that no single person can delete every copy of your essential data (unless that single person owns most of the company) - if nothing else, you should keep backups under the founder's bed.
I think selective abortion is more common then selective infanticide.
You must have missed the recent funding announcement.
Last week he had a couple of Star Wars posts.
I think (I hope) this is an excellent time to be competing on price/value. Competing on price and/or value is a difficult thing during the fat times, but when people start feeling the squeeze, I believe it becomes a much easier sell.
Also ulimit and /etc/security/limits.conf

The default for max open files (1024) is ridiculously low.
First thing to do when installing linux, up the max open file limits.
Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity
EBay Plays Warren Buffett and Buys Online Lender
It's pretty unnecessary, but it gets thrown around from day 1 in Econ classes so you get kind of used to it.
What is the link for "non-hacker related news" ?
Can't recall off hand what the new forum url is for "non-hacker" related stuff? I just wrote an article on my blog against proposition 8, http://blogkinnetic.blogspot.com/2008/10/no-on-prop-8-civil-rights-must-not-be.html
and wanted to post it, but couldn't recall the url for "non-tech" news kind of stuff.
As near as I can tell, noone's area of expertise is economics. Hackers seem to have just a good a handle on matters as the "experts". If you really want to feel "safe" do a little research and see what "Greenspan's" PhD thesis was about. Spoiler hint: You won't find it. Folks that have studied his background believe he was "gifted" his PhD in effort to allow his rise in the government. I'm not supporting this viewpoint, just pointing out the uncertainty. To add irony, Barron's thinks they found a copy and the 1977 thesis was about a housing debacle!!! http://online.barrons.com/public/article/SB12091741904904680...

You may not like that someone thinks its a depression and not a recession. You may not like that someone thinks its 3 years, not 1 or 5. But hey, their guess is as good as the "pros" at this point.

And noone can explain the little raise in the dollar the last week. These little hiccups are almost unpredictable in a complex global economic realignment.

So you may not agree with certain words such as "recession" vs. "depression" or someone's guess as to how long it will last or even if the U.S. will ever recover.
But I think the non-quantitative predictions in the article are solid nonetheless.
Neat. So how much money do they make?
10 Programming Proverbs Every Developer Should Know
Abandonment is common too. My sister worked part-time in an orphanage in Xian for a year and saw a lot of sad things.
cerebris palin == a hockey mom with a brain. Latin Oxymoron ;)
I've heard this about scientists and criminals...both desist when they get married. Not far-fetched.
We just used then this past weekend to distribute a campaign video which had 10 million downloads. Worked like a charm. I asked a sales person about that blog, and he said it was posted from an engineer at AOL's CDN trying to drive them out of business. The article is a total lie, and we have had nothing but great service from SimmpleCDN. I would recommend.

He did say the address is their billing remittance address, so if you need to send them payment, you are all set!

I remember when I used to dial up for that special "You Got Mail" sound on AOL... good times, good times.
http://www.newmogul.com/ ?
Personally, I just blew 4 months operating expenses on new server parts in preparation for launching a 'value for the dollar' initiative, so I obviously agree that businesses will become more cost sensitive. I wasn't thinking about the capex vs opex change, but that's good for me, too.

Interesting times indeed.
jbyers... i just switched to simplecdn from cachefly because simplecdn does https and allows you to do gzip and cache-control. I second mediaman453, dont know what article is talking about, great expereincecc soo far great service emails you back at all hours of the night is crazy
MySQL cofounder leaving Sun
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Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download The Sopranos Episodes. The reality is that you can actually download all The Sopranos Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
The story does not seem as clear-cut to me as your post suggests. From reading between the lines it seems that your partner is responsible for some if not most of the coding work, and that you're responsible for other things including financing, community management and possibly marketing.

If this is the case you should have no complaints about the money. And if you've been rushing at the project for more than a year and were in desperate crunch mode three months ago, the slow-down in code growth is natural. Products routinely oscillate between new feature development and bug-fixing. It isn't uncommon for the code base to hold constant or shrink as it is tightened up following launch. You should evaluate whether your founder is doing/has done his job by the reliability of the system you have built under the constraints of money/time/effort. If he moved heaven and earth for you 12 weeks ago, you have no right to complain about a little lethargy now that the ball is in your court.

Your post does not include any suggestions that the tech side of things has been up-and-down or unreliable, or that your partner has failed to do his job on this front. Merely a complaint about the pace of new feature development. If this is the problem perhaps your co-founder is simply burned out and needs a vacation. The best way to motivate him may be to start hitting home runs yourself.

If the company is going into debt and you can't hold up your earlier division of labor/finance, that is a problem for the business. If it were me I'd work to make any new financial obligations shared going forward. This should help motivate your friend to cut his losses if he does not believe in the viability of the business anymore.

First and foremost though, you are out of the development crunch and are presumably at the point where you are being expected to deliver results and problems will surface with scalability. You need to be really careful your attitude towards him is not being caused by your own frustrations at how your business is developing, and/or a desire to find a scapegoat for slow growth or underpar performance.
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I guess you are referring to the NewMogul news site by nickb: http://www.newmogul.com/
I am curious - where are you and what is your website?
The Farewell Dossier - Software and Cold War
"Just out of curiosity (and my own mathematical ineptitude) I wrote a quick PHP Monte Carlo simulator to goof around with the numbers, and it pretty much just confirmed Baye’s Theorem exactly. You can snag the source for it here.

And yes, I’m aware I’m an awful programmer."

Did you learn to hack recently? What's the story?
thanks, now I see a price attached makes a difference; else it's not "shopping", so won't show up in a shopping comparison. Yes, just making it shareware would fix that.

I'd guess they'd want to keep it open source: they could dual license it - but there might be a backlash if buyers find out they could have got it free (ironically...) so perhaps some trivial glossy addition to the shareware version, so there's a sense you're getting something for your money... mail you a USB drive with it installed? (very cool). mail you a printed manual? (old skool) or, maybe include a bunch of glossy templates, by a paid pro graphic artist (I like this, because (a). digital, auto-delivery; (b). not code).

I'm assuming they're not in it for the money so it doesn't matter if they only break even (as long as it's not a hassle to provide); it's just a device to promote adoption (as you say).
Wufoo in general is a good simple success story. Its a story of polish. Polish in concept, site design, feature set, attention to detail, hand written thank you for using our service notes and more. They are a good envious benchmark for you want to be.
9 Lessons Richard Feynman Taught Us About Creativity
Geode is slick, and completely simple... now if only there was FireFox mobile.
Excellent analysis given little info. Although it is possible the VPS host is not managing its resources well and its possible Apache is configed poorly, it is just as likely the app itself is a pig and needs lots of cleanup.

If you don't have the skill set be a good sysadmin and you "dont know" if its your app, you are in for a world of hurt. I highly suggest you find help: a good sysadmin and maybe an outsider to look at your code and web page structure. I have not heard enough to say your hosting company is screwing you. And its maybe wise that you are paying $60/month for better tech support but you still only get $60/month worth of tech support and that's not much ;(.
He's talking about Matt Maroon's site: http://nonhackernews.com

Or maybe REDDIT!
He's probably bored. Most creative folks get bored easily. http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_ha...
Any interest in this area has to do with monetisation. They both work. They're bot popular. Next.

How much bigger will stumble or digg get? I haven't heard many (any) stumbleupon advertising success stories. Anyone know of case studies.

There's always the chance that a big chunk of that is coming from companies that spend big on ppc/seo with good returns & are looking for any other channel. They could be throwing some money at it to see what happens. They may not come back.

Actually, a good sign of potential would be money making sites obsessing about being on Digg's home page or getting 'stumble thunder' like bloggers do.
Help meeee BackgroundRB is killing me
Anyone has a clue on how I can solve this...

1) We are starting asynchronous Worker threads using the BachgroundRb Server from our Rails App. What is the right way for the Rails application to be notified that the Worker thread has completed (preferably without having to check status periodically with the Worker).

2) Once we have determined that the Worker has completed its work, what is the right way to delete the Worker thread? Is it BackgroundRb::Connection.delete_worker?

We are currently using the BackGroundRb::Connection.new_worker method to instantiate workers and have tried ask_result and register_status to get status from the worker, and neither of them seem to work!
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I'm all for speaking your mind, but what exactly is the point of an idle personal attack like this?
Yes, I was kidding.
Japanese 'robot suit' to be used by paralyzed people
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Wow. This seems useful, if it's the only clock you have (and, of course, if you have this problem). Unfortunately, we're all surrounded by clocks. Or maybe just I am. I can see three (including the upper-right OS X clock) from where I sit, and every cellphone has a clock, too.
Bah. Enough with the false dualism, there are plenty of other operating systems and software vendors out there; most of them speak standard protocols.

Here is an experiment you should try, go down to your local public library and do a quick census of who is running what on their own computers. You may be surprised at the diversity that is actually out there.
One thing to remember is that any large economic upturn or downturn is more a sideturn then anything else.

How much 'consumers' spend only moves a little bit. Even if your market is marks 'decline in GDP' exactly, you probably have such a small portion of it that it is indistinguishable from the effects of any of the normal factors that have an effect on sales.

But when you get into little areas, there's big changes. Markets can double, halve or stay the same. Common sense says luxuries go down, basics stay similar & thrift items go up. Theoretically, there are almost as many opportunities to be expected as threats.