skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
and it appears that two out of their 3 availability zones have to go down in order for anyone to collect on sla. This effectively makes the sla meaningless afaict.
The Windows addition is saying something. I think this clearly represents that Amazon is wanting to stay up with it and is, in a way, preparing for the "Windows Strata" announcement that supposed to come at the developers convention. I'm curious to see how well it all works out, I've never personally thought of Windows Server as much of a "cloud-ready" server O/S... if you will.
Algorithm to decide if you should recycle X:

1) Is there a market for X?
2) Do people steal X?
3) Do people run successful businesses recycling X?
4) Do street people root through garbage cans to collect and resell X?

If you can answer yes to 3 of the above, then you should recycle X.
Sure, you can think of creating the best possible environment that makes sense & so that the pages can be used on future browsers & browser like things, but that is dwarfed by the prospect of letting grandma have a website.

I would argue that the continued evolution and improvement of the Web are far, far more important than letting Grandma have a website. Besides, Grandma can already have a website -- there are dozens of services out there like Typepad, Wordpress, Blogspot, etc. which allow Joe Public to have a website -- and he should be able to have a website, so long as whoever (or whatever) makes that site uses proper HTML, CSS, and Standards to create it.

Would it be great to get to a point where Standards are written for machines, I can write some super high-level markup that describes how I want a page laid out (or just draw it!) and nobody has to write another line of HTML or CSS, ever? Sure. But it's not going to happen any time soon and pretending like it has just hurts everybody.

If your framework generates a 30-character ID for damn near every element on the page (hi, Microsoft), it's Not Good Enough.

If your language generates tables for damn near everything, it's Not Good Enough.
How Derek Sivers sold CD Baby for $22M without taking VC
For a role model/inspiration I would go rent a couple seasons of Entourage and try to mimic Ari.
Print and Leave on Your HR Managers Chair
Bill Clementson's Blog: Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 2 - Setup
How do you scan CSS with javascript?
Tranmission for torrents. Inquisitor for Safari's search bar (though at one point it was putting in sponsored links), CSS edit for troubleshooting CSS.
So, at what point are you going to reverse that decision, or what do you think are currently good investments for a retirement beyond 20 years from now?

Especially passive management investments?
It depends on how you have the phone set up and how well you know it. The obvious way:

- One tap to open the menu of applications

- One tap to open the camera application

- One press of the camera button

- One tap to choose to share the picture

- One tap to choose gMail (vs. messaging)

At this point you are in the To field, but you need to slide open the keyboard to type the address in. So it is essentially the same "number of interactions" as the iPhone. If you're a power user or curious, you might have figured out that you can also launch the camera application directly by pressing the camera button, which collapses the first two steps to one.

...Which highlights one of the strengths and weaknesses of the Android platform. While the iPhone has just a few inputs (the screen and main button being the obvious ones), the G1 has many (screen, five main buttons, trackball, the keyboard, and the keyboard slide). This gives the G1 more (and potentially faster) ways to do things, but it also means that the user may not always be able to guess which input is required to accomplish their goals. The G1 apps are pretty good about telling the user when they need to do something out-of-the-ordinary -- the camera app, for example, points out the camera button on the casing -- but third-party applications may not be as careful, or they may neglect to handle all possible inputs in an Android-consistent manner.

I think it's a difference of philosophy, much like the difference between Apple's preference of a one-button mouse versus the preference of multiple-button mice on other platforms. One button is easier for users to learn and developers to implement consistently, but more buttons let you do more stuff.
This style of programming interview is directly descendant from early microsoft. Some of the best minds in the business of making software engineering organizations cut their teeth on the topic (maybe microsoft isn't so stellar now, but how many organizations from that period are still making software that works at that scale?). Bill Gates pointed to the MS hiring strategy in particular as something that set them apart from their competitors.

However, there are lots of other fields that demand a certain level of competence for you to pursue them. Interviews at investment banks last all day, and they ask for pretty serious mathematics exams among other things. Lawyers must pass the BAR, which is fairly brutal. Actuaries must pass the actuarial exam. Musicians and dancers must audition. Aspiring professors must give a series of 'job talks', opening up their research and program to the criticisms of an entire faculty, after which they continue to meet one on one for hours at a time.

By contrast, the hours spent in Google interviews seem comparatively simple.
"Amazon's shipping rates page lists two-day shipping for books and video games (my most common purchases) for $1.99 per item or $9.99 per shipment."

That is $9.99 per shipment plus $1.99 per item.
I have some code for a music video site i tried to get going a while ago..
it's in rails, maybe it could help a noob get their head around rails, anyway, i'm not doing anything with it, so you can download the zip here:

http://www.src-dev.com/will/rebuzzcaster.zip

(it scrapes blogs and shows what music vids the bloggers are posting -- a kinda hype machine, for music vids.)

hope it's of use to anyone.
Microsoft's U Rank Prototype Offers Custom, Social Search
My cofounder once was interviewing someone. An earthquake struck in the midst of it. The candidate froze, bolted out the door, drove off, and was never heard from again.

My cofounder now says that he wish there were an earthquake for every interview...
Startups & The Downturn
Summary of what investors (angels and VCs) think will happen to the startup environment.
There is no headphone jack, but you can apparently use an adapter to plug standard headphones into the mini-USB jack.
I worked at my college unjamming printers for two years. The interview was pretty relaxed, they just made sure I could use Windows, Mac, and Linux (our school used all three).
this is a hilarious thread...SOMEONE keep this going!!
we need more ideas.
Sorry, what's HR?
What do you think the iPhone has that Android doesn't have? As someone who has used an iPhone and now owns the G1 I can tell you that they are incredibly similar. A friend and I were comparing the two side by side. Most of the applications are comparable and in some cases we both had installed the same exact applications from the respective App Stores. I doubt most average people would know the difference if they were using Android in an iPhone case or the other way around. The two platforms have far more in common than you may think.

The Android SDK allows for some more possibilities than what is allowed on the iPhone, but this seems to be purely a business decision on the part of Apple. As far as features that appeal to consumers - branding and fads aside - I think it's pretty much a wash. The big difference is Apple's far superior marketing.
How about Mantis? http://www.mantisbt.org/

Demo: http://demo.mantisbt.org/my_view_page.php
I suggest tuning into Presentation Zen on a regular basis. http://www.presentationzen.com/
Means that hedge funds should hedge against their own investors, too.
angel tech is a good book
Most useful stuff: OmniOutliner, Scrivener, OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, LaunchBar or Quicksilver, Path Finder, and VMware Fusion.

Also terrific, but less focused on pure productivity: Adium, Colloquy, Fission.

Great utilities for maintaining your system: AppCleaner, AppFresh, MainMenu, Service Scrubber, Name Mangler, OmniDiskSweeper, Winclone, Tunnelblick, Toast. Growl comes in handy, too.

You might also find Leap useful, depending on how you like to organize your data.

In terms of text editors, TextMate and BBEdit (TextWrangler is the free alternative) have their adherents. So does SubEthaEdit for collaborative work. Some people like MacVim. I personally use Emacs.app, easily built from the emacs source tree.

If you do any serious hacking, MacPorts is terrific.

LaunchBar or Quicksilver: tough call. I haven't seen any Quicksilver updates in about a year, since the original developer open-sourced it. Supposedly a rewrite is in the works. In the meanwhile, I switched to LaunchBar. It's a little more responsive and stable, although not quite as feature-rich or as good-looking.
Scott,

War is a hell of a business for the military industry, and that is why there will always be wars.

If you like science and are not afraid of what the truth maybe I dare you to do this: watch on youtube videos of the collapse of the WTC on 9/11 and explain how can fire cause it to explode? Why it turns to dust? Why the second building to collapse starts doing it from the top (can the sky put pressure on a building so it crash itself from the top, instead of on the dent that the plane made)?

I do not know either the answer to this, but as you point out in Gods Debris: "Just because I do not know how a magician makes his tricks does not make it magic", but those buildings exploded.

Thanks for all the laughs, yesterday comic was great.

Regards,
Carlos
Can anyone compare FogBugz with Jira (my current fav)?
He's talking about total MS phone vs iPhone sales next year, assuming that iPhone sales double and MS phones sales are flat. Which is pretty pie in the sky, imo. But having said that, I've not seen a windows mobile device I would give a second thought to buying.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/the_phone_company
Jira is fantastic, but not open source (although you do get a copy of the source when you buy it).
you need thompson eye-phones to access 3.0.

what.. you never watched Johnny Mnemonic?

basically web 3.0 will herald more seamless integration of computer->browser->webapplication, perhaps even bypassing the browser level (gears anyone?). in addition we're going to see social-networking integrated more fluidly, perhaps you won't need to access facebook or myspace but it will run in your taskbar and configure how you see the internet based on your profile, your friends list, everything you do on the internet.

and of course it culminates with microsoft making their own version and integrating it to the OS, bypassing third party developers entirely.
When people complain that work-life balance is out of whack, I don't think that means you need to go to the other extreme, and let everyone leave work at two in the afternoon to go to the movies.
Of course not, but you seemed to be saying that if any semantic meaning is desired, it should be encoded as such and made available separate from the HTML... I don't agree.

Take Microformats, for instance. Say you're already displaying Events somewhere on a site; to add Microformat support all you do is add a few attributes to your existing mark-up and any Microformat-aware browser can properly recognize it. Sure, you could create another file entirely that contains XHTML specifically created as a Microformat, but that would be redundant and not nearly as helpful to visitors.

Or, say, a sitemap. Many times it makes sense to have a completely separate XML-based Sitemap for, say, Google. Then again, what if you just added the requisite semantic mark-up to an existing sitemap, one your visitors can use, but so can Google? You basically get two for the price of one.

RSS is a different animal and in most cases couldn't logically be encoded into the XHTML itself because you wouldn't have every RSS item on one page, etc. That's why the <link> tag is used to include it in the source, just like you include Javascript and CSS and so forth.
Cruz - A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard
Technology startups face the downturn
Glad you are happy with Acunote. You probably won't have a reason to switch away from it, not in Mantis/Jira direction anyway :-) That's functionality-wise, the open-source angle is always valid of course.
I think the market is pretty close to fairly-valued now, by conventional valuation measures. Maybe still a little overpriced, but you can't call the exact bottom.

I'm waiting to put money in because I don't yet have a job, and so may need that cash to fund another startup (there's that luck aspect again; had I not been starting a startup last year, I likely would've had way more in the market). But if I had a normal employment situation, I'd be gradually money into stocks, towards a more normal asset allocation.

As for a retirement 20 years out - I wouldn't even try to predict that. I haven't touched my Roth IRA this crisis, nor do I count it in overall returns (haven't even looked, really). The one thing I would say is to have some international exposure. Prices rise or fall based on how reality compares to the market's expectations, and I think it's unlikely that America in 20+ years will have the hegemonic position it does now.
Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot on the Economy
Phone chargers - the truth
I may be one of the few hackers that loves marketing as much as I do programming. I often split my reading time between both subjects. (And personal development.)

For me, marketing is exactly like hacking code. Except that it's hacking for humans! Even though humans tend to appear inconsistent, there are patterns (just like in code!) that you can leverage.

The bottom line is this: my marketing allows me to do more of the programming I love.
I don't see it working, either, but mainly because the target audience is small.

Sure, you can lie to get your money back, but you would be lying to yourself. For some people, the personal shame is worse than losing the money. Likewise, you could simply set the money aside yourself without involving the service. But, again, for some people, a promise made in public is more binding than one made in private, even if there are no real consequences to breaking the promise. For the portion of the population in both categories, this service could be attractive.
You guys rock. I'm checking out nearlyfree right now but I think PRQ might be the way to go. Moving our site over is going to be painful and expensive so we want to get it right the first time and not have to deal with it again. With PRQ, it looks like we can do just that.

The best part about all this - the company who is bullying us has never, not ONCE, sent a notice directly to us. Nope, they just pelt our host as a scare tactic. Low and behold, it finally worked and our host gave us a week to vacate. Super, thanks...

So as usual, you guys rock. Thanks so much for the help. Sweden here we come - where the air is cold, the women are blond and the hosts have brass balls.
Hilarious Political Endorsement
LOLz!
huh. well, I imagine they still have the credibility edge over small providers. I guess if you really are using it as a cloud (that is, provisioning as needed, and not worrying about it if your existing systems go down) one out of 3 availability zones seems like it would be enough.

But then, I bet a lot of people use ec2 like an ordinary VPS provider, which is to say they keep their image up all the time. (this is why I see them as a competitor, even though I rent by the month, not the hour, meaning you can do things with ec2 that you can't do with me. I am working on better provisioning/billing scripts, but I've been talking about it for a while, and it hasn't happened, while I have to say the ec2 system is pretty slick)
A beautiful hack was my first thought and then -- ugh, let the exploits begin?
Why does it seem like computer jobs require such a higher standard of competence than other jobs?

They don't. If you can reverse a string in place in C, or reverse the words in a string, you can get hired at 90% of programming jobs.
Slghtly unrelated to hacking..
when you guys think of a start up/web app, do you think you want to make something that will change the world, or something that will make you rich?
I run a.. shall we say, niche site. 9 million hits a month, about 2TB of data.. and we use Hetzner. They're pretty good.

http://www.hetzner.de/
If you like Jira you might not like the simplicity and clean UI of FogBugz. We switched from FogBugz to Jira at my last job and I personally didn't like it very much. But management liked the flexible reporting and complicated workflows they could invent.

Personally I think Jira looks like it was written 10 years ago and can get quite slow at times, which together with the fact that there's no AJAX and every click reloads an entire page means it can be a very unpleasant experience.
My bad. I meant HN - as in here. :)
stories like this piss me off when I'm unemployed.
Ask HN: Best intro to Emacs, Latex, Python?
I'm currently an ee student in college, and I was talking to a professor about doing some research. He suggested that these things would be helpful to know. So what would you suggest for an introduction to emacs, latex, and python? Programming wise, I'm familiar with c++ and I've started working my way through SICP.
The article doesn't present any reasons to switch to Emacs, just reasons why he had not previously switched.

I realize that the editor war has passionate individuals on both sides of the fence, so I'll choose my words carefully.

In terms of Emacs versus Vim, I'm agnostic. It seems like as long as you're not doing the hand-on-mouse-hand-on-keyboard dance then you've solved the Editing Problem. Maybe some people have become super-productive after switching from one editor to the other, but it seems rare.

Personally, I was introduced to Vim a couple years ago by a coworker. I liked the idea of never using the mouse while editing, so I memorized the new workflow and haven't looked back. There are two reasons why I haven't been interested in switching to Emacs:

1) The Vim key bindings have been burned into my brain over the course of two years. I even close popup dialogs by accident sometimes, because I often press the ESC key after typing anything.

2) The ViEmu Visual Studio plugin ( http://www.viemu.com/ ). As far as I know, there isn't an Emacs equivalent. And yet, even if there were, why switch to it? The value is in the ability to not take your hands off the keyboard, which the Vim key bindings already provide. So that would simply be trading one set of key bindings for another.

In summary, certain tools work for certain people. As long as people are using quality tools, why does it matter which one is used?
Reason why I stick with emacs: vi is a great text editor but emacs is a shitty OS... and OS >>>>> text editor.
think of something that will change the world. you have the rest of your life to worry about chasing money, we can all agree that the world needs changing NOW
Maybe he can finally learn rails now :P
He hasn't changed all that much over 50 years once he puts the wig on.
Amazon: We Promise Our EC2 Cloud Will Only Crash Once A Week
I believe it's a false dichotomy in this context. Our bodies and brains are both shaped by our genetics as well as our experiences.

Small differences in heredity can have drastic effects on mental limits. Those limits may not be as easy to see as height is, but they are real, nonetheless.
Don't know what startup to do? Try this
are downtime and crash really synonymous though? seems like an awfully sensationalistic piece. they're not saying it's GOING to die once a week, but you can hardly tell from reading AlleyInsider's version of it. an SLA on an innovative new system, be happy you got any guarantee at all.

especially if you consider a crash extending longer than 5 minutes it breaks the SLA...
From the beginning, Amazon has said that individual EC2 instances are not supposed to be reliable and thus you should build some sort of HA. The SLA covers the case where you'd go down even if you have HA.

This does leave the door open for a more reliable cloud provider who takes care of most of the HA for you.
Collateral Damage: Why Windows Mobile will die.
Not really - Joel is smart. He knows that the marginal cost of a frogbuz account is almost nothing but that the price - if the company is acquired - is an entire company that use his software.
2TB... hmmm... no guessing needed :-D
Reddit goes 'Independent,' says more deals to come
Mantis is okay - we used it for a (school) project last year, but for what we needed it for it was overkill.
Sometimes those mistakes don't come from competency of the program writer but rather the translator...

"All your base are belong to us!"
either, since its really the person, not the idea, that matters.

if you're the type of person who wants to change the world, but can only come up with an idea that makes you rich, that money can be used as a tool to help you change the world.

if you want to get rich, even a "change-the-world" type of idea will turn inward into something that will get you rich (potentially ruining it in the process, though).
Greenspan "shocked" at credit system breakdown
They shut down Muxtape.
"At IBM, 40% of the workforce has no official office" I hate this stat. 40% of IBM is not hanging out in their pajamas like these articles imply. 40% is in global services (consulting) of which the vast majority are on client sites. IBM has a great PR department.
Apparently dropping your company name in this thread is a good way :)

- http://mattcrampton.com/flickr/
Ideas which change the world almost always create wealth. Ideas which create wealth do not necessarily change the world.
I haven't gotten to use FogBugz so I can't compare the use of the UIs. AJAX would be really nice, although I haven't had any performance issues. We replaced Mantis and Bugzilla with Jira at one place I was at, and it was significantly faster than either of them.

I'm in love with the ability to very easily create different issue types with different attributes, states, and work flows. That lets us use the same system as a project management tool with release schedules, features, sub-tasks, reporting on hours breakdown by resource etc..., and a customer facing issue reporting/tracking system, and an internal bug tracker, etc...

edit---
Also love the great integrations with Confluence, Eclipse, SVN, Hudson, etc....
Performance based management - about time. I hate the constraints of a 9-5 job. What is the use of forcing me to work till 5 even though the only thing I've been doing is sitting on my ass reading online news? If the works not there how about you let me go home. Stop assigning me busy work - why do we have to be "busy" all the time? And if there is a large amount of work I'd be happy to work late nights to get it done. And if I can get my job done from home, the wild, Starbucks or where ever why does it matter - where I am?
Mantis is an improvement over Bugzilla, for sure. However we saw huge performance problems once we hit the 50k issue level. It was also much more difficult to modify than Jira (which we moved to). Although I guess among free options Trac and Mantis would be my top two.
Speaking of a lack of "balls", don't be so reticent to say who your current hosting provider is.
if you run an OS and you don't support your developers, you will die out. we've seen this cycle over and over.

i would expect that RIM will switch over to android, or very quickly start a campaign to sweeten the pot for developers to come to their side...

http://www.blackberry.com/news/press/2008/pr-12_05_2008-02.s...

http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=1869

woops, i'm a bit too late to be nastradamus on this one
The lightbulb I think.
New Business Model for News: Make Other People Money
wait...what?