skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They could, but I doubt it would go on forever. Maybe 10 years, sure. But guess what: we are a species of constant change in generation. Todays 12 year olds will, in 5 years time, pretty much want to hear todays important tech news, too ..
100% uptime is not an operational requirement – it's contractual. A client that demands 100% uptime isn't being unreasonable; they're looking for a contract remedy (most likely a termination right) if/when the site goes down.

1. "Uptime" is defined in many, many ways. In the OP's article, it's the definition of uptime that seems unreasonable. Normally, the demarc points for the network segments and equipment being measured for uptime are entirely within the provider's control. In the OP article's update, the client clarified that 100% uptime only applies when hosting is cut over to the provider's site – something they are (theoretically) capable of controlling.

2. Remedies for failing the uptime requirement are different for nearly every agreement. Often SLA credits are the exclusive remedy. Sometimes the customer has a termination right (either express, or through the termination for cause provision). The remedy is probably more important than the uptime percentage.

You'd be surprised how many big name web apps offer 100% uptime as a matter of contract, knowing that it's a near-impossible operational goal. It's a matter of taking on the risk of your customer leaving you or claiming SLA credits, or whatever remedies you agree upon.
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This problem happens with Python/Lua/Ruby because they're compiled from their original lower-level implementations using Emscripten. Which means everything have to work synchronously and there is no way to stop execution in order to get the user's input, unless we transform the code into CPS, which will probably make it much slower.
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(1) The visa is good for a year and you can extend as long as you're able to support yourself. (2) Every single person there was building something. (3) It's not a lottery -- if you want funding you have to be fundable, and decide to raise money instead of bootstrapping.

There is serious investment capital available. The point isn't that you're guaranteed to raise it. It's that if you can't get a higher valuation and better terms after six months of work and 40,000 in free outside investment then you probably don't have a company anyone will fund anyway.
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If we're referring to HP as a single company it should be has ( - it has ...)

If we're referring to HP as a collective of things (i.e. individuals, such as the board) then it should be have
( - they have ....)

IMO I'd say it could be either really, though I would probably favour the singular.
Git is the quintessential example of requiring the users to get inside the author's head if they want to avoid disaster, and thus falls into the "steaming pile of crap" category. The things "git merge" will do to your tree are not defined by what a user might reasonably want or expect but by what's easy and convenient for the git authors, and there is simply no way to understand "git reset" without thinking about the internals of how git tracks changes. Simple commands do bizarre things that are almost never needed or desired, while simple and common tasks require non-obvious (and poorly explained) options. Git is a powerful and useful tool, but it is also the poster child for what is wrong with modern software development.
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Thanks, we'll keep you posted for new features.
Most of the problems I mention aren't objective. Sometimes I like washing dishes, it's relaxing. I certainly like eating from dishes. Some people like cars and like driving. It certainly saves people time. Peeling grapefruit is very satisfying and makes the room smell nice. Central air is so much nicer than setting up a fan by my window and hoping that blowing the 75 degree air from outside will cool down the 85 degree ambient temperature inside.

Blaming "human ineptitude" is pessimistic. Sure, the fact that humans can't all manipulate computational machines directly and require layers of abstraction to effectively model problems can, technically, be called ineptitude, but really-- why be so down about it? That's the way things are and there's a lot of good that comes from software if you think about it for more than 30 seconds.
I also began a "develop fast and get something out there" challenge this week. My goal is to get my app launched in 7 days. I'm documenting my progress on my blog: http://jpastika.posterous.com/. I'm not sure I'll have the app out by the 7 day mark, but I should have a functional product. I like your idea and will follow your progress!
Goodbye recurly and chargify. You're no longer the prettiest girls at the dance.
Such write patterns can be avoided by buffering writes by only a few milliseconds if you're clever. It's not like this isn't a long-known problem.

If you just want to make the blinking light on the drive accurately show when it's safe to unplug you can easily delay writes for at least a quarter of a second.
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Why the downvotes? Though the comment is snarky, it's simply saying not everything can be made accessible to everyone.

The visualization of maze generation in the presentation is pretty neat, and is meant to demonstrate the running algorithm. The author isn't making it inaccessible on purpose, he can't possibly know about all the accessibility guidelines, and even if he does, there is content which can't meet all the guidelines.
Copying code into a file isn't 'coding'. And it took a lot more than 5 minutes to work all this out.
Look at F5 networks Global Traffic Manager. It's really just a fancy DNS server. You set your TTL (time to live) down to just a few seconds and it monitors your main and standby sites. If one of the sites goes down it changes your A records to point to the new site. It can even do load balancing across sites based on response time or number of connections.

They are expensive, but this is how large companies like Yahoo keep close to 100% uptime.

Explain to the customer that even with a hot site, the failover can take a few minutes. Also, some ISPs don't honor TTL and cache DNS queries for longer than they should. The Internet isn't perfect, and usually each extra 9 you add is around 4x more cost.
I'd also like to know this. PayPal as a primary payment gateway should not be an option for any startup.

What laws stop companies like Stripe, Recurly etc from easily launching in the EU?
> Usually crazy customers aren't rich.

On a personal level, I think individual people who've become wealthy have a more reasonable outlook when it comes to stuff like this, but this doesn't apply to rich _companies_.

The least reasonable clients I've ever had were employees of large companies, and more specifically those who'd been recently empowered with the responsibility of the project I was working on and lacked the perspective required to realize that crazy doesn't help anyone.

It's not their money, but it's their decision, and that's a petri dish for crazy.
HP: Is it a broken company?
This is KILLER!
My kids are going to eat this up. Thank you.

I also recommend Orbiter 2010, but it is a simulator and is not easy.

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
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I think the problem is that the companies in Europe have individual rules. America is just one country.
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"HP have" is British, "HP has" is American.
When you say you have a "universal iOS app", does that mean that you have one app that works on iPad and iPhone? I think so - just making sure. That's the first time I've heard that term.
This is one of those US/UK differences. In the US, we usually refer to companies or groups (like sports teams) as singular. In the UK, companies have been historically referred to as plural. Since the parent uses the British spelling 'favour', but feels the singular form is correct, I wonder if that's changing.
Was it just nostalgia, or did you have a use for it?
Not sure he meant a literal hot spot.
It's not the 'try' aspect that's useful, it's the interactive tutorial that comes with it that's engaging
It sounds like Google should be more aggressive with default CSPs.
This is the kind of service I'd love to attack as a side project, it's fascinating. Though I'm sure someone out there reading this, has something like this service but affordable for startups?
Missing support for the canvas tag really isn't relevant when IE offers VML and others offer SVG. There are some okay cross browser charting libraries out there, Raphael etc. And then there are the absolute stunners such as Highcharts, which has been a pleasure to work with.

For a technology-driven company to revamp aspects of their product whilst ignoring what is a widely held complaint, it just boggles the mind. I don't see how the decision to use Flash can be defended in this day and age, regardless of whether Metro IE10 drops support for Flash or not.
My suggestion is eBay. Back when hp meant something other than crappy computers and the good stuff wasn't called Agilent, hp made some very nice lab power supplies that can now be found for less than $50 on eBay.

I can't recommend any specifically simply because I have never seen a bad product come out of hp's Test & Instrumentation division. They're all good.
Obviously things change with time, but having used the public beta, this actually feels like a more accurate recommendation then previously. It really does run pretty smoothly on 1Gig/1Gb rig. For now, atleast
Nokia and Accenture Close Symbian Development and Support Services Agreement
Level3 offers 100% uptime in their SLA. All that means is that if the network goes down you get some money back.
"For a technology-driven company to revamp aspects of their product whilst ignoring what is a widely held complaint, it just boggles the mind."

FWIW, you could just as easily hoist Apple with that particular petard.
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Sorry if you find the title misleading, it certainly wasn't intended that way. In fact, sometimes I find it harder to pick the right title than I do to write the blog post.

My intentions were that you could read the article in 5 minutes and the code sample would give you a good starting point to code your own implementation.
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I want to be better, too, and I'm continually working at becoming such. But I'm not convinced that tripping is a guaranteed way to betterness, nor how much better any accidental betterness would really be.
And then there's all this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_visibility

It's more than the mirrors, and unless you have transparent pillars on top of the car (giving up the structural integrity of the cabin) it's going to have blind spots.
Having an academic and industrial background myself, I understand that researchers currently do academic work for conferences, journals and so on

The point I was making was that employers could enforce the parts of the contract that allow them to control whom their employees work for. That would, at the very least, not be contributing brainpower to an industry that charges the very same companies / universities enormous sums for access to journals.

While you may not have seen such restrictions in sysadmin/programmer type positions, they certainly exist in several scientific and medical-related disciplines (though I agree that can be waived in certain circumstances).
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Alternatively look at Zeus's Traffic Manager and Global Load Balancer.

http://www.zeus.com/products/traffic-manager

http://www.zeus.com/products/global-load-balancer

These are smart, easy to use and well supported. They're also to be found inside big cloud offerings like AWS and Joyent.
I really don't understand how "configuring a text editor" implies that "you don't understand that the only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user". Good user experiences can only be written if you haven't customized your text editor to be more efficient?
You have to consider the infrastructure needed to support developers too. It's not just a piece of software they delivered.
Those of us who feel a bit uncomfortable and nervous when camping with friends should just stick with the minds we have, then?
We got serious inbound inquiries just from taking part.
Sometimes, you may want a file container (e.g. TrueCrypt) simply to present a monolithic entity during file transfer and storage.

Also, some utilities can help somewhat, depending upon specific circumstances:

RichCopy

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2009/03/22/ric...

There's another popular utility whose name escapes me at the moment. However, its author has insisted on continuing to use a package format that some anti-virus programs flag due to high use of the format by mal-ware authors. I've also found it to behave incorrectly in some circumstances, in the past.
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You know what actually makes a difference in life? Acquire knowledge, apply that knowledge, make connections and use all of that to HELP other people and change the world.

But you know what makes a difference to the experience of bring alive? Changing the way you interpret experiences.

(you're very negative for someone who claims Helping people is the only thing which makes a difference).

And since when are people only allowed deep epiphanies, but not shallow ones, even assuming you can judge that from outside?
I think that a "good book" in the sense used above is a book where you spend the next coupla days thinking about the new ideas from the book, or the new vantage on a subject you thought you understood, or examining your life in light of what you just read.
Snark for snark? If you trip out, do you think you'll become open to the new (I presume?) experience of raping the corpses of decapitated skin-tumor-ridden grandpas?
I wish HP treated hybrid plugin (the equivalent of Native Client for webOS) developers like Google treats their Native Client developers. Oh well, just one of the reasons they folded.
I don't understand what the issue is. The client wants you to plan for disaster, and they aren't math oriented, so asking for 100% probability sounds reasonable. The engineer, as engineers are prone to do, remembered his first day of prob&stat 101, without considering that the client might not.

When they say this, they aren't thinking about nuclear winter, they are thinking about Fred dumping his coffee on the office server, a disk crashing, or an ISP going down.

Furthermore, you can accomplish this. With geographically distinct, independent, self monitoring servers, you will basically have no downtime. With 3 servers operating at an independent[1] three 9 reliability, with good failover modes, your expected downtime is under a second per year [2]. Even if this happens all at once, you are still within a reasonable SLA for web connections, and therefore the downtime practically does not exist.

The client still has to deal with doomsday scenarios, but Godzilla excluded, he will have a service that is "always" up.

[1] A server in LA is reasonably independent from the server in Boston, but yes, I understand that there is some intersection involving nuclear war, Chinese hackers crashing the power grid, etc. I don't think your client will be upset by this.

[2] DNS failover may add a few seconds. You are still in a scenario where the client has to retry a request once a year, which is, again, within a reasonable SLA, and not typically considered in the same vein as "downtime". With an application that automatically reroutes to an available node on failure, this can be unnoticeable.
I'm tempted to create a LiveJournal account just so I can explain to the_fetket that he is the very embodiment of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
We have and are in a similar situation.
Our setup at the moment is. HSBC Merchant Account, SagePay Gateway and Recurly for recurring billing. Its a lot of middle men and really isn't that great of a solution. I'm just about to setup Barclays EPDQ. It looks good. 3% charge and £10 per month for the privileged.
We were using Spreedly to abstract out the payment gateway side of things for our subscriptions.

However, to use them you need to be able to disable CVV checking using PayPal's "advanced fraud management filters". The same applies for Recurly and other similar services AFAIK.

Unfortunately PayPal wouldn't let us do this as we don't have enough trading history etc... so until we get a merchant account we're having to use PayPal's own recurring billing APIs.

We'd love for there to be a viable alternative to PayPal, Stripe's API looks gorgeous in comparison.
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It's hard to find out what other startups (from Europe) use for billing. Can anyone give any examples?

I understand that the rules are different and that most of the banks here are probably old-fashion, but isn't there a way to work around al those problems?
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7.0.1 was just a small change to fix an issue where Add-ons would disappear from the Add-on list after an update:
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/09/28/issue-discovered-w...
This is awesome! I see this replacing my normal pastebin/ideone workflows ...

One comment: in python, technically tabs are equivalent to 8 spaces, but in your REPL it is equivalent to 4 spaces. Is that a modification to the version of python you are using, or did you make a decision to match 4 spaces (BTW: I really like this, but it breaks some older code)
What do we know! We're European! Obviously I meant the US :)
It's still very clear what you're getting with each Kindle product.

Kindle DX has a massive screen, Kindle Keyboard has a keyboard, Kindle Touch has a touch screen, Kindle has buttons, Kindle Fire is a tablet.

And then there's the 3G and Wi-Fi splits, but that's also an obvious feature.
Here's a fascinating interview with Chuck Peddle, lead designer of the 6502:

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I am amazed, more so by the fact that you made the source code available (and also since it's made with node.js).

I will have a lot of fun either with the app itself or the source code. Thanks!
100% uptime is unrealistic for big companies because at scale, it costs a lot. For example, replicating is expensive with transmission, storage and maintenance costs.

When the Amazon incident happened, I did an analysis and found that the cost about triples if stored in an external data centre. Almost 6x cost if hosting overseas despite same company.

I then understood why companies like Reddit do not aim for 100% uptime possible beyond the data centre. It depends on how much the customer (or client) is willing to pay that determines the uptime aim (I think Reddit's aim for example is 90% at least).
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I am also looking for something like this. The best I could come up with so far is fastspring.com. They offer their services to european customers and even handle european VAT.

I have not had a chance to try them out, though. Maybe someone has some experience to share?
I already mentioned in the other thread:
http://www.saasy.com

No direct experience with the service but same guys that offer Fastpring (non recurring) which I recommend!
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Long live the PaaS mechanics!
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Except that it's not just delivering the SDK; it was also the App Store and all of the infrastructure it requires.

As anyone else who's worked closely with Apple can confirm, they don't change strategy based on public pressure.

The iPhone was in development 2.5 years prior to its introduction in 2007; the decision to support native 3rd party apps was made long before any of us heard of the iPhone.
If you want to compare on low-end computers... here you go...

http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/02/low-spec-computer-alt-...
But "three 9 reliability" is still not the same thing as 100%. The contractor has a right to be concerned about the 100% figure making it's way into a contract.
ok, so now i'm curious - if they paid less for somewhere to live, would they have more money for their startup? i'm sure you can imagine that the programmers that they are hiring for $1m a month don't spend 60% of their wages on pads with gyms and pools...
Apple at least pretends to be limited by technology, eg: battery life for Flash. It would take about 15 minutes to prototype it with a jQuery date selector and Highcharts supporting legacy desktop browsers and mobile devices alike. Nothing about it is remotely difficult.

But if it's competition they fear (in an entirely different SBU), why not address the shortcomings that drive people to use Mint and other analytics services?

I really can't believe I'm having this argument (and downvotes to boot). I've converted many Flash and Silverlight applications back to HTML5/JavaScript. I only ever really get stuck at File IO, which is irrelevant here. Maybe I should have taken that job offer at Google.
So... you're defending that type of architecture? Reading these other comments here, you're not alone it seems. No wonder we're in the mess we're in. Why bother looking for constructs like the arch? You want a big building? Just pile rocks in a heap.

PS. yes, yes, yes, there is irony in Dr. Kay's quote in that the Giza pyramids are of almost magical construction. He meant it metaphorically.
The problem with all salary sites (Payscale.com, Salary.com, Glassdoor.com) is the reliability of the data that they're pulling from. They all make such gross exaggerations and generalizations of salaries across locales, industries and titles that I'm sure you could reduce an entry-level statistician to tears.

Given that this site is based on "open sources of information publicly available to anyone on the internet," I think it is just a rehashing of the same, polluted information that's plagued salary discussions for a decade. I had initially hoped that, coming from a Googler, there'd be some new intelligence brought to organizing and interpreting the data. No such luck.

The best source of accurate salary discussions still comes from sites like http://salaryshare.me/ (previously discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441888)
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> If I want to bake a pie, I just grab the ingredients and bake it. ... Don’t use parameters in your programs.

If you ignore the parameters like the precise amount of each ingredient, the order in which you mix them, the oven temperature and how long to bake your pie -- It'll be a pretty shitty pie.

For now I think I'll keep using functions with parameters.
When you're at it, also create one to shame those who make the fundamental attribution error.
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