skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I'm running operations at Blekko, and just prior to that I was at Google in their eng/ops organization. I had been doing a whole lot of 'total cost of ownership' aka TCO computations around engineering infrastructure both for Google and of course now for Blekko.

The conclusion I came to is that for a 'web 2.0' type setup, the break even point was about 500 'machines.' That was in part because a 'machine' today has 8 - 24 'threads' and 2 - 40T of 'storage' and (at the time) 2 - 96G 'memory.' So in terms of 'cloud' you could easy run 10 "instances" on these sorts of machine. So 500 machines might be 5000 'instances' in an AWS type cloud.

Its this '10:1' multiplier effect (which is only getting better with bigger machines) and the management techniques of running the same config everywhere, etc. Means your TCO goes up more slowly than the capacity of the resulting infrastructure, so you can 'solve for x' where the two lines cross to identify the break even point. Everything east of that point you're coming out ahead of a 'cloud' based deployment.

What is still a challenge however is geographic diversity. If you wanted to put 500 machines 'around the world' so 125 machines in each 90 degrees (approximately) of longitude, the economics of getting 5 - 10 'cabinets' in places around the world can work against you. (you have more negotiating power if you're putting in 100 racks than if you are putting in 10 racks)
Facts About Smiling
A factor this post doesn't mention is bandwidth cost. If you use a lot of bandwidth and negotiate competitive hardware pricing, you also save with dedicated hosts.

Say you have 10 machines at SoftLayer and use 30TB a month. Each machine comes with 3TB and you pool your bandwidth for $25 per server so you can allocate the whole 30TB to your proxies. It's unknown what fraction of your server cost is applied to bandwidth, but we know the point where you start saving.

At Amazon 30TB of US-East EC2 bandwidth costs 10000 x .12 + 20000 x .09 = $3000.

If you estimate the bandwidth portion of your SoftLayer server cost at less than $275 you're saving money when using your full bandwidth allocation. With servers starting at $159, sub-$100 seems realistic.

In our case with dozens of servers and ~60 TB of bandwidth, we're saving thousands a month compared to EC2.
True but that doesn't mean your own service/whatever should only offer updates via facebook, instead of having RSS for your blog/whatever.
The five 9-hour-days it took to create Raiders of the Lost Arc
My understanding is that the server sends either ANSI codes or HTML depending on the user agent.
Call Your Friends for Free Through Lucyphone Exploit
He's certainly head strong, and there are many modern cases of implementations that he didn't agree to (The app store, iTunes on Windows etc.) But despite his opposition and his ability to prevent these things from happening, he did eventually concede to them, stand up on stage and present them with excited fervour and ultimately sell them to the masses.

I suppose what I'm saying here is that Stallman too is head-strong, but probably needs to be surrounded by a team of rationalists to make his direction palatable.

People talk about Jobs like he was a genius, or the devil, or a god, or some personal friend. He was the head of a company that finds opportunity in tech-stagnation.

Also there is so much talk about Woz, I doubt anyone would really be interested in Woz if Apple went bankrupt towards the end of the 90s.
Who usually pays for filing and incorporation fees for bootstrapped company?
Starting my bookkeeping for company. Who usually pays for filing and incorporation fees for bootstrapped company? If you paid the fees, are you expected to be reimbursed later on?
it sounds like a hybrid between Supreme Court and the corporate board/CEO scheme.

To me the problem lies deeper - it is in the principle that government/state is a concentrated power (taken away from people by force) and what behaves like a violent force against the people. Any tweaks to the current system is tweaks with who and how authorizes the application of that violence.

The government should get it power through willful delegation from people. The US was a nice attempt to implement the idea. Unfortunately the "willful" isn't there anymore. And without it the government looses moral ground under its violence.

The next stage would be government/state system that acts not through force. What can be used instead of force? Persuasion/education, consensus...? it is though too far fetched for any specifics.
Except of course when that small business relays to much on the cloud. I know a local gym that decided to "host" their cash register. I told the owner it was a mistake. He basically said I was suck in the past.

Until his Comcast went/slowed down.

Or a local non-profit who's board came up with a great way to save money - host their phone system in the cloud. A local carrier was happy to sign them to a 3 year contact. Even supplied the 42 phones. Now, they lucky if they can make calls mid day. It's so bad, that if 10 phones are in use, the next call will sound like you calling from a wind tunnel. And forget about calling at peak times. What does the carrier suggest? Upgrading to a T1. Of course that carrier never mentioned this when selling the service in the first place. And personally, with 42 phone plus 50+ computers and other devices I'm suggesting T3 (cost down here about 500 - 600 a month).

My point is, our infrastructure (at least in South Florida) isn't there yet. Sure the cloud is a great idea. But if you can't reach it, it's useless. But that doesn't stop the marketing. Or the complaints.
If only things were so simple in real life where liberty is often abused so as to threaten the safety of others.

The historical trend has been the other way around: as societies have become more free in general, they have also become safer in general. I would much rather live in the liberty of the United States, where I enjoy a crime-free neighborhood, than in the one-party dictatorship of China in the 1980s, where I saw more fights among strangers in public in three weeks in three different cities than I have seen in an entire lifetime traveling all over the United States.

See Steven Pinker's new book

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0...

for more about increasing safety of human societies over time (when the long-term trend has also plainly been in the direction of greater individual liberty for all aspects of human behavior).
Ruby and Python have strong types, no automatic coercion besides numeric promotion, customizable and extensible type models, the ability to create new first-class types, a complete type system, dynamic attribute and method dispatch; these things are not in the flavors of ECMAScript used in browsers and Node, to the point where there is no "class" keyword, or an equivalent, in JS.

I object to Ruby and Python being lumped with JS mostly on account of features, and additionally because JS does not occupy the same systems-programming niche that Ruby and Python can easily fill. (And some companies, like Google, would not permit Ruby and Python to be grouped, nor Python with C++ and Java.)

Edit: Nevermind, you're right. I concede.
Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company
There are other aspects of a contract that can be beneficial:

SLA, including compensation for outages and outs if they have too many. Sure, without a contract you can leave anytime, but a contract isn't necessarily a permanent trap. They are negociable. You can push for lower incidence allowances, an opt-out part way through the contract, and so on.

Support... more in actual human assistance with the move and issues. Depending on your size and the terms, that contract could be worth 6 to 7 figures to the company. That is some serious motivation to help make the initial experiences good and the help along the way.
If you go to youtube while using a google apps account it specifically warns you that everything you do can be monitored by your company.
Why does 2 reserved expansion slots versus 8 general purpose expansion slots indicate that Steve Jobs' "down with the man" attitude was a front?
Having extra hardware to help speed it up doesn't stop it from being bank switching. That is its essential nature, it doesn't matter how heavy the lipstick is.

By that same logic, all of paged memory management is bank switching. I might also point out that current x86 CPUs map 64-bit addresses into 43-bit physical addresses using pages. Is that reverse-bank switching?

It's purely coincidental if your CPU was designed to map N-bit virtual-space pointers into N-bit physical-space pointers. It's much more common, both now and historically, to map from N-bit to M-bit. There is no hack here.
I think you bring up a few of the reasons why I'm finding RSS feeds more difficult to locate on sites. Several times recently I've only been able to find them by knowing where WordPress automatically publishes the feed or by viewing the source of the page.
I don't think ARM can outdo Intel given Intel's tech and advanced fab capability, but I think business model wise Intel is in serious trouble with this announcement.

Intel has done its best to lock companies out of adding value to Intel's chips. Intel forced Nvidia into a more limited role and even limits the usage of Atoms. Intel also is failing at keeping the wattage of its chips down.

Companies are getting very good at adding their own custom designs to the ARM core (something Intel is kinda / sorta conflicted about). With a 64-bit core, some of Intel's safe space might got away as companies go with a solution that they can decide on fab partners and on chip design elements. Don't want this type of port, then don't put it on. Need more GPU, add it.

The game really isn't technology, it's business model.
Bitcoin mining pool hardware and bandwidth requirements
Yeah bandwidth can be insanely expensive on the cloud. Amazon at least can mitigate that if you're exclusively on their network so it's all incoming + across-their-network but as soon as you start kicking terabytes off their network you're going to feel it.

Dedicateds with massive bandwidth plans are very easy to come by, on top of the perks of dedicated io and raid (which also starts very cheap).
026 RR Pair Programming
This is the correct answer. The Double Irish/Dutch Sandwich schemes are used to avoid foreign taxes. All that is required to avoid paying US federal tax is to avoid bringing the income into the country.
Do you rent your house, or did you buy it?

Cloud is renting servers: low cap-ex but high op-ex, minimal risk exposure, highly nimble.
Dedicated hardware is buying servers: high cap-ex but low op-ex , more risk, and more consistent.

There's nothing inherently "better" in either strategy; they each suit a different need.
That's assuming the per GB monthly charge works out cheaper than the up front investment in a machine like that. Which these days is rather small.
>So what? The same could be said about Muammar Gaddafi.

Hopefully, you can see how Muamar Gaddafi and Steve Jobs differ. Gaddafi's death was a relief, Jobs was a loss, that should have been implicit, in his argument.
37signals Speaks - Presentations, Keynotes, Recordings, and Interviews
If you're doing anything with the real-time web (websockets, node, twisted, etc), you need to be there. If you look through the speaker list, you'll see there's almost no fluff, just lots of experienced implementors. I think the same will be true of the attendees.

To be clear, I'm not affiliated in anyway, just excited about attending.
Python is in no sense an everything-is-a-hashtable language.
You have to think about your MVP as a serious effort to validate or disprove your thesis and assumptions. An MVP does not have to be code, it does not have to be a prototype of your real app. You can duck tape anything together (video, screen cast, screen shots, photo shop images...) to try to prove/disprove your thesis. Here a quick example. Let's say you want to build a new way of searching for hotels. The first question you ask yourself, is what is it that will make people come and use my product/site (instead of expedia or hotels.com)? What is the value that I am adding? So you come up with your 2 or 3 true, core value adds that you think build the foundation of why people will love your product. Now you go ahead and verify if you are right, if these 2-3 value adds really are enough to have people come and use your product (if there is a market for it). So you identify a place on the web where your target audience hangs out and you put your MVP (whatever form/shape it has) in front of them. Drew Houston from Dropbox just showed people a video that was fake (the real product did not work yet and was not really build) to measure how many people would like it and the response was amazing.

For reference check out: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Dropbox-reach-its-first-100-100...
and: http://vimeo.com/16091659
Drew is very inspiring.
I suspect they will not be able to remove the feature as long as it's an official Android phone. My initial guess is that this will be added to CTS, or at least the list of requirements for things that work on Android.
But a transcompiler will always be a kludge, at least when the target language hasn't been designed as a bytecode.

Most importantly, I'd bet that the intersection of developers who:

(1) can write good software; and

(2) Can write decent JS code, but can't become proficient in Lua within a couple of days;

is mostly empty.
Can the multi-tenant problem be solved by just using the beefiest EC2 instance available? At some point don't you become the only one occupying that box? And if your site has the volume that MixPanel does, I assume you wouldn't be exposing yourself to single-point-of-failure issues because you'd still have many such boxes. Can someone more knowledgeable please address these?
I wish I was going. Go or regret it.
I'm in the same category. I want free software because I love to be able to hack on stuff.

However, I also don't pay a dime for it, at least in terms of cash. I try and 'pay back' bug reports, patches and the like.

But we're in a tiny minority...
Vimeo vs. Indie Game Developers
Exposing Social Gaming's Hidden Lever
Since their app is highly optimized, profiled, and tweaked low level C then it's no wonder they could not tolerate the CPU variances of the cloud. Even so at least on EC2 there's much less noisy neighbor issues on the bigger CPU instances, for example on extra large instances you essentially have the entire server to yourself.
I don't have to bear one second of Youtube ads. (Thank you AdBlock!)

The "Shark Week" ad that literally screamed at me at 11PM was the straw that broke my mental back. I immediately installed AdBlock.
There are some traits that can be easily observed on Googlers and Xooglers. Particularly, if you meet at least two of the requirements below then they are definitely going to screen your resume more carefully:

1. Holds a BS/MSc/PhD from a famous US university (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, etc) or a PhD in a known university.

2. Has publications or is a well renowned CS researcher/professor/veteran (including famous progr. lang. gurus)

3. Is/was the committer of a famous open source software

4. Has invented algorithms or data structures or programming language

5. Has worked on a major company like Microsoft, Oracle, or Intel;

6. Has been the finalist of programming competitions like ACM, TopCoder, etc.
Having a little trouble with language are you? The headline and the story dont support your interpretation. The story says that closing tax loopholes that allow separate allocation of expenses and revenue will gain the US up to $60B in revenues. A more sensible allocation is based on number of employees or revenues, or cost of production.

Apologies to those who dont like snide remarks, but I also dislike distortion to make a political point.
Thanks for sharing the experience. In your particular case it seems the right decision to move to a dedicated provider. The reasoning was similar to GitHub's (https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace) Cloud environments make the most sense at either end of the spectrum. It works if you are Netflix, where the choice is not to purchase a few servers but build your own Cloud infrastructure (http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-come-to-use-clouds-not...) or if you are getting started, when you are cash-constrained and there are a lot of uncertainties, allows you to run quick experiments etc. Take our case, we provide a cloud hosting tool (http://bitnami.org/cloud) but we don't run all of our systems there, they are divided between "traditional" providers (one of them Softlayer) and AWS. It is a bit of a pain, but for our current requirements and budget, it works nicely.
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I found no combination of people with quite my taste on Twitter. There are always bits and pieces that get left out. My RSS reader gives me a more comprehensive overview and allows me to be more effective.

A better Twitter client won’t help with that: It can’t display information that’s not there.
It showed me that we still need banks. Even though bitcoin has no banks, people used the wallet sites as essentially a bank.

One of the other reasons the banking industry doesn't see much innovation is that it needs to be very secure (which is why it's a pain in the ass) and so it's going to take some time to adopt new technologies.
Considering Dropbox also has revision history, it makes even less sense to have granular access control.
To be fair, you do get to use all of the new accessories and cables. Plus if you want to run ICS, while Google may not support it, it certainly seems like Cyanogen will have a version for the N1.
I look at this and say to myself, "This dude's missing the point."

Twitter is not a superset of RSS. It does a small part of what I do with RSS, but not all of it, and not in as nice of a way.

The Twitter-Instapaper thing is a good idea, but it's just not the same as RSS.
> Right, so because someone adopted a license, the GPL, that forbids distributing the software under the EULA, you guys are going to blame the EULA, rather than the GPL?

Yes, because it is that EULA that takes away our freedoms, not the GPL.

You can blame the GPL for being uncompromising in this respect, but the GPL came first. They could've made the EULA compatible if that was a priority. Google managed to, after all.
Much like brlewis said in his response to the GP, no one said that RMS can't say what he thinks: he will not be hauled away to labor camp for saying it. However, the other topic of this discussion is that the rest of the community has the freedom to pass judgment on tactless people like RMS, which is exactly what's happening.
Hey all - this is definitely a huge issue for forward thinking tech/payment start-ups.

I work with a lot of tech start-ups to help them get around these issues. I know the acquiring side pretty well, and would love to chat with anyone who is interested in doing the aggregator model. So far, I've helped a few people find workarounds to avoid aggregator status, and if that isn't possible, I might be able to help you on the way to becoming an aggregator. Give me a yell! alex (at) coremerchant (dot) com .

Happy to offer advice and help you brain-storm free of charge. Cheers!
It is an almost trivial observation to say that those who don't understand RSS are condemned to reinvent it, poorly - but if you are going to reinvent it, why make it extra-difficult and do it using a proprietary platform and an as-of-yet non-existent client for that platform?
It is free for individuals, or was maybe they changed that?

I ised it for free for seversl years but just started paying in the hope of getting better support. Given I didnt I am probably going to go back to free.
It doesn't seem to be happening quickly. I have yet to see even one screwdriver shop anywhere selling ARM CPUs and compatible motherboards at retail.
That is because these are difficult questions that everyone want to avoid(subconsciously). It's easier to take sides depending on what OS(es) you're running or what devices you're a fan of and then blast the other party for real or perceived faults.

Some questions for discussion:

1. How do we make a software distribution system that simultaneously keeps malware off but allows developers and users liberty without a third party policing the content? (Without crippling the apps to a basic denominator like HTML does). Also, discouraging piracy is another goal.What do you do about the developers who abuse the liberty and do things to mislead the gullible users or kill battery life needlessly? Social reputation for apps?

2. How do we encourage innovation in technology(which sometimes takes massive investments of time and money) and design while simultaneously encouraging the reuse of code and ability to fix and tinker with things for yourself and others and all this while preserving the experience for the majority of users(who are not technically inclined at all)?

3.How do we workaround the fact that most people do not and will never have an interest in the technical workings of devices and asking them to research things and make an optimal choice of their own is too much to ask, should a company or central authority make that choice for them?

The above are some of the points that Jobs and Stallman were on the opposite poles of. But it's easier to discuss, "hahaha, he hates parrots" and "what a jerk, parking in handicapped spaces" rather than having a real discussion about these tough issues.
You're not a fan of the relatively low barrier to entry on the WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade, and Steam platforms? You don't enjoy relatively new people creating games without large war chests or corporate backing? That's too bad. :c
I'm all for AGPL myself, and this isn't about Google's spirit, but Google is undoubtly "powered by OSS", like it or not. You may label it as "profiteering from OSS" if you want, but you can't entirely throw the baby away with the bath water -- think or Android, Go, etc.
This is mostly mypoia, based on the technology you see every day and think is important. CPU cores aren't remotely all of Intel's business, just as ARM Ltd. gets no revenue from semiconductor manufacturing. Intel has hands-down the best process technology out there, and gets insane margins on their parts (average of $2/mm^2 or something like that). They aren't going anywhere. The PC market is stable, but not shrinking. The server world is booming.

Intel clearly wants to be a player in the consumer SoC market. And they've had... let's say rather mixed success there. But they'll keep trying. Similar challenges were seen in the early 90's vs. the RISC world and '99-02 years vs. AMD. They reworked, adapted, and clobbered the competition.

As someone else posted, their death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's almost a running gag in the industry.
Well said, to both commenters above me. Access has both pros and cons.
Yes, that is also an issue for us, we provide a large number of downloads (virtual machines, installers) that go into the TB and it would be quite expensive to move that over to EC2. One nice feature of Amazon, if you can afford it, is the ease of use with which you can put that content on their CDN
Earn Passive Residual Income | Work With Robert Dorsey
Anybody noticed how closely this, being from the programmer's point of view, is related to what Bret Victor [1] has been talking about from the UI perspective? Take http://worrydream.com/#!/ScrubbingCalculator, or any of the "Kill Math" or "Explorable Xplanations" articles, for an example.

Combining a good UI to the propagators as explained by Sussman in this video, would make a disruptive product on any field where decision making is needed. (Not like such tools didn't exist already in the hands of some, of course.)

[edit] fix typo
Of course a different tax law would have different tax revenues. But current tax law lays no claim to this money.
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