skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is, why are there laws that exist to prevent the sort of absurd things I propose? That is, why isn't "if you don't like it then don't buy it" sufficient in those cases?

There is a line to be drawn somewhere and different people may reasonably argue for drawing it at different places.
Choose an answer to this question at random, what's the chance you're correct?
I disagree with you. What is the difference between buying a new type of crop vs. getting 3 more lives so that you can explore deeper down the dungeon? The only difference is that in Farmville it's a bit lazier because they enhance the speed of the items. You don't think that back in 1985 when we were playing Gauntlet that if you paid $0.50 to get an invincible player vs the regular $0.25, that it would be considered gambling? No way, it's enhancing the gaming experience. That's it. In both cases, you are enhancing the gaming experience by paying more money.

This is entirely different from a slot machine where "if I just do 10 more pulls, I might win $1MM! My luck is bound to turn sooner or later!" It's a completely different mentality. You put money in slot machines because you consider it an investment in hopes that you will make back more money than you put in. If you removed the ability for people to win money, the casinos would probably be empty, despite how many blips and bloops you put into the game.
I would be quite upset if the car manufacturer attached locks to the hood of my car without warning me.

I might be considerably less upset if there were both "cars with locks on their hoods" and "regular cars without locks on their hoods" and if I was offered the choice between them.

It's quite possible to support the choice between FOSS and commercial software, and think that FOSS is a great thing for people to develop, without deciding that people whole build closed-source software are "immoral". Don't like it? Don't buy it.

I know this is a bit disingenuous and there are corner cases where it's hard to avoid closed-source. There are even a few cases where no amount of consumer choice (even, say, someone who avoids smartphones and 'cool gadgets') will allow you to escape closed source (e.g. government services available as closed-source software only or working only on platforms where you have to use closed source). The point still stands, broadly.
Marvetteconstruction
Marvette Construction is a licensed general contractor in the Bay Area, specializing in kitchen remodel and a variety of other custom remodeling work.
I wonder if its cheaper (and/or better) for a hosting provider to spend less on reliability and instead build in multiple redundancy. Thoughts?

Also, i've never heard the expression 4 nines before, anyone explain that for me?
Free PSD UI Kits
I suddenly find myself wondering if someone wanted the stock price to crater, to make a takeover or mega-buy-in cheaper.
The only credit I give Whitman for this is that she realized that the markets (both PC customers and the stock market) had already spoken, and they did not like the spinoff plan. Analysts had already pointed out that existing synergies (the supply chain, etc.) would be lost. I think it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the spinoff decision would be reversed, although I'll grant Whitman the benefit of the doubt and assume that she really did study the question deeply and with an open mind.

I doubt she would have reversed the WebOS decision even if she had had the chance. As much as we techies may bemoan it, the fact is that for HP to see any profit from the Palm acquisition, it would have had to suffer losses for several years and then try to recoup them in an extremely competitive environment (read: low margins). I think the real mistake there was when Hurd bought Palm in the first place, and I see no evidence that anyone in HP's upper management thinks otherwise.
If I have to guess, I would guess cost is too high to have rackspace managed dedicated server. I've been working with rackspace's managed dedicated for 10 years. They are pricey but for a small shop where you dont have dedicated network/hardware guy. It's worth every penny. 99% I called their fanatic support, I hear human voice after 1 ring.

Now their cloud support is different story.
Lawsuits for what?
A lifestyle business is a particular type of business, and a startup is another distinct type. They each have different requirements and business models, just as either one is different from a large public corporation.

Most of the Silicon Valley startup infrastructure is basically extraneous to a lifestyle business. Incubators, angel investors, VCs, all the other support pieces built for rapid growth -- all of that is geared toward businesses that have a chance of getting huge and IPOing and giving back a huge return to everyone who helped it along.

With a lifestyle business, by contrast, you tend to self-finance, you shepherd your cash and investments carefully, and if you need to expand, you might go talk to your bank about a line of credit and show them your cash flow and consistent returns to date in order to help secure it.

Lifestyle businesses can be great. My dad has a successful retail store, a low-stress environment, a great house, and plenty of time to enjoy it all. We should all be so lucky. They're just not the same thing as startups.
Don't forget the additional $10/hour "region fee" (= $7200/month)

And that dedicated instance is likely still running inside Xen, so you got the normal virtualization overhead, and slow disks.
Missing the point. Because RSS has a more convenient alternative in the form FB Likes and Twitter feeds its not so popular to use. If the web/email/tv/phone had a super convenient alternative, we're talking one-click integration to a system you've already adopted, that people would use it don't you think?
That's also what I respect most about Hitler. Like him or not.
Great post as always. Keep them coming. TC should get you to do some guest posts.
It just came out of beta testing. Here's the discussion from the beta announcement almost a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675
>The most important reason x86's are relevant today (and why we are stuck with them) is because

they had better price/performance at the start and just plain better performance a bit later. Alpha ran Windows and was a nice CPU. Unfortunately it did _cost_ .

Can ARM run Java for enterprise users? Nehalems with DDR3 have hard time doing it.

There is of course the market for energy efficiency coming with ARM's straight in-order execution, and if we multiply these simple cores, and with programmers and compilers doing better work on parallelization we even can get decent performance, yet i doubt it will beat out-of-order superscalars.

On the other side it isn't [directly] about price, performance or efficiency because it isn't direct competition. x86 run desktops which was explosively growing computing segment of yesterday. ARM runs mobile - explosively growing computing segment of today. The arguments of big iron CPUs vs. x86 back then were similar to the arguments of desktop/server x86 vs. ARM today. These arguments are technically valid, yet they just don't matter today like they didn't matter yesterday as they talk about different computing devices and task they do. The mobile device primary task isn't Excel. It is maps, photos and Facebook/Twitter. This mobile computing looks primitive the way Visicalc looked primitive to the computing of big iron. Yet it is the largest piece of tomorrow's computing and ARM is just more suitable for it than x86 the way x86 was more suitable than Alpha/Sparc/Cray/etc... for desktop.
Here's my advice:

STOP BEING SO GODDAMNED SERIOUS!

You're 15. You will have your entire life to work. The whole point of being 15 is not having to worry about this kind of stuff.

I'm not saying don't work hard, or don't be passionate. I'm saying if you think your future is defined by what you're doing at age 15, think again. Please, please, please, enjoy being young. I know it sucks sometimes. But don't wake up on your 40th birthday and realize you've spent your entire life working. No matter how hard you work, you will never get the chance to be 15 again.
While I have heard good things from a couple of people about HP's business support, my personal experiences with their consumer support division have been wanting.

My HP laptop has a locked BIOS that prevents you from replacing the wireless card. I sent them an email message describing the BIOS error message that was returned and asking for more information about what were valid wireless cards for the machine. I received a reply telling me to reinstall my wireless card drivers. Over the next few days, I tried to get someone who understood my issue, but was repeatedly told to reinstall drivers, to reseat the card, and a variety of other solutions that seemed to come from some wireless troubleshooting customer support script.

I called, and the person I talked to eventually told me to send the computer in, because "the depot would have a different unlocked BIOS that they could put on". When my computer arrived at the depot, I talked to:

- a technician who was sympathetic but very confused about why phone support told me to send my computer to the depot,

- two case managers who started out by telling me that they were "non-technical" who I had to explain what a BIOS was, and

- a rude senior case manager who yelled at me for wasting everyone's time and told me "if you bought a car with a Sony stereo, you wouldn't expect a Panasonic stereo to work in it". When I told him that he was being rude and I wanted to provide feedback to someone about it, he told me that there was nobody else I could talk to, as his superiors would not want to hear from me.

After a day of not hearing anything from the depot about when my computer would be returned, I called a HP executive support number I found on Consumerist or some other forum. The woman I talked to was exceedingly polite, but admitted she was non-technical, but then told me that my issue was "it was because HP wanted it that way" and even though it is in a user-accessible location, trying to install a different wireless card would void my warranty "just like installing Linux."

A week or so later, HP released a BIOS update to include more wireless cards on the internal whitelist, in order to support the version of the laptop in the Small Business store (same components, starting price was $300 higher).
Understanding HP's dilemma is as simple as looking at the comps.

HP is trading at 6.5x P/E currently.

Yet HP's consulting business should be worth more separate (IBM at 14x, Accenture at 18x)

And HP's hardware business should be worth more separate (compare Toshiba at 12x, Apple at 15x, even Dell at 9x)

As a result I understand why they allowed Apotheker to do what he did.

Cut ONCE, bleed heavily and launch two strong, focused companies that aren't burdened by the distraction of the other and can unlock maximum shareholder value.

BUT wow, do they have a fricking communication challenge.

Every press release (even this one) is dry, complicated and nonsensical.

The current press release talks about a "data driven decision".

Why can't they just explain what they're doing and why?

Come on HP.
IT still hating on Apple: 41% block employee-owned Macs
I assume it refers to uptime, e.g. 99.99% uptime.
I hear you. I too cringe each time I see a post about RMS here. I know I "have" to read it, at the same time as I know I will get angry and extremely disillusioned about mankind doing so.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of RMS. I agree with a lot of what he says, but at the same time I cannot agree with the way he presents it. There are two reasons why I am a member of The Linux Foundation, and not the FSF, and their names are Richard Stallman and Matt Lee. Though I feel very strong about the motives and ideology of FSF, I simply cannot condone their way of presenting them. I personally feel that RMS does as least as much to harm their goal as to aid it, and I find ML to be horribly hypocritical. No matter how much a disagree with how their do tings, I would never disrespect them as human being. But sometimes it feels like I'm alone in the world. Everybody else either adores them, or tries their darndest to disrespect them.

This is in no way unique to HN. I see it everywhere. Even in the media (here in Norway). Last time RMS talked here, all of the important IT-related media where represented. (And I noticed immediately that they were more concerned with their beers than actually listening). The articles the day after were horrible. RMS had talked about some really far out there, fairly absurd stuff, and some really smart, realistic stuff. Every single media gave their best effort to make RMS look like a loon. _None_ of the smart, realistic stuff was mentioned, even with a single word, anywhere. An they had twisted the far out stuff, to look even worse. One of them seemed even to either not have listened to a word, or was simply making stuff up. RMS said at least 6 times specifically: "I'm not talking about Micropayments, I'm talking about making pay what you like/can easier", "Don't confuse this with micropayments", etc. Yet this journalist managed to write a half an article about all of the stuff RMS had "said" about micropayments.
As someone who started an RSS-based company (that's now defunct) I think the issue isn't just a lack of a default client, it's a lack of a tangible conceptual model for people. I spent years explaining the RSS concept, testing lots of different metaphors, and almost always got the "blank stare" or "nodding along so you think I understand".

I think the deeper problem is that it takes a kind of abstract thinking, that content and presentation are different things and that the content of a website or blog can be a resource as much as a particular presentation of it, that's just not normal for non-technical people. I think most people still think of websites as "places" you "go" to, and the idea of the content/data packaged in a format for easy syndication is a mental leap regardless of the metaphor you use.
It's a common way to describe uptime. It means 99.99% uptime/availability, which works out to under 1 hour of downtime per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering)
Is there really a Data Scientist shortage?
4-nines is 99.99% reliability (downtime of about 1 hour per year). More detail :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
Amazon has only recently begun rendering pages via EC2 based images. But, yes, Amazon is not primarily hosted in its cloud.
It's not clear and this makes me change my view.
In fairness, HP never proposed to "kill one of its largest sources of revenue". The idea was to get some cash by selling or spinning off a relatively low-margin division. Killing it would be ridiculous. IBM certainly didn't "kill" its PC division; Lenovo is now the #2 vendor.
http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html
I have a dual monitor setup, and usually work with maximized to full screen windows. I can always ALT+Tab or Command+Tab (depending on the OS I'm working on, I have a KVM to work with my dual monitors with a Windows 7 machine and a Mac Mini) to another full screen application, but I like to focus on what I'm working. It's nice to have the ability of having two views at the same time with the dual monitors, though, specially for coding/hacking, when I can have my code for debugging in a monitor and/or a console log, and/or a a web browser for testing if it's a web/app or to read documentation. But I don't like the clutter of multiple medium sized windows at once...

Interesting programs though.
What Being Number One On Google Gets You
If redundancy was cheap and easy, we'd do it even if we had reliable data centers.

It's not, and that's why we don't have it.
You should read his profile.
There's a reason I use FB and Twitter vs. RSS feeds. Because its so damn dominant, a lot of sources post to Twitter and FB exclusively. Furthermore, if there's anything particularly popular/huge/breaking, FB's algorithm populates the top of my feed with it. RSS feeds don't do that. Different clients' "magic" function doesn't work properly. RSS has become spam to me. For exclusive news, I thus rely on social clients.

For major news sources like Gawker, IGN, CNN, what have you, RSS is still there and probably won't be going away.
The number of nines refers to how reliable something is. "Four nines" means that it is up 99.99% of the time, or 0.01% of downtime, which is 0.0001 * 365 * 24 = just shy of 1 hour of downtime per year (or 1 day downtime every 30 years).

These things are usually specified in SLA (service level agreements) where if the provider exceeds the amount of downtime in the SLA means that you don't have to pay. If Amazon has a 4-nines SLA that means that you don't get any discount if they have 1 hour down per year.
Some interesting ripples:

Steve Yegge's rant follow-up: https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=bwJ7kAELR...

Steve Yegge Amazon war story #1:https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=AaygmbzVe...

It would have been interesting to see the ripple for the original rant...

edit: Although Steve deleted the post, here's the associated ripple: https://plus.google.com/ripples/details?activityid=WugKtXSp7...
Facebook User Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison
The #1 way to lie with statistics is . . . to just lie
You've just lost your synergy jedberg.
Tear It All Down
Reading this thread, I can't help but have the thought:

We're really arguing about semantics. This is the definition "startup" in the Silicon Valley echo chamber vs. the definition of "startup" everywhere else in the world.

Sometimes I rather dislike the term - it seems to, at least in a small way, justify the bubblicious way many companies in our field are run, particularly in the Valley. Can you imagine saying to someone "I run my own business" and then be unable to answer "so what do you drive revenue from"?

It seems to me in this community there's a tendency to believe that "startup" businesses (as SV likes to define it) somehow transcend the traditional rules of business, and this quibbling over nomenclature doesn't help at all. By believing that you're "not just like those antiquated 'businesses'", you're more liable to, well, do things like run a company without a plan for revenue.
It seems strange that Vimeo has this policy when they're way behind YouTube in market share and mind share. Are they really so desperate for money that this is necessary? If so, they should surrender to YouTube, give up, and go do something else.
My response to the victim-blaming part is here (http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3164269) and here (http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3165026).

That there is such a difference points out that there is a problem.

No, it points out that there is a difference. There's thousands of differences between men and women. This one happens to be about employment in engineering jobs. You could claim it's just because of sexism, but it would be nice to have proof that it's that and not (for example) that there's just not as much interest from women in engineering jobs. I have no idea why you brought up combat, though, as I never mentioned it...

On your point #2, it wouldn't surprise me if they dropped out because of a number of factors and the bulk of them just happened to be the same cultural and sexual differences which make men and women different in general. But it would be really nice to have real evidence of something rather than wildly speculate.

On point #3, the current generation is in love with the idea of nerds and geeks. They're sexy and intelligent, according to pretty much every person on OkCupid.com (I think they actually have infographs on that too...). However, I can tell you definitely that being a geek was highly uncool when I grew up. It's the only reason I got into computers - I had no social life and computers were an escape. I'm not an engineer so I don't know what that's like. I could speculate (again) and say that based on my female friends who are geeks, not one of them is the stereotypical bubblegum hottie cheerleader type. Why? Beats the hell outta me. If we could solve that maybe we could get Paris Hilton to take up nuclear physics and little girls would grow up with a positive role model instead of what they have now, which is largely pretty drunken sluts on TV and tabloids.
ARM is basically doing to Intel what Clayton Christensen taught Andy Grove to do with the Celeron.

http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1
And you are a cloud expert as per your LinkedIn profile..

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Nice .... .... ...
Is This The Next Nintendo DS Lite?
100tb.com?
Generally "no contract" means no fixed-term (eg: multi-year) contract. There is always a contract of some sort covering acceptable use, SLA, payment terms, termination rights, and so on. Otherwise you could use as much as you want for any purpose and not pay them a cent and they'd have no recourse. You can even have a contract locking in your price for five years but that you only pay month to month and can leave at any time without penalty.
I think that was probably me with the stickers. Skud and I had vaguely similar hair for a while. I am the one with the wheelchair so while people have confused us, actually it's quite easy to tell us apart!
This is an institutional problem, despite your heroic efforts to recast it as an individual one.
When I did a comparison of co-located vs. managed vs. cloud my numbers broken down as such:

co-lo: 1x cost
managed: 1.5-2x cost
cloud: 2.25-4x cost

This was with headcount changes figured into the pricing. (We did not see a head count reduction when using EC2)

The primary advantage the cloud offered was that it was an operating expense without a contract, and that you could turn systems off when not used.
Double Dipping
The Unusual Startup Incubator That Could Only Exist in Chattanooga
You realize I was joking...
Link bait headline. Obviously the issue here is that Data Centers are not reliable enough. A good failover option is necessary but generators and UPSs don't represent the primary costs behind data centers, removing them won't come close to cutting prices in half.

The point seems to be to expect failure and make sure you're prepared but increasing the likely hood of failures for a slight decrease in cost is not a good way to go about it.
I'm curious as to why the author hasn't referenced nginx, which is written also event based (epoll/kqueue) and written in C.
Still free but the link is kind of buried.
because Rackspace is very expensive. They are awesome, but they are expensive on the dedicated side.
"Your Browser is no longer supported.

http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p...
"

Now, I get this idiotic error since I don't use one of the major web browsers (FF, IE, Chrome, Safari).

I really hate the websites (such as read.amazon.com) that ignores the other webkit based web browsers (uzbl, luakit, surf...) with same capabilities with Chrome and Firefox. (I don't even compare them with IE!)
Microsoft's OmniTouch turns everything into a touchpad [video]
Disrupting Homelessness One Voicemail at a Time
I realize I use the buzzword on my linkedin. I may hate the term, but I still have to play the game, right?
"You know what HP should do? They should acquire Netflix. Then a week later back away and say “Never mind.” Then a month later go ahead and buy Netflix. Those two are made for each other."

–John Gruber
So in that case, what about customers who DO buy new devices? Your argument suggests that developers won't build software to target the new capabilities their devices have. In which case the manufacturers' refusal to keep their old devices up to date is actually undermining their ability to sell new hardware ("Why should I buy a new android phone; all the software is written to target my existing two year old model")