skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We buy physical servers in a managed datacenter. They provide the box and KVM access to it. We pay a reasonable price for top of the line hardware thats not on our balance sheet. We do all of the software bits (OS, updates, deploying software) and if the server has a bad drive or somehow else breaks the data center folks deal with it.
I think the best way to Jail break iPhone 2G is to use videos available in you tube, just search for the term "How to Jail break iPhone 2G"

http://www.imakerz.com
Both, because you can't run OSX on a virtual server and we need them for CI with Xcode.
New York’s New Taxi Plan Could Be Bad, Bad News for Uber
Roger L. Martin, the author of the book hawked in this article, is also a director at RIM. Maximizing shareholder value indeed!

That said, Roger is correct (incidentally or not) in my book to criticize the short-term casino nature of the public equity market buyers and sellers. Too often they forget that as shareholders of a stock they are part-owners in the enterprise; rather they only desire to see the price tag on their stock certificate go up in the next minute so they can sell for a profit. That kind of thinking can poison a company.

The lesson I draw from this is that it matters who your investors are. Once you've sold part of the company, you must take into account the desires of your new partners, even if they are a teeming mass of the investing public. After all, you make the choice of whom you sell to. Some corporate leaders attempt to 'manage' their way out of this by massaging earnings the way Jack Welch did. I personally think the best way to handle this is by open education. Warren Buffett writes an elegant and informative letter each year and answers questions alongside Charlie Munger for four or five hours straight at the Berkshire meeting. If your business is too volatile, too secretive, or too sensitive to be explained to the public, you probably shouldn't be doing an IPO in the first place.

It occurs to me that Roger's best hope is to change the minds of RIM shareholders declaring open season on the board. It is naive of Roger Martin to think that his book and Denning's sensationalist hawking of it will do anything to soften the ire of RIM's shareholders. By the same token, it was naive of RIM's leaders not to take into account the fact that once they sold shares to the public, it became the public's company.
I would hate to see these guys get away with such unprofessional and crass behavior.
I can still manage the server from anywhere in the world via SSH which I have setup -- of course if the Internet goes down at the server's location then all bets are off, but with EC2 do you have the ability to modify the apache configuration files? I need this ability for the web application that I'm developing
'The Information Diet' Should Be Your New Year's Resolution
Former YC alums. Thanks guys.
What data collection is the Voyager doing? What do we have an opportunity to learn from it about space?
While I applaud Microsoft for trying trim down the chrome, gradients, etc. to leave only the content, in the end it feels too industrial with the sharp hard corner edges and monochromatic dumb-terminal look where all the apps look basically the same. People want something warm and fuzzy which skeumorphic, rounded corners, gradients, and shinyness offers despite detracting a bit from the content which makes it more accessible to ordinary people.

From an efficiency standpoint of getting the data and interacting with it the Metro design is definitely superior in that sense, but fails to capture the connection of the phone being something that just isn't a tool.

I think Microsoft should offer more choices than just Metro despite having things look different app to app, and let the user better customize the home screen with whatever personalization embellishments they want (backgrounds, gradients on tiles, folders, etc.) instead of forcing a design on everyone as everyone is different.

If they did that maybe, people initially would start out with the "skeumorphic" look similar to the iPhone/Android/etc. as that's what they're used to with other phones and in the real world, and slowly allow them to change settings to transfer if they want back to a content focused Metro mode.

I think having this option would allow them to sell the devices better despite it breaking some minimilistic cohesive designer sensibility in favor of what the consumer wants and what will sell which is the ultimate goal anyhow.
One word: unlock. Until the phone is on Tmo, the unlock is mandatory.

As far as software, for me, SBSettings is vital. Apple still doesn't have a quick way to access Wifi, brightness, airplane mode and other settings, and until they do, I wouldn't think about running without a jailbreak. I also still prefer Lock Info to Apple's Notification Center.
We use both: Dedicated servers (at rackspace) running a private cloud for our website and shop plus various cloud based systems (EC2, Rackspacecloud, et al.) for testing and non-mission-critical stuff. You can create mission critical stuff on cloud servers, but you must "embrace failure", i.e. build the whole setup with failures in mind. We have an extensive post about our setup in our blog: http://www.paessler.com/blog/2011/11/15/networking-basics/fa...
went from PHP to a bit of Ruby and extended my skills in JavaScript land with learning CoffeeScript
E-Myth revisited

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051QVESA/

I've read it early in the year, and it made me think about my business in a totally new way. Way too many parts me had me nodding sadly "yes, this happens to me too". A must for any business owners
pairnic.com (registrar) and their sister company pair.com (hosting) are reasonably well integrated.
I have to say, I do get a certain kick out of seeing the success of things I use, which started out being ridiculed.

Twitter is an excellent example -- in its earlier days it really was something special, but people mocked it in the manner he describes. And of course now it's indispensable. Basically everything Apple made in the last 10 years or so would be another example.

I think it's because to ridicule this things is to imply that their users are essentially idiots, whereas the one doing the ridiculing is a free-thinking skeptic. Then, slowly, you watch them all get iPods and Macbooks and Twitter accounts...
Something that people don't get (as it's a tricky concept) is that OSM isn't primarily the online mapping you see at openstreetmap.org. Just like Linux or GNU isn't about a single distro or use case, OSM is a community and tools for building a variety of different user facing tools from a shared digital mapping infrastructure.

Also, the best of OSM is in places like Germany where in some areas they're mapping down to the level of individual trees and lampost locations as well as where animals are located within zoos.

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-de-berlin-zoo

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-ch-bern

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-fr-strasbourg
The Rise of Mobile and the Return of Neolithic-Style Hunter Gatherers
I learnt Python this year. I went from being a fulltime LAMP employee to contracting in Python.

In May I started spending a few hours every night after the gym working on Django apps, mostly re-building my blog and just fell in love with everything Pythonic.

In August I started applying for Python contracts around London and one came through in about three weeks. I've since managed to only be out of work eight days since the beginning of September. I've done well enough to take six months off and travel around Asia next year.

I'm really glad I did this as I was unhappy being an employee and LAMP coding felt like I was untangling other people's piles of cables all the time.
I've learned/am learning Python for about a year now mostly because I've always worked with C type languages, except Pascal and (TI) Basic long time ago, and wanted to try something different. It's so much fun to program with it, I'm having some trouble wanting to use anything else.

I've also played with OCaml and R, not to the extent of actually understanding them, and learned a fair (i guess) amount of Octave by doing ml-class problems.

I think actually learning R may be on the table next due some dabbling in machine learning.
My grocery prices consistently creep up with my income. The retailers accomplish this by presenting me with a trade off between price and quality/convenience. In other words, they extract more money from my by giving me more value in return. I don't see why that can't continue to work. If they start fucking around with weird pricing schemes instead, that destroys the tradeoff and with it my incentive to continue giving them more money.
iMakerz developers are very skillful and experts in designing iPhne, iPad and Android applications, if anybody need assistance he/she can contact us.
http://www.imakerz.com
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Interesting article. The current selfish and misguided crop of politicians and the declining economy (and prospects) lead me to believe there is some truth to what this article states.
A shorter version of the Checklist Manifesto originally appeared in the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...
Rework. Also, "The Long Run" by Matt Long. Mr. Long wrote a book about his experience as a NYC firefighter who, a few days after qualifying for the Boston marathon, got run over by a bus while riding his bike and literally got split in half up to his chest. Almost two years later, he ran the New York City marathon and went on to do the ironman. Insanely great story and the book is a good read. His story was inspiring to never give up.
When I was in Thailand, I was always a bit befuddled when people would greet me and say "Hi! Did you eat?", but not actually invite me to eat or something.
"Have you eaten/did you eat?" seems to be the east-asian equivalent of "hi, what's up?". i.e., an apparent question in which your response is just a formality.
I'm reading Fooled by Randomness and really like it. The Black Swan I couldn't finish because it kind of rambled. Not sure if he had a better editor for Fooled by Randomness or what.
You have to get money into Intrade, the fees are bad for small sums like a hundred bucks or so, you can't do long-term predictions profitably (foregone interest/investment return eats you alive), and you can only bet on the preselected set of markets - assuming they're even liquid enough to bet on.

So for predictions like we're discussing here, PredictionBook is way better. (Sometimes using real-money doesn't make things better.)
We use 2 physical servers at Rackspace sitting behind a Cisco firewall. They are mirror images of each other and they load balance between them. Should one fail the other covers us until both are operational again. Rackspace handles hardware issues, backups, and monitoring. We do everything else via remote access.
I almost wish retailers would try to price discriminate more based on all the personal information they gather. That would finally create a massive financial incentive for people to defend their privacy.

Geek: "Hey, if you use this browser extension you won't get tracked."

User: <Yawn>

Geek: "Did I mention you'll also get better prices when you shop online?"

User: "Sign me up!"
To enable "legitimate tethering" on AT&T, I have to give up my grandfathered unlimited data plan, be charged $45 per month and be limited to max 4gb or $10 for every GB I go over. Sounds like the jailbreak will still come in handy.
Your headline doesn't say much. Why not just write "I wrote a PHP function that takes an SQL statement, executes it, and returns the result in a PHP array?"
Interesting article. The current selfish and misguided crop of politicians and the declining economy (and prospects) lead me to believe there is some truth to what this article states.
Site that lets you record and automatically phone-blast SOPA supporters for you
TCP/IP over Lego model train
Bundle exec rails … executes Bundler.setup 3 times
.........and the sad thing is now everyone will buy it.
Yes, you have full root access to your EC2 instances.
Ask HN: How many side projects did you work on this year?
I personally worked on five.

iOS Game - Harvey Vs TheBadBits: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/harvey-versus-thebadbits/id477710593?ls=1&mt=8%20%20

Sinatra App - eight - twitter magic 8 ball - eightapp.safetyscissors.co

Ruby Gem - Cloak: encrypted password storage - http://rubygems.org/gems/cloak

Rails app - Styylt: Style sharing app (Still working on it) - http://styy.lt

iOS Utility - StatusPad (Still working on it, well just waiting for iTunesConnect to come back) - News, Twitter, Schedule and Weather feed for the iPad.

What did you folks work on?
1) Cringely thinks the same thing: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/4942
No, its extended mission was designed to measure energetic particles at large distances from the sun (plus a few other field sensors). That's it. The whole "golden record" thing is just a monument to ourselves.
If you're a self-consciously hip music snob like me, two works of fiction you will enjoy are:

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
No injection checking, and a memory hog. What could possibly go wrong?

And seriously, what are the chances of having the mysqli stuff but not the mysql_* functions?
Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel.

It was recommended by several friends, and I finally got around to reading it. Helped, along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to work through my personal thought process. Highly recommended.
Property Management Companies
An industry leading FREE property management and vendor company directory.
I used to get that all the time as a kid while waking up. A loud buzzing noise or a bang followed by paralysis, which freaked the hell out of me at the time. It reduced in frequency and eventually stopped when I was 15. I didn't know it was abnormal and never told anyone about it though.
"""My point is simply that if a startup is paying a law firm & that ESPN is paying a law firm then maybe the law firm cares more about ESPN's business in case of conflicts."""

That would be a case of mis-representation of your interests, and the lawyer/firm could face serious legal consequences.

"""I do not think that is as unreasonable as your hysterical response makes it out to be."""

You keep using that word, "hysterical". I don't think it means what you think it means.

"""They are not saying "we the firm support SOPA" but they are saying "our lawyer looked at this law for our client and he finds it constitutional though this is not the position of the entire firm." I can understand if you're not disturbed by the latter but I think a simple incentive analysis should make it clear why I'm not the first to argue against sharing law firms with those on the opposite sides of controversial issues facing the court. A simple hypothetical should explain it: ESPN wants SOPA, they get their lawyer to sign a letter which says the law looks fine. Let's say the law threatens the startup's business at the same time, maybe the law firm isn't as likely to write or sign a letter arguing against the law if it means it upsets ESPN. End result, more lawyers at these firms sign on to SOPA and you end up with what appears like considerably more support for that side from the legal community simply b/c bigger clients support the law than those that oppose it."""

Hmm. Not really familiar with how the legal system works, are we?
Why don't they use the "var f1 = function() {}" syntax instead of the "function f1() {}" syntax? I thought the former was better because of scoping.
We live in a bubble. Does your mother know about KickStarter? Does she understand it? Has she used it?
I'm ignorant of how YouHaveDownloaded.com works. Does it have any way to weed out dummy IP addresses inserted by trackers? Claiming to have peers in the House seems like exactly the sort of cheeky thing the TPB trackers would do.
C#, but that went hand in hand with the Visual Studio and IIS stack.

C# is good, IIS has a ways to go imho.
Pinker's _Better Angels_. Mind-blowingly detailed and thorough.
A very good writeup, but one thing always confuses me.

What is meant specifically by the "heap" and "stack"? I know what a stack is, but "heap" gets thrown around in many different contexts and I've yet to find any explanation that made it clear.

If anyone has a good explanation or good links for those two terms in this context, I'd be very grateful. Thanks!

[EDIT: thanks everyone for the answers so far!]
12 Consumer Trends for 2012
Please don't editorialize the headline like that. This isn't reddit's politics section.
Eliezer, if you are reading this, please stop procrastinating and finish writing it.
On HN I would have expected more people to be super excited about the on-board computers, instruments, and particularly the RF subsystem on the voyager spacecraft (think about it - it's something like a 40 watt transmitter -- the strengh of a lightbulb -- radiating between 10 and 10000 bits a second back to earth 11 billion miles away). AND the round-trip latency is 26 hours! Recently they had to do a marathon debug session to discover a bit-error in the memory http://www.space.com/8355-problem-detected-voyager-2-spacecr...

Everyone just seems so caught up about this whole alien thing. Come on guys, there are serious things to get excited about here.
http://predictionbook.com/predictions/5004
[Shadowing] prevents you from making use of the original value for the remainder of the current scope.

That's totally false.

In languages like Scheme, O'Caml, etc you are never prevented from using the original value.

The point is that lexical, aka static scope is all about lexical pieces of code that you fully control, and all their properties are statically apparent, by looking at a single piece of code.

Scheme:

(DEFINE FOO 1)
(LET ((FOO 2)) ... FOO IS SHADOWED HERE ...)

Inside the LET, FOO is shadowed (FOO is "your FOO") and that's lexically, statically apparent by looking at the piece of code.

If you don't want it shadowed, and use the global FOO, you just use another variable name. You cannot be prevented from using the original global FOO, because you choose the local variable names you use in a piece of code.
Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers
I posted my list in this recent blog post: http://dundat.com/blog/2011/11/30/a-wannabe-founder/
'Anonymous' hackers hit US security firm Stratfor
How about the annoying 20mb download limit in app store?
Jon Rubenstein destroyed Palm
How to Get Hired By A Startup: Dev Edition
Technology Footprint: Starting Up in New York
> This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on."

There are plenty of organizations that do this. Google spends thousands of developer hours and millions of dollars contributing to open source projects. And it's not just for the developers: they recognize a better resource and use it. When their needs outgrow the library's capabilities they add to it.

There are at least a few companies doing this exact same thing for OSM data, too. For example, MapQuest and Bing both use OSM data in some of their products and contribute data and tools/source back to OSM.

> ...developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider?

As I've previously mentioned, OSM is certainly inadequate in many places (and the community is working really hard to fix that -- thanks for contributing!), but in some places it's _MUCH_ better than Google. It's certainly a business decision: do you want to pay Google $10k+/month (where it was $0/month not 2 months ago) to run your site or do you want to use OSM? If your business's primary area of interest is Europe (especially Germany), then you probably want to use OSM. If you want to cover the entire world or don't want to deal with the lack-luster-but-improving data in the US, then use Google.
If nothing else, this snippet is a prime example of why friends don't let friends work in PHP. It fosters awful development practices that lead to entire code bases of spaghetti like this.
Startups need friends, family and fools
They don't practice what they preach, because they're not the kind of person they're preaching to.
Should startups focus on profitability?
Doesn't this model work for cell phones because they are really cheap and the provider doesn't care if they get lost/stop paying? Afaik solar panels are expensive to make so how does this make any sense?
Avoid downtime: Currently using GoDaddy's DNS? Switch DNS before transferring
> What does "definite" mean? ... Either you made it to orbit or you didn't

The difficulty of defining what probability is is not a defense.

People are able to calculate a value called "probability of launch success" and use this number for useful things like pricing the insurance of the satellites being carried. I assure you that no one involved expects part of a satellite to go up.

> SpaceX's record is abysmal, and you forgot a few facts.

Your facts seem to be (angry) critiques of Musk/SpaceX, but none of them address the original point of discussion i.e. that a new rocket platform had launch failures.

Let me skip to what seems to be the important bit...

> A few years ago, we had the era when Google could do no wrong, and any criticism of Google would not be tolerated by its many fans. Now, that same mindset applies to Musk, except this time, people will die.

If that's what bugs you, here's my criticism:

- Electric cars: can't take off until there's a breakthrough in battery tech. Oh, and the breakthrough can't use elements which are rare/expensive.

- Mars: we don't have enough energy and raw materials to send more than a handful of people.

I still admire Musk for his combination of genius & entrepreneurship. He's attempting, rethinking and achieving way more than most people.
A Growing Divide Between Congress and Constituents
It seems pretty weird to design it that way, using a global config. At least name it some other way to avoid name collisions. Maybe add it as an optional second parameter and define it as static.

Also, the mysqli extension should be preferred over mysql so it should come before in the code.

Finally, if your connection fails, $dbconn will be set to false, which is == to null in PHP. You should have two checks on this variable: $dbcon === NULL and $dbconn === false.
Or, in short, the amount of profit that they earn -- on average -- every 86 minutes (going by the July 2011 figures).
Traditionally, the stack is a FILO (first in, last out) allocation area. Generally they start at the top of memory and work their way down as space is allocated, then back up as it is freed.

The heap might start at the low end of unused memory (above the program and libraries) and is used for allocating space with arbitrary release order. This means it has to keep track of what is used and what is available as well as when to "grow the heap" by allocating more pages of memory.

Garbage collection is one way of managing a heap.
Surprisingly Paul Christoforo has also been in Health Care & Realty and has a degree in Culinary Arts... according to his LinkedIn page: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/paul-christoforo/1/295/835
If Your Dream is to Get Rich, Don’t Try a Startup
Online Shopping Spiked 16.4% On Christmas Day, 7% Of Purchases Made On iPads
Under The Banner of Heaven.