skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. It really makes you wonder what can be accomplished today!
Mochilas Escolares
Mochilas Escolares, Mochilas Escolares 2012.
There are a lot of people working on that. I think it's less a schlep and more just a problem so enormous that it's difficult to see progress.
I'm running a mix of small VPS and dedicated servers (most of them below 20€/month), including for receiving emails. Once you've spent some time tinkering with them, taming the OS, and stuff, it's much more flexible than any SaaS. And probably way cheaper, too.

I use 3rd party services for sending mails, though. The amount of boring work to get out of my recipients' spam folder is just too high without that.
How big are planets and stars?
I like this reasoning. Only I disagree with the comment about competition. When others see someone take on a schlep, something (or things) dawn on them. And they are apt to compete. They don't all stand on the sideline and watch. Some want to get in the game. pg even acknowledges this phenomenon when he says "it's too late to the next Stripe". That implies others who are now willing to take on a schlep.
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You may win the award for most rational reasoning so far. I should do that. Maybe it would be fun for everyone. I'm really glad I asked this after reading your answer. I could totally get rid of one of my VPSes and replace it with Heroku until or if, like you say, it takes off
I like how there is no option for shared hosting.

I did a php app for a client on Media Temple's (gs) and it was unbearably slow. The php execution time would vary drastically (.1 seconds to over a minute) even on a simple debugging page. After a lot of back and forth with customer service and never being able to pinpoint the issue, I switch to Linode.

Screenshot of a page taking 1.4 minutes to render: http://i.imgur.com/e310W.png

Same page on Linode:
http://i.imgur.com/OTN9l.png
All of this is just fluff until mobile payments become a reality. I don't want to remove the waitstaff, I want to remove the wait. I should be able to pay from my phone when I am done ordering and walk away.
A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering
This is a bad poll because there isn't even distribution here. By definition there are more small companies then large ones which by definition will use month-to-month dynamic hosting options.

Most every startup will start in the cloud and some will move to dedicated machines later when it makes economic sense and if the team deems the additional headaches worth it.
I kind of stopped using LLL as a tool because initially it was really horrendous and frankly, convinced me that release early is not as smart. I checked it out recently, it is much better... still, whole idea about canvas is that I can draw it on paper, I kind of like that. I might use LLL, but not as primary tool for sure.
One minute BBC is fine, next minute it's, "I see an Atraidese I want to kill." That's just reality. I finally figured-out that much. Don't kiss ass--doesn't help. Believe me...

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

and departed.

16:5 And when his disciples were come to the other side, they had
forgotten to take bread.

16:6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

16:7 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have
taken no bread.

16:8 Which when Jesus perceived, he said unto them, O ye of little
faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no
bread? 16:9 Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the fiv
This is the best way to go these days, hands down. I can't imagine working any other way now that stuff like Heroku exists and can be used essentially for free during development.
I wonder if this is a general Media Temple thing. I have a few small sites using Drupal on MT and the response times vary widely. I thought it was because of Drupal itself (I never use it; client decision) but maybe it's just MT, which I've found to be basically horrible overall.
I think the OP meant to say PaaS instead of SaaS on the Heroku/PHP Fog/GAE line.
Recieve. Has to be my number one pet pieve.

https://github.com/search?type=Code&language=JavaScript&...
VPS (Linode) for hosting and Google Apps/Sendgrid for email
Dude, I wished I did like you. I spend so much time configuring the damn thing and it is still not quite there. I did get great deal on the server which is why I did what I did, but seriously don't think this was a smart move.
> In what way is the status quo not an adequate compromise?

In the way that the current laws are flagrantly abused by significant numbers of people, at an unknown but substantial cost to the legal rightsholder.

Whether new laws are required to address this situation or more effective enforcement of existing laws would suffice is a different question, of course.
How would you rate their network? I have a few sites that need bulk content serving stuff with minimal code, and these prices can't be beat for 100mbps uplink..
> First, the sample size. Clearly, github is very popular with the Ruby crowd, with more than four times as many projects as Python, the runner-up.

It looks like Python is at ~400 in the graph, and Ruby is at ~1200. Am I missing something?
I mean, use the tool that's best suited for the job. I enjoy exploring Java, the JVM, functional programming and lisp syntax with Clojure. As a matter of fact, I'm working on a project right now in Clojure and having a great time. I use Python at work, and sometimes in hobby projects (though that's being muscled out by Clojure lately).

I agree that there is generally a lot less magic in lisps than Python. There's no magic in Python when you get down to it either, though. And for me, at least, my exposure to Python has helped me to spin up faster with Clojure than I would have otherwise. And my work with Clojure has changed the way I approach solving problems in Python.

Your post concludes with some lukewarm language zealotry. The last two sentences in particular are glaringly false dichotomies. Using Python doesn't mean you don't know how it works. Using Clojure doesn't mean you do know how it works. They're both just tools; abstractions you can leverage to make machines do what you want. You're criticizing the propensity of some people to not learn how the stuff in their toolbox works, which has absolutely nothing to do with the language at hand.

It doesn't matter what tool we want to talk about, odds are there's someone out there using it with their head planted firmly up their butt. Usually it's me, but I take a day off every now and then.
> "I've never written any perl" that says it all. Try it,
> you will understand.

Let's not start a language war here, please.

> I fail to see how its really any worse than ruby/python.

> B/w what makes you think ruby/python is worse?

I fail to see where the parent post claimed that ruby/python were worse than Perl.

My interpretation is that the parent poster believes that Perl, Ruby, and Python all suffer from the idea that the larger the codebase gets, the more complex it gets. That complexity then becomes a barrier to entry for contribution to the project.
I always figured why not pay someone else to deal with these problems? Not that I end up paying Heroku very much at our current scale.

Sure there might be an in-between period where we are doing a large amount of traffic on Heroku + paying too much for it, but by then we will be able to afford to hire someone who can set us up properly + at the right price. Either way, I avoid wasting time configuring servers!
This is not trolling here lol but I honestly do not understand what the big deal is here with SOPA. Surely it is good to stop people from pirating DVD's, etc.? What I am missing here? If anyone can shed light on this, I would appreciate that - and I am a developer by profession. Thanks.
For some reason, when I look at pictures of SAGE, the part that really makes it look outdated is the ashtray built in to the operator console.
> I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate.

I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders.

On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard.

Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.
Rethinking Youtube
I dont want to be stuck with youtube the way it is
Unless you are a very poor reader, written documentation is simply faster to absorb than videos. Videos are a huge time-suck in comparison, for the same amount of info.
I hope these Github searches for misspelled words don't become a thing.
Here's a suggestion. Integrate with Evernote and you'll gain customers that use Evernote as an all encompassing data store but would like a filter for stuff like this. Also free exposure on Evernote Trunk.
It's brilliant, one of my servers does about 90mbps around the clock.

They advertise a 6TB transfer limit, but I've been with them for almost 2 years now and they don't seem to enforce it.

I'd totally recommend them to anybody.

Also, if you're looking to save cash, an Atom CPU is surprisingly capable. At any given point in time both of my servers would have about 700 active HTTP connections each.
Imagine a legit flight that was punched in wrong. Boom That would be a bad false-positive.
Perhaps someone could make a tool to do this and notify the repo owners.
I recently saw an interesting strategy for finding bloggers to contact: "I wrote some code that pulled the top 500 environmental blogs and their descriptions from Technorati along with their site descriptions." This is quoted from: http://www.giftrocket.com/why-marketing-bd-should-learn-to-c.... I intend on trying this to get some publicity for my sock subscription site - sockpanda.com
Median is an exact term that means the middle value in a sorted list of values.
Let's say I ran a startup and secured $20M in VC funding but had to give up 80% of the company to get that, then later had several additional large rounds of financing which diluted my ownership to 5%. Would you rip off my company's products/services because you feel I'm not getting most of the profit?

I'm curious to know how the two situations differ. In both cases, parties have entered into contractual agreements to give up a large portion of ownership in exchange for money and other benefits they wouldn't otherwise receive if they tried to bootstrap things on their own. Would you rather people get 5 cents on the dollar from your purchase so that they could save up enough profit to not have to give up so much ownership the next time? Or 0 cents on the dollar from your piracy and not be able to save anything such that they're forced into the same arrangement the next time?
Did you pull this from my google+ post?
> tl/dr: Perl code is often written by old timers
> who expect everyone to be a perl genius like they are.

While I can agree with this sentiment, it seems to come close to the idea that you should ignore language features in favor of making it newbie friendly. You don't want to ignore features of a language just because it might not be entirely clear to someone that is new to the language.

That said, there is a lot of Perl code out there that was written in the past, or recently by people using old idioms/styles. I've even come across people (recently) expressing their dislike of Perl based on their experience with Perl 4.x (hint: Perl 5 was released in 1994).
Tansey is a great commenter/submitter and I respect his opinion, and I also mean no disrespect to the people working on LLL, but honestly the reason I wouldn't use a tool like this is because I don't think it is useful.

Look at the screenshots. https://www.leanlaunchlab.com/#screenshot-canvas

"Key activities: Write code. Meet entrepreneurs. "

"Cost structure: Employees. Rent"

These are obvious. These arn't things that need to be written down in a planning app. A 10 minute smoke break and it should be in your head for good. Then a month later they are in an accounting app or spreadsheet with hard figures on them.

Then there is an internal blog with commenters talking about learnings and whether or not angel funded startups have board meetings. Common, do people really needs this?

It's starting to feel like everyone talking about "lean startups" is just trying to "play business" instead of making an awesome product that solves a real problem and hustling hard[1] charging people as much as they can for it. The whole thing reeks of MBA BS.

[1] (read: meeting clients, split testing, funnel marketing, optimizing adwords, etc. not writing internal blog posts about how you feel things are going)
The light-gun user interface is interesting.
I thought about having a shared host option but honestly, shared hosting is kind of a joke if you're running any sort of custom app. It can be reasonably assumed that most shared hosting is used for static sites and PHP blogs.

I'll also add that I keep a MediaTemple gs account in addition to my VPSes for various static sites. You can actually use it to host your DNS and email then have your site resolve to the ip of another server. Obviously that's a really expensive option for basic email but if you've got the account for some other reason like me then you've got 100 domains you can add for free so it's an option in rare cases. Anyway, I'm in the middle of building a PHP app for a client on their MediaTemple gs account and I'll testify to the fact that performance varies wildly. I haven't seem anything take over a minute to execute but I've seen it go from .1 to as high as 50-something seconds. I've found you can fix most of the long queries by writing more efficient code. You'll still get some wild variations but not as often.
There are a handful of products that turn Gmail into a filesystem. I have no idea how well they work today or how inter-operable they are.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm (Windows)
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmai... (Linux userland FS driver)
http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/ (Mac)
Twitterpocalypse - zombie apocalypse survivability rating
Code To Use To Make Your Website Go Black Against SOPA On Jan 18th
Made this out of boredom. Also, the domain name wasn't taken. Just enter your twitter handle to see how well you stack up!
In my experience, hosting your own email is just a huge time sink. It's probably the most difficult service to get up and running and maintain over time. If you take your hourly rate and consider how much time you waste on email, it seems a better investment to pay someone else to do it.
Reducing the usefulness of the Internet sucks as tactics go.

SOPA advocates are taking the war to the legislative process since they're losing elsewhere. Let's answer by raising the political stakes: organize instant protests, flashmob their buildings, name and vocally shame the supporters.
Finding Similar Items with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop
I'm interested in the Start-up Row event as per http://pycon.blogspot.com/2012/01/pycon-startup-row-2012.htm...

However, after reading about seed-funding @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_funding
I didn't find anything that indicated there was a way to get funding or win award money

Could you clarify how it works and elaborate it in a bit more ?
Yes, I don't think anyone has disputed that.
"Mute alarms or don't" is a false choice. The right way to do this is straightforward. When the user presses mute, if an alarm is scheduled and DontShowAgain is false, then pop up a window and ask the user how he wants the alarm to be treated. If the user also checks DontShowAgain, set it to true and never show the window again.
I agree with the major points in the post, and even think that code format guidelines like K&R for C, PEP8 for Python, and jslint for Javascript should be freely broken by experienced programmers whenever the beauty of the code is unambiguously improved.

Incidentally I just checked out the redis code base. Gorgeous:

https://github.com/antirez/redis/tree/unstable/src
The article says "monotonic", not "monophonic". The paragraph discusses pure tones and overtones.
I know Bloom Filters came in handy for this sort of work but I'd love to see some other data structures and algorithms that were developed in the 80s to deal with limited memory.
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I disagree with the conclusion.

Mute is a temporary state that overrides previous requests to be loud. If thought absolutely necessary that alarms should pierce the mute, then if there are pending alarms when mute is engaged, it can alert the user at that point and give them the option.

The real design problem seems to be the lack of vibrate mode on the iPhone. Other phones do this to silently alert the user without disrupting a performance, secret agent mission, or other situation requiring silence. Vibrate mode solves this problem on other phones. If a phone designer chooses to eliminate the vibrate mode function, that is his prerogative but it is a design mistake to then make mute be non-silent as a result of a decision to eliminate vibrate mode.

But wait a minute. The iPhone does have a vibrate mode. Ah. Then there is no excuse at all for this is there.
In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch".

This definition is fuzzy, and thus harder to understand, which was my second point.

Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute things.

I didn't say these were the only times, I claimed this was the most common use case. Granted, I don't have data to back this up, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons to mute, this just seems to be the classi case that I anecdotally see the most.

I for one really appreciate that I don't have to think about what state my mute switch is in when I get home hours later and try to watch a YouTube video.

This is hardly a big problem, though, certainly not worthy of confusing behaviour.

The common case is that your alarm is only ever set to wake you up in the morning and your timer is only ever set when you're sitting around, waiting for your dinner to be ready. It's very rare for you to set an alarm or a timer which will affect a quiet group environment.

I agree you wouldn't normally have an alarm/timer set for these times. It's probably a rare mistake, but an embarrassing and costly one! These aren't the only ways that an iPhone will ignore the mute setting, though. This "feature" gives you plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
The article said monotonic music is boring, not monophonic music..

Monotonic means one tone - I.e. a sound that is made up of a single frequency. About the only time you'll ever here monotonic sounds is from a signal generator that is producing pure sine waves. The sound is very flat, lacks character and is, well, boring.

All real instruments, even a tuning fork, produce a multitude of sounds for each note. The number and intensity of the overtones each instrument is what makes the instrument sound like it does. Cellos produce rich overtones and are far from monotonic.

This is all clearly explained in the article. You do, however, have to read past the first paragraph...
Ask HN: Why does Google need so many employees?
They look so clean did they get that way through lack of use or were they restored I wonder?

I can't imagine the night janitorial crew giving a spritz and wiping down those workstations with all the buttons and switches.
And then apply that to the folks that include database credentials in public repos.
I would be very interested too. I use Fabric for server deployment and have for some time wanted to build something exactly like you just described.
Just because you dont see it means its NOT? Google it up! I think there are a significant number of Indian people visiting this site. I see no reason why a less offensive term like BRIC or developing countries can't be used.
Progress for computing, absolutely. Progress for software engineering? Questionable. Are the clever solutions applied in legacy spellcheckers obsolete simply because sufficient brute force is now available on everyday machines to solve everyday problems?
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"The distinction between tonality and noise is mathematical form" doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose.

My favorite study of tonal harmony is "Theory of Harmony" by Arnold Schoenberg (sounds ironic; here's a preview on google books: <http://books.google.com/books?id=5Y5MyjbU87oC&lpg=PR3...). It was the first theory textbook that attempted to teach composition of harmony without value judgments about what is "correct" or "natural," instead taking pains at every step to justify itself on first principles. He wrote the book because he believed his students needed to understand conventional harmony before they could transcend it. In my mind Schoenberg falls into that class of visionaries whose legacies are more about their failed predictions than of their analyses and contributions (Marx shared a similar fate, his own fault of course). Schoenberg was partially right — nobody in their right mind argues that ninth chords can't be processed by our feeble minds (jazz is western canon at this point), or that the tritone will summon demons (well, maybe some people in Norway still believe that) — but classical harmony hasn't been completely replaced.

The scientific stuff in Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony is mostly garbage though. If you're interested in reading more about the modern understanding of the physical properties of music I'd recommend "Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music," and Benson's "Music: A Mathematical Offering." For an attempt to look at musical structure in terms of its cognition, I enjoyed "The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures" by David Temperley. It's a bit speculative, but that's the current state of the field if you're trying to go beyond the simplest aspects of music.
> Facebook didnt grow much (functionality-wise)

How about Open Graph or the Facebook Platform?

Think if dropbox has a platform. (like word processors saving directly to Dropbox - the defacto cloud storage network)
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There are always questions on the edge of computational complexity. In 30 years: "Indexing all of the individual web pages in the world used to be a tough challenge. Network speeds were in the hundreds of megabits, and..."
We've used the exact same reasoning with our app Denso. The costs will definitely not make sense if/when we hit scale, but in my mind that's a good problem to have. The advantage with Heroku over services such as GAE is that no component of our stack is proprietary (as opposed to the BigTable data store available on GAE) and hence, moving hosting providers is slightly more straightforward.

The Heroku Add-ons marketplace is also a huge competitive advantage that they provide over other services. There are plenty of examples where we've relied on third-party addons to begin with (for e.g. Embedly) but once the costs of using such third-party services increased (due to increased traffic), we switched over to our own hand-made solutions and we were able to bring down costs substantially.