skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SimpleCDN's S3+ service is much cheaper than S3, with the same pricing for storage and $0.059 for transfer.

The other points you are missing are FEATURES. SimpleCDN supports RTMP streaming. HTTP streaming of FLV and MP4 files are also supported. As is gzip compression (A BIG Bandwidth Saver - 60% to 70% size savings on CSS and JS.) and the ability to set expires headers.

S3 and CloudFront does NONE of this. Repeat, NONE of this.

So lets say you had a website with lots of scripts, images, some videos, etc. So lets say it is 10GB worth of stuff. $50 a month for storage. Okay that is more... but then if you are pushing 10TB per month, that would be $1700 on S3, and $890 on SimpleCDN. So big deal for the $50. Plus gzip compression will save you more.

Did I mention RTMP Flash streaming? S3 is like something out of 1999.

Oh and SimpleCDN will mirror files from ANY HTTP website. With CloudFront you have to use S3. AND pay for S3 transfer to CloudFront. Stupid.

How often does CloudFront drop its cache of your files? Think about it, ALL CloudFront locations constantly caching your files and re-caching from S3, costing even more bandwidth. Stupid.
What's noteworthy about Exchange is all of that comes together, in one package, with documentation, that integrates with your existing MS domain users and groups that manage desktop and server access, with a support contract from a single vendor, and as much as it sucks, it generally "works". Plus you can put up a job listing for 2 Exchange admins, and get folks who know how to configure/maintain the whole system.

Trying to build all those services yourself using open source options, tying them all into an LDAP server, is an amazing pain. Does everyone need all of that? No. But honestly I can't imagine trying to handle the mail, shared mailboxes, messaging, scheduling, booking resources (conference rooms, equipment, etc..) for a Fortune 500 using the other options I'm aware of.

It may be "blather" to you, but it's generally pretty important stuff for a large company.
15 Ways to Optimize your Subscription Model
Quit your job and launch a website for spammers! You can makes tons of money and spend your time blogging mostly useless motivational crap.

Ok, that was harsh but really, advising people to quit isn't new, innovative or really helpful.
Exactly. I have no debt and a bit of cash savings that are now worth 1% more, woo hoo!

Sustained high deflation is only good for you if you have a magical source of guaranteed income, completely and totally independent of the economy, like a magic money printing machine.
Apple's Director of Eng. of Unix Tech Jordan Hubbard's Talk at USENIX 08 (PDF)
Great, so in 6-8 years I will be able to drop my support for HTML tables for CSS tables. In the meantime, I gotta get back to work.
I like the Superman 3 reference. Office Space would have also been acceptable.
GitX: Git GUI for OS X
Am I crazy or is this a great way to figure out if your bug is in the hardware or the OS?

Tell me I'm crazy and no one else is thinking of doing actual work with this.
quite impressive. thanks for posting, will play around with it.
Dave Barry?!? What is this 1997?
No, considering it's software that does the work (the Windows portion of Wintel).
good stuff, hits on a lot of important things we often overlook or push off till later, but we could benefit from by doing now. Most of his suggestions can apply to any startup. Every Friday I like to bring out the comb and not worry about feature improvements... definitely added a some new things to our list.

Glad Noah is hanging out, building cool games, and eating burritos in Austin. :)
Great idea, can't wait to get my first payment.
Specialize in Something Relevant
food staying hot is a feature not a bug
Do you already have someone in mind or are you planning on going through the interview process?
Great summary of features in Leopard. He went into more detail on sandboxing stuff than most other presentations I've seen.
Cucumber: The Latest in Ruby Testing
Just had an idea... when you show the revision view for a given revision, attach the chats that happened during the same time as comments to the page.
This is so off base it's funny. The whole point of leaving tables has very little to do with semantic markup. We front-end developers hate having to adjust the rowspans, column spans, etc. because one small bit of content needs to be shifted or added. By freeing yourself from the grid (in terms of markup not design), you can nimbly alter a site's layout.
Nice but not very relevant to HN, unless you have some angle I'm missing.
Like an annuity or pension... retirees come out ahead for once.
Interview process
Chainless bicycles have been around for a while* in other forms, but it's nice to see a major manufacturer getting in on it--this should bring prices on it down. I know I'd gladly pay a few extra bucks for the lower maintenance of a belt drive, which doesn't carry the negative performance impact of a shaft drive.

* http://www.dynamicbicycles.com/
Google is beta testing letting users change the look of their gmail
Rational or random? Professor models how people send e-mails
Interesting as both Apple and Wal-Mart strong arm their 'partners' into lowering prices (major labels on iTunes/Wal-Mart's suppliers)

I'd love to see a meeting/match between Jobs and whoever negotiates for Wal-Mart. If only to see Steve get his ass handed to him.
although beta testing may not be entirely correct, since Gmail itself is still in beta.
I've seen that site before but forgotten about it - thanks for posting
Noah brings useful info to the table once again. The post could have some more meat to it, give more exposition on each point but it's also to read a short and sweet list of tips and advice.
Austin is the place! glad you like the advice. just some tips i picked up along the way. let me know how they work for you.
glad you like it. i can add more meat in a future post. it was just a sampler:)
Scientists sequence woolly-mammoth genome
NASA tests communications network in space that’s modeled on the Internet.
"Reversion to the mean" is the important observation here. Everyone seems to have forgotten that prices have been skyrocketing for the last two or three years.

As recently as six months ago, everyone was freaking out over the possibility of runaway inflation, and the government was cooking the official statistics by excluding such "non-essentials" as food and energy. This is one of those times where moderate deflation is probably a healthy correction, and I hope the government doesn't try to stop it.
Ask HN to predict: Will we keep staring at computers for the rest of our lives?
Ask HN to predict: Will we keep staring at computers for the rest of our lives?
I suppose. What we really want to do is make it so that if someone cracks it and posts it on thepiratebay or something that someone will need to consciously need to run a keygen program or something so they at least recognize they were supposed to get it from a more official source.
I think this is the first legit website I've seen, thats using a .me domain
LISA’08 Technical Proceedings Now Available Online
A link to the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/11/18/0800332105.abst...
Using multi-boot to test on multiple platforms sounds painful, but giving every developer multiple machines and a KVM sounds wasteful. Finding a way to leverage virtualization would be much better IMHO.
Realtime chat where you can edit other people's comments as they type them - brilliant!
I personally have no problem hiring someone to work remotely. In my case; most everyone I've hired to work remotely - I've worked with in the past - so I knew they'd get the work done effectively. If I hired someone I didn't know and they wanted to work remotely I'd bring them in house for a period of time during a probation period - then I'd let them work from anywhere they wanted too.
Tim Ferriss discussed this strategy in 4HWW, he actually hated the title Four Hour Work Week but he quickly discovered it was far and away the best in terms of conversions. So he went with it.
No I really doubt it. I'd guess society will change as well as technology.
Good idea. i'd just have to have the neighbor kid scan everything in, first.
You expected any kind of depth, even in criticizing others for a lack of depth, from Spolsky?
IPhone Development vs Android Development in 5 Days
Apple’s Bite
You say "effective-with-the-masses" like it's a bad thing, but I think it actually just works on a psychological level for anybody. You don't have to be a mouth-breather to appreciate something that is simply straightforward and readable. "Whitespace" and "clean design" are just aesthetic trends that have little positive correlation with readability or usability.
Some cool, non-obvious tips in there, although (9) (JavaScript countdown) seems downright insidious. I'd never buy from a site that did that.
OK, only people in IT departments want integrated solutions. Except they're the ones buying the software. So what's the problem?

Integration is not a bad thing. If you don't like the way Microsoft does it -- whether it be the quality of their implementation, or their disregard for standards compliance, or whatever -- that's cool, and I don't even disagree. But business decisions are made based on the bottom line, not on ideology. If Exchange meets the business requirements, and is cheaper to administer than a hodgepodge of other technologies, pragmatically it just doesn't matter if it doesn't implement IMAP exactly to spec.

I'm not a big fan of MS, but they're just giving the market what it wants here. If you can do better, please do.
This is like saying McDonalds has the best tasting food because they sell the most of it.
5 Tips for Better jQuery Code
In the case of Balsamiq, I think it would be pretty simple. My files are saved in BMML, which is just a simple XML dialect. I suspect someone with good XSLT/HTML/CSS knowledge could write a little BMML->HTML+CSS script in a couple of days.
Does anyone happen to know of a service like you describe - Dropbox, but made to back up music, with playback/playlists in browser?
Michael Pollan.
as a society within my lifetime, yes, probably.

as a society in the indefinite future, no, probably not.

as an individual, hell no.
it seems crappy but it totally works. also, you have to consider who is really purchasing your products. if it's educated buyers who take longer to purchase than that will seem childish vs other things.
but open source cannot compete with apple. That is like saying an army with no generals, navy, air force or money will beat an army with a great general with stealth bombers, battleships, and a building filled with hundred dollar bills and gold bars. Just not gonna happen.
I'd like to see Versions http://www.versionsapp.com/ for Git.
Ask HN: Password manager for OS X?
Working on multiple sites I have dozens of passwords saved for each client. I tried out 1Password but wasn't too impressed. I've looked at Wallet and a few other password managers, but before I purchase and buy into one option I wanted to get the low-down from this community. Anyone have any recommendations / feedback on various password managers? Here are my requirements:
- must be an application (not a firefox plugin)
- must store usernames/passwords for web sites, accounts, etc
- must store other notes (credit numbers, contact info, etc)
- easily searchable (some sort of integration with quicksilver would be awesome)
- bonus: ability to store the passwords on my iphone and sync them on other computers.
You mean, "I was on a bus, complaining about Thomas Friedman, when the driver looked back and said, 'A lot of essays are extrapolated anecdotes. It's not an intrinsically evil form.'
And I realized it was true. You just have to do it right."
What's up with using text background highlights for adding an emphasis ? Someone needs to ease off on NLP. This is really annoying and most importantly it doesn't look good. Vary the text color if you are so inclined to tap the subconsciousness.
The standard of living in much of the EU is pretty bad, and in the rest there generally aren't many people. There may be 800 million total, but only a small subset of them are marketable.

The U.S. has almost as much GDP as the entire EU, while having <40% of the population which, most importantly, means a lot more discretionary income.

I hope you didn't take my statements as jingoistic, it's just a well-known fact that U.S. users monetize much better than the rest of the world in general.
For code I agree it's not so much help - after all the amount of mental work it takes to even think of all that code far outweighs the speed at which you can type it.

That being said, I do feel like it's improved my code in other ways - it's allowed me to discuss in a more in-depth way, with more detail, without a real time cost, my code with other people. I can write large blog posts and get feedback from very smart people about what I'm doing right and wrong, etc.

I've tried typing on the iPhone, and my speed is so slow that I find myself compromising the message I'm trying to get across just so I'd be done with typing.
Unfortunately the company I work at is based on a java backend, and they've taken to using JSF components for form elements. The problem with JSF is that almost all of the components are rendered out in tables. For example, h:selectManyCheckbox renders out x numbers of input/label combos but wraps each one in a <td>. God forbid you want to set a width on this table and have IE6 or 7 do anything other than screw up the layout.
I think the innovations we've seen over the last 100 years of our current system would be proof that you're wrong. American inventors have made huge leaps and bounds in every area in which innovation is possible. I don't see how it's possible to look at the last century and say our patent system is anything but amazing.
The Art of Laying People Off
Allvoices pays students for site comments
This is a nice feature, users like to adjust the look and feel. I know I've wanted to do away with the look before.

I am beginning to feel like Google is just sort of playing with gmail, they could be pushing it further as a mail client. The labs and the new look and feel stuff are all rather quite inconsequential.

They need to push gmail out of beta and begin a full development support for it.
Sounds like you're looking for 1Password.

http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
This is survivorship bias. A ton of similarly ugly sites launched in 1997, one, for whatever reason (possibly the content quality) survived this far without changing. And then we get his "staying power" paragraph.
Doubt it. The ISP's of this nation will strangle every last penny out of this new tech and probably will stifle any innovation or open access initiatives.

You'll see local wifi providers fight it, towns will fight it, and consumers won't want to pay for it (but sadly probably will anyways)
Drop the SEC Investigation Against Cuban
Exactly - UserVoice is a suggestion tracker and I'm sure this isn't official.
Still got 6 points though :?
See also GitNub: http://github.com/Caged/gitnub/wikis
I don't think there is a sensible UI for it. I'd leave it out completely.
There's this: http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/, which is a port of Schneier's Password Safe.

If you're already on OS X, why not use Keychain? In Keychain Access.app, you can create a new password entry (⌘N) or a new note entry (⌘⇧N).
"They need to push gmail out of beta and begin a full development support for it."

That's a joke right? Is there any perceivable difference between the development of a 'beta' Google product and a 'final' Google product?
Agree2 for creating and negotiating agreements launches
In my opinion Linux has already beat Microsoft and Apple on the desktop, why should it not be possible with hardware?

Open Source can have generals, too, and if money was the only issue, why didn't Microsoft beat Apple?
I'd like to see Cornerstone http://www.zennaware.com/ for Git. :)
If the employee is going to be a 'peer' then remotely will work fine as they will most likely be responsible and highly motivated to do a good job. If they are just a cog in your machine and productivity is key (thinking not so much), you can't beat local yokels.

Also with developers, there's a huge difference between being able to look someone in the eye after they just horked your entire product/service and trying to do the same over the phone/via email. Remote developers simply don't care, because they don't usually have to care.
I've used SEE almost exclusively for the last three years. I know plenty of other people who do too.
Attention all Dutch Here comes the fiber network
"Sorry, only 8 people are allowed to edit a single pad at the same time. In the future, we could work to increase this limit."
Passpack (https://www.passpack.com/) have an Air version.
"(My theory is that Friday is the best day to do a layoff because it lets people have a weekend to decompress.)"

Not exactly your theory, it's been common business practice for many years (prob since Mon-Fri became the standard work week)

/got shit-canned on a Thursday because I had Friday's off.
From the FAQ:
"What’s your business model?

Superman 3
I never saw that movie.

Twitpay charges a nickel everytime you make a Twitpay over $.99."
Yeah if we hired remotely we think we would have a two week or so on site period. We would also probably hire as a 3 month trial period that allows for reevaluation at the end of the 3 months.
In this case we would likely be thinking of the person as a mini founder, with a significant amount of equity. So hopefully the ownership of their work would help with the self motivation.
"(My theory is that Friday is the best day to do a layoff because it lets people have a weekend to decompress.)"

I can sort of see it, but if the person is laid off on a weekday, don't they have from that point on to decompress? If a person isn't employed, the weekend has no significance.
I created more pads just for news.yc users here: http://etherpad.com/ep/newsyc
Touché, that app looks amazing.
59 euro per month? are you kidding me?
First Ever Public Study Concerning Business Oriented Social Network Giant LinkedIn.com
No it's not a joke. Google lets things sit in beta forever, why? Because then they can work in spurts of development rather than continuous improvement.

How long was it before we saw improvements to gmail after it first launched? We're in a period of development now but for a while it was stagnant and had no real features rolled out for it.

If they move it out of Beta and commit to continuous development for it, then they can continue to attract users and converts, and have a more appealing tool with which to sell corporate systems etc.

No joke, I was serious.
"for a while it was stagnant and had no real features rolled out for it."

I agree, but maybe the top priorities were coping with scaling or other boring infrastructure issues. They may have been continually improving, just not improvements anyone outside google sees.
>.but a healthy economy shows some nonzero manageable inflation level.

Not actually. Permanent inflation is a feature of modern fiat money regimes. As I noted, we have experienced prolong periods of modest deflation and economic growth in the past.

Economic growth tends to increase prices for all the usual Keynesian reasons and tends to increase the money supply, even with a commodity reserve currency. However, increased productivity tends to reduce prices. If productivity increases fast enough and money growth is limited by a commodity standard, it is possible to have a growing economy with declining prices. In fact, it has happened in the past, as I noted.
I agree it might be more productive (I've never used it). But I do feel the costs and associated costs are quite high.

Imagine you get accepted by PG into Ycombinator and you have your $15000 in hand to start. Using MS technologies you have to pay ~$700 per developer for a Visual Studio license: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WM04HU . As you are now a commercial enterprise you can't use the cheapo student version for $50 anymore. Plus you need to pony up a IIS license for each developer to test on, and Windows Server 2008 license for each developer, and an even more expensive OS license for your multi-processor multi-core server ...

So off the bat you've already spend more than a month's rent for that studio in Sommerville your going to be camped out in ...

Whereas if you go the freebie Open Source route all you need to buy is hardware. Maybe your labour is more, but it's your blood, sweat, and tears which at an early point in the game is cheap. VS is a lot of .99c noodles! ;)
Heyo! Will you be here all week?
Seth Godin on how to build and lead your tribe [video]
Okay, fair enough. I was thinking of more of a business audience - I can't imagine such a stunt would go down well with them. I wouldn't do it on my site, regardless.
Is their other stuff really "open source"?

They definitely released their source code (available here: http://appjet.com/download) but the only mention of a license on that page is:

Disclaimer: The appjet.jar software is provided "as is", and you use it at your own risk. AppJet Inc. is not responsible for anything bad that may happen.

From that, it's not really clear whether it's open for modification and redistribution. Any of the AppJet guys care to comment?
Sounds like a great way to pay for gambling debts without having to adhere to PayPal's morality rules.
Microsoft Poaches Yahoo's Top Search Engineer; "the end of Yahoo search."
A C# REPL in Clojure
They definitely didn't release their code. That jar is full of built class files, dependencies and some of their library in javascript.
You can find more MacBook hacking stories here - http://www.applemacbook.com/mods
Ask YC: How do you keep track of the different things you are doing?
I often work in a depth first sort of way. Right now, I am trying to learn Weblocks and get better at Lisp by going through the Weblocks User Manual. But as I read that, I see that it doesn't explain something all that well so I find a separate tutorial for that. As I am reading that, I will see some Lisp concept that I want to read more about, so I open a new tab and read what Practical Common Lisp has to say about it. While reading this I see something else I don't understand so I Google about it, and that leads me to see a quote I like so I open up Emacs to write down some thoughts on it, which makes me realize that I really need a better way to keep track of all the things I am doing, so I write a post on Hacker News about it. In the end, I lose track of all the other threads of thought and learning that I had started.

So my question is - does anything exist that helps with this? Something that just keeps track of the windows and tabs I have opened in a stack-like fashion seems like it would be great - even better if it lets me write notes or keeps track of where I am in each. I know Juice tries to do this a little bit for browsing the web in Firefox but it seems not exactly what I want. Right now I just make notes in a text document but it is distracting to any kind of flow I have going and it seems like a better way should exist.

Thanks!
Having seen what can happen to even new computers that are fully 'locked down' with multiple spyware scanners and user restriction software; all of which needs phone home for updates on boot on a network made of 10-base-T hubs... the 10-15 minutes strikes me as plausible.

//those of us who can take care of our own networking and system administration don't always realize how good we have it.
That was one of the applications the Appjets had in mind. Aaron told me that when he worked at Google one of the main reasons they used to fly candidates in was just to watch them write code. Part of that step could now happen before the flight.

Air Etherpad. Official Airline of the Recession.