skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the costs of safety checks can be more pronounced in software than in other areas of business. It's not just that good hackers are particularly irritated by them -- they're irritated for a reason.

A two-week release-process lag is so much worse than it might sound. If you can ship instantly, you can get feedback and make improvements rapidly, over and over. Sure, without a careful release process you might occasionally break things, but when you do you can fix them in minutes rather than weeks. When you insert release-process lag into that cycle, improvements that might have been made in a rapid series of releases over a day or two can take months. Sometimes those improvements just never get made, because no one is motivated to keep working on them for so long.

In software, "stable" often means "unchanging", but only rarely means "high-quality".
This particular example could be written as follows:

>>> char = 'f'
>>> char * "foobaf".count(char)
'ff'

Or

>>> [char] * "foobaf".count(char)
['f', 'f']
For whitebox vendor you might want to look at Supermicro

Cheers
Well yes, because that assumes that there is some magical amount of checks that must never be exceeded. Some checks are extremely valuable and should be added based on their merits alone.
I'd guess that a large majority of twitter users have just a single account (it's hard enough maintaining that).

Even then, the popular clients like Twhirl already support multiple accounts.

Not sure what their goal is, but seems like it will be tough to get traction.
No-one planned not to need their servers...
Stacked - an Open Source implementation of StackOverflow.com
The sensible way to build more complex web apps these days is to have a (invisible) client side model, and have the controller communicate with the server as is required (typically to fetch data, sometimes to poll). The server becomes more of a router and data repository, with less intelligence. It is sometimes easier to think of the server as a secondary, dumb user with a huge amount of data on tap. And the more intelligence you can push out to the client side the better the system will scale.
Question: If Al Gore believed it himself, would he live in a 12-bedroom mansion with a heated swimming pool? Would he jump on a plane at the drop of a hat? Would he sell carbon credits to himself?

Regardless of the merits of the climate change argument, Al Gore is in it for the political mileage and that's all.

I'm old enough to remember when the Green lobby was worried about global cooling, a new Ice Age. The things they prescribed - massively increase regulation and taxation - strangely are exactly the same despite the problem being the opposite! Doesn't that seem odd too? Almost as if it was never anything to do with the environment...
"Believing is irrational. Given enough time, charisma and persuasion anyone can be made to believe anything."

Because some beliefs are irrational and the result of charisma and persuasion, the act of believing itself is irrational? Really?

I find it ironic that you immediately follow that statement with a persuasive argument that you seem to believe.
They were running generators down there, so there must be cooling available. I guess they've just left it off to save money while there's no tenant.
Has Google Failed in China?
That article has nothing to do with the one I posted. The one I posted is talking about the implications of Omega numbers for math and physics. Yours just talks about the busy beaver number. It is more mathematically informed though, I'll give you that.
I think this phenomenon is caused by the culture of fear among most employees. Screwing up badly will get you fired, the greatest fear of all. Most employees have heavy mortgages and children, and require a consistent and predictable income. (This state of things is a problem in itself, but that's another topic).

The big issue is that the level of fear increases as you move up the command structure.

Let's assume one of your startups has crashed and burned. Something really spectacular must have happened if this makes potential customers of your next startup spurn you. Taking risks may have consequences, but they are temporary. But if you are a high-level manager for a large company, spectacular failure will make you unemployable, or in the best case push you several steps down the ladder - steps which took years of boredom and politics to climb, and which you will never get back. Failure is punished disproportionately, success is rarely compensated. Conservatism is the correct choice for each individual actor.

We all know bureaucracy, culture and politics - existing companies won't change in this area.
I've got these guys bookmarked for when I need them: https://www.clarityaccounting.com/

EDIT: I can't comment at all on their actual services.
No, it's that most people don't want to use a product that changes often, if at all. They get it for what it is and if it changes, it means disrupting their way of using it. When you're working with a smaller product, you can iterate more and work closely with the people using it. When it gets larger, any change you make will alienate some users, so you have to plan to minimize that alienation.

You can change and roll back features quickly, but that gives an impression of instability among users. If things are constantly changing, they'll seek out something more stable. It's "lowest common denominator" thinking. It results in something that nobody dislikes, and that's the goal of larger groups. Niche companies are able to work much better, but even then there's some slowdown.
To think that these mistakes can be eliminated entirely is somewhat delusional. Yes, Apple could be doing more to increase the quality of their products, more rigorous testing, etc etc, but in the end there is an engineering limitation to how far they can take this.

Things breaking down, or manufacturing defects, can be reduced, but never eliminated.

So there are currently two choices in the market:

- Things that break down often, with no customer support.
- Things that break down often, with great customer support.

I think it's pretty clear which one I'd choose :)
For large companies with a valuable reputation, that's almost guaranteed to be true. Most people won't generate a million dollars worth of value in a given year, but nearly everyone could do that amount of damage to their company's reputation in just a few minutes.
Was the Great Depression a monetary phenomenon?
If you have the agility to make rapid production changes, you also have the ability to rapidly rollback.

This is just not true. Rollbacks are always more expensive than changes, because you can't rewind time to undo the consequences of having your software be broken for minutes, hours, or days. Worse, in the absence of "checks", the cost of making a production change tends to be roughly constant as the company grows -- it takes the Amazon sysadmin no more time to type "make deploy" than it does me -- but the cost of a rollback scales directly with the size of your company's customer base.

Within a few seconds after Amazon.com breaks S3, thousands of companies begin to lose money, and they lose money second by second until the rollback happens. Even if Amazon is only down for a minute, that's one minute of downtime multiplied by its number of customers. The larger the customer base, the larger the stakes.

And, unfortunately, the cost of downtime is nonlinear. If Amazon goes down for a mere two minutes, hundreds of peacefully sleeping system administrators will get emergency pages from their uptime-monitoring systems. They will get out of bed. They will check their logs and their failover mechanisms. They will lose a lot of sleep, and soak up a bunch of overtime pay, and a lot of their good will towards Amazon will dissipate like the morning dew. Once you lose your reputation for quality it takes a lot of work to get it back.

This is why larger companies have more controls. The controls are in place to try and pass the ever-increasing cost of a rollback back to the team that causes the rollbacks. The reason it seems so gosh-darned expensive to add a trivial feature to your flagship app is that it is expensive: If the average rollback costs $1m in revenue and every new feature is only 95% reliable, every new feature costs the company $50k to deploy.

The secret here is: If you want to deploy changes rapidly, don't work on a product that has a lot of uptime-sensitive customers! Start a different product line, or start a beta program, or found a smaller company.
Is open source hardware that much harder to do thats why there aren't a lot of projects out there?
From the article:

"Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that "we're dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational"."

Strange thing is, I only ever see this kind of article from the "no-global-warming" camp. I don't recall reading any articles bashing the "no-global-warming" people's personalities. Could be my selective memory, could be something else...
Because it comes with the phone, and up until recently there were no other options.
We've tried several vendors at Justin.tv, but we always end up circling back to Dell. Pricing is great, spare parts are readily available on Ebay, and they're quality machines. Definitely get in touch will their sales guys and plan your purchase for the end of the month, or better yet, end of the quarter.

You're making the right choice on 1U 8-core boxes. We've done the math and there's no better combination of price, performance, density, and power consumption out there.

-Kyle
Telcos are screwing .... everyone. News at 11.
Windows Mobile is one of the more 'open' platforms when it comes to third party apps. On win mobile you can choose to install Fennec (mobile firefox), skyfire, opera, etc.

Apple on the other hand bans anyone from making a replacement browser
Responsible Tweeting: Mumbai Provides Teachable Moment
My hypothesis: global warming hype will decline, not because the global financial crisis but because of the new administration. The main reason global warming was such a popular meme in the recent years is by the power of association. So many people had a grudge with president Bush and the republicans were perceived as global warming skeptics, therefore everyone felt that preaching the global warming doom was a way to emphasise their hatred for the president. Now that there's no one to hate in the White House the global warming preaching will lose its cathartic power. (This of course is totally unrelated to any actual reasons to believe whether the climate change is man made or what actions should be undertaken to control it.)
Ask HN: what do you use for mailing list software?
We're setting up our webapp to send out emails, for confirmation emails, alerts, special offers, regular mass mailings, etc. Just wondering what people had used for mailing list software.

Do you use an open source solution like PHPList, a SaaS offering like ConstantContact, or roll your own? Or some combination of the above? Any recommendations would be helpful.
Amazon EC2 has a large VM if you don't want to purchase or lease hardware yet:

"Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform"

$0.80/hour - about $730/month.
What game developers do when their games launch
One Uber Identi.ca List for Creatives & Geeks
I have been chatting about Identi.ca quite a lot this week, trying to drum up some enthusiasm, my main motive being, ‘what happens if Twitter goes down‘.
It seems like almost everyone prefers to play with purely virtual things. It always bugged me that there are so many startups out there and almost all of them seem to do web development stuff while so few do more of what I call "real" (i.e involving hardware) After all, we live in a physical world, so shouldn't we be more concerned about stuff that connects to it one way or the other?

There must be reasons to it: software is more easily controllable (you can do everything by the keyboard), software scales more easily (hardware needs factories for mass-production), and inertia of thinking (powered from the previous reasons)

I think that many interesting upportunities utilising the hardware technologies remain unexplored.
I think a lot of it has to do with the cost; software is more or less free to create. So the barrier to entry, hardware-wise, is much higher and requires more capital.
There is a major, fundamental problem with moving the definition of web applications to being JavaScript/Python/Java-centered. It offends one of Berners-Lee's principles of web architecture: the 'principle of least power' http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP. That allows the substance of the web to be accessed, analysed, processed by other unforeseen applications. But encoding everything around a full procedural programming language is very opposite to that.

There is certainly a place for JavaScript-like power -- very specialised, low-level tasks, perhaps like the core of google maps interface. But there needs to be a larger, general framework of a simple, declarative form to express web apps. Something like SMIL and XUL. Actually, W3C has begun to develop something that might form the basis: CDF, but probably few have heard of it even, and it lacks the most important stuff...
Note that Dell's end-of-quarter is the end of January, not December. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=DELL
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010820.html#01...

Klein observes that Chait’s riff here is the equivalent of those people who attack Al Gore for being a global-warming crusader even though he rides in cars and uses light bulbs. Of course it is; the point of such attacks is, first, to deride anyone who says anything that makes us feel uncomfortable, and second, to establish that we need listen to radical truths only if they’re spoken by people who live lives of saintly renunciation. Since such people are very rare, this guarantees we won’t be frequently disturbed.
This is probably true. Most people in EU countries (excluding the UK) are pretty sure that man-made global warming is a fact. Only in the USA, Australia and the UK do you find this strong contingent of people who think that it's all a conspiracy and lies. You have to conclude that the governments of these countries have a hand in this public feeling.
S3 is a really bad example because they provide infrastructure. Their customers actually see their entire site go down. Those kinds of companies are the exception. I hope Heroku has rigorous testing and scrutinizes every change, even though they are a startup.

Let's say I own a video site and I want to add threaded comments. If I have 5 users and the site goes down for 5 minutes, those 5 users will get 5 minutes each of annoyance. If I have a million users, each of those users will get 5 minutes of annoyance each also. There is no difference to the user there. So, by adding more checks to make sure the site doesn't go down for 5 minutes when you have more users, you're saying the more users you have, more the important each user becomes. I think that's a strange way of thinking.

(The same is true here of an infrastructure service-- if S3 had 5 users and were more cavalier about their release schedule and broke something, those 5 users would exact the same net effects of downtime as if S3 had 5 million users.)

The awesome benefit of getting threaded comments developed, tested briefly, and pushed in one evening is worth the risk of 5 minutes of downtime compared to the 2 weeks of rigorous testing and approval-by-committee. No matter how many users you have.
Ice core samples are not accurate?
Interactive Video Object Manipulation
Research Competitiveness of World Universities in CS
I've bought over 500 servers from 8anet over the last six years. I'd highly recommend them. Call them and talk to Mary Z.
The PHP website is one of the most complete and easily navigable and searchable language documentation websites I've ever used, and I directly blame it for my being so well versed in PHP that PHP has (grudgingly) been my tool of choice for years.

The quality of the documentation on php.net has actually gone down since they started wrapping everything in objects and using automatic documentation generators like doxygen. That's great for reference, but not so great when you're trying to learn it. The documentation for SPL (largely http://www.php.net/~helly/php/ext/spl/ ) is an example. The php.net website has traditionally been good for both reference and learning.

On the other hand, a lot of that "bad advice out there" is actually in the PHP documentation (like building query strings directly), which has caused it to pop up in other places. The comments on the documentation nodes are a great idea, but use anything in them with caution. If one comment says "Here's how I solved this problem..." there might already be function that did that and the poster didn't know about it.

As for pass by reference working with objects but not arrays... I think a lot of confusion over this comes from PHP4's crappy object model when objects were passed by value (which doesn't make any sense in an object model) and that people like to think of arrays like C arrays (which are just pointers). That arrays are not passed by reference by default seems to fit the immutability of other base types (however, I use the word "immutability" with caution there, since it's not strict immutability in PHP).
Baskin Robbins, in HS.
How the Recess! Framework addresses these oversights: http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/11/28/how-recess-solves-commo...

To summarize: abstractions and proper layering of database code.
I used to do IT Consulting and was responsible for procuring hardware from dell at a few companies including now my own.

What I learned - End of Quarter yields huge savings at Dell. If you are going to buy 10 servers for sure, create an account, spec out one server and call in to the small business division. Ask the salesman what he can do if you buy 5 of the one in your cart, he will give you a number let him know you have to talk to your partner put him on hold or call back. Then ask what he can do if you buy 10 - watch the price go down again on the quote.
There's a danger in personifying overall concern about global into a single spokesman, Al Gore. It's a fallacy to try to discredit everyone who believes in climate change by simply tearing down Al Gore himself. It's a convenient way of not confronting the facts on either side of the argument.
If we don't bill our working time by the hour, software is more or less free to create. Desktop software, that is. But here and now, web-bassed software seems to be all the rage, doesn't it? To accomodate decent amount of concurrent users (tens to thousands) you will need hosting that should cost somewhere around $20 to $300 a month. Maybe somewhere on the $20 a month side for the starters.

Many of the hardware projects, and definitely most of those listed in the original post, can be built with that much worth of parts.

EDIT: But that's just the prototype. After that, you need to build the real product (scale, hardware needs factories for that) and sell it (again easier with software). But this doesn't mean we should only do software because it's easier; otherwise we would be like the proverbial drunkard who kept seeking for his money under the lamppost, because it's brighter over there.
I think this is particularly important given that often the biggest cost in using a new product\tool is learning to use it well... if it's changing all the time, with no release schedule or no attempt to stabilize the main release via betas\QA\etc, then it gets very frustrating to learn.
From the second paragraph of the article: 'The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent's report, claiming he behaves like a "rejected genius" [...]' So yeah, I would conclude it is your selective memory.
How about the fact that all American plans come with free national long distance. That's unheard of in Canada. You get billed long distance for calling a city an hour away.
I really dig the simplicity - in the app and in use. We have a dynamic IP that's not even remotely tied to our location (Hughes Net Satellite) and so it seems to get reset every time we get a new IP. Any way to implement some cookie to save the zip code?
I'll add another vote for Dells-

a) Their servers rack very nicely, particularly when you're using Dell racks. No tools are necessary, which saves a Lot of time when you're setting up/moving the machines.

b) The management tools are much better than you get from SuperMicro/offbranded machines- You can generally find a hardware fault quickly from their boot CDs, rather than diagnosing manually.

c) As Kyle mentioned, the parts are ubiquitous- Dell still carries parts for most of their machines, but even if you can't find it from them, you can find it from another vendor.

d) Because Dells are so common, it's easy to find other's experiences with a software/hardware combination.
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/

e) Support. Don't underestimate this when choosing what vendor to buy from.. With one of out offbrand vendors, a replacement drive took at least 2 weeks to be shipped out and arrive.. If you pay for the Dell premium support ($200ish per server), they'll drive a tech to the spot within hours.

They're less than ideal on storage pricing- It's often cheaper to buy drives elsewhere.. Further, their live reporting tools (Check HD status, etc), aren't as good as they really should be.

I'd certainly call up a sales rep and have a chat with them. They'll usually give you a discount if you're buying any quantity- If they hesitate, ask if they'll throw in free gold support. They'll normally do that to save a sale, since it doesn't cost the rep very much.

-Colin
How the Recess Framework Solves Common PHP/MySQL Issues
That's the point I was trying to make. Something like
"always commit and run the tests before going to production" makes a lot of sense, and should be mandated. Even something like "three signed copies of an authorization form" makes sense for some projects if, for example, the cost of damages (say, lost data, downtime or annoyed paying customers) is big enough.

Measuring this, though, is the hard part. It's like trying to do the math behind "no silver bullet" and estimate communication costs (too many unknowns and conditional dependencies).
gotta start somewhere.
I built a Sanguino this morning as it happens. It was quite easy and instantly gratifying. Definitely recommended for any aspiring hardware hackers.
Japan detects Gravity Anomaly on the far side of the moon
The fact that it's obvious but not easy does not necessarily mean that it's not worth reiterating periodically. Quite the opposite.

Another good example of something that's obvious and hard to do is "Make something people want" :-)
http://corduroysite.com/
"2. My Black Book. A website where people can setup a list of the people they hate, and how they will exact their revenge"

wow, really? "want to know if anyone is planning to murder you? enter your e-mail address and find out!"
Other scientists have said that more species are created and go extinct than we've ever cataloged and that this has been going on for millions of years. And I don't have a reference either.

Statistics are like standards: there so many to choose from.
Sure, yes, if e.g. the customers' health or safety was at risk. But I don't think the average bug in a web app would damage a company's reputation significantly. GMail occasionally shows me a message saying "Oops, an error occurred." It doesn't make me think any less of Google.