skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also using both vendors with a couple VPSes at each.

I've had one outage with Slicehost when they needed to replace a drive in one of my servers. I wasn't even aware that there was a problem prior which shows how proactive they were. The outage was short and on schedule and everything came back up, as expected.

I've had excellent experiences with tech support in both organizations. Both are very responsive.

Both have pretty strong user communities with Slicehost having a bit of an edge on documentation, if you aren't already comfortable with your own admin. Both have active IRC channels.

Honestly, for me they're almost a coin flip. When I get ready to acquire a new VPS I see what each is offering at the time and go with the biggest bang for my buck. The article is helpful, even if unscientific, at determining the efficiency of the bang.
It's called globalisation, and you're just gonna have to deal with it...
I can't speak for slicehost, but I have used linode for a little while now and it's been completely painless. I haven't had any disasters (perhaps that alone is telling) so I can't speak about riding the river either.

Linode has help on IRC for anything that isn't straight-forward too. Easy.
I would counter that if you asked the question "Why does this idea suck" up front, you'd have gotten that exact feedback way earlier in the process.

Why does it suck? Because it doesn't interface with the bike. As you put it yourself, "it goes against what people expect" It's not that you should quit, but that you need to think about this ahead of time and figure out specifically how you're going to counter these expectations.
With Slicehost now being owned by Rackspace, they are more likely to stick around for a while which is nice if you're into that sort of thing. But they are both fantastic, can't go wrong.
Pointing out a pattern of dogmatic reasoning unmoved by evidence to the contrary is hardly an ad hominem. It is a way of warning that this article adds no information, if you are already acquainted with the dogma. Also, if you believe that you have a convincing argument against the dogma, it will probably apply to this article.

In a similar fashion, if I tell you that an article recounts the same old many-worlds hypothesis, and you are acquainted with the many-worlds hypothesis, you may skip the article.
It's actually * and &. ;-)

Don't interview for positions in languages you've forgotten, then, or brush up and re-learn stuff before the interview. It's like riding a bike...it comes back to you.

Not being able to remember pointer syntax is a serious problem if you're being hired to program in C. I can understand why they'd want to weed out anyone who can't get that, particularly given how many candidates they have.
What the NSA thinks of .NET 2.0 Security
Congrats Paul. It'd be interested to see if/when your user count spikes due to this article.
In a way it sort of reminds me of the sex offender laws - what politic could vote against it? The headline media would destroy him: "Senator X Supports Sex Offender".
YouTube virals must play by US ad rules • The Register
azlyrics.com is a very popular site.Only a broken searchbot/politics will exclude it.

Alexa #805
I think Posterous has some excellent features going. What it doesn't have is a community feel behind it. I get the feeling that every Posterous blog stands alone. Versus other blogging systems - Tumblr comes to mind - where community is a big part of the fun. That's one of the things that's made Posterous tough to consider as a main platform - that and theming.
I second the "most recently updated" list on the Explore page.
What do you mean? You can't even comment on a Tumblr! There is no community there by design.
The Grim Future of Adobe Flash
Ask HN: The Ways to "Deal" with SMS Costs
My startup is looking to use SMS as our primary way of interacting with users but are a bit worried about the cost. We don't need a short code so so far these are the options we've come up with:

1 )asking users for their carrier and using the carrier's SMTP gateway (1234567890@txt.att.net)
2) once they blacklist us for having too much traffic, using multiple IP/SMTP addresses
3) switching to using GMS modems (essentially SIM cards with unlimited messaging plans plugged into our server)
4) working with a 4Info or Movoxx to have them subsidize our costs with their ads
5) finally succumbing and using an aggregator

Does anyone know of any other options? Anyone have experience using the SMTP gateways and how much traffic carriers will allow before they start blocking? Once blocked, can I just change SMTP or IP addresses? Anyone have any advice on how to go the GSM modem route?
The video was entertaining and if your product is similar to the philips livingcolors then it should be very cool! Good luck with your pitch!
Half of me wants to say "Bravo for running your company in a manner that works for you". The other half of me wants to say "Contact an adult, you may need supervision."
I am 150% onboard with the notion that there are other viable ways to labor other than 9-5 five days a week for the entirety of one's working life.

(For one, I live in Japan, and 9-5 sounds like a pleasant spring breeze. So there is one other successful model, for certain definitions of successful that do not include enjoying Tuesday evenings in the forseeable future.)

I count 1,110 hours per employee per year devoted to that boring task of actually making money. 1,110 hours a year... I really hope you never, ever hire an employee who is less than stellar, or you will be dragging his deadweight on your minimal number of productive hours. Of course, why would non-stellar employees ever be attracted to a job where they get paid extravagant amounts not to work? Oh, wait, nevermind.
An Epidemic of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder or Normal Sadness?
I have used both. Gor my usage pattern (low) they have both proved to be excellent.

However, I would a ++ for Linode because they seem to offer more RAM/$ on paper. And their online control panel is a bit more sophisticated than Slicehost's.
Nvidia Details ‘Personal Supercomputer` Design Based on Tesla GPU
Wonderful. One giant Web2.0 company with no profit decides not to acquire another. How long can both of these companies wait before they produce profit? The more logical acquisition of Twitter is definitely Google, as they are the only web giant that really knows how to monetize users.
Kudos on the title-- you definitely got the best quote.
Never settle. You're worth more than that.
Poll: Turn off The Internet a few hours a day?
I'm really not convinced that bulbs is a good space for a small startup. It's the type of product that needs a lot of push behind it, and that's exactly what startups don't have.
Facebook Wins An $873 Million Judgment Against Spammers That It Will Never Collect
#scheme on freenode.
lol, thanks. I could have said x[i] is the same as ^(x + i) and really thought that was the correct syntax. The problem is I have used enough languages and dialects that I really can't brush up on it all. I just say if it's been five years, let me break out my cheet sheet for that stuff.

PS: Ok, if it was really just a C job of course I would focus on that.

Edit: Dammit it is like riding a bike. I have been having C flashbacks to horrible old code. O Malloc how do I hate the let me count the ways.
Citigroup Bailout: Socializing Loss after Privatizing Gains
Replacement for script onload in IE
It already had influence. When the tool came out it helped us to find a regression in redirect caching that occurred from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. We fixed it and it's back to working again in Firefox 3.1. Steve has good clout - he knows his stuff and is happy to provide easy test cases.
Or use something like Sphinx (or Solr, maybe) which does a lot of the work for you in building a decent search backend.
There is a lot less biomass in the ocean than you might think. Huge areas of the ocean are nutrient to the point they don't support significant life.
Steve is simply labeling the WebKit nightlies as "Safari 4" - it's a little bit heavy-handed but it will, technically, be correct. Probably moving un-released browsers off into another area (Minefield/Firefox 3.1, Safari 4, and IE 8) would make things more consistent.
Can you really call this a company just yet?
That's why comparing China with developed countries and blaming any literacy shortcomings on orthography just isn't fair.
Nokia 3200 Lcd Connetor Ways
3200, 3200 connector ways, 3200 display ways, 3200 lcd connector, 3200 lcd ways, 3200 no display, connector, display, lcd, Nokia, screen
Cyberdyne startup launches Skynet.
"How do you get serious? You make a Powerpoint!"
Thanks for your response.

I think most startups are not really startups. They are more like elementary school science projects, where all the kids show off to other kids what they are doing.
Are you a Tumblr user? Because the large part of the community occurs on the Dashboard, through reblogging and passing things along. You get some people who comment back-and-forth, some people who act as nodes for large amounts of content. I'd love to map it: you get a brilliant web built up.

Tumblr isn't about the individual blog community. It's about the Tumblr community. And I like, actually, that when you look at a blog it seems entirely personal, but that from the dashboard it seems like parts of a larger community.

Also: see http://tumblelog.marco.org/61329864, where you can see the actions of an item in the community. They've also beta-tested a "questions" module, which you can see here: http://www.davidslog.com/58675697/where-should-i-get-cupcake...

The Tumblr founders are very against comments, and I love that. Comments don't form a community. They add a facade of a community in all but the best cases. Community relies on the form of the medium, and commenting very rarely is the answer. With forums, you have threads; with Tumblr, you have likes, reblogs, and answers. It's a wonderful solution.
Cutting Up the Founders' Pie
Could anyone point me on how to solve this(either a solution or preferrably a pointer on how to get to it):
"Q: Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7."

First I thought it was simple but the I got stuck, maybe I'm just tired.
No matter how I twsit and turn it I seem to get only an even distribution over 5 numbers.
Facebook Hackathon yields cool data visualization, but is it useful?
Man Vs. Machine On Wall Street
I would guess that it's true for many APIs which rely on the user providing their password to the 3rd party application.

Of course that's the bigger problem. The user shouldn't have to give their password out. It's somewhat ironic that Twitter doesn't implement OAuth or something similar since Blaine Cook started OAuth.
I've been using Colloquy. Not great but gets the job done.
FWIW, Slicehost also has both IRC and AJAX chat support channels, plus an 800 number for escalating omg-people-are-dying level of support requests.
Try MacIrssi.
A solution for the "send email to relatives when I die" problem
Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit
Bailouts: Citigroup vs. GM
#cappuccino on freenode ;)
The most common goods and services offered by cybercriminals
#postgresql, #ruby-lang, #python
The State Of Venture: The Ugly, The Bad And The Good
Combining Pages with LaTeXiT (http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php) is my current favorite setup. Pages takes some getting used to but after prolonged use I find it easier to use than Word or Writer. Word is a pain under OS X. LaTeXiT accepts LaTeX markup and produces a image which can be dragged into a Pages Document, perfect for sporadic equations.
a pattern of dogmatic reasoning unmoved by evidence to the contrary

Which was not the claim that was made, right?
Slicehost has a pitiful per slice bandwidth cap of 10mbit. Linode's is 35mbit.
There's that too but from the size problem. Still your comparison is probably off since a donut is more likely a snack, while a bagel, properly decorated, is a meal. Then again, I grew up eating bagels for breakfast while donuts were a special treat with breakfast.
This is good advice, but you need to be sure that the person is "co-founder" material. I have personally been involved in startups where someone who was a top-notch coder, but a horrible "businessman" was given co-founder influence on the company (they never had an official co-founder title, but effectively had the same ability to impact the company and make decisions on things).

Some people are brilliant at implementing a concept, but utterly horrible at pretty much every other aspect of running or building a company.

Just because this person would be instrumental in getting the working code going does not mean that they are at all qualified to shape the business...
Surveillance system helps police snare shooters
I hit this limit and slicehost upped it on my slice, I'm not sure if this is typical or not, but they were very quick to increase the limit for me.
So are you guys going to launch every feature on Hacker News? Think about it when every startup starts launching their each feature announcement on Hacker News?

Just because you are a YC alumni startup, does it make sense to launch every feature here?

Another thing which annoys me about YC startups is - to get immediate attention, they add "(YC Summer/Winter 08/09)" in the title of their post, and other YC alumni vote up immediately. And the post comes to the front page. I'm tired of these tricks!

Please, there are many startups launching many features every single day. Launching search feature is not a news. Launching a startup is a news. So I would appreciate if you can limit such releases to your blog only. If we are interested, we will follow your blog for feature releases.

Please don't take this personally. I meant this to all YC alumni startups who launch features as if it's a big press release on Hacker News using all above mentioned tricks.

Anyway, it was my $0.02s. Hope you agree to it.
Social Media Monetization and Revenue
I'm not convinced that it's an easy space either, but that's really all about the distribution channels. If you wanted to do this as a startup what you'd need to do is to lure away someone who's specifically connected in the lighting industry. I think access to the distribution channels would be much more important than money -- and I'm not even convinced that if you did have money that you could automagically solve the distribution problem. There are of course fabrication expenses, but I can only assume that the original poster has taken those into account.
Both Obama and McCain talked about improving/increasing regulation because that's what they thought the public wanted to hear. Obama was able to do it more credibly, which helped his campaign. He was always quite unspecific, though, leaving his administration the option of e.g. improving enforcement or oversight rather than just writing a bunch of new rules. Obama never really promised to be a liberal, but both people who wanted to love him and people who wanted to fear him for that were able to hear what they wanted.

The lesson here is how important it is that politicians ignore their campaign promises. In Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence", Greenspan expresses surprise that the Bush administration wanted to follow through on the tax cuts and rebates they promised when the government was running a surplus even after that surplus was projected to vanish. Other presidents, he recalled, were always willing to throw out campaign promises that no longer suited the circumstances.

This is where Obama's vagueness, stern rhetoric, and large margin of victory are reassuring. We probably won't give him too hard a time if he doesn't add a bunch of regulations, or if he decides to change his tax plan a bit. Hopefully this will help the experts do their job.
In a similar fashion, if I tell you that an article recounts the same old many-worlds hypothesis, and you are acquainted with the many-worlds hypothesis, you may skip the article.

How about the case in which I am mistaken, and have never been exposed to a many-worlds argument that was well reasoned and persuasive?

I don't know if I would want to listen to an argument that claimed, for instance, that spirits lived in rocks. But if I were part of a community which found such an article interesting, I would find it more useful in terms of understanding both the posters and the cultural nature of the submission to take the argument on face value and submit a few kindly-worded criticisms. After all, maybe the other guy has never heard a clear, reasoned, and persuasive argument either, right?
Linode has been around a pretty long time now- I've been a customer for least a couple years. I think they're well past the point where we need to be worried if they're still going to be around next year.
I'd be pretty freaked out if I was 60-something and I got an email like that from one of my children, I think.
True, email polling to determine live-or-dead status is pretty dumb :)

A company exists that offers after-death services using a multiple-redundancy scheme like the one described:

https://www.mywonderfullife.com

They call the trustworthy people "angels" :)
The problem with dual licensing
Can one of you more economically-savvy hackers explain to me why $10,000 to every American, at a cost of $3 trillion, wouldn't bailout the economy as well? Seems like that would lead to an broad injection of capital into almost every market sector. Some would choose to save (banks), some spend (retail/autos/mortgages/loans), and some would invest in stocks, and/or all of the above. What am I missing? Instead of these top-down strategies, why not go completely bottom-up?
Xing’s CEO Steps Down, Denies LinkedIn Is Getting Any “Real Traction” In Europe
Startups making progress and launching new features is my second-favorite thing to read on news.yc. New startups launching is less interesting.

My favorite thing to read is user feedback on new features.
I've been a linode customer for a year, and it's pretty cool. My only wish at this point would be for them to offer hosting at a european datacenter.
There are no IRC channels in which I want to admit being involved.
Good article, but I don't agree with many points there - like JS with CSS can do UI wonders. I think the same can be done in Flex/Flash for a fraction of code.
Adobe AIR is not 'yet another UI toolkit', you have to learn, it can very well become an ancillary tool to Flex. In fact, the idea there is you can keep the same UI, same components, and changing the container from web to AIR. Of course, you may have to switch how it talks to your backend, but its a great way to create an online/offline version of the same app, reusing most of the same flex codebase.
I evaluated Mercurial some months ago and found it very easy to migrate to from Subversion.

Here are some benchmarks on the Linux source tree that might be useful:

http://laserjock.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/bzr-git-and-hg-per...

This blog post is pretty good at summarizing git and mercurial:
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur...
I honestly think most of it's just ignorance. I don't honestly think that anyone who has used Mercurial in anger can seriously be unaware of merge customization, or of the fact that Mercurial has simple revision numbers in addition to hex codes, or that Mercurial can clone from HTTP, but I can definitely see missing those features if you just messed around with it for an hour when you were trying to evaluate the two systems. Likewise, even someone who had used Mercurial fairly heavily could easily be unaware of Launchpad-like sites, or new back-ends in upcoming Mercurial versions and the like. At any rate, I don't think that the bzr team is being malicious; just uninformed.

The one point that I do think they're guilty of intentionally bending the truth are their claims of speed. bzr goes to great lengths to have more thorough history and merge tracking than either Mercurial or git. It pays for that by being slower. That's a perfectly viable trade in some cases, but bzr needs to own up to it. Instead, rather than simply admit that bzr is slower, its supporters generally try to explain ways to get around the fact bzr is slow, and then claim that the slowness doesn't matter. For example, initial clones ("bzr branch") with bzr are simply atrocious. A bzr supporter will tell you that you don't do clones that often, and besides, there are work arounds--e.g., since bzr works with whole-file hashes like git, it can share file objects and revisions across all of the repositories on your system, making branching repositories you've already brached at least once go more quickly, and for ones you've not yet, you can just download a tarball of an existing clone and use that as the base. These arguments are weak, sidestepping the issue. I'm reminded of git in its early days, when you had to manually run very, very slow gcs every once and awhile, and its supporters shot back with, "Well, yeah, but you can totally just stick that in a cron job." Mercurial's not innocent, either; I remember its dev team trying to argue why it didn't need named branches, when everyone using git (including me!) thought that git's branching was one of its killer features. bzr needs to do what those projects did: quit explaining away the bug, and just fix it.

bzr's merge algorithm is better than either Mercurial or git's, its GUI (QBzr) is best-of-breed, and its online operational mode makes it a drop-in replacement for Subversion for sites that are trying to migrate away from old habits slowly. It also happens to be significantly slower than the competition, to the point that, much as I personally believe that Mercurial has a better power-to-usability ratio than git, I think bzr has a bad power-to-speed ratio compared to either git or Mercurial. Whether you agree with my assessment is up to you. I just wish that their comparison pages were more honest about what the trade-offs are.
Git integration with Hudson and Trac
Maybe it's because I'm a naive (second time) entrepreneur but something about this argument seems wrong to me; I can't put my finger on what it is though.
That's a great idea, I wish we had that in college.
Up until now, I thought your name was Mat Caton.
darcs has a very nice interface, but it does not handle binary files (many/large) well.
The Disappearing Male [video]
does this remind anyone else of the fighting hell fish episode from the Simpsons???
Techdirt: Connecticut Finally Drops Charges Against Julie Amero
I gave up on darcs awhile ago, but darcs 2 honestly does greatly reduce the merge issues that used to plague it. If you're still on darcs, get the upgrade. You may find you no longer need to move to a new product.
I can't get it to open up chat rooms. I enter in the room name and it goes entirely blank. And their help files are rubbish.
The elegant solution escapes me for now, but you could treat the odds and evens from the 1-5 function as a biased bit stream, apply a von Neumann corrector and then use the resulting stream.
Mobile Speed Trap Mapping with iPhone
Have they fixed the issue where sometimes the entire chat conversion disappears until you switch themes a couple of times?
I agree. This part wouldn't be vital for a pitch (unless showing the site is a part of it), but for anyone going to the site, it would be. If I can't figure out what the site's about, I'm just going to close the tab. It's like what Gladwell says in The Tipping Point about Sesame Street, people lose when it's confusing.
Very interesting idea. I think it would make sense to send these notifications to the party's estate lawyer, rather than loved ones, just to reduce the "morbid" factor.
Ideally, they would also alert you that you've been "marked as dead" and give you a week or so to claim that you're still around.
Have a lawyer and a will.