skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AWS should have shaved down the cost of the dedicated unit as well, if we are in cost cutting mode. Those prices would look very different if they just used some plain jane boxes from 100tb.com or leaseweb.

In order for AWS to make sense, you need to utilize the hourly billing. If you use EC2 and leave you server on 24/7, you are going to be paying more for less powerful hardware than you could with dedicated. Yes, they have a fancy datacenter and instant provisioning and cool backups. You are still paying more. Way more in some cases.

*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver. Once you go above that mark, Its almost always more effective to be on dedicated unless you are one of the very few people who has truely hourly based service (Think, a seti@home where you only crunch data once a month) - Any normal "website" will do better with dedicated.

Finally, to summarize the above. EC2's main, most important, if-you-arent-using-it-you-are-doing-it-wrong, feature is HOURLY BILLING. If you dont constantly switch on and off from different sizes (and you spend a decent amount of cash) then dedicated is likely better for you.

Dont get me wrong, EC2 is great. But use it for overflow. Or use it for the bells and whistles. Or use it because you have more cash and you would rather not deal with the issues and you like simpledb and yadda yadda yadda. Use it for whatever reason you like. Just dont use it because its cheaper. Because its not.
> non-web developers

Sorry, not sure what that means </sarcasm>

OK maybe not everything will be a web app, but pretty much everything that isn't some deep driver-level boot code or embedded firmware is already almost always part of some sort of web app, and the stuff that isn't is pretty much all written in C/C++.

When is the last time you wrote a Python program that didn't interact over TCP or equivalent with some other process? And how often was that other process not something at least nominally webby?
Well, at least you admit your interest in this article is essentially selfish. You like it because you learned something. What did you learn, exactly?

Never mind than Andrew had no say in whether this article should go to press. He may or may not be a terrible manager -- is that a good reason to shame him in public?

If he were a fantastic manager, would TechCrunch have written a similar, but glowing article? Of course not. Anthony's article is no better than tabloid crap.

This just in: Brad and Angelina have a fight over how to raise the kids. Do you rationalize that article by saying it's teaching valuable parenting lessons to aspiring celebrities?

Is an this article the price for screwing up, assuming he did? If it is, I'd wager fewer people will want to take the risk.

And that is bad for startup culture.
This would make an awesome screensaver too.
You mean with someone with physical access to my machine can trivially bypass software security measures?

I am shocked, shocked, good sir!
Directly from the article:

AudioGL is a big project for one developer. These dates are estimates.

AudioGL BETA (Windows32/64): July 2012
AudioGL v1.0 (Windows32/64): Fourth Quarter 2012
AudioGL BETA (Mac): Fourth Quarter 2012
AudioGL v1.0 (Mac): First Quarter 2013
Working on big legacy code base without proper unit testing and strong style checks is probably hard in any case. With Python the idea is that e are grownups. If someone accesses private methods or changes the type of an argument without proper checking, it's his problem.
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If your virtual machine's CPU is 1/10th the performance of host, there's something incredibly wrong. Almost all CPU instructions in a VM run unmodified on bare metal.
> Because labor is a mostly fixed cost for each alternative, it will tend not to impact the relative comparison of the two alternatives

I don't buy this. My experience is that the ops cost of a co-location facility are much more expensive than aws. The ops cost functions doesn't seem to linear as he is describing either.

People costs dominate early on and are a huge factor until you start to reach steady state and that's the variable that you need to optimize for.

Having said that aws is expensive. If dollars are worth more than hours to you, then yes, by all means host things yourself.
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I believe that the key point here is calling around first. Walking into a particular dealership without a negotiated price is like giving away your best asset in this negotiation - the right to choose the dealer.
This is eerie! I was planning to make complete websites with themes using Bootstrap just yesterday! :-) .. Here is what I launched about an hr back on my own site! http://bit.ly/zn9Wxc
You can fully delete your FB profile (not just deactivate) - in their help center there is a blurb and a link to do a full deletion...

http://www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=how+do+i+delete+my+ac...
Can anyone explain why BenchmarkUnroll was specifically set to run twice as many iterations as the other two for the timing tests? It seems intentional. But why? Is there some overhead in having the compiler unroll the code versus manually that required more iterations to "even out"?

BenchmarkUpdate 500000 2996 ns/op
BenchmarkManual 500000 4642 ns/op
BenchmarkUnroll 1000000 2824 ns/op
"*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver."

I was going to say this. Using an US-East micro instance reserved for 3 years is cheap as hell for my screen/irssi and occasional VPN needs. The cost per month is something like the change I currently have in my pocket.
I think a fair comparison is very complicated and depends a lot on: do you need to occasionally ramp up the number of servers, do services like Elastic Map Reduce work well in your system for occasional data crunching, do SimpleDB and DynamoDB fit in your architecture, does EBS with high durabilty but slower IO performance meet your needs, does having lots of cheap S3 storage with free inner-data region bandwidth save you money?

If enough of these considerations match your needs, then AWS looks great, otherwise look to dedicated servers.
I learned to stay the fuck away from any company where Andrew Hsu or relatives are involved. And until we see a bunch of ex Airy folks saying this article is full of lies, it's fair to assume it's accurate.
If you want, you may visit reddit.com/r/electronics. Some discussions on /r/ece are also good.
I'm getting the impression that that HBR video has had a much wider penetration than the 5 Why's concept as a whole. This seems to have lead a lot of people to draw the wrong conclusions about even what 5 Why's is really about, let alone how it works.
Surprisingly enough... there is no set rule here. Some people have trouble doing both, others manage both just fine. I would guess there is a correlation between those that really want to achieve both and those that do. Are we going to assume because a few successful people don't have a typical family life that this is because they are successful... and not because they didn't want a typical family life? That seems like a more obvious explanation to me.

So often we look for simple rules as an explanation, but typically outcomes are a result of many smaller factors. It's like the recent discussion here about VC causing more startups to fail vs. succeed. Maybe we can realise that VC isn't the deciding factor, in fact there is likely no single deciding factor, just a bunch of things that impact the outcome.
More related to startups than hackers (but so is Mixergy which is on the list), This Week in Startups (or TWiST), is very entertaining!
Most Perl tutorials do a terrible job of explaining the two or three things you really need to understand to learn Perl syntax. I wrote Modern Perl to rectify that:

http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/
Aren't there any Python-related podcasts? Seems like everything is either Ruby or JS.
Cool, thanks for the info. I will be checking you guys out.

Tilaa.nl is one company does the shady two month cancellation stuff. They suck.

It seems non-Linode VPS providers either have shady cancellation/retention policies OR lack auto-provisioning/pro-rated billing.
A single article, quoting sources, and even giving the founder a chance to respond right in the article itself, is not "internet vigilantism".

We've seen the ugly side of internet vigilantism - anonymous accusations, no chance to respond, personal information posted online, threats and intimidation, the works. But yet, that's not what has happened here - it strikes me as disingenuous to try and color this with a weasel word like "vigilantism" when nothing of the sort has happened.

In your books, me blogging about a terrible previous employer is "vigilantism". Unprofessional perhaps, but vigilantism? Get real.
Thank you for illustrating my point, earl. The damage is done, and the people in this thread are acting like Romans chanting for gladiatorial blood.

In short: vulgar.
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Airy Labs and Ed-Tech Startup Failures
I'm sorry to see you're being down voted. For one of my comparisons, Amazon is orders of magnitude more expensive (because I get bandwidth for free as part of the dedicated server package while Amazon charges... even though the dedicated server is both cheaper and significantly more performant than EC2 instances.)

You made a good argument, made some good points, and you linked to a blog article with real data, so naturally you're getting down voted.

I think its a shame that people apparently fall of the "amazon is a tech company" propaganda. I've worked there. It was like working for walmart. Its not like working for Microsoft (worked there too.) The Amazon hype machine is very strong, but people don't seem to realize it, and the amazon hype isn't strictly honest. (EG: They claimed AWS was "running Amazon.com" at a time when none of Amazon.com was running on AWS. They "leaked" the kindle fire to build hype, and brag about how its selling so well, but never release honest numbers, only bundling the fire with all the other kindles in the few numbers they've released. Lots of puff pieces clearly orchestrated by PR firms trying to paint bezos as a visionary, etc. etc.)
I'm not quite so ready to believe terrible things about Andrew Hsu - there's a non-zero chance that this is a hit-job by disgruntled ex-employees. Nor do we know if 100% of the accusations are 100% true, so assuming complete and utter factual accuracy would be unwise.

But I take issue with jfarmer framing this as vigilantism. TC has brought up specific, verifiable claims of abuse, they have interviewed ex-employees, and they have given Hsu a chance to respond. I don't see how this is "vulgar" or "vigilantism".
I would say, everything considered (thus inevitably comparing apples and oranges at least in some respect), hosting options ordered by longer-term cost from lowest to highest:

1. colocation w/ yours or your admin team physical access

2. AWS

3. normal hosting

And I've put AWS on the 2nd place only due to the ability of replacing or scaling your hardware in minutes.

It's good to know that for $11k a year (paid upfront) plus traffic costs one can run their biggest GPU instance on 10GigE connection, or a 60 GB RAM machine on a normal connection.

I think AWS is absolutely unbeatable for startups where you are not sure about the success upfront.

Also, I'm running my Node.js sites on a Micro instance which I have free for the first year, and $16/mo onwards.
Sorry I overlooked that last bit, we do offer pro-rated billing. The way it works is when a new client orders, that becomes their monthly billing date. Any upgrades are pro-rated with the remaining days in the billing cycle. If you order another package as an existing client on a different date than your monthly billing date, open a ticket with the billing department and we'll pro-rate it with the remaining days in the cycle. Some clients like having different billing dates for their services, others prefer them all to be on the same day each month. We're flexible and will accommodate to your preferences.
The kind that saves you money. ;)

Joking aside, a quality mattress can last for decades (and will often have a manufacturer's guarantee of such). The price of the mattress is surprisingly non-correlated with the annual cost of ownership:

http://www.us-mattress.com/durability.html
If those considerations matched my needs, AWS wouldn't look great because I don't want vendor lock in. That's why they're able to charge high prices-- once you build on their platform, you can't easily migrate elsewhere.

I want to save time by not having to learn Amazon specific APIs (which seem to be terribly engineered, cause every time I want to throw a small project that way I find myself in a morass of poor documentation and way too complificated configurations.)

So, I see that really as an added cost.
> As for the mobile web... even my WebKit Android browser fails often, even on this very text field. There is no single 'webkit for mobile', and it's all the non-iPhone users that are treated as second class citizens, webkit prefixes or not. That's IMO a very different problem.

It's the same problem, and it's just as bad: If there is one dominant implementation, and other browsers can't render the actual web even when they implement the relevant standards - then the web is broken. If it's WebKit vs the rest or iOS vs the rest, it's just as bad.

Regarding your frustration on the Mozilla bug tracker, I've definitely felt that both there and basically on every other major bug tracker. The other day I filed a bug on Node.js, and in 15 minutes there were three responses, saying things like "why is this a bug in node?", "don't file bugs on node like this", and soon after the bug was closed. A few days later, it was confirmed as valid... that's how it goes in big bug trackers ;)

> Ultimately it all comes down to opinion and perception. But I have a hard time finding people who are still excited about Firefox who aren't Mozillians.

I have very much the opposite impression, we probably just visit different websites and communities.
The version of MiniSat (a Chaff-style solver) that won the SAT competition a few years ago is only on the order of five hundred lines of code.

Code: http://minisat.se/MiniSat.html

Paper: http://minisat.se/downloads/MiniSat.pdf
and necessary...

Education is the worlds biggest problems and opportunities right behind healthcare. People risking everything to make the world a better place shouldn't be denigrated like this. Their failure means there is more for someone to learn from.
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'A single article, quoting sources, and even giving the founder a chance to respond right in the article itself, is not "internet vigilantism".'

Yes, it is. This isn't meticulously researched. This is not a 60 Minutes exposé. Did Anthony do any fact checking? Did he spend time researching the company and verifying these people's stories?

No, he wrote an article in the Fox News style. Who needs fact-checking when you can just get people from two opposing camps to contradict each other?

It was gossip. It worked. It's no better than an article about how such-and-such celebrity yelled at a waitress and made her cry.

'In your books, me blogging about a terrible previous employer is "vigilantism".'

Again, yes, by definition.

If you put your name to it I'd think it was distasteful and a little petty, assuming we're talking about bad management and not something criminal.

If you didn't, I'd think you were a coward.

(This is my last response, so you can have the last word if you care to.)
I'm able to get to the site on http now but a few months back I was having the same problem. I couldn't get to the site on http so was using proxies for a while but then realized https worked fine. Not really sure what was going on.. but like I said, all is well now. I'm on Time Warner in the Raleigh NC area.
I wish the downvote action here on HN included a mandatory reason textbox where you'd have to write why you have downvoted, and this action itself would be downvotable. So much political bullshit going on here.
Not convinced with the idea, it isn't solving a problem, and it's more on the extra-features side of github rather than being a site on its own.
A technical solution to a social problem. Freenet & co rely on our right to private communication with whomever we choose and to run whatever software we want on the machines we own.

You cannot have Freenet on a locked-down box that only connects to registered sites (google Minitel for an example of such thing.) That's why it is essential not to rely solely on Freenet/Tor/Mute/whatever.
Using your example, if the said article goes deep into the matter, talks about what methods they've tried, how those methods failed, what was the outcome of using those methods, the couple's discussion on the said methods... then yes, I'd consider the story to have some useful nuggets... but that's assuming the article is non-tabloidy (you're begging the question here)

The article is the price he paid for screwing up, yes. I much prefer entrepreneurs entering the space with a realistic model of their responsibilities, rather than "Do whatever you want, we'll just sweep your mistakes under the rug :)".
I know a lot of people have already said it but I'm going to agree with digg being one of the biggest reasons reddit has done so well. I was amongst the top users on digg in its heyday (had the best overall success rates at hitting the front page second to kevin rose basically). When digg version four came out it really ruined the site. Most people left for reddit. I came here since tech was what I was looking for and this was a much better community for that IMHO.
You can fall back to AWS in those cases.
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I want the machine to be located in U.S because of latency
Ask HN: Whats a reliable cron service?
Hi HN,

I'm building an app and thinking of using phpfog as my hosting provider but they lack cron job features so I was wondering if anyone had any experience with cron jobs as a service providers?

What I need it for is to update and cache rankings every 5 minutes instead of every page execution.

I was hoping anyone had any experience they could share, also preferrable free but willing to pay a monthly fee but would rather not pay per cron execution as I hope to run this cron every 5minutes

Thanks a lot
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It can be used to teach facts. Facts aren't just facts, they are the context around facts. You can't just learn that steel has a UTS of 500 MPa with a density of 7.8 g/cm^3, while aluminium has a UTS of 50 MPa with a density of 2.8 g/cm3.

You could ask students which material is used to build planes, and then discuss which material would be better. At some point, you'll need to introduce the exact figures, but that's a small portion of the lesson. There's a reason why the back page of a textbook can hold most of the facts that the other 300 pages teaches - information and knowledge are mutually inclusive.
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Well, right then, let's all enjoy our Two Minutes Hate.

The claims are hardly specific or verifiable, for what it's worth, and I don't think Anthony sees it as his job to determine what "actually happened." What "actually happened" is incredibly boring, most likely.

Instead we get a Fox News style report where two sides say contradictory things and we cheer on the one we identify with the most.

For example, does Anthony really know that there is an email address that goes to the three adults? Did he do anything to verify it? I think all he knows is that an anonymous employee said there is one.

And even if there is, it's still lurid.

"A vigilante is a private individual who legally or illegally punishes an alleged lawbreaker, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal punishment to an alleged lawbreaker."

I mean, yes, by definition. "The group" has decided Andrew Hsu should be punished publicly for being a terrible manager -- allegedly. Before the internet, maybe a group of people would go over to his house, force him to put a sign around his neck, and march him around the town square for a while?

(This is my last response in this part of the thread. I'll let you have the last word if you'd like.)
This attack is hot precisely bc it blurs the local/remote line.

Physical access is relative. 'Remote' vulns are still exploited with some level of physical access: i.e. via a network that lets you touch bits on the other side of the machine's ethernet jack / wireless card.

The other extreme is standing over the ripped carcass of the machine case, triumphantly raising an unencrypted hard disk over your head, and blowing a kiss to the receptionist on your way out through the main lobby.

The OP's attack can be staged multiple hops away, through a physical network of peripheral devices. In a heavy SAN or PPPoFW environment, where FW cables are regularly disappearing under desks, a somewhat-insider could dump a lot of RAM.

RAM which, for some goddamned reason on OS X, apparently contains an unencrypted copy of my login password?! Ouch.
Agreed. Here's a good relevant blog post by mark maunder challenging the "cloud hype" - http://markmaunder.com/2011/10/31/clouded-vision/

I love some aspects of AWS, but I find it hard to trust them when it comes to the cloud vs. dedicated hosting discussion.
The interesting part of this question are the bits that aren't asked.

I see this when selling software. Prospective clients focus completely on what isn't working in their existing system. If a potential customer asks me "do your reports contain graphs?" then I know their current system can't, and it's an issue. But they assume we can do everything their existing system does well.

Back to this question. Nothing asked about medical facilities (doesn't everywhere have practicing dentists, doctors and an optometrist when my glasses break?)

What about education, internet, transportation? What about housing, roads, running water or electricity?

Clearly the answers to the above will make a huge difference in the location he finally ends up in. I really hope he gets some answers to the post, because it makes a rear analogy when talking to clients about software. It's helpful for them to understand that while its good to know what you want, it's also good to articulate the things you want, but which you take for granted.

That which goes without saying, goes better with saying.
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> I’ve never had to deal with testing all that heavily in statically typed languages,

Lack of tests means bugs now, or later when you're refactoring. They're pretty essential in static languages, too, although you can certainly lean on the compiler for many things.

Anecdotally, my bugs usually aren't caused by having passed in the wrong kind of an object.
I remember when there were things like this (maybe not quite as high quality) almost all the time on HN. :(
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Whether it arguably could be or not, I think we both know this is never going to be prosecuted, which is why I agree with grellas' take on it.

(edited to fix grammar)
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