skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that pricey. Let's Price EC2 against SoftLayer (which are actually the two most common hosts for YC companies).

SoftLayer
4x2GHz cores
16GB RAM
2TB Bandwidth
250GB RAID 1 storage
500GB backup
$999

EC2
4x2.4GHz cores ($576)
15GB RAM
2TB Bandwidth ($340)
250GB EBS storage ($25)
Backup (~$50)
$991

To be fair, they aren't equivalent systems completely.

* Amazon you can scale up or down your bandwidth and just pay for usage.

* SoftLayer you have a 1,000Mbit port rather than the 250Mbit port in EC2.

* Amazon you can scale storage effortlessly, SoftLayer you need physical drives or to pay for their NAS at $0.40/GB.

* Amazon you can provision in minutes, SoftLayer takes hours.

* Amazon snapshots are easy, don't know about SoftLayer.

* SoftLayer often runs promotions like double RAM and double HD so you can knock the price down by $120/mo based on that.

AWS isn't cheap, but it's easy. SoftLayer is offering a great deal too, but I like (at least the concept of) being able to launch a new box within 5 minutes if one dies and being able to just say, "hey, do a delta snapshot to S3, thanks!" rather than dealing with creating a reliable backup strategy. I do love the idea of getting a 32GB RAM server for the price of a 16GB one and a 1,000Mbit port, but I don't want to give up the ease that Amazon offers.

So, AWS isn't so out of the ballpark. There's a premium for the complete flexibility to scale storage from 1GB to several TB (or even petabytes with S3) and the ability to launch instances on demand and backup with no hassle and I'm willing to pay that if it's reasonable and AWS is reasonable.
I'm so used to seeing bad news, I was trying to figure this one out. "So, this is a big step backwards for us, then, right? Oh, wait."
I think Dale Carnegie's feedback to Microsoft would have sounded thusly:

===

Dear Sir:

I wish to express my most sincere admiration of your company's business leadership over the years and its continued relevance in all matters of public life.

I am especially fond of your Windows XP product, as its ease of use and popularity are unparalleled. It was very generous of you to trust your users to do the right thing when it comes to multimedia copyright.

Your Windows Vista product also shows a lot of promise and I'm sure your company's renewed emphasis on security and stability is appreciated by many.

I can't wait to see what you will come up with next!

===
While I realize much of the capitalist world still operates this way, I'd be hesitant about anyone who asked for a business plan. While a business plan isn't entirely a waste of time, there's just so much of it dedicated to pulling meaningless numbers out of your ass as to be an exercise in futility, and it gives them something to be pissed at you about later if you miss your fictional quotas.

And if I even heard the phrase "pro forma" I'd run.
You can download a ready-made keyboard installation package at http://colemak.com/Windows.
> You can find HTTP cache servers on Google Groups from 1995, a year before he claims to have invented them, and you can find discussions of them dating back to '93.

The CERN httpd did caching in 1993 or maybe even before. And the Harvest Cache (now called Squid) was started at least by 1994.

> [...] As a result, FTP and HTTP servers find themselves swamped with requests for the same popular files, like the demand for images of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet which saturated NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's wide-area network links in July 1994. As a result, there has been an attempt to retrofit caches for internet information system servers like the popular CERN proxy-http cache. One recently developed cache which deserves further examination is the Harvest cache, which boasts improved performance of an order of magnitude over the CERN cache and even over popular http daemons like Netscape's Netsite and NCSA's 1.4 httpd.
Zed's point 3 is fascism not libertarianism.

Fascism the the standard straw man to throw at libertarians.

And because I can't bare to go through this again, let me just say:

Hitler was a vegetarian, and if you're a vegetarian you're a nazi.

Good day and Goodwin!
Ranch Style Home 3 BR / 2 Bath - 2 car garage (housing rentals/new york/281294)
KPSS BASVURULARi
I've been in the situation you've described (and I've been part of the problem). And yes, it can be really frustrating. Some teams don't work. And sometimes a single person makes or breaks a team. This is fascinating by itself, but a bit off topic.

The big difference is that online the reader to writer ratio is way different. Online, when somebody points out that a hash-map insert is amortized O(1) instead of O(1) hundreds or thousands of people benefit.

When the contractor tries to convince you that a scattered shower is different from a heavy mist (even though you're not in the least interested) nobody benefits. It's just noise.
You refuse to allow login during the delay period. That is, after the 5th failed login, for the next 16 seconds, if the user tries to login, you say "Wait sometime before trying again." You do not accept and check the credentials supplied during this time. You simply refuse to begin the authentication process until the delay period has elapsed.
Why 1980? The Zune came out in what, 2006? I realize it's more or less arbitrary, but why not 2000.
criticism is not constructive if it cannot be.

Criticizing vista is generally little other than an exercise of complaining, whining, etc. Microsoft most likely does not hear the majority of it, and therefore cannot do anything about it. You cannot do anything about vista's poor qualities other than not use it.

Criticism is only truly useful when it can have a positive impact.

Imagine saying, I don't think it should have rained today. Although phrased as a criticism, there is no possible good change that can come from that statement. Therefore, it is simply a complaint.

Truly, however, criticizing vista in the proper venues and at times where some good can come of it could be constructive, generally, however, it is as useful as criticizing god for the weather. If you want it different, go elsewhere.
This argument is actually interesting, but I didn't get the slightest hint that it was what Zed was really talking about.
Except that the code that caused it was written by Freescale.

http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/the-zune-lie-y2k9-bug-is-...
And we could call it "The Argument Clinic" (Tagline: "The right room for an argument")
But printing money and expanding the money supply have different effects on the economy. Printing money necessarily causes inflation; expanding the money supply does not ( it depends on where AD and AS are relative to each other).
"overflow: scroll" doesn't force a line-wrap. What you're thinking of is the "white-space" property.
I am not sure you understand how hedging works. You don't go short and long on the same stock to hedge. You generally take one position (long or short) on the stock you are speculating on, and you take the opposite position with stocks in its peer group to protect against swings in the industry. The basis of the hedge is that stock performance is correlated within sub-industry. With a short squeeze like the one of VW stock, this type of a hedge wouldn't have helped.

But that was not my main point for this reply.

The German regulators should care about financial transparency, because even hedge funds (and even naked speculators) provide an counter force to the natural tendency of the stock market to always go up. if shorting was not allowed, the market has a natural tendency to go upwards. everyone benefits from the market always going up -- the buyer, the seller, the company, etc. a buyer can always sell the stock for more later. no one would benefit from a price drop. however, the stock price growth may not have anything to do with reality of company's books. shorting stocks helps keep the stock at a reasonable price point because when the stock price rises unreasonably, plenty of people would like to gain from its pending downward spiral.

as an example, look at china. no shorting is allowed there. their stock market went up, up, up. the balance shorting provided was not not presence. when people realized how vastly over rated the stock market was, it got hit. hit hard. now, it is one of the hardest hit market out there.

shorting (and other financial maneuvers) only work with greater transparency of information.

note that the hedge funds did take a big gamble and paid the price. I do not feel sorry for them.

(Anyway, I am sure I didn't do a thorough job of explaining the benefits of shorting and transparency.)
I've written more business plans than I care to think about. This is my experience:

1) A business plan is a marketing document. Usually you are using it to sell your business to banks, investors or partners. You have to think of your audience when you write it. An investor likes to see projected revenues that are high and don't mind that there's a risk - banks are the other way around.

2) Don't use business plans as a plan of how to run your company, write a one page strategy note instead. I have never seen a businessplan that was followed 100% and turned into a successful business. Everything changes fast in a startup, and you have to adapt accordingly.

3) Make sure you don't write something in your businessplan you can't honor. Investors and banks will look at it and blame you if they invested money and you don't live up to what you have written. Make sure to have escape routes. (If this and this market condition is true we will do such and such, if it isn't we can't do jack shit, we expect to do such and such but require this or that to reach these lofty goals) This will give you leverage and deniability in later negotiations.

4) Make sure you use a lot of sources to underpin and validate your assumptions (Gartner projects that within the next five years this trend will do something, making it inevitable that we will make loads of money since we're currently the only ones in this business) This will lend you credibility.

5) Make good budgets, and talk about your assumptions in the business plan. Budgets are the first thing investors look at. Particularly the assumptions behind the numbers.

6) Beware of investors that think everything in your business plan is a road map that simply needs to be followed in order to attain fame, glory and fuck-you money: They don't know what they're talking about.
Unemployed architect gives advice for a nickel
PowerTOP on my Atom-using MSI Wind netbook shows a hair under 10 Watts total consumption at idle, and up to 13 Watts used under heavy load. There are probably some tweaks I could do to drop that even more but I think I've hit diminishing returns in that respect. I'm getting about 5 hours of real-life usage on the 6-cell battery.

Incidentally, the backlight on this thing is almost too powerful. I keep it on the lowest setting even on AC power because it's just that bright.
Just practice a softer delivery. Instead of saying "I don't like how this is..." or "This sucks because..." say: "This is good and it would be even better if ...". This way you're not saying anything negative at all, but at the same time voicing the things you believe should be improved.
I agree. Indeed, if you criticize the choices a professional made in his area of expertise, you are often criticizing their competence and/or intelligence by implication.

Often, the right target for criticism is supposed to be the person himself. For example, if someone without the right domain knowledge or understanding of math deluded himself into thinking he knows enough and starts messing things up, you really don't want to help him along.

Imagine some VB noob "fixing" your mission-critical Lisp code, saying it would have been easier if it was all ported to .NET or something.

Dealing with all these situations in the best way possible requires a lot of finesse, I'm sure.

I just noticed, in retrospect, that such a blunt approach as not giving any criticism ever is STILL better (for me, not my employer necessarily) than what I was doing.
Programming as Design
PowerShell ABC's - N is for Numbers
Treasure Mapping Reveals Path to Lost Retail Revenue
I'm not sure where this idea that it is "mostly used for sudoku solvers" comes from. While clearly insulting, it is also clearly false.

The breadth of code on http://hackage.haskell.org/ gives witness to this, with just on 1000 libraries written over the last 18 months, most heavily weighted towards networking, graphics, guis, databases, and so on.

Similarly, the industrial users , http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry , aren't writing sudoku solvers, but are finance houses, defense contractors, game companies, bioinformatics places, hardware dessign, a full range of applications, for a general purpose language.
Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3
For the sake of a working solution I also just store passwords in encrypted files (using encfs, though) and stop worrying about accessing everything from my non-main computers.

Script for new passwords follows, for the fun of it. I have stuff added afterwards to save the username, website, and password to encrypted files.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import string
from random import Random
okchars = string.letters + string.digits + "!@%^_&*+-"
print ''.join( Random().sample(okchars, 40) )
I think Zed should stick to Ruby rants.
The architect, John Morefield, also gives online advice for a nickel. His website is http://www.architecture5cents.com.

Yet another example of someone adapting and adopting the Free to Fruitful business model.
Designing in public can improve your business
Boxee gets BBC iPlayer, Joost and MTV Music Support
Seth's Blog: The thing about goals
Pelicans Mysteriously Falling from Sky on West Coast
> If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks

not necessarily. Remember Windows Mobile already runs on ARM so Microsoft already has plenty of experience porting to RISC machines (not to mention DEC alphas way back) I think MS could do it fairly easily if there really wanted to.
Neat.

It took me a while to figure out how to "undo" the slide. First I tried clicking the link that triggered the slide, then I tried clicking around the side pane itself, then I looked for links that might close the side pane, then I finally clicked the original page and it slid back into focus.

And, that's the unfortunate problem with cool javascript UI enhancements. Unless they win the javascript lotto and become really popular / prevalent, users often don't know know what to do... Which is a shame.

But, nevertheless, nice effect.
"Intel Outlook Pared Again" as AMD announces Phenom II and SanDisk announces new SSDs
That could be, but there's got to be a solution that doesn't force me to set my browser window to 1920 pixels wide to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar.
The purpose of a business plan is to show that you've given some thought to how you'll run and grow the business. Anyone who thinks that's an exercise in futility will have a hard time getting funding.

If you have an idiot investor, sure they might be pissed at you because of missed quotas, but you can also use them to look at your cash flow. If miss my Q4 quota by 30%, does that cause me to go bankrupt in Q2 this year? If I've spend the time setting up a cash flow budget, I'll know ahead of time, and can plan accordingly, if not, some day you're just going to hit a wall.

A business plan is basically a collection of things that are pretty smart to think about and write down. Things can change, and should change, but that is also easier with a business plan - you'll update it, and that'll give you an idea what else you need to change to accommodate the new environment.

Taking things as they come may work reasonably well for a 1-2 person setup, paying the bills with on-the-side consulting, hoping to go bootstrapped some time, but once someone is ready to dump real money in your lap, I'd be very hesitant about anyone being quite so lax about the sense in putting to paper what you're going to do with that money, and how the investor can hope to get paid.
Too bad Ben Franklin didn't know about Twitter...
I went whole hog and switched to the Kinesis Contoured and to the Dvorak layout. I'm an Emacs user, and had been one since before the switch. I'd also touch typed qwerty before the switch.

A few comments:

* The first week or two is almost completely unproductive. You spend most of your time screaming at your fingers to just shut up and get used to the new arrangement.

* Once you make the adjustment, although your typing speed goes up, it doesn't go up by a large amount. The real benefit of Dvorak is typing comfort. Also, your accuracy will probably increase a bit.

* Switching to dvorak while using Emacs was not a problem at all. Not sure if it would be more difficult for Vim users.

* Switching to the Kinesis Contoured is a vast improvement over those "regular" keyboards most people use.

* After the switch, I rapidly and completely lost all my ability to touch type in qwerty. It just vanished in that first week or so. Nowadays, if I'm stuck on a machine without dvorak, I'm reduced to ridiculously slow hunting-and-pecking. If I were to open Emacs or Vim on such a machine (and I know the basics of Vim), I would scarcely be able to quit either program without damaging something.

* Things are a bit of a pain on Macs, since they have that extra "Command" key, and the Contoured only really makes Ctrl and Alt readily available (2 Ctrl keys and 2 Alt keys). You can remap Command to one key of one of those, but you don't want to lose any of them if you're an Emacs user.
Ditto. I find that tend to read more carefully and fully offline than on too.
Some ways in which the government helps large corporations:

Subsidies, government contracts, regulations designed to increase barrier to entry, a legal system which favors those with more resources, beneficial legislation which can be bought through legalized bribery (lobbying and campaign contributions)
There is a hypocrisy in libertarianism à la Mises. When you read his hyper-logical texts (wich should be appealing to the HN crowd btw), he claims that we should remove any sort of ideology from our political and economical systems. Reason and logic only should govern our lives, and it is the duty of economics to aim at this goal.

Sure, sounds attractive !

But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different, it's not an ideology like marxism or catholicism. It's THE way. It is the only path to reason and logic and science, because when we reduce the role of the state, we reduce the part of ideology in society. Therefore it must be the less ideological system of all, the most logical, and thus the the right one.

Of course, liberatarians turn out to be just like any other political sensibility. They agree on broad things that makes them look like unite only because they are a tiny minority in the political landscape. But like any other sensibility, you reach a point in the debate where their own camp is split up in two and they will fight each other, etc. It wouldn't be the case if it wasn't an ideology, and they would all agree on core issues like the private/public fire stations, or even health wich should be considered like any other good for some, but not for some others (I can tell because I have some libertarians friends). The above comments about the protection from plagues are very interesting. It leads to the very interesting history of sewers.

Mises is the reflect of his century when we were too optimistic about science, we believed it would soon answer all the questions even in fields that looked like non-scientific, like human organization. It turned out science is indeed good for changing our lives in an indirect way, but unfortunatly not so good outside real scientific fields. It doesn't answer philosophical questions (if such a science existed, then it would be the right one to follow for organizing human societies).
I've seen these things in the sky over Stockport about 6 times now, they're never falling, always travelling as a plane would. On new years eve four of us saw one going along as usual but then split into 3 and go in different directions. Whatever these things are they seem to have a flight path over our house as we've only been there 6 months and seen them 6 times! I've seen mereorites falling before and they're definately not those and I live near Manchester airport and know for a fact they're nothing to do with planes. They are definately big balls of fire travelling through the sky. Weird!!!!!
Confession: I love Flex, but we're parting ways in 40 or so days
> 4. I can't wait to see the Apple commercials calling Windows 7 Vista 2 ;-)

That's partially true - the internal version number for Windows 7 is 6.1 (Windows Vista being 6.0):

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/1...
DoS is a different problem. That's about trying to soak up the entire bandwidth of your servers using lots of computers.

If you are throttling number of login attempts per account then it doesn't matter what the IP address being used is.
Sounds like a job for user preferences.
I don't quite follow. Isn't buying shares de facto "investing" ?

(You may have a point on the shorting of shares, but that serves a purpose too; to devalue overpriced assets)
This is called a straw man fallacy. If you had originally said this, instead of resorting to another logical fallacy, you might have been taken more seriously.
When compared to the neighborliness of a tiny village or the freedom and peace or huge ranch or a villa in the mountains or the life of a city, suburbs truly are the worst kind of compromise.
How about if Steve Jobs smoked a pipe?
How to learn CouchDb
Collection of CouchDb available info
You should also remember to throttle login attempts for accounts that don't exist.

It's important not to create new attack vectors that don't already exist when implementing security features.

If you don't throttle accounts that don't exist then a brute force attempt can be used to determine which logins are valid for a given service. This information can then be combined with targeted phishing attacks, etc.
Note that "hedge funds" is kind of a misnomer. A hedge fund is just like any other fund, except that it's less regulated and exclusively for rich people (the thinking being that rich people need less gov't regulation over their money because, well, they're rich).

They don't make money by literally "hedging their bets."
If you wanted any indication to show how desperate FB are to monetize, consider their aggressive introduction of invasive (and I suspect redundant) ads over the last two months. There's no master plan there - the redundancy of "users first, monetize later philosophy" has seriously screwed up any plan they may once have had.
My advice to them: subscriptions, by the end of the year, before they start falting on their datacentre bills. People can't flock to a new free version of fb because nobody would fund it now.
I used a different layout based on dvorak optimized for the german language. You get very, but it sucks if you have to use a different computer, then you hack with two fingers.
I switched back. If you only use your own computer go for it. Otherwise I wouldn't do it.

Rockin Regards,
Marco
That's a stupid resolution! 5 cents please.

Seriously though, I prefer to go Socratic when I disagree on a technical question. I don't want to prove to myself or anyone else that I'm right. I do want to draw someone else into my way of thinking.

If my partner in argument manages to answer the questions I thought were subtle and revealing, maybe my understanding was incomplete. In that case, I should have been asking questions all along anyway. Depending on how sarcastic your questions sound at the beginning, you can probably change stance from know-it-all to ignoramus without anyone noticing.

If a problem has a settled answer in the public record, send a link. Not everyone considers the same sources authoritative, though.
P2P highway traffic control