skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AWS, no hesitation.

AWS isn't that hard to configure. ElasticFox puts a nice GUI to it and while it will take a short while to get used to the AWS way of doing things, you're better off.

With AWS, you have a nice spray files everywhere storage in S3, EC2 provides lots of RAM and CPU muscle, EBS provides RAID-level reliable persistent storage for EC2 that can be backed up to multiple data centers with a single API call, CloudFront even gives you the chance to have static files served from 12 different locations in the world making your latency very small. If you need more servers, no problem just wait a few minutes for them to boot. If you need more bandwith, it's automatic. If you need more storage, S3 is infinite and EBS can always give you more (you can even stripe the drives so that you could have terrabyte after terrabyte of storage as a single drive).

Dedicated servers have little upside. You're relying on physical hardware in a very acute fashion. While AWS runs on real hardware, there's an abstraction level which helps a lot. Let's say you're small and want a single box. That box fails, you call your host and get a new one in a couple hours, you restore from backups for another couple hours maybe and you're back online. Of course, many often don't test their disaster recovery scenarios that well and are often met with little problems. With AWS, you simply boot another machine off that image and you're good. Worst case, your EBS gets trashed and you say, "hey, S3, rebuild that EBS drive". Easy by comparison.

Real boxes are a pain. You have to deal with RAID, backups, how fast your company can provision new boxes, bleh! AWS (or even Slicehost and Linode) isolate you from a lot of that mess. There's a reason virtualization is the hot new topic.

AWS isn't that hard to use. It's definitely different, but it makes so many other things so much less painful. If you want some of the benefits of AWS with a "simple as dedicated" feel, try Slicehost. You can get instances with as much as 15.5GB of RAM and they just give you the instance with your choice of Linux on it. From there, you can install Apache, MySQL, other. And you get benefits like cheap and easy backups - they just store an image of the machine. Then, if you need more capacity, you can boot one of those images as a new instance, now you have another server. If one of their servers fails, they can easily migrate your instance to another box. RAID10 is already set up. Easy.

If you're worried about AWS' management being a little different, don't worry too much. It's not that bad once you start using it - just a tad hard to imagine without trying it. If you're still worried, Slicehost will give you instances that will work like you're used to dedicated hosting working, but with many of the advantages of AWS.
Hosting on EC2 might not be cost effective when you only need one server, but once you start need multiple servers the advantages quickly add up.

I'm currently a customer of Amazon, Softlayer, Serverbeach and few cheap VPS elsewhere. I find that each has their advantages.

Need cheap bandwidth - nothing beats Serverbeach (youtube ran their CDN on serverbeach boxes until they went to google). If you need a small number of dedicated boxes, Softlayers support is worth the extra money (I usually get softlayer boxes for about $50+serverbeach costs -- and softlayer includes private net in that cost).

EC2 is great if you are going to be scaling up/down or have interesting synergies with S3. (filesystem snapshotting, free bandwidth, ...)

Small VPSes are great when you are building to prove an idea - a couple bucks a month while you have no traffic.

I also find using EC2 for one time tasks preferable. Spin up 10 instances to do a massive amount of computation or to do load testing.
Windows 7 will ship as Version 6.1
plus they have Real Academia Española to regulate the intake of new words while English doesn't :)
I'd say that if it isn't obvious why you would need AWS, then you don't need AWS and should go with a standard dedicated server provider.

Configuration should be the least of the reasons to make the decision. The many other factors are much more important than configuration.
I've said for a while now that spam would be a much smaller problem if every e-mail sent cost 1/100¢. Normal users wouldn't notice the charges (how many e-mails do you really send?), but massive spam-bot orgs couldn't hope to pay the fees. Really, of all the ways that advertisers can spam (junk mail, telemarketing, flyers, TV commercials), e-mail is the only medium that is essentially cost-free.

Actually, now that Amazon has its "Requester Pays" system, I'm just waiting for someone to setup a messaging service that charges fees to send me something (think encryption key stored on S3 that must be payed for and downloaded before e-mail can be sent to me).
> "Also, you know that airports queue planes, right?"

Yeah, but usually a queued plane is waiting on the tarmac, not at the gate, right? Fixing boarding delays may not always lead to earlier takeoffs, but it can definitely get planes pushed out of the gate faster (freeing that gate for other planes).

Also, boarding time probably depends a lot on the type of plane (ie, even more so than fueling time does). I fly trans-Atlantic every now and then -- boarding a 747 full of people who don't fly regularly almost always takes more than 30 minutes.

Maybe boarding time isn't a delay for small planes, but I'd bet it is for big planes.
I see it every now and again.
Google is trying to get people to move to _faster_ browsers, meaning Firefox 3, Chrome or IE8 (and definitely not IE7). IE8 gets less attention because it is still in beta. I don't see an anti-MS stance there.
Phase 4, "Winter":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West#Phases_of_r...
I find most of the content on HN great - have a look at the front page now, it's largely balanced and good. The list pg posted is also spot on.

My only qualm is with articles like 90% of those on http://www.reddit.com/r/politics and http://www.reddit.com/r/business . I believe that if we don't keep a watchful eye on things, HN will turn into something similarly intelligence-free and I'd hate to see that happen.
Ask HN: Review New Startup - Trafficspaces (its like having a Facebook Ads for your site).
I would like to get comments from the community about our startup - Trafficspaces.

http://www.trafficspaces.com

Trafficspaces is an ad management service that helps publishers create self-service user interfaces for their advertisers.

It is like having your very own Facebook Ads system customied/branded for your site.

We reckon it will be a smash hit with publishers because 1) it saves money for publishers and 2) it helps them reach more advertisers. This is particulary important in a recessionary economic environment.

We created Trafficspaces because we think a branded self service interface is infinitely better than the manual, time consuming email based ad processes that many publishers currently use.

Please take some time out to have a look at our site, and our demo and tell us what you think.

We appreciate your time.

Thanks in advance.
Niyi
It seems clear to me the SEC has failed as an institution. I tend to agree with the author that the revolving door policy whereby ex-regulators become bankers for the banks they were previously regulating is no longer acceptable.
Base hosting for an AWS small image (if that's still the correct terminology -- equates to about a 1.8Ghz Xeon with 512Mb RAM or so) is $72.50 a month in machine time. That's to keep the machine running only, not counting bandwidth. Their bandwidth is confusing to me, so I can't really speak to that, and I've only been dealing with me and the machines so far (no users), so I can't speak to how that works out at all.

That said, $75 a month or so can get you a small dedicated server in some places that includes a fixed amount of bandwidth, or more predictably priced hosting at slicehost or somewhere similar.

If your application doesn't need to scale, then AWS probably doesn't make sense. If you do, then it does.

As an AWS noob myself, the only confusion I had were with the very initial setup (in using the keys provided to authenticate and whatnot) -- and in the initial server configuration. The major differences you'll need to be aware of are as follows:

- The AMI image (basically just a virtual image) is static. You can't save files to this and expect them to exist after a reboot. That took a second to get my head around, after configuring apache and rebooting, wondering where it all went.

- Set up your base OS, then save the AMI. It was confusing to me figuring out exactly what needed to go where, and remapping my server between 'fixed' and 'dynamic' content and making sure that they were in appropriate places. This includes your web server configurations, disk mounts, /var/ directories, etc. User generated data, SQL data, and (probably) your website data will be stored on either an elastic block or to an S3 bucket. The important thing to note here is that you configure your OS to look how you want it to be every time you wipe it clean. Perhaps you put your web application on it, perhaps you don't. I could see using AMIs as a sort of version control for your apps, but I don't know your use case.

- The elastic IPs threw me. Don't release them on production instances. lol. Effectively, it maps an IP address to your machine virtually, which means it can be moved around. Your DNS points at the EIP which can be a single apache instance, or later, a load balancer -- all configurable within a couple minutes.

Other than that, it took me less than $10 worth of AWS resources to configure a couple servers, deploy my app and get it configured to how it would be in the real world if I were to migrate, so you should definitely check it out. There's no major upfront commitment like there is with dedicated hosting, so there's really no excuse not to familiarize yourself with it.

Also, you definitely want the elasticfox plugin if you're going to do anything with it. I'd point you at the following resources, which got me up and running within a few hours.

- ElasticFox Plugin - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

- ElasticFox Owner's Manual (PDF) - http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/elasticfox-owners-manu...

- Configuring MySQL to use ElasticBlock storage - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
I should definitely try out AWS. It's a bit of work, but the docs are good and I think it's a useful experience to at least know a bit about how it actually works.

Since you pay for AWS by the hour (and bandwidth), you can more easily switch to a dedicated server from AWS than the other way around.

If your application doesn't need to deal with peaks of traffic or potentially scale up fast, going with a (couple of) dedicated servers is probably a more cost effective option.

If you do need to deal with peaks or fast scaling, also check out http://scalr.net/
Submit stuff that interests you with a title. If the community agrees it'll also get upvoted, if not no harm. Unless you're flooding the new page, which can happen accidentally sometimes.
I do an automatic daily dump of all databases and an automatic rsync of the dump and all code, git repository + other files to a disk in a different location. Surely this could be improved upon, but I think it's a good start.
1. Make it read-only and keep around for 3 months. It's not like hosting a static site costs a lot of money these days.

2. Take the site down for a month and bring it back online for one final month. This should get everyone's attention.

Above and beyond all, they could actually start caring about the impact they make on people. When driving down the road I slow down to avoid splashing pedestrians with water - they never paid aything to me and it slows me down, yet I try to be conscious of the impact I could make.
GitCred: PageRank applied to the GitHub users/followers graph, implemented in Clojure.
Gaza map comparison - Google Maps vs Microsoft Virtual Earth vs Open Street Map
Phishing Slamming into Twitter
Maybe his bet is that CPUs will become massively multicore "soon enough".
So, just to comment on the disk reads: the local, non-persistent disks don't offer great speeds (you're right). However, that shouldn't matter too much now. All of your application code should fit in memory once it's been read off the disk and so you shouldn't be hitting the local disks much after boot. Static files should be on S3 and databases should be stored on EBS.

EBS has great performance. RightScale noted that they got over 70MB/s with sysbench and over 1000 I/O operations per second. If you want more performance, you can even stripe across EBS volumes.

EBS really helped EC2's viability a ton. EC2 users now have access to cheap, reliable, and fast storage.
I wasn't talking about CDS, and I am aware that Blythe Masters is credited with inventing the CDS while at JPM. I think it's still too early to tell if CDS are good or bad on the whole. Ultimately, they're just insurance contracts, which have been around for hundreds of years. But that's another discussion.

I'm talking specifically about subprime. JPM and Goldman explicitly decided at the very highest levels of management to remain uninvolved in certain areas of the subprime mortgage market. Chase did originate subprime loans, but it did not securitize them and for a long time, did not make a market in subprime bonds. Chase also stayed away from certain areas of alt-A lending, in particular option ARMs, which have become one of the most toxic forms of mortgage debt. Also, JPM didn't purchase billions upon billions of subprime bonds and subprime-backed CDOs, like Merrill, UBS, Citi, and other banks did. That's why JPM has taken "only" $6bn in writedowns over the past 18 months, vs. over $30bn each for Citi, Merrill, and UBS. And yet Jamie Dimon remained CEO of JPM through the mortgage lending boom, despite staying away from its most lucrative areas.

You might find the following article interesting: http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/29/news/companies/tully_jpmorga...
Source Code: http://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-garden/tree/master/gitcred
I have once gone for 30 days without logging into my hotmail account (vacation and all). When I came back it was erased, along with 10 years worth of emails and contact information. Needless to say I will stay away from anything MSN - they have proven that they don't care.
Nightly backups to S3 and to our in-office dev machine. We also all have copies of the code base that we are constantly pulling from Git, so the only thing to really worry about is DBs.
We have a trivial implementation that does a full backup and prepends the date/time stamp to the backed up filename.

We call it from crontab to run once a day with the following:

java -jar s3backup.jar /etc/iptables-save /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf ...

You just list out which files you wanted backed up, and then they show up in your bucket as:
yyyyMMddHHmmssZ-filename

Code is here: http://3banana.com/pics/S3Backup.java

You need Amazon's Java S3 libary which you can snag from here:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

If you want to toss it into a JAR and simplify startup use the following META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Created-By: IntelliJ IDEA
Main-Class: com.threebanana.S3Backup
Sequence 3: Unload checked baggage, then load the new baggage.

Still - agreed - the unload/clean/board sequence in probably the longest one
If you fly transatlantic, then those planes require more than an hour on the ground before flight. And planes get queue times allocated as soon as possible and pre-planned, not just when they leave.
Good points, but please refrain from using British and English interchangeably.
Again, I'm not certain that free markets are the answer. It may be that telecom is fated to suck, and the regulated alternative sucks less than the complete laissez-faire one. But I am fairly certain that telecom sucks at least in part because of regulation.
I'm talking without much experience here

"Again, this was a heavily CPU based technique while the industry was trending towards being CPU-bound." -- isn't the industry now trending in the opposite way? ie - everything is becoming a CPU (and it has more and more cores)
Near the beginning of my last "real" relationship, I responded jokingly to something she said with "don't ever piss me off." Apparently, though, there was something "in my eyes" when I said it that scared the crap out of her. In the year we were together I think we only had one fight and as soon as I raised my voice (which I rarely do in general) it was over.

To this day I don't know how I managed that "look", but something tells me if I could perfect it I could win fights indefinitely. And possibly frighten bears.
I found that the best way to submit a good comment is to edit your comment at least 3 times. Anyway, I found that this feature is a bit annoying especially some people edit their comments straight after someone replies to the comment.

Sometimes, I even see some replies are totally unrelated to the comment because the commentor change the comment after people put replies to the comment.

And, never write a reply that is against PG if you want to keep your karma point high. Some people will downvote your reply blindly.
"President of Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented (volunteer), founding director and math coach for Edina Center for Academic Excellence (career), homeschooling father of four children." - extracted from the profile of tokenadult.

He is a grown up man with four children. Not longer a boy.
My development machine runs Windows because I mainly work in Flash and occasionally Java/JSP and PHP, which all have perfectly good Windows support. Dual booting or maintaining a separate machine to develop in the more "Linuxy" languages would be an unnecessary inconvenience.

On the other hand, I've been thinking for quite a while that I could just run a virtual Linux and get all the benefits that way. I just haven't quite got around to it. Any Windows users interested in detailing the pros/cons?
You forgot to close the
BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
so you'll run out of file descriptions if backing up too many files. And bis.read(jpgByte); doesn't necessary read all of the files; at least som java versions on some Solaris versions doesn't.
for in-progress code and data, we use Dropbox for everything, with two geographically segmented local caches. recovery takes only a few minutes.
Probably in Canada. Maybe not in the US.
My first thought on reading that was, "some people don't know that?!"

My immediate next thought was, "I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

Is there a wiki for this sort of thing? There needs to be one.
Brainscans support the case for long-term love
"We simplify environmental legal obligations and maintain your legal register." <- Curse of Knowledge. For a layman like me, I really had hard time understanding this sentence.
Cool, but if you really want to blow your mind, look at some of the tricks for diagonallizing Hessians!
Does living smaller mean having to give up things (such as replacing socks with holes)?

The majority of Americans can take simpler steps. For example, buy larger containers. So, I'm a young post-college student trying to save as much money as I can and most of my friends make wages that are barely double the federal poverty line and we're in the Boston area. So, we buy as large a container as we can to save money. When I'm with people not of that demographic, I see the opposite. Those 8oz Poland Spring bottles abound - in the homes of environmentally conscious people. Saran wrap and plastic bags to be thrown away replace tupperware-style containers.

You don't need to decide that old, crappy, ripped socks need to be repaired. Buy that huge thing of soap to refill the one or two small containers you actually need. Get a nalgene or similar bottle to use for water or other liquids. If you want soda at work, get a 2-liter bottle and a reusable glass rather than constantly buying cans and 20-oz bottles. Don't get single meal wrapped stuff.

I love people living smaller, but I don't think most people will do what the author has done (but congrats to him for accomplishing it). Still, there are little things you can do that don't affect your quality of life that really do make a difference. It's not that hard to do it, the problem is that it's so easy not to do it. Buying a reusable glass and 2-liter bottles requires a tiny bit of planning and forethought when that vending machine is there with wonderfully easy, single serving containers.
"How can better vision not be at the top of my to-do list?" (to quote comedian Brian Regan).
I disagree with some of the suggestions in the essay, but I think your assumption here is a little unfair.

You're right that serious domestic disputes never actually have a 'winner', in that their very existence is an indication of a breakdown in the relationship somewhere to the extent that emotions boiled up to the point of a verbal fight. Even if you win one of those arguments in the traditional sense, both sides still lose because of the breakdown in trust and the hurt experienced by the losing side.

But Crichton seemed to understand that. His essay contains advice not on how to triumphantly win each and every fight as though you were in a high school debate, but rather on how to resolve domestic disputes without them turning into fights, how to limit the emotional damage fights can cause and, importantly, how to do all of that without being weak and merely acquiescing to the demands of your partner no matter what. As such, it's really better described as a guide to domestic dispute resolution.
This seems like a very unusual configuration. Can you explain why you chose it? If you control the hardware and software, how does the VM layer help you scale better? Why not just install whatever packages you need on whatever servers you have, and skip the added complexity and performance cost of virtualization? Is there an assumption that at some point you'll move part of your operations to AWS or a similar service? Or is some of your software buggy enough that it needs to be contained within a VM?

I'm not trying to judge, this just seems like a weird choice and I'd like to know what motivated it.
Is there any example that I can see the "self-service user interfaces"?

And, I don't think that your service is comparable to Facebook Ads System where you can target the demographic you want which your service doesn't not provide.

Anyway, I don't think you are going to read the feedbacks I leave since you just created a dummy account to promote your website.
How can the author claim Firefox is Google's ally? Does he not realize that Chrome is a WebKit browser? Is he completely unaware of the recent TraceMonkey vs. SquirelFish Extreme vs. V8 battle?

All Google is doing is telling its users like it is...There's a lot of advancement in the world of browsers, and Microsoft's not a part of it!
there are many problems, one of them is money laundering, like criminals who could use the service to get "clean" money. which means Colektivo need to track individual investors and make sure they are in Canada.
Why such extremism? Without it, one could get most of the benefits without most of the hassles.
Depends how much people care about who they go to for heart surgery.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend/ally?
There are probably key-loggers designed to be placed inside laptops, but, not being a black-hat, I've never seen or looked for one. In any case, it'd be a lot more difficult. The cop would have to be trained in how to perform the installation in a reasonable period of time.
21 Rules of Thumb - How Microsoft develops its Software
Programming Language Hall of Fame
For sure - with all those pesky users gone, their servers should have no more scaling problems.