skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say "do both" - aws is awesome if your site is running slow 'cause you are out of capacity, or you otherwise need a box 'right now' or for only a short period of time. spin up another instance and be done with it. But for the boxes you leave on all the time, you are probably better off buying and co-locating your own server. Usually the capital cost difference is made up in only a few months.

The times when a Xen host makes long-term sense are when you want a box that is smaller than optimal. Right now, I buy dual quad-core opterons w/ 32G ram and 2x1TB disk... assuming I am ok with moderate-speed low-power opterons, it costs about $3K up front. Hosting, say, another $150/month. That's a whole lot of ec2 instances. At those prices, well, AWS is pretty expensive over the long term.

But yeah. AWS is awesome for the servers you don't need on all the time, or servers you don't have time to setup (or your whole ball of wax if your margins are such that paying more for computers won't break your business model.)
Xobni Closes $7 Million Series B Financing
That was enjoyable. Thanks for the link.

For some reason, I sometimes find myself somewhere with free time and sheets of paper, but can never make a good airplane. That is no longer going to be a problem :)
Let's flip this around a bit. Who would have a better chance of survival, one of us transported back to the Middle Ages, or a person in the Middle Ages transported to 2009?

I'd say we have a better shot at living a longer period of time (over a year) since we could take basic precautions against disease and germs. The Middle Ages guy/gal would probably die of our modern germs within a few days (similar to the Indians when they met European explorers).
I need food and clothing (if it's cold, or nudity is a crime).
Interruption Marketing: Rumors of its Death have been Greatly Exaggerated
thats not a bad idea. one limited private repo would be good incentive to buy up if people like it
The best iPhone apps for business
Roku’s second act: Amazon Video on Demand
I wish I could see his slides.
Top tech resolutions for 2009
Will More iPhone Apps go Open Source?
I dunno about the thousand bucks, but one thing you should do is get in touch with Bacon's Mediasource. For a couple thousand bucks a year, they will let you subscribe and make media lists (lists of contact information of reporters). But just get them to let you trial it for a week, make your media list, and start making phone calls.

No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for free).
Communities need anchors, the one guy who's going to e-mail everyone to come out every week, or those two guys who've been friends forever and are going to be there if no one shows up.
the upside of dedicated servers (that you own) is that after a few months they are dramatically cheaper. Personally, I think that if you are small enough to need less than a full physical box, a VPS usually makes sense. If you are large enough to need more than one physical box, it usually makes sense to use ec2 or other VPS providers for the stuff you need right now, and then build out dedicated servers for your longer-term needs.
Windows 7: The beginning of the end of the "Wintel" duopoly?
There was a joke soft called 'sl' circulating among Japanese universities (I don't know if it went out abroad). It just showed an ascii art animation of a steam locomotive running across the screen. It was irritating, though, when you mistyped while logged in a Unix machine via a 1200baud modem...
Mine flew surprisingly well. Took around 20mins to build and I've just lobbed it out of my balcony on the 30th floor lol. It was too dark outside to follow but will try again in the daytime :D
Amazon offers pay-per-use service for data hosted on S3
The thing I don;t get is how malleable it all is. I remember evangelizing the Mac over DOS because you shouldn't have to remember some stupid mnemonics to use the computer.

Now I have to put up with fairweather Mac fans telling me that Vista sucks because it doesn't have a terminal, and that I should get an iPhone because it has the biggest market share.
More people with more money to spend means a bigger market for whatever I'm selling. That's why Social Security is good. That's why markets are bigger in places with lots of Social Security-type programs (Europe, the U.S.) than in places without them (South America, Africa).

Where to start? Sheesh. Markets are "bigger" in the US than South America because of social security? How on earth did you come up with that notion? Besides being completely upside down (viz, social security draws money from the free market) South America most certainly has its share of SS equivilents:

http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/ssptw/2006-2007/amer...
Can you explain "turnover per client per month"?
That sounds exactly like what I had in mind. The Chicago equivalents would be Naperville, Downer's Grove, or Oak Park for the good ones. I don't want to call out the bad ones specifically.
I think that whether it's a one-time opportunity or not depends on whether you capture that email. If not, then yes - it's a one-time oppty. But if you capture the email, you have many chances to get in front of them - on your terms as well.

And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)
see you there
Corporate for pay twittering does not immediately strike me as a profitable business, is it just me?
While I love Spotify as a user experience and definitely plan on using it myself, I'm not bullish on pure music consumption apps as a business. The music labels have unfortunately made it very difficult to get content licenses and even for those who have gotten content licenses, have made it very expensive.

Check out David Pakman's post for more details on how bad the label deals are for most music consumption apps:

http://dpakman.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/invest-in-music-star...
Google Videos have a "Download video - iPod/PSP" link in the top right underneath Share/Report Problem.

This program works well for YouTube - enter URL(s) and it will download and convert them to MP4 for you. http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-to-iPh...
Analysis of Linking Patterns on Twitter
Coincidentally enough, this conversation has come up on HN before, and the consensus was that professional chefs actually use knives that cost around $30; $100 knives are for people who want expensive knives that are functionally indistinguishable from $30 ones. It's more like paying for a "free-range" leather option when buying a car. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=269945
Wha..? Where would one go to read or hear these speeches?
I'm a student -- and have been for way too long.

My answer's no for free. Instead, a heavy discount's a good idea. You can make it really significant, like 50-90% off. Cheap enough for anyone serious to afford it.

But, the fact that it isn't free will get most of the worthless ones off your back.
Nokia 2680 Slide S.GREY Unlocked 
The Nokia 2680 Slide simplifies things for a moment to give users a simplified call-making experience. So many phones on the market focus on new technology and can as many features as they can into the case. This phone delivers exceptional service without bogging down your experience with the phone.
Semi-notable projects are likely to be open source, and GitHub is already free for open source projects.
I'm sure there's something buried in the bowels of SAML, but that doesn't make it well-known or stable.
Monday Morning Madness
FriendFeed has none of the issues and does not have the critical mass to draw the sort of high-profile attention the defacers were seeking. Given enough scale, FriendFeed will have its share of issues.
Surfers should pay congestion charges
For Sale at the New York Times: The Front Page
Does this support a REST command interface?
KPSS TERCiHLERi SON GÜN
Xobni Closes $7 Million B Round Led By Cisco
Here's the info on the compromised support tools:

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/monday-morning-madness.html
Not necessarily. The square root hardware could be heavily pipelined to get each stage short enough for one cycle. This increases latency, but lets you keep a one-per-cycle throughput without slowing down the clock.
Is there any science that shows that increased co2 will actually cause cooling? I haven't seen any, but am very interested in a link if you know of one.
Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe
When I was in college, food was a necessity in order to survive and was a justified expense in my head. Starbucks, on the other hand, was an occasional luxury that I typically tried to avoid. For a college student who is probably paying for hosting and domain names on top of all their required college expenses, it makes more sense to use a free alternative or a completely different system (svn) rather than add on another monthly expense. At least that was what college was like for me and so now I'm stuck on subversion.

If I had the opportunity to try out GitHub for free, I would have jumped on the opportunity and would probably eventually switch to a paying customer.
"... @coda I don't sympathise with @al3x. Twitter is basically walking around bent over with no clothes on right now. They can fix that. ..." ~ http://twitter.com/blaine/status/1096877937

Knocked off for the night reading this message timely message by Blaine Cook . Woke up reading the headline above by Biz Stone.
You're right it doesn't make any difference, but your point is irrelevant.

Social security is only as "sound" as the will of future taxpayers to pay the inevitably increased taxes required to keep it going, regardless of whether the money is borrowed, promised, set-aside, appropriated, recommended, etc.

Since its inception, social security benefits have been cut little by little to the point where middle class people must significantly supplement it with their own private investments to avoid poverty in retirement.

So there still may be something called "social security" in 20 or 30 or 50 years, but chances are it will bear little similarity to the program's initial inception or even to the program people think of it as today.

You also argue that the government should borrow money. Why not just tax today for what we spend today? Had we done that, Bush would never have been able to go to war in Iraq, the "trust fund" would not be in danger, etc.

Not to digress, however. The biggest threat to social security is that congress won't have the will to use the limited available tax revenue for the program, and the public won't want the drastically increased taxes.

Obama wisely suggested switching SS over to be a welfare program and funding it from general revenue, but the initial concept was that it's not welfare and so nobody should feel like they are on welfare when they receive their social security check. This is a fairly significant matter.
> the average temperature over 10 years and it starts to drop

So the last 10 years then?
http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2008/12/15/clintontemps....

(If the data is wrong, let me know, but don't just complain about the source)
Large cities do have many benefits. I'm from the Chicago suburbs and I've been living in the city for about 18 months. I think my next move will be to a rural area. Here are some things I enjoy about the city:

* museums and art

* ethnic food

* ability to live without a car (I save a lot of money this way and I never have to worry about a designated driver)

* large enough population to support special interest groups of all kinds

* availability of goods and services (I have multiple choices for cooking classes, I can find most unusual ingredients, we still have record stores)
Mapping looks to be the web’s next big thing
I think you should only consider giving free accounts to students who go out of their way to ask.
The better thing they can do is to email all of the websites that link to your competitors and ask those websites for a link. But you can do that yourself.
I only know that some specialists recommended it as a bargain at a barcamp a while ago. Your site get's thrown into the stumble stream, so people actually stumble upon your site, they don't have to click on an ad first to get to your site.

Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors, more than the average digg I think.
"We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

I know it's easy to say it, but wouldn't it have been worth making sure those admin tools were 100% secure to start with? Do they even need to be accessible to anyone outside the company lan?
Most Popular Articles and Working Papers 2008 — HBS
The hacking seems like it was motivated by profit.

See: http://d.ioj.com/209937/pxkr3qeg24ds.jpg

The perpetrator posted a link to a website where users fill out a simple survey and enter their email address to get a prize. The perpetrator would get $1.50 for each person that completes the survey. Seeing as how this was done from Obama's legitimate Twitter account, it would be very easy for people to believe it.

However, the advertising company that runs the survey has banned the hacker. It really was a dumb thing to do: the URL itself contains his affiliate ID on that advertising network - enough to get his name, full address, social security number with simple cooperation from the advertising company (Copeac).
I'm so cheap I'm teaching myself Python so I can use App Engine's free hosting! And I even have a research stipend.
You may be right, but the intent of the system doesn't really matter. When SS began the tax was 1%, now it's 12.5% and benefits have been decreasing every year.

Sadly, the planners didn't anticipate just how population trends would play out, and so the initial idea -- that everyone pays 1% and then no old folks have to worry about poverty if they choose to retire -- just doesn't quite work out any longer.

The trouble is that people can't really rely on social security for (guess what?) security!

Will congress increase the payroll tax to 30%? Will it decrease social security benefits drastically? Will it fund SS out of general revenue at the expense of other programs? Will American taxpayers decide that SS is worth a middle class income tax rate of 55%?

The answer to all of these things is the same: maybe.

But that's not security. Obama has wisely advocated converting SS into a welfare program, but that hasn't gotten much traction.

The point is, with population trends doing what they are, somthing has to give. When people running for office talk aobut "saving Social Security" they are not honest about the impending outcome of obvious demographic trends. Meanwhile, all of us pay 12.5% of every paycheck into something that will probably offer us ZERO security in retirement.
As I recall, most of the Native deaths were from smallpox, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, and the bubonic plague. Not exactly common diseases these days.
I don't think that the Middle Ages person would do too badly, though we would definitely do better as we have MMR and other mandatory vaccinations.
New ESPN.com homepage
1. I punched ESPN.com into my browser.
2. I'm greeted by the most confusing interstitial ad I've seen in a while. I did not like how it messed with the reality of what I thought I was looking at.
3. Then I got a popup.
4. Then the new site loaded incredibly slowly and crashed my browser.

Won't be going back there for a while.
I went the other direction. My wife is a natural born materialist. She has a tendency to buy things for me that she thinks I will like which turn out to be things that she would like if she had my interests but had her attraction to object ownership (e.g. anime figures, novelty ThinkGeek keyboard).

EDIT: although I must admit that she nails it sometimes - turns out the under-desk cycle and the rotating push-up handles are portable, useful and multi-tasking friendly.
Why should the Y combinator be a point attached at the end? Do we talk about the same 'pointfree programming'?
TechCrunch recently posted on how to get access to Spotify from the US. Might need to find a different proxy if the one suggested is blocked.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/03/how-to-try-spotify-imme...
Well, you forgot about the way that benefits are systematically reduced and the retirement age is systematically increased. What about someone who worked hard in his 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s in hopes of retiring at 65 only to see the SS age be increased to 70? Is that security? No, that's a 5 year ripoff.

Now, the SS retirement age is GREATER THAN the average lifespan of African American citizens! You may consider that another "good in a sick sort of way" aspect of the program, but I don't.
and here is the link to the guys who fked them over:

http://www.lagomorphics.com/

Its funny that they listed Journalspace under their "notable clients" section.
11.4mm is an amazing amount of money to raise, congrats. This is one of the applications I think add real value to offline software; I just wonder how they deal with the pressure that Microsoft could duplicate the feature of search or otherh features in the next outlook... and this has to push the price (20mm wasn't enough from microsoft) - how much do they need now to accept the offer? - probably in the 100mm range eh?
I don't think that's true.
If you just spend $1000 blindly on advertising, you'll get pretty much nothing back. It's not enough to make a difference.
It's better to either spend it creatively, for example as I posted, buying old domains that still have traffic, or just keeping it, and using the far more valuable and scalable "word of mouth".
Twitter's explanation regarding the hijacked accounts
Come to CUSEC 2009. He'll be there.
The privatization plan would give the beneficiary ownership over the investment, so there is not a problem, it just means that the investment has longer to grow. Ideally someone doesn't just build up a pile of money and intend to die with $0, he/she intends to leave some to the next generation or to charity.
That's not worth much in and of itself. It has to be compared with past data to be relevant to the argument. Also, it would have to be that 18-65 has gone down while 66+ has gone up. Seems highly unlikely to have done so significantly.
Amazon's Best-Selling Album Download of 2008 Was Available for Free
I set goals and also use GTD. I have a constant struggle between setting lots of goals, spreading myself too thin, and then coming back to a small set of most criticals goals. Then, the cycle continues - I feel like I am not accomplishing enough, widen my scope, set lots of goals and spread myself thin again.

Over time I accomplish just about everything I set out to do, it would be nice to know exactly where my limits are. I've been getting better, but it is is still imprecise.
Taking money from Cisco is a very smart move. Congrats on the round guys!
Bops, tree hugging, and safe wagers
This seems very cool.

I could see this going a step further to merge it with being an actual cache, keeping much of the frequently used data in memory, while still saving the data so that it's persistent. I'm for sure going to tinker around with this.

MemcacheQ (message queuing system) linked on that page seems like it will solve a problem I had been thinking about recently for my system.

On first glance, this looks like some pretty useful stuff in the overall.
how about a onetime fee of one month worth of whatever they are requesting, if you are going to go to the free for students route
I blame it on the government for citing the worthless stat in the first place. They rarely express it as anything other than from birth expectancy. They should mention it from some stable age like 5, then simply show infant mortality stats separately. Though I guess they don't want to do that because we have one of the worst rates in the developed world.
These complex technologies are hard to get rid of because organizations must accept reduced feature sets ... But the payoff is worth it

What!? That's just nonsense.

Geek 1: It's free!

Geek 2: But it doesn't do the things we need to do.

Geek 1: But it's free!
i still have my @gatech.edu, granted i did just graduate
Nabweekly.ca wrote a warning about a University in Alberta Canada who teaches their students to hack computers, this an actual course. I feel this course is teaching their students to not follow privacy rules and that hacking is a criminal offense. Read more on Nabweekly.ca http://nabweekly.ca/?p=2635
Haha, I completely agree. It wasn't based on fear; we just avoided the yelling and throwing shit stage. There was, of course, the occasional disagreement and discussion regarding it.
Increasing Value in a Declining Ad Market
Watch what you twitter, big sister is watching. (Includes potty language.)
An excellent article that gives you a look at the mathematical model, Value at Risk, that brought down Wall Street. VaR turned out to be a problem because it was accepted by the regulators and executives, but it could be gamed by the traders.

It has a profile of Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan." A Black Swan is an unpredictable event, because the day to day probability is so low, say a world wide liquidity crisis. Taleb argues against probability based models, because in the long run an outlier is going to kill you. I got "The Black Swan" for Christmas. I have read only 3 or 4 chapters so far, but I highly recommend it. Very interesting and very entertaining.
Georgia Tech also lets you keep your @gatech.edu address permanently, for free. Just having a .edu address does not prove you're associated with higher-ed.

When I signed up for GitHub, the free and a paid accounts were differentiated (to me at least) by the need to keep source code secure. If you remove that distinction by offering free student accounts, you'll end up with a lot of ex-students using them. The movie theaters out here in Arizona figured that out and now only offer student tickets on Thursday nights.

Any group of students trying to launch a website with any chance of turning into a profitable company will have figured out how to come up with $12/month.
If true, the disgruntled employee belongs in jail.
Why It Sometimes Sucks To Be A Geek
If you like this and you're in London you should check out the Taking Liberties exhibit at the British Library, they have a live-action Political Compass projected onto a wall:

http://www.gaius.org.uk/tl3.gif
Immediately after 40:30 is actually the best part of this talk.
Well, I certainly wasn't claiming it was a top-notch investment strategy. But for Social Security to work, it has to have periods where it's overfunded, so it can pay out when it's underfunded (and the problem is that it didn't) and that surplus has to go somewhere. I can't think of anything better for it than what they do, which is essentially buy government bonds. It's the only 100% guaranteed investment, since the government can print money to replace it. Just be glad they didn't buy CDOs with it.
Big list of 2009 tech conferences that every startup should be aware of
This is one thing I'll never quite understand. Do users who buy it consider it a tip or donation? This is where economics goes from being a science to being an art. Economics is a great discipline, but it really doesn't explain human weirdness and how that weirdness comes into play with money.
You actually do earn interest on HSAs right? I don't know much about them other than the bit I read, but they seem to be all the rage nowadays.
Hackers School of Business--Some School for Thought
Nabweekly.ca wrote a warning about a University in Alberta Canada who teaches their students to hack computers, this, an actual course. I feel this course is teaching their students to not follow privacy rules and that hacking is a criminal offence. Read more on Nabweekly.ca