skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add light. Or use glow-in-the-dark paper.
But aren't they also improving the sound quality to 256 whatchamacallits? I thought that was another aspect of iTunes plus.
Is there a way to just "upgrade" certain songs instead of your entire library?
Don't forget time to spec servers, install the OS/Apps/Backup system, configure, test, drive to the datacenter, install the kit, document it. Also you will need to spend time setting up an account with a rackspace provider and arranging all the DNS, public IPs, any necessary firewalls, etc.

Also, server warranties, UPSs and the sheer hassle of specifying, ordering configuring servers and taking them to somewhere and fiddling with them and regularly patching them and so on.

And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB

No it can't, you need to pay a competent admin to go to the servers, shut them down, install new drives, and start them up again and expand the RAID onto them. 1hr minimum. Assuming the RAID is expandable and there is physical space in the server - if you need to add more mounted disks the app must be adjusted to support that. If there is no space, you may need to replace some drives and handle moving the data onto them (several hours?), or worse buy a new extra server.

Assuming your backup system can just take another TB of data without any changes.

And what if something does go wrong? You're talking of at least half a day from the time you find out until you get someone to go, wait for the travel time, diagnose and repair and restart, then dealing with problem reports and complaints.

I hope Amazon has better monitoring on S3 than anything I have set up as well.
On a related note, whuffie is not a new invention. There is no difference whatsoever between whuffie and money. They are perfectly synonymous. I get the feeling the author, and many of his readers, seem to believe that he has created something distinct from money (from the Wikipedia: 'Whuffie has replaced money...'). Whuffie, as a currency, is no more different from the dollar than the króna is from the euro.

As a descriptor of currency in an inconsequential economy it is somewhat useful. I happen to prefer the word "karma."
He's referring to the upgrade cost, not the actual price.
One thing they're missing here is that optimization is also about optimizing resources, not just the speed of an individual request/response cycle. If each request takes 50% less time, the app has 100% more resources to handle other requests. So even though the individual users don't feel a difference, the app as a whole is much more efficient.
So it's only an improper plane..
a sad day. seems like nobody knows what to do with the thing since brad fitzpatrick removed himself from day-to-day operations.
Well, it's already better looking than pgAdmin III and I doubt it would make me force-quit my browser when the VPN drops like pgAdmin makes me, so... I might be motivated enough to try it. Does it go on the DB server itself, or does it matter?
Inflated or not, 8 hours for the 17-inch is better than 5-hours for the 15-inch.
We've been using postgresql for several years, and have used a wide range of tools from EMS, Navicat, PG Lightning, pgadmin, etc, and would love to provide you with some feedback, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to download and install this beta. Something like a tar.gz of the files would work fine, the ubuntu install won't work on our gentoo box, and the fedora link is down, and I try my best to avoid installing anything on my local machine. As soon as I can download something that's installable I'm sure we'll have some very valuable feedback for you.
Probably not. I suspect pork bellies don't stay fresh that long.
Some of this is probably for accounting purposes as well. It's the same as when the wireless-G drivers on some device were released after the fact - apple charged existing owners $10 to upgrade so as to not fall afoul of laws regarding earned and deferred incomes.
I was introduced to the paradox from Wikipedia, but I submitted this article instead. I found the Wikipedia version more precise, but Presh's explanation is a bit more accessible to those not versed in game theory.
Hypothetical case study:

You want to host a liveblog for the Apple keynote at Macworld. No matter if you are a small site or Engadget, your traffic for that 90 minutes would be 2x to 100x bigger than your daily average.

So do you:

a) buy or rent extra servers for the whole month, spend a few man-weeks (or pay somebody for) setting them up, working on their synchronization, etc.

b) write a small script that regularly uploads the static liveblog HTML (or JSON) to an S3 dubomain and rely on Amazon's thousands of servers and flexible scaling (Dynamo, which powers S3, will allocate as many servers as needed to handle your load) to do the work?

Granted, option b)'s per-GB cost would be a bit higher, but your fixed cost for labor and hardware in a) would be even bigger.
Just to be clear, not all the SF staff were laid off.
Lesson learned for them, then.
Most of the Stevenotes aren't amazing.

'08:
* The Air
* Time Capsule
* Movie Rentals

'07
* The iPhone (ok, ok)

'06
* Intel Macs
* iWeb

'05
* Tiger, potlight
* iWork
* Shuffle

'04
* iLife
* The iPod Mini

'03
* New iMovie, new iDVD
* Safari
* Keynote
* 17" and 12" TiBooks

Was '09 as big as '07 or '06? No. But it's bigger than '03 and on par with '08 and '04. iPhone and iMovie are a big deal, the 17" MBP is their flagship computer (and some of the thunder from the MBP was stolen by the Q4 MacBook refresh --- which was a big deal), and the iTMS DRM thing is the biggest news on iTunes since Video.
Program Your GPU with Haskell
I thought it was worth 99c when I bought it. I don't think it's going to be worth $570 just to strip off a DRM feature that doesn't actually bother me.
Why the TechCrunch Economy Will Falter
I'm not paying to upgrade because I know it will cost Apple more $$$ to support my DRM tracks. I figure at some point they'll want to turn off their DRM servers and I can only hope they will have a free upgrade path to iTunes+.
I've got kind of a love-hate relationship with Programming Collective Intelligence.

In many ways it's an awesome book. It covers a lot of territory with relative grace and in clear language. On the other hand, it's often simplified to the point that the versions of things covered in there aren't really suitable for more than toy applications.

My fear is that it brings the low end of some of these fields in reach of folks who aren't used to working with the sort of material that they'll need to get up to the next notch -- which is really where the practical applications begin. I suspect that could be frustrating for some.
I still don't understand people's problems with glossy.

I have glossy and it is just fine inside, outside, at home, at the coffee shop, etc.
I have had to once or twice tilt my screen to avoid some glare.

Do you really have a lot of glare all the time? Do you wear a spelunking hat at work? :)
I use S3 for small things... it can't be beat if you only need to back up a few gigs. I agree, though, that once you scale up it gets pretty expensive. I host my own backups for the heavy stuff. (there are other providers willing to host your backups for cheaper as well, if you are willing to buy in terrabyte-size chunks)
In addition to getting a claimed 7-8hrs per charge, they also claim to be getting 3x as many charge cycles.
Can't tell you. Different projects act differently, and I was just a lowly grad student in a small research group for a small period of time.

At some level, you can't do full-on iterations when you have only 1 launch. But, you can certainly do iterations that each end in tests.
iTunes going DRM free is a big deal. I'd say it marks the beginning of the end of DRM, at least in music (Amazon MP3 was first big store, but iTunes is the largest)
Ah, I thought you were replying with regard to the question "Anyone care to guess how low online music will go?"

In the case of upgrading, I don't disagree. Sorry for the wrongful callout, it just drives me nuts when people have thousands of songs and listen to music all the time and say "it isn't worth paying for."
Thank you for such a detailed and reasoned answer. I'm learning a hell of a lot from this thread already.
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
James Hamilton posted a fairly robust model of how to think about this (and evaluate S3), just prior to joining Amazon.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/22/TheCostOfBulkCol...

His is a more datacenter-level view (considering $/GB, from the perspective of arbitrary GB), but builds a convincing case why S3 @ $0.18/GB is fair).
Ask YC: Hacker Groups (please help me fill out)
I like how it shows slow growth at first
What do you expect? They're letting you redownload songs that you already bought. They've sold how many million DRM tracks? So now they just turn on their servers and, without charging, let you redownload every song you've ever bought from them? That would kill their server. I doubt even iTunes could support that all at once.

The pricing helps Apple in two ways: it keeps their server going, and, by adding a charge, it discourages everybody from doing it at once, which means iTunes doesn't break. I understand your frustration, but Apple's doing a good thing by making this available. Complaining is fine, but don't act like Apple's the villain for negotiating an end to DRM in the largest store on the planet.
Aw, c'mon -- what's the story? Did you upgrade to brass ones? No more room? Are they too unprofessional? Are the haunted?
Some variations of the problem: http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~sillke/PUZZLES/logic_sum_p...
I have lights behind me at home that can't always be turned off. (IE, if someone's in the kitchen.) It's annoying.
Let's not forget Richard P.Gabriel (Lisp meister)'s view of this 'square' behaviour: http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html
> Goog has been using Juniper for a while

Don't you mean JNPR?

I've never understood this idea about speaking of companies in terms of their stock ticker symbol.
Glare is one problem, but I find seeing my reflection in the screen extremely distracting. Something about that human face keeps pulling me out of the "zone" while I try to code.

PS: I don't know of a better word than "zone" so I hereby name that state Zem, it's like Meditation with the added creativity of Rem sleep. Feel free to start using it in everyday speech.
...wait a minute. You guys actually use the laptop screen rather than an external?
How is this a "problem"? What is wrong with just regular rubygems?
Cool. Does that mean we can have a linux client now?
Review: iTunes Plus
I don't understand the attraction of LiveJournal in the era of Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter. Was it a sad day when they started winding down Friendster?
For the love of GOD. The Internet has been around a few years now. It's time to stop doing stupid shit like this.
Scholars unpack the secrets of charisma, and suggest the elusive quality can be taught
It doesn't use the tags, it looks up your account history. The MacBook Pro I'm sitting in front of doesn't have any of the music it's offering to upgrade to iTunes Plus.
Apple unveils all-new 17-inch MacBook Pro - Engadget
Burma's Stilwell Road: A backbreaking WWII project is revived
Good to know. Apparently most of my music just isn't in iTunes Plus yet.
From an Operations standpoint, having two conflicting package management systems is a huge headache. It's one more point of failure on production systems. The jpackage project was a similar effort which packaged oft-used Java libraries in RPM format.
You can put it on any server that can reach the database over the network.
I suspect that the draw of LiveJournal is very similar to the initial draw of AIM, Y!IM or MSN. People tend to go where there friends are. I don't care how much better or more open Google Talk is, if all my friends are on AIM, it doesn't help me (hypothetically speaking since I can now use GTalk to talk on AIM.)

Another thing to consider is that LJ does do a decent job of aggregating 'friendfeeds' from other LJers (and has been doing this since well before Twitter or FriendFeed existed), so it's really easy to look, at a glance, at what my friends are up to, which isn't so easy from an out of the box Wordpress.

That said, as a long time user, I agree that LJ does suck, and has iterated at a snail-like pace, but it serves a purpose, and has some non-obvious features that make it better than some of its more flashy competitors.
Is there a reason the title of the post is in Flash?
Yes, having "unsend" as part of the mail client functionality is the way to go.

Maybe the "send the message right now this exact millisecond" function should require an extra step from the user. And the default action should be to enqueue the outgoing messages and wait for N seconds/minutes before sending them.

And add some rule-based "are you sure you want to send this?" function since you are at it.
Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes
AIM has a huge network effect. LiveJournal has a very weak network effect (as a minor blog reputation service).
Some clients (e.g. Outlook) let you put a delay on your outgoing email, so you can cancel it if you change your mind in time.

And the email recall feature of Outlook/Exchange is also quite good. It even tells you how many emails couldn't be recalled (because people have already read them). It will only work within an organisation though, as it is a feature of the Exchange server.
I've never understood this idea about speaking of companies in terms of their stock ticker symbol.

It makes sense if your only interest in a company is how much money you can make from its stock.
Holy living fuck, I just did the math on how much that upgrade price means I spent on music over the last few years.
Renormalized with equal weights. The only major change looks like philosophy jumped from 9th to 3rd.

1	1.19
2	1
9	0.92
4	0.89
3	0.87
5	0.7
6	0.67
7	0.43
8	0.39
11	0.36
10	0.32
15	0.27
18	0.16
14	0.14
16	0.12
17	0.08
19	0
20	-0.03
13	-0.16
12	-0.2
21	-0.59
23	-0.61
22	-0.67
24	-0.86
25	-1
26	-1.12
27	-1.43
28	-1.83
Regarding those services that offer "unlimited storage", I think they are really banking on the fact that many people _won't_ use enough space to cause the company a loss. Sure, there are heavy users, but when it all averages out, the company (hopefully) makes money.

Also, you have to read the terms of some services closely. IIRC, some of the online backup services are limited to "personal use only". They have separate pricing tiers for business backup (because they know those customers will use more).
Perhaps it affects people who prefer a light on dark color scheme as opposed to dark on light. Glossy doesn't bother me at all, but there is a lot of white on my screen.
As proposed by Jason Scott of textfiles.org (see http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1649).

The idea is to have a response team ready and willing to help back up users data in the event of a service going down.

It's just starting out, but if your interested we're on #archiveteam on #Efnet
Well, I think what it really comes down to is what your business is. If your business is storage, get good at doing your own storage. If your business is web applications, get good at web applications. Then there are companies on the cusp. Flickr is clearly storage heavy enough that they need to be a storage company. 37signals, on the other hand, stores attachments and some pictures, but it their primary function isn't storage - it's the interaction with that stored content.

Is storage such a thing for your business that you're willing to put a lot of labor behind its solution? Or is storage important to your business, but as long as you get something reliable it doesn't have to be the most efficient possible because it's a small part of your business relative to the other things you do (like HTML, CSS, Ruby/Python/Perl/et al., MySQL/PostgreSQL)? Your time might be better spent on other company work than on storage.
You've had it too good for too long. Consider Apples innovation in the last three years compared to any (or all) of their competitors... even the glorious Apple can't deliver at the rate they're expected.

The batteries better perform as well as Apple is claiming or this could be a major fail.
This is very exciting. I've always bought MP3s from Amazon exclusively because I knew for sure that all Amazon's files are DRM free. With this move by iTunes, it's likely that I'll be picking up some albums on iTunes now if I can't get them in MP3 format from Amazon. Before, I would just live without the music, or buy the CD and rip it.
We should keep two things in mind before we go overboard with the ponzi scheme thing:

1) Exponential GDP growth does not necessarily mean using exponentially more natural resources. Quite the contrary. A lot of growth could come from work going into reducing resource consumption. Describing this distinction as quantitative vs qualitative growth creates the false impression of a need for some kind of revolution in order to make that switch. It's not a switch. We're already right in the middle of it and it's a gradual development.

2) Global debt is always zero. Debt is always a claim on other people's labour. If debtors throw their hands up and say, sorry I can't work enough to provide that labour, debt is written off and that's it. There's no link to the use of natural resources at all.
Things Every Small Business Owner Should Do in 2009
The bright lining to the missing mini is that maybe they have to wait for the next round of processors from Intel. That would mean even better minis when they do get upgraded. (Alert: unwarranted optimism detected)

If I had to roll out a mini now I'd be of two minds: 1) take the price down so people will buy even in a depressed economy. 2) leave the price on the theory that the cost sensitive will buy horrible low end machines for $100 less anyway. If you choose 1 and the economy starts to rebound you have shot your profits for product lifetime. Maybe it is best to wait and see how the next month or two plays out before committing to an 18 month product cycle.
Missing Steve at Macworld? Get a tamale to drown your sorrows SF style
The iPhone travel guide, twiddler, the app that caters to your every mood, caters! Wednesday at lunchtime twiddler will be giving out tamales to Macworld attendees as a tribute to one of SF's treasured local traditions, the tamale lady. (Another colorful SF personality in place of the missing Steve Jobs!) Anyone who flashes us our twiddler app icon on their iPhone or iPod Touch will get a piping hot tamale, a true San Francisco treat! Here's the link to our app: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=298878565&mt=8

Also, we have a few free twiddler app codes to give out for ycombinator news folks. Email us - thumbblers at thumbble.com.
How it that evil? You're getting something other than what you originally paid for.
Man analyses cause of bad TV reception, finds his TV is de facto radar
I'll take em.
SmugMug's cheapest plan is $40/year, which is $3.33 a month

S3's most expensive tier is $0.15gb/mo

So, not counting bandwidth, a user would have to store roughly 22GB of images to eat up that cost.

Being conservative, a high-res JPEG out of camera (12mp) is probably 3mb on average. So, we're talking about over 7,000 images.
A list of 200 Free & Open Textbooks
I really don't enjoy eating meat - so once I tried vegetarianism for about 4 months. I have never been so sick in my life ! It probably was co-incidence, or could have been lack of some nutrients (or body adjusting) but it was horrible.
Cue the complaints: 17-inch MacBook Pro without a removable battery?
The Death Of “Web 2.0″ Is Greatly Exaggerated
Here is a thread (and related article) on HN about the problems with RubyGems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386036

Here is the official position of the Debian/Ruby-Extras team: http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html

It has been a polarizing issue, as you can see.
For Sale: Streetread - Innovative Financial Webapp
The VC Firms Most Exposed To Web 2.0
The last time they revamped the Mac Mini (to the Core 2 Duo processors), they didn't do a reveal at MacWorld or WWDC. The Apple store was simply updated to reflect the update. Be interesting to see if this happens again, given all the "leaks" about a new Mac Mini being imminent.
Giticular cancer
We've actually had some success getting managers to get rid of bad programmers. It's a matter of building their trust in you first, and then letting a programmer call the shots and do real interviews, etc.
The whole source code was visible by appending "/admin/" to the url. You could then read through the PHP files and gain access to the backend.
I know I paid for a DRM track; its just bittersweet that I'd have to pay for the same song again to not have DRM. That nets Apple 0 good/evil points in my book.
You forget management costs -- someone has to deal with this storage, service the computers, replace the drives, add them, add additional computers, etc.
Javascript widget approaches: Singleton vs Prototype
It is noteworthy that this was created by Phusion, the same people who created Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Basically, a company that really enjoys solving high-profile problems related to Ruby. (First, Rails is a pain to deploy. Then, Ruby is a memory hog in web-application applications. Now, Debian hates RubyGems.) From my perspective, their work is high-quality, and increases my confidence in this 'product'.
The requested URL /wiki/Main_Page was not found on this server.

A taste of things to come? :-P
Dalvik is register based byte code - from what little I have looked at it - it looks quite low level and apparently it is meant to run fast enough "interpreted" (ie a JIT isn't practical on small devices). However JVM bytecode (and similar) being stack based is much higher level, leaving more room for JITs to make a faster runtime (but for some cost which is not practical on small devices) - but slower when "interpreted". At least that is my understanding.
A lot of the time, memcached won't make things faster: it's meant to make things more scalable. On small sites, memcached won't increase your speed, but when you start getting lots of users, it's wonderful!

Memcached allows for O(1) lookups. Your database server probably uses b-tree indexes which are great, but they're log(n) lookups. If you aren't dealing with a large number of hits per second, your database will do very well. Once you start getting a lot of lookups per second n * log(n) starts looking a good bit slower than n * 1.

Memcached also allows you to scale effortlessly simply by adding servers. Databases can do replication, but only to a point. Remember, even in multi-master replication schemes, every write must be done on every server. Memcached shards your data so that the writes are only done on one server and the load is distributed and knows where to read based on the hash. And every time you're able to read from memcached, you're lowering the load on the piece that is less easily scaled - your database. So, even non-cached loads should get better simply because some of the lookups that would have gone to the database are now hitting memcached.
After seeing that the feed had been hijacked I poked around to see how easy it was.

My first guess was http://macrumorslive.com/admin which contained the full source code and password hashes to everything on the site.

They must have had a strange configuration because their .php files were showing as plain text files. This revealed their master DB username/password along with many other ways to exploit the site.

There's a reason security through obscurity doesn't work. Unfortunately MacRumors had to find out on what was probably their biggest day of the year.
I like the inline footnoting type approach for some cases. It gets a little unwieldy at times if there are too many, but you just hide it.