skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people are not you. :) In fact, it might be that you aren't really like this except while dispassionately considering things after the fact: I know that I, personally, like nothing more when I'm angry or depressed than to continue to be angry or depressed, and there's an emotional bonus if I can feel justified in my anger or depression. Someone (Sandra Tayler, I believe) once said that you can't argue someone out of being upset; the best you can accomplish by arguing is to make them also feel stupid for feeling upset.

For most people, "explained why I was wrong to feel insulted" could go either way. If the friend explained that he hadn't meant to offend, then it might be that the upset would go away. This is a win for the relationship, but as the argument just evaporates, there's no win or loss for either party (unless you can manage to feel like a winner anyway, I guess). If he pointed out that you'd totally blown this out of proportion, and if you'd only paid attention / thought about it / cared enough, then you'd not have felt insulted, then this could easily seem like a loss for you, and a win for him.

In my (sadly, ended) marriage, it seemed rare that an argument we had was really about what the words were about, though I often didn't know until later what the argument had really been started by. Arguments seemed pretty rare, though, and only at the end did I find out that she thought we'd argued all the time, and that I never budged or was willing to lose an argument. Had I known we were having these arguments (which seemed like discussions to me), I could have easily arranged to lose enough of them to keep the balance -- it wasn't that I wanted to win; I just didn't understand she was losing. Hence my statement about either winning or losing arguments too much putting strain on a relationship. All this stuff seems clearer from a distance, to me. :/
Our policy is outsource the IT to WebFaction. They RAID our data and back it up daily. Thanks WebFaction!

If you are a start-up that doesn't have serious SysAdmin talent on-board, the only logical call is to outsource every machine possible. Even if you are ludicrously good hackers, you need to have a true Linux money, who isn't needed elsewhere coding, to consider not outsourcing web and email hosting. And you should back-up anything important on your personal computers to a managed box.

I really can't say how deeply I believe this. I've worked with multiple start-ups, and the minute you start trying to host your own website, do your own backups, serve your own emails - you're asking for trouble. Even if you set up everything right, just the time dealing with the computers could be better spent changing the world

Whatever you do, don't host actual email boxes in house. A telephone pole will get hit by a truck, and you will lose email for two days, and no amount of tech smarts will get you out of that. Trust me, it happens.

You can get a slice of a computer for $10 bucks a month these days from Webfaction - which comes with tech support that extends from installing PostGIS, to an optimized PostGres install, an optimized Apache static content server, and answers to tech support within the hour, even on the weekends. As soon as a machine you manage costs you an hour, you're financial decision has become a poor one.

Also, they have better security than you.
GitHub + Dropbox
Thanks. Right-clicked for context menu in Firefox to open new tabs with each link. I see "21-days.html" from the Peter Norvig site is the "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" article that I was rereading just yesterday. (I've referred my son to it before, and heartily agree it's good for young people who like programming to read.)

Hackety Hack is new to me. Your comment is an example of a good comment with links to further information.
The 'first true scientist'
New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen
I asked Slicehost and they say that because of the way they currently do backups, they can't guarantee that backups of slices larger than 2GB will get done in a reasonable amount of time
It was an experiment.
http://tinyurl.com/9mxrly: was my first text on speed-reading. It's a very quick read and overall a great speed-reading primer. If you're interested in speed-reading you might also when check-out some SRSs (spaced repetition system) available. I'm playing with Anki (open-source) and SuperMemo (commercial) right now.
That's what the FaceBook app is for, presumably. I've had one of my cousins tell me that it was kinda-sorta useful for keeping tabs on my computer-related comments elsewhere on the net.
there was a good piece here a while ago that got me speed reading effectively. your brain can understand things much faster, the holdup is the input stream of your eyes. trick is to make them faster.

the basic gist of it is this: instead of focusing with your eyes on the start of every line and reading to the end, try and start indented in and read the first word with your peripheral vision. end the line on the second to last word in the same way. as you get good, you progress with this technique.

it does truly work, just using the basics of it speed up read time for me substantially.

however, it makes it hard to use your imagination, so if you're reading for enjoyment, don't do this.
Do you have any experience with 10tb.com (or heard anything about them)? Their bandwidth prices list as better than serverbeach.
The other thing I'd add is that if you're interested in this as a serious endeavor and not just for show, you need to take some time and analyze your expenditures first. Just like optimizing code, you need to go get the low hanging fruit before you start fiddling around the edges.

Buying a 2-liter and a reusable glass isn't worth much if your lead foot is costing you $200 extra a month in gas.

(Incidentally, I'm not tossing in the "just like optimizing code" thing as a sop to the audience; the optimization loop 1. Find biggest problem 2. Solve biggest problem 3. Repeat as needed (and no more) is generally useful in many situations.)

Analysis will almost certainly reveal some expenditures and things that are surprisingly expensive, but will probably also show there are some niceties that don't actually have anywhere near as much impact as you might think at first. For instance, I tend to buy the nicer spices; sure, they may look twice as expensive but it may be worth 1 penny more per meal (for instance).
I have experienced this first hand. I grew up in the country and I've also known that I've got issues with ADD but when I moved to the city to go to school I started notice it more and more. I also noticed that I would be exhausted after normal days and that I never really felt satisfied after working a hard day(like I did in the country). I thought it was just that my job was hard but when I went home I worked a full day(that would normally exhaust me) but I wasn't. I could look outside, breath the fresh air, drink clean water and feel good.

I need to convince my boss to let me work remotely 24/7 :)

I also wonder if they did tests of people within rooms with forest pictures surrounding them. Furthermore I wonder if they tried doing the same with forest noises going on.
Industry standards and associations would crop up after a string of failures, and consumers would eventually move towards firms that are endorsed by the industry standard bodies. eg. chartered accountants

Sounds remarkably similar to where we are.
> Consumers regularly counter act companies. Brands are so valuable that companies fight to protect them.

There are many kinds of businesses that exploit faults in the public and market, yet don't even have any relationship with branding. Companies have better resources and access to more information about the areas they function in than the public does (whether as individuals or groups), and many businesses don't market to the public at all, even if they deal with the public. Debt collection firms, for example, have all of these features.

The public does have a mechanism to counteract the actions of companies, and that's representative government and regulation. It's obviously imperfect, but it is the mechanism the public has.
Alternative Memcache Usage: A Highly Scalable, Highly Available, In-Memory Shard Index
"... As a British engineer who is not English it can be seen as offensive ..."

Hey thanks danw for distinction.
I think this is default behavior (thought I vaguely remember configuring it) -- on a computer without a mouse you can simultaneous left and right to open a new tab.
ideological concerns aside

So what is the point?
I agree. But if, as you suggest, it's an "engineering no-brainer" to retain the leading digit even on a major new release, something about the versioning system is broken.
Maybe the only reason I don't have friendfeed is it's welcome page.

FriendFeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your friends and family find on the web.

Like I have time with which to look at interesting stuff after spending all day on news.yc....
The risk is that the world will change around you in the meantime and make what you're working on irrelevant.

My two previous employers were both started in 2001, in terms of the idea and not the corporate entity. Last I heard, they are both still around, though in one case a founder let the company fold and then ran off to China with the IP to start again with cheap labor. But the ideas are increasingly irrelevant now.

In one case, the product was software to tunnel through firewalls. Most recent products just build that into the product itself now (witness: FogCreek CoPilot, AIM, anonymous proxies), using essentially the same technology we were working on 8-9 years ago (FogCreek calls it the Reflector) so there is less need for a general solution.

In the other case, the product started out as a desktop quant analytics interface. But then around 2002-2004, everything switched to the web. They did too, but they fell off the leading edge of technology: other firms now have much more web expertise than they do. And now with the financial crisis, I'd guess that people are increasingly suspicious of quant analytics.

I keep thinking about whether it's better to go for breadth or depth (in anything, not just startups). The answer always seems "Go for depth, as long as you're going deep into the right thing." But it's often not possible to tell what the right thing is until you've gone deep into it. By then, of course, you've already sunk a lot of effort into exploring the territory. Maybe that's why people ascribe so much of success to pure luck.
He's surprised too: http://twitter.com/markimbriaco/status/1091009771
You only remember about 20% of what you read at best. So the optimal approach would be to pick the 20% you want to read.

Skimming over dull parts and reading the start and end of paragraphs helps. I've also tried EyeQ and AceReader and felt the latter helped in learning to read chunks of words at a time.

Personally though, the biggest difference was made by starting to use a Sony Reader. It'll make a lot of your otherwise mundanely spent time usable for reading.
I don't. Quantity rarely corresponds with quality.

The greatest value I gain from books is in identifying how the subject discussed can apply to my own circumstances. That insight often comes to me in the pauses between pages and paragraphs where I find myself thinking on what was just read.

I might be able to absorb a bit more information from speed-reading, but I don't think I could process and internalize the text nearly as well. Since that's why I'm reading the book in the first place, speed-reading seems of little benefit to me.
my girlfriend just went to india and got more than 10 different vaccinations and still got sick.
Thanks! That's a pretty thorough reply, and I have to agree that it's hard to imagine an easier way to deploy new server instances than copying a VM. I think you can get pretty darn close with a package system like DEB or RPM, but in terms of being able to bring up and test an environment on a development machine, and then be assured the same environment will work exactly the same in production, this is a reassuring approach. I think it makes a lot of sense if you are expecting to require rapid scaling at some point in the future.

I'm a little unsure why you wouldn't just use EC2 in that case, although it might make sense to use a dedicated box for as long as you can and supplement that with EC2 instances when appropriate. Obviously you can get a lot of EC2-instance-equivalents out of a 16-core 32gb box, and your approach would likely be easy to integrate with EC2 when the time comes.

I'm not sure what your load trends look like, but if you're not likely to surpass what your dedicated server can handle within the next few months, this would seem like overengineering. I know you said it "ruins encapsulation" and makes a "clusterfuck of a server" but I don't quite see it. If this is a web app running on a modern gnu/linux distro, with maybe some DNS and cron jobs and email and blogs, we're talking about a very common setup that's running successfully on zillions of boxes. On the other hand, two or three times in five years I have had buggy Apache modules bring down a machine by leaking processes, and it would have been nice if that didn't take e.g. email down with it.

I think my biggest reservation about your approach is that it's weird. It's basically hand-made custom EC2, right? Is there an open source project somewhere to package up the tools to do this on one's own servers? (If not, maybe you should start one... :)
Most business take pride in what they make..
And some didn't/don't:

By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, cosmetics which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent. The only way that the FDA could even seize the product was due to a misbranding problem: an "Elixir" was defined as a medication dissolved in ethanol, not the diethylene glycol used in the Elixir Sulfanilamide.

http://www.calcompnutrition.com/natural-cures-kevin-trudeau....

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q1=ALL&q4=...
It continues to baffle me that GMail is the only client* with all-in-a-page threaded email. Some desktop apps make a stab at it, but generally limit it to some kind of highlighting by subject line. Even if it didn't have the search, I'd stay with Gmail for that.

* Well, Zoe had a go, but was always buggy and now seems dead.
they're not free since they have constraints. Those constraints bring prices higher. there is no free flow of information either in black markets
The big question is how to stop worrying about the need to personally fetch water and make clothes, and how to start worrying about implementing your overall plans. That is, how to get enough production going where you wouldn't be screwed when the solar cells powering your electronics (you didn't seriously consider bringing batteries, did you?) wear out.

My basic plan would be: Convince a small village I'm God and chose them to build my kingdom, improve their farming and sanitation enough to produce some labor surpluses, and then work my way up the tech tree.

The basic sketch of that would involve fireworks, a single assault rifle, and a low-power device storing lots of specifications.
Two more things that AWS has that no other hosting company offers: Queue and Billing. The Amazone Message Queue service handles all those messages you pass from virtual machine to virtual machine. Companies far larger than Amazon have spent years working on message queues for proper scaling (RabbitMQ, AMQP), and Amazon just has one there that works for you off the bat. It makes scaling a lot easier.

Also, they have a bill pay system for charging credit cards for access to your systems. Just another boring bit of code you don't have to write yourself included free with the AWS service.
To extend the gist, speed-reading is more or less about reading sentences like words and paragraphs like sentences. The trick is figuring how you can read beyond your rate of comprehension, and actually forcing your eyes line-by-line faster than you can vocalize each thought.
PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports
The Great Implication of Context-Driven Methodology
"Following Windows 3.0 was Windows NT which was code versioned as Windows 3.1. Then came Windows 95"

Wait, what about Windows 3.1 (ie the 16-bit one, the upgrade from 3.0)? Did they have two different products that were both Windows version 3.1, or did "Windows 3.1" get a different version number? These people are nuts.
Cheney's staff was reading all the White House NSC emails
you need this kind of articles to change the system, make sure senators or entrepreneurs see the problem and act upon it.
I'd imagine that's why nearly all boarding calls have a separate group for "families with small children", usually called first.
This is like 13 pages in to the best political article of 2009. Last paragraph. Cullen Murphy, William Langewiesche, and Michael Lewis are all contributing editors at VF now? Crap, I'm going to have to subscribe to Vanity Fair, and chuck The Atlantic.
Pure: A modern-style functional programming language based on term rewriting.
In 3 of the last 4 flights I've taken, boarding was the limiting factor. We left the gate within 5 minutes after the last person boarded, and were airborne shortly after without having to wait on the tarmac. On one of those flights, the plane didn't finish boarding until 10-15 minutes after it was scheduled to take off.

Curiously, the one exception was a United red-eye back from SF to Boston. And I think they may've been using this boarding method - the gate attendants said that the boarding groups were window seats first, then middle, then aisle. There certainly was no rhyme or reason to seating within boarding groups, and there were about 12 boarding groups.
Personally, I enjoy reading. Speed reading is for people who don't.
It's relative right, b/c unlike the rest of you I only find stimulation and focus in cities. Everything pails in comparison... so does my attention. This is very interesting read though, enjoyed this post.
Generally I find that it's not my reading speed that is limiting me, but my ability to digest that which I read. Also these speed reading techniques get me a bit on the defensive. I feel a bit bad being so skeptical without being able to carefully articulate my reasons for it. Similar to neuro-linguistic programming techniques, this seems like something that might be true and can perhaps be even be proved to be so, but in some way it feels like you shouldn't try to bring things like these into conscious thought.

When I read, I just want to read like I naturally do. When I interact with people, I think it may make me act awkwardly if I try to consciously apply some techniques. Of course as in anything there may be a learning curve, after which it pays off to have expended the effort. I suspect I might have been burned by a shortcut technique like this before, although I might never be sure.

Before moving to Japan, I started studying the 3000 kanji characters that are required to be able to read properly. Of course this seems like an utterly monumental task, but never fear someone suggested to me this clever hack called the Heisig method. Instead of learning the characters and how to pronounce them by rote, the Heisig method splits the characters into subparts, and the whole learning process into recognition and pronunciation parts. Like in speed reading, the method tries to make you conscious of your learning process.

Sounds great, right? Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but in my two years in Japan I was not able to complete that book. Even after coming back, I would still open it and try to proceed, but somehow it feels wrong. Now when I look back, I notice that the actual characters I remember are not from Heisig, but from the rote exercises or the practical usage of characters in our classrooms. This makes me suspect it may be better to let subconscious remain as such, and just concentrate instead on practice. Checking characters as you read, writing them in essays and emails. Interacting with a lot of people to get more comfortable at it. Reading tons of books to become a better reader. When you're really into a book, you might find yourself going faster just to discover what will happen next. Let your subconscious take care of the details.
A sure way of seperating the boys from the men.
In that case, Internet (especially social news websites) hurts your brain more. At least I am one data point that they do.

The article also explains the headache I get when someone drags me to malls.
If you only read the 20% you want to read, then according to your first statement you will only remember 20% of that!
> There's a lot of advancement in the world of browsers, and Microsoft's not a part of it!

Umm.... the benchmarks I've seen of IE8 show substantial (order of magnitude) improvements in javascript speed. They are still behind, but we should be able to count on a big increase in javascript speed across the board in the next couple of years.
I read a lot of speed-reading books when I was in college. I was working my way through, living in my own rented place, so time was of the essence. But I eventually decided that a lot of speed-reading techniques are less useful than they appear. The most helpful book I discovered during that research phase was Reading for Power and Flexibility

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-Johns...

which was a refreshing change of emphasis from most other speed-reading books.

Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading (for example, making sure to read the whole table of contents, the whole preface/introduction/foreword, and even the whole index before starting the book proper); focused vocabulary development targeting words with Latin and Greek roots used in the international scientific vocabulary; and daring not to read a whole book if reading one section of it would answer my question.

Good vocabulary development books are

http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

and

http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...
But what if you and your friend are not on Facebook? What if you want to give them a feed of your pandora channels, some videos you liked, and 2 or 3 articles without them having to navigate at all once they got the feed? This person has no net prescence and you just want to set up a tv channel for them to enjoy. The interface would be as simple as "turn to channel me" and that's it.
Google Timeline Experiment Seen In Main Search Results
I use a laxidasical reading technique: I read the document 3 times over, each session punctuated by series of breaks. It sinks in eventually.
"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." —Cardinal Richelieu
Or at least suicidal (adventurous?) men from the others.
I may not have anything to hide but I'm NOT a criminal so I shouldn't be treated as such.

Also, your position is somewhat selfish. Just because you don't care about your rights doesn't mean you can do the same to mine.
Wow, that sounds creepy when you put it like that.
What I did a few days ago was to create a friendfeed account for my family email list, and set it up to get weekly email summaries. The first summary hasn't arrived yet, or I'd tell you how it's going.