skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, a small AWS image comes with 1.7GB of RAM. That's a big difference.

In terms of the processor metric, that's harder to gauge. Right now, Amazon says one EC2 compute unit is roughly equivalent to a 1.0-1.2GHz 2007 Xenon or Opteron (or a 1.7GHz 2006 Xenon which was their original documentation).

Think of it this way, Amazon is putting you on a beefy server with some other people. I'd guess these servers are 4-core boxes running at around 2GHz+ with 16GB of RAM. So, with the Extra-Large instance, you're basically getting the box (15GB of RAM, 4 cores with 2 compute units per core (roughly 2-2.4GHz per core)). So, with the Large instance, you're getting half of the server (2x 2GHz Xenon processors) and with the small instance you're probably getting one core at half speed.

And that's really as much as most people will need especially since I'm guessing there's a bit of bursting ability to the CPU capacity.

Hope that helps make Amazon's CPU situation a little more understandable.
Overnight success takes a long time
Predicting Food Shortage with Satellites
apple-shift-t reopens closed tabs in firefox
Quake 3 Arena was released in 1999.

When designing rendering engines, the general goal is to design for 80% to 90% of the market of the market conditions for when your game releases. Considering most games have a 1 to 3 year development cycle, this seems like a weak bet.
Though this article isn't all that well written, it brings up what seems to be a (very good) trend lately: people exploring the idea of living with less.

I'm only a college student right now, and already have limited expenses, but I've been exploring the idea of reducing the amount of things I own; a more minimalist lifestyle. I've realized something that Jelliffe points out towards the end of his article:

"Simplicity is great if it is coupled with quality household goods, but terrible with commodity goods that bust all the time."

Most items you can get at Wal-Mart, Target, or any major chain store are not well made...and, well, crap. Yes, the nicer things are more expensive and more difficult to find, but they are worth it. Which makes more sense: owning one quality $100 knife for 30+ years, or going through 10 $20 knives over the course of 30 years?

That's just the beginning of living simpler, though. It isn't just about replacing your stuff with better stuff, but about reducing the overall amount of stuff you own. Do you really need X, Y, and Z, or can you do without Y and Z?

Relating this to my own experience, I like to see it as an interesting challenge. Since I fly back and forth from my school (and I don't own a car), everything I own has to be packed away in a storage unit at the end of the school year. Therefore, the less I own, the less I have to store, and the better off I am. I've been working to get rid of a lot of things I don't need (how much clothing do I really need? Electronics? Trinkets?) and avoiding buying new things. The major advantage this has is that it frees up a lot of money to spend on things I really want to do, such as a trip to Japan I have planned for this summer.

I wish this idea would go more mainstream, though, as I think the whole US could do with a little downsizing. Perhaps this current economy will help push us in that direction?
Ah yes. Thanks for the clarification on the numbers, yours sound more right (and more generous), and do a fair job of making AWS services even more competitive than I'd thought they were.
Have a look at Kmail (or Kontact which intergrates Kmail with Korganiser & KAddressbook). Evolution ain't too bad either, but seems to have gotten buggy (or buggier) in recent years.
I think he means that he doesn't worry about encrypting third-party-hosted backups of his source code, because the code alone wouldn't be of much value to someone else, whilst it is very valuable to himself.
Everyone has something to hide. You have photos of Big Ben and a degree in electronics? Translates into, "This guy is possibly planning to bomb a clock tower."
I think the fundamental difference is that there's no real effort here to appeal to a wider audience. In fact there seem to be some things done (lack of a "fancy" design for starters) to discourage that.
Yes and no.

GPUs are becoming more CPU-like. They are gaining more general-purpose instructions and supporting additional complexity in computations.

CPUs are becoming more GPU-like. They are increasingly pipelined and parallelized.

However, there are still fundamental differences between CPUs and GPUs that make them suited for varied tasks. CPUs tend to support branch prediction (although not always, see game consoles) and various volatile threading operations. GPUs gain a lot of their speed by making assumptions about side effects and causality in their calculations. Branching is rarely, if ever, needed at runtime and almost all of the operations performed by most applications can be encoded as vector operations.

The future of powerful computers is probably a hybrid of various processing units, memory architectures, and special purpose hardware. We're going to need software abstractions to deal with this complexity.
Smells like a con, I explain why here:

http://www.danielharan.com/2009/01/04/colektivo-another-mont...
The First True Scientist - al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham born 965 A.D.
There are lots of laptop keyboard loggers. The real convert ones embed them in the keyboard by putting it between some connector or another. Laptop and desktop. You just need 10 minutes if your good.
I think the problem is not regulation, but that regulations are almost always implemented after something has gone wrong.

Regulations should be more dynamic. If it looks like someone has found a loophole, they shouldn't be afraid to plug it before it becomes a problem. But they should also be more active in modifying and "optimizing" existing regulations, so long as they don't do it too often.
I think it would be fair to say that I am not a hacker, although my oldest son aspires to be a hacker. So some of my bias in what I find interesting to post here is

a) what is good groundwork-laying information for a YOUNG hacker?

or

b) what contributes to a broad, complete education for hackers of any age?
It's not zero sum. You can both win, or both lose. Or she can win and you can lose, but only if she's not a very nice person (e.g. a controlling bitch). Or you can win and she can lose, but only if you're a controlling prick.

You win if you can resolve the issue and make her feel better without making major loss to yourself or the relationship. Usually, this involves her winning, as well.
FWIW, Dreamhost doesn't even recommend hosting email on their servers, even if they offer the ability to do so if the user wants. They're trying to migrate people off to Google's custom domain services.
we keep local (on our web box), networked (NFS) and S3 backups of a) our entire server build, b) our code base, c) our database dumps, d) our email & configs.

we backup nightly (we backup at the "quietest" period of last nights activity on the subsequent night)

on our local machine we can keep: yesterdays backup, day before yesterday, end of last week, and start of month backups.

it's entirely automated, except for the bi-monthly backup check (I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH - CHECK BACKUPS!) where we fully restore our data and code on a spare box.

by code i mean live code - we also backup our git working code base.
What about Archimedes? His pure mathematical works have survived to the present better than some of his scientific works, but he is not alone among Greek-speaking people of his era in being scientists. Eratosthenes must fit, I think.
How cities hurt your brain
As a point of linguistic information: boy used as the poster did is an exclamation, pretty much equivalent to Wow.
There is also a disconnect (related to your comment) between what the left (and centre) are accusing, and what libertarians defend against.

The left are simply claiming that this was caused by market liberalisation. Increasing market liberalisation would make it worse. The free marketeers are then countering by saying it was never totally free. You can't use that situation to judge anything.
Yeah, that was a strange quote. The article then contradicts itself a paragraph or two later.
I recently flew Southwest and sat in an exit row. The flight attendant came by to give her spiel, and the 100 pound young woman sitting next to me expressed doubt that she could lift 50 pounds. I think it took about 5 minutes of pleading(!) with the rest of the completely full plane to find a volunteer to change seats with her.
I've theorized that I don't remember a name until I need to use it. I can game this with some effort by taking the time to artificially "need" to use their name by imagining their face and mentally calling their name.
"never write a reply that is against PG if you want to keep your karma point high."

Really? I'd expect pg himself, at least, to upvote a comment that gets him to think. I don't think I've tried yet the experiment of disagreeing with him directly. I'll observe the results if I do.

To answer the main question, I like comments that grapple with the main point of the post or comment to which they are replying, and especially comments that link out to useful resources on the same or a related subject.

A kind of comment I would like to see more of, a kind I have posted but don't get a lot of upvotes from, is asking a question along the lines of "How could we find out more about the facts of this issue?" or "What is the significance of this statement and its importance?" (You can see specific examples in the listing of my comments with low upvote totals. :) ) I really would like to know from the smart people here how they gather and evaluate evidence and how they make social policy trade-offs among competing interests.
Social sites live and die on the activities/behaviour/culture of their members. While I agree that the article isn't groundbreaking, I found it interesting because it shows in a very pragmatic way the kind of maintenance required to keep a site from going downhill. The author of the site used to be 'fraud czar' of match.com and is now starting a new free dating site.

I think it would be fascinating to see everything that goes on behind the scenes of these sites, and this guy gives a little bit of a glimpse.

Elsewhere he has some interesting commentary on how much money Russian and Nigerian con artists were making on dating sites like Match.com.
watch sbs
the list the algo generates proves pagerank is a very good.. Google ftw- I do wonder sometimes how they kept the lead now that most search engines are using similar algos..
Fast JavaScript VM's are Google's ally. In the long run, TraceMonkey, SquirelFish Extreme, and V8 are all money-makers for Google. IE7 and Microsoft's slow JS engine is not.
There's one major obstacle to adoption of non-IE browsers: something I call the "big blue E syndrome".

I see it a lot at work-- all computers have both IE and Firefox installed and the icons are positioned next to one another on the desktop. As far as I can tell, there are only two of us using Firefox despite it being accessible alongside IE. That big blue E, for most people, IS the internet. It has "Internet" in the name, for goodness sake. I don't use it simply because I need to get things done online in the day and I find IE mindnumbingly slow.

If Google really want to be cheeky, they should take the e from their logo, turn it blue and use it as the Chrome icon. Then rename the browser "Internet with Google"...!
Ctrl-Shift-T on Windows: works in Firefox, Opera and Chrome.

Also middle click closes tab.
Toss Your Most Brilliant Product Ideas Into Ponoko.com's Fishbowl
I always look at friendfeed as the beginning of something that I could broadcast to my friends that don't haunt the web that much. What if you could take the feed and somehow turn it into a show, where a more passive web viewer could just watch?
John Battelle's 2009 Predictions
Sure (I really should do a real write-up on this...):

So the main purposes are simple horizontal scaling and efficient use of hardware. Virtualization makes horizontal scaling simple because it's just a matter of cloning a particular machine (or machines). It makes efficient use of hardware because there's no need to have a dozen physical machines for a dozen different purposes, unless they all use a full machine worth of resources.

Lets say I want to add a new (non-static) Web server. Well, Apache is on its own VM; I can clone and migrate it to a new physical box (or just have two on the same hardware). I could also simply add more resources dynamically. If I need to scale the database, same deal. The biggest win here is that when I scale one of those, nothing else comes with it. There's no DNS server on the Web box. There is no NFS server on the database box.

Before virtualization, you basically had two choices: Throw a whole bunch of packages on a single box or spread it out over different physical machines. The first completely ruins encapsulation, thus adding unnecessary complexity, while the second is really uneconomical unless you're using all those resources out of the gate.

Then, what happens when you need to scale? All that crap needs to be setup again! Hopefully we were smart about it and made it as simple as possible, but I have never made a system as scalable as my current one-click-cloning mechanism.

Right now we only have a single physical machine (16 cores, 32gb ram, iSCSI); using your recommendation of "whatever packages on whatever servers" I would end up with this clusterfuck of a server that does a dozen different things at once. What I have now is exactly that, except encapsulated into VMs with their own resources and their own purpose.

Yes, virtualization has a slight performance cost (though bare-metal virts like Xen have a pretty marginal one), but I'll gladly accept it for the massively easier scaling and efficient use of hardware. And, yes, if one VM happens to go insane for some reason, it doesn't affect anything else. For instance, on one of our older servers, the MySQL VM's "drive" had a tendency to become corrupt randomly. I never really did figure out why, but I imagine it was because I make fun of MySQL all the time, but I digress -- the point is, it never affected the rest of the machine and, since MySQL was used for things of little importance (Wordpress), it didn't even take down the website when it happened.

That was a pretty rambling explanation, but hopefully it covers your questions. If not, let me know.
the only over night sucesses I have heard of are those 2 startups that flipped within hours for around 1.5k each, so there is some truth in this article
Scale. And now brand.

Back when Google starting gaining popularity it was an order of magnitude better than anything else (I remember using Dogpile to search a dozen individual engines because they were all so crappy).

I feel like the quality of Google search has declined recently, but for something to usurp Google it will need to be an order of magnitude better to get me to switch again.
That was really my point. Sort of. My point was also that in order to have a policy you have to nail down something that is un-nail-downable, like defining obscenity.

There is nothing inherently obscene about breasts. Actually breasts are a funny case because in some places it was always OK to see them, while in others it wasn't. Genitalia are almost universally banned (& we don't often encounter issues with public childbirth so it's not the same sort of issue). There isn't anything you could describe as 'rational' about the bans.

Anyway, normally we eyeball it in the day to day, make a policy for laws & try to avoid the area where definitions get fuzzy.

If you feel so inclined there are all sorts of things you can do to dance around the definitions. Cover only the areola. Show a slow zoom-out shot of an areola starting with individual cells. Let the regulators decide where the shot needs to stop zooming out.

Breast feeding is an issue at the core because it is very inconvenient for mothers of young infants to be banned from public breastfeeding. They either can only go out only for short periods of time or need to go & sit in the bathroom to nurse. That's not nice.
"Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may
be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can
never come again into being; nor can the dead ever
be brought back to life." -- Sun Tzu, Art of War

i.e. Be patient and don't give in.
>> Really, really, really real free markets never seem to exist, though.

What, pray tell, do you think the black market is?
i think for a true micropayment system to work it has to be usable across domains instead of just within a social network... this means the iphone, myspace and FB have to agree to use standard (open or other wise) protocols... without a common system all developers would see is increased transaction costs in the long run... either that or one social network/distribution channel has to beat all others which I dont see as a likely outcome or alternative..
And I commented here: http://www.danielharan.com/2009/01/04/colektivo-another-mont...

I can't see how this is a con.

I work on this project btw. We just didn't see the use of a "who are we?" page, but it's no secret.
I was reacting to the vocabulary of "fighting", "winning" and "losing". What you're saying sounds more reasonable. Crichton seems to be trying to have it both ways.
"everything I own has to be packed away in a storage unit at the end of the school year. Therefore, the less I own, the less I have to store, and the better off I am. I've been working to get rid of a lot of things I don't need (how much clothing do I really need? Electronics? Trinkets?) and avoiding buying new things."

Well said. Whenever I've had the luxury of living somewhere for an extended period of time I've accumulated things, despite all efforts to the contrary. It's certainly less wasteful to save that half-used roll of wrapping paper than to buy another in 11 months, but it comes at the cost of having to keep it somewhere, and the need to be at least minimally aware of it. Before you know it, you've got to have a box for the wrapping paper rolls, and a closet in which to keep the box, and then you put other stuff in the closet, and....

When I moved to San Francisco, I got rid of everything that couldn't fit in one of those door-to-door moving crates. It was a cathartic exercise, and I've been surprised that I haven't missed anything that I eliminated. There's a lot to be said for throwing away everything you own to make a journey; it lets you focus on the things that actually matter.
You need enough medical people to take care of people who are sick, enough lawyers to keep the legal system running efficiently, and enough financial people to make good decisions about the allocation of capital. You also need a few managers, to mention the most prominent elite profession. Most of these professions, however, are overloaded and have people in them who don't belong.

Having one profession attain the status of an elite caste leads to a lot of problems, including a sharp reduction of quality within that profession. People go into that profession with the wrong motivations, and a lot of the people who enter this elite profession don't have the necessary talent, but get put there as political favors (e.g. top-tier managers). Much of why managers have such a negative reputation is that most people in management really have no talent for it, but ended up there because executive positions pay well while expecting very little at minimum, and they were able to get these jobs.

Much of why finance and law suck up so much talent, though, has to do with risk-aversion. A person only has one life, and an assured upper-middle-class lifestyle is more appealing than a 1/5 chance of becoming very wealthy and a 4/5 of faceplanting and having to enter a traditional track at 30. There's more expectancy in starting a company than in going to law school, but expectancy is meaningless, given human mortality.

If I had the ultimate power, here's the program I would found in order to take at least the long-term risk out of startups and encourage bright young people to form companies: career mentoring, 3-5 hours per week, from a VC. The "trainee"/protege works for, and eventually may found, startups. He operates "on the market"-- the program wouldn't guarantee any funding or line up particular jobs, though it might provide assistance and advice-- and is therefore fully responsible for his own job search and funding. After 12-14 years working in startups (some successful, some failed) he gets a job in VC, if he wants it (he might be doing something more interesting).

This removes the long-term career risk from founding startups and makes "serial entrepreneur" a viable career rather than a pipe dream. While one might argue that the guaranteed exit would lead to people being less hungry, most young hackers would much rather found successful companies than end up in business in any context, even as VCs.
"... please refrain from using British and English interchangeably ..."

Why out of curiosity?
I've been following programmers that make stuff that I like, and programs that I use. Collectively, the news feed for all these follows have been pretty useful because it's a little bit like a leading indicator on what projects productive people find interesting, so you hear about things a little bit earlier. I found about about _why's Mixico a few days before it was posted here.

I've heard of most of the names top of the list, but #2 was pretty interesting. I had never heard of imbriaco, but it seems like he has just one project: the erlang-textmate. Seems like it's because 37signals follows him, so that gives a lot of juice to his rankings.
It's hard to look for things that solve problems you don't know you have.
CTRL-click does the same.
You are my hero.

I presume that's built in? I've been using TMP to get the same functionality, but it uses F12 which gets swallowed by firebug if you have that enabled.
I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Which makes more sense: owning one quality $100 knife for 30+ years, or going through 10 $20 knives over the course of 30 years?

But living with 1 $100 knife requires certain behavioral changes. You must take care of it, sharpen it, transport it if you're moving.

Really, these are positive changes and I totally agree that we should be buying more durable goods and maintaining them. In fact, this behavioral change is why the government wants people to own homes. Home ownership gives you something that you need to maintain well rather than simply move away from/discard. It even gives you incentive to improve upon it as that trip to Home Depot can really improve things like the value of the home. People live in communities, improve their homes and communities, and take a real stake in improving things on that local level.
How much ammo would you carry?

It'd be nice to have enough to make an impression on anyone who threatened you. Aside from that, you'd probably never have to use it.
FORA.tv - Guy Kawasaki: The Power of ‘No Bull Shiitake’
It's the end of the world as we know it.

God bless REM