skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... When I visited Japan last month to study its successful high-speed rail system, its transport minister told me that Japan’s first railways were built by Edmund Morell, a British engineer, in the 1870s. This is the time for Britain to seek to regain its world-class engineering skill base and to lead in new industrial sectors such as low carbon technology. This will happen only if pioneering companies recruit top talent now. ..."

Good idea, but will regrettably not happen because after the grads are trained

- where is the industry into which they can be recruited?

- what market is willing to pay for these products now & in the near future?

- where are the English entrepreneurs?

The UK made a deliberate decision to specialise in finance at the same time winding back engineering. A shame really because English engineering is first rate.
Most kids that want to pick up programing probably use windows. That makes perfect sense. But if you are asking about the programmers, that know programing and are not noobs, than there are 2 options, they either have descent knowledge of unix, but prefer windows as a platform for different reasons, or they don't know anything outside of windows, in which case they probably suck. Maybe the problem is not in ruby developers on windows, maybe the problem is the ruby community not understanding them:

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/lam-ironruby-ms-opensource
I've lost data 3 times due to host cock-ups and I didn't have the correct back-ups in place to fix it. It sucks, I learnt to back-up properly, and I moved on. Certainly didn't require anyone to "take a stand" on my behalf, and I fail to see the need for anyone to take a stand now.
> auctions off portions of the wireless spectrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Modern_s...

> municipalities control where you can build cell towers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
your argument is fallacious:
Basically saying: Look there was SOME government regulation. The market failed, so it is the fault of regulation. less regulation is the solution.

While if you flip the coin you can have:
The industry was not regulated enough. Recently there has been a trend to de-regulation, and letting the market free to do what they want to do, and this let us to this huge mess. The markets are made out of people, that have a herd mentality, and only view their short term interest, while ignoring the long term ones.

And there are many experiments to prove this: (insert many experiments done on how people would rather have 5$ today, then $20 if few weeks, even though the later is a much better deal).

While you fail to mention the fact that the government is not forcing anybody to actually acknowledge the rating agencies ratings, and to invest by them.

If the market was smart, why didn't reconginze the problem with the ratings, and avoid it?

Another thing that libertarians fail to mention is that in the late 20s, early 30s, a lot of this regulation, or agencies, didn't exist!! Yet the market failed to protect against themselves, and we had the great depression.

Please explain that!
In MS's defense, it was leaked; the build wasn't supposed to be public.

Not that it makes a difference anymore - it leaked with this bug (& many others, most likely, just somewhat more minor) - and can't be unleaked.
Server: iSCSI cross-country replication, snapshots (automated)

Desktop: Time Machine (hourly; automated)

All code is hosted at GitHub; I just sort of assume the EngineYard people know how to back stuff up. Google for e-mail, though it is locally mirrored via IMAP.
Is shortly in the next couple days or next couple months?
>Think about it, if you're an investment banker, what else can you do?

You can read a balance sheet, research an industry, make a presentation to sell something expensive, and work 80 hours a week at something no matter how tedious.

There's got to be some demand for those skills.
Make sure the tool you use to post the data uses the Content-MD5 header!

Many of the first backup scripts and libraries didn't use this corruption detection feature.
This is the reason I'm buying the less possible games from Steam, because I know Valve could be bought buy Google or EA some day, and you have no control over it . You have absolutely no guarantee that the service you are using will be the same tommorow, and I definitly don't want all my eggs in the same basket. Same goes for a lot of online services.
Every youtube video I watch and scroll to bottom of page i see the chrome ad.
I'm interested in reasons of those, who have Linux knowledge. Those who don't probably just don't want to bother themselves with it and they always argue with "Why would I ever need bash when I a have my super GUI explorer"

(Though, the last ones are also an interesting case, because my point is that you can't do ruby good if you don't know how to use linux tools at least as an average dumb user, and I wonder if I could be proved wrong).
Ask HN: How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN?
I just saw a comment by pg reminding another commenter of the HN guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This seems like an opportune time to ask how I might implement the guidelines quoted below:

"What to Submit

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I've read most of pg's essays

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

over the years, so I have some sense of his intellectual interests, and I remember the very early phase of Reddit (which I think was seeded with participants by a bunch of personal friends of pg and the Reddit founders). But please inform me so I do better. I can see empirically which links and which "Ask HN" posts get upvoted the most, but which links and which Ask HN posts are the ones you would most like to see? What posts that gratify intellectual curiosity should there be more of?

Still learning at age fifty,
"... I was not at either Commodore or Atari, but I had to deal with Jack Tramiel as a third party ISV. He was a genuine ahole. He would lie, bully, and break promises. He would start off giving you a verbal good deal and then take it back bit by bit. Of course nothing was ever written down. I had a bad feeling about our deal and pulled out before we had spent any real money. ..."

It's reported Tramiel, a Polish Jew had to deal with the Nazi Mengele as a child ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Tramiel I guess everyone else is a pushover.
Some of the recruiters I've talked to from larger and smaller firms that never see the "I-bank crowd" are now getting swamped with top applications.

They'd be bonkers to hire any of them, they'll all jump ship at the first sign of the economy recovering.

Until more traditional companies allow for greater meritocracy and faster advancement they won't be able to hold the top talent.

Agreed. Here in the UK one of the remnants of the old class system is that managers will never pay a worker more than themselves. Its never been a problem in the City as the place was just awash with cash (and the traders and their managers were of the same "class" anyway, and they all made much more than the programmers). But in other companies, someone on the "graduate management fast track" will feel a sense of entitlement (comes from being institutionalized) and will bitterly resent anyone with technical skill, whether that's someone who operates a compiler or a lathe. I'm fortunate to have mainly worked for enlightened employers (the CEO of my current company was formerly the CTO) but I know that's not the case in most of the IT world.
A few words with Jack Tramiel & the Commodore 64 gang
I think the discussion is getting lost here. We recognize that the current system is a partially-free, but heavily-regulated structure. Now the question is, what were the weaknesses in the system? What were the points of failure?

Leftists are saying that the problem was that the system was too free. Libertarians are saying that the main problem lies with the corruption and inefficiency of regulation. Neither point is trivial, neither point can be dismissed as ideological rhetoric.

There are those libertarians who will always blame the government for every problem until we live under Rothbardian anarchy. You may think that position is idiotic, and you are welcome to do so. However, the leftists who blame every problem on "the unfettered free market" sound equally idiotic to my ears in a world with regulatory agencies with multi-billion dollar budgets and hundreds of thousands of pages of rules controlling trillions of dollars of capital every day.

So, don't dismiss all claims of misregulation even if some of the critics are unhinged. After all, if something is wrong there, we would expect it to have large effects. My old firm spent at least a seven-figure number each year to comply with regulatory rules, and it wasn't very large.
What does "research an industry" mean, tho'? It doesn't mean anything about how to do stuff in that industry. It means knowing that if the price of oil goes up, sell your airline stock. It's an open secret in finance that when an analyst says "buy" he means "hold" and when he said "hold" he means "sell SELL SELL". I'm not clear where the value-add is there.
Regulatory costs do raise the barrier to entry and push the market towards fewer, larger firms.
Experiment: let's try an economics post of my own.
I'm a Mech Eng graduate and it's too late for my generation. Once we were all eager beavers, we couldn't wait to get out into the real world and engineer some stuff. Most of us went into IT or banking because there were so few jobs for engineering graduates in our field. Now, hell, I've all the database skills you could want, but I barely know one end of a gas turbine from the other. Getting the UK back to an engineering powerhouse will not be quick or easy to do.
AuthSMTP is a nice idea and I would pay their rates if they were metered like Amazon's Web Services. The problem is that I often don't know how many emails I'll need to be sending. For example, let's say they had a simple charge of $0.001 (one tenth of a cent) for each email sent plus $0.005 (one half of one cent) per MB sent. That would work nicely (and be in line with what they currently charge).

The problem is that I have to decide on what plan to buy. AWS' model works nicely in that it works for a tiny bit or a lot.
I stopped reading at "As web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0". It seems your website contains slightly less vapid jargon, but I still think your homepage could do a better job of selling the service (Jasber had some good advice). Beyond that I can't offer much as I have no knowledge of Canadian businesses and environmental policies.
I've been on an airline where they line up individuals in a specific order (there's number markers along the line at the gate to make it easy). I don't know what the algorithm was, but it seemed fairly efficient.
Authorities could break into PCs

Into the PCs they CAN break ;)
Certain the tragedy of the commons is a real issue, but the FCC and the spectrum control is too far in the regulated direction.
Do people really care if they're split up for 10 minutes while boarding? In the case of families with kids, they're allowed to board early anyway.

And I've seen planes loaded from the front and back before.
I think if you just change up your homepage, it will be a thousand times better. Other than that it looks great, well marketed!
"What do I do with a dot zee eye pea file?" ...
Might work for strictly business-folk serving lines? If groups still sit next to each other anyway, they can deal with the wait I think.
If I were you I'd avoid anything overly complicated.

A lot of potential customers are going to balk if they have to put any work into figuring out how much your service is going to cost (eg: if it was based on some formula involving the table count and the column count(s)).

Sometimes a clever and innovative pricing scheme works well, but a lot of times customers shy away from anything they're not already used to. Keep it simple to figure out what this is going to cost.

If I were you I'd split your offerings into three tiers, basic, medium, and enterprise, and then sell them on a subscription basis. When you subscribe to a tier, you get unlimited use of that tier's offerings (!).

Basic would be aimed at projects a small ISV would tackle; probably put in some limit on the model complexity, or omit some of the crown jewels.

Medium would be aimed at larger projects; relax the limits on model complexity and omit fewer of the crown jewels.

Enterprise would be aimed at "enterprise" stuff, would have essentially no limits and would include the crown jewels, if you have any.

Candidate prices: 99/yr, 999/yr, 9999+/yr, but you should do more research to home in on something.

I suggest yearly subscriptions b/c it's more money upfront, it puts less mental strain on a potential purchaser, and the larger #s make you look more serious.

About the "more serious": $99 is cheap, but a believable price for "serious software". The equivalent monthly rate is ~$8.50/month, which is hard to take seriously as being "serious software".

I want to reiterate that you'll probably have better luck monetizing this in some different way; no harm in trying the service route first, if that's what you want to do.

Even as a service, though, you guys need to pound on some doors and do some interviews to figure out which features are wanted by what potential customers, and why; this will help you refine your offerings, get a better handle on the right price(s), and figure out where best to draw the lines between tiers.

(!) If you do offer unlimited use within a tier make sure your terms of service prohibit resale of the service itself. You'll also need to plan on building a monitoring infrastructure to alert you to "suspicious use" (eg: high volume on an account, or a large # of distinct ips using a particular set of credentials).
Which tool(s) do you recommend that do this?
Oh, I agree completely that some on the left make plenty of bad statements of their own and are altogether too ready to blame markets for various things. I'm sort of a centrist and believe that many things need to be worked out by trial and error. This means that people basically need to be free to try, but that, in some cases, errors also need to be dealt with, and sometimes, the government is the most efficient way to deal with them. Often, local governments are preferable to farther away/bigger ones, but some issues are also dealt with best on a larger scale.
Tell you who the major players are and how they differ. Estimate a value function for the equity of firms in that industry. Find out how large the market is, how it has changed over time, and how it differs across countries. Research the regulations that effect the industry and give a concise explanation of which rules are normally constraining and which rules can be worked around. Find out what companies have been bought or sold in the sector, who has been doing the buying, and who has the balance sheet to do more deals in the near future.
We'll win eventually.
It's really easy to understand if you know what the Newton Method for computing roots of a polynomial is.
Sounds like someone who'd be ideally suited... to working in an investment bank!
Lightsack - how to send data from CPC 464 to PC without owning the neccesery cables
I think a major problem is that governments are large, monopolistic, and tend to copy each other. How do you know what really works if you don't have different models to look at?

We see some competition between governments in areas like the European Union that have free trade and free movement. This has resulted in tax rates being lowered and business being liberalized across the EU. However, the European Union cooperates on some things, such as financial regulation, so we won't see any competition between different models there.

I think the US is much too large in terms of people, GDP, and land area to be efficiently governed by one entity. The law is crusted over with special interest regulation and really needs a rethinking. However, I doubt that is likely to change any time soon.

And I agree with you that trial and error is a good way of proceeding. The problem is that the visibility and the severity of an error are not always correlated. It is easy to fix visible problems but not get closer to an efficient model.
Once Labour get kicked out things will return to sanity.

Unfortunately I doubt it. That's exactly what we all said when we kicked the Tories out.
They hooked me a couple years ago with one of these deals. I now pay $10 / months but I haven't had any problems.

And thats how they can afford to give 95%.
I second the motion for more clarity on what exactly you do and why people/companies want it.

Also, on the "Pricing & Signup" page, when I click on "Sign-Up" under a certain plan, it would be nice if the radio button defaulted to that plan.

Your customers may know, but I didn't know that SME stands for Small and Medium Enterprises. It may not matter since you list the features, but that certainly confused me.

I don't really like the box around the SME plan. It may work if you use some other color. Also, the Red on Blue doesn't work. When I saw it, it seemed wrong, and then I checked this article:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377508
which agreed.

Also, since you're targeting companies, you may want to allow company name rather than first and last names.
Sit still, breath and wait for the LSD to wear off (:
As a counter note, I had been using them for about 16 months straight, ending about a year ago. During the time I was onboard, my monitoring services recorded about 30 different occasions when my server/cluster went offline, each for generally about 30-120 minutes at a time; there was one month that my cluster had seven or eight outages, one of which was for nearly a day.

When users (like me) are relying on the server to host email accounts, mailing lists, and subversion repositories, downtimes like that are just absurd.

Good thing though is that I absolutely love Slicehost, and for only a little bit more $/mo, I have a VPS solution that hasn't gone down even once since I signed up. The only downside is that setting up your own email server is a pain in the ass... :P
2008: My year of living smaller
In another post someone asked who Jack Tramiel is ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419249
Yeah, maybe. Might be useful in internal management and strategy divisions of large firms, too. It would probably be good to have an ex-investment banker somewhere in the high level management of your firm.
I agree with you in general but disagree about this piece. I think it's much better than you describe, for two reasons: Lewis is a fabulous writer, and the article is more truth-telling than fear-mongering.
I've tried, but I just can't take Steve Gilmore seriously. Anytime he writes or speaks, he just inflates his arguments with air. He usually has some good core ideas, but he always smothers them with excess exposition. Unfortunately it just makes it difficult to finish his articles much less get any usable info from them.
Born: 10-23-1942. Died: 11-04-2008

Let him rest in peace.
I tend to look at it as an economic lubricant. It makes things run smoother, and as complexity increases things would break down if it wasn't there, but at the end of the day it is there to enable the parts of society that produce valuable things and ideas.

I agree that it is useful and its existence is desirable, but the problem is that it is often overshadowing the parts of society that it is supposed to be supporting. Because of this, it is drawing a disproportionate number of smart people who might otherwise be having a greater impact elsewhere.
IMO HN sees hackers with a wide range of interests. I personally like to read anything that tickles my intellectual curiosity, from programming topics, to articles covering the current financial crisis (of which I know very little, BTW :D) [Needless to say every now and then I come across an article that introduced me to a topic that I knew nothing of, and it has subsequently found itself on my "like" list]

Right now as I write this the top 3 articles on HN cover how to load a plan, an article on the current financial debacle, and the highly optimized square root calculation used by the makers of Quake. I read all three, and upvoted all three (did not comment on any).

IMO I would not worry about what articles other hackers find interesting, post those that _you_ do. The voting process will separate the wheat from the chaff.

After that long response, personally, I tend to like to read about the new language/technology that I have currently immersed myself in, but I tend not to post all the articles that I read to avoid making HN a www.reddit.com/r/<insert language here> clone.

I think for the most part, submit what you feel is interesting, and every now and then a comment will tell you that you messed up (I know I have had a few, and have apologized for the same).

Happy Posting...
Eliezer, thank you. Your essays, without fail, introduce me to concepts I had not considered before. They get me thinking, and hopefully, thinking in a different way about the topics.
Anything that's intellectually stimulating to entrepreneurs and hackers. 99.9% of the people who visit Hacker News are in one or both categories.

Problem solving? Ground-breaking tech news? News about YCombinator start-ups? Better development methods? Ways to raise funds? Ideas that grate against the system?

Bring them on.
I've done AWS, dedicated, and colo. Each one has their own tradeoffs.

AWS is daunting at first -- but then so is Debian. Once you figure out the keys thing and your base image it's fairly easy (also see ElasticFox, S3Browser). You might as well learn it, even if you stick with dedicated hosting for other reasons.

Things not to sneeze at:
* elastic: start up a dozen servers in a few minutes
* free access to s3 storage
* crazy awesome pay-as-you-go bandwidth (250mbps)
* expensive for the CPU/RAM you get
* virtual disks can be slow on random seeks
* sorry, no cPanel (though see RightScale)
* poor locality of servers
Right, as I commented. I thought it would be a bit humorous, so I left it, but it was just down-voted for the hypocrisy. Fair enough.
I used to curse too much when I was a kid, there are some short term gains at a young age, but I observed that it seemed to hurt my vocabulary. Unfortunately I still have a slight habit.
I'm glad at least one person found it amusing.
Although lawyers, with their TPS reports and infinite memos, drive me absolutely nuts; they are necessary. While they don't create wealth, they allow others to do so.

I agree major reforms are needed, but they certainly provide some value.
I don't know anything about legal environmental obligations but what made sense to me was the last line on the front-page: NIMONIK is the best automated tool to meet ISO 14001 requirements for the management of legal requirements. I would suggest putting giving the line a better position.

I would also suggest changing the preview image for the video. Vimeo lets you select from several screencaps so maybe there's a better one in there.
I'm not sure this would work very well with Southwest because they don't assign seat numbers to passengers (at least in my experience). Most of the time, the people at the front of the group choose seats toward the front of the plane and hold up everyone else while they're stowing their bag.