skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a demonstration of how popular the post is, not their capabilities.
Why is Wordpress on the base level?
The short answer is that we believe running your own instances gives better performance and reliability than RDS. However, the cost is complexity: I'm a relatively experienced DBA, and we've since hired a second person with deep MySQL experience. If MySQL admin is something you don't want to spend much time doing, you may be willing to make the performance sacrifice of RDS.

The longer answer is that we don't use RDS because it relies on EBS, and we do not trust EBS for any critical applications. Instead, we put our data on instance storage (aka "ephemeral" storage).

This has two big disadvantages:

a) portability: you can't detach the drive and move it to a new instance like you can with EBS -- to clone or backup, you have to copy over the network, which is much slower (and obviously, if you kill the instance, you lose the data).

b) storage: you are limited in how big your DB can be. An AWS large instance these days gives you nearly 1TB of instance storage, but if you have a single DB larger than that, you need to use EBS if you're on Amazon. (Of course, if you care about performance and your database is > 1TB, you should probably be looking at sharding across multiple machines anyway)

However, using instance storage has two big advantages that we think outweigh those:

a) performance. EBS is basically a network drive. Total I/O operations per second (iops) is punishingly low. If you have a high transaction rate on your database you're going to really hate it. As I mentioned, RDS tries to mitigate this by using multiple EBS drives, but we consider that a band-aid on a pretty fundamental problem with EBS. Instance storage on the other hand is physically local to the VM's host machine, and is therefore much faster.

b) reliability. After 3 years on AWS, our trust in EBS is zero. It fails too often, and its failure pattern is awful: you tend to lose big batches of EBS drives at the same time, and whenever there been a major EBS failure, the API used to launch replacement volumes has failed at the same time, making replacement impossible. Again, we think this is a fundamental problem with the nature of EBS and unlikely to change.
The about page is worth a look. Some cool stuff going on.

http://codesear.ch/about
For what it's worth, Cornell is the only Ivy League school amongst the top-10 for CS.

That said, there is still a strong reason to consider a private university (even if they are not in the top 10 for CS, but are still amongst the top 25). Many of the flag ship state universities do not directly admit students to the CS department. CS major is considered "impacted", and admission criteria may have very little to do with programming ability (e.g., UW CSE emphasizes grades in Physics and Math).

OTOH, I believe you can still transfer into the UC Berkeley BA CS program -- in the College of Arts and Letters from a community college with ~3.6-3.8 GPA. Transferring or getting admitted into the BS EECS program (in the school of engineering) is much harder, but the CS classes the students take are no different. The "BA" vs. "BS" means very little at Berkeley, as they also grant BAs in Physics/Math/etc...

If you're intrinsically motivated and are fairly set on being a software engineer or going to grad school in CS (as opposed to also pondering electrical/computer engineering), going to a community college which is considered a feeder school for Berkeley (such as De Anza College) and transferring into the BA CS program at Berkeley/UCLA/UCSD/UCSC seems to be route of least resistance.

Of course the big downsides are losing the first 2-3[1] years of the social "college experience" (important if you're more interested in entrepreneurship rather than being an individual contributor) as well as limited internship opportunities during freshman/sophomore years (OTOH participating in open source or doing side projects will help greatly).

[1] It can take up 3 or more years to transfer due to lack of space in many general education and major pre-requisite classes: I was unable to register in a vector calculus class until sophomore year just due to supply/demand and lack of registration priority.
Maybe it once was, but it is not the current password (tried a moment ago).
Twitter open sourced twemcache, its memcached fork
This reminds me of http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
I'm curious to see if this works.

"SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost).

I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point moot.
I agree with you on that point. I'm just telling how it looks from the outside. Once you are really doing projects, it all looks very different. That's why we tried to make something like that in the first place.
How to set up and use your Avon V Brochure
$5 to make hundreds of customers happy
This is great - it looks to have some very sensible answers to many of the questions of how a distributed cloud would work.

The thing that excites me most about a distributed cloud is that it could turn the notion of elastic computing on its head. You can buy your peak compute requirement, and sell back the surplus. So you can get elastic computing not by re-engineering your own systems, but by selling excess capacity to those whose workloads are a good match.
Fourstalgia - historical photos to your check-ins
I agree that there must be a better way, but I need to point it out.

Ruby does come with Mac. Ruby is not Rails. The default installation allows anyone to try Ruby.
In Silhouette
As a starting point, your logo is confusing ... I thought you had used some fancy unicode "F"-like character ... but you are substituting a ? with a "-" for "F"? Seems off.
Oh... this is going to be confusing :)

There is also http://searchco.de.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivates tied to the LIBOR. If the LIBOR moves 0.01% it translates to shifts in billions of dollars around the globe.

Fixing the LIBOR is one of the (if not the) biggest thefts in history.

Free-market capitalism is a joke. Deregulation and corporate socialism has led to a dysfunctional society ruled by a kleptocratic elite.
A Vernacular Web: The Indigenous and The Barbarians
31 Tips for Growing Your Blog
I didn't notice Geekli.st and PeepCode are sponsoring. Did Aussie company stop sponsoring because of kangaroo joke?
That is a great idea, please join up with others doing the same: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/u8qtd/texas_reddit...

They have funded a billboard: http://fightforthefuture.org/billboard
and a TV commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhBBZnSpDwY

He still won his primary but you can join to help defeat him in the general election.
What, really? I've never had someone in front of me use the space beneath their seat. That's my space! (I'm also 6'2" and only bring a small carry-on because I need that space for legs.)
Surely bundler helps solve some of these problems; at least it makes managing gems easier on a per-app basis.
See my problem with Pig is that it doesn't unit test well. It's easy, it's quick, it's fairly powerful, but unit testing is horrible. I spent 3 days extending PigUnit to make it easier to overload hard coded reference files in the script so you can provide mock test files. Even getting this to work, and having under 5 megs of reference file for the test, the test takes 3 minutes for 7 simple filters and joins and about 900 megs of RAM.

Compare this to Cascading which is far easier to unit test.

Also PIG is a hog when it comes to making jars. If you don't install pig on EVERY node in the cluster and rather provide it via a submitted uber jar, the jar is HUGE (50 or so megs). PIG's dependencies are ridiculous.

Again compare to Cascading who has a far smaller foot print.

I would like to a strong comparison of HBase. Pig is useful for one-off, ad-hoc stuff, but I don't think it's production ready.
Stackato v2.0 now supports *nix and .Net applications - here are the release notes for everything that V2.0 includes http://docs.stackato.com/reference/release-notes.html
Sure, in some cases it makes sense to make the tradeoff of not handling more obscure characters. But if the tradeoff is made, the encoding should not be called UTF-8.

"UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format—8-bit[1]) is a variable-width encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set," says Wikipedia. The UTF-8 implementation in MySQL does not meet this definition because it cannot represent every character in the Unicode character set.
They could use few of those cheap instances to run their web site, its so slow.
Well, IMHO, Barclay's is taking alot of heat for the entire industry.

They were correctly reporting their libor rate, which scared some people as it was higher than other banks libor rates.

Partially because other banks were lying, partially because they were in more trouble than other banks.

The government asked Barclays to falsely report their libor rate at a lower amount.

This has the effect of lowering the reported libor rate. The libor rate is important as it's the base rate for pricing alot of other paper. This other paper is the base rate for pricing alot of derivatives,etc.

if you follow the chain, the libor rate can indirectly affect the price of literally trillions of dollars of financial instruments.

Hence the hoopla surrounding the rates manipulation.
How we make 5000 row tables fast in Streak
In the bigger picture, there are a whole lot of interesting things that would need to be built to allow for non-batch processing on a cloud like this... a smart web proxy / front-end that could cope when your instances go down being #1 on the list.
I'd argue that the lack of "large-scale" MMO's is more due content production problems, and activity density (I don't care how good this grid database is, there is a density that will bottleneck it, at the very least, it will bottleneck the client's bandwidth pipes if nothing else.) Rather than huge technical limitations. MMO developers are pretty familiar with sharding these days.
Creativity and Execution
At the very least, you're giving someone food to solve your pain :) . Any volunteers for a CRM startup? :)

I haven't tried any CRM, but are the industry standard ones so bad? (SugarCRM, Salesforce)
Zombie SOPA? Congressman Introduces Pieces Of Defeated Bill
This is interesting territory for Kickstarter. They've been clear throughout that they'd like to fund specific, time-limited projects, e.g. someone producing a book, and don't allow general fundraising to operate a business, e.g. raising funds to pay a year of salaries and rent for an ongoing business.

There's a way you can squint and call this a specific project, a time-limited "remove ads from PA for a year" experiment. But it sure looks like it's getting close to that raise-general-funds line that Kickstarter claims to not want to cross. In particular, the "costs" of the project that are being funded are entirely notional opportunity costs (foregone revenue), not actual expenses, whereas KS claims to be oriented towards raising funds for actual expenses that are needed to complete projects.

I doubt they'll pull this particular one, even if they determine it does violate their ToS, because PA is too high-profile (and, perhaps, because PA has fans known for being somewhat vindictive). But it seems like they'll have to either do something to prevent more of these kinds of Kickstarters going forward, or else just drop that language in the ToS and agree that anyone can use KS to raise a year of operating funds for their business.
Thank you for helping me find weak points in the post and clarify it. :)
When I read your post, I feel like I'm reading someone who is hoping for them to fail. It brings to mind this quote.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Lots of discussion when this was posted a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384
Haha no, they're just less focused on recruiting at the moment.
If this drug also kills cells in near proximity to the cancer, would it be effective treatment for brain tumors?
Just out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on DynamoDB, or have you played with it? Not as a "would you replace what you're doing with DynamoDB" but more a "heres a niche where we think it would work really well"?

I know it's very new so I haven't seen any advice on it, where I don't think I've ever seen a pro-EBS point of view from people with non-trivial experience with it.
Anyone else find it interesting he is so against black box tactics, yet his app name is "Timer :". I guess that is better than "Timer+++".
I sent them an e-mail when I was looking into dropbox and they offered me 10G, 20G or 25G for a slightly smaller price.

I'm not sure if the offer still stands, though. I got into it when they just launched.

Edit: Looking at the e-mail they stated this is a one-time limited offer. But still worth a try.
But the the manipulation was as likely in your favor as it was against you.

Edit: I take it back. Looking at the data, Barclays was definitely cheating against you.
There should be another entry in the YC RFS http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html :

10. Kill Wall Street (etc.)

We now have the technology to completely remake the financial system -- not just make 'banking' or whatever easier online, but a thorough and innovative re-imagining of what the whole thing should even be about.

Information structure is the essence of all cooperative systems, and that means the economics of tomorrow is absolutely about software -- its architecture, its engineering.

The practicalities mean this cannot be tackled directly, but someone needs to think big and work on it (in various ways).
Re-imagining life at night
>They still lost.

FWIW it was only the primary.
Thanks, we're looking into it and it should be fixed soon

edit: now working http://tetsubo.org/mot/montage/examples/sink/
I just tried it beginning with the article on HN and ended up in a 9 article loop beginning with science.
Yay, trying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Power again.
I'm not surprised. if I noticed it while snickering, I'm sure they noticed it before posting and changed it back then. easier to do that than refilm.
The new kid was an interestingly drawn strip and it would be nice to see it brought back to life.

Or even just see gave come up with more crazy DnD settings.
Cheater
Sharding like done in Eve is well established technically in the game development community. And I agree that this basically solves the problem we already know how to solve. The problem is in content, Most MMO's are designed to be content heavy, with zones of high-traffic, this causes a population density problem that creates the exact bandwidth problem you mention.

This doesn't solve any new problems, what it does do is provide a licensable technology that many studios have to re-invent themselves, there is value in that however.
Some solid points in here and some good links.
I have NO idea of what you're talking about ;-)
Form a crowdfunded corporation and direct mail every household in his district to annoyance until his district removes him.
The best UX designers I know are pretty horrible at HTML and CSS. Fortunately, that doesn't matter if they can communicate clearly through images.

While I agree that this piece would be strictly better as HTML, I'd rather see that people present their ideas somewhat sub-optimal than not at all.
But you aren't being asked to front the full $1 million. The lowest amount is $1.
And neither are customers paying zero. Personally Im not that thrilled about buying into something where I subsidize a sizable free tier. I love Dropbox, but I can't justify $10 a month for just personal doc storage. Dropbox isnt great for collaborative sharing (becuause you can't have 'shared' space) it isn't a proper backup service (I use crash plan for that) so basically it's personal storage. In that market $5 is all I'm willing to part with.
A Preference for Radical Innovation
>Get rich first, then you can improve your code.

I agree with you, but the second part never happens.
Real life dwarfs gaming. Remember the recent EVE exploit? Someone discovered that it was possible to pump prices of low liquidity goods, pack ships with said goods, destroy the ships and score an unusually high LP, due to the artificialy inflated "value" of those goods.

The underlying mechanism is the same - someone ties some kind of payout to a market price. Then someone other discovers that th price is not something that reflects the market equilibrium but rather something that can be manipulated so that it maximizes said payout rather than market efficiency.

It is a bit scary, especially if you tie real money in gaming goods. Or if you tie real money in goods whose price can be gamed.
Comparing a 440 Euro handheld device (arguably targeted mostly towards people interested in emulating bootleg roms) to a $99 console is really comparing apples to oranges.
At which point do we get a search that syntactically understands what its searching? Thats such an obvious improvement when you know that your entire data set conforms to a language that an 80s C compiler can understand.

A simple grep I can do myself (with the added bonus of knowing what version/commit I'm searching against).
This has nothing to do with sharding (except that if games wanted to use this it might help them do away with shards), and not related particularly to games at all (in fact, we think it could also be great for real-time graph databases).
I use the heck out of the appts and tasks - appts are "things that I have to physical participate in" (phone call, lunch) and tasks are "reminders". I would not survive long without those. I use Trello but only to manage a small team of tasks.

You said, "The only thing I'm missing is better attachment management" - to me, the worst part about Outlook is the search functionality. It's just awful IMO. I can deal with the crappy attachment handling/saving/etc but when it takes a week for the "Instant Search" thing to index my 2gb Outlook file, I get pissed haha
And then you try and deploy it:

http://serverfault.com/questions/405994/state-of-the-art-dep...

And you're either stuck with this Mongrel-derived nonsense that is incapable of utilizing the computing power of the server to dynamically (de)allocate resources, requiring you to pick numbers at setup time, or you've got Passenger, which gets that right, but basically nails your deployment to one and only one Ruby.

(Yes, I've not had the best of days...does it show?)
Fabric + Pygments = Love
Small update, those 5k sold out too. Now they're selling additional 5k. Total of 10k at $99. And it's selling fast too.

No idea how they're gonna cope with all that. I'm waiting for an official update from them telling us what the plan is. But it seems worth my $99 to give it a shot and see what happens. The project just makes way too much sense not to give it a go.
I think one of the main points that the article touches upon is: "It's 2012, unicode was invented 20 years ago, why the hell has no one tested this yet, let alone gotten it to work?"
It is available on iOS, for instance Quora pages you open in Mobile Safari will have a link to open in the Quora app. But it has to be provided by the site working together with the app.

Details: http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-appl...
Second month freelancing
And the full text of the bill: http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/Markups%202012/PDF/Mark%...
As someone who has just begun to learn to program (I finished JS lessons on Codecademy two weeks ago), I could attest that the Rails installation was quite daunting. Had I read about the "straight-forward" path you mentioned back then, I'd have just seen "Get acronym > which version of Ruby > What is a gem > Rails > what the hell is fork ".The last thing I want when trying out a new language is to be presented a smorgasbord of options that showcases language's capabilities, but all of which I have little understanding of.

I see this process somewhat analogous to learning a new musical instrument, like a violin. A professional violinist may care to customize many aspects of the instrument to meet his or her needs, including the turning of the instrument (perhaps he cares to set A to 416 to emulate Baroque turning). A beginner, by contrast, would just like to be handed a well tuned instrument ready to learn and experiment. Now, would it kill that beginner to set and tune his own set of strings, or maybe given the options to set his violin to Baroque turning as well? Certainly not - though the necessity and benefits of such an exercise would surely be lost on many beginners.
The penny arcade guys aren't exactly here as business men. Hack when they finally got someone on board to mange their site he was shocked that they nearly got bought twice, and that they still barely had an idea of how their income worked.

I think they are appealing to their community, and people who find stuff like child's play, pax and the rest to be great.
I meant that it could technically be done but only from the Wikipedia side, not that they have any motive to do it.
OKSU Digital Data Printer
There's no good reason for one to be faster than the other, though! They're both utf8 encoded sequences of bytes, and there's no good reason to not stream through them as utf8.
I think you have a point, but I have learned a lot about programming and UI in the last years just by being an iPad user. There are a lot of apps in the iOS ecosystem, some more cool than useful of course, but such concentration of great programmers and designers really inspires me to be better.

When I bought my iPad I wasn't really sure about my user scenario, but now I see that getting inspired by other people's work is a big part of it.
So it's a good thing, then, that, a) it's open-source! and b) it's not even directed specifically at games!
It uses stripe, so to switch from a single purchase to a recurring payment you basically need to change one line of code:

https://github.com/2tablespoons/Thylacine/blob/master/app/mo...

Just change "Charge" to "Customer" and give it a plan ID instead of a price.