skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree wholeheartedly.

Terrible names (e.g., Mad Cow for steak company) can sink companies, but companies by and large succeed because of their product, not their name. Amazon outshines everyone in e-commerce, even though one rival -- Buy.com -- owns the perfect name for online shopping. Would you care if Google renamed itself to Moogle? Probably not. Google's search engine is the best, independent of name. To paraphrase billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, brands are nothing more than proxies. Meaning, great names cannot hide poor products -- especially in the information age.

There are many examples of ordinary names representing extraordinary businesses. Apple. Four Seasons. Amazon. These names evoke excellence because the underlying services are excellent. Strong brands today will fade tomorrow once quality suffers. Think GM, Dell, and Sears. These were once among the most respected brands in America.

Build something people value, and value will flow to the name.
Apple didn't actually create completely new products, just polished versions, same as Tesla. The same with market share, they only want a small segment (the only exception to this rule are ipads).
In Iceland we have something similar, but free: http://islendingabok.is/English.jsp

I sometimes use it to check if people I meet are closely related to me. Pretty much any two Icelanders are relatively closely related. It's a small island with an even smaller population, mostly descended from the original settlers.
We recently switched to PostgresSQL after we had some very disturbing performance issues using floppy drives with MongoD... oh... Mono 3.0.. uh, nevermind.
Startup School And Survivor Bias
Knowing what you do now, with the memories of the terrible bugs you had to work through due to Chrome / OSX, would you still choose HTML5 over other cross-platform game engines like Unity?
They've acknowledged that at http://status.aws.amazon.com/ for awhile now with a tiny "i" status icon (I can't load my instances pane):

12:07 PM PDT We are experiencing elevated error rates with the EC2 Management Console.
A co-worker of mine (US) lost his kindle library about a year ago. Amazon closed his account and refused to tell him why. It took several tech blogs and newspapers phoning up Amazon with the story for him to get it back.

In other words, he got restitution because of articles like this one. He no longer buys kindle books.
at a minimum the person should get a refund. There are ways that happens automatically (because it's the right thing for the customer -- Amazon doesn't want to take sides in the bigger debate)

Minor quibble. Yes deleting & giving a refund is more moral than deleting without a refund. But deleting someone else's property without their consent is very unethical, and is not "the right thing to do".
Perfectly timed with our product launch, now our site is down too - www.zenwheels.com
Hollywood blockbusters and AAA video games are disgusting as a concept; most are also lousy and boring as an implementation of that concept.

So good news, I'm not pirating blockbusters, but bad news for you, I'm not paying for these either.

No food for your thick sarcasm.

What do I do? I support independent efforts while torrenting oldies and classics. You can say that latter is piracy, but I don't care and their authors don't care either, and I could not care less about "rights holders".
Given that Tesla is a startup, it's a fair bet to say that "huge success" or "bust" are the most likely outcomes.

But regarding point B: many makers already have an electric model: Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford. I think Tesla is a cool company, but they didn't invent the concept of the electric car and they don't have a monopoly over it.

I think it's likely that electric cars will gain a bigger share of the market relatively soon (in auto industry terms), even if Tesla doesn't succeed.
Does this just affect normal EBS or EBS with provisioned IOPS as well?
Yep, according to the most recent estimate I saw[1], us-east was more than twice the size of all other regions combined.

[1] http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-s...
This is really cool, nice work. I really like the art style.
At last week's MonkeySpace I sat in an awesome demo of Don Syme (Mr F#) show casing F#'s 3.0 type providers support in Mono on OSX! MonoDevelop had run-time intelli-sense of Type Providers and he was running code inside the built-in F# REPL in MonoDevelop.
That's probably an opportunity for someone to pick up. Keep in mind that the data is more easily obtainable thanks to the household registries institutionalized in East Asia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system] which record familial information such as parents, professions, dates, residence changes, etc.
So far I haven't solved the problem of keeping a non-trivial service without any interventions. How does running your servers and services on a PaaS provider solve the need for OS updates and security? What are your typical architecture and operations like?

I personally think that OS updates and security fixes/hardening are crucial in all cases if you're running any production site (and even for the dev environment). Granted, some of the colocation providers don't offer services like AWS VPC (and the associated SecurityGroups and ACLs) but that's pretty rare nowadays. In all cases, and Ops or a Sysadmin person is quite important for the stability of your business.

The only big advantage I see about using PaaS is the rapid and flexible provisioning of new instances in case you need them. That's why the best solution to me, so far, has been running a combination of bare-metal servers with optional provisioning of additional cloud instances if you need them. The price difference can go to orders of magnitude (even if you factor in the costs of paying somebody to be a system administrator and take care of your servers).

Edit: added the last paragraph
this is the absolute best quote to sum up this situation.
I always understood the cloud to mean a black box of sorts that automatically handles failover, among other things. The cloud being just a fuzzy representation of the infrastructure.

S3 probably fits the description of a cloud service. You send your data, and the service worries about making it redundant without your intervention. If data in NE USA is unavailable, the service will automatically serve you the data from somewhere else. You don't need to know how it works.

EC2 and some of these other building blocks, however, I would not consider to be cloud services. Merely tools for building out your own cloud services to other customers who then shouldn't have to think about failover and other such concerns.

If you know you are using a server that is physically located in a certain geographic location, it need not be represented by a cloud. It is a distinct point on the network.
Pinterest has a pin in its logo? At first I thought I had never noticed this, but then as I look for it I'm not sure if it really was designed to be a pin.
The thing that jumps out at me as a question from this data is why some sub-topics/specialties of a subject have such a huge range? Some things make sense. Lots of women write papers on Sociology/Gender, and this doesn't shock me in the least since I think more women consider gender issues over men who have the privilege of not needing to think about it (which is part of the problem). Culturally, we push women to studying things that are family, children and fertility related as well (and push men away from them)- and these are present in the numbers.

Yet under Law, you've got only 8% of papers on Antitrust by women, but 34.6% on legal oversight and regulation. It clear isn't that there are no women in law, but something has influenced them to study different things in the larger subject of law.

Similarly- Mycology has 57.1% of the papers on Yeast with authorship, but 7.7% on Zygospores. What makes yeast more equitable than zygospores? Again, it isn't that women aren't in mycology, but for some reason are studying different things it seems.

And for mathematics; 24.3% for Lie Algebras, and 4.5% for Oscillation Criteria. I honestly don't know what either of those are, but they don't appear to be particularly gendered sub-topics/specialities in math. I understand that culturally we push young women away from some subjects, but I've never heard someone intone that a woman shouldn't do oscillation criteria or automorphic forms in math, or encourage algebraic groups instead?

(Numbers above looking at first author)

Clearly, there is a gap. This is a problem. I'd just like to know more about the causation on more of the stranger gaps.
Not sure why this comment in particular got downvoted, bizarre..
Congrats! this looks great! It brought back memories of an old game that I loved as a kid called Sea Dragon:
http://homeoftheunderdogs.net/game.php?id=3871
I think the black and white is a great atmospheric choice. It reminds me of Frank Miller's Sin City. Also from the video I got a bit of feel of Metriod 2 on the GameBoy. Which was B&W and had a very creepy subterranean feel.

You could present color in a future sequel or expansion and even use it as a plot device.
Amazon verginia servers are down
Amazon verginia servers are down
a ton of other stuff is down too... www.reddit.com, netflix, www.freewebsite.com and a bunch more
A good article on lessons from startup failure.
Ebay had the advantage of a tremendous amount of free publicity because of when it started. While it's no longer relevant whether it's a good name or not that is certainly worth mentioning.

Heroku is an interesting name and has trademark and brand potential certainly because it's a made up word. The problem is it can be confused spelling wise. You could do hiroku or hirowku or herokoo just to name a few. It's usually a good idea if possible to steer clear of names like this lest you want your email, or some web visitors to end up in the wrong place.

A great name depends on the circumstances. Things have worked for heroku obviously given who they are selling to. It might have been a good name for a car model as well. But I wouldn't say a heroku like name is the right choice in all situations.
I don't think this is true. US-East's incident history over the past 3 years is terrible. If you had a completely non-redundant set of rented servers sitting in Softlayer or Rackspace's data center over the same period, even factoring in expected hardware failures over the time period (replacing a hard drive or two, probably), you'd have been available more than even a multi-AZ deployment with failover in AWS US-East.

I've got heavily used servers at Softlayer that haven't had more than a few minutes of downtime in 4+ years, and have never been rebooted. During that same time, I ran a site out of US-East for two years (EC2 + EBS + Multi-AZ RDS + ELB), and had more downtime and spent more admin time working around significant issues with Amazon. Amazon neither saved me time nor money, nor did it provide better availability.
Same here, our servers are still up, but our RDS instance is down.
Just from browsing the comment threads on some articles on ReadWrite, it seems as-if people are making tons of mistakes, or more than likely, something is broken on the site and posting comments to the wrong article pages. (Seeing phone/camera toss comments on Google Stock article, google chromebook article, etc.)
Simulated Annealing and the 8-Queen Puzzle (with running code)
It's like grade inflation. You can never give out an F (Mr. Admissions officer, are you so bad at your job that you would admit such an unqualified student?), so a Gentleman's C is handed around. In Amazon's case, it's a gentleman's B+ (green, with an info icon).

A: fine
A-: problems
B+: servers are on fire

I really like Amazon as a company, use a lot of their services, but this is dishonest.
To be fair, AWS downtime always make the news because they affect a lot of majors websites, but that doesn't mean an average sysadmin (or devops, whatever) would do better in term of uptime with his own bay and his toys.
Italy Finds Scientists Guilty Of Manslaughter For 2009 Earthquake Forecast
Amazon clearly needs a change in management at the head of AWS. The engineers are either petrified of telling the truth (very, very bad) or incompetent (less bad but still bad). And it has been this way for an unreasonably long time.
The artwork is beautiful. I second the request for a playable demo, though.
I wish there was. Architecting a system for failover requires a mindset change, a culture change within your org, and the right technology that lets you build for it while not slowing yourself down too much. The last point being the hardest.

I would argue that none of the common full stack frameworks that startups use are fault tolerant enough for AWS. Most of them have multiple failure points that can quickly bring down entire apps.
A recent blog post by OP: http://ektomarch.com/blog/?p=36
Fantastic weekend project. @patrickambron 's suggestions are the best because they're the simplest.
12:32 PM PDT We are working on recovering the impacted EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Hopefully recovering in the next hour.
Yeah. Even with this, they still do better than I would. My record: misconfigured air-conditioning unit alarm leading to servers being baked at high temperature over a weekend, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I now know to be really careful to set up air conditioning units properly, but what other lessons am I still waiting to learn? The main lesson that I took from this is that I should stick to what I am good at: cutting code & chewing data. :-)
I was also under the impression that BankSimple rebranded to Simple due to regulatory issues (I think certain states have rules about the type of company that can have the word "Bank" in the name).
What are your thoughts on:

C - full-electric is the rage, every brand has one and Tesla remains the 'premium' brand ?

My thinking is that the new vehicle market is quite large, and Tesla, as an early mover, has a great advantage relative to the other manufacturers. Their disadvantage is that they aren't as well capitalized. Their lack of working capital will kill them if they have to pivot very far from their current path, but otherwise it won't be an issue as long as they can scale production with demand.

Currently, you can't buy anything like a Model S from any of the other brands. Further if they start today it will be 24 months before they can launch something. So Tesla has a couple of years of runway, nearly all to themselves, in this space. (Note if you don't think they bring anything unique, I suggest you get a test drive of a model S and then go to Nissan and drive a Leaf) Tesla sells a 'no compromises' electric car, no compromise on range, no compromise on performance, no compromise on comfort, no compromise on quality. And significantly cheaper to fuel up. So that will sell them a lot of cars to people who are attracted to that stance, and those people's followers will get cars because they are followers.

Now it is an open question as to how many total cars that first batch is. Is it 100k, 250k? 1M? That depends on a lot of things. But if electric cars do take off as mainstream, I expect Tesla will be the 'best' one for a while yet.
Yes, it does make the concept suffer because the concept is the power of the (crowd-sourced) quote. The slow-loading background is a strong visual distraction from that, detracting from the vistor's first impression.

(I'd even argue that the background, content-wise, overpowers the quote...and that's somewhat related to its byte-size)
if you are interested: John Esser, Director Engineering at Ancestry.com, is participating in a webinar next week about how Ancestry.com implemented Agile and Continuous Delivery (disclaimer: yes, he will also talk about how they used ThoughtWorks Go in the process): http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/content/go-user-group
Aren't GM, Dell and Sears still respected brands? The BigCorp I work for issues Dell laptops to everyone, I thought GM had regained it footing in the auto world and Sears is still the go-to place for a new dishwasher?
Personally, starting to believe the Amazon is quickly becoming public enemy #2.
Co-founder of Clever here. Clever is a more efficient and secure way for schools to connect their learning applications with their SIS database. No data is shared otherwise. Clever helps schools stay compliant with FERPA, the federal laws on student privacy.
I'm not a Heroku customer, but I want to be after just looking at that status page.
If javascript could run outside of the browser, I'd use it for everything.

Javascript was nothing but pure bliss to work with, but the browsers were hell. Overall I know I'm definitely going to keep making short, simple games with javascript because it's a wonderful tool for the job. Long-term projects are a bit risky due to browser issues, so this'll probably be my last huge game with the language (sadly). If you're planning on doing a 2D game, javascript is a great language. Flash would still be "best" at this point in time due to all the support and speed at which you can create something, but, in a way, the problem solving and brain wracking is what makes development fun.

Unity's something I've been looking into for a while now, so it's a possibility for future projects.

The OS X issues have been screwing me over inside of outside of the browser. Performance dropped like a rock after Snow Leopard, so the real question is whether or not I'll continue using OS X.
Alternative suggestion : name it after anything you have the matching .com domain as long it is not offensive.
Time to switch to Google's Compute Engine.
We (men) always seem to assume the women in these scenarios are physically desirable. Sometimes flirting is unwanted or off-putting, but we never imagine it going that way.

I wonder if the same scenario was given to women would they make the same assumption (that the flirtatious male was attractive)?

(Also where the hell can you get a car for $1200, do you have to push it off the lot?)
Lance Armstrong's epic downfall
> Legal or not, this looks, smells, and feels so obviously wrong, it ought to be illegal.

How many people, if they'd known this could happen, would have bought a Kindle in the first place? I suspect many would not. Digital rights activists need to educate the public that DRM = you have no rights.
Regulations, mostly. Financial transaction rules and regulations are very complicated and vary from country to country. For example, dealing with EMV in Canada is a complicated process, made even more so by Interac.
RDS is built on EBS, so if EBS has problems you can bet that RDS will feel the effects.
The problem is likely the same as usual: if the damn control plane is down, it doesn't matter how robust your failover architecture is, because your requests to bring up new machines go unanswered.

There's pretty much no way to architect around that one as an AWS user (apart from going fully multi-cloud, but "nobody" actually does that, at least at scale), and I'm kind of shocked that those bits of AWS are still not robust against "single AZ outages", given that they're involved in pretty much every one of these incidents and make them affect people on the entire cloud...
This isn't meant to be a weak attempt at trolling, as I'm genuinely interested and I may be out-of-the-loop: Do people really care about portable telephones __this_much__?
Seatgeek is seriously amazing. More people should be using it IMO.
Not sure I agree with your Amazon example.

Think about the websites that are commonly spoken by the general public - none of them have a pronounced "dot com"
This reminds me of an ad campaign we sometimes run on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/hg9oa/your_platform_is_on_aws...

... which you'll be able to click as soon as reddit is back up :)
I'm surprised amazon hasn't built another region in the east. If you're in the west you get US-West-1 and US-West-2 and can failover and distribute between the two, why don't they have that kind of duplication in the east?
MonkeySpace was great! Especially that thing that was demoed that we can't talk about. You know... wink wink, secret hand shake...

Awesome things are coming!

I've been working with Mono for going on 8 years, I'm so glad to see that they were able to pull away from Novell.
Bad grammar throughout but yes, just incredibly lazy.

>"It does sound like the site has offers more than a lot of other Internet things these days."

Good god, this is the Atlantic. At least they could act like they're trying instead of just getting something out quickly for the pageviews.

Edit: a quick author search shows a ton of this half-assed blogging. Won't be going back to the Atlantic Wire any time soon. ( http://www.theatlanticwire.com/authors/rebecca-greenfield/ )
Yes, in particular Guadalajara is a _major_ contract manufacturer location for electronics.
I've only ever sold a few properties myself but as I understand it, yes you can discount-list or even flat-fee list a property but the agent that represents the buyer typically still expects to get 3% from you.

It has amazed me that we have been in a technological age for a long time now where buyers can pre-select what they want to see and don't need more than someone to open the door for them at a property, and sellers don't need anything more than a way to get their property on the MLS yet they continue to give up a total of 6% of the sale to an agent.

That 6% amounting to $10K or so on a "median" house in the US seems not incredibly out of range given how much effort along the way results in no sale, but in a major city it can reach $100K or more for the same amount of work. The competition to be a selling agent must be fierce.

Overall it makes local moving relatively costly and can chew up a disproportionate share of any investment gain if that's your angle.
EC2 seems to be about as reliable as a mid-range host provider. Which is to say that they can do 99% but not really 99.99%.

They also seem to either have no issues is everything goes out all at once.
I'm not too surprised. I've got Googlebot still requesting old URLs even through there are no incoming links to them (that I know of) and they've been either 404 or 301 redirected for six months. I even tried using 410 Gone instead of 404, but it made no difference.
and who is #1?
If it's systematically difficult to do it correctly, then the system is wrong.
Unlimited vacation: the only thing that makes sense for startups
id="facebook_recommendations" <~ Is horrifically ugly. It really makes me not want to look any further.
A bra that could detect cancer
I think Ancestry.com is worth the 1.6 Billion. I have ancestry in Poland and the Ukraine and doing research can be tricky. Ancestry.com was the go to source for me. Amazing resource.

However, the current pricing is prohibitive. A year's full access was almost $400, and that was nearly 10 years ago. I hope they lower their price. I'll sign up again if they do.
"Men talking about mathematical proofs, about a South Park episode on evolution, about their latest mountain-climbing adventures.

"The lab is like visiting a fraternity,""

This is seriously disgusting. Imagine an article when a male journalist writes upon visiting some research faculty that "it is like visiting a sorority".
I imagine there would be a serious torrent of anger from the defenders of whatever rights. That journalist will be immediately labeled as a biased chauvinist.

However, when a woman visits a lab and tells us that it is like visiting a fraternity, it's somehow okay. Obviously there is something discrediting in climbing or watching the (award winning) South Park.

To clarify: I (as many and many Hacker News readers) am male and happen to work in mostly male environment, but it does not feel like a fraternity. In fact, it feels like a place where grown-up intelligent people do creative work. And yes, we occassionally do discuss climbing and TV series. And no, there is nothing wrong about that.
Stories about Iceland crowdsourcing it's legislation keep arising, but I have yet to see any authors talk about Iceland's incredibly small population of 300,000.