skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ephemeral is definitely not EBS, as its I/O does not contribute to saturating an instance's network connection (I've tested that). EBS has a ceiling for throughput (the instance's network throughput) and competes with your other network traffic, which is interesting for database workloads for obvious reasons. In addition, every single benchmark I've seen run reports ephemeral behaving very differently from EBS.

As ephemeral disappears when you stop an instance (presumably, when the system is given the opportunity to relocate your instance to another machine), I've always suspected that ephemeral storage was part of local disks on the virtual host's chassis -- as opposed to a SAN or other kind of network-attached storage. As such, you probably end up with the same unpredictable performance you find in all virtualized resources, since it is very unlikely that Amazon is giving you your own storage.

Before benchmarking ephemeral storage you have to pre-warm it, which might have contributed to your findings. Ephemeral is worlds better than EBS, particularly in outage scenarios; if I could convince everybody on planet Earth to stop using EBS, it would be a noble cause.
... in a lightbox!
http://37signals.com/backpack-retired
We need an open bug tracker for Internet Explorer
Yes, if you check out http://grep101.blogspot.com/ you'll see that its very much pared down from some of the wild ideas I had!
Yup; fascinating to see how close / far that future is.

To my mind the most acute observation Stephenson makes in that novel is that if you control the education of hundreds of millions of people in the third world, you also get tremendous political and social influence (the "Mouse Army"). This potential for power is something that I think is understood deeply by Salman Khan (who already has a devoted legion of followers whose lives he has changed) and by groups like Coursera and EdX.

How much government funding is there in the educational startup space?
Safe Cracking Robot
Oh, yeah, I agree. These are very bloated, outdated solutions. But I don't think the site administrators are really interested in doing a full overhaul. Could possibly hurt SEO. Porting over old posts and data would be difficult too.
Discovering the future of Java
No, each day's task will have you leave evidence that you've completed it (a directory created, application installed, etc) so that "we" can judge progress.

The "daily tasks have some general tips and a series of link to online resources that should make them easy to complete.
If you read the link I gave for the Fermi paradox you'll see that this is one of the dozen explanations on why we haven't been contacted yet by an alien civilization. So, yes, we might be trying to contact the wrong way.

Actually though it's not exactly wrong, we managed to capture once a significant signal that could be of alien origin. It's called the wow signal and you can find more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal

The basis of the Fermi paradox though isn't about what we did/do to contact alien civilizations but the fact that even if one advanced existed in our galaxy they should have already found us even if we weren't looking for them. Which brings us back to the conclusion that there might not be advanced civilizations around and life could very well be in the beginning.

As for the Drake equation it's not a law of physics. It is just a way to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy and from there to make an assumption of the number of alien civilizations able to make interstellar contact.
Wait, so what went wrong? Were you losing money? Have you peaked at an unacceptable level?
Correct, I do not suggest adding HM to C++.

I suggest using a HM language when you start a new project.
How so? If he committed some crime, got convicted, did the time, then started a business and bootstrapped to success, how is that not a self-made man? A great many successful entrepreneurs (Branson comes immediately to mind) were criminals before they were successful.
It's great that EC2 prices are coming down, but they're really not keeping up with the general trend in computing prices.

If you're running a static set of computers on EC2 today, and not making use of other features like S3, ELB, etc, you're almost certainly overpaying by a significant amount compared to even high end dedicated server providers, let alone the cheap end of the market like OVH and Hetzner.
I am not sure if nested comments are really necessary for a forum either. For example, I see a lot of hacker news threads link to other threads in the same post where a response has been provided (I see one in this post as well).

However, I think user addressability (@xxx) is important in a flat forum.
History tells us that the US dollar is much more volatile than bitcoin can be.

Plus I do not think that Kim will want to have anything to do with that currency.
I got my degree in a non-CS engineering field. As a working programmer I never regretted not having classes where I built stuff. Always did regret hitting a problem where I knew there was an applicable theoretical framework that I hadn't been exposed to in school.
Happened to me. And that person responding completely aside of the question voted to get my question closed and erased its answer. I was asking for axisting asynchronous signal slot library to avoid implementing mine. Another guy proposed to use QT and another one to use boost's signal which is not asynchronous. The later guy commented to the QT guy that boost was so much lighter and faster. Boost signal is known to be the less performant, but because its boost it must be the best. This guy also voted to close my question once I said I don't want to depend on boost. The question was finally closed and I implemented my self the signal slot lib with a perfect match to my requirements.
I've had an 11" laptop/tablet with a touchscreen for a couple of years now... (Gigabyte T1125N; I didn't even realise it was a tablet when I bought it)

The novelty of the touchscreen wore off after the first month.
It's a stupid term, kudos to him for using it in a way that makes more sense.
You said what I thought much more eloquently. I found the business models and example emails really spammy if not even scammy.

If what you offer is so vague that you have to do those silly engagement tricks, maybe it doesn't have real value.
I didn't even notice the serif font, because I have overridden the font-family in almost all places to the Ubuntu font-family (hooray for user style sheets!). I tried it as an experiment somewhere around a year ago. I strike the occasional website that doesn't look right and where it looks like the typeface used may have damaged it, but overall, it's marvellous. I noticed very quickly that the whole web was prettier and more readable. I tried going back, just out of curiosity, a month or two later. I went back to overriding the font-family less than a week later.

But as far as their layout is concerned, I do like the large typography, and don't see any problem with the paragraph spacing and layout. Overall, it's a nice, clean layout.
I'd recommend taking this advice with a grain of salt. OP is clearly talented, and a U of C degree will pay huge dividends down the line. There are lots of great jobs closed to people without a top-notch degree on their resume. Though balancing debt for college is always something that should be kept in mind.
Great idea, and interesting model for a course. This is really an ability that many good developers lack. The downside on your marketing approach for me is having to pay $20 for something without having any idea about how the classes are. A cool model is letting the first user try one class first, before signing up :)

Besides that, as I said, its a very cool idea, and I wish you good luck with your project!
Levels of programmers (2009)
Really? I was under the impression NZ didn't have the criminal conspiracy law the US was using.

(Copyright infringement is of course illegal in NZ, but that's a civil matter and not what he was supposedly arrested for).
Hopefully I'll get a better-paying job. I am currently getting paid ~$13,000 annually developing software for assembly-line robots.
Regarding Buffer Overflows
I am currently an average programmer, as judged by this scale.
Dmitri - this is mere serendipity as this fell into my inbox today - it is probably not useful, but it is a rare skill set wanted: (I have no idea why a recruiter think I am fluent in Russian)

I am afraid I know nothing about the role or the recruiter but it may be possible to remote.

<snip>
Your details have been returned in a search for a Russian / Ukrainian speaking Senior Project Manager I am currently recruiting for a company in the Midlands please see link below for details of the role

Lee Brook
Principal Consultant
Follow me on: LinkedIn | Twitter

Modis
33 Queen Street, London, EC4R 1BR
DD: +44 (0)207 038 6470
T: +44 (0)207 038 6400
F: +44 (0)207 038 6401
www.modis.co.uk
</snip>
Does anyone have a good description of the keyboard he describes? I haven't seen any details so I don't know how the Surface works, I didn't very much understand the post.
Great advice from the founder of http://iwanttodrawacatforyou.com/
I loved this article as it clearly demonstrates Jeff's love of all hardware. There is no real hatred for any brand here, and he complements all the major devices while remaining objective.

One comment I would make is regarding this, "I knew that the Nexus 7 was really working for me when I gave mine to my father as a spontaneous gift while he was visiting, then missed it sorely when waiting for the replacement to arrive.". I know that Jeff is above my pay bracket, but even still, this makes me wonder what sort of money stream this is, if he can simply hand away Nexus 7's. I earn a respectful living but that sort of money is still substantial enough that I can't afford to simply give one away.
You don't find a technical co-founder, you earn one.
I'm currently between two jobs and have a lot of free time. While not really in need for that sort of courses, I might consider giving it a try but I'm unable to find any information on the stuff taught.

What are the highlights?
For almost 4 years I've had and still do as my primary computer a Tablet PC (HP 2730p), no touch, but with stylus. I still use it and will probably use it in every aspect of it until it dies on me.

Touch is maybe cool and natural and whatnot, but stylus is useful. I can actually account for how much money stylus option had brought to my wallet.
While not that explicit, that's exactly what Virgin America is doing.

For me it is an easy trade off. When faced recently with a 3 day jaunt out East, my pact with myself was to fly Virgin, or not to fly at all. It's the difference between an acceptable experience and a high chance of a very unacceptable one. Seriously - I have no idea why there hasn't been a mass rejection of the flying experiences in the USA.

Some folks like chasing Air points or status, but ask first - do you really want to spend even more time getting lousy service on a lousy airline?

I'm lucky enough to be based in New Zealand, and these days our flag carrier is simply great. Their Hobbit safety video just came out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc
A free application service where people complain about how much they hate any form of advertisements, which doesn't store cookies, session or any form of data and in fact the only database fields are: (thread{id, title, text}) and (comment{id, text})
Nutrition et Santé 2011-2015 : Ce que fait la France
ArcticStartup has been one of the shining stars of European startup journalism. Lack of English language coverage is something that afflicts many European startup communities, and I'm sure ArcticStartup has been pivotal in raising the international profile (to both investors and customers) of many of the startups they've covered.

I hope they manage to keep it going and retain the quality of their coverage.
I guess people use other channels to get help, or not much help is needed, or there are few noobs working with python, ...
Intriguing. I'd be interested in whether the presence of the phrase "at the end of the day" correlates strongly with low comment quality.
Citi Web Analyst Fired After Lapse
Depends how you define "make money from". If you mean revenue then there probably isn't an example. If you mean profits then there I am sure there are plenty.

You only have to look at the movie industry. Plenty of popular movies that weren't profitable.
The TouchCover, a very thin pressure sensitive keyboard cover:

http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/touch-cov...

There is also a TypeCover, slightly thicker and has physical keys:

http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/accessories/type-cove...
Well, it originally came out of the Cold War, so I guess there is definitely something a little weird about it. Personally I don't really care for "developed" either though; it implies to me that those countries have achieved some peak of civilisation and don't need to change any more, which plainly isn't the case.

It's probably more pejorative than "third world", but "rich" and "poor" are probably clearer descriptions for a discussion of cellphone usage patterns than most of these euphemisms. That'd upset people even more, of course :)
From http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring:

"This account automatically submits a 'Who is Hiring? (Month YYYY Edition)' post at 9 AM Eastern time on the 1st of every month."
Remove Social Effect In Google Search Results Without Logging Out
I find the same thing with writing anything longer than a couple of sentences, and that's the major reason I've stuck to a laptop.

I love my phone - and I could see me wanting a tablet as well as my laptop, but I definitely want the laptop, so the tablet becomes an "If I have the spare money" item.
I don't get it. The Surface is cool becasue of the keyboard? Logitech made the iPad keyboard some time ago. That's all there is to it to help you type like on a laptop.
Review: http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/29/review-logitech-ultrathin-ipad...
Yes, and that is exactly the problem. The iMac's size and resolution is awkward-DPI.

I enabled HiDPI mode, but then I got 1280x720 on 27"... And without it much of the texts on web pages are too small.

You make it sound like I'm blind or something. I'm just tired of reading far too small texts.
Oh wow, that's a good idea! Damn. Very nice.

Thanks for the clarification!
From Sun Type 5 to PS/2 in under $15: my PIC-based converter
Because physics.
> Seriously - I have no idea why there hasn't been a mass rejection of the flying experiences in the USA.

One reason: Cost
Yes, I see that, but these daily "bites' really are just that. For example, the first simply gets you pointed toward PuTTY, provides some reading on SSH, and asks to to logon and use passwd to change your password.

And yes, there will be monitoring and chasing up of anyone who isn't doing their tasks :-)

(the original concept was to report on you to your SO!)
Hypocrites
This doesn't make any sense unless (even if?) you read the version that he's spoofing. http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7art.htm

He's just replaced some of the words; the result makes no sense.
I live in Montevideo, South America, and I've never had a problem with a Google SMS not arriving.

I had my account compromised once, it's not something I want to repeat.
not everyone wants to be a "Rockstar Programmer!!!11!!"

I want to know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and why it works or doesn't work.

I don't want to be a rockstar, I want to be confident in my current abilities and in my ability to always learn more.
It seems to me that average programmer and working programmer overlap quite a bit. I might never be a great programmer but there are still plenty of jobs out there I can do well as an average programmer and I always have work.
What are the critics saying about Windows Phone 8?
He gave it to his father. That's a bit different from handing them out on the street.

I imagine he's doing quite well though.
I'm quite glad he says "tongue firmly planted in cheek", because the idea that a successful programmers are "Programmers who are both well known and have created entire businesses – perhaps even whole industries – around their code." is just plain silly.

I think what he means by success is "money", which might well work for him, but doesn't for many others.
Thanks! You can be sure that we're doing this very seriously and we see a lot of business opportunities but more about that later.. The fact is that we're not afraid to get the Big Load of Many forums.
That's the problem with the "criminal" term. Don't confuse moral and legalities.

Much better to comment on whether you think he's done something inexcusably wrong or not.
Looks good, good luck with that! That seems a really interesting and challenging project, do you have a background in neuropsychology or another field that helps you understand how the human brain work? If you need help, you can shoot me an email, and I will see what I can do (my background is more in applied maths).
It's always been true that running a static set of computers on EC2 means you're overpaying. It's not a case of not keeping up with the trend.
Likewise, Asus' eee Transformer Prime has been around for a while now. While somewhat pricey for an Android tablet it's still a lot better value than the Surface.
Well done Antti - it's a big thing to start your own company, and I'm sure even harder to know when to let go. I'm interested in why you are moving on - is it mainly a lifestyle/family decision ?
Fair point. It's dark where I am, so sleep is called for, but when I wake I'll add in some extra detail to the launch page.

To give you an idea, here's some headers for the days:

1 Accessing your New Server
2 Basic navigation, cd, pwd etc
4 Installing software, exploring the file structure
5 more, less, nano, tab completion, history and "dot files"
9 cron, contab, /etc/cron.daily anacran and "at"
19 Automation - using logrotate
I remember many strikingly similar designs as these "new" concepts of Windows 8 tablets being presented 10-15 years ago as new concepts of computing devices powered by Windows CE Handheld PC Edition (with some of them being actually manufactured then).
Good for him. I'm picturing him realizing that he's getting older, and that he can either keep spending money on kid's movies, or he can try to make a real difference in the world.

Education is a great thing to focus on too. My personal belief is that a lot of our social and political problems stem from a population that, on the whole, lacks critical thinking and analysis skills. When one can't think critically, emotion and fear take over, and people vote against their own interests or slide into apathy. If Lucas is planning to invest in high-school-and-below-level stuff, he might have a chance at changing that for the next generation.
I would have said "imgur is great" except it deletes images. Imgur is simple for the consumer, and you don't pay the bills for bandwidth usage but http://imgur.com/faq#long says if it doesn't get at least 1 view in 6 months, it can deleted.

http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/1523/imgur-com-is-deleti...
It surely is re-imagined. For example:

http://boards.4chan.org/c/

Even with 4chan we think moot.it is the best domain name for us and we'll both see how it works.
عاصفة ساندي تشل أمريكا
عاصفة ساندي تشل أمريكا - http://news.middle-east.ps/?p=2157
عاصفة ساندي تشل أمريكا - http://news.middle-east.ps/?p=2157
عاصفة ساندي تشل أمريكا - http://news.middle-east.ps/?p=2157
After reading his post on quality chairs, I have no doubt he is well off.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/07/investing-in-a-qual...
It is very good for people to learn how to use specific tools like grep, ssh, tail and the command line interface in general. That said, together with a course like this, one should, really, really find a real world website/group to support.

I have yet to find a shortage of friends, family and hobby groups around me who want someone who can take care of their website/hosting/and so on. Its like learning to cook; there are always someone who want free food. By taking responsibility for a website, one is very much more invested to "get it to work", and learn around 85% of what syadmin really is about.
We'll do the official release rather soon so we don't put too much efforts on that beta intro page.

Thanks anyway.
Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelance rate
Class act all the way; I hope everyone lands safely.
I have only one tablet, if my dad asked (thankfully he does not read HN), I would give it to him immediately. Being 'well off' is not synonymous with generosity.
Yea. Those are valid concerns for sites with existing forums. We're making importers and dump SEO friendly data for crawlers.
Do you plan to include more fun stuff (postfix, bind, etc...) in the future? That's something I'd definitely pay $20 for..
My apologies, thank you
Ask HN: Can you explain Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances?
I am trying to price up running an instance for 12 months. Part of that is trying to understand their reserved instances and if savings can be made by buying them.

Unfortunately Amazon's pages are cryptic at the best of times and damn right nonsense in some cases (or maybe I'm just a moron).

So I have the following questions:

- If I get a 12 months reserved instance, do I need to buy a "on-demand" instance first? Are you reserving the on-demand instance or is a "reserve" instance a type of instance within its self?

- What the heck is the "Offering Type" (or RIs) and why would a Heavy cost LESS than a Light instance? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Just to give you an example. Let's say we want a "medium" Linux instance for 12 months. 100% monthly utilisation.

If we do a single on-demand instance that is $117.12/month. But if we do a single reserved instance that is ONLY $23.42/month.

That seems "too good to be true" in terms of discount/savings (80% off). So I am guessing that isn't how Reserved Instances work.
Welcome to CAPITALISM 101.
All ethics are mere shades of grey. What is bad today will be good tomorrow, the villains will be heroes, the heroes will be losers who could have done more and every starry-eyed sucker aspiring to "make it" will swing like a pendulum within that grey spectrum, like it or not.

So, where in the grey zone are you, today?
Say he buys these gadgets in a year:

1 high end laptop - $1500
1 netbook - $500
2 phones - $500 X 2
2 tablets - $500 + $250
1 ereader - $100
1 cool TV device - $250
accessories $500

Total: $390 per month

It's a lot more than I spend but it definitely isn't super rich level spending. If someone spent $390 owning a nicer car, a fancier kitchen, slightly better apartment, a Harley Davidson, etc. you wouldn't even think about it. I knew students that spent $390 more than me (I spent 0) on clothes.

He has money. He likes computers.
Is there any reason for this?

Clicking on the Princess Bride links me to Ep6, Lost Ark, Avengers and BTTF.

To me it implies that they're related or similar. But I can't see any relation or similarity across these 5 other than score.
Man faces 3 years in prison for tweeting about finance minister in India
Knuth isn't dead.
I guess that falls under Very few programmers ever achieve this level in their own lifetimes.

It's still bad, though.
Wow, you just absolved me of a lot of guilt over my tech purchases this year so far.
Absolutely. At least in this case participants do have a working remote server of their own for their duration - a big step up from either a server "just in class" or a Gnome box on their desk.
This is exciting, the load time is one of the things that is most painful for me when working with Rails. It's really great when you can just add gems and get things working quickly but the load time tends to shoot through the roof...

Spork etc help but you still end up spending a lot of time waiting.
These Guys’ $5K Spending Sprees Keep Your Games Free to Play
Most Epic Software Office Ever? An 1814 Lighthouse [pics]