skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost
Hi everyone. I did a quick search but didn't come across any topics directly related to this, so I'm looking for some help from the community. I've recently become interested in switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost. Some background: right now my MediaTemple (gs) account hosts about 5 or 6 Wordpress blogs, and a few static sites. I'm starting to get into Rails and my MediaTemple account is old enough to have been grandfathered in to the free 64MB gridcontainer. None of my blogs receive much traffic, and I really just use my hosting for learning, testing, and non-critical projects. After seeing CloudKick, and researching Slicehost some, I'm thinking of switching over to the bottom of the line Slicehost server. I like the idea of installing everything myself and I think it meets with my goals (what better way to learn than to set everything up yourself). So what do you think? I have 0 experience managing a server, installing Apache, etc. I'm comfortable enough in the terminal to follow any tutorials I might need. Does anyone have any advice on switching/migration? Any great articles I should read before I make the change? Will the 256MB Slice be enough to continue to manage my existing blogs?
Thanks for all the inside info, brandnewlow. I actually went to Princeton for undergrad in the 90s and find your insight fascinating.

What I found with the prep school kids there (I was from a mediocre public school) was that the great education they received in high school did not teach them to learn on their own. This was particularly true in the sciences (physics, in particular) but might not have been true at all for those following the pre-med/i-banker/mgmt consulting track.

Even though they might have seen some of the material in high school, the depth at which it is addressed in college called for a level of thinking that depended more on mental maturity then on familiarity with the material. I remember a classmate from France who showed me his linear algebra notes from high school and had obviously done matrix manipulations but just couldn't get the proofs in Mathey's 1st year linear algebra class. He ended up switching to industrial engineering, doing management consulting, MBA, etc., and is assuredly making more $ than I am.
But no engineering there... almost completely adwords.
I really, really, really, really, love being an Apple fanboy - it gives my life endless meaning - but the iPhone 3.0 isn't out, they'll add more features to it before launch, and the Pre has not been seen or touched yet save for one demo that looks really cool - but we have no clue if, say, Palm has figured out how to make scrolling feel good, which might sound ridiculous until you realize that every iPhone-killer on the market today has really awful touch-based scrolling, including Blackberry's model, which you'd kind of hope would have a better system attached.

Comparisons are silly. (The article acknowledges this, to be fair.) I know I'm asking a lot of people who really like arguing about things, but could we possibly delay these arguments until the iPhone 3.0 and the Pre actually come out?
The Sun Cloud will be RESTful
Actually foreigners can buy property in Detroit. There was a story in the local paper about a group of Chinese investors buying up blocks of houses.

Can you imagine a Michigan YCombinator where they would own a block of houses and provide a place to live? A self contained entrepreneurial village? It would have to be an outsider as the locals just don't think that way.
As a former indie developer who made games for free, here's the one thing I think you might take from my experience:

There are a lot of people who make games. Pretty much any basic idea you can think of has been done before. The best way to stand out is to polish the stuff you make, because otherwise you'll be looked over. If something's polished it can rise above a more-featured game because more people will take the time to play it.
If the web newspaper focuses relentlessly on providing the best local news, high value editorial news, and news of a regional interest (sports etc), they are also only competing with one or two big competitors.

The same thing can be said for startups - they have to focus on one thing and do it well.
Government 2.0 Meets Catch 22
Parrots and Oil Painting... niche markets that couldn't be further from web 2.0. The majority of the population with high levels of disposable income, and the will to spend it (soccer moms, retirees, busy non-geek professionals etc) are not catered for. It is a massive, untapped market.
iPaper on the Mac breaks the very clean PDF viewing that's built in. That's kind of sad because breaking things on a Mac are really hard, but Flash does it.
If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country.

In this regard, how poor is poor? And, for my better understanding of your statement, what are some examples of "incredible credentials"? This whole discussion is quite interesting to me, as I applied to exactly one college in my day, in the 1970s, my state's flagship university, largely for financial reasons. I was not aware then of what I hear now, that more selective colleges will both admit and fund students from working class or poorer backgrounds.
IBM is focusing on services, this is all about getting those juicy support/operations contracts.
I thoroughly disagree that you should leave people to use what they want to (anarchy).
Sun challenges Amazon for cloud dominance
Simulating an xterm in JavaScript
I'm not really making a point. I was hoping to open up the discussion on censorship in general - where do you draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable? Is all censorship bad? Where is the line between censorship as it is obviously being practiced in Australia and 'censorship' on a 'private owned and operated website'?
I don't understand why I would want C++ syntax when I could have python syntax for the same task? I checked and the python code for that matrix multiply is significantly shorter and arguably more readable, and that's without making a Matrix class!
If I want to become better at something, I must accept poor results, especially in the beginning.

Facing one's own mediocrity is the toughest part of practicing. It's almost a magic process because you can spend so much time feeling like it's going nowhere -- even for days or weeks at a time -- but then somehow, one day, you're able to handily do things that used to seem impossible or out of reach. I don't know how it works, but I like it!

[I] avoid certain things - to preserve a day by day individual status quo.

Everyone does that to some extent. There are a few parts of the essay that talk about it:

We can't write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives."

Everyone fails, Joe Louis said "Everyone has to figure to get beat some time." The question isn't did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead? And there is one other little question: "Did you collaborate in your own defeat?" A lot of people do. Learn not to.

But my favourite quote is:

You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown.
Here's a very detailed article about Harvard's recruiting strategy.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998441....

Harvard starts by sending 70,000 letters to high school students in their junior year (second-to-last year) of high school. Telephone calls are also part of the recruiting effort. These days that provides almost 30,000 applicants for just more than 1,600 spaces in each year's entering class.
Parrot's biggest issue is that they don't have a First-among-equals language that they can do better than anyone else. JVM has Java, CLR has C#, even Perl 6 has moved to PUGS. I commend the Parrot team for the amazing effort they've been showing, but I'd liken this to Duke Nukem Forever finally settling on a Physics Engine...
I'm going to be a devil's advocate.

1. It's successful, at least in terms of traffic, so it's worth watching and perhaps learning from.

The lesson here is that if your concept is extremely general, you'll have success. Scribd went after a niche that was completely underused, and props to them: they got just as big as that plan would predict. That said, it's still not a good web site. It's not a particularly good role model for people who want to build their own web site, unless said people have an idea that's just as large, and large ideas are hard to come by.

2. The web hasn't obliterated the old document formats (yet). Not everyone that has content in those formats has the time or inclination to replicate the layout in HTML, so Scribd is making distribution easier for them. It may not be solving your problem but it is solving some people's problem.

It's solving the problem, but again: not well. Google's suite of PDF-to-HTML and slide displayers do a much better job of this than Scribd's iPaper does. Why that system hasn't been used yet for a public site I don't know: perhaps Google's scared of getting supersued again.

As I said on the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521565) the real challenge is making PDF displays convert to HTML. I'm certain it's possible: hell, with SIFR you could even keep the PDF's embedded fonts. That's a really interesting challenge (and it's one that I'm working on, though its implementation will be radically different than Scribd's much more all-purpose viewer). The end result is that you'll get something that requires no custom displays, because it just works the first time.

People here usually have a soft spot for YC funded startups; not sure why Scribd's treated like the disowned member of the family.

We encourage YC startups. Note how rarely we attack DocStoc, which is way, way worse than Scribd is. However, HN isn't a site of happy encouraging people. We're all critics of everything, which is awesome. There are also pretty vehement Reddit critics, a few J.tv critics, a lot of people who make fun of OMGPOP, and on and on. So think of this like tough love. We'd love to love Scribd, but we won't tell it we do until it rehabs itself up. (I also suspect there's some jealousy of its success, along with some annoyance that they don't need to take our advice, good as it is, because they're a behemoth without our help.)
Why TomTom Is Fighting Microsoft On Linux -- It Has To
It really looks like it needs some more promotion though.

That problem is being solved. I just learned about it! From this nifty blog post that someone just put up! ;)
What is microblogging?
Microsoft's New Silverlight Already Out
And cuba
Why is nickb's submissions page empty ?
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ==> http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb ==> http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb

I could find a(another) contact for news.ycombinator.com ...
For the majority of people, the fact you can easily divide a measurement by 1000 is absolutely useless.

Just like the fact you can happily discuss units of measurement with someone from a foreign land.

If an entire country uses a particular unit of measurement, leave them alone to continue using it in peace.
Either way, the "g" kids aren't going to bring home the bacon.

This is how things work now, but you are at least in a position to change this, admittedly in a very small way. Why aren't you trying to bring about a world where the "g kids", so to speak, are able to bring home the bacon, instead of the children of the caste that brought us Bush and subprime?
I'm seriously considering a move up to Detroit. Is anyone else interested in getting a "hacker block" setup?
I'm considering doing one too. Maybe we should team up? (email me if interested.). Here are a few ideas I have so far. What does HN think?

1. Growing Avocado trees
2. Raising Geese
3. Understanding statistics
4. Something with the Arduino
In my mind the best zombie films are
- Dawn of the Dead (modern version)
- The first Resident Evil
- 28 Days Later

The common theme in them is they are different and "non cheesy". I hate cheesy horror films (Scream made me laugh so hard ;)).

Dawn of the Dead has fast zombies in (Day of the Dead failed partly because they slowed down :() which is a great idea. The "gritty" camera work also works well with that (the sort of hand camera filmed look) speed as you really get the horror etc.

Resident Evil was just epic full stop. Verged on cheesy but elegantly avoided it. Not particularly scary but the sexy lead kicking ass = good :D Also it was somewhat intelligent - it explained the Zombies fairly logically (and mixed in an acutally good storyline - the memory loss etc.) and crucially kept them locked into one location. None of this "spreading across the world" thing. It could happen :D

28 Days Later is far and away one of the best. The Zombies only make up a small portion of the film and the rest focuses on humanity facing the end of life as they know it. It was an extremely good story (really, very very simple but hugely effective) and didnt push the reality enevlop too far.

So IMO what makes a good zombie flick?

- Realism (as far as possible)

- Good, sensible, logical story (it could happen!)

- No cheese (OMG were all gonna dieeee)

- Hot lead optional

- Gritty (camera work and writing)

Hope that helps :D

EDIT: oh yeh make it logical. Slow zombies are never really a threat - I always hate those films where they fail to avoid lumbering zombies. Please :(

Also, I never thought Shaun of the Dead would count. If it does this pips 28 Days Later as my fav zombie film. The writing/story is pure brilliance and the production is very very good. It nails it's genre perfectly.
ISAS - Studenti - Průběžná klasifikace
Good to know you go to such lengths. From some of the posters here you would think it was as simple as looking at a website with CP gets you 10 years :)

Respect, and good hunting :)
Redis beta-7 released, new features implemented. Make sure to check the SORT command.
Have you ever wanted superpowers? Brilliant Short Film
FTC urged to investigate security of Google services
My meals and conversations with the students there were astounding.

Right. Very wealthy kids become very good at impressing people early on in their lives.

If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools.

It depends on what you mean by "poor". If we're talking about someone from abject poverty, or from Wyoming in a year short on mountain-state applicants, you're correct. If you're talking about someone from upstate New York at the economic 15th-percentile, you're wrong. He would not be highly sought; he'd probably be turned away for not knowing which extracurriculars were "right" (e.g. crew, sailing, lacrosse) and which were not.
There's lots of software that does the same thing. But you need to have a server/computer running.

Search for "webcam server": http://www.multicamserver.com/ , http://webcamserver.sourceforge.net/ , http://www.multicamserver.com/ .

Check for yourself, because I haven't tried those...
it also takes a long time to show the page with no submissions...
Raising Private Equity in a Down Market
Net access? The article talks about homes that have had the copper wiring stripped from them. (Actually -- I do want to do a full reno of a house one of these days)... how do you get onto the Tubes?
The timeline goes much longer, and the involvement much deeper. As for the timeline, former treasury secretaries Summers and Rubin were both at high-level positions at Goldman, Rubin actually was co-CEO. Then Friedman (his "co") who is Republican worked as chief advisor for Bush. Then Paulson, who as you said also was Goldman CEO. Now we got the Rubin people in there again, Geithner was his protege at treasury (as Rubin himself says in his autobiography) and Summers (now chief advisor to Obama) was Rubin's protege at Goldman. Note that Goldman paid out about 10 or 11 billion in 2008 for compensation, in the same year it received about the same sum officially (i.e. not counting the AIG shadow payments). Someone on a panel once said that if this same thing happened not in the US but some "developing" country, we would now hear big lectures about "crony capitalism". I used to admire Rubin and Goldman but this does not look good. This looks like Russian oligarchs, just in a richer country.
Running copper from the telephone pole to your house is provided by the phone company.

Many cities require a permit and inspection before you can get hooked up to utilities. So gas and electricity will be harder and more expensive.
Yea it definitely will. Just follow the tutorials on slicehost's website and you will be fine. Start off with ubuntu 8.04 imo
I see submissions on the page.

Might be due to some of the database/scaling issues going on with the code.
I could always imagine the solaris code base being dumped on a group like ISC or something...
Can we just go back to calling it the 'net' or 'web' please? :(
Terrafugia Achieves Maiden Flight - Live Blogging from the Boston Museum of Science
I didn't talk about the influence of yield rates because at no point during my two years in admissions was a decision ever made on a kid based on whether or not we thought they'd matriculate to our school. This simply did not happen in my presence, so I didn't speak to it.

I find this difficult to believe, given that I know people who've worked in admissions at a surprisingly large number of colleges-- private and public, universities and liberal arts colleges, elite and average-- and they've all indicated the importance of yield. It's not something that will get a mediocre applicant in, but it's easy for a good one to get rejected on low predicted yield.

This is one of the problems I have with college admissions consultants. They charge kids an arm and leg to help them get into elite schools, but few if any of them actually ever admitted kids to elite schools. All they can do is look at the black box, see what goes in, what goes out, and then make educated guesses about why. That's not good enough for the prices they charge.

I would argue with you on this one. The outcome can be altered, but most people don't have the means or knowledge necessary to do so. For example, consider a student with a 3.9+ from a reasonably good public school, and a 2200 on the SATs, and otherwise middle-of-the-road "soft factors". He's not getting in, obviously. If he improves his SAT scores to 2300-2400, or spends three times as much time on his admissions essay, it won't matter in the least. He's still not getting in.

On the other hand, if he had attended a prep high school (it's ridiculously easy to get into elite colleges from a brand-name prep) he would have a guidance counselor with enough social connections to state his case personally in the admissions office, and he'd almost certainly get in. Or, if he had a great internship-- especially of the kind that can only be bought, in high school, using elite connections-- he could get in.

The service provided by "admissions counselors" like Kat Cohen is the sale of their social connections: an internship at a NYC art gallery in your junior year, a recommendation from a Senator, etc. Everything else they provide is pretty useless. The reason this business model begins to fail at some point is that connection-pimping doesn't scale. Kat Cohen can do this for 3 students per year, but if she's pounding her network for 100 students, her "connections" are going to become annoyed at being sold to rich high schoolers, and fade away from her and her efforts.
Ah, so the script that automatically posts this skit to Reddit whenever the word "Parrot" is mentioned works with HN now. Very nice.

Or should I say, this joke was funny about 5 years ago. After being used 150 times since then, it's really lost its charm.
The difference between the two is fairly clear to anyone who has studied political theory or common law.

The difference is that in one case, you have a privately owned and operating website exercising censorship as a function of the owner's property rights.

Just as you have the right to deny a stranger entry into your home, a website owner has the right to set the rules of engagement in their properties.

Whereas,

As in the case of the Australian Gov't, ostensibly based on common law, is exercising the bludgeon of government fiat in order to ban access for all citizens outright to a particular website, and in doing so, is engaging in censorship.

There is a difference between a gov't engaging in censorship reminiscent of Stalinist-era USSR and you telling a stranger they cannot enter your home without your permission.

The division between public and private is central to nearly all modern governments, even a "communist" gov't like China makes the distinction even though that gov't does exercise power at will, more or less.
Perl 6 hasn't moved to Pugs. Although anything that passes the Perl 6 test suite is Perl 6, the "real" Perl 6 is Rakudo, which runs on Parrot.

Pugs was really just a prototype. Read the source code some time, and you'll see why.
I've been running my sites (Django-powered) on Slicehost for about two years and have been very pleased overall.

A few observations:

1. Running Apache with both mod_php and mod_passenger (assuming that would be your deployment method for Rails app) on a 256 meg slice may be tight if your traffic levels pick up. (Based on experience with mod_wsgi, mod_python and mod_php, I haven't explicitly used mod_passenger and am unaware of its memory/interpreter model, but think it is similar to mod_wsgi.) But it will be enough to manage your existing blogs and additional PHP applications as long as the load doesn't explode.

2. You don't need any linux administration chops to get started, but every year or so I've learned enough additional practices that I grab another slice, setup the new slice from scratch, transfer my webapps/sites to the new slice, and power down the old one. There are just a number of small best-practices that--when avoided--add up to a hard to manage setup over time, especially when managing multiple sites within multiple servers. You'll probably want to do the same.

3. Slicehost has great resources, http://articles.slicehost.com/ , which should cover most configuration/setup details.

4. Switching over to my own slice and doing administration myself has been a very valuable experience for me, and I really do recommend it.
Also remember to divide Atom clocks by 3 when comparing to Core 2 (as a rough estimate, I choose Core 2 because most people are familiar with them). A single core 1.6GHz Atom might compare to a Core 2 at 500MHz using only one of its cores.
http://www.mail-archive.com/libertarianisland@yahoogroups.co...
Thank you. That is some good material.
Hybrid clouds are coming
Until system scripts start being written in alternative shells (which will never happen), I wouldn't bother learning any other shell than /bin/sh (and, by extension, bash). For more complex applications, stick to Python.

Also, I never really understand why everyone wants to tout the "cross-platform" nature of their applications. You always run up against OS differences fairly quickly, negating any supposed "cross-platform" benefits. Especially if you want hooks into the OS (and who doesn't want OS hooks?)

Cross-platform apps that do provide hooks into the OS are excepted: those are indeed useful: Python, etc.
Capitalism, Apple Style
Joel wrote "Commoditize your complements":

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html