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It's not hard to guess the winner
Tip: keep the long posts, with a good hook at the beginning and a summary at the end with key points highlighted at the end.

Example: http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend... (still on the HN front page)
Additional bandwidth on slicehost is 30c/GB. Linode is 10c/GB. That's quite a difference if you're using a lot of bandwidth.

One thing that amuses me is that on both, it's actually cheaper to buy more VPS's, and use the pooled bandwidth, than pay for additional bandwidth. On Linode it's only a rounding error cheaper, but on slicehost it's significantly cheaper to just buy another VPS and never use it.
I have a question about organizing projects
Sergey Brin starts study after finding he has Parkinson's mutation
Your headline doesn't match the content.
Show new users a fake front page; ones that upvote the content you don't want on the site get dumped.

(I'm only partly joking)
Problems with releasing early and often, eh? Have you tried Erlang?

Sorry -- I'm still getting that out of my system.

Seriously, as smombat points out, posts are much better if you tell the story of how you got to where you are and why you made the decision you did. That gives the rest of us some context. For the most part, broad, sweeping statements are false. Especially in IT, where there's too many edge cases. So the details of your particular situation are what adds value to the reader.
Google Voice announcement and comments by eBay's CEO dim Skype's prospects
IMHO this is great, but not perfect.
The model of reserved instances takes EC2 users back into the
business of provisioning planning. How many instance/years
should I buy for the next year? How many is too many? EC2
users are still unable to to spread the 1 year time credit
over multiple instances. In principle, it costs the same to
run one instance for 1000 hours than to run 1000 instances
for one hour. In practice, the current model makes it
impossible to capture the discount. What is needed is to able
to buy a year worth of CPU time at discount, and then be free
to launch as many instances as needed to use up the time
credit.
(more on http://weblog.smirnov.ca/2009/03/12/ec2-reserved-instances-a...)
The Big Job Engines: Education and Health
I really like your post, I commented it http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend... . But even then, I'd say that I read 80% of it (most time, I read less than 50%). I just said to myself why not cut the post to have a shorter one that people will enjoy a moment. Turned out I was (maybe) wrong. I'll definitely give it another try though...
FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra
the ability to quickly transfer energy from one unit to another

Just swap physical devices. That's how electric "filling stations" will work; you'll drive in, exchange your flat battery for a fresh one and they'll recharge their stock overnight with cheap grid electricity.
$350 for a 1000 bot net? Maybe you could run Crysis on it
I didn't want to write a "statement" and that's why I said that it failed for us. I just wanted people to think a little before they release early and often. About how could it fails for them.
I wonder if it actually worked. I personally feel like not coming back for a few days to let all this Erlang stuff go away. Not that it wasn't interesting. I've never heard of Erlang before.
I hear your frustration, but sorry, it comes across as whining.

Life ain't fair and ofcourse systems like the AppStore are subject to major gambling and spamming. You either find a way to shine through the noise - or you get eaten.

I'm not sure why you feel a need to talk down to the spammers, though.
I, personally, have nothing but envy for the creators of the "SoundGrenade" and such. Spent a day, made a few dozen kilobucks, that's what I call a good hack, no?

You know the old saying; if you can't take the heat...
JavaScript needs Elvis
The Plane, The Plane. Where is the plane?
My first computer was this 1984: Apple Macintosh. I still have it in the attic along with it's system floppy. $3,000 used. We've come a long way baby!
Your number of Twitter followers, compared to that of another user, does not make you more valuable to society.

No one cares - you shouldn't either.
>constantly hiring

When I left late last year a lot of divisions/projects were in a hiring freeze, don't know if that's still the case but they've definitely kicked the 100-new-people-in-the-lobby-on-Mondays habit.

> I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner

There are a lot of hoops to jump through for this sort of "innovation". A lot. As in, these social features started being really pushed by VPs and the like way back when Facebook Apps launched, and are just now slowly seeing the light.
Yeah, it's not optimal to let your processes die from running out of memory because maybe some other non-server process actually requested the last bit of memory, and then who knows what sort of state your machine is in. How about making your restarter job notice when the machine is very close to being out of memory and preemptively kill the server then?
Sounds like there is another problem with who Obama appointed. Sad really.
They better be careful or Apple is going to sue them for violating their patent on swipe direction detection.
Well, in a language with existing web frameworks it would be convenient to use one of them and store your data with SQL. In Arc you would have to write your own SQL wrapper. I suspect if pg was not using Arc he would not be keeping everything in memory.

That said, the lisp world could use a good web framework, so perhaps this will inspire some lispers to create one.
As a counter-example, I tried to be brief as well in another post on there (http://danieltenner.com/posts/0003-impossible-is-a-step.html) and that one didn't work out very well - when I asked people why they didn't like it, they said it was too short and lacked substance/examples.

I'm a big fan of keeping things as brief as possible, but from what I can tell it's not the best format for the web. I've only seen it work for people who have huge followings already (e.g. seth godin). Even there, most of their posts don't take off...

I could be wrong of course! Good luck to both of us :-)
If this actually works, it would really change the world. Think of trucks with huge batteries that charge them in some central electricity center (next to a dam or so), then drive to far off villages to provide them electricity for weeks. There would be no need for cables any longer, one can transport electricity by train.
Sometimes it's nice not to have to search for the little button and press it that opens the next mail or goes to the next picture, but simply do a quick gesture. GMail actually has a labs setting for that.

I use gestures for navigation all the time, as a firefox plugin, so i don't have to press the back arrow, but simply do a quick gesture. It's much faster, for me anyways.
If everything is purely RAM resident, wouldn't you lose it all when the server gets wedged?
if they were going to stick around anyway, then its worth it for the comedy factor alone.
An in-memory database is pretty simple - it's just a bunch of hash tables.

A server restart mechanism is also pretty simple. Write a cron job that activates every few seconds to ps aux and grep for the server name, and if it's not there start the server. That won't catch server hangs rather than deaths, but that's exactly the problem that happened here.
Here, here.

I'm not an extremely avid programmer. I code, but my interests lie more in design. As such, I find that when we get into deeper, more technical moments - absolutely yesterday, with Erlang - I find that I've got nothing to contribute. On the other hand, when the conversation stays more social - not meaning off-topic, but rather focused on interesting unrelated subjects, with discussions about design and site launching and site events - I'm able to contribute more.

On the other side of the coin are people who are more interested in programming and less interested in that stuff, and the best part of the community is that both types of people have a place to talk to one another.
The most interesting passage to me was: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard.

One of the main barriers to Linux adoption is the fact and/or perception that it requires a lot of retraining. So now that we have the fact and/or perception that moving to Vista requires retraining as well, then Ubuntu becomes just another alternative.

I've dealt with plenty of situations where Windows is the sensible choice and plenty where Linux would be. And I have no problem with someone considering the options and choosing Windows even if I'd personally have chosen Linux. But often Windows is mandated by some executive who seems to consider a computer using Windows to be as necessary as a computer using electricity; that's just what computers use. In most places it would still be a major coup for Linux to even be CONSIDERED as an alternative to Windows, even if it was rejected.

I actually don't believe that moving from XP to Vista would have required much retraining. But I'm happy to see that Vista's perceived problems have led to large organizations at least looking at Ubuntu as an alternative, whether they use it or not.
Saw Reformat the Planet last night. Amazing!
Yes, and to get people to think about how it could fail for them, you need to paint a picture in their mind of how it failed for you -- so they can emotionally connect. Otherwise you're just writing one-line platitudes: think about how you release, be sure to debug, think about design before coding, etc.

It's all good stuff, no doubt, but without a frame to pull the reader in it loses a lot of impact.

It's a style thing. Do what comes natural to you. I didn't like your post, because to me there was nothing there. I already know that teams that don't think about the big picture and just push to release get caught in a tweak-debug-release cycle. That's just me, though. Personally I would have enjoyed learning if you started off with a design, what happened to it? Who was driving your release cycle? How often was too often for you? Did you have a master release plan that you threw away, or did you never think that far ahead? Etc. It's the details of the thing that matter: everybody already knows the one-liner (or think they do)

That's just me. No worries here. Glad to see you writing and submitting. Look forward to reading more of your work.
For a while, yes. But not forever.
Book Review: The Little Schemer
http://twitter.com/lacker

I try to mostly tweet about computery stuff.
Ah, you work at LShift. A funny coincidence indeed.

I think the URL request protocol itself would be fairly simple but any use case would be application specific so coming up with a general purpose implementation might be tricky.

I'm just finishing off the Erlang book and for my first project, I was going to either build a general purpose Comet server (improving on Orbited, Meteor, cometd, etc) or flesh out the above protocol and implement it... or a combination of the two. If you want to offer input or be involved: jedediah at silencegreys dawt kom.
Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons
I think the idea was to draw a letter 'h' for help.
The kindness of crowds
Python Library for Google Search
Design and implementation of a simple Twitter clone using only a key-val store and PHP.
Proxy servers don't help too much if your bank isn't signed up to share data with Yodlee, which is where all the Mint stuff comes from.

On the other hand, if you hypothetically wanted to use Amazon's Video on Demand service and got caught out by the US-only licensing restriction, you might be interested that Apache's mod-proxy can turn your Slicehost slice into a Virtual Private American.

(I feel guilty about doing this. Which is really weird, because I'm feeling guilty about trying to pay them money while every other expatriate I know just flies the Jolly Roger.)
I don't think short posts are bad, but to make a statement about how something doesn't work for you, you really set us up for a longer more detail filled post. Maybe you revisit it later to re-examine and discuss it in more depth?
7 Steps to Happiness as a Software Developer
Programming should be fun, not depressing. This article discusses some steps that can help unhappy programmers enjoy their work.
Dr Vinton G. Cerf - Father of The Internet
I frequently hear these two arguments against releasing early and often:
1) You will have a primitive product with bugs which means that the people who see it will be turned off and not want to come back later.
2) The argument made in this post, namely that you loose focus and end up putting out fires and implementing feature requests all the time.

As for #1, I just think that it matters very much because the group of early adopters is going to be very small anyway, unless you do some hyped launch like Cuil. Therefore, loosing a couple of users for good can be a small price to pay for the highly valuable feedback that you are bound to get.

#2 is something you have to be concerned about but that doesn't mean that you have to let it control you. And once something is launched, you are bound to get feedback anyway, so it really only applies to the "release early"-part.
No. The Windows and Linux kernels are hardwired to reserve a huge chunk of virtual addresses for kernel memory space. Windows can be toggled between reserving 2Gb and 1Gb (the latter of which Linux does by default). I assume this is so that a system memory address can be identified by testing a couple bits, and the minimum size is presumably limited by the chunk of addresses eaten up by memory-mapped devices like video cards.

Here's a page with some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452005
The new iPod Shuffle is the iPod Air
Probably counts more as reinforcement of a slightly unwanted meme.
Another example of another form of procrastination.

Release often is about getting exited with your product, I about bugfixing as exiting.
I'm guessing part of that psychology is set by prices of songs and TV shows in iTunes. Songs $0.99, TV shows were $1.99 (think it's more now for HD?). So if you are in that range, it's like impulse buy of a song or TV show. Out of that range, people will take some more time to think about it, which means they probably won't buy.

As to rationality, I think the impulse buy works because people know if they buy 5 or 10 things, some will turn out to give them a lot of enjoyment but others not so much. Buying $1.99 apps instead of $3.99 apps means you have twice as many "tickets" to spend in the hopes of finding a few things that are actually fun.

(If you are not selling fun, but actually eliminating some real pain people are experiencing, you can probably price more aggressively.)
Or a question mark.
Ask HN: Why developers at startups use 3 monitors?
Hello,

There is something that confuses me, and I can't find an answer for it.

Why the developers at startups, use 3 or 2 monitors? What is the point from using many monitors?

Why a startup would spend 3x on monitors, while they can save that money? Is there a ROI from using 3 monitors per developer?

I am really curious to know...

EDIT: It would be great if you tell me how do I install 2 monitors per machine... Does the hole screen appear devided into 2 screens? Or the 2 monitors dislay the same thing?
I don't think anything is going to work on every web page in existence. Perhaps strlen.
The point is how integrate text images(videos) and sound to improve the UX. When Google started there were no youtube or other services. Just plain text.
2 monitors is cheaper than 1 really big monitor. more screen space makes multitasking easier, improving productivity.
Like Dan, I think that releasing early and often is a bit overrated as a concept. It was started by 37signals and people have a tendency to read their stuff like it was their bible.

There is definitely a danger to release early and often : You have less time to think about your core idea. If you embark yourself in a quick release cycle without precautions, you have greater chances to forget about the product as a whole and its evolution. This is what happened to us. Now you could say that it happened to us just because we are stupid, but it would be more productive to start cogitating on the implications of bold statements like "Release early and often".
sorry for posting this again, but now there is an article in form of a tutorial explaning the internals of the twitter clone. It was not possible to have it finished for yesterday.
I call this the social network that is "there when you need it, and not when you dont" which is the best approach to this space. They are surfacing things up when you need them and in a non-obtrusive way.

I have written extensively about this exact phenomenon on my blog a lot recently as I feel that most people do not want a "Social Network" they want solutions to problems - the naming convention is what we all give it after the fact.
It's a documented trend that more monitors enhances developer efficiency. There is a point of diminishing returns as well, so two or three is the sweet spot. Some can see improvement with four, but not many.

I apologize, I can't find the source of the study for efficiency.

That being said, some prefer a single screen. I love dual screen as I'm a big proponent of code on one screen and website on the other so I can easily see the results of my code.
Introducing Media Cloud: A new tool to track how news gets covered
I don't think it's that. There are plenty of reasons to raid an office that have nothing to do with the office owner (for example, if you are after one of the employees)

More to the point, the Obama administration could have the worst vetting team in the world and they'd still be smart enough to ask the FBI if they had any active investigations on the appointee. It's too rudimentary a step to skip.

Which means this is either (a) not about Mr. Kundra (the nominee) or (b) is something so benign as to not have concerned the vetting team.
I actually really miss the deep geek articles. The ratio of geek:webby current events articles used to be higher.

I've actually customized my reddit with sub-reddits, and I get more of my deep geeky stuff over there and more of my business-y stuff here.
I've been using BeautifulSoup on a project and noticed the exact problems he's mentioning. I actually ended up filtering the source with a regexp to remove script tags and their contents prior to parsing because of the HTMLParser weirdness. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The whole time I was doing this, I kept looking at my nice Firebug element tree and wondering "Why am I even going to this trouble?"

Does anyone else wonder why we're writing all these parsers when both Mozilla and WebKit have reliable, robust parsers that are actively maintained? How difficult would it be to package up the existing code and distribute it with wrappers for python, ruby, etc... I assume there's something I don't know, because not only has it not been done, but no one seems to want to talk about it.
Once you've had double-headed there's no going back. Try it!
Its performance is getting worse over time because maintaining its speed requires more maintenance than anyone is willing to give it, at least so far. I would call that bit rot too.

I think both of you agree that the original author deserves only thanks.
Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization
I actually do organize my plugins as raganwald suggests...and, as we've rolled out more products, and I'm seeing increasing commonality in pieces between then, am thinking more and more than 90+% of every one of our projects should be all plugin code.
Flagged for misleading headline. Why not use the actual title of the article?
I like the idea of the topic day.
And what about sub-HNs, that would discuss very specific subjects ?
IE? Why?
looks like they were after someone else.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2009/03/breaking_dc_tech...
It's a little weirder than that, since Orkut is huge in Brazil and India but unknown in the US. It's kind of the opposite of, say, Google Search which is big in most countries but less than 5% market share in Korea.
Looks self-referential. I think this blog post was released too early, before it got any content.
Just IP NAT on the dest address sending you to the portal server. So actually they do tamper with headers, but only IP headers. You don't actually get any traffic to the real site until after your machine has been exempted from the NAT rule (and presumably a drop rule for non-HTTP traffic). There's an open source captive portal called NoCat that you can poke at if you ever want to set one up yourself.
Meanwhile In India, Google Launches Village Voicemail With Noticeboard
Jane Street Summer Project '09
On Building an Efficient Search Indexer
It was not started by 37signals, it was popularized by them. The practice has been around much longer as part of extreme programming, as have most of the things they preach.

The 37signals guys are great marketers but about the only thing unique to come from them, the only practice they actually created, was convention over configuration as a core principle. Everything else they just picked up and repackaged from existing extreme programming principles.
The difference between Slicehost's highest mem/cpu slice and Linodes is significant. So much so, I wouldn't even consider going with Linode if I need to scale my slices up to something beefier.
Good to hear, I got off of it several years ago. I know it's still thriving in Brazil but haven't looked into it at all except once in the past year I think when I somehow ended up on my Orkut page...
SaaS Sales Management Tips - Organization Strategy
I think this is actually a key motivator behind many of the cloud computing vendors. Hopefully some better competition will continue to keep pushing things forward.
They migrated 5000 workstation out of 90k. Presumably, they started with the easy ones first. I bet they'll keep a number of windows machines for those cases where no OO equivalent is available.
Brand New: Cracking Down on Comment Crime
Definitely try it. I will never be able to go back to one monitor.

Here are some statistics:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000012.html

Here are instructions:
http://lifehacker.com/software/dual-monitor/how-to-set-up-du...
Thanks for this to make me feel welcome. I came in through CH and have immediately fell in love with the format and content here. I was a bit confused by the rush of Erlang posts right after I arrived (did I do that?), but now I'm settled in and trying to absorb as quickly as possible ...

like a shamwow
Hulu to Launch with Social Networking
The thought process behind this is the same as shortcuts. It provides advanced users with increased learnability and memorability design principles. After a user becomes accustomed to the application they can use these gestures much more quickly then finding their respective navigation.
Easy Tips To Lose Stomach Fat
There are terms used to illustrate fat stomach or belly fat that a great number of people set on such as the spare tire, a potbelly, and love handles. Higher risk of heart diseases, strokes, diabetes, and disease like cancer as well may be resulted by it as one of the most dangerous fat.
I envision this being very useful for allowing touch features on a website - like a webapp on a tablet.
Cherly: a fast local cache for Erlang
what is timmyontime?
New Microsoft Board Member Maria Klawe on Bill Gates, College Students, and Innovation
Ive tried both and so far I find slicehost to be much more efficient especially because I dont need to install a 64 bit operating system.
Imagine you're trying to write a letter on a piece of paper but the desk you're writing on is only 3cm². Were it bigger, it would be so much easier.
Because Erlang sucks.
I laughed, I must admit.