skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have worked for a university which, under budget pressure, allocated for < 1% average annual raise, but STILL put all the effort into review to spread it out so some got .7%, some got .8% and so on. What I remarked from this was: all the pain and anxiety with none of the benefit.

More recently, the company I work for seems to have moved away from an emphasis on raises and towards an emphasis on bonuses. Somehow for me this is psychologically infinitely superior. I actually can't remember the time series of my bonuses. I suppose if the company was stupid, it would report my bonus as "your bonus is 20% lower than last time" or "your bonus is 30% higher than last time." But they just report the amount. Contrast that with salary changes, which in my experience have always been reported to the employee as a percent change, just in case the employee was not thinking that way anyway.

What these guys are doing appeals to me very much. The real changes in salary come from moving up and down the ranks, which is a public process even though not transparetly linke to salary changes generally. A super simple salary system is very appealing to me. Give me my feedback in significant (>1% effects) chunks, and keep me from doing the equivalent of staring at 16 indistinguishable brands of soap wondering how they picked Tide for me.
Publicly criticizing someone, even outright denouncing them in stern but entirely truthful terms, is not even in the same league as publicly whipping someone.

This public criticism elicited awareness of the behavior for people who might have gone to GS unaware of their practices. It elicited GS to amend at least some of their practices. The only observers plausibly "scared" by this are people who want to build a business that involves impersonating other companies.
Genes, Race, And IQ
do you mean delicious
This is correct, in the job configuration only the initial data is loaded from s3, afterwards you can chain mapreduce steps that run off hdfs on the local machines.

Step 1:
"-input", "s3n://elasticmapreduce/samples/similarity/lastfm/input/",
"-output", "hdfs:///home/hadoop/output2/",

Step 2:

"-input", "hdfs:///home/hadoop/output2/",
"-output", "hdfs:///home/hadoop/output3/",

etc..

There is no explicit support for mounting data from EBS yet, but in theory I think you can hack something together in the initial mapper to mount an EBS volume to be used in the second map task...
I think the premise here is that it's better to stop this sort of exploitation through some short-term action than to pay off GS over the long term.
You could also make each connection finish faster. I'm not suggesting you don't need 50 Apache processes for what you're doing. Just that you might find other way to serve the same userbase, if having 50 processes is a problem for some reason.

mod_fcgid is more efficient for some classes of problem than mod_php...though not "faster" by a huge amount, it does require a lot fewer resources including having a lower process count for the same workload. Switching to mod_fcgid for all PHP on your site would mean you could remove mod_php from your Apache process, which is a big memory savings.

eaccelerator can speed up some PHP applications.

Profiling your code and removing the bottlenecks would be another good option.

Since PHP is historically not thread safe you probably can't switch to a lower process Apache concurrency model (though there seems to be the possibility to use a limited subset of PHP 5 in such an environment, I'd be hesitant to do so in production, and you'll spend an awful lot of time digging up the facts on whether the modules you're using are thread safe).

While I've seen suggestions of running a lighter webserver for assets that don't need the full execution environment of Apache...I would instead suggest you make a lean VirtualHost section just for those assets. Yes, it will still be spawning Apache processes, but Apache can share a huge amount of resources with all the other Apache processes. It's hard to see in "top" and the like, because shared resource usage isn't very clearly dilineated, but overall resource usage of a single Apache installation (with many processes) is probably going to be less than that of Apache plus a second web server, particularly if you've already cleaned up your Apache and gotten rid of all of the unnecessary modules. Only real data can tell us for sure, but I'd be suspicious of any advice that seems certain that adding another webserver to the mix is the best solution, without having data about your particular deployment.
I think it depends where you're from, salsa is a big thing down south. But yeah, I get what you're saying... salsa probably would not have been my first choice either, but maybe they know something we do not. I'm also pretty sure they selected based on the people/personality and less on the business.

For the record, I did not downmod you.
Good for them. I really don't see this as a sign that investor confidence is increasing though. Rosetta Stone is probably the most recognized names in computerized language instruction, and I am sure it is profitable. The company is also around 17 years old.

So I really don't see investing in Rosetta Stone to be a big risk. I have no idea how the stock is going to do, but I don't see any significant risk that the company will go bankrupt or lose the majority of its value in a year. They already have a successful business model.
This book contains a lot more exercises in the same vein:

http://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-Repe...

Changed my life -- no more typing pain.
I do, but HN it's the first socialmedia news site where comments remain insightful and interesting and without meme-jokes even after dozens and dozens of comments.

I, personally, usually like more the conversations and comments here than the original posts
Ooh. I didn't think of having two apache configurations on the same server ... one that does media serving and is streamlined and one that does mod_php. I would prefer this over nginx. At least have the sanity of staying in one world. Thanks for that tip.

So I run multiple sites on this server and plan to keep adding more, so that's another reason configuration maintenance is an issue. Not to mention one day I plan to write a web gui to handle all this configuration ... and I don't need nginx's super-duper performance. I need a stable piece of software to configure, apache does everything, I've been using it for years, know all the ins and outs, and memory is cheap. Just mod_php is the bear and you add drupal to that and you have a beast.

I don't know what the bottleneck is really, that is part of the problem. But I know that every now and then when we we get bursts of traffic I can find with a /server-status that 50 apache processing are in a write state.
"I honestly don't understand the modern notion of usury. It looks like any other business exchange to me"

Usury laws date back thousands of years. Its hardly a modern notion. They exist because its well understood that all forms of high interest add to wealth distribution problems. Which in turn causes all sort of other problems in society.
I really don't think that's the motivation at all-- but, of course, the Internet mob loves a villain, so pour on the hyperbole. Jesus, did you just make a 1984 reference aimed at a site that's trying to encourage businesses to have public support conversations!? Do you REALLY think it's Orwellian for forum software to allow the admin to delete threads?

It's not extortion to build a channel for discussion and have that channel get used enough that the company really oughta start paying attention. If it was, Twitter would be guilty. Let's bring our torches and pitchforks to all of the other forums out there that focus on technical issues with specific products.

The officialness of non-sanctioned forums (<20% of their signups nowadays, apparently) is clearly a problem which they agreed to and are addressing-- and I honestly think they need to do more than they did (notably: they need to fix how they appear in search engines when they are non-sanctioned forums).

I think you're taking a short view of profits. GS might be able to make a few bucks by faking people out on purpose and trying to extort companies. They stand to make a lot more if they do the right thing. And, if you actually take the time to read about the founders and the company, it seems like they are trying to do that.
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It's absolutly Free. There is nothing superfluous, only that you really need. Try it and make sure in this!
This has been implemented: in every RFID reader. The difference between this thing and a radio is that this thing supplies its own power; RFID tags get their power from the radio transmission. You may have noticed, however, that RFID tags generally only work at very short ranges.

There are a few major reasons that this doesn't scale, but the big one is the inverse square law. The efficiency of the system is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the user and the tower, whereas the efficiency of wires is inversely proportional to only the length of the wire.
I'm not sure what to make of this issue, I haven't made my mind on it yet.

However, the analogy given by Nisbett comparing human intelligence to the height of corn plants is ridiculous. A false analogy if there ever was one.
I have used Ning only briefly a couple of times. I haven't set up a site on it.

What if they want to leave, the customers, can they just grab their data and go somewhere else? To another social network like Facebook or MySpace or somewhere like that? LinkedIn?
(More Explicit) Advice to Summer Applicants
The exploding termsheets

http://ycombinator.com/exploding.html

have started to arrive. I just talked to a group who got one, and they hadn't realized we were willing to interview groups early when this happened.

So I should be more explicit: If you get an exploding offer, send us an email, and if we were going to interview you, we'll do it early.
Had the phrases referring to Mafia, blackmail and extortion been left out of the piece, I'd totally agree with you.

Including such words, however, is not "publicly criticizing" someone nor "outright denouncing them in stern but entirely truthful terms". They're meant to incite the other side. They're there to show righteous anger and having as many readers as 37Signals does, it's completely out of bounds.

Combine that with the complete and utter lack of professionalism displayed by Jason and that post can, and will be, taken as public shaming of GS.

Public shaming is not criticism nor denouncement. But yes, you're right. The only companies scared will be the ones who want to follow a similar model.

Of course, I'd have preferred to have the technical issues pointed out so that those up-and-coming companies can learn from this debacle, but I guess appealing to people's fears is much better. After all, that's what most of the world's governments have been doing to their people, so why expect more from our technical leaders.
Regulation on paydays loans is by design not strict. Most states passed special laws to work around existing usury laws to enable companies like these to exist.

Its up to the payday company to figure out how to be profitable...and most are.
"Sexy" Sells - I have the Stats to Prove It
Wikipedia agrees with you, for values of "not very long" that are about 60 at mid-life. Since that includes essentially no medical care, however, I'm not sure how much of it is attributable to diet.
I hoped that HN readers would be more objective than this, but then again it's only a news site. Oh, well.

Just remember that this type of judgmental attitude goes both ways. As likely as everyone who disagrees with you is a 37Signals fanboy, you could be a hater just looking to troll any thread to create a negative perception of the company.
A blog post gets to more people than an email.

I wouldn't like GS's chances if they'd tried a slap-suit against 37S, even if they hadn't publicly admitted every factual point, apologized, and blamed every "misinterpretation" of their motives on their own poor communication skills.
It's just a photo of a Pixar company-wide function but I'd love to be good enough to work for them based on it (and what I've read).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teohyc/2564116426/sizes/l/
I also could live with having another slice just doing media serving. If I could share the filesystem or run some rsync script, in some efficient/non-cumbersome manner, between the media server (threaded apache) and app server (main box with php etc) that could work and would allow more parallelism, as they say, for faster web pages.

Then again you have the same problem with things like drupal, that just plop media all over the place and it's up to the client to maintain the separation of media in their code. Drupal users don't do that.
I'm afraid I have nothing further to say to you; we are speaking very different languages.
Windows 95 almost had floppy insertion detection but the training cost was prohibitive
You’ve Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care?
Hopefully this is a decent indicator of increased investor confidence.
Oh, I thought the submission was going to be an article from The Atlantic, and not just a short Andrew Sullivan blog entry about a new book,

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/winter09/006505.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-Cultures/...

which does happen to be well worth reading.
Maybe a prediction market inside Second Life. Isn't there some kind of exchange rate for lindens to real money (http://secondlife.com/statistics/economy-market.php)?
fastcgi with Apache will be a waste of your time I think.

Apache+php is solid, but a memory hog. If you want to keep things simple, move to Nginx with php+fastcgi. This is the suggested config for Slicehost.

Or, as previously suggested, offload the client connection to an Nginx server sitting in front of Apache. This will relieve the pressure on the php instances and will also handle static file serving.
www.ericsink.com/articles/Compensation.html
I find this speech baffling. Investors don't make companies successful, sales do! Do you want taxes to increase on the people investing in companies that may or may not succeed or do you want taxes to decrease on the people who buy your products. Cutting a companies taxes doesn't increase the amount of people a company can hire. However, cutting the taxes of the people who buy your products will likely increase sales. These increased sales mean more money to hire more people.

Let's be real. Companies will hire the minimal amount of people to get the job done. They aren't going to hire people willy nilly because they get a tax break. Companies will hire more people when their sales increase and they need more bodies. To increase sales you decrease the taxes on the consumer class.
I think they stopped posting while they work on their book but I could be wrong.
Ah, but it's also a sweet-spot of 37Signals' fans.

That's not true. There are many critics of 37S here, some of them rather harsh.

I'm no 37S fan, but this controversy is a no-brainer for me. Customer support is a critical, inalienable part of my business. If someone tried to get between me and my customers, I would be furious. If they did it using a website that fooled people into thinking it was me, I would be exponentially furiouser.

Before this, I had a vague idea of GS as an up-and-coming startup. Now my perception of them has become: I don't want them anywhere the hell near my customers. Who do they think they are to insinuate themselves into that relationship? They might as well be trying to replace parts of my code with their own.

Edit: replaced "Now I know one thing about them" with "Now my perception of them has become". I don't of course know what GS' strategy or intentions really are. But from a positioning point of view, that doesn't matter.
You'd be quite right, but you'd have to ascertain that by looking through my comment history. I don't troll, but I will fight for what believe vehemently, even if that gets me downmodded. I'll then sit and think about what I've said and what others have said. If I'm very wrong, I'll correct it.

Fighting for objectivity on a site is something that I don't think should be looked at negatively. But, to each his own.
I discovered a similar exercise to the 3rd one shown a few years ago, and it really helps. Basically, you push your hand out like you were telling a car to stop, and pull your fingers back with your other hand. Like this:

http://i40.tinypic.com/54dm6b.jpg

I usually hold it for about 20 seconds. You should feel a good stretch going on in your tendons.

It's surprisingly effective, and the results are almost instant, with any wrist pain basically subsiding after doing this stretch.
So why is a payday loan your best option? Because the power company will turn off your electricity if you don't pay today. So you go get a loan which is payable in a week for high interest+fees, and you then go pay the power company.

Did you really need an entire industry that charges high interest to solve that problem?

If such companies did not exist, what would happen? Electricity would get cut off right? Then what? It would happen to enough people in your community and together they would go to their local leaders and find solutions. Solutions that would not involve the creation of payday companies.

Apply this set set of thinking to other scenarios: car payment (car gets repo'd if you don't pay today), your out of weed (gotta get high man), need to pay the babysitter so I can go to my minimum pay job. Try being poor for a while, its quite stressful.

Every problem you can think of, by providing high interest loans to briefly avoid it, only causes these problems to get worse.
"You could also make each connection finish faster."

Well my I have set KeepAlive Off. Not sure what else I can do to close connections.

"remove mod_php from your Apache process, which is a big memory savings."

That's what I'm shooting for but php under mod_fcgid has proven to be unstable, or I have to dig deeper to find the problems.

"Profiling your code and removing the bottlenecks would be another good option."

I've never done this on php any hints would be appreciated.
But I am not too crazy about digging through random client code, I'd rather be able to handle the average inefficiency.

"I would instead suggest you make a lean VirtualHost section just for those assets."

Well I'm not sure how to make a lean virtualhost. I thought I could only remove modules from the main apache config, not a vhost. So I don't understand how I can make a vhost leaner than the parent apache. I should look into this further, but any advice is appreciated.
And for that, I apologize.
Of course one blog post doesn't take longer than one email. But one blog post that nips things like this in the bud going forward is a hell of a lot shorter than emails+waiting for action+follow up for however many n companies try to pull this nonsense.
I'm not disputing the trademark issue. I think 37s would have a pretty good case there. But 37s went beyond there to call them extortionists and other implications of illegal activity (not connected to trademark infringement), which is where they crossed the (legal) line.
I think where you and I and Femur disagree is what constitutes skepticism.

For me an experiment who's results can't be replicated, indeed have not been replicated since 1924, is as wrong as wrong can be. It is 2 + 2 = 5

For you and Femur it is perhaps merely reasonable skepticism.
Perhaps you were expecting some proof that it is wrong, not just lack of proof that it is right?

In science inability to reproduce is where the buck stops. There are no further attempts to actually prove wrongness.
"I don't know what the bottleneck is really, that is part of the problem. But I know that every now and then when we we get bursts of traffic I can find with a /server-status that 50 apache processing are in a write state."

I think you do know what the problem is ;-)

What is your PHP Error handling and logging set to? How big are your Apache access_log and error_log files?

Cheers
IIRC The version on the website is the text as of the first printing. The book is now on its third printing, and there have been substantial corrections, revisions, and additions to the text. It's really worth buying a copy of the third printing from either his site or else from Amazon.
Apache/FastCGI/PHP _should_ be very stable (it's mature/old).

I have used it on production sites for years, and in fact, have not used mod_php since before PHP5 for the exact reasons you describe.

You may need to tweak your FCGI settings a bit - the amount of children/fcgi process lifetime, etc all make a difference.

One thing I would highly recommend is ensuring you run under a PHP accelerator (APC is free/great), particularly with FCGI. This will reduce the time each PHP-FCGI child takes serving a PHP request (as it doesn't need to reparse the code every time), which means you can have less children. Less children means more memory available and we all love memory.

If you're having specific stability problems with fcgi, do some googling on the errors you're getting. There definitely have been bugs in the PHP fcgi interface, so an upgrade to later/latest version may help you there.

Alternatively, something like lighttpd/nginx could be a good option for you (though they both recommend fcgi if you want them talking direct to PHP as well).

Good luck!
A trademark lawsuit would have made 37s look bad and would have taken forever to be resolved, while they were still getting damaged. A lawsuit wouldn't have been better, it just would have been justified.

The need was: their business was being hurt by the presence of the GS page that looked official but wasn't. If that doesn't count as a need, wtf does?
A dollar is worth a dollar because a lot of people want it that way. Gold is "worth" 900USD because a lot of people want gold. But not too many people - otherwise the price would rise.

My point is that nothing has intrinsic value. The market parameters of supply, demand and prices are one way we assign value to things.
Wow. These are amazing. The one with your hand upside down against the tree was excruciating on my mousing hand, which is where I usually have problems, so I figure that's the problematic tendon. Let me give this a week and see if things improve...
This is part of the benefit of taking matters public; sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I still don't get why they couldn't just spin the disk up, check if it exists using that message and then check the bit at the same time. Do that once during installation and there's no user intervention.
I think it's a great idea to view how businesses outside of tech are tackling the problems they face. A show like this can help to make you a better entrepreneur not by only looking at the decisions and strategies they employ but understanding how and why they've built the business the way they did.

I welcome a fresh perspective.
I suspect this would have accomplished things real fast:

"Guys x, y and z need to change in the next week or we're going to rip you apart on our blog and possibly sue for trademark violation. -37s"
So do I go to 37signals' website for support on GS now?
The guys behind GS are not stupid... the sheer volume of evidence against them would suggest that much of this was intentional.

The initial reply from GS that promised to change the phrasing on their site seemed, to me at least, disingenuous, like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar.