skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But I wouldn't call them competitors. That would imply actual competition. Nobody competes with Twitter. They appeal to entirely different sorts of users, because they know they can't go directly for Twitter's userset, and if they do target Twitter users wholesale, they invariably fail. Twitter knows this as well.
It depends. Amazon started out really cheap with 1.7GB servers in 2006. However, it's now 2009 and the prices are the same. At that point in time, Linode had their 400MB instances for $80 (which became 512 which became 1024 which became 1200 which became 1440 over the years). Slicehost had just been founded at the same time EC2 came around and I remember the big waiting list as they became popular.

So, I don't think that Amazon can become dominant unless it offers more for less. Their EBS (elastic block storage) is a good offering that's really attractive, but they're starting to look expensive. Slicehost will give me an 8GB box with 2TB of transfer for $450. Amazon would cost $628 for that (40% more). Even if you commit to a 3-year term and pay $2,000 up-front, you still only bring the cost down to $500.

It will really depend on whether Amazon keeps prices down. Their competitors will have the ability to lower prices as hardware improves. If Amazon doesn't follow suit, they won't last. Right now, there aren't too many providers, but Xen knowledge is getting out there and more companies will start offering the same thing.

Amazon is doing well now. They need to keep driving costs down to remain competitive in an industry where many providers will start being interchangeable.
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; - Dijkstra

While I fully agree with the above, and I am a good programmer, good at proving theorems, I am terrible at algebra, I can barely do my taxes.
Yes. And no.

Take yourself back to 1989 or so when very few companies asked brain teaser questions so therefore there were very few people who studied brain teasers specifically to ace job interviews. The question for an interviewer was whether being good at brain teasers correlated to being good at a programming job in a statistically significant manner. Now combine that with a number of other interview techniques, each of which correlates well and you may have had something.

If you must search for reasons and meanings, it was probably because the kind of people who studied brain teasers for fun also happened to have a certain knack for the math-y problem-solving part of programming. Or they actually enjoyed solving problems for fun. Or both. I am not suggesting that we need to prove that the skill of solving a brain teaser was an important programming skill, it could be there was a root talent which expressed itself in programming and brain teaser abilities simultaneously. Or that some event in their past opened them up to learning two different and unrelated skills. All that mattered was whether you could measure a correlation.

But that was then. Today, I avoid such questions entirely. However, that is because IMO it no longer correlates well. Mostly because it has become popular enough that interviewees game the system by swotting up on brain teasers, so being good at them no longer means you have innate talent for math-y problem solving, nor does it mean you enjoy solving problems for fun.

So in summary I say that being good at brainteaser problems in a job interview no longer even proves that you're good at brain teaser problems, or like solving them for fun, but I disagree that it has never conveyed useful information to an interviewer.
Nginx shines as a high-volume proxy, but as a straight up web server or app server, if either apache or nginx is your bottleneck, you are probably do something wrong.

At its heart nginx is a fork of apache 1.3 with the multi-processing ripped out in favor of an event loop (and all the copyright statements removed from headers, but hey, it's cool). The event loop, time and again, has been shown to truly shine for a high number of low activity connections. In comparison, a blocking IO model with threads or processes has been shown, time and again, to cut down latency on a per-request basis compared to an event loop. On a lightly loaded system the difference is indistinguishable. Under load, most event loops choose to slow down, most blocking models choose to shed load.

A few short years ago the benefits from using an event loop instead of blocking io were much more dramatic -- the level of parallelism achievable in hardware has gone way up (hey, look, erlang!) and is accelerating. Paul Tyma did some great experimentation with this a while back, http://is.gd/nJ6Z .
And they made an open enough service that whizbang features are coming out of the woodwork from third parties. Like 10 new Twitter apps a week or something, I bet.
What problem does a meter solve that a foot doesn't? Easy conversions between different sized measures of distance. 1000 beats in a day is easier to keep track of than 1440 minutes. Just because its not easily converted to from the units you're used to doesn't make it "bad" (2.54cm to 1 inch?).
I guess if you're planning on wasting a candidate's entire day, you can afford wasting time on puzzles. (I have read the science that says we make decisions on the hiring issue far faster than in eight hours, which matches my experience, so why sit there and fiddle around all day when the decision has been made?)

I find it easy to believe that many people make a decision in far less than eight hours of interviewing, however I do not believe that all interview processes lasting eight hours are a waste of time for the candidate and for the interviewers.

To pick an example, what about a process involving twelve different interviewers, each of whom takes between a half hour and an hour, with the process spread over a certain amount of elapsed time? Can we really assert that we cannot make a better decision with this process than with having one interviewer spend thirty minutes with the candidate?
North Korea opens "authentic" Italian pizzeria for elites
If you want to see how much downtime they have see: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

also a twitter feed http://twitter.com/dhstatus

As a customer for the past 6 months, I have on occasions been unable to access the web based admin panel
A few days ago I learned that Gateway District School Teacher passed away sometime in 2008. A true blessing for everyone concerned.
probably not, they do that 777 deal all the time, so a lot of people are already signed up under that. i.e. when I signed up for dreamhost about 4 years ago, I used that same deal.

I still stick around with them, even though I hate the service, but that is mostly because I told about the deal to a few people when I signed up, so I make more money from referrals than I pay for hosting.
Interesting idea, but really all that's doing is encouraging people to think about what they write. If they're already doing that, Twitter won't help.

I disliked his suggestion that there's a such thing as a possible Canon for writers that makes writing easier. No such luck. The power and purity of writing comes from the fact that you can't cheat. It's all about you and your words, and they have to be your words - rhyming dictionaries and thesauri more often than not will make your words seem fake.

The problem with modern text editors (exception being TextEdit, which is incredible in every way) is that they're too cluttered. They take too much effort to make simple results. I think Apple has the right idea with Pages, but even then it's only good for when you're finally ready to get your writing looking nice. It's too complex for the task of simply writing.
Yeah, I'm sure FriendFeed would hate to see a full-scale defection of Twitter users over to their service, or to have Shaq shut down his Twitter account in favor of a FF account.

If you're arguing that Twitter is winning, fine, I agree, but it's just flat-out wrong to say that nobody's trying to take a cut of their users.
Agreed. I'm glad that this site spotlights great work.
A better question might be: why would anyone think this would work?
Sometimes these closures have more stuff in them than you could conveniently put in a url. For example, they might refer to another closure describing what to do next. When you try to do something that requires you to be logged in, for example, you're given the login page, with a fnid referring to a closure describing what you were in the middle of doing. That's why after logging in you're able to continue doing whatever you were doing.
As far as massively overloaded shared hosts go, they're not bad. Support for almost everything you could ever want, reasonably decent customer-support (as long as you don't mind their rather foot-in-mouth snarky approach - which I honestly don't mind, but does seem to drive some people crazy).

The two downsides are that a) as mentioned, they massively oversell their capacity; depending on what server you get, you may or may not have issues with downtime, bandwidth or processor usage; and b) if you have intermittent problems, they're generally pleasant but unhelpful - sort of the "nobody else is having problems so it must be something you're doing" approach.

I keep an account around for things where I'm really not worried about uptime or reliability - but I wouldn't trust them with anything business-critical.
I noticed the same thing with linode. I'm about to switch to them from layeredtech. I've had a personal site on linode for years without an outage.
If your idea truly is great you have absolutely nothing to lose by applying. If your idea is accepted you still have the option of declining the funding, requirements to move, etc... But if your idea is accepted then it obviously has some merit and you'd at least have the YC stamp of approval and a slightly better chance of succeeding than those who didn't get in.

At the end of the day, do what makes sense to you and your values. Good luck!
Strategy today around demographic based advertising
ANY site would like to see a full-scale defection. That's different from angling specifically to get those users.

There's no such thing as a "cut" of users between non-competing sites. You can use FriendFeed and Twitter together and there's a good reason for it. There's less of a reason to use, say, Twitter alongside Jaiku. Suddenly you're using two services to do the same thing.

Same with Twitter and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, or Twitter and nearly any successful company.

A real Twitter competitor would be a "this-or-that" competitor. Facebook-or-MySpace. Flickr-or-SmugMug. Youtube-or-Vimeo. Twitter has no competitor that's worth mentioning. The second-biggest competitor was Jaiku, and it was mediocre.
Putting a button to discard both movies at the same time would be better in terms of user experience IMHO.
not sure but i think he meant (10k) - (taxes) - (cost of moving to sf from florida)

which is about 5k
Computer science major is cool again, college enrollments up 8%
Though, for me, it results in fewer visits to the site.

I would venture to guess that each of those clicks are less valuable than 25% of a single click, but many publishers are always looking to fleece their advertisers any way they can.
Meters by themselves don't solve anything. But the whole metric system makes a lot of sense; everything is a power of ten, a cubic centimeter equals a milliliter, which makes length=>volume conversion trivial, etc.

From infancy, seconds, minutes and hours are ingrained in our minds. 60 is also a beautiful number, being divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. Given a time, like 10:42AM, a person can conjure feelings, instincts and memories about that time. Using a system based on 1000 "beats" would make time measurement meaningless for a very long time.

Outside of the Internet, most "normal" people communicate predominately with people in their own area and timezone, making the benefit of no timezones moot.
I don't agree. Business requirements very rarely require complex solutions, yet most "engineers" come up with stunningly complex solutions for every problem they face, no matter how simple the problem might be.

Good engineers, much like good artists, simplify the solution as much as possible while still meeting its requirements.
MakerBot Industries - Robots That Make Things
If I may ask, what apps have you built that brings all this experience?

So it does cost a little bit more than the regular services. Thats what I gathered, but its also def worth it.

Since I have ASP.net Stack, I would have to go with Windows Azure.
This running shoe philosophy is fine in high school, but accepting that there are differences in ability between us all is an important aspect to maturity.
I wish this phrase would die a manly death.
They've likely not exceeded the SR-71 by very much since then. The last several decades have seen the trend where costs are more frequently taken into account when deciding whether or not to pursue a line of scientific research. This is akin to the new direction the lazy chip makers have taken with multicore-multichip instead of continuing to work at improving the individual chips as much.
I wish she had the hacker skills. But she is still in school which makes it EXTREMELY DIFFICULT.
The post was primarily based on my (limited) experence with good hackers I know and their ability to solve brain teasers. Most of them, incidentally, are not very good at it. The sample base is small though, so it might be skewed.

Also, in my opinion a lot of them are "aha" questions - once you get them they're obvious. They don't require deductive thinking, but rather that you "get" this particular question. A good example of this might be "Why are manhole covers round?" The answer is that round covers are bigger than the hole no matter how you turn them, and thus can't fall in. It's hard to deduct your way to this conclusion, yet once you get it it's obvious.

Questions such as "how many pianos are there in New York?" require a bit more deductive thinking, but I'm sceptical as to how much they say about someones ability to code.

But, as you point out, if there's a correlation, hoowever small, and you get other loosely correlated data it adds up.
Great info, nice job.

How would you recommend sourcing components?
Remember the underpants gnomes from South Park? Their plot was simple. 1. Steal underpants, 2. ???, 3. Profit. Most YC people have something similar going on: 1. Come up with great idea, 2. Get YC to fund it, 3. ???, 4. Profit, 5. Get a Girlfriend. You've already jumped to step 5, skip 1-4.
I am imagining the words "Man Up" at Thermopylae, hurling a spear at Xerxes.
Wait until she's out of school? I found that my girlfriend's world view changed considerably when she graduated and had to get a job. She was much more understanding after that.
Not sure about Anybots. Only remotely familiar with them through some mentions here. A quick (very quick) bit of research looks like they're part startup and part experiment in terms of investing in the robotics space overall.

Most of what they're doing is work, not invention, so they should be on the cheaper end of the spectrum. They still likely have a relatively high BOM and a ton of tooling costs for custom parts and such. Additionally, they're going to have to spend a lot of money on PR, tradeshows, and demo equipment to get it anywhere near viable (assuming it is meant to be more startup than experiment).

It's also too soon to tell, a small bit of fate could swing something like that wildly in either direction.

If anybots were a true stand-alone startup (and for all I know, they very well could be), I'd put that at around a $20M net (aAB rounds) investment to get chugging. Could highly likely need a C round to scale out, depending on distribution model (do you buy them online, at Best Buy, or both?).
Twitter was founded in 2006. According to Twitdom there are 554 twitter applications out there (no doubt it's missing a few). Even assuming that they came out linearly from day one, that would be about 1 application every couple of days.

Making more realistic but less provable assumptions, I would assume that Twitdom doesn't know about all the apps - let's say they know about 50% of them. And I would imagine that at least 80% of these apps have come out in the last two years rather than in Twitter's first year. That would mean about 800 apps in 700 days - so just over 1 app a day.

Which is about 10 apps a week. Good guess.
Just because its not easily converted to from the units you're used to doesn't make it "bad"

You have clearly never met an American machinist. ;)
Live Ars Technica coverage of Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 event
Indeed. Next up: Why doesn't the world speak Esperanto?
I am in the same position you are.
I considered DreamHost, SliceHost, and few others and went in for a barebone Linux Xen virtualization hoting at vpsfarm.com. Good enough for me to boot up.
Why I didn't go for Amazon - though I think EC2 provides way more value for what I am trying to do. BUT - their pricing is very confusing and sucks - while companies like slicehost/engineyard give upfront pricing, and they are scalable too (may not be upto EC2 level). For me, the price plays a big role as we are bootstrapping from our own pocket.
EC2 pricing is a huge matrix of upstream, downstream, storage, bunch of other things, which makes it almost impossible to estimate how much you might have to pay! Having said that, I may consider them at a later point of time, where we grow (hopefully) to bigger infrastructure.
The problem with AdSense
GDB isn’t really a developer tool,

How is gdb "not really a dev tool"? The article is just a bad list of IDE's and html editors with gcc,make and gdb mixed in, not very useful or insightful. I was hopeing to learn about some cool unix tools and stuff. GCC, make and gdb are cool, but im sure there are better articles about them.
> The East Germans were incredibly well educated.

A deep education according to Marxist principles that explain all economic growth as being the result of central planning, and all problems as being the result of competition is worse than no education at all.

For evidence of this, look at Eastern Europe.

...or the humanities department at any Ivy League college.
This was posted last week.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511506

The sort of person who wants to opt out is probably using adblock anyway.
Not at all. They are bastards! I haven't used them for about a year. I have been thinking about getting an account for a while now. Saw the special and decided to sign up. No, I can't since I was a customer on the past.

So F#%& them, I am not going to sign up!
When I noticed I could opt in interests for the advertising I did that instead. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but if they are going to give me advertisement at least now maybe I'll find some of them relevant. I appreciate the gesture that they let people who care more about their own privacy than me to opt-out, though.
I agree that comparing movies in different categories this way is awkward.

I think the idea of getting an ordering by pairwise comparisons (instead of discrete scores for each item) is sound, but it doesn't work as well for movies as for people.

pickthehottie.com (launched at least before June 22, 2001, according to the Wayback Machine) did the same thing to AmIHotOrNot's photo-rating juggernaut (launched in October 2000, according to Wikipedia). I think the A-B model worked really well for them, and the incentive for sticking around to compare for photos was a little more intrinsic.
I had a client who had "released" a founding CEO, who was the primary contact for their hosting. Although he wasn't malicious, both sides dropped the ball when it came to transferring ownership of the accounts.

Almost a year later, they come back after the holidays to find that their public-facing FTP account, hosted at Dreamhost, had been suspended. No big deal, except it was suspended before the holidays, everyone was out of the office, and when they came back, we paid to renew only to find out afterward that Dreamhost irretrievably deletes all of your data after 14 days.

Yeah, not doing business with them.
Which components, exactly? :)

I buy most one-off parts-n-pieces through DigiKey.

I've done a ton of prototype PCB's with ExpressPCB. (expresspcb.com)

For CNC work, vacuum-form molds, and injection mold ME's, I keep some local folks on speed-dial. I often reduce costs here by doing the roughing-in of mechanicals myself. I have a moderately well enough equipped shop that I can do prototypes for cases, bezels, etc. myself. I will most often sketch something out freehand (I'm a HORRIBLE artist though), then make a wood model to see what it looks like "in person". Then (generally) do a fiberglass model (because it's cheap and easy to work with) of the part, check rough fitment, THEN go to an ME or CNC person to discuss costs and production times. I've done that cycle enough times now that I generally know how to make something "manufacturable". IE: little things, like complex curves for an injection molded part, can add a comma or two to the mold costs :) In any case, having a physical part to base your discussions off of makes things easier. Most of the stuff I've done hasn't warranted a bona-fide Industrial Design cycle (or if it was warranted, it wasn't budgeted :) )
Thanks for digging, I knew I had seen this before. Amazing story anyway.
Now with unicode support
You have a very limited idea of competition.

You do realize that the ability to use both at once is FF's strategy for competing with Twitter, don't you? They know Twitter has a massive user advantage, so rather than try to build a competing network from scratch, they're trying to get users to use both, and hope that the extra features eventually convince users to be at FF more often than Twitter.

And FB: they have about a billion more users than Twitter, but their recent redesign shows that they certainly think of Twitter as a competitor. "Closed" vs. "open" isn't a point of competition? You don't think to yourself "I'm going to take the next 30 seconds to tell people about what I'm up to, do I use FB or Twitter?"?
I agree.

I've been using NGinx/Mongrel for most of my large deployed apps, but am working to get things moved to Passenger (and Apache, natch), simply for the ability to do a graceful restart on most code changes. For large apps, the ever expanding mongrel footprint and slow restarts is becoming too much to bear.

So for me, Nginx has a lot to offer over Apache, but with the rails deployments I've been working on mostly, it's no longer enough.
Just think of all the girlfriends you'll be able to buy once you become rich and famous in Silicon Valley!