skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nagios is excellent once you get comfortable with it. People have written check scripts for all sorts of bizarre hardware, interfaces (RS-232 polling, X10, etc.), and so forth. You can turn the babysitting proactive by writing event scripts, eg. when a MySQL slave goes out of sync or memcached wedges, the event handler notices, kicks it, and if it doesn't recover after a few tries, THEN you get a page. Obviously you need to be careful about what you put in an event handler, but used judiciously, they're great.

Cacti, ganglia, and so forth are useful adjuncts for routers, clusters, and the like. But Nagios is a time-tested warhorse with a lot of community support. It's ugly but it works and works well.

PXE + cfengine + nagios can be pulled together for Real Ultimate Power, or at least a simulacrum of what goes on at places like Google (whose scripts are custom Python monstrosities for the most part, but the functionality is pretty similar, with several levels and types of babysitter systems funneling into a more proactive statistical resource allocation type of analysis framework since the scale is so vast; at least that's the track that development was on when I left, and Urs is still in charge so I doubt it's swerved much).

See here for an article on adaptive state monitoring: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/05/25/self-healing-n... with Nagios and Cfengine. Add something like PXE reimaging of dead nodes to the mix and you cut down workloads by an order of magnitude on large installations.

If you are a sysadmin and haven't experimented with self-healing systems, you should fix that gap in your skill set. If you have a sysadmin who can't or won't, fire him.
Language Matters: A Summary and Response to Steve Yegge
Do you need a 'community site' with drop-in modules for stuff like 'post this to Reddit/del.icio.us/YCnews' and 'upload a photo'? Drupal is good.

Is it a custom application with tightly scoped, somewhat unique functionality? Then use something like Rails or Django.

DO NOT attempt to use Rails/Radiant for a full CMS, or Drupal for a mostly-AJAX browser-based app. Trust me on this. You have been warned.
I think he was referring to garbage collecting. Not that it makes this statement any more justified or anything.
Correct. There can be permanent changes in market structure that make historical data irrelevant. The term for this is regime change. That and model risk.
The profit-loss patterns weren't good enough to be ready for real-life trading.

I'd be much more willing to tinker with it if I could do it with someone else's money. The hedge fund motto is "other people's lives, other people's money."
At first I thought there was a meaning to the colored numbers, but then I noticed they alternated. Too bad. It'd be neat to indicate how fast a story is moving up the list. However, it'd be completely inaccessible to color blind people.

Anyway, Happy Holidays all.
What magazines. ;)
Dutch Guy Hacks Traffic Sign (vid)
I like munin better than nagios: http://munin.projects.linpro.no/
they never stop linkbaiting, even when they act like they aren't.
Do you want to win $2,000 by writing an open source computer application program?
2.5 dimensional instant messaging is the next "killer app." YC hackers can go to http://www.distancedrawing.com to download the paper, "Science on a Napkin," the contest rules, and startup code. Good luck!
2007 In Numbers: The Ask Mouse Squeaked A Little Louder This Year
Halcyon Days: interviews with classic computer and video game programmers
You can't celebrate New Years until the 26th.

Laws of Nordstrom.
what about Hanukkah and the Winter Solstice? Also, the whole month of December is kind of a celebration of consumption in America. ;)
They call it a "simulation" and a "model" for a reason.

It's closer than anyone has ever been before.
Can Focusing Too Much on the Competition Harm Profitability?
CanvasPaint - Microsoft Paint clone done in canvas
sorry...i didnt know that my formatting wouldn't stick. if you do look at the transcript, you'll notice it asking for my ssh key and password a couple of times.
Happy holidays hackers!

Edu, don't worry you still have New year ;)
8-year-olds should write my code.
http://programming.reddit.com/info/updn/comments/
Jd, I'm an Economist reader because I enjoy its perspective on important political and economic issues.

What else has been slipping, do you think? Can you (or your friend) be more specific?

Thanks.
"let's put no ads on our site and we'll destroy facebook's network effects, surely that'll work!"
"Plan B (R) is not a substitute for routine birth control. It's important to remember that Plan B (R) does not protect you from HIV infection (the virus that causes AIDS) or any other sexually transmitted disease (STD)."
It worked for PlentyOfFish.
Their biggest goof is even existing, what a waste of pixels.
Mark Cuban: Success & Motivation
"To my Facebook friends: please read this!" [Howard Rheingold]
I don't have a problem with it - just didn't look constructive to me (I don't and never have used php, but I just hear a lot of people bashing it, which is fine, but I use some good apps daily that are PHP).
happy hols!
OLPC a huge hit in Peru
Thanks everybody. I appreciate all the good links. I'll go experiment a bit with them.
Do you think the problem is that LISP has been tied up with academia for too long for the community to be friendly?
The ad-free bit is no big deal, but their alternative source of revenue (letting people buy popularity) seems diabolically clever.
I think the problem is mostly imaginary.
Wishing y'all every personal and startup success in the new year. Kick some butt!
Unless, of course, your competitor is Santa!!!
12.5m users is pretty impressive considering what they're up against.

Facebook is vulnerable. The obvious way to hijack is to pull a Facebook on Facebook itself -- ask for your FB password and then copy out all your information, and msg all your friends.

If you could click a button and do a horizontal transfer to an equivalent service any time some other service crossed the line of what's acceptable to you, people would migrate in droves. Big companies survive because of inertia -- the truly disruptive technology that the Net should enable is to remove it.

Facebook's evil ways will doom it.
You know you're thinking it.
Yes, it wasn't just a joke. I actually fear a man on a unicycle stealing my wife.
Starting with "Do you remember Andro" we seemed to have switched topics.

Your brain produces acetylcholinterase which scavenges excess acetylcholine. Arricept, Huperzine, and other chemicals inhibit acetylcholinesterase formation (and therefore increase acetylcholine levels). If your brain acetylcholine levels are low then certain substances may help in the formation of additional acetylcholine (e.g in addition to DMAE there are other compounds like choline, CDP choline, Alpha GPC, and PPC). If your equilibrating mechanisms are working then small amounts of precursors shouldn't cause a derangement. Athletes taking steroids are attempting to overload the equilibrating mechanisms to build muscle. Choline precursors don't seem to have these same "down-regulation" harmful side effects when taken in moderation to bring brain acetylcholine levels back into "normal range." I am not advocating steroids or supplement use, but it seems to me that they have two different usage patterns: steroid use involves intentionally boosting levels outside of the normal range for "performance enhancing" results, where the DMAE use described by Hexayurt was in response to "programmer burnout" which likely involved depleted acetylcholine levels in the brain and was in his own words "performance restoring."

In terms of the hacker news angle, I would think all things in moderation in the context of development plans that rely on efforts that are sustainable over a long period of time.

A references on choline for memory formation improvement:

http://sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20031122/food.asp
Wow, that's pretty sweet - i wonder if he was caught. Can anybody translate/explain the vid?
I remember reading the cluetrain manifesto that dedicated about a quarter of the book towards how much corporate intranets suck and stuff.
"Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed."

The reason Peru has such a terrible education system is because of Christianity, or at least their implementation thereof. They don't let the boys and girls go to school together, so the boys go in the morning and the girls go in the afternoon to prevent intermingling. Thus each student gets only half the instructional time as students in any other country. Merry Christmas.
http://iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/24/technology/LA-TEC-Peru...
If you send out your notice on the evening of December 24th it's not for Hanukkah.
Great, now I'll get 50,000 "Reduce Your Size" spams a day instead.

Hmm, those could actually be useful...
For magazines with a focus on world news, the Economist is still the best.
Wow. I wish the U.S. were a Christian nation then. School half-days were a rare reprieve... those lucky kids get 'em all the time!

I aPERUve.
DUDE TEH INTARWEB JAVA SCRIPTS WERE PUT THARE BY BILL GATES FOR FREE JUST TAKE EM
Ereldon,

The Economist has been pushing out shorter pieces on their website which generally aren't as good as the longer ones that find their way into print. It is possible the need for increased production has stretched the staff and made quality drop across the board; I'm not sure. In some ways it is symptomatic of all web media: greater quantity, shorter time to market, but generally less attached reflection and quality. I see it as akin to Americans general preference for filling their houses with many cheap things instead of fewer better things. I'm not sure if this is a function of the local culture or the capitalist system; either way one hopes to help the web evolve in a better way.

One other deficiency, IMHO, is the slipping ethical standards. One recent Economist article on Mao's management style concluded with an incredibly pessimistic couple sentences about how it doesn't really matter how many unethical things you do, so long as you aren't caught and forced to reckon before you die.

In any case, I stopped reading the Economist cover to cover about a year ago.
I'm writing the chapter on Capistrano deployment on non-Rails framework for capify.org. If you can wait for a week or so maybe I can help you. Or maybe also post to a more readable copy of your error and comments off-site?
I don't know what effect neurotransmitter precursors have on endogenous production, which is why that information would be useful so we can better judge their safety. The steroid example was to point out that there could be substantial repercussions from taking a substance which you produce naturally. You don't even have to take excessive doses -- take in only as much as you would normally make and your body's production may drop to zero, since it's now being completely replaced. Steroids must be cycled down gradually, because going off cold turkey just leaves you with a crashed endocrine system. If neurotransmitter replacement works similarly, one can imagine a few problems that might crop up with a crashed brain.

> Choline precursors don't seem to have these same "down-regulation" harmful side effects when taken in moderation to bring brain acetylcholine levels back into "normal range."

"Don't seem"? Human studies needed. Maybe these already exist -- that would be handy. I'm not familiar with neurotransmitter supplementation.

Taking something because you have a deficit is indeed different from trying to massively exceed your nominal levels.

In the context of performance-enhancing mental drugs, exceeding your typical levels is of course the point of the exercise.

> "programmer burnout" which likely involved depleted acetylcholine levels in the brain

Possibly, but that assumption seems like it could be quite a leap.

Kind of like saying coffee works because of depleted caffeine levels in the brain. In fact, we have no data on what caused his particular case of "burnout". We can well imagine that an adrenaline shot, cocaine, ephedrine, and many other drugs could well "restore performance", but that doesn't indicate there was a deficit of those particular substances.

Provigil and Ritalin may also help but that doesn't mean there was a deficit of those, either.

An ACh deficit is only one of a bazillion possible reasons for "burnout".
1) I highly suggest NOT changing the deploy.rb file in the Cap gem. You can override any task in your own deploy.rb file. For instance:

namespace :deploy do

desc "Custom stop task"

task :stop, :roles => :web do

#My custom "stop" command

end

end

(as a side note, does anyone know how to do code formatting on here?)

2) I think from what you're saying- it is deploying correctly, but you're confused as to why it is asking for your password three times? This is common, and I think it is a bug with Subversion. I deploy using svn+ssh as well and get the same thing. If I remember correctly, you only have to enter in your password correctly for the first one, and can just hit enter through the other 2. Alternatively, you can make sure you have your SSH keys set up correctly.
This is part of a Dutch viral campaign for some IT school/company. They have put a bunch out now with the same guy.

A quick translation (with Babel Fish) off some dutch site regarding this video:
"viral campaign for itafstuderen.nl but if you ask it me is this nevertheless of the best viral campaign which is ever made."
Worth reading or rereading: Guy Steele's Growing a Language (PDF)
It's not imaginary, but it is unimportant. Spend a day in #haskell, #python, or #ruby asking basic questions about the language, then repeat in #lisp.

There are helpful people in the CL channel, but most newbie assistance ends with the veteran delivering a scolding. That doesn't consistently happen in other language channels, but perhaps it should.
This seems like it would do well in the next editions of founders at work or something.
happy whatever it is you celebrate!
I visited #lisp only a handful of times, but the one time I tried asking a question, I received a flamebath along with my answer. If newcomers step on your toes, channel regulars should have the maturity to deal with it respectfully. I'm not entirely new to Lisp, and I'm not stupid, so why not take the time to try and educate instead of discourage? I asked just that, and I got very close to, "why waste the energy, you'll never learn." Ten minutes in an IRC channel isn't enough time to make such a judgement.

The article above may be a bit blunt about it, but I think the term "douchebaggery" is pretty darned accurate from my experience with #lisp.
Ideas for Tech Innovation in 2008
Success with vpslink.com?
This looks like a great deal 28$ every three months. They have a clone option so you can clone working hardware. Has any body had any experience with these guys.
This guy should start his own blog, people are not interested in thoughtful conversation they do not have the IQ for it.
Is it Christmas? .... does not account for time zone..
I mean really...if this is going to be the only purpose of your site, at least tell me when it's Christmas for me, and not the valley (i'm only supposing..)
I mean really...if this is going to be the only purpose of your site, at least tell me when it's Christmas for me, and not the valley (i'm only supposing..)
http://isitchristmas.appjet.net is my attempt. Yay client-side code.
That's a low monthly fee, yes, but it's a very small amount of RAM. By the time you get up to 256 megs it is more expensive than Slicehost.
Why Banning Lead In Electronics Was A Bad Idea
What kind of user is on your wishlist?
In a long conversation with one of my users this week, I found myself mentioning or recommending other web sites. A lot of us here are running web startups/projects. Why don't we introduce people we know to each other's projects, assuming they're the target user?

Two college-level music instructors will be at our house for a few hours this Christmas. Any site of yours I should mention to them? I also know a lot of MIT alumni.

For my own wishlist, I'm looking for users who have a lot of photos that tell a story (kids growing up, travels, etc., as opposed to artistic photography) but can never find time to organize/share them. Please point them towards ourdoings.com. Friends who disappeared after they became parents would be perfect.

I'm trying to enlarge my pool of users to get lots of feedback before I dive into serious marketing. I was hoping to gain 10 new users this month, but have only gained 3 so far.
US Army guarding its Windows with OSX
Quite the Xmas color theme going on at YC

Makes my eyes bleed red and green :)
If a supercomputer can simulate a model, what would it take to simulate a supermodel? 'Cuz that would be "handy" for me...
no I meant 28 dollars every 3 months, or 7 a month. Their 256 plan goes at 20 a month. It looks competative, What I like is that allow me to start small so that I can test some things.
I really don't think that is the reason. Where I grew up 99% schools had two shifts, and sometimes even three shifts. Boys and girls were not separated, although my country is one of those where >80% peple are christian.

Our school day was up to six hours long (7 school hours (45 min each) + 5 min breaks in between). We received generally the same quality education as many other Central/Eastern European countries. Btw., the reason schools introduce extra shifts is to be able to accomodate more pupils in same classrooms.

Merry Christmas!
If you're starting from scratch, consider puppet (http://www.reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/) as a cfengine replacement. cfengine is solid, but unless you've already mastered it, I think you'll find puppet is at least as capable and a lot more intuitive.
haha, this is the best way to ring in some holiday cheer.
0x2A
I think it's more productive to acknowledge all holidays and get 24% more audience, instead of going to extra effort to be sectarian in your good will.

There are plenty of people like me out there, for instance. My family celebrated christmas at this time of year when I was younger. I still feel like having a happy holiday right around now, but I don't connect with any of the Jesus stuff. Thanks to the original poster for wishing me a happy non-christmas-holiday-that-I-celebrate-around-the-same-time-as-christmas (on mine, I get to argue with people on the Internet!).

I feel your point has been thoroughly dismissed now. Happy holidays anyway!
Unless it is 2005 or possibly 2008. (since I'm getting downmodded for the above, thought I would add a qualification).
But, interestingly, it does account for locale. I'm visiting my parents in Quebec, and I get "YES/OUI".

Anybody else getting localized results?
Happy Holidays to you too!
this why i've had a harder than hell time reliably sending email to users
Actually, since I'm not celebrating the holiday in question either and am more to happy to argue on the Internet, here are my more extended thoughts.

Even if some subset of the population is going to lose the Jesus bit doesn't it make more sense to keep the name of the holiday the same? For instance, if you are going to send out holiday well wishes (which I appreciate, I also upmodded the original poster) and going to send them out at a specific time (for example, Dec. 25) doesn't it make sense to refer to the holiday as 'Christmas' ?

In my own limited personal campaign of holiday well-wishes, I usually end up only wishing Christmas greetings to people I know are Christians, sending more general holiday greetings to others at a time other than Christmas.

In conclusion, my contention is that if you are going to send your greeting on Christmas, you might as well call it a Christmas greeting. If you send it Dec. 20, or 27, then maybe a holiday greeting.
Plus it seems to be all smoking hot latin women.
it seems to be for the US east coast
I'm Peruvian, I don't know why you think that here boys and girls can't go to school together.
I know the public education is not good enough here, but it has nothing to do with Christianity, it has more to do with teachers getting paid the lowest salary you can imagine. So, if a teacher gets paid so low, who wants to be a teacher?
That's the main reason why most Peruvian teachers suck.
So that's what it was. I'm in Japan and I thought the "HAI" response was more LOLCODE garbage... I'll say it's not localized because they used roman characters and not something more natural like [Arg Hacker News can't handle Japanese characters]
It's terribly more efficient to send out generic holiday wishes to everyone and stop associating with anyone who gets too offended that you didn't conform to their particular brand of holiday. I really don't want to keep a 6 billion row spreadsheet of holiday associations for everyone I might encounter and wish well of.

Will mass confusion ensue if generic "happy holidays" cards are sent on the same day as christmas? Will people not know what day of the year it is? There is no utility to the nomenclature. No religion owns the day, and it's hardly a religious holiday to begin with.

It doesn't offend me when people say merry christmas, it only offends me if they are attempting to correct somebody who says happy holidays. It's a superset. You're correcting someone who says "yes! it's the weekend!" with "no, but thank god it's Saturday!".
happy 2008!
Sigh... I thought long and hard about the Christmas vs Holiday wishes thing. I'm actually pretty devout in my Christianity, but I rather dislike people who are jerks about it. How about this:

To my Christian friends Merry Christmas.
To my Jewish friends Happy Hannukah.
To my Atheist friends Happy Holidays.
And to all a happy New Year.
(Unless you're Chinese, then I'm a few weeks early.)
I'm also a karma whore :)

I was a few hours too early...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92249
Holidays cure cancer.Happy holidays!
OH HAI I LOLCALIZED THIS FOR YOU
There have been a number of studies done with choline supplements in a variety forms. Here is a list of citations

http://healthlibrary.epnet.com/GetContent.aspx?token=e049880...

None of these listed have found the rebound side effects. I am not saying that you couldn't cause yourself problems at a high enough dosage, but in the dosages used in the studies it's not mentioned as a side effect.

This is not true for acetylcholinterase inhibitors (things like huperzine, arricept, galantamine,...) which can cause a significant excess of acetylcholine because they inhibit the down regulation process.

You are correct that I was speculating what might cause "programmer burnout." I agree with you that there are people who believe in "mental performance enhancing drugs" but I am not one of them. I do think that folks with ADD may be able to take substances that limit their ADD and I think that you can take things as you age to limit the effect of age related cognitive decline, but I don't think you can "supercharge" someone in their teens or twenties.

One of the great discoveries of the last decade has been that we continue to add new brain cells (at a much lower rate than in early childhood) all of our lives and that lifelong learning and stimulation does in fact encourage the formation of new connections and delay the onset of diseases like Alzheimers.

Our brains are plastic and respond to how they are used. In that sense my answer to the original question of "how to build mental muscles" is: I don't know of any drugs but I do believe that mental exercise helps.
I am getting YES/OUI and I am visiting my parents in BC (I live in Montreal, however).
So what software setup were you planning on running on a 64 meg Linux server?
Motherboard Architecture
Nice artwork inspired by Computer Motherboards
(can anyone tell the make and model? ;-))
2008 Web Predictions
This Hack Was Not Properly Planned
Insects and Entropy
Project2Manage, a Basecamp clone (nice design)
Hey, do you live in Peru? Can you share any more observations about the situation? I'm very interested in this topic.