skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand, you had a backup HD - that means you had a RAID setup. Why didn't your host replace the damaged hard disk ? In my experience hosts usually monitor RAID health on their servers and if there is a problem they replace the bad hard drives at the quickest opportunity.. and I'm talking about budget hosts.

EDIT: Too many to respond to below so just editing in here. The author mentioned that the primary hard disk had failed over a year ago - but he didn't know about that (the host informed him of this... now?). That points to a RAID setup where the mirror was basically working all this while. That's what I'm talking about in this post.
"Anonymous IP allocation through Heroku Worker Dynos." Is the subtitle of the actual project hosted on github: https://github.com/thnkr/cloak

Basically Heroku assigns a new IP address with every app deployment. Redeploy, get new IP.
One must not be an MBA/smooth talker to be neck-deep in SV politics. Here are some companies he was probably referring to (or would be if he studied them closely): Path, Color Labs, Quora, Asana, Airtime and Foursquare.

I'd cry if two of those services went away but I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge they are cogs in the machine this article was describing.

TechCrunch is the elephant in the room. Basically any startup that is successful at getting frequent TC coverage could be accused of playing the politics game. However whether they are using TC to reinforce their safety net or using it grow their company (or both) is open to interpretation.
It varies hugely depending on where in the world you are, your attitude and the attitude of the staff. I'm from Australia but spend most of my life moving around in Asia.

In Australia coffee shops rarely provide wifi. We've never been moved on but there's only so much you can do without a net connection.

In most of south east Asia in particular they're generally not phased by you sitting there for hours and hours. We avoid anywhere super busy which probably helps.

My wife and I will buy something periodically because we get hungry but the cost is usually minimal. A breakfast each, two fruit shakes mid morning, 2 lunches. Total cost usually less than $15.

As we're quite smiley friendly people and my wife is a woman, duh, and people often feel more comfortable talking to a woman we've wound up forming a bit of a relationship with the staff at some places. We've had the occasional free drink or snack, had staff worried about our welfare because we didn't show up one day, had staff taking it upon themselves to provide us with an extension cord so we could recharge our stuff while sitting at a table with a nice view, hugs all round when we drop in to say that we're leaving town. We've had masses of positive experiences and I can't really think of when we've encountered anything more negative than an unreliable net connection.
The most basic backup would be to have a remote backup of your files and databases. That's a simple shell script and cron job combination. I can understand that one may not get around to setting it up (I had a massive project and only started doing this after about 7 years of running it..) but it's definitely very important and doesn't need a ton of Sysadmin experience or setup time.
Frankly, that'd be a fine policy, but it may well be considered discriminatory.

Not being in debt is awesome. Being self-taught is really cool, and I'm sure we could debate the merits of traditional university education all day. The fact of the matter is, wasting four years of your life and starting out deeply in debt is half the societal contract that makes you a 'student'. In exchange, you get to do student things. You get student discounts. You get a free pass to drink and be a git for those four years, if you choose. If you want to buck half the system, why not go whole hog and pay full price for GitHub? You're still saving $9958 a year over my education.
You didn't disagree with the comment that you replied to, which said that the fact screen sizes are quoted in diagonal length does not contradict the assertion that reasonable people are more concerned with screen area. You're just making a different assertion.
Wave was built on XMPP wasn't it? If I understand correctly XMPP is fully extensible which means Google can add whatever data they want and still be inter-operable with all the common parts and then define the new parts.

Video seems like it could be out of band using WebRTC and initiated by new XMPP data.

Watching the Wave introduction presentation from Google I/O 2009 it's hard to buy that a new protocol was needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
It helps us share the moments that matter with those close to us.
With Scala in use a lot of implicit conversions, works pretty well for the most part you just have to wrap the left side in a Expr(x) for it to work
"We messed up bad. We launched without having a backup procedure in place, and without the resources to make it happen. This was a hard-learned lesson that won’t happen again. We have no one except ourselves to blame."

You know how you messed up? By not using something like AWS - EC2 - Snapshots. Or even S3 or Glacier. What is this trend of devs doing Operations? As a Sysadmin with a Compsci/dev background, it blows my mind constantly.

Great, you know how to move around the CLI, but are you versed in how to maintain a proper and robust system?

Also, why weren't you using something like SES for your email alerts?
The best I could ever get them to commit to was, "Unlimited within reasonable amounts." I.E. They would let me know if I was pulling down too much traffic, but wouldn't let me know what "too much" was.
glad I wasn't the only one who had that as a first thought. as an ops guys I wasn't sure if I should be offended or just shake my head at the irony of it.
"The backup HD" doesn't necessarily equate to "that means you had a RAID setup". How did you arrive at that conclusion? Budget hosts are notorious for having little to no backup solutions in place simply because, well I don't really know why? Costs? Complexity?
Share your code poetry
Personally, I'd rather see lisp with JS syntax (CoffeeScript would be even better)
It's noble of you to come clean and own your mistake, but let me say this over and over:

You should never, ever provide an environment that stores people's hard work without having professionals who know how to safeguard it.

If it makes you feel any better, I recently had to clean up a mess in a huge enterprise IT shop, (if I were to name the organization you would immediately know them) involving hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work lost due to a lazy, incompetent DBA and the clueless management above her.

This "DBA" was the kind of person who came in at 9:45AM, took a 2 hour lunch at noon, and left at 3:30. Did I mention she refused a work from home option?

She didn't know how to do chron jobs, so all of her backup scripts had to be run manually. If she was on vacation, they didn't get run. Surprise Surprise, the DB died after her long pre-Christmas vacation. Zero backups for the first 3 weeks of December.

Even "professionals" can be suspect sometimes.
Google faces new federal antitrust probe
Nah, most people are just genuinely concerned about him, especially when he disappears. I'm in China -- if I did this in NYC, I wouldn't have done it. But that type of malicious intent is far, far less here. When he's gone, there's lots of talk online about where he went and people start looking out for him. I just made a way to scale and centralize it.
Well apparently someone didn't like my comment since it got down-voted. Whatever. As someone with a background in systems administration, it bothers me when this profession gets left out of the equation, far too often.
Extremely frequently in China (where I am), yes.
Spinrite !
I see this too many times.. and have read about this more than once on HN in recent memory.

Hire a proper system administration company early to work with you on these types of things. There are many companies out there that do this. I happen to run a company that does this, so I know that you can add an expert admin to your team for $100-200/mo.
The introduction to Toast has some interesting thoughts on issues faced by current futurists:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

(The intro in the collection, not on that page. Click through to whichever format...)
No, that's greyhat - the morally grey area. It's finding a hole and dicking around to see how it works.

Blackhat is outright stealing/espionage/manipulation of other devices for your own gain.
The author said that the primary hard disk failed and the host had told him there was a backup hard disk that hummed along for a year.

I cannot imagine any other practical situation in which a 'backup hard disk' would automatically kick in - apart from a RAID setup.

I know that budget hosts do not backup data off site, but they do tend to maintain their hardware, RAID arrays, etc.

However, I admit that I am all too unfamiliar with shared hosting environments in today's day and age, it's either a cloud or dedicated server for me - and for my budget dedicated servers, hosts have been pretty proactive about replacing bad hard drives.
Deleted my portfolio, made $30k in my first six months
Easel.io is a really beautiful looking product. I just played around with the demo tour and it worked pretty well though a little quirky. Are you using Tourist.js to implement the demo tour?
Great resource for anyone trying to start a SAAS business: Microconf 2013 recap
A thing can be said to be "free" if, at a price of zero, there is sufficient supply to meet demand.
judging by some of the other comments I think people believe sysadmins can and have been replaced by heroku, aws and such.
Interesting read. I agreed with most of the build-up to the climax. Yahoo! does frequent my mind now! Yahoo! is doing some interesting things!

Although, after reading I did visit Yahoo.com on my iOS device's and I was greeted with a much more pleasant mobile experience than the OP. For example, swiping gestures flicked through headline articles, stationary search bar, and a hamburger menu icon that hid navigation to other areas of Yahoo!.

Maybe it was just the OP's device?
"Nobody is smart enough to optimize for everything, nor to anticipate all the uses to which their software might be put." -- Eric Raymond, _The Art of Unix Programming_

Go's primary niche is server software, and in that niche, it is gaining in popularity and has the backing of a large company. For servers, neither support for a 32-bit address space nor real-time support is important.

Does support for generics really matter when the language has built-in support for the most common collection types?

The allowance of shared mutable memory between goroutines does worry me somewhat.
xkcd.com/1015
I imagine he means things like awk, sed, sort, etc., that are standard unix tools. The newer versions of gawk have extensions that are designed to help handle CSV files, but, unfortunately, Arnold Robbins opted to make it "some assembly required." Given the fiddlyness of parsing CSV files and their ubiquity, hard-coding a CSV mode probably would have been a better solution.
Not necessarily. Blackhat folks are generally divided into 2 basic groups...the type you described, and the kind that for example break into servers just to show off their skills but they don't do anything other than prove to their peers that they were in...and the more difficult the server they get into , the more praise they get from the "scene."

There are whitehat folks who do the same...the difference being blackhat don't tell the company whose server they broke into how they did it.
What's your beef? Seems to work fine.
When you buy unmanaged servers, the host isn't monitoring RAID health -- they don't have any remote access to your machine except maybe IPMI for reboots. I've rented servers from various providers for a decade and none has ever monitored my hard drives... plenty have failed, including disks in a RAID and RAID adapters themselves; they get replaced when I call up and tell someone the server won't boot and I need someone to go take a look.
How about quit moving the goalposts and examine the years you've been wrong about inflation already.
I give a big hat tip to universities (as I noted the benefit of going to schools like ... Stanford).

Plus, the universities + tech sector have worked extremely well in tandem. They fund each other, one with labor talent, the other with money being donated back.
Do you have an example? I'm having a hard time thinking of any.
Ford did get a $5.9B loan from the same DOE program as Tesla though.

https://lpo.energy.gov/our-projects/
It's a recurring theme on HN. I'm a sysadmin and cringe when reading these rather common posts.
Thank you. This was exactly what I was getting at. 1&1 is on the short list of budget hosts that are notorious for doing the bare minimum to get your money.
I don't understand the fascination with github. Bitbucket gives you unlimited private repos for free, no special requirements. It has wikis, issue tracking, and contributors.
One of my clients has a poorly designed access system (using, now, mssql as the backend). It's not access's fault that the system is shit, it's the developer's fault.

Bad devs write bad code. Beginner bad devs tend to write their bad code in Access (or Excel). It gets the job done --- until it doesn't.
Part of the problem is that most of the things Sears sells are things people are used to getting their hands on first. When Sears was mostly a catalog company people simply didn't have the option -- order the dress and get the sewing kit out if it didn't fit. The long gap between pure catalog Sears and online sales was one that trained shoppers to be just different enough that it no longer worked for them.
JET isn't all that bad. It can be used to run SQL queries CSV files. As an ETL tool it's pretty flexible.
To be fair, this is an advanced article written by a computer scientist that designed the innards of the drivers for other computer scientists that want to understand how the drivers work.

Novices can do most things without having to understand any of these issues, and even very advanced users don't ever have to learn this if they don't want to.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the people responsible for designing ReQL.
As far as I'm concerned, one of the best features of git is how easy it is to create new repos. Setting up a new repo for a new weekend side project, or splitting out a large codebase that's gotten unwieldy into a few separate repos, should be a no-brainer.

BitBucket lets me have as many private repos as I want, since they make their money when you want to add collaborators; GitHub's payment structure forces me to consciously think about how many repositories I have. I prefer GitHub to BitBucket in terms of their web UI/UX, but I really don't like that psychological shift.
The Restricted Boltzmann Machine Capable of "Dreaming"
I would have to agree. But I would also have to agree that Heroku or AWS may have been a better choice than a 1&1 dedicated server in this particular instance.

However, Heroku and AWS are no substitute for good systems administration. They are good substitutes for data centers given signed and documented SLAs.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Y Combinator's two biggest home run successes - Airbnb and Dropbox - both did not seem to fit Y Combinator's typical selection criteria at the time?

Yes, the Airbnb founders have always been "relentlessly resourceful", but 2 of their 3 cofounders were not hackers, which as far as I know is generally a big red flag for YC. And as someone else mentioned, PG thought their idea was terrible and only chose them because he liked their grit.

Drew Houston does seem to fit the mold of a prototypical YC founder, but it can't be stressed enough that he was rejected the first time he applied to YC. If Drew Houston had decided to not apply again and decided to get funded by someone else, the way we view YC today might be significantly different. Of course, maybe Dropbox wouldn't be where it is today without YC's help, but I don't wanna delve too much into counterfactuals.

My point is, seeing as YC's two biggest successes came from two teams that normally were rejected by their model, should YC be criticized for being too narrow in the way they evaluate startups, or should they be lauded for being willing to be contrarians against their own model when it came to Airbnb and Dropbox?
Apple's iPhone advertising was also the subject of several lawsuits that resulted in the (now) wide-ranging disclaimer of "Sequences shortened, screen images simulated", when they spent ads talking about how quick and easy it was to do things on the iPhone, that in reality took much longer than the demonstration implied.
I thought it was called the "casualty department"
Baltimore doesn't have the economic / educational / social structures in place that Silicon Valley has consciously incubated. There is no Stanford of Baltimore; there is no Y Combinator of Baltimore; there is no massive talent pool in Baltimore for tech.

Not to mention Baltimore is extraordinarily dangerous, with their crime rate and murder rate being through the roof.

Who said Silicon Valley was the only place you can create a tech company? New York has nearly all the structures you could ever possibly ask for to do so. Baltimore does not however, nor does Detroit.
Sure I'm serious. Steam, and Front Row, are focusing on linux. Valve's making Linux X86 the target platform for their console. the Steambox is going to be another X86 PC of comparable speed to what I already run, but much smaller.

I'm an early adopter of the same hardware you're all going to be enjoying this christmas, and many of the same games. Plus, I get a Virtual Console offering that Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony only wish they could match, and a television experience with Sickbeard/XBMC that not even Netflix can match, let alone whatever soon-abandoned toy Microsoft will be including with the XBO.

You're absolutely right; Microsoft/Sony adopting the X86 platform for this generation is a perfect storm for Valve; release a Steambox running linux, and you can minimize the cost of porting to 20% of what those same efforts would require coming from a PPC architecture.
That's not true at all. If you call 911 (or someone calls for you), and you don't want to go to the hospital, you have to sign a form saying we offered to take you, but you are choosing not to go.

As rdl pointed out, the liability is just too high to refuse to take someone to the hospital.
This doesn't sound like RAID at all. How are you guys coming to this conclusion? At best it sounds like a server with a master/slave hard drive setup...you know, something from the early 2000s.
slava @ rethink here. If you didn't already you might want to join rethinkdb-dev google group (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/rethinkdb...). We don't have Scala people, but we if you post a question we'll do the best we can to help you out!
This is the pinnacle of the software developer's era of leverage, and yet you seem to insist that it isn't.

Really? This must explain why every software company runs open allocation, instead of people being stuck on projects that often hurt their career. It must also explain why software engineers get to pick their tools and never get stuck maintaining legacy garbage that really doesn't add any value, but that risk-averse empty-suits are afraid to throw away. It must also explain how software engineers get paid enough money to raise a family and weather the instability of this industry, with its disposable companies and all that. It probably also describes the absence of age discrimination as a threat that begins in the mid-30s.

Oh wait, I just described an alternate reality that doesn't exist. And the real one is pretty horrible.

Maybe the world is dramatically different where you live and, if so, I'd love to hear about it. What I've seen is pretty dismal. Low respect for people who actually write the code, lots of legacy, low autonomy, ageism starting around 30-35. ("If you're so smart, why don't you have my job?") Even Google is closed-allocation. Now, if you know where to find something different from what seems to be the prevailing software industry experience, I'd love to hear about it.
It's not always because I don't want to pay. In my case for example, I don't have a job, credit card, bank account or any other source of income. I simply can't play for a monthly subscription for version control. how do I explain it to my parents who are middle class indians and only have limited computer exposure, because they will be the one paying for it. Believe it or not, hosted version control is luxury for people not getting paid and Bitbucket lets me have that luxury without all the hassle for figuring out how to pay for it and I am very grateful to them for it.
Do record labels get off on being withholding?
Meet the 23-ton X-Wing, the world’s largest Lego model
Does it have the projects? Once a platform is big enough it's not only about features.
> It depends how you define "bigger"

Hmm, it has bigger pixels ... :]
Intellectually lazy and arrogant attitude? You just replied to paragraphs of text with two lines, both of which are empty of substance. You didn't actually debate a single point. Intellectually lazy and arrogant indeed.
PDF version? I would post one myself but https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471112
Perhaps it's me, but I don't see the roles of SA and Dev as interchangeable. Yet, HN seems to present a world where all Devs are SAs. As a SA, it's frustrating.

All of that to say; I agree with what you're saying. I just wonder how to get the message across that maybe both roles aren't the same...
Honestly this has never been a problem for me. How many private repos do you really need? It can't cost that much per month. The things most people are working on just aren't that important. Or better yet, they _benefit_ from being public.
Ask HN: Do you know of any "Rental Market Hacks"
I must have reached out to hundred of listings in the sf renters market and have only gotten close to an apartment once. Does everyone know a trick to getting a place that I dont?
This is tricky and there are certainly limitations. For example, you can't translate an if statement, so instead we implement our own branch command (http://rethinkdb.com/api/#rb:control_structures-branch)

We overload operators when we can (unfortunately no operator overloading for Javascript folks) and it works really well.

You don't always get a great exception, but most of the time this turns out to be fine. Novices don't need to worry about this too much, and we found that as people get more into ReQL, they pick everything up extremely quickly, and they rarely confuse things or make mistakes.
Not to be depended on as a substitute for backup, but 'dead' doesn't necessarily mean dead. Forensic recovery (either DIY or professional, depending on the nature of the failure) may still be an option.

Logic board failures are common, and replacements cheap (the cost of a new HD of the same model), data can be highly recoverable from soft failures. Mechanical failure is the worst case, but as long as the platter(s) is/are in tact, not insurmountable.
Sounds like they need a technical founder. Stock well spent imho...