skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Following the ABI is only an issue at module boundaries. If you control every callsite of a function, you can invent whatever calling convention you want.
You pay for convenience. Saying EC2 is slower is like noticing that you have to wait in line at the bank: yea it's slower than just stuffing cash under your mattress, but you don't have to worry about it being stolen, either.
There really wasn't with Facebook when it got a bit more public, and yet there was orders of magnitude more excitement and buzz when it expanded to certain cities. Google+ may have more users, but Facebook was one of those things that you had conversations about nearly daily, with people not even vaguely involved in the tech scene.
> waiting forever for my Windows machine to shut down

The worst is when I have 10 updates. (I boot Windows maybe once every couple months so this is not an uncommon occurrence for me.)
Hiring Summer Interns? How to Make the Most of Them
Google bans porn on Google Glass
Medium.com Is Intimidating
This article pretty much reflects my experience with EC2. EC2 makes it very easy way to get started with things when you're figuring stuff out and don't have a great deal of experience in managing servers and machines. You don't have to deal with RAID, power outages, etc. and can literally treat hardware like software.

But once you get up and running, you will realize that this comes with a great cost. EC2 absolutely sucks in terms of raw performance. I also notice variation in performance of machines on different times of the day, and between machines.

Amazon has done a great job at selling "the cloud", and I can see many CXOs buying into that. But the fact is, renting dedicated machines from a good provider isn't exactly that hard. They take care of a lot of things for you.

EC2 is good if you have wildly varying amounts of traffic such that you need to really have that kind of elasticity in your infrastructure. However, for most businesses, especially web apps, that's not the case.
Wow, say that to the 3million native Singaporeans. I'm sure they will paint a very different picture. You are a foreigner living life of Singapore via rose-tinted glasses. Don't make such sweeping statements.
I agree with the author, EC2 seems really expensive compared to other clouds. One of the comments suggested DigitalOcean, which has much better pricing, and you can do flexible by the hour pricing and it has a rest API to bring up/down servers.

/shameless shill + happy DO customer

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

https://api.digitalocean.com/
This is so incredibly wrong in so many ways. Many developers were seduced into social games because people loved them and it seemed like a new frontier and a new market with shorter development cycles and interesting challenges. It is easy to have great hindsight but a few years ago the game industry looked very different. Zynga has had a few games be reviewed quite well, but nobody ever seems to remember them.[1][2]

As a former Zynga employee that came in through acquisition, I find it repulsive that people assume we are all responsible for the poor decisions of a few at the top. Most of us worked our asses off to try to make something awesome, but ended up having to compromise in the worst possible ways to satisfy the top brass or poorly understood metrics.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/31/zynga-channels-settlers-of-...
[2] http://kotaku.com/5836588/adventure-world-is-zyngas-take-on-...
I wonder how the cost would compare at a special-purpose orthopedic surgery center vs. a general hospital? I actually thought that otherwise healthy people are encouraged to utilize specialty facilities rather than hospitals as they can be optimized to the procedures performed, and may have lower risk of post-op infections.
I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
operations is hard, let's go shopping!
dont forget,that many people who chose not to sign the legal document were able to negotiate a better comp package.

my friend got 6 months after talking to HR and agreeing to sign the doc. remember, no one asks you to sign something for your benefit :)
Okay I'm trying to understand exactly what we're looking at. So apparently the star has been blacked out in order to see the exoplanet which is on the lower left. It says here that the blue circle is the size of Neptune's orbit around the sun:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1324a/

But how big is the star in relation to this? Is the star the size of the blue circle or is it smaller like the size of the white flash shape in the middle? If it's the size of the blue circle, that's a REALLY close orbit for a planet. If the star is the size of the white flash shape in the middle, that makes more sense, except that the star looks almost the same size as the planet.
Libgit2: Refs, Tags, and Branching
I would love to hear Cindy Gallop of https://makelovenotporn.tv/ weigh in on this!
Agreed on EC2 being expensive and slow.
from comments: op uses softlayer
Maybe, but not any significant part. As evidenced by this post, only a small portion of the costs are attributable to the work performed by the surgeon. The majority of costs are allocated to facility costs (whose increases in price are not related to tuition costs) and equipment.

Indeed, if there was such a direct correlation between the two, the easiest way to control healthcare costs would be to reduce doctoral school tuition rates. Clearly, this is not a viable solution here because the two are not directly correlated.

Now, it is true that Tuition Costs have risen at a much higher rate since 1960 than Health Care costs on a percentage basis compared to inflation [1] [2] [3], but in aggregate the actual health care costs on a per-individual basis dwarf total tuition costs as part of household income [4].

[1] https://lh3.ggpht.com/-dqm5PIPoC58/Ti8HKy2jjrI/AAAAAAAAPgU/W...

[2] http://chartingtheeconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/hea...

[3] http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2011/08/aw-chart-c...

[4] http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d775519ccd1d571150...
Except that everytime you want to have access to your money you have to go to the bank and line up.

Then randomly the bank won't work, all banks in the region will shut down randomly and you're stuck without money, and you need to pay rent but you can't.

You are invested in certain banks in the region but sometime s it feels like the bank has noisy neighbours, and it takes a while to withdraw money.
Yes, though that is far less a pain in the ass since they use multiple processes. I can't count the number of times I have run out of memory with firefox on windows despite having far more than firefox was using.
Nothing good can come from sleeping with a co-worker. I think the saying, "don't shoot holes in your own boat" is the perfect way of putting this.
Yes, and it was a good life lesson of things not to do
OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage).

Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.
Angularytics: The solution to tracking page views and events in a SPA
I think this as a terrible way to look at people and the world. People need jobs to provide for themselves and their family. Social gaming isn't a "ponzi scheme" -- you can think its a waste of time, you can think Zynga's corporate policies were bad, but at the end of the day a bunch of people who just wanted to make money building things just lost their jobs.
This. Even though I am Singaporean, I do not consider myself pro-Singapore. In fact, I would like to leave at some point. However, I occasionally find myself... not defending Singapore, but opposing its detractors because the criticisms leveled are either inaccurate or unfair. For example, saying that littering in Singapore will get you caned is grossly inaccurate, and comparing it to regimes like North Korea is grossly unfair, kind of like forum moderators accused of being Nazis is unfair.

Regarding the issue in the OP, I would not even attempt to defend it. It sucks and is typical of the sort of stuff the government pulls that makes me want to leave.
Programmatic access is a big thing, and is what makes EC2, GCE, Rackspace and friends, different from dedicated hosting. (In the case of AWS / GCE, global availability is something else).

Using the Cloud isn't only about instant scaling and per hour billing. Those are useful features, but mostly for specific use cases.

--

The Cloud it's about the ability to have software that controls the hardware.

It's about being able to orchestrate automated failovers that provision new servers.

It's about being able to have services that grow and shrink depending on usage.

It's about being able to replace your app servers with data crunching servers at night and relaunch new app servers at day - all transparently.

Of course, those are just a few examples, but the general idea is that programmatic access (APIs) is the big thing. The rest is secondary.

---

Is is, however, true that this is not useful to everyone.

On the topic of succeeding using the Cloud, it's indeed difficult. That's why companies are building cloud management tools to help users do this.

Disclaimer: I work for one of these companies.
I've been living in Vietnam for the last two years and my life here as a foreigner is pretty sweet, all things considered.

But I'm not sure I'd feel the same way if I were a native. The fact that I can buy a plane ticket tomorrow and be half way around the world any time makes it easier to ignore some of the realities that natives face without that freedom.
> That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code,

Minecraft isn't written in "native code" either. Have you noticed any problems with this demo? I haven't.

> probably without offline support

Wrong.

> need them to be online to do multiplayer

? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...

> redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again

What cache are you referring to? The normal browser cache won't affect this at all. Sure, you can remove appcache, localstorage, indexeddb data, but why would you? That's the equivalent of uninstalling a game.

> have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability

What does that have to do with you as a user? The developer has chosen to work around such issues because he/she sees benefit to being in the browser.
Kidding on the square is a very useful (and insightful) phrase.
The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.
Just thought I'd mention that someone has organised a protest in Singapore to this particular issue, at the government-sanctioned "Speakers' Corner", this weekend:
https://www.facebook.com/events/185882738236629/

I'm looking forward to see if the government listens.
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
They are web pages with some heroic contortions to maintain a facade of a stateful application. Web pages that connect you to useful information (and perhaps even, your useful information) are certainly very useful things. But they've never been anywhere near the power and flexibility of native apps on any platform (at the time) and never will be.

In this particular case, the best email "app" on the web still struggles to match the functionality of 15 year old native applications in the same category.
They can be... Rickard Gunée actually generated a raw analog NTSC/PAL signal to be connected to a composite cable using a microcontroller:
http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/howto.php

It's a pretty good read if you're into that sort of thing, and really helps explain the mechanics of analog video (and also gives you some hints about simulating it in software). He also created his own clones of Tetris and Pong that run on the MCU as well!
This is Engineering (video)
VC Marc Andreessen: We Are Living Through a ‘Tech Depression’
check this out, Pincus' profile: http://people.tribe.net/markpincus
Well for people like me who actually play games, we care about things like Frame rate, mouse latency, and load times. The day a browser improves on these attributes, will be the day it's a selling point for us.
It will be interesting to see if HTC tries to set up some sort of Zoe to Vine integration.
It would be really nice if you could strip the things out of VS that you don't want. For me, all I really want is the code editor, R#, NCrunch, nuget, and the debugger. There might be a few other things that I didn't think of right away. I personally prefer to do source code management (git) outside of the IDE, because I find visual studio doesn't tend to make good choices about what should be controlled.

If I could make VS just do those things and nothing else, that would be really nice.
Are they web games or mobile?
I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
It's funny you post this. I published a post on my blog about not being able to release my personal projects because my self-expectations are so high I never end up releasing anything. http://ilikekillnerds.com/2013/06/jfri-just-fucking-release-... — I don't mean to spam my post, I think it's pretty relevant though. I feel your pain and I'm 25, I fear I won't ever release anything but I am learning to embrace the mantra of, "just release it" even slowly.
That's f*ing brilliant!
This is one of those cases where submitting the article with the original article title would be very helpful. Both on the page, as visible to readers, and in the HTML source code title element, the title of the article is "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did." The timeline that the article sets up claims that the (belated) declaration of war by the Soviet Union against Japan, which came only after Allied victory in Europe, is what forced Japan to consider surrender to the Allies.

Responding to this, I would point out that it was a known historical facts for a long time that Stalin had spies (plural) in the Manhattan Project, and generally had a good idea of how far the United States was progressing toward developing an atomic bomb. So one could just as well say that it is the advanced development of the bomb by the United States that prompted Stalin to declare war against a new enemy, right after a brutal and prolonged war against the European Axis powers.

Over the years, I have read many proposed ways to defeat Japan without dropping the atomic bomb in a variety of American sources. Submarine captains thought that submarine warfare alone could defeat Japan. (Near the end of the war, American submarines were operating freely very near the coast of Japan, and even in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and the other main islands of Japan.) American aviators were glad to have the bomb to continue to justify their existence, of course, but many have expressed the opinion that conventional strategic bombing alone could have defeated Japan.

Japan set up a rather harsh set of expectations by how fiercely it fought against the Allied landing on Okinawa. That made Allied war planners revise upward their estimate of the difficulty and cost in lives (both civilian and military) likely from a forced invasion on the main islands of Japan. That had to be part of the consideration as Allied war planners decided whether or not to drop the bomb. It's still a historical fact that no surrender was offered until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
Cancer elevates cost dramatically. I had cancer at age 41; I kept track of the full costs (not what my insurance negotiated downward) but stopped after my surgery, chemo and radiation treatment passed the $500k mark. I still go in for tests on an annual basis, so my guesstimate is that my total cost just for my cancer has probably surpassed $1 million. Even if that got negotiated down to $100K, that's still a lot. All it takes is one life threatening event, or a chronic condition to skew things out of what we would normally think is "normal" and rational in expenditures.

P.S. Thanks to my excellent doctors, Nathan Green and Richard Pitsch...
I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up.

I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.
6. Pay them. In case anyone forgot or doesn't know, unpaid internships are illegal.

Edit: sometimes illegal
Did you miss the bit where I said the "exodus" (I even used scare quotes!) wasn't the point?
It is possible to launch a software startup to profitability without VC funding.

I don't think this fact changes the "do what you love" message at all; it just means that you have a better chance at getting a decent slice of the pie if and when doing what you love becomes lucrative.
RegEx-based Brainf*ck interpreter in JS
So they basically recreated the Google Maps car with a script.
There is something very wrong with the camera/movement for me. The camera seems to be "tilted" to the side, and perhaps offcenter from the movement? Like if I had eyeballs coming out of my right bicep instead of my head. Mining also seems to happen somewhere to the right of the center of my screen, not from the middle.

Screenshot showing the tilt: http://i.imgur.com/tW2h9Dr.png (I un-fullscreened for the screenshot. )
You can get that flexibility without putting your base load on EC2: Use EC2 (or your "normal" hosts cloud services) to spin up extra servers when needed, and host your base load elsewhere. Extra bonus: It allows you to save even more money by flying closer to the wire with your long-term provisioned servers.

These days there are so many hosts that offer combination of colo + dedicated servers + cloud services that you can seamlessly do both even if you don't want to deal with more than one provider.
At least for stills there's simply no way the iPhone is faster, burst mode apps or not. (I speak as a frequent user of both DSLRs and iphones.) The ability to zoom and crop means you can get shots with a DSLR than an iPhone could almost never get (barring ungainly tricks like shooting through binoculars) and you can't freeze action.
What exactly does a libertarian supporter of Singapore look like, I wonder? Isn't Singapore sort of the opposite of a libertarian country? Are you sure such a beast exists?

It seems like "libertarian" in the last six months is being used more and more often as a contentless slur on HN. Not even with the standard stereotypes from those who disagree (selfish, greedy, etc.), I mean just flat-out content-free, no apparent understanding that it is a word with some meaning (even if ultimately as fuzzy as any other major political label).

"What about Singapore?" seems like a decent challenge to a libertarian. (I'm just using that observation that that is a fair, nontrivial question to further my main point. It's not a request for 150 messages providing a libertarian critique of Singapore; I've got one, thanks.)
Yup, I was wrong. Sorry.
I wonder what the ecological impact of all those blister packs is.
I think it's interesting that Arrington seems to accidentally agree with Jamie.

> "I've been burned badly by VCs. Treated unfairly. But my response was simply to stop doing what I was doing and start doing something else."

Isn't that exactly what Jamie is saying? Once what you're doing stops being fun, don't force yourself to keep slogging because you think keeping your nose to the grindstone will make you rich.
Oh, yeah, THAT's horrible -- I've in that situation couple of times (not so often, as I hibernated the machine most of the time, but there were times that couldn't be helped.)

It's almost gets the point; embarrassing -- while, Starbucks people are usually nice, it's really awkward when they already have given a word that they are closing in 10 minutes and my computer's still 4 out of 10 updates after that 10 minutes...

INHO, actually, that update scheme might have been appropriate if computers were desktops, but I don't know why they are keep insisting on that. (With the SAME machine, I can happily work while update is in progress running Ubuntu. I don't understand why they have to make updating the system so painful with Windows.)
I updated my post to make a note that I am not accusing this guy of anything but merely pointing out evidence that this person in the images and videos person has my tablet (He might be innocent and might have bought it from the black market)
I strip down the UI a lot. I don't have any toolbars visible, for example. It's not exactly the same thing, but I have no complaints, really.
You really can't beat it for the first year, though ;)
The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well.

Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.
At Scribd we initially used EC2 for systems like converting uploaded documents to HTML5 (the capacity we needed varied a lot over short time spans due to things like variable API usage). Meanwhile, the app and web servers (and many others) lived at Softlayer (still the "best-looking horse at the glue factory" for managed hosting, IMHO).
Most employees of startup companies are given restricted stock with a typical 4-year / 1-year cliff vesting schedule. Aka - they have to be with the the company for 4 years to vest 100% of their shares (25% gets vested on the "cliff")
That's not entirely accurate. A guideline for unpaid internships is that the interns should contribute nothing to your business; they get to learn and you get to train them so you might get a better shot at employing them later, or at least know if you don't want to hire them.
One exists. But it's got the specs of a 2009 netbook and is really expensive. http://www.sunbook.us/
OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?