skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Singapore passport is pretty good. It's supposedly better than Iceland in terms of travel freedom. [1]

However, I personally think the government has implemented considerable measures to stop brain drain, including 4/6-year bond government university scholarships [2] and an intended lack of (usually bilateral) working holiday visas [3].

(Can't find any links aggregating such visas for Singapore citizens, but I found that New Zealand might be one of the few countries to offer such a visa [3]. There's no such programme for Australia [4], Canada [5] or the UK [6] — this could be contrasted with Malaysia, which has bilateral programmes with some of these countries.)

On the bright side, the USA offers the H1B1 non-immigrant-intent visa for Singapore citizens. [7]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Singapore...

[2] http://www.ifaq.gov.sg/psc/apps/fcd_faqmain.aspx#FAQ_34197

[3] http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/work-hol...

[4] http://www.immi.gov.au/visitors/working-holiday/visa-options...

[5] http://www.international.gc.ca/experience/intro_incoming-int...

[6] http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/visas-immigration/working/...

[7] http://travel.state.gov/visa/laws/telegrams/telegrams_1391.h...
I'm trying to figure out where this niche is that EC2 is more expensive than traditional hosting on a price/performance basis and I'm drawing a blank. Yes, they're vastly more expensive than the sticker price on a server (assuming you can size out your server needs years in advance), but most of the cost of running a realistic server are elsewhere, housing/power/cooling, NAS, networking, licences, manpower, spares, security, monitoring... The actual per-hour fees aren't really the top consideration for choosing among the alternatives and AWS is at least competitive on a TCO basis.

The only things I get a big price/performance advantage over AWS for are things I might as well host on my desk, and even there it's dicey.
Is there really that much Python code out there that is not IO bound (obviating the GIL)? Scientific computing is the only area that comes to mind where I can imagine problems.
The guidelines are also different for nonprofit and for-profit companies (and if your interns are getting college credit vs. not), so it definitely pays to check. FWIW we pay our fulltime interns, but there are circumstances when it's ok not to.
Really it's the Availabilih Heuristic, of which survivor bias is merely a specific case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
You can orchestrate automated failovers that provisions new servers even if you have dedicated servers to handle your base load. And the price difference with EC2 is so huge that you need really massive traffic spikes for it not to be cheaper to have a bunch of extra dedicated servers on standby.

Nothing stops your from spinning up data crunching EC2 instances at night either, if you want to, and if it really is more cost-effective for you than having VM on your dedicated hardware.

There's plenty of API's available if you want to run your own "private cloud" on those dedicated servers too. I never deploy outside VM's any more, even though I also mainly use dedicated servers.

EC2 is cost effective if you truly have really short term (< 4-6 hours per day) batch processing needs. It continues to shock me how many people take the pain and cost of dealing with EC2 for more typical web app usage.
Rackspace and Softlayer both have dedi/cloud hybrid offerings. You don't need to support multiple companies or multiple private networks to get the benefits. They still offer multiple datacenters for reliability.
Singapore is most definitely what China aspires to become.

I bring up the Wumao tactics because they apply almost verbatim here: the common "criticism of criticism" in Asian countries is to assert that you can't criticize unless you somehow are perfect. Since perfection doesn't exist, all criticism is therefore unwarranted.

Dictatorship is an unideal form of government in general, but sometimes can be the best of other possible evils. One would hope that Signapore could move towards being a real free society much more quickly than it is, but perhaps they have another 50 years to go or so.

As for your bigotry comment, it is unjustified.
We use SoftLayer to run a few hundred nodes and they have issues as well. For example, their network sucks and they have high rate of hardware failure (sometimes hard drive failures are off the charts).
eInk is very slow refresh, about a second...not fun for a laptop. Pixel Qi displays work better: have TFT-speed refresh with sun-light readability. Indoors its a color display. Outdoors you can turn off the backlight to conserve power.

If your computer/laptop has VGA/HDMI or composite out you can use our Pixel Qi+Controller kit http://www.adafruit.com/products/1303 for modern laptops with a 40 pin LVDS cable you can just do a swap out as long as the screen's the same dimensions.
Yup - these are the DOL guidelines with the 6 criteria to see if internships can be unpaid http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1].

2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc.

3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of < 20 minutes.

1: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ and https://aws.amazon.com/security/
What's cool about our industry is that interns can contribute a lot, on or soon after day one.
The go-to response to criticism of Singapore, if you don't immediately concede the discussion, seems to be "It isn't like other places that you are use to. It is very different."
I looks pretty cool and just that fact that it is 6 dollars was enough for me to buy it and see where it will end up. But I always buy games that are that price as long as it doesn't look totally broken and is kind of cool.
> app parody

My thoughts exactly on most Android apps :p

(I say this as current Android user, ex-iPhone user, and an ex-Googler).
In this day an age, the inability to compute two things at once is a pretty major flaw, if you ask me.
Hmm I would like to hear more about these problems that prevent people from spinning up instances. Is it a frequently occurring problem or only happens rarely (e.g. when APIs are down). Also are they managing the instances themselves or using EC2's AutoScaling cluster? I run a dynamically scaling cluster on EC2 and have not run into the problems like you mentioned, so I would like to hear more about them if possible. Maybe they are spinning up and down too rapidly and exceeds the API rate limit? You'd have to have a bugged/bad provisioning system to accomplish that though...
My experience is that the devops cost drops: Most of the time you're dealing with a much simpler and more predictable dedicated environment - your challenges happen when you have to handle (rare) abnormal spikes.

In terms of inter-datacenter network reliability: You have to deal with this if you want reliable hosting anyway. If you spread your database and app servers across data centers, yes, you are begging for problems and the problem is that your app is not designed for resilience.

But you can easily enough do "hybrid" within the same datacenter, if you opt for any of the number of EC2 alternatives from companies that also do dedicated hosting.
Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.

If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)

Also see this AWS cost analysis from TripAdvisor Technical Operations team: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso...

"Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"
Impressive. Being open about the journey and giving ideas and hope to others is very commendable.

Also $100,000 a month from a company that couldn't scale like a software company is really cool. I think more Hacker news people should worry a bit less about 'scaling' and getting a good product going first and foremost.
I'm not so sure they deserve the sympathy though. Nearly every game released for the past several years has been a literal clone of another game- usually so wholesale, so completely devoid of any innovation or new content, that it was indistinguishable to the lay man.

When you're literally being told to copy another company to create your product, so brashly? You honestly deserve what's coming to you. I'm okay if you try to innovate at least a little, but they never did. They just used their platform and size to bully smaller companies(and sometimes, stupidly, larger companies like EA) into irrelevance.
> [...] particularly, as you observe, the ones who are otherwise ostensibly very libertarian.

You might find http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/12/neocame... interesting. (Moldbug is crazy, but sometimes interesting.)
That is true of course. I don't dislike advertising, just like I don't dislike paying for dinner. However I see it as a economic thing, rather than charge money for their articles they charge 'eyeballs' (so that the advertiser picks up the tab) and the better the content the more I'll put up with that (case in point watching things on Hulu where you get forced to watch ads) but at some point the 'cost' of the ads, the in your face pop-ups, the mouse over talking heads, the slide on banner, the pop under or over banner, it costs 'more' than its 'worth' for me to read it. I determined after reading space.com a lot how much ad I was willing to put up with in order to read their content, and rather than pirate it (or subvert their intent) I just stopped viewing it allowing them to spend their server resources on showing ads to people for whom its worth it to get to the content.
It's also noteworthy that the Japanese troops in Manchuria were, from most accounts I've seen, their most veteran land-based army. And the soviets, having fought the Germans for the past 6 years, basically cut through them like butter. That will make you reconsider your position.
+ You get very unpredictable server resources, which is why disk and network throughput can vary wildly.

These issues are why we started Uptano, really just to scratch this itch for ourselves. Plug: https://uptano.com

The thing is, EC2 really was neat when it launched, but there are so many things that can be improved upon. Amazon has moved surprisingly slowly in improving EC2 itself.
I don't normally upvote non-tech things on HN, but that was one of the most fascinating articles I have read in awhile. I started to idly read it, but immediately become engrossed.
I am aware of that but thanks for pointing it out explicitly for others. I was addressing more about the original article's suggesting of running a hybrid system of dedicated + EC2.
Good points. And, after a while it seems like there's not much ROI on using a piece of software like FB to try to "manage" with whom you communicate and how.

In fact, it seems an artificially wedged in middleman at some point. And it becomes more efficient to get it out of the way and go back to simple email, phone calls or, as you say, IRC and forums.
Node.js is stupid and if you use it so are you [2012]
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Supreme Court Rules DNA Can Be Taken After Arrest
The guys that are making GooEngine, that recently reached front page of Hacker News with their Perl Boy[1], also did a pretty good clone Minecraft Classic[2]: https://apps.facebook.com/gooblocks/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5755653

[2] their demos here: http://www.gooengine.com/demos/
it's perfectly possible that there are not really that many singapore defenders on the internet, but that the government/hardcore singapore supporters proactively search for stories about singapore and positively comment on them.

I forget the exact name, but pro-Zionist peoples have a similar program which basically prompts them with a small button on their desktop, which automatically upvotes pro-israel stories, or downvotes anti-israel stories on social media sites.
Lack of Sleep and Weight Gain
What about OpenVZ? It isn't as light as Docker (you get a whole OS) and solves a different problem, but it is solid at providing a OS virtualized container.
Eve Online returns after DDoS attack forces server offline
EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).
We use Softlayer too for the same reasons. Have been with them for over 10 years now - since they were called The Planet. Just had one hardware failure during the entire time. They also now offer Cloud computing instances - which can be deployed either hourly or monthly. And you can mix and match your Cloud and dedicated servers - giving you all the flexibility to scale that you get with AWS / EC2.
[Insert pointless negative comment]
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At least you are free to vote with your feet. Something that e.g. the GDR made very hard.
As always, the coupon "SSDTWEET" will get you $10 of account credit on signup.
No, nearly all of the people that I have seen support Singapore on HN are active contributors who comment on a wide variety of issues.

Also, you are probably thinking of the JIDF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force
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One school of thought is we let the tornadoes kill the thrill seekers, although my issue is the 'tourists' putting people doing actual work at risk with their crazy stunts. For that reason I am a big fan of the research going on in storm penetrating UAVs. That will pretty much obsolete any need to 'chase' by car.
Ask HN  On freelance sites, is there a bias towards hiring people from the US?
Agreed, very good read.
That's a roundabout way of saying it's agnostic. Which is very embracing of atheism, generally speaking.
Honest question: what's the point of cloudflare if it can't keep a basic content site up? I feel like I've seen quite a few of these branded error messages that have made me curious.
No one advises it, for very good reasons, but the truth is that it happens all the time. Co-worker romance is also responsible for a very large percentage of marriages.
Segment.io Lets Mobile Developers Send Analytics Data To Dozens Of Services
I'll make an array of the parts of your post that I disagree with. And optionally an array of the parts of your post that I agree with. I'll mark any root concepts, and then highlight where they appear in the rest of your comment. Then I'll make an array of possible responses, and check for frequent use of the root concepts.

Wrapping something in patent-mumbo-jumbo, doesn't prevent it from being bullshit. No one will find a link to prove that making arrays and root concepts and blah blah blah has prior art, because it's all crap. Top to bottom.

That's my opinion.
The protest about the immigration policy actually makes me glad that Singapore isn't run as a democracy.
I've given up on advocating ESDF. :(
There are real libertarians on HN, it is mostly a belief in a niche economic system that is mostly the opposite of communism. But many people are confused about the word, and a lot of young disillusioned Republicans have latched onto the movement without truly understanding its principles.

I always get giddy when a libertarian on reddit points Singapore out as the kind of country they want to live in: low taxes, high economic freedom! But that's only because they don't realize its an actual police state! (whereas we could argue that the USA is only partially a police state)

They then move onto talking about Hong Kong...
Is there anyone elastic that costs the same as EC2 but beats them on performance (CPU in particular, as well as more and faster RAM).
This should be talked about more. I see no reason (privacy or otherwise) that they can't put deleted accounts 'on ice' for some time before permanently deleting the contents.

Give the poor souls with fat fingers a chance to recover.
As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2 + Linode + colocation. A little puppet/chef knowledge goes a long way.
I believe this one came from McAdoo's talk at Startup school. The context was that you want to pick a market that's growing, instead of trying to create the market yourself. Then you have both the problem of building your company, and educating potential users. I think this is one of those pieces of advice that resonate more to those that managed to build something people want, but found that they were a big fish in a small pond.
... following up to myself (why not?), it's also important, I think, to resist the fallacious inference from "X loves his job" to "X would be happy to work all hours". It really does not hold up, but it's distressingly common in conversations like this to hear the proviso "well of course if you love your job you'll work the long hours and that's fine", but one could well love one's job and have other interests one also considers worth pursuing. Nothing to excess! (Plus holding the fallacious inference to be sound contributes to its pernicious contrapositive: "if you don't want to work all hours, you must dislike it here".)
Google’s Matt Cutts On SEO Industry Misconceptions
Sure, but then they need to be paid. That's why I said it was a guideline for unpaid interns.

If you don't pay them something for the work they do, that's sometimes illegal and definitely immoral.
depriving yourself from sleep is demonstrably bad for you. i wonder why we reached a consensus that smocking crack, drinking underage and driving fast or without a seatbelt should be forcibly prevented, but driving yourself crazy on adderall to build an app so people can write a blog on their favorite sushi restaurants and VC can prosper is socially rewarded.
I have long fought the battle by spouting the many advantages of ESDF, but WASD is just too ingrained in people's heads.
During my last internship, I spent the majority of my time working on a project idea I came up with. Apparently it ended up being much more difficult than what the team there was going to come up with, but it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot.

Eventually, the summer project became an important feature of their product. It feels great to have a significant contribution as an intern.

If you're hiring interns, ask them what they would like to do. It might let them make the most out of your internship.
I guess I qualify pro-Singapore since I live here and often seem to be defending it (albeit mostly from people who grossly misunderstand the place and/or think that the ability to chew gum is some sort of god given right).

I hate the proposal, of course. Plain and simple.

It still doesn't make PAP a fascist dictatorship or a police state, though. Plus, while censorship and control over the American media is a lot more subtly done, I think it's almost as pervasive as it is here.
Switching load or transferring data between a remote DC (your dedicated servers) and AWS is not that easy when you start having large-scale infrastructure though.

This is a great idea on paper - but running your baseline infrastructure at your dedicated provider and the rest on EC2 is definitely a challenging task.

Not that it's impossible, but that's probably going to be extra work at the app level.

---

Running OpenStack / CloudStack, or similar software on dedicated servers is indeed a relevant solution too, but this is an extra maintenance cost to bear in mind.
This woman is bodypainted with a gene linked to breast cancer
Leaked Contract between Coursera and U of Michigan Explains Possible Rev Models
The guys at Netflix don't mind paying the premium to avoid the "overhead" of systems people. It's more a philosophical issue than a technical one.

Also, they get preferred pricing and status at Amazon that normal people don't get.
That's correct, you can approximate the overhead of LXC (and any other similar containerization such as OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, BSD jails etc.) as zero. In terms of performance they are closer to chroot than to a virtual machine.
> But if that were the case, the patent would almost certainly be invalid; the claimed invention must be inventive, i.e. having come up with something that is not obvious.

You just proved that you don't know how patents work. I'm sorry, but that's the naked truth.

Clean-room implementations are no protection from patents.
It's very simple.

80% of the crap is from 20% of the people.

Just hide them from your timeline. In your browser, hover over the person's photo, then hover over the Friends button and deselect "Show in News Feed".

Problem (mostly) solved.
We do spend thousands a month of hosting. We have servers in 5 geographies...If you include our CDN costs, the amount we spend is quite large. The money we save is enough to get a full time devops and then some.

Netflix probably doesn't pay what you and I pay. Also, for every Netflix, you can find 100 examples that use dedicated or collocated.
Why would libertarians support a country with one of the strongest governments in the world? Their ministers are among the mostly highly-paid officials in the world!
Exactly my experience with tech follows which I enjoy most of all. I've found it entertaining, informative and inspiring. I've never used twitter and stopped using Facebook. Also, so far no issues with spam on G+.
Yahoo Shutting Down Mail Classic, Forces Users to Upgrade
I've been using Singlehop.com for over three years, and I couldn't be any happier. I rented a dedicated server in which I can create and destroy as many VMs as I want. I didn't have to setup anything. Once I got the dynamic server everything was available for me. No sweat, no headache, same price every month.
See pg 28 for revenue split (6-15% for UoM) and pg 40 for 8 possible revenue models.
I was thinking with all the news converge there has been lately regarding the many possible illegal objects that can be "printed" (ie weapons of all kinds, unofficial replicas etc.)
In the past, when an AZ goes down, everyone tries to transfer to another AZ and makes lots of API calls.

Consequently AWS has to rate-limit API requests to avoid taking another AZ down.

Maybe this has changed though, but we'll probably have to wait for another disaster to know!

---

But of course, an AZ shouldn't be your infrastructure's single point of failure!
Fluent 2013: Brendan Eich, "JavaScript at 18: Legal to Gamble"