skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OpenVZ is almost identical to LXC, which is what Docker uses under the hood. You could port Docker to OpenVZ very easily. In fact, there is a plugin planned to do exactly that.

Fun fact: before running on lxc, dotCloud (where Docker originated from) was initially based on OpenVZ (which was great). As the mainline kernel's support for containers improved (in large part, I believe, thanks to the pioneering work of OpenVZ), eventually we moved over to that.
Hmm, the JIDF may have been what I was thinking of, but as I recall, there is some kind of desktop program which streamlines the user registration/"upvoting" feature on any arbitrary website(perhaps by just making you solve the captcha, and automating the rest), which broadcasts relevant stories to pro-zionist netizens computers to instantaneously upvote or bury.

I wasn't trying to suggest that all pro-singapore commenters fit that mold, but that that possibility may explain why pro-singapore responses appear disproportionately in any article or comment involving singapore.
20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank.

And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.
If you are using a hybrid approach (assuming dedicated + EC2), you have to have the ops system in place to deal with the dedicated environment AND the EC2 environment, which is why devops cost will be higher. Of course if you only deal with dedicated hardware your devops cost could drop.

Inter-datacenter network issues are less of a problem when your datacenters are from the same provider, because they are responsible for making sure the connection is good. Plus, when problems do occur, you can troubleshoot fairly easily (when I had the routing problem with dedicated provider + EC2, I had to bounce back and forth with the network support for both a few times before one of them admitted the routing issue with the upstream network provider) as you are dealing with a single company.

I understand the hybrid solutions that other providers such as softlayer offers, but I was mostly addressing the suggestion of using dedicated + EC2 in the original article.
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As a Malaysian who reads HN almost everyday, Singaporean stories appear way more frequently than Malaysian stories :)
Ignore the negativity train on Hacker News as of late. I thought it was a very well written and interesting article.

I was once one of the very noobies that your article describes. In fact, I even made the same Stack Overflow post asking why threading made my program slow to a crawl. I did then (thanks to a friendly answer) learn about multiprocessing rather than threading, but I never actually got around to learning -- or even thinking about!-- what exactly the GIL is and why it makes threading terrible for CPU bound tasks.

Point being, I enjoyed it.
No, but I have worked with my wife, both as a peer and as her subordinate. No problems there.
>> At our most expensive location, we get 64GB ECC RAM, 4x1TB RAID 10 (hardware), Dual E5-2620 and 4 1Gbps adapters (bonded, 2x public, 2x private) for around 60% the price of an M3-2XLarge.

M3-2XLarge = $720 per month, 60% = $432

As a softlayer customer, I would be very surprised if you can get 2620/64GB/4TB disks at this price range, we also consider ourself not a small customer, but for the above config, I guess we need to pay $800+. (after discount)
Turkish Prime Minister Blames Twitter for Unrest
Yes; let's increase frustration for everyone based on some flimsy evidence!

"One [study] in Ireland, for example, found no reduction in overdoses"
While clearly Amazon is working on bringing down the cost of EC2, as it is today you're paying a premium to get at the AWS ecosystem (and for some companies it's well worth it). There's no other great reason to choose EC2 for servers given the pricing. I understand why people keep writing about the cost, but if you have use for the myriad of AWS services, then good luck replicating what they offer on dedicated servers (without spending an equally huge sum, either in dollars or time or both).
You have had better stability with Arch? They're known as a bleeding edge distro for a reason, and frequently release updates that break previous installs. Not that this is bad - it's just how they roll.

Also, Javascript is not Mozilla's language. It was originally invented at Netscape, and is a standardized language. Yes, Mozilla does great things with Javascript, but is no more Mozilla's language than it is Microsoft's.
I used to work at a small company / startup... once we got rid of the snacks everyone started jumping ship... how true this is... how true.
>You are complaining about products that you are not paying for

Facebook's revenue model is built upon your participation (labor) and your information. Sure you're paying for it.

>It's hypocritical to navigate to a site and make use of its free services and, at the same time, go out of your way to deny them revenue.

But it's OK for FB to welcome you to their site, encourage you to supply information using your own "labor", then sell that information to third parties (even if in aggregate form)? And, it is OK for them to constantly look for ways to further track and glean data about you for its own profit? How is people using ad blockers any different from Facebook burying their monetization schemes in fine print?

Perhaps FB should simply ban ad blockers or make users prove they've viewed x ads per page view. Ah, but that would open too much dialogue about how much FB utilizes information that it harvests from users and how it monetizes it. Wouldn't want those items foremost on members' minds.
>>he cashed out $200M during the share price peak

This shows he clearly knew of what was coming and had to make hit-and-run profit to get money out of it.

I don't know who would ever want to work with such a person again. Besides having $200 million means he may never need to work again.
I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.
> 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.

Personally, I'd rather have 20ms shaved off my users time than a 20 minute disaster recovery time. Disasters happen perhaps once a year (on AWS, possibly less on dedicated servers), people are loading pages every day.
One of the most common criticisms of the place does seem to be that it is some sort of police state or fascist dictatorship.

Mostly these accusations are made by people who have never even been to Singapore and never experienced a police state.

A lot of US criticism sounds awfully ironic, too, when you consider that the things being strongly criticized - lack of certain freedoms, for example - are often worse (or not much better) in America.
Apple e-book deal 'cost hundreds of millions'
I normally flag non-tech things on HN. Even if I enjoy them. Just planting the seeds.
You also lose one of EC2's only advantage: per hour billing.

This isn't true. Reserved instances still use per hour billing, just at a discounted rate.
Ask HN: What do you want to see in a portfolio? 
You've seen endless amounts of Javascript libraries, HTML5 "Next Big Things", end-alls of social networking and aggregate-your-everything's. You've dealt with the brightest young minds who could recite you their textbooks word for word, but couldn't find creativity if it hit them in the face. But what haven't you seen, HN? What is it on a portfolio that truly wants to make you say "You're hired"?
Former Microsoft exec has big plans for marijuana
Yeah, it seems I was overly optimistic when I wrote that post on CppRocks. I was thinking that they would release another update of the CTP features pretty soon, but it doesn't look like it's happening...
Ask HN: What's the purpose of this type of mailform spam?
So I recently changed up my mailform handling for my website and I'm now noticing a steady stream of incredibly detailed and well formed mailform spam. A good one just came in that looks like this:

==============================
Name: Lilla Dobbs
Email: AmandaLanesh0@yahoo.com
Phone: 06-91009165

Comment:

My partner and I absolutely love your blog and find the
majority of your post's to be what precisely I'm looking
for. can you offer guest writers to write content to suit
your needs? I wouldn't mind publishing a post or
elaborating on many of the subjects you write concerning
here. Again, awesome web site!
==============================

* I've changed last name slightly (which still wouldn't match the name of the email) and the domain of the email address in case of the incredibly unlikely event that this email isn't spam.

So, the submits come from an IP, and a seemingly legitimate User Agent:

==============================
IP: 5.135.35.83
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0)
AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112
Safari/535.1
==============================

I guess the question is: what's the end-game here? Are they expecting a reply to the email address and then things kick off from there? Is this seeding to get through a couple legitimate emails to start conditioning spam detection algorithms?

These emails don't contain the most basic of spammy info:

1. no obvious keywords
2. no urls
3. no selling of a scam

It just really seems to me that it's crafted to get a reply. I just don't know why. There is obviously a purpose to this relatively new breed of spam (at least to my eyes), and I'd really be interested to know if anyone has the answer.

For some breadth on the messages, here's a sampling of others:

==============================
Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a
team of volunteers and starting a new project in a
community in the same niche. Your blog provided us
valuable information to work on. You have done a
wonderful job!
==============================
Superb post however I was wondering if you could write a
litte more on this topic? I'd be very thankful if you
could elaborate a little bit further. Cheers!
==============================
Awesome issues here. I am very satisfied to look your
article. Thank you a lot and I am taking a look forward
to contact you. Will you kindly drop me a e-mail?
==============================
Just last week I ran the numbers on my current DC costs - hardware, cooling, space, network - versus EC2 and it was 60% more expensive per month for EC2.

Quite a premium. Even adding in the salaries for my admin team only drop it a few more percentage points.
What Your Website’s Design Says About You
A guess: they want you to let them contribute 'content' on your blog, which will in turn link to their payload (scam, malware, whatever).
We're in the same boat.

I definitely agree with you on the disk failures, and that's something I need to bring up with our account manager.

The above said, the network has been solid for us at SoftLayer for the last 1 1/2 - 2 years (things were rocky for a little while before that as the client base outgrew their capacity). Of course, your systems might be in different data centers to us so mileage may differ.
I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.
Totally agree.

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.
That's explicitly contrary to the HN guidelines, as is your comment. ...as is this comment of mine. I'll show myself out.
Are you including the up-front payment required for reserved instances?
>Or if you are gay?

Section 377A is pretty rarely (if ever) enforced nowadays, and judging by the government's current lacklustre response to protests against it, I have a feeling they'll probably be repealing it in the next couple of years.

There's even a gay village up in Changi.

>Or immigration policy? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21485729

The government has reacted to that by tightening up visa requirements. Probably not nearly as much as the protestors, but they're still paying attention and responding.

Not saying that these aren't issues, or that they shouldn't be protested, but compared to most other countries, you've still got it pretty good here.
> Due to the design of the Python interpreter, using multiple threads to increase performance is at best a difficult task. At worst, it will decrease (sometimes significantly) the speed of your program.

Nope. The writer sounds misinformed and is spreading FUD.

I have successfully used Python's threads to perform concurrent database fetches, http page getters, file uploads in parallel. Yes, there was almost linear speedup.

If you listen to this story it sounds like Guido and most other talented and smart Python contributors added threads to Python just to fuck with people heads -- "thread don't work but let's add them anyway! just to mess with them!". Nope they added them because there are many cases when they work.

The answer is if you handle concurrent I/O Python's threads will give you good speedup. Threads are real OS threads and come with nasty side-effects if using shared data structures, but make no mistake you will get the speedup.

Your mileage may very and everyone is probably biased and has a different perspective, but where I am coming from in the last 10+ years I have written mostly I/O bound concurrent code. There were very few cases where I hoped to use extra CPU concurrency.

Now I did have to do that a couple of times and if you do have that issue, most likely you'd want to descend down to C anyway. Which is what I did. Once in C you can release the lock so Python can process in parallel and your C extension/driver can process in parallel. This is exactly what I did.

Now wouldn't it be nice if Python had CPU level concurrency built in. Yes it would be great. But I don't think that is the #1 issue currently. We still don't have 16 cores on most machines.

#define RANT

What worries me is library fragmentation and the new Python 3 adoption (or lack of) now coupled with the new Async IO Future/Promise/Deferred framework introduction. That will harm Python faster and worse than GIL ever did. Adopting and standardizing a Twisted like approach to Async IO will put the nail in Python's coffin. And Guido is certainly marching in that direction. This will fragment existing (already rather fragmented) libraries. Now we'll have Twisted, Tornado, gevent, eventlet, asyncore, Threads, new Promise/Future thingie (anyone know of more?) ways of doing concurrent IO and every time you pick a library (unless you use threads, gevent or eventlet + monkey patching) you will end up choosing a whole new _ecosystem_ of frameworks.

I remember for years scouring the web for a Twisted version of an already existing library,because I had made the mistake of picking Twisted as the I/O concurrency framework. Regular library module is available, oh but I need to return a Deferred from it of course, in order for me to use it.

#undef RANT
May it is a SEM gimmick? Get you to link to them?
> 1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1].

While the compliance and security links are impressive, AWS still doesn't offer a BAA agreement for HIPAA/HITECH compliance.

There are plenty of health care companies that are held back from AWS for this single reason.

Surprisingly enough Microsoft is leading in this respect (or not, given their historical enterprise focus...) - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/security-and-compl...
1. Agreed. IAM is really, really, nice, and I find myself missing it greatly when I'm on other platforms.

2. We use quite a few more things than EC2 for our systems.
- SQS eliminates the need to build / manage a queuing system.
- DynamoDB/SimpleDB eliminate the need to build / manage a distributed data store.
- OpsWorks eliminates the need for a DevOps team (mostly).
- ELB eliminates the need to build / manage a load balancer.
- SES seamlessly takes care of out-bound mail.
- Direct Connect gives us a way to extend our DC tools into the "cloud".
- And to top it all off, I can bring up any/all of these services at a moments notice, run some experiments, and then shut them down when I'm done.

I don't think there are very many vendors that can help us do these things with this much flexibility. Yea, AWS can be expensive, but we feel like its worth it.
Robert Cialdini explains the six ways to influence people – Interview
>they were part of a modern day ponzi scheme that would blow up once Facebook become uncool.

but isn't this like 80% of silicon valley, at this point? I mean even google is now trying to become facebook; and the rest of us are just trying to get acquired by one of the giants, or trying to sell something to the Engineers who are in one of those groups.

I mean, seriously, glass houses; be careful with them rocks.
I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective.

So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :).
In the book "What I wish I knew when I was 20", the Author brings forth a similar point, stating that doing what you love as a standalone piece of advice isn't that helpful, but a widely held conception. What she advocates is to attempt to find the intersection of "what you love" and "what people are willing to pay you for".

From another point of view, Robert Greene tries to mount the horse from the other side, in his book "The 50th Law", where he brings forth that the mastery of any skill at a sufficient level will make you love that skill (kinda like Intellectual Stockholm Syndrome). So there are arguments from the other side as well.

If we are to follow Greene's train of thought, most work can be made enjoyable through an unhealthy dose of obsession.

On the question whether people are sucessful because they are obsessed, I personally think that it's a contributing factor. The existence of people that are obsessed but not sucessful seems to prove that obsession does not lead directly to sucess, but most people I consider sucessful posess some element of obession.

I actually tend to group people by obsession, for example Tim Feriss, Robert Greene, Neil Strauss, Cal Newport, Stephen Key,Perry Marshal etc. by their obsession for different kinds of Systems.
I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
Is there something comparable to Hetzner in the US?
Yep, that is the sort of response I am referring to.

Also, it seems like you find "not as bad as America" to be more comforting than I do.
Are you globally distributed?
Are you using CloudFront?

Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.
Zynga has poached a lot of talent from the real game industry. People don't need to resign and join Zynga - it's a choice they've made. And with the requirements Zynga had - even if you had been unemployed and got an offer from Zynga you could get another one everywhere else: they had not been exactly scrapping the bottom of the barrel, quite the opposite.
I would like to see more comments on Ward Wilson's larger point, that atomic bombs should not exist.

This is merely one piece to that larger argument, which I find convincing, that atomic bombs are not useful in a modern world as a militaristic or diplomatic tool. Maybe some of the commenters that are demonstrably far more expert historians than I would explain whether they think this recollection supports that idea, or that atomic bombs are merely less influential than a large scale invasion from Stalin, a scary dude.
It's not just a question of speed. If your machines are slow, that means you need more machines to handle your throughput, which means you are paying for that 20 ms slowdown in actual dollars.
ThoughtWorks' P2 Magazine
$720 is the on demand monthly price for m3.2xlarge.
"An August 2010 conference in Anaheim, Calif., cost the IRS $4 million. About 2,600 managers attended the event and stayed in presidential hotel suites that usually cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night. About 15 outside speakers were paid $135,000 each"

$1,538 per attendee if you do the math. No mention of how long the conference was, but that does not seem unreasonable for hotel stays, flights, food, training, etc. Also, I doubt the speaking fee was really $2 million in total. If it was, that makes the rest of the conference really cheap.
Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.
That's probably it and is in line with good old fashioned comment spam. I'm just not collecting a URL, so I'm not seeing them come through. I might just add one, hide it from my users and see how many of these comments come through accompanied with a URL.

Without seeing the URL to tip it off as comment spam I may have just been overthinking it.
So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy?

I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.
we use 100tb.com, a sofltayer reseller. It's $359 + $50 since both DC and SG aren't official 100tb datacenters:

http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/

We get access to Softlayer's vpn, their control panel..pretty much everything.

Years ago, at a different company, we used Softlayer proper...you can negotiate prices down by huge amounts..even so, they are overpriced when you take into account their reseller. (Note, I know the deal says 48GB, but we have 10 or so of those servers, and they all came with 64...ssshhhh).