skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My comparison of SliceHost to EY is also based on actual experience deploying large scale sites. EY claims to offer all the services in the world, but at the end of the day the technology they delivered was sub par. I understand all of the things you say about Ezra writing the Rails deployment books and their support of the community. None of that changes the fact that their offerings are vastly over priced for what they deliver.

I've been building web solutions since 1994 as well, and have built dozens of web sites for Fortune 50 and better companies. I fully understand what it takes to scale out an architecture to 30,000 transactions per second at 30% average cpu utilization, or to deal with 70 Terabytes of text and images in sub second response times. I've built arbitrarily deeply nested hierarchies with 100's of millions of items that have to return their result sets in sub-second response times. I don't mention this to brag, but to illustrate that I have substantial system engineering and architecture background.

I'm not sure how you can say that comparing SliceHost to EngineYard is "very very fishy". It depends on your perspective I guess. EngineYard seems to cater to companies that don't have strong in-house database talent, or who aren't comfortable with certain things like creating a Capistrano deployment file or basic sysadmin tasks. If you are comfortable with those things though, when you compare what they do with what they claim, they fall very short imo.

The thing with SliceHost is that they focus on one thing, which is delivering virtualized resources. And they deliver them fast. You can have a new slice up and running with SliceHost within minutes, where with EngineYard that same tasks takes weeks. On multiple occasions we had to escalate to one of the company owners before we got a new slice created.

So perhaps for my background, and for the needs of the companies I've been at, maybe EngineYard's services weren't a great fit. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. If you just need virtualized resources though and are comfortable building out your own architecture from there, EY may not be the best fit.

I do find it interesting that you mention Rackspace's service, considering they bought SliceHost sometime ago.
I think an interesting corollary question to this might be how to look for open problems that might be worth while to do research or papers on. Any hints?
No git pull?

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-pull.htm...
Understanding Affiliate Programs
Modern Corporate and business world operate on a very different line than that followed a few years back. The facility of the internet and the computer has facilitated the businessperson as he can now sell his products and services on the internet to people living in any part of the world.
Wolfram's Black Box: a biologist's take on Wolfram Alpha
I'd like to learn more about daemons to satisfy my own personal curiosity. Do you have any resources you recommend?
The Two State Solution: Native and Serializable Continuations in the PLT Web Server
Best response ever.
Really quick response + detailed solution - great work!
Stone Age Superglue
And much of that money will get poured back into assets...young professionals who work at firms that cater to retired customers will buy homes, retirement communities will expand and build more buildings, older people will sell their assets and rent instead, which means that someone will buy homes and turn them into rentals. I agree that many older people will be liquidating assets, but it just seems they'll shift to other parts of the population.
I think you're spot on. And I'm a .Net developer (a bumbling fool no doubt). But really, you grasp the point best so far.
I have published in ASPLOS and HotOS with a bachelor's in computer science, though some of my co-authors either had or were pursuing PhDs. Publishing and PhDs are correlated, but not necessarily causally related. I.e., the same impulse that causes people to publish causes them to pursue research careers.

There's no shaggy-dog story of how we broke into the big leagues. We submitted the way everybody else does, and the anonymous peer review process never demanded our grad school union card. We had the benefit of amazing, experienced readers giving us unsparing feedback long before submitting, and had the good luck of having built an interesting system with some weird properties. Having something to say that your peers might find interesting is the hard part, not collecting qualifications.
I've felt similarly, but I found that part of the problem was that I was seeking acceptance and participation from my friends, even though I was occupying myself with increasingly specific and esoteric things. Part of the solution was just caring less what other people think, and mentioning to them only the pretty/nifty/cool/engaging things that I work on, not the theoretical stuff.

Another good tip is that, with some time and effort, you can largely shape the kind of new friends you meet, especially today with the web. You could organise some informal gettogethers, interest groups, lectures, etc. Providing free beer helps a lot. Leverage your workplace, your school, your local watering hole. Hunt for people who are doing the same things you do. Blog about what you do, so others can find it. These days, you can automate a lot of this just by setting up search feeds on Google, Twitter, etc. Even on something as noisy as Twitter, there's someone talking about fluid dynamics, linguistics, philosophy, etc. Find them, see what places they link to, and join their communities so you can find out where they hang out in real life. The trick is to not treat the online world as a separate place where the "cool people hang out", but simply the medium through which "cool people hook up". Most of the people you want to hang out with are in the same boat as you: bored, alone and online.

The fact is that you are less likely to meet someone truly interested in your pursuits than just regular 'nice people'. Accept this, but make sure you are ready to encounter these special people and show them, very quickly, that you are a smart person worth getting to know and worth having in depth conversations with.

Also, though the hacker lifestyle has its perks, it never hurts to expand your interests to include more outdoor activities. Often you can be as intellectual and nerdy about those as you want, without suffering the nerd penalty.

As for correcting people on urban legends: people don't like being told they're wrong and many people enjoy urban legends for the drama and excitement, because it gives them a story to tell. Often they don't really care if it's true or not.
Yeah, that's my main concern as well. That kind of curation just doesn't scale. There's a large body of people out there who can be leveraged, who spend their lives curating and optimizing data sources, especially in chemistry and biology.
Enjoyed reading, followed along for most of it, but as the post wound on it became increasingly more dense to make sense of.

Some simple pictures or diagrams would make it perfect.
That wouldn't get as much publicity. Most people hate math.
Who needs to do "integrate 1/log(x)" in a website?
or this one (the utility is questionable, but it's the kind of derived data that makes WA "computational")

http://www91.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+India*p...
Ask HN: Can Google be replaced?
First Cuil, and now Wolfram Alpha. Google is still the dominant search engine, and it appears it will stay that way for a long time.

Do you think Google could be replaced?
Am I the only one who couldn't even select the resulting text? No good
Why should it ever be acceptable for someone to sit down in the morning to a machine with 4GB+ RAM and have things like a volume OSD take tens of painful seconds to swap in because the night before the machine ran 'updatedb' and the system decided to swap out a few bits of "unused program memory" with a useless cache of the entire disk index?
Stop comparing Wolfram|Alpha to Google! When did Wolfram ever say Wolfram|Alpha was supposed to be anything like Google?
it could go either way but in general x seconds after reading it (YMMV) and judging it HN worthy. i have found submitting stories prior to reading them, or even knowing that they exist, to be an inferior method.
Storage
StorageMart is a family-run business operated by the Burnam family.
Fiat Grande Punto in India – The Car to Wait For
it kind of feels to me like this author willingly jumps into the exact same snake pit he's accusing wolfram and other journalists of falling into.

wolfram alpha isn't a google killer. but to expect any small company to somehow or another come up with a fully functional and completely superior-in-every-way product, and to get it right on the first try, is naive at best.

google has been at search for years and years. wolfram might develop into something that gives google a run. but to expect it to be a deux ex machina, catching up to google's more than a decade of development and billions of dollars sunk after only a year or two's worth of development, is fairly stupid.
Copyrights protect original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Copyright protection also extends to derivative works. If a new work is transformative when compared to a parent work, the child work is not considered derivative. In that case copyright doesn't extend to the child work. In the opposite case the opposite would be true.

So the issue is whether an algorithm implementation is transformative when compared to the pseudocode.

The answer to your main question is fact specific. Each case is different and a court of law will look at the specific facts and make a ruling.

Talk to a lawyer for counsel that relates to your specific facts.
On the other hand, try "4.7L/100km to mpg" in both. Alpha understands the question and reformats it nicely but then doesn't calculate the answer. Google just gives the answer.
Twisted Python comes with its own "twistd" script to daemonize a Twisted application. Sure, not every Python daemon is written in Twisted, but most daemons talk to a TCP, UDP, or Unix socket for something, which means Twisted is a tool you're likely to be evaluating anyway.
This is very nice. It has helped to make the storage mechanism in particular clearer to me, but also some of the nomenclature used when working with Git — tree, blob etc.
Richard Stevens's "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" has a chapter dedicated to how to write well-behaved daemons. The book is a great investment if you are doing any kind of UNIX programming; I highly recommend it.
“If you get to thirty and you still think persuasion is about making a logical argument, you have already lost”

I feel this kind of advice, that comes in many variations, has one major pitfall: you need to do more than make a logical argument, but often you still need the logical argument. People smell bullshit a mile away and get properly annoyed when someone tries to sell them some.
Lookit, it's just a calculator. It's not a search engine. The phrase "computational engine" dresses up the former as the latter.

That said, it's a badass calculator and with some guided navigation, it could be really helpful. Mortgage refinancing, crazy sports stats, economic indicators, healthcare costs - anything that bloggers graph, Wolfram|Alpha has the ability to be really, really useful for. Wouldn't you like to tweak Nate Silver's assumptions and see what would happen? Wouldn't you like to be able to see if you could run a regression analysis to outwit PECOTA? You could wonk off with Ezra Klein to see which healthcare cost reduction opportunities would have the biggest impact on the deficit. And that's just off the top of my head.

It's going to be the best new tool for educated and interesting commentary since RedLasso, and no one will DMCA it to death.
For some queries, Wolfram Alpha is excellent. As mentioned in other comments, Wolfram's marketing sucks not the search engine.

Like all potentially disruptive products, it meets the needs of a particular niche well, For example, try "population density" in W-A and Google. Be sure to click on the "More" links to expand W-A's results. Amazing.

Over time Google may have a problem. I'm using Twitter for real-time search, W-A where it's strong, and even using Live.com when Google doesn't return meaningful results.
Wolfram Alpha is much more interesting to me than Google was when it came out (all Google had going for it originally was that it had no ads). Its calculating abilities are also more impressive than Google's Calculator feature has been at any point in time.

Wolfram Alpha will benefit from strategies that every other startup uses--getting as many users as possible, monitoring what users appear to need, and adding algorithms and data to meet the needs of their most popular queries.

I think Wolfram Research is hotter than Google right now.
"Having money, a depreciating asset, forces everyone into being a speculator. You have to make prophecies"

You're exactl yright. Perhaps this is why people are almost asking to be creamed on their finances. The classic condition for stress is having to do sth and not being able to do it. People who have spent tens of years doing "economics" are none the wiser for it, their forecasts are about as correct as those of a bunch of taxidrivers: Zero, no statistical significance. And still everybody must do it or, even worse, judge the ability of others to do it. No wonder the snakes thrive. In my experience, people who are blunt and truthful to clients have a really hard time to get heard.
This is a very naive (or doctrinaire) view. Please read one of the canonical value investing books, or Cunningham's book of excerpts from Berkshire Hathaway's annual letters by the chairman. For a more scientifically minded angle to this topic, please see Didier Sornette's "Why stock markets crash" (PUP 2003). Price and value are two different things, at least in my representation of the world...
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“Power unexercised is pointless”

Hopefully Pakistan doesn't feel that way about its nuclear arsenal.

I found that example perplexing. He puts the company into liquidation without discussing it with the other shareholders first. Why is this a good thing?
Ask HN: upd to http
Google usually helps me find these types of questions, but nothing is turning up. So I thought I'd throw this question out.

I need to get a UDP packet to HTTP (on my shared webhost) UPD because a small microcontroller (low cost sensor) generates the packet. To HTTP because my webhost doesn't allow socket connections beside port 80.

I'm using a home server right now to catch the UDP packet and then pass along the data to the webhost over HTTP. But can't use that long term.. Any web service available for this, or some tips?

Trying to keep things cheap and simple for this side project.
it works if you match the ratio (i.e. 100km/4.7L : m/g) but it probably should understand that input and maybe have the result as blah^-1
This is great. Even though it wasn't just for me, I offer my gratitude: thank you.
vimtutor

No one can do your job for you.
My tutorial on de-anonymizing data published by Lendingclub might be useful: http://33bits.org/2008/11/12/57/
Stanford iTunes U class at 1 million downloads
A tutorial on de-anonymizing data published by Lending Club
pg submitted Wolfram's announcement of Mathematica 7 a few months ago, and believes in launching early and then iteratively improving the product. I think he might have been sarcastic.

I think Wolfram really does want as many users as possible. This is a type of search engine, not an online version of Mathematica. Students may stay for the step-by-step solutions to many types of math problems, but statistics on how real people use and seek to benefit from such a product are what Wolfram must really be after.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369056
without the hype, wolfram alpha would have been a sidenote in history that noone heard about
This is from a few months ago, but in the light of the news about Mint considering selling anonymized customer data, I thought it might be useful as a cautionary tale.
Death of the newspaper and rebirth of news
See also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/24/

If anyone comes out with a website that purports to provide quick access to information, it'll inevitably be compared to Google (or Yahoo, or Live Search, or whatever comes next). Slate's comparison is actually even pretty close; the author took the examples provided and tweaked them slightly.

For example, "running 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" provides an answer, but "golfing 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" doesn't. I think that his conclusion was the most interesting part, about "the eternal problem for any wannabe Google competitor[: ...] Google can easily co-opt such improvements -- and suddenly everyone's got a better Google."
i've been using it for plotting/calculations while learninating some subjects. i like it because the interface is elegant compared to say my TI-89 and even Mathematica with its ugly square brackets
Honestly, were you expecting otherwise?

The kind of guy who would sincerely reply to your post would not have written the original article in the first place. Intellectual honesty does not seem to be one of his priorities.

Disappointing, but not surprising given the things I've seen written about him.
The best time to submit a story?

When you have something relevant and interesting to share!

(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Tell HN: My group just finished our short animation. Thoughts?
Completed for CNM190 at UC Berkeley.
As many have said, you don't need a PhD to publish - it is quite routine for people to publish papers while they are working towards their PhD. In some countries your thesis actually consists of submitting these papers that you have published to a research committee in order to get a PhD.

If you believe you can make a genuine contribution to a field, you need to pick a candidate publication, read it to understand its style convention, follow the "Instructions to Authors" religiously and pay the page charges (where appropriate). In your paper you need to link what you present to research that has been published before - think of science as case law - it builds up iteratively. By basing your work on previously peer-reviewed publications you are helping your reviewers see that you are working on solid ground.

Most editors will screen arrant nonsense ("I can prove Einstein was wrong"), but are likely to pass reasonable material to a review panel irrespective of any qualifications of the authors.

The real question is why you would want to. Generally being published in a peer-reviewed journal is only of real value to academics, because they are rated depending on their publication and citation rates. Otherwise, if you can anything interesting to say you can just publish it on a paper server (eg. arXiv as mentioned in another comment).
Anyone able to help with these questions:

What are external events?

What is going on with Dawkins being out-of-body and able to influence the world?

How did Dawkins get from the date of his death to a simulation in the future? Is it because he was at the moment they've copied in their time bubble?
"Everybody is lying to you
[...]
Our stock experts, David and Tom Gardner, avoid fish tales. These are two straight shooters who take their big catches in stride and don't lament the ones that got away."

Right...
Target Job Applications
I recall having an email conversation with him about PHP vs his TCL home grown stack years ago. His response said only amateurs would use PHP (Are Facebook and Yahoo amateurs?).

Anyway I use Rails now and he long ago lost my respect for being too narcissistic and closed minded.
I concur with plinkplonk. Spending $1000 a month I would say would be more or less a plush life even in Bangalore. Unless you eat out at places where the bill comes to $20 a person.

Additionally you also need to factor out that you would be a foreigner and at times locals hike their prices and you might not get fair deals.

You would get best available non-commercial broadband with unlimited download limit for < $20

I think it is how comfortable are you going lean. When we ran out of funds in our start-up I taught my co-founder to go lean - he was pleased at the end of the saga how he could actually live healthy & happy with very minimal cash. $300 is very good for start-up founders ensuring a calm place to stay & occasional business meetings too.
Much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
Somehow I don't think Wikipedia would sue you for implementing their pseudocode.
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this is my solution, comments?

du -s * 2>/dev/null | sort -n | cut -f2 | xargs du -sh 2>/dev/null
In an age where those things already exist, it's very, very difficult to bootstrap.
Even in an urban setting it is definitely feasible to lead a respectable life - no need to beg/ borrow.

Jyothi, exactly what is your idea of leading a respectable life? If one can subsist without having to beg, that is considered leading a respectable life?

By the way, have you had a chance to walk around construction sites in Bangalore and talk to the workers? I can't claim that I'm an expert in those matters; but here are some observations:

These workers earn more than $2 a day. But they don't have a proper roof over their heads. IMO, they live under horrible conditions. Go to any large construction site and find where the workers live.
Since you know its useless, why not just turn off the updatedb cron job?
Read the article. The author compared the two, so it's fair that the poster did too.

And you'd have to be a fanboy or an idiot to NOT compare Google to W|A. They both do the same thing, only W|A doesn't do it very well. I know since I've used them both.
i think they are missing the point. the vision that Wolfram has for this service is probably not found in the product currently. but you can't get very advanced things if

1. you don't actually shoot for it
2. you don't have a solid foundation on the basics
3. you don't have lots of people testing your service

you're not going to get something great by just aiming because the problem space for this kind of thing is massive. by shooting first you can get a better aim

i suspect the hyping for it was more for #3 than people think

from this perspective i find the data argument weird because data is easy. comparing it to Google is also weird because currently Wolfram Alpha is clearly not an internet search engine in any caliber
Perhaps one should add that the "apprenticeship" model would represent the ideal. If all goes well, it should then bloom into full research partnership towards the end and after. But again, that's the ideal.

As others have said already, your field matters a lot. If you try to publish in a "softer" field, say history or economics, politics and outer markers count for a lot. If you are in mathematics, there should be zero problem if you are good. Alternatively, if you are in a field where success can be measured concretely, say in engineering, you should also have less difficulties. Good luck, whether you go for PhD or not!
Ethos, Pathos, Logos.

Remember that.

Appeal to authority is only a logical fallacy -- it is, on the other hand, sound persuasive advice.

Appeal to emotion is only a logical fallacy -- it is, on the other hand, a valuable persuasive tool in many situations.

Appeal to logic is, therefore, only part of the equation.
Given its market share, I don't think that Google could be replaced ; instead - if it happens - it would be rendered obsolete by a new paradigm for finding data.