skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work for iServer (later bought by Verio; in full-disclosure, I'm now a contractor for Verio). I remember one time the city had shifted their output by 90° (or something like that...this was years ago).

Our datacenter UPS was tied right into the 3-phase output and didn't recognize that the power was still flowing from the city. The diesel engines fired up and started powering the datacenter (redundantly). When the gas ran out a few hours later, everything started shutting down. It was terrible. Hundreds of servers with 600-800+ days uptime all went down and stayed down for hours. We were shuttling people from the office down to the datacenter to fsck and bring machines back up. It was a long night and long next week issuing credits to customers who had lost data.

Today I've got servers with Verio, Bluehost, and LayeredTech. They've all been great for the most part, but none of them have been near perfect. I know that most hosting companies I've worked for or dealt with put uptime near the top of their list of priorities because they know it's an easily measured number people bank on. I'm sure RS will get their act together and be as solid as they've typically been in the past.
Welcome to Your Quarter Life Crisis
TangoCMS 2.3 Dolphin launched - another PHP/MYSQL CMS competing with the sharks
Unfortunately this question, at this time in our understanding of neuroscience, is so ill-posed that the only response [1] this neuroscientist-in-training can give (in the 2 minutes I have allotted to the task) is to agree with Joshu [2] and shout, "MU!"

---------

[1] Well, okay, the only response that I find both cogent and fun to write.

[2] http://peterspearls.com.au/mu.htm
I know nothing about hosting but how much more expensive can running fully redundant be? Backups available at a separate physical location ready to go online incase A goes offline? I guess the question is how much can businesses afford to pay.

Has anyone done the math to see income lost per hour offline?
(I'm pretty sure Twitter makes money for being offline. heh)
At first, I was flabbergasted at the awesomeness here: "Oh my God!" I thought, "You could order pizza from any terminal. Ohh! You could even use a mobile terminal client to order pizza from your CELL PHONE! HOW NOVEL!"

Yeah... I slapped my forehead, too.
were there any?
It is b.s., but the good news is that you can often get a credit annually for whatever percentage they're down from their SLA (I don't know if RS does this).

Before you buy from a web host, check their SLA and ask how they cover SLA breaches. Don't do business with a company that won't put their money where their claims are.
thanks for the good laugh :D
except this is much faster, and way geekier.
It easy to answer. The existence of sweatshops as a culture means that companies that wish to treat employees better cannot compete with such low overhead. This is why there are no better options. No viable and humane solution can be reached while such poor working conditions are allowed.
Have a read of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and you'll be wondering even more.

I'm not a vegetarian or vegan (meat is too tasty), but that book in many ways changed how I shop for food.
The profit from "green" energy needs to exceed the interest on the loan it takes to build it. Today the loans are still slightly more costly than the profit. It's like 5.9% profit vs 6% cost of a loan. The math get's complex as you need to take into account inflation, the rate of depreciation of your assets, and taxes.

This magnifies the amount of wind farm you can build today. If you had a billion and wanted to donate it to "clean energy" then you could get a loan for 5 billion in wind farms and use your billion to make up the difference. By the time the loan was paid off you would still have some money, but far less than if you had invested it well.

If on the other hand you a billion dollars and built a wind farm without borrowing money then you can keep expanding indefinitely. You would still have less profit but there would be little risk.

PS: With subsidy it is profitable today which is why we are building so many wind farms, but that's just the government handing out money.
Oh ok. Come back in a week with your site that parallels SO in features and activity then.

And "I'm too busy working on other projects" doesn't count as an excuse.
Genuine question here. I've heard these stories before (and lived through one at a company, but under very different circumstances), and it always amazes me that anyone would let a generator run out of diesel. How can that happen? I understand the fuel tanks on these things are enormous and you can't just run to QT and get a couple gallons to tide you over, but they had to have been filled by SOMETHING initially, right? How can it be that whatever that was, can't be repeated?

Do HA plans not cover this contingency? Do they not specify that someone immediately calls a fuel truck the SECOND the generator kicks on?
Sure, it's not the whole picture. The problem is that the additional parts of the picture are more like "details" than like "exceptions." Lots of people have been looking for many years for ways to hack around the issue of quantity, and nobody has come up with anything that fundamentally changes the equation. How many people lose weight on the Atkins diet? Anyone who sticks with it. How many people lose weight on a vegetarian diet based on beans and whole grains? Anyone who sticks with it.

It just turns out to be really, really, really freakin' hard to do that, and there are any number of fascinating little details you can explore to avoid facing up to that basic truth. Really, I think we're just too hard on ourselves. I think we'd make a lot of progress if we'd just admit that we have a problem saying no. I'll be honest about my problem with food: right now I'm almost ten pounds heavier than when I was in my best shape, which probably means twenty pounds over my ideal weight. I got injured playing sports, couldn't exercise much for two months, got depressed, and gained ten pounds. Now I'm in the process of taking it off. How much I eat is roughly a function of how optimistic I feel about my life, so my weight wanders up and down within a fifteen pound range. (However, the top of this range is 25 pounds less than I weighed ten years ago, so it's not like I haven't made any progress.)

I know exactly what I need to do to get in the best shape of my life by October, without taking any time away from my other priorities. Maybe it will happen, but the smart money says no. This isn't a problem of nutrition or exercise physiology -- those problems are solved. It's a problem of psychology. The only reason people deny it is because they're ashamed that they aren't in complete control of themselves.
well if its fully redundant, it'd be 2x as much.

Personally I think, the best bet is to just have a backup on Amazon. Sure its not as fast as switching to another dedicated server, but its just something to have in case of emergency, users can afford to have the page take an extra ms to load.
The more redundant you are the more it costs. And even with redundant network routes, power distribution, backup generators there always seems to be an undiscovered SPOF left.

Murphey's Law is the Law of the Universe ;)

One hosting provider I used, I forget who, had redundant everything, except some part of the power switching to the UPSs. During a regular UPS maintenance test it failed and half their datacenter went dark.
Still very cool though, thanks for the link.
It's not my body that likes blood sugar, it's my brain.

And, when I say "my brain likes blood sugar", I mean that it's happy when I'm grazing on bread-like carbs, which produce glucose, not sucrose/fructose/etc per se.
I was very close to doing this (for Pizza Hotline) for my IEEE Student Branch, but I was pretty sure I'd forget to cancel it for a holiday some time, so I never did.
Don't listen to the Plain Dealer. Aggregate my content, or my site is toast.
Google Wave Is Too Hard: I tried to put Wave on my site
I don't think it would too hard to categorize in the manner you are suggesting but that would take away the leverage users have over what gets to be on the front page. I am not sure of this but submitters karma points may have something to do with how many up votes are required before it lands on the front page. If that is true, considering that you high karma may you shouldn't submit those stories.
There's no doubt access to a large audience helped get some publicity and users early on. But to be fair, Stack Overflow worked well and was useful on day one. We've seen startups basically fold on the first day when things don't go smoothly. The site crumbles under load. There's no content on a user-generated-content site. Maybe the thing flat out doesn't work as advertised. Some of them eventually overcome these problems only to be ridiculed for it over the next year. The Stack Overflow launch was handled incredibly well. I would attribute their success to much more than the size of their audience.
Why would they do this? Seems like any money flowing into the economy would be a good thing.
A lengthy informative article that might not get the reading it deserves.

Owning a hotel resort has been a dream job of sorts and with that in mind I was surprised to read how The Four Seasons works, sounds smart...

This might surprise even its longtime guests,
but Four Seasons — the company, that is — doesn’t
own hotels. It operates them on behalf of real
estate owners and developers, who typically call
this office in Toronto with nothing but a patch of
land and a checkbook. Four Seasons participates in
the design of the property and runs it, with nearly
total control over every aspect of the operation,
from the number of bell staff to the thread count of
the sheets.

But now owners are stuck with costly hotels they own but can't fully control and don't know how to value.
This just doesn't seem to be empirically true. When I took on demanding jobs I found that I needed to exercise more as I'd need to concentrate for longer stretches of time.

The first position that I took out of college was a fairly demanding (in a good way) and challenging position. At the time I was overweight and began experiencing some early stage diabetes symptoms (constant thirst, fatigue). I've found that I'd want to do more work but lacked the energy. Losing weight and developing a habit of exercise greatly changed that and I have been able to not only work longer hours, but to more productive when working same hours.

Some of the most "hard core" entrepreneurs I know specifically make a point of exercising, even if they do nothing else besides work the entire day.

I also wonder if there any other needs that, if neglected, greatly impact immediate performance (in addition to just being a sort of "deficit spending" in the long term): e.g. if one is an extrovert and is left with no time for social/group interaction is their performance degraded as well (and conversely if an introvert spends all of his time working in a high-interruption open office environment)?
Well, in this case because the power never went out (the UPS only thought it did), none of our usual "the freakin' power is out—send out the diesel trucks and keep the tank full" alarms went off.

It was truly an unexpected case (which was quickly fixed in the UPS hardware), but you know, life is one unexpected case after another, often coming in waves and in bizarre combinations. I don't believe in 100% uptime anymore :)
My thinking was, if they already own a datacenter in another location, why not add another floor? Obviously it's not cheap but is it really 2x? If you're big enough, you don't have to hire double the staff or buy double the resources since you already have them.
Give 13 years old a chance and you'll be amazed at what they can do. It's one thing I'm really not happy about western society: forces teens to be kids until about 20.

AFAIK, physical mental development ends around 9. After that it's only education which decides if you're mature enough at 12 or at 30.
Anyone else find it ironic that this appears the same day as the "Sacrifice your health for your startup" submission? ;)
Chris Hoff's "Metastructure" and the Intercloud
Apple Will Never Replace Darwin With Linux
Re: the China study (of which all I know is what I just read on Wikipedia).

I don't want to tell you what to believe, but for the record the correct scientific measure for morbidity is "all-cause" mortality. For example, suppose I say to you that eating M&Ms halves your chance of death from liver cancer. Your response should be "What are my overall chances of dying"? For example, while it halves your chance of death from liver cancer, maybe it doubles your chance of death from pancreatic cancer. It is not enough to say that diet X "lowers the instance of Western diseases" - the realy question is, does it genuinely stop you from dying. Of anything.

Once you have shown that an environmental factor is indeed correlated with a reduction in all-cause mortality, then the next thing to do is try to prove causation (since we all know correlation is not causation). For example if you told me that the average life expectancy in China is 100 and in the west it is 70, I would say "so if you parachute a bunch of Westerners in China, would they live to be 100?". It may be that Caucasians, exposed to the "Western Diet" for millenia, are actually well adapted to it.

These are very hard questions to answer to a high level of scientific confidence. I also don't like the implication, as reported in Wikipedia, that if lots of animal protein is bad for you, 0 is bound to be better. Every single substance known to man has a poisonous dose and a safe dose. There's a safe dose for arsenic. The burden of proof to say that 0 of something is meaningfully safest is very high.

I'll give you a well-researched example. Mercury is a neurotoxin. In certain quantities it causes terrible mental decline. There is mercury in fish, mainly in the fish that are high up the food chain (eg. swordfish, marlin, the big tunas etc). So, in the US it is standard to advise pregnant women not to eat fish, so as to avoid exposing the foetus to significant levels of mercury, which from experience with industrial workers can cause low IQ levels and other problems.

You would think that is cut and dry? It turns out that if you go and study Pacific Islander populations where all they eat (three meals, 7 days a week) is fish, then there's nothing wrong with their kids.

Why? I don't know. The point is that even with one single chemical compound and one well-known effect, it is really hard to understand what goes on inside the body. So doing so when you have something as complicated as nutrition on one hand, and longevity on the other, is really really hard to do, and in principle I distrust anybody who claims to have a simple answer.

I mention all this because you seem to have good motives and say you are building a business on this. I suggest you look a bit further than one or two best-seller books before you commit yourself.
Rackspace policy is obviously better since they charge a lot more.

My host has:

If Liquid Web is or is not directly responsible for
causing the downtime, the customer will receive a
credit for 10 times ( 1,000% ) the actual amount of
downtime. This means that if your server is unreachable
for 1 hour (beyond the 0.0% allowed), you will receive
10 hours of credit.

Rackspace has:

Rackspace Guaranty: We will credit your account 5% of
the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of network
downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the
affected server.
Are... are you a politician?

So if the alternative to a sweatshop is homelessness and starvation that's better? How does that help people "see past [their] present situation"? What does that even mean?

Have you even been to China? Unless you have family or friends to support you the only alternative to employment is starvation or crime.

I fail to understand how making someone unemployed will do anything BUT keep costs down(among other things).

For some reason people think sweatshops are an awful thing, compared to working for MicroSoft sure.

Look at Victorian Britain. Yes they had sweatshops filled with women and children, who without the work would have starved(to death). Never mind the affordable goods that those factories produced.
The serving size for peanut butter is also around 2T (~30g) so that 2g of sugar is basically going to double the sugar content of the serving...
> Sweatshops are unacceptable even if no better alternative currently exists.

So, you want the poorest people in the world to have a worse life, now, because it'll make you happier about the state of the world? You're asking them to give something up. The worst off people in the world should sacrifice for you?
yes, your brain needs sugar to function - one of the reasons I find that low-carb diets are awful for my productivity - my brain shuts down
If you're living on carbs that's not good for you either
You don't live longer on those diets, it just seems longer.
i have to admit - i don't think i would ever want to retire if i could help it. it would be much too boring, i feel. even if it means being a part-time cashier somewhere, as long as i'm able.
If you are an industrious person you'll get bored an wind up working on another project anyway. better to save money so that you can take mini-retirements in between major career/project shifts. either that or plan on retiring in a country with a cheap standard of living.
I changed it from not-for-profit to commercial. It's still free for everyone to bid, with an optional $9 seat upgrade which moves you to the head of the line so you can bid sooner.

My lawyer says that since bidding is free and the payment is optional and only changes your position on the waiting list I should be okay.
Ray Ozzie calls Google’s Wave nice but too complex
I was going to say that it didn't seem like much food, especially that salad at lunch and itsy bitsy afternoon snack. I'm a skinny kid and I have to eat waaaay more than that to keep my weight.
That doesn't factor in peering, Google is in a ton of data centers and almost every major ISP peers with them (they'd be stupid not to with all the outgoing traffic going to them).

Either way the Credit Suisse estimate was way off.
I've changed it to be very clear instead of suggesting future goals (such as one car per day) and I like it better this way. There's no more donations either, now it's a simple auction service with free bidding - and a $9 option for impatient folks who would rather bid in the next auction than wait their turn.
I foresee a sharp drop in July profits... unless they weasel out of it by differentiating between "uptime" (i.e., does the CPU have power) and "reachability" (i.e., "Our network died! Sorry about that, but no soup for you").
If you're going to use one of these terminal pizza ordering apps, do yourself a favor and make sure the damn thing isn't sending your credit card number over the Internet in plaintext. I know one of the pizza orderer things that made headlines a while ago did.
This won't change anything. Gold farmers already evade China's national firewall in order to access international game servers.

Most of the currency the farmers sell is stolen from hacked accounts obtained by malware that the farmers actively spread for the express purpose of hijacking in-game currency. The rest is obtained by bots that they run en masse which really mess up the game for everyone else.

Do you really think they'd sit there for 14 hours a day pounding away at buttons, earn their gold/gil/whatever legit, and sell the fruits of their labors? No way.
Mel was a requirements driven programmer that had the luxury of only having to write code for one platform at a time. None of his code as described sounds possible to abstract and maintain across platforms. I'm going to guess he evolved towards hardware engineering rather than software engineering.
Yeah but 3g is < 10% of the 40g of recommended sugar in a day and way less then the 50g in a Snickers bar.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_daily_recommended_inta...
Sean Ross stops maintaining Mudballs
Important to the author of the story: Steve + Apple are BFF again.

Less important: a man has overcome the worst of his medical problems and is trying to get his life back together so he can keep doing the things he loves and be with his family.
Lots of MP3 players lately have FM tuners included. It's pretty head-scratching that Apple omitted radio from the iPod line.
Please review my Startup: PacsDrive - Medical Image Archiving
http://www.pacsdrive.com

Medical imaging is not like the JPGs you shoot with your camera. It uses a specialized format and transfer protocol called DICOM. DICOM compatible backup systems cost a lot of money ($25k on the low end, or $3 per exam).

We've created a cloud service that is more cost effective for small to medium sized health care providers and gives the simplicity only the web can offer.

We applied to the summer round for YComb, but I pulled the application because I felt we weren't quite ready. We're hoping PG and co will take a look later this year.

What do you think?
oh, and serious cardio should combat the weight gain you speak of
I suggest you actually read The China Study b/c it addresses your concerns... I think you'll be satisfied with the level of scientific rigor used.
I'm not the Mel in the story, but yea you've got me pegged.
You don't have to give up eating delicious things. The original author does go extreme in not eating any meat, when in many cases meats are actually healthier than vegetable products (e.g. properly prepared chicken vs. deep fried potato fries or HFCS containing products). I'd probably wager that in many cases it's the vegetable products (sugars, white rice, white flour, HFCS, vegetable oil) that are the worst offenders.

I'd wager to say that fast food/chain restaurant food is not only less healthy, but is also less delicious. E.g. Thai Green Curry chicken with brown rice seems to be a lot more delicious than a meal at Denny's (and is actually cheaper).

(I'll address the exercise issue -- including the original authors' mistakes in a separate -- in a separate comment).
PG, you're a great entrepreneur, but a terrible dietician.

You should eat lots of fruits and vegetables, a reasonable number of calories, and lean meats.

The best thing to do if you have a pair of co-founders living together is get a CostCo membership and eat every single meal at home.

Buy $2/lb chicken and ground turkey, and huge cartons of Spring Mix and other vegetables. Buy a huge sack of rice for $20 and a huge bag of flour as well. Buy the cheapest of fruits - oranges and apples - but buy them by the case.

You can eat a balanced diet for just slightly more than rice and beans, feel better, and be more productive.
Cheers! May this source of so much spam be offline for 150 years.
Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now
The thing I most want from eclipse is the ability to remove a folder from the project import. The combination of django requiring certain things to be under media, and eclipse's lack of support for this leaves me with very slow refreshes.
Yes, that's roughly my thinking. Everyone has some part of the puzzle, but nobody has been able to put it together. My goal is to find a way to combine all the parts of the puzzle.
I visited Savvis hosting facility several years ago and they had redundant generators (each about ths size of my two car garage), redundant network connections (some high-level peerage), two separate power lines from isolated parts of the grid, and at least two separate certified diesel suppliers. Oh, and VESD fire detection and grate-type floors to help with the cooling.

And I am sure a cost to match.
And Gell-Mann seems like the perfect "straight-man" for him.
You're right, I hadn't considered that. Googles agenda does closely match my own, but not always - their record in china doesn't suit me at all. Though I'm no apple fan at least they've never helped put someone innocent in jail.