skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All these other questions are dependent on context and out of scope of the argument.

The article argument in a nutshell is that validating email is hard, so don't bother, in fact, let users submit whatever they want including javascript. Then just check for @ and send it off to your next parser in the chain, in fact get lots of 3rd party parsers for misc features and send data to them first. spend effort fixing autocomplete so users can enter data easier that you will automatically accept. I'm sure this can only improve data quality...

I can imagine that wanting to know all the stupid shit your users submit as an email is the correct solution in certain contexts, but for a majority of cases, this article is wrong in everything that it suggests. Admittedly, there is very little context given.

Perhaps the context is "I don't care about security of my users or my services, and I will run whatever 3P code on my backend that appears to do the job of making a webpage look spiffy and easy to use. Once I have 10 Million (unverified) users, you sell your spaghetti factory and it's no longer your problem."

After all that, he recommends not letting people use software without a validated email address. Too bad he never bothers saying how he would get to that point, only how he would avoid doing to work.
Did they call his day phone or his night phone?
agreed. looks like using homeless people as props in a story is only interesting when that story is not happening in the real world.
The biggest deal with doing hosting is not even the server.

It's a) getting customers but actually even more important b) supporting those customers. c) A good online site to take care of the majority of the issues that come up. d) "c" helps keep down the "rtfm" type calls.

The "iron" and everything else is fairly easy.

So a hosting company is really people if you can solve the people problem you can definitely make money in hosting. Despite what Marco says the average retail hosting customer is not looking to switch their hosting if they get "good enough" service. Most don't even know that there site is down. (They do know when their email is not working of course because that they are constantly checking).
I don't think it's complicated either, but it's still (at first) unintuitive.

Interesting things tend to happen when you have forces that cancel/counteract each other (e.g., spinning a bucket of water over your head, dropping a magnet in a metal pipe)
What do you mean about multiplying by 2.3?
I just installed 4.3 and tried running a directx9 program on XP with 3d acceleration and it caused the VM screen to flicker and not display any content.

I hope Vbox will catch up with VMware player on 3d acceleration soon.
Ask HN: how to java+heroku+psql+rest?
I'm trying to build a set of REST Web Services to be consumed from 2 apps I'm working on (js and mobile clients)

I have followed some guides and tutorials but none of them actually worked -- even the official templates-apps provided by heroku wont't work.

Do you know where to find some good references?
yes, great web design without subservience to powerful interests would be ideal.
The problem isn't making a commercial business model around open source, but doing so in a way that has the opportunity to achieve the levels of return VCs expect.

IMHO the best returns in open source don't come from early monetization, but from growing a community so much that the open source product's brand value becomes attractive to the largest enterprise-focused service organizations like IBM, Oracle, RedHat, etc. IMHO this is basically the end-game that MongoDB is gunning for.

Charging for a premium product early on when you instead angle for owning a large chunk of major category of software globally like webservers is naïve.

Owning the brand of a major du jour technology keeps big enterprise service orgs top of mind with CIOs and CTOs.
Wireless? Rejecting/accepting Google Now? Non-gmail email accounts?

I'm trying to think back to when I set up my dad's phone and my own phone. Certainly wasn't 1. Create Google account 2. Done.

I don't think Apple did it any better though. It all sucks in different ways.
I bet Dave would take a call from Marissa Mayer.

Yahoo are pretty good at paying over the odds for mutton dressed as lamb.
Actually, the recorded literacy rate is 86% in the USA[0].
The only number I can find for numeracy is this study [1], and depending on whether 'level 1' is considered numerate, it seems to show that between 5% and 20% of the US population is innumerate.

[0] - http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-...
[1] - http://skills.oecd.org/documents/SkillsOutlook_2013_Chapter2..., p75
"there’s effectively no barrier to entry"

Made this point in another comment but want to stress the biggest barrier to entry is being able to provide customer support and handling the "rtfm" type calls. So it's a people problem. In the sense that you could start doing hosting as one individual but at a certain point you'd have to hire someone to take care of the support calls that a larger customer base (than one person can handle) would require.
Seriously take a look at Sentry[1]. It supports just about every major language out there, is open source and used on some very large web properties (disqus, which powers comments for cnn.com amongst others), and is just generally awesome software. If you don't want to set it up yourself, use their hosted version[2].

If you are a .net / C# guy check out their csharp raven client[3]. Raven is the client to sentry which automatically sends all exceptions.

[1] https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

[2] https://getsentry.com/welcome

[3] https://github.com/getsentry/raven-csharp
I've liked Shiller's opinions and seen them before, and agree with them. Just because it makes a "terrible investment" however doesn't mean it's a terrible thing to do. You look at your home as an essential element of life (shelter) and do the math for rent vs. buy, but you don't worry about making a huge return from it.

Use other investment vehicles for growing capital.
Thanks Justin. Looks like we weren't able to find your address the first time around. Email me and we'll get some skittles + swag sent your way :)
I've been with Media3 Webhosting since 1999 for all my clients ( mainly for Coldfusion Hosting ) and the great thing about them is I can get a live person within a minute to a few minutes, any time.
Well, at some point you're down to the addresses of known murderers, at which point I don't think you'd want to sub-divide any further. "Franky's house is fine, just don't go in the basement".
Interesting overview of data protection and privacy laws in the Middle East
While we're on the topic, this page is heavily astroturfed like those of many large companies. A number of sockpuppets are implicated in the page's history. I enjoyed contributions by "ParsonsRep" [1] which aren't sneaky at all, most edits signed "(I AM AFFILIATED WITH GODADDY.COM)".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsR...
The original key was revoked by the CA. Lavabit couldn't operate with the original key even if they wanted to.
It is not black and white, just not the right shade of gray.
New smartphone device can make a plain bowl of rice taste like curry
Anonymous Pro: a programming font with style
you should probably prepare for the worst.
developed square miles are certainly increasing, developed land remains less than 1% of land that can be developed easily, and population is tapering.
> Do you happen to know why they don't and what do they use?

Google originally used a modified version of Apache (and, as you have linked to, contributed a module to it), but my understanding is the Google Web Server is now so far removed from Apache it bears virtually no resemblance to it.
In my city (Christchurch, New Zealand), renting is more expensive than mortgage repayments for an equivalent house. I don't see how renting could be a good idea in this case.

That said, I recognize that different cities have different conditions, and what makes sense in one city might not make sense in another.
Translation: Path stole 20 million e-mail addresses from iOS and Android address books and spammed them.
I cannot tell from their website what this company does. (Other than that it might be a Facebook clone.)
Did you not read rayiner's link? There's a big graph labelled "Tablet Web Browsing Battery Life" with the MBA in it.
After looking into it, angular seems to throw an error if two directives ask for an isolate scope.
Ultimate CDN Price calculator - Open Source
Yes, but that's also true of purchasing a house. Just because the price might not appreciate over the long term doesn't mean it's a loss.
So I've applied a couple of times and didn't get in. Since then I've actually taken a bunch of time off from startups, work etc. One thing that's been made clear is that the startups I was involved in at the time wouldn't have succeeded even if we did get into YC. My co-founder was not the right person and we were doomed to fail from the start.

I am back into creating a start up with a cofounder that works perfectly with me. We use to work together a long time ago and everything just feels a lot easier/right this time round. We also have enough funding for a year to get this business to be self sustainable.

I'd like to think our chances of getting into YC are very high now but we won't be applying. I guess my point is that for everyone that applies and doesn't get in, don't worry about it and don't change your plans! If you are with the right person and have solid evidence that your business has potential, then whether you are in YC or not won't change things.

There is a steep learning curve to this whole startup thing and it seems to me that everyone is required to make a lot of the same mistakes until something just clicks in your brain. I can't guarantee that my current startup will be a success but the chances are ridiculously higher than ever before.
I don't think Engine Yard has abandoned support. Back in April they added funding for a Rubinius developer [1]. But they did lay/move off the full-time Rubinius team, back in 2008-2009, which, as far as I know, was due to financial constraints [2] [3], not a lack of interest.

[1] https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/engine-yard-expands-support...

[2] http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/11/18/a-sad-day/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424000
Well put. Over the last few months we've come to a conclusion that we'll measure the product's success through the ability to earn a customer referral (stolen from Ecquire's Paul DeJoe). Prviously, it's been 'get fucking launched', and 'build a UI that doesn't make me want to punch my screen'.

Baby steps...
I disagree - Bytemark have been in business nearly 12 years, thousands of interesting clients, no difficult ones that I've not turned around to my way of thinking :-)

We've just built our own data centre (http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-w...), have launched our own IaaS product (http://bigv.io) and we get a lot of recommendations though as we're based in the UK we're not as big on most HN readers' radars. Not _just_ a plug, but as someone who wanted to go into video games and ended up running a hosting company, I've found it more interesting than I expected.

We still pick up business (and staff) from great hosting companies whose founders run out of steam. So seeing that happen over and over, our big challenge is to put a company structure in place where (one way or another) we don't have to make that awful "nothing will change - honest!" contractual obligation blog post. I've seen it happen over and over in the UK too - anyone remember DSVR? But also Melbourne last year, RapidSwitch, Redstation ... all beloved names with keen founders that got folded into a bigger company and gradually forgotten.

So I'm 1) trying to put in place products that will last at least another 10 years, and as we develop new ones, also have a transition plan to keep service going without ridiculous legacy maintenance 2) thinking about very long-term private ownership plans, turning it to an employee partnership, or anything else that will give new customers the assurance that we're here to stay even after Pete & me step away from it, as we will do one day. It'll be a few more years before anyone should believes us, but I think 12 years is already above average.
Watch Disney transmit sounds through touch
Compared to an average of other projects coded in C out there.

Others mentioned kernel, GNOME. Redis is nice because it is fairly self contained. It has a good set of networking code, some command parsing, storage. Kind of a happy medium.

Anyway, I didn't look in depth at understanding the semantics of every module.

Here are some more things (besides NULL check I can see that are worrisome in that particular piece of code):

* can len be out of sync with actual list length

* can list->free be defined (non null) but value wasn't allocated with an malloc perhaps

* what if an element is inserted twice in list, will list->free be called on already free-ed area

* on 64 bit machine unsigned long will be 64 bit and on 32 bit it will be 32 bit, is that problem?

Which ones do you see?

Now those are issues I see by looking at the module in isolation. But it is not quite an isolated. It is part of a large module. Sometimes there are invariants that are enforced at the input (at the system boundary) and so it is not necessary to always keep checking for NULL or validating inputs in every single internal function.

That is one good lesson I learned from Erlang. Check your inputs at the boundary then code for the "happy" path and let error result in quick and early failure. Maybe prefer a quick segfault rather than a dangling pointer or wondering later how exactly to handle NULL pointer if it is not really expected to be NULL.
The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/6057... - look at him with his big happy face, he could choose to spend his time and money in so many ways and he chooses to go and shoot elephants.

Godaddy could shit rainbows all day long and I still wouldn't want to give them any money.
More activity in the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553767
Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

We're working on solving this for static sites with BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com).

Both by giving people an instant way to get their site online, but also by making it dead easy to do typical tasks like adding Analytics or getting forms to work.
"mail server crashes"

Side note. Nothing makes someone willing to pay a new hosting company more money for the same basic low end email service than when they have the inevitable problems getting their email from their current host.

The email is a bit less of a problem now then it was years ago.

The reason?

Many people now want the email forwarded to gmail etc. As such they aren't even aware if there is a service interruption because they are getting email addressed to the gmail and the domain and they lose track of which is which. So it could be hours or even a day until they even know something is wrong. As opposed to pop or imap where they get an immediate connection error.
Unfortunately I'm unable to edit my post now because it's too old. For anyone finding this, cataflam is partially right, I had some typos but the math is the same. I stand by using total power output per day to calculate efficiencies. cataflam's right that over a 24 hour period, you could say the average output would be 210 MW. Here is the corrected version:

---

3 square miles is 7.77 square km. Just over 1 kW of sunlight falls per square meter, so I will round up and say that there are 8 GW falling on the plant total. 280 MW over 8 GW = 0.035.

So 280 MW of production is 3.5% efficient of peak irradiance.

BUT average irradiance is smaller than peak:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hydroelectric_p...

It looks like 5 kWh per m2 per day for Arizona, so that's 5 kWh per m2 times 7,700,000 sq m = 38.85 GWh per day irradiance on 7.77 sq km. Assuming the plant can put out its maximum capacity for the 18 hours it runs each day, that's 280 MW times 18 hrs = 5 GWh per day. 5 GWh over 38.85 GWh = 0.1287.

So it's operating at almost 13% efficiency of average irradiance.

That is very good, considering that they are able to store heat much more cheaply and environmentally friendly than storing electricity in batteries.

The most important thing of all is that it doesn't have to wait for innovations in photovoltaics. Anyone can buy land, set up parabolic mirrors, and tinker with forgotten heat engines like Stirling cycle engines or Tesla turbine engines that easily achieve 30, 40, 50% efficiency and approach the Carnot limit. Conversion of rotational motion from a turbine to electricity with a generator is a solved problem at 95% efficiency.

Oh and these plants can be supplemented by biomass, say biodiesel from algae or fuel pellets made of hemp. If that's too granola for the fossil fuel industry, they can also use natural gas.

In fact if you study this long enough, you find that there are only two real hurdles: energy storage and connection to the grid (made difficult because of resistance from established utilities). Generation turns out to be relatively inexpensive because there's a sea of free energy all around us. To put it in perspective, Grand Coulee dam puts out less power than the irradiance falling on the solar plant. It's just more efficient at converting the motion of falling water to electricity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hydroelectric_p...

It puts out 6.8 GW times 24 hrs = 163 GWh/day. That's 33 of these solar plants. So every 100 sq miles (260 sq km) of desert is equal to the 324 sq km of area flooded by Grand Coulee.

Solar thermal is the hydroelectric of the future and uses less land, which will only improve going forward. IMHO this will someday dwarf wind and nearly eliminate intermittency issues.
Yeah, I think often the best choice is to join the larger company. But we're talking about perceptions, which are not the same as reality
Thanks for the info! I imagine that for people reaching out who may need to establish an ongoing, anonymous, relationship with a reporter, the ability to use the same system the reporter is familiar with, but know that it will only be them viewing it, might be a useful feature.
Well, it does not sound like a very big picture goal, unless you are leaving something out. Without a big picture goal, "outstanding" success seems very unlikely.

Take care.
While I don't think that large Chinese companies like Baidu will accept bitcoin in the near term, the exchanges in China are actually booming. Chinese traders on the bitcoin forum say that it is quite easy to get state currency on and off the exchanges (much better than the US), and apparently it is competitive enough for several exchanges to be running extended no-trading-fee promotions.

You can see Chinese bitcoin trade volumes at this site: http://btckan.com/price (Google translate, also don't forget the 0-fee promotions). I hear that a one or two of them have shady reputations, but the majority don't. Volume has been increasing, and is rivaling dollar trade volumes. So the government isn't too overbearing in this regard, it seems. The state media also ran a detailed bitcoin TV special several months back.
I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.)

Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood

My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.
As long as we're sharing hosting anecdotes/recommendations, I'll throw in my two cents: I've dealt with umpty gazillion hosting companies over the last 15+ years, and the only one that has consistently impressed me to the point where I recommend them to clients without any reservations is Rackspace. Both in their dedicated server offerings and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff. (Rackspace Cloud doesn't have as much bleeding-edge whiz-bang stuff as AWS, but they make up for it IMO with excellent tech support/customer service.)

They're generally more expensive than the competition, but you get what you pay for, you know? I'm sitting here trying to think of a time when Rackspace has ever let me down, and I can't. Being able to have that kind of confidence in your hosting environment is nice.

Marco is correct that shared hosting is a disaster area, so much so that Rackspace doesn't really compete there, so I'm always hesitant when people ask me to recommend a shared host. I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.
I hear they are looking to sell, j/k

I'm excited about Exitround!
I reckon it's probably happiness.
> If it costs them $1M+ to hire you there's just a chance they'll behave as if your time is worthwhile.

I like your last sentence.

There is another side here too: companies often overestimate their ability to manage acquisitions. A price floor means that those more likely to be poor integrations will be filtered out.
Interesting. Why? What would be valuable about the commit history for you?
Why Drivers Should Pay to Park on Residential Streets
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) is not a new idea at all, and it already has changed everything. CISC has been dying for decades now, because it's hard to optimize very complex architectures.
will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)
I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting; the web should be inclusive and easy to use, and for lots of people with uncomplicated hosting needs shared hosting is a fine choice. See also: Heroku, AWS, any other level of abstraction you care to pick. Many developers outgrow shared hosting, but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

(My personal site has been on Site5 for over a decade; they have mostly been pretty good)
Took a look that looks really good.

I assume people can also drag a .html etc or a .jpg and it will replace an existing file after verifying (and/or rename)?

Good luck!
Just curious, do other reverse proxies have this feature? Why aren't you using them?

To me this sounds like exactly the sort of feature that belongs in an enterprise product. So simple it could be implemented with a shell script in an hour or two by any competent sysadmin, and just out of being core functionality.

The idea would be that by buying the enterprise product you save yourself the time/money of being/hiring that competent sysadmin. How is that not reasonable?
If you pay your home in cash that's true.

But if you have to borrow money for that 0% rent, it's not that simple.
Looks nice, sadly it's just overkill for what I need.

Has anyone built a very simple solution to start/stop an arbitrary set of Windows services across several boxes, in a specific order? It'd be nice to have a simple GUI for this sort of thing. I've started working on it, but I suck at desktop programming (well, at programming in general, probably)...