skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about appreciation for a company that essentially helped sponsor your company's incubation?

One of the things I appreciate about EngineYard, and the Ruby development world in general, is that they appreciate the benefit of helping to incubate open-source and small startup operations. It's about re-investing back into the community. They did this when they helped incubate a startup company with some great programming minds behind it, which they knew would assist in the rapid development of open-source Ruby libraries.

But it seems GitHub hasn't absorbed any of that mindset by their move to ditch their supporter as soon as they're in a position to show appreciation for the help by actually paying for the service they receive for once.
The whole situation appears to have been an attempted blackmail, Turing meets a teenager at the cinema in the week and invites him back to his for sex, they meet that weekend (with another person IIRC) and have sexual relations and the youth takes some of Turings possessions (money can be a possession, Secret government docs can be too(!), something was taken) presumably under the belief that Turing wouldn't report it due to their relationship - approximating blackmail at least. Turing reports the larceny (theft of sorts) to the Police, they ask him what the youth was doing there and Turing told them. Resulting in Turing and the youth both being arrested.

I'd warrant there is no record anywhere to show this wasn't an attempt at blackmail as part of espionage activities - but you're right he turned out not to be blackmail-able in this instance as he went to the police. But one does not know whether he was in a trap and realised it or not in a trap at all.

The MI6 file on this would make an interesting read I'm sure.
Is it so hard to imagine that they weren't jumping at the chance to write their own custom non-filesystem storage backend?
As xsmasher said, you're citing Peopleware, by Demarco and Lister. If you didn't know that instantly, you need to read the rest of the book as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...

Pick it up, you won't be disappointed.
ULA releases plan to replace Shuttle, refuel in space and reach the moon
Ask HN: What is your social cause & what will you do?
I was impressed when 2 members of our community initiated action on social causes important to them...

John Graham-Cumming on the apology to Alan Turing here

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-09-11-enigma_N.htm?csp=34

Aaron Swartz on the Massachusettes senate vacancy here

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090901/NEWS/909010310

Then I realized that I'm so busy with my own projects that I don't spend any time on issues important to me. I'm not even sure what they might be. I always thought if I did my job, that was my part. Now I'm beginning to wonder...

What about you?
There were several hosting services that were a good deal cheaper. It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime, while purchasing a server with similar specs only costs $2k or so. The data center across town could give us an equal number of server power for much cheaper. We're in our own data center right now, in another city, and we simply have a contractor we pay to go in and occasionally replace broken equipment. It really is quite cheap to do it this way.

Various hosts offered greater degrees of managed services at various prices. None really offered the flexibility that EC2 offered, or offered that much over simply colocating our own servers. With less traffic or fewer servers I can see many of these hosts being a great deal.

There also were several places that gave us completely screwy quotes that I can imagine were only meant to trick CEOs who don't know any better. One example is a place that offered us the use of an HTTP load balancer for the "low, low price" of $1000 a month. A lot of places offered expensive managed services, but when talking to the people who would serve us it was clear they didn't know what they were talking about. We did not seriously consider these places.

To Engineyard's credit, they were only managed host who sounded like they had knowledge that would be really valuable to us. They also made clear that they would devote significant resources to getting our site working smoothly. We would have paid a premium for this service, but not the premium they asked.

EC2 offers an amazing amount of flexibility that we found highly valuable. A sysadmin and developer spent most of a day diagnosing an issue with a DB server that ended up being a flaky drive. In EC2, we would have simply killed the server, fired up a new instance, waited an hour for its replication to catch up, and returned it to the rotation.

To return to EC2 we would have to drastically reduce the load on our MySQL instances, since we found that EBS volumes had somewhat unpredictable and not that great performance. Reducing our reliance on MySQL is something we're doing anyways, since on its current course it would have been difficult and expensive to continue scaling up in any data center.
Failed founder, just graduated, looking to help build your start-up
I recently retired my start-up and moved back to the bay area, but I'm certainly not done trying to build new companies. I'm a scrappy, brainy commando with no training in CS, and if there are any start-ups in the area who could use the free aid of another founder-type I am totally in. I don't need to be paid and I don't need equity, I just want to continue the experience, training, and fun of building something new. Let me know if I can help.

dp4man@gmail.com
I don't like my PDFs in the browser. Just downloading the PDF is fine for me, it will display in evince.
The event-scraping problem has motivated a year of technology development on my part. Parsley, Parselets, date_range, csvget, SelectorGadget, and a bunch of unreleased niftiness.

I've mostly moved on from the problem, but would be happy to talk to anyone who's interested, share my experience, etc.
I think there's potential there. But I can think of two big factors/features which should be considered ... and some heads-ups:

1. Location-aware mobile searching. I can't recall how many times I've been driving around with my wife on a Friday night wondering "what should we do tonight?" ... if you built a startup around this post/concept, I think it would be a big mistake not to put a lot of resources into an iPhone/smartphone app. Think of it like Yelp's iPhone app but for events.

2. Let event coordinators sell tickets to paid events from your site. Don't do ecommerce and take a transaction fee. Just let them plug-in PayPal/Google CO info and be done with it. You'll immediately have an advantage over sites that don't do this.

Heads up for:
- Craigslist. If you start scraping their sites, they will probably block you at some point.
- Facebook. FB is growing rapidly as a place for events/RSVPs and it fits well within the "social graph" ... the latest FB iPhone app puts events front and center. Expect them to be a big competitor in this space.

Other low-hanging fruit:
- City/chamber websites. Every city or chamber of commerce website has an event calendar. You'll probably want to scrape those.
- Community colleges, libraries, etc. have non-credit/weekend classes and workshops. If you had a way for them to sell tickets, it might be a nice draw.

That's all I got for now ...
On a somewhat related note, if you make a website for a specific event on the top of the first page, clearly visible, you should have:

* The date and time of the event

* The event location

* Price

* Any other relevant information (dress-code, what to bring, etc) or at least a prominent link to said information
Depending how evil you are you can follow the Facebook-app model of offering the personality tests, games and whatnot for free and then getting them to sign up to get the results - only let them know that they need to sign up at the end though.

This coupled with a minimal info request - name, age, email, location (at first) should hook you some punters.

Indeed a FB app is probably a good seed method (or would have been last year!) - something like "which of your friends is most compatible with you" ... you can snag extra info about them under the guise of refining the friend choice then at the end say "here's a list of people [not their friends other people near them] who might want to date you, get more dating suggestions by signing up".
I propose Law 1a) Always and inevitably everyone underestimates their own propensity to stupidity

Very good read. Great points about people's categorical actions either benefiting or detracting from society as a whole.
Its worth noting that you get more than just EC2 + a full-time sysadmin with EY (speaking as an EY customer myself), and I don't mean this to question your own decision...that's something we all have to make considering the budgets we have available.

With EY, you get EC2 + several heavily experienced sysadmins who work every day on the exact stack that you're working with...they know it in and out like the back of their hand + the EY stack which has been battle-tested for several years now in all sorts of unique situations + performance that you couldn't replicate yourself without all that experience.

Again, not attacking your choice at all, I'm just saying that its hard to appreciate all that you're getting until you actually use the service and once you are, its easy to justify the costs.
>> The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.

Maybe check out http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fruit-and-veg... It is a blog post but it seems to have reasonable sourcing. However, I do agree with your conclusion: it's complicated!
Binary tree traversal in Python with generators
There was no radical direction change.

They put up a web interface, just for the heck of it, and soon a lot more people were using that than PDAs.

It doesn't involve needing trust when you look at the numbers and see that Y is a lot more profitable than X.
This is a test. I had my previous two submissions go [dead]. No idea why. So I test one more time with a random URL.
I'd definitely like to hear more about your experiences. I couldn't find your email address in your profile, mine is jtoy at jtoy dot net
Chris Wanstrath: The Real-Time Web (and Other Buzzwords)
"I think a spider should be employed that searches
the web for events and adds them into the database."

Everything but this has been done "well".

If you can do this you can make money, but I don't think it's so trivial...
Ask HN: Do you know some companies doing niche business in custom programming?
For web or desktop it doesn't matter.
> In France, you can literally arrive a minute before departure and hop on your high-speed train (it's not recommended because the risk of missing your train is high, but it's possible).

Same in Germany. And in Switzerland the risk of lateness is even lower.
I heard there will be almost as fast as regular European trains.
And what if GitHub can't afford EngineYard?
Exercise, a short cut to inner peace
I've thought of using an FB app, but like you said - last year it would have been great: last year; instead of a quiz, some sort of game that collects the needed info peripherally might work (full disclosures in the game, to lessen the evilness of course)
You can't be serious: all of his theory is really scientific, at least at the same level as Darwin (but I would say much higher, because he has gone through many discussion/corrections by other scientists).

This book is really hilarious, because it states the complete opposite of Darwin, and is even more convincing than Darwin.

For the fun of it, go read it!!
Yeah, I read that one here - that's why I decided to repost my question from reddit here on HN...
Forget Gen Y: Gen X is Making Real Change
He actually doesn't talk about Virgin Galactic in that interview (just watched it). A fascinating watch nevertheless.
Yelp?
Is there actually a wait for Google Voice? I signed up and got an invite in less than 48 hours about a month ago.
Not you again (lol!).

When hair was mentioned as used in the device one thinks "bunkum" or similar. Then one learns that melanin is a semi-conductor and that initial thought is at least tempered with "they may have something of interest; if that device produces that output I'll eat my hat, but perhaps it has some output?".
More than $29 worth of difficult. That's for sure.
A Japanese language guide for analytical thinkers
Engine Yard and Github's business relationship aside, is anyone else sick of everything these days being about the tool or language people are using? For some reason we hear more from the Ruby side than any other about how great their language is, but frankly the only thing that matters are the products made from it. I don't know, I'm just kind of sick of Ruby fan boys.
NBER Paper: Having more money kills people.  Money is Bad For You
Announcing JRubyConf 2009
Congratulations, you're happily using one of the few browsers with flawless built-in PDF support (the other being Safari on OS X).

The vast majority are not nearly as fortunate.
Study: Growing Up in a Recession Makes You Cheap and Suspicious
"The lens and microphone are smack-dab on the flip side of where your hand would be when you're using the scroll wheel, so you're limited to shooting in landscape mode."

Who would intentionally shoot video in Portrait?
Father (bursting in):Son what are you doing shaving your balls with my electric razor ...?!?!
Son: Err ...
Father: Well.
Son: It's for school, err, ... I'm making a hair powered solar cell.
Father: Really? Wow ... I always told your mother you were a great kid.
Thanks for the links--I'm now off to do some reading! :-)
I find that hard to believe. They're one of the most popular and successful companies in the Ruby community and they have paid accounts that they've been collecting on for quite some time now. EY has thousands of customers who pay them every month and can afford it. How would it be that one of their most popular customers who doesn't pay anything for hosting wouldn't be able to pay them for once?
Here is a better one I just read 15 minutes ago:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/20-htm...
That is what I'm trying to figure out. Atrack is designed to make as efficient use of the quota as possible, and so far so good, but I hope all this publicity helps a bit with the stress testing.
There is still a difference. The probes are placed in different things, so the two probes have differing ability to oxidize.

Oxidation of a metal is a much more likely source of electricity than a tree, so much so, that they need a much better experiment before I'll be convinced that the tree is making electricity.

For example, let it run for a long time and check for any evidence of corrosion.

Are there metals that don't corrode? Perhaps palladium?

They could also try a variety of different metals for the probes (both at the same time) and see if they get different voltage readings.
I think this gentleman has a radically different understanding of the proportion of businesses versus content leeches on Youtube than I do. Youtube has something on the order of 500 content consumers per 1 content uploader, and that probably overstates how many content creators are involved, because most users are just reposting things that they have copied.

http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN17436388200...
A Fake Amazon Reviewer Confesses
Good point!

Apple has become very restrictive lately about "Lite" versions so I wasn't sure how to make one that would pass muster. Alternatively, if you'd like to try the app I'd be happy to provide a promo code; I just don't want to post a bunch of them here because they expire if not used and developers are only allowed so many for each app.

If you'd like a code, visit http://www.gullicksonlaboratories.com/about/ and shoot me an email with the codeword "hnrma" in it and I'll be happy to provide codes to the first 25 requesters.
I wonder why that would get stripped out.

After some experimentation with my test account, it looks like it's actually (re *) that gets stripped out. I wonder if it has to do with replying, or retweeting
I interned at one:

http://www.foliage.com/
Let’s assume that YouTube has 100MM registered users. Let’s say that only 1% of those users (1MM) would pay $10/month

Why in the fuck do you think 1% of registered youtube users have even uploaded a video, much less original content?
Why would I need a dedicated event site to find where Rubyconf is this year when I know, to a moral certainty, that Googling [rubyconf] will give me that answer on the first result?
Perhaps the same thing that happens after a fatal airplane or automobile crash.
There are two lessons to be had from this, and the recent facebook fax hoax 1) Traditional Journalism is good because they do fact checking and blogs do not.

What? The original story was published by the Daily Mail, and it appears to have been debunked by a blogger.
An idea for a superhero: she can deftly and permanently reform any particular low-level stupidity using in-person persuasion, but can't impart a truly general lesson (so the villains can offer many episodes of mayhem). Our hero can't fully impart her persuasive ability to her sidekick, even though to all appearances it's her insightful arguments that do the trick, not any magical charismatic force.
The difficulty with that policy is that old-school journalists (the NYT, WP, NPR types) would never agree to that either.

Unless, of course, they did. Were all your dealings with online tech press, or any (ahem) real press?
Insurance startup targets chronic but manageable diseases
Trees could be the ultimate in green power
I completely agree. I think we're in for a very long wait. We over achieved getting into space and landing on the moon so quickly. (barely 50 years after air travel was a viable technology) I don't see a private industry for space travel unless a few things happen:

1) Earth's resources are depleted to the point where we need to harvest them from another planet. The situation would have to be VERY bad for us to get to that point. More likely than not it would be another dark ages for most of humanity with private space travel extracting valuable resources for the extremely rich & powerful.

2) Contact with intelligent life. It seems certain now this will not be in our own solar system so this raises the bar on the technology private industry would have to develop to travel so far. Very likely it would span the lifetimes of several generations of humans traveling to even a nearby solar system.

3) Over population on Earth becomes such a problem that a massive number of people are driven to taking the huge risk of re-locating to some underground colony on Mars. If you had 100 or 200 million people willing to relocate to Mars there would actually be a viable business model there I bet. (kind of similar to what happened with immigration to America early in the last century. It was expensive, dangerous, and life wasn't really that much better when you got there but the alternative was just so bad people were willing to take the chance)

So realistically I think we're probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of years away from the standard sci-fi dream of accessible human space exploration. LEO flights could be a profitable niche in the short term.
You're right. I might buy it if they inserted the word 'genetic,' but clearly, the social traits of a stupid person are largely the product of their stupidity.

Nonetheless it's a useful law - it helps to overcome bias toward believing other people are non-stupid by emphasizing that stupidity could be lurking anywhere.
Let's not even mention the fact that on the day it was debunked, CNN was running a story about a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. that turned out to be a Coast Guard training exercise.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/white-house-...
Yes, Engineyard offered by far the best impression of competence and having sysadmins who would actually work well with us. We've heard great things from everyone we've heard of who uses them.

I've also heard great things about the Porsche 911 turbo from everyone who drives one. We were expecting a very expensive quote, but we were all surprised by how high it actually was.
Just thinking the other day how there are too many event sites, which implies they all suck b/c none have really nailed the feature.

Upcoming sux as well, not to mention it constantly defaults to the wrong location even tho my yahoo profile spells it out.

Another thing: too much about "bands playing" which drowns out all event lists, put bands in a folder, offer other categories ...
I wonder if making a good events site is equivalent to being able to create a personalized filter for large, noisy streams of information (Not just events.. I'm looking at you, Twitter).

I can't be bothered to sift through the damn noise on upcoming, etc.
Combining that number with the 1% estimate (10% seems very optimistic) leaves only $ 20K per month or $240K per year. On googles scale that's probably not worth the effort and risc.
The results are missing latency numbers for the concurrent requests, and there's no indication of the amount of work being done to handle a request, which will have a significant impact on load performance.

That said, performance testing Python web server implementations seems bit like racing snails. If speed is why you're using Python, you're probably using the wrong tool.
This is the reference I wish I had when I was learning Japanese. I tend to learn natural languages a lot like I learn programming languages: I get a lot faster at learning once someone explains the underlying rules and how they combine and interact.
Does this mean Python's own HTTPServer uses epoll starting v2.6?
Twitter: Your 'tweets' belong to you
People always assume this with sites like youtube/facebook/twitter/etc but they forget that the most interesting problems tend to come from the requirements of scaling.

From my experience most people seem to have their wall at which point they can't possibly conceive of a better way to scale X until someone comes along and goes "Try this". My experience also says this level is pretty low for most people.
I do not expect rackspace to give them free infrastructure, no. I also don't think this will cause them to fail. They're pretty smart folks and they have revenue coming in, so they'll probably be fine.

After reading more into the thread and the issue being mainly with GFS, then perhaps it won't be that difficult to improve performance at Rackspace because they'll control the hardware and be able to use any file system they want.

Knowing why they can't run at EY clears up a lot of the questions. The scalability at EY is simply too limiting for GH, paid or not. It probably doesn't make sense for EY to install a new file system simply because GH wants it and GH probably can't afford, or doesn't want to afford the amount that it'd take for EY to move all their customers to a more scalable file system.

If you look beyond all the drama here, this really is a rational decision on both sides. It's a testament to the community here that two groups parting ways in such a dramatic way can both participate in this very comment thread together and with civility. It speaks volumes and I think everyone involved has handled themselves very well.

I can't imagine this is a pleasurable experience for either group, but when one party wants something the other is unwilling to provide and in this case, it's true of both EY (different file system) and GH (compensation for the change) it's rare for both to understand the other side's perspective and avoid irrational name calling and bickering. I'm glad this breakup hasn't gone down that route.