skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dan was one of those guys who would light up the room when he came in. He was always very positive and he genuinely cared about others. I definitely agree he was the heart of our YC Summer 08 batch and gave so many of us great advice.

Dan, you were a good friend and will be missed.
There doesn't have to be a reason. Sometimes it might just work like an aneurysm. Nothing detectably wrong. It's nobody's fault and there's no narrative for it. The wrong set of things happens inside of you, you were fine, and then you're not.

I've been through this; never as close as Tom to Dan, but close; and that's what helped me make sense of it. Sometimes it's just a sudden illness, and sudden illnesses are tragic but they happen.
We've been contacted by several hosting providers, and right now, Rackspace seems pretty nice.

The problem isn't that we don't have failover here, it's that we store all repositories on a single EBS volume. This has worked great for us in the past, but as of last night, that volume has become virtually unavailable to us. It doesn't matter which instance we mount it on, the throughput we get from it is excruciating.

If, or at this point--when, we move, the disk architecture will look different, and general failover will be less of an issue.

Amazon has for the past 8-10 hours been investigating the issue, and we're left pretty dumbfounded as of to what has happened exactly. I'll summarize everything in a blog post once the chaos is over.
I've been futilely reading his recent FriendFeed and Twitter updates for some inkling as to what could have triggered this tragic act.

http://friendfeed.com/danhau http://twitter.com/danhau

Not so much as a smidgen of a hint. His comments seemed consistent up until the last with no hint of despair. No wonder this caught people by surprise. It's flabbergasting.

My condolences to everyone close to Dan. Although I didn't know him personally, he seemed like a terrific guy.

What sad news.
No, I think the difference between nazi and coumminst terror is not just historical perception. There is a very clear difference between political terror and racism. You can choose to be a communist or not. You can choose to be politically active or not. You cannot choose whether you are jewish or not.

The communists killed political opponents and they killed many more people by plain incompetence. They did not set up an industrial operation to deliberately murder people _regardless_ of what they did.

It's not just a numbers game either. If it were, the inventor of the automobile would have to be considered one of the greatest villains in the history of mankind. So we do make a difference based on the motivation for killing people. Here's my hierachy of evil, which explains why I agree with those who find communism less horrible than the nazi holocaust:

Killing people for what they are

Killing people for what they do

Killing people by accident or incompetence

Letting people die unnecessarily

The nazis did all four. The communists just the latter three. Capitalism specialises in the the last item. And yes there are exceptions that blur the lines (like Stalinist ethnic cleansing), but they are just that, exceptions.
You keep it hidden because for every 1 person who takes your advice and helps you out there are 5 who will write you off as a serious person for the rest of your life.

Edit: I'm not saying this is right/wrong, but there are real consequences to outing oneself as a depressive.
Women Are The Majority On Many Social Networks
Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background, development, social elements, etc.

I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not" came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people nonconform by acting as randomly as possible. Of the people that quote unquote conform, I doubt many think of it as conformity. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that if many of those people were convinced of its being conforming, they would take certain steps to change.
Ok, then we need DDR3 replicators :-)
Cool, and sorry then if I seemed inclined to doubt it. The troll put me on edge, but that's my bad anyhow.
Their investigation of the scene pretty much ruled it out. Autopsy results take 4-10 weeks.
I was thinking more about luck regarding people's abilities to make a living with their work. So far nothing exists to easily facilitate an artist's growth into profitability: That first step is still the scariest for that reason.
Good points, but: There are many genocides that target based on race or religion. So I was trying to explain why the Holocaust and not a similar genocide targeting, say, racial groups.
I can't argue with that.

But it's Saturday afternoon, so let's digress. Let's talk rhetoric.

The secret to dealing with these vague but useful nonscientific concepts like "the Pareto Principle" or "Agile software development" or "cloud computing" or "startup company" or "Zen Buddhism" is that you need to approach your essay with a positive attitude. You need to think like an improv comedian: Train yourself to say "yes". An essay about "what the Pareto Principle means to me and how my specific interpretation might be insightful" -- like the one I've just tried to write -- is potentially useful. But an essay on "what I think the Pareto Principle is and why I think it's totally wrong" often leads to an embarrassing place. [1] It's like trying to punch a cloud. No, actually, what it is really like is trying to attack a straw man, because that is what you're going to end up doing. Arguing with yourself is difficult enough; arguing with yourself and losing in a believable fashion is nigh-impossible. [2]

There's a reason why another term for unscientific things is "unfalsifiable". Don't set out to write an essay on "why this unfalsifiable thing is false". You're gonna embarrass yourself.

On the other hand, a brave attempt to falsify the unfalsifiable is an effective form of linkbait. So I take it back everything I just said. Tune in tomorrow for my award-winning essay: "Why there is no such thing as a startup company." ;)

--

[1] If you want to argue with a concept like "cloud computing", you will be more convincing if you choose to argue with a specific instantiation of the concept. You can flame Amazon AWS, or you can flame a certain form of client-server architecture, or you can flame
the poor security of a specific online backup vendor. All of which is more credible, because these things can argue back.

[2] Though it can be great for a laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH1Dk-rZ1IE

(read the following only if the YouTube link is down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_%22Bomber%22_Harris_vs_Co... -- this is meant to be physical comedy.)
This is one of the worst things I've read in recent memory. Nerds rising at the expense of artists? Plotting a world where writers and musicians are at the mercy of mathematicians? Even the most cursory examination of this piece shows that it's not connected to anything resembling reality. Since when did creative types run the show? Since when were 'footballers' (athletes) relegated to the sidelines? What fantasy world has this guy been living in?
This isn't at all about hipsters. Most "hipsters" aren't artists. Most of the artists that find themselves in the hipster subset aren't hipsters so much as they are the people who set the definition for hipster.

That aside, your comment was lame for other reasons too.
Revenge? Revenge for what?

Or, more pointedly, what have you done that you're afraid nerds would want revenge on you for?
I didn't say they rewrote everything for .NET. There is managed C++ which uses the CLR while also support native C++ code. So they could use code written in the 80's with managed C++.

I seriously doubt they rewrote Visual Studio to be completely managed. That would be incredibly stupid for more than one reason.
Ok, I believe that without a seconds hesitation. But here is my problem with this: A REAL business, such as twitter or facebook creates an ecosystem around it. You are just part of their ecosystem, conclusion, you are not a business.

A business stands on its own strengths, and minimizes its dependence on outside factors that threaten its existence.

If your business is solely dependent on Twitter or Facebook you should be trying to diversify like mad.
Creativity saved me. Please, be creative, always.
:|
I'm really sorry.
We're on the same page here, but realistically, what is he to do? What specific advice would you give someone like him beyond "start a blog"?

It sounds like he spent his career typing down his thoughts on the issues of the day and handing them off to an editor to publish. He's not in a good place.
I apologize in advance if this question is intrusive but is there any possibility it could have been an accident?

Sometimes the line can be blurry. Accidental suicides do happen. Especially since there was no note.
An unfortunate event, however, re-iterates to system admins why the cloud should only be used as a low tier of storage -- for now.
I'm looking at cassandra as a possible solution for things like this.
TDBank lets commerceonline.com expire after buyout
Dear HN readers: What according to you could be one way of architecting the storage so as to avoid similar AWS EBS outages in the future?
Depression is an incredibly insidious disease folks, especially because sufferers normally keep it hidden from others.

Depressed people don't merely keep it hidden from others; they often develop a coping mechanism of keeping their depression hidden from themselves too.

If you know someone who suffers from depression and has communicated to you that they have suicidal thoughts from time-to-time

The last part of this is the most important part. If someone is depressed and have recognized it then it's very important to provide whatever help you can. But it's also important to not intrude prior to that point; otherwise you risk forcing them to confront their depression before they're ready to do so (not to mention alienating them).
A lot of people think murder is bad, except:

- when it is in self defense

- when it is done in the context of war

- when the state executes a serial murderer

And so on. If life were as simple and context free as you suggest we wouldn't need courts at all.

Your honor, he stole babyfood from my store!

Yes, but did he steal it to sell it or because he's too poor to afford it and needed to feed his baby ?

What's the last time you saw a street person make a law on shoplifting ?

In the law, and by extension in court, context is everything.
I find it so interesting that there are so many interpretations of what the Principle states. I don't disagree with any of them. My point is simply that many of us interpret it in a counter-productive fashion, that demotivates us to over-invest in one particular activity.
Last time I did a startup, it was made very clear to me that having IP was effectively a requirement; without it, our chances of getting investment money were enormously lower, and our likely value at M&A or IPO would be lower as well. In other words, not getting a patent would significantly decrease the chances of success, and the eventual value of the company.

So I applied. The short version of the story: it was a revolting, morally abhorrent, tedious, timewasting and unbelievably expensive process. It costs $15,000 to apply for a preliminary patent which offers no protection, but does set the date of your priority. From the date you file the preliminary patent, you have 1 year to file the all-up version or all rights expire and you can't get them back. Doing this second version would have cost $50,000.

Throughout the application process, the lawyers made very clear that:

1) We wouldn't get approved or denied for 4-5 years.

2) We wouldn't ever know until the patent was actually granted if someone else had already filed one on it that had priority over ours, because some patents are not visible to a search.

3) The patent was going to be useless to us in court, because a) we would not have the money to defend it and b) we had probably invalidated it anyway by discussing the idea in public and/or having a publicly-visible (if unpublished) alpha version available before the patent application was filed.

4) Whatever protection it did grant was only in the USA; international protection was an entirely different ball of wax that we'd need to deal with separately, and probably couldn't have gotten or paid for even if we had wanted to.

Tell me how this does not describe an utterly broken system that discriminates against small companies?
Thanks a lot for the references, now I have some reading for tomorrow!
I'll say this. The academics won't be the ones to figure this out.
http://ycombinator.com/dan.html
Oh my gosh. This is just awful and I'm literally at a loss for words.

We've had several tragic deaths amongst the YC community both recently and over the past few years, but Dan's is definitely the first to viscerally choke me up. I didn't know him personally, but I've read so many of his posts here that I feel like I did.

Please accept my condolences during this difficult time.
That's a very fine line to ride there.
You can write a self-hosting compiler for C# quite easily. However, the core of the runtime is going to be a major pain in the ass to write self hosting.

The Mono guys came to the same conclusion, their tree contains oodles of C/C++: http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_package=mono&as_file...
Wait... this was satire right?
Leaving a suicide note is supposedly a lot less common than our popular belief (from movies or books that depict fictional suicide situations) tell us...
Tom, I am so, so sorry.
In the greater context of start-ups and the pressures associated with that, it's not just 'young kids dying', it is 'young kids working on start-ups dying'. I realize that some people are of a mindset where 'failure is not an option', and this in and of itself brings some risks with it.

No clue what the factors are in this particular case beyond what's in this thread but I've seen people literally break because of the strain a start-up put on their lives.

Working past what your body can normally do and taking on mental burdens past what you could cope with under normal circumstances (huge responsibilities) is not going to be without its consequences.

Again no idea how much of that was a factor here, but I really think that those that get into the game should be very much aware of the pressure and should be able to somehow get rid of that and always remember that even though your start-up is important it is never more important than you and your health.

Don't push it too far.
I didn't go to either so I don't know. But in a previous job I hired programer grads from both & found them all excellent (& much better than Harvard - but nb. tiny sample size). I strongly recommend you make some connections in London whilst at either, and take advantage of the cheap flights/train to Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Berlin etc. for weekend breaks. Good luck!
Yes there are many. But I'm not aware of one that was as elaborate, ideologically and logistically, as what the nazis did. In my opinion they fully deserve their place at the top of the evil list.
Money. You buy a second set of instances in a different availability zone and failover to it in case of problems. You buy a second datacenter at a different ISP, keep it in sync and failover to it when your primary fails.

Eventually you architect your application to distribute load over multiple facilities and to become resilient against component failure.

Until then: You do nothing, grab a beer, relax and wait as the amazon guys sweat their asses off to fix it. You pat yourself on the back because it is not your ass in the trenches right now.

On top of that you have the perfect excuse for the followup blog-post.
If you're really interested in how artists approach color and theory, you might pick up a copy of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which puts forth a modernist/Bauhaus color theory:

http://books.google.com/books?id=mG-VRWgfpuYC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky#Concerning_th...
I've used GoTo Meeting and also setup custom VNC servers to do the same thing with skype for voice or IM chat along with it. VNC works pretty seamlessly in mac and ubuntu.
A solemn reminder to shower our friends and family with love while we still have the chance...I am so very sorry for the loss of your friend...my condolences.
Unfortunately this doesn't sound like an EBS issue but a systems architecture flaw. I apologize in advance if my analysis is wrong here, but I think it's important to understand.

We use EBS extensively on our infrastructure. Occasionally an EBS volume will fail. We ran into an issue where a volume had a spike in IO load as I think was the case here.

EBS volumes are not magic, they are just chunks of physical disks. Disks fail. You should have the system architected so that you can handle such failures.

Here are a few things you can do (we don't do all of these, but enough to assure we won't lose data or have downtime in the case of a failure.)

- Mount several EBS volumes, use raid.

- If its a database, set up a failover node on a separate EBS volume.

- Take regular snapshot backups.

- Take regular full backups to S3.

It's also very important to have everything highly automated. If an EBS volume fails for us, its one command to switch to the failover node. If that doesn't work, its another command to spin up a new machine off the last available snapshot with a few hours of data loss (worst case scenario.) Everything is highly monitored with nagios + ganglia so we know when bad stuff happens.

The two or three times we've had issues with EBS we were able to either switch to a failover node or take a snapshot and mount a new volume from there. I haven't set up RAID on EC2, but I'd imagine this also a very good route to protect your data.

Remember, the cloud isn't magic. The only advantage you get with the cloud is rapid provisioning and unlimited capacity if you need it. You still have to build a shared nothing, reliable architecture within the framework the cloud gives you. We've found EC2 and EBS to work out very well, but of course there were growing pains as you learn very quickly where your single points of failure are! I get the sense that the overall reliability of resources such as instances or volumes, on the whole, is definitely lower than what you'd expect in a standard hosting provider, whatever the reason may be.

Edit: Of course, you could also load your data on a distributed data store like Cassandra as well that handles some of this failover and replication magic automatically, too.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858933
Do you think it helps to use colors that you find in brands that people are already familiar with?
Back in the 80s, I very clearly remember being the only person in my grade school library during recess (granted, it was a very small school), and one of very few people who carried a book around with them in high school.
Actually yes, you can walk around Shanghai with ugly words about the government. As far as I know there are no laws against it.

There are laws against plotting to overthrow the gov or causing civil unrest similar to the ones that exist in the U.S. or UK. I just fact checked this with my Chinese wife. She has a degree in Chinese Law.

Could someone use your t-shirt to concoct a case against you relative to these laws? Maybe. But the Chinese police have bigger things to worry about. I have heard about people in the U.S. being tossed off airplanes and detained due to the content of their t-shirts.

The Chinese Internet has massive amounts of chatter expressing anger at the government. Some of it gets removed by the gov and site management. But not all of it. There is plenty of juicy stuff to read online.
A Pragmatic Legal Expert System (free ebook)
So true. One of my favorite memories of him was when we first met him and Tom in June of 2008, right when we had begun Y Combinator that summer.

Brad, one of my co-founders, and I had flown in from Chicago to start living there that summer and hadn't found a place to live yet so we crashed at Tom and Dan's pad for a night, sleeping on the couches. It was a nasty, hot summer night and they didn't have A/C. Not only did we stay up late drinking but Brad and I barely went to sleep.

Early in the morning before we had to leave, Dan was up (he was usually a morning guy) and made us this incredible breakfast for us. It was just about the nicest god damn thing we could have had that morning after such a shitty night's rest. Dan was in my book instantly as one of the nicest, coolest guys to have met and gotten to know that summer.
I'm glad you took it upon yourself to write a poignant note; I couldn't have done him justice. The picture damn near made me tear up.

Thank you.
What you are saying makes no sense.

Everything fails occassionally. Amazon probably has a team of highly specialized engineers on the task right now, working under the pressure of a few dozen disgruntled customers and under the eyes of worldwide press.

Could your company respond with an equal intensity if this was your own hardware? Will your SAN supplier whip his staff on-site as fast as they will for amazon?
Some of us grew up like that, and we like it.
I work for MS and do Visual Studio integration work for XNA Game Studio.

The whole of VS isn't even close to being mostly managed code. While it is true that 2010's GUI is mostly managed code, thanks to WPF, the internals are entirely COM. The project system, debuggers, command system, and many other large components are all C++/COM. Even many of the components which are managed read more like C++ than like C# due to all the QueryInterface and ref counting nonsense.

Developer devision, commonly known as DevDiv, contains the VS team, programming language teams, and many other related teams. DevDiv is by far the company's largest consumer of managed code. I'd bet that there is more managed code in DevDiv's source tree than the rest of the company combined. That doesn't mean they threw out 30+ years of efforts and backwards compatibility all at once.
http://aviary.com has a great color picker called Toucan. It allows you to pick colours spaced out around the colour wheel based on a few parameters. Also does the colour-blindness emulator. You can check out colour palettes that others have created as well and modify them to become your own as you see fit.
Completely randomly, and it shows:-/
Legal Applications of Artificial Intelligence
What do you think of the other post critcizing your architecture? I am doing my own arch work on EC2, so I am trying to understand exactly what caused this failure. Is this a problem with your instance being able to access any EBS? Why couldn't you spin up another instance with a fresh EBS from a backup and redirect DNS to that instance?