skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just talking to someone wondering how you guys at reddit were able to do it. The article about taking your last server offline really pushed me to move forward on this.

I should mention that I'm running Windows with MSSQL. I imagine the performance should be the same but there must be some differences of course.

I like the option of rackspace allowing for a dedicated server next to the cloud but I should probably give EC2 a few test runs of my own too. I think if EC2 is going to work it wont be an overnight solution. I'll have to move over slowly, learning to tune the box as I use it more.
Looking for a Method in Cellphone Price Madness
Here at RescueTime we use EC2 for all of our servers, with the exception of one server outside EC2 for monitoring.

All of our MySQL instances are currently each running on 4x EBS volumes using LVM stripped across all 4 volumes.

Our primary transactional table is nearing a billion rows, and just this weekend we performed a migration that segmented this table into 40 partitions, containing data back to 2007.

We are currently handling roughly 3,000,000 inserts and 2,500,000 updates on this one table daily. IOWait on our DB holds steady at about 5% throughout our peak (5am - 4pm PST).

It is certainly not Fibre Channel backboned speeds, but the other benefits of using EBS CURRENTLY outweighs any IO performance hits we might have. The ability to backup production and refresh any of our other DB environments in less than 15 minutes, using EBS snapshots is worth it. Especially for the price we pay monthly for this infrastructure.

If you need any more details on our setup or tips in troubleshooting/setting up your own, feel free to ping me.
My major at my college has a class that asks these kinds of questions on tests. It's widely considered to be one of the most difficult and painful weed out courses in the major. We were asked to describe how we would make an elephant fly, how much oil is used to make all the french toast for waffle house in a day, and other silly questions.

We were also asked to rewrite non-linear equations in new units, design simple industrial scale chemical processes, and generally do the kinds of problem solving engineering trains you to do.

These kinds of problems are relevant when done properly. The ability to reason with enormous quantities, think logically and out-of-the-box at once, make consistent complex plans, and, finally, explain these things to another person are often instrumental for solving problems and building new things. Those who passed and enjoyed this class are easy to pick out: they've been breezing through all of the upper level problem solving and group-based classes.

At the same time, I think something like that bike-for-the-blind answer is genius. Sometimes it does come down to rejecting the question or, perhaps better, redefining it in a way that is creative and useful. Who knows how well interviewers are prepared to respond to these answers though?
If you're using Windows, I would stay away from EC2 right now. They aren't quite mature enough for Windows yet. If you look at the EC2 forums, the majority of complaints are about Windows bugs.

Actually, you might want to try and get in on Microsoft's Azure beta.
Pinker does a great job of putting Gladwell on a pedestal in the first half (makes you want to read the book) of the review only to totally destroy him in the second half (now I wouldn't read the book even if it was a gift).
The numbers are just too massive to matter.

Forget something complicated like IP address. Lets go with something simple like east coast to west coast. If only 1,000 people can be sued I'll actually think I'm protected from being sued since I live on the west coast. I'd be willing to bet that there are 1,000 people between me and the Atlantic Ocean still willing to cheat.

This is a great concept but it seems to only be effective on a much smaller scale.
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Bloomberg News: A Modest Strategy to Rule the World
Forth has incredibly primitive memory management. Of course, you can add your own, but out of the box you don't have any GC. Heck, you don't even have reference types; it's like the hoary days of BCPL where "everything is an int" until use use ints as pointers. PostScript is a very cleaned-up forth, for example.

Bootstrapping a forth-like system on your own is a great exercise; it'll teach you a lot about writing minimal systems. The _Threaded Interpretive Languages_ book is a good read, too.

My personal belief (after seeing many forth-based projects fail) is that it's a terrible language for scaling to real systems and even medium-size teams, but it's got some great ideas. The trouble comes when you do stuff like trying to treat that toy driver ("hey, i just wrote a disk driver in eight lines of forth!") as something that is ready for production. Also, a sea of invented operators like "^!" does not help, though arguably this is more developer discipline than a fault of the language.

[[[pats forth on the head. nice language, now go play]]]
I think we do have many kinds of ketchup, we just tend to call the fancier kinds BBQ sauce.
Azure is tempting, especially since MS is trying hard to get into this market, but I worry about putting all my eggs in the MS basket this early is Azure's life.
Your example proves nothing about the boundedness of the rationality of (most) humans. It tells you something about what people expect about other people: others are not expected to carry an argument to its logical conclusion. However, taking that knowledge, or educated guess, into account, makes '10' or '20' a fully rational guess, based on lack of complete data.
I hate the Microsoft Natural 4000 so much - I have one here. Apart from the split layout there's not much for me to recommend.

Problems I've faced on it are: 1) Long spacebar with pressing mechanism in the centre. Pushing from the side (where my thumb is) creates a slight resistance in the centre plastic which then causes a louder clack when it gives way. This is noticeable when working in a silent room, and noticeable on my fingers.

2) Too much key travel on all keys - when I went back to typing on my mac after using my 4000 for 6 months, I couldn't believe how much more relaxed my fingers were after not having to press so far down with the keys.

I think the MS Natural 4000 keyboard is designed for people who aren't aware of their fingers but think they're getting ergonomic benefits just from a split keyboard with a faux-leather palm rest. I tried many of these MS 4000 keyboards and they all had the same design that I consider to be a flaw.
Right on! I have more questions since i have found out that there are places where my insatiable thirst for knowledgecan be fulfilled.

Thanks for the link. Will test it out!
Can America Still Innovate?
Good tips, but they are definitely not sufficient to make $20 Billion
:-)
The Case of the Missing Stars: Why a Startup Community Can Thrive Nonetheless
Read til the end, the conclusion is not what you think.
thanks! In fact i believe that this is the simplest code i have found (and here i thought punBB was simple!)
Anyone have any experience with NewServers? They offer dedicated server provisioning in about 5 minutes. On paper they look great but I have not found much commentary about their product anywhere.
http://www.tankafritt.nu/uk/
http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/
Could we please avoid the Internet memes on HN? Flagged. Repost it to reddit.
"These kinds of problems are relevant when done properly."

Yes, if done with the correct expectations. The real problems arose in that it is also a bit of a test for the interviewer too, in that the interviewer must understand the point of the questions, one which far too many of them failed. In the worst case, which happens far too often, you're sitting there trying to mind read the interviewer for the expected response: "How much does the plane weigh? I'd ask Boeing." "Nope, you can't." "What, why? The reason why that's not possible might factor into the answer...." "No, you just can't." "Well, I'd ask a librarian." "All the librarians are dead." "What, why?" "Doesn't matter. Do something else." "Well, I guess I could find a scale that might be able to handle the weight..." "No." "Why?" "You just can't." And so on...

(Because, honestly, "I'd ask Boeing or a librarian" really is the answer. Ask a better question next time.)

However, in the end my real problem with this style of questioning isn't that. It's the opportunity cost in the interview. While you're dicking around with the question of how much a plane weighs, you could be talking about their previous projects, or doing a programming problem, either one of which will teach you far more per unit time than a brain teaser. If you really want a brain teaser, ask a non-trivial programming problem. Anyone still asking these brain teasers might just as well yell out that they don't care about at least one of "your time" or "their time".

I don't need to filter people out based on their plane weighing skills. I want to know if you're going to spew cross-site scripting attacks into my websites, or if you're going to spew spaghetti code into my codebase because you can't do decent functional breakdowns, or if you think "var3" is an acceptable variable name, or if you're incapable of requirements analysis (the only thing those riddles tangentially touch, but not good enough for my tastes), or any of several other problems I've detected in interviews. There's better ways of obtaining all that information.
This is a good clarification to make. It was not that our entire application ground to a halt when we flipped the switch. We would experience intermittent and extreme performance issues. We dug deep with tools like cacti and ended up being able to point only at the 'unknowns' of the shared resources and EBS.
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Emacs

Subversion

Rsync

-----------

Emacs for a few general text editing tasks and all of my programming tasks (HTML, XML, PHP, Scheme, Python, etc...). I also use Subversion religiously and so should you (or any version control system); most editors/IDEs have some form of an integration plugin for VCS software to make it easy.

I'm not a big fan of FTP. It works well for "little" things, like pushing images up to a web directory or transferring tarballs from server to server. For my web application projects I use rsync exclusively - I just have a little deployment script that I run and it takes care of pushing all the files up to production/development/sandbox wherever. Rsync will only move files that don't exist or are "different" from the source, so it is very efficient especially if you make changes to other files down the road so I don't have to hunt and peck for which file I changed or upload the entire project all over...

Also, nothing beats a consistent, cogent, and lucid directory structure and file naming conventions. Clear thought process = clear work process.
I've gotten around this by enforcing that kind of thing in software by using the US-International layout.

I speak English and German, so while I can transliterate ä, ö, ü, and ß, I don't particularly want to. Instead, I just type AltGr+q, AltGr+p, AltGr+y, and AltGr+s. There are dead keys for other diacritics.
Actually, the best thing that works for me is to work with somebody. For example, two of us are working on our startup: I'm the coder, my partner is the business guy. When we discuss how each one of us is doing and check if we match our goals, then I get enthusiastic for the next 24h. Of course, this is an oversimplified example but hopefully you got the idea. :)
This really would not be all that surprising, but it also would not surprise me if the average Postgres setup was better tuned/architected than the majority case of MySQL uses.

Our setup was surely not ideal, but even with significant tuning, it was not sufficient.

It is really good to hear successes like Reddit's, though. How long have you folks had your databases in EC2?
On this naive microbenchmark yes. Notice how fast CouchDB is when dealing with multiple documents (fetch all). Also I'm sure that on a benchmark showing many clients fetching many documents (which is a likely scenario in many applications), CouchDB would shine compared to other databases.
"The only way they win is if you don't fight!"

The only way? How about if they overpower you in an expensive, drawn-out court battle.

Not only is the law stupid, but in the US the process to resist it is seriously flawed.
Kinesis Freestyle. I bought mine for $90 from an online retailer, and I turned around and bought the VIP kit for another $40.

In retrospect, I wish that I would've spent the extra bucks on the longer cable connecting the two pieces together. There're nuts on the underside of the thing that look like they'll accept screws for mounting it to half-assed hardware for attaching it to, e.g., a chair.
It's worth noting that the average person starting a successful company is not in his early 20s. http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842907756695817/the-average-en... That's one article discussing this, there are others.
The reason you hear about all the rich millionaires is that they make good stories and they're rare - people just don't talk about the guy working hard through his thirties to make a few million. Also, look at the big entrepreneurs - they very often come from MIT, Stanford, etc. and get their initial funding either from rich family or connections made at those schools.
An excellent demonstration of why it's a bad puzzle--there's an obvious naive solution that most people get stuck at (the 19 minute one), and a single critical insight that reveals the otherwise simple optimal solution.

It's not testing logical reasoning ability; both solutions are "obvious", which one depending on if you know the trick.

It's not testing creative problem-solving; the solution is so constrained by ridiculous limitations that there's only one "correct" answer.

It's not testing skills for any sort of practical, real-life situation (I hope).

The main thing that questions like this reveal is whether or not the interviewee enjoys frivolous puzzles and riddles. Not the worst thing to select candidates based on I suppose, but probably not ideal, either...
Is it just me or does the article just leave me hanging around? Apparently the title is non descriptive of the article. Nevertheless. Here is what i think.

I belive (rather solidly and logicly) that the ONLY thing behind a succesful startup are:

1. A good aesthetic design
2. Hardworking management team
3. A good backing community
4. Proper massive SOCIAL publicity.
5. Be original, innovative and DIFFERENT

SOcial Publicity is what counts the most. If your startup gets coverage, it will be a hit!
I actually shy away from using SVN's update to push files to production or development; primary reason is I don't like my entire code history sitting in my public root...

Generally, I prefer rsync. Rsync can exclude all of the .svn directories so you are pushing the latest working copy and it also only pushes files that are new or have been changed on the source machine.

You can easily write up a little deployment script that you run when you are ready and up you go; it does many of the same things (exception being delete) that Subversion's update command does for you.

Because I use rsync with a shell (rather than it's daemon process), I generally have a passwordless private key to the server so rsync can run without constantly asking me to authenticate.
A classic. The most referenced underground paper, ever!

112,605 documents found

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search?q=Smashing+The+Stack+For...
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Ah, fond memories of my computer security class, where this was assigned reading. We also studied format string vulnerabilities: http://julianor.tripod.com/bc/formatstring-1.2.pdf
That's my process too, only, we have four different remote sandbox servers... I wrote a python script that sends out notifications to the sandbox servers to svn up when the post-commit hook is run.
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In one of my freshman CS courses, one of our last assignments was to read this paper (as well as a more approachable tutorial written by our TAs) and carry this out on a toy architecture (LC3) that we had been working with for the whole course. It was probably the most interesting assignment we had that semester.
We had some of databases at EC2 since November of 2008, and moved the rest of them over in May 2009.
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For a lot of these tutorials to work, you also have to turn off SELinux or any other stack protection.
This is tangential but I must:

Oh, oh why someone like Ron Rivest allows himself to be associated with a name like "Scantegrity". It's a name I could expect to see in the title of the next Doghouse on Bruce Scheier's blog. And it almost reads like Scam-tegrity. D'uh.

To offset the above, there's a nice summary of the system on Wikipedia as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity.
The linked article is a bit ambiguous, but remember that electricity is a subset of a country's total energy needs.
The title is slightly misleading since they also include PostgreSQL, MySQL and Memcached in their tests. They conclude:

* MongoDB and Tokyo Tyrant are useful now. CouchDB has promise, but is too slow currently.

* Non-relational databases have shown their worth at larger sites when used cleverly.

* Non-relational databases will continue to improve performance, stability & features.

* Relational databases are still a great choice: fast, powerful and proven. With caching, denormalization, rework (e.g. Drizzle) & better replication, they will continue to be competitive.
For me it depends on who offers the bet. I don't want to be in a market for lemons.
> "I have a question for you. What is the maximum number of balls from which you could find the heavy one in 5 weighings? If you know the answer to that one, then you know I know the answer to your problem."

I don't get it. What does that answer tell me? (Unless the answer I calculated for your problem was not the right answer, and the right answer would tell me something.)
I think the last crop of indie games represents a significant point in time for the industry, though, and is worth writing about.

Yes there were always people making games for fun, but this is the first time a critical mass of people are feeling hung over from the industrial games. The industry itself feels it, and is taking notice.

Also a new phenomenon is that scale of the market has allowed these indie games to be financial viable as a primary income stream; making a game in a 2-3 person team or solo can be more than a hobby for the first time since the very earliest consoles.
we will def try to make it! (@hypem + @sched)
Did you look at the site then?
I work on the Cassandra distributed database for Rackspace. A _lot_ of people start out trying Cassandra on EC2 but the universal conclusion has been that I/O performance is miserable.

Anecdotally, Rackspace Cloud Servers I/O works much better, although the only serious head-to-head comparison I have seen is this one: http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2240 (tl;dr: < 20MBps on writes with local storage or EBS on EC2 vs 100MBps+ on RCS)
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NIST demonstrates 'universal' programmable quantum processor
What is the difference you think you see between "Windows 7" and "Windows 7 backported to XP"? If I gave you one of each of those, how would you tell the difference?
> by betting on money or even the failure of others you are a pest to society.

Then everyone is a pest. For example, Apple bets that MS will fail to provide a good computer experience for some people.
Years ago there was a diet based on this idea, I think it was called the blackmail diet. You set your weight loss goals, and then escrow, say, $10,000 to be paid to the Klan or the Na$is or some other loathesome group if you don't reach your goals.

People are still fat, at least in the U.S.
I admire your idealism.
So does this suggest that news organizations are not self supporting, that is, Bloomberg's fees from the financial data seem to support the news organization.
I can imagine seeing some sort of label maker where you can select n days, n weeks, from now and having it spit out a use-by date.

Not high tech, but something you could sell with a convincing enough infomercial and a Billy Mays look-alike
> I think there's something distinctly Indian about making 5 year plans

I suspect that it's more "human" than Indian.

A five year plan is short enough that it looks reasonable but long enough that you don't have to do anything for a while at the beginning. And, when the 5 years is over, few people remember what they were promised at the beginning, especially if you've started a couple of other five year plans in the interim.

The five year plan may be ideal for getting resources to not do anything useful.
Financial data is news. The most lucrative kind, it seems.
That's a fun one, I wonder if people are still fat, why isn't the klan the best funded institution on the planet :) ?

Either someone at the escrow company is now living the high life or the enrollment wasn't very high. But that's a really funny application of the idea.

I've looked it up, I'm late to the party:

The Blackmail Diet by John Bear (1984, Ten Speed Press)
Reminds me of this : http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/21/
I think that as it stands, this is the reality. The Washington Post is similar in that their Kaplan business supports the newsroom.

What I think may happen though, is that players like WaPo and Bloomberg will ultimately emerge with profitable news businesses because competitors will go out of businesses and their assets will be able to be picked up at fire sale prices and benefit from a lack of competition.
Simple answer: no. If they use this for anything, I imagine it'll be for something similar to the iPhone, but without another company (like AT&T) backing them up financially. This allows Apple to sell something at a low price but still be financially viable.
How Old Is Old Enough?
If we are going down memory lane, check out JP's "Advanced Doug lea's malloc exploits"
http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=61&id=6#article
Rory Marinich: Make Great Shit
It's interesting to compare exploit tech from today to how simple things were back in '97. In '97, a complex exploit meant you couldn't have lowercase ASCII equivalents in your shellcode. Now, you scan the target for info leaks that will disclose stack cookies, and spray the heap to increase the odds that you'll hit your exploit in randomized memory, and forge stack frames that will return to mprotect or VirtualProtect, and and and.

So much of "security research" over the last 10 years has basically danced around a fundamental fact: if you lose control of the runtime memory of your program, you lose control of the whole program.
Ask HN: Scriptable command line browser?
Basically what I'm looking to do is use Selenium IDE (http://seleniumhq.org/) on Firefox to generate some regression tests but then I want to replay them without having to fire up X11 and Firefox.

I found ELinks (http://elinks.or.cz) which is a text based browser with Lua support but it seems like it would be a good amount of work to write a Selenium binding.

Anyone know anything better?