skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done similar cost calculations at various times. Assuming your application(s) can run on cost effective commodity hardware, co-location becomes cheaper once you can occupy roughly half a rack. This assumes a middle of the market data center, 1 full time sysadmin at 100k or equivalent smart hands hours and a 2:1 peak to average traffic level and dynamically scaling your ec2 instances accordingly.

If your traffic is peaky, but those peaks can be anticipated with at least a fraction of an hour's time, then ec2 can be a win at a larger host count.

And of course, it almost aways makes since for batch jobs like scraping.

Another interesting way to use ec2 is as a disaster recovery plan: keep your application configuration current in ami's and keep a db slave going there. If your primary co-location fails catastrophically you can be up at scale on ec2 as fast as your DNS propagates.

Overall hybrid models seem to be the most effective way to use ec2.
Maybe this is because sitting around practicing a piano for 8 hours a day is acceptable for 6 to 18 year olds but no 20+ year old is able to do this.
Less a theory and more an observation.
I'd rather see a campaign for equality. That's not so bland and gets more to the heart of the matter.
Useful Online Generators for Designers
Dude - thanks for the heads up on this. Will reach out to the organizers and see if we can help each other out.
If you go back in time and watch threads during almost ALL web hosting outages, the #1 COMPLAINT is always lack of communication with users.

PLEASE, web hosting companies, get the point, we want constant communications, even if you have nothing new to report. WE are smart too, let us know what you're trying, what's working, what's not, maybe your USERS can help you fix the problem.
These are from a list we made over the summer while getting ready to launch our API. Now that the RFS is official, it seemed like a good time to share them with everyone and solicit some more ideas.
I think the implication of 'fake business name' is business name that is not registered as your business. Otherwise, why have a qualifier?

Anyway, what I mean is that the OP messed up with registering his business.
During the courtship, here's how I pitched it:

* Programming talent: Conde would be getting the foundation of an uber-talented programming culture in team reddit, which is the only way to beget more talented programmers (because I think you'll all agree that people like me -- that is, non-programmers -- can evaluate programming talent).

* Valuable destination: A community of the tastemakers for most of the Internet. Like it or not, most hot Internet links that aren't about nudity are first on the front page of reddit. Owning this front page of the web is an attractive proposition. Monetizing it is a bit more work, but we have always been a very scrappy [cheap] shop. Looking at 7M uniques this month with 6.5 employees (4.5 come Nov).

* Geek cred: This might be a bit of a stretch if I hadn't heard from folks like Ars Technica's Ken Fisher that the reddit acquisition (and how well it went) helped the decision to accept Conde's acquisiton offer. Furthermore, if you're thinking about hiring programmers down the line - because you know the Internet represents the future of publishing - it helps your pitch a bit more to say you own reddit than, say, Vogue.
I believe the trampoline function / special form can do the mutual tail-call in clojure (http://clojure.org/api#toc569) :

trampoline can be used to convert algorithms requiring
mutual recursion without stack consumption.

but I haven't used it yet, am still fairly new to lisp / clojure, so certainly am not an expert in this field. YMMV
Actually, if you think everyone's bid was too high, you bid $1, since the goal is to get as close as possible without going over. Like blackjack.
RAND Releases Paper on Cyberdeterrence and Cyber War
It's very de-humanizing. Even in places that claim otherwise, they tend to treat technical staff like interchangeable parts, rather than people. And they wonder why their best folks tend also to be the least loyal.
The hardware broadcaster was my suggestion. It should be dead-simple, with inputs for video, power, and ethernet - configurable through a web interface, just like a router.

If you can make it cheap enough (< $100 would be my guess), we have a lot of gamers who I believe would buy one. You wouldn't have to write much software - for example vlc can already stream to jtv.
Yeah I agree - without any evidence I would expect it to be neutral. But I think that there is a pretty well documented tendency for people to be much more aggressive and extreme on online forums than there are in real life. (Similar to road rage) Back in the day I remember reading littlegreenfootballs and being shocked at some of the hateful rhetoric which was in the comments (of course left leaning sites have this too)
I agree with this sentiment, though I wish the reality were more like your theory for smarter brand positioning. On paper, it's a very attractive demographic -- 26 median age, pre-dominently male, affluent and well-educated.

It's oft pitched as Wired readers, only about a decade younger (Wired is an extremely well loved brand by advertisers).
For enterprise scale with 100+ terabytes of Apache logs (or any other logs) use a tool like SenSage (http://www.sensage.com). It adds real-time alerting and operational/security analysis of your entire server history.
As someone from Austria I can easily understand why he created a UK LTD without actually living there.

Take Austria for example, you need to have €35000 in equity (I hope that is the right financial vocabulary) to start a GmbH - a company type similar to an LTD in terms of liability.

In the EU there is a ruling that you can create a company in any EU state, without actually living there. Of course you still have to obey the laws (of both countries) regarding taxes.

So if you want limited liability but you don't have enough cash upfront, a UK LTD can be a good idea.
But you usually create a UK bank account for your company after incorporating.
A little under two weeks, after a PG mention in an essay. Sounds like you got a similar boost from a reddit appearance (oh, if only we'd had reddit to promote on back then...). Be sure to engage those users, especially if they write you; users who care enough to write feedback -- that's gold.

Then a week or so after that, we had a splendid day - neither Steve nor I needed to submit any links, we just used the site like anyone else.

It was a good thing, too, because I was hitting my limit of aliases&passwords to remember.
I <3 IAmA. And it's entirely reddit-generated and -run. Give users easy tools and get out of the way - you'll be pleasantly surprised.
This is something we still need to improve. Too few visitors to reddit understand or even know about how this vast network of user-created reddits should work. See, here I go wanting to mock a new redesign up in photoshop...
I'm a fan of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think and Ginny Radish's book on web copy. Both are great for web design
What'd you think about the new 'xkcd' sort we implemented for comments last week?

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
That's what I mean by short-term rage. As much as you think people accept you for who you are and what you think, when you express yourself online you realize that most people are awful and immature in a handful of ways. But past that point you develop some self-consciousness and, more often than not, come out of the social parts of the Internet a lot smarter, wittier, and more savvy than you used to be. I can't wait to see that happen on a mass scale.
Define equality. There're a lot of versions of the word that I don't support. Peace, now, there's an idea I can get behind, impossible as it might seem.
I've experienced more tension playing go than any game other than poker.

I think initially go particularly punishes people who are very strong at thinking their way through combinatorial problems.

If you're good at strategy in general, and used to quickly and deliberately thinking through decision trees, I think it's only natural to build up a sense of confidence of being able to be good at nearly any game.

But go utterly defeats this, as the initial few moves of the game involve very vague intuition. Certainly experienced players have a library of standard opening formations and patterns they rely on, but more importantly, they've played the countless games necessary to intuitively apply that knowledge effectively. There's a saying that if you learn the standard patterns (joseki) you become 2 stones weaker. It's true. It takes many games to integrate that knowledge into actual play effectively. Trying to learn it before you're ready is counterproductive.

The other proverb is great advice: lose your first 100 games as fast as possible. I'm still on this path, and have gone from understanding little to playing even against 14k players in the local club.

Keep courage, the anxiety may not go away, but the enjoyment of the game will rise to meet it.
I'm a mostly MSFT guy so here are a few of mine:

SQL Server - @brent0, @bradmcgehee, @GFritchey, @lazycoder, @MladenPrajdic

.NET - @shanselman, @scottw, @RickStrahl

Misc - @meetdux, @edbott, @codinghorror
I don't know who downvoted you, I voted you back up. I tend to share your pessimism (or its close correlate realism) about this particular situation. Pick your battles so to speak.

As an example of what I was trying to express, in the last German national election, 2% of Germans voted for the Pirate Party, which was running essentially as an interest group for personal freedom and privacy.

The previous grand coalition government had used the specter of child pornography to legislate secret Australia-style black-lists. People stood up by signing a petition against this and risked being labeled "pro-child porn".

The newly formed (more liberal) coalition abandoned this project during their negotiations, with the Chancelor expressly pointing out the surprising 2% success of the Pirate Party.

This is a case where stupidity was being undone, because of civic engagement.

As I said, pick your battles and don't become a cynic. (Not trying to imply you are, just generally speaking). Cheers. :)

Side note: I appreciate a good rant once in a while, so I don't take any issue with your original post.
So gmail will let the city of LA do litigation holds on e-mail, right?!??
Curses! What tipped you off?
Sure. Modern linux can handle 100s of 1000s of threads without breaking a sweat.

See also http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2008/03/writing-java-multithrea... for an interesting (java-centric) analysis.
Mildly interesting overview but I'm not sure it achieves it's purpose of making "mainstream business audience—laypeople ... understand the phenomenon of the Ruby language"

I thought this was cute: "In its required annual filings in 2009 with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft listed both the Ruby language and the Rails framework as significant competitors."
I'd love to see live gigs use this stuff.
The name of the game for the app store is shifting. People really need to start understanding marketing their apps beyond the app store.

There are tools out there that are being designed to help you as a developer do this, http://appsto.re , is one example. Apps need better metrics and feedback to improve sales.
This sort of thing makes you wonder about how valuable protecting biodiversity is - how easily one of the hundreds of thousands of species being wiped out could be critical in allowing us to find out some key potential understanding of how DNA can work, which otherwise it could take us centuries to uncover without a natural example to start from.
"vlc can already stream to jtv"

Are you guys looking for hardware or software encoding? I thought you were talking about something like an FPGA or ASIC.
Check out http://appsto.re/ as a free tool to promote iPhone apps. http://blogs.appsto.re/ explains a bit more about the service.
Give yourself a raise: keep good books and educate yourself on taxes
I was told once that "education is expensive" - like attorneys, bookkeepers and accountants are always more expensive when the !@%! hits the fan.

When your business catches fire, and the money is rolling in:

- A handful of incorrectly tabbed transactions can lead to paying too much or too little in taxes.

- A stack of improperly marked receipts can set the IRS aflame looking way deeper into your lives than you’d ever guess capable.

- But worst of all, if your books are behind, confusing, or inaccurate the multiple you’ll achieve in a sale or merger will be substantially decreased, or ruin a deal altogether.

All in all I spent more money receiving this education than most people spend on a 4-year degree and I thought I’d pass it along.

My specific advice:

Get in the habit right now of keeping clean books, spend a weekend learning how to do it yourself so you can competently hire a bookkeeper and train that person to do it for you.

Invest at least 3 - 4 hours with a CPA, find one on recommendation, make sure they have experience in business, and plan for success.

Spend one hour a week for the rest of your life managing receipts, and properly entering transactions.

With the advent of online accounting systems such as QuickBooks Online there’s no excuse not to keep things up to date, and believe you me, the money & stress that you save in the long term is the simplest way to give yourself a raise.
Mine is also at Dallas (dallas98) but has only been up for ~20 minutes and is extremely slow.

edit: Looks like my VPS was offline for 20 ~ 30 minutes and has settled down now.
David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation
What is notable to me is the surprise received by those who purchased hosting in multiple geographies to survive a datacenter-wide issue. I hadn't thought much before about the effect of centralized IT management decisions on availability. Perhaps those who really need uptime will now consider using another hosting provider as fail-over. Not sure how the DNS issues would play out as network-level load balancing isn't something I know much about.
I've rarely met people who are excellent at everything. For the areas they have problems with, I imagine human teachers are great.

I imagine such people on HN who think they are 'brilliant' (see a recent question) are actually only adept are certain subjects, sometimes quite a narrow subset. I'm guessing they drop the other subjects asap.
Seriously? This kid unloads his complete existential disillusion, and your advice is "join a startup"? HN is starting to smell like Kool-Aid..
A little under two weeks

Well I definitely feel like a loser now, haha.

Glad I saw you posting here. I'm sure that it's gotten old by now (although I hope it hasn't) but seriously good job on reddit. That website is leaps and bounds about its competition (who is its competition anyhow? digg? fark?). I've spent more time there than I have anywhere else...truly an awesome awesome awesome community.

I hope you guys realize that, to people like me, you are literally a superstar, thanks a lot for responding to my question :).
I'd forgotten about this. I trust none of you take/took this as hard journalism, but it's good story-telling. I do remember that particular quote, though. I'm more of a Jack Sparrow guy myself (Hurray for 3 years of costume recycling! Gotta love sequels).

Re-reading this, three years later, I'm struck by how incredibly guilty Aaron appears to feel on the night of our acquisition. More than anything else, I know I felt relieved. Make no mistake, when you're working through it, there is nothing glamorous or care-free about slogging through a startup acquisition (yet I hope you can all enjoy that suffering one day with your respective startups).
Equal in rights and opportunity, ok? I'm not proposing the kind of enforced universal mediocrity that I know you hacker news ubermensch are paranoid of.
Of course everyone wants peace. The oppressed want a peace that is an end to injustice. The oppressor wants a peace where the oppressed will just shut up and take it.
Compared to what? Consider the alternative - the cost of buying, running, supporting, and maintaining Exchange servers.
Real interactive gaming

Customer service application

Video dating

The real problem here is always latency. Even if you're not doing Onlive-style stuff, videoconferencing is hard. I doubt the standard Flash toolchain (webcam + Flash + etc) can do it all with acceptable latency. Current Justin.TV only works IMO because you're communicating via chat in one direction and via video in the other; a real two-way communication link gets really awkward even at 500ms latency. When people do videoconferencing, they expect it to be like their cell phone, not like a call to the moon.

We at x264 have been working on this for some time for... a certain company that wishes to stay anonymous. Right now you can get down to about 9 millisecond total end-to-end latency for 800x600 video (not counting client and network latency, just server-side), which works pretty damn well.

But dropping encoder latency isn't enough; you need to have a system built around it that has tolerable latency. VLC, for example, doesn't; it's not made for two-way communication, and so it has a 5-15 second internal buffer. It ends up requiring a lot of custom-rolled toolchains, even if the basic libraries already do what is necessary.
The real problem with ASIC solutions is that they generally have terrible compression; you usually don't get good results until you get up to the range of tens of thousands of dollars (for real broadcast encoders). Combined with the utter lack of upload bandwidth that most users have, this could become a serious problem.

The best option I could see in the near future is ARM's recently-announced 2Ghz quad-core CPU; it's low-power enough and hopefully cheap enough to stick in a small box but fast enough to run a good encoder at a good resolution. But even that would probably put the cost well above $100, at which point you might as well start selling capture cards and using peoples' CPUs instead.
Ask HN: Can Friendster enforce their patents against Facebook ?
Friendster has been awarded several patents related to social networking - 7,069,308, 7,117,254, 7,188,153, 7,451 - they range from social networking to uploading content in a social networking site.<p>My question is - can they enforce these patents against Facebook ? If not, can anyone explain why not ?
You can use trampolines in dumber languages too, so that mutual recursion without stack consumption is possible in for e.g. Javascript.

http://pastebin.com/m73e36bfc
If you want command line, then you can edit the /etc/rc* files to startup into a full-screen terminal if you like. There's nothing that says you must run Gnome/KDE/etc.

Karmic Koala Beta runs on virtually everything I've tried it on with no driver problems, even wierd built-in webcams on notebooks.

If you want to go really minimal, then you could run Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based). I have a Compaq Armada running Debian without problems.
I think you slightly underestimate JTV's performance, as well as the level to which it can be customized...

EDIT: concede the point to DarkShikari, though I still think you could make very viable companies based on those ideas and JTV technology.
I worked as a director on (don't shoot me) Big Brother TV show. We had numerous live feeds (40+) with capability of recording only two channels which consisted of two cameras each at the time. It was of premium importance to me, as a director, to choose which streams we would record. When I delegated to my switchers which cameras and persons should be on streams I would bounce myself between other "stories" developing in the house.

How is this relevant to justin.tv? Live television/streaming would be impossible for me to do without a 'tool' I had, which was loggers. Loggers were basically two persons, one delegated to each stream that would vaguely transcribe what was happening on the stream via simple logging software.

Logger would watch two cameras (master plan and close ups that were chosen by me and operated by switcher and remote camera operator, or cameraman behind mirrors) from the stream and listen to it and then would hit Alt-m in a textarea sort of control to enter current SMTP timestamp and start writing what was going on or transcribing a dialog.

I think this kind of primitive, yet powerful feature for logging what is going on can be of use for justin.tv in more ways then one - lectures, spiders could crawl through text, one could skim through a transcription and have SMTP links into the prerecorded video.

Of course, not every video will have willing logger to do so - but premium content would most probably have. Look at avid pirates transcribing subtitles for pirated movies and stuff. I can only imagine someone transcribing a webcast lecture, or a company sponsored live event being transcribed.

just my 2c.

edit:
Now that I think about it - justin.tv could be ideal platform for casting. Private one to one sessions with casting apprentices or even director should not be a problem with remote cam, since casting is usually one person with lame camera and one person in front of that camera acting out directions from the person behind camera or making poses, headshots and stuff like that. You could have an option to make it somewhat open, so people can vote who they like most and stuff like that. This is more of a product idea than API/tool. I have much more, I'll stop now since this was not a question. But, you smart guys here - someone should build something like this on top of justin.tv (or them themselves) and offer someone like shots.net a percentage for marketing.
The new jquery.mb.extruder component is out
This jquery component let you easly build a sliding panel where to insert any kind of content; it has builtin all the functionalities for managing menu lines and sub panels with accordion effect. It can get the content via ajax and therefore you can dynamically build it by passing DATA via request using the metadata attribute settable on the extruder container.
I switched the other way (vim to emacs), and whilst there are some annoyances and it's not quite as "pure", I'd never go back.

I'm surprised that an emacs user says that macros in vim are "awesome" - they're there and very straightforward to use in Emacs, too.
I've not noticed any downtime or lagging in Dallas
The normal way to solve this in government and big dumb companies (which issue RFPs) is to have one domain-specific expert firm awarded an RFP management contract, recusing itself from the actual implementation contract, which then specifies what will be in the RFP. Judging the proposals is a combination of the client and process-management contractor, and in some, the management contract manages the ongoing relationship with the contractor as well.

It's inefficient for best case (you have 2 contracts instead of one), but solves a lot of worst-case problems (bribery or incompetence leading to a rigged bidding process, companies awarding themselves contracts, or buying a perfect but wrong thing).

I'm not sure of the background of the author, but RFPs are standard in a lot of domains.
I was thinking someone might want to try vlc running on an embedded linux, but I don't really care what's in the box so long as it Just Works ;-)
I wasn't talking about that. I also didn't know there was a Hacker News ubermensch.

"Equal in rights and opportunity" still doesn't mean much. How can Facebook enforce equal opportunities? And everybody on Facebook is equal. So you're still dealing with a nebulous term.