skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bravo. HN would be a better site if more people did that. Particularly on Sundays.

I have a few bête noir topics I try to moderate away, too, but I tend to draw the line at explicit endorsements of one side over another in a tribal conflict. I can see how it would make sense to just excise tribal issues and have done, though.
This article is mere bullshit. CRU never dumped their own data. They just dumped their own copy of the data they got from other sources, because anyway they could not give those around. The original are safe where they belong.
Also, this is hardly news related to the hack considered that this information was put online on August 11 2009.

See
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cr...
I think the big advantage of Amazon is that you can scale up and down quickly so that you aren't paying for services you don't need. They also have the advantage of better integration with their other services since you don't pay for transfers within the same region and the transfers are fast since it's all on their network.
M-Power Turbocharge Audio Series
"So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless."

Unfortunately this is true. As someone who has never doubted that global warming was man made (yes, those last leaked emails were private conversations and held no smoking gun whatsoever. People were reading into one term used ten years ago to sex up a graph), this is embarrassing. This, more than any other thing has made me reconsider my views.

The problem is that glaciers and polar ice are melting at unprecedented rates, this is unarguable. The earth is getting warming in those areas and it is effecting the sea levels and biodiversity of the planet. How do we tell if it's man made? What can we do to stop it? Remember this doesn't prove that global warming isn't real.
Well, for Linode: http://www.linode.com/api/

JSON REST goodness.
If cost reduction is the reason then CPU resources should be higher as well, but they don't seem to be.
One thing scares me about Linode: I can not find any information with regards to availability guarantees at all. Even when they talk about their "datacenter availability", they're talking about which image slots are available in which datacenter.

EDIT: Ok, I just found some availability information in their FAQ:

http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm

"What we can boast about is our commitment to resolving these issues in the quickest fashion possible. Most customers will tell you the last time they rebooted was to take advantage of a plan upgrade. 99.9% uptime, or your lost time is refunded back to your account. "

This essentially means it's worthless: they're only backing it up with paying you back the time your server was down (they'd better do that!). Looks like they don't have much confidence in themselves in that area.
When you knock 4 other companies and promote one, then make money off people buying the service based on your analysis, you create an impression of being non-objective.
Exactly, I would claim the author to be a fool if this wasn't included.... we are all entrepreneurs here, right?

In the same way I never batted an eyelid with David Welton's Slicehost vs. Linode[1] article. It was informativve and unbiased and I was happy to provide some incentive back for that.

[1: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode ]
True, but you properly wasn't using Mint with your friends the way you would use Facebook, etc.

"Nex3 is paying of his credit card bill. Remaining amount $12158" is properly not something you want to share with your friends.
no evidence the earth is warming.

Just a quick comment.

The earth is definitely warming. We are exiting an ice-age. There has been a conscious effort, I believe, to equate global warming with man-made global warming. They are not the same thing, even if used interchangeably by the media.

The "hockey stick" graph appears to shows that the earth is warming faster now than it was earlier. It's this "steeper slope" that we're debating, and that may have been manipulated. The general public, however, has had the debate obfuscated for them into "is it warming, or isn't it?"
I think Colin would do well to lead his explanation with a cleaned up version of the second paragraph "So for the moment, I'm taking the path of least resistance..."
The fact that a topic is treated by some people as a religious dispute doesn't mean articles about it can't be interesting. By flagging stuff without even reading it, you're behaving as mindlessly as the partisans on each side.
Is it possible for you to provide a pre-compiled client for windows without the cygwin install?
sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.
Somebody please do this for the low-end dedicated providers. You can get Atom systems for $30-$50/mo now, which should solve the performance variance (especially on disk IO) that affect cloud/VPSes.

Provide network latency/tput data also, please. :-)
"So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming?"

If Darwin's original notebooks were lost, there would not cease to be evidence for evolution. There are many thousands of papers on climate change. A loss of the raw data sets for one paper does not change the conclusions drawn by the others.
I'm not saying this never happens.

It does, but you'll rarely see this pattern in any real Erlang code base. And when you see it, it will not be "littered". It's an exception, not an idiom.

And those samples from Joe's book and thesis are just snippets with no context. BTW, O'Reilly's "Erlang Programming" doesn't even provide such an example.

Edit: One example when I do use this pattern is constructing proplists for some function calls.
99.5% seems bad until you realise the rolling period is a month. that's pretty good actually, since most will roll over a year, or not mention roll over at all, leaving them fine to say 99.9% covers 3.65 days in a 10 year period if they want. can you imagine your site being down for 1 day and they say it's within contract :)
Not necessarily. This article ignores the "neighbor" factor. That is, performance might be highly dependent on what the neighboring VPSes on the same compute node and storage node are doing. It could very well be that on Linode he was placed into a underloaded system that did not have other active VPSes on it or even have been filled out to capacity yet. It's not possible to tell. It may just reflect a better allocation system than the other providers, assigning compute nodes in a round robin fashion, not in order.

So, it's a little unfair to do a benchmark when 95% of the system's resources are taken up by an unknown factor.

(Note: I don't host with any of these guys, so I'm not defending Slicehost or anyone else. In fact, I run my own hosting company and I'm working on our own cloud offerings right now.)
Pre-compiled clients are on my to-do list. Obviously I want to do this is a systematic manner so that my release process is more repeatable than "find boxes running the following operating systems: ... and borrow them for a few minutes to build a binary".

I'm not sure if it's possible to build binaries using cygwin which will then run without having cygwin installed. If not, this would turn into "port tarsnap to Windows", which is also on my to-do list, but much lower down.
Rands in Repose: Up to Nothing
You should next make a bet with him that for any deterministic shuffling algorithm that does not consider the value of the cards, the cards will return to their original state eventually.

1. The number of permutations of the cards is finite (52!).

2. Therefore, by the pigeonhole principle, if you shuffle the cards 52! + 1 times, at least two of the card orders will be the same. Let those two decks be A and B.

3. Take a blue deck of cards and place them in the order of A. Take a red deck of cards and tape them to the blue deck, so the red ace of spades is taped to the first blue card, the red two of spades to the second blue card, and so on.

4. Shuffle this deck however many times it took to get from A to B.

5. Since A and B are identical, the blue cards at the end of this shuffling are in the same positions as they were when the shuffling started. And since the red cards started out in order and traveled identically with the blue cards, the resulting deck is in order.

6. Since, by hypothesis, the shuffling algorithm does not consider the value of the cards, we can just throw out the blue cards and shuffle the red cards alone however many times it took to get from A to B, and if they started in order, the cards will return to their original order.
Need to? Nope. Want to? Sure.
Pakistani Singer Mahmood Khan Number one in Australia.
It was not merely a silly comparison, but a deliberately dishonest one. Reddit is one of 144 startups we've funded.

It's also false that federal R&D funding was the "entire basis" for Silicon Valley. And false that YC is a product of Silicon Valley. In fact, it's hard to find much that you've said that isn't false.
Save Your Spin for Someone Who Cares
He is not giving you his opinion, he is giving you results of his benchmark. You can even download logs to check and run the patched benchmark util yourself to compare.

I (and most others hopefully) already knew about prgmr and EC2 has horrible performance, even before I saw this benchmark, the only one new to me is Rackspace performance numbers (BTW Rackspace owns slicehost).

I don't see any logic behind your objection.
Humans lead these companies. While they may have a fiduciary duty to their stock holders, no human decision is perfect.

You can't ignore the role played by ego, altruism, greed, short-sightedness, and other human emotions. I'm not saying that "thinking it will help make (more) money" isn't important. But these decisions are anything but basic.
They will give you an opening offer most of the time. If they ask what you're looking for, just say that you're exploring the market and don't have a set figure yet. Here's a simple strategy for a first timer, especially if you want the job and don't have other offers on the table:

1. They will call and offer you the job, and tell you what the salary is. Say "thanks, I'm very interested, but will need a day to think it over."

2. Call them back the second day. Say "I'm very excited about this job, but I was really hoping for a higher salary."

3. Shut up and wait for them to reply. Leaving a space of silence is key. You've said your piece, it's their turn to reply--just wait for them to say something back.

4. They will usually come back with a higher offer. This got me a 10% increase in starting pay at one job--and I was absolutely going to take it either way.

There are lots of other things you can do if you have other offers, previous salaries, or industry comparisons. But this is a solid fallback plan, and anyone can handle it.
Ask YC: How do I use Flash to let users upload videos from their webcams?
I want to make a site where people record videos of themselves using laptop webcams. I know that Flash can do that. Are there any open source tools that I can use to grab a quick clip easily?
No, it's not even remotely close to true.

What happened here? They threw away their copy of the raw data. That data still exists (they gathered it from public repositories), and the methods of the paper describe what they did. You could reconstruct the results.

Essentially, the "skeptics" are getting worked up over what amounts to throwing away the lab notebooks for a paper published two decades ago. Even if you assume malfeasance on the part of these authors (an assumption that does not appear to be justified), you'd have to disregard the results of thousands of other papers to leap to the (wild) conclusion that "there is no evidence the earth is warming."
You can pretty much just replace all instances of "Boston" with "Chicago" for that entire article (except the 2 hour grace period thing).

When I lived in Chicago and had a truck (tiny little Chevy S10), I came to know first hand how aggravating the street cleaning schedule was and built up a collection of tickets to prove it. My truck also got broken into despite it being completely empty and having a bench seat clearly showing anyone who walked by it was empty.

I'll also never forget coming home around 7pm on a weekday night and literally driving all over the neighborhood for 2 hours waiting for a spot to open up.

I was so happy when I got rid of that thing.
No, that is 7.50 pounds sterling a month in taxes, not total, for fiber.
She repeatedly made comments about her work being good but her publishers wanting something "commercial". Maybe she should have tried to make something people wanted instead of something she thought they should want.
The KEY to success
Someone clear this up for me: What is the difference between expats and immigrants?
Actual article here: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/11/25/product-design-debt-ver...

Real reason websites look so ugly, not mentioned in article: browsers don't use good typesetting algorithms in order to keep reflow speeds high. (Compare TeX to a Word document or a browser page rendering. Yech.)
I agree. The story here is impressive, courageous, daring, and brash, but calling it a "great hack" doesnt seem fitting.
I agree that the articles are sometimes interesting, but they're frequently just re-hashes, posted as platforms for ranting comment threads by the same handful of people.

It would be nice if there was a flag-like mechanism for the community to turn off comments on articles like this one. It seems that if the karma incentive was reduced on political articles, people would have less incentive to post the thoughtless ones.
Cooliris » Channels » sun studio
Non-broken link: http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf
It looks like they have a category for "applications", which seems to use the same definition commonly used around here.
Don't apply for SBIRs if you're at a startup - unless you think addiction to crack is good. Seriously, there have been but a dismal few examples of companies that actually stop working for the government and become product centered.
Treatment of alcoholism
There is definitely the fiscal policy aspects (Abu Dhabi has good reason to let Dubai and its backers know that it will not necessarily bail them out) and there are also socio-cultural aspects as well. Abu Dhabi is much more conservative than Dubai and there is some friction there that is getting magnified by the financial aspects.
Giving gets you places more so than trying to climb over people to attain success, opposing the view that many of us have grown up with in North America of a 'dog eat dog' world where success is attained at the 'expense' of someone else'.
Its kinda sad to see Google - "the big daddy of innovation", now turning into a Microsoft killer. I understand the importance of competition in the market, but its coming at the price of Google's innovation, which is going down. Google should stick to the web, innovate there and Microsoft should stick to the Desktop -- they are good at it, and there are so many unsolved problems in both fields. Stabbing each other is not going to help anyone. At the end of the day, as a human race, we just loose time to do good things.
Kurdistanpost
While I'm obviously not every Linode user ever, I've had 100% uptime on my ~9-month old slice. It's been an absolute dream.
You're in much greater danger of having poor performance and downtime from your own code rather than anything to do with your host. So, before you jump ship from one to another based on benchmarks, think about how much time and effort such a move will take and ask yourself what you could spend it on.

If you're running a web app, my bet is you'll get a much better ROI on time if you pick an expensive DB query you're running and try to analyze/optimize it.

All that said, if you haven't yet picked a host, this does offer some interesting insights. Still, I would rank APIs, GUIs, management panels, and helpful support as way, way more important than raw performance.
Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters:

Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.
No one has any cast iron guarantees. I've been on linode for about a year now, and only had 1 or 2 outages (Power failure, and one issue with a host update).
Definitely. Look at the other points as well, like bandwidth.

From what I know linode is also cheapest for bandwidth overage. Far far cheaper than slicehost.
Ask HN: Which are some of the most expensive off-the-shelf sw products?
We all buy windows and at the most photo shop for few hundred dollars. But which are some of the most expensive software products around?

I have heard of SCADE suite and SCADE graphics each costing around $100k
I recommend you adjust your first job step: emailing each day. You should email when you have something to say and not be bound by the rotation of the earth.

Other than that, I'd be happy to provide feedback if I'm able.
It's pretty accurate, although it doesn't mention that many quant jobs can actually cover several of the quant roles he mentions.

(I'm not a quant, but I work with quants and friends in the field)
> You mean like the George W. Bush White house email scandal?

The media was highly critical of GWB during his whole presidency. He was portrayed as a stuttering moron.

This is in complete contrast to the current love-fest with Obama.

(I am not American btw, just making an observation).
It also depends on whether the main purpose of the graph is to show changes along the ranged axis (as if from period to period over time), or the magnitude of differences between the lines on the ranged axis.

If the latter, a zero origin is fairer. While the day-to-day differences are of some interest here, the main interest is provider vs. provider, so the axes are not ideal. They make the provider-to-provider differences seem larger.
Are you a linode or slicehost user?
I think the genesis of this line of thought was actually Steve Blank's stuff, not VCs.
War Is Peace: Can science fight media disinformation?
What does the plug-in do?

The page didn't make much sense. Is it really nothing more than an image added to your footer?
Dated May 20, 2008.

"Investment Banks, e.g. Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers."
Why did they not want to give away the data?
Slicehost calls their VPS instances slice, so it seems he is a slicehost user.
The overall presentation convinces me this is a good-faith effort, but such a financial interest in the results would ideally be disclosed prominently up front.

Even with no conscious/devious intent, this sort of interest can bias the results. For example, what if the relative results could vary arbitrarily from week to week (especially possible with the neighboring load on VPS nodes)?

If you get a plausible result that shows the companies pay commissions do best, you are incented to publish right away. If you get a result that shows the non-commission-paying companies on top, you will dig deeper: maybe there are ways the commission-payers are better, in a longer analysis.

(It's similar to the publication bias in other research, which also requires no scheming intent, just natural behavior in response to incentives which are each alone reasonable.)
You're right, that would be useful information. However, Aaron was one of the reddit founders and I imagine gained a few pennies from that. Perhaps the project he's hired for is openlibrary.org?

From http://openlibrary.org/about/people: "Aaron Swartz, Former Project Leader. The Open Library wouldn't exist without Aaron. He wrote the backbone of the system you see today. He has also worked on specs like RSS, startups like Reddit.com, and software projects like web.py. He worked from San Francisco to architect the site, put together the team, and attempt to keep things organized, and we couldn't have come this far without his crucial expertise."
Yes, I should of probably cited where this came from. This is from the Tarsnap FAQ. (I'm not affiliated in any way.)
> literally driving all over the neighborhood for 2 hours waiting for a spot to open up.

The NY Times in a feature on holiday parking in NYC mentioned this guy's blog which is all about finding a parking space before/after/during street cleaning hours in NYC. I wouldn't think reading about someone finding a parking space would be so fascinating but it is strangely entertaining.

http://alternatesideparking.blogspot.com/
expats don't intend to give up their original citizenship - my understanding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate - gives it a broader definition to include permanent immigrants.
Http%253A%252F%252Fwww.addthis.com%252Fbookmark.php
MIT Economist Confirms: Health Bill Reduces Costs, Improves Coverage
I lived in a highrise condo community during 2008 that had subsidized fiber lines. What would have cost $60/month was $22 and it was stellar at 80 megabits down, 40 megabits up at its peak.
Oops. I totally meant to put "(PDF)" in the title rather than the URL. Thanks.
When you finally do have a pre-compiled windows app, sans cygwin, I'll have more clients to refer to tarsnap.

One client I'm dealing with now has health care data needing backup. I wouldn't trust other online backup services with this, but would trust tarsnap. For now, we're using USB hard drives.
He says it's for R and MySQL, but R is just reading CSV in his code. It looks like you can use Postgres, or SQLite, or even code in a general programming language.
I can't, dammit. I'm trying to read the article, but all I'm seeing is "igon value igon value igon value". Damn you, Steven Pinker! I will never enjoy Gladwell again.
Top most famous hackers
I'm really beginning to hate this terminology (virality). It just sounds retarded.
Generally I agree with you, on the importance of being skeptical about analysis/benchmark comparison where financial incentives are at sake. IE, some research publications are sponsored by Microsoft who in return publishes glowing review of Internet Explorer 8.

However, in this case, the author is not sponsored by or works for any VPS service. He provided affiliated links at the end of the article, where one of the linked service did not prove to be superior than the other according to his analysis. If he sneaked in an affiliated link within the article, the objection and skepticism could be somewhat justified (still I think its somewhat fair game).
SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.
Seems like the simplest way to implement this would be to add an option in the address book that says 'Automatically apply Label XYZ to this person's incoming messages' (but with less words than that).

Or a filter option for the 'From:' box that says 'In my address book' or something like that.
http://www.filerex.com/get/windows/antivirus/
In London Starbucks is usually the best choice unless you know which local places are good. A lot (in fact I would say the majority) of the mom-and-pop places in the center are just as expensive and serve much worse coffee.

From a recent review of an independent that is next to a Starbucks:

"Best to throw the coffee in the Thames, and remember to offer a brief prayer for the fish."
I like how he says that brevity != disinterest. I wish this understanding was the norm instead of having to be pointed out.
Any idea if the amazon one used EBS for the database? Or the new shiny RDS?
I wish your study accounted for the elasticity. I end up using 20-30 machines (sometimes 100) for couple of hours every day. Normally, I would use 3-4 large instances.
I wonder how EC2 compares with others in scenarios similar to above.
Tiger Woods Mistress
How new media has led to a polarization into blockbusters and niche content