skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having an IQ of 160 or above is not a life of sitting on clouds thinking deep thoughts about how string theory is obviously wrong. You run especially hard into the nurture trap so often discussed here.

That is, hearing,"You're so smart," so many times, from teachers, other students, coworkers, bosses, etc., cultivates a sense of elitism and a shock when something is actually difficult.

You're also bound by the same emotions as most other people. If you're a particularly aggressive or irritable person, imagine being surrounded by people who keep making mistakes because they're stupid. If you turn it outward, you're impatient at best and a bully at worst. If you turn it inward, you're stressed out, anxious, and depressed.

All of that said, being a professional programmer was the most satisfying thing I've done. Unfortunately, I moved on precisely because of the above paragraph -- I had managers I felt were particularly dim.
That's not insightful. You can't use Wave like that. It's technically an impossibility. Guy has no clue what he's talking about, just like every other armchair reviewer of Wave.
The author currently contributes to the PLT Scheme ecosystem. Among other things, he is the primary author of Moby (qv http://github.com/dyoo/moby-scheme/blob/master/README).
climate is an enourmously complex system in the short run, but quite simple in the long run.

In that case we should cut NSF funding of long term climate research. If it's so simple, why waste money on supercomputers?
Actually, he didn't leave that out.

> Of the total cost of $185, perhaps $40 to $50 is captured in the U.S. Is that a problem? After all, Amazon seems well-positioned to capture most of the value of the Kindle (the difference between the product's wholesale cost and retail price) and a healthy portion of the profits generated by sales of e-books to Kindle owners. In addition, the Kindle's wireless data service, which uses Sprint's data network, resides in the U.S.

> So why does it matter if the Kindle can't be manufactured in the U.S.?

And then he goes on to answer that question.
I accidently hit the down arrow when I meant to upvote you and now it's vanished - sorry. Absolutely right about the efficiency of specialization.
Marketing Predictions for 2010
Ballmer has made it clear that he wants Microsoft to hurt Google, but I don't think Larry or Sergey set out with the intention of Google hurting Microsoft. I think that they just can't help it. By their very nature, Google upsets the balance of every industry. Google's primary mode of operation is to invent. Invention hurts incumbents. Microsoft's primary mode of operation is to negotiate business deals. Business deals make globs of money, but they slow invention.
>If you're really this interested in it and really suspect an entire scientific field has engaged in completely terrible statistics

You're confused about something: the post you're replying to clearly wasn't accusing an entire scientific field of engaging in "completely terrible" statistics. The poster was just questioning whether the comparison you were suggesting was feasible given our current (rather imperfect) knowledge of temperature changes over the last few hundred years. It may not be a matter of just getting two sets of figures and comparing them.
"It just wants to get more people onto the Internet and show them more ads."

An over abundance of advertising would have the exact opposite effect.
I switched from Slicehost to Linode and haven't looked back. Their management GUI is complicated but way more powerful.
Errr, I'll give you 50% credit for pulling out the catch phrase "comparative advantage" which indeed is used to weakly describe the concepts Mr. Smith was outlining.

As for the article itself, as it is from harvard business school, the author may indeed be concerned about margins. I'm more interested in the inherent dangers of a system that makes you extremely vulnerable in bad times, and how to balance that against the obvious advantages, in good times, of that system.
There's different ways to interpret the article's main point; I see it as: chose a path, not a destination. If you enjoy coding, you'll eventually get somewhere. If you're trying to 'learn JavaScript in 21 days', you wont get anywhere, you're just missing the point.
I flag anything that has anything to do with it, pro or contra.
The real problem is that ecologists don't tell you that the clime fluctuates all the time.
Have you heard of the little ice age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age)?
We should already have a real ice age, but fortunately it haven't started yet (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png), would you like to live on a glacier?

Do you know that the same scientists that propose global warming now have said that there will be global cooling (in 1960s/1970s)? Oh, and BTW, its interesting that now they say it's "climate change" not "global warming", are they preparing to change what they are saying again?
Secrets of innovation
I suggest you bring your search for an adviser to real life. The advisers you initially have at your start up don't need to be gurus. Yes, they should be more experienced, more knowledgeable, and more connected than you are. But they should be someone who's opinion you trust and rely on. If probably know someone who will be a great adviser, just pitch them.
Fair enough, I got the timeline pretty wrong.

The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship.

Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why? Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've iterated on it for 2 years.

Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next time ;)
This is an apples to oranges comparison. Amazon's "small" instance is far slower than any other instance type they offer. A medium instance, for example, costs twice as much but is much more than twice as fast. He also compared it to all x64 instances; why not use a 64-bit Amazon instance?

If he put an Amazon medium or large instance up against those others, it would have fared much, much better.
This is my keyboard...
For the former question (percentage of revenue that comes from the US vs Internationall) you can usually find out from a companies financial filings. That said, that doesn't really say if the company is bringing foreign profits into the US. There is often significant financial disincentives in moving money into the US from , say, Dublin.

As to the open source helping/not maintaining, I would say that with a few exceptions, it doesn't matter. It helps bring revenue in for us based companies that best take advantage of the code, but at the same time, it helps level the playing field for other people/countries/companies entering the space, which might endanger entrenched interests.

This is a bigger question than HN is good for. I've thought of writing it up in a blog post, but I suspect most people would find it hugely boring. For instance, does the release of the ChromeOS source code enhance or detract from Google's (my employers) revenue.

If ChromeOS is successful it will help bind people closer to google, which is ostensibly good for us.

But...If we lose technological leadership in the project, does it matter? It will mean someone else has advanced the project and likely as not , brought more people onto the internet, where through our advertising skills we thrive.

Also, I don't think that you could call seach a commodity while there is qualitative differences between the different engines. But that's a much longer post...
"illegal for a board of directors to not do whatever it takes to maximize shareholder value"

I hear this quite often but have never seen a law that says this. Do you know of one?
Wow...very disappointing for Slicehost since I'm running most of my stuff on there. Would love to see what their response to this is (if any).
If you read the article I ran the benchmarks on both i686 and x86_64 on Linode (which gives you a choice). And paying more than $120/month for one instance is not within my budget for http://wasitup.com which I did the comparison for.
Linode also has a 10% discount for 1/yr prepay or 15% discount for 2/yr prepay.
Original: http://www.offshore.hsbc.com/1/PA_1_4_S5/content/internation...
I was frustated because the artilce talked money but not economics. If 10% of people are readers and read ten books a year, and 1% are authors and write one book a year, average sales are 100 books. Yikes!

It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days, but if twice as many people want to write as 20 years ago, how does that work out? Do average sales halve? Is it possible to write a novel that is in some absolute sense better than a novel of 20 years ago, so people change their priorities and read a book instead of going bowling? I doubt it. The author is on friendly terms with her fellow authors, but it seems likely that they are in zero-sum competition with each other and all the other authors out there.

She gives the impression that it has got harder to earn a living as an author, which makes me guess that more people are trying to earn a living that way, but she leaves me to guess. How many competitors does she have? With inelastic demand, supply becomes the key number. I think that Charles Brown said "God loves authors, he made so many of them" with bitter irony.
You can also export your Database from the Windows version of KeePass in a form that's easily massaged to upload to your iPhone with the Keeper app. I use this to keep my password database with me at all times, as well as on all of the machines I work on. No subscription or payment necessary!
Asyncronous Message Systems
KeePassX is also available on OS X.
Thefacebook | Welcome to Thefacebook
1107454306.txt

Professor Jones: Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [Patrick notes: he is referring to McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
"Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity."

So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless.

If I can't reproduce your work, you are a crackpot (isn't that the definition of junk science?) I can't reproduce their work, so they are crackpots. (Or deliberate frauds.)

Did they even record their methodology on how they adjusted the numbers? Maybe we can undo that methodology?

If they didn't record even that, then they are incompetent. And I see no reason to pay attention to incompetents.

What if someone made a simple arithmetic error? Without the raw data, and the methodology of adjustment how could we ever know?

Their conclusions are worthless, and unless there are others (are there?), then there is no evidence the earth is warming.
iDroid App Rejected By Apple.  Well, Duh.
Not exactly. Greenscroll invests funds in Renewable Energy projects - wind farms.
If I remember correctly, Xen will give your instance more CPU if other VMs on the same physical host do not need it at the moment. If that is indeed the case, then your CPU performance comparison isn't very useful, as it only shows that you were lucky to get an otherwise idle machine with some providers, while others were loaded.
It would have probably been better if these tests were run on different host machines. An easy way to have accomplished this would have been using the migration feature to switch data centers, etc.
And Turkish is confusing for someone who doesn't know Turkish. If you want to use a language, learn it.
The best answer might be Lamson, by Zed Shaw:

http://lamsonproject.org/

An extensible SMTP server in Python.

You might still have to write some email-specific plugins, but they would probably be reusable. For instance, a CSV-receiver plugin that inserts rows into MySQL.
Attributes of Effective Teams
Watch out for the bad Y-axis labels on this post: they go from min to max instead of 0 to max. This doesn't change the ranking, of course, but exaggerates the relative difference.
Hmm.

The rest of that email reads:

Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.
Gladwell, on creeping determinism
The lawyer analogy came to my mind as well while reading this article. The "Hollywood" version of a lawyer's duties to his client is narrow and not accurate. There are certainly lawyers that operate on this narrow definition, but its not inline with judicial process or state bar ethics and the lawyer's oath.
Bad form? It was hard to represent the data with a 0 to max Y-axis. Should I make a note of it?
Normally, I'd agree with you. There seems to be more incompetence than malice, in general.

With technology as it is and science as it is and has been for hundreds of years, this seems like an extraordinary goof. I could see a goof being losing a block of data, but all of it? Why was destruction of this data even an option or consideration? How expensive and difficult is it to keep it? I suspect there are numerous other organizations that would store it if they were given copies of it.

"Purposely" might be a bit extreme but it was more than a simple goof.
That lesson may be the correct one to draw here. However, I could just as easily say that the lesson here is to abandon your web app, and write 10 more, until you "make it". No amount of lipstick will make a book with a boring plot shine, or a web app that doesn't fill a need, popular. I've abandoned three of them (web apps), and am working on a fourth, while you've been presumably, iterating and making yours more beautiful. Hopefully, we'll both win.

As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too bad he didn't abandon that at some point...
The labels seemed clear to me; I don't think it's a big deal personally.
It depends on whether you do in-shuffles or out-shuffles, but with a deck of 52 cards, out perfect out-suffles will return it to its original order.

I've seen it done.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RiffleShuffle.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling

http://www.google.com/search?q=perfect+riffle+shuffle
I find it hard to believe any developed country or even a developing country like China would be shocked enough by drought to stop trade. Sure desalination is expensive, but that's all it is, expensive. On the other hand, countries currently challenged by droughts... will sadly continue to be.

As to war, what is the probability of the countries actively tied up trade with each other going to war. Obviously the US and China are posturing all the time, but war?

Plus trade and countries are dynamic and flexible and changing all the time even without major external shocks. A sudden reduction in supply in location X, would shortly lead to a rise in supply from location Y.
I can testify to the power of his last point on both fronts. Yes, it is a business model in of itself and you would be amazed at the referral and word-of-mouth you receive for being a white knight to the recipient. An amazing way to build a business.

On the other front, heed his advice to NOT get into tech support though... or cross the line into client territory... that is when disaster can strike and tarnish the goodwill that you built.

Anyone else have experience with this?
I believe linode has a 7-day money-back trial period for testing as well.
Seriously, I know we're all hackers here, but do we really need to price things in "picodollars per byte" ?
I think so. It's an easy-to-miss detail that really changes your perception of the data. Ideally the graph would indicate this itself by having a broken axis, but that's probably a pain to do.
Has anybody actually tried to serialize a novel in a blog? Has anybody done so successfully. Turning a humour or rant blog into a humour or rant book can (and has) worked. I've yet to see it done for any other kind of writing.
Can you please release the actual numbers that you plotted?
I think it's fairly reasonable to try to understand what will actually happen in the short run (100-200 years) and what we can do against it.
right you are - I should have said software.
The linode and slicehost affiliate links at the bottom gives this less credibility.
I have used slicehost for a long time it served me well. I don't use them anymore. One of my favorite option was the ability to increase the size of slice whenever I needed it and get charged only for the time it was used. Is it possible to do the same with Linode? As often, quickly and easily as I want?

If so, I can see myself getting Linode for my next project. Heard a lot of good things about them in the past.

In defense of slicehost, they have a no-bs interface with good reading resources to setup machines and very fast and helpful customer service. I was once more than 10 days late in payment because I had problem transferring my money to the account I exclusively use only for online payment and they were very reasonable with me.
Why? He also has slicehost affiliate link at the bottom.

Edit: I think you should point out, when you edit your original post, where you only mentioned Linode not slicehost. Thanks.
Well I don't know how likely it is that we go to war with China. However, in this particular case, most LCD technology actually comes from Taiwan. The tension between China and Taiwan could conceivably pull us into a war with China, as we defend Taiwan, or we could just sit back and watch, depending on who is in the white house. In either instance, LCD supply would be disrupted.

I only mentioned drought, because, in an agriculture based economy, a drought is devastating, as you suddenly have a huge reduction in your exports. It doesn't even have to be what you're imagining. Just a wheat crop that's only 60% of last year, could be ugly.

Anyway, we know what the most likely disruption will be, and it's not war, it's currency collapse.
Economic mutually assured destruction. Asia depends on the US, the US depends on Asia. It may not solve all our problems but it's nice to know the world economy is so interwoven at this point that there's no incentive for any one of the major powers to destroy each other. Not bad considering 30 years ago we were on the brink of annihilation over ideologies. If manufacturing and trade gaps are going to be the H-Bombs of the future we should all consider ourselves lucky.
http://github.com/uggedal/vpsbench has all the data and scripts used.
Linode will charge you at the beginning of your billing cycle and if you ever resize, which you can do automatically through the control panel, you will receive a credit for how much you didn't use.
With regards to the first point, how do I know how much to ask for? There are a lot of salary calculator tools out there, but I suspect they're only so accurate.
Why does Prgmr offer so much more memory/$ compared to the other providers? Is there something about the usual workloads that makes RAM less important or is it based on hardware capabilities?
Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body, says chairman
How so? (I've only used SH)

Do they have good DNS tools like SH?
The convention I've used is that this is okay for line graphs like the ones that you've used, but not okay for bar graphs.
So you're suggesting that despite years of education and learning from mistakes, investors never learn from their past mistakes, and that all of these crises you mentioned are exactly the same thing?

This could make sense if you're talking about currency arbitrage, but investing in entire sectors of a nation is different from trading tenths of a cent of a dollar.
Why I'm excited about HTML 5
I have no idea what ecologist have to do with it, but every climatologist is easily going to have a lenghty chat about climate variance and fluctuation with you.
Basically that's what climatologists study. Yes I know what the little ice age is, but I really can't see your point.
There is a lot of natural fluctuation, but that doesn't disprove the greenhouse effect. Just because the sun or vulanic activity cause a cooling effect in the short run doesn't change the basic fact of the greenhouse effect in the long run.

Your Link to the Vostok Ice Core Data should really make you scared just add 100ppmv to the co2 level and try to imagine the temperature.

Global cooling was never a widely accepted scientific theory, in fact the scientific consensus even back then was that global warming was going to happen in the future.
From programming erlang by Joe Armstrong:

At this point you might be wondering how it’s possible to program with- out variables. How can you express something like X = X + 1 in Erlang? The answer is easy. Invent a new variable whose name hasn’t been used before (say X1), and write X1 = X + 1.

X=#todo{}.
X1 = #todo{status=urgent, text="Fix errata in book"}.
X2 = X1#todo{status=done}.

From Armstrongs thesis

X = 5; X1 = X + 10;

I found those just by searching on "X1". There are more X1 examples in the erlang otp sources. Who knows what else is in there.
"It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days,"

Yeah: see Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-pub... .
Let's look at it the other way around:

Increasing competition in the Operating System business: Good for Consumers.

Introducing Segmentation of the Searchable Web: Bad for Consumers.

It's not the battle that's bad for consumers. It's the ammunition chosen by Microsoft. Really, that's nothing new.
Even innovation at a 'large company', typically it is from the hands of a few innovators. The best tools, products and inventions are always by small numbers of people and many times a single person with a drive.
I would like to see a comparison of the APIs provided by these companies.

My understanding is that Amazon is competing on developer and sysadmin productivity with the depth of their API and focus on manageability-- not on performance. Is that correct?
Funny -- an article on HN yesterday (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/edmundconway/100002310/...) tells us more about the Kindle and Western manufacturing than an article that putatively deals with both those subjects.
It's a half-page NDA. You can read it in about 2 minutes.
It makes it hard to draw conclusions like 1x vs 4x scaling for hosts with 1 VCPU vs 4 VCPUs.
You can get a good look at the linode control panel at http://www.linode.com/features.cfm
Well, judging by the SLA of Prgmr over here:

http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/SLA

it seems like Prmgr is ran by a single person, with a 99.5% uptime guarantee. I bet this reduces costs quite a little.
Looking for an advisor too.
I'm reposting my comment from Fred's blog here:

I've always wondered if a "tweetdeck interface for email" would make sense. Basic column for white listed important people, add columns for filters (search terms, groups of people,etc.) and other parameters. People can write longer emails, but the form factor enforces things to be shorter when they can. Integrate in some simple plugins for media sharing (pictures, video, large doc attachments). It would also know when notifications came in from facebook,twitter,etc. since each service usually uses a certain email address. This is my killer email app. If someone builds it, name your price, and ill be your first customer.