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New Vista Desktop--what would you install? | techky: 7-ZipAudacityDropboxFilezillaFirefoxFoxit PDF ReaderGoogle ChromeHamachiNotepad++PuttyTaskbar ShuffleUltraMonuTorrent |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | tsally: I prefer console apps:1.) Music: moc (Music on Console)2.) Irc: irssi3.) Editing: vim4.) Mail/News: mutt |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | silentbicycle: dmenu - launcherdzen2 - simple (but very configurable) statusbarscreen and surfraww3m - excellent text-based web-browsermpd and ncmpc - for musicmutt - for email (if you don't use emacs)bitlbee - an irc proxy that handles most other instant messaging protocolsirssi - irc (or e.g. rcirc in emacs)cowsay and figlet :)xwrits - typing timerrsync - for backups (set it up with cron)git or mercurial (whatever, pick one)good windowmanagers: xmonad, dwm, wmii, blackboxCommon theme: non-flashy, shell/keyboard-oriented stuff. If you like several of those, you will probably like most the rest. |
Did you work on a personal project over the holidays? | bkrausz: This WordPress plugin was technically a client project, but it's for a non-profit so I did it for free as long as I could release it as open source. It being the first OSS I've started (rather than just contributed to), I got very attached to it. It is still short a few features, but I'm very happy with it and it seems to fill a much-needed niche in the WP community.http://nerdlife.net/custom-taxonomies/ |
Generating sales leads for hacking jobs | raffi: Try subscribing to the computer gigs and jobs section on craigslist for your city and surrounding areas. I watch it for contract jobs in my specialty. I see a lot of web stuff float that way as well. |
Did you work on a personal project over the holidays? | ttrashh: I had very little time since my wife just had a baby, she wanted something to do besides blogging while she is home, and I wanted to learn a bit about drupal so...http://papersubmit.comIt's not finished but it's close. My wife will edit the content and post it. I figure it'll be a way to get some original content pretty easily. Maybe a few flyers at the local colleges. Anyone have any suggestions for getting some inbound links?I'm an asp.net developer by day...I gotta say drupal is very nice. You can do a lot quickly with CCK + Views. |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | mapleoin: here's a post I wrote last month on what I do every time I install a new linux system. The same steps apply to any recent gnome distro. http://mapleoin.bluepink.ro/perma/after-install-work |
Generating sales leads for hacking jobs | il: Advertise your services on HN :)Seriously, send me an email to silent.watcher[-at-]gmail.com. I need some web development done, and if it works out I'll probably have several other leads for you. |
Did you work on a personal project over the holidays? | callmeed: Yes, I did actually.I conceived and (almost) finished building a rails app. I'm gonna post it on HN shortly for review. |
New Vista Desktop--what would you install? | nailer: I'd get the Windows 7 beta. It's really stable, the dock (ahem 'new taskbar') is nice, and UAC is less annoying.Anyway:* Poderosa, or Putty Connection Manager. Tabs beat 8000 terminal windows.* TortoiseSVN or the beta GIT app.* PowerShell.* eTextEditor.* xMing if you need an X display server. |
Did you work on a personal project over the holidays? | geuis: I've been spending the time working on a server-side javascript platform I'm calling Rapture. Uses lighttpd, V8 via llv8call(the v8 engine is freaking FAST), and couchdb. It's still very early but it's been really fun to work on. It's definitely me scratching a huge personal itch. |
Did you work on a personal project over the holidays? | ejs: I spent a good amount of time writing code for http://overtrainer.com including adding a blog and incorporating some of the feedback I was given here on HN (Thanks again HN!) |
Generating sales leads for hacking jobs | namcos: Might need a bit of web development done here too, got any previous work we can go off? |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | asjo: bubblemon - bubbling load monitor |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | sb: since nobody mentioned them before:* workrave (similar to xwrits, but IMHO less annoying and better GUI support)* swiftfox (has debian package, customized ff build for your CPU)* worker (directory opus clone -- i don't use it that often, but it comes in handy from time to time) |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | speek: Arch Linux :-DAs much as I like ubuntu, Arch linux just makes more sense to me. It doesn't do anything you don't want it to.Seriously though, zsh is nice bash replacement. VLC is a great media player and Enlightenment is a nice GUI.Actually, check out Etoile (etoileos.com) too; its a really nice GUI that's based off of OpenStep and its really pretty and usable. |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | ericb: I've been using Thunderbird, and I hate it. I want a more functional UI and better search. Gmail is great, but I want my own local mail store. Any suggestions for a better mail client? |
Choosing a pricing model | frig: "we focus on the "? You left something out.A better approach to figuring out how to charge for this is:"what workflow do I anticipate my likely customers will have, and how would this product integrate into that workflow?"You should also look at what other products are in this space, if any, and see how they price themselves.All that said:I'm not sure selling this as a service is the right approach.You could set yourself up as a specialized consultancy (give us your tired old schemas, we give you a shiny new data-access layer using your choice of the current best-of-breed technologies), and just keep your code generator as your secret sauce.Then you market your consultancy to various outsourcing shops, offering to take the initial persistence layer coding
off of their hands for their new projects. You can turn around better quality code for this stuff, faster, than any of the sweatshop operations, and you're cost-competitive with the sweatshops, too.I know the dream is to set up a service, let it run, then sit back and collect the checks, but the consultancy route might be an easier route to monetizing this.Otherwise, I would attempt to negotiate big-dollar site licenses with large outsourcing firms, who probably stand to benefit the most from this technology (b/c they are the ones who most often are given a legacy database and asked to build systems on top of it).If you go that route, being available over the web isn't much of a selling point.For a trial versions, making an unlimited use trial for N months (N = 1, 2, or 3) available after a phone call works:* the phone call step slows things down, but makes it much more difficult to "farm" an infinite # of free trials (!)* since the primary value-add for this service is at the start of a new project, and since the typical large outsourcing firm has new projects starting all the time, a short-ish trial doesn't run much risk of giving the customer everything they'd want from the full product (b/c it only helps them with projects that were getting started in those months)(!) If you go this route, don't hard-code a time limit, but do set up some automated emails to remind you when a trial is coming close to wrapping up. It's helpful as a sales thing to be able to extend the trial a week or two (or, at least, it's terrible from a customer's standpoint if the trial cuts off hard right in the middle of something). |
What is your startup's backup policy? | cperciva: I do daily backups, automatically, using my own script which is a paid solution; my data is encrypted (and signed), and I back up complete filesystems minus easily re-downloadable stuff (e.g., the FreeBSD ports tree), to one location (unless you mean geographic location, in which case tarsnap counts as 2 locations). |
Choosing a pricing model | akronim: Why is this a web app? For many companies even letting your service see the database metadata is not going to be viable. i.e. you're excluding the potential customers with the most money. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | aschobel: For customer data, we do daily automated encrypted backups to S3.We also do more frequent backups to an internal server during the day.Our code is in SVN, which is also backed up to S3.We have scripts that take a vanilla etch build and prepare it for production. That way we don't have to worry about backing up the OS. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | patio11: I rely partially on backups and partially on wide distribution of key data.There are at least 5 accessible copies of my source code at any moment, for example: my laptop, my server (source control), my server's backup from yesterday, my server's backup from a week ago, and my per-release In Case Shit Happens tarball chilling on a Google server farm somewhere.Which means if my apartment burned down on the same day that Slicehost's colo facility got hit by a meteor, I would still have a copy left.Customer records? Important but not as important as source code. I have five redundant copies of every transaction: one at the payment processor, one at e-junkie.com, and 3 in my database and its backups.Email? Much less important to me. I pay Google to worry about it and assume they will be competent.Analytics data? Nice to have, wouldn't cry too much if I lost it all tomorrow. Mine gets backed up as a side effect of backing up the other stuff. Google Analytics and Clicky also keep historical data for me, and I rely on them to make sure it doesn't vanish.None of this is encrypted (except to the extent my service providers do it -- Paypal certainly does, for example). I don't store customer billing information, so the most sensitive data I have is a list of names. (Source code? Pfft. Very little of my business value is in the source code.) |
What is your startup's backup policy? | gibsonf1: We backup all data to S3 every 30 minutes. We are a bit paranoid about data loss as we host business critical data. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | zitterbewegung: I use time machine to back up data on my mac os x box. I haven't launched yet but if I did I would create a mirror on S3 since I am going to use EC2. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | shizcakes: Anecdotally, it seems like S3 is pretty popular here for backup purposes. Does anyone care to enumerate any pros/cons they've experienced? |
What is your startup's backup policy? | hs: i use mercurial for everything (code, images, generated html/jpg, etc) ... maybe i should put some in .hgignore especially the generated bitsso there are at least 2 copies (colo and desktop) ... and dvdi do still tar on structural disruptions (jquery update, openbsd upgrade, data structure change, etc)that's per site, every morning, semi-automatic (i still prefer to ssh and then manually hg update shrug) |
What is your startup's backup policy? | there: rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org/) against all of our openbsd servers over the internet (via ssh) to an off-site machine. runs every few hours and keeps 6 hourly, 7 daily, 4 weekly, and 3 monthly backups. once a server's initial full rsync is done, the incrementals finish very quickly even on servers with lots of changing data (mail server messages, web server logs, etc.)regular mysql dumps are taken from all databases on all servers every so often in case the rsync'd mysql binary files won't restore. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | Jasber: After spending 5 minutes on your site I barely understood what it did. After reading the About Us and watching the video I had a better idea, but I'm still not quite sure why I'd pay for a service like this (I realize this isn't geared towards me).My only suggestion would be on the front-page tell me why I need your site. Something like:Keeping up with environmental regulations is hard. Let us help. We simplify the process to let you focus on stuff that matters.Then tell me how you do that.Overall interesting idea, good luck with it. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | gcv: For the S3 users here, if you don't mind sharing: how do you actually do it? Do you use duplicity, Jungledisk, s3rsync.com, the s3sync utilities, tarsnap, something homegrown? Do your backups require incremental updates, snapshots, encryption? |
What's wrong with Ruby-programmers on Win? | pavelludiq: Most kids that want to pick up programing probably use windows. That makes perfect sense. But if you are asking about the programmers, that know programing and are not noobs, than there are 2 options, they either have descent knowledge of unix, but prefer windows as a platform for different reasons, or they don't know anything outside of windows, in which case they probably suck. Maybe the problem is not in ruby developers on windows, maybe the problem is the ruby community not understanding them:http://www.infoq.com/interviews/lam-ironruby-ms-opensource |
What is your startup's backup policy? | tdavis: Server: iSCSI cross-country replication, snapshots (automated)Desktop: Time Machine (hourly; automated)All code is hosted at GitHub; I just sort of assume the EngineYard people know how to back stuff up. Google for e-mail, though it is locally mirrored via IMAP. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | tdavis: I stopped reading at "As web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0". It seems your website contains slightly less vapid jargon, but I still think your homepage could do a better job of selling the service (Jasber had some good advice). Beyond that I can't offer much as I have no knowledge of Canadian businesses and environmental policies. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | jackowayed: I second the motion for more clarity on what exactly you do and why people/companies want it.Also, on the "Pricing & Signup" page, when I click on "Sign-Up" under a certain plan, it would be nice if the radio button defaulted to that plan.Your customers may know, but I didn't know that SME stands for Small and Medium Enterprises. It may not matter since you list the features, but that certainly confused me.I don't really like the box around the SME plan. It may work if you use some other color. Also, the Red on Blue doesn't work. When I saw it, it seemed wrong, and then I checked this article:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377508
which agreed.Also, since you're targeting companies, you may want to allow company name rather than first and last names. |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | raju: IMO HN sees hackers with a wide range of interests. I personally like to read anything that tickles my intellectual curiosity, from programming topics, to articles covering the current financial crisis (of which I know very little, BTW :D) [Needless to say every now and then I come across an article that introduced me to a topic that I knew nothing of, and it has subsequently found itself on my "like" list]Right now as I write this the top 3 articles on HN cover how to load a plan, an article on the current financial debacle, and the highly optimized square root calculation used by the makers of Quake. I read all three, and upvoted all three (did not comment on any).IMO I would not worry about what articles other hackers find interesting, post those that _you_ do. The voting process will separate the wheat from the chaff.After that long response, personally, I tend to like to read about the new language/technology that I have currently immersed myself in, but I tend not to post all the articles that I read to avoid making HN a www.reddit.com/r/<insert language here> clone.I think for the most part, submit what you feel is interesting, and every now and then a comment will tell you that you messed up (I know I have had a few, and have apologized for the same).Happy Posting... |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | Mystalic: Anything that's intellectually stimulating to entrepreneurs and hackers. 99.9% of the people who visit Hacker News are in one or both categories.Problem solving? Ground-breaking tech news? News about YCombinator start-ups? Better development methods? Ways to raise funds? Ideas that grate against the system?Bring them on. |
AWS or dedicated server? | aristus: I've done AWS, dedicated, and colo. Each one has their own tradeoffs.AWS is daunting at first -- but then so is Debian. Once you figure out the keys thing and your base image it's fairly easy (also see ElasticFox, S3Browser). You might as well learn it, even if you stick with dedicated hosting for other reasons.Things not to sneeze at:
* elastic: start up a dozen servers in a few minutes
* free access to s3 storage
* crazy awesome pay-as-you-go bandwidth (250mbps)
* expensive for the CPU/RAM you get
* virtual disks can be slow on random seeks
* sorry, no cPanel (though see RightScale)
* poor locality of servers |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | delano: I don't know anything about legal environmental obligations but what made sense to me was the last line on the front-page: NIMONIK is the best automated tool to meet ISO 14001 requirements for the management of legal requirements. I would suggest putting giving the line a better position.I would also suggest changing the preview image for the video. Vimeo lets you select from several screencaps so maybe there's a better one in there. |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | pg: Boy, I wish someone had asked this before.The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the internal details of how something works is about hacking, in the broader sense.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098 |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | alaskamiller: This site is a cargo cult dance in action:1. You've seen highlighting on header texts and you thought it looks nice and want to add it to your copy. So, why are you highlighting what seems to be random words?We "simplify environmental" legal obligations and "maintain your legal register." ==> We track and simplify environmental legal requirements for your business. No highlighting is required, it's already a short sentence.Also, in your features page you start to randomly highlight things in all the paragraphs. If the highlighting is what's important, why bother writing out a whole paragraph then?2. You've seen demos and thought it helped people. So, why does your demo video complicate things? Why do I as the end-user need to know your site used to be a textbook community? Why does the video's title-card even say textbook community? The explanation also doesn't hit home as to what your site does. In the short 2 minutes you wasted a lot of time on pointless items. Focus on quick facts and quick edits.3. You thought public releases looks professional so you drafted one up. But your end-users -- for example, this community -- don't care. We especially don't care that you just copy and pasted that here. In just a sentence or two -- leaving out that "as web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0" -- what does your website do?4. In your pricing and signup you just basically ripped off 37signals' recent blog post about their signup page. You even tagged your $99/month plan as your most popular plan. Really? Is this really necessary?There are more things that needs a bit more polish, ping me for more help. |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | Tichy: Assume that you are a hacker, then submit stuff that interests you? |
AWS or dedicated server? | jawngee: Hosting on EC2 is stupid, it's way more expensive than linode or slicehost. I accidentally left one of their extra large slices running for a month, and it cost almost $600. You can get real metal for those prices.That said, if you have no problems setting up dedicated servers, than you won't have any problems with EC2. Use rightscale's free interface to manage instances, the rest is what you already know. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | bayareaguy: Based on a quick read of this ISO 14001 Guidance Manual http://www.usistf.org/download/ISMS_Downloads/ISO14001.pdf which states (for section 4.3.2)Legal and Other Requirements: “The organization shall establish and maintain a procedure to identify and have access to legal and other requirements to which the organization subscribes, that are applicable to the environmental aspects of its activities, products or services.”Is this really a big deal? I would imagine any company with an internal Wiki could comply with this by just adding a page or two. |
AWS or dedicated server? | delano: As always, the right solution depends on what you're building."Dedicated server" sounds like you're asking about one or maybe a few machines. If that's the case, you're better off with dedicated hardware from a vendor you're familiar with.AWS is an entirely different way to build an application infrastructure. You don't keep state on any one instance because you plan for redundancy. Rather than have 1 or 2 front-end machines, you're running 1 or 2 load balancers in front of N front-end machines. If something goes awry with a front-end instance, you take it out of the loop and start another to add to the loop without downtime. It's the kind of power that up to now only companies with large IT budgets have enjoyed. |
What's wrong with Ruby-programmers on Win? | jballanc: Two words: POSIX COMPLIANCEWindows (out of the box, no additional installs) does not have this...just about every other operating system in common use does. Patching and tweaking anything (not just Ruby) to get around this can be a pain. If it seems more prevalent with Ruby than with, for example, Python, it's probably because Ruby is younger, not as widely used in IT, a hobby language for many, etc.In my experience, Ruby-ists don't use Macs because they have something against Windows. They use Macs because they need a Unix, but also want the ease of use that comes with a commercially supported OS. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | iheartrms: I backup to S3 using bacula and an s3sync wrapper which I made called s3-backup.py |
What is your startup's backup policy? | iheartrms: Oh, and for my purposes I do daily incrementals and monthly fulls. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | jbyers: MySQL: replication across VPN to server in a different state. Week's worth of daily full backups (innobackup), compressed, encrypted, periodically sent to S3. As much binlog history as we have disk to keep.MogileFS: real-time encrypted backup to S3 (in addition to multiple local copies). This covers all of our blob-like data, keeps MySQL relatively small.Systems: logs nightly synced to S3, otherwise no data to back up. One puppet script away from reconstruction.Email: local server rsync in addition to procmail failsafe copies.Code: svn master encrypted and sent to S3 nightly.We use boto to access Amazon services. |
AWS or dedicated server? | tdavis: I've been setting up dedicated machines for years and looked into switching to AWS for TicketStumbler. I determined that it was actually considerably more expensive to obtain the same amount of resources (i.e. cpu/ram) on AWS because the pricing scheme doesn't lend itself well to having many always-on images.In the end I chose to run Xen on top of dedicated hardware, which has essentially bought us the best of both worlds: simple scaling and low costs. Granted, it would probably take me a couple hours to start up a dozen more VMs (I'd need to requisition new hardware) as opposed to a few minutes and S3 is still cheap for mass storage, but neither of these points had any relevance to our situation.As mentioned by others, it all comes down to what your project needs. |
AWS or dedicated server? | mdasen: AWS, no hesitation.AWS isn't that hard to configure. ElasticFox puts a nice GUI to it and while it will take a short while to get used to the AWS way of doing things, you're better off.With AWS, you have a nice spray files everywhere storage in S3, EC2 provides lots of RAM and CPU muscle, EBS provides RAID-level reliable persistent storage for EC2 that can be backed up to multiple data centers with a single API call, CloudFront even gives you the chance to have static files served from 12 different locations in the world making your latency very small. If you need more servers, no problem just wait a few minutes for them to boot. If you need more bandwith, it's automatic. If you need more storage, S3 is infinite and EBS can always give you more (you can even stripe the drives so that you could have terrabyte after terrabyte of storage as a single drive).Dedicated servers have little upside. You're relying on physical hardware in a very acute fashion. While AWS runs on real hardware, there's an abstraction level which helps a lot. Let's say you're small and want a single box. That box fails, you call your host and get a new one in a couple hours, you restore from backups for another couple hours maybe and you're back online. Of course, many often don't test their disaster recovery scenarios that well and are often met with little problems. With AWS, you simply boot another machine off that image and you're good. Worst case, your EBS gets trashed and you say, "hey, S3, rebuild that EBS drive". Easy by comparison.Real boxes are a pain. You have to deal with RAID, backups, how fast your company can provision new boxes, bleh! AWS (or even Slicehost and Linode) isolate you from a lot of that mess. There's a reason virtualization is the hot new topic.AWS isn't that hard to use. It's definitely different, but it makes so many other things so much less painful. If you want some of the benefits of AWS with a "simple as dedicated" feel, try Slicehost. You can get instances with as much as 15.5GB of RAM and they just give you the instance with your choice of Linux on it. From there, you can install Apache, MySQL, other. And you get benefits like cheap and easy backups - they just store an image of the machine. Then, if you need more capacity, you can boot one of those images as a new instance, now you have another server. If one of their servers fails, they can easily migrate your instance to another box. RAID10 is already set up. Easy.If you're worried about AWS' management being a little different, don't worry too much. It's not that bad once you start using it - just a tad hard to imagine without trying it. If you're still worried, Slicehost will give you instances that will work like you're used to dedicated hosting working, but with many of the advantages of AWS. |
AWS or dedicated server? | bjclark: I'd say that if it isn't obvious why you would need AWS, then you don't need AWS and should go with a standard dedicated server provider.Configuration should be the least of the reasons to make the decision. The many other factors are much more important than configuration. |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | swombat: I find most of the content on HN great - have a look at the front page now, it's largely balanced and good. The list pg posted is also spot on.My only qualm is with articles like 90% of those on http://www.reddit.com/r/politics and http://www.reddit.com/r/business . I believe that if we don't keep a watchful eye on things, HN will turn into something similarly intelligence-free and I'd hate to see that happen. |
AWS or dedicated server? | bmelton: Base hosting for an AWS small image (if that's still the correct terminology -- equates to about a 1.8Ghz Xeon with 512Mb RAM or so) is $72.50 a month in machine time. That's to keep the machine running only, not counting bandwidth. Their bandwidth is confusing to me, so I can't really speak to that, and I've only been dealing with me and the machines so far (no users), so I can't speak to how that works out at all.That said, $75 a month or so can get you a small dedicated server in some places that includes a fixed amount of bandwidth, or more predictably priced hosting at slicehost or somewhere similar.If your application doesn't need to scale, then AWS probably doesn't make sense. If you do, then it does.As an AWS noob myself, the only confusion I had were with the very initial setup (in using the keys provided to authenticate and whatnot) -- and in the initial server configuration. The major differences you'll need to be aware of are as follows:- The AMI image (basically just a virtual image) is static. You can't save files to this and expect them to exist after a reboot. That took a second to get my head around, after configuring apache and rebooting, wondering where it all went.- Set up your base OS, then save the AMI. It was confusing to me figuring out exactly what needed to go where, and remapping my server between 'fixed' and 'dynamic' content and making sure that they were in appropriate places. This includes your web server configurations, disk mounts, /var/ directories, etc. User generated data, SQL data, and (probably) your website data will be stored on either an elastic block or to an S3 bucket. The important thing to note here is that you configure your OS to look how you want it to be every time you wipe it clean. Perhaps you put your web application on it, perhaps you don't. I could see using AMIs as a sort of version control for your apps, but I don't know your use case.- The elastic IPs threw me. Don't release them on production instances. lol. Effectively, it maps an IP address to your machine virtually, which means it can be moved around. Your DNS points at the EIP which can be a single apache instance, or later, a load balancer -- all configurable within a couple minutes.Other than that, it took me less than $10 worth of AWS resources to configure a couple servers, deploy my app and get it configured to how it would be in the real world if I were to migrate, so you should definitely check it out. There's no major upfront commitment like there is with dedicated hosting, so there's really no excuse not to familiarize yourself with it.Also, you definitely want the elasticfox plugin if you're going to do anything with it. I'd point you at the following resources, which got me up and running within a few hours.- ElasticFox Plugin - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...- ElasticFox Owner's Manual (PDF) - http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/elasticfox-owners-manu...- Configuring MySQL to use ElasticBlock storage - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex... |
AWS or dedicated server? | eelco: I should definitely try out AWS. It's a bit of work, but the docs are good and I think it's a useful experience to at least know a bit about how it actually works.Since you pay for AWS by the hour (and bandwidth), you can more easily switch to a dedicated server from AWS than the other way around.If your application doesn't need to deal with peaks of traffic or potentially scale up fast, going with a (couple of) dedicated servers is probably a more cost effective option.If you do need to deal with peaks or fast scaling, also check out http://scalr.net/ |
How Can I Make Better Submissions to HN? | danw: Submit stuff that interests you with a title. If the community agrees it'll also get upvoted, if not no harm. Unless you're flooding the new page, which can happen accidentally sometimes. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | bemmu: I do an automatic daily dump of all databases and an automatic rsync of the dump and all code, git repository + other files to a disk in a different location. Surely this could be improved upon, but I think it's a good start. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | bkbleikamp: Nightly backups to S3 and to our in-office dev machine. We also all have copies of the code base that we are constantly pulling from Git, so the only thing to really worry about is DBs. |
How can I make better comments? | siong1987: I found that the best way to submit a good comment is to edit your comment at least 3 times. Anyway, I found that this feature is a bit annoying especially some people edit their comments straight after someone replies to the comment.Sometimes, I even see some replies are totally unrelated to the comment because the commentor change the comment after people put replies to the comment.And, never write a reply that is against PG if you want to keep your karma point high. Some people will downvote your reply blindly. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | jm3: for in-progress code and data, we use Dropbox for everything, with two geographically segmented local caches. recovery takes only a few minutes. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | siong1987: "We simplify environmental legal obligations and maintain your legal register." <- Curse of Knowledge. For a layman like me, I really had hard time understanding this sentence. |
Review New Startup - Trafficspaces (its like having a Facebook Ads for your site). | siong1987: Is there any example that I can see the "self-service user interfaces"?And, I don't think that your service is comparable to Facebook Ads System where you can target the demographic you want which your service doesn't not provide.Anyway, I don't think you are going to read the feedbacks I leave since you just created a dummy account to promote your website. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | pclark: we keep local (on our web box), networked (NFS) and S3 backups of a) our entire server build, b) our code base, c) our database dumps, d) our email & configs.we backup nightly (we backup at the "quietest" period of last nights activity on the subsequent night)on our local machine we can keep: yesterdays backup, day before yesterday, end of last week, and start of month backups.it's entirely automated, except for the bi-monthly backup check (I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH - CHECK BACKUPS!) where we fully restore our data and code on a spare box.by code i mean live code - we also backup our git working code base. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | sreitshamer: I put everything in git repositories and push changes to a clone on my slicehost slice. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | jasonkester: Having burned through $5M in the early 00's at a startup doing exactly this, I think you're in for a tough ride.Environmental agencies hardly ever actually enforce the regulations on small businesses that would purchase your product. In our case, we found that the only way you could actually get the EPA interested in auditing your facility was if you used our software to file your paperwork. The Agency was interested in finding out how accurate our software was, so the end result was that our customers got picked on.Meanwhile, businesses that simply ignored the regulations or sent back the paperwork incomplete were let slide.In short, I'd check to make sure that you are solving a real problem with real consequences. In my experience, Environmental for the Small Business doesn't have any enforcement, and is thus not a real problem for which people will pay money. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | InVerse: when i first read the title three meanings came to mind:1. how do you back up data?2. how do you back up 'progress' (eg, code commits, releases)?3. what is your plan B (eg, this startup failed, what do i do next)?maybe it's just me, but verbal communication is funny. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | fuzzmeister: For books, I often use a very basic technique taught by my HS history teacher:
- Read the first and last paragraphs of every chapter.
- Read the first and last sentences of every paragraph.This obviously doesn't work for novels or dense technical reading, but it is very effective otherwise. |
Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | joshsharp: The company I used to work for has a similar product aimed at Australian users, but still to fulfill what I think was the same ISO standard. I can say from experience that yes, it is a niche that most hackers probably won't understand, _but_ it should be an attractive one. A lot of businesses signed up for our product because they didn't want to have to understand the legalese of the compliance regulation - they just wanted a site that said: for this situation, here's how you manage it.I think it's a great field to be in, as it basically involves rewriting regulations into plain English and adding examples, then charging to access them. Nice, passive income :) |
What is your startup's backup policy? | andrewljohnson: Our policy is outsource the IT to WebFaction. They RAID our data and back it up daily. Thanks WebFaction!If you are a start-up that doesn't have serious SysAdmin talent on-board, the only logical call is to outsource every machine possible. Even if you are ludicrously good hackers, you need to have a true Linux money, who isn't needed elsewhere coding, to consider not outsourcing web and email hosting. And you should back-up anything important on your personal computers to a managed box.I really can't say how deeply I believe this. I've worked with multiple start-ups, and the minute you start trying to host your own website, do your own backups, serve your own emails - you're asking for trouble. Even if you set up everything right, just the time dealing with the computers could be better spent changing the worldWhatever you do, don't host actual email boxes in house. A telephone pole will get hit by a truck, and you will lose email for two days, and no amount of tech smarts will get you out of that. Trust me, it happens.You can get a slice of a computer for $10 bucks a month these days from Webfaction - which comes with tech support that extends from installing PostGIS, to an optimized PostGres install, an optimized Apache static content server, and answers to tech support within the hour, even on the weekends. As soon as a machine you manage costs you an hour, you're financial decision has become a poor one.Also, they have better security than you. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | charlesju: GitHub + Dropbox |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | mlLK: http://tinyurl.com/9mxrly: was my first text on speed-reading. It's a very quick read and overall a great speed-reading primer. If you're interested in speed-reading you might also when check-out some SRSs (spaced repetition system) available. I'm playing with Anki (open-source) and SuperMemo (commercial) right now. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | noodle: there was a good piece here a while ago that got me speed reading effectively. your brain can understand things much faster, the holdup is the input stream of your eyes. trick is to make them faster.the basic gist of it is this: instead of focusing with your eyes on the start of every line and reading to the end, try and start indented in and read the first word with your peripheral vision. end the line on the second to last word in the same way. as you get good, you progress with this technique.it does truly work, just using the basics of it speed up read time for me substantially.however, it makes it hard to use your imagination, so if you're reading for enjoyment, don't do this. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | dilanj: You only remember about 20% of what you read at best. So the optimal approach would be to pick the 20% you want to read.Skimming over dull parts and reading the start and end of paragraphs helps. I've also tried EyeQ and AceReader and felt the latter helped in learning to read chunks of words at a time.Personally though, the biggest difference was made by starting to use a Sony Reader. It'll make a lot of your otherwise mundanely spent time usable for reading. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | tom_rath: I don't. Quantity rarely corresponds with quality.The greatest value I gain from books is in identifying how the subject discussed can apply to my own circumstances. That insight often comes to me in the pauses between pages and paragraphs where I find myself thinking on what was just read.I might be able to absorb a bit more information from speed-reading, but I don't think I could process and internalize the text nearly as well. Since that's why I'm reading the book in the first place, speed-reading seems of little benefit to me. |
AWS or dedicated server? | VonGuard: Two more things that AWS has that no other hosting company offers: Queue and Billing. The Amazone Message Queue service handles all those messages you pass from virtual machine to virtual machine. Companies far larger than Amazon have spent years working on message queues for proper scaling (RabbitMQ, AMQP), and Amazon just has one there that works for you off the bat. It makes scaling a lot easier.Also, they have a bill pay system for charging credit cards for access to your systems. Just another boring bit of code you don't have to write yourself included free with the AWS service. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | ojbyrne: Personally, I enjoy reading. Speed reading is for people who don't. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | bemmu: Generally I find that it's not my reading speed that is limiting me, but my ability to digest that which I read. Also these speed reading techniques get me a bit on the defensive. I feel a bit bad being so skeptical without being able to carefully articulate my reasons for it. Similar to neuro-linguistic programming techniques, this seems like something that might be true and can perhaps be even be proved to be so, but in some way it feels like you shouldn't try to bring things like these into conscious thought.When I read, I just want to read like I naturally do. When I interact with people, I think it may make me act awkwardly if I try to consciously apply some techniques. Of course as in anything there may be a learning curve, after which it pays off to have expended the effort. I suspect I might have been burned by a shortcut technique like this before, although I might never be sure.Before moving to Japan, I started studying the 3000 kanji characters that are required to be able to read properly. Of course this seems like an utterly monumental task, but never fear someone suggested to me this clever hack called the Heisig method. Instead of learning the characters and how to pronounce them by rote, the Heisig method splits the characters into subparts, and the whole learning process into recognition and pronunciation parts. Like in speed reading, the method tries to make you conscious of your learning process.Sounds great, right? Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but in my two years in Japan I was not able to complete that book. Even after coming back, I would still open it and try to proceed, but somehow it feels wrong. Now when I look back, I notice that the actual characters I remember are not from Heisig, but from the rote exercises or the practical usage of characters in our classrooms. This makes me suspect it may be better to let subconscious remain as such, and just concentrate instead on practice. Checking characters as you read, writing them in essays and emails. Interacting with a lot of people to get more comfortable at it. Reading tons of books to become a better reader. When you're really into a book, you might find yourself going faster just to discover what will happen next. Let your subconscious take care of the details. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | tokenadult: I read a lot of speed-reading books when I was in college. I was working my way through, living in my own rented place, so time was of the essence. But I eventually decided that a lot of speed-reading techniques are less useful than they appear. The most helpful book I discovered during that research phase was Reading for Power and Flexibilityhttp://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-Johns...which was a refreshing change of emphasis from most other speed-reading books.Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading (for example, making sure to read the whole table of contents, the whole preface/introduction/foreword, and even the whole index before starting the book proper); focused vocabulary development targeting words with Latin and Greek roots used in the international scientific vocabulary; and daring not to read a whole book if reading one section of it would answer my question.Good vocabulary development books arehttp://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...andhttp://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/... |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | sown: I use a laxidasical reading technique: I read the document 3 times over, each session punctuated by series of breaks. It sinks in eventually. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | bayareaguy: Here's a link I use occasionally:http://www.zapreader.com/reader/index.phpSome older discussion on this is here:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156464 |
AWS or dedicated server? | ltbarcly: I just ditched slicehost in favor of http://www.vpsfarm.com$80 per month, 10mb/s unmetered, 2048mb RAM, 80GB disk.Slicehost gives 400GB, 1024mb, 40GB for $70, which isn't too bad but 400GB is a garbage amount of bandwidth, and they charge $0.30/GB for overage.vpsfarm doesn't seem to have any way to set up a backend network, so you are stuck on the one machine from what I can tell. I haven't asked about it, but for me this is fine anyway.I've used slicehost, gandi.net, and vpsfarm's xen, and webfaction's shared hosting. I have to say, slicehost is very very nice, but the amount of bandwidth they offer is garbage. gandi.net is ok, but they seem to use raid 6, and my '2 unit' vm had terrible disk IO (otherwise it seemed ok, they charge $16 per unit, you can dynamically change it from 1 to 16, for example to use more resources during peak times. you get 5mb/s unmetered per unit, which is pretty cool, but the servers are in France, so add 100ms of latency to something in the US).vpsfarm however gives very good cpu and disk performance, unmetered bandwidth, and it is a fraction of the cost of AWS if you want to run a single dedicated box. It is super bare bones, basically nothing is provided but a root login. So far I am really liking it. |
How can I make better comments? | gojomo: Minimize. Don't say 'great article' or 'great comment'; use an upvote. Avoid cliches of phrase and thought, especially emotionally-charged cliches.Details from hard-won personal experience are always good. Armchair intuitions and snap judgments, rarely.Use the 'delay' setting, set for a few minutes, and reread your comment just as the delay is expiring. Fix typos and problems with clarity at any time, but avoid adding or removing substantive points without acknowledgment -- especially if there are replies.Read others' comments charitably. Think, "In what way could this make sense?", rather than "Aha, gotcha!" (Obsessively finding trivial bugs in code is a virtue; in conversation, it's rude.)Also, read articles charitably and considerate of their original context. A mood piece, a blog post, a popular-media account, etc. is written by an author with certain goals and for an imagined audience. To savage such an article because, once removed from its original context, it doesn't meet other standards or please some other alien audience is cheap, empty, artificial controversialism. |
Review New Startup - Trafficspaces (its like having a Facebook Ads for your site). | adityakothadiya: the logo still points to http://www.aductions.com. pls fix it. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | pg: Speed reading is basically an urban legend.http://www.slate.com/id/74766/Intriguingly, this legend was greatly encouraged by JFK's campaign staff:http://www.slate.com/id/74766/sidebar/74768/ |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | Silentio: I don't speed read per se, but I have developed some techniques that help me digest what I need to digest when reading an assignment (I'm in grad school and the amount of reading assigned is obscene).I love to read, and when I read for fun I start at the beginning and read to the end. This doesn't work when you have 500 pages to read spread across 4 classes.Assuming you know what book you're reading and why you are reading it, and that you've gone through the table of contents so you know the shape of the book, let's say you're starting a new chapter:Read the intro
Read the conclusion
*Read section headings and topic paragraphs
-Hopefully now you know where you need to read more carefully and what you can skimSometimes you'll get sucked into what you are reading because it is so damn interesting. You could view this as negative, but I think that is positive. If you are really loving what you're reading, you're going to learn it better than you will if you don't care.Anyway, I've given some thought to bondafide speed reading, but the above works well for me when I need to get through a bunch of pages and know I need to learn it well.edit: I've gone back and read your question, sorry if my post response wasn't what you were looking for at all. |
Review New Startup - Trafficspaces (its like having a Facebook Ads for your site). | paraschopra: OpenX has a plugin that enables this |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | DarkShikari: I speed read--but not books. I like books too much to speed-read them.But I do speed-read code. When coding, I am bottlenecked not by my ability to program, but by my ability to come up with ideas. And one of the best ways to come up with ideas is to read other peoples' code.So, as a video encoder developer, I've gotten into a habit of reading through the entire codebase of other video encoders and decoders. I've gotten it down to almost a science where I can sprint through an entire codebase--understanding most of the basic structure and spotting anything "interesting"--at a few hundred lines per minute. I went through the entire libavcodec H.264 encoder proposal ( http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~h264/ ) in just 7 minutes. I went back later and spent over an hour reading it--and found I missed absolutely nothing of note. And then I stole its strategy for level-code VLC tables for x264.Other codebases I've read include most of libavcodec's MPEG-related code, dirac, schroedinger, a lot of Intel IPP stuff, libmpeg2, and some proprietary stuff I've had access to from time to time. And probably lots of stuff I forgot.It is quite easy to speed-read code, of course, if you already know everything the code is going to do, and you're only interested in the implementation or algorithm.Another thing I do is read changelogs going back years (especially svn/git logs). They often offer even more insight than the code itself. |
Review New Startup - Trafficspaces (its like having a Facebook Ads for your site). | il: Heh, that's funny, I had the idea for this exact same product about a year ago, and never got around to building it. Props to you for actually executing.
Feature suggestion:
I'm more of an advertiser than a publisher, but as an advertiser, I would love the ability to search all sites registered with Trafficspaces, and bulk place ads on them. Similar to the AdWords content network. To appeal to advertisers, highlight popular/niche sites using the system.
In order for you to succeed, you need monetary incentive for publishers to sign up, that is Trafficspaces will bring more revenue on a CPM basis than say, AdWords. To do that, you need to engage adveritsers to actively use the system. |
Feature Grid/Price Chart Design? | siong1987: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the... < 37 Signals Highrise Signup Chart Design |
what do you guys think of JavaFX? | ThomPete: The problem with JavaFX as with Silverlight is that they are missing something very important in their understanding.RIA is not really about the developer support but about the designers. If you don't have your support from there its going to be hard to compete.The RIA world is a very different world from the enterprise development world that most developers are used to.So no I don't personally believe you should look into it. Concentrate on Flex/Air, HTML 5.0, PHP, Ruby and the usual Java, C++, C, C# and what have you. |
Feature Grid/Price Chart Design? | patio11: I'm a REALLY big fan of this article by Smashing Magazine (my #1 stop for design best practices, precisely because they published this):http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/13/pricing-tables-sh... |
What's on your bookshelf? | Hates_: My bookshelf: http://www.ur-ban.com/library/ |
What's on your bookshelf? | jamess: My bookshelf has been all fiction for about 6 years now. Technical books are more or less obsolete, the only ones I can remember buying in all that time is the Samba administrators guide from O'Reilly (useless.) and Stuart Cheshire's Zeroconf book (delightfully written, I could read it for pleasure but no help at all in really getting to grips with Zeroconf from an implementer's point of view.)I still have some classics which I refer to from time to time. The camel book in particular, since there exists no better reference to Perl's core APIs. However, for anything else the web is a far better reference library. |
the link to the article ``what makes a good teacher'' | whatusername: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391576
searchyc.com is your friend |
What is your startup's backup policy? | ahoyhere: We backup a complete snapshot of our customer data every hour to S3, via a Ruby cronjob.We should be able to keep up this strategy because it's "just" a time tracking app (http://letsfreckle.com/) with fairly lightweight data.I was originally worried that once we got into production, this'd cause a performance drop every time it ran, but so far it's all good.As for our codebase, we're on github and our own 4 laptops. But thinking about it, we should have another system in place for that. looks around nervously |
What's on your bookshelf? | devin: Hackers and Painters, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Prism of Grammar |
AWS or dedicated server? | inovica: What exactly do you want to do - surely you need to ask that question before deciding which route to go (or at least let us know and we'll try to help). We use AWS extensively for scaling up and down and it is AMAZING for this. We couldn't do what we now do without it - well, without a huge amount of investment anyway. It enables us to sell our products at a decent price point. If you are just wanting to host websites then a dedicated server might be your thing. How much bandwidth are you going to consume? Sometimes a dedicated account will give you a better deal for bandwidth. |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | bloch: Tyler Cowen on reading fast:"The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago."http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12... |
What's on your bookshelf? | makecheck: I appreciated "The Art of UNIX Programming" (ESR), because it clearly demonstrates the value of the "do one small thing well" approach to software. While it's a bit of a refresher to Unix veterans, it still has lots of interesting examples of well-designed programs that uphold Unix design principles (e.g. flexible, simple, transparent). I've seen plenty of developers over the years who've been "tainted" with the Monolithic Blob approach to software design, people who ought to read this book cover-to-cover. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | dcurtis: Daily + hourly + monthly backups to S3, my local machine, and a USB flash drive that I keep in my wallet at all times:http://www.amazon.com/KingMax-Microsoft-Certified-Drive-Wash... |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | gjm11: My technique for speed reading is to read really fast. Doing so just comes naturally, or at least it feels that way. I was a very early reader as a child, which I bet correlates strongly with being a fast reader thereafter.I do find that for material that's heavier going my retention is worse than I'd like it to be. I don't know whether that's just because I'm unrealistically optimistic about what ought to be achievable, or whether my reading speed is tuned for easier stuff because, e.g., in those formative childhood years most of what you read is relatively easy, syntactically at least. (For stuff that's conceptually difficult, the prescription is the same whatever your reading speed: put the book down and think/scribble/experiment, read multiple times, force yourself to express the key ideas in your own words, etc.) |
AWS or dedicated server? | jeremyw: I built a 140-machine farm at Softlayer, ~6 months ago. Here are some observations (that may not mean much south of 10 boxes.)a) AWS feature advantages (mostly instascale, in our case) fade with the high cost of every additional dedicated box.b) It's nice to virtualize the map of services to boxen, but at some level of scale, each box has a single task and you want the ability to run it _flat out_. If so, you have to decide if Xen overhead is worth labor somewhere else, and alternately, if Xen source compatibility holds you back from new kernel features. (Pick your VM technology.)c) We still wanted instascale with our own software distribution, so in something less than a week I hand-tooled a pxe-based provisioner that initialized from a live exemplar (gentoo, whee). It took some work to find the right propeller heads at Softlayer, but eventually we understood each other and the bootp listeners got turned off for our subnets. "Insta" became 2-hour hardware activation, which was ok for us. You might consider puppet in the same way (except for Gentoo's long from-scratch build time.)d) Virtually all provider admin is automated and this still works and makes sense at scale. The SOAP API that backs it is not quite fully baked, but is very useful. Paired with box-level IPMI pokes, you can replicate AWS control over hardware.e) Whatever AWS provides, at scale you still have a custom setup at some level of abstraction, so putting in place exactly the right hardware saves labor.f) Substantial discounts can be had. |
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