Antisec-Symantec chat about releasing their source code - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/GJEKf1T9

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousIRC/status/16674450231538893...](https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousIRC/status/166744502315388930)

<https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7014253>

 _We are not in contact with the FBI. We are using this email account to protect our network from you.

Protecting our company and property are our top priorities.

We can't pay you $50,000 at once for the reasons we discussed previously. We can pay you $2,500 per month for the first three months. In exchange, you will make a public statement on behalf of your group that you lied about the hack (as you previously stated). Once that's done, we will pay the rest of the $50,000 to your account and you can take it all out at once._</comment>


Difference between two days in Java - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3299972/difference-in-days-between-two-dates-in-java

<comment><AUTHOR> I amazes me how many programers are completely ignorant about daylight savings and leap seconds. OTOH, those who aren't, don't mind the low performance of looping. :(</comment>


New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/business/media/new-york-times-earnings-subscriptions.html <comment><USER3> That's just insane.

This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I'm worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.

NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well- executed digital transformations of an old company ever.

If NYT is _the_ best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding.

This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success.

The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less 'diversity' in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we'll have 5.

Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus.

In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

<comment><USER4> There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each.

What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.

<comment><USER5> > What I can imagine is a "digital pass"

this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.

<comment><USER6> The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

<comment><USER7> Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.

In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).

<comment><USER6> It's just semantics, sure, but it does mean the UK's largest broadcaster is not state-owned and has independence. That's important.

<comment><USER7> It does not. Politicians have absolute power over funding regardless. They decide exactly how much BBC can collect and in what circumstances (or they give BBC the mandate to do it themselves, but they can revoke or change that at will).

It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's surprising to see how small they are. Only 3.8 million subscribers, and you have to imagine that some percentage of that barely reads their content.

I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube.

One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.

<comment><USER9> I canceled mine last week exactly because of those dark patterns. They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me. I'd love to support them, but those practices don't belong in 2018.

EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block the source. Or even better, I may have found a trick. You can switch your payment to Paypal, and then Paypal let's you block/cancel reccuring payment. Let's see if that works.

<comment><USER10> > They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very > backward to me.

So are you also cancelling your cable subscription, any magazine subscriptions, physical newspaper subscriptions, no longer driving on toll roads with billboard...?

I'm not saying it's right, or good, or valid--but the standard practice, for as long as I can remember, for most mediums, is to still show ads for things you pay for. So I'm not sure how that makes it "backwards".

<comment><USER11> A lot of people have cancelled their cable subscription and get by with ad- free services like Netflix and Hulu, MLB.tv, etc...

The other things you mention - magazines, newspapers, and billboards - <USER2> don't track you and build a profile on you so they are less objectionable.

<comment><USER12> _billboards - usually don 't track you_

With toll roads keeping a record of who travels on them when, it's only a matter of time until this revenue source gets tapped.

<comment><USER11> There's nothing special about toll roads. A billboard company could put a camera on their bill board pointed at the nearby road and collect the same data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As much as I like the NYT, as mentioned below, their unsubscribe functionality sucks. I sent them an email last December requesting to unsubscribe. I didn't follow up on it and eventually forgot about it.

Eventually, they email me around May to apologise that my email was "delayed" due to a technical glitch they had just discovered. Great but I still never got an actual unsubscription processed.

A few months later, around July while doing a "subscription spring cleaning", I called them up to cancel it. The guy asked why I was leaving (6 months+ with no customer support answer) and promptly processed my cancellation.

A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine.

<comment><USER14> > A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely > frustrated me as you might imagine.

If it's a single one, I don't think they're overdoing it. Resubscription offers are pretty much standard practice. I know some people who regularly cancel their cellphone contract after the minimum duration in order to get discount offers for the next contract period.

<comment><USER13> I get them every other week generally. It was more the timing that annoyed me, haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I purchased an annual digital subscription and I'm never even logged into NYT. I get my news from various sources, including NYT, but I don't go _to_ NYT for news, it comes to me through Reddit and Apple news.

I consider the subscription more of a donation, because we are living in a time where the news media has to be supported -- we can't have it die.

I wonder if my use case resonates with other people my age.

<comment><USER16> I'm in the same boat. I open the app maybe once or twice a week. But I support their work and effort. I'll pay more once my student loans are done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a paid sub, really don't like that they still attempt to blast you with ads.

<comment><USER18> Try [https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper), should be ad free for subscribers (it's a closer approximation to the actual print version)

<comment><USER19> I would also like to recommend [https://app.nytimes.com/](https://app.nytimes.com/) , which is a different approach to the same content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love their 'The Daily' podcast. They pick one topic everyday and dive deep over 30 mins. Overall a happy NYT subscribed for last 6 months. I paid 110$ for 1 year membership and got a free Google home device. Great deal!

<comment><USER21> That's on my daily rotation too; but I still don't sub to NYT.

After seeing the low NYT subscriber #'s in this thread, it's amazing to me how much reach 'new media' creators have. There are hundreds of YouTubers that get more eyeballs daily. Crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The NYT has been paying roughly the same amount each year for production of news for the last few years, and a steadily increasing amount of "general, sales and admin", even as their gross income from subscriptions has shot up, and their income from advertising has plummeted.[1]

I really struggle with that. That isn't how this is supposed to work. Escaping the broken advertising model and moving to a reader-funded model is supposed to give you scope to shake off overheads, to clarify your business's purpose and to slimline and focus operations to improve the quality of content at the price point. That's the mantra for the new renaissance of journalism, in which the NYT has been hailed as a massive success story.

I don't by any means mean to denigrate the NYT - they produce some excellent reporting, but it seems that from a business perspective there is something askew here. The Guardian in the UK has managed to do exactly what was expected - the proportion of their staff who are journalists has increased steadily for a decade as their revenue split has shifted towards subscription, and their finances have steadily improved (they're still not in the black, but it looks like they will be this year, for the first time since the business model fell apart). On the other side, it seems like the NYT are posting profits, but without fundamentally reshaping the business.

There is a massive backlash in this thread against dark patterns to prevent subscriber loss and continued advertising even after subscription. It feels like the company may be selling the goodwill and brand value that are the cornerstone to the reader-funded, reader-focused new age of journalism in order to get their profit margins looking healthy, despite failing to cut overheads, which is where the profit increases in this new model ought to be coming from.

I would really, deeply like to be shown to be wrong. We need sustainable, reader-funded businesses producing great journalism and I want to think the NYT is one of them.

[1] [https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...](https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Final-2017-Annual- Report.pdf) (page 55)

</comment><comment><USER23> I pay for the Economist and think it's worth every penny. Wonder how many magazines/news sites can actually get users to pay for their content though. I suspect the number is low.

</comment><comment><USER24> There seems to be a natural opportunity for ISPs in a certain country to pay to have all their customers unblocked by major publications relevant to that public - and have a certain fraction of the customer bill disbursed depending on online circulation.

I would gladly pay 20% more to my ISP to have hassle free access to major online publications, knowing that revenue helps journalists produce quality news, and that I only pay for what I use. instead of New York Times having 3 million subscribers for 9$/a month and lose a good part of that revenue on customer acquisition and card fees, they could have 100 million subscribers at 30c each, their respective revenue share from a $5-10 ISP bill price increase. While at the same time, supporting 30 other papers the size of NYT, or thousands of smaller, local ones.

That's because the NYT online success story is a very rare bird today.

<comment><USER25> I like this idea, but I wonder, would that be a net neutrality violation? Honest question, because I can easily imagine this being rephrased: "If you don't pay for the extra news package, you cannot access NYT for free".

<comment><USER24> I think the intent behind net neutrality is not to prevent bundling but technical discrimination. Your ISP can bundle free Hulu with your data plan, as long as you can also get Netflix and Youtube at the same quality with no bandwidth throttling.

So as long as there is no technical discrimination and you can access and subscribe to other news sources, net neutrality is respected.

<comment><USER26> There's no such thing as a free Hulu.

If your ISP is taking a share of your subscription fee and giving it to Hulu, your subscription will cost more.

<comment><USER24> Yup, that's precisely the idea. The grandparent was concerned that this masked price increase (for Hulu or for NYT) is a breach of net neutrality.

<comment><USER26> I've noticed a lot of discussions about net neutrality are actually about other things like that.

In non-technical circles net neutrality has become a catch-all term for improving speed, lowering cost, and otherwise regulating ISPs.

I doubt the narrow technical definition will survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i would pay for their subscription if they didnt blast me with ads even after paying.

<comment><USER28> not only do they advertise to you after you pay, if you are running adblock they attempt to guilt you into disabling it.

it's especially galling because the washington post costs me $27/year and doesn't bug me to disable my adblocker, and nytimes is $12/mo plus a guilt trip about "supporting journalism".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would pay another couple dollars a month to not have ads in the app (though I am thankful that they tend to not be hugely intrusive). Overall pretty happy with the service.

<comment><USER30> Agreed. I hate my NYT subscription exactly for this reason. But I'm tempted to keep it to support them. What a sad reading experience: they show the same ad 6 times in a short article.

NYT employees: please lobby internally for this. We can pay 2$ more for no ads. How much % of the ad traffic is subscription users anyway?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd sub if the basic package included the crosswords too

<comment><USER32> It's strange it doesn't include the full crossword. I really like the mini crossword game however and "set" puzzles

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> While that's great they should have taken a page out of Nasper's book who used to look up to the NYT as to what to be in the digital world.

</comment><comment><USER34> I subscribed the moment they hired Susan Flower (susanthesquark). We often call for the boycott of bad actors so we should reward the good actors, I feel.

I couldn't subscribe again when they hired Sarah Jeong (sarahjeong) but if I could, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER35> Can you say more about why it's a good thing that they hired Sarah Jeong, who has a history of racist and sexist tweets?

<comment><USER36> It's interesting, I wasn't at all aware of her until a day or two ago. The first link I read about her was this:

[https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new- york-t...](https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-times- tweets-backlash-racism)

Which shows her "racist" tweets, and shows how they're only really racist if you strip away all context for them. It then shows how the alt-right use this as a tactic.

I found that very interesting, and I also now find it interesting to see who comments on these. Do you think Vox -- without attacking it as a source here -- is wrong that these Tweets have been read out of context? Were you aware that they were? Why do you repeat this talking point?

<comment><USER37> The context should be provided in the Vox article but it is not. Is there any article where all of the offensive tweets are available in their context?

<comment><USER38> Gonna need a lot of context to cover the span of 5 years of those tweets. That or there is no context and she's just racist.

Burden of proof is on Vox here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I pay $40 a year for the crossword only and it's a great deal. Includes the archives, too!

</comment><comment><USER40> It should say "Thanks to cuts"

</comment><comment><USER41> 24 Mil is a really really bad read for the NYT. This means newspapers are in a bad way.

</comment><comment><USER42> The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left.

This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.

<comment><USER43> Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting.

It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet- advice...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet-advice-from- a-cave-man.html)

> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of > agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of > developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.

To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.

<comment><USER44> I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet.

I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article.

Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another fad diet.

<comment><USER45> I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average, but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo- diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led back to peer-reviewed research such as this:

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children > born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager- > horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age > 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager- > horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower > young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45, > conditional on reaching age 15.

[http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.ed...](http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth.d7_gurven/files/sitefiles/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf)

<comment><USER44> Sure, I agree it's a good point. But it does seem to be a fairly minor point in the whole article, and I really don't understand what the OP's point was.

Was it just they didn't like the criticism of paleo? Because honestly, to me publishing reasonably well thought out criticism of anything seems exactly what a good newspaper should do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I canceled my subscription recently after they hired a racist tech editor.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yeah, but now that they refused to fire the openly racist Sarah Jeong, their credibility went to zero for me. I hope they lose subscribers over this.

</comment><comment><USER48> The only part of the New York Times worth paying money for is the crossword. I was a subscriber for a couple years, but after a while you start noticing that all the opinion pieces and non-A section articles seem to be on about a six week loop, and you just keep reading the same piece that's been dusted off and reworked over and over and over again.

<comment><USER49> What about the news? You know, that thing they do apart from opinion pieces and the crossword puzzles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?

<comment><USER42> The Washington Post. The NYT is unapologetically taking a side in the culture war and on many issues (campus politics, feminism, title IX, migration..) will ever only let one side make their point. The Wapo in my observation has a much better mix of both sides.

<comment><USER51> This is not a proper representation of NYT's opinion board. Beyond the absolutely dishonest stuff of more recent hires to the op-ed board, they have multiple conservatives on the board repeatedly publishing their "actually the problem is the leftist college students" every couple of months. They also have a couple "mainstream liberals" publishing inoffensive (but rarely courageous) pieces that usually match what centrists want to hear.

the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that both sides have roughly equal support.

Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.

<comment><USER52> Looks like:

ban = 20%

limited = 50%

anything goes = 30%

[https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx)

So 70-30 for at least some form of restrictions on abortion.

<comment><USER26> Also notable from that poll, 48% of respondents consider themselves pro- choice, 48% pro-life.

If rtpg means banning abortion even when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, it's true that few people support a ban that extreme.

But if rtpg means banning abortion _except_ when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, both sides do have roughly equal support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Good for them! But is it good for us? I don't know how I feel about news organizations (liberal or conservative) profiting from the Donald Trump era.

<comment><USER54> Yes, it's good for us. The more sources of journalism the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Why would anyone subscribe to NYT when the content is readily available online behind a trivially bypassed paywall?

<comment><USER56> Not as trivially-bypassed on mobile, I presume.

<comment><USER57> Open in incognito? (Not advocating bypassing, just responding to your comment.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Why would anyone pay for news is beyond my understanding. I pay for things I enjoy, not things that make my blood boil.

</comment><comment><USER59> I just disable javascript to read full articles from news places like this that force subscriptions.

or maybe I just dont understand why people would subscribe digitally? Are there different articles?

I think people have moved away from what the internet is supposed to be, which is a way to share information, not force people to pay for information :/</comment>


Show HN: Dogebark.sh - Get notified when DNS propogates - <AUTHOR> http://dogebark.nijotz.com/

<comment><USER2> > _Fill out the form to get code you can run in your terminal without > verifying its security._

Great advice. I hope this is supposed to be a joke? Other than that, why not make it a shellscript where you can give it the paramters using arguments?

And last but not least I think just checking the TTL of the DNS record and then sleeping for that amount of time would be more elegant.

        sleep $(dig google.com | grep -A1 "ANSWER SECTION" | tail -n1 | awk '{ print $2 }'); echo -ne '\007' # or bark.sh

</comment><comment><USER3> It's spelled "propAgate", but else nice idea :D

edit: btw, you could implement a gzip in front of the base64 so the shellscript doesnt grow as huge (500 kB Oo)

</comment><comment> TD-Linux ....What? Why not in JS?</comment>


Nethack 4 - <AUTHOR> http://nethack4.org/

<comment><USER2> I nearly lost my job at one point in my career because I played so much Nethack at work.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is using Kotlin for server-side applications? - <AUTHOR> While the project points to various ways to use it (https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/server-overview.html), the list of projects on that page actually using it server-side is very short (Idea and an open source project called Corda).
Is anyone here (or have you in the past) using Kotlin for the server side portion of their app? If so:

  * What does your stack look like?
  * What improvements/drawbacks have you experienced?
  * Are you using Kotlin on the client side as well?
  * If you had it to do over, would you choose Kotlin again?

 Thanks very much for any feedback you can provide. <comment><USER2> We are using Kotlin with SpringBoot + Hibernate + Redisson. Have no complaints whatsoever on stack, the only drawback I am experiencing is backend people have never seen/used Kotlin before so the initial friction and dogma of it's too complicated. Our Android apps do use Kotlin but there is nothing common from codebase being shared what so ever. I would still choose Kotlin but probably different framework stack not because I didn't like SpringBoot but due to projects like Ktor getting mature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you know SpringBoot going in? I don't really have a lot of experience with Spring (or SpringBoot) but it seems very "enterprisey". Have you found to be be a good foundation? How steep of a learning curve was there for you?</comment></comment>


Functional programming in Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.dzone.com/links/r/functional_programming_in_java_using_lambdaj.html

<comment><USER2> If you'll indulge me in some nostalgia, quite some time ago I wrote a similar Apache Commons (it was Jakarta Commons at the time) library called "functor", essential trying to solve the problem of functions-as-first-class-objects-are- missing-in-Java (but without resorting to byte code manipulation or anything fancy like that; I may not have been clever enough for that). This was just prior to the introduction of generics into the core language, if memory serves.

So for example, Pratik's first example (iterate through a Collection of Strings and return the elements starting with "inv") would be written like:

      List<String> list = Arrays.asList("invalid1", " invalid2");
      return new FilteredIterator(list.iterator(),new UnaryFunctor() { boolean test(String str) { return str.startsWith("inv"); });

although as a practical matter most users would have predefined constant functions, predicates, and helpers, so the second line would read more like:

      return F.filter(list.iterator(),F.startsWith("inv"));

(Yes, Java is verbose.)

It's actually a pretty well tested (100% coverage) and documented library that I used on a number of personal and work projects. but never bothered to push it out of the commons "sandbox". You can find it at <http://commons.apache.org/sandbox/functor/>. The examples (<http://commons.apache.org/sandbox/functor/examples.html>) are kind of fun. We were experimenting with a test-first, pseudo-literate programming documentation style.</comment>


Try Erlang, a hands-on tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.tryerlang.org/

<comment><USER2> Some notes after doing a few steps of tutorial:

\- a simple command history feature in the shell would be really nice

\- I wish the notification that I don't follow tutorial didn't appear there each time I try to play with the shell - well, I like the tutorial but I want to play on my own for a few moments, and this message is quite a distraction

\- also, proceeding to next step of the tutorial could be done in some other way - e.g. I see logical operators and I try some of them, and they all disappear when i type one; it would be much easier for a newbie to learn some erlang if they stayed a bit longer on the screen

\- there should be a 'back' button in some visible place too - e.g. next to clear window and reset - I can't find it at the moment

EDIT#1: formatting

EDIT#2: well, it seems that history is there - it just didn't work for some reason in my browser when I started. At the moment I am stuck in lists and tuples - whatever I do in 'Building a list' section I got a message it is not I am meant to do - is the tutorial bugged (or is it my browser again)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Building a list doesn't work for me either. It gives every indication that I succeeded in creating a list, but the tutorial tells me I'm not doing the right thing. =(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't get me wrong, I respect these try-X efforts. But they have glaring annoyances (usually popping up in the name of Security) that are just begging me to open a good old-fashioned command-line REPL (but that's if I'm at my own computer).

For instance, in Try Erlang, io:format is out of reach, not to mention spawn. Same goes for Try Clojure: there doesn't appear to be a way to create threads.

Don't you think, given the languages we're talking about here, that these projects are self-handicapping from the start? (the seriousness of those security measures notwithstanding)

I'm getting the feeling that these online REPLs were created just to show that it's possible to do, not to address any practical concern or to highlight a strength of these languages.

Again, I don't mean to disparage the efforts of the authors. Just my $0.02

<comment><USER4> I think these sites are trying to cater more toward FUD-encumbered newbies than those for whom installing and having a play with a new language is second nature.

<comment><USER4> Would the down-voter care to explain their rationale?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice so far. The online REPL tutorials are always a great opportunity to try something new quickly.

"Operations on integers (and floats) include addiction.." Just a rather amusing typo in one of the first sections.

<comment><USER6> Yea, I'm with you - this is a great way to get people tinkering with a new language. Does anyone know of any similar websites for for playing with other languages? I'd love to see a language test drive site with as many languages as possible in a format like this.

<comment><USER7> <http://tryruby.org>

<http://tryhaskell.org>

<http://try-clojure.org>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's pretty annoying to have to type "." after every expression. I'm sure there's a reason for it in Erlang, but perhaps it would be better for the tutorial to automatically add it for you for the first few sections of the tutorial, until you learn what it really means, and come upon a situation where you finally don't want it. At the very least, a clearer warning message than "syntax error" should be shown if you forget the dot, in one of those fading black rectangles.

<comment><USER9> i think it's good that it makes you type it as it quickly becomes a habit and you need the practice when you first start erlang.

However, perhaps he can put a big floating arrow pointing left that just sits there saying "DONT FORGET THE PERIOD" as soon as you hit enter without a period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I got a 503, anyone else does?

<comment><USER11> It was up 15 minutes ago. My guess is there were too many concurrent users.

<comment><USER12> Ironic for erlang..

I kid.. I kid

<comment><USER11> Glad you got the joke. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This video is also a great way to get up to speed on Erlang: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyVvGjNjBOA>

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not exactly what was requested by the current tutorial step. Feel free to play with the shell, anyway.

Erlang R13B04 (erts-5.7.5) > node(). "This functionality has been disabled for security reasons in tryerlang.org." > q(). "This functionality has been disabled for security reasons in tryerlang.org." > ls(). "This functionality has been disabled for security reasons in tryerlang.org." >

</comment><comment><USER9> first thing i did, lists:map(fun(X) -> X * 2 end, lists:seq(1,100)), and it worked! very cool.

next thing i did: application:which_applications(), and that didn't work.

</comment><comment><USER15> _Expressions using arithmetical operators

Operations on integers (and floats) include addiction_[sic]</comment>


Lenovo's Promise for a Cleaner, Safer PC - <AUTHOR> http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1934&cid=ww:social:152315640:152297239:TWITTER:lenovo:*%20Customer%20Service%20and%20Support&linkId=12599155 <comment><USER2> "software required to make hardware work well (for example, when we include unique hardware in our devices, like a 3D camera), ___security software and Lenovo applications_ __. This should eliminate what our industry calls "adware" and "bloatware." "

Which sounds awfully like bloatware. Maybe that's a bit snide; they are at least addressing the problem and committing not to install stuff which is really bad.

<comment><USER3> I would love for any manufacturer to offer a "Just Windows" version. On my last Windows desktop, I freshly installed Windows 7 when it came out and it was a much better experience than the brand new Windows 7 laptop I had purchased, but with the additional manufacturer bloat. Immediately re- installed a fresh version of Windows and the performance and experience drastically improved.

<comment><USER4> Why doesn't Microsoft do something about this? It can't help the Windows reputation that most of the problems Windows users have are not caused by Windows, but by the crapware-suite that came with their PC.

<comment><USER5> They do on a limited basis. They sell "Signature Edition" computers without the bloatware/spyware installed.

[http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_U...](http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_US&Action=ContentTheme&pbPage=MicrosoftSignature&ThemeID=33363200)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So they give you bloatware (McAfee) to apologize for giving you bloatware.

<comment><USER7> If you ask any purveyor of crapware what they peddle, you'd never get them to admit to it being crapwware. Take YC for instance, with their InstallMonetizer investment that PG tried to defend as not-crapware[1]. This is a way for Lenovo to commit to something without committing to anything. They'll be right back to installing gigabytes of crapware on their laptop lines just as soon as they have some marketing people type up reasons why it's an enhancement.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711)

<comment><USER8> Exactly. While this Lenovo statement is still a good thing, and IMO shows that they are at least trying to address a real problem, you have to note that they haven't specifically mentioned _any_ software that they are going to remove.

In other words, they probably think that all the software they preload is useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They're not to be trusted. PC's are a commodity space. The marginally better quality of a Lenovo isn't worth the tremendous security risk.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is a good reaction, so they get some props for that I guess. I mean they had to remove Superfish, but going beyond that and committing to removing all "bloatware" is at least a good declaration of intent.

</comment><comment><USER11> How can you trust this response when Lenovo still maintains that Superfish was not a security problem except in the wild imaginations of security researchers? You can't.

<comment><USER12> Executives far, far removed from the decision to preload Superfish are unlikely to actually understand the problem. And that's OK. Their job isn't to understand how these things work, it's to set policies for folks who _do._ As a result, they've articulated a specific, falsifiable claim about the preload policy for their upcoming laptops.

Our job is to hold them to their word. If they keep it, the industry ends up in a much better place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers _for free_ would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys _paying_ for this crap?

<comment><USER14> Lower-end PCs typically have something like 5% margin, compared to substantially more on a mac. And that's assuming you configured the hardware in a way that someone wanted to buy it before it became semi-obsolete on the store shelf and has to be sold for even less.

The manufacturers have to make up the money somewhere. With a complex product at commodity rates, with customers mostly having no idea what the differences are between them (and for good reason, it's all just a set of nasty price/perf/quality tradeoffs that I wouldn't want to look at), you compete on very basic features and the price that they dominate.

<comment><USER15> That might well be true for many PCs, but the ThinkPad range is pretty high end and comparable to Macs in both specs and price. As far as I can tell, it's not just the low-end crap that's affected by this issue?

<comment><USER14> ThinkPads didn't have the software installed. Only the lower-end stuff.

<comment><USER16> They didn't have Superfish installed, but they do come with bloatware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a positive step. For now, you can try the Microsoft signature editions of various pcs. Or a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER18> >> Additionally, we will offer Lenovo PC users affected by this issue a free 6-month subscription to McAfee LiveSafe service

This is definitely the most ironic part.

<comment><USER19> I agree. The first thing I do to a new machine is get rid of McAfee/Norton, leave it to Lenovo to find profit in the midst of what should be a PR disaster!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't help but take this with a pinch of salt. I own a Thinkpad x220t, which is an amazing little machine (except maybe for the wonky wifi) but I completely fail to see how most of the Lenovo software is "required".

Take for instance the wifi manager, which crams a huge icon in the corner of your screen and somehow makes connecting to wifi even slower than it already is (not even speaking to the atrocious interface). I regularly disable the thing, yet Lenovo's updates insist on re-enabling it, without my consent. And this isn't the only Lenovo "required" software to have this behavior. There's also the system health thing, which will seemingly randomly pop up when I'm watching a film or playing a game.

I'm really curious, how does Lenovo think this improves user experience?

<comment><USER21> We buy these for work. We use our own Windows images because the stock image is just a nightmare of OEM crap. Its just shocking how much they put there. Before we used images we would just push them out as-is and it would cause all sorts of weird and hard to solve issues. One day no one could search their Outlook. Turns out that there's a Lenovo 'speed boost' service installed by default. It literally just sits there and then disables the Windows Search Service arbitrarily. Without that service, you can't search for files, emails, etc. How that made it to production equipment is mind-blowing. Took a while to figure out. We would re-index and restart the services, etc but it came back. There's a lone Lenovo support thread on their website about this where the customer answers his own question. Even Lenovo support doesn't know about this junk.

Sadly, the stock Windows experience is pretty pleasant, its just most people will never experience it. I'm not sure who is clamoring for a 3rd party "wireless manager" or "update helper" or "speed boosters." Probably no one but product managers at Lenovo know that without this ecosystem of add-on crapware, their jobs would probably be eliminated.

The above is just the "business productivity" apps. On their consumer models, they're chocked not only with a lot of these apps but also tons of 3rd party pre-loads like multiple ebook readers, Norton AV, Evernote, etc. No wonder so many people just buy OSX machines. You get just as good, if not better hardware, and a machine that's usable right out of the box. With PCs, it seems like these 3rd party companies are the real customer and we're the product. That's okay with free stuff, but if I'm spending $1,000 or more, I expect to be treated a lot better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps they should start by admitting that their prior response to that debacle was dishonest (or at least "horrifyingly, inexcusably incorrect", if they'd rather plead incompetence).

</comment><comment><USER23> Gotta love the passive run-on sentence they start the article with:

> Just over a week ago, the Superfish visual discovery software preloaded onto > Lenovo consumer notebooks beginning in September 2014 created concern and > frustration among our customers and the security and privacy communities.

Instead of:

"Sorry, we messed up!"

<comment><USER14> I assume they're avoiding admitting fault or damage to make it less easy for them to get sued?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "For some countries, certain applications customarily expected by users will also be included."

Does anyone know what this vague clause means? I, for one, have sadly come to "expect" all sorts of preinstalled crap on my laptops.

<comment><USER14> I assumed this meant asian-language input software?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The fact that not a single Lenovo employee ever leaked what Lenovo was doing prior to discovery makes this statement moot for me.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a great move on their part, but would have been much better if preceded or accompanied by an apology.

</comment><comment><USER27> A good reaction. I will be quite happy if they hold themselves to this promise as bloatware is quite a problem. If anything they should include Malwarebytes which gives a free unlimited scanner, but not realtime protection unless you register. Compared to other antiviruses that just turn off it is a better pre- install option. But naturally this is a partnership and pricing issue.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't trust anyone who uses multiple spaces after a period.</comment>


Maya civilization was much vaster than known, newly discovered structures reveal - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/03/mayan-civilization-was-much-vaster-than-known-thousands-of-newly-discovered-structures-reveal/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291272)

</comment><comment><USER3> 'vaster'? Is that even a word?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure Ursula LeGuin knew her words well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaster_than_Empires_and_More_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaster_than_Empires_and_More_Slow)

<comment><USER3> I offer 'shifgrethor' and 'kemmer'.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon clinches deal to buy Middle East online retailer Souq.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-souq-com-m-a-amazon-com-idUSKBN16Z0Q1 <comment><AUTHOR> What I find interesting is that they decided to stick with amazon despite there being a supposedly larger offer from a local group.

I wonder if that offer was to try and raise the stakes or they just decided amazon was a better fit for them in terms of mission/value/whatever.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best programming books for someone in prison?  - <AUTHOR> A friend of mine went to prison 17 years ago (robbed a bank; first offense; no one was hurt, but they through the book at him). He'll be released in November and is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life (he's 39).
I told him the only truly meritocratic profession in the world is programming. He's done a lot of VB/Access-work for the prison factory and really enjoys it, so this path is probably a great fit for him. He'd like to use the next 9 months to learn as much as humanly possible about the general fundamentals of computer science and, more specifically, the basics of what is needed to be a web developer.
Unfortunately, he is limited to book-learning because, well, it's not like they have a One Laptop Per Inmate program. Additionally, his facility does not allow  actual programming texts to be received/read by inmates. The more technical/instructive/informative a book is, the more likely it is to be returned to the sender. Yes, it sucks. But it is the reality of the situation.
He is, however, allowed to receive/read books that are conceptual in nature. Based on these constraints, which programming-oriented books (they must be physical books, as opposed to ebooks and pdfs) do you recommend I purchase for him? Given the constraints, what books do you recommend? <comment><USER2> Here's another idea: Since your friend is coming out in 9 months anyway and there's so much risk involved in trying to sneak in a programming book, he should probably spend his time developing another equally useful skill: writing well.

As many other successful programmers have noted (Spolsky, Yegge) and demonstrated, effective communication, especially through writing, is a very useful and necessary skill for a programmer. So, maybe you should send him just some good books on writing well.

In general books, I can think of Strunk and White, On Writing (by Stephen King). But some examples of good writing about programming could also help:

The Best Software Writing (edited by Spolsky)

Joel on Software (the best articles from his blog)

Steve Yegge's blog posts (others might disagree but I think he is an excellent writer).

Paul Graham's essays

raganwald's old blog - <http://weblog.raganwald.com/>

James Hague's blog - <http://prog21.dadgum.com/>

Rands in Repose - <http://randsinrepose.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I would look into donating the books to the prison library. Censors usually don't go to town on books that are donated, whereas things that are sent in via the mail to a specific inmate are scrutinized to an unimaginable degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just double-checked with him about this: The prison library no longer accepts book donations of any kind. And the Inter Library Loan program has been shut down. He told me not to try to make any sense of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it shocking that "technical/instructive/informative" books are disallowed. I can't begin to fathom a reasonable explanation for that.

To be more helpful, a mathy algorithms text, like CLR ([http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H- Corme...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H- Cormen/dp/0262033844/)) might slip through the censors and be a good option-- depending on whether your friend is comfortably enough with thinking about code abstractly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was told that staff has explicitly stated to him that the institutional policy does not encourage inmates to pursue white-collar professions upon re- entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mathematics is probably "theoretical" enough? A good Discrete Mathematics text, Perhaps some others. He'll have some mathematics knowledge around which to orient his programming. And people have been learning math for a long time -- meaning, long before computers.

Related, a good book on logic, including logic as implemented in circuits.

I recall a fairly intense "computer science survey course" back in college, that started with and, or, not gates and built up through adders, etc, to an ACU. Introduced a pseudo assembly language. I forget how far it continued beyond that. Something like that book I can see doable in good part on paper and in thinking, and it would provide some fundamental background that many programmers don't have or don't retain.

It might also be helpful to give him a good, concise book on project management. So that he has some idea what people are talking about when he encounters the work environment.

And there are always some of the classics, both for insight and for cultural orientation. Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month". Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine". Some years back, I rather enjoyed "Where the Wizards Stay Up Late", for it's take on the early development of what we now call "the Net".

If you're sadistic (and willing to risk some bucks against the chance of censorship), you can always send him Knuth's compendium. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if this is the right direction or not. In different ways they are all, essentially, about programming...

[http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware- Softwa...](http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware- Software/dp/0735611319/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328659335&sr=8-1)

[http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building- Pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building- Principles/dp/0262640686/ref=pd_vtp_b_1)

[http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer- Prog...](http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Programs- Engineering/dp/0262510871/ref=pd_vtp_b_6)

[http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/...](http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=pd_vtp_b_12)

[http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Master...](http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Master/dp/020161622X/ref=pd_vtp_b_13)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is absolutely the right direction--thanks! The one book on the list that might get kicked back is "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Too bad, since it's probably the most concrete. This is a great starting point, thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a good list of highly-praised books. Most of them look like they could make it past the censors: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is- the-single-m...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single- most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read)

From those I personally recommend "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach". SICP might not make it through, but GEB definitely would (although its direct relevance to day-to-day work in web development may be questionable, it should do a lot to spark an interest in computer science).

</comment><comment><USER8> Just a suggestion, but what about books which don't look at all technical but are full of cartoons and humour, eg "Land of Lisp" ( <http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm> ) , the Head First books and so on ? These might be acceptable.

Secondly, one of the most common comments on HN is how few programmers are also any good at design, so perhaps books focused on design, usability and typography would be another option.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have done work at a charity that mails donations of books to prisons called "Books Through Bars", and I am always excited to get a request for books on programming. You may want him to send a request to them, there will be some lag time, but it sounds like he has a bit of time left.

I'd go with "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" or a Donald Knuth book.

</comment><comment><USER2> If he's already doing VB/Access work for the prison, could you not slip in a .net book as a means to help him in his work there? Or donating it to the library (as tdfx suggested) sounds like a good way around it.

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory, that's a good workaround. But that's based on our understanding and what is logical and reasonable to us. My apologies for the tone of that statement--it's not at all directed at you; you could not believe the obstruction he has had to deal with as he has put himself through undergrad and graduate school through mail-in correspondence. He was hoping to pursue a phd, but the administration would not allow him to pursue his research project, so he had to stop at a master's. Bettering himself has been no easy task.

We pursued the option of donating to the library, but the correctional officers do keep a good watch on what comes as donations, apparently. He has also tried to order programming books through the Inter Library Loan program, but no luck. He learned VB/Access through material that was available in the factory and, of course, just figuring things out through trial and error. But I'll ask him about this option in more detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A php mysql book like this may be a good start.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0470096004/

<comment><AUTHOR> As helpful as that book would be, I'm almost certain it wouldn't be allowed. He's ordered a few of those types of books before and they were all rejected by the facility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would you be able to send him photocopies, as "letters"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I could. But I live in Poland, so mailing an ebook (100 pages?) would be incredibly expensive--and there's still no telling that he would actually receive the letter. Out of curiosity, what title did you have in mind?</comment></comment>


Emails show Mark Zuckerberg feared startups were building faster than FB in 2012 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348082/zuckerberg-facebook-house-committee-emails-app-development-speed-copying-innovation <comment><USER2> I was following a thread on twitter the other day about how facebook's decision to buy Instagram in 2012 was questioned by many. Some suggested it was Mark's amazing prophetic vision in hindsight, some suggested he feared innovation was not happening at FB.</comment>


How big was the "holiday bump" for mobile app devs? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.app.net/2012/01/05/how-big-was-the-holiday-bump-for-mobile-app-developers/

<comment><USER2> It was terrible for me, but that's because my app is educational, and winter/summer breaks show obvious troughs in my sales charts.</comment>


What is a desktop email client? - <AUTHOR> http://www.getmailbird.com/what-is-an-email-client/

<comment><USER2> Integrated Apps? no thanks</comment>


Design Principles for Reducing Cognitive Load - <AUTHOR> https://blog.marvelapp.com/design-principles-reducing-cognitive-load/ <comment><USER2> This article is interesting, but in case you're like me and read comments before articles to get a tl;dr, this article is about _web design._ I was personally hopeful it was about managing teams or projects, which does have analogous lessons, but it's specifically about web design.

Disclaimer: no longer a web designer; take my opinion on the substance of the article lightly.

<comment><USER3> In that case have you read "Managing the Design Factory" by Reinertsen? Excellent book on managing projects and teams.

<comment><USER2> I haven't, but thanks for the tip! I'll check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cause 4. Too much information.

Cause 5. Multichannel redundancy (i.e., reading something to someone as they try to read similar text)

</comment><comment><USER5> Cause #0: implicit information.

Implicit information may force people to guess what is being said. Turns a simple thing into a riddle.

Cause #-1: lack of consistency

When something is designed in a different way, people try to infer why it's different. If they turn out to be the same thing, it pisses people off.

</comment><comment> tony-allan Almost all of the points in the article also apply to programming languages!

</comment><comment><USER6> There is much to add to this list. For instance the task of writing concise copy. It can take a lot of work to get there. A simple form may require only a few sentences to guide someone through but getting everything in a logical order can require several iterations. The finished result may be the result of many, many tests. Sometimes only working with the form and building the backend for it is how to get to the result. In fact you need to know that problem space to get there. The finished results should look effortless and simple but there may be many commits leading to getting there.

</comment><comment><USER7> I saw a talk on Friday about designing interfaces for people with locked in syndrome. It turned out that to be effective they needed to design for increasing cognitive load rather than reducing it.

As everyone knows, how and when to employ a principle is the key!

<comment><USER8> Any link to that talk, or info about the speaker(s)?

<comment><USER7> It's going to be on BBC in December

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Says a website with hover share buttons and distracting color choices. I had trouble focusing on mobile because this site had so much going on.

<comment><USER10> Exactly what I wanted to say. At one point I almost thought that this was a copy-paste job from some other, more clearer site.

<comment><USER11> It is. There is the link on the end of article: [https://blog.prototypr.io/design-principles-for-reducing- cog...](https://blog.prototypr.io/design-principles-for-reducing-cognitive- load-84e82ca61abd)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: favorite books - <AUTHOR>

with the exception of programming/technical books, what are your faves? <p>Mine: lotr,ugly americans,the new new thing....<p> <comment><USER6> "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

This philosophy of science masterpiece illustrates how a community evolves its mental model or paradigm - from a long-accepted world view, to a crisis caused by evidence that contradicts the prevailing model, and then at last to an acceptance of a new paradigm.

<http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html>

<comment><USER7> My other favorite bit is how the old dying dinosaurs fight the on-coming revolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman)

What do you care what other people think? (Richard Feynman)

</comment><comment><USER9> \- Godel Esher Bach

\- The Development of Mathematics, by E. T. Bell

not that i understand mathematics that well, but this book gave me many ideas of how an abstract/complex thing like mathematics can evolve through history, i found that exciting

\- when i was a teenager i liked a couple of books by Martin Gardner

<comment><USER10> I like how GEB ties together everything with 'strange loops'.

The concept of how small pieces of something can form into something else entirely, is fascinating. How does a bunch of your cells form into you? How do a bunch of notes from a song form something so grand? How does a collection of 'inanimate' material form something animate?

<comment><USER9> Yes that kind of mental-masturbation excites me too ;)

from reading other posts (comments) I've remembered another good book, sort of on the same flavor as the "biological" parts in GEB:

-"Investigations", by Stuart Kauffman

exciting lecture too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ender Series - Orson Scott Card

Rama Series - Arthur C Clarke

Firestar Series - Michael Flynn

1984 - George Orwell

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Some guys at MIT (I know it's technical, but couldn't resist, it's just too good)

Anything by Bret Easton Ellis, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, and the above mentioned authors.

</comment><comment><USER12> \- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

\- Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP)

\- Godel Escher Bach (GEB)

\- All books from Gibson, Asimov, Sterlig, Huxley and Douglas Adams

<comment><USER13> Why GEB? I read the original Godel paper and I studied on the subject, and I read a lot of related material... so I found GEB to be rather boring when talking about Godel (and pretty repetitive), and when not talking about it, I found it to be almost unscientific: unfocused, always going into unproved conjectures (or shallow theorems), and very little times explaining about stablished and scientific work that has proven to be useful.

So I could never understand this... why all the hype with GEB? What's the big thing with it?

<comment><USER9> GEB is not a scientific paper ... if you don't realize this, then there is no point in continuing with this answer

<comment><USER13> I know it's not a paper, but I'm not sure it's a science divulgation book either. Sometimes I read it and I found it fun (as a sophisticated book-game of science), but most of the times it makes me nervous, for the reasons I pointed above, and because I feel it's taken as a book a lot more serious than what at least I feel it is.

Maybe it's a mistake in my appreciation of the book, but I can't help it. What do you think about it?

<comment><USER9> i think it's a great book, not a "serious" book, whatever that means

as i mention in another comment, I'm willing to call it mental-masturbation, in the sense of exciting one's mind (the nerdy mind anyway), so in a way I'm probably not too far from your vision of the book

i also think this kind of excitement is the basic motivation of the nerdy minded persons, and any text/experience that can get you in that state is something to appreciate.

lastly it exposes the reader to many topics, the reader may get interested in some of those topics and make some further investigations on its own, and at least in that sense it is a science divulgation book (it's more important for science divulgation to get you interested in the topics that to give you some raw facts)

<comment><USER13> Ok, thank you, next time I'll approach it from that perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately I can't read fiction too much, I feel like what I read must directly help me with what I do, so I feel a lot better reading either technical stuff or business related (I love business). Since we are excluding technical, most of the following are business related, or helps you in dealing with people and solving problems)

Netscape Time - Jim Clark (very educational for those interested in startups, good piece of Internet history, interesting insights to the culture of the first Internet companies)

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie (found it through YC recommendations, THANK YOU. one of the best educational books I have ever read, it will teach you how to make friends, be a good leader, get along at home, encourage people, make them follow you and so much more...)

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston (I found it relevant to what I am doing, good lessons, and interesting insights)

Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury (teaches you how to negotiate and how to get the best out of each situation for yourself and the other part, will be useful both at work and personal life, a bit dry)

Winning - Jack Welch (great advices on leadership, might be more useful to someone that is running a big company)

Leadership Is an Art - Max Depree (great leadership advices, it will give you the right mindset of how to be a great leader)

\</comment><comment>-----

Animal Farm (George Orwell), Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Interpreting Your Dreams(Freud)

</comment><comment><USER15> The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

</comment><comment><USER16> The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence by Josh Waitzkin (the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher was about him): talks about the higher stages of mastery. Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey- Pursuit-Excellenc...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Pursuit- Excellence/dp/0743277457)

</comment><comment><USER17> Fiction:

\- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)

\- Dune (Frank Herbert)

\- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)

\- Neuromancer (William Gibson)

\- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)

\- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)

\- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

\- Cryptonomicon (" ")

\- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)

\- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)

\- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)

\- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)

\- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

\- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

\- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)

\- various Cory Doctorow short stories

\- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)

\- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)

\- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)

\- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)

\- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)

\- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

\- Ringworld (Larry Niven)

\- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)

\- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)

\- The Black Company (Glen Cook)

\- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.

\- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen

Non-fiction:

\- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)

\- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic

\- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)

\- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)

\- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))

\- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)

\- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)

\- anything by P. J. O'Rourke

\- anything by Dave Barry

</comment><comment><USER18> (I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".)

\- GEB

\- SICP

\- anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse

\- most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

\- Joan Didion, "Where I Was From"

\- Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software"

\- Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis"

\- Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"

</comment><comment><USER19> Watership Down. It is surprisingly epic and immersing for a book about rabbits traveling through the English countryside.

<comment><USER20> The animated film is a classic :-)

<comment><USER21> Oh, no. I should never have read that, now I've got the damn Art Garfunkel theme song stuck in my head ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Eyes_%28Art_Garfunkel_so...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Eyes_%28Art_Garfunkel_song%29)).

Curse be upon you :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Bible,

Wild at Heart,

How to Win Friends and Influence People,

Songs for Martha <\-- I have an autographed copy,

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,

Rainbow Six (and most other Clancy books)

</comment><comment><USER23> 1984

The Silmarillion

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Dune

Walden (about half the chapters anyway)

</comment><comment><USER24> Godel, Escher, Bach (An Eternal Golden Braid) by Douglas Hofstadter. Also, The Mind's I (more philosophical) edited by the same guy.

</comment><comment><USER25> V. by Thomas Pynchon

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable)

Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Shogun by James Clavell

Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)

</comment><comment><USER26> No Contest / Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

The Underground History of American Education (John Taylor Gatto)

</comment><comment><USER27> Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Material which kicks off with the Golden Compass is a great read.

Sherlock Holmes stories are fun.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick is also a good read.

Pierre

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm analytical to a fault, but Neil Gaiman's novels genuinely make me believe in magic at some level. I love that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Snow Crash (Neil Stephenson)

The Bible (Various chaps)

<comment><USER22> Which books/chapters? I love Psalms and Philippians, but I really love the beauty of how it all fits together.

(Not trying to belittle, just curious)

<comment><USER29> John and Genesis.

Genesis is a necessary read for anyone, regardless of religious affiliation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Many.

In short:

All books written by Witold Gombrowicz (Diary if have to pick one),

All books written by Slavoj Zizek (Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates if have to pick one)

Recently read and significant:

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper,

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, Jack Schwager

</comment><comment><USER31> Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury

Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Peter Medawar's The Art of the Soluable

Designed by Peter Saville

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols

Bloom County Babylon

</comment><comment><USER32> It is hard to say what my favorite book is. But the book that impacted my life most was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Read it.

My favorite authors and playwrights are (in no meaningful order) Michael Lewis, Carl Sagan, Siddhartha Gautama, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Patrick Marber, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare.

</comment><comment><USER33> A few sort of random selections from my bookshelf (in no particular order):

     * GEB:EGB - <USER2>
     * The Pragmatic Programmer - Hunt / Thomas
     * Peopleware - DeMarco / Lister
     * The Mythical Man Month - <USER3>
     * Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - <USER4>
     * Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - <USER5>

</comment><comment><USER34> House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

<comment><USER35> House of Leaves is so good! I have yet to come up with a good description of what it's about, but I always try when I tell people about it.

I usually describe it as a story about a guy who finds a manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of essays that detail a documentary that was made about a house that randomly changes rooms.

So at the center of the novel, you have this really creepy story. But there are all the layers above that storyline that you have to read to get there. There's the storyline concerning the people who make the documentary. Then there's the storyline of the guy who wrote the manuscript ABOUT the documentary. Then you have the storyline of the guy who's reading the documentary.

Then there's you. You're reading about a guy who is in turn reading a manuscript about a documentary which was made about a house. It was so well done that at the end, I found myself not really sure what the hell I was reading anymore.

I'm still not sure what the book is, but it's certainly a stroke of genius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep

[http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&dq=Vernor+...](http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&dq=Vernor+Vinge&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dvernor%2Bvinge%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en- US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=3&cad=author- navigational)

I'm sure his other books are good, too, but this is the only one I've read. I've never seen anyone else able to extrapolate the consequences of entire races advancing past the Singularity and how mortals manage to get by in such a galaxy (if you're able to accept faster-than-light travel as a premise, but he has a very interesting take on even that). A ton of innovative sci-fi ideas in one novel.

<comment><USER37> Read his other stuff, it is equally good!

<comment><USER38> Indeed. I think his best book is A deepness in the sky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Bible

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Mastering the Winds of Change (solid self-improvement book)

</comment><comment><USER40> All of William Gibson and all of Neal Stephenson (especially Cryptonomicon and Baroque cycle series)

<comment><USER37> Same, and with special emphasis on The Diamond Age.

Also Douglas Adams, Vernor Vinge, Richard K. Morgan, and all kinds of other stuff. I like to read almost as much as I like to program.

Best nonfiction I have read in a while: "Leaving Microsoft To Change The World" by John Wood. A Microsoft VP leaves to pursue his dream of changing the world with books, and ends up founding Room to Read (<http://www.roomtoread.org/> .) Highly recommended.

<comment><USER40> Hmmm. Diamond Age didn't do it for me for some reason. I liked it but not nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. But I have had several people tell me the same thing that you did wrt DA, so it just must be me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> \- Brave New World

\- Night

\- Hitchhiker's Guide series

\- Dark Tower series (Mostly just the first 4, though)

\- Eats, Shoots & Leaves

\- Just about any George Carlin or Patrick F. McManus books

\- Wheel of Time Series

\- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

</comment><comment><USER42> \- use of weapons (ian m banks)

\- surely you are joking mr feynman (rpf)

\- origin of order (stuart kauffman)

\- slaughter house five (kurt vonnegut)

\- goedel escher bach (douglas hofstadter)

\- theta-magical memas errr metamagical themas (dogulas hofsta)

</comment><comment><USER43> Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

</comment><comment><USER44> The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect -- Read it free online! <http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html>

</comment><comment><USER45> The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

LOTR

Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams) -- Alright, not literature! But come on, it's Dilbert :)

</comment><comment><USER46> For anyone looking for more ideas, there's a related thread here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56618>

</comment><comment><USER47> 1984 (George Orwell)

Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C Clarke, Space Elevator SciFi)

Dune Series (Herbert)

Ender Series (Orson Scott Card)

2001 Series (Arthur C Clarke)

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

I, Claudius (Robert Graves)

</comment><comment><USER48> For sheer enjoyment (measured in how many times I've re-read them, at least at various times in my life): Heinlein's _The Door into Summer_. Connie Willis' _Bellwether_ (these can be funny, right?). Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ (more in my youth than today, but I can probably still recite passages by heart).

Non-fiction: Gerry Weinberg's _Secrets of Consulting_. Lynn Truss' _Eats Shoots & Leaves_.

</comment><comment><USER49> LOTR

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)

</comment><comment><USER50> \- What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff

\- Alongside Night, J Neil Schulman,

\- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson

\- Anything by Doug Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box is a good one for business/entrepreneurship

\- The Dubliners, James Joyce

\- The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

</comment><comment><USER21> You reminded me of a great little book published a long time ago which is still very relevant: "The Ugly American"(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American>). A recent really good read was Le Carre's "The Mission Song"

</comment><comment><USER51> Rebel Without a Crew (Robert Rodriguez), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

</comment><comment><USER52> This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (out of print, yet much more worthwhile in my opinion than other dystopic novels) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond The Books of the Fey by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer The Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis

</comment><comment><USER53> Cradle to cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

<http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm>

About environmental design of, well, everything. Might fall into the "technical" category, though.

</comment><comment><USER54> I enjoyed The Undercover Economist. I especially recommend it if you liked Freakonomics.

</comment><comment><USER55> The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner. The Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper. The Illuminatus! trilogy.

Robin Hobb books (with special mention of the farseer trilogy), Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, Terry Pratchett.

</comment><comment><USER56> Some more SF/Fantasy yarns:

\- Hyperion by Dan Simmons \- 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear and all the other Zamonien books (only know german version) \- Pollen by Jeff Noon \- Otherland by Tad Williams \- Ubik by PK Dick

</comment><comment><USER57> The Design of Everyday Things

<comment><USER58> This is a great book. It delves into the psychology of how we think about and use the built world and explains why some things are simply hard to use as compared to other, better designed things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Against the Odds (James Dyson)

</comment><comment><USER59> Are your lights on - Jerry Weinberg The blind watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

</comment><comment><USER60> I'll go with anything written by Vonnegut. Feynman books too.

</comment><comment><USER61> Godel Escher Bach - non fiction

The Tomorrow File - fiction. Written in the 1970s as the author's only foray into science fiction. Seriously, it's that good.

</comment><comment><USER62> Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy

</comment><comment><USER63> 1984 (George Orwell)

The Four Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss)

Getting Things Done (David Allen)

Deception Point (Dan Brown)

</comment><comment><USER64> How about... How the mind works (Pinker) Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (Pirsig) Sophie's World (Gaarder)

</comment><comment><USER65> Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (bit of a beast, but well worth it).

</comment><comment><USER66> Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Wealth of Nations, The Great Gatsby, See No Evil, Hannibal

</comment><comment><USER35> Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

House Of Leaves (Mark Danielewski)

</comment><comment><USER67> Sherlock Holmes

<comment><USER56> Definitely among my favorites, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Phenomenology of Spirit - G.W.F. Hegel

</comment><comment><USER69> The "Captain Underpants" series.

</comment><comment><USER70> Blink</comment>


Ask HN: Hosts you use for your projects? - <AUTHOR>

I've used webfaction and slicehost quite a bit and have been very happy with them but wanted to check out a few others before I release my latest project.<p>Wondering who everyone else recommends or likes for their projects. <comment><USER2> I use Amazon EC2 for several reasons. They basically boil down to having everything I want with little hassle.

\- I can hold my own as far as basic sysadmin functions go, and I like having control over the entire software stack. A lot of Amazon EC2 machine images can be stripped bare to give me only what I need.

\- I don't have a lot of money to blow on a dedicated machine each month, so it's nice to at least have a running environment even if it's virtualized (and therefore slower). At least I can know if my code works out in the wild.

\- I pay only for what I use. There's also the option to leave it on and pay in advance (Reserved Instances). So whether my projects end up being just small diversions or whether they gain traction, there's a pricing plan I can go with. It was meant for companies to scale up and down, but I've actually found it useful for scaling my personal projects up and down.

\- The management tools are pretty good. ElasticFox is clunky at times but it has everything I need without a whole lot of hassle.

\- Elastic IPs. I can claim a static IP if I wish, or just choose not to use it.

Amazon has exposed a lot of stuff over their APIs, but don't be fooled into thinking that this means they added layers and layers of cruft akin to all the useless software that comes on new PCs. The APIs just work on a meta level -- useful if you want to package up machines and that kind of stuff -- but if all you need is a Linux box with good bandwidth for your personal projects, give Amazon a shot.

There's also the added bonus that they're, well, Amazon. And they're not going away anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Linode: <http://www.linode.com>

Rackspace Cloud/Sites: <http://www.rackspacecloud.com>

<comment><USER4> linode here too, but I've heard decent things about hetzner.de which works out much better from a price perspective if you want more resources.

<comment><USER5> So you're hosted in Germany? Is your target audience in the US? Prices are great in Europe in general, but the latency between US West coast and Hertzner was too high for us. They also had network issues at some points with a lot of TCP retransmission, that did not help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use Google App Engine because we lack serious sys-admin skills, and GAE abstracts all that away from us. Also, the datastore was much easier for us to understand and hack than relational databases.

For project hosting, we use hosted-projects.com because it gives us SVN+track+bugzilla and wires them together, and they have good tech support. I also like Beanstalk, but it doesn't come with a bug tracker.

<comment><USER7> We use GAE and also for projects that need PHP. Also see how to run PHP on your app engine [http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google- app...](http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app-engine/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Linode (<http://www.linode.com/>) at the moment but will probably move to prgmr (<http://prgmr.com/xen/>) so I can cut costs — anyone got experience with them?

<comment><USER9> Linode is fantastic. Their support and control panels are great. Anything not in their really cool guides, you can always jump into their IRC channel, which I've had really great results with.

I love my little VPS!

<comment><USER8> I was remiss in not posting my experiences with Linode:

* I got an unintuitive error using the Control Panel to do a simple operation (resizing a disk) so I emailed support and got a quick response.

* Linode rolled out a security update for their control panel whereby one had to whitelist the IP's you could login from. This is a good thing except that I don't have a static IP at the best of times and when they rolled this out without notice I was cruising around the North Coast of NSW (Australia) with my sole connectivity being spotty GSM/3G.

* I emailed support to try and gain access to the Control Panel again. They said I could either call them as they needed to verify my identity or they could reset my account and email me new credentials. I did the later for above mentioned connectivity reasons. Apparently my response got lost in the support-rep's inbox (reps words, not mine) as it took a while to get a response. I can't remember how long but I think it was about 24 hours. I'd have been well frustrated if it was urgent.

* Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host. What is, is the service itself — the VPS has been rock-solid and I like knowing that I can provision another VPS in ~15 minutes. I know prgmr can't do the later but hopefully they can do the former.

* Price is the real reason I'm going to move away from Linode (at least in the short term). I'm topping out with my Linode 360 at the moment. I'd like to move up to a 720 so I have some head-room. I'd also like to have a redundant setup in place when I start charging users. That's ~$860 a year with Linode versus (with 1024 mb instances) $384 with prgmr.

tl;dr: Linode are good but not exemplarily. You might be better off elsewhere depending on your needs.

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth I've never had any of the problems you've mentioned. Otherwise I wouldn't be posting such a glowing review. I think documentation + instant communication with the community is a strong point for any company as well, honestly.

But yes, as always, everyone has different needs and there is no one size fits all.

<comment><USER8> To be clear:

* _Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host_

I'm not referring to documentation on the service itself here, but to the software install/setup guides which seem to be in vogue at the minute.

Regarding community, with a service like a VPS it's a bit of an airy concept to me; somewhat akin to having a community around a petrol station.

That said - I can see how both of these things would be nice to have for some people.

<comment><USER9> Understood, it's probably just the knowledge divide that makes certain things more valuable than others. I'm not a sysadmin, I know enough to get around and get things done and learn to do them properly, but the guides certainly help at times when I get stuck.

IRC I'm not really a regular on, but I've been on Linodes a few times and the people are extremely nice and helpful, I feel if someone can relate directly to my situation (same host, same features) it's a lot easier to solve certain issues.

You sound like you don't really have these needs for the most part, which probably makes the value of these services a lot less for you than for me. Although, this is the first time I've heard of prgrm(?), I'm going to need to look into it now, peaked my curiosity.

<comment><USER8> I've got a VPS with prgmr now and whilst it's too early in the piece for me to share any meaningful opinion, I will say that I think it's quite likely they represent genuine value for money. Feel free to email me (see profile) in a month or so if you'd like a more in depth review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Checkout <http://www.softlayer.com> for dedicated and <http://www.vpsfarm.com> for VPS hosting. I have used both and highly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Heroku is pretty kickass for deploying Rails (or any Rack framework) on. Couldn't ask for anything simpler. Integrates right into your Git workflow.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also check this from the webfaction site:

 _Scale as much as you need Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers._

I think that's the reason I signed up.. That and the prices.. It's nice to know you can scale out your solution that way.. but anyway, I still want to have a plan B if it doesn't work out with them.

<comment><USER12> Also I'd like to see some more details about their "multi machine loadbalancing". The blurb that I found on their site was so devoid of facts that I'm tempted to believe this is just a red herring (hosted HTTP loadbalancer or such?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm using gandi hosting for my hobby projects.

I think their virtual servers are XEN based, having access to the actual console via ssh is nice if you like to do your own OS install on your slice. (They also have easier web interfaces for those users who don't want to do spend as much time sysadminning, but I have no experience with that).

<http://www.gandi.net>. (it's a french company btw, so especially useful if you and your target audience is in europe :)

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe this question is related but, are there any special hosts for ruby/rails or python/django?

Sort of like MediaTemple's containers?

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it just be worthwhile to get a VPS and setup what you need? You should be able to host multiple small sites on even a 256MB VPS. And of course you can just upgrade from there, if they grow too big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We're using Solo on EngineYard (i.e., their AWS-based offering.) Quite happy with it so far. Thinking about moving to Flex eventually.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've had a VPS with tektonic.net for about three years. It's not oversold, I've never had unscheduled downtime. Scheduled downtime is very rare. Tech support answers their email.

Aside from that, it's a basic VPS running Debian. They're all pretty similar.

</comment><comment><USER18> Slicehost.com

<comment><USER19> Same here... their support is awesome, and upgrades are easy. I would skip the 256 slice if you are doing anything but hosting simple static websites though...

I found that even a single Wordpress install was able to bring my 256 slice to it's knees each night when it was indexed by search engines (until I installed a bunch of caching plug-ins that is).

I was quite fearful of using Slicehost as I have practically no knowledge of system administration, but their support and tutorials made the whole process easy. I've done it a couple of times since and I'm getting faster each time!

<comment><USER18> You may want to setup a system just for cloning if you create a lot of slices for yourself or customers. You can then just restore it to a new slice, run updates, make firewall changes, etc, but at least you get some of the core work out of the way each time - and it's as easy as a few clicks.

<comment><USER19> That's actually a really good idea - I'll keep that in mind for the future!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> <http://www.fdcservers.net/Services/VirtualDedicatedServers>

Storage is larger than other virtual hosts.

<comment><USER21> i am a bit late to the game here. but i have used FDC for a year or two and have been very happy. Have one dedicated unmetered 100mbit box. it owns.

They also have GREAT support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit off topic, but in terms of source control and bug tracking, I use www.unfuddle.com which supports Subversion/Git, integrated bug tracking, simple, and has a free version

</comment><comment><USER23> <http://railsplayground.com> specializes in RoR hosting - they offer both shared hosting, vps and dedicated servers. Extremely rapid and competent service.

I've used them for both my startup and some smaller personal projects over the last 10 months, very satisfied so far.

</comment><comment><USER24> Depends on the project. If it's just for a simple content site, I'll use my hosting account through ASmallOrange. If I need Ruby/Python/more resources than a shared account I'll set the client up on GAE or Slicehost.

</comment><comment><USER25> Heroku!

</comment><comment><USER26> Checkout <http://www.arpnetworks.com> for OpenBSD and FreeBSD VPS hosting. I'm a client and they've been quite good for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm trying Google, as in Google App Engine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about using them in the past but was scared off by the TOS. I think they place some restrictions on apps hosted there no?

<http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i like prgmr.com for VPS.

</comment><comment><USER29> hosteurope.de

dirt cheap VPS

<comment><USER30> They need to have an English section on their web site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Google App Engine and SliceHost</comment>