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capstoneon Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why?

Having just gone through evaluating various cloud providers for our high-traffic website, this is my personal definition: utility computing as electricity, meaning unlimited (in both directions) metered access. Most "cloud" companies offer neither: a typical VPS provider requires a contract that stipulates exactly how much you may consume, and when your consumption changes, you pay and wait. Imagine if you had to do that at home... a $25 set up fee and 48 hours to turn on an extra light.

capstoneon Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why?

Any benchmarking numbers off top of your head?

capstoneon Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why?

Amazon. We have very large data transfer requirements* plus CloudFront is the cheapest CDN out there as far as I know.

*Spent weeks trying to explain to a large school district's "caching expert" (100,000+ students all going through a $30,000 dedicated caching server) that they do not need to flush the cache every day. He was not convinced. Oy.

capstoneon An Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc.

Huh? Informationless trading is pretty much the exact opposite of algorithmic trading. It has nothing to with volume, it simply means that you are buying/selling not because you have information that leads you to believe the stock in question is about to go up/down but rather because you need cash, or it's an IPO, etc.

Algorithmic trading is nothing but informational - the whole purpose is to analyze information, detect a trend, and ride it. Add to that quote stuffing and other price manipulation techniques (emphasis mine). It think it's rather hard to make a case that the robots that make up the majority of trading volume have no effect on prices.

I don't know where you get your nebulous is thought not to move prices. Thought by whom? HFT firms and technology providers? Well, duh. They are making a killing in essentially passive income and they are about to get shut down by various regulatory bodies in US and Europe. What do you expect them to say? Of course their party line is, we have a zero net effect on prices, and a positive effect on liquidity.

capstoneon An Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc.

Stock market is the most efficient grader of all? Really? Algorithmic trading accounts for over 70% of US equity trading volume. If there ever was a time when you could grade a CEO based on the stock market performance, that time is long gone. Check your assumptions.

capstoneon Web Programming Is Hard

To play the devil's advocate, and I am speaking specifically within the context of web development, what is a practical example of a linked list?

capstoneon Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS

From Amazon:

Amazon Route 53 supports wildcard entries for all record types. A wildcard entry is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for any domain name based on the configuration you set. For example, a wildcard DNS record such as *.example.com will match queries for www.example.com and subdomain.example.com.

capstoneon The dark side of open source conferences [about women being harassed]

Sorry to hear your experience as a father is less than positive, socially-speaking. As a mother of an 18-month old whose father is currently taking care of him full time, our experience is quite the opposite. My husband gets more compliments in a day than I do in a month, I think largely because of the "otherness". He is is also a very popular member of the local "mommy" group. Perhaps it has something to do with where you are? As an ex-New Yorker, I've found the city to be unfriendly to parents of either gender.

OT, are you aware of the HN parents google group?

http://groups.google.com/group/hn-parents

capstoneon How to destroy your business with one email

Google alerts, Reputation Defender, etc.

capstoneon High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

I was working for Arthur Andersen and later KPMG in New York. The technology stack was varied (Vignette/TCL is one odd example) and largely irrelevant to my rate, as was my value as a programmer (I wasn't very good back then). $325 was one of my more sedate rates actually, they've billed me out as high as $400.

People tend to think the crazy numbers were a byproduct of the internet bubble but the biggest factor was due diligence: certain big clients had to choose a Big 5 firm for their projects based on requirements such as, minimum number of employees, minimum years in business, minimum assets, etc. The whole racket was absurd, if you ask me.

capstoneon High prestige, low satisfaction jobs

Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highest-earning states (NY/CA) is around $60k.

capstoneon The Decline of marriage?

I just looked Nawal El Saadawi up; apparently she is a survivor of female genital mutilation. Having your genitals cut off sans anesthesia in the name of preparing you for marriage is a rather good excuse for speaking out against the institution, don't you think?

capstoneon The Decline of marriage?

I think at the heart of the feminist movement lies a belief that marriage is a tool devised by society to control women.

Why do you think that? As far as I know, the feminist movement is a part of a greater civil rights movement focused on equal political, economic, and social rights regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, in the particular case of feminism, gender. What makes you say that feminism is mainly focused on destroying marriage?

On a separate anecdotal note, I grew up in the former Soviet Union where religion was largely absent and yet marriage was very strong.