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dapzon Why we are not leaving the cloud

Actually, unfortunately I think that the price is more like 9 cents per GB, so the calculation looks even worse. The $0.01/GB you saw must be across zones within AWS?

So ~$900/month for bandwidth alone.

The disk and CPU costs for me are worth it, much better to pay $600/month and let that be someone else's headache. But the bandwidth makes this totally a nonstarter.

Out of curiosity, what are you moving?

I'm also not sure how these smaller datacenters somehow charge so much less for bandwidth.

dapzon Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

Such models presumably can be tested in some sense. E.g. build some sort of predictive model of elections in each state using Twitter users as a surrogate, see how well you do.

I'm not claiming that such a model is guaranteed to be perfect or even as good as a pollster, but it sounds in principle like a reasonable thing to do, if you take appropriate precautions to reduce bias.

dapzon Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

If you have a demographic model of twitter users and appropriately re-weight, why is this a bad approach to take?

dapzon Firefly – Full Text Search Engine for Dropbox

"Firstly, we expect some users to have a large number of documents in their Dropbox, making it non-trivial to update their corresponding index “instantly”."

If the alternative is maintaining a single index, won't the time it takes to update it at least be the time it takes to update per-user indexes? The former naively sounds like updating a single, gigantic binary search tree, the latter seems like updating a hashmap of UserId/BST pairs.

"Secondly, this approach requires the system to maintain as many indices as there are users with each stored in a separate file. With over 300 million users, keeping track of so many indices in production would be an operational nightmare."

..Why?

Anyway the stuff about shared documents is enough to make per-user indexing probably a bad idea, but I don't understand the reasons they provided above.

dapzon Microsoft laid me off after 15 years of service. Life after Microsoft?

Layoffs not based on talent? As competitive as the market is, throwing away valuable people seems insane to me.

dapzon GoLearn – Machine Learning in Go

GNU Scientific Library? I've not benchmarked it against Numpy/Scipy, but there is quite a bit of overlap in functionality.

dapzon Ask HN: What language should I learn next?

Modern AI (Machine Learning) doesn't have anything to do with Lisp.

dapzon JDK 8 Release Notes

Isn't map/flatMap and orElse enough, if only for Optional?

dapzon By The Time You Give Them a Raise, They’re Already Out The Door

How frequently can/should one ask for raises? I was under the vague impression that once a year is reasonable, but looks like I might be wrong.

dapzon Paths to being a kernel hacker

Minix 3 seems like a really good route for this purpose. Supposedly a kernel in less than 10k lines of C.

dapzon Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers

Does this have comparative summary statistics for these exercises? I did 45 WPM on the first Scala lesson; is this average, terrible, or good?

dapzon Paul Graham reviews Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2000)

Brian Harvey's video lectures on Scheme using SICP:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,s,Spring_2011,EC3E890...

along with the home page for the class:

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp11/

I'm going to use it to complement the PDF version of SICP posted above in this thread.

dapzon Sacrificing everything for my dog. How I became a programmer

I think it is mostly wonderful. In the part of the third world my parents are from unless your family is independently wealthy then you simply won't be able to afford to go to college and thus are destined to (at best) have some very low-paying menial labor job.

Contrast this with the US, you can get federally-backed, low-interest loans, go to school majoring in engineering and move from poverty to middle class in one generation.

Pretty sweet deal, imo.