Some people suggest paying off all debt before investing, if X% interest on the debt is greater than %Y expected return on investments. In theory, that's fine; however, if you apply that to Roth/Traditional IRA contributions you have to be aware that they have an annual cap ($5000 for a Roth), and you can only make contributions for a given tax year until April 15 of the following year.
I'm currently migrating from HBase to Riak.. and I'll just say that it is a huge breath of fresh air, compared to dealing with HBase. I also played with MongoDB for a bit, prior to Riak, and found it to be incredibly fast -- but Riak's ease of scalability was a huge win for me.
I agree wholeheartedly. For comparison, I currently see ~95% of search engine referral traffic from Google, 2.8% from Yahoo, 1.4% from Bing, and <1% from all other search engines combined. It makes no sense to let X, Y, Z random search engines index content like Google, when they send nowhere near the traffic. As others have mentioned, blocking by robots.txt often doesn't work as some bots don't obey it. I currently use an extensive rewrite rule to block those bots' User-Agents, and block specific IPs as a last resort.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. - Misattributed to various people, including Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. The earliest known occurrence, and probable origin is Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68."
"Hope is not a strategy." - ? Also, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." - Benjamin Franklin
I loved the author's discussion of "the deep friendship of intimate conversation" as a form of solitude and introspection. I've experienced increased self-acquaintance through such conversation a few times in life, and can't imagine ever forgetting a single one.
Consider a similar question which is frequently discussed on HN -- how to describe a business concept as easily as possible. One technique is to make comparisons to existing businesses that are fairly well understood. For example, YouTube was described as "the flickr of video" (see http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/14/1320217.shtml - from 2005) in its early days.
From my experience, Google does actually seem to do a reasonable job of ensuring they don't over-crawl your site with the automated crawl rates. Increasing the crawl rate above the automatic figure can certainly be helpful - just make sure you know what you're doing.
So they've only tested heavy access load on a double-digit gigabyte volume? That concerns me a bit, as I'm considering migrating from HBase to Riak, which would be several TB of data.
Good idea -- see AeroFS for a few clever people doing it already (http://www.aerofs.com). In answer to your question, I wouldn't pay for it, but don't let that discourage you as I'm almost certainly not your target user (and I would suspect many others on HN aren't either).
Stability and reliability have dramatically improved in HBase over time (2 years ago, those were definitely concerns I had). When we began using HBase in mid-2007, it seemed like the best (read: only viable) option for our use case. Now, there are comparably lots of options. Without much testing so far, Riak's fully distributed (non-master/slave) architecture seems appealing..
Looks like 0.14 is a great release, from the notes. I'm setting up a Riak cluster tomorrow to evaluate performance as an alternative to our current HBase-based setup, so the timing on the release is perfect for me.
John Resig posted this on his Twitter account (@jeresig) today, while announcing jQuery.com had reached an Alexa rank of 513. I personally found it very interesting as it highlights the inconsistency of Alexa rankings, as I'm sitting on nearly identical visits/pageviews -- with a current Alexa rank of 2269.
In the same vein.. if you want a delicious salad, try making this: an over-easy egg served on top of chunks of crispy bacon over baby spinach greens, with a dressing of a mixture of a decent balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
I work in the translation industry, and the interesting part of this to me is the implementation. Generating the resulting translation image in real time is a unique idea that is probably hard to make work well. OCR on a mobile device without a network connection is not as difficult as you might think (read: it can fairly easily be done on Android with tesseract-ocr, at least). Also, instead of the typical rule-based or statistical machine translation you get on the web, think of translating word-by-word as simply substituting words from a key/value dictionary list.
Having said that, I'm always glad to see interesting translation being developed and getting such a positive reaction on HN. Congratulations to Word Lens on launching!
I absolutely love when someone can explain something you know, but make you understand it. Although the article is about CEO succession, it seems to make a strong case for creating a diverse executive team. While it may be more difficult to do in a small company, in larger companies it seems to make sense to have each member of the executive team function as a CEO over his or her area of responsibility.