Hacker News Reader

chatterbeakon What Closing a Government Radio Station Would Mean for Clocks

The entire NIST budget is pretty large. This is one of the most visible things they do. By threatening to cut this if their budget shrinks, perhaps they're hoping to preserve their original budget request.

chatterbeakon Gatwick drones pair 'no longer suspects'

Also, the drones may never have existed.

chatterbeakon AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

With that much RAM, you'd be insane not to use ECC, which is another good reason for Xeon.

chatterbeakon AMD Ryzen Full Lineup Prices, Specs and Clock Speeds Leaked

Really? I won't use a computer without it for production work. You get one bit-flip/GB/year. With 128GB or more in most of our desktops, it's not worth the risk.

chatterbeakon Ask HN: How do you back up your site hosted on a VPS such as Digital Ocean?

Here's how we do it:

All the databases and other data are backed up to s3. For mysql, we use the python mysql-to-s3 backup scripts.

But the machines themselves are "backed up" by virtue of being able to be rebuilt with saltstack. We verify through nightly builds that we can bring a fresh instance up, with the latest dataset restored from s3, from scratch.

This makes it simple for us to switch providers, and can run our "production" instances locally on virtual machines running the exact same version of CentOS or FreeBSD we use in production.

chatterbeakon Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).

There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.

chatterbeakon Moolo: A private and focused place for writing daily thoughts

What's their business model? Why would I type my thoughts there instead of, say, "google docs." Or putting text files in a dropbox.

I like the idea of quiet and uncluttered. But it's hard to trust my writing to some new web app with to viable way of monetizing it.

chatterbeakon LAX becomes largest U.S. airport to allow Uber, Lyft pickups

LAX is the second largest (by passenger boarding) airport in the country. So until ATL allows Uber, I guess this is true.

chatterbeakon New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

Wikipedia says the data rate from Pluto is effectively about 1 KBit/second. That's why it takes so long to get the photos....

I'd like to find more detailed information about the hardware and software on this thing. It's amazing that it was launched back in 2006. My 2006 Mac Pro is basically useless now....

chatterbeakon AeroFS Raises $10M Series B

I like the concept; you wonder why Dropbox didn't enter this space.

chatterbeakon [dead]

There's a chance that reddit is simply not a viable business, and just because you amass a large audience doesn't mean it's monetizable.

Cut through all the drama, and maybe it's really about that. A weak, messy platform, with no focus, and no possibility of getting.

How many of us here would take a job at reddit? Not many, I'd bet. There's no real Engineering problem to be solved.