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tywon Georgia Has a Coast?

Used to live in Brunswick, now we're living in middle Georgia but my wife and I still love to fly our C182 down to grab some BBQ at Southern Soul (or cheesesteak at Skinny Pete's) every month or two. SSI is gorgeous and the airport is in a great location and staffed by some great folks.

tywon Air France A380 over Greenland on Sep 30th: Fan and engine inlet separated

best glide (converting altitude into the maximum distance) speed is quite a bit higher than the stall speed and found at the lift/drag max. minimum sink (converting altitude into the maximum time) is usually found about halfway between best glide speed and stall speed.

http://learntoflylv.com/drag%20curve.gif

tywon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2015)

Audiomack | NYC | REMOTE

Audiomack (http://www.audiomack.com) is a fast-growing music sharing and discovery website. We are looking for a generalist engineer to work with us in a contracting role on a full-time (or nearly FT) basis. You would be welcome to work out of our SoHo NYC office, remotely, or some combination. We are looking for candidates who can contribute immediately to both backend and frontend projects.

Between destkop & mobile sites, embeds on other sites, plus iOS and Android apps we generally have 5-20k simultaneous users, 2-3 million streams per day, resulting in 30+ TB daily bandwidth use. We are looking for someone who is passionate about designing and implementing efficient systems that millions of users will interact with daily.

Skills & Requirements:

- excellent coding skills and proven track record of delivering value

- several years of experience with full-stack web development: backend, frontend, database

- (if working remotely) proven telecommuting skills: self-motivated, highly productive, maintains open lines of communication with the team

- able to make sense of existing code and seamlessly integrate new features without breaking current functionality

- good coding habits: writing tests, matching existing coding style, intelligent decision-making on when to refactor, etc.

Key Technologies:

- PHP / Zend Framework

- Redis / Redis Cluster

- The usual frontend technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript + common libraries, AJAX)

- AWS (EC2, CloudFront, S3, etc)

- Git / Github

Bonus for candidates with experience in:

- music fingerprinting

- extensive HTML5 audio/video development

- soundmanager2 or some other audio API/framework

- redis clusters

- sysadmin-related tasks

If interested, please contact us: management at audiomack.

tywon The quest for a reactionless space drive

don't really know what the power requirements are for his device as it currently stands. generating enough power in space would probably weigh enough to make the effects of the current device they've built all but unnoticeable over a reasonable amount of time. if they can advance their modeling of the effect and figure out what effects efficiency they'd likely be able to design and launch a device that could deliver much more convincing results.

tywon As Amazon Mimics Google’s Price Drop, Cloud Computing Grows Up

> We found a few really nice features in their cloud products

Such a tease. What cool features did you come across?

tywon World's longest aircraft takes disaster relief to new heights

Watched the video, don't think they mentioned it... any idea how fast it is? They said it can fly for up to 5 days, but without knowing cruising speed it's hard to say how useful it could be for moving people and cargo around when there's other options.

tywon STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

regarding #1, I don't believe he's talking about someone who has chained together a bunch of jobs spending a year at each. Having "The same year of experience X times over" generally means you didn't grow as a developer from your experience because you were doing the same thing in the same way for a long time.

For example, if your job is cranking out CRUD apps or "online brochure" websites for various clients and you do it for 5 years, there's a good chance that while you're very good at those things now, it hasn't really gained you the same experience as if you'd been doing something a bit more demanding.

tywon Third cryptocurrency exchange becomes hacking victim, loses Bitcoin

hard to say but I'm pretty sure the parent was dripping with sarcasm.

tywon Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

could easily knock multiple thousand bucks off of that by just reserving the ec2 servers you know you'll need, plus reserve the cloudfront bandwidth you know you'll need (for the amount of data served I believe you should be able to cut CF costs by at least half).

3 year heavy EC2 reservations pay for themselves in ~7 months, cloudfront reserved bandwidth is just a 12 month agreement so that costs nothing up front. You might want to experiment with some different instance types though, depending on your resource utilization. Personally I really like using the new c3.large instances for my web servers and anything else that needs more CPU than memory, proportionately. If the standard instances suit your needs better you still might want to move to the m3 class.

Aside from those two items it looks like you are sending out a considerable amount of stuff from EC2->internet (27 TB transfer out from US-East to internet). I'd recommend looking at whether you could set up a cloudfront distribution with your EC2 servers as its origin.

tywon Comcast is definitely throttling Netflix, and it’s infuriating

sure, all of that is possible. but honestly how likely is it that some or all of those things are the case on the direct path from netflix/youtube through the ISP in question to so many people's homes? and yet the problem spot is mysteriously avoided when using a VPN (not any particular VPN, but pretty much any of them, judging by most of the people who have spoken out about this problem recently). the problem so effectively avoided by changing the route from the optimal(ish) path to one that is almost guaranteed to be worse from a network flow standpoint.

sorry, I don't buy any apologizing for comcast/verizon failing to deliver HD video from netflix/youtube yet somehow able to do it under the same network conditions (same time) just this time through an encrypted VPN. if it was an isolated report... maybe. this is far too widespread to be anything but intentional.

tywon 37signals becomes Basecamp

More to the point, why would a profitable company who wants to stay small take VC money?

tywon AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ the reserved capacity pricing is much better than the on demand pricing. Basically like EC2 on demand vs reservations. We set our reserved capacity at about 70-80% of what we expect to use most of the time. We could probably shave a few tenths of a cent per gig off but we get a good price on everything above what we've reserved so it's worked out.

If you use a lot of cloudfront bandwidth without setting up a reservation, yeah... you're gonna pay through the nose.

tywon AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

also the outbound bandwidth cost of S3 is very high. it would cost us several times what we're paying for s3+cloudfront to serve our content straight from s3.

tywon NavSpark: Arduino Compatible with GPS GNSS Receiver

is centimeter accuracy even possible with GPS? http://www.gps.gov/systems/augmentations/ cites 10-15 centimeter accuracy under their NDGPS modernization efforts, but don't even say they've gotten there yet.

tywon LiteCoin Payment API

I have mixed feelings about this, but my gut reaction is that it's not acceptable. Mainly because inexperienced programmers tend to cobble together functional apps by leaning heavily on example code, and don't know that those examples have dangerous security issues.

tywon Poll: Are you looking for an exit, or building a lifestyle business?

http://www.audiomack.com

I wrote most of the code for Audiomack. Free music hosting for artists. Predominantly hip-hop/rap because my cofounders have had other ventures aimed at that genre over the past decade or so, but audiomack accepts everyone. We'd particularly like to make inroads into electronic & dance music.

Started it in our spare time, launched Feb '12 and I went full-time in May '13.

edit: interview with my cofounders for anyone interested in the ideas behind audiomack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S1Vb0PE7w4

tywon Poll: Are you looking for an exit, or building a lifestyle business?

Our business has been profitable from the start and is now a pretty comfortable lifestyle business, but I don't know as any of us want to still be running it 10-20 years from now, so an exit certainly wouldn't be out of the question.

tywon Google announces ban on "multi-purpose" Chrome extensions

that's a little bit disingenuous. google pays huge amounts of money to Mozilla to be the default search engine because of the huge amounts of money Mozilla users make google by using google services on a daily basis. it's not like they're propping up a competitor just for the hell of it (or even to avoid anti-trust issues).

tywon How MySQL memory table saved the day

I haven't used either elasticsearch or solr, so I don't have firsthand experience on how they compare to Sphinx search (http://sphinxsearch.com) but I really love Sphinx. Also integrates nicely with MySQL if you're already running that.

I think Solr and Sphinx pretty much tick the same boxes in terms of features and performance though, so use what you know and like.

tywon I know none of my passwords

it should be roughly equivalent to knowing the salt of the hash you're attempting to crack, right?

tywon What I've been up to for the past year

Do you specifically want it for sale if you don't expect it to sell many copies, or are you just looking to have your music out there? There are sites you can put music out there for free on. Shameless plug for my own site: http://www.audiomack.com. It is predominantly used for hip hop so that's what comes up in the top music charts, but there's nothing keeping anyone using it for any genre they like.

tywon Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

yeah we recently migrated from memcached on elasticache to redis on EC2 (and bought the reservations), though our migration rolled out about 4-6 weeks ago. oh well, I guess.

tywon It's a Dumbphone, But It's the Nicest Dumbphone You Can Buy

I still haven't joined the smartphone revolution and this appeals to me in some respects, but I wish they'd have opted for a full physical keyboard. I avoid sending texts whenever possible because T9 is such a pain in the ass compared to QWERTY.

tywon Just released a major update for my site. What do you guys think?

I think your #quickref_links click events need an 'event.preventDefault()' to keep the browser from jumping up to the top of the page when you switch between tabs.

tywon Amazon Elastic Transcoder - Watermarking, Bit / Frame Rate Control

If there's anyone out there watching, I would love it if there were a similar AWS service just for audio transcoding (mp3, flac, etc.). Obviously I don't know what all is happening behind the scenes, but it seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure would be reusable.

tywon Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

you wouldn't want to do this straight out of EC2, but once you add S3=>CloudFront to the mix it's much less bad. Only thing you want to be serving from your EC2 boxes and load balancer is gzipped HTML/CSS/JS (could even do CSS/JS on S3/CF if you wanted).

tywon DigitalOcean wiped my server because of $6.22

DO's policy aside... to be fair, having a single server (virtual, no less) be the only copy of anything is pretty much asking for it.

tywon Poll: is your startup profitable?

http://www.audiomack.com

Built it in our spare time early last year, went live around the end of Feb 2012. Been growing like a weed ever since, and this year it's just been too much work to keep making progress on AudioMack in addition to having a full-time job.

Never really plugged it on HN because it didn't seem like quite the right crowd and I feel awkward about shameless self-promotion. :)

tywon Poll: is your startup profitable?

yep! just quit my job and went full-time on the startup this week, too!

tywon How I served 100k users without breaking the server or a dollar bill

honestly, just make up some fake info to see why everyone enjoyed the site.