skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been there. Done that twice. Highly recommended. I've never regretted "firing a client". In fact, my only regret the first time around was not having done it 6 months earlier.

Everyone has their moods and passions. Any non-trivial project will almost inevitabley take a few unplanned paths and hit a few bumps in the road. Mr. Murphy never takes a day off.

Alas, when performance demands keep reliably falling well outside the boundaries of the available (budget,staff,time) work-potential triangle, it's time to move on.

Life is too short. It's simply not worth the wear-and-tear on one's health, staff, family, and the company's bottom line, to deal with consistently unreasonable people on a continuing basis.
Sugar is actually rather bad for people also. Corn syrup is just even worse, apparently.
Wouldn't it be cheaper (stickers aren't free) and more effective to remove the poster? Nasa made a 1 million dollar pen to write in space, the Russians...
He sounds pretty crazy... par for the course for chess champions of course.

There's a lot to read between the lines with what he says about Kasparov... and he already thinks he's better.
Probably busy counting profits.
That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the history books.
The CIA’s Failed Al Qaeda Recruitment
VCs on the Healthcare Bill
There isn't any information about the people behind appbackr on your site. I would never enter into a financial agreement with a completely unknown entity.

I think you need to personalize the site - let us know who exactly we're dealing with.

Other than that - it's an interesting concept. I think the description of how it works could be made clearer, but it's an interesting idea.
I realize they are unrelated, but it takes only one fanned spark to ignite nationalism. It's one thing for China to down a spy plane, but what Google is doing is taking the high ground. It just feels different, like the environment is being prepped for more severe action.

[edit]
And I don't even mean a coordinated salvo, but rather the type of event that historians will one day look back on, as a turning point.
That's what's great about having your own projects. You can either be manic about it or do nothing for weeks at a time.
http://www.invested.in - clickable link
Actually, it is not legal in terms of China law. The law requires any website, in mainland China or not, need to implement a process called beian (a licensing procedure and that is the reason why you can see ICP XXXXXX on any Chinese target website). It is a strong legal justification that gives local police the authority to block any foreign website at will. For a commercial website, the beian process will cost about $1000 dollars (you have to hire agency which has close connection to the Chinese government to do this) and any foreign website in principal cannot implement this process (it requires or in tradition only limited to the company that significant share (more than 50%) was hold by Chinese capital entities or individuals). Google.cn, prior to the announcement held a ICP licence from its local partner. Kaifu Lee did a lot work in the back scene that made the whole ICP transaction procedure OK to China government.

For your curiosity, the local Chinese companies that were listed on NASDAQ all go with a mode in which the company that registered in China will hold the license and sign a contract with the offshore company that actually gets listed to guarantee the profit will go to the offshore company in order to mitigate the restrictions.
> As far as I can tell, getting good 'de-duplication' technology is more expensive right now than just buying disks.

Working at the abstraction layer of disks is misleading because there are so many other pieces that go into making a service like S3.

Instead I'm proposing an arbitrage that works one layer up -- on top of S3.

> Also, how much would de-duplication help? I mean, how much stuff is stored on s3 that is uncompressed? (or the same compressed file?)

It's a good question. The answer is unclear. Certainly if you're willing to get exotic with redundancy elimination (as opposed to dedup, which is a subset) and large-data-set compression algorithms there just are going to be economies of scale. What's not clear is (a) how large those economies become, or (b) how exotic your algorithms have to be to capture those economies.

> ..I could turn a profit renting uncompressed drive space at $0.05/gigabyte/month..

I wouldn't want to compete with Amazon S3. Data safety and uptime would keep me up at night like a mofo. I just wouldn't want to run that company, though I can imagine folks like MS doing it.

> Costs in the outsourced infrastructure market, as far as I can tell, have always been dominated by marketing.

This is a really interesting question. The landscape is obviously changing with the current batch of cloud infrastructure services.

I do think there are pieces of cloud storage that will not be commoditized, most notably the peace of mind around data safety and uptime. I wouldn't want to use a small cloud storage provider. Thus: (a) they will be able to charge a premium for a long time, and (b) there will be a smallish number of providers, meaning marketing will be less important in the future than having a good product.

(I'm not sure how much the API's and other development tools will be commoditizable. MSFT historically does a great job of embrace & extend when it comes to those parts, though their recent cloud services are too wedded to Windows and .NET.)

(EDIT: added responses to more of your original post.)
Yep, that's why I'm not world-class at any one thing ... I'm just too intelligent.
Learning Clojure by writing a (very) minimal Lisp interpreter
Data de-duplication is clearly the win, only paying larger dividends as your data under management grows. Why does the OP think that amazon, google, microsoft, apple, et al. are not already doing this at scale... which in turn allows them to provide the services that they do.
Funny that SO now has more traffic than EE, but doesn't seem to be making (any?) money while EE is still raking in millions.

I guess what's even more interesting is that Experts Exchange was in this exact position some years ago. Everything was free, open, easy to find. Then they sought out VC money and started talking how to turn a profit. Fast forward a while and you have what you see now: an extremely profitable site with questionable morals.

Makes you wonder what's going to happen to SO after they get the VC funding they're looking for.
I can definitely see that become a new form of awful on the internet.
I'd guess it's a psychological thing. If a person is willing to work for below market rates, they've decided how much their time is worth. In other words the employer may very well look at those employees as below market quality, rather than getting a great bargain on high quality employees.

There's an old story, I think it was Buzz Aldrin was giving some sort of talk. They changed the entry price from free to $5, and more people came after the price was increased. That may be a similar situation.
Absolutely. I was recently considering an ebook about good web copy and read the following in the preview: "it's purpose is". That was a deal-breaker for me.
Disclaimer: this is not an official answer from Google, and while I have worked there I do not at present.

There are data centers around the world, however Google only stores sensitive data in locations where it can guarantee security and privacy[1]. Quoting from an official blog post from 2006,

"Protection of user privacy -- We will not maintain on Chinese soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data. This means that we will not, for example, host Gmail or Blogger, our email and blogging tools, in China."

What this means is that your data could be stored in a number of countries, which will include a copy in the U.S. and not include a copy in China.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in...
HOW TO: Bulk Unfollow People on Twitter
I think the important point to consider here is where the incentives are. People generally follow the incentives, and even if they don't there's the perception that they do -- in a case of reviewing a site or a book this kills credibility.

In the consumer-review industry, for example, I think we all can say that we trust Consumer Reports, their incentive being to give the most accurate information because they rely on a revenue stream from the consumer. If they don't give accurate information, they won't be trusted and their customers will stop paying.

On the other hand there's Top Ten Reviews, who perform a similar service as Consumer Reports, but do reviews on software and other technology products. Their business model is to include affiliate links for each of their products - this gives them the incentive to find the highest-paying commissions and best-converting landing pages. They have little incentive to give the best information because of where their revenue comes from. I think that most savvy people don't trust them. It's true that there will always be a "sucker" who won't realize the conflict of interest and will buy a product - this fact allows Top Ten Reviews and sites like them to be profitable. But they will never gain the trust or stature of Consumer Reviews, because the savvy visitors won't rely on the information they have, and savvy honest people won't recommend the site to others.

I'm in class so I don't have time to edit this to make sure my arguments flow without any logical inconsistencies, but you get the idea.
1. Google App Engine is free to begin with, but you known the cons.
2. Rackspace Cloud Servers (21$ for 512 MB. Pay for BW separately)
3. Slicehost (Same as Rackspace Cloud Server, but 40$ for 512 MB. But you get 100 GB BW I think)

I am using 512Mb Slice, with Nginx and Jetty and MySQL on the same slice and its been working pretty well so far.
Texting is to 5 Years Ago as ______ is to Today
Google’s Transpacific Fiber Ready (7.68 Tbit/s)
Maybe he meant "resign with some sort of stock-option buyout"?
Or they could just, you know, raise fines to absurd heights so no one ever again will think about putting posters outside of designated areas.
Just nationalism.... the tea baggers are just as vitriolic...
A few months. But we only work on it on our free time.
I still have my childhood oscilloscope. Its only 25Mhz but its all analog and dual trace (Phillips PM3214). When I run into something particularly vexing, I still get it out even though I have a 100Mhz DSS now.

Call it a sentimental "security blanket" thing, but it seems like I can feel circuits on that little analog screen.

I've also definitely felt the pain of weird high frequency transients blowing motor controller components. They tend to be high voltage as well. Fortunately I haven't lost any expensive gear yet! Good luck TLB, your bots are awesome.
The post doesn't mention this enough, and maybe it's fairly obvious to most, but make sure you choose something that doesn't end up causing you legal harm of some sort.

I have a friend right now who's dealing with a company that found a name that was "easy to say" and "highly spellable" that ended up basically ripping off his product name. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that, but I thought it was worth mentioning since some people get so caught up on domains that they forget there's more to it than that.

I always think of 37signals when it comes to naming something, too: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Name_Hook.php
> If you want the lowest risk sure fire way to make money online though, it's certainly "Find a niche" -> "Create useful content" -> "Promote" -> "Monetize through advertising".

I keep hearing this Find A Niche thing, and I have been doing some research. It really sounds like a case of researching stuff and writing some useful articles on it. Place the articles on a SEO optimized website and wait for the adsense dollars to roll in.

If it is that easy, surely everyone would be doing it, or is it really that easy?

While I would like a passive revenue stream, the only problem I have with this strategy is that I don't really want to spend my time researching and writing articles. I would much rather find a niche market for an online software app (sort of like patio11's bingocardcreator) that is small enough to build fairly quickly and makes a difference to some market, but finding such a market if you don't already have inside knowledge is the hard part I am finding.
I think you raise interesting points; there is, however, historical precedence, I think, for encouraging immigration in certain fields; I understand that foreign doctors have been given immigration preference for some time.
Reality TV Wreckage
if you plot track record vs. productivity you'll end up with a (largely) normally distributed curve

Are you saying people with great track records are likely to be very unproductive? That seems unlikely ...
You are right, the US sugar producers are protected - they buy off both Dems and Republicans.

One family is the Fanjul family - who got some unwelcome attention when it was disclosed that Clinton was talking to Fanjul while spending uh, "time with" Monica Lewinsky.

Part of the reason that HFCS is so heavily used is that it is cheaper than sugar - since sugar is so heavily protected from the world market price.
I got downvoted for this? Seriously?
You're right that they are doing this at scale.

It's just that their business model -- charging per GB, instead of per GB of new data that nobody else is storing yet -- leaves them susceptible to arbitrage. I.e. customers can steal the economies of scale if they collaborate.

You know how Starbucks charges $5 for a small and $6 for a large? It's the same thing. If two people want smalls, but collaborate, they can just split a large and save $2 each. It's the same idea, except that arbitrage becomes more realistic when it's electronic.

(I've ignored compression in the whole discussion for simplicity. If AWS wants a business model that isn't arbitragable based on compression they would have to charge based on how compressable your data is. Also, next generation compression algorithms -- another blog post on that later perhaps -- could achieve compression rates that have the same economies of cross-customer scale that data deduplication does, so really it would have to be price based on how compressable your data is __given all of the other data S3 is storing__.)

(EDIT: made starbucks example simpler.)
You cant see anything without signing up...........
This is misleading.

Among the posh, well-educated elites who aspire for jobs at US MNCs this may be true.

The rest of the masses are very much one-sided in support of the CCP. At the very least, even if they are sympathetic to Google's cause, at the end of the day the masses will always believe that China (and the CCP by extension) > Google (or any other western MNC).

That is the reality for the vast majority of Chinese - both online or otherwise.

The China vs Google issue is not really about internet freedoms in the eyes of the polity as it is in the eyes of westerners. Rather, its about a western MNC trying to "bully" the Chinese into adopting their (western) values. This line of thinking; westerners bullying China has been pounded by the CCP for the past 60 years so its very easy to troll that line to great success.
I've done IP blocking for about 5 years on my site and will continue to do so. I put up a special page when the IP is blocked that has my phone number and I explain, "Hey - this sucks for both of us. Here's the problem and one of the possible reasons your IP might have been blocked. Those stupid spammers - it's all their fault. If you are a human, we apologize and here's our phone number." I get probably 2-3 calls a year.

Is this ideal? Of course not - bluesmoon's solutions are far more elegant. But how much time will it take me to code/manage those solutions over the next five years? Lots. How much more money will I have made as a result? Probably none. So I made the choice to be more aggressive but to be humble on my "You're blocked!" page and the customers that do call get it; they understand.
yeah that's the one.
heh, figures. for future reference (and I can repost a new link, if someone wants), know of a public one that's not blocked?
If Gruber was not a well known defender of whatever Apple wants to happen in the world I would say that his viewpoint was meaningful, but it's not, he simply want to advance the Apple wishes... if we will need to migrate to other formats after some time, because of patent enforcement, then why adopt a format as a standard? Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all? What about the legacy devices that will not support the new format?

See, he also does not have any practical concerns, he just lives in a world where Apple idealism is the norm.

That said, my demands from a codec is simple: it must be free to encode/decode using the codec, free to be included in the nightly builds/repository of WebKit and Gecko (H.264 is not) or every other project, free for a guy in a university dorm develop a new product using the codec without paying for any royalties, it must be patent free as it is the desirable for every other W3C standard, I think it will be better to not have a standard at all if we do not have these guarantees.

EDIT: lanaer and GHFigs comments were eye-openers for me, I recommend you people to read them.
Hmmm, the job of my friend who runs MIT's EECS undergraduate program is even more secure than I thought.

And what I know of that department's accreditation is that the only problems are with fine differences in educational philosophy, the biggest being the question of can you teach design per se, or only as past of other courses. MIT EECS believes the latter for their field, so they have to show the accreditation how the various required courses include enough design time/effort to qualify.

I also noticed a little while ago that of the big 4, Standford has by a substantial margin the lowest number of CS undergraduates. U.C. Berkeley as a state school of course has the most, and CMU has a program who's size is capped, but is as I recall more than twice as big as Stanford's.
Fructose in general (sugar and HFCS) is poison - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Did you do it in a weekend? ;)
Brosho 'Design in the Browser' jQuery Plugin
Most of the things you mentioned, you could see coming quickly enough that you can get on insurance if they can't deny you because of preexisting conditions. You'll be able to get insurance after your get cancer come 2014. The exceptions are the ones involving car wrecks, falls, etc, where you don't have time to fill out paperwork before racking up a huge bill. Even those can do no worse than bankrupt you, and immortal 25 year olds are usually also broke 25 year olds.

Not that it's a good thing to go bankrupt, but you're talking about a low single digit chance of an unfortunate but not disastrous event vs thousands of dollars a year. Contrast to the old system where you were liable to go bankrupt AND not get coverage at all with no insurance (for example, see the immigrants who can't get dialysis who were in the press in the last year).
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229

FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.
"web site publishers are clearly betting on H.264 remaining free to use for freely distributed web video"...

Yes, and MPEG LA might be perfectly content with a $5 million check from every browser maker every year.
So it turns out that the Allies committed genocide when they wiped out Nazism.

No. The Allies did not commit mass murder (genocide) of Nazis. The Allies put Nazi high command on trial and basically let everyone else off the hook.

Even if you think Nuremburg was a show trial, what happened was very far from genocide.
100Mbit is way more than enough, unless you are trying to break into the adult industry or similar.

The problem with doing it at home is usually the reliability of network and availability of network, ventilation, and the reliability of power. But if you have some 100Mbps FTTH then sure, buy a UPS and rack up a server at home. Make sure it's in an area that doesn't get much warmer than you would like for yourself (whatever you do, /do not stick it in the closet./ )

Really, the colder you can keep it the better, but you shouldn't have any real problems through 80-85 degrees (I'd like it cooler, but eh.) I've worked in home-made data centers like that where the temp. regularly hit 100 (F, not C) and things mostly worked.

Do the math on your power usage, though; many places have retarded pricing for residential power, meaning you could actually save money by bringing it to a data center.

Me, I'm stuck on a 3m down, 768M up connection or something like that. Wholly unsuitable for actual hosting.
Right on. Surprised to hear the criticisms in these comments since this seems like such basic advice: don't have debt, work in a context of trust, and the desire to have everyone do good work.

Not having debt is fundamental for real freedom. Not having debt is worth giving up some material crap for.

Trust people. Make adjustments on an individual basis if it is ever necessary.

We all want to do good work that has a positive effect on the world and make money to support people we love. Try to set up an environment so people can do their best work.
gotcha. thanks
My understanding of the research to date was that corn syrup was not worse than the equivalent sweetness or caloric value of sugar. (the reason for the fructose ratio is precisely to give the same perceived sweetness per calorie). This study either changes that, or is flawed. For now I'll just continue to stay away from soda pop.

Also, if the hypothesis in the article is correct (that anything other than a <1 ratio of sucrose/fructose may be the cause of the observed obesity affect), this affects all fruit juices and probably whole fruits as well. However, it looks like bananas are about 1:1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose ) and berries and citrus have less fructose than sucrose ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorption )
The Russians were at risk of pneumoconiosis due to breathing graphite dust and tiny little bits of eraser..
Firefox was not immediately available for comment.

... Hopefully the non-sentient Internet browser will have something to say for its self a bit later on.
I'm not sure when it comes out, but he earlier did an authors@google talk on the same subject, which has been embargoed so the TED version came out first. My comments are based on that earlier version of this talk.

Sam did a very good job of demonstrating that it would be really good if we could get morality from science. He did a good job of pointing out that science can validly inform our decision making. However he misses the fact that science is about problems that are tractable, not important. And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has.

In essence it is the same mistake the social sciences make. The case that something is important, and that data is a useful thing to have in studying it, does not suffice to make a compelling case that we are on the right line of research.

See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h... for a more detailed explanation of my opinions about what is and is not science.
The problem with basing your morals on religion (or science for that matter) is that biblical passages can often be taken out of context to validate any action, the same way scientific data can be looked at in many different perspectives (lying with statistics).

Morality is difficult to explain. I think most people just know what is right and what is wrong. A lot of people look to a higher power (religion or science) to justify the wrong actions they want to take.