skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't speak to anything but my own experience. Having helped on a few ecommerce sites for very small merchants, the amount of fraudulent purchases that came through was staggering. One of those companies has been open for about six months now and is only breaking even in large part due to the expense of dealing with chargebacks. What they have observed is that a significant number of cards were tested through what appears to have been a rented botnet. Those went away with the addition of a captcha. The remaining fraud that looks like card testing (only purchases of low value items, with IP's far away from the billing address and similar peculiarities) are often done from Tor exit nodes.

Small merchants have very little support in this area. Local authorities often don't care or have the man power to deal with these types of issues. The banks and visa/mastercard also don't care since they just force the merchant to eat the costs and still collect all their fees. It would be very difficult to tie these transactions back to any one person in most cases as the tester is going to be using a valid card, valid billing/shipping address. Once they know the card works they can just have a mule go get a cash advance from an ATM or start having big ticket items shipped to various places for pickup. Or they just resell the card info as verified which increases the value significantly.
Links: Purchase Location and Isotope Ratios of Bottled Drinks in the US
Somebody did. And it appears they are now going out of business:

http://mythic.tv/
Not a good comparison, I have to point out. You appear to have had one VPS on each service and run the test once on each. No idea how old either was, how crowded the host you wound up on was, or any of that. So interesting, but not scientific.

For all I can tell, the Slicehost VPS may have been very old, and the Linode VPS may have been brand new on a fresh machine (so no one else was using it and eating into the disk access times).

The forums for both companies have customers talking about hdparm results and such, so it's worth looking there for a broader sample. In general, people testing an existing VPS against a new one (for either service) tend to see better results on the new one. It's just a fact of life if you get a VPS - the old hardware stays in service because customers still run on it, and those customers don't want unnecessary downtime. For best results, make a new slice on each, talk to the techs at each to make sure you're in their latest and greatest datacenter, and then see how things stack up.

It's also worth pointing out another caveat with a VPS - shared disk access. So for scientific results you'd also need a way to control for the number of users on the box, and their usage patterns. If some jerk on your machine consistently thrashes the disk with swap access, it's going to be a pain on any service until their admins see it happening and reboot that VPS.
Argh! As a security network engineer I was really hoping the future of self service banking would have more emphasis on security.
"The plan was [...] to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the belts."

Well... what did they learn then?
I find it very insatisfactory when articles only state an hypothesis or the how of an experiment. Surely people are interested in the results too?
"Any OS paravirtualized to work under Xen should work. We will install Linux (Debian 5.0.3, ubuntu 10.04, or CentOS 5.5) and we provide instructions so you can install your own NetBSD."

http://prgmr.com/xen/
Ask HN: Feedback on my small app
"Seven satellites were destroyed as radiation knocked out their solar arrays or electronics, including the first commercial relay communication satellite ever, Telstar."

Such an explosion today would probably cripple global communications for a month. The device used in this test had a 1.4 Megaton yield, and present speculation paints Israel as the sole, non-NNPT signatory that may possess megaton devices, which is not to imply Israel has any obvious motivation for doing something like this in the near future.

However, as the number non-NNPT signatories grow in number and in yield stockpiled, so does the risk of someone (again) triggering such an explosion intentionally.
Insight, "YouTube & Viacom: Time wasted, Not forgotten"
I don’t think things are going to stop here by any means. Content is a huge business and customer acquisition can be done fairly easily if you’re sticking to a specific niche.

This is interesting to me because my family's business, Seliger + Associates Grant Writing (http://blog.seliger.com), runs an e-mail grant newsletter that's been far more useful to us than anything else we've done in terms of advertising and in terms of getting people's attention. In addition, we regularly look for e-mail newsletter where we can advertise but have trouble finding them—a lot of people want to sell us banner ads on their websites, which have proven useless, but relatively few have newsletters.

I'm not sure why this is; I would guess part of it is because people have to actively sign up for a newsletter, rather than merely finding the website through Google or whatever. Maybe the ads are better integrated.
Well, if you are willing to work with a time scale a couple magnitudes slower then we currently do, then it is rather practical, sure it takes a few million years to transmit, but if I think at that speed too then it is not a problem. Heck I'd use a group giant balls of flaming gas as a transmission medium, then encode data as the pulses of their supernovae. Anything with eyes could receive the data, luckily I would also use RSA encryption and it would sound like noise to everybody else ;p
For the brave, I can also recommend "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...).

I write `brave', because it implements Scheme using Haskell. And if you aren't familiar with either, the learning curve will be steep.
If it's outside the realm of science, it's no longer a question. The believer already has an answer. In fact, any answer that makes the believer happy will do, for it cannot be neither proved nor disproved.

Science folks my return to the question in the future, when there is a hypothesis to test. Right now, it can't. Trying to answer a question by throwing reason out the window cannot be called trying very hard...
or click the "ask" link at the top of this page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
Yes. I do this, although I also use a dedicated HTPC by my TV. A little expensive but gets used all the time and I can stream Netflix, Hulu, watch a movie in almost any format including Blu-Ray.

I've looked into alternatives, (PS3, dedicated media players, etc, etc) but nothing else has everything I wanted.
Google Music Appears in China
It seems to be phrased both ways, like "I want something that does these things, and I think there is a market for it". We were mostly addressing the first part.

I agree that a consumer-oriented gadget to do the same thing easily could be neat. I don't know that there'd be that big of a market though. I suspect most of the general population wouldn't see the need, and the very geeky would tend towards existing free methods of doing the same thing (MythTV and the like).
Along similar lines, a company I used to work for had a command-line tool called "metalink". If you mistyped it as "meatlink", your screen would fill with an ASCII-art rendering of the Japanese kanji meaning "meat", along with the legend "meatlink - the tastier alternative to metalink". (It would then go on to invoke metalink.)
If the Orion project had not been killed for political reasons, by now the vast majority of all exploded nuclear devices would likely have been used for transportation.
I was feeling left out....

"The program 'sl' is currently not installed.

You can install it by typing:

sudo apt-get install sl"

What's the point if I have to know about it and explicitly install it? Kind of ruins the surprise, but I guess I can set it up for unsuspecting others...
I'm confused. Scenario (c) sounds inherently dependent on humanity losing its moral compass. So it sounds like your assessment of the risk of such an event occurring is much higher than two to one.
Hey Locke, the music we play is gathered from indie music blogs - we figure that if there are already direct links to the mp3 file then it is ok to stream as well. We could be totally wrong though.
You can be all of the three.

I don't believe there is a god, so I am Atheist. I also don't think the answer to "is there a god?" can be answered definitiely. That makes me Agnostic. I also think that since the answer cannot be determined, the question is a silly one. That makes me an Apathist too.
A pageview consists of many hits.
Or just "answered".

OTOH, I can always answer that 2+2 is 5. And no amount of faith will make me right.
A lot of the time, NPR (let alone other media) seem to miss the crucial points of a story, as if they didn't notice.
Innovative? This is just another name for vaporware, launch a small ad campaign, see how it goes, discard failures brutally. It is also incredible offputting to customers (who actually aren't complete idiots and can remember a brand). I'm sure anyone who has googled around for a solution to something knows the feeling "We have a product that matches what you want to do completely! Click here! Oh btw, by 'have' we mean 'don't have but will. Perhaps". Yeah, next time you offer something real, there's a good possibility may say "Suuure you do".
I'd like to see it in my rear-view mirror!
The author also wrote in the context of a problem and under his "solutions out there" he did not list the self-configuring solution as a possibility. Presumably, the author may not be aware of this solution and we are just throwing it out there as a suggestion. As gdl noted, there are advantages to this solution over a plug-it-in-works solution. It's pretty straightforward to configure and set up too (google instructions, download, and tweak some settings); provided you have the hardware lying around.
"Am I?"

Yes.

"What happens immediately after they graduate?"

It depends greatly on where they're from, and what they've been studying. A lot of my Chinese colleagues have gone back to China...because there are jobs there, and not here.
And the replacement of our manufacturing base by Japan and then China is not an issue?
Have you checked out Dashcode that comes with Apple's SDK? It does some webkit-only hooks in the HTML/CSS/JS it generates, but as a real-life example of what you suggest it comes pretty close.
While I agree with bimble's comment about the test not being very scientific, I'm not sure that it's "utter nonsense". It's a person's first impression from using both Linode and Slicehost.

Eivind Uggedal has already beaten scientific comparison to death: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966555
> Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.

Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.
Concise and practical example of MVC and REST architecture
Investing in pre-IPO nanotech firms gets harder
I'd like to pick apart this post as a piece of really brilliant marketing. It gets so many things right:

* Link to a review

* Reviewer puts book in context of things I've already read. Gains trust.

* Incentive to evangelize -- the product is like this awesome book I've read, but easier to read. Everyone should read that awesome book, but it's too hard. Maybe I can convince them to read this.

* HN is the absolute perfect, laser-focused market for this. By definition, I want to read this book.

* The pricing sheet looks like a 37signals page--it's comforting and familiar

* DRM-free instant delivery.

This is actually the fastest (other than maybe at a grocery store) I have ever made a purchasing decision. It was under 60 seconds.

Damn, I wish I had marketing skills like this.
I don't think Twitter is the best solution for streaming movies...
Sidenote: excellent background music. Goes well with the mood of the game.
That works out to an average of less than 5000 per day. Not bad but also not that great. The good news is that there is an increase in the number of pageviews per day, so he seems to be on the right track but it's a long way to go before you could really call it a success from a traffic point of view.

Pageviews as a goal is not too great a metric anyway, better things (that result to some extent from pageviews) are turnover and conversion rates.

Just a few pageviews per day with a very high conversion rate (to paying customers) is a lot more effective than to simply trying to maximize pageviews alone.

I don't really understand the business model behind drawar, other than that it is a web design and developer community, there does not seem to be any attempt at monetizing that traffic (as far as I can see, maybe I'm wrong), which makes it even harder to appreciate the increase in pageviews, after all that makes it a hobby project (more pageviews -> more costs!) instead of a business. But he's on the the right track and if he adds a businessmodel and quadruples the number of pageviews he'll be able to pay for the hosting and have some money left over.
Not only that, but it's also out-of-date; Linode now has one-click backups, in contrast to what this blog post claims (though it was correct when written back in Dec 2009).
Ask HN: Any help or suggestion for a template Pitch email to bloggers?
Hi Hackers,

I'm trying to pitch my service to some bloggers and couldn't get one to cover it till now, so I assume ,maybe it's the way I write my pitch, I've tried Peldi email pith and other templates, but no success till now, any help on a template pitch for a service like http://www.gmbhnews.com ?

(disclosure: Not native english speaker)
Yes, so what do we need this, I repeat, utter nonsense for?

hdparm is not a benchmark. Not even close. He could just as well have posted "the linode green looks faster than the slicehost blue".
I strongly advise everybody to stay away from Iomega. I bought a 1TB NAS a few years ago when 1 TB was a lot. The web UI, to make shares, was so stupid that it would create a tree, in memory, of all directories and files on the NAS every time you tried to make a new share (this tree was passed as javascript to the web UI). Needless to say, after a few hundred gig the amount of files was so big that it took longer to make the list than the timeout was set, effectively rendering making shares impossible. There were dozens of complaints on the support forum (that's right, support through a forum!) and after a year and a half of no updated I gave up hope. Shoddy material, and that's being generous.
I think GP meant that social networking would announce new media available on their servers, not that he'd stream over Twitter.
This sounds a lot like Opera Unite, which was sadly totally ignored 5 seconds after it came out.

http://unite.opera.com/

(As a totally tangential rant, I've been using Opera recently for no particular reason, and it's been frustrating me how left-behind it's been, even by the tech crowd. The latest version is both faster and more responsive than Chrome, which had been my browser of choice.)
Sure. Used SciPy / NumPy before?

* Sign up to the London financial Python user group

* Mention you're looking for work and eager to learn

I'd focus on getting a job per se right now. But it's a great career path financially. I know some of the guys at AHL (a hedge fund that uses Python for Algo trading) and can introduce if needed. Are you on LinkedIn?
There was a great comment on here a while back saying how we justify our flaws by a perceived lack of "natural talent," when we haven't invested enough time to see our skills improve.

Be careful to avoid this trap.
I've never been too crazy about a device that both (a) stores my media and (b) plays it. Since Hollywood and the scene cannot agree upon formats for any length of time, freezing the state of the industry into a closed box leaves me in fear of not being able to play something in the future.

Specialize. I want a device that stores my media (I already have this), and I can then replace the "display media on television" part with whatever I like. When a device tries to wear too many hats, quality of each hat tends to suffer, in my experience.
How to Make Social and Demographic Ad Targeting Work
The use of GWAS data to infer global ancestry is quite entertaining, and I'm glad that the author shared so much about 23andme's results with us.

Still, I have the urge to mention this everytime I see 23andme, so apologies in advance. Your genetic profile is currently less useful than a proper history and physical exam (but mostly just history) in predicting risk for the vast majority of diseases.

This may change, but the extent to which the GWAS data from 23andme will be useful for imputation of the (as yet undiscovered) causal variants that we'll be discovering in the near future is currently unclear.

So in the meantime, enjoy every aspect of their services, but I would encourage you to put little emphasis on their disease predictions. The fact that you don't have one of the known breast cancer mutations doesn't mean that you don't have a novel one. The fact that you are predicted to have high risk of heart disease doesn't mean that you don't have a novel cardioprotective allele elsewhere. At some point in the near future, genetic data will be really useful for risk prediction. We're not quite there yet with the GWAS data that 23andme uses (EDIT or any GWAS data - this is no knock on 23andme).
Like my new startup on Facebook
Could anyone point to/share a discount code? Thanks!
One vertical to begin with isn't a bad strategy. I think the one they've chosen is a good vertical to start with — the genre has a strong online community looking for new things. If it works with indie music, Mixest can broaden out.

Of course this might not be what they're intending to do at all.
You can trust crowds if the crowds are made up of highly educated and enlightened people who are familiar with the topic that you are discussing, which most people are not.
A business model besides the ads and the subscription service already in place?
It's run by Wasabi Ventures' - perhaps an effort to do something neat to attract attention to their program and companies?

I've never heard of them, but it looks like they're a mix between VC and startup consulting firm - taking very active roles. Many of their portfolio "companies" even say Wasabi Ventures in the copyright - interesting.
Netflix Achievements (A Design Suggestion)
Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained
After reading the article, I got the opposite impression: if the big players are no longer going after pre-IPO nanotech firms, it should be easier for others to invest in them. Of course, this makes things harder for the pre-IPO nanotech firms, but that's not how the title is written.
I don't see any really compelling reason to have all that functionality shoved into one device. I like the idea of separating playback/record from storage.

I like the idea even better when the storage is in the cloud (with a possible local cache, would be nice).
Great post with some really great points in the comments as well. There are a TON of upstarts in this space and some already target the areas you've mentioned. Of particular note is Startup Digest (www.thestartupdigest.com), which already has thousands of subscribers and an established presence in tons of cities. At the moment, they send out a weekly newsletter with startup events in each city. Definitely worth subscribing to if you're an entrepreneur.
Now that's an intriguing weapon! Sounds more plausible than the parabolic mirror, too.
So where are the libraries for making games with canvas? There's Akibahara, but it's pretty opinionated (not that there's anything wrong with that) - I'd love to see more diversity of approaches.
From the comments, the current location of the Postmodernism Generator is: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Your net worth is not strictly your cash in hand

Excellent point, though I'd heard part of the recent Accredited Investor 'compromise' (in lieu of inflation-adjusting net-worth limits up to $2-million-plus) was to change the definition to consider only 'liquid' net worth. That could cause troubles for this net worth accounting method.
.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
Ctrl-\ will kill it (in case you didn't know about that one).
It's too late to worry that the aliens will find us
catch 22 :(
I just upgraded my Dropbox account to 50Gb, and for me, it covers a lot of needs.

I keep all my important files in there (my mp3 collection, projects, documents, etc.). I have Dropbox set up on 3 machines (main machine, family computer and my laptop), so I get automatic syncing of all these files, plus backups of all the files on 3 computers, plus access to all these files in the cloud.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a revolution in how I work. Dropbox is now my guardian angel, silently backing up everything I do.

The only problem with this arrangement is that 50gb is too small for all my files (videos, mostly), and even their 100gb offering is too small for that. I expect this to change in the near future.
Are you saying we're in a seed/angel bubble now? Is that (really) bad?
I hope he finds workarounds for some of PHP's more serious defects, like "pass by value or maybe reference" semantics, no user-defined types as indices (even most primitive types get silently mangled), and == being just blatantly wrong. Part of what makes a language pleasant to use is that it doesn't keep surprising you--stuff you'd expect to work, does.
1 million pageviews is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but just getting there for the first time is a still a big deal. Congrats, and I hope this founder finds that the first million pageviews is the hardest million.
How great is Linode in terms of uptime?

I have been really happy with the rock solid service provided by Slicehost for me over the last year and a half.

I also have an account with Prgmr that has been beyond excellent over the last year for some of my more personal stuff.

Edit :

I just ran the tests on my commercial VM's.

2GB Slicehost --

Timing cached reads: 5370 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2692.83 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 242 MB in 3.04 seconds = 79.51 MB/sec

512MB Slicehost --

Timing cached reads: 2118 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1059.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 204 MB in 3.09 seconds = 66.02 MB/sec

2GB Prgmr --

Timing cached reads: 5424 MB in 1.99 seconds = 2720.95 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 196 MB in 3.16 seconds = 62.05 MB/sec
I like it. Simple and useful for both technical and non-technical people.
There are a variety of accepted definitions of upgrade, and most of them agree with my usage. Only one agrees with your 'correct' usage.

Ubuntu is a software platform that provides improved performance in a variety of ways, including 90% software compatibility, since most of the important software is web, Flash, or Java based. (Of course, I'm talking about home use.)

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/upgrade

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/upgrade
ditto; a mistake I make far more often is hitting <enter> before s.