skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I ran the tech at Amazon, I'd want to reuse as much otherwise internal tooling and software architecture and best practices between EC2 and core Amazon.com as possible. But, have physically separate machines and network zones. Maybe share some of same data center, of course, but that's as far as I'd take it, and even that sounds a little risky.
Since I want this evangelize this to others, making a full repo lets me put in a nice read me, make it clear the license is in the public domain, and also provide unit tests.
Airlines do not sell seats. They sell "inventory" which is not particularly correlated to seat availability.

The most likely scenario is that someone will miss the flight before this guys' and that person will now be able to get on this flight as a standby passenger. The OP is just screwing himself out of $49 because he doesn't know how airlines manage inventory.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851864

I wrote "This "article" is misleading. The video which this link-bait inaccurately describes states "they visited Steve Jobs just to meet him because he was a hero of theirs and they said to John Doerr after the meeting 'Why can't he be our CEO?'" (The section of the video pertaining to the CEO hiring starts around the 24 minute mark.)
The video makes it seem as if that question was basically a joke and also that it wasn't ever directly posed to Steve Jobs. I resent being lied to by the puff piece, but it is interesting to think about how such an outcome would have changed things (bmelton's thoughts being an example)." when a slightly LESS misleading version of this submission was posted some months back.

I'm disappointed to see this has received 20 upvotes at HN. It has no citations, and it is obviously full of bunk.
Ask HN: What's your smartphone data consumption?
Just wondering how much data a typical HN reader goes through in a month. Here in Canada data prices are outrageous and I was wondering if it would be possible to get by with 500MB if I avoid videos, app downloads, etc. My web usage is fairly heavy, but very low on video/other high bandwidth stuff. I get at most a dozen emails a day and send very few.
99 percent of single cell organisms can't be cultured in a lab, and they're starting to get some DNA sequences from this 99%.

So a researcher says "They really are the dark matter of the biological universe."

I thought the article was going to say that dark matter was related to some unknown form of life.
I don’t mind the downvotes -- I have to share this tangentially relevant bit because it’s so great: United Breaks Guitars http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/ubg/. Another example of customer hostility ending up costing the company.

Fantastic blog post, by the way.
sorry, but there is no such thing as bad-timing, only bad-leadership. And digg becoming "out of control" was the result of bad leadership.

Frankly, if I had to evaluate Kevin as a leader, I would give a big thumbs down. There is no doubt he has enormous abilities as a visionary.

But, Visionary != Execution.
That's likely to shut down many, many Google services, though. So many aspects of the company are funded by search advertising. Maintaining an "investor" relationship in them would be a huge distraction.

I hope they continue down the "change the world" path by continuing to look at how their expertise in data analysis and AI can do more (like self-driving cars).

I'm really excited to see what he does.
Hey HN,

My friends and I made this the other day. It is 100% javascript using node.js and canvas.

When you call in, you connect to Twilio's server, which does a request to our server, which then sends a message down to the browser using socket.io, and then your tanks shoots.

That means your signal is going from your phone, to the cell tower, INTO SPACE, back down to california, and then travels over the internet to reach you at your computer.

The latency should be less than 1s, which is pretty impressive considering how far the signal travels.

I hope you guys enjoy, make sure to have a friend play with you.

Also, it uses an 888 number so it should be toll free :)

Cheers,

David, Paul, and Justin
Cryonics is like a startup - how / how not to start a cryonics company
I think it helps to think of starting a cryonics operation in the same terms as if you were starting any other high technology enterprise that requires substantial physical infrastructure and wide-ranging expertise in both hands-on and theoretical areas.
> I would guess that the people who make the greatest positive changes in the world weren't necessarily setting out to have a huge impact, they were just doing what they knew to be right.

This is exactly the same conclusion I have come to. I don't want to change the world. I even gave a Toastmasters speech on this topic - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkct9OcTKRI

Putting your focus on changing the world puts way too much pressure on me. Instead I just want to do the things I enjoy and hopefully they'll be of use to someone else.

Besides, who I am to tell what is good for the world? Does dictactor-like thinking really help people? In all cases I can think of, people in dictator roles who have had the ability to mould a place to their wishes and have had the power to "change the world" have just made things worse off.

Perhaps you could say that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs knew Microsoft and Apple would be world-changing companies, but there are probably countless entrepreneurs that think the same thing before their company fizzles and dies.

If you develop something and it goes on to be a huge success that provides use to hundreds of millions of people around the world then great. If it only impacts a few people then that is great too.

I don't think ambition to change the world plays any part in actually changing the world. It might just only lead to superiority complex.
Yep. And there's that whole asymptotic cost/complexity curve where as you chase more 9's of perfection, your cost and complexity rises out of proportion to the value you're getting. At the end of the day, no matter how much we might like Reddit, it's still just a website with social discussion forums and link sharing, full of non-essential chatter and pictures of kitties. (Again, I love Reddit, don't get me wrong, but it's far from a Mission Critical resource for any business or person's life.) So achieving perfect reliability & performance is probably not worth the cost/pain.
Become a techie. You don't have to be a programmer to be a techie, just stay up to date with tech news. YCombinator wants the companies in their incubators to employ a wide range of techies so I don't think you should be looking to YCombinator for funding.

Also just having a "good idea" isn't enough anymore. Venture Forums see hundreds if not thousands of business plans a year and spend about 30 seconds looking over 95% of them.

It is also difficult to find an god outsourced coder, not to say that they aren't out there, it is just really difficult to weed out the bad one's.

Do you have an executive summary? I would start by sending out the executive summary to local Venture Forums in your area and gauge their reactions. Angelsoft.net is a good place to submit your business proposal to. You can only submit to 3 companies at a time though so chose wisely.
Look all that stuff is useless we need him to invest in ITER such that we can have fusion reactors soon.
Cypress Semiconductor is a lot like that, with individual teams in competition with one another for funding and resources.

You seem to be making it more extreme with people losing their jobs on failure. One of the advantages of having a big company is that you get to attract good people that are more risk adverse and to assign good people to projects more easily. If you let go of that I'm not sure what's the difference between what you described and a VC fund.
The moon's got plenty of unused space just waiting for AdSense.
Colonizing != visiting. There're many possible economic benefits of colonizing the moon - new sources for rare minerals, reduced population pressure on earth, and a launch pad for future interplanetary missions are some of the major ones.
You bought a non-refundable ticket. Be happy they are even giving you $49.
Great post! Finding a great technical co-founder may not be easy, but waiting for the right fit is key. I consider myself lucky to have found the perfect partner in the early days.

On the subject of SEO, one key thing you can do is to start a blog. There's got to be lots of content you can generate around different spa treatments and the like. When it comes to ranking well, this is probably the biggest thing you can do to influence it. You can "optimize" all you want, but without fresh content updated regularly, you will never rank well.

Jonathan
AutoSlash.com
http://www.autoslash.com
Japan sends robots into Fukushima nuclear plant
I won't be showing up for my Sunday night flight, and this blog post is costing you up to $450 in revenues, while only costing me $49

no, it cost you $199.
Eight years in jail for ex-Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov
I find that when I am depressed I do something that makes me belly laugh. Whether it's watch a comedy show or just go out with my friends. You need to be reminded of how it feels to be happy, even if just for a second.

On this "happy thought"you should pick up on your work where you left off. The more productive you are the better you will start to feel.
Operations Research Tools developed at Google
How to Beat Traffic Ticket
At http://www.californiatrafficticketsguide.com you can find valuable information about traffic laws in California and how to defend against traffic tickets, and connect with professional and experienced traffic ticket defense attorneys.
> My father is a doctor, and his lifetime number of "customers" is probably a lot lower than a largeish web app serving some good purpose, but I wouldn't call it a wasted life.

I really like a quote from Einstein for situations like this:

"There are some things in life that can be counted that don't count. Other things that count can't be counted."

Not everything is about numbers.
I don't care if anyone has my email address, Facebook or Twitter. It's one of the reasons I use my full name to post on HN - I personally want to be found. The problem is that not everyone is of that mentality, and that while this might seem like a minor info leak, it can still be damaging.

I wouldn't want one of our producers, assistants, whatevers to schedule a meeting with an important client, only for it to reveal some AOL style username contain at least the numbers 69 and some reference to a body part. I also wouldn't want some of our more intense clients to have one of their personal email addresses and either email them there, or look up any of their Facebooks etc.

The bottom line is that it is an information leak that according to their privacy policy is guarded against.
The Demon Core
FDIC sues Washington Mutual Executives and their Family
And even if its posible I hope it doesnt happen. Along with startup mentality comes risky bets, possibility of fatal mistakes and lack of stability. Google has had an amazing decade and it should continue to innovate within the constraints of a public corporation. AAPL is doing it fine. Jobs never had to take it to its startup roots to resurrect it.
Although there may not be a fourth domain of life, I am pretty excited about what the metagenomic studies that use next-generation DNA sequencing will fish out from the depths so to speak. There have been some crazy papers published that use this approach. The title of one: "Windshield splatter analysis with the Galaxy metagenomic pipeline." I imagine there is lots of interesting stuff living in the oceans that is about to be revealed using the high-throughput approach.

It is also interesting to think about what this approach will miss: if somewhere on Earth, perhaps near thermal vents deep in the ocean, however unlikely that may be, there exists a non-DNA-based life-form (which would easily be the most interesting result ever), metagenomic studies will miss it because by design they can only analyze DNA sequences. Similarly, if a probe gets sent to Europa, for example, DNA sequencing would be useless.
As many as British-speaking ones? I'd be shocked if 1/8th of their reporters could speak Japanese.
> "There is still debate [over] how to clearly distinguish the
> three proposed domains of life, and how they are interrelated,"
> Gupta says. "The suggestion [of] a fourth domain will only add
> to the confusion."

Yes. We should keep this 'dangerous' information from them. It will only confuse and enrage them.
> G = E x M x D x F x V x B x P

It's the Drake equation for spam! $7000/day is not too shabby, either...
This is something I've never quite understood. Best practice guides say you need to do a "flush all tables" in MySQL and then do a filesystem freeze (possible in XFS) before you can use a snapshot system like the ones built into EBS or LVM. If you don't, you apparently stand a good chance of getting an inconsistent snapshot, even if the snapshotting mechanism itself is (like EBS and LVM) "point in time" consistent.

Why is all this necessary? If the system (i.e. DB + FS + block device) are all working as they should, then once a commit returns, the data should be on disk. If it's not, you have no guarantee data that you thought was committed will still be there after a kernel panic or power outage.

In that case, no amount of xfs-freeze or table flushing during a snapshot is going to save you from the fact that your DB is one kernel panic away from losing what the rest of your system believed were committed transactions.
nice. except now i need to take more consulting work to actually afford to go to one of these places.
If you type it on what?
> Lean waterfall process

I'm adding that to my collection of oxymorons. "lean waterfall" process. awesome!
I don't think its going to happen and I don't even think he means itwhen he says that he wants to take Google to be a startup again. I think it's a publicity stunt to attract talent. Just like their "Do no evil" tagline.
Let's be fair. Knowing CNN, the analysis will probably be more than 8 times as deep as their analysis of Japan. Don't underestimate CNN when it comes to overanalyzing the most trivial of issues.
Crowdsourcing the Preservation of U.S. War Papers
Is this in Chennai? Whereabout in Chennai?
"One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google’s pulse is his insistence on signing off on every new hire—so far he’s vetted well over 30,000"

Wow that works out to be 9 everyday for the past 10 years, really?!?
"To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue. With their driverless car project, I think they’ve got a shot of taking a much bigger slice of the pie than that."
I'd say it takes more to "do it properly", but I'd recommend reading this nonetheless: http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...
Google probably can't become a startup again, but it can probably start some kind of internal startup-like culture to spur internal innovation. If it "funds" groups of employees to essentially build an autonomously run startup (and rewards successes with $$$) it can probably save tons of money over the current acquisition strategy it has (many of which aren't really turning out to be great performers for Google).

With YC level success rates, it could be a great strategy for them.
AB Testing: Why You Shouldn't Focus on Conversion Rate
This is a gimmick. Google did lots of evil things hiding behind its motto of do no evil. Similarly this is only a mechanism to attract smart kids out of the college with an allure of high paying "startup". Google can't be a startup again. It's a public company. Too many people's too much money is betting against it.
No. The initial cost is a sunk cost that he has paid regardless of whether or not he takes the flight. He's already certain that he's not taking the flight, so he has only the options:
[ ] Get Refund
[x] Attempt to make a point

The first pays out $49; the second $0.
The opportunity cost of the second in relation to the first is $49, not $199.

The questionable part of that is the $450 he claims to be costing the airline.
What's more likely is that either the seat will be empty if the flight was not full, or if it was full, one more person will make it to their destination on time.
5 Common A/B Multivariate Testing Mistakes
I really like your ideas here! But the thing you do where you take what someone else said, and then turn it into something absurd, and then call them out for being absurd... it doesn't really move the dialog forward.

jv22222 said "Alex [is] one the lucky few to be on the 0.0001% side of the equation and raised $2.9 million first round funding"

You translate that to "only %0.0001 of people who enter into startups walk out with their lives improved"

Really, what does that accomplish?
I wonder how the case of Kevin Rose and Digg gels with all of this.
Do you require the whole team come in for the interview? Flights are expensive, $6500 just for an interview?
> They also have a great program for business users which gets you expedited service.

Yes, be sure to setup a business account, they'll expedite, etc. Plus a meager 3-7% discount over time.
From the linked page:

> However, even though booking ploys might be a breach of contract and against airline rules, the illegality of such endeavours has been disputed by legal experts

"airline rules" and illegality are quite different.
What the New York Times Pay Wall Really Costs
Come on young rubyist. embrace the dark side. You will like it. /jk

I adopted Python because I was told Ruby is the dark side. oO
Running the whole company as a startup isn't going to work. But what might work is to build several skunkworks projects within the company with their own CEO's. And if the projects are successful to run the companies as subsidiaries and offer equity (options for the subsidiary, not Google stock) to the people directly involved in the project's success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
Exactly, if you buy "a non-refundable ticket" you can't complain even if they don't refund any of it.
You can probably learn enough by being lean that parallel universes isn't necessary.
Wow, Google Has Ported My Ten Thousand Button Nightmare To The iPhone
Probably not, but they still have some leverage... from wikipedia: "airlines may respond by confiscating tickets, cancelling frequent flier status and billing travel agents for the fare difference."
IPhone apps and cappuccinos. How much is a hacker's time worth?
This should be made into a movie
Would he have been cultural fit? Google seems to be an extremely analytical, numbers driven company. Doesn't Steve jobs reject this approach?
Great work guys. I love playing this game. But I am a little biased...
He can do what he wants to do for free.

See "same day standby" and "confirmed standby":
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus/955496-un...
Great stuff!

Didn't see anything like "invite your friends to this room" buttons... if they were there they should be clearer.
A pressurized dome? Public offers ideas for fixing Japan nuclear disaster
More Mike Darwin awesomeness.
StatusNet, an Open and Distributed Microblogging Platform
I said this on their thread, but I'll share it here too.

United treat's you like crap if you aren't a frequent flier.

United treat's you pretty reasonably if you are.

If you assume that the vast-majority of non-frequent fliers book solely on price, then you should skimp as much on customer service as possible, and throw no amenities (e.g. food, checked baggage) in at the base ticket price.

All of the sudden what the big airlines are doing seems rational.
"Being a startup means lots of things."

So giant corporations that were founded in the 1970s are startups too? I guess "startup" is just a state of mind then. Maybe we're all in startups and we don't even know it!
I'm still tethering and haven't received an email. There is always going to be a way to out smart you AT&T!
Think there is a phrase for this -- "cutting off my nose to spite my face".

Sure, airlines are evil, but they're not this dumb about optimization of Revenue per Available Seat Mile. I'd guess this seat got filled just fine.
(I don't think this is the exact problem you have, but a related 'exposing other email addresses' issue with gmail)

There is a long-standing gmail bug that Google refuses to act on:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2cb03...

Basically, you've always been able to import and send via other email addresses from your gmail account. Either another gmail account or yourcustomemail@example.com

A while ago they added settings to send through your own SMTP servers when using an @example.com custom email through gmail. This removes all traces of your gmail account from the email header.

But for some reason they inexplicably don't allow this option for imported gmail accounts! So even though they control all the gmail mail servers, you're still forced to send "on behalf of" your main gmail account.

This is a really annoying exposure of your main email address. No longer can you have a main/professional personal account, and then an anonymous linked email to use otherwise. Every time you use the anonymous account it lists your main account as well in the mail header.

To make matters worse, Outlook often replies to and highlights the "on behalf of" account rather than the account you sent with. Major annoyance when dealing with companies using Outlook. The root issue is gmail's fault though.
HeyAstro Fetches An Email Of Daily Updates To Start Your Day
'Ring' by Stephen Baxter explores the idea of a dark matter form of life. It's a good hard scifi read if you're into that.
I believe this is an issue with jQuery UI, not this theme in particular. I remember that to get QuickFuse working on the iPad, we made a shim that wrapped the jQuery UI draggable so that it responded to touchstart, touchmove etc. events. jQuery Mobile is more suitable for these widgets if you are making a mobile-optimized app, though.
The opportunity cost faced by the blogger is entirely irrelevant to United though. They've gained a real $199 in revenue from him which is all their records will show; he's sacrificing a potential $49 rebate to convince himself he's depriving them of a hypothetical $450 from a most-likely-nonexistant last minute customer.
What about adding the traveler's insurance for an extra $50-$100 and getting 80% of your trip refunded?
Apple, HP and Microsoft were all startups at one time.
Thanks for this. It's really interesting to find the source of ideas
NPR doesn’t need footage, their programming is more than half something-other-than-news, they repeat programs a few times, and most importantly they’re funded by subscription and grants, rather than by advertising dollars driven by ratings.

They do substantially better work than CNN, but they’re not really analogous.
Show HN: html5 Motivation Calendar, my weekend project
www.powermotivate.me

This is an MVProject I'd like share with you all. It's a very simple Seinfeld calendar, inspired by a certain comment on HN[1]. It's built using Raphael.js and Backbone.js. The website is 100% static (it's hosted on Amazon S3), and the X marks are saved in your browser's local storage.

The source is on github[2], along with a TODO list if you so feel inclined to improve it :)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2331650

[2] http://github.com/mindeavor/powermotivate.me