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Gasp, this is turning into a joke!

I had Netflix for a few months, I used it to watch the entire Battlestar Galactica. After that, I went through and searched for 30 different movies to watch, and they weren't available, and I'm not talking about new movies. None of the Indiana Jones', Star Wars', Rockies, Bladerunner, etc. Now with the Starz debacle, and with content providers getting ready to pound them with price increases, Netflix is in real trouble.

Yes, streaming is the way to do it. I love streaming. But I don't think it will be through Netflix. This sounds like a company in its death throws.

I simply don't understand why they would split themselves up into 2 companies. The only reason why I can think of why they would cut themselves into 2 companies, is so that the content providers can't use the DVD business' cash flow to pay for the content. So content providers can't charge an arm and a leg because the cash flow of the streaming side would be much smaller.

However, the miscalculation here is that content providers can simply make their own content available themselves through streaming. Which is already happening in other continents, and even in the US through Google, Facebook etc. I think Netflix has severely miscalculated itself, and this may be the end.
Apart from short term fluctuations during the recession, more Americans own homes and health insurance coverage is roughly the same as it ever was.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USHOWN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Uninsured_and_Uninsur...
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What are the rules? Hand-pick all of your certificate authorities and regularly check up on them? The idea that you can have dozens of authorities any one of whom might be compromised and be secure is intrinsically broken.

SSL would work a lot better if it worked more like SSH, where you could check to see if you have the right fingerprint at the beginning. And of course you can use it like this, but your browser tells you horrible things will happen. Alternately, a true web of trust with something more like the notaries might be useful.

But when it comes right down to it, any scheme of communication that relies on a variety of third parties for security isn't going to work, because you never know when one or more trusted parties are the eavesdropper.

Sure, the crypto works fine, but in practice good crypto often just lulls people into a false sense of security. "The browser shows https" is really a pretty weak indicator that no MITM is happening. I especially say this in contrast to something like an SSH handshake, which is a pretty strong indicator that no MITM is happening, especially if you validate your keys.
There are probably worse gambles than leaving the disc business to redbox and the mom & pops.
Probably nothing; they've been removing that kind of functionality (e.g. add to DVD queue from the streaming UI) for a while.
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The top earners pay the majority because they're earning the vast vast majority of money and are increasing that majority share at a rapidly increasing rate. It's common sense that pretty much how ever you tax it, whoever controls 80% or more of the wealth will end up bearing the brunt of taxes as well.

Add the fact that most of the whales out there pay a much lower marginal rate than you or I makes it all the more impressive that they carry so much of the load. It's a stark sign of the disparity.
Fair. Do you feel that $20/year is reasonable or are your initially anchored feelings negative? We wouldn't be making any huge shift upward if we do move the price up.

We can probably move into custom graphs and real-world data as we bump up the grade level of the math generation.

What types of problems (if they're not the types you just mentioned) would be valuable?
Kind of glad to see video game rentals coming; too bad they're late to the party and will have to compete with Blockbuster, Gamefly, and Redbox.

All of these services have trouble. Blockbuster has a tarnished name (and I personally have never used the service), Gamefly has poor turnaround time and stock, and Redbox has awful stock and a high price.

Netflix/Quikster have been in a prime position to totally disrupt this for years. That they haven't pounced on it sooner has always been odd to me. It's like they consciously decided not to make money.
At the moment, the reliability problem with SSDs stems entirely from firmware bugs, rather than the underlying flash technology. All the issues you hear about with regards to drives causing blue screens or simply failing to be recognized by the system at all after a while are issues with the firmware on the controller chip - the actual flash chips themselves are pretty dumb and rarely fail catastrophically.

This will get better with time, as SSD firmware accumulates the kind of run time (in terms of number of hours x number of units in use) over years that HDD firmware has had.
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I honestly don't care how Apple runs it's business. I don't work for apple, I do, on the other hand, work for netflix, and not having to worry about DVDs will be a nice relief.
I was under the impression that connecting as root via ssh was a bad idea in general, ie. that it was better to connect as an unprivileged user and then su. What are your thoughts on that?
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what a terrible idea. the best part of Netflix is that it was integrated between DVD and streaming queues. dfm. how much does Amazon cost with Prime?
"this makes it crystal clear that Netflix is a premium streaming video company. I mean look at them, thats all they do now!"

Yeah, well...now they're providing a commodity service. Renting DVDs through the mail has/had a huge infrastructure advantage for the established player. Streaming video over the internet? There are dozens of sites that do it well. The technical advantage is far less sustainable, because it isn't nearly as difficult.

Once you're running a streaming-video business, the only differentiating advantage is content -- and you're in a weak position to negotiate for that content. Whereas before, the studios needed Netflix to distribute their content to consumers, the internet has turned the tables.
It wasn't that long ago that it was "illegal" for CEOs to blog.
me as well. i thought: this can't possibly be real its so user hostile.
Are you forgetting about the decision to create Apple's entire retail division, i.e. the Apple Stores? An idea which people thought was ridiculous at the time?

Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?

Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?

Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?

Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?

Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?

Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?

(Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)
It's just an idea we'll be having some fun with. The quote (and much of the page) is a spoof on theleanstartup.com. There's some real content to discuss on this topic that'll be tackled in the Lean Dating methodology, but it isn't meant to be something you take too seriously :)
I might agree with you if Netflix ran their DVD business in a few other countries. That is not the case however. The DVD business is still profitable. Reed said it's unlikely he'll sell it for a long time.
My initial reaction to seeing the $20 number was that it was more than reasonable. I thought it inexpensive.

Factoring polynomial problems. It's a pain to come up with them. Writing problems where the solution to a quadratic equation has to be integers are a pain. Especially if they are of the type:

(x - 3) (x + 2) = (some number to make it work out nice)

Generating fraction problems where the denominators don't get out of control is and having the problems with a good mix of denominators is good. I've seen some ridiculous computer generated fraction quizzes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_ac...

Scroll all the way to the bottom.
Strange. Of all the presented languages, PHP and Javascript always made me swear the most (the latter because of browser incompatibilities, though).
All these statistics come from server use, where drives are constantly spinning and kept at a relatively constant temperature. I'm curious if there's a bigger difference in laptop computers, where the drives see a lot more physical abuse, power cycles, temperature variations, etc.
Two points:

1. When it comes to security, from the point of view of an OS vendor, if you have gained unauthorized access to an interactive shell on a target machine it's already "game over, man". You cannot protect against physical access, and you can pretty much assume that there are a plethora of unknown privilege escalation bugs so that any account is effectively a root account. Every company has limited security resources, and at some point there are trade-offs between usability and security. This is why efforts are typically focused on keeping the baddies out.

Once the bad guy gets in, you can only mitigate potential harm. This is the goal of things like File Vault (which will still protect your stollen laptop, assuming you put on a screensaver password). This is also why merely being able to change a password is not nearly as bad as...

2. Being able to recover the plain text of a user's password. I'm not going to discuss how or why, but this was possible on earlier versions of OS X and fixed only in Lion. In this regard, "cracking" passwords is much harder on Lion than it was on Snow Leopard and earlier.

Of course, that sort of level-headed approach to this kind of topic seems to be rarer and rarer on HN these days...unfortunately...
I've heard good things about that book, but to be fair The Bible Of Algorithms can only be Knuth's TAoCP.
Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data.

Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7 make you feel guilty for not doing it (though OSX's version is better, both deliver on basic backups).

All this said, the difference between an SSD and an HD is about zero when it comes to real reliability. Both will fail at odd times, and you should have a backup, preferably bootable, to get you back to good. An external drive with a system-imaged startup disk (free for all major desktop OSs) is quite cheap to maintain.
You bet. I'm surprised that the IE team is still alive with that much hatred directed towards them :-)
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The entire question is deeply subjective, which just underlines my bemusement at people accusing pg of ignorance for seeming to take a given position on the question.
Make your bet. Two years from now, is Netflix still going to be doing DVDs in some form--whether via Qwikster or otherwise?

I say yes.
DVDflix!
My understanding is that someone can now patent teleporters and replicators, and sue the person who eventually invents it. True?
dvdflix would have been a more appropriate name
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This move is uncomfortable but necessary. The two businesses are different at every level (supply chain, cost structure, technology, user experience, etc.), and the DVD business is on its way out over the nest 3-5 years.

Better to disrupt yourself now than wait for some upstart to do it and react.
ST has a very nice "Standard Peripheries Library" for their STM32 ARM Cortex M3 line which abstracts all the bit and register manipulation away in a very elegant manner.
Atmel has the "AVR Software Framework" which I have heard good things about but haven't used it myself.

Nearly all the chip manufacturers I know of have some sort of framework/library for their Cortex M3 line (which is what is in the new Arduino).
> Its not completely outside the realm of possibility that the 5% created nearly all of the gains and then only grabbed most. Net win.

IANAE, but I don't think wealth creation works like that (the Randian hero as the engine of humanity). I'm inclined to think that parents are the greatest wealth creators, followed by teachers

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/who-creates-the...
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And yet somehow Amazon manages to stream video and sell DVDs at the same time.

Heck, they sell lingerie and organic tea at the same time.
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I want to focus the discussion. When people complain about things I've written, often as not they're complaining about things they believe I think, rather than things I actually said. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation with that level of disconnection between the participants. So I usually ask people who disagree with something I wrote to tell me what specific sentence or passage they feel is false.

If I've said something false, I'd honestly like to know what it is. I wrote that essay, like most essays I write, to figure out things for myself. So if I've made a mistake I want to know what it is.
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Although a great book, I don't think there is enough material covered to prepare one for a tech interview.
Just because they call it "responsible disclosure" doesn't mean it is responsible.

I can call myself a shark. That doesn't make it so.
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I'll throw it out as a side note, because in all the discussions I've read on Netflix of late no one seems to mention it: Netflix has FANTASTIC kids content available for streaming. My kids would revolt if we cancelled our service. That alone guarantees my business until there is a truly compelling replacement. I cannot believe we're the only family like this. And while this is probably not a large enough market to sustain them (let alone power growth), they do seem to have a pretty good sense of how people engage with their content - and my guess is that their deep long-tail of streaming content actually holds more appeal than might be guessed. To be honest, my only frustration with them of late has been the fact that my streaming queue is overrun with "Bob the Builder" & "Caillou" when I'm actually looking for something to watch. Perhaps this new, sharper focus on the streaming side will enable them to improve things like this? Here's hoping they survive this transformation and emerge stronger for it.
+1 to Mr. Hastings, sheerly for the courage and grit it took to write that.
I'll take the slightly more extreme point of view (that will probably be shot down as "pinko-commie bullshit")

You should pay as much tax as is required to lift the rest of society to (or close to) your level (of lifestyle/income etc). (obviously "your level" will decrease as you pay more tax).

That's the IDEAL it is of course highly impractical. Most ideals are. :(

Just because you got given awesome opportunities (good school, good family, good race, good society, whatever) and even if you worked really hard, doesn't mean you deserve to hold disproportionate amounts of wealth compared to those that didn't get those things.
I'm hoping it comes with the requisite netflix...err qwikster... efficiency that I've come to expect. We tried Blockbuster for this, and it was a nightmare. Getting a game from them was an exercise in patience. We were with them for two months and didn't receive a single one:)
Hastings replied to that question in the Netflix blog post's comments: [1]

Question: "If a film I search for on Netflix is not available for streaming, will the website still tell me if the DVD is available? Or must I search twice?"

Reply: "ouch. You'd have to search the second place if we didn't have it in the first place."

[1] http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some-reflect...
But if Amazon's DVD business, or selling organic tea, doesn't perform well in the long run, they'll still be in business. If renting DVDs or streaming movies doesn't perform for Netflix, they're out of the game.
Windows touchscreen laptops are old news.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140385/Review_3_Wind...

Said items with a suitable OS are a different story
I think that everyone is missing the really big thing here, the US Post Office is screwed...
I don't think any shareholders of consequence are going to think they just made this decision a day ago. Maybe they announced it after the stock plummeted because the assumption is it won't go down that much further, where a 2nd announcement after it rebounded might send it down yet again.
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Totally agree. It was a no brainer to cancel the DVD side of our subscription, but the streaming, no way.
I have to say, I think they blew it with this one. Spinning DVD-by-mail off into a separate business might make sense, but I just don't get splitting the ratings/suggestions up by not integrating the services. Considering that one of Netflix's greatest strengths is the (very good) rating system this is a questionable decision, and I think they'll catch a lot of heat for it from the crowd that maintains accounts on both services.
Video:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/19/netflix-reed-hastings-video/?...
s/it's/its/

... oh, how I hate this mistake
This split might be what they needed in order to secure more streaming deals. Time will tell.
Judging by your choice of word, I think you might be a University of Toronto student. If you're a University of Toronto student doing the PEY program, then the tech interview for the big companies should be pretty easy. I think the hardest they managed to throw when I was doing interviews for PEY was how to reverse a string in Java.

If you're aiming for smaller companies or startups, they actually have harder technical questions.

Also, don't skimp on the preparation for the non-technical part of the interview. Prepare to answer soft questions (e.g. your previous team work experience, etc), practice talking about your past project experiences, practice making eye contacts and sounding confident, etc.
Good point about statistics not being people, but you should really cite your own statistics if you want to suggest that movement between income groups would paint a significantly different picture than the one presented here.
If you have time you can practice at http://www.topcoder.com or also http://projecteuler.net/
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I'd say it got about 5GB/day of mostly-sequential writes for a year, and I base that on absolutely no quantifiable data. It was used for lots of development; compiling stuff, running an IDE and browser in addition to the full stack of stuff in production. It had MySQL with a prod snapshot, RabbitMQ, a Django web app and a bunch of twisted services. The biggest writing culprits were restoring MySQL snapshots and ridiculously verbose logging from services.
To reduce risk, I think they could have pushed the Quickster brand within the Netflix UI harder before putting all this on its own domain.
Well, I can identify with that pattern. Though perhaps, i have been a lot slower at 29 with different levels of arrogance and shyness than you mention. But as far as i have noticed in others, it is not a very common trait. I have found that this trait does make us outside the normal distribution and my estimate* of the variance is around(2.5 sigma).
*- Just a biased one from my past encounters and relationships and what i remember of them.
has everyone forgotten how limited the streaming service is? They should have waited until they at least have a selection. I'm going DVD service, and Amazon for streaming.
If you don't mind reading German then you might be interested in the the four volume series "Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte" by Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Friends from Germany keep telling me that this is the reference about Germany's society. Parts II and III should cover 1848 and I figure there are similar texts for other European countries.

(Since you've read Faust and the intial post mentions Gibbon's Rise and Fall, you might be interested in Theodor Mommsen's "History of Rome" as well.)
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Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem.

The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?