skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this boils down to the fact that if you look at historic proceedings the outcome seems obvious, because the details which make it obvious are the ones reported. There is a total bias to write what looks like a progressive narrative, when the reality is usually far from it.

i.e. A->B and B->C then CLEARLY A->C. Except when A went to B, A could also have gone to D, E, or F, but you don't write about that, because clearly covering all your bases would be ridiculous, and it's generally difficult to evaluate the likelihoods of any options except B, where the likelihood of B is 100%.
I think the issue is more about timing your business decisions, not making smart or stupid ones.

Netflix is worried about the end of physical media, as they should be. They are looking 3 or 5 years down the road and trying to position the company to be successful then (as well as today).

However, for the average customer today, DVDs are still very important. And for the average investor, next quarter's earnings are much more important than earnings in 2015.

I think Netflix made the right decision for next year, or maybe 2013 -- but made it too early; they got ahead of their customers. (An easy thing to do when you live in Silicon Valley.)
RIM has approximately 1.4 million+ unsold Playbooks
Amazon Offers AWS Simple Icons for Architecture Diagrams
In anticipation of the fire sale that's about to occur, someone should get started on porting Android to it.
I think you're missing my point. Netflix taking out BlockBuster does not prove they can do no wrong, merely that Reed Hastings a perfectly capable CEO, and smarter than the media would have you believe.

If you read about the history of the company, they started by SELLING DVD's. They barely made any money renting them. But, Reed Hastings made the decision to split that company because it wasn't the future. His 10,000 customers complained but he stuck to his guns. And look at them now. The largest streaming company in the world.

He was placed in the same situation this past year. Stick to a business model with no future (DVD's-a dying medium), or split the company to improve negotiating terms for streaming deals(the future) and hopefully sell off "Quickster." It was a brilliant plan that poised Netflix for the next generation of digital distribution.

Instead they backed down and changed direction, looking weak in the process.
That's a lot of instances! It'd be interesting to run the numbers and get an idea of what their monthly AWS bill looks like.
I can think of a couple of counterarguments.

First, the video rental business was ripe for disruption once DVDs became sufficiently popular. Once you had a video medium that was small enough to cheaply ship through the mail and durable enough to keep in circulation for a while, it was inevitable that somebody would challenge the incumbent brick-and-mortar stores and win. Netflix may have simply been in the right place at the right time through sheer luck.

Second, intelligence isn't a single thing. It's a blanket term for a huge collection of disparate characteristics. The intelligence which lets me write code at a level well beyond most of the population is not the same kind of intelligence that would make me succeed in business. Perhaps the kind of intelligence that lets a person build a successful business from scratch is not the same kind that lets a person sustain an existing large business.

I think the article makes a good point, that we tend to ignore complication and subtlety in favor of simplistic explanations like "he's stupid", but I think it goes way too far in the other direction. Rather than assume the CEO is stupid because his company is having trouble now, the author assumes the CEO is smart because his company had success in the past, which is no better.
If I were to watching YouTube over ssl, the carrier would not be able to tell what videos I watched, all they could know is that I went to YouTube. With http they could know what videos I watched.

There are plenty of youtube videos that you might not want everyone to know you are watching, political videos, religious videos, how to do crossdressing, etc.
"The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an explosion of creativity and entertainment industry."

You keep saying this and I keep not believing that that's all there was to it. It was also a matter of people having way more disposable income and leisure time than ever before, as well as the means of production becoming readily available to the masses.

You're also mostly talking about an era during which the marginal cost of distribution was significantly greater than zero. That's not the case anymore.

"our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles"

I disagree with this. I think most of our enduring works of art come from a time before copyright. Some, e.g. works of oral tradition like Homer, the Ramayana, the Bible, Gilgamesh, etc. actually depend on the unrestricted free exchange of ideas.

We just passed through a historical window in which the confluence of surplus disposable income and leisure and scarce distribution models made a few artists very rich (but a few corporations even richer). I would argue that this was never an optimal distribution. Anyway, it's coming to a close. Art will go on.

"And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?"

The only Spanish works I'm familiar with are Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and various films by Pedro Almodovar. They were better than anything on, for example, this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...
Yes, but the lesson learned should be "sometimes things unexpectedly wind up working out well", not "fire your CEO and you too could become the highest market cap company in the world"...
Maybe we don't need stuff like Avatar.
From your own link:
"Since the statistical results are not distinguishable from zero, this suggests IQ test scores and net worth are not connected." (em. added)
Do books that you load on your Kindle with Calipre still get their metadata (read location being the main one I'd want) synced across Kindles/iOS/other devices?
I'm surprised to say this, but I like the Kindle ads. I have an ad-free Kindle and I got the ad-supported version for my wife (she was on the fence about getting a Kindle at all, and knowing it was cheaper compelled her to finally get it). The ads are pretty great! As the blog post says, they are unobtrusive and only displayed when the Kindle is off. More importantly, though, they are sometimes useful. The first few ads that I ended up clicking on were "$5 off any Amazon purchase" and "Buy any one of these 100 bestselling business eBooks for $1." Yes, there are ads that have nothing to do with Amazon or books, but the fact that I occasionally see an ad that makes me go "Wow, I will use this!" is pretty unexpected and pleasant. If my Kindle 3 ever breaks, I plan to replace it with the ad-supported version.
TheCaptchaExperiment.com: The results are in
If people really only want to support musicians, it would make more sense to just hand them a nice note with some cash and walk away.

I mean, isn't it weird that they want to make music, and you want to hear music, but it doesn't pay unless they make and you buy a t-shirt that you don't want? It's like, you make software that I want, but I won't buy software. I require you to make and sell me a lawn ornament, which I will throw away.
It's not a man in the middle, it's a new man on the other end, and since he has the domain he can get a legit SSL cert for it.
When I say "your fault", I don't mean you wrote down your password and mailed it to the "hackers". All the domains compromised seem to be related to a certain extent.

Your credentials were compromised by some means. Maybe you all signed up for the same site that was compromised? Or all went to the same website that installed some sort of malware on your computer? It's way more likely that you (unintentionally) were at fault. It's doubtful this is on GoDaddy.

Don't get me wrong, I love your site and have been reading for years. However, if someone really had hacked GoDaddy, they wouldn't waste time taking over blogs about MooTools. There are so many better targets they could have gone for.
I have no idea because I only ever use my Kindle to read stuff.
...but actually, it does.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/04/iq-income-and-weal...

Zagorsky is being sited in other comments here, but the problem with Zagorsky is that his results control for education and income. Problem: Education and income is highly correlated with IQ.

What Zagorsky is saying is that, for people with a given level of education and income, a higher IQ doesn't really help you much. Fine...but it could hardly be less relevant to the question of whether wealth and IQ tend to be found together!

Let's unpack Zagorsky a bit more: Overall, people with a low IQs, no degree, and a poorly paying job have a low net worth. Overall, people with a high IQ, no degree, and a poorly paying job also have a low net worth. However, most people with a high IQ have a degree, a well paying job, and a high net worth. Zagorsky concludes that IQ doesn't matter, but this is, frankly, nonsense.
logging anything beyond data quantities is most certainly not part of the function of a well-behaved ISP.
Free “as in free speech” or why I don’t by Apple’s products
Ultimate Darth Vader Gift Guide
I'm a little surprised so many machines are used to run Instagram. TechCrunch mentioned their peak has been 50 photo uploads per second (which they say go directly to S3, so Instagram's servers only need to pass a token). Of course there are other forms of requests, but just back of the envelope it seems like it should not require anywhere near "hundreds" of machines.

Not to be too harsh - it's just three engineers, so it makes sense if the setup is still evolving.
I guess I should have clarified that I'd like to be able to use the device more-or-less as designed. Sideloading and conversion is nice but not something I want to do on any kind of regular basis.

That is to say: Yes, I can try to overcome cumbersome DRM by applying my own labor, but there is a cost to that. In my mind, that cost would count against the value proposition of the device.
That's a common misinterpretation of the results of statistical tests. You can never conclude from that type of test that two things are not correlated, you can only conclude that the data you have does not suggest a correlation ("fail to reject the null hypothesis").
In Soviet Russia XYZ confirms Netcraft is dying.
I don't think that they've earned the benefit of the doubt here, but I think it goes too far to say that there's no reason why benign diagnostic software might pay attention to key presses. For example, a particular button combination could bring up a diagnostics screen or send additional information.

The logging, likewise could be just some debug code accidentally left in.
Helioid’s Search Engine Provides Category Sorting To Aid Research
So far, yes.
Apache CouchDB developers respond to UbuntuOne issue
"Free software doesn't just kill duplicate effort. Free software kills the original effort that is there to be duplicated."

Once more you're making a distinction that seems meaningless to me. How does one kill "original effort" and what on earth would it mean to do so? My guess is that you mean that it kills off the profits gotten from the rights to software that has already been written; in which case I can only suggest you google "rent seeking" for the thoughts of smart economists on the issue.

Using free software means that fewer people need to be paid to develop software. And over time the market will put them to work doing something else. (Note carefully that I'm avoiding loaded terms like "leeches" which you seem to be so enthused about using.) That's just macro economics 101. Do you really disagree?
Not really a lot of relevant experience. Would like to see some Hadoop or heck, even some C#. Let's talk again in a year or two.
I enjoyed that Norvig listed being co-recipient (along with 6 billion others) of Time's Person of the Year award in 2006!
Yes, another, maybe even more important point that Christensen makes is that smart people get sucked into these metrics not because they haven't been educated well enough in the tools that business school programs give them, but because they fail to think critically, to ask the right questions, and to form the correct narratives.

And this is a criticism that applies not just to business, but to engineering, product development, design, etc. You can be the best problem solver in the world and it won't help if you're solving the wrong problems. And this sort of thinking is something that a broader liberal arts education can at least encourage, which is why I'm still a proponent of the liberal arts, and wish people would find more value in them. (Yes, I was a Comp Lit major.) (Obviously, it has to be a well-executed program in any case, and an unserious student isn't going to learn anything in any case, either.)
Or to put it slightly differently, the act of measuring a system changes it.

Pretty much any system, but for businesses this is especially true. As you measure, you respond to the measurements, and the response ends up being reflected in future measurements. Sometimes the new system created by this feedback path heads off into the hinterlands like a glider flying off the gameboard in Life.

A real world example was BYTE magazine. They were polling their readers to see what kind of machine they owned, more and more owned IBM PCs, so they started doing more and more IBM PC articles, which attracted more readers who had IBM PCs. But it left out in the cold people who came to BYTE for non-PC articles (who complained loudly). The key was that the metric 'what computer do you own' did not reflect accurately 'why are you reading this magazine' and yet it was driving what the magazine covered.

I'm a big fan of metrics, but I'm also a strong believer in re-assessing periodically how changes in response to a metric have changed the business and measuring that too.
> [RMS is] proposing a massive disincentive to engaging in one of the most productive, highest growth industries in the world's history.

OK, you lost me. How exactly the possibility of rendering your software proprietary enhanced in any way at all productivity in software ?

Just a warning : I don't accept metrics based on how much money you extract from others, or how much people work behind a keyboard. What matters is how the lives of the people actually improved thanks to proprietary software.

My guess is not much at all. If I recall correctly, the most crucial innovations where mostly public research work.
Concurs de creaţie literară  decembrie: “Cea mai poveste frumoasă“
One thing about how Instagram's load balancing that I don't like is that they rate-limit their proxies on image requests. In my recent testing, its roughly 5-6 requests every 3 seconds or so. Any requests more frequent than that return 503 status codes. I don't entirely understand why they do this, since their load balancer simply does 302 redirects to the S3-hosted image resource.

I can guess at some of the reasons, such as they didn't foresee a user loading more than a few images at once. Perhaps they perceive rate limiting as a protective measure.

However, I've done testing on Twitpic, imgur, and yfrog and haven't run into the same issues. Twitpic, for example, generates a lot more traffic than Instagram and they don't have the same rate-limiting.
To be clear, they are monitoring the physical keys on the phone, not key presses on the virtual keyboard. The physical keys are the buttons for things like "Home" and "Back." Why you would monitor the physical key presses seems obvious to me: in the case of a phone or application crash, you want to know which keys were pressed at the time. In order to know that, you need to log it.

It's possible that they are monitoring the key presses of the virtual keyboard, but I have seen no evidence of that. From what I can see, they're recording the same kind of information that, say, Chrome or Firefox record for crash reports.
Facebook buys Gowalla
The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value
If private equity doesn't see value (because of limited growth or too much risk) why would the public markets see it differently?

I see your point about exits but there are enough private equity companies that are OK with holding companies indefinitely so long as the company is viable.

The biggest reason to worry about an exit is liquidity and fear of being the last sucker to invest. Liquidity can be addressed by going in the private market and fear of being the last sucker can be addressed by not buying the company in the first place.
Paul Graham and not being as right as he could be in “The Age of the Essay”
Or they're measuring or looking at things in the wrong way. It's easy to see the peaks and the valleys in a company but the truly important points are the inflection points.

If a big company waits until a small company has taken away 10% of its business it may still be too late to save the company, depending on how long it usually takes to change momentum. Often the reasons for differing degrees of growth come down to different fundamentals. A big company may not even realize that they've screwed themselves over by evoparating all of the best talent out of the company through boneheaded corporate decisions until revenue growth stagnates and then people start to wonder why they can't execute as well as they used to.
My girlfriend loves it. She loves sharing and viewing photos. Its better than twitter in that you don't have to click the links to see the pictures. Time will tell, but I like it so far also.
You're assuming that all the smartest want to become rich.

Maybe not.
Anyone else like Golf?
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That was basically it, for the most part. I wasn't the one handling it, but essentially the guy was trying to get some of our server configs for some reason (I work on Postmark). We filed an FBI report and went back and forth with GoDaddy until they got our domain back a week later.

So not really as exciting as Hackers, but sort of.
Design House Plan
I resisted the Kindle for a long time because of the DRM/openness issues that you mention. They idea of not being able to share books, to not "own" what I had paid for, etc. really bothered me. Last year, someone bought be a Kindle for Christmas, so I figured I may as well give it a try. The Kindle quickly became one of my most cherished possessions.

Some observations:

1) Yes, the DRM sucks, philosophically speaking. I would even pay a little more just to get DRM-free versions, but unfortunately that's not an option (yet?).

2) Over time, you save money on books. A dollar here, two dollars there; it quickly adds up. Pretty soon, even if you ever had some book removed from your Kindle, you would have saved more than enough money to just go buy the physical copy.

3) That said, the horror stories about books getting removed (like the ironic '1984' fiasco from a few years ago) or accounts being locked are extremely rare. Out of millions or tens of millions of Kindle owners, there are only a handful of stories about people being screwed by DRM.

4) Because of the convenient form factor, the ease of taking the Kindle everywhere I go, and the ease of buying books (a double-edged sword), I read 2x as much as I used to. In 2010, I read just under 40 books; for 2011, I'm on track for about 70. For me, this alone makes the Kindle worth it, regardless of DRM.

5) You can have several Kindles under one Amazon account. This means my wife and I can buy 1 book and read it at the same time on our individual Kindles. That's pretty sweet.

6) As others in this thread have mentioned, you don't have to buy books through Amazon. That lets you potentially sidestep the DRM issue depending on the availability of what you like to read.

So yes, in theory, DRM sucks, and I would happily pay higher prices to truly own everything that I purchase. In practice, the cons of DRM are outweighed by everything else.
I was surprised they had so few... I once worked on a site with 1/6th the users and 3.5 times the number of instances.

They could do better but they'd have to manage their own datacenter and write portions of the app in C++. It's probably not worth it at this point unless they hire someone with that specific expertise.
To be clear, many android phones have physical keyboards.

>Why you would monitor the physical key presses seems obvious to me: in the case of a phone or application crash, you want to know which keys were pressed at the time.

What good is that really going to do to diagnose a crash when 90+% of interaction with the UI is with soft controls?
Facebook acquires Gowalla
> you would think they would market that ability more

Maybe Amazon thinks that if it is obvious, no one will pay up front to have ads removed, and getting more money at the time of purchase is more valuable than future ad revenue.
Since we're on the subject of Play, I'm going to add Akka to this list. In my experience, programming for concurrency (and even distributed concurrency) is just way more enjoyable using Akka.
Science Exchange (YC S11) Gets A $1.5 Million Boost
I think that's not splitting hairs at all; it's a major detail and it's appalling how many of the comments on that post are like "oh this is a SQL Server vulnerability"....yikes !
I thought facebook was moving away from checking-in. Is this a talent or product acquisition?
I've found that in order to really pick up a new language, paradigm, library, or platform, I HAVE to do some real work. I can't just sit there and start typing up something. Some people like Project Euler as their own rosetta stone for this kind of thing, but I don't.

I always need tools or little one-off programs so I forced myself to write them in Common Lisp and then Clojure and it really helped me.
Talent. Congrats Gowalla.
If I conflate the two, it's because big labels are generally the only ones with enough resources to enforce their copyrights.

"Copyright does not give people the right to get compensated for what they want to do. It compensates people if they make something that other people want to use."

Fair point. But the economic argument I'm making is that copies of music, for example, is a commodity at this point, because of the ~0 marginal cost and more or less substitutable.

My point is that I believe that artists will figure out how to get compensated for the contributions to society. Charging for copies isn't going to be part of it.
>> There's a lot of talented and hardworking people here, like you, not as lucky tho.

Not denying a significant random component to success, but success does not seem to follow a random distribution.

If given a choice between picking someone coming off a big success, or someone who looks equally smart but was only moderately successful, many would choose to bet on the person who was successful last time.
What was the clock counting down to?
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Gowalla's been moving away from the check-in too, but even so, I imagine its mostly a talent acquisition. The source article mentions that the team will be working primarily on Facebook's new Timeline, which fits well with Gowalla's recent focus on "stories".
How about the https urls being intercepted?

Those were for a diagnostic command sequence or debug code too?
ThanksMachine Launches API For Customer Love - Inspired By 37Signals and Wufoo
The list of technologies is really intimidating for outsiders. Its not like "Oh, XYZ, thats just Django templating language". When I see Struts and Hibernate, I know those things as gigantic opaque stuff that will take a long time to learn...