skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With its price-to-earnings multiple in the stratosphere, Amazon often comes up in conversation as being "overpriced." While this conclusion may be true, it's not because Amazon is unprofitable...

Publicly traded companies optimize for return-on-invested-capital (ROIC), which includes profits (dividends) plus increases in equity value (share price).

Stable companies in stable markets often make the greatest returns by increasing revenue and reducing costs (i.e., optimizing for earnings). Companies in high-growth markets (esp. competitive ones) typically optimize for long-term market share/growth (which manifests as increases in equity value). Amazon falls into the latter category.

Not sure this makes sense to/helps anyone, but yeah, that's why Amazon operates the way it does.
Samsung posts $7.4 billion profit as handsets mask weak chip sales
There's a lot of reasons people incorporate in delaware...

http://www.quora.com/Can-members-of-a-Delaware-LLC-be-anonym...
Am I wrong? I specifically addressed the question and I didn't imagine the weird correlation out of nowhere.
Back during the dot.com days Yahoo Finance had a game where you could "play the market." (take note entrepreneurs this could be a lifestyle business :-) For each group you got $100,000 to invest and you were in competition with other people in your group for best return. I lost about $75,000 on Amazon stock :-).

However, my actual portfolio has done ok with Amazon so I'm not complaining.
Haha: I’m guessing the app that leaked this info is called “facebook”
Not everywhere; In some parts of the world AAA games still cost $100. It's not just games either; in Australia the digital download version of Adobe Creative Suite is 57% more expensive than it is in the US. Thats a huge price difference when dealing with $4000 software.

Prices here have not come down at all; services like Steam should let us buy games at US prices but most companies use regional pricing on Steam so we still have to pay more (and accounts get locked if you try to sneak around buying games from other regions)
Can someone point me to some references for the following statement? I curious to read more:

the revenue generated per active user by top apps on iOS is four
times higher than the equivalent number on Google Play. The
majority of publishers don’t even bother to release paid versions
of their apps on Google Play, opting to monetize using IAP and ad
support, with the latter making up the lion’s share of profits.
Playing devil's advocate here, but what is the hype surrounding this lock?

I bought two 'aesthetic enough' keypad code locks from Home Depot and it' been serving me well since. It doesn't require my phone or launching an app from my phone (think bags of groceries in both hands and you forgot to preunlock), doesn't require Wi-Fi, and I can program temporary codes for Airbnb, etc. within seconds. The only draw back is lacking the option to increase 30 second autolock interval.

Add a keypad, make it as rugged as existing locks, place it in the Home Depot lock aisle beside the other 'uncool' locks and you have a disruptive winner.
This is bananas!

Please, someone who has reserved one ..

WHY do you need to open your deadbolt from anywhere other than your front door?

Do you often find yourself down the street / at work / in an overseas hotel with the need to open the deadbolt?

Don't you want to see who's there?

Don't you have a second lock built into the knob?

It's an interesting idea to control a mechanical object (lock) with an internet connection, but a deadbolt?
Not our program, the creator decided that. We personally wouldn't care, you could write to ask.
Whether or not this converges for all inputs is a famous unproved math problem, so it is somewhat humorous that you think you have a proof of convergence.

Take your last case of f(f(f(even):odd):even) = (3/4)n+1/2. If you take one more step and this is odd then you end up at 3( (3/4)n+1/2) + 1 = (9n + 10) /4, which is larger than you started. In fact, the result of that could be odd which would then grow even larger (before becoming even as you note).
Yes, I want an ARM not an x86.
> Then I stopped carrying Ids

I assume you either a) don't drink or b) live in NYC.
Are people really having such trouble with the context of this article? The author's name is in the headline (maybe it was modded in later, to be fair), but also there's an "author" link[0] in plain sight. PG's essay's don't have a "who am I" introduction, and if you didn't know who he was then you'd simply click on the obvious "bio" link.

[0] http://www.foundersatwork.com/author.html
Single digit margins on $14 billion dollars in quarterly sales is still lots of money. 2.5%, as an example, is 350 million dollars a quarter, which is still 1.4 billion dollars a year.
They got SWAT-ed by those evil emacs guys.
Dying company? How so?
Here's hoping they can finally work natural _underline_ support in...

Edit: I've wondered whether the original Markdown didn't have underline support because <u> was deprecated/removed from HTML. FWIW, <u> is now back in HTML5.
yup. i'm there.
Then what do you call it when people are chosen because of their skills and their relationship with the individual?
It's great because you don't NEED a keypad. Also, for people who rent and can't replace their locks, this gets them all the functionality a keypad lock can give.
Oh, that's why Call of Duty is always in the PS3. It all makes sense now.
This may come off as a joke, but dead serious:

It seems you have never gone to get coffee in San Francisco.
How a single wrong link can cause GoogleBot to go crazy
Asus Windows 8 Introduction: Part Two
Here Comes Windows 8, New Apple Hardware, and Super Home Theater PCs
If you've ever been involved in producing content management systems for non-technical users (typically involving TinyMCE/CKEditor etc etc) then you'll probably welcome this as much as I do.

Dodgy HTML, content pasted in from Word (with crazy styling intact), and a general encouragement for users to see text content in terms of styling rather than structure are all things that it will be delightful to see the end of.
32 Japanese medaka fish in space
Nano is actually quite powerful. Check out the nanorc manfile for all the options, and /usr/share/nano for the various supported languages and fileformats.

Nano provides syntax highlighting, auto indentation, and multiple buffers.

It's kinda funny that Nano is so easy to use people never bother to look into actually configuring it, unlike Emacs which has consumed my entire workflow.
Multiline support, please.
In case you're afraid of real hacking ...

FTFY ;-)
Consider everyone who lives in an apartment who doesn't have the option of replacing their lock (and I wouldn't really want to anyway... I rather prefer the unchanged external appearance of this product).

IIRC, you can also easily deauthorize users, so it's also the cheapest way I can think of to retrofit something into being a shared space where you want to be able to control access going forward.

It's not the perfect lock solution for every use case, but it's a really cool utility for a lot of purposes.
I've been lurking this site for years. It's these comments that brought me out from lurking after spending the past 11 months building something I hope will work out. If you folks are interested in a google hangout, irc chatroom, I don't care, something... please let me know, too!
Really, it's intellectual pedanticism at it's finest.

It's amusing that people are so worried about being correct (and others being correct) on the Internet. Insisting on only talking about empirically measurable things is not a fail-safe way to raise the S/N ratio of a site; it just dulls the topics to those we already know well.

Meanwhile, it potentially rules out threads on things that we're still trying to discover the inner workings of: nutrition, aging, sleep, and many others. Those topics are extremely interesting because they can veer into uncharted intellectual territory. And we may only have anecdotes to go on. Quelle horreur!
I did something similar to this in high school a few years ago. I ended up losing to another team in the class that bought Gamestop and other related stocks. I stuck with stocks like Intel and GE. If the game had ended even a two weeks later, I would have won.

These games teach high school students very little about investing, especially long term. The other team's strategy was simply "I play video games and I like Gamestop, so let's buy Gamestop!".
I haven't ordered one, but I could see it being useful to give access to certain people at certain times. Like if you're using AirBnB you can give someone temp access, or if you want to give new employees access to the office without having to make more keys/cards.

edit: You could also use it to detect when the deadbolt is used, presumably when someone you know enters/leaves, since a burglar would probably not use the deadbolt ;)
This is another great piece of writing by Jessica Livingston (I was at Startup School for the talk as well).

Is she ever going to pursue writing a sequel to Founders at Work?
Gender differences are across entire populations, but individual variance absolutely swamps them. If you want to fill a single position, you're better off looking at the individual applicant's skills, not their genitals.
To answer your questions:
1) Why? Faster than keys. And I might forget my keys, but I won't forget my phone. Also, if a neighbor wants to borrow something, I can let them in remotely and lock the door behind me.

2) No, but I often am not sure if I locked the door or not. Or see the above example with a neighbor.

3) I don't see how that's relevant. If I'm home, I'll walk over and open the door. Or if they yell "It's John!" then I'll open it for them.

4) Nope, not in my apartment. And at my family home we never used the knob lock, only the deadbolt.
So .. it stops physical keys from working?
> If I had any cash sitting in my brokerage account, ...

Uh oh, classic indicator.
how do you handle btrfs updates? from what I understand it seems like every kernel update I have supports a newer version.

are you updating the filesystem regularly? does it matter?
Neither! Never got the acquired taste for alcohol. And I don't live in NYC - residing in Toronto atm.
They also used to focus on the desktop market. Now they focus on the tablet market, to the point of sacrificing the desktop user experience to gain entrance to that market. That might prove to be a big mistake.
Cheap NFL Jerseys
This is just a general problem of slave lag. In this case you should read from master on redirect.
Climate scientist gets compared to Jerry Sandusky, files libel suit
I wasn't doing anything.
making it possible to continue operating/expanding for another year is a good thing

This is not true if you are destroying value, so its not true per-se. A Junkie with an Amex black meets this definition of success, for example.
Is Barack Obama the President?
http://www.isbarackobamathepresident.com/
When Facebook opened their second data center, they basically had one be read/write and the other just read (if I remember correctly). You could do something similar and if a user causes a write or update, keep track in a cookie and use only the master for their reads and writes for a period of time equal (or longer) than the typical replication length. Then when the time expires, start using the slaves for their reads.

I'm sure there are better ways than this, it's just one that I know has been used in production with some success.
This isn't such a great thing. Bad time to have cash. Bad yields and lots of currency risk out there. Apple isn't willing to invest chunks of this into longer term investments that can yield potentially huge returns? Looks like they're happy to sit pretty with their current line at the top.
FUNDRAISINGSA B**** T Shirt with quote from StartupSchool 2012
This would be so freakin' great. Would especially love a couple of the github things in there like '''lang that would totally be awesome.
1. Faster than keys? Wow .. you need faster keys .. it's WAY faster for me to pull my key out of my pocket than my phone. And I don't have to unlock my phone, find the app, launch it and anything else the app needs me to do (PIN?)

1b. That's the most expensive let-in-a-neighbour idea ever. My neighbours have a spare key to my place. If you're going to trust them once, why not just trust them?

2. Again .. a really expensive solution to this simple problem. How often do you actually leave your door unlocked? Or are you just scared and this device will give you needless peace of mind?

3. The point is that this device lets you unlock from anywhere in the world. Why would you unlock it from anywhere other than your house?

4. What if the neighbour in 1b decides to use the knob lock (after all, it's his habit to lock) and you left your keys at home because you have your phone?
It'd be nice if it Markdown was added to HN, at least for a consistent way of quoting that's better than using the code tag (which frequently cuts off text for some reason in mobile Safari).
I'm not that psyched about automatic return-based linebreaks. Everyone thinks they should use linebreaks to align their text, and the system should just ignore all single line breaks.

The current behavior of Markdown solves this problem very well. I don't want the newlines I enter for non-wrapping editors to remain in the generated HTML.
Jessica's speech follows one of the themes she established in "Founders," - overcoming emotional responses being a key to success in startups (and life). Her skill in communicating complex ideas is subtle, but more impressive because it lacks the usual dose of ego and/or one-upmanship. The sole intent being to help people who can listen well enough to use the information to help themselves.
Relevant: http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-responds-to-privacy-...
There seems to be some confusion about the difference between SmartDeblur and Blurity.

In short, SmartDeblur is a parameterized non-blind deconvolution tool. It handles only a narrow set of blur kernels: focus errors or camera movements in a straight line. Real-world motion blurs seldom conform to SmartDeblur's limitations. Also, the technology in SmartDeblur is nothing new: the commercial FocusMagic has been doing exactly the same thing as SmartDeblur for almost a decade.

On the other hand, Blurity is a blind deconvolution tool. It handles any type of blur kernel, not just when the camera was out of focus or moved in a straight line. From talking with many actual customers, I've learned that almost all real-world motion blur is non-linear in nature. Blurity is well-suited to those situations.

Of course, I encourage people to try both tools and use whatever works best on the blurs in their images.
That is a difficult question to answer. A good parallel to what amazon is doing to retail is what globalization did to manufacturing. As we all know, manufacturing in the US has been gutted and is now largely based in developing countries. While this is good for the consumer because products are cheaper, this also resulted in a great deal of unemployment for a certain category of workers (primarily low skill). Retail, which is also a major employment source for low skill workers, is now facing similar pressure from companies like Amazon, who employ significantly fewer people than the companies that they replace.

Ultimately, developed countries are going to have a difficult time finding good paying, reliable jobs for low skilled employees. This is an inevitable by-product of our shift to a globalized, modern economy and is one of the primary reasons why the US and Europe are struggling to keep their social safety programs solvent.
I'd also advocate for accepting reversed ()[]'s on links.

In other words, let the user type:

[something](http://whatever.com)

or

(something)[http://whatever.com]

...and have both work exactly the same.

It will save a lot of trouble -- and especially when linking to a Wikipedia page whose URL contains parentheses.
I love that someone who HASN'T ordered one actually has a better real-life reason for using one!

Yes, I can see that temporary access would be a good use-case.

But it's probably cheaper to buy more swipe cards or keys at the office than pay to make sure everyone has a compatible phone with them.
Lockitron does not sound like lohotron to me in Russian. Not even close.
Founder bias here, but...

As someone who lives with three adult roommates who all have S.O.'s we have people in and out all the time.

As someone who lived by himself in college it was nice to know when the landlord came by.

As someone who runs a startup, it provides more benefit than a typical modern access control system without the $3000 price tag.

For American locks, the deadbolt provides most of the security. The handle can usually be loided and is kind of only useful if you're stepping out for a minute to grab the mail and want to shut the door behind you.

For letting someone in remotely, you usually have an idea that they're coming over first. If they were to show up unsolicited, you would likely call first.
I saw this talk at Startup School. Honestly, as someone working in industry who tried doing a startup during school, there's a huge thing missing.

CMD+F for "luck" = 0 results.

Luck is a huge factor and sometimes you just need to move on to either something new, or working for a company to fill in the gaps, and trying again soon.
Agreed. I don't see how copyright comes into the picture if I buy a piece of hardware, erase whatever is in its memory, and put what I want there instead.

Of course, I could see hardware going the way of e-books: You don't own your phone/tablet/laptop, you merely license it from the Corporation who reserves the rights to control what you install or not and to erase it/take it back at any time.
Please - is this really going to move the lever?
Something I've wanted from Chrome for a long, long time is default download locations for certain filetypes. I mean, why would I ever want .mp3s in my last selected folder if that was full of .doc files? <1st world problem> I have to spend up to 30 seconds to navigate my hard drive, ugh. </fwp> I heard Opera has that feature, but I like Chrome too much to switch.
Please please use <> to delimit URLs instead of ().

This is an [example link]<http://www.example.com/>;
Steve Ballmer: Other Guys Did Good Work, But There's Nothing Like The Surface
About two months ago I was thinking that the bubble, of which everyones been talking about for the past years, might finally pop soon. I thought I might short some major tech companies and make some money off of it. I had two indicators that I was looking at to determine the start of it:

1-Zynga begins laying off people. (really, any big web 2.0 company begins laying off people, but zynga seemed like the logical choice.) The way I see it is this: if a flood of veteran web-devs, artists, PMs, etc hit the SF market, salaries will go down slightly as demand goes down. Since techies spend their money on tech, this will lead to revenues going down within the industry. This will begin a positive feedback loop because everything seems to be built on top of itself right now.

2-Second indicator is that Amazon's stock would fall. This is because they are essentially the bellwether of the tech industry: everyone runs their stuff on AWS. If their revs go down (which it doesnt look like they have), that means companies are feeling the pinch. Again, a positive feedback loop could quickly ensue.

Now that my two indicators have come to pass, I still don't believe strongly enough in the bubble theory to short the industry. But if anyone else wants to take my theory to the bank, I would be happy to take a 10% referral fee on any and all gains :)
At the time I was there (2006 - 2010) and this may sound strange to some, I am sure that someone at Google had MSDN access but finding that person would have taken longer than hacking together a solution (which took a couple of hours in front of the VM instance). I don't doubt that at the if at the time I needed this that the TechStop guys (and gals) hadn't yet been dismantled I could have just said "I need an XP license for about a week" and they would have obliged. But I didn't have time to hunt down an owner, I didn't want to expense an XP OEM kit for this simple project that was a 20% thing anyway, and well TechStop had fallen way hard from being a resource to being a nop.
I might be the only one, but I actually prefer Markdowns handling of a single "enter" without spaces at the end to mean that the paragraph is not finished. It makes writing blogs and various other stuff in Vim much simpler, and I can more easily reformat text to wrap at 80 characters, and have better control over it.

Could I soft-wrap in my editor? Sure, but that would mean that the text files sitting on my hard drive now have very long strings in them making it harder to grep, making it harder to add to git (change a single character, entire line is now a diff :-().

I hope that doesn't become the default.
A BNF grammar would be nice to start with.

IMHO, pandoc markdown support is the mother of all implement featuring lots of goodies (table and footnote to name 2)
>>My grandma kept a stash...

Interesting. I've asked my grandma how she saved given she was in the USD=42oz period but her response was we never had enough to save (postwar period really).
My mum would rather believe a nobel prize winner rather than me :) As with evertthing, views on these matters depend on ones life experience.

>> impossible to do at the volume I need

Ha! a good problem to have!

>>if trading stopped tomorrow, it could not settle and there would be huge defaults

Exactly right! but if you trade in comex futures then you are still trading in paper - albeit paper gold. When the musical chairs stop then those holding the real physical metal will be ok imho.
I don't want to be a christian missionary trying to convert but you may find the concept of freegold and the fofoa blog worth a read. In a nutshell, freegold is about thinking through the transition when the USD/paper gold market collapses and looking at what the giant players (central banks) are doing. If you subscribe to that theory then there are some good arguments why there would be no tax on gold in the future (a black market would arise to ship the gold to any region where it is not taxed). YMMV.
As a non-web developer I cry every time I need to use HTML: It's really "ugly" in some way (And I'm used to ugly languages).

But I have learned to love Markdown too, I hope in the future, distant future: Someone will create a language that integrates HTML and CSS into a nice Markdown-like language.
Underlines traditionally have semantically meant the same as italics. When an editor wanted the printer to make a certain word italic, he would underline it in the draft.

Really, underlines are a useless decoration. That's why HTML took them out. Not sure why they put them back in...
I've been annoyed by that on reddit for...like 6 years. "You can just escape it" people say. As if normal reddit users are gonna escape strings themselves these days.
This is a non-issue.

Look at MongoDB.

If you want to say "You're a retard" in German you'd say "Du bist ein Mongo". Mongo being short for mongoloid and just as `politically incorrect` as retard is in the English speaking world. If anything the name made the product more memorable for me (and I use it almost every day now)
I found that I've moved on to reStructuredText. It doesn't seem to be marketed as much as Markdown (the only reason I know about it is because of Sphinx) but I feel that it's a bit more capable. Simple tables are exceptionally easy and it handles URLs with parens in it just fine (a common pain when trying to link to Wikipedia articles with Markdown).
My 9yo is learning Python, he's been a decent bash scripter for years. Why not let them loose with real, powerful grown-up tools from the start?
This would completely defeat one of the best parts of markdown, which is the ability to mix in HTML tags whenever you want, when you need to represent something more complex.