skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Leveraged closed end bond funds are an option to get close to 6% with the added benefit of diversification (but the disadvantage of management fees, but the 6% yield are AFTER subtracting the fees): http://cef.morningstar.com/quote?t=FCUSA0004E&ops=&p...

Personally I have a diversified portfolio that yields about 6%, with corporate junk bonds (US and emerging market), emerging market sovereign bonds, business development companies, REITs, mREITs, and international high dividend stocks.
Not About The Shark
Hopefully it'll result in a TOS that lets Instagram monetize without infringing on the privacy of its users.

What I don't get is why Instagram doesn't just let users pay for the value they are obviously receiving from the service.

http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/your-cloud-data-not-your...
Maybe not. My firewall at work prevents a lot of video from playing.
The last episode of "60 Minutes" included a segment on the Vatican library, with its millions of unique and irreplaceable books. It's just too awful to contemplate the loss if the building were lost in some disaster.

Why isn't there a program to digitize all of it? Sure, it'll take decades, but every treasure digitized is one that won't be lost. It doesn't have to be imaged with the finest scanners available, even just a cheap digital camera is enough to record the information for posterity. And, it's the information that matters, not the physical books.
Show HN: agglo.php | Minimal CSS & LESS packer
DC federal judge says cops can get cell-site data without a warrant
Adding and Verifying Bank Accounts
Hell no. You invest in a 1% CD, you get 1% absolute return, even if inflation is raging in the double digits.

Edit: I assume you mean that over time interest bearing account rates rise with inflation. That's true in general, but as the current situation shows, there's no guarantee they're actually even above the inflation level at any point.
Seems to me this is a test. Push the updated terms of service out, if no-one complains, or if there is only minimal response then cool, it's acceptable by the users. If complainst come around, mitigate that risk by issuing an apology afterwards. As the phrase goes - " Do What You Think Is Right & Apologize Later "
By the numbers: Guns in the U.S.
Google+ Stronger Ties To Blogger. Now Lets You Mention Others In Posts
Any good resources for XtraDB's streaming backups? I'm looking to move in that direction early next year.
They aren't running a charity, you're right about that. But I think they misrepresented their business by giving it away for free, knowing full-well that it won't be sustainable in the long run under that model. Their response? "Oh ok, no problem, we'll just switch the terms of use while nobody is looking."
Given that the last ten years include the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, a net gain of 7% is pretty good. Plus, the annual distributions were consistently over 6%, so you're looking at a total return of almost 7% per year. That's actually pretty good.
Bah Humbug (please excuse me, it's just a seasonal expression). While I can feel your pain, this story has nothing to do with SV - it's the story of an entrepreneur. The same story exists in every state in the U.S. and every major city (and most small ones) in the world. Entrepreneurship is very hard.

I'm 41 y/o and bootstrapped my first internet company at 24. I owned a nice home, a beautiful vacation (lake) home, a big office building, 2 Mercedes Benz (wife's SUV, my car) & an awesome FICO score before I was 29. It all went away (except for my primary home) by the time I was 35.

As entrepreneurs we believe that the charts will always go up and to the right (we can't help it) - but they don't.

This year, after TEN (10) F'ING YEARS of working on what everyone in SV would label a little "life style business," we hit $1M+ in revenue. I am confident we will hit $2M+ next year and $100M eventually. Our company is debt free and my co-founder (and best friend since kindergarten) own 100% of the company.

My point: It's not easy. We have been working very, very hard for TEN (10) F'ING YEARS on this thing. I lost almost everything along the way...but I never, ever stopped believing in what we were building. When you hear those billionaires claim that "perseverance" is the key to success - listen to them, they are telling you the truth.
IPads in the cockpit of a jet fighter
Show HN: Pivit, an elegant game with simple rules and masterful strategy
This looks great. I use a modified version of gdash, but always wish that the graphs were rendered in D3 instead.

At first glance, it seems like the configuration could be a little more expressive for some common use cases. For instance, it seems pretty typical to build graphs that are collections of stats from different regions/instances from a set of metrics that have the form: stats.<machine/region>.specific_stat.

One nice thing about gdash is the ability to define a list of instances/regions and their readable name mappings, which you can then easily build multiple graphs for different stats using.

Seems like that'd be a little trickier here.
Sincerely, thank you for sharing. (both your story and your generosity)
Seriously?

This is a fact: <opinion here>.

Java calling anyone else's stack traces is backwards and hilarious, and only going to get better in about 15 years when java finally gets lambdas.
Stack Exchange's Winter Bash 2012
You are not your name. The fact that you have an official name does not mean the government is "deciding who you are." And beyond that, in most places, you can choose which name is your official one if you care that much about it. I do not understand what your beef is here.

If you don't think that Facebook should require your official name, I get that. But trying to deny that people generally have one seems odd.
"...born 100 days early."

It's interesting, according to Roe vs. Wade, a fetus is not supposed to be viable anytime before 91 days prior to the due date (3rd trimester).

As a programmer, nothing drives me more crazy than an arbitrarily chosen (and in this case, clearly incorrect) number, as a basis for critical decisions.
Entrepreneurship truly is a roller coaster. You constantly swing from ecstasy to depression, sometimes on a day by day basis. The underlying truth is that over time this cycle does not cease; it will continue in full force. However, over time things get better. I may be an optimist, but I believe that in the long run things always get better. One of my professors showed my class a graph that described this effect, which I have recreated. [1] In the long run, an entrepreneur's lows can be better than the rest of the world's highs. That is the future we seek.

[1] http://i48.tinypic.com/20hxbbt.jpg
http://feeds.alestic.com/alestic
Raul, the terms and conditions are pretty clear, they do have the right to sell your photos to someone else. This is simply unacceptable.
I would love that, but I don't see a sensible way to get there.

deep_dup and deep_freeze solutions would have to dup/freeze the entire object graph of an object in question, and this would have to include classes and modules as well, including the Object, Class, and Module classes. This would probably become a very huge object graph.

One way to prevent this could be to explicitely freeze such objects at some point during startup. This would still break a lot of code in the Rails world, where dynamically adding methods to a class is just standard.

Another way could be to implement copy-on-write semantics for such (and other) objects - if two threads share, say, a Class object, and one thread modifies it, this modification should then only manifest itself in one class.
I was surprised to see that microsoft paid very little to license the game, and even originally tried charging companies to include games.
> The technology to more efficiently route airplanes exists, we just have not yet allocated the money to do it.

This is actually well on its way to being implemented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...
It's really nothing, what might be something small to me now, like a food parcel costing a few pounds, could make a difference to someone else. It would be ungrateful and irresponsible of me not to want to help.

I am however off to sleep now, but I will be awake again by 7am.

My offer still stands to all who need it.
The img lowsrc attribute was deprecated a long time ago. If content negotiation isn't going to be used, then a system like that, with separate attributes for the different URLs, makes more sense than overloading the contents of the current src attribute with a custom, differently parsed format (explode on commas or whathaveyou).
I don't think the downvotes for justin are merited. That site is remarkably ugly.
I posted an article explaining his reasons. Why ask "Why?" to me?
"carefully and specifically ... standard operating practice whenever lawyers are involved."

You know - just like the terms and conditions.
Former Kindle ad guru sues Amazon over termination, alleges internal retaliation
I think it depends on where your knowledge lies.

If you have the know-how, you can probably make a bit off sports betting, or stock investments, but otherwise high interest savings or a managed fund / superannuation would probably be best.
Again, you are confused with user mode API (Win32/64) and kernel mode service API. Windows does have kernel mode service API. Just it's not well known since most people don't need to deal with them.
Can I have a link for that stat? If I recall they are around 1 billion users. I'm quite certain they didn't make 36 billion last year...

Actual numbers - 4.64B revenue. 400M profit. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=FB
Grocery Store Analogy for Evented Web Servers
By defining what "best" means first.

Higher return? Lower risk? Long or short term?
You can buy a lot of books with that and it could be (if you read it) the "best" investment.
They should include Xbill by default:

http://xbill.org
Such a dated definition of a good lawyer!

If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act.

That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write whatever shit they like in legal agreements, and nobody would complain.
How does this affect Instagram accounts that are set to 'private'? I know a lot of people that only use the app for photo filtering and cropping instead of the sharing aspect.
Money isn't worth anything right now (beyond its face value) because we have extremely low interest rates at this time. I would suggest using it to buy some stocks in a sector you have some understanding about. If it goes well, you will know a place you can put money in the future. (This only is feasible if you can afford to lose your $870 if it doesn't go well.)

Also, if you have any debt at all (school loans, etc.) you can probably make a better percentage profit paying your debt off early than you can in any other way.
Thank you, pmoz and callahad. Email received. I assumed it had just slipped through the cracks, no hard feelings. I did receive an awesome Game On t-shirt, and the Buckyballs.
The majority of Instagram users are nontechnical and have never heard of the TOS change, nor do they care. Letting advertisers put someone's Instagrams on a billboard is a pretty low bar for "villainous".

I think it's amusing that Instagram is, in its own words, "trying to build a viable business", just a few weeks after they sold for a billion.

In short: Instagram is a fun site for sharing silly photos.

Facebook vastly overpaid for it, and the pedantic hacker types on HN and Slashdot vastly overestimate the importance of its new terms.
Success cures depression that is caused by lack of success or, relatedly, low social status.

That doesn't apply to most depression, that being often a serious biological problem. No amount of success will cure that. That requires psychiatric help.

It does alleviate a certain gnawing unhappiness that most ambitious people experience (unless the definition of success is raised, which it often is).
It's odd. The vast majority of Instagram users seem to leave their accounts open to the public - more so that most photo-sharing services I've used in the past. Instagram presumably has business relationships with all sorts of entities. And Instagram has APIs allowing users to access the data exposed by these public galleries. It seems the pieces are already in place for a 3rd party to enter into a business relationship with Instagram to pay for access to the data contained in their users photos. Why were the new terms even necessary?
Excellent article! I'm looking forward for the next wave!

His insights echo some of mine regarding social media; it's both comforting (knowing that I'm not crazy), and scary (discovering that others are seeing the patterns I see). I have an idea for a new kind of social media website, which I really believe it could be disruptive; I just wish I wouldn't have to spend so much time with this useless university work, and instead code…
Please read and understand this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question) before wildly claiming that things are offensive because you read a certain phrase.
How We Achieved a .50s Page Load
You could characterize it that way, or you could assume that all of your users aren't complete fools and realize at some point they will have to make money to pay for the costs of running the service. They also know full-well that it isn't sustainable to run this service for free forever.
I completely agree with a default plan of not burning bridges anywhere. But it is still possible to do that without tipping your hand to the employer.

If the employer needs more than two weeks to be ready for an employee to leave, then the employer needs to be better organized or they need to ask for longer resignation timeframes. Of course, the two times I was ever "let go" (both from re-structuring), I had zero advance notice, so that doesn't seem very balanced.
It really depends on what you want to learn. As you know, with the diversity of philosophy (language, science, law, art, mind, etc.), there are many different types of educational roadmaps.

What are you wanting to learn?
I stumbled across Gephi ('an open source graph visualization and manipulation software') and got a few comments on it about 9 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700471

https://gephi.org/
Is this... legit? or was it ever?
Well, they would first impose it and then somebody sues them and it starts bouncing around various courts for the next 5 years. It would take some serious time until there would be a final ruling.
compound interest is money's best friend.
Being a patriot doesn't mean I can't complain about horrible service at a high price. I live in the worst run state in the US, with the highest income tax rate, bad public services, and a massive budget deficit. Are you saying I should be proud to send that tax check in every year to a broken system?

I wish pro-tax types would stop providing a smoke screen for bad governance.
Well, remember that they already had to rewrite a lot for Win32 anyway.
Skill: Save Astronauts - Free Online Games
>Downloading a plugin to play seems counter to what HTML5 web games are trying to do?

O RLY?
We just built a prediction market iOS app for Inkling: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/inkling-predictions/id549984...

It uses fantasy currency due to US law...
I thought of a couple of things to post, but then thought "Hey, these are good ideas I should do myself" :-)
Yeah, honestly though those fail the "clean" test for me. What I really meant isn't the computational capabilities of python generators but the way the mesh nicely with the way builtins like "in" or "all()" or "any()" work on plain old data. Reasoning about them, in general, isn't any harder than reasoning about a dict or list in the common case, and that's a feature missing from the perl equivalents which try to do it in a library. I'd feel comfortable throwing a comprehension into code intended to be maintained by a novice. I'd never inflict any of that junk on the poor maintainer.
Great blog. Do you have an email I can reach you at?
Because they want to do business in Germany? Or do you assume that corporation rights are more important than individual rights?
Hm, I see NUI uses method swizzling, which in fact a potential reason for app rejection.
Well said. I was struggling today with my art, and your words resonated- the truth is deeper than entrepreneurship. I realized that for the millionth time, I was expecting something to be easy, and it never is. It always helps to hear real life stories, thank you.
How Gangnam Style showed us the Social Media value of a Viral Video
Safe to say there have been more than a handful of Gangnam Style case studies bouncing around the net over the past few months; case studies looking at things like HOW and WHY the video went viral, WHO was behind this freakishly cult phenomena, and WHAT the contributing factors were in driving nearly a billion views.<p>This is not one of those.<p>As a Digital music marketing agency, we are fascinated by the nuances of different Social Media platforms and the relationships they share with each other. In creating this Gangnam Style infographic, our aim was to understand the impact that a viral YouTube video has on other Social Media channels. In other words, what exactly is the exchange rate of a YouTube view when traded in on the ‘Social Media stock market’.
Instagram's unofficial response
A Banner Year for Sex Toys
No surprise, any good/successful idea is always copied.
My ops guy has reminded me that we do, like you, have one EBS drive for snapshots of one particularly hefty DB in addition to our other backup methods.
I especially like Firebase tutorials and docs. After finishing tutorial on Firebase first launch I immediately knew where and how can I use Firebase in the future. When the time came we used it for real-time worker/web-app communication at http://dubjoy.com/ and it worked like a charm. I still don't know how to use web sockets and I hope I never will :) While working with Firebase we needed some ACL-like security features and Firebase delivered again. Amazing.
I'm really excited to see it.
The elasticity, no capex and api management are great. But bending over backwards to deal with their terrible SAN, saturated layer 2 and low reliability easily wastes at least as much engineer time as it saves in ops. If the OP's 100 boxes are similar to most of the other AWS deployments I'm familiar with it's likely that'd be 10 or less actual machines to manage.

Don't get me wrong - the idea is great and it's great for really low end workloads where the gotchas don't matter or really big systems where you'd be managing against most of those issues anyway.

But in the middle of the two there is a dead space that I bet a lot of shops are stuck in - double digit instance numbers running a workload that a 2-4 servers could handle with plenty of leg room.

If you're deciding on a cloud provider in 2012 I think it makes a lot of sense to shop around. There are lots of people doing the on demand api deployment thing now with different trade offs. I like joyent a lot (local reliable io) or providers with cloud and a colo area even if it's exorbitant - as paying five hundred dollars a month for instnaces one ssd could replace sucks.
666 JOEY ALIZIO - SOME TRIGGA IN A BATHROOM - PART THREE - DEC. 15 - 2012
> The downside of working with open source software is that documentation is horrid. As the author states, man-hours are finite, and people who write OSS typically don't want to spend their finite hours documenting their code.

Not universally true (although it probably is true in most cases). PostgreSQL has great docs and I've heard good things about Open BSD although I haven't looked myself.
These mistakes are so common among billion dollar corporations. Can they not anticipate these sort of reactions? Do they get 'Larry' down in legal to quickly write something up and then post it without another thought?
666 JOEY ALIZIO - SOME TRIGGA IN A BATHROOM - PART TWO - DEC. 15 - 2012
Trading iPhone for Windows Phone, Week 2
Instagram is for Dummies
That's a nice description of what's going on, but it really boils down to:

* Running 32-bit kernel on 32-bit hardware

* Running 32-bit kernel (mostly; enough that kexts are 32-bit) on 64-bit hardware

* Running 64-bit kernel on 64-bit hardware

Interestingly, for a while only the Xserve defaulted the kernel to 64-bit mode, whereas all consumer machines used the 32-bit kernel mode, though this could be toggled using a certain keyboard chord at startup (I think it was holding down 6 and 4). Eventually this shifted so the 64-bit kernel became the default, but only after giving kext authors enough warning so they could update their kexts.

In any case, as diverting as this is, it doesn't really matter to the consumer. There was only one version of OS X to install, and it ran in whatever mode was appropriate for the machine in question. The only reason consumers ever had to care what mode their kernel was running in was if they wanted to use a kext that did not have both 32-bit and 64-bit support, and by the time the kernel switched to 64-bit mode by default, this was pretty rare.
This has scared me for quite some time:
http://i.imgur.com/ZxBWh.png

and:
http://i.imgur.com/u6aU2.gif

With a plausible explanation:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/04/the...

The only explanation I can come up with is that this happened because it could. Because money is self-reinforcing, and breeds power, which allows control.

But I don't think it's sustainable, and I think it's one of the largest, if not the largest problems with our society today.

1. I am not an economist. Is this view in any way valid? Am I seeing the right things?

2. What are the other causes? Surely the economy is complex and there are multiple driving factors.

3. What can we do?

Help us all if this can't be resolved. Because that graph is very, very scary and I see this going downhill fast if something doesn't change.
did you ever examine DRDB (I think it is integrated into some of the Linux kernels)?
Speaking of "Bullshit Metrics"