skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the guess as to how much revenue Amazon loses for every second of downtime?
Somebody has to provide evidence (and, you know, a perpetrator) to a prosecutor first. But there's no real "investigation team", save maybe FINRA.

If FINRA detects something they can refer an investigation to the S.E.C. or other law enforcement body. But they don't exactly have a stellar track record. And nobody even has to listen to them; they just gather evidence and make recommendations. It's very much a dog with no teeth.
I also hear you, there will be real data soon. We just want to be careful about making sure everything is sound before publishing information.

As for many-to-many joins, I'll write something up about it, thanks!!
Ask HN: I need a marketing partner for my startup
I am a developer by profession and currently working on building a platform for developers to pair up with marketing professionals - www.tractionify.com. Ironically, I am in need of a marketing individual who can work with me to build and grow this developer-marketer interfacing platform. The application is about 60% complete and I can share a link to the work-in-progress website to anyone who is interested in teaming up.

Brief background about myself
- senior .NET developer with about 8 years of experience in I.T.; passionate about building startups; projects in the past - www.docverifier.com, www.inqvest.com; very flexible and open to suggestions on how a product can be improved, change directions if needed.

What am I looking for?
A qualified marketing individual who
1. is passionate about building a startup
2. who can work part-time, I work on weekends and weeknights
3. is skilled at using the online marketing toolkit - blogging, facebook, linkedin, twitter.

What would you get in return?
1. we build a cool startup
2. we can negotiate the partnership terms

Please drop in a line at hello@tractionify.com and we can chat up. Cheers.
Why do you take this article so personally? I feel like your comment is way overblown. My personal impression is that this person felt affected by what happened and that this blog post is one way of expressing that. I think it's natural when someone dies this way for someone who feels that loss to question why it happened. I certainly felt that way about Aaron Swartz and I didn't know him at all. That's all I see here and I have a hard time understanding why you are so offended.
For a lot of these economic numbers and earnings report, they are provided to news organizations prior to the announcement with instructions that the information cannot be released prior to a certain time.

So, for this example, that time was 10:30AM. The moment it hits that time, the reports get pushed out into the newswires and reported on-air.

This allows the reporters to digest the numbers and figure out how to report it.
I disagree. It contains the word Dutch, which is still the common way to refer to, well, actual Dutch people. This is not the case for villains, vandals or paddy wagons.
Hmm..that's weird. Surface RT is 1.5lbs and Surface Pro (yet to release) is 2 lbs[0]. Both versions (11, 13 inch) of Macbook Air are more than 2lbs[1].

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html

EDIT: Those are without the keyboard. Depending on the keyboard, I can see how Surface might have been slightly heavier.
I'm perfectly happy running 3+ concurrent Windows VMs on my 2011 MacBokk. The main limitation is RAM, which you can max out for under $100USD.
It is worth pointing out that the EIA Natural Gas Report comes out weekly (every Thursday at 10:30) and the market reacts within a few milliseconds.

Since it's not the report producer's job for investors' computers to rapidly parse it, they should have some fun in phrasing and presenting the information in different ways each time. If nothing else, it could lead to an explosion in NLP and content parsing technology ;-)
How many $/seconds do you think the homepage being down costs?
I thought Diamond's comparison of Europe and China was especially weak. He wrote it off as that China had an emperor, and thus a single point of failure. He didn't do enough to explain why Europe did not become an empire, or to explain why China's immense bureaucracy did not avoid such a single point of failure.
What would happen if that crucial number was published as a riddle instead?
Good catch - title updated accordingly
GIF has a certain mindshare that the other formats don't, crossing over into folks who are less deeply technical.

I've worked with a couple web designers and developers that said "Gif" to mean any image, as in "Move that gif up twenty pixels" when referring to a logo that's actually JPEG. I think it's a holdover from the days of BBSes and AOL and CompuServe, where everything really was a GIF. "Check out this new cheerleader Gif I got." It's not a far leap to imagine these users just out of habit and familiarity clicking GIF in the save-as dialog without really thinking about it. So GIF persists out of familiarity and inertia.
The biggest wake up call in history
Back up @ 19:46 GMT.
Since Amazon's retail operations are unprofitable, they're actually gaining money.
Power and the Internet (Schneier on Security)
It is a great tool. Be careful of the FB guidelines for hosting giveaways sweepstakes on their site. There are some rules about how you promote - do it wrong and you can lose your page. RC has a good blog post on the DOs and DONTs. Rafflecopter's been great though.
They are still rolling out features - would love to see the different winners displayed when there are multiple prizes. That part can be a little confusing.
By the converse opinion, if you actually set the privacy settings on Facebook, and Google for that matter, to your comfort level, your data is probably more secure than if you weren't using Facebook or Google etc.
Yes very cute but that only gets a $TAXRATE percentage refund on the wasted money. The rest is gone.
Wingdings is suddenly relevant again.
still down for me
The weight of the Surface RT and Surface are lighter than the Macbook Air 11 inch by .88 pounds and .38 pounds respectively. The Surface was engineered to equally distribute the weight so that it even feels lighter than it actually is.
... and it's down again @ 19:47GMT.
Yup. It's all about parsing FIX faster than the next dude.
I love it. This may very well be the first monetization attempt I can tolerate from Facebook: it's (finally) a win-win scenario for all parties involved, and it makes a superb use of both the social graph and the fact that nowadays every aunt, uncle and nephew have an account on Facebook. Brilliant.

Looking forward to try it here in Canada.
The title was truncated to fit in the allotted HN title field (80 characters). I agree it could be re-written for further clarity though.
Still down for me in US-East at 19:49 GMT
China's GitHub Censorship Dilemma
It looks like this is just a prepaid credit card with dedicated balances for each merchant. While I'm sure Facebook has buy-in from the merchants (as they are using their logo and other brand marks), in theory Facebook could offer gift cards for arbitrary merchants. At POS Facebook just uses the merchant identifier to determine which balance to approve funds and subtract from -- aside from that, it works like a normal prepaid credit card.
Housing booms or busts don't last long and people often fail to realize the transition from one to the other

Irrelevant. Whether boom or bust, people still look for housing, especially apartments. He could expand the offering to cover more than just university student housing. For example, I just bought a house in August 2012 (during a down market), and it would have been useful to have a snapshot of the neighborhood (how many grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants within 1 mile, crime, school ratings, etc). I might have paid $20 for a one off report with all this data. He could sell these reports directly to consumers (like carfax does for cars), or sell them to agents (like eBay has on car listings).
I know very little about finance, so treat this as a genuine question: what would be wrong with preventing people from buying or selling in such a tiny window? What would be the downside?
Cats on Vine: Vinecats
Why would trade relevant data be released while trading is open?

Seems like it could screw tons of people with open orders who can't react within seconds of new information.
Interesting. Never thought I'd see that.

Does anyone have statistics for Amazon homepage uptime? I don't remember the last time I heard about Amazon being down.

And an hour after I read Patrick's (patio11) article on the Rails vulnerabilities. It's a scary day indeed.
How a man's dance moves can not only attract a lover but also ward off rivals
Is this seriously true?? (If so, where do they make their money?)
Duolingo’s Data-Driven Approach to Education
This stuff particularly applies to machinery: the horror stories about people getting hair and clothing caught in machinery or looking away for a second when using a bandsaw are always a reminder to be careful no matter how many times you've used the machine before.
Do you have sources for this? My impression is that cocaine is significantly more addictive than caffeine, which seems like a very large negative. This page (which I believe is meant to be sympathetic to legalization) seems to imply cocaine is 'worse' on every metric: http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/28
Jason raises a good point. The stresses of startups often go unmentioned, or certainly minimized, in the myth-of-the -heroic-founder out startup narratives become after the fact of a success. Failure and hardship are rites of passage, right?

But the collateral damage is real. Going out on a limb financially is celebrated but most stories don't end with a win - just the ones we tell. Most startups fail and a lot of these risk takers we celebrate end up with financial strains for years to come, busted relationships or broken marriages. Anything can derail the startup process. Experienced entrepreneurs are acutely aware of this and if the end comes when you're out on that limb it can be devastating.

I am sure there are many more suicides and countless lives broken that we just don't hear about because they never achieved prominence or success. It's worth pausing a moment to think about that.

To the criticism of Jason's post. He has his haters for whatever reasons, though I find them to be highly unfair - I think it's clear that he genuinely loves startups and will do whatever he can to help the ecosystem succeed. I've met him twice and he's been nothing but generous. I think it's wrong to accuse him of using this for traffic. It's an important point he's making, and he's right nobody was talking about it in this case, for some reason.
Zero, because people who want to buy from Amazon will just try again in a few minutes/hours when it is back up.
I think you're missing the point, that perhaps we need to examine the culture we're creating. The benefit of discussing the matter is that we may be able to prevent future tragedies from occurring if we find thing we can do differently to relieve the pressure of being a founder.
I am a little skeptical of this idea. We should spend no money fighting one threat until all greater threats (as measure by deaths/year) have been eliminated? I think rather we should spend money proportionally.

And I do not think that we should completely ignore the fears of irrational people. If our citizens are unhappy because they fear something, it is worth some expense to set them at ease. Though perhaps a careful placebo would be most fitting
5 Rookie Mistakes Not to Make When Publishing Your App
Hell, they even release it in JSON: http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/wngsr.json
Even if that is true, it doesn't change the fact that when the person's own family and friends are not discussing this matter, it doesn't behoove a stranger (more or less) blogging about it. It just strikes me as being in bad taste.
In some asset classes (e.g. equities) the exchanges and dealers have built their own proprietary protocols to reduce the excess bytes.
Unfortunately changing the URL from http://www.amazon.com/?down=yes to http://www.amazon.com/?down=no does not appear to fix the problem.
At work, we use Atlassian's Crucible. It's ok, although it tends to get confused on moderately "interesting" git repositories. That said, you can go quite far just printing out the code and writing comments with a pen.

We do high-security work, so code reviews are a standard part of the development process.
Pirates beware: Kim Dotcom's Mega isn't the safe haven he says it is
Looks great Nathan! Can't wait to try it out.
I am quite sure that the concept of "polite conversation" is not american or puritan-centric.

In my experience, the people using the f-word in business interactions are the same people trying to con me. Maybe this is because several of my early experiences correlated this behavior with people trying to get me to join Ponzi schemes (these 'businesses' often target college-age people in the US).
Button design can affect conversion rates, and that's roughly about it. I only got one and I use many of those other brands regularly.
A good headline is pretty much 'link bait' by definition. If a feature writer mistakenly wrote a terrible headline like yours, I would expect the newspaper editor to fix it before going to press.
As another example of Font-Awesome in production: I've incorporated Font-Awesome very heavily on my own blog, and it works very well: http://minimaxir.com
The initial code for Rubygems was written at Rubyconf '06, if I remember correctly. The Ruby world was very, very different back then. Same with Rails, originally released in '05.

My point is that it's 'taken so long' because all this code is stuff that was written in a totally different time and place. And then was built on top of, after years and years and years.

Now that it _is_ being examined, that's why you see some many advisories. This is a good thing, not a bad one! It's all being looked through and taken care of.
Well, depending on who is responsible for deciding when the data is released, you may have answered your own question.
1. In the coming release we'll be storing documents on disk via protocol buffers, which, unlike BSON has an extremely low overhead on fields. A few releases after that we'll be able to do much better via compression of attribute name information (though this feature isn't specced yet).

2. No ETA yet, but we're about to publish an updated, better document, better architected client-driver to server API spec, so we'll be seeing many more drivers soon.
Not as long as they are presenting it in JSON format.

http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/wngsr.json
Mega API Python wrapper
The system in Silicon Valley pretty much forces startup founders to make this all or nothing approach - at least for the first several years of a startup's life - it is virtually impossible to compete without doing so (and yes there are rare exceptions).

The same VCs that laud founders also push them to these extremes while claiming to support balance. I know few founders who haven't experienced that.
Hah, we're losing $3 a minute from lost sales while they're down - the travesty!
I think the attitude of your comment is what he is dissenting against. Why should we ignore the fact that prominent people in our community have committed suicide? Why should people who bring it up have to deal with anger?

My take on this blog entry is that the writer wants constructive dialogue. I'm personally fine with that. Suicide is a touchy subject and I understand some people aren't comfortable discussing it. But I think your accusations against the author are unreasonable.
http://kottke.org/13/01/amazon-is-a-charity-run-by-the-inves...
I will take a stab. Using these numbers: http://www.statista.com/statistics/197099/quarterly-revenue-...

61.1 Billion dollars (yearly revenue) / 31556926 seconds = 1936.18 dollars/second
Back when I worked for them (many years ago) I was told about $100,000 in lost orders per minute.
personal != marketing

P(biased|personal) -> 1
Private BitBucket repository names are discoverable - WONTFIX
It's actually surprising it isn't down more often—internally, everyone has write access to prod and the rule is that if you deploy something to prod you need to be able to roll it back.* Apparently, though, someone has failed on the second item.

* Or so I was told in a job interview with the big A a few years back.
A modified Pareto/NBD approach for predicting customer lifetime value [pdf]
I think it makes a good point on how much time people spend on certain activities.

Domestic cleaning/yardwork and Commute times are non-trivial portions of our life you get a hearty time benefit by eliminating/paying to eliminate.
I was looking at fatalities per miles traveled (given that is the measure of how much we use cars). It seems the trend line was dropping pretty nicely before the 70's, so I am not sure how much all the safety requirements have actually changed things. Seat belts and air bags might account for the delta from the 70's, but I am not sure it isn't the same reasons we see a reduction from the 30s. Looking at what happened after a change is good, but it needs to be in the context of what was happening before.

> What remains notable about the gun debate in the US, is that we're not arguing about "what to do" so much as arguing about whether to study the problem.

You must be watching some other debate, I consider new legislation being introduced "what to do".
Gambia: kleurrijke Afrikaanse cultuur
When a prominent member of the startup community commits suicide I think it is clearly in the public interest for the leading media voices in the startup community to discuss how this is impacted by the culture o that startup community. I am afraid I'm not understanding the beef here.
Can someone explain what this means in practice. As in how much money did these people make or stand to make because of being 400ms early?
You have to realize the distinction between trading and investing. Investing is putting money into something in the belief that over the long term, it will likely return enough money to be worth the opportunity cost and the risks involved. Trading is seeing a price difference between here and there (in 4 dimensional coordinates) and making money by moving the goods.

The stock market was created for investors, who by investing grow the economy as a whole, but it has been taken over by traders, who are helpful for greasing the wheels of the exchange but ultimately not necessary in anything like today's numbers. It would seem by competition for a commodity service they should start killing each other off but so far it seems there are still enough amateurs in the game to keep them well-fed.

So in short, make sure what you are doing is investing and not trading. Investing still pays off. Trading is like jumping into a tank full of robotic sharks.
It is a tongue-in-cheek reference to widespread perceptions about Rails developers' hardware of choice.
Is there a name for the fallacy of ignoring marginal effects at the tail end of a probability distribution? I see it here incredibly frequently.

There will almost certainly be some number of people who would have stopped by Amazon right now and made some impulse purchases. At the scale Amazon operates, the increase in inconvenience to push off the marginal purchase as a function of inconvenience is almost certainly miniscule (See frequent reports on how milliseconds of page load time affect the likelihood of purchase)
They are not unprofitable, they are just quite slim http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/01/29/amazon-earnings-stron... (It's profit margin on a product is 0.5%).
Tornado web server internals
I work remotely as a programmer / designer, it's the best job I've had, and I'm far more productive than I've ever been, with a lost less time spent.

I'm sure collaborating in person is necessary for some people, but if you're working with people who can visualize what you're talking about with words it seems pretty great to me.

Not everyone is suited for working remotely, but for those who are, I think it suits us very well.
Riak is NOT operations-oriented. It's nearly impossible to manage operationally without dedicated staff at scale and the tools to introspect and analyze and deal with failures aren't robust enough yet.

I know they're just trying to contrast Riak and Cassandra with Couch and Mongo, and that Riak is designed to shard easily without the developer having to think about it.

That philosophy actually is "developer-oriented" in that it SEEMS like an operational savings because it was designed by developers.
If you knew this was coming, why didn't you close your orders?
Backup for US EAST at 14:58
I believe Patrick is referring to this Bitcoin exchange being hacked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5043122 .
He didn't say it was limited to Macs. He gave it as a random example of what could happen.
Oh no. I definitely don't mean to imply that corruption was involved here.
Hmmmm...hint of conspiracy theory; xenophobia; out of context quotes from law; no idea how fair use actually works; extreme hyperbole; general cluelessness.

In other words, a typical Mike Masnick piece. I do not understand why anyone takes Techdirt seriously.
That would be pretty accurate, according to ANAM[1]. It's almost never due to equipment failure.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Accidents-North-American-Mountaineerin...
Been a while since I've seen the amazon homepage down. Wow.

I know from the e-commerce side, when walmart.com went down last year we saw a traffic increase (enough to actually link to to the outage for walmart). I wonder if it'll happen here.
It doesn't appear that this is the case. This is more like a multi-gift-card (not sure of any technical term for it) than a pre-paid credit card. From all I can see, you can't use it to make purchases at any merchants other than the ones which have balances on the card. This is much like the Verizon Visa Gift Card that was being given out when you would sign up for certain FIOS services. It was a Visa credit card, except it was not able to be used at any Visa accepting merchant, but only Verizon approved merchants. Hardly a normal pre-paid credit card.
Brain function is not the only variable at play here. Software and culture change constantly.
That's incredibly sad. There's more to life, but this brainwashing of startup founders seems to be stripping more lives than it enriches.
This seems to be working for me: http://www.amazon.com/?is_it_jeff=yes
Today's deals works fine
http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27
Hessian – A brand for sale
I think by now it is obvious that issue is not about privacy anymore rather how these gigantic companies are "using" your data to their advantage, and not really yours!
Thank you :), again it is not really serious gripe as regular installer does the job just fine, but I tend to install all apps like that and this helps.

+1 for sure for this one

btw, when I was installing it, I tried that even before checking on homepage :)
Some have suggested to charge a percentage of a cent on all these requests rather than banning or limiting the rate of transactions. Seems reasonable to me.
> ping ec2.amazonaws.com
Agreed, though Jason (and many others) reiterate that being a founder is inherently "imbalanced", at least during the early days of running a startup. The idea of living a balanced life is not a priority in entrepreneur culture (perhaps just the opposite, with all-night hackathons etc). It would be great to see a new focus on "life-balance" that goes beyond 'work productivity' blog posts to look at emotional/mental health issues. Personally I find planning time to go out with friends and exercise helps a lot (I began running last year, also hiked the tallest peak in the area 4 times).
>...my theory is as well supported as the claim in this post.

Are you familiar with Nanex beyond this article?
Haha - yeah, they still could: they could change the schema weekly.
Volume, volume, volume!