skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no question that this new service will be a huge problem for Zencoder. However, I'd argue that many companies build on top of competitors and survive. For example, in the cellular world, we get companies like StraightTalk and Simple Mobile who are doing nothing other than reselling service from one of the major carrier, but are often selling for cheaper. With AWS itself, Engine Yard resells instances on top of EC2.

Zencoder's pricing has been high to say the least. For example, for a Medium High-CPU instance (about 2x 2.5GHz processors) I should be able to encode video faster than real time (encoding a minute of video should take under a minute). At $0.165/hour, that's $0.003/minute. Zencoder is charging 10x that amount for many people (Zencoder charges 2-5 cents per minute depending on whether you commit to a large package of minutes or not). Plus, Zencoder can possibly combine spot instances and reserved instances to get better. Now, that's not to say I haven't been a happy Zencoder customer - for the volume of video that my company does, it wouldn't pay for us to run a server ourselves. Zencoder is immensely cheaper than rolling our own solution. However, it seems like it's also a place where another company could come in and disrupt Zencoder a bit. Even if you weren't Amazon, if you built up enough of a customer base, you could likely have undercut Zencoder's rates.

I think one thing to note is that companies don't offer the lowest price they can. In fact, in an oligopolistic market like this, economics suggests that the price (if services were undifferentiated) would drop to the Nash equilibrium. Looking at Amazon's pricing, it seems clear that they want to provide a good value proposition compared to Zencoder, but they're still charging nearly $1/hr which certainly allows competitors to match that price on EC2 hardware and shows that Amazon isn't offering the bottom of the barrel price.

It's never fun to compete with your infrastructure provider (or any well-run company like Amazon even if you aren't relying on them). However, we see these things happen and companies on both sides survive.
Whenever a project comes along thats as useful and open as this I feel compelled to donate. These guys do such a good job. Keep it up!
Cloudster - the fastest way to provision your AWS stack
Apple And Samsung Earn 98% Of The Profits In The Smartphone Market
* SublimeBlockCursor works for me.

* Set `"vintage_start_in_command_mode": false` in the vintage preferences.

* You can remove the autocomplete on '.', just look through whatever plugins settings or bindings.

Also, make sure you get the plugin VintageEx.
I love that that originated with a Ren & Stimpy skit. Regardless, yes, that sounds like what I mean. Is there not a more technical term for it? (I haven't tried searching journals for "yak shaving," but I'm doubting that will be a highly used term.)

Edit: I see originated isn't right. Still, amusingly tied to Ren & Stimpy.
I remember the Brownstone residence I stayed at was on a block which had some street names. I found that unusual, especially since nobody knows the names of the streets anyway.
Backbone like spine has moved to support the "asynchronous UI" in its models by default. The general philosophy is that all storage should seem local, and the interface should wait as little as possible with data being synced in the background (given the appearance of success to the user). However this is not always possible, and needs to be worked around, as some people have covered (validation for uniqueness in a DB). But it was generally accepted as a sensible default stance. To read about it from the Spine author checkout his blog and presentation.

http://alexmaccaw.com/posts/async_ui
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Asynchronous-UI
It's a fair point, and I agree we need to find a place for other academic pursuits as well. I think the problem is we have been giving students the impression that any degree is worth getting, and that simply isn't true. A bachelors in English from a liberal arts school is worth nothing. Now if you want to extend that and do post-grad work, then you are actually making an effort to persue a career in a field (probably academia). But too many just do the undergrad and then expect a job.
This Post is Not About the 128GB iPad 4
Or even Microsoft's Azure. They officially announced their entrance into the encoding game about a week ago.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/media/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/01/22/announcing...
Google Announces Pwnium 3 competition with $3 million in Rewards
Because they have gigantic, low-cost datacenters. They just don't need you. What they need is to use up the extra capacity on the machines they already have.
we have to abide nature's law in this also "Too Much of Anything Can Be A Bad Thing" Use it wise
I never would have guessed it before they released their Simple Workflow Service. Once I saw that, though, game on.
Are there any formulas that relate the complexity of the expected output with the time it takes the genetic algorithm to find a solution? I'm guessing it starts taking years after not too much difficulty.
That is absolutely insane. Why do they still have clients if this is how they are treated?
ChallengePost:Platform for technology competitions
Welcome to markets & capitalism.
Why can't you just use the 10.7 built-in VPN software?
encloudit.com just have a dummy wordpress site on it.
mostly fair comparison, but Android should come off better, at least with recent version of the OS and the SDK
5 Cars You Can Buy (Overseas) For the Cost of a Toyota Corolla in Singapore
The article casts a wide net for what defines an ambivert:

Ambiverts [...] are people who are neither extremely introverted nor extremely extroverted.

What can we really say about this third group if we are including everyone who is not an extreme example of the other two?
I think the use of the word printf makes which ones we're discussing pretty clear.

I'm getting up there too. And I know lots of older programmers with very bad habits. Many who have also working on household names. Age+popularity != skill/quality.

Doing that in anything but interpreted and micro applications seems like a massive waste of time and effort(both placing the printfs, recompiling, removing them recompiling.

We've all done it. It doesn't mean its a good way to do it.

And like I said above it can introduce bugs into your code doing so. I remember one case where a printf for debugging changed the memory in such a way as to make an uninitialized variable work. After testing when the printfs were removed the application would stop working.

Introducing code into your code base with the intention of removing it later when there is an easy way to not do so is asking for trouble.
I don't look at it as working for the man. Nor would I call running a business fun, necessarily. I'm doing this now because I'm genuinely interested in building up a business. The reality is that even if I went and got a job and started making payments, I'd have to remain employed for decades to even make a dent.

For me, I'd rather struggle a bit knowing that at the very least I'm doing something worth doing and not just working to work. It seems like a huge waste of life (especially when there's little value in what I'm paying off – if it were the other way around, my attitude would be completely different).
Video encoding tends to rely heavily on previous frames so it's not trivial to split a video into small chunks for encoding and still get a good result.
I don't go out of my way to intimidate men. It's a side effect.

It's also an example of how short =! disrespected, as OP was implying.
Nice job! It's great to see what we can do using Python
please
I actually use "autosave" as a temporary clipboard. When I need to keep something over multiple days but don't need it forever (i.e. big, hairy command strings) then I just open a new tab and paste it in. That way I can continue to copy/paste the command whenever I need it and as long as I don't close that tab I'm good to go. :)
Wow, this is really clever! At first I was thinking, "what is this? Why is there a story?" ...but if you stick with it it's very, very good. You're a very gifted illustrator and storyteller. I actually thought you borrowed the illustrations from a storybook. If things don't work out with the app you may have a future as a children's author. In fact, maybe you could publish a book version of this as a companion to the app?

I wonder if the entire experience would be better if the entire UI for the walkthrough at the beginning was the storybook without the shelf(?) and the black background, then after the story is at the end make the "last page" a fullscreen app?

The dark colors and the image mirroring was distracting and it isn't clear what its purpose is until the screen rotates, which is a very cool effect. I wonder if there's a way to achieve the same effect without rotating the screen though.

That said, an app for building habits is something I've thought about before, and I think your execution and creativity is way better than anything I would've imagined. Gamification feels like a needed component, but I wouldn't have thought of this. It almost feels like Legend of Zelda for self improvement!
This needs more upvotes so it remains visible to all the people in at the top of the discussion who think Zencoder lives and dies on price alone.
Change meaning of stress, why stress, what is stress?

Can't you just sit there at work, drink your tea, enjoy the view outside the window, the birds, concrete, clouds and noise. Listen how people speak, phones ring, listen to this music, composition of life.

Problem? Turn around and walk away. If problem is not solved by then, then try different strategy. Experiment. Failures are essential to success.

More of life will not help you get away from life.

Also, I did not considered one important factor, you enjoy stress and have opinion that it is must be rid off. >:D
The Online Marketing Arms Race
Have you looked at CodeCollaborator? If both organizations used it, each team could review the other's code. And you can restrict access so that if either organization used the tool more thoroughly, the other team sees only what they have access to. It's worked great for our team. It's fairly expensive, but it's worth it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnNhzgcWTk
Agreed.

Equivalent of spray-painting over a billboard.
"Writers don't write because they can write. They write because they can't not write."

This certainly describes my relationship with programming.
There's no good ones. Navicat is probably the best but it's a very far cry from Sequel Pro, and very poor value IMO.

Basically the best hope is for the Sequel Pro guys to support PostgreSQL, which they have stated they intend to do.
Cloud compute instances: it's not always about the horsepower
That sort of lint is easily done in Python, in fact I have it integrated in my editor.

More interesting static checking is not, however, doable in either C++ or Java. Hence why I find that the current checks are not worth having a stupid and annoying type system.
I love python but I'm not convinced that a language with significant whitespace is ideal for the web where formatting is too easily lost.
This is fabulous to see, very excited to download and give it a go. They're very responsive to questions, comments, bug reports, and are an all around great group of guys.
I've had a tab in magic-in-progress for about an hour now :(
Here’s the best part, however. The distribution of introverts and extroverts in the population looks eerily like the results Grant found plotting revenue across his 1-to-7 scale. Some of us are heavy introverts. Some of us are stalwart extroverts. But the vast majority of us are ambiverts.

Surely these results could be explained by saying that we are better at selling to people who are like us then?

Assuming there are few extroverts or introverts but lots of ambiverts in a population of sales people and the same distribution is found in the people being sold to. If we are better at selling to people similar to ourselves then the ambiverts chosen for the experiment will perform well in a wider segment of the population and hence make more sales.
nice job. thanks for the post
Considering that Michelle Bachmann is in Congress, In think his whole "FB pics kill your career" thing is overstated.
pgAdmin? I don't know, besides a very silly bug in the object's privileges tab, it works perfectly fine for me. Well, that and the fact that somehow they use a mixture of Windows/Mac keyboard shortcuts in the SQL editor.
The cost and time of pushing them out over the public internet rather than as internal network traffic, for one.
http://www.feed-alert.com

Launched it today! Mostly, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could finish a side project. Even if it was just a small one.
>There are tons of other blogs out there (The Art of Ass Kicking, etc.), but I generally find the other options to be too 'commercialized' for my liking, and they're filled with those really short, hyped up kinda articles.

yeah, the same here. I usually prefer authors who write for the sake of writing: the content is more "pure".

I second your recommendation on Sebastian's site. I'd add:

- Skinner Layne http://skinnerlayne.com/blog/
- Games and Strategy http://gamesnstrategy.blogspot.com/ (about strategy, lifehacks, history etc)
- The Rationalist Conspiracy http://rationalconspiracy.com/ (For rationality stuff)
Request for Feedback on Business Idea (frostedblooms.com)
Hi...

I would really appreciate your feedback on a business idea that I have... About a two years ago I got drawn into shows like cake boss, dc cupcakes ...As a result, I took an interest in cake decorating... This is a great fit for me because I like the artistic/creative aspect of it... For quite some time I have treated this as a hobby until I had the following idea ...

What if I created an edible gift option that replaced traditional flowers and fruit baskets found at edible arrangements with ...
1. cake pops that look like actual floral arrangements
2. cupcakes iced and arranged in flower pots to look like flower arrangements
3 cookie pops that look like flower arrangemets

Visit the following link to see images - www.frostedblooms.com
Would it have helped to use, for example, 0.0625 or 0.125 as the scaling factor, instead of 0.1?
Everyone is anonymous with a small "a".

FTFY: I guess some people who act (regardless of affiliation) have good intentions but the vast majority don't.
https://lebenslauf.com/technology
Danger! Danger!

http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner-Relatio...
This shouldn't be too big of a surprise. Most academic research about hedge funds show that the majority of them don't outperform the market. When they do, it appears to be because of greater exposure to particular risk factors rather than manager skill (in investing, greater risk usually means greater potential for reward). When you consider the extra costs of investing in a hedge fund over investing in the market, most hedge fund investors are getting a bad deal -- they are paying more, but getting market returns.

One source that looked at 12,980 hedge funds with $1.8 trillion in management: http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/tbali/BaliBrownCaglayanJFE201...
as outragious as it sounds , banks can bet against their own clients , in fact , that's how they make most of their money, they have the duty to protect shareholders interests , and respect a few laws but that's it.

If they do not guarantee any return on whatever investment they sell then they are under no obligation to look for their clients best interests.

It happened during the subprime mortgage crisis where banks would sell derivatives to their clients and short the same clients because they knew the products were bad. And it is totally legal.

So who is to blame ? the banks ? or the elected representatives that made these things legal ? in the end the people is , for electing people that serves bank interests.
I hope you mean something like board games or card games or word games, and not FB spam games.
i have personal limit for maximum 3 active projects at the same time:

- work: regular 8hour work to earn money

- workdays side project: i do this before and after the regular work (1-4 hours per day), on workdays only. (usually a "may get rich" project)

- weekend side project: on sat and sun, only. (usually a fun/charity project)

the rules are strict:

no work on projects not scheduled on that day.

not even think about the other projects.

no more than the three active projects. if a project wants to start it has to wait until the active finishes or the active must be cancelled (not suspended).

thees few rules allow me to have side projects and enough time to complete each. and guarantees that only the best projects get the spare resource: me.
It seems the author was looking at the Facebook group the wrong way. I'm sure most people signed up to it to get questions answered and discover who their roommate was going to be. He seems disappointed that the people he talked to on it didn't become his friends. The group served it's purpose - to make friends you converse with people in person when you get to college. The author seems to have unrealistic expectations of social media.
As someone involved in enterprise purchasing occasionally, all of this is true. Particularly notable is the timeframe and the random external events killing the sale.

If you're going to sell to enterprise, be OK with 2 year sales cycles and ensure your salesperson is running lots of leads.
You can curate your FB sharing lists to handle this, just like in real life.
More to the point - someone actually called GS and asked to do this deal (reverse inquiry). So to label this as "scam" borders between disingenuous and libelous.
> but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service?

Anyone who has used their instant streaming service. They have a boatload of video to transcode to zillions of devices. The fact that they would take that in-house was not a particularly big leap.
HN posters supported GS because the article is ridiculous, not because GS is a well beloved institution. It showed no evidence of a scam, in fact no evidence of wrong-doing by GS, and the correction posted to the article make it sound like the journalist had no idea what was done and just declared a scam because the public loves shady banking stories.
I'd expect anything that allows them to sell more instances without having to increase cost of sales. They have unique edge in being able to see what types of services would do well under this model, including live competitive analysis on the instances they currently run.
Google Glass patent applications: bone conduction, laser-projected keyboard
I have always been confused by this, as well. IANAL, but the reasoning seems to be based in the need of educators to reduce disruption and offensiveness, at the cost of protected speech. This wikipedia article [1] does a good job laying out the history of opinions on the subject.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_speech_(First_Amendment)
The uphill battle of libraries trying to deal with the technicalities of copyright law and its whimsical interpretation by the courts (format-shifting, etc.) is a minor battle, I think.

The real uphill battle is convincing content creators and distributors to focus on new and interesting ways to persuade people to pay for content, rather than trying to mandate that everyone pay for the content and mandating punishment for those who don't and are caught.
On the peoplemov.in site I did not see the word "legal" anywhere? Did I miss it?
Also, add a favicon... easily overlooked, but very helpful to have.
How Boeing's Dreamliner was Grounded
Other than amusement value, wouldn't any TODO app work better?
How exactly is this a scam ?

These are very generic products, and many investment banks issued dollops of them (especially tied to Apple) in the past few years.

Basically, they look like bonds that pay a higher-than-average coupon, the catch being that if the equity the note is tied to declines in value, you lose part of your capital. Company treasurers tend to like those because of the high headline return rate (i.e. assuming the underlying equity doesn't tank).

Now, the banks do not take the reverse position. They hedge it (probably not perfectly, but very closely) using a combination of cash deposits and equity options (which is really what these products are about). There is little to no trading PnL on these things. They make money by selling the note $10 when its intrinsic value is $9.50.
Yes, person who doesn't look at Facebook, please tell us what Facebook looked like 4 years ago. That is incredibly relevant.
Tundra ROM: Enable Android App Multi-Windowing On Galaxy Note 10.1
I assumed, with the wooden border, it was for web only - as all textures of this sort fail pretty badly in anything less than a professional print job, on good paper.

However the export options are PDF and Website, so print is probably one of the goals.
I do a similar thing with Trello.com, in fact the whole house hold now uses it (mostly through the mobile app) to manage shopping lists (supermarket/garden/farmers market), upcoming 'events', House Jobs, House Projects (which can evolve into their own boards).
It's not pretty, but nothing comes anywhere close to the functionality of PgAdmin. I think it supports nearly every feature of the database, which is impressive.
How is formatting "easily lost" merely by virtue of being used as a web scripting language? There's nothing that mangles whitespace of anything delivered over HTTP. Yes, if you include it directly in HTML for display without any kind of escaping, the whitespace will be collapsed. But if you'll notice, JavaScript is the current web scripting language, and it has significant whitespace (line endings). So it's not like having significant whitespace makes it unsuitable for the web.
Get Your Redis On on Windows
A simple email hack that will save you a lot of pain during review season
10gen Promotes Max Schireson to CEO
That’s something I’d like to see :)
In reading pg's essay, I find it curious that he doesn't mention Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punnish[1], which describes how schools and prisons did in fact have common historical origins.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
Great point. I cringe when I'm on some site and content gets posted that the site owners take issue with and remove, when in reality there was actually nothing wrong with the content -- it just didn't fit the preconceived notions of what the owners had intended. "This is not how the site is supposed to be used, therefore this content is bad and must be summarily removed" seems to be the thinking; it's as if they're scared, but of what I don't know.

And yes, it's very refreshing to see GitHub allow this. Thinking about it further, ticketing systems could see many more uses in the real world, and it makes me wonder if this is where we're headed? Whether it be parents keeping track of their kids' chores, homework, and other activities, or perhaps it's a neighborhood that uses it to help foster a community-driven cleanup and improvement system, or maybe even a city taking bug reports for anything and everything: "Street light out on 5th street", "Leaky hydrant in Centennial Plaza", or even bug reports about the city's provided websites and services in general.
> that can be made more cost effective in bulk

I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.
Пипец.
Which is AWESOME. After years of fighting crappy PDF generators, I found wkhtmltopdf and am very very happy!
Not so much clashes, just documentation and examples tend to use often radically different coding styles.
No. If you have a block of shares, there are much better ways to get rid of them. These deals typically take a long time to structure, market and initiate.

Besides, you really don't need a lot of shares to hedge this type of product. You need options that are typically (at least initially) deep-ish out of the money and so have little delta.
Check out http://transloadit.com