skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the netflix numbers are actually pretty easy. At $8/months, it's ~$96/year ... which is close enough to $100 to make for easy math.

Quick and dirty numbers (on just the domestic streaming).

At 30M subs, run rate revenue is approximately $3B. They had about $2B in content commitments. Delivery costs (i.e. bandwidth) runs about 20% of revenue. So on their $3B, $600M goes to delivery, $2B goes to content, and they have $400M-ish in profits.

NFLX is difficult to value because it's growing so fast and the content cost is a moving target. If NFLX can keep content costs around $2B, then every incremental customer is 80% profit. Every 1M subs they add, is $100M in revenue and $80M in profit (capitalize that at 10x and you're adding $800M in valuation ... keep in mind they added 2M domestic subs in the last 3 months). Some people argue that content providers will demand higher fees as NFLX increases subscribers. I'm not convinced. They walked away from Starz and they cut a deal with Disney that doesn't look any more expensive than what they were paying previously. And they're also building a library of owned content.

It's definitely one of the most interesting stories to watch.
I must disagree, in light of ChuckMcM's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5592391). Though saying "timing is everything" may belittle the efforts of the founders who succeeded, saying "execution is everything" gives the successful founders too much credit, and the researchers, the also-rans, and the market too little.
People farm reviews all the time unfortunately. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=googl...

That is just the tip of the iceberg.
CISPA Anyone? Exposing Pirates at The U.S. Government
> a new big "safe" vehicle

> doing about 40

> She was killed instantly, one of the boys is paralyzed from the neck down

that's what happens when you don't fasten your seatbelts. or your passengers don't fasten their seatbelts and kill you on their way to the windshield.
Only to other Bitcoin transactions.
Want To Raise A Million Bucks? Here’s What You’ll Need
The same reasons [0] are why I have a Chromebook. CrOS is limited, sure, but the limits make the thing bloody near invincible (and amazingly productive).

[0] Hangouts are luckily the VoIP of choice for most I work with
If you couldn't, we'd all be wearing contacts.

I seriously doubt the accuracy of that judgment.

Likewise with the rest of the post. 'smug' and 'lazy' are nice, quick labels but none of it actually serves to differentiate the Segway from any other product. (I mean, 'started off extremely expensive with the goal of getting cheaper with volume'? Really?) The Segway just didn't fit a niche. There was no reason to buy one, so they stayed rare and weird. Which is also why they remain fairly popular as a tourist attraction in quite a few places.

The idea that Segways exude a 'douchebag' field (along with an irrational hatred of mall cops) seems to be either highly regional or simply confined to the Internet. Just based on my own anecdotal experience, of course ;)
Read this as "terrible" the first time and was confused. Nice effect.
The figures don't include pirating. If HBO had been smart enough to launch and promote HBO GO as a stand-alone service, pirating would be lower and streaming/revenue/official viewership would be higher.
It's very simple really. It's a grid of point masses with constraints between them (the lines you see) that says to keep the points at a constant distance from each other. Think of the constraints as springs that follow Hooks law[1], only infinitely stiff. You iterate through all the constraints and move the two points of each constraint apart if they are too close, or closer if they are too far apart. You need some basic linear algebra for the distance and direction calculations. It's common to use verlet integration to actually move the points because it's so easy do solve the constraints with it. Add some gravity and it looks very convincing.

To tear the "cloth", all you need to do is to remove those particular constraints from the list.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke%27s_law
this is a great experiment.
A photo of a fat mall cop on a Segway wearing Glass could be the kiss of death.
Probably something similar to this: http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/tutorials/implementation/simulat...
Crowd-Funding Geary, FOSS Linux Email Client
"What designers need more than anything is an environment where it’s safe to try things out."

Yep, except when you're a consultant/contractor/freelance. You can certainly spend the time, just don't expect to be compensated for it.

And therein lies the rub -- anyone willing to allow a designer to work in such a manner cares about design, and quite often isn't interested in outsourcing that to the lone-wolf. They may do that with a firm, or have their own in-house talent, but rare is the situation where a client is willing to accommodate perpetual iteration from a contractor while burning hours.
Slides from the Conference where he won the prize:
https://cga-download.hmdc.harvard.edu/publish_web/Annual_Spr...

Didn't see a link to a published thesis.
You can achieve most of this with Euler integration to update the positions and velocities of the points—as well as Hooke's law to simulate the connections as a grid of tiny little springs.

I've used similar algorithms in a graph layout library of mine: http://getspringy.com/
>I think people waste a lot of time giving types to APIs and obscure the intention of the code

What do you mean? Adding types to the surface area (arguments and return types) removes a lot of friction.

I'm using jQuery for a couple of years. I still have to look at its docs almost every day I use it. Today, I had to check if the "selector" argument of "children()" is optional (spoiler: it is).

Also, having the type annotations there makes the intention so much clearer. The name and the type of the argument is usually all you need to figure out what it does.

I really like that about Dart.
If you're wondering, I stumbled upon that text file while reading the official company response to the recent hack here: http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/

I was interested in setting up a Linode account but I think it's best to wait for some more information at this point. Thoughts?
Microsoft responds to The Hindu’s story on AICTE deal
HBO would lose subscribers immediately as operators no longer actively replace subscribers for them as others churn out.

But that's going to happen -- and is happening -- anyway.

"no, we shouldn't throw away $10+bn/year to give Bob his internet subscription while we're in the midst of a death battle for the future of digital entertainment distribution".

"What? A phone that plays music?! Are you crazy? Do you realize how much money iPods brought to this company last year?"
Of course. I wish I could use Ioke, but JVM/CLR just aren't in the cards for me for the foreseeable. On the subject of derivatives, I think Oia is at a sweet-spot, being JS-hosted at ~1-2kSLoC (1/5th-1/10th that of Io): https://github.com/stevedekorte/oia
"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else."

I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes.

His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.
I find the most helpful model to be a (probably multidimensional) spectrum containing everyone. Most people are in the neurotypical part of the spectrum, some are like your son, some lie in between, and some are way off in the extreme parts. The borders are wide and fuzzy.

(This model sounds almost too obvious to state, but it prevents a bunch of irritating arguments about what discrete bucket to put someone it.)
Proposing mBTC
I didn't catch on to what you were doing at first. However if you look at qeorge's profile he actually has an 8.58 "avg" stat which is incredibly high and means that you must be right.
Car Dealership starts accepting bitcoins
The exact same argument may or may not be leveled against Glass. "I already have a phone, why would I spend $1500 on something that just does what my phone does? Is the guy wearing Glass so lazy he spent $1500 so he doesn't have to take out his phone to check Facebook?"

I was one of the people out there defending the Segway's absurd price point as a temporary condition since it seemed "obvious" that everyone would be riding around NYC on Segways in a few years. Segways would be incredibly useful in cities even today for getting around local neighborhoods, expanding the distance you can feasibly travel on a outing on foot. But you look dumb on them, they cause awkward interactions, you sit yourself on a tier above "normal people just walking around", and you are viewed as lazy relative to bikers. All of these aspects have clear analogs to Glass wearing. It makes no sense because people in cars do not look lazy relative to pedestrians. People are funny when it comes to self-image, regardless of utility.
And it's really bad when you look at a project after a 1 month break and have no idea what's going on. If I know I'm writing bad code, I leave a fun treasure map of comments. Jibberish to others, but takes me back to why I would write a function like that.
Tsarnaev may have a valid defense if he claims God ordered his action.
How come a police state is so attractive at the beginning?

I would like to believe that I would have the courage to challenge this curfew if it comes to my town.

I would like to believe that this was accepted this time because the curfew was unexpected. I hope that next time, the curfew is resisted.
I've been programming for a number of years, I still follow this mindset. I'll write out a function and then later realize I need to use a subset of it somewhere else, so I refactor it out to its own function. Or I'll realize I've now extended the same class twice, so I create a better abstraction. It's much easier to create well designed code when you actually see a need for something in the source and do it, instead of starting first with some fancy design pattern you saw someone else use on another project. I mostly focus on getting the small, granular stuff right the first time and keep an eye out for any larger problems being created in the code.
Content ownership is already small offices of attorneys and support staff. Most major IPs are actually owned by small production companies. These production companies are in turn generally wholly or partially owned by the major movie studios.

It's done this way for financial bookkeeping, legal liability, and tax structuring reasons. This type of setup is more popularly known as "Hollywood Accounting" and is the reason why a movie can make hundreds of millions but still yield a "loss." (The studio acts as a distributor and is payed a distribution fee; the IP owning company receives royalties; the production company that actually writes the checks for expenses gets its cut "last" after the income has been redirected to various other entities.)
Disagreed. This is a super cheap operation to test
Thoreau wrote "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." It's a shame so many entrepreneurs desperately seeking co-founders ignore the simple wisdom in this.
I did mention that two posts above. If Glass is just "cellphones, but on your face" I agree that it probably won't catch on. Of course, smartphones are already useful for a lot of things besides checking Facebook. There's a reason they were so popular among businessmen even before the iPhone pushed them into the mainstream.

The real question is whether or not 'the masses' (and especially teenagers) will pick up on the things, though. Smartphones followed in the cell phone's wake. So 'Facebook' might actually be a selling point, unless Facebook hatred picks up first (an extreme dislike for Facebook being yet another thing that essentially no one outside the techie-sphere shares).
Isn't part of the problem the Canadian content laws?
Less impressive is logic like this:
"Facebook obviously controls a large share of internet use, but the content it serves isn’t as rich, or bandwidth-heavy, as YouTube or Netflix. In theory, the richer media should ultimately translate into more revenue."

That makes no sense. Why would that be true? A gigabyte of Facebooking would be a SHITLOAD of Facebooking, seeing lots of different pages and ads, and providing loads of demographic data. A gigabyte of video is what, one hour-long show at max quality?
The problem is that it makes people more concerned about getting the types right than about giving people shortcuts.

The API designers end up creating a multitude of APIs to deal with different type parameters and so on, to get their "generics" right and so on.

It makes the APIs look like Java APIs more than they jQuery ones.

Part of the problem is that the designers really want to get the types of classes and so on right on their parameters and return types. The types go beyond the primitives.

I've been able to watch it unfold and it's rather painful. The result looks less like a scripting language API and more like a C# collection of libraries, for better or for worse.
This has bugged me too. But I've come to accept these as just over-sized tweets, which helps. I sort of see these as a thread-starter for a discussion here, rather than an article you'll google for 5 years later to show someone.
I don't think anyone at HBO believes they won't go to an internet subscription service, but I do believe they still think it is too soon to switch. They have to pick the point correctly or have some bad quarterly earning reports.
This feels like a puff piece, I am worse off for having read it.....
And now gearbox will execute on their ideas because th kick starter campaigns provided social proof?
I'm sure Netflix has churn; I'm sure they have clients that turn the service on for only a few months of the year; I'm NOT sure that is the majority, which is what I assumed you and I were referencing when quoting "people."

I'd literally pay 3-4x as much for the non-original content. Again, that is only 6-16hrs of content Netflix has to serve up, that is only remotely interesting. The convenience and paying for the business model I believe in does the rest.

If HBO offered its service unencumbered of cable subscriptions, I'd still find it less valuable than Netflix.
This is a poor analogy. The net profit on an iPhone is higher than the net profit on an iPod.
Somebody should put this on the App Store with 10 textures for $0.99 and extras if you buy more. It would sell like crazy.
And the reviews are spectacular:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/showtime-anytime/id484232467...
Some people want to make the world a better place by having families. To me this makes at least as much sense most plans for world-improvement.
by the time my code hits github it's been rewritten at least twice...
Young men, please sue the New York Post
Less effective = lower compression savings. I was testing with source lossless JP2s in the 6MB range: PNG was 14MB and WebP took at least 10x compression time to hit 20MB (tied with TIFF LZW for least savings).
Yes this is a fair point, but it's a chicken and egg problem. To start, Glass is going to be "cellphones, but on your face." It takes time for new devices like Glass to not just be riffs on the last paradigm as people learn what they are good at and suck at. Recall the original iPhone apps were little more than "touch the screen and it makes a sound, yay!"

The problem with Glass is this incubation period is happening at the same time the public is forced to come down on if the device is cool or not. Just like the "iPad is a big iPhone" meme died down after people built cool iPad apps that showed how it was different, so will happen with Glass unless the backlash is so strong it is cemented as a unwearable nerd-toy too quickly.
Interlacing usually happens in two-dimensions in image formats, if I understand it correctly (ie it first sends one pixel out of each 2x2 block).

The only thing is I think that is one of the actual pixels, rather than an average. In an ideal world you could send the average color of each 2x2 block, then send the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pixels and use that data to reconstruct the 1st pixel.

Or is that how it works already?
TSA delays allowing knives on planes
Stanford Online course on technology entrepreneurship
Me. I don't have HBO, and I'm not willing to pirate it.
Who Needs Antioxidants?
Nepal: 'I was 14 when I was sold'
Their customer service is indeed embarrassing. I called to complain about my video quality, which was just pathetically bad:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8321/8001863565_4764150145_b.j...

There was no GUI control for quality anywhere in the Netflix UI on my Blu-Ray player. Turns out that it only exists on the Netflix Web site under your account settings, and had magically been degraded to the "good" setting. Netflix, no doubt trying to save bandwidth costs, probably degraded everyone's setting en masse to see who'd even notice.

Risky strategy. The quality was so bad (despite my having set it to "HD" originally) that I was just going to shitcan the service. But I bothered to call. How many people would? But they weigh that against how many people notice they're watching a mottled pastiche of dogshit.

Even more ridiculous was the reaction of the customer-support rep, who tried to excuse the unauthorized degradation of my settings by saying that not all devices had enough storage space to hold entire shows at high quality. Yes, the Netflix support rep didn't understand that it's a STREAMING service. I had to explain this to him.
I'm using .Net 1.1 for my day job. God how I hate C#.
Even if you use rigorous statistical techniques -- and economists do under the heading of econometrics, even inventing new techniques -- it's still really hard to draw meaningful conclusions.

There are just so many variables. And the more interconnected the world becomes, the more variables there are. Pointing to any one correlation and you'll find a hundred statistical fingers pointing at correlations with totally different consequences.
The question is what kind of processing he did. Usually database systems are heavily constraint by the I/O bandwidth of the system - even the cheapest consumer CPU is able to process data orders of magnitude faster than discs are able to deliver new data.

That is why database servers usually have the fastest discs money can buy, as much memory as you can fit in there in order to keep as much data as possible in main memory and the largest possible caches to avoid hitting the relatively slow memory bus as often as possible. The situation becomes much worse if the database is not read-only because all changes have to be persisted and you have to hit the disc on every change.

Therefore I think using GPUs will buy you nothing for common database application - processor speed was never your problem. But this does not exclude the possibility that there are operation, for example correlating millions of data points from your data set, where the processing power of GPUs comes handy, but this is most likely not what you will see in one of your line of business applications.

The number 700,000 is probably the result of a highly tuned GPU implementation versus a general purpose CPU implementation. A quad-core Core i7 at 3.0 GHz has a theoretical peak performance of 96 GFLOPs [1], the currently fastest supercomputer peaks at 27,112,500 GFLOPS (Titan, 560,640 cores, 8.2 MW [2]). 700,000 times the mentioned Core i7 is still more than twice the performance of Titan, 67,200,000 GFLOPs.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15655835/flops-per-cycle-...
[2] http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/11/
I'm curious if the OP has seen http://founderdating.com/about/. It seems to be what he was looking for. Not sure how big the presence is in AUS though.
A Conversation With Elon Musk [Video]
No, it wouldn't. It's engaging for about 2 seconds, and doesn't even begin to compare to the addictiveness of a successful game, even if you lumped a bunch of bogus social stuff on.

I think this is only really novel to technical users looking through a lens of tech, though of course I think it's incredibly novel too. But addictive video games already do very realistic stuff around hair, cloth, and all sorts of things, and your average game player will rip the cloth and move back to Angry Birds.

I agree it's really cool, and I Facebooked this, but a cool animation a game does not make.
Nope, its all mixed outside of software segregation.
I think we've seen 15 years of people trying to program Javascript like Java. I think we see the same programmers who bitch and moan every time we have a concatenative, Smalltalk(1), or DSL thread about how it is too different. I think we have seen that if it looks like C++ or Java, it needs to act the same way. I guess the old rule about FORTRAN is now true of Java.

1) to quote "how will I ever use and image-based language with source code control?"
The rise and fall of AMD: A company on the ropes
New Technologies have Side Effects That are Hard to Reason About
I watched the first episode and honestly didn't find it interesting.
HBO makes a profit of hundreds of millions on revenues of <$3 billion a year [http://ir.timewarner.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=70972&p=irol-ne...], while Netflix's annualized profits are expected to be roughly $15-20 million on estimated revenues of $3.6 billion.

HBO could quite literally suspend operations for the next decade and it would still be vastly more profitable than Netflix, especially now that Netflix has begun incurring massive content production/acquisition costs (see e.g., http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nflx/financials and the massive drop in Netflix's net income after its sweetheart content deals with Starz and other media companies expired).
Yeah that works until you live in an area without any useful public transit. I live in BC and in my town you can't go anywhere without a car, and I have to drive 40km to the next town for some of my university classes and there is NO bus route at all to get to those classes. I'm only 21, how would you propose I get to class if I didn't have my drivers license? The problem in North America is that a lot of places do not have public transportation so you have to drive and not everyone's parents can drive them _everywhere_ _all the time_.

Aside from that, all of your anecdotes could happen to anyone at any age if they don't have any experience driving, hell your first anecdote could have happened to a 40 year old if they didn't know how to drive. I disagree that age makes that much of a difference in driving, inexperience is the problem and you can't avoid that.
With the current tech there is no way Google can put in computer-vision based two-finger gesture into Glass. There isn't enough processing power in the cell phone linked to the Glass. And there isn't enough space in the Glass for a custom computer vision chip. So it is likely that you are right, and it is merely a two-finger touchpad gesture.
1) Climate change is going to kill us all

2) A hot bike is more likely to get you laid than a hot car

CASE CLOSED. Now can we please stop talking about reduced driving like its a problem?
A message from one Linux lover
The Minimalistic Gmail Cheat Sheet
i disagree this could make a lot of money off pure satisfaction. better than playing first person shooters and blowing things up
Friend Fracker
It's a nice demonstration.
Well done.
Why aren't more students working for start-ups?
Whoa, `spintax_parser`? ...are there legitimate uses for this?
Really? You worked for 26 hours and didn't realize it because your screen was the right color?