skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's called selling a product for less than it costs. A variable cost is one that is dependent on the the # of units sold. So, obviously, the more one sells, the more one loses money. Think of it this way: you could make a million dollars right now, really fast, by selling gasoline (in the US) for $1 a gallon. You'd sell a million gallons. And lose $2 million in the process. The more you sell, the more you lose because your costs (which are dependent on your total volume) increase with your revenues. This is why you can't confuse revenue with income.

Amazon had that model for many years of operation. But it went public before it ran out of money. Call it the "cost of acquiring the market". The problem was that Amazon had a much bigger market to work with.
I tried to do email digests. I really did. I am signed up for a few of those. My problem is they get lost in my inbox. Personally I like to check into news sites several times a day. The feature is really interesting to me however. I personally don't use tumblr, but the inherent "repost" feature about it seems really attractive. Maybe I should look into automatic posting to tumblr. Thanks for the feedback! I've never heard of the brief!
My armchair criticism is that a good documentary is both embracing of AND skeptical of its subject. Can this project, given its angle and backing, possibly resist canonization?
I didn't use the aforementioned verlet.js physics engine, but that's basically what this is. Verlet integration is a simple way of modeling forces. If you are referring to the actual js code, it's asm.js-compatible javascript, which you can read more about here: http://asmjs.org/
That is interesting. As did bidder 'ddorato' at the $6,000 - $7,000 bid.
But surely most e-commerce websites can't have a net negative margin for three years?
Because, to investors, any revenue is better than no revenue. The latter implies the worst possible scenario: making something nobody wants.
It would be good if they can get both sides and views in the same documentary.

Not necessarily. It depends on what the story in documentary is about. Absolutely nothing wrong with one POV in documentaries. Real devil is editing and narration which isn't structural in its function. By structural narration I mean narration written only to shorten some prologues to sequences in the story structure itself. With narration and editing you can distort your story in any way possible. I found out, through experience, that with sensitive subjects it's best to avoid narration altogether and tell story only through editing. Careful editing, where you weave story only through what you've been told by carefully selected interviewees.
Both flash and silverlight are deprecated by their makers. The question is whether they'll go away, it's what will replace them and what specifically it will do.

Flash and silverlight lost to an open, interoperably-implementable standard (html). This EME proposal just standardizes an interface to something that's not standard or open (the CDMs).

Some people like to say that content producers will never let up on their demands for DRM. But that's happened already in music and with the broadcast flag, and it's starting to happen in book publishing as well. We should keep fighting for it to happen in web video.

Everything is available pirated already, but people still pay for netflix & friends because they're convenient and most people are honest. If DRM doesn't make it into HTML, there will still be a viable business model streaming video to paying customers without DRM.
The way I got my first big promotion was by identifying gaps in the company's processes.

In my case, I was working on the help desk, and was sort of a hobbyist programmer. Answering help desk calls on the night shift was boring work, and because I was the only one working at night, I didn't have the luxury of getting to ask others what the answer was. I either knew the answer, or knew how to find it.

Knowing how to find it was tricky. The Windows group (that supported Windows servers) kept all their information in Sharepoint. The Lotus Notes group kept all their data in Lotus Notes databases. Unix group kept all their documents on NFS shares. Each group knew how to find their data, so it was great for them. But the problem is that if the Tier 1 support can't find it, they have to escalate to Tier 2. This costs more in terms of hourly wages, delays customer satisfaction, and takes longer to solve problems.

My solution was to write a central, web-based knowledge base, and I wrote convertors to go to each of the knowledge stores and import it into the knowledge base. Now, as a Tier 1 help desk, I only had one spot to go to for finding knowledge. Customers got support faster, less calls had to be escalated to Tier 2, and all was right in the world.

Later I refined the crap out of it and made it really pretty good, but that initial implementation saved the company a lot of money. By not having to engage Tier 2 support as much, that meant they could be working on their regular jobs, like managing servers of streamlining application processes or whatever it was they were meant to do. By offloading the work to the cheaper Tier 1 help desk, that was cost effective. By reducing the time it took to satisfy a given customer request, that meant less workers could handle more calls. That's cost effective. That was a problem that they would have been willing to pay $xxx,000 to solve, because it saved them well more than that, but I just wrote it for them and let them know how much it was saving them.

I didn't initially make more money, but I did get moved into a position where I could do more of that, which I did. At some point, I was awarded for having saved the company an average of 3 million per year. At the time, my salary was something like $50k a year. I never struck gold working at that company, but "developed applications to reduce company costs by $3 million per year" looks pretty good on a resume. It sets you apart from the vast majority of developers who are just going to build what they're told to build. It shows that you take initiative, and that you care about more than just what's in the scope of your job -- you care about the company, and the company's bottom line, and can actively impact that bottom line.
And this is why venture capital, as an asset class, performs so poorly and provides such a poor ROI.
Parsing binary data with Node.js
I want to bring this up because it's a point very often overlooked about why TF2 is a fun game, and that is that it has a reliable and accessible in game VOIP system.

I don't see this talked about much, but it really makes TF2 shine as a straight up fun game. It allows players to communicate in any way they see fit, from the user casual to the highly formal/competitive. That means players can organize themselves to pull weird shenanigans or play very competitively using communication to gain an edge. Also, since voice is such a uniquely human attribute, it humanizes other players who would otherwise be anonymous participants.

The end result of this is that you get highly cohesive communities that make the game great!
I know you aren't. In fact, you taking time out of your day to post here with your opinion about my site really does quite the opposite of discouraging me.

Summly getting bought for that much really confuses me as well.
I don't think he's being idolized because he committed suicide. He's idolized because of who he was and what he accomplished. He still deserves recognition even though he committed suicide and his recognition isn't based on his suicide.
A Case for Learning J (2012)
The New High-Tech $100 Bill--3 Years Late
I had to LOL at the line from the post mortem:

"No Balance Sheet or Statement of Cash flows had ever been prepared"

I've not been involved in the finance side of a startup, can you really raise millions without any documentation at all? I mean, yeah, we all heard about the dotcom boom but that's all in the past, right? Or is it?
Whether or not Encrypted Media Extensions(EME) is included in HTML5 SHOULD NOT be construed as a referendum on DRM. The HTML5 standard is not the place to determine if something is ethically/morally good, advancing humankind, or will even work.

If some orgs or people want a means to retrict the playing of media in HTML5 by downloading keys from a license server then so be it. The HTML5 standard should be as inclusive as it needs to be to represent the needs of all parties. If enough parties desire this functionality then who are we to say they cannot or should not have it.
You would have to have some pretty awesomely low interest loan rates or severe inflation for early payments on a mortgage not to be a net win. A loan we had recently for a house (loan taken out at financial crisis loan rates) worked out at such that an early payment of $1 saved a payment of $7 at the end ($6 being interest). That was enough to motivate us to stick every spare dollar on that loan.
I guess some may take this as MS bashing, but I've had a bad feeling about Expedia from its start. That being:

Expedia was started by Microsoft and later spun off as a multi-billion dollar company because it was "no longer about software intensive technology" and they were "concerned that they would not do their best at this."

per

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedia

Whenever MS ventures away from OS, tools, and Office -- and, I guess for some people, games and, oddly enough, accessory hardware -- it's a bad bet.

In short, don't do business with them, again.
Personally my experience is really on the web side of things. I am however looking at the option of doing an HTML5 wrapper around it so it can be published as an application in the stores. Should be an interesting path!
@pyre I'm no spam. I'm a badass Molecular Biologist and I just got a little excited ;) Genome Compiler is really that awesome. And I'm glad to see synthetic biology in the lights. This is all incredibly innovative.
Thanks, I had just skimmed the article. You're right that there is no irony. And it may not even be a coincidence, may just be that one of the reasons that a person attracted to Python may also be attracted to Go.
My gut tells me, that this is not legal (it would not be in Germany), so I don't advise you doing this before consulting with a lawyer first.

That being said, I just got a US phone number and I get at least 3-4 calls a week for the previous owner of my phone number.
Those calls seem to be revolving around credit loans that she had.

To me it seems as if they try to remind her that she should pay those loans back. One could pretty easily build a really annoying twilio-based version of those phone calls...
I started building a custom analytics solution like this, you basically passed all the data you wanted to it (from however disparate sources you like), and you could write custom Lua scripts to process them in whatever way you wanted. It had a pretty simple widget/graph API that allowed you to basically return JSON to be turned into a full dashboard.

I didn't manage to get anyone to want to try it out in the year I was looking for potential customers, so I shut it down in the end.
I personally would find a documentary about weev/Auernheimer much more interesting. I'd throw some decent money at that, just because listening to his mixture of genius and craziness is utterly entertaining.
A nice parable, but for anyone who has used a rock tumbler credibility is lost when you get polished stones in one day. It makes me wonder if the story is completely fabricated, or changed for brevity.
I assume your right - but this must come close. http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-16/zuckerberg-s-loa...
Yes but instead of nitpicking to criticize maybe we could use the same skill to filter out the bad parts and get to the good parts. I'm not saying I agree with the way the author presented the information, he thought it was the best way but that doesn't mean I have to completely ignore what he wrote based on that fact. It's pretty obvious to see in this post the relevant part to HN.
Yeah, I convinced the moderators to update the link to a newer version of the paper. But keep in mind that a paper published in 2013 probably describes research performed in 2012 on hardware purchased in 2011 (if they're lucky). Getting back to hardware, the premium for 4-socket servers appears to be much smaller than it used to be, so now you can get a ton of DIMM slots for a reasonable price.
They are using it for marketing.

(I mean the post is what it is, I don't mean to whine about it)
Another cool auction format used is this:

The last person putting $10 in the pot wins the auction. Putting $10 in the pot will postpone the end of the auction for let's say 30 minutes.

This format has been used at some of the charity auctions I visited. It was very funny... Now that I am thinking about it: Maybe it only works in real live because the moderator of the evening was very funny and motivating.
Here's a problem for Bill Gates: You have $800 to give to charity. Which one? Did you use any rational thought? Ideally, you'd know the need and the level of funding, I would think. You'd want to know which one was over funded and underfunded.

I guess if you give them a steady income it's best for making plans. I don't want to.

This problem is similar to "When you fill your taxes, allocate your money to different branches of government." If you can't see how laughably horrible this is...

Long story short -- these activists, like most activists -- have absoluetely no rational clue.

Maybe, it's possible to have somewhat of a clue and I'm wrong, but I look at these problems and imagine the people who love lecture on the topic are as stupid as people who play the lottery. Give money, but don't pretend you know what you are doing.

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\2CITIES.TXT

this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see
him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worse, to
convey to him the means of anticipating the sentence."

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to
see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look,
and evidently understood it.

"She might think a thousand things," Carton said, "and any of them
would only add to her trouble. Don't speak of me to her. As I said
to you when I first
Google Glass challenger Telepathy One,competing for "Willy Wonka" of tech title
I didn't contend there was. You want to keep the ultra low mortgage because inflation is likely to make it have a negative real interest rate.
Pieces of Professional Advice I Didn't Want But Definitely Needed
This along with comments from Western Union have surprised me. But it does make sense. These companies would be foolish not to stay open to pivoting with market demands. Right now it is "we're aware of it", if it starts to take off I expect them to integrate it into their business models to capture part of that growing value.

Remember that in the gold rush you got rich selling pickaxes. WU and Paypal stand to profit from bitcoin with very little risk if they play it right.
I'm also not too satisfied with the 4GB default on the MBP - I needed to upgrade to 16GB to work properly. Getting a 16GB MBP from Apple, however, proved to be more exp then getting a 4GB and upgrading it manually to 16GB vengeance ddr3 ram. (best upgrade I ever did)
The network is P2P, there is no limit to the amount of transactions per second it can handle. MtGox is not the network.
Can you please add CppCMS (http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main) and Gwan(http://gwan.com/). Both are high performance web development framework claiming fast.
A Field Guide to Developers
Will you deliver non-food items from Costco? Are there weight/size limits?
C/C++/nVidia (formerly Ageia, formerly Novodex) PhysX.
My company is over 40 people and is still in the startup, pre-revenue stage. Sometimes you need to build traction in your space before you leave startup mode.
Agreed. It could also take a deep look at how ridiculous the extent of his sentencing was in a legal and technical context.
Even more interesting is, will in the future that space that represents the entire internet ( the rack ) grow in size or will disk storage improve faster than the growth of internet when finally you will be able to fit internet on a small hand held disk.
I don't know if it's possible but, in general, it's not a good idea to mix server-side and client-side templating. The Angular guys discuss this in one of the videos on the Angular channel (I found it for you here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...). The two reasons seem to be first, it's not clean and second, it's easy to introduce security issues.

If I want to have a page that has both server-side templating and client-side templating, I push the ng-app directive down into the DOM and assert that Angular has "ownership" of that portion of the page. I can't remember what Django's templating engine supports, but in Jinja2, you can create a {% raw %} {% endraw %} block that tells Jinja2 not to parse any delimiters in the block (I'm sure Django has something like this, I just can't recall what it is). This makes it pretty easy to separate out Angular's purview from the server's purview even on a single page.
The ethical coffee shop freelancer
Hacker News of Music? Would You?
Would you use a platform where you create a playlist to listen to based on the current ranking in a "hacker-news styled" site? You then up-vote songs in your playlist while listening. Thoughts?
Something something Bitcoin, something something disruption
And don't forget about: http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2013/04/12/video-tuto...
Well I'm glad you approve, because as a former content writer, I resent any one who thinks that their algorithm can provide more value than me ;)

No really though, I think that because human writing (and just as importantly, HTML layout) is so diverse, even a very good algorithm risks extracting something very banal or redundant. Cross-referencing an article with social data, however, is very low-hanging fruit and at the same time, pretty useful.

For example, take a post like the currently popular "Introduction to Position Based Fluids" (http://physxinfo.com/news/11109/introduction-to-position-bas...)

An extractor is immediately going to have a problem here because most of the meat is in the video...there is some descriptive text, but it doesn't add much more than the title and the meta description ("Position Based Fluids is a way of simulating liquids using Position Based Dynamics (PBD) approach")

However, the top HN comments are insightful...for example:

"The only uncanny valley effect here is that the water doesn't wet anything - everything is perfect Teflon. So it's hard to judge whether the movement of the water is perfectly realistic, because I keep looking at the transitions. If I don't look at surfaces, it seems very convincing."

And since the mechanism is the same, why not extract the top comment from Reddit?

"Wow. Not much else to say but wow."

OK, not that great in this case...but the retrieval work is trivial. More importantly, both of these sites have built in meta data telling you the value of each comment...not just upvotes, but how much discussion it generated...there are plenty of useful ways to slice this data numerically...And the same pattern would apply to Twitter/Facebook...pull in the comments/reactions from users with high social cred.

In other words, why resort to machine-summarization when you have perfectly fine humans to do so, and who are actually (in some cases) adding new insights?

And there's nothing stopping you from applying text-mining to the social data/commentary you've collected...for example, showing only comments that directly refer to the main keywords/proper nouns that are in the article (this will keep your algorithm from collecting comments like: WOW, AWESOME!! that get upvotes merely for being positive).

Anyway, this seems like an easier route with a lot of value...maybe it's so obvious and technically easy that it's not sexy...but I think it would be very useful.
Which ruins quick iterated testing for jsfiddle and jsbin using gist.
Diamond shows promise for a quantum Internet
Switzerland to restrict EU immigration
Did you cover those assumptions with the client? If so, talk to them. See where things land. Maybe you can document what they do have and some of the prototpye code and code clean up suggestions. Which can be provided to someone else that can do the job.
totally offtopic typographic comment - anyone else seeing the alt-font ﬁ ligature in the title? It's quasi-bolded on my machined (Safari, OS X), so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
I don't think Aaron was a "hero," but if you can't do a biography of someone without first doing a biography of everyone else who is plausibly "more deserving" than you'll never end up with anything.
Ask HN: Good forum for hobbyish ARM(industrial) design discussions and advice?
Have some embedded, board level integration experience, nothing really - getting simple boards masked for low density shit. Broadly interested in learning about the next level in ARM board level design (call it cubbie board esque). But I've zero luck finding such a place - it's either raspi/arduino folks (not a diss), folks mostly repurposing android mobile or net tops for software, or the people who are really on the supply side - either they are talking about building the newest open mobile designs with the cheapest bom in chinese i can only half follow, or they are the real deal talking about modular soc components and electronic interface issues with off soc component count vs oem ability to implement. And high cost IP.

I am hoping to for something in english (ha! I'll survive) or just anything that might be suitable. An HN sorta thing where people often have a clue would rock, but the big missing piece is picking soc->minimal reference board revisions->build or source some custom stuff to give the arm some supervoisor like qualities on the x86.

To balance a zero content post, I provide my rough plan to amuse to reader. Basicially I want to combine a SFF server (think HP microserver or so slash less for mini. Most are essentially low end x76 roll your own nas that make do with 150w and 4 sata bays, 2 dimms and 1 eth.

I want to see what I can do if I meld that kind of platform together with a few low poer arm linux servers all in one case. I imagine the arm sections being able to utilize some kind of pci/pci or similar bridge as well as monitoring, reset, ipkvm etc that could leave them as super programmable debuggers more or less, that could always easily act as low power satndins for much of the traffic that wakes up your typical low use server - ntp, ping, mild file serving, ldap, etc. Anything harder and they could provide a superior holding pattern as the main box woke up from deep sleep.
Pushed native moonscript support to busted[0] this morning. :D

[0] https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/busted/blob/master/spec/moon...
Incorrect. From the wiki:

Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps by some artificial limits. These were put in place to stop people from ballooning the size of the block chain before the network and community was ready for it. Once those limits are lifted, the maximum transaction rate will go up significantly.

Of course, a significant increase from 7tps still might fall well short of what is required for real commerce. If you look at this graph of the daily transaction rate, you can see that the actual performance of the network is somewhat less than 1tps:

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

For comparison, there are probably more than seven transactions per second going on in any small to medium sized city, let alone worldwide.