skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/5/3607456/tumblr-20-billion-...

According to that, Tumblr had 20 billion monthly pageviews around september 2012. That is about 250 billion pageviews a year.

http://www.quora.com/Amazon-Web-Services/Roughly-how-much-do...

Gives a very rough estimate of about 50k in server costs for 1 billion page views. That would be $12 million a year in server costs alone.

As of May, they had 178 employees. It is going to take a lot more than $2 million to pay those employees, then you have all the on costs, office space, advertising, etc, etc. I'd be very surprised if they weren't losing more than $15 million a year, and going on those quick calculations + knowing how much money they have raised, I think they're at a net loss of about $40 million a year, or more.

I said "its obvious" based on the rumours they are running out of money plus knowledge of when they last raised money. But doing a quick calculation as shown here throws up the same conclusion.
Because as soon as she took the job, people were petitioning her to save flickr.

Suddenly, results! There's no way it could have been anything other than her personal initiative that got flickr turned around.
Looking for Arrested Development joke...
I just hope they don't toss Scholar. That thing is salvation.
Sounds plausible to me... like Buffet says, it's about temperament.

Marginally related: nice old article about Taleb vs Neiderhoffer: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

Both brilliant guys, IQs off the charts, but the difference is clearly temperament. Neiderhoffer was the genius and squash champ at Harvard. The typical M.D. probably has life experience closer to his.

In contrast, Taleb writes a lot about his family suffering through the Lebanese civil war. I know who I would trust with my money :)
Too noisy I agree... fotoblur.com tries to do this by giving images lots of space.
It looks like we'll have a FlickrFS Fuse implementation shortly.
No, they are getting rid of the payment processing.
Do you mean semantic web? If so, then check this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Primer-Cooperative-Informatio...
does anyone have any idea what happens to the google drive subscription, if you're paying via google checkout?
I don't really trade much, but I thought this was an interesting data point: my one share of GOOG has made ~2x more profit in ~6 months relative to the amount of profit obtained by the 10 shares of YHOO I bought one year ago.
Yes! I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, I guess it depends if you went to a good high school that actually taught those things or not.

From my own experience, high school was super easy and I was shocked when I got to college in that I hadn't learn very much at all (there were exception of course).
Wallet doesn't have payment processing except for items on Google Play.
Social Media Shopping: Keeping Retail Up-to-Date with the Latest Shopping Trends
Liked this suggestion. Unfortunately the domain names getsiv.com and sivapp.com are taken.

Edit: siv.io could be nice.
This is a very recent change, if I am not mistaken. Seven days is a very short window.
My guess is the stronger social support system makes a it less risky to start a company... You have a safety net.
Just wanted to public thank you for detailing your experience as a merchant, setting up with MtGox and BitPay.

Just curious, would you give BitPay a second look?

Obligatory: I'm currently using MtGox and haven't really had the time to try BitPay, but the MtGox legal issues could be a reason to need a second option.
Google Checkout was US/UK only.
So, the thing is, there are alternative ways of looking at the laws of physics that take a time neutral view and look at the entire system and do take the view that the entire system and use exactly this kind of reasoning. In such an approach the ray of light doesn't start at one point en route to the other, and it's more legitimate to see the system as a whole and see some kind of minimization like this - minimizing the time the light spends in the slower medium.
I suppose having my deferment rubbed in my face like that might rankle
"Google's implementation of Checkout was flawed from the start (esp how they handled/treated merchants)"

I don't mean this to sound like Google treated its merchants badly.. because that's not the case. Google was ok, and I don't have any bad stories to tell. But several of their policies were not pro-merchant (some outright anti-merchant)... it was as if the entire thing (from the interface, the policies, etc) was put together by someone who had never used another payment processor in their life. It was like someone just sat down one day, decided how it should work, and did it.. without bothering to understand what any of their competitors were doing.

I don't know how true that is.. but that is what it seemed like from the beginning.
And how is it related to my comment?
The adjective is random, it listed me as a javascript expert[1] too, and I do have a couple of js projects, but the bulk of it is php. The only project that's even gotten contributed to is in php.

And I don't know where it's getting that I do shell scripting....

But it does make me look pretty good so I might just send it to potential employers >_>

[1] ha ha.
Obvious answer, but targeting is much more effective for online companies, and success is much easier to measure. An online advertising company can give much better, more quantifiable ROI by targeting specific users more likely to convert: in Google's case, it's largely due to the desire to click inherent in search, whereas in Facebook's case it's through deep demographic information. They can also directly measure the effect an advertisement has, by measuring click throughs, etc. Compared to the much more nebulous effects of TV/print ads, this can be highly appealing.
You may want to read up further on Fermat's principle.

Your response is a little bit ill-formed because Fermat's principle is about the time to travel between two points. You assert that light is not "taking the shorter path", but in doing so you are changing the destination point or else leaving it undefined. Instead, pick a start point, pick an end point, and see how light travels between those two points, with respect to your cube of glass.
Google merged Checkout with Wallet over a year ago. That was unpleasant, but bearable. This time Google is killing what's left of Google Checkout: API and subsriptions. That's much worse.

To add an insult to injury, Google uses Doublespeak, so now we have to guess about what's really going to happen.
This seems disingenuous to me. A key part of creating a great "product" is that it continues to support itself. Having a great product without having some sort of a revenue stream isn't being hyper-focused - it's being negligent.

Congrats to David on everything, but it seems very odd to try & separate "product" from the revenue that it should generate if it's going to be a business.
> but in any case market efficiency is a very general claim, it doesn't rule out some "special" people with innate talent to predict future prices.

The "efficient market hypothesis" is one of those hypotheses that has Strong and Weak versions, with the weakest versions being obviously true, and the strongest versions being equally obviously false, and practically pseudo-religious. The strongest version of the Strong Efficient Market Hypothesis does indeed rule out the existence of such exceptional people (or at least their ability to profit), because it says that the market will always instantaneously reflect the knowledge of all participants. Such a prognosticator would find their ability to beat the market asymptotically approach zero, as his attempts to take advantage of opportunities cause those opportunities to evaporate in his hands at the instant of investing.
I'm not sure how this is related to the technical issue of not being to just "design" drugs on a computer and have them "printed out."

> in his small home laboratory.

You can certainly work out of a home laboratory, if you so desire. The location is not particularly relevant. But it will definitely cost you a lot more than a laptop and internet would. And even then, what Shulgin did was quite limited by his capital resources.

> it seems kind of analogous to what a hacker does vs what an engineer does.

Don't forget that he already had a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley. If he had just tried to learn like a "hacker," he would have either bankrupted or killed himself (or killed someone else and ended up in jail).

And even then, he got raided by the DEA and fined $25000 (the regulation issue).
I disagree. His friends could communicate on their own with the internet, saying "This is what Weev said when he was talking to me...", or in some other way make it clear that it's not weev talking to the outside.

That would likely still piss people off and get him in hot water, though.
Plus.io a visual IDE for Google Glass
MP4轉檔教學- 將任意視訊或影片轉成MP4檔案
luckily git takes both GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE as environment variables. This python script generates a bash script that sets a date and commit one line changes for every pixel that needs some gitfiti.
He acts on what he perceives as mispricings in the market. That these mispricings may be caused or magnified by his own actions in the companies he is involved with isn't really the point.
I feel like we're celebrating whoever can make the most money in the most ridiculous way rather than those who make the most useful thing for society. A lot of kids are growing up with this pathetic and twisted idea of success being... come up with "some stupid internet thing that everyone uses", get money from some rich guys, get advice from other successful guys, grow your stupid internet thing into a business using their money and the hard work of hundreds of employees, be worshiped and become famous. On top of that media and society concentrate worship, idolization, and ass-kissing towards 1 person. It doesn't matter if you came up with the iPad while working at Apple, Steve Jobs will be the one who will be known for it by nearly everyone. Did you redesign Facebook and make hundreds of millions of people rejoice at the new easier layout? No one will know your name, Mark Zuckerberg will be praised. Did you create FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars, Cafe World? Their names will be connected to Mark Pincus, not yours. Not to say that these leaders were lazy, many people have been given hundreds of millions and have wasted it away without having anything to show for it, these founders took the money and trippled it. That takes work & intelligence but it's never done by one person. Yet the success all goes to one person.

It's so shallow and superficial & yet there's no one to blame. It's no one's fault. We can't help we celebrate such primitive things. Especially looking at The Kardashians and Paris Hilton. Usefulness need not apply to this contest. Worth seems to be measured in how many people you can get to follow you. 50 years from now all of will be old and we'll read about how some 9 year old made $75 billion dollars by creating a website were kids under 18 can gossip and rate how lame their parents are. You will sigh. You will laugh. And you'll remember it all started in our generation.
Well - there is also the Age/Risk equation in which you need to rebalance your portfolio out of equities, and more into conservative (diversified) instruments (money market funds, AAA bonds, Cash) as you get older, and/or have less tolerance for risk.

But I get your point, the single sentence

"Put as much of your income into VFINX as you can afford."

gets you 95% of the way there - doubtful that you will really increase your performance that much by studying books like these - http://www.amazon.com/Top-Investment-Books/lm/R3OSLG8NX7CO8W.
I suppose he meant that an IQ of 125 corresponds to the sort of intelligence that is not especially hard to find (and is thus "ordinary"), although it is still above average and higher than the score of most people.
And TV:s, fridges, computers... They manufacture more than just phones you know.
Avoid Monsanto products with Buycott
>>A big part of high school and even college is figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Frankly speaking, looking back what I was when I was 14. I am very glad I didn't make that 'what to do with the rest of my life' decisions back then. I'm sure 100% I would have made a very big mess of my life.

14 years is way to younger to make such decisions.
I don't understand, where is the beef?

How is this qualitatively different than a plain old symmetric encryption. Bob and Alice (or whatever and for whatever reason renamed characters in their example) each have the key, Alice encrypts ( ⊕ ) sends to Bob, he decrypts.

Is it the idea that the key cannot be digitally copied and instead it is two pieces of glass? How is it different than Alice and Bob using a one-time key for each transmission then destroying it (using secure wipe)? What if they use hand written papers to keep their keys and burn the pages when done.

I am probably being dense missing some deeper idea. Anyone care to explain?
It's about 5% of the population, so not normal in the sense that most people have an iq of 125, but normal in the sense that meeting someone with an iq of 125 is not terribly uncommon.
Demystifying Certificate Requirements in Mutual TLS
businesses and technologies than just Cinderella stories.

Wishful thinking. I see far more political stories than enterprise M&A on here. In fact, I very rarely see M&A on here. For example, Workday's IPO should have been on the frontpage. Hint - It wasn't and you've probably never heard of Workday.
> Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Temperament really is everything, and investing and/or gambling brings out the worst in people.

I used to play a lot of poker (which I consider a pretty good proxy for investing) in college and it was amazing to me how some of my smartest friends could be so horrendously bad at it.

For example, one of my Math major friends just couldn't control himself. He'd start with e.g. $1,000 playing online, get up to $10,000 in a few hours, and then blow it all soon after. He repeated this cycle too many times for me to count.

One of my pre-med friends was so smart and so confident both academically and socially, but he'd be the most timid and passive person at the poker table, never being able to raise or bluff anyone and usually losing all his money to more aggressive players.

I'd also venture (no pun intended) to say that most VCs are terrible investors as well - Following the herd, short-sighted, and little to no appetite for big ambitious long-term investments of time and money.
> Google is the ONE company that you should want to invade a new market

Sorry, this is a bit over the top. Google did just that - invaded the RSS market when it was new, wiped out the RSS niche with a free product, and then suddenly had a change of heart, ditching everyone presumably to "focus" a few of its 54000 employees on the social buzzword of that year.
I feel a betrayed, too. I really don't understand why the plan went up in price and has less features. I have the attitude that I want to store (indefinitely), search and link my photos without being visually distracted with ads or pagination limits. In 7 years of using Flickr, I've only uploaded about 30GB of photos mostly just for archival use. Only a small group of Flickr users curate more than 20k photos. Most of the high interestingness (and ostensibly talented) Flickr members store less than 5000 photos and in very small file weights so their photos aren't reproduced in print. So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions. I can't see myself paying more for Flickr without some kind of incentive. Hopefully they don't kill off their fairly loyal subscriber base, but stranger things have happened.
I have 25Mbps down, 1Mbps up (both numbers are best case scenario). So I'd be seeing 0.125MB/s, not 0.5. My internet connection is really quite good for everything I need, but Time Warner doesn't seem interested in catering to individuals who push upstream. The only way to do better is with business fiber for hundreds per month (and not available in residential districts).
Wiggles of Hope: Yahoo Stock on the Rise, At Highest Point Since May 2008
Please quote yield, not number of shares.
As any engineer knows, nothing is 100% efficient.

I think a better way of describing the market is as a competitive game. Roger Federer may not play tennis "perfectly" -- what would that even mean? -- but you know what's going to happen if you or I step out onto the court with him.
>But one of the other requirements set forth in the paper is that if the slab is stolen, Eve must not be able to send or receive messages. I'm not sure how that is fulfilled here.

If a "full" message involved both sides randomly picking a P, then this could still be satisfied.

But it doesn't seem to live up to my hopes for security: all it really guarantees is that the probability of Eve decrypting an intercepted message (assuming she steals the slab for time t and knows all the P's) is t/T where T is the time Bob and Alice spend generating K(B) + K(A) for different P's.
Here is the open spec to the current version of the API:
https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec
You'll get better answers if you ask a more specific question. E.g. Hetzner is an established company that will give you lots of server for your buck (and you may be interested in http://www.serverbidding.com/); but if you're trying to run a game server for your buddies in the US, the fact that's in Germany means that you won't have the best ping possible.

Similarly, OVH's budget brand KimSufi is unlikely to go under any time soon, but your questions won't exactly be a priority for support. RackSpace is the opposite - they try to offer excellent support, but they definitely aren't the cheapest.

Finally, AWS and Linode have their own advantages; unless you're sure you want to stick with dedicated, at least consider those - if only because you can claim "cloud" experience. ;-)
I believe it's the novelty of the fact that "some stupid internet thing that everyone uses" was purchased for 1.1 billion that makes it newsworthy. An extremely profitable medical company that very few people come into contact and that makes life saving medicines is purchased for a large amount of money and goes unnoticed and this is somehow surprising? It's the height of pretentiousness to expect that everyone be as interested in the things that you are interested in and to look down on them if they aren't.
Tried it. High costs, technology lock-in burnt my fingers. Moved to open technologies and not "platforms".
Python, Java, Go-lang and now apparently PHP.
For discerned users who are ready to spend effort, AWS is definitely the way to go. No restrictions, fire up your virtual machine, setup everything as you like and optimize as you need - you have the control button.
I agree with what he's getting at, but I'm not sure why he phrased it this way. It's not like he did a study and this was the result (that I know of). He has no way of knowing if IQs of 125+ actually correlate with success in investing or not -- he's just guessing.

It's an educated guess, sure. And it might be entirely correct. But I'm sure Buffett has lots of useful advice that people will take at face value, so there's no need for him to dress wisdom up with unsubstantiated scientific language.

It's almost as if he's trying to channel Malcolm Gladwell's claim in "Outliers" that any IQ points above 120 don't provide any advantages.

I'll let Steven Pinker to set the record straight [1]:

> It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...
> I am not a fan of the “web application frameworks” such as express.js being widely used without thinking about what is really required.

Woah, I wonder what TJ has to say about that. In my impression Express was the simplest of node frameworks.
When I lived in West Philly, I had to walk 10 blocks east and a few blocks north to reach school. Just before campus I had to cross a busy N/S street with a light, but most of the other intersections were just stop signs. I thought all the time about whether I should go straight east to the busy street or take the prettier route by cutting north a couple blocks first.
Congrats, you singlehandedly killed any desire for anyone to ever want to acquire your business. Who would possibly want to buy a business where the founder is ready to abandon ship as quickly as possible?
You don't seem to understand what is meant by the term "efficient market".

The efficient market hypothesis does not preclude the possibility that share prices could be improved by a buyout or activist shareholder.
Perhaps the point is that it shouldn't be such an easy decision for you, and that if it is you're probably not as passionate about your startup as you should be. To me, it sounds like you're passionate about money. That doesn't make you insane, but it might make your startup less likely to succeed.
> Sure you don't have your old startup anymore, but you have something newer and more exciting.

or with the newly found money, create a competitor to the startup you just sold! And this time, you don't need to sell out, because you already did on the previous one, and have FU money to truely realize your vision...
This is bit of a nitpick but he did not quit school to work on tumblr. He was homeschooled, first of all, while working at various startups. Secondly he started tumblr in 2006?, long after he had dropped out of high school.
That's fine in itself but Canonical seems to fail to make educated decisions on technical details and is not behaving "nice" when it first says "we'll support Wayland" and then abandon it. It would even be fine to abandon Wayland but Canonical didn't show any intention to do so until they released the first Mir code already (by this time the decision must have been made for quite some time). Plus, spreading FUD about Wayland and how it is not working for Ubuntu is not helping either. Especially since all points have been debunked very fast. It's not putting the decision making at Canonical into a good light.

I also never understood why they didn't put their efforts into Gnome Shell to create their vision of a desktop. It's totally possible to customize Gnome Shell (or even fork, see Cinnamon). Instead it's running compiz (which is critized for being hacky, bugridden and understaffed for quite some time) or QML (Unity 2D), two totally different APIs.

And how would you rationally justify developing upstart when the rest of the world puts its efforts into systemd? I understand that systemd is not as mature as upstart, but how far would it be with upstart efforts put into systemd?

The problem of Canonical is not even working on seperate projects but the utter failure to work with the rest of the Linux community. Do you see other destributions offering Unity, for example? No. Will you see Mir in Fedora or Debian or Suse or Gentoo as primary displayserver? Never. Upstart? Nope.
Do i think that it's Canonicals fault to not reach out to the community and combine efforts? Yes. Yes. Yes.
And this is the soul of open source movement. Canonical doesn't really get it.

What they do get is to make Linux easier to use for the masses, that's for sure.
It's a cool idea but the language breakdown seems to have missed all the OCaml code in my repositories. Maybe there's some sort of conservative language whitelist?
Yahoo Japan Data Breach: 22M Accounts Exposed (10% of all Yahoo accounts)
Yahoo Won't Restrict Porn on Tumblr
looks great, nice work