skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It differs a lot between different companies. Some have a LOT of roaming income, some not much at all.
If there is any interest, I'm trying to start a meta discussion on successful acquisitions. I'm genuinely interested in examples, as I can think of none: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738288. All the ones I've been part of (five now), have been total crap.
The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars
These four points illustrate the fact that making a large acquisition to try to transform/redeem yourself has not worked well in the past. Think AOL and Time Warner or HP buying autonomy.
Hey Twitter, why are you spoofing your own users' accounts?
That's cool. Have you tried to make GIF compression lossy?

The idea is that when looking for longest match in the dictionary you don't match colors exactly, but instead allow some difference. That can reduce file size by 20-30% (here's my take on it in C: https://github.com/pornel/giflossy/commit/5a9adbc0feb899a228...)

Another optimization is to set pixels that are similar between frames to transparent color. That sometimes massively improves quality, as you only generate palette for part of the image (so the palette is better) and several frames overlaid together may give more than 256 colors.
Upvoting and intelligent links to info sites would be my top two suggestions. Allowing users to showcase how they tuned their cars would make it something like a facebook for cars. Featured cars could be a simple slightly random spotlighting of a few cars that are in the top ~30% upvote ranks.

Right now it looks like it is geared towards the "Ohh shiny! Lemme get my camera!" crowd than the "Here is the work of art I poured my blood swear and tears into!" types. Appealing to the former nets more users, while providing a forum for the later gives you more dedicated users.
Revisiting the ‘Crack Babies’ Epidemic That Was Not
Europe has already imposed increasingly more strict caps on roaming fees and many operators now offer a one-off fee per month for europe wide 'tariff transfer' to take your free included minutes with you as you travel - they get more from that fee than they do from roaming fees. This sounds like the final removal of roaming fees altogether - remember in Europe you do not pay to /receive/ calls in your home area unlike the US & Canada so it is a bit of an anomaly to have roaming fees for receiving calls when you move around the EU.

Of course, the roaming fees /outside/ Europe are now eye-watering.
Really loved working on this with you, and I'm excited to see what you come up with now that you have a much better understanding of AWS. Congrats on the re-launch!
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and there are without question issues with a number of companies on that list.

However, that does not change the manner in which the leadership of the companies viewed their contemporary success and how it came about.

I found it extremely interesting that such high-level leaders could swallow their pride and attribute success to good fortune. It is trivially simple to dismiss luck as a huge factor due to our own egos being in the way, and the fact that these people were so publicly adamant about their lucky streak suggests to me a level of humility rarely seen in that echelon of executive power.
with two major enterprises who will help fund our initial development through NRE and invest.

What is "NRE" in this context?
Yes, it's in percent of calorie intake.

I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world).

It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening.

My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts.

Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little.

The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask.

Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects.

Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...
I think the plan is that the "Other Half" can actually contain hardware that augments the capabilities of the phone.
One good reason is because it's illegal. You can't just go around selling shares in your company to anyone. There is a reason why an IPO is called a "Public" offering and why there is tons of regulations and paperwork. This is to prevent scams, pyramid schemes, and the like.

And forming a non-public company with more than 20 or so shareholders is a good recipe for a completely unmanageable entity.

So while the basic idea seems good, it would be difficult to pull off. I guess a ransom-type deal would work better: "Dear Users, we have a $1.1 billion buyout offer. But you could just pay us $13 each and then assuming we get $1.1 billion in revenue, we promise to maintain the service for 2 years."
What I don't understand is, why did they have to keep <IE9 support in version 1.9 AND break compatibility by removing a bunch of functions as well as create a new version strand, 2.0, that drops support for <IE9. Why not jus break the API in version 2.0 only?
Are you kidding me? A graphing calculator unreasonable? You can't seriously think that any hacking could be done from a graphing calculator inside a prison with no Internet connection. He's a hacker, not a goddamn Salem Witch.
Let's hope we don't get the opportunity to find out.
Android 4.x supports it, but I think the phone hardware has to also support it somehow. As far as I know there is no way to get a galaxy nexus or a nexus 7 into usb mass storage mode.
If you're looking for more of this, but in greater depth, pick up a copy of Biometry.

It's written for biologists, but you don't really need to know much biology to work through the examples, and the focus is inherently practical.
Offshore vs. Outsource (pros, cons and tips)
Writer wasn't, but was the submitter?
> " I guess a ransom-type deal would work better: "

Or you could just, i dunno, charge for the service.
The Private, Personal, Open Source, Ad-Free Cloud.
Sorry I should have put a disclaimer that I was talking about trading in the US. I'm not as familiar with retail trading in the UK. In the US you will typically pay between $7 - $10 per trade for stocks (regardless of order size). These are the sorts of retail rates you see here:

https://www.scottrade.com/online-brokerage/trading-fees-comm...

https://us.etrade.com/investing-trading/pricing-rates

https://www.tdameritrade.com/pricing.page

So at these rates, a $25 trade still doesn't make any sense, but a $500 - $1000 (still well short of a round lot) trade might.
Web 2.Hell: people, it's bad.
You're right, that code will blow up if the browser doesn't support XMLHttpRequest. The version below is more common:

var ajaxObject;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
...
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
...
}

if (ajaxObject) {
...
} else {
//handle users without ajax
}

and that's just to create the object! compare to:

$.ajax();
Teen invents revolutionary device to charge a cellphone in 20 SECONDS
Why would they lose a lawsuit over it?
What's the difference? At a glance, it looks like Seamhub organizes everything under their brand, whereas ChowNow makes a custom app for every restaurant.

The latter seems nice if I already have a restaurant in mind, but if I'm too lazy to cook on monday night, I'm not going to go through the apps one-by-one.
Adobe Edge Reflow
First-ever fully autonomous flight of a kite power system
Three Tips To Foster Creativity At Your Startup
Sad to see the recommendation to use MySQL - in my experience RDS hasn't been worth the effort - but I'm probably biased since I already invested the time in automating PostgreSQL replication setup.
So, no synergies other than ... authentication services? Then what's the point of buying them? Remember, Tumblr is barely making any money and was running out of cash. If Yahoo has nothing to offer them other than "identity management" and bureaucracy, then this is yet another failed Yahoo acquisition.
> The way we set up Soundslice is relatively simple. We made a custom AMI with our code/dependencies, then set up an Elastic Load Balancer with auto-scaling rules that instantiate app servers from that AMI based on load.

Doesn't sound that simple to me (as a complete sysadmin noob). Somebody should write a book about this.
On my end I get a complete crash once a week when running with one dyno. The official response for support I got was to upgrade to two dynos.

Apart from the PostgreSQL hosting, I'm not really happy with Heroku. Add to the random deploy breakage I've experienced mid-launch (not to mention it's slow as hell), I'm going to move back to my own servers.
This isn't entirely fair, as clientWidth isn't really the same thing as $().width().
What is the HumanAPI?
A few off the top of my head:

Microsoft:

- Vermeer

- Hotmail

- Visio

- Bungie

Google:

- Pyra

- Urchin

- Applied Semantics

- YouTube

Of course, most of the time they seem to flame out miserably. Microsoft, for instance, took a $6.2bn charge for their Aquantive acquisition. I also once remarked to a couple friends on the Kin team (yes, Kin, remember it?) that Microsoft would've been better off taking $500m in cash to the middle of their soccer fields and lighting it on fire, since at least then it wouldn't have been a huge distraction in the face of launching Windows Phone 7.

Google, of course, has a long history of bungling acquisitions (Jaiku, Dodgeball, etc.), too, but their bigger, more strategic acquisitions seem to have worked out far better than the little ones.
This is definitely doable -- we've put this in our to-do, thanks for the feedback!
"It wouldn't be a far fetched thought for someone to have constructed a, say OAuth 2.0-esque URL which, when requested, would result in the deletion of a resource, as an example to a colleague"

That does indeed sound extremely far fetched to me. Or even impossible. Can someone who knows more about OAuth tell me if this is realistic at all?
You obviously don't know how rapists and murderers are treated here.
Kirkpatrick, Levy, Markoff: Chroniclers of Technology in Conversation
netflix for baby clothes. every mo. send old box back get a new box.
"Now it's probably worth several times that..." to Facebook.

Facebook acquired Instagram because they were worried about the rapid growth of a photo sharing app that didn't involve Facebook. The Instagram purchase was a very expensive insurance policy.
I use Wifi File Transfer:
http://www.smarterdroid.com/index.php/wifi-file-transfer/usi...

Which just runs a tiny web server on the tablet/phone and then I can upload/download from my browser.
You cannot eliminate confounds by simple over-measurement. “Overkill” provides false confidence.

The only way to eliminate confounds is to understand them, and either control for them or bound them to an acceptable error tolerance. For a simple benchmark such as this, cache misses and page faults reach steady state within the first millisecond of operation; the error they contribute to the measurement of a .1s benchmark (even in aggregate) is no more than 1% — almost surely acceptable.

I have no experience with .Net, and would not care to make any estimates on the contribution of VM startup time, but the experiment in question does not include the VM startup in the measurement.

If a system were so noisy as to have interrupt storms on the order of .1s, then I would not be comfortable with timings that run for 60s either. I would much rather have statistics on 100 measurements of .1s each, which would make clear the impact of such anomalies (while still being faster to gather). There are many events that can make such measurements slower, but almost none that can make them faster; the distribution of the measurements is typically well-modeled by a Poisson distribution with bias. If one is actually trying to eliminate the effect of those events from the measurement, taking the minimum over many short samples is actually much closer to the truth than averaging over one long sample. If instead one is trying to include the effect of such events, then a different statistic would be in order.
While I agree that WP is an absolute mess, I want to remind you that this has been how WP has operated for long before the vast majority of today's frameworks have existed.

WP isn't a framework. It's a CMS. A shitty one that needs to go away, but criticizing it for not having the same feature-set as modern frameworks is simply unfair and unnecessary.
> What's best for my future family? That I 100%, undoubtedly love my job, or that I 100% always put food on the table?

And that's the crux of it, isn't it? I find that if my job is boring and my life outside of work is slow and uninteresting, I'm very unhappy. I need one or the other to be engaging on a regular basis. My wife is the strange sort of creature that is happiest in a very stable routine at work - one that I'd typically call monotonous.

Fortunately we already live happily on less than a third of our combined income, so it's actually lower risk for us happiness-wise if I pursue higher financial risk but more interesting employment. My lack of routine can often upset her, but it's much preferred to me being totally drained and demoralized at the end of a long and painfully boring workday.
Since the jobs we're locking can have somewhat inconsistent times we're actually using an implementation where the tasks can get a lock with a time limit and can extend their lock so long as they still have it, so they do potentially auto-release.

Even given this, bad lock timing (not that likely) or a crash (more likely) could let inconsistency in.

Shrugs

Like I said, my problem is not really Redis's. If I can't trust everything that uses a lock not to crash 99.99% of the time I should really be looking at our jobs and not at Redis.

Even then, though, it's probably more a matter of me not trusting things than it is said things not actually being trustworthy.
Hehe, yeah, that sentence doesn't sound particularly simple. :-)

Check out the code snippets I linked to from that blog post. It's pretty easy, I promise -- the tricky thing is just figuring out the various APIs.
Bonuses Are Toxic At Startups
Most browsers won't display GIFs at more than ~20 FPS anyways.
Heroku docs do say (and I'm afraid the link to it is escaping me) that if you run only 1 dyno, it will shut down after something like 6 hours of inactivity. So if no one hits your site for 6 hours, the next time someone does it has to boot the dyno up again, which can take enough time for the request to time out.

Not saying this is a great policy, just explaining in case you weren't sure. When you go to 2 dynos they keep things up for you presumably because now you're a paying customer.
Only on the joindiaspora pod. Many other pods never had invites and were always open for registration. It's federated, don't forget.
It is extremely unlikely that any pressure was put on the HN admins by VMWare or anyone else to get stories scrubbed. It's almost as unlikely that VMWare gives a shit about stories about Redis.
Believe me, I am sad to stop using Postgres. What parts of RDS haven't been worth the effort? I didn't have to make much effort, beyond rewriting my Postgres triggers into MySQL syntax.
Opening Keynote - Patterns of Basecamp's Application Architecture by DHH (video)
The examples discussed in the article are in the 1-2 figures $millions range. The Tumblr deal is two orders of magnitude of that.

The article is perfectly justified in asking that question of those acquisitions - I have no idea how much cash the Flickr founders walked off with in the end (after VC and early employees got their shares), but there's a reasonable scenario in which they would have made it much bigger on their own.
Mint

Reddit

Android

MySpace(I kid)
Did you consider using Heroku Postgres?
Link [1] is broken :). Need the encoded apostrophe in the URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Law in Czech Republic says you can refuse to testify against yourself or family member. Sorry for confusion, I though laws are similar in US.
What's the cost difference between Heroku and AWS for you?
Hacker News founder Paul Graham (pg) wrote in August 2010 about his experiences after his company Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998.

http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

He makes an explicit comparison between Yahoo and Google in his essay. Anyone looking at the strategy of large companies acquiring smaller companies might want to look at pg's essay as one more set of data points about what could happen after an acquisition.
Glad that you liked the concept. Wasn't aware of the unfortunate name collision. I am open to suggestions. Thanks!
Yes, I suspect that Canonical are attempting to "creat[e] a soccer mom friendly Linux" but I think the motivation may be to make some money so they can continue to develop the Ubuntu core.

I imagine that a workstation/high end laptop developer oriented version of GNU\Linux will be developed, and many would argue we already have such distributions available. Room for everyone. I personally want my Ubuntu phone for perhaps nostalgic nationalist reasons.
Because if the EU becomes a single telco market there is no justification for intra-EU roaming fees: the market itself is the "home network" and roaming fees are specifically when the device is outside its home network.
The problem in the USA is telling everyone you are looking for invstment. That breaks the rules of general solicitation, which the SEC was supposed to have updated last year but has been dragging its feet. So startups can only really talk to accredited investors, and can't talk to their users and tell them they're going to pay dividends or something.

However, they CAN charge their users for SERVICES :)
I was going to suggest it could have been something as simple as a name. Posterous is a proposterous name. It's horrible. Tumblr is an equally shitty Web2.0 crap name, in the same vain as the ghastly i prefix. iYahoor!
That depends on how much it affects the display - if snapping a cover on and off is easy, I could see myself using a blue and an orange one as a sort of hardware f.lux switch.
Proves the point: No JCPenney Catalog, profits falling, oust the new CEO.
Because the users are the product.
Hello,

1) I no longer work for VMware, but Pivotal. Redis is open source and copyright is of the original guys that wrote the code: I, Pieter Noordhuis, other contributors.

2) I posted the link to the original article in the first very lines of my reply. Actually thanks to my reply the exposure the Aphyr research had about Redis is the greatest, compared to the other data stores mentioned. I publicly said thank you to Aphyr on Twitter, and posted its blog post.

So I really don't understand your theories here.
Each of these DBs involves about 25-50 hours of research, coding, experimentation, back-and-forth with the DB authors, and writeup. I'll do Cassandra some day, but this is about 3 months of work as it stands. :)
If you've ever been accused of even the smallest crime with the flimsiest of evidence, know that there are multiple salaries at stake once the handcuffs are on:

1. The police who arrested and charged you.

2. The prosecutor who decided to go ahead with the charges.

3. Your lawyer.

4. The judge (if it ever gets there)

5. Yours - you probably lost your job as soon as you were arrested anyway and good luck finding a new one with that on your record.

There is only one person on this list who even cares about your innocence. That's right, you.

Even your lawyer? S/he doesn't really care. For him/her, it's about getting the "best" deal. Because going in front of a judge is like flipping a coin and if you fit any stereotype, you are likely fucked.

Ever had a tax audit? Same idea. No one cares about fairness or justice in the government. They only care about their salary and performance.

The police are given more funding, the more arrests they make. The prosecutor has a full pipeline ensuring his/her job. The judge likely doesn't even need to see a single case in a week.

There is no way out. Talking about it doesn't help because anyone who takes a plea is assumed to be guilty: "Yeah he wasn't found guilty, but he must have done something otherwise why would he take a deal instead of go to trial?"

That is the way the layman thinks. If I was to tell you that I was arrested for walking in a room a police officer told me to walk into, you'd laugh and say I was lying. But it's true. And I had to plea out of it. Because it's my word against his. And I took a plea after he tried to steal $400 from me and burned my watch while I was in custody.

The government is a mechanism for satisfying bullies. Is it any wonder why small government is desired by some?
That is a very unfair comparison. Riemann discussed these topics in an afternoon after having worked on them beforehand. Additionally, Einstein wasn't working on the math that whole time, he was pondering through the physics/math together. He wasn't solely trying to understand Riemann's lecture.
Well, I snack constantly, but my diet consists mostly of vegetables, fruit, nuts, meat and water. I haven't had weight issues yet. If my snack consist of one carrot, one apple, handful of nuts or one orange, it's not that bad. Doesn't hurt that apples and oranges are delicious. But then again, I'm not trying to lose weight, just eat healthier than coffee and donuts every day. My dietary requirements might be different if I actually also did strength training in addition to cardio (running & walking).
The overall opinion is that, if that's enough for your needs, then Webfaction is a very good option:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=webfaction...
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=aphyr.com

HN stories on my original posts are still there, as far as I can tell. They just never hit frontpage.
This will be interesting to see.

Of all the new entrants with new mobile OSs, Jolla has the most experienced crew. They also chose Qt as an app runtime, so they do not rely on Web apps to become mature and efficient on mobile hardware.

Since it does not rely on anything heavy-weight, the Sailfish OS should scale down to budget smartphone hardware at least as well as Android.

The also have a lot of drive to prove Nokia wrong, much the same way Andy Rubin was driven to succeed after Danger failed to make headway with OEMs and carriers. There is a lot to be said for the power of smart pissed-off people.
China Resumes Cyber Attacks on US, Firm Says
There is also a story here about Yahoo's loss.
Haven't they said this about every aquisition?
Because that company which is operating a network across several EU countries (which is one market) is, among other things, discriminating against users based on their location in the EU.

Remember that the EU was "born" with the main objective of creating a "single market" through the standardisation of laws across all member states.
Emerging Langs 2013