skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're talking about short-term, temporary gains. There are two types of maximizing of profit: long term, and short term. The strategies required to execute them are polar opposites.

If the insurance company laid off productive workers that significantly contributed to their ability to earn a profit, then what you describe is the opposite of maximizing profit for the long haul. What it sounds like, is the insurance company got swallowed up by a vampire looking to suck the life out of it for a short term gain.
Shared libraries on Linux only share read-only text and data, which should not be application-visible.

If you want to share state between processes, the library must explicitly set up a shared mapping - but of course a statically linked library can do this just as well.
Come on, us Aussies are just dying to become "Little America" (at least at the political level). Of course that goes through to terrible slides ;)
"Asked about the spying revelations in a separate interview, Abbott said: "To use the term spying, it's kind of loaded language … researching maybe. Talking to people. Understanding what's going on.""

Is this the onion?
Is that assuming they are replacing all existing hardware with newer models as they become available, or is it based on some reported replacement schedule Amazon has stated? Also, is it based on Moore, or the actual market prices?

I would expect their costs are based on the mixture of systems they have in place and for it to go down somewhat similar to the market cost for the component, but with a somewhat large lag time as older systems are phased out and newer ones phased in.
There are likely many motives, with some being opportunistic. My read is that a lion share of the discourse is rooted in Google attempting to redefine its relationship with users (unified id), when users are happy with the status quo. YouTube is what brought it out of the shadows.

Google can justify the move as being good for users, but I strongly suspect that, in most cases, this agenda is not supportive of the value proposition that the individual properties offer its users. I suspect that Google knows this, but their goals are not consistent with that of most of these users.

In other words, Google is willing to take a hit from angry users in exchange for building a unified user network.
It depends on how long you've had an HN account. At some point the content seems to get repetitive. It's pretty easy to ignore the content that you've seen before.

But in the beginning it is a wealth of information, giving you insight into what should be expected when trying to start a barebones new company.

So you gorge on the articles until you rarely get new insights from them. Then, naturally, your addiction to HN ends. (Typically this starts the "remember when HN was good?" comments)

Now if you are addicted for other reasons, like you feel socially involved here, that I can not speak to. But if your addiction is content, that will fade once you've had your fill.
Oh, reverting merges! I've been there, and it is completely possible, out of the box, with git. But! It requires a relatively thorough understanding of how it works, or you will definitely mess it up. I wrote up this summary a while back for our company wiki:

Imagine this scenario:

- Team Sandy does a ton of work on branch foo.

- Team Sandy ensures the release manager that branch foo is perfect and bug free.

- Team Sandy merges branch foo into branch develop and pushes.

- Other developers continue committing to develop.

- Massive devastation and destruction start occurring due to massive bugs scattered throughout Sandy's code.

At this point, we want to get all of Sandy's code out of develop, as we can't post to production until develop is Sandy-free. What do we do?

- Revert the merge commit

The important thing to note here is that this basically undoes the effect of the merge, but NOT the history. If you were to try to merge branch foo back in at a later date, git would do nothing and tell you that everything is already merged in. This is technically correct, but confusing.

Let's imagine that Sandy goes back to branch foo and commits bug fixes to fix the devastation. Now, branch foo is ready to be merged back in. What do we do?

- Revert the revert commit (yes, really). This basically undoes the effect of our original undo. At this moment, develop has all of branch foo's code pre-bug fixes.

- Merge foo into develop. This merges the subsequent bug fix commits into develop.

A much more thorough discussion can be enjoyed here (I highly recommend the read): https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/rever...

--

Basically, it can be done with one line on the commandline, but I wouldn't recommend anyone do it unless they've read the above (specifically, the discussion I've linked to).
Another good question is at what point will the US government and other countries declare bitcoin illegal? If bitcoin becomes widely used it will threaten the power of major governments. I cannot see a scenario where the US or any other major country allows that to happen.
Microsoft leveraged their market dominance to distribute more copies of Windows and Office, not to stifle competition. Your statement makes it sound like you don't understand the profit motive.

Distributing more software is how they earn more money. The $ reveals what you think of Microsoft, and going by that, one would have to assume you think Microsoft's goal was to optimize profit. Optimizing profit would require distributing more copies of their software.
I don't know, but don't think so, that's the same difference between asynchronous and concurrent.
Scientists Develop A Battery Electrode That Heals Itself
> For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid
> notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added
> you to a circle.

Plus launched on September 20, 2011 -- that's just over two years old. The default notification setting changed from "everyone" to "extended circles" in October 2011, which blocked notifications when strangers mention you in a post.

The default for being added to a circle is still to notify you regardless of whether you know the other party, which seems to match the behavior of most other social networks (people like to know who's watching them).

> Scrolling the G+ timeline would show this is a very rosy
> depiction: notice how it's jerky even in Chrome? Hit the
> spacebar and notice how, unlike almost every other page
> on the web, you can't scroll?

Scrolling is smooth for me in Chrome on MacOS. The spacebar pages down properly, and shift+spacebar pages up. You might want to verify whether the behavior you're seeing is due to a misbehaving browser extension or user script.
It is highly unlikely that the U.S. government will declare Bitcoin illegal, due to this breaking news story:

"U.S. Agencies to say Bitcoins Offer Legitimate Benefits"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/u-s-agencies-to-say...
That chapter (like the entire book) is still a work in progress and I'll hopefully fix the most egregious errors before publication ;)
No Anandtech reviews, but here's a few:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422923,00.asp

http://www.androidguys.com/2013/08/30/lenovo-ideatab-a1000-t...

I think the average conclusion is that the device is OK, but if it cheap enough then it may be worth it.
Is it just me or has gmail got REALLY slow for anyone else in the last 3 months as well? As in sometimes it might take like a minute to open an email. I was hoping that it was some temporary issue but it does not seem to be going away.
I really like the look of this. Can you describe more about your long-term goals with this? What is your intended market?
Oh man, two things: first, I wonder what DropBox will do with PiCloud, and second, I feel like a dodged a bullet. I kinda hate saying that, since it always turns up on these threads, but it's just true.

I had been working seriously on converting a financial application to run on PiCloud. It's mid-November. In the hundred days until they cease operations, I would have had to deal with 10-K filings for my clients and scramble to get the hell out of there, just in time for Q1. What an absolute mess that would have been.

No other time would have been much better, and I know there's an API compatible replacement in the works, but I've been there, and I'm sure something would have freaked out.

Whatever happened to having some kind of reasonable transition period where the buyer continues to support all of its clients? PiCloud, your product was really neat. DropBox, I really wish you wouldn't just hit it and quit it.
You have to admire Buffer's PR skills. By writing that seemingly random post about naps and getting it republished, they end up getting a link to their site in the first paragraph of an article on a major blog.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my nap.
Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful

-Warren Buffet

I'm not touching bitcoin while there is this kind of hype around it...
I don't have super high confidence BTC will survive in the mainstream more than a few years. It's too easy to shut it out by putting pressure on banks not to open accounts for the companies running exchanges. [1]

I had bought some BTC long ago for a few dollars a coin, and spent most of it on domain names and other purchases at sites that started taking it, just to understand the ecosystem. I had my own wallet, tried some cloud wallets and both MtGox and Coinbase.

I sold what was left a few days ago in the $400s/BTC. That'll cover my Christmas gifts for family this year.

1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/15/bitcoin-c...
Quoting Mt. Gox prices == lawl.

Seriously, there is NO liquidity in that market.
yeah, but did you read about what they were doing? granted the breaker of it all did something he shouldn't have... but its still terrifying to hear of these things.
I think the parent is meaning something like the git-status integration of e.g. oh-my-zsh [0], or something like the 'official' git-status integration script for bash [1]

(I've used the former, but not the latter.)

[0] https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
[1] https://raw.github.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git...
I think you may have cause and effect backward here.

Suppose a bunch of people get fat. What are the chances that they, after the fact, convince themselves that fat is okay?
Similar story, Angel Densetsu: http://www.mangareader.net/178/angel-densetsu.html

"The story is of Kitano Seiichirou, a very kind and pure-hearted young man, with a horrifying, monstrous face. People being what they are, they think he's a terrifying delinquent, and there are plenty of chance misunderstandings (coupled with Kitano's convenient inability to understand what's happening around him) that propel him into the position of &quot;school guardian&quot;, a.k.a. head thug on campus"
"You can also improve a service without charging more. Again profit and benefit will not be directly correlated."

In your example, profit and benefit would in fact be directly correlated.

If you improve your service, without charging more, then more customers will want your product accordingly, and you will earn more profit all things being equal. In fact, this is one the most basic of all methods of earning more profit from an existing service or product: give customers a better service or product without raising prices, increasing the value proposition of your offering.
Agreed, Google Code is awful. The tree ui for browsing code is so very terrible. Browsing commits is a terrible pain. Viewing diffs is awful. And the site just looks ugly and is hard to use. I was tired of Google Code before I even knew about GitHub, I had switched to Unfuddle.
how long is "long term"? 30 years?
Low hundreds makes sense to me. Everything else to me screams it's just hype/bubble.
For everything Hiroshima was, and it may have been a war crime, but it clearly was not a genocide.

"Rich Jews are in control of media" is a bigoted stereotype that saying "we wouldn't have heard about this except for rich Jews" runs afoul of.

Here are some pages that will let you know of the various anti-semitic tropes you referenced in your post as well as some reasons the Holocaust is unique amongst all the disgusting genocides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
http://ww2history.com/experts/David_Cesarani/The_Nazi_hatred...
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Why_Do_People_Hate_Th...
Minimum Wage, Minimum Life
I use (hourly) both regular GMail and apps for domains, and I haven't noticed anything like that. A minute to open an email seems like it would be really noticeable, too.
Governments wouldn't have to declare bitcoin explicitly illegal.

Instead, governments would simply make them impossible to exchange for official currency by denying bitcoin providers access to the banking system (by closing bank accounts, defining bitcoin as "high risk for money laundering"). Under such a scenario, governments could also prohibit banks themselves from transacting in bitcoins.

In such an event, if governments were then to enforce the requirement that any income earned in bitcoin be paid as taxes in official currency, holders of bitcoin would find themselves liquidating non-bitcoin assets in order to pay their tax bill.
Exactly. Although rebasing is convenient, it does involve taking destructive actions on a repository which is ostensibly a tool to make sure your data isn't lost. The feeling in the Mercurial community is that this is potentially dangerous and not necessary.

Really, it would be best if there was some way to retain the original commits while rebasing to clean the history. Time for a new DVCS?
Just checked out www.multyvac.com, which has webvan, boo.com, etoys and lehman brothers listed as customers. What's the joke? Not sure I get it.
You make an excellent point, as the public gets more bullish on BTC the end may be quickly approaching...

On the other hand, a couple hundred bucks is a small price to pay for the chance that BTC could explode another couple orders of magnitude.

In the end, my indecisiveness on the matter will lead to laziness determining my strategy, i.e. letting the BTC I have ride.
If I heard convincing stories of a good client, I'd use that. But I've used Gmail's web interface for years, with reasonable happiness. And yeah, the anti-spam rocks.
As a very happy user of PiCloud, I'm sad to see it go. It is a shame they had such A-list VC's (Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Greylock Partners), who don't have an interest in just a good solid business. They only wanted a huge, home run.

I've been looking around for a good replacement, and there is a gap. PiCloud really had three components. The first was an ability to run code with arbitrary dependencies with no more than a second start up time. PiCloud called them environments. This is really the same problem Docker is addressing. Both were using LXC and AUFS to solve the problem. Unfortunately, Docker-as-a-service is very early days. People like orchardup.com are getting there, but so far only have hourly pricing. There is enginedock.com which has per minute pricing, but is it super early on. I'm in a "Docker gap", where these services are really not at the same level that PiCloud was.

The second was the nice Python API, RESTful interface, and the command line interface for triggering off jobs, querying when the finish, and getting the results. That part will presumably be open sourced, but it is really all tied in to the hosting portion.

Then the third level is to have a bunch of machine you can load balance across, to allow per second pricing on AWS. They had such lovely high memory, high CPU machines to run on. The split up some of the biggest EC2 cluster instances, and you could run each process on your 1/8 share. The nearest current replacement is iron.io's IronWorker. However, they only have 320MB per job, which doesn't work for my application. Also Heroku workers are billed per second, but they only have up to 1GB of memory. I'm hoping that this (new?) entity Multyvac can serve that role successfully. Hopefully, they'll tell us more detail on this soon.

Anyway, best of luck to the PiCloud team. You were great. Especially Aaron who did much of the tech support. Thanks.
Yes, basically it's a global whishlist that your can collect products you want buy from other E-commerce website, and you can organize them in your way. You're right, we should let user use it first instead of show some instruction and register page, we'll improve soon. Thanks your advice.
Yeah, but if you ignored that advice when the hype was about Bitcoin hitting $10, you'd be rich right now.
There's virtually no limit as to where it could go, since it is driven by demand and perceived value. As long as there will be a large amount of people who see value/utility in Bitcoin in the short/mid/long term, its value will continue to increase.

Keep in mind that for now, Bitcoin has almost zero utility. The day when Bitcoin becomes easier to use/to exchange/etc..., its value is likely to increase way further.
I'd imagine hundreds. Financial institutions are some of the slowest moving things out there.
I don't know how to operate a airplane, but that isn't a problem I have with airplanes. That is a problem I have with myself.
I guess just that they are there to pick up the pieces from PiCloud, like someone should have done for those other failures.
> On the other hand, a couple hundred bucks is a small price to pay for the chance that BTC could explode another couple orders of magnitude.

This is how I look at it. How much money will I make in a lifetime? Am I really going to miss a few hundred dollars for something that could become revolutionary? We've never seen something quite like Bitcoin before, so it's really hard to predict what will happen.
Yea, but um, 20% is 20%
Ask HN: Is it a big deal if my app was on lifehacker+published newspaper
Also got tweeted out to like a million feeds. Where do I go next? I want more people to find out about the app.
I honestly don't know. The world is changing so fast now that it wouldn't surprise me if this happened in 10 years, or even 5 years. As context, just 6 years ago there was no iphone. 8 years ago there was no Youtube. 9 years ago there was no Google maps. 10 years ago there was no Facebook. I like to think how much these things have already changed the world, and my life, and how none of them were around just a decade ago. I'm very excited to see what the world will look like 10 years hence.

edit: a word
I'm talking more long term. Right now bitcoin is not a threat or a legitimate replacement for dollars. If and when bitcoins become a normal every day option for purchases, that story could really change. For example, one of the major problems with bitcoin for a government is that they cannot as easily trace taxes on bitcoin trading. If I could do all my local purchasing with bitcoin, I assume the benefit would be that I would not pay sales tax. That's a huge issue for governments if bitcoins ever become ubiquitous.
On what basis? What sets the value of a BTC, for you?
It's not always but it seems to be mostly with unread emails but sometimes with read emails as well.
I am not sure if that's the case: I think banks and government are starting to enjoying this new competition. If there is a room for new investment and new way to generate tax revenue, they two will go forward with Bitcoin. The adoption might take a couple years to mature but I am sure they are all looking at it (Congress is already planning to regulate bitcon at some point as a bill, and government agencies like FBI is targeting at deep web which is fueled by bitcoin now).

I do however agree that bitcoin can't be a long term investment. Bitcoin is a short-term investment. You should buy and sell as soon as a target price is up.
I have a hard time thinking objectively about anything that upsets YouTube commenters.

Maybe Google is "accidentally" breaking them on purpose?

Tangential: http://comments.thatsaspicymeatball.com/
You're right, see my above comment, we'll improve and let user try our product first and then ask them sign up. Basically this is a global wish list, and you can organize something you want buy online in here, currently. later, we'll help you tracking the price of products you added and give you some recommendation if we find them in lower price.
At our office we keep a cot in an office on the 2nd floor. Almost everyone on the dev team has grabbed a nap at some point. I'd rather a 20 minute nap and feel refreshed then trying to keep slogging away drowsy from whatever reason (big lunch, up late the night before whatever). Never had anyone abuse it, max nap was probably 45 minutes someone took with the avg being around 20.
The article reads like a jealous 30-something founder/ceo/evangelist/whatever_is_trendy writing off snap-chat as a 'boy-band'. Facebook offering $3 Billion shows that snap-chat is indeed starting to eat facebook's lunch (future users)...you know facebook, the company geared toward teens, college kids, and in the last few years, older adults. So maybe the article is right, kids aren't indicators toward the future of tech (kindle, ipod, whatever), but they are indicators of the multi-billion dollar market that exists for them that Facebook current resides within. The author needs to throw out the "i know more than you" attitude and look at the market that snap-chat has either created (facebook not gearing toward teens) or is stealing.

This should especially ring with HN, as everything i've read here is about how if you have some crazy idea there's probably a market for it.
Music videos meets Instagram
Which is what makes BTC so disruptive. You don't need traditional financial institutions, once there is a market for goods and services. It's only the smallness of the BTC market right now that makes it necessary to buy in from and cash out into state-sponsored money.
Heh right on I actually thought of that flexibility / throw them a bone bit after I already posted. I think that's the abstract bit, is that these things need to be negotiated in real-time for it to make any sense. If you find you're doing too much work or it's something that requires a lot of specialized knowledge, you need to get that level of pay while having it make sense to the client. I know some people try to whine that this amorphous rate idea is sketchy but then I hear stories about freelancers & small web ventures trying to do psychotic shit like quoting 2k/month for "site maintenace" or getting a 5k contract for "SEO". I deliver MUCH better quality of service to my clients than these "professionals" who are trying to set up bunk service contracts as sources of recurring income. The reality is you need to have your client's trust. I do the best work I can & if I feel I deserve extra for a job and can justify it, by all means I say so and negotiate it. And I do something similar to your lawyer in that I don't bill for email/communications unless we have time blocked for a longer meeting, so it's hard for the client to ever feel as if they've overpaid. 15 minutes on the phone every day or so on the job I let slide. Then I log most of my hours by task. What I want is to deliver them value so they can succeed and give me more work. Most clients can appreciate that.

Man I like your attitude larrys. Business really is an art, & I think my role model is kindof like "Better Call Saul" but without the illegal activities. He starts off as a sketchy, unlikable guy but then you notice that his clients are always satisfied and they are all well-paid. :D

It seems much easier to reach that type of relationship by doing some high-velocity business rather than dragging the process down &, as you said, letting everyone dwell too much on $$ signs.
Do you not know how to take a screenshot on an ipad?