skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, every situation is different, but replacing capacity that you use at peak on AWS will cost you much less to buy, rack, and power yourself considering hardware and hosting costs.

Elastic scaling will save you money on AWS, but you generally can't scale everything (databases, caches, storage are harder to elastically scale up and down). And you need to pay at peak for whatever your peak is and deal with additional complexity of elastic scaling to begin with. No doubt you're paying smart people already to figure this out - it doesn't come for free.

In any account - if you take a largish box you might rack as an example (Dual-socket Sandy Bridge Xeon, ~256GB RAM, SSD, approximately a cr1.8xlarge), that box costs about $30k annually on AWS. You can buy it for around $8k. Over two years with hosting costs, you're looking at around $10k vs $60k roughly. Numbers work out similarly for other instance types although you would need some scale - perhaps a dozen of these systems - for this to make sense for your application.

Netflix I think is a special case - video delivery which they almost certainly don't do from AWS is their biggest cost - api/web traffic would be dwarfed in comparison, so who cares if it's expensive on AWS in that case? They probably enjoy the flexibility of AWS more than the little bit of money they might save by doing it themselves. Many other largish companies have gone the private cloud route; Zynga comes to mind: http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/inside-zyngas-big-move...). It's not the right fit for everybody, but it's a consideration.

Hybrid is interesting too -- provision your own hardware for the big iron - and burst into cloud for the rest of it.

All the hype of "cloud" makes people think that it's the only and/or best way to do it - certainly not the case for every sort of business.
Weird, I have never encountered this bug and I have been on outlook.com since the beta days. Perhaps, you temporarily had bad connectivity?

Also, I will have to disagree on the design part. I find outlook.com refreshing. For me, that's just about right. Minimal, if any, bells and whistles.
Sounds unlikely, as he has talked about this before - He told me after a talk 7-8 months ago that he is well capable of making such a drug but that he doesn't have the funding (and he wasn't even looking for funding or publicity yet).
I'd be quite surprised if he is just trolling them.
> But with EC2, I can just use EBS @ $100/mo/TB

If all you're after is the storage, that is very expensive unless you keep moving your storage tiers up and down very rapidly. E.g. Hetzner has servers at 49 euro (ca. 66 USD) per month for 2TB.
I think it's somewhat of a disillusionment, like a boss you thought was a friend turning out to be just a normal boss. Google had such a great reputation. Don't Be Evil. 'Unintrusive text links'. Effective advertising for small businesses. Free stuff. Empowering with information. Free webapps. 20% time. Nice to employees etc. etc.

Over time several things have happened. We got used to some of the good things about Google and made them our baseline expectation. They got used to all that income and growth. To keep up growth they had to "optimize" and in many cases put profit before aesthetics/ethics. The "unintrusive text links" for high value searches got bigger and more intrusive. 'Contextual links' in Gmail became contextual to your digital life (eg scanning your emails and analyzing your browsing).

You need a lot of goodwill believe 'Don't be evil.' From an average company it sounds phony. A lot if stuff has a tipping point. So when a free service gets shut down or rolled into another service its seen as putting profit first, herding users into profitable products or just generally sucking. Before it might have been seen as failing fast. When they ask users for a phone number now, they react with cynicism.

Google started with a lot of goodwill. Perhaps too high. People react emotionally when you don't live up to perceived promises.

Maybe there is a lesson here about over promising.
This seems like an advertisement for Cloudfare, why is it on the homepage? It contributes absolutely nothing. The two so-called reasons to be an engineer at Cloudfare can be applied to a very large number of Internet companies besides Cloudfare...

I get there are generally job listing ads on HN, but they're not normal submissions. This submission seems a little fishy to me in that it appears to have side-skirted the usual way you go about posting job advertisements on HN.
This Robot Is Changing How We Cure Diseases (Youtube)
Bitcoins are very susceptible theft, as evidenced by the fact that someone heists a whole bunch of them from a website every other week.

You can't play off a good which is hard to move as "susceptible to theft" when you can log in and copy a data file and have succeeded in stealing a whole bunch of money.
The thing that made my day when I saw someone using it was him actually editing the placeholder in the search bar (by bug). It didn't use the placeholder attribute, just some autoselect. This is something that reeks of bad design overall.

disclaimer I have not used outlook and my opinion is based on this one thing and some other quick looks over the shoulder.
Completely agree. Sometimes I wonder whether people here actually use the products that think suck or just repeat whatever they have heard elsewhere.
A Simple Guide to Creating iOS7 Style Icons
Yes, nicely put - people have a hard time believing it until you start to put numbers in front of them.

AWS has turned infrastructure into an api and software which is just simply fantastic, but you pay for that sort of flexibility.
so this should lead to an even higher exchange rate since there's even less supply. any estimates how many bitcoins are lost in oblivion?
We are on the verge of functional quantum computers. Encryption could die very suddenly.
"Years ago"!!
thanks for answering. So I guess you should always keep that file in dropbox :)
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot's prison letters to Slavoj Žižek
Code Firefox
I guess the OP thought HN would be interested in it. We (CloudFlare) didn't submit it; it's just one of many, many posts on our blog.
Stock footage video- deep into space
> If you don't need to scale up AND down quickly and regularly, EC2 is probably not a good fit for you. With EC2, you are paying for that flexibility.

If EC2 customers realised this, they'd lose 90%+ of their customer base.
I have been using fastmail (and gmail and outlook and a bunch of others). Fastmail is quite good. I have no complaints.
Which brings up another observation: when starting a business, sure take advantage of all those practical and inexpensive tools that can help you build your product in record time. But as soon as you start getting some serious traction and money (income or investment), don't hesitate to replace them with something you have more control over. Hm, it would be interesting to see open-source, self-hosted equivalents of useful services like PiCloud and the like.
This also pretty cool
http://osrc.dfm.io
Why do I have the feeling this is just a blanket lawsuit and product may not even be counterfeit.

Big companies do it all the time and smaller companies that don't have the financial means to defend themselves loose because justice is blind to everything except money.
Try editing a crontab in Python...

pip install python-crontab
Here's my little PSA, I wouldn't use mtgox to trade bitcoins, the price is inflated on there for a reason:

http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/#jump-btc-usd
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mi4h7/mtgox_withdr...
Look, this isn't a new issue. Lots and lots of us have been getting increasingly dissatisfied with Google for years. But each problem is isolated and hasn't made much of a ripple in the wider world...

Is it a big deal to me that Google messed up their automated AdSense "publisher" interaction script, and cut off my income for a few weeks? Why yes, yes it is... but that doesn't mean that anyone else cares about that. Even if Google's generally poor supplier relations affects a lot of people (and it does), there's never enough of them for it to affect Google, the brand.

Same goes for any number of other Google problems. Did the "nym wars" cause lots of disaffection amongst Google users? Yes, but again not enough. Did adding lots of pointless JavaScript to search results pages piss off a lot of people? How about the fact that search results are much less specific/useful than they used to be? Unilateral changes to the privacy policy? Or Google Reader? Code Search? Etcetera, etcetera...

Google have created a huge amount of simmering resentment over the last few years. So, once an issue like this starts to get some traction, there are a lot of people ready to wait in line to put the boot in.
This is a great page in the same vein - bash specific, but quite a bit more comprehensive.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls
Well, it that's the case Google should really start to be very careful about wording and explanations. How I am suppose to know ? After the fact by accepting something I don't want to ? Discovering it by bitching on HN is not the solution. If I want to manage my device, I don't want to locate it. At best a locator is a inner functionality a device manager. But the real question here is : is it misunderstanding on my side or misleading on Google's ?

It's ambiguous and given Google's recent trend I am a very lot less forgiven than i used to be. The more pushee they are, the less forgiven people will be, even the small mistakes will be less well received.

That's my strong and unobjective opinion. Google is getting too pushee to my taste. I pushback.
Speed your site up. after the first 30 seconds I was bored of waiting for it to load, the next 45 seconds were even worse
Http://www.9kdesigns.com/wordpress/wordpress-code-snippets
While it's very true that Bitcoin could use major improvements in general usability and user-friendliness, I don't know your location, but buying BTCs here in Poland is trivial - transfer money to bitcurex, buy and transfer coins out within 1-2 working days top.
Would anyone use peer-to-peer email service, that could send/receive to/from any other email provider and could be accessed also via web page, if there would be one?
Indeed :). The link at the bottom (to "more browser ponies"):

http://paulirish.deviantart.com/favourites/51528712

That said, I didn't know so many browsers existed. I guess it is part of Paul Irish's job to do so :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Irish
It is to be expected, to some extent, for people in the tech industry to be pompous. After all many of us have been great universities and were taught (or perhaps suggested) that we are the smartest of all.

I see this general pomposity among my fellow techies all the time. Some think that business people are stupid, some think humanities are unnecessary, some argue that users are all noobs etc...

Perhaps it's pride in work/abilities gone too far. Perhaps we overvalue ourselves...
Google's Eric Schmidt announces new blocks on child porn
No, it's not just "trendy", there are some legitimate reasons to dislike them. Just like many people have reasons to dislike Apple or Microsoft even though they also make some great stuff.

Google has done a lot to shoot itself in the foot regarding goodwill in the developer community, even though they still contribute a lot to open source.

They killed off Reader and a lot of other products, has closed down many open APIs, so instead of enthusiasm when they launch a new product, now they get "oh yeah, how long is this product going to live?"

They are now forcing every service and pushing their users into Google+ whether they want to or not.
It seems like Social is something Google is obsessed with winning, and they are happy to alienate some users in order to do that.
> which doesn't prevent them from being awesome

But how can they be awesome if they don't tell the Internet about it? It's unfathomable!
Anonymization is really not enough. Some government force Google to anonymize the data after a certain period of time. But I am sure Google engineers are able to piece it all back together without much effort. I don't say they actually do this. They probably comply with the wishes of these governments. I'm just saying they are able to do it. I would be kind of disappointed if they couldn't. What would work better is if the data were aggregated instead of anonymized. But try explaining that to a politician though. Math is usually not something politicians are well versed in and you can pretty much forget about statistics.
Here are some ideas:

(1) you can import your email from any account (that supports POP3) in a new GMail account. Just go to Settings -> Accounts in your new GMail account and configure it (note that the old GMail account also has to have POP3 activated). Actually from a new GMail account you can also send email using an older email account by SMTP. So basically, with a new GMail account, you can keep using an old email account from within the same interface, if that's what you want (heck, you could use a Fastmail.fm account from within a GMail interface, if you don't mind the slight latency).

Make sure that you label these emails with a special label, such that you can filter them later more easily.

(2) on your old email account, you can set a "Vacation Responder" that informs people of your new email address automatically.

So yeah, if you like GMail, then don't wait and do migrate to your own Google Apps domain. You won't get ads anymore in GMail, you'll have the option to migrate without losing your email address and you'll be treated like a customer (in my experience that doesn't necessarily match other people, their support has been very responsive).

And $5/month is not very cheap, but on the other hand it's the price for 1-2 coffees and I value my email. I do prefer the "Flexible" plan and not the "Annual" plan, because the later imposes a termination tax. So do it, don't wait.
5 Dropbox Security Warnings For Businesses
Advanced Javascript and Web Debugging Techniques
I'm interested in the reasoning behind taking the @ symbol rather than card or the 'lines of text' from the existing solutions. In the examples in the solution diagram all four represent a card, and 3 examples for a vCard icon have the lines, while only one has the @.

Had you already decided that the @ was important? In which case, what is that diagram trying to show? The final icon, while quite nice, doesn't represent "vCard" to me because it's too focused on email rather demonstrating what a vCard is - a representation of all of the things a user might have available.
Hilariously this post highlights like, every reason why trading goods for BTC is a sucker's deal for the retailer.
One word: http://gmelius.com/

Extension that brings back the old compose and everything from their previous UI. Gmail's time machine. Awesome.
Your Google+ profile will be deleted along with other services and data that depend on your Google+ profile.

I wonder what would happen to my old Blogspot blog that has hundreds of entries. And photos in that blog, that were uploaded to Picasa through Blogspot before G+ even existed.

I can see that Blogspot album in G+, so it might be data associated with G+ and it would be deleted. We spent hundreds of hours writing and taking those pictures, so it would be a shame to have all that hard work deleted because of a vague what gets deleted description.
There's an entirely different reason for using github as a filter.

But isn't one of the major reasons we look for a github portfolio, really as an ideological filter for finding cofounders? I wouldn't go so far as calling it communist, but contributing to open-source projects requires a dedication to the 'common good'. If it is communist, it is a great filter for people who would like to own the means of production (equity) rather than getting paid from surplus profits! (salary). I'm not great on communist ideology, but anyway startups are a mix, they're a bit socialist at a very early stage then mature.

At any rate, if this is the correct way to view github, then the counterexample we're looking for isn't people who say "I'm a great engineer and I have no github" but - "I am highly interested in working for equity alone (in a pre-revenue context!) as a cofounder, building a project from scratch with no initial reward except a sense of ownership, and I have no github".

That rings a lot more hollow than being a well-paid engineer with no github.
Being colorblind, the bottom row in Figure 5 is completely useless to me. I can also not distinguish +1000 from -1000 on the left side of Figure 1.

Publishers, please use color only when it's really neccessary, and then please have some colorblind person available for sanity checking! While it might be hard to find someone with the less common variants, you can at least cover red-green.
Well, I don't understand the "all browser logos possible" part. Is it a generator?
What, no Lynx?

http://whichbrowser.info/images/Lynx-logo.jpg
You're assuming people outside Facebook would perceive value the same way. This isn't necessarily the case.
I despise the new compose window, but most of the time I'm using IMAP anyway.
Please do not include google in statements about 'lack of faith in institutions'. When people bemoan the declining faith in institutions, they're generally talking about the legal system, the legislative system, journalists. Institutions that are supposed to represent disparate social groups with at least part of their mission to make the society and the world generally a better place.

Profit driven corporations are not that.

Less faith in corporations would probably have very few disbenefits. Less faith in the legal system leads to people taking 'justice' into their own hands. Less faith in the political system leads to people becoming disengaged, threatening the legitimacy of government.

“The profit-driven corporate person, in other words, acts just like a natural person with Antisocial Personality Disorder, commonly called a sociopath or psychopath. ”

http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diag...
A few thoughts:

1. I'm probably too lazy to look this up, but given mining Bitcoins essentially boils down to solving hard math problems and there is no centralisation, what prevents collisions from two miners mining the same bitcoin at the same time? Is there a GUID element involved? (if so, then perhaps collisions are possibly, just extremely unlikely as to be practically zero).

2. If the bitcoin mining difficulty increases on a known path, would it be possible to tie the current BTC price (probably would have to try estimate a forward price) vs the current cost of GPU processing on EC2 (ie. via Amazon's spot market mechanism). Has anyone done this?
... but gmail doesn't do spam filtering on messages it pulls with POP.
The Database section needs a bit of work. When I click on Database I'm stuck. I HAVE to create a table which I then cannot rename. When I delete the table I'm in the same situation, lock down.

Other than that, very nice.
Both are commodities and containers for wealth. If there's an arbitrage opportunity in exchanging one for the other, they'll likely be exchanged.

The thing about "store of value" principles is that the ascribed value of things changes. It generally has a floor of the marginal cost of production / extraction / acquisition, though sometimes it can fall below even that (viz: inflated currency literally not worth the paper it's printed on).

If someone's willing to pay more for bitcoin than gold, or you're betting that that the value of bitcoin will increase, trading gold for BTC makes sense.

In terms of tangible value -- Gold is more likely a persistent store of value than BTC, but where you need to move wealth quickly and easily (say, you're fleeing an unstable situation), a BTC wallet somewhere else might be a lot easier than smuggling out gold ingots. Even a (moderately) modest amount of wealth, say, $50m, would be somewhat over a ton of gold. Hard to run with that in your pockets.

If you want to limit yourself to a maximum of 45# of weight, you could carry slighltly under $850,000 at current market prices. Not insignificant, but depending on the loot you're trying to, well, loot, possibly less than you might hope.
Weekdone Finds €148,000 Investment, Wins Slush's Pitching Competition
Bloomberg News Suspends Reporter Whose Article on China Was Not Published
It irks me that this is called Frontend. It's not, it's design. Call it Design. Or Frontpage 2013. Whatever. Frontend is a development skill, which requires intricate knowledge of markup and javascript languages/frameworks.
It's possible and probably that they are fascists. But pedantically someone could be one and not the other.
I feel exactly the time. I talked to a friend of mine when it hit $200 and I said I didn't think it was worth investing to make cash at this point.

Had I put $500 in then I would have $1500 now :(
Extra-nice thing about this feature: it can be enabled and disabled, for a class, with a very little effort. So you can check correctness first, and optimize later.

Does that fuck up? Rinse and repeat.
Great tips. Unblocking folks also applied to taking an afternoon off, or even using the office pool table.
It's an implementation issue.

I posted this as a comment to the article:

--
I'm working on a Ruby compiler and have taken pretty much [the PyPy] approach [of automatically using slots when possible]: Any instance variable names I can statically determine are candidates for the equivalent treatment (allocating a slot at a fixed offset in the object structure).

Anything else will still go in a dictionary. In practice my experience is that a huge proportion of objects will have a fairly static set of attributes, and the dynamic set is often small enough that having pointers them included in every instance is still often cheaper than using dictionaries.
---

In a static language, your options are generally to either statically allocate slots, or explicitly use a dictionary anyway.
Podcast: Ian Lawson – Mr Red Hat
Abandon Gmail for Outlook.com? After suffering through the mega-fail Games for Windows Live, real suffering: constant restarting and sign-in needed, really slow, really annoying update cycles, terrible support procedures; kinda worked when you went through hell... sorta thing.

After that torture, I'm reluctant to trust MS web email. I'm sure a different mob did the email application from the GFWL mess, but I won't rush over. I'd use Yahoo above Outlook. Yahoo email seems reliable enough, not too painful.
One more thing to add in: If you're in Germany (and are not an American citizen), I highly recommend bitcoin.de for buying/selling bitcoins. Super smooth, very legit, plus they are working with a real bank. https://www.bitcoin.de/de/r/wttmmm (disclosure: referral URL)
> When people are referring to using Github as your CV, they aren't talking about Github pages.

That's actually my point. They should be, and maybe you didn't read the comment I was replying to, but that is in fact exactly what we were talking about - "Unless you have your CV on github.."

Of course having a mess of github project pages is a bad portfolio, but each of the individual projects in your portfolio makes sense as a github project, and the fact that they give you a pleasant <username>.github.io site to tie it all together makes it one of the best ways to host your portfolio.

It makes perfect sense to have github projects as your portfolio parts and turn it into the 'narrative' so beloved of the original author with a github pages site.
You will soon see prices in mBTC and maybe even μBTC.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MilliBit
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units
To avoid relying on external sources, I use expect, to telnet into my router and get the ip address of its public interface. Here's an example expect script.

http://serverfault.com/questions/89114/finding-the-public-ip...