skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps, but discussing profitability of AWS in gross margin terms is somewhat pointless. At 100%, that means not a single cost of operating the business has been accounted for. No computers, no engineers, no data centers, no electricity, nothing. It's a meaningless number.

I'm not suggesting the business is not profitable, by all accounts it is, but to understand how it's benefiting the company as a whole, you need to look at the operating line.
Prada, suicide and sexual harassment: A whistleblower speaks out
You can say the same things for Orlando and Tallahassee. :-)
I think it is pretty clear from the wording it is an aqi-hire by DropBox. They are just getting a talented team.

I am very close to launching Predictobot.com, which uses PiCloud for all of its computation. I spent last week moving to Heroku after DotCloud's pivot, and now I'll need to replace PiCloud. The web sure is a stable place.
Wow, so you might be sending immaculate condition items you've labeled "good" quality while someone else might be sending junk in a can labeled "good" quality with no ability to affect what your customers see. If I were you, I'd find items that were being sold and just send shit in a box. Either you'd knock out all the competing sellers while making a small profit or someone up there would have to rethink their M.O. Seriously sounds a one way ticket on a race to the bottom of quality to me.
A remote command capability was revealed in the trial of a mob boss. The FBI used a non-smartphone as a room bug. A reasonable surmise is that the phone can be commanded to periodically power on and listen for commands. Those commands could include turning on the speakerphone, jacking up the agc, and auto-answering without indicating the phone is on.

Turning on periodically so it can be tracked would be one part of what it takes to implement a room bug.
Other things that kids have flocked to that haven't quite panned out as long-term, large-impact businesses: Formspring, Livejournal, Xanga, Chatroulette, Fart sound apps, snap bracelets

There's nothing inherently wise about what a kid thinks is a worthwhile thing to do. I can only guess that those who target them know the power of peer pressure, so if you get many kids roped into your product, then you'll get many, many kids -- and presumably, their parents. Other than that, hard to see the wisdom in pre-adult crowds.
Here's the blog post I think you're referring to.

http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/
I remember hearing Warren Buffet also tries to stay away from technology investments, because he doesn't understand them well enough.
Check out Nerds For Nature in the Bay Area: http://nerdsfornature.org
VmWare is a much greater waste.
shUnit2 - xUnit based unit testing for Unix shell scripts
Start-Up Leaders Recall Choice to Cash In or Stay Independent
HN doesn't have that much content, I never feel overwhelmed. The front-page turnover rate is really slow, to the point that I pretty quickly get my "fix" and then leave. Over the course of a day I might sink an hour into it, 2 if there's something interesting going on. However, I usually read maybe 3 articles per day at most.

>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.

I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Mysterious.

"80 companies were sued in the past 12 months".

Where did the new counterfeit items come from? Is someone making them and feeding them into these guy's pipeline? How does that happen?

How were there enough counterfeits to sue 10 companies a month? What did the purchase history look like for his last buyer of a new "the mentalist"?

Did the author mean to imply that Amazon might have shipped a forged copy that Amazon procured?

Why is the tone of the article so glib? Why was it posted on a site like that, and where is the follow up, now that it's a year later? And whats with his next article about selling xbox games in June

I'm a cynic and conspiracy theorist, but I can't help but wonder if this tribe of amazon merchants found a source for "new" DVDs that was too good to be true, and looked the other way while passing them to amazon. A more outlandish theory would be that the rights holders set these guys up to destroy huge volumes of used merchandise.
I'm not sure what you think gross margin means. It's revenue minus COGS (computers, data centers, electricity) divided by revenue.
It sounds like he sent used items, but customers (and the law firm) received new, sealed items sent in by other merchants. This would seem to be a problem when someone orders a new item from a merchant participating in comingling, and there are only used ones in stock.
+1 on not needing exotic hardware. This is—while not trivial—not exactly hard today with an Intel E5 processor and it's DPDK.

What's strange is that they used an FPGA at all. The entire industry for network processors is moving the opposite way.
I got one for ~$32, TVS-E Gold USB, they uses Cherry MX Blue.

http://www.amazon.in/TVS--Bharat-Gold-Wired-Keyboard/dp/B00A...
No. Outlook.com, which is hotmail rebranded. It's pretty good.
Assuming it reaches pretty widespread use, an interesting (if extremely back-of-the-envelope) number might be the world's money supply divided by peak bitcoin (21 million). That is to say, if all the world's money were replaced by bitcoin right now, that's about how much value each bitcoin would have to cover.

I'm to lazy to track this down for the world, but a quick search indicates that the US M2 money supply is about 10.5 trillion. Replacing that with bitcoin would require each bitcoin to be worth $500,000.
and he is right, stay away from anything you dont understand.
My priors are as follows: 98% chance of $0, 2% chance of > $10m.
These are spread over an enormous number of machines.

OT, but for truly impressive single machine performance, check out the LMAX FX trading platform, which can handle 6 million orders per second on a single core on commodity hardware.....in Java. [1]

[1] http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
I got the feeling they bought lots of DVDs for a variety of sources; estate sales, going-out-of-business sales, disposals from other merchants or whatever. There's no reason to think some new/shrinkwrapped items wouldn't be in there.

For example: My mother has an enormous collection of DVDs, some of which she rented from the local DVD rental shop, loved, and then purchased a (new) copy from Amazon "just so she owns a copy" but has never rewatched it or even unwrapped it. As I don't watch DVDs, in the (hopefully long away) event of her passing, I'd be highly inclined to see if I could find someone to just take the entire collection off my hands for a reasonable sum. In theory, some of those DVDs, including "new" shrinkwrapped DVDs could end up as FBA merchandise.

In fact, it's entirely possible that she has a shrinkwrapped, counterfeit DVD right now without even knowing it (due to commingling, who knows where the DVDs she orders, overwhelmingly from Amazon, actually came from?); a timebomb waiting to take out some FBA merchant if it ever finds its way back into Amazon's supply chain (which isn't unlikely).

The more I think about it, the more FBA and commingling seem like utter disasters. It's mixing untrusted merchandise into a "trusted" pool; I can't know if the DVD I buy from Amazon came from Amazon or not.
http://bitcoinaverage.com is the place these days.
That option is there, it's the x button in the top right corner.
No, that's just Tony Abbott. Expect more hilarity in the years (days?) to come. If you can't wait, just Google some of his past statements. If you like prejudice, two-dimensional thinking and more meaningless rhetoric than you can shake a stick at, then you're going to love Tony Abbott.

Let's see where he can take a country that ranked #2 on the Human Development Index and the highest of 34 countries on the OECD Better Life index. Should be interesting, considering he was voted in by the "Aussie battlers" who were enjoying a better quality of life than they've ever experienced in Australian history (notice Australia doesn't move on the HDI even when you account for inequality? The US sure does, from #3 to #16). Should be great when, under the Trans-Pacific Partnership he sells out to the US to trade a few horses [1] and our healthcare/pharmaceutical industry emulates the American system. Good times ahead.

[1] "there's always horse-trading in these negotiations, but in the end … everyone is better off" - Tony Abbot, November 14, 2013
We hope that this becomes the way people learn online. A flexible, mobile way to learn with others who are on the same path as you... The Best content is usually spread across 2 or 3 sources for any topic, so the goal is to curate the best possible structure for any skill. Also to make learning super actionable and easy to track...

We think that all college education and beyond should happen in this format!
What is so surprising in that ?
The companies running exchanges have already been shut out and are currently doing just fine without bank accounts. The main thing a bank offers you is security of your assets; they have vaults for their dollar and BitCoin reserves.

The other thing about financial institutions is that if there is an investment opportunity that gives them the possibility of making a ton of money they will take it. As soon as they see that they can make money off of BitCoin they will welcome the exchanges with open arms.

I would have agreed that it wouldn't survive the mainstream if there was a danger of a serious attempt by the United States, the EU or China to ban its use. But it appears that government agencies are smiling on BitCoin, and both the United States government and the Chinese government appear to be embracing it. I suspect because if it becomes the world reserve currency it neutralizes the advantage that both parties have in manipulating financial markets (China by not allowing its currency to float and the US by, well, bailing out its financial system every time it leverages itself to the hilt and crashes which sends ripples through the world banking system.) The US and China want to neutralize the others' ability to manipulate their economies through monetary policy, and BitCoin gives them that opportunity.
They shipped something to some people, and nothing to others. They shipped me an initially defective pair of cases, said they'd happily replace them, took them back and shut down the company without ever replacing them. These guys took a lot of people's money and left them with nothing to show for it. I've been extremely hesitant to Kickstarter anything since.
this is a terrible analogy, its more like 'i can't drive this car if i don't do an engine rebuild myself - maybe i'll drive this car that already works the way i want'

tbh, i started a place they used git, i started learning it but nobody already there knew a damned thing about it and they should have been using it at all. they used it because it was more popular, despite having history with mercurial. we now use mercurial.

no need to be condescending. i did just point out not knowing it was precisely my problem
And not linking certain things helps people more by helping distinguish between which references are particular enough to merit linking when mentioned and which can be assumed as common knowledge.
NSA grapples with 988% increase in records requests
I suppose it depends on what you consider large. At the moment my team is 3 who are doing daily work, and a few more that do more intermittent work. I'd consider that to be small.

I have in the past worked on larger teams (~15 developers), that project used svn and we never seemed to really run into any issues even though we had branches for mainline dev work, and support branches for each "released" version. I'd get the occasional conflict to resolve but it generally wasn't too bad, and I get those with Git also.

I've never worked on a project where dozens or hundreds of remote developers were contributing, but I'd say that outside of a small number of high-profile open-source projects, most people don't. I understand that's what git was built for; maybe that's why all those features just seem like overkill for anything I've never worked on.
With this level of volatility, no one would be using BTC for anything except for pure speculation. Who would dare purchase anything for 1 BTC when the value of that BTC could go up 10% the next day?

When there is no inherent use of something other than pure speculation, then it will end badly. This is 21st century tulip bulbs, but I cheer on anyone who has the balls to jump in and make money on BTC while there's money to be made.

But holding on long term is seriously a fool's game, this is a trading instrument, not something with any long term value.
yes, tbh this is the first time i have heard of the reflog.

i extensively googled when i had the original problem which put me off using git
Is it possible to do something like a short on bitcoins?
I have a similar need for memcached, but I'm still using DO. I'm running the $5 instances running Twitter's fatcache. For $250/month, I can cheaply get 1TB of memcached storage online and available in our cluster (out of NY2).

Thrown in a some consistent hashing and I can scale up/down as needed. Fatcache is completely kick ass.
It was a pain in the butt to set up, but it has been basically hands-free ever since.
Yup, stupid advice indeed. You can't predict what's going to happen, so in the end it really depends on the case. You could find many counter examples to this quote.
yeah, as a rule a user shouldn't care about implementation details. to be fair this is mainly possible with git in my experience... but not always. my experience with hg has been positive in that regard
Yeah that is my problem too. GitHub seems like a natural fit for a B2D service, but the permissions is a problem. I don't want to piss of devs.
I don't think it's possible to predict. Nothing like Bitcoin has ever happened before. If it works, and if it remains the leading cryptocurrency for a few years, the upside is damned near limitless (I see a comparison to gold...but gold is such tiny percentage of the worlds transactions, and it sucks compared to the efficiency of Bitcoin). I can imagine people who would never consider gold (me, for example), using Bitcoin for everything.

I'm trying to visualize situations that would make me stop dealing in BTC (my companies both accept BTC now), and it pretty much boils down to: The government makes it illegal and puts stiff penalties on its use. I'd, obviously, have to stop accepting it for my businesses. But, it would be disastrous for the US economy to lose this innovation, so I'm betting it won't happen.

The other variable that is difficult to predict is other cryptocurrencies. They dilute the market, but not by a lot, so far. If a truly superior competitor to Bitcoin came along, it might dethrone BTC, and replace it...leaving BTC vastly less valuable.

Finally, if BTC gets broken. i.e. double spend becomes possible, mining exploits, etc. that can't be fixed without destroying existing coins...that would also cause a massive crash. I suspect we're past the point of that being a significant risk (so many eyes looking for holes, we'd probably see if by now).

So, I'm betting it's got a very big upside still.
So sad to see PiCloud go. They made parallel computation so easy to implement. Their service was really well-built.
Hmm - it tells me to get flash player. My phone says no.
If I think pessimistically, between the TPP, NBN and carbon "tax", this government could do 50+ years worth of damage to Australia's economy, not to mention damage to reputation.

What can we do?
You could just as well say that your dollar lost 10% against bitcoin in a day, who would dare buy something with a dollar with it fluctuating so much so often.
Ahhh the days where 1 domain was selling for 10 btc, and I thought "what a waste".
For a moment, I thought he'd made synthonol

There's also soma from Brave New World. Not sure if Aldous Huxley was the first to write about the idea, but it's hard to argue that he wasn't the first to bring it up well.
Echo JS is two years old
For anyone who doesn't know, Tony Abbot == George Bush Jr.

He's incredible repugnant & stupid. It is definitely damning when someone like him actually could get elected. What a time to live in...
If you sold right now.
Ugh. I want to use OpenBSD- alas, OpenVZ...
The old school yahoo style categorization of links works. I was pretty surprised, I used google back then and didn't remember them having that...
Fly Or Die: Tylt Energi Backpack
Pissing off devs is bad, but yeah, my main thing is that securing a website and database is hard enough, but fairly easy to mitigate.

If an attacker could gain write access to a customer's private repositories though, I feel like that would make an otherwise unattractive service far more of a target.

You're dead on though -- I've wanted to use Github oAuth for at least five different dev-oriented projects, but their permission system just makes it impossible.
Yeah, that was a pretty big turn-off. Scribd is already on my groan-when-I-go-there sites, but I'm pretty sure a service that lets me download a pdf is not something I'm interested in paying for since that was invented decades ago when it was called ftp.
Anyone have anything to say about fastmail? I have been hearing about it lately.
So you can install other stuff on there right? If I want to use some cool framework can I? Or am I just restricted in what the browser IDE provides?
Tanker Truck Broken Down In Russia On Highway
This Is Amazing That Tanker Truck Broken Down In Russia On Highway.This Happened Suddenly.
... to stifle Facebook. Next question?
Show HN: Tablo – Create and publish books socially
Very interesting column! Thanks! I will think about it.
How come you didn't put it on the 3rd floor?
Fortune tellers use tricks because they have nothing else to go on. In the case of the iPhone, though, analysts had plenty to go on--heck they got a 2-hour demo of the product. This guy simply blew it.

He was even wrong in saying that the iPod was under attack by smartphones. The leading smartphones in 2007 all totally sucked at music.
sshdautoban is useful for preventing ssh brute force attacks - hosts.deny ban for any ip address with 5 failed connections in less than 15 secs
Here's an interesting hypothetical.

Step 1: User A purchases a shrinkwrapped DVD with excellent packaging from a counterfeiter in China.

Step 2: User A sells the DVD to an FBA merchant, who forwards it on to Amazon.

Step 3: User B buys the DVD from Amazon; due to commingling they get the counterfeit DVD. Before they can open it they get hit by a bus.

Step 4: User B's executors sell the DVD back to an FBA merchant, who forwards it on to Amazon without a second thought (since it's a shrinkwrapped DVD straight out of Amazon's warehouses.

Step 5: User C purchases the DVD from the FBA merchant, opens it, and finds its counterfeit.

In short, the FBA/commingling stuff means that merchandise you buy directly from Amazon can be untrusted. In turn that means that, as an FBA merchant, even merchandise that came directly from Amazon can be untrusted. Any shrinkwrapped DVD that has passed through an Amazon fulfillment warehouse is actually of entirely unknown provenance; it could have been purchased at a stall in Shanghai for all you know. And if your business relies on never selling a counterfeit DVD, then that means nothing you buy or sell can ever touch an Amazon warehouse.

I doubt this is a real concern (this is the first I've heard of any issues with counterfeiting and FBA), but it's still an interesting structural flaw. Given Amazon's volume, they're probably shipping out multiple counterfeit DVDs right now, under their own shipping label as well as that of various FBA merchants.

Fascinating.
I work for corporations through a consulting firm. Most won't let you deal with them directly. But I get a paycheck every 2 weeks, I can't really see them being able to take that away from me retroactively...

But trust me the corporations (the one I work for is an international electronics manufacturer) are very polite and respectful and very much understand the realities of risk/reward, and that you have to spend money to make money.
And they all have an army of QA engineers double-checking work because they will not allow $1 million dollars of business to be dependent on a single point of failure. Even if they bring you to court (they never would) I'd assume its VERY difficult to get compensation. If you hire an employee and he does a bad job, do you get to sue him for damaging your profit margins? Hell no, you just get to fire him and hire a new guy. If everyone were legally on the hook for the work they produced, it would be like assuming that everyone you ever hire is required to be omniscient. The reality is, you can't hire someone with a 50 IQ and then sue them because you believe one of their lines of code hurt your profitability. It's your fault for hiring them.

I gotta say a lot of these responses I'm getting are very paranoid. When a company pays you for work it's really hard for them to take that away from you. The most that's ever really at stake is your current paycheck and not even that really because the department of labor is VERY harsh on reputable employers who deny paychecks.

It seems like your point is more of a fantasy scenario where they give you a billion dollars & 5 years of unsupervised time to design a huge blackbox program that has to do X, then find out it doesn't do X. The software industry is simply not like this. All tasks are broken up into discrete components and if you're not doing a good job they'll fire you and bring in a new team to finish the job.

The ONLY way I've actually heard of an employee losing $$ is when they have a long-term employment agreement and they break it. It's kindof like an athlete signing a 10-year deal & walking off the field after 6 months. Then, yes, you're liable.

Otherwise being a paid consultant is pretty much the same thing as being an employee. Also, I doubt that companies will sign some "boilerplate contract" that absolves you of all liability. They'd rather hire someone who is more confident. That's not a dig, I really mean that sincerely. Over-negotiating and specifying a bunch of "unrealistic-covering-my-ass-terms" can come off as amateur.
"The web sure is a stable place."

This is an interesting variation on this round's "boomlet". So in the previous dot.com boom there were lots of companies who didn't have revenue so they appeared, until the cash ran out and then fell back to earth. Now we can start a company with much less money, but they go poof in an aquihire when things go squishy.

So was it a pricing issue? or a customer acquisition issue? How is it that so many of these companies get into this squeeze? Is it a chicken -/- egg thing where you can't price it to be self sustaining until you get critical mass? Or is it that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just sucking all the oxygen out of this space?
Couldn't help but laugh at this as well:

>> "Yet Apple has never been good at working with other companies. If it knew how to do that, it would be Microsoft Corp."
I'm always amused when I come across comments like this.

Yes, bitcoin could be our tulip bulbs.

Or history might not be repeating this time and we might actually be looking at something new that is here to stay.

Nobody knows, I wonder why so many people have that reflex to pretend they do.
Paul and Storm’s BALL PIT Kickstarter
Is there any way server-side to determine if a key is passwordless or not?