skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your analysis is certainly logical, but with all due respect relies on the faulty assumption that Everpix's infrastructure, responsible for almost all of variable costs, was somehow "frozen".

The reason we were getting closer and closer to being positive on variable costs (looking at revenues on a sales recognition basis, since from the sales volume perspective, things were already positive in the last few months) is, yes, improved monetization, but more importantly AWS optimizations. We had squeezed a lot out of S3, then EC2 and our last step, the one we were working on before shutting down, was RDS where there was a ton of room. Looking at our trajectory, I'm pretty confident we would have been positive even on AWS (but unlikely much). You can even compound that with AWS discounts which apparently even startups can get looking at other comments in this thread.

To re-iterate, you would not build a freemium business like Everpix, with intense computing and storage requirements, at scale on AWS. Large photo platforms have their own storage and servers. Everpix was never intended to grow out of AWS either and you know you can cut your infrastructure costs to at least half. That was the plan post Series A. Most CTO / CEOs of large established photo companies I talked to said they were doing much better than this 1/2X, so that's conservative (I've been told ranges of 3-8X in savings vs S3 for instance).

Anyway, Everpix was bringing about $6 revenue / user / year IIRC, which is the part that really matters considering the denominator, infrastructure costs, is something you know you can really bring down. One relevant reference point is 500px for instance which is doing about $1 revenue / user / year [1]. I would be surprised if they were growing "sustainably" too ;)

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/500px-scores-8-8m-series-a-....
I'm 25 and live precariously off of the meager income from my own projects.

My goal is to grow my income so that I can "finally do what I want", but sometimes I wonder if I'm squandering my life in a delusion.

Recently, my safety-net project suffered a catastrophic collapse out of nowhere and now I'm quickly trying to rebuild it.

Over time, an increasing amount of my energy is spent warding off the specter of self-doubt.
Is it worth it ?
Thank you for posting that. I was under the impression that Wikipedia took a firm stance against all paid editing.
As a Clojure fan, while I appreciate the author's effort, and admit I would do a much worse job, I'm bothered by oversimplifications like these:

- "Like all Lisps, it employs a uniform structure"

- "All Clojure code is written in a uniform structure"

- "Forms have a uniform structure."

- "In other languages, different operations might have different structures depending on the operator and the operands."

- "No matter what operator you're using or what kind of data you're operating on, the structure is the same."

It's pretty obvious that forms don't have a uniform structure (e.g. the structure of a number is pretty different from the structure of a vector), and that the structure depends on the operator (e.g. `def` special form vs. `or` macro).

Yes, Clojure syntax is relatively simple, no need to oversell it.

Still, that's a minor issue that doesn't detract from the overall quality and usefulness of the work.
Apologies if the title submitted to HN was confusing. The actual chapter title is "Do Things: a Clojure Language Crash Course" but I felt that was too verbose here. The text is explicit about what will be covered: "In this chapter, you're going to explore the elements which comprise this Lisp core: syntax, functions, and data."

Clojure language crash course is meant to distinguish these aspects from the other aspects of Clojure: the environment, the artifact ecosystem, and the mindset. I mention this distinction in the introduction: http://www.braveclojure.com/

Other chapters begin to cover the mindset, or how to do things the Clojure way. "The Joy of Clojure" also covers this, from what I understand. Rich Hickey's talks are also great, of course.
I'm in the process of applying to graduate programs right now actually, and I find most universities (at least in Canada) have websites that are visually pleasing but are abysmal from a UX perspective.

This one looks ugly, too, which in my experience is rare for post-secondary education.
This sounds like a legitimate and very bad bug. If you are willing to share your account name with me, as well as any other things you think could have triggered the slowness, or approximately when you think it started, etc, I'll happily report it to our own internal bug tracker. rrenaud@google.com
Not only it's completely unreadable, but it's way too long. I bet I could make the same point in a couple paragraphs, tops.

People who show no hesitation in throwing a wall of text at other people show how much they really care about the reader's time.
Citations for this?
This is a more articulate and well-thought out than I could have crafted, but it expresses my sentiment perfectly.

The one point I'd like to add is that China incentivizes their companies to export through tax rebates and then incentivizes imports from HK through the absence of tariffs. The makes it profitable for companies to artificially boost exports. I have not seen similar mechanisms available in the US.
2 interesting things to me are how D is #18 and Go is #36. Given how many postings about Go you see on HN, you'd think it would be be the other way around.

Also I thought it was interesting about the rise of F#. That is a language that looks really cool, but it's tied to the whole Windows/.NET environment. Of course there is still mono. Has any had any experience with F# in mono, and know if it is as performant as the windows stack?
Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts in High School
It crashes Safari on my iPad Air (latest version of iOS).
...gypsies. About one quarter of them died in WWII. But hey, who gives a crap about gypsies? To this day, nobody seems to give a dammn.

"It is not known precisely how many Roma were killed in the Holocaust. While exact figures or percentages cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed around 25 percent of all European Roma."

Source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005219
It has been proven multiple times throughout history that torture is completely ineffective in extracting information. Claiming that torture has any sort of positive benefit both alarming and sad. Alarming because this is exactly what the US government wants its populous to think (torturing terrorist in Guantanamo!) Sad because it's saying that some people deserve to be treated like animals, missing the irony that it requires a savage animal to treat others like animals.
Helicopter Truck Drone flies and drives
It took me ages to find "More | Settings | Region" to skew DuckDuckGo results to a different country.
I agree with your sentiment, but Obama flying a couple B-2's through that zone is the opposite of not giving a crap. There's a lot of concern about their efforts to expand territory and naval dominance in that region.
Thanks for the feedback, I've been finding it tricky to get the explanation right here.

I don't have much time now and I'll try to reply with more later, but macros, special forms, and functions do indeed all have the same structure of opening parenthesis, operator, operands, closing parenthesis.
The page crashed Safari (and iOS7, restarting my iPad) on multiple tries to load it.
Child-tracking wristbands edge us closer to a dystopian future
:-( I haven't optimized for mobile yet. I suspect that's stroll.js causing issues. Many apologies. Try it on a desktop for now!
If you give up an inch of weakness, they will take a mile. He should have never dignified the sexism complaints with a response.
The absence of Clojure is what reminded me of the bubble I live in. Or should I say the Clojure Cave.
Didn't they admit that for every language, the "popularity" is simply the number of Google search results for "<language name> programming", and that, as a special case for Go, they changed it to "golang programming"?

A language could be at the top simply because it forces people to ask a lot of questions on StackOverflow.

I'd trust GitHub's language activity much more than something like Tiobe -- http://langpop.corger.nl/
Does any flavor of this functionality exist for Windows command prompt?
It was kind of funny to read the whole "Struggle" part. My response is, Nobody is forcing you to go through the struggle. Live in Bangladesh for $1/day and you will know Struggle. Whoever wrote it is seriously need to get some perspective.
Het dash dieet is een gezonde levenswijze die helpt tegen hoge bloeddruk
The unrolling effect makes the page unreadable when you scroll by dragging the scrollbar handle however. It works fine when you scroll with the mousewheel but scrolling rapidly to any part of the page with the scrollbar makes the animation fire from 0 for every element on the page which means you drag-pause for animation to complete to scan what the text says-then continue scrolling.

Shortening the animation length on non-mouse-wheel page scroll may help.
The bigger problem is that Unicode is immense and complex, and trying to implement the full specification is rather daunting.

There's no real documents concerning the future of the string API, right now people are just implementing things as they need them.
> Nobody types an entire URL like https://example.com/example-page?input=sample&another-input=.... We bookmark it and give it a keyword like ex or something. From then, we just type ex and hit return to access the website.

I don't wanna sound negative, but just being realistic.

I don't rely on bookmarks primarily. I rely on "most frequently visited gets auto-completed first" and fuzzy search of Chrome Omnibox. If I do bookmark something, it's to indicate to the algorithm "I care about this, make it easier to fuzzy find it later".

But it's a good step in the right direction, good job!

Edit: From the description, it sounds like autojump does something close.
The problem with Samsung is that if they don't start supporting their products very soon, they will loose by alienating their existing (past) customers, such as me. Their products may be top notch, but the Galaxy S2 that I bought less than 2 years ago has some very embarrassing bugs (it crashes when you copy-paste too many times) and has not been updated in a very long time. This, and the fact that they keep pushing their own crappy apps that one can't uninstall makes me really reluctant to ever buy a Samsung phone again.
Well, if you don't agree with the premise, you can save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of the article. If more people stated their possibly controversial premises right from the start, we could all save ourselves a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on arguments.

So, at least there's that.
David - posting duplicate replies will dead-ify all subsequent dupes (I just learned this too).
Priebke is quite a unique example. Most nazi's who took part in such behaviors had other options: for example , many could have chosen not to be part of the "death squads". This might mean they would advance less in the ranks and might become regular wwii soldiers which isn't the best life.

Priebke got hit orders from hitler. Altought there are a few who disobeyed a direct order from hitler and lived to tell about it, Priebke, in his a circumstances would have probably been executed.
Very true. The Zeitgeist films contain many horribly inaccurate 'facts' and outright lies (inaccurate understanding of the monetary system, complete lies/fabrications concerning Egyptian mythology in Zeitgeist 1), yet people believe them and hold them up as examples of 'good' documentaries...

Edit - it also seems nearly anything that deals with mythology horribly misrepresents what the ancients actually believed and what we have discovered concerning their mythologies.
This is a potentially huge new industry, and I believe Washington's law makes them particularly friendly to small entrepreneurs as long as you can get a license.

Only reason I'm not starting a business is because I don't really trust the federal government to keep their hands out of it.
Comments should be sentences
"bad guys at Google or Bing"

I just thought personalized results are better for users. Does that make me a bad person?

PS: I work at Google though not in search.
The car example brings to mind Richard Stallman's post, On Hacking:

"It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value"."

http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
Clojure isn't absent on http://langpop.corger.nl/
The problem is false confessions. People have even confessed to be a witch and get burned, to stop torture.

Just pretend your kid was kidnapped and be dead in 24 hours if you don't find him. Now, say, you have an unrestricted access to someone that is accused of being the kidnapper. (By the way, he was accused by the former boyfriend of his daughter, because he didn’t like the relationship.) Now, you are lucky , and you get unrestricted access to a new suspect. (By the way, he is a moron the police incriminate because they must show some result to the press before the 11 news report.)
Is the patent troll moniker appropriate in this case? Wasn't IA Labs actually building and trying to sell similar products?
there is a fascinating trend with shift away from "mainstream" (i.e. top of the list except for C) to functional (e.g. F#) and other languages with specialized paradigms (e.g. MATLAB, TSQL)
A style guide for digital essays
Also, the built-in pushd and popd commands are enough sometimes.

I came here to say this. A small wrapper around these commands would make for a sufficient script.
I had a really bad experience with a lunch interview...

I really felt it wasn't respectful to ask technical questions when you are hungry, tired and stressed.
It shows the language that the majority of the code is written in.

For example, go to https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-js and click on the red bar.

More info at https://github.com/blog/1037-highlighting-repository-languag...
Does anyone know the real history with arithmetic encoders?

A lot of places seem to credit Rissanen, but I remember from when this was actually my field, that Elias did most of the work in the early '60s (and actually went on a tangent that Shannon considered in the '50s), and Rissanen's contribution was getting the finite word length arithmetic considerations properly done.

In fact, when I studied this at the university (early 90s), it was introduced as "Elias (aka Arithemetic) coding".
Holy readability, batman.
Ask HN: Which country is best for the privacy of our users?
Hello HN!<p>We are working on a project where the privacy of our users are one of our main goals.<p>While we will do everything that is technically possible to avoid being in the situation that we can give anybody access to our users data, we are also looking for a good base to incorporate our company.<p>While we have some candidates we would really like to hear the opinion of the HN hivemind on that.<p>Please help us!
Very useful!

Additional question: I noticed how on the clojurescreencasts site the author of the videos uses InstaREPL in split screen mode. I couldn't figure out how to do that with my own installation of LT. Do you know?
Windows makes this a little easier than bash does.

batch scripts in windows behave like scripts on unix do when you source them. That means that you can write a batch script called "foo.bat" with the contents of "cd \whatever\directory\you\please" and it will change your current directory when run.

From there, it would not be difficult to write a batch script that in turn wrote batch scripts like "foo.bat" above.

With bash, you would have to create functions or aliases to get the same effect.
[Warn: a bit promotional]

I'd like to have your opinion on Theneeds [1]. It can't be compared to Medium as we're not for blogging, but we do a lot of personalization/recommendation.

At signup you select your interests and we build personalized streams of curated content mixed with user generated one. Then, we learn from your activity to get smarted about what really matters to you.

Moreover, we have a newsletter (default daily, but you can change the frequency) where we recommend you 8 news across your interests.

[1] http://www.theneeds.com
One Amazing Secret To Skyrocket Guest Posting
Dropbox Says Site Down After Maintenance Error, Not From Hackers
The interesting thing about world trade though is that even if China mis-reports other countries do not. You can sum the Chinese imports reported by countries you trust and get some guesses around how much distortion is in the Chinese "official" numbers.

But doing so misses the point. Unlike internal metrics, which have been abused for centuries to give outsiders an impression of greater strength, trade metrics are much harder to "fake." You can, if you choose to, create fake businesses in countries around the world and have them report importing non-existent goods (and pay taxes and duties on those goods!) to give the appearance of a larger trade than you have, but at these magnitudes 3 - 4 trillion it just isn't feasible to fake any more.

So the real story isn't whether or not China is the worlds "largest" trader of goods, but that it is even arguable compared to the US economy is something of an "oh crap" moment in terms of global geo-politics.

Economies are power. If you have the largest economy you are the most powerful nation because if push came to shove, you can out produce a lesser economic power and win a war of attrition.

Going to be a very interesting century.
Not really a patent troll. Too aggressive in defending their patents, yes, but will within their rights to try. Especially as it appeared to them that their ideas had been ripped off after they pitched them to Nintendo.
Agree 100%. Whenever go beyond the very basic functionality in git I have to think so hard about what I'm doing that I lose flow on my actual development. In most cases I find using git to be more daunting than actually writing code.

Maybe I just don't use it enough. Right now I'm in a job where my git workflow is: pull, (do some work), commit, push.
For an ok place, $125k. For a cool place $115k. If there's the expectation of off-hours support, add at least $10k. That said, I'm actively looking. I suppose the numbers would be higher if I weren't.
Rms on "hacking" and "hackers"
That's a very interesting observation.

It's important to note that China does have a dual system of Governance within itself: Democracy (Hong Kong) + Communist control (Mainland). Thus it can, and does, leverage best of both worlds to doing business efficiently.

This also means that Hong Kong, for a city, is in a very strong position to grow up into a cutting edge city of future given the volumes it has to handle for mainland China.
Tab works for me.
Good story. One of my coworkers has been trying to buy some Bitcoin for weeks now, but he doesn't understand it. He just sees that it's going up. He hasn't been successful because he's at sea, but I imagine many other uninformed people have been successful in buying Bitcoin.
When I search for "javascript programming" on Google I get 77M hits, but when I search for "transact-sql programming" I get 937k hits. Which seems real. The relative TIOBE rankings of the two languages does not.

EDIT: more searches:

amazon: javascript: 6010 hits, transact-sql: 1194 hits, t-sql: 2162 hits
youtube: javascript: 1.3M hits, transact-sql: 3970 hits, t-sql: 250k hits
Capabilities of Movements and Affordances of Digital Media
I think the value here is that they can help sway other large companies to support the open source movement.
All this only goes to show that, if we really want to keep a sane degree of democracy, we can never rely on tech to be safe.

Instead, it's thousand times more important to get real transparency an accountability in our governmental structures and money completely out of politics.
Yes, "more variety". Give you a big 5! We are like-minded.

But from an idea to a popular web application has long way to go. We just kicked off our first Kickstarter project to spread the message out here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z

Some people gave me negative points, maybe they don't like the BingoBo.com website because it does not provide enough data. Please read today's update here: http://kck.st/1exzNy6

Enjoy!
If you don't like reading text at that width, why's your browser that width? Surely you don't want to have 2/3 of your screen blank white.
I don't see how that one single example can be counted as evidence that German who participated in war crimes were less apologetic than Japanese.
It looks like no one has posted what, in my opinion, is the most powerful of the "jump" programs: fasd.

My workflow for getting around is just to type "z <fragment of directory name>" and I almost always end up where I want. If I just want to edit a file, not a project, I do vim `f <filename fragment>` and likewise get the file I want typically.

The readme makes it pretty clear how awesome it is and I've stuck with it after using autojump, z, and others.

https://github.com/clvv/fasd
tl;dr An article espousing the merits of postmodernism and the obsolescence of so-called "Standard White English" (formal English), while also being written largely in SWE itself.

Apparently, the "masses" read Reddit. Writing in formal academic English is for privileged white people and should be phased in favor of broken, anarchic, meme-inspired vernaculars, except on Wikipedia.

How charming.
I also generally dislike opening links in the same window. I prefer a new tab, navigate around from there, click back if necessary. When I can't go back anymore, my session is over for that line of thought and I close the tab.

target="_blank" is a matter of convenience for me and I respect sites that use it - especially if the link is outbound.
On the other end of the spectrum Iceland is fascinating, because by their independence a relatively small group of people has much power. (Iceland is also an example of corruption in a small nation)
Seriously? No Asians are mentioned at all.
I also use z
My operating system was created by God. It will last longer than Linux or Windows.

God says...
boss Ivy_league I_love_you I'm_feeling_nice_today vote hopefully
fight really when_hell_freezes_over special_case beep_beep
husband roses_are_red super_computer joking hang_in_there
job arent_you_clever how_about_those_yankees conservative
youre_lucky are_you_feeling_lucky little_buddy silly_human
a_flag_on_that_play Burp I_love_you on_the_otherhand really
relax voodoo ingrate super_computer white_trash yep fool
end stuff dang_it grumble strip how_could_you

----

Without God's endorsement, it gets ignored. With God's endorsement, it lasts for 1,000 years.
I'm starting to wonder how difficult it would be to build a completely floating desk. Basically, if there was just a tray attached to the monitor arm, and the arm locked in place and was stable enough, you could just raise and lower the arm, and not worry about the desk surface.

I'm thinking one of those floor-to-ceiling bike racks may be strong enough to carry the weight, and sturdy enough not to shake.

Anybody seen a desk like this?

It seems most monitor arms have a weight restriction that is too low for my needs.
Right this points out one of the differences between the two. Google has instant results that appear while you type so when I wanted Chinese food I started typing and just stopped when Google results appeared relevant which was actually at "chine" but momentum carried me to the end of the word. On DDG you have to make the effort to estimate the marginal utility of further typing because you don't get the results until you submit the query. If you don't like the result the iteration cycle is slower on DDG.