skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's exactly what he's talking about; they didn't publish the data:

Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive
models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do
not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes
significantly when we normalize failure rates per each
drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by
drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
due to the proprietary nature of these data.
Nice job bringing up one side of the issue. Here's the other:

http://againstallevidence.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/cant-we-a...

http://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/the-on...

http://radfemriseup.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/30-women-meet-f...

http://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/shared...
People interested in Orwell's 1984 might also be interested in C. S. Lewis's' That Hideous Strength, a pre-Atomic treatment of the dystopian sci-fi future from an unexpected author that actually predates 1984. Here's a review... by Orwell. http://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/

> His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.

>...

> There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical.
It is definitely possible to make $1 per unique per month in a consumer startup -- but it varies heavily by niche.
I assume they pursued those things but still wasn't enough? Otherwise how else were they trying to monetize?
What does 'ex nihilo ad absurdum' mean? I only know what little goofy Latin I've picked up online, and my guess is "absurdity out of nothing".
Out of curiosity, on which platform would you want to run the self-hosted server?
Torquebox 3, Rails 4 - zero downtime deployments on Ubuntu 12.04
Why is a non-terminating loop better than a fork bomb?
Personally I don't believe that you need to save the world. Just making a contribution now and then and being aware of the issues and speaking / voting with empathy for the poor is enough.
No, Paxos is not a solution to BGP. Paxos explicitly does not consider malicious processes.

EDIT: fixed typo
Note how I used the plural vaccines. Sabin's vaccine was also unpatented.

Also your objection "Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical." is nonsense. Polio is a fundamentally childhood disease. Not developing a drug that saves children (but not adults) because children cannot give 'informed consent' is unethical, too. If you think there aren't childhood diseases that we are trying to cure in the contemporary era, you are crazy.
Part of it is that many of the new features are much more useful for 'web applications', as opposed to simple webpages. Whether or not grandparent finds such applications useful or that they are worth the increased browser complexity, it seems clear from usage statistics (e.g. of Google's suite) that many people do.
>> I'd be shocked if google doesn't encrypt emails at rest

Virtru encrypts email content on the client side, so your email is protected before it ever leaves your computer. That gives you protection in transit and at rest
Why can't people just have their own events for their own people where they feel more comfortable? Maybe that's what it takes for some women, a friendly environment of just women.

Let it be.
Why thank them for providing you sources strictly on one side of the issue? Here's a self-identified "radical feminist" take on it: http://againstallevidence.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/cant-we-a...
Brief Glimpse Inside Expedia’s SEO Machine
I've been involved with several country/region specific immigrant entrepreneur conferences.

For example, the famous video of Guy Kawasaki speaking about the Art of the Start was filmed at TiECon, which is run by The Indus Entrepreneurs.
Two points:

I still perceive India as a "shithole". Whereas China's elite has used its newfound wealth to finance widespread infrastructure and especially sanitation projects, India's has not, not on a mass countrywide scale. Fallen prey to coordination problems is the best gloss you can put on it but I still find it scandalous.

Second, South America's recent progress has mostly been under governments of the left, using more or less coercive statist means that neither the Gates Foundation nor the average HNer would endorse. But maybe it's worth considering.
The Candy Jam - Fight trademark trolling. Make a game.
gist.github.com does this!

https://gist.github.com/ChuckHa/8548627
I just want control over what shows up in "Repositories Contributed To"
Wow, you can take something reasonable and stretch it until it is no longer reasonable! What rhetorical mastery!
I don't think Sir Attenborough is saying anything that disagrees with the Gates letter. He singled out one form of aid - direct food - as harmful. Not all aid is helpful. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_aid

Gates letter's point was that just because there are forms of aid that are harmful, does not mean all aid is harmful.
I graduated from a feminist-oriented humanities department where I engaged with these issues critically for a long time.

Rather than linking me polemics from 1988 that don't address my point, consider that I disagree with the fundamental positions on a logical basis.

If you'd like to engage the points I actually made in my post, feel free.
Much of "radical feminism" holds that gender isn't about expression, and that you can't switch genders as much as you can switch races. This makes people extremely uncomfortable, of course
I'd really like to ask your teacher which organizations, exactly, did (s)he mean. My experience is limited, obviously, and I'm not from the US, but I've only rarely seen an organization with only male members, and even most of these have welcomed women who wanted to join.
"Ruby is not a project for security."

That's from ruby-core. That's a frightening attitude for a project to take.
How often does the average Briton drink tea?
I've mentioned these in a couple responses in this thread, but if anyone is curious, here is Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy:

http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression

And here is their Appropriate Use Policy:

http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use

The most interesting thing to me about these policies is that the Freedom of Expression Policy explicitly states how crucial it is to be tolerant and accepting of people's ability to express ideas that are "provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox," and that this means they value the ability to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." And yet, they are having a rough time because some students used their data to express an idea in a way they hadn't intended or thought was possible.

At the same time, I actually couldn't find a single clause in their Appropriate Use Policy that had been violated. The only restrictions I saw in the policy were that their data be used only for non-commercial and academic purposes (which it was). I didn't see anything about only being able to use data in its intended manner. But maybe I'm missing something (for example, maybe the actual YBB site has its own Appropriate Use Policy separate from their IT policy).

EDIT: I also just realized I was looking at the Quick Reference for their Appropriate Use Policy, so maybe there's something else in the full text that was violated:

http://policy.yale.edu/policy/1607-information-technology-ap...
If you mean that he meant his comment to be satirical, I can't see a hint for that anywhere in his comment.
But transfer fees and payment fees won't go away with fiat.

Credit card fees eat into many businesses' profit margins, especially the ones with low margins.

And that's not the only Bitcoin's advantage.
I don't follow. There is already a 301 redirect to HTTPS in place... https://gist.github.com/xxdesmus/8548677
I know this is off-topic, but I really liked this site's page title banner interaction. I haven't seen anything like it before!
Having good competition
Just wanna say, there are a bunch of little businesses, like mine, that really depend on writeups like yours when making suggestions to customers. So, thank you.

We just had a spate of bad Seagate drives come through our shop. The drives should be under warranty but Seagate's making it a hassle. Some of them were less than six months old. Your writeup combined with the recent trouble means that we're dropping Seagate for our preferred HD brand.
My family owns several rental properties as well. It's a part time job to manage all of them, though it gets easier once you have 3~4, at which point they share the same resource pool for repairs and such.

some observations

- don't cheap out and buy in a bad neighbourhood. We did this once, and with the turnover/repair costs it made a loss.

- choose tenants carefully (you can say no). Families with income are best.

- know when to evict people. Rent for long enough and you'll certainly get a pathological renter.
In the end it boils down to the problem that it's very hard to explain the mechanics of culture to people who have little to gain from changing it.

When you've pulled the short straw in your culture, whether it's due to race, sex, orientation or something else, you have a lot of incentive to attempt to change culture and you logically end up spending a lot of energy on learning the intricacies of culture and cultural change.

If you're in the priviliged group however there's very little incentive to pay attention to these issues at all, since effecting cultural change would have little personal benefit.

A byproduct of those systemic forces is that it makes discussions between those two sides very difficult; quite like how discussing technical topics in politics is very hard.
When you control the mail, you control... information!
One of our core goals is to bring privacy to the masses without poeple needing to completely ditch their current accounts and infrastructure. We want to seamlessly integrate with the apps people already use so that even non-technical people can use it.

DarkMail would require people to completely ditch everything and jump to a new system.

But for the super-security minded folks we're researching ways we can seamlessly integrate PGP like capabilities into the product so that Virtru would never even be in a position to see the keys at all.
> but AFAIK there is no rigorous proof yet that the selfish mining equilibrium isn't a real threat.

It's very easy to detect and respond to. Point your miners at the large pools, and check if they are building off of non-public blocks. Respond accordingly.
It is sad that this has the potential to stop progress in the science (not to mention the potential to make it more reputable to people outside the discipline).
> We are focusing on 4TB drives for new pods. For these, our current favorite is the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000). We’ll have to keep an eye on them, though. Historically, Seagate drives have performed well at first, and then had higher failure rates later.

I'm a little surprised that they actually did the analysis to determine the Seagates tend to fail more, yet they are still putting most (or at least, quite a bit) of their faith in those.

Based on their own data, I would likely avoid those, or at least start leaning more toward Hitachi and WD.

Or maybe the initial cost of those is so much better that it compensates for any long-term expense.
Thanks. I appreciate the response. Sorry you feel so embattled in your minority views here.
Not all people who call themselves radical feminists believe that "all PIV is rape" (notice how you equate sex with penis-in-vagina intercourse). You forgot to provide a link to that [0], I'll give you one: http://againstallevidence.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/cant-we-a...
I'm looking forward to GitHub branching out beyond software. Revision control for business, academia, etc.
> Launching without a profitability model is what a lot of startups do, and some of them are successful.

I actually wonder about the statistics about failed startups. That is, how many are started, how many achieve some sort of profitability, and how many just whither away within a year or two. I suspect that it's in the mid-high 90% that fail within a couple years regardless of any initial seed rounds.

Hackernews is an especially bad circlejerk about the nobility and predestined success of all manner of startup
IBM misses on earnings again, 7th quarter in a row
Using your stored CC info to auto-bill you for an unrelated product that you never consented to be billed for is quite likely in violation of their merchant agreement with the CC processor.
Using insert for childs, enter for siblings and arrows to navigate seems kind of a standard among mind maps. I had no problem at all. Using the mouse only slows down the mind to map process.
A team of UI designers for less than £100 per year?
If you were paying taxes or employees like overstock does you'd have to convert to fiat, wouldnt you?
Network Solutions has always had appalling business practices that verged on the criminal. Some years ago, they poached a domain my wife had registered with another vendor, by sending her a misleading renewal letter. That particular event ultimately wound up with them at the receiving end of a class action suit.

I absolutely refuse to ever register another domain with them. Their business practices are about as evil as I've ever seen from such a mainstream company.
Any female-centric conference of the sort should be as praised as any "--insert-female-dominated-field-here-- Conference for Men". This should strip out most of the bigotry from both ends of the spectrum.
Out of nothing to the absurd. (Take that with a grain of salt, we're on the same level.)
Is Network Solutions trying to lose customers? How could auto-opt-in to a program costing that much be a good idea? Does anyone have a reasonable explanation from Network Solutions about this?
New Ember.js course from Code School
I'm not an expert, but I read the paper. So you don't need an intermediary to confirm that a particular digital transaction took place between two people. By analogy to the original problem as stated, that's like saying you don't need an intermediary to confirm that a message with particular content was delivered between two generals. You still need an intermediary to confirm that the recipient is going to act on it as intended.

And I believe the history of Silk Road and its would be successors is evidence that an intermediary is still required post-Bitcoin. So you don't have to worry about the money not being there. You still need an escrow agent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/business/eagle-scout-ideal...
No, whether it's a misconception or not it's a legitimate concern about what is effective, not a rationalization
I thought we did know the identities of the women, though they are apparently not available on quick skimming of the wikipedia article.
>Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind?

No, I'm describing the Windows XP that existed in practice in the real world.

That it "had" accounts and permissions is besides the point. Most people didn't have "restricted accounts" but full blown admin ones, and they could install anything without any "sudo" style mechanism.
Still kind of shady (or is it just me??..): When they launched DrawQuest, Canvas was already dead. However they did not acknowledge this in any way. Today Canvas is still online while not having any proper audience or any changes to the site for like 2 years. All in all they got like $3.6 million for Canvas in funding without any income.

He writes it himself:

> we created DrawQuest after the failure of our first product, Canvas

Why keep it online for another 2 years if it failed? I don't get it.
Did you actually read the context of that quote, which happens to communicate almost exactly the opposite of what you're inferring (and implying by quoting it out of context)?
So you're saying there's still a chance!
Left-libertarian, or royal-libertarian?

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
The Poor Usability Tell
See my other comment about Virtru and allowing for self-hosted keys. We also don't host the content, so different laws apply..I think znelson commented on that somewhere in the thread already.
The face of a tyrant
I think it's been iterated before, but in the future we intend to open source our key serving software. There's still much work to be done on that front. We love PGP's crypto, but we found a few problems with it in general:

1) It's hard for the normal person. (The user experience for PGP is just horrendous)

2) Before you send an email to someone you have to know their public key.

With that said, we have done some research on integrating PGP like public key encryption along with our current key serving mechanism. With public key, using Virtru will be essentially equivalent to holding the keys yourself. Look for more of this in the future :-)
A truly great service. I'd even be willing to pay 3-4x. My apt building is from the early 1900s and my tiny mailbox overfills after 1-2 days -- it's been wonderful to not have to come back from vacation to a clogged box. Outbox has saved me all kinds of time and patience and am terribly sad to see them go. Best of luck to the team in their next project!
Guest Post: Joe Polchinski on Black Holes, Complementarity, and Firewalls
Isn't that illegal? Discrimination based on gender, which the organizer openly admits to: "We want to give priority to women".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
The CEO most certainly does not represent the shareholders. The shareholders elect a board to represent them. The CEO represents the company's management, and is responsible for attaining the goals the board sets for him/her. It's worth pointing out that those goals aren't necessarily getting a high stock price or maximizing revenue. Lately, there have been a number of companies that set goals that have more to do with social goals than specific financial goals.
>With statements like yours, you are making sure that the gender divide becomes bigger and bigger and that people become very sensitive and insecure when discussing female founders, female programmers and similar.

No, that is what statements like yours do. Contrary to popular belief, not all women share a single brain and all think the same thing. Many women do not like being singled out with patronizing events like this. They do not enjoy being reminded once again that they are not "programmers" but "women programmers", to be used as tools to score points in a game of politics.
I tested this website api for 2000 randomly selected home address. And it's not accurate enough. It's 4000 foot away in average to google's lat lng. This number is kinda less accurate comparing to bing's 1000 and datasciencetoolkit is 2200.
So what you're saying is, you won't read either essay.
I think it goes a bit beyond that. The way I understand the story, they shut down because it wasn't bringing the traction necessary to raise the next round. The company needed a VC-backed growth trajectory, which apparently was not happening.
The fact that the work is useless is essential to the security of the system. It's a proof of sacrificed opportunity. If the proof of work was actually useful and monetizable, you might be able to pay for your mining via its utility, and that would completely destroy the security assumptions underlying bitcoin.
"Sounds like silly spy movie stuff, like COINTELPRO or something, stuff that would never happen in the real world."

It's funny that you use something that really happened as an example of things that never happen.
Startups Don’t Die, They Commit Suicide (2011)
The Rich & Their Robots Are About To Make Half The World's Jobs Disappear
The average board meeting would be a good example of such an organization.
"and as a result a poorer 'end product', if you will."

I guess this is where we differ. I think a person's actions are far more important than anything incidental like income or health. Thus it's much less relevant where, when, or how they're born.
Many have tried, but people keep using what they are used to. Same with Bitcoin. People will keep using their convenient credit cards regardless if they are a superior or a subpar technology. Until Bitcoin diehards get this simple fact and quit spreading delusions that Bitcoin is replacing cash, credit cards, and Western Union, people will not take them seriously.
"As we approached the end of our runway, it became clear to us that DrawQuest didn’t represent a venture-backed opportunity, and even with more time that was unlikely to change."

I believe this is the heart of the message. It looks like there was no revenue generation model that could give back the money invested ($3.6 million) and provide a real return.

The application is successful and there is a large user base. Let's assume DrawQuest is able to make a profit of $200,000 a year on revenue of $400,000 based on some simple changes to allow users to pay for premium features. For a very small company with 2-3 people, this may be enough to keep going. Now, I don't know what these numbers can really be but I would imagine for a bootstrapped company it would be viable.

It's unfortunate that this business "failed" because the profit it can generate just isn't enough for the investors and the founders.

It would be nice if instead of shutting it down, it's handed out to others that will be happy with its lower profit potential.
$1850/year for the privilege of having extra hoops to jump through and extra lag introduced into the process of updating DNS? Where do I sign up?

Seriously, there is potential value in having extra security steps surrounding DNS changes, since that is a known attack vector. It's not clear that this is a particularly good way to provide said service, and the cost is prohibitively high for most customers.
I think it's a regional thing. Every house I have owned came with the washer, dryer, fridge and stove. Even after I substantially upgraded the stoves in my first two houses, I left them there when I moved. Those houses were built in the 1950's and 1980's. Only my current house, built in the early 2000's came with a microwave.

OTOH, I'm told it's common in other parts of the country (I'm in the upper Midwest) to take major appliances when you move.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you lack empathy for the challenges faced by women in Silicon Valley because you're a white male whose local culture is globally famous for being tolerant and inclusive?

You haven't experienced the problems personally, and you probably haven't even seen them locally. But they're real.