skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that analysis is also short sited. Yes, they where upside down on their marginal costs right now, but that's because they went the minimal engineering effort way and used AWS to get things started. By raising a large(r) round they, presumably, could have hired an infrastructure engineer or three and moved away from the higher costs of amazon.

If they had gone that route from the beginning they would have had to sacrifice some other part of their business because they would have had to hire for that role...and that could have been more expensive than just paying Amazon to get things off the ground.

So yes, they could have saved on operations, but either at the expense of product or at the cost of another engineer or two...thus increasing depth of the human capital sinkhole.
I don't want to do the usual ranting thing, mostly because of how pathetically sad it all is.

I will say as a disinterested observer (I do not support either major political party in the U.S.) I'm curious to see if any candidates will run on an anti-surveillance state message in the upcoming presidential elections.

We could end up with the same assholes who support all this nonsense going back out and making a bunch more speeches about how bad it all is -- just so they can get elected and continue things as before.

People say cynical voters are a problem, but you watch enough of how politics actually works (and has worked over the centuries) and if you don't become refreshingly cynical you're an empty-headed fool and more of a danger to yourself and others than anything else.

ADD: Ok. Maybe a little ranting.
I think they got him.
I'm at the point where a decent market rate salary, with generous health/dental/eye benefits, 401(k) matching and ample vacation and sick leave is more than enough to keep me around. But screw me on my annual raise and it'll trigger an immediate job search, period. I consider keeping up with inflation the bare minimum raise, an actual raise should at least beat inflation.

I really don't care to eat catered food, or dry cleaning, game rooms or free massages or half a dozen other perks that startups are known for. If they have those things, that's cool, but I know too many places that skimp on salary, vacation days, insurance in favor of "cheap" perks like a twice a month in office masseuse.

At my current place, about 60 people

- individual health insurance is 100% covered.

- matching 401(k) up to 7%

- 20 days of vacation, can carry over 100% of remainder year to year. Some people from the early days have so much accrued that they're taking some well deserved multi-month vacations.

- fairly standard sick leave, I forget what it is, 80 hrs per year I think, doctor appointments taking less than half a day don't count

- 11 holidays, all are floating so we can take them whenever we want (meaning effective vacation days are 31, but you may have to work on a national holiday)

- flexible work schedule.

- free gym membership (a healthy workforce is a productive workforce)

- various public transit benefits that make taking public transit effectively free
Replacing an existing item in your house with something for 10x the cost is not something you want to be doing too often as a homeowner. The benefits have to be quite significant. I've got a simple programmable digital thermostat that works fine. If I come home earlier than normal, I just bump up the heat manually. Calling ahead with my phone wouldn't add all that much value for me. If it was $50, I'd think about it. $250? No chance.
Amazon Wants to Suck Money Out Of Your Pocket Through a Hose (wsj.com)
Everything That's Wrong With The Social Gaming Industry
I've had a few jobs that were similar, but I ended up loving them.

Pay was good, resourcing was terrible, but the problem sets were really interesting and overcoming the technical challenges to get work done kept it interesting.
Huge yearly VPN offer - 25 locations from £1/year
Amazing App Lets You Try On The Face Of Walter White, Kim Kardashian
Data integrity is just a small part of security. I wouldn't even call that security at all.

I mean, we technically shouldn't trust our HDDs and should do data integrity checking at every level.

I'm interested in what they mean here by security, and what things they support beyond the normal integrity features of most modern file systems (zfs, btrfs).
If Greenwald were trying to hide what he has, he could put the documents/information he has already leaked, plus a bunch of stuff he decided not to, plus some other documents that are undecided and innocuous in an unhidden (encrypted) partition- or have a second hidden partition- that he could give the Feds access to very reluctantly and such, and they would find all those documents and possibly think that was all he had. They still would not know what else he had, and really wouldn't know that he had anymore, even if they suspected it.
I found this article to be very educational on start-up fundamentals ; where can find a sample income statement spreadsheet which illustrates the concepts and formalae in this article ?
Someone posted an in-depth overview about why their business model was flawed. If you're selling something for less than it costs you, you can generate a ton of revenue, but it's still at a loss. This is why they couldn't keep it going: http://research.ivanplenty.com/2014-economics-everpix-shutdo...
that's so terrible! is this serious? why aren't you leaving right now?
Man, some people really don't like Path. I saw people making similar comments when they raised some cash a while back. A high school friend of mine works there, so I'm curious... why all the hate? Seems like an okay idea to want to have all of your social media type stuff in one place, right? I don't use it, though. And I don't see what their business plan could be. Seems weird to actively hate it, though.
Seems like an argument in favor of a bootstrapped companies which intentionally keep costs low and intend to go for slow growth instead of a spectacular flameout. Because infrastructure costs have come down so much, it now feels like companies are more likely to remain viable as bootstrapped concerns than shoot-for-the-moon operations.
Right, but data integrity doesn't equate to security in my mind.

If that's the main security claim, than I feel that much isn't new here or even "secure."
I don't think we got the person we elected in 2008 and 2012 ... what makes you think that Palin would be worse? Have you noticed that after all the "Tea Partyism" during the last election, the Republican party seems to have congealed back into its original form?

I really don't see how we elect change without a third party - yet I think the way elections are run (especially financially) virtually guarantees we'll never get that third party. The only possible solution is to pray for grid-lock.

Yes ... I really am THAT cynical. But I'm older than most of this crowd and my idealism is spent.
Yes it is. Threads don't share a GC - there's no implicit sharedness. Memory is copied between threads. And of course, it doesn't prevent manual management of shared memory (just not GCd) so you CAN use locks to do so. Just like other languages.

I turn off the cycle collector in my realtime apps. I prefer designing a clean, solid system that isn't reliant on cycles without my direct knowing. I guess that's just my inner control freak though.
I agree with you. This is the closest i've been able to get...

class whatever{

private $Properties=array();

function __set($key,$val){
try{
if(!isset($this->Properties[$key])){
$this->Properties[$key]=$val;
}
}catch(Exception $e){
//...
}
}

function __get($key){
try{
if(isset($this->Properties[$key])){
return $this->Properties[$key];
}
}catch(Exception $e){
//...
}
}
}
My papershare asks for a stupid bunch of stuff before it'll let you read anything. For twitter it demands the right to edit my profile and tweet on my behalf for example.
I think it's OK being a file system.

All a fs is really is a specialized key-value store. Redis is a file system.
As someone who voted for Obama twice (once for change and once against Romney) I will be voting from now on for anyone and everyone who would be new to DC. At this point that's the best hope for change that I can see.
> The man who promised to closed Guantanamo Bay... And didn't.

Yeah, I mean its not like Congress passed a law specifically prohibiting the actions the President proposed in order to close the detention facility at Guatanamo Bay. [1]

[1] They didn't pass a law, but several, on different occasions.
I used PeopleFood for our catering and it changed how we eat food for the better. We also used Homejoy (good experience) to save time.
The CPU component of this is a synthesis of LEON3, which is a GPL implementation of the SPARC V8 ISA. Seems pretty neat, especially with the presence of a hard FPU.

http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon3
Make something genuinely cool.
Those are examples of predicting demand changes on a macro scale.

Amazon wants to do this on a more micro, person-by-person level. For example, you visit a product page for some specialty shampoo. Amazon might decide to ship that product before you even add it to your cart.
Yes, they have said it will be.
That is a great place to be, and what I had always hoped to get out of a large engineering company. Part of why I gave my previous (and first) employer as long as I did was that I was hoping to reach that point with them, as the work was really interesting. When I realized it was never going to happen and I was going to be stuck as a cog in a classified program for the rest of my career I got the hell out[1]. My current, very small (but not startup) employer gives me all of the above except #3, #5, and #2 to the degree that our size limits it.

After reading a few of your posts in the past, I've thought about applying up where you are now (I'm an EE doing nothing EE related in my day job). I'm not sure I want to live in Madison, though.

[1] Took me two years, but I did it
It differs in that it uses personal data to ship for individuals, not for entire areas. So much smaller scale, much more specific.
How Facebook built Trending topics with NLP
For me, I have a young kid and am the sole breadwinner at the moment. My goals are to a.) generate money reliably for my family, and b.) be with my family as much as possible, and c.) not die of boredom at work. Startups are risky and can require very long hours, and I have very low risk tolerance and limited extra time.
I refer you to http://www.phpbeyondtheweb.com
Because it's fun…?
Expedia Affiliate Hacks Google Plus Local hotel listings
Recent Google Plus Local hack shown to be by Expedia affiliate
"cheap acquisition costs and expensive disposal costs"

Great point. Simple and head-smack obvious when you read it. Hits right at the core.

Immediately after reading, I generalized to "cheap up-front, expensive back-end costs."
I imagine transportation costs could quickly spiral out of control if you didn't have the analytics tuned correctly. But one particular use case comes to mind: you look at a couple items, maybe even add them to you cart, then walk away. A lot of retailers now will send you an email for "abandoned carts"—imagine if that email also included a line that said, "Oh, and if you finish your order, we'll have it on your doorstep tomorrow." Pretty compelling.
First thing I clicked on was the "Dialogue on Virtualization," not being familiar with why virtualization would necessarily be the first thing taught in an OS, but then, that's why I'm looking at this, because I know nothing about building OSes.

Anyways, the dialog was pretty campy, or excessively goofy. Also, I'm probably hellbanned.
So does that mean someday I will be able to call in a same-day airdrop of semi-uncommon product x that has been sitting in my amazon shopping cart or wishlist?
They made a pretty bad first impression on me when it was revealed they were phoning home your address book data when you installed their app.

Apparently it was "common practice", and I know how valuable that data can be to a social network in progress, but still a pretty bad move, I think.
I wonder if we will ever have a historical perspective capable of comparing the current NSA/CIA/FBI with the likes of the Dulles brothers and J Edgar Hoover.
Hey, I would like to learn more about where you work. I couldn't find your email in your profile.
It's probably a combination of Path's mildly pretentious brand positioning and Dave Morin's highly pretentious personal brand positioning.
any SEOs for hacked sites see traffic changes or referral changes
They're a "design, development, and consulting agency based in LA and NYC. We're young, dynamic, and take on lots of cool projects."

http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Fc-Flamingo
There's a million ways he could fight that, loudly and publicly.

But why would he, when an army of apologists will rationalize and defend any failure.
Review: Equity-free accelerator in the Italian alps
Is there a reason for this? I'm heavily invested in Ubuntu and I'm also making heavy use of the cgroups API in its current form. Does that mean that I can't use cgroups without systemd in newer kernels? Or do I miss cgroups features?

I'm quite happy with the mountable filesystem at the moment. It's scriptable and reasonable flexible and still easy to use for solving my problems.
drew here has it right. While it is possible to find money on side projects in more mainstream technologies like Java or .NET; it is easier in specialized fields.

Depending on where you are targeting geographically those technologies vary a lot; I personally have seen a lot of demand for iOS/Android, but even more demand for Ruby on Rails. I think that quite a few Ruby on Rails developers left the community and flocked to Node.js as the next shiny thing and that has just made it easier to find Rails contract work.

Not only is it easier to find work in a less mainstream technology, but you are able to negotiate better rates since it is more difficult for businesses to locate help. After a certain point you can't scale by taking on additional hours; so your hourly rate makes a big difference.

And hourly vs fixed rate contracting should be considered. I will negotiate my hourly rate based on term of contract, but under no circumstances will I take fixed rate contracts any longer. Quite a few of my friends in the contracting scene are the same way. I've seen too many times where this just leads to continual "feature creep" and a strong difference in opinions of if scope of work has been expanded beyond the agreed contract (in all cases it was). I bid a fixed rate contract with a couple of associates against my better judgement. Based on the initial scope of work it should have taken about 3 months. Instead it took over a year and the lead developer on the project walked away making a rate of right around $10/hour.

And this point can not be overstated.

Network! Network! Network!

If you are an introvert you are going to have to get over it. It doesn't matter if you have the raw programming skills of Linus Torvalds or John Carmack; if you can't get out there and make connections you aren't going to make any money.

I am very introverted by nature, but I force myself to regularly attend meetups and conferences; and make a point to connect with new people at those conferences. You need to grow your real social graph; not your Facebook/LinkedIn/etc... Nothing makes the same lasting impression as a firm handshake and 5 minutes of conversation face to face.
The more interesting data is when it is filtered by conference or team.
Rails + Angular + Jasmine: testing your code
If you have a good online portfolio (a site showing what skills you have, what projects you've done, and your personality) as well as good client facing skills, check out matchist. We built it to help awesome freelance web and mobile devs (in the US only currently) find curated projects.
Any comments submitted here may be stored in for-profit corporate databases ran by the likes of Booz Allen Hamilton. Your comments are not data, they are meta-content. No data is collected to be stored in this database, any incidental data that does get stored in the database will be carefully minimized so a worker has to press a key to expose the information.

This data will be pitched to the likes of US Chamber of Commerce[1] via firms like Hunton & Williams[2] as to be used to attack/stifle/undermine political dissidents, journalists like Glenn Greenwald[3], and _THEIR FAMILIES_[4][5]. These comments may be used against you by any nation-state that pays, or entity that leaks information from the database.

All of this foretold in the details (meta-content) of the 2011 anonymous leaks.

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/02/10/143419/lobbyists...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/politics/12hackers.html...

[3] http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/

[4] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/02/10/143428/chamberle...

[5] http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Aaron-Ba...

edit: Oh eat me anonymous down-voter. Anyone that wishes to learn more about the for-profit interests often created by the NSA or their past employees can read Telecomix's BlueCabinet[1] or Barrett Brown's Project PM[2]. Free Barrett Brown.

[1] https://bluecabinet.info/wiki/Blue_cabinet

[2] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page
I vote for those trying to change the system to give third parties access to it.
A lot of the enmity stems from a widely-ridiculed interview with the founder in Vanity Fair, and a feeling that he (and by extension his company) encapsulates much of what's wrong with Silicon Valley. Personally, I think he's been turned into a bit of a scapegoat, and Path is certainly no Color (whatever issues it may have with growth).
'There are a significant number of concepts that aren't easily explained in plain english required to get at the heart of "what is a monad?".'

Indeed, it's arguably not even the right question. "When is something monadic?" is a better one; "monad" is an adjective, not a noun. In Java terms, "Monad" is an interface and something is "monadic" if it implements the interface. (Except Java's type system can not express "Monad", so that doesn't work as a concrete example, but the idea is there.)

I'm sure you've seen me claim this on /r/haskell, where I think people operate in a context where they find this so obvious that the very idea that there could be a problem is confusing... this is the sort of context that leads me to that claim, though. Regardless of whether it's a noun in math, in programming it's an adjective.
>legally the Fourth Amendment does apply

Legally the Fourth Amendment probably does not apply.

Constitutional protections are provided only within US jurisdiction. If you are a US citizen outside of US jurisdiction, then the government isn't required to extend those protections to you.

The lack of spying on US citizens outside of US borders is more of a courtesy - the government doesn't yet consider it worth rolling the Supreme Court dice.
But Obama was "new to DC" - I don't get your logic here.
Except as an amazon prime customer. I already know it'll be there on my doorstep tomorrow, or at most the day after tomorrow.

Of course, this would probably make shipping to me a lot cheaper.
Personally I think this is an excellent way to turn your WAP into a burglar alarm. Burglars are too stupid to put their phone in Airplane Mode before they break into your house, so your WAP says "Hey unknown phone is in da house!" and calls the cops.
Wondering if there could be a genetic test to determine where one should live to achieve optimal health.
You mean they passed a law specifically blocking the actions the President took: he gave the executive order to close Guantanamo 2 days after the inauguration.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ClosureOfGuantana...

Sure, he could find a way to push it through, but given the Republicans' historical success at demanding the world from a Democrat with a mandate (e.g. cutting capital gains tax by a third in exchange for childrens' health care), I'm sure their asking price was high.
> As someone who voted for Obama twice (once for change and once against Romney) I will be voting from now on for anyone and everyone who would be new to DC.

Actually, unfocussed churn in elected policymakers just means that the unelected powerbrokers -- who are very much not interested in change -- increase in power relative to the rotating classes of novice elected officials.

Especially given the limitations of our electoral system in providing choices and effective representation, educated voting on substance alone without effort outside of voting is insufficient to do much to produce desired change, but reducing the effort involved to just voting blindly for novelty will be even less effective.
Kinda cool. I can imagine a day when, due to "pre-shipping," one could look at their wishlist and see an alert: "Receive this product today!"
Makes even more sense when you consider that 37 signals is located in Chicago where winters are brutal (yay polar vortex) and summers are awesome.
Satire becomes reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_gwzx39LQ
Obama admits this is "to restore public confidence" not to fix a broken system. He doesn't even think there is an actual problem. This is all about PR and very little, if anything, about reform.

Our power-mad leaders never give up any of their power without a long protracted fight. We have to continue to keep the pressure on until this is actually fixed.
You just have to cross your eyes and look for color swaths, not individual red counties.

When that's done, you can see that the South is the clear leader.
> I'm curious to see if any candidates will run on an anti-surveillance state message in the upcoming presidential elections.

The danger of this (from a politician's POV) is that it paints a giant target on your head, to the extent that the public is spooked about bad guys. Especially if something bad happens while you're in power, and the public rises up demanding the ability to catch all the bad guys whatever it takes. If we could learn to not freak out every time J Random Lunatic does a public bad thing, then we wouldn't be handing pro-surveillance politicians the tools to so easily defeat their opponents.

Basically this isn't just politicians being evil, it's the symptom of widespread irrationalism.
Funny thing is when I'm getting really crappy as a freelancer I cave in and accept some fulltime job offer. So it's the other way around. If you are that awesome then why are you working 9 to 5? It's easy and pays well, that's why.
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