skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They shredded closer to a sixth of the initial price less whatever IP benefit they received.

Motorola had ~$3B in cash when acquired. Google previously sold their set-top box unit for $2.35B and realized about $1.7B in tax benefits from previous losses. However since acquiring it has taken $1.038B in losses, which is $0.67B post-tax. There will be another write down for the lost goodwill less the value of the remaining IP that should be worth very approximately $1B. So including the $3B from Lenovo, they recouped approximately $10.4B of the initial $12.5B purchase price.

Edit: Previous version excluded cash.
Tell me you're joking ?

You're actually comparing virtual CPUs between two providers.
PayPal Takes Your Security Seriously
Dr.Dobbs: Developer Internet of Things App Starter Kit
What kinds of Internet of Things Apps would you build!?
He was fucking around and not taking the meeting seriously.

If I was a CEO trying to get the house in order and at that very second Instagram is more important to you... you're gonna have a bad time.
Definitely not. Since Chromecast is sending audio and video over the same connection (HDMI), this is likely a problem with your TV or the like. Do you have a complicated Home Theater setup?
I still use my ICQ account.... Mind you it's combined into trillian.
Adoption of the Job DSL Plugin at Netflix
My worst screw up was causing a fire that destroyed one of the two prototype 3D printers my company had built.

I was working at a startup that was trying to create an affordable 3D printer. We had two working prototypes that were used for everything - demos, print testing, software testing, PR shoots, everything. Each prototype had cost hundreds of man hours to build and debug and quite a bit of cash as well.

Among other things I had done all the work on the thermal control system for the printer, it kept the print heads and build chamber at the correct temperature. One night while working on one of the printers I hit an edge case that my control code didn't handle well and the printer turned all of the heaters on full-bore. Half an hour all the plastics in the prototype had either melted or burned and I was left with a room full of smoke and a pile of scrap aluminum.
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk ?
You're just wrong here. Whether "gender" is pure a social construction is a matter of debate. Your fallacy is in assuming a position you personally hold is a priori. You're just espousing one particular position.
Uh, are you streaming the tab or casting the video?

All the Chromecast is is Chrome and Linux. When you cast a Youtube video, the "youtube app" on the Chromecast is playing a direct mp4 stream, out to HDMI.

I'm guessing you're casting the tab instead.

edit: Go fuck yourselves Hacker News. I'm fucking sick and tired of being hellbanned for no reason.
Killing RC4 (softly)
I think in your situation I would have made HR do their own dirty work.
I'd be shocked if Google doesn't get full access to use all the patents covered in the deal( assuming the reports are right and the patents are going to Lenovo), but even with that in mind a big part of the value of holding lots of patents in some technology area is (unfortunately) that you can use them as a nuclear option against someone who is suing you for some other patent to allow for MAD-style defense. IANAL but I'm not sure how they could structure a deal that gives away the patents but keeps that defensive option available.
It was worth ditching GoDaddy just so I wouldn't have to use that horrible interface ever again.
Same on Firefox. I spent a while clicking - it seemed natural.
Very true, that's why I say "perhaps... some things". While technology may have worked well for food, I just don't see how this can be applied to housing, education, healthcare, legal expenses and taxes [1]: these tend to expand/shrink based on how much money you have and "pin" the poor to a certain "ceiling" of disposable income leading to the perpetual hand-to-mouth cycle despite encouraging growth of metrics like GDP/capita.

[1] This BTW may explain why new middle class in emerging economies tends to consist of real estate people, doctors, lawyers and (true in ex-USSR countries) government bureaucrats: they get to benefit from growing GDP first.
Python Bindings for NYC's Geocoder
I agree. Don't care how much money you have or are making annual, but losing 9.5 billion in TWO years doesn't look good.
What's google thinking?
I'm not sure if "MS stack is hard to set up and use" is the right way to characterize it. SQL Server is probably the easiest full-fledged RDBMS to get up and running, for instance, and Visual Studio is among the most friction free environments I've seen (for getting started at least).

However, I wholeheartedly agree that MS stack, mostly Windows, is hard to configure, monitor, and administer when you want to horizontally scale, primarily because of the GUI driven configuration mindset and proprietary nature.
Are You Sure You Are Solving a Problem?
Lenovo to buy Google's Motorola in China's largest tech deal
Show HN: I Made a minimalist chess clock for android
I've been rather dissapointed in the quality of chess clocks on the Android platform, so over the holidays I decided to make my own.

I tried to keep the design as simple as possible, and UI clutter to a minimum.

I thought I'd share it here as you probably have valuable feedback I could use to refine the design further :)

Link to the play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.burkow.magnuschessclock

- Aleksander
Yep, I plan on adding more words and some additional domain extensions. Follow me on twitter for updates: twitter.com/justinthiele
""sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!""

I don't know if anyone is really that stupid especially someone who is in charge of firing. That is like rubbing salt in your wounds. A better way would be "Sorry you have to go through this but we have no choice because <fill with HR/Legal script>". May be I am rating those firing-in-charge people way too high intellectually. But I find this argument that "companies are too stupid hence they would rather not say anything human" seems far fetched. I am probably too naive though.
It would be nice if we had some sort of independent research verification system. Basically a group or individual that validates the most important (or highest paying) publications.
Thanks for taking my comment seriously. The lack of technical detail combined with the simplicity of the method just set off my BS detector. "Miracle cures just around the corner" is a constant distraction. Didn't notice that it was being published in Nature.
And more importantly Dogecoin? I'm only half joking, IRL Dogecoin tipping would be awesome. I'm pretty sure that it could also drive adoption. If every user got a couple dogecoins with the app and saw how easy it is to send it to other people, they might start using it with real money.

(I'm in no way insinuating that Dogecoin is any less of a currency than dollar).
The adding a node or dropping a node isn't really a problem. The problem is that most applications can't handle that type of environment. So until all applications are written in a way that can handle that, don't hold your breath.
10 things bit.ly should have monitored
Yeah I was thinking this was a great gift to them too.
The American Dream!
Yeah, legit .com dictionary words are all taken. You can sometimes find really obscure ones, but none of the ones on Dictionary Domains are available as .com.
Yes, this seems like a very clean way to phrase what I intended to say.
It sounds to like what Nintendo is doing is more or less the same as what printer manufacturers do to prevent third party ink cartridges from working in their printers.
... and apparently people have been saying that about "fortuitously" since the 1920s.
I'll explain my Chromecast experience simply: We are either using Chromecast in my house, or DirecTV.

When we want to watch Netflix, HBOGO, or something on Plex, we fire up a phone or tablet, open the app, and Cast it to the TV. The Chromecast automatically switches the input and begins playing what we asked it to.

@Loki540 - You might be referring to the still in development Chrome extension. We don't use that much but I hear it has to be on a very solid wireless connection. Chromecast-ready apps do not have that problem.

@yetfeo - It only costs 30 dollars, and any app can choose to be a 'Chromecast' app by adding in their API. Our iPads and Android devices all can use the Chromecast and the variety of things we can do with it is superior.
I know Google is trying to break out of their traditional business, but it seems like they've been trying to do that for years and nearly all their revenue is still ads.

Just because very smart entrepreneurs are able to capitalize on an opportunity (search) and turn it into one of the world's largest companies, doesn't mean they can arbitrarily do it again.
from TFA:

(For more, here is a blog post on the whole shebang by True Venture’s Tony Conrad — who is, IMHO, the coffee hipster poster boy — in which he notes loftily: “What we saw and why we got involved is that James and his team are part of a handful of people who are founding a movement around coffee … We believe Blue Bottle Coffee is at the forefront of a ‘consumer movement’ or mega-trend in which consumers are moving to higher quality, artisanal micro-roasters of coffee, where quality, attention to detail, beauty and a distinctive experience are being sought over more mainstream alternatives.” Viva la siphon, apparently!)
I don't want to be too flippant here but you seem to be making case that we would not want to refer to you specifically in any context ever because you are determined to make it frighteningly complicated to avoid persecuting you.
I responded above, sorry :)
I unknowingly reset serial number counters in a bicycle part's database, so now there are a few hundred people in the world with high end bike hubs that overlap each other.

Lesson: Keep the code that touches production databases as simple as possible so it's easy to verify exactly what it does. I was using a framework's database tooling incorrectly because I never dreamed what I used would touch the databases's counters.

(Not my worst mistake in terms of people affected, but it's the only mistake that was literally laser etched in metal forever.)
Check Point Discovers Critical Vulnerability for Wikipedia.org
Two things. Price, and no lock-in to Apple's ecosystem.
Doesn't happen for me. Where are you double clicking? (I tried a few different spots.)
Capitalism vs. Democracy
I can see the company growing slowly into something large. Starbucks has left behind the craft and replaced it with automation and burnt coffee that can be tasted through 20 ounces of milk. Yet, the people still want craft coffee.

This gave rise to lots of independents, but you never know what you're getting from one independent to the next. Just because you're an independent does not automatically make your coffee any good.

Blue Bottle has worked really hard to develop a reputation of really really caring about coffee, from farm to cup (and good ingredients in all food products). There are very few large independents who have a similar reputation (Stumptown comes to mind and Intelligentsia come to mind).

The last time I saw explosive growth in Coffee, which was cut way too short by a buyout from Starbucks for millions, was the Coffee Equipment company who manufactured the Clover machine. The Clover essentially elevated drip coffee to espresso status. The machine made drip coffee that tasted good, one cup at a time, and within 60 seconds. Blue Bottle isn't manufacturing anything, so my opinion is that it's going to be a long road to get to big growth.
They explain it really weirdly, but it's not that hard to cap your expenditure if you translate it into bandwidth units rather than storage units, since that's what's really being billed. The footnote on the main Pricing page is the most misleading part of their explanation:

If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte.

From this you might think the retrieval fee is some function of the gigabytes retrieved, but isn't really in any direct way: you're charged ((max gigabytes retrieved in any one hour in a month) x (720 hours in the month) x per-GB price), modulo some free quota. So you can really get charged up to "720 gigabytes" for a single gigabyte retrieved, which is a bit silly to think of in terms of per-gigabyte pricing.

It makes more sense to me if you think of it as priced by your peak retrieval bandwidth. Then you can cap your expenditure by just rate-throttling your retrieval. Make sure to throttle the actual requests, using HTTP range queries on very large files if necessary (many Glacier front-ends support this)... throttling just your network or router will not have the desired effect, since pricing doesn't depend on download completion.

Anyway, the retrieval pricing in units of Mbps is ~$3/Mbps, billed at the peak hour-average retrieval rate for the month above the free quota. If you use that as a rule if thumb it's not bad for personal use. For example given my pipe, it's perfectly reasonable for me never to pull down more than 10 Mbps anyway, in which case my max retrieval costs are < $30/month.
Heh, we have a Windows Server that all of our accounting software runs on. It's named "beancounter".
> He says, after suggesting you can't trust what someone says because they are an evangelist.

What the hell are you talking about? I provided a counterpoint to Kmett's detailing all that is wrong with Scala, by providing some of the good. Kmett is a living legend, I'm not questioning the guy's integrity; he went off in that reddit thread based on his [deep] experience of the language, which is entirely non-average.

re: Paul Phillips, he's knows Scala probably better than anyone else on the planet; yes, the soundness of the compiler affects everyone, but those who are most bitten and bothered by it are library authors (read: advanced users), not end users who remain, for the most part, unaware of whatever issues may lie under the hood.

> Or this. Do you remember the part where I tried to convince you to use haskell? Neither do I.

Other than Haskell, given the context of the thread, which language might you be referring to as the better alternative to Scala?

> You could leave for something better, keep all those things, and get tons of important things that you also won't realize you are missing until you get used to them and then try to live without them.

That sounds great! I am curious about leaving Scala for something better -- please name this better alternative that is presumably not Haskell.
It's cheap. I bought one for my bedroom tv which I only use when falling asleep. I already have a Roku for the living room. Until the SDK comes out their features cannot be compared.
I have not been targeted, I just tend to think like a hacker so I take a lot of precautions to protect my identity.
Oracle denies fair wage because he makes, "good money for an Indian."
I spent a lot of money on Google in the RV industry (to the tune of $500,000/month for a certain fortune 500 company) & there are a lot of issues with this post:

First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate evenly".

The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - which doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is tainted from the start.

Also,

> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but the differences should be proportional.

Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all. I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.

Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html
It's surprising how many people are willing to share this information in comments like that.
Um. What exactly are you suggesting.

Oceans are capable of being crossed by little more than someone clinging to or sitting on a log (not with a particularly high survival rate, mind). Or bundles of papyrus reeds or balsawood rafts, as Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated. I personally know several people who've rowed across oceans. Some of them multiple times and/or multiple oceans.

The odds of rowing to Ceres or Alpha Centauri, let alone the Andromeda Galaxy, on a log raft, are rather slim.
Wikipedia Is The Top Source Of Health Care Info For Doctors, Patients
There isn’t enough money to keep educating adults the way we’re doing it
Hey, nice site. I actually built a very similar tool a few months ago:

http://shortdomainsearch.net/
I've come to be a big fan of async.auto which allows me to break a large task down into smaller functional steps, define their required dependencies on each other, and then just let async take care of the magic of executing the operations in the correct order, and parallelizing operations when possible.

Do any of you promise and/or generator users know of a good equivalent to async.auto?

I feel like promises and generators have potential but much of my code is based on async.auto and I feel like it would be complicated and painful to try to rewrite that with promises and generators.
When Very Important Principles Collide
I have to admit, I'm thinking "buy Lenovo stock" right now. I like what they're doing lately.
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)
For the Google index, I'd also like to note that LLVM 3.4 released three weeks ago, has support for C++14 in Clang. Incidentally it also mimics Visual C++'s compiler from Microsoft in Visual Studio. I'd expect it to ship with an Xcode 5.1 alongside iOS 7.1. Now that I think about it, I should run to Apple's developer site and see if that's true. :)

Edit: Xcode 5.1 beta 4 ships with Apple LLVM version 5.1 (clang-503.0.9) (based on LLVM 3.4svn) according to Google searches. So I guess that's a yes. I'm off to try it now. :)
Ask HN: How do you deal with abject poverty around you?
I'd like to get thoughts on a specific incident that happened to be last night. I was in Manhattan (at a McDonalds of all places). A teenager came in (he had a slice of $1 pizza) ... he sat around for a bit and came to me to ask me for the food I was eating. I said no. The reason I said no was because I wanted to discourage him from begging for food. He persisted for a quite a bit. I engaged in a bit of conversation with him to understand why he was begging, why didn't he get a job, etc. This kid seemed to be on another planet ... "you have money. you can just buy more food ... I want your food ... give it to me". It was a bit surreal. I threatened to call the manager, but that didn't make a difference. After a while, I just gave up in disgust and gave him my food. Just to be clear ... giving him food or charity was not the issue here (at least from my perspective).

The whole episode has got me confused from an ethics standpoint. I feel I am a lucky person and probably should give more charity. At the same time, I don't want to encourage such unacceptable behavior .. especially in a teenager who has his whole life in front of him. What was the right thing to do in such a situation?

In retrospect, I should have asked him for something in exchange for the food. Maybe do a quick errand for me. E.g. buy me gum or give me a napkin. Try to impress on him that he had something of value to give. Maybe I should not think so much and ignore aggressive begging. I am very confused and in some pain. Are there ethical principles to guide me here?
I don't think it's exaggerated at all. I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, "What is this? I thought it was supposed to be like Hacker News, but for products. It appears to just be a bunch of people posting half-sentences that make no sense."

Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
How is that not hypocritical?
And they're off to a good start with the Moto X and Moto G. I don't really understand why they'd want to sell Motorola now.
Back in my younger days, I once had a project manager who was asking me to make a significant network infrastructure change but refused to tell me why the change was necessary and basically told me to do as I was told. I messaged a coworker to see if he knew what was going on, and dropped in that the PM was being a "fucking cunt." I was unaware, however, that the co-worker and the PM were troubleshooting an issue together and the PM was staring at his screen as my message came through.

The PM brought the issue to the CTO, but somehow I didn't get fired. Ended up apologizing (obviously a poor choice of words :)) and moved on. Never made that infrastructure change.

Key takeaway: if you're going to talk shit, don't do so in writing. ;)
I learned the first lesson the long way. To make myself feel better, my excuse is that it was my first job and I can in on the weekend to fix it.
A lot depends on the remaining 7,000 patents.
Would a café be any different? A busy café needs to keep patrons moving through, same as any McDonalds.
Instead, by the Summer of 2016, the majority of living rooms will be using Chromecast or something similar running Android. Android will acquire a monopoly share in smart TV, exactly like it did in smart phones and tablets. In fact, the game is already over, the competition just doesn't realize it yet.
" In reality, Wolfram Alpha queries are more often for the sake of fun than for the sake of discovery"

For me, this is because WA starts asking me for money when I try to use it for useful things. I suspect an open-source version will have different numbers.
Moto patents worth 1.7 million per year
There are plenty of strong android competitors in the chinese market. Google's Hugo Barra headed to Xiaomi just last year.
nothing would happen until google is driven into the ground(bankrupcy) with spurious judgements from various companies against its profits. I would love to see that happen, because then something will be done. Anything above is just a blip in earnings diagram. Digital mafia will just keep on truckin'
I don't think I am underestimating the stupidity of companies, because the threat of lawsuit and the industry (HR, training) around it is a huge influence. It overrides any and all other concerns when doing any HR activity especially those with high stress such as firing.

> Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!"

I would say that was a stupid comment, but not worth the millions it will cost the company in litigation. If the firing reason was not pregnancy / kids then it is still legitimate.

The very real problems that are encountered at the workplace are shadowed by the unreal "problems". I do not like giving up our humanity to follow a damage control doctrine that causes more damage.
Try using the native apps for chromecast for streaming content as opposed to streaming the chrome tab. Youtube has a native chromecast app.
Awesome product that's mobile oriented too. It's nice for my friends to not have to download an app to pay me back for one meal.