skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rackspace pitched OpenStack hard to competitors when they released it. I mean hard. They were practically begging various folks to give them a moment to discuss switching entire hosting services over to OpenStack. The strategic play was, and remains, fairly obvious: if you remove feature differentiation the market competes on other differentiators (Rackspace wants to compete on support, most likely). Given that historical context of OpenStack's origin and not-so-subtle strategy, it's interesting to see such a dismissal of hosters that still want to compete on features.

Think about it. If you launch a hosting shop today and adopt OpenStack, you will be able to offer a similar feature set to Rackspace right off the bat. You then have to begin work on how to differentiate yourself feature-wise, while meanwhile not really competing with Rackspace because it's the same offering. OpenStack tells us that Rackspace wants all hosters to look largely equivalent technically.

I'm pretty sure what's where the project came from. Now, however, it appears to be evolving into a community effort to compete with Amazon, which is smart on Rackspace's part: by making a community effort, Rackspace (and everybody who runs OpenStack) get to capitalize on the work of the community to build an Amazon-like system, since such a system would require a significant investment on Rackspace's part and they likely don't have the people to do it. The danger, however, is that we'll end up with a hosting industry with dozens of AWS clones.

Regardless, in the broad, virtualization was our crutch until Linux containers caught up to what zone/jail admins have known for decades: there are far more efficient ways to share a machine than virtualizing an entire OS. The smart minds are focusing on containers now. I know OpenStack just implemented Docker support in Nova, but I don't think OpenStack models container computing well.
A thank you letter to UW CSE
Meteor demos reactive SVG
To answer your general question:

http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths

But specifically, by the time a company is widely regarded as successful, noteworthy, at the top of its game, the train has left the station. By contrast, Warren Buffett would invest in a "company" consisting of a couple of guys in a garage with a vision for the future.
Wow a CEO talking to users. What good idea.
A few years ago, a friend asked me if I had any interesting problems he and a coworker of his could work on for fun. One of the problems I gave him was this (although I presented it as a state machine problem, not a firing square problem).

In a burst of over-enthusiasm, I also quickly hacked together a simple state machine simulator that he and his coworker could use to test their proposed solution(s).

The problem specification, state machine simulator, and documentation are available here: https://github.com/tzs/problems-state-machine-sync

I told them I would consider it solved if they could describe the algorithm. They did not need to actually specify fully working state machines that dealt with all the details.

Much to my surprise, especially considering that my friend had not studied computer science beyond what was given in a high school programming class, not only did they solve the problem in a few days, they produced fully working state machines.

Another puzzle I gave them consisted of several images that show the tracks of a bicycle. One of the wheels is leaving a red track and one a blue track (color assignment was random for each image). Their task: determine in each image whether the bike was traveling left to right or right to left. Here are the images: http://imgur.com/a/hv0b0

It was also randomly determined for each image whether to draw the front wheel track first or rear wheel track first, so you cannot deduce anything from which track appears to be on top when they cross.
Maybe over time. A long time. Lots of folks don't seem to have the mental real-estate to spare to realize there's anything beyond '.com' in the US.
HTML5 photobooth with live gallery in 250 lines of Stratified JavaScript code
Oil companies were the tech companies of their days. We take them for granted now but oil is what enabled mass industrialization and freed up labor everywhere from manufacturing to farming. Oil has disrupted more industries than you realize and has had a profound impact on human history.
I love this idea! But this seems to be more like crossing an RPG with a shell than with the filesystem. There doesn't seem to be any mounted filesystem. It's more like Zork with Unix commands.

Anyway, kudos, this is a really neat project.
1. Gadgets are made of plastic is made of oil.

2. Transportation is critical to you receiving the gadget that you hold in your hand.
Sure. rpedela at datalanche dot com
Electronics such as the cell phone have become integral parts of consumer's lives. Fact is you are at a severe disadvantage in modern society without them. Are they food and shelter necessary? No. But as a society we are hoping to move beyond just barely subsisting. Our poor (in America) are EXTREMELY well off compared to the bottom 10% of the world. There is a difference between absolute and relative poverty. Without food, water, and shelter you are absolutely poor. Without a cell phone and computer you are relatively poor (by American standards).

I challenge anyone to imagine what a disadvantaged life they would have without cheap, ubiquitous computing ability and connectivity.
Just because a possible alternate explanation is put forward does not imply that explanation is deemed probable. It can simply be more information to consider.
The security researcher posted a followup:

http://blog.trendmicro.com/russia-experience-part-2/
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'up'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'in'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'a'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'ball'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'and'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'curse'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'the'

curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'gods'
I use my tablet (iPad 4 with LTE for $10/mo) for a fair number of specific tasks, but I prefer a laptop/desktop generally.

It rocks on planes, as a car nav system in a rental car, for reviewing applications (...), for instapaper, for bathroom computing, for reading PDFs (although sometimes I use a Kindle DX), etc.

Maybe I'm old, but using an iPhone 5S for reading long articles is kind of painful.
Bitstamp seems to be good.

There's also the Canadian https://www.vaultofsatoshi.com/, which seems to be top notch as far as the tech (multiple 2FA options, OpenPGP cryptography for email, etc.).
And this comment here explains why Apple didnt remove bitcoin wallet apps because it will compete with their rumored future payments platform.

Cryptocurrency is not in a state ready for mainstream adoption.
There was a regulatory meeting Thursday in Russia, this appears to be the result.

Conflicting information on whether individuals can still trade in bitcoin legally. If so, this would leave Russia in pretty much the same boat as China.
I’m not yet ready to reveal my company or name, I may never be.

In the long term, I am for fixing such problems if possible, of course. This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7186407
A thank you letter to UW CSE [direct link]
Didnt the templar do something like this before? I think so:

http://history.econtrader.com/the_first_banking_institution....
Not it doesn't all go into your car.

It goes into manufacturing. It goes into farming, fertilizers are often oil based. It goes into the chemical industry. It also goes into generating power for electricity. How do you think the gadgets manufactured in China gets to the US? On ships powered by oil. When you fly on a plane, what do you think powers those engines?
Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?
It's a fixed fee per session. Some start-ups like to have a session every week/2 weeks, others prefer to do it on an ad-hoc basis. The pricing scales based on the size of the start-up.

If you'd like a free session as a trial you're most welcome. There's no obligation or commitment necessary.

Contact details: krmmalik.com/me
yes. donate to someone who makes $400/hour.
>'ve talked to a backend developer at Coinbase, he said their codebase is a mess and that he wouldn't hold any in their system

I usually wouldn't jump in on hearsay or be negative in this way. But Coinbase apparently proudly uses MongoDB as their database. Which is just, like, bizarre.

But hey, I'm a rather satisfied customer. Although I'd be much more satisfied if they'd have let me buy earlier in 2013, instead of having an opaque systemwide cap system and not providing helpful responses.
A good amount of the oil does go into gadgets. Energy, plastics, Amazon shipments, etc. In the U.S. natural gas is also the 2nd-largest fuel source for electricity generation (~30%, 2nd to coal at ~35%).
Rachel Roy Q&A
That's the thing about Apple, they have $165 billion but they have no idea what to do with it. The only R&D they seem to be able to think of is how to make their consumer boxes shinier. No moonshots, no diversification. That's why Wall Street doesn't see any huge upside.
Salary transparency might not be sustainable
so is the idea to spread this organically with employees in the same way that Yammer achieved success? I think that's a great way to go.
"It's still the same warning. no more, no less" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=452894.msg4990618#ms...
Not getting you. And no not my intent. What he said was funny and I found it funny. Nothing to do with Russia at all.
Segregation and discrimination create suffering, and those doing the discriminating are responsible.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Gadgets are made of plastic.. which is made of oil.
Two different but related businesses. That's like asking why does Ford/Toyota/Honda manufacture and sell taxicabs when they could make more money hiring a fleet of drivers and operating the cabs themselves?

In reality though, the ASIC companies are probably doing a mix of both - selling the hardware until they've reduced their exposure to BTC/USD to their desired levels, then keeping the remaining miners for "testing."
The "bro culture" locks out anyone who isn't comfortable with working in that kind of environment, which probably includes most white guys. My guess is that it also holds these companies back. For example, I couldn't imagine an ethnically diverse company like Google (with an HR department and lawyers who worry about harassment issues) wanting to acquire a company that was known for its bro culture; it's just asking for trouble.

Does anyone know if any bro-oriented startups have actually become successful, i.e., grown beyond a handful of employees? Are they a mainstream phenomenon or a fringe phenomenon? Just reading stories like this from the outside, it's hard to tell.
Google also has a pile of cash. And a fiber optic network. And millions of square feet of data center space.

Exxon:
Assets: $350bn Liabilities: $75bn

Apple:
Assets: $225bn Liabilities: $53bn

Google:
Assets: $110bn Liabilities: $15bn

If you're trying to value a stock on fundamentals alone, you should take these tangible assets (as you call them), back them out of the market cap. Then look at what kind of P/E multiple you're getting. And compare that to other companies in the industry.

The big difference here is in growth rates. Google is priced for growth. And certainly you can imagine Google growing much faster over the next decade than Exxon.
> Another way to put it: If the market is really that small that one small startup can take away business from another small startup, then you don't have much of a market at all, and you should find a larger market.

This is true but not the entire picture.

It is extremely common for the VC community to de facto agree on a leader of a space. Markets are frequently interpreted as winner takes all, despite the reality that almost none are. Once a winner has been agreed to it can be extremely difficult to raise funding in the same space.
Maybe, what's your point?
Congrats on the launch. I have a question, do you do event based notification like customer.io?
We would not live in our current modern age without oil. Moreover, the oil companies are tech companies and have been since before the phrase was coined. What do you think Exxon's R&D budget is for? Exxon has over 1,000 PhDs on staff.

Also, when you refine oil, not everything that comes out is gasoline. Those byproducts are a major component of consumer electronics (plastics). The entirety of a barrel of oil most certainly does not wind up in a car.
Yet it's so small:

XOM ('12) GOOG ('13)
Revenue $453 B/a $60 B/a
Profit $45 B/a $13 B/a
Market cap $393 B $394 B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil

(101 for anyone who doesn't know this: revenue is how much you sell, profit is what's left over for shareholders, market cap is how much shareholders think that profit stream is worth).

Relevant: check out wikipedia's rankings of company size:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r... (and the see also)
We are moving to Gitblit too (from subversion). One of the things I like about Gitblit is that much of the configuration is backed by plain-text files. While that may not be ideal if you have thousands of repositories and a gazillion users, it makes it much easier to back up or change/fix something by hand.

And indeed, the installation procedure is trivial :).
Find local business and services near you.
LocalSurch makes it easier to find telephone number, address and direction to restaurant, spa, business and services near you.
This is not a ban exactly in a sense that there is no law baning bitcoin, but by results of this meeting they (Prosecutors office mostly) decided that some existing law could be used against not clear who. The whole situation is not clear either.
Could someone please ELI5 if I was a very wealthy Russian criminal involved, say, in counterfeit, drugs, human trafficking and/or technological scams, how exactly can bitcoin help me "launder" my wealth?
Something goes boom, Mars gets new crater (pictures)
Unfortunately, that isn't compatible with the DNS spec. Specifically, it conflicts with the concept of "short names" versus "fully qualified names" (FQDN's).

A DNS resolver interprets a "dotless domain" to mean that it should try applying its search-suffix list during name resolution. Your computer would take a "dotless domain" and mangle it into something like "http://cocacola.local" before trying to resolve it. This means ICANN couldn't implement "dotless domains" without first changing the way every DNS resolver in the world currently works.
I can see the utility of the tablet as a browsing/reading/listening device. However, I am a bit of a curmudgeon and will clutch my laptop to myself as long as possible.
What is the difference between this and the now dead Greplin ( which was amazing ) ?
I devised the system and iterated it with Joel. It was originally inspired by the "toyota way" but i've just read up on the socractic method which is very much like what we did. It's all about getting to the root cause of a problem and finding a way to eliminate it. The key thing is the discovery has to come from the person being questioned.

Hope that helps?
Visions of a larger iPhone 6 are stunning
Hilarious - I was wondering where Microsoft copied this system from. This is exactly the new Microsoft system.
I appreciate bumping this link in a few places but I have some questions regarding it.

If all you do is put a js file in and a theme file, how do you have control over what element, the progress bar is on without having to write css to do so and how do you say which requests to monitor and which ones to not? It seems like having full control isn't quite there.

You could simply add an AJAX prefilter that has an update function within it before making AJAX calls and that wouldn't be many lines of code at all and means one less dependency.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the heads up though!
Yes, but here in the US we invested hundreds of billions in a housing bubble, rather than productive capital investment. Consuming all the seed corn will keep us competitive, right?
> By contrast, Warren Buffett would invest in a "company" consisting of a couple of guys in a garage with a vision for the future.

I think you meant would NOT invest in that scenario. Warren invests in

- companies with strong reoccurring revenues

- strong moats around them to protect them from competitors

- companies that are the number one or two in their chosen fields

two guys in a garage with a vision of the future is sadly missing all of these things. That's a very unlikely scenario for Warren Buffet to invest in.
Opsworks is nice, and it's a good packaged solution. A large number of smaller apps would benefit from a switch. It's also more fairly priced.

That being said, opsworks is still based on chef, which is still cumbersome. For most people Ansible is far easier to deal with if they don't fit into the opsworks box. The overhead of starting from scratch with ansible can be made up for with the faster overall development time.
fixable by sticking to a simple rule: never give help (including advice) nobody asked for.
Really funny sketch
It's not the failure that matters in the long run, but what you take from the experience to respond to it.

Good luck.
The wide lens helps, since vibrations will shake the subject proportionally less distance across the frame. It's not stabilization, but it's not as bad as you'd think from shaking a normal camera.
The big reason investors are skeptical with Apple is that there is no guarantee they can pull the same revenue without creating a hit product every two years. Once the revenue starts to shrink, things go downhill very quickly.
That makes me remember that as a small kid there were certain spots in my environment beyond which, I was conviced, infinite wilderness would adjoin or the world would just end (for example behind forests or hedges). Growing older I was often sobered when I discrovered there was just bog-standard urban landscape.

Yet, the machine seems to come from an entirely differernt direction. It has much more facts accumulated than a child and can articulate and process them to absolute precision.
Yep, not yet. But I'd like to see how they will be banning PGP.
Accused Silk Road website owner faces November trial
By that analysis, Google "left the station" in what, 2005? Microsoft left the station in the late 80s. Apple left the station in 2005?

And to the contrast, Warren Buffer invests in things like Conoco, WellsFargo, and, humorously, Exxon.

Small doesn't mean growing. Large doesn't mean shrinking. Any analysis that assumes either is simply flawed. Buffet looks for companies with good fundamentals and returns, whether they're two guys (though I've never, ever heard of him doing such a speculative investment. That seems entirely contrary to his philosophy) or 200,000 people.

Google currently makes most of their money in advertising. Anyone paying attention knows that they're working really hard at expanding out from that, and in a few short quarters their non-advertising revenue exploded to 10% of their total (it sounds small, but 10% of a huge number is a huge number), with an incredible growth rate. If they start successfully leveraging their smarts and technology, they truly can be a trillion dollar company.

The same is true of Apple. They've coasted on the iPad/iPhone train for a while -- a very enriching coast -- but if they apply their designs and intellect to other industries, the impact can be absolutely enormous.
That was really good at giving some perspective. I actually know the feelings expressed about his trip to Russia, although I am not Russian. (I'm from West Virginia.)
> So the question is: given a GoPro camera strapped to your wrist, and say, a 30 minute space walk, what temperature will it be once you are back in the airlock and before you pump all the air back in? My hunch is that it will be pretty darn high.

Think about this. One of a spacesuit's key features is that it uses insulation to protect the astronaut from the temperature of space (meaning those objects, however distant, that exchange heat energy with the spacesuit via radiation). This means the spacesuit's exterior will quickly rise or fall to the temperature of its environment. That, in turn, means the GoPro camera will also rise or fall to the temperature extremes of its environment.

So, if the astronaut is located in a shadowed environment -- let's say on the moon -- the spacesuit exterior and the GoPro camera will fall close to the temperature of space, or the temperature of the shadowed areas of the moon:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091217/full/news.2009.1149.h...

Quote: "Previous findings had identified the Moon as the coldest place in the Solar System, but the latest results push the temperature even lower, all the way to 26 kelvin ..."

The above refers to the shadowed areas of the moon. Pretty damn cold. :)

But -- if the astronaut walks around in the sunlit parts of the moon, the temperature will be very high. My point is the astronaut's temperature inside the suit isn't the issue, and the more efficient the suit, the less its external temperature reflects that of its occupant.

So the GoPro camera would have to tolerate a very wide temperature range.

> After all, it is connected to your wrist, and the inside of your space suite must be at least above 273 K for you to be able to do anything.

A spacesuit that externally radiated any significant energy at room temperature would be a very poor design indeed. And the GoPro camera isn't attached to the astronaut's wrist, it's attached to the spacesuit wrist area.
Apple is traded cheaply to its P/E. That's true. But I think any attempt to explain that in a single sentence is certainly flawed. It's complicated. Apple is widely held. There is ENORMOUS open Options interest in the stock. Etc. There are many reasons it's not trading at its ATH's.

So I think you're wrong about your conclusion but I also think you're wrong about your premise. Product development cycles take several years. It took 3 years to follow the iPhone with the iPad -- essentially just a big iPhone and a product that they started working on before the phone. There were 6 years between iPod and iPhone. It's not like cash is the only constraint here.

I of course do believe in Apple, and I use their products, and yes I'm definitely long on their stock. And I see so many people today frustrated by their low P/E. It delights me. Every month I dollar cost average into it and the longer it stays in this "cheap" P/E range the better.
Well, I understand why the Russian government is doing this. I don't have much confidence in the Ruble and am pretty sure I am not the only one. So BTC might be a viable alternative. An alternative that the Russian government has no control over.
Because PaaSes use containers to isolate customers from each other.