skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then there's the AWS massive disadvantage in data traffic cost. Small VPS providers (or large ones for that matter) typically include 4-5 Tb of data, and their compute is no more expensive (or cheaper) than amazon. And half the customers want large pngs (because jpg at 2% "reduces quality"). I'd say only to people with 45" monitors at 5cm to their screen or less. It also produces 50% data savings.

That's the biggest mistake one can make : host a traffic intensive app (even lots of graphics) on AWS.
Ok, I see where you are coming from, if you are defining "fair" as similar they are not similar. Its a reasoning tool not a comparison tool. But the question you pose is a good one to think about.

So let's start with Zynga, and take for our example that they "net" $95 on a $100 Facebook transaction. How often does the customer do that? Once a month? Twice? every day? So every 24 hrs you clock out a chunk of cash to power servers, cooling, operators, maybe a security guard etc. So your "factory" is this data center with a bunch of machines in it. If you turn off the data center, money stops coming in. So if you model out the transactions that data center did in a month, you have the cost of running the data center, and you have the money it generated. You take the difference and that is the money that you got to keep and that is your gross margin. So customer pays $100 facebook transaction, $5 goes to Facebook (leaving Zynga with $95) and if they happen once a month and the cost of keeping the data center up and running for a month per transaction is $55, then Zynga gets to "keep" $40 of that $100. Their gross margin is 40%, if the cost to keep that data center up for a month per transaction is only $15, they keep $80 and their gross margin is 80%.)

Now lets look at the Apple case, Apple has a factory in China making iMacs. It takes a certain amount of time, and labor, and parts to make the iMac. When someone buys an iMac the money first is used to pay off the parts suppliers and the labor and the lease on the floor space and what other costs it took to make. And that what is left over they keep as gross margin. So if they sell it for $2000, spend $1000 on parts, and $100 worth of factory time to make it, they keep $900 and have a 40% gross margin)

So at a very high level, you've got employees of Zynga in a "studio" which design a game, draw the assets, and plan the flow, and you've got a data center "factory" which ships that game to customers. None of the customers pay for the game studio directly, instead they pay for access to the game and in game tokens, and that money, once it covers the cost of the data center goes toward paying their salary and benefits.

In Apple's case you have a bunch of engineers who design a cool laptop, and an OS to run on it, and design its shape and asthetics, they are not paid directly by customers, instead they transfer that design to the factory which manufactures them and ships them to customers. The revenue from that first pays the suppliers and factory and then the salaries and costs of the design staff.

In this way the information businesses are "similar" to the goods businesses. They differ however in their ability to respond to demand. A data center can go from idle to full utilization in milliseconds, it can take weeks to have a factory go from idle for its maximum production capacity.

But in both cases, the work output of all the employees, whether they are soldering boards, being an on call sysadmin, writing an OS, or drawing attractive cartoon characters, is financed by the amount of revenue that work generates for the company.
What I find most perplexing is that people don't really understand that the point of Amazon is elasticity to make capacity planning easier for high growth situations.

That elasticity only makes financial sense when you use it properly. Like, if you keep your entire infrastructure turned on all the time, and cranked up to 11, but you aren't using reserved instances, then you are missing the point and you might as well just build/rent your own datacenter space and run your own servers (or pay someone like Rackspace to do it).

If you are using AWS, then you need to make use of reserved instances and the elasticity to spin down things that are being underutilized. If your infrastructure is too fragile to safely handle spinning up and down instances, then you probably are missing the cloud or aren't taking full advantage of what it has to offer.

I'm not saying Moz wasn't doing all of these things, I'm just saying that if you are spending $7 million a year, but aren't doing the appropriate capacity planning, then you are making a mistake.

At the very least, the exercise of doing real capacity planning by moving into physical data centers probably had a lot to do with the cost savings as well.
You cannot write asm.js by hand (in a sane way... it uses one big array for everything). It's meant to be translated from emscripten clang compiler project. So you can compile C/C++ code to asm.js.

But Javascript engines like V8 with its JIT are way faster than Python. You can even use typed arrays that give you almost native speed for such operations (e.g. matrix). I am coding a 3D game in WebGL and JS is as fast as Java when used in a modern fashion, though JS run in every browser
That's why I said the math was actually more complicated than in my example. ;)

In reality, you'd want to max out your 401k and IRA options while also setting money aside in savings or regular brokerage accounts.
I sincerely hope you never deploy a system then. Not trying to attack you, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Deploying servers is not as easy as you make it out to be. If you have the dough to hire 2-3 people to run your servers, you can afford to do it right.

I would never roll with a FiOS line to run my services, for one I doubt their TOS supports it. I'm not sure anything but the smallest of startups could pull that off, and even then they'd be better served spinning up a few droplets on DO.

If you have a 'moderately large' AWS configuration, you need a corresponding 'moderately large' DC deployment with plans for redundant network links and redundant power. I can't express the importance of that: anything you run that you care about needs to be in a controlled, monitored environment. Not a home-rolled franken-rack powered by a single non-symmetric line without an SLA. Not to mention proper fire suppression.
Alberta today is much like Ontario was in the 1960s. It has a relatively young population, it is economically driven by medium industry, is highly suburbanized, and wholly dependent upon cars for even the most basic of transportation.

While this can be a feasible lifestyle in the short term, it is not sustainable in the long term. Ontario started feeling the crunch from its similar lack of sustainability in the 1990s, and is still feeling it today. Alberta will likely run into the same situation in a decade or two.

It will be particularly severe if there's a large-scale movement away from gasoline-fueled vehicles at some point. With fossil fuel energy prices rising, it's becoming more and more likely that this will happen sooner rather than later. While there may be short term gains because of rising petroleum prices, they won't last. The economic harm caused by the province's nearly complete dependence upon its petroleum industry should be quite obvious. We've seen the devastation that even short downturns in the sector have caused in the past, and it's not pretty.

Without inexpensive personal transport, large swaths of Calgary will be nearly uninhabitable due to its high degree of sprawl. Edmonton will only be slightly better off. While a province like Quebec has ample and well-established hydroelectric facilities that would prove essential for a move toward electric vehicles, and dense major cities that pre-date the rise of automobiles, Alberta will not be in such a position.

In general, Alberta has nowhere near the economic, industrial and resource diversity of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. Agriculture and tourism are basically its only other options, and they're nowhere near sufficient to sustain the current way of life there.

Alberta's boom times may be better than those of the other provinces, but its busts have historically been far worse. When the next bust comes, it will likely be particularly painful, and the influx of people to Alberta will quickly reverse itself. Any prolonged downturn lasting more than a few years could very well see those remaining in Alberta revert back toward a mainly agrarian economy. It will be far more like Manitoba than it will be like British Columbia, and I don't think that many Albertans today (and especially ones who arrived more recently) would put up with that.

I'd be very hesitant about putting all of my eggs in the Alberta basket.
Maybe. What's the benefit? Who specifically would benefit from using it? (don't say "everyone")

The standard is probably using ImageMagick & an appropriate wrapper. Why is using your solution better?

Take into account that you're at least doubling the transfer latency involved, which will frequently dominate the time required to complete an image operation.

end_user->your_user->end_user
end_user->your_user->you->your_user->end_user
Yeah, you understand the code - we all do. But it doesn't tell you anything about the context the code runs in. And its context doesn't tell you about its context either.

Sparse code is not necessarily self-explaining.
I don't suppose there's some way to disable x32 from within a running system that's not using it?

edit: It doesn't appear there is. Not shocking, but I was hoping for a bit of luck.
I'm not sure how to communicate this better than I've tried -- I'm talking about populations not individuals. Most likely cletus is a better programmer than me but that does nothing to my argument. Which primarily was that I'd like to be able to filter based on comments from people who have skin in the game rather than random hate from passers-by. And secondarily that the wealth of talent and resources are located here, and therefore you can identify a significant (but inexact) correlation between talent and location.
I think passion is when you try something (theme A) for a good long period of time, and failed. Tried something else (theme B). Then when someone talked to you about Theme A randomly - and it struck you with a feeling on getting back into that field. <== then you found your passion.

In your situation, you have no crunch time, no deadline. You sit safely in your good job (understood through the situation). But there is no urgency.

Create self-motivation to try new things. Help people for free. If you enjoy the process even when its free - good opportunity to continue.
A very big number. :)
Software Defined Radio in JavaScript, as a Chrome App
I'm even more interested in the conversion rate for the front page HN generated visitor boom, and actual long term gain. But that might be too hard to measure.

I myself always visit the sites but I cannot remember I have been using one for longer than a day.
I'm at one and I would recommend it. But it's not the perfect solution, It provides you some socialization but it can be a little bit distracting: people chatting, mobile phones, somebody wants to show you a youtube video...

We have the rule that somebody with headphones cannot be distracted, but even with this sometimes is hard to get focused.
Thanks

Our web app turns a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo system; all devices play same audio in sync.

http://SpeakerBlast.com

We think it's cool, but maybe people don't see it being useful? We use it at home to fill our house with audio.
Upside really is, hey! Feedback! That's what HN is good for, not finding users!

Truly and honestly, if you don't have a product that is perfect for the HN crowd as a niche, it's still important to get on the front page if you can take feedback well. It's the best you'll ever get, it actually may make or break your business. If you don't get it here, get it elsewhere and fast.
If by "no amount of code analysis will help" you mean to exclude techniques such as running the damn thing on a known-vulnerable box/VM, then sure. But very few reverse engineers operate under that restriction.

It's like DRM: the user must have the key, so the only security you can have lies in obfuscation.
We were using EC2 and RDS (we still use S3 quite a bit).

Nothing reserved because we never wanted to be tied to the platform for long, although we ended up staying on longer than I wanted to due to difficulties in migrating away.

Yes, I realize we could have saved a lot with longer contracts. But the costs would still have been much higher than what we're paying now.

RDS crashed (completely) for us 2 years in a row, on exactly July 4th. We never got a straight answer from Amazon and their support system is a nightmare. Performance was always an issue.

Our main servers are now hosted on Hetzner (surprisingly).

We've had issues here and there with individual machine performance but nothing catastrophic and their customer service has been good.

For redundancy, we replicate back to the US onto Rackspace (and small EC2 instances for additional redundancy) servers and can switch over completely if need be.

We were worried that latency (because servers are in Germany) would be an issue but it hasn't. Also, in addition to US customers, we have a lot of customers in Japan so it doesn't seem to make much difference.

It's probably not for everybody and it's certainly not "cool" but it's worked very well for us.

Edit: our needs are relatively inelastic, which obviously makes AWS a poor choice to begin with. That was something we learned a little later in life as a startup.
Background at https://plus.google.com/+JacoboTarrio/posts/jjeQ7wTUG9U
FluxCards: Spaced Repetition flashcards (and its vast competition)
We use other cloud services as well. Rackspace and Nimbix are a couple of them. We even looked at Azure figuring no contention for boxes but we don't have any MSFT in our stack (sorry to my whole neighborhood of MSFT employees). We never depend on just one and have a detailed cost breakdown before we decided to buy or move a service. The ROI needs to be there.

As an aside, AWS has everyone beat when it comes to regions however. We can be close to our customers in Europe, US and so on.

To date, no one is spinning up cloud fronts and services in more areas than AWS. It will take the MSFT , IBMs and the like to move the global cloud along. MSFT just needs to realize not everyone wants Sharepoint, SQLServer and .net.

Which service you use is really situational. Plenty of good ones out there. AWS is just one!
Show HN: OpenLate – SF Evening Hack Lounge
I agree, though I am probably closer to 30 years form retiring.

I _hate_ the specific advice in the article (find a job with a pension? My parents have done well with this, but I trust most companies that would hire me about as far as I can throw their annual report), but the "between the lines" idea that we should "find stable things that you can enjoy for a long time" is both not obvious and important.
NewRelic? If you don't need much data retention, it's free.
I spent years volunteering with Seawater Greenhouse and Charlie Paton, the inventor, including working in one of the pilot plants in Australia for a short while.

They are very interesting technology and if I wasn't working on the organization I am working on now I would probably be working with a large scale Seawater Greenhouse installation somewhere today.
Who said anything about Alberta?

Sure, I lived there for a while, but when I talk about the west and the attitudes that people have, I'm talking about BC, and now I'm in the Yukon.

Life out here is different because you're encouraged to live the life you want to live, not the life that everyone else thinks you should live.
Yes, that's rather the parent's point, I think.
It all about future growth and not what is happening right now.
Winamp website gets revamped, what's next?
One problem with offering a dataset as a torrent is that it's impossible to edit it after it's released.

for scientific endeavours, this should be considered a feature, not a bug.
I'm in my late 20's. And a good deal of advice in this post is pretty good.

>>Everyone I know has repeatedly lost loads of money in the stock market, but not one person I know has lost money buying real estate in large urban centres in Canada.

Actually if you look at it real estate is the best deal you can get. No one, not one single person who bought lots of real estate I know has ever repented buying it. Fortunes have been multiplied by 10, some times even 20 only because some one bought a great deal of real estate in the city outskirts and watch prices multiply in multiples of 10's when the city grew. Same with rent. Rent is the best and safest form of passive income. Here in India, there are people who get obscene amounts of rents, then use the same rents to generate more of it.

In most Indian cities, real estate crashes rarely happen. Even if they do, they turn out to be local minima's and within 2-3 years the rush for property accumulation starts again.

Next, comes Gold of course. Of the things that I learned from people who buy real estate is- Buying Gold is buying real estate in trickles. The trick is to keep a proper balance of gold investment. And a real estate loan which you can afford to pay and is not beyond your means. The reason you need the loan is the inflation here is close to 9%. While your property value will appreciate your loan will only lose its value due to inflation, plus when you have enough gold you can dispose it off to pay of the real estate loan and move to buy the next property.
I forgot my PGP passphrase and can no longer sign Java packages in the Sonatype maven repository. This is not a big deal for me but I did try to recover my passphrase.

I got an extension to John the Ripper that supports Gnu PGP keys and built a dictionary of permutations of words that I think I could have used in the passphrase.

I got nowhere. In this case, a passphrase > 20 characters was unbreakable to someone with modest computing power and an appropriate dictionary.

Edit: I did not save a revoke certificate because the Sonatype instructions did not include this step.
Makes sense. I think the real benefit here will be mobile developers and those who want strict client-side applications.
Maybe check out:

http://www.quora.com/Massive-Open-Online-Courses-MOOCs/Is-th...

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-seminal-papers-in-distribu...

http://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-best-papers-resources-in-...

http://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/

http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs347/reading/textbook.pdf
(warning: huge PDF)

http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/PARTHA/Teaching/531-common-files/p...

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/PDF/CSI-article.pdf

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/465/notes.pdf

http://net.pku.edu.cn/~course/cs501/2011/resource/2006-Book-... (warning: huge PDF)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Generals%27_Problem
As far as I know, no. I'm about 90% sure you have to rebuild the kernel to disable it. That said, I've only read about it, not played with it, and I don't have a box with it enabled at my fingertips.

That said, this is a local exploit, so unless you have untrusted users or otherwise run untrusted native code, your risk is pretty low. Someone would have to exploit something else first to get access to run custom code on the box.
Bold move, defaulting to Curve25519 ECDH.

I'm not saying DH/DLP is broken, but the NSA declines to include non-EC DH (or RSA, for that matter) in their Suite B of algorithms approved for internal applications. It's nice to have the option of ECDH for day to day use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography
It's different from Zynga's "-ville", because Zynga creates new words that have never (or very rarely) been used. It's different from Apple's i-Things as well for the same reason. Both of those companies made prudent decisions about their brand trademarks by not treading on anyone else.

The law should not allow companies to own common English words in perpetuity. If you want to make your brand a common English word, you should accept the fact that other people get to use it.

I doubt King will win any lawsuits against others who use the words.
Pure Al does form a passive layer, but apparently not 2024 Al alloy as used on aircraft (trades more strength for corrosion susceptibility).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_aluminium_alloy

Some corrosion pics still at http://connielinguscorrosion.blogspot.com/ .
Show HN: Minecraft-look-alike in Browser with Meteor
>stop spending money on things that don't make you happy,

First you must learn what doesn't make you happy. It might not be what you think.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740811...

Drawing on empirical research, we propose eight principles designed to help consumers get more happiness for their money. Specifically, we suggest that consumers should

(1) buy more experiences and fewer material goods;

(2) use their money to benefit others rather than themselves;

(3) buy many small pleasures rather than fewer large ones;

(4) eschew extended warranties and other forms of overpriced insurance;

(5) delay consumption;

(6) consider how peripheral features of their purchases may affect their day-to-day lives;

(7) beware of comparison shopping; and

(8) pay close attention to the happiness of others.

https://www.happier.com/article/c46eeac85cc741b39e0e39d15d4e...
I have locks on my doors but that doesn't mean I don't have a pistol next to my bed.
Who said it was? I don't see that in the article or comments.
It doesn't sound stupid. Given we may exist in a shared CPU space which renders this universe, it would make perfect sense for implementing said universe and our awareness of it. Obfuscating the universe's rules would keep people from jacking with it to the detriment of others. It's bad enough we can screw up other's lives in here as it is. Being able to alter the universe's infrastructure at will wouldn't work out so well.
If you want a worldwide site though, AWS gets you in 10 locations around the world. This would take even an experienced admin a month for just the admin stuff to get going. An inexperienced one ... half a year ?

(but it's still better to have a webserver on AWS, that simply 302s to your "real" services, or only provides a skeleton web page, though 302'ing is better, without it you'll quickly run into difficulties with same origin policy. 302 redirects will also change much faster than dns updates).
Getting started with AngularJS in Rails
...Write A Blog Post About It That Makes the Front Page of Hacker News Instead?
Zero deployment on the networks I have access to. Also I would not be surprised if the carriers manage to break permanent connectivity there with stateful firewalls.
I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.
But the discussion is about truthy values and inexact comparisons - avoiding inexact comparisons and having an else means:

if something==True:
do_this()
elif something==False:
do_that()
else:
raise UserWarning("Shouldn't be here")

Which is a code smell to me. What I would do is:

assert isinstance(something, boolean), "Shouldn't happen"
do_this() if something else do_that()

(replace assert with something else if you want it not to be optimized away with -O; assert is a debug-only construct in Python. Or just drop the assert altogether. In most places, I would - there's no end to the amount of validation you could do, and most of it is unnecessary)