skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> * Lets provision as quickly as VMs (as opposed to 1hr+ on SL)

How many Rackspace customers need a full machine in under an hour?

> * Lets engineer hardware to deliver maximum uptime via no-moving-parts design (as opposed to vanilla SuperMicro on SL)

So just replace spinning disk with SSDs. Unless you're replacing the last moving parts (CPU, PSU, Chassis Fans) with something solid state.

> * Lets design hardware to deliver maximum unit of work per dollar (like DB transactions/second per dollar, or requests/second/dollar) as opposed to average value elsewhere.

This is fair for RAM intensive workloads. Everyone else is already giving you instance SSD access.

> * Deriving from the above, lets just give RAM away nearly for free, and put dual 10Gig network in place, because modern apps should be mostly RAM-based.

Again, perfect for RAM intensive workloads.

> * Lets adopt standard OpenStack provisioning API, with myriad of pre-existing tools, community and ecosystem (like auto-scaling, orchestration, etc) as opposed to proprietary API.

Also another fair point. OpenStack (and its open platform design) is all Rackspace has to compete against AWS and Google.

I don't want to say OnMetal is their "Hail Mary", but Rackspace is exploring their options in the marketplace with regards to an acquisition: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-15/rackspace-hires-mor...
Thanks, yeah it will be hard to find the right times. Usually I'm pretty sure about an idea before I start on it but this one is the first that I'd want to really hear what other programmers have to say about it. Any tips on how else I can go about validating the idea if not just approach people at Startup School?
Why do VCs require companies to be in the city they are in? Can someone please explain this? We are talking about an industry whose product is supposed to transcend physical space, but we have to be located in an ultra expensive city to get funded? Where is the logic?
>> As a founder, it's not inconceivable to think all the proper taxes are being paid when one slips through the cracks.

In any company, someone's responsible for the books (whether it's the CEO, some other employee, or an outsourced accountant), and you would think that the bank statements would be reconciled with the general ledger more than once a year. At the very least, it would have been done with each fiscal year end.

That the unpaid payroll taxes weren't noticed for almost three years is mind boggling to me.
having to do with distributed markov chains

I'm guessing you mean distributed Markov Chain Monte Carlo ?

Sounds like an interesting problem, I'd really like to hear more about that.

I'm really interested in "difficult" problems with significant commercial applications. (My contact info is in my profile if you don't want to post publicly).
Bitcoin makes it very easy: http://www.coinwall.co
> I wouldn't pay to read any of them

Then why should they care about you? If you're not willing to give them money you shouldn't expect them to give you content for free.
Excellent, point taken.

We're really looking at giving customers the option of doing something to the drive before it ships out. It seems that there's enough demand for it (based on comments we've gotten over the past two days).
I was surprised by the density of opportunities in the Gulf of Guinea.
Funny you should mention that on this story...

https://bkdelivers.com/
“Our network knows within 20 milliseconds if the status of a
piece of data or a node has changed. It has to happen that
fast because if you turn your computer off the network has to
recreate that chunk on another node on the network to maintain
four copies at all time.”

What do they mean by that 20ms figure? That can't be the entire network, since trans-pacific latency is something on the order of 100ms
Something else that can change is fiat -> fiat transactions become progressively less useful if everything supports BC transactions.
Inside Man’s Best Friend, Study Says, May Lurk a Green-Eyed Monster
You've just described a company willfully failing to remit payroll taxes. That's not just a terrible idea; it's (often) a crime, and it's easy to see why: you aren't really "borrowing", so much as you are "stealing" money that doesn't belong to you and hoping you can pay it back before anyone notices.
You were using punch cards in the 80s? I thought they'd given way to magnetic storage by then.
And they should go away. Local MLS's are fraud and add very little value to either buyer or seller collecting 6% of total value.

When I bought the house, My agent spent total of less than ten hours showing the houses and made 30K with 3% he collects. (He was even absent at final walk through vacationing)

I believe Real Estate Agents even got a law passed where you can't be a real estate agent unless you work for someone for year in California. Really? You can be a doctor and do surgery on Patients on your day 1 as a Doctor but you apparently being real estate agent requires some unknown skills.
The bell labs project was plan9 not cloud9 https://www.google.com/search?q=plan9+from+bell+labs
It's the same logic in requiring employees to work in the office. It isn't necessary valid, and likewise it's probably slowly eroding over time (probably due the high costs referenced in the article).
It sounds like they are reinventing Freenet. Badly. Not realizing how hard some things are. Instead, they make big claims. Where's the code?

Not that I think Freenet is terribly good.
That's very dangerous, no matter what the reputation of the firm.

The thing to do is to use separate accounts for reserves like these and to pay directly into the coffers of the tax man, lest the party that you do business with unexpectedly goes bust (they do) and you end up being liable again for the same amount of tax that you already paid to the payroll company. Don't for one second think that you're off the hook because you paid the payroll taxes to some other company.

The best arrangement is where they tell you exactly what is to be reserved and when it is due and you do the payments. That's how I've been doing it and it works flawless, never a problem (so far!).

As an extra bonus, you get to check the amount against the last couple of payments you made and you'll spot any big fluctuations before things get out of hand.
Literally the first step described in Four Steps to the Epiphany is selling mockups. Mockups.
I'd like to hear the co-founder's stories as well. I think this would give us a complete story of the situation.
Even if I grant that his desires aren't more complex relative to the platform, that doesn't help, because the platform is enormously more complex.

But his desires are more complex relative to the platform. He wants to do open-source development with distributed version control and collaborative bug tracking. Try that on a C64.

Further, the C64 was a consumer device, carefully engineered to make it easy for novices to a constrained set of basic stuff. I agree that we should have Android development tools like that. Sort of a Logo or Visual Basic for the modern age. But the current mobile tools are for professional developers to do complex, professional things. That's because they mostly want to make complicated, highly polished, consumer-friendly apps.

Those tools may also be needlessly complex for the purpose, and I think we should fix that. But we won't do that if we can't acknowledge the essential complexity of the domain. As Einstein wrote, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
> That has changed. In today's freelance system, they lost some efficiencies (movies cranked out quickly) but also gained some (hire desired actors directly without dealing with other studios that have them under contract to "borrow" them.)

OK, now I'm understanding you, I think.

You're saying that a hierarchy of freelancers would potentially be a market-driven system that could potentially compare favorably to a company with monopolistic control.

I can buy that. I tried to run my own company that way for a long time, though now I'm working for The Man.

>But that's describing almost every mature company in existence

I'm working for a very mature company (in the Fortune 100) that it doesn't describe (at least that can be said for most of the items in the list). It may describe most companies on the Fortune 500, but it doesn't describe all of them.

And that's my point. It can be better, even if human foibles tend to make it the way it is.
> I'm sure BK's investors are great advisors...

Bill Ackman is the hedge fund investor who played a key role in formulating Burger King's current strategy[1].

Ackman brought former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson in to run J.C. Penney, which turned out to be a huge disaster. Ackman reportedly lost ~$500 million.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Ackman is not a smart man based on one failed investment. In fact, I'd argue that he was 100% correct about the need for J.C. Penney to change, but it's one thing to identify a need for change and another to make the right change. If you execute well the wrong strategy, you're still going to fail.

The problem with Burger King is that what you call "a well defined playbook" is far from a proven playbook. There has been a trend in the restaurant business for chains to reduce the number of stores they own, but as a percentage of all stores, Burger King has basically dumped all of its company stores.

Today, that gives Burger King a financial profile that investors can cheer, but the company's ultimate success depends on what happens tomorrow. There are more reasons than not to believe Burger King's strategy will hinder and not help the company over the long haul.

If I was an investor in such a competitive space, I'd absolutely bet on companies being led by a visionary leader like Steve Ells (founder and CEO of Chipotle) over companies being led by former Wall Street folks with little to no restaurant experience.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020333550...
What's the problem? The question isn't closed, and has an accepted answer. Both the question and that answer are ridiculously upvoted. About those "ugh" comments: they are also quite upvoted: people agree with them. The question is not blatantly off topic, but it is squarely not on topic either. Plus it has another problem, namely that it appears to be a solicitation for opinions about a generalization about TED presentations. (You would think that the credibility of a presentation of any kind rests in its particular content, and not in its association with other presentations by name, or sponsorship or whatever.)

About SE: the various stackexchange sites have different "flavors". I like the EE one (electronics.stackexchange.com). It has a small core of regulars with decent personalities.
I forgot, one of those weekday 8-10 mile runs each week should take the form of a fartlek, tempo or strength building hill workout which will be 10-20% faster and more intense than your goal marathon pace.
By the time she's in the doctor's office, there's not enough time to undo all the damage. The doctor cannot change her mind in a 15 minute visit, let alone build up her trust.

This is a false dilemma. It takes time to fix this sort of thing. Unilaterally shutting her out is probably the worst thing the doctor could do.
The next step is cars that can park themselves.
In my experience, local MLSs are still way ahead of the publicly available online services. Trulia tended to be better than Zillow in my region, but they still lagged weeks behind what my realtor was able to send me. Properties moved so fast that almost everything I sent my realtor from a publicly available data source was already sold.

I really hope that this will change.
That's another issue too. If it's not a public website that you're building it's quite hard to show off your work!

One of my favourites was a forward-chaining rules inference engine written in T-SQL on MS SQL Server for a sixth-form college. The Management Information System (MIS) was called unit-e built by Capita PLC and probably cost a LOT of money.

It was quite a good system, the query builder for advanced users was excellent (every MIS should have one), but it had a fair amount of data duplication - names, addresses, previous address etc. And the admin staff had lots of name changes and spelling corrections to make. Also you had the data entry dudes who'd write a lazy name like fiesta try basharat instead of Fiesta Try Basharat.

So I built the rules-engine as a stored procedure (SPROC) called by triggers on tables. The rules themselves were just simple SPROCs and some not so simple but the rule interface was simple and so the system was robust. All of a sudden every letter sent by the school was formatted properly and went to the correct address! The admin team even gave me and my junior a present! And the 'junior' became an expert in SQL and learnt a secret ninja weapon (rules, inference engines and conflict resolution).

How many good things were created? How do you demo the transition of knowledge? How do you monetize the time saved? How do you portfolio the potential for benefit of new rules that haven't been thought of yet?

Expansion of knowledge, the beginnings of infinities, there's so much out there I love it!
In due time, this will exist. The interactive documentation (a wiki on steroids) will merge many existing systems into one platform that is unparalleled. I plan to make this system, I just need to figure out where to start, and organize a team.
Let me ask you this.

Would you be annoyed/angry if someone took your twitter handle and primary domain name and started using it as their own? If though you are very active and controlled that name for a number of years?

Almost everyone would be angry (or very annoyed). There are a limitless number of names out there.

Here is why it is a dick move.

1) They almost for sure knew about him and his name.

2) They didn't contact him or offer to buy out his domain/handle.

3) They went ahead with it anyways probably because he hadn't trademarked it.

Look it's not the end of the world, it's just a pretty shitty thing to do to a person.
Google gets tons of PR from Google X, why shouldn't Microsoft as well?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant
communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to
keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software
for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of
censorship.[4][5]:151 Both, Freenet and some of its associated
tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined
Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet
with strong anonymity protection.[6][7]

Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000.

I ran a Freenet node for quite a while. I eventually stopped for two reasons:

1.) Freenet is really astonishingly slow. Think ten kilobits per second of transfer, and tens of seconds of latency. It doesn't fit the www user interface very well at all. It would probably need to maintain a dozen copies of every file in order to attain a reasonable amount of throughput. Bittorrent has it beat cold for mildly illegal files, (copyrighted music, movies, etc) which means that Freenet's users mostly use it for very illegal files, thus:

2.) Man, it is absolutely full of child porn. If you donate 10 GiB of disk space to Freenet, then you can be sure that at least 5 GiB of that is going to be dedicated to child porn.
Hash collisions are dependent on the length of the hash and the quality of the algorithm. AFAIK there has never been a _single_ SHA-1 has collision, and it's an old algorithm that people don't recommend using anymore.

As mentioned in the article, 12 bytes is enough to make collisions very unlikely. Assuming a high quality hash algorithm, you can use this table to determine the necessary length for a given number of documents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox#Probability_t...
To answer your questions:

1. Anybody with $10K+ monthly hosting spend would love to get a "full server" in under an hour. Actually sub-second provisioning would be nice too.

2. You are right, and yes, we've moved power and cooling away from the servers to externally serviceable redundant arrangement. They're truly no-moving-parts. And we've put something way better than SSDs into them.
Is there actually "plenty of cheap real estate" in Oakland?
You might be interested in Smallest Federated Wiki[0][1], a software project by Ward Cunningham (creator of the first wiki). It focuses more on collaborative, distributed editing than distributing content though.

[0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
[1] https://github.com/fedwiki
Why Probability in Quantum Mechanics is Given by the Wave Function Squared
It is a fucking sham!

I'm about to make a big move, and it is absurd that the only value the agents I'm talking to are (that a user on Reddit can't provide by telling me about the area) providing is the MLS they have access to.

The 6% commission, you would think, would be a price subject to market forces, but due to collusion among realtors, its locked in. Why anti-trust isn't investigating? Lobbying, that's why.
Yes but again they can't. If you used local bitcoins or a bitcoin ATM to buy and sell bitcoin it would cost you more using almost any ATM around.

It wouldn't make things cheaper. The people with the money on the other side to run the western union shop are the same people with the money on the other side to buy the ATM or the liquidity to give you cash for your bitcoin. They have no incentive to lower the price just because you use bitcoins instead of their traditional services.

Side note:

Overstock released their Q2 results today. So now we can say for sure if it's just a case of them having a slow second quarter which is leading to the dropping bitcoin revenue! Turns out their revenue is up for the second quarter. It's just bitcoin sales that are down.

Unless you want to argue that bitcoin sales are detached from normal sales and operate on an offset cycle I think you have to admit that you were incorrect there.
Notch has said so himself.
Great news, congratulations. I'm interested to hear what people think about it's chance of survival now. As part of Fog Creek they started monetising Trello and had a chance of building a long-term business. Now with the investment there is greater risk they will end up acquired and shut down. On all the Trello threads here people have always been very worried about that scenario.
The money shot is the alarm that apparently knows when you should wake up.

I found the video hard to listen to. The guy has a bedside tone going on, a bit sleazy in his efforts to endorse the product with smooth caring ambience!
I think graphical story telling format that is so popular now would be a smash with web comics, but for me it really interferes with reading the story. Abrupt background changes leave me confused, definitely not the best state to be reading about quantum physics.
Archaic languages could be a source of jobs for really old programmers.
See also: "Transporting the [Lockheed] A-12s to Area 51" at http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-...
If you're selling products to developers, it is helpful to be in San Francisco. But if you're selling non-developer products to businesses, it can be unhelpful, because you want a diversity of clients and because tech companies have NIH objections at a scale that normal enterprise customers don't.

The subtext of your point about the STL person having kids is a little icky. You might want to reframe that point.
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report – Second Quarter 2014
There's OceanStore.

In the long run I don't see how various things like twitter aren't replaced with P2P open source systems. What about twitter really requires a single centralized provider?
I dont think the sensors would detect any movement unless a problem happened. The wheels don't rotate and the movement does not seem to have acceleration high enough to trigger the alarm. Many alarms today don't even get triggered when the car is hit by a ball, for example.
Also relevant?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3xd8bXlzeU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYubZoycACw
Macroscopic quantum objects cannot exist if P ≠ NP?
Isn't that why he was writing this? To explain that his mistakes aren't representative of what he now knows he should do as CEO? I understand what you're saying on a literal level, but it's very possible he's been a good CEO in other areas that he hasn't mentioned here. I would hold off on the judgment.
The restaurant industry is finally being taken seriously enough to make fun of
This may be good advice in NL, but it's sort of diametrically the opposite of best common practice in the US. Payroll being handled by payroll firms is the norm in the US, and the stories about terrible payroll withholding screwups hurting companies are, as far as I can tell, invariably the result of people trying to handle this themselves, paying "directly into the coffers of the tax man".
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle multiple pins in the same location very well, you can sometimes zoom all the way in and still have a cluster circle - making it impossible to click on individual items.
I bought my house after seeing it on Zillow. It never showed up on the Keller Williams site my agent set up for me, and he never knew about the place until we asked about it. It was my first home purchase, so he was very helpful throughout the process. I probably won't use an agent the next time I buy, and I definitely won't be using an agent when I sell.
They are both people with no relation to whether or not they will molest someone else they are attracted to. You could also just throw heterosexuals in there to be safe. I suppose if you wanted to avoid comparing a sexual orientation to something that isn't you could maybe use something like being attracted to people who wear glasses. People who find other people who wear glasses attractive has no relation to whether or not they will molest them.
Right. Chains try to maintain at least some amount of stores run by the company to help guide and preserve the brand. Especially in new and high profile markets.

But 3G doesn't need to maintain the brand. The Burger King brand, both to the customer and the franchisee is still decent based upon its historical success. It will take quite a few years for that to trickle down to retail investors and potential franchisees. You have contractual 4.5% royalty of gross and 4.5% for advertising of gross. It does not matter if the franchises make any profit. The IPO paid for the original expenditure, so all BK is left with is debt. Debt which has very little teeth because the majority of assets have already been sold off with some more equity about to be drained out during a debt refinancing. Maybe this is just 3G getting in first on the feeding frenzy of the shrinking fast food, burger joint market, and didn't really change Burger King's path too much, but no one should pretend any of this has to do with running a traditional corporation looking out for its own best interest.
That depends on the paywall; some give you a private URL you can use to share the page with non-subscribers.
Didn't Skype do some of this, though?

The way I see it, it's not being marketed to "users" prima