skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Realistically, there was probably very little Blockbuster could have done to challenge Netflix.

I disagree completely. There's nothing that would have prevented BlockBuster from doing a few really great things:

1. Get customers email address and email them the day before the day of and every day thereafter a DVD is due with options to renew the rental at some kind of reduced rate right in the email, as well as perhaps some kind of option to buy.

2. Implement a "lottery" system. Blockbuster doesn't hold on to inventory forever, so eventually they sell off old rentals. Occasionally give them away. Give them away at a rate which is high enough to keep people renting, but low enough to not decimate profits. Maybe 1:50 or so? And only movies that are getting sold off anyhow. Some people might "game" this system, but they're renting to do so!

3. Make suggestions. BB had my entire friggin rental history for a couple of years and not once did they recommend anything to me that I might like. Could they have thrown in the occasional suggested rental for free with some other rental I was making? Sure. Even better if it was the first disc of the first season of a TV show; I'd be back for all the rest of the discs of all the rest of the seasons.

These all would have required hiring a CXO (customer experience officer) and giving them a lot of budget and authority to do things which seem like they'd hurt the bottom line for the sake of keeping the company afloat. Would it have worked for sure? Maybe, maybe not. But they would have had a better chance of keeping everything afloat.

Trying to sell me overpriced popcorn and whatever was a total joke; I can get that stuff much, much cheaper at the grocery store. Blockbuster isn't a movie theater than can charge outrageous premiums because customers are trapped once they're on the premises.

But Blockbuster didn't do anything to try and turn their ubiquity and huge collection of data into competitive advantage. So they failed.
The recent developer tools improvements/additions to FireFox in the nightly (and maybe aurora) have, in my opinion, surpassed Chrome's.
On the topic of the floating point mechanics, I'll readily defer to you. I'll be honest: I was grasping for an explanation of why the result was simply a solitary "1", and there's likely a much smarter explanation (like "After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn." - false, but useful typically).

As for the counterargument: I don't think that works. And that's taking into account the harrowing liberties I'm willing to assume for the sake of a physics argument. In the inertial reference frame of the Earth, the Earth is rotating - as in, there's rotational inertia in that frame. This has measureable effects on stuff, from time dilation from velocity (very small) to time dilation from gravity warping spacetime (noticeably larger, but still small).

Put another way, here's a thought experiment. The mantel of the planet is molten rock, and can be treated as a viscous fluid. If the planet were spinning, the fluid would bulge out at the latitudes where the planet is spinning fastest (centrifugal force stuff). Otherwise the planet would be a sphere. This is directly measurable, and - in fact - the planet's a sphere. Mostly. It bulges out a bit at the equator [0].

So if you're careful, you'll note it's never fair to say you're in a non-rotating inertial frame on earth. But in practice it almost never matters. Unless you're doing something crazy like measuring femtillionths of a second with one of the most sensitive devices we can build - then we start being a bit wrong. Or you're just trying to be accurate with your GPS satellites (which are way higher and faster than a mountain top).

I rant a bit about this, as this sort of counterargument comes up a lot. I think it's due to the completely unreasonable mismatch of scales people are used to. Feynman ranted a bit on it about QM, and we're running into it here with relativity [1]. Here we're trying to talk about something reasonably, and the levels of precision are completely unreasonable: we're talking about a couple mile's difference over the span of thousands of miles to have an effect on the order of a few (bi|tri)llionths of a second; how do you keep such a scale in mind? It's like the silly analogies of hitting a baseball in NYC and nailing a bumble bee in San Fransico for precision. By the same token, we're hurtling through space, whipping around the sun and being wobbled so hard by the moon the ocean sloshes over our beachfronts. And that seems perfectly normal, even though it directly implies enormous forces at work.

/rant (and sorry for that - I find this sort of thing facinating)

TL;DR: I think that counterargument is simply wrong. But completely understandably so.

[0] http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11818.html

[1] http://bouman.chem.georgetown.edu/general/feynman.html
San Francisco, CA - Full-Time Lead Dev Ops Engineer needed for MongoLab https://mongolab.com/welcome/

MongoLab is a fully-managed cloud database service featuring highly-available MongoDB databases, automated backups, web-based tools, 24/7 monitoring, and expert support. Developers absolutely love us because our Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) allows them to focus their attention on product development instead of operations.

Who we're looking for:
We are looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to take a major leadership role in managing our vast fleet of MongoDB deployments and making our users the happiest and most productive MongoDB developers on the planet.

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* The uptime and reliability of MongoLab's infrastructure
* Maintaining our Node.js and Python ops toolset for cloud and database operations
* Customer and community communications regarding our cloud service

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* Has at least 2 years of experience handling technical operations for a SaaS or IaaS product
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* Loves problem solving and is naturally inclined to provide unbelievable customer service
* Has programming experience, ideally in Python, Ruby, or Node, and experience using automation tools such as Chef or Puppet
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I'd be more impressed if someone did an MVC framework in Rust.. just sayin'
Net Neutrality is about managing perceptions and control Not content
You have to convert to and from js objects with the facebook one (immutable-js), although lots of the js api calls are the same push/set/slice etc.

This one is directly on js objects (seamless-immutable).
Turing machine simulator
Our Future Stack, or Why We Love Knockout, Coffeescript, Redis and Go
How is that? In some communities the difference could be between learning to read and finding an appreciation for modernist poetry. Or more drastically, the difference between instilling a sense of civic duty and keeping kids out of prison. We do expect teachers to have a part in all of these things.
My critique was aimed at the form of the disclosure, not the act itself. This may have not gotten through for various reasons.

> Really? He gave you two tips, didn't he?

I do stand corrected. Either the last paragraph was edited into the article after I wrote my comment, or I did not see it the first time. Unfortunately, I can no longer edit my previous comment.
Mozilla Launching New Browser for Developers
I own this one:

http://www.ergodepot.com/Ergo_Depot_adjustable_desk_AD17_p/a...

I got mine at $480 (I got it without a top: I made my own) delivered to my door a couple of years ago. It's a single column with wheels in the back, so it's compact and transportable. I push and pull it around in my office very easily. The only problem with the single-column design is it wobbles a bit when cranked up. This doesn't bother me. Otherwise it's _probably_ built better than the Ikea one.
This is awesome! Curious if you guys also use Luminus? What was the genesis of that?
SpoonRocket (S13) is looking for a VP of Engineering
SpoonRocket is looking for a VP of Engineering to lead its tech team. The SpoonRocket technology platform is comprised of all customer facing apps including our iOS, Android, and Web apps, plus a host of internal tools built on the rails and iOS platforms. This VP of Engineering will be responsible for coordinating with the tech team to execute the technological vision of the company, and develop an infrastructure that ties the online and offline components of the SpoonRocket business.

This VP of Engineering should have at least 3 years of experience managing and running engineering teams.
I'm very curious - did you come up with all of this off the top of your head?
I'm actually the author of Luminus, and it's used as our default template for web apps right now.
So they call it "The Martini"?

I'm going to guess whomever named it was thinking it would be "shaken, not stirred."
Oops, I meant gender. That's what I get for multitasking.
No different than the terms on Hacker News here.

I signed up, didn't notice anything like "We own you" or something like that.
Agreed. Found this on my Twitter feed today. Arguments have been hilarious
> if VAM is measuring the amount of value a teacher adds to student test performance based on an average student of similar background, and the average student in a wealthy neighborhood does well regardless of the teacher, then every teacher in every wealthy neighborhood adds no value!

I'm no statistician, but I don't think this is actually true. We would expect students who are likely to do well on standardized tests under a Hypothetical Average Teacher (HAT) to benefit relatively less from a good teacher than students who are likely to do poorly on standardized tests under a HAT - at least when we use standardized test results as the metric. But presumably, any sophisticated statistical model will take this into account. You would simply adjust the model such than a unit increase in actual score vs. predicted score is "worth more" in terms of indicated teacher performance as predicted score increases. It's just a case of diminishing marginal returns, and not unique to teaching or education.

It might be harder to distinguish signal from noise as the predicted test score increases. But it still seems a better system than "the students have done well, therefore the teacher has done well".
The Internet may not have changed the way we consume news as much as you think
nitpick, the code check for NULLs at a low level but misses checking NULLs at higher levels like here:

https://github.com/Netflix/dynomite/blob/master/src/dyn_dnod...
That's only true if you take the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other interpretations (like 'consistent histories' for example). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation#Alter...
NB: At least some people do manage to successfully install a usable Ubuntu on Surface Pro 2: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183946

I hoped it will become more straightforward as time goes, but it still remains to be seen.
Nice deal.

I have a T420s that was bought new and I love it as a computer -- but when I go to grab a laptop to work on 'on-the-road' I nearly always grab my old X201s + big battery that I bought on ebay for 80 bucks total.

If I was to buy a T420 now-a-days i'd check out eBay. Great deals on older hardware, especially if you don't mind repairing small problems yourself.
API design is also a human decision-making process, vulnerable to commercial concerns and similar "evil" impulses. I believe that was even spelled out in the consent decree?
Ok, since we're kind of nitpicking over the word "nation": what do you suppose was the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation?

I'm aware that you were referring to the idea of a nation as it was established around the time of the French revolution. However, "Germany" as some kind of coherent construct is not just a recent concept.
In my world I should not have to test the latest browsers.
If it works in a modern browser, I would assume a even newer browser would not be less standardised.

To be honest do I only use and develop in Firefox and these days it generally works on all other browsers as well.
Citizen cartographers can help fill in the blanks in West Africa
Or by many worlds: the quarter is both ways in the box. When you each open your boxes, you yourself are pulled into the doubling. Now there are two pairs of you-and-them. In one pair, you hold heads and they hold tails. In the other pair, you hold tails and they hold heads.

Thinking about this makes it clear how communication is impossible. You will always get both answers - for different values of "you".
Not to mention the current refund fee of 15%..what a nightmare. Reading through their twitter and facebook walls is spooky to say the least.
Alaska first state to allow Internet voting, but the system cannot be trusted
I hope that's what happens! The alternative is, they'll just raise taxes and hire more people to sit behind desks at City Hall.
I agree that benchmarks are the final arbiter, but javascript engines are pretty well optimized for handling garbage. So if you're going to be making garbage, javascript isn't a bad language to do it in, and immutable data structure algorithmic performance isn't going to change in js.
Direct Link to App: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/immunizations/id914709957?ls...
Pretty good best of here: http://www.wbur.org/2014/11/03/car-talk-tom-best-of

Car Talk was my gateway into NPR growing up when I used to listen with my dad on long drives. I've had the fortune to meet the Car Talk brothers many times and they were just as funny and friendly in person as they were on the show. RIP Tom.
My point is that as wealth and average test scores increase, certain kinds of value become more important in distinguishing teachers. Values which VAM does not even attempt to measure.
get paid
Gym Problems
Same boat as you. I wanted to like Ember; everything on paper looked great. But with Angular, things just clicked and have allowed me to be more productive than ever.
drink a beer.
Interesting. Excuse my ignorance(which is certainly present), just trying to learn.

Can you expand on the last part about statistical correlation?
Mesosphere - https://mesosphere.com/jobs - San Francisco, CA
INTERN, VISA

We're a fast growing and well funded distributed systems / enterprise tech / infrastructure startup in San Francisco. We provide tools and services around the Apache Mesos project, a cluster scheduler that currently runs tens of thousands of nodes in production at Twitter.

Currently recruiting engineers heavily across the stack, from front-end (Rails, Python, Javascript) to back-end (Python, Go, Scala) to core (C++).

We're significant contributors to open source and are one of the main committers to Apache Mesos, as well as other popular projects like Chronos and Marathon.

Our customers run huge numbers of compute nodes, so if you're excited by the prospect of your code running at immense scale, get in touch.

Full-time hires and summer 2015 interns welcome. Please apply via our jobs page for full-time positions or email summer-2015@mesosphere.io for an internship.
The desktop calendar is far behind. I'm moving to Sunrise desktop calendar until they put out a big update (someday).
This seems like it's vulnerable to noisy signals creating spurious zero-crossings. If you have some high-amplitude harmonics, isn't it possible for them to create several crossings in a few samples as the wave for the fundamental tone is near zero?
San Francisco, CA - Full-Time Dev Ops Engineer Needed for iMatchative http://imatchative.com

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We're looking for an experienced and talented Dev Ops engineer to join our growing engineering team. As our first hire in this area you'll architect and own all configuration management, deployments and help us provision servers for our platform.

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Not a link, but I can tell you that one of the philosphies OpenBSD dev's enjoy is 'trim useless code for maintainability and security.'

LKM hasn't been worked on, improved on, or maintained in any significant way, so... it went away.

There won't be any fanfare made about it officially, because the dev group didn't seem to care about it anymore. Anything un-needed or considered bloat in OpenBSD goes this route eventually,. not with a bang but a whimper.

edit: Having looked at the article, it seems a bit sensationalized by Phoronix. Unfortunately the OpenBSD maintainers didn't care as much as this writer at Phoronix seems to have done.
Sprint dropping customers, losing money, and laying employees off
Two things:

1) lots of other stuff rocks, so you don't want to leave and you can downgrade your living space to something smaller that is more "affordable" to get most of what you want

2) people are leaving, but at a slower rate than they are coming. Basically, come here, work hard, burn out, and go somewhere else. Or maybe you get a job on the periphery, like say san jose, and then you live way out in Morgan hill or gilroy or in the cheaper parts of san jose. Or you get a job in Dublin/Pleasanton and then live in like antioch/pittsburgh/tracy.
Capitalize on it how? Clearly you're doing that for some definition of the term given that it's on the front page of HN and the Walgreens developer website.

What are you hoping to get out of this exposure?
SEEKING WORK - Remote or UK

I'm a machine learning/data science expert with years of professional coding experience. I've written big C++ systems and Python backend code. I have a PhD in natural language processing, and practical experience using machine learning to build automatic trading strategies.

I have experience with numpy, scipy, scikit-learn and vowpal wabbit.

CONTACT: dvadas+hn@gmail.com. Email me for a resume or to have a chat.
How is it a poor decision? OS X generally has been designed to not need right clicking. And where it does, aka Xcode you can just do control click in most places.

I don't really see how this is a poor decision on apples part. For windows sure, right clicking abounds, though I'd argue that right there is the crux of the problem in general. The over reliance on right clicking in user interfaces I think isn't too far off from "magic track pad pawing motions like triple swipe etc...". But that last bits mostly my opinion on the matter.
That's great news. Thanks
Boot looks interesting, but replacing an immutable data structure with side-effectful functions feels like a step in the wrong direction.
That's not a problem with encryption, it's a problem with the scary warning most browsers give about self-signed certificates.
We use Clojure in production at Shareablee with Storm.

http://www.shareablee.com/
Why live in a terrible city and state (CA has atrocious taxes)

Right... the only thing SF/CA have going for them are the jobs, the rest just is terrible...
Meh. Teachers moaning about evaluation. Hold the front page.
My new startup Clubhouse (http://www.clubhousehq.com) uses Clojure for the entire backend. Also, the data team at my last company Intent Media (http://www.intentmedia.com) used Clojure for most of their data analysis.
Thanks, I'll look through some of those sites you recommended.
Unexpected Complexity in a Spider’s Tiny Brain
There are a lot of ways to come up with an idea if nothing itches:

1- Learn a new technology and you realize there is a missing feature in between 2 technologies and now you can full-fill it and make it happen:
it can be a Rails gem, Node package, some library, or a service.

2- Try talking to peers and folks who you feel are smarter than you, if you can be influenced by them, they can give you a good insight on what solution is missing around you or in a specific field.

3- CHECKOUT PG's essay on coming up with startup ideas: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

4- DON'T push it, don't focus on coming up with an idea just for the sake of doing something. Once you let that go, some ideas will come to you.

5- Go to communities like /rails or /webdev or just go on Github and do a random search and see what people have built and left it alone, maybe you can fork something then rebuilt it or go on top of it.

6- I personally endurance through books, tweets, blogs, hackersnews, reddit, quora, github, my client startups every f#$kin content I can find when I get excited and want to build something :)! So I'm not sure if that is the smartest way to do it all the time.
This is one of those things that's of no use, but to show people that there are creeps online who build things like this.

Great advertising for domain privacy.
Forget the Glass Ceiling: Build Your Business Without One
I don't understand why Google is pushing two different email clients as the 'main' email clients for users of its phones.
Uh - remote? I've spent most of my professional life working from home.

With some extra effort, you can earn an SV salary but live in an area that has a very un-SV cost of living.

Traffic isn't an issue either.

You can network remotely. You can build companies remotely. You can even find investors remotely.

A few people are doing this already. More and more will in future.

(Are we really supposed to believe it's always better to build Internet companies in meatspace? Hmmm.)

I know there are downsides to remote working. Guess what? There are epic, catastrophic downsides to working in SV meatspace too.

I'm looking forward to the day a few decades from now when what's left of SV gets turned into a museum, while the rest of the planet gets on with doing cool fun stuff... elsewhere.
That is crazy. Like, I always knew that was technically possible, but we quickly shot the thought experiment down as silly in high school/college. I mean, feeling the changes in gravity to monitor the surface of a planet? That's patently absurd.

I'm having a lot of fun being wrong today!

EDIT: Aaaand that's from 2004. Which means I really wasn't paying attention while in college. Considering my roommate went to JPL to work on a sister project, I feel a bit of shame just learning about it now.