skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The tax system in the US apparently doesn't take kindly to non-profits funding open-source projects because they "can" be used commercially. e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness

$300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.
It took about 30 seconds of Googling to turn up a link to the GQ interview where this was originally reported.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/uber-cab-c...
Google's stated reason for abandoning XMPP is nothing to do with product evolution. They publicly stated that the reason for dropping support, was a lack of "industry adoption".

Personally I trust that about as much as I would trust a priest to give me a colonoscopy - open access means less control for Google, which means less ability to collect data and/or display ads.

Keeping XMPP support (and federation) would have allowed interoperability with a range of XMPP clients on desktop/mobile devices, AND with users of other XMPP services - whether they be services provided by third parties, or "private" services run by organisations/individuals. It would also have also been useful as leverage to encourage other "big" IM networks to open up their "private" XMPP based IM networks - Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, Cisco WebEx, etc. They're all using XMPP, but they're islands right now. At this point Google are worse than those islands, because not only are they not embracing open XMPP & federation, they're not even supporting XMPP any more - so if FB/WhatsApp said "hey we want to support XMPP federation from tomorrow" Google users have no possible way to be involved in that any more.

Google's implementation of IMAP is fundamentally broken. The big ticket item, "tags" is ridiculous, as IMAP already has a defined standard for "tags": the IMAP keywords feature.

The usual Google fanboy response to this is "but IMAP clients don't support keywords fully", which of course ignores the fact that standard IMAP clients also don't support the idea of messages appearing in multiple mailboxes (i.e. folders) either, but the network effect of Gmail has meant MANY clients have come to support Gmail specific features.

Imagine for a second, if instead of its current shit soup solution, Google had implemented the existing IMAP standard for keywords. It's not unreasonable to expect that the majority of IMAP clients would have been quick(er) to implement support for this part of the spec, which would mean users of other IMAP services (either hosted services or self-hosted mail servers) would also be able to use IMAP keywords.

It's been said before and I'll say it again: Google is following the same plays that Microsoft made over a decade ago. Latch onto an open standard, use your market position to make "additions" to said standard, and finally pull support for said standard, in favour of your own closed solution.

I'll wait for the regular Google fanboy down votes.
I feel like being siloed would actually increase the probability of dissent happening. Leaving you all by yourself to question the rules you follow. Of course I suspect a certain IQ and/or education level is needed for this kind of self reflection.
In summary, AWS rides the benefits of economies of scale. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale)

They design/build their networking gear, full hw/sw stack. This is cheaper and more reliable (their code is simple/customized to their datacenter use case.)

They also have SingleRoot I/O virtualization at each server: each guest VM gets its own hardware virtualized link, which is great for reducing the giant tail at scale problem (google for Jeff Dean's description of the problem.)

Their relational DB system RDS is getting popular: 40% of customers using them. So they compete with Oracle by offering similar highly-available service with much less price. They keep adding new relational DBs: Aurora, RedShift, EBS.

They design/build their power infrastructure. Faster.

They are very customer oriented, they make things simple/painless for customer use cases. They are obsessed with metrics, measuring everything, with tight feedback loops to improve things weekly. They rolled 449 new services + major features in 2014 alone.
The Case of Big Phones and One-Handedness
There is such a beastie as an ordered hashmap.
Wow. I'm interested in seeing how Uber responds to this. I had no idea that Al Franken was now the chairman of the privacy subcommittee. For those not in the United States, Al Franken used to be a popular comedian on the show Saturday Night Live. His biggest hit was this character Stuart Smalley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPc-dPVbow
That sounds like Paypal Working Capital, which they have been "suggesting" to me rather aggressively.

It makes a lot of sense. If you use Paypal for your business they have a good sense of your revenue, and they can be sure they're first in line for repayment.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/workingcapital/
Ricochet, a useful http proxy in 19 lines of python
A project I'm working on currently (not public-facing) is a relatively complex design tool for a manufacturer. One of the tools they were using was quite clunky and was somewhat "option heavy".

What I decided to do (and am glad I did) was condense alot of the "option" stuff into basic gestures or movements. I use the term "gestures" liberally in that this isn't a mobile or tablet app with touchscreen interface. It's a browser-based desktop app where the only real interaction occurs through mouse / keyboard input.

Given that it's a 'design tool' there are probably alot of things about the app that couldn't be transferred to a typical data-driven GUI, but I think having this frame of mind when designing the UI / UX can probably help in alot of unexpected ways.

I think the general takeaway here is that "more options doesn't always mean more buttons" :)
> I can’t imagine how we would have solved this problem without being able to sample Node.js stacks and visualize them with flame graphs.

This has me scratching my head. The diagrams are pretty, maybe, but I can't read the process calls from them (the words are truncated because the graphs are too narrow). And I can't see, visually, which calls are repeated. They're stacked, not grouped, and the color palette is quite narrow (color brewer might help here?).

At least, I _can_ imagine how you could characterize this problem without novel eye-candy. Use histograms. Count repeated calls to each method and sort descending. Sampling is only necessary if you've got -- really, truly, got -- big data (which Netflix probably does), but I don't think the author means 'sample' in a statistical sense. It sounds more like 'instrumentation', decorating the function calls to produce additional debugging information. Either way, once you have that, there are various common ways to isolate performance bottlenecks. Few of which probably require visual graphs.

There's also various lesser inefficiencies in the flame graphs: is it useful (non-obvious) that every call is a child of `node`, `node::Start`, `uv_run`, etc.? Vertical real-estate might be put to better use with a log-scale? Etcetera, etc.
The face detection on her research group's front page has one glaring mislabel (http://vision.stanford.edu/).

I always find that quite amusing.
I thought that Woz had moved to Australia in a partnership with UTS (http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/apple-cofou...).
When I was first introduced to SSH, the administrator had me transmit my public key to them and they added it to my account themselves, and that's how I've done it on all the servers I administrate since. This way, you can disable password authentication entirely.
Mozilla Corporation--the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and that has gutted Mozilla into a support community that's as organic and empowered as the support communities for any other pseudo-grassroots company--is absolutely a for-profit company.

> Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways

The only proper response to this is "lol". If you did a comparison, the skew of Mozilla employee versus non-employee contributions would be even more stark than the respective ones from the stats for the Linux kernel that everyone bandies about all the time.

> they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself

Wish you could've got this through to Mozilla this when they were facing the prospects of looking for replacement for John Lilly and everybody seemed to be jumping ship to Facebook. They could've saved a ton of cash on the incompetent business folks they brought in and whose only contribution has been to shit on the Mozilla brand and to "other" the existing volunteer community.

Or are you on some sort of [delay](http://olduse.net/)?
Outgoing chairman. Democrats lost control of the senate.
How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014
Yes you are right. But the title should reflect that.
I'm in favor of getting a variety of approaches to explanation out there. My post was attempting to provide context you'd seemed to be missing, not attempting an entirely separate explanation. I'm sorry you found it offputting. Using C++ template style syntax for paramaterized types does seem a reasonable alternative, though they're not exactly known for their clarity. I do think you're going to lose a whole lot of programmers with CollectionMaker (smelling a bit of industrial-Java style overengineering) - a better example should be found.

"But it's given in terms of constructs a programmer might actually use."

A lot of programmers I know actually use StateT - myself included.
Why would people not feel comfortable modifying GPL code? The entire goal of the license is to allow people to make and distribute modified versions.
Show HN: From Them to Us, Elderly Folks Sharing Their Take on Life in Video
That's a lot of robots, especially in such a short period of time.

"In May, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos told investors at Amazon’s annual meeting that he planned to deploy 10,000 Kiva robots by year-end, up from 1,400 at the time."
Quip is pretty good as a Google Docs replacement. It's got apps for web and mobile-- https://quip.com
The parent (and the article) are both talking about 1ms request latencies, not 1ms routing latency.
Hi, possibly not the best one for you because it's built using .NET C#, www.saasecom.org is open source and integrated with Stripe.
A bit of a shame you can't change the sort order. I think seeing oldest tweets first is going to be regularly useful, for instance to see who broke a certain piece of news.
Is a line of basketballs all found to be spinning in the exact same direction more or less random than a line of basketballs spinning in random directions?

I know, I know. "Sufficiently large scale."

(lol)
I downvoted you, and I feel obligated to explain my reason. Others will vote how they will.

I'm no Google fanboy. But please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

Instead of calling gmail "shit soup," just talk about the existing IMAP standard for keywords.
I make about $1,400 MRR from my SaaS app LinksSpy (https://www.linksspy.com).

LinksSpy is a tool for SEO agencies that helps them find better link opportunities for their client's websites.
I started it at the end of April 2014 (7 months ago) and it has grown ever since.

Considering that I am moonlighting the app, it has been quite successful so far. AM(A)A
I was very pleased that Light Table went against the current fad and adopted the GPL, so this turn of events is exceptionally disappointing. Editors/IDEs are particularly effective places to use copyleft, because it encourages the development of a free software ecosystem around them.
These typically have many bits of grey and a calibrated response curve that is stable over time. Specialty stuff.
He's a goddamn hypocritical moron.
Minesweeper Fanfiction
What statically typed languages have you used?
http://stratechery.com/2014/dependent-digital-whales/

"These ad units are largely purchased by free-to-play game publishers such as King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) and Big Fish Games, which leverage Facebook’s incredible demographic data to target the small percentage of players who will spend hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases.”

.. So to recount, Facebook is going gangbusters because of ads for free-to-play games, developers are excited about the chance to cash in via Facebook ads, Google and Twitter are trying to mimic Facebook’s success, and Google and especially Apple are hanging their app store hats on the amount of revenue generated by in-app purchases.

In other words, billions of dollars in cold hard cash, and 20x that in valuations are ultimately dependent on a relatively small number of people who just can’t stop playing Candy Crush Saga."

Many of whom are women, their purchases leveraged up into Valley value. How is that for irony?
>the waste in this case is on "organic" non-paid interactions with users

True, but the two seem inextricably linked. Hard to imagine that the perception of value on one front won't impact the perception on the other.

>Facebook lets you target that exactly and clicks to the ads just go to your website.

This has always been the theory and it sounds really compelling--even intuitive. But, in reality, click-rates on FB ads tend to be abysmally low. We have experimented quite a bit and FB ads are consistently outperformed by Adwords campaigns. This has been the case across different products/services with different demos. Our experience seems to be common.

Interestingly, the thing we found most effective on FB was promoting our page through FB ads. But, of course, the value of the fans we acquired is relatively low, as is the point of the article.

I think this is in part due to the core problem that people are on FB to socialize and "do" FB. So, they will click a like button, but they don't want to leave FB.

But, it is ironic that the thing FB ads do best actually creates more value for FB.
Google is spreading misinformation about birthright citizenship
I found out this very early, a few years ago when their ad platform was barely launching for everyone. I had a digital magazine and overall it seemed like a good deal, send me people interested in music from these countries at very low CPCs, nice. In total, I may have spent around $1200 USD over a month for a little more than 100 subscribers; needless to say I felt scammed. When trying to figure out what happened (w/ Google Analytics, my own event tracking code and even a few apache logs) I found out very interesting stuff, like that 99% of those clicks were people who didn't stay for more than a second on my webpage, like in: they didn't even wait for the page to load completely... weird.

Just for the record, my ads were not clickbaity and were targeted fine, and my magazine didn't suck (IMO at least heh), so if someone clicked on my ad I would pretty much expect it to stay in the page and have at least a look at the cover of the current issue.

Why did I burn $1200 if the ads weren't working from the start? I wish I had figured that out earlier and spend that money on a fancy chair or whatever instead... The thing is that I was only looking at my daily visitors and believed that everything was fine, it was until the end of the month (where I always made some kind of audit thing to see if I was growing or not) where I noticed that the number of new subscribers had remained the same even though FB ads were active all time.

Since then, the only advice I give to friends and clients is "stay away from Facebook ads, it's not what you think they are". And on a small side note, I tried a lot of advertisers at that time and the best experience I had was with StumbleUpon, their referrals converted to subscribers at an incredible ratio (like >50%!!!) and on top of that they drove some extra organic growth even a few months after then campaign was finished, respect for them.
Indeed, this standards against the background of most of America where using a taxi is a sign of profligate spending. Recall the WASPs from Tom Wolf's Bondfire of the Vanities: http://www.realcityonline.com/media-book-bonfire-of-the-vani...
Two Mistakes I Made on the Engines of Growth
This is actually awesome. I'm in the exact same boat that the writer started in, able to create UX but admittedly clueless about UI design. Putting some principles I've had swirling around my head for a while trying to learn into concrete writing just solidifies it.
Basketballs are not formed by gravity.

Edit: quote from the article:

“A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structure they belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our Universe. Our data provide the first observational confirmation of this effect, on scales much larger that[sic] what had been observed to date for normal galaxies,” adds Dominique Sluse of the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn, Germany and University of Liège.

So clearly this was expected.
Let's not go overboard. Uber's real time tracking, checkin, and reservation of cars, in conjunction with dynamic surge pricing to guarantee there will always be a vehicle, is pretty damn innovative - when it works. I use Uber a lot, and in the bay area, it's world class in terms of providing time estimates of arrival. In Dubai - not so much.

So - yes, lots of missteps by Uber, particularly on the ethics front, but don't discount how they revolutionized the real time tracking/reservation of cars.
0.001% of 365 days = 5.26 minutes (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.001%25+of+365+days)
I wish the API used the new index, but unfortunately it still provides a very limited and incomplete search functionality.
That's interesting missing context - Was this all in response to Sarah writing about the private lives of Uber Execs? I thought it was in response to her writing about the Companies Behavior. If not excusing the idea of writing about the private lives of the reporters, it certainly provides context that didn't exist before.
It will revolutionize porn search, for sure.
IS Serial a blockbuster, or just creepy?
There are a few bots & bot hunters out there, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023040263045794...
Even if this is not working now, it can still be applied later on video shot today. So we are already en route to being judged by such an automated guardian.
ZeroCater (YC W11) is looking for a full-stack engineer to help feed the world
Title:
ZeroCater (YC W11) is looking for a full-stack engineer to help feed the world.

Body:

We're looking for full-stack engineers to join our team and help us feed the world. Our stack consists of Python, Django, PostgreSQL, AngularJS. We move quickly and deploy to EC2 multiple times a day. We're profitable and we’re growing like crazy.

About You:

- You're ridiculously in love with Python

- You’ve got experience with Django or another MVC framework

- You're constantly learning new technologies

- You’ve built and shipped a project that you’re really proud of

- You’re ready and willing to work on the full stack - backend, frontend, and everything in between

Bonus Points:

- You love food!

- You appreciate good design, whether it’s a clean API or a beautiful UI

- You've worked at other startups and loved it

Responsibilities:

- Build customer- and restaurant-facing features to make their experience awesome

- Work on our internal tools to make our non-technical team as efficient as possible

- Dig into our data to find useful metrics or possible problems

- Automate all the things!

To apply, send a note about yourself to jobs@zerocater.com, along with your Github username, portfolio, resume, or some of your work.
It's not "exploiting others' fears" when there is actual evidence that Uber has tracked journalists and other high profile figures, and top execs have brashly threatened to spend millions investigating journalists' personal lives. This is disgusting.
> A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structure they belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our Universe.

This was predicted so there must be some understanding of how it works. Doesn't seem that spooky.
Interpreting the Debian init system GR
very great! And as a voluntaryist myself, I love the voluntary.net branding! It would be nice if they made these tools cross-platform with linux and windows builds.
Baen: A cube connects your car into game world
At work we have to send data to a few third parties, it's pretty much up to them how they set up their end. I think everything is using SFTP at least, but a few still have passwords rather than keys. The accounts are restricted so you can't get a full shell though. My guess is these systems are designed by non-technical people who don't really understand the issues.
> For the past eight months I have only seen Neovim folks being very professional, open, and quick to respond to user input.

They've done even more than that. They have gone to great lengths to be helpful. For example, tarruda created an issue on our own issue tracker to let us know they updated their python plugin architecture so that we could fix our Neovim plugin. He didn't have to do this.

https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-neovim/issues/10

tarruda has shown himself to be a very productive engineer and a great steward of a growing Neovim community.

Our experience with Neovim and Vim has been night and day. The reality is that with Neovim you can build plugins that do more than you can with vim, painlessly. I don't really want it to be a vim versus neovim thing, but Bram strikes me as someone who at the very least doesn't understand Neovim's goals. I certainly hope that Neovim's changes are not backported into vim, Neovim is much more open about contributions whereas with vim there's a single gatekeeper with limited time to address big changes.
In most cases, if I've written some open source code I would rather see someone exploit it for profit than see someone prevented from using it because they can't meet the license terms. I don't claim to speak for anyone else but that is the logic.
I didn't complain about being down voted nor did I "invite others to down vote", I referenced a well-known phenomenon where opinions (and even statements of fact) that criticise Google are often down voted on HackerNews, simply because they are critical of Google.

The whole concept of "don't complain about being down voted" is itself quite ridiculous. Given how hacker news works (i.e. down voted comments are hidden) this effectively encourages people to simply "go with the crowd". I disagree with this entire concept. Differences of opinion, and yes even criticism, are what drive people to make things BETTER.

> But please reply to the argument

What, like identifying why I believe Google's actions are "bad", what I think they could/should have done that would be "good", and how those alternative actions would have been had a more positive outcome?
It only has Some or None to deal with. Some<T> or None. Also, do you take it all the way? By the current logic, Some(Some(null)) should also return None.
So it's ok for the NSA to snoop on people out of curiosity, but not Uber employees. Some citizens are more equal than others. Gotcha
TSA has nothing to do with entry into the country—you don't encounter them on arrival unless you have an onward flight.

CBP handles immigration and customs.
See if your company allows for a sabbatical. If they do, save the side revenue for a few months to prep for the sabbatical. Then devote yourself 100% to it to push it to the next step. Afterwards, you have a job waiting for you and you should have done enough work to see whether the future of your business is viable.

Employees and/or partners is also a good idea.
Ignoring the fact we can't get out there, does this give us a neat method of orienting ourselves when travelling through these vast distances?