skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's think this through.

1. If IT infrastructure was a relatively small cost for their retail business, why on earth would Amazon have built a core competency building infrastructure and services that operate at a scale only a handful of other companies match? A lot of AWS is evolved from internal services that supported their retail business.

2. Given the above, what possible reason do you have for thinking Amazon doesn't strive for efficiency in its datacenters? They spent ~$80M on servers in 2008, and it seems very likely that they spent at least that much this year, so most of their equipment is fairly new. Also, given that power & cooling costs are a significant portion of both capital and operating costs in a data center, the economics for aggressively retiring older equipment is quite strong.

3. Bloated legacy choices: See the above two points. I think the fact that the dominant infrastructure as a service vendor grew out of a f'ing bookstore should tell you that Amazon is not a company that gives bloat and inefficiency a free pass. Furthermore, given the growth they've seen in the last few years, they've had both the opportunity and probably, the necessity, to revisit earlier choices. And by the way, they hired a VP earlier this year who clearly lives & breathes data-center efficiency.

4. Don't underestimate the advantages of scale in this business. Say saving 10% in costs is worth $50K to your startup. Consider how many dollars shaving just 1% in costs is going to be worth to Amazon. It could easily be enough to hire an engineer for a year. For a startup, it might be enough to buy lunch for the company, once a month.

It going to play out in other ways too. Amazon is surely transferring enough data that they can negotiate free peering, something a little startup is going to have a harder time doing. And having a broader customer base likely gives them an advantage in higher average utilization while still keeping a reasonable safety margin.

5. You act as if the Amazon name offers nothing to small business and startups. The relative certainty that Amazon is going to be around tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year is not some foolish superstition. How big is their Amazon bill going to be that it is worth risking data-loss or multiple days of downtime because they were dependent on a startup that ran out of funding?

In the end though,its really not clear to me how you think a startup is going to "absolutely wipe the floor" with Amazon. What's actually going to be better? Clearly, there is room for improvement, but you're talking about taking on the market leader in a growing, and all you talk about is efficiency.
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That's because "Renaissance" will only make it in OpenOffice 3.3...
Metafilter does that. Guess what still happens there?
I've been working on one to encompass erlang, ocaml, haskell, scala, python, ruby, lfe, arc, mzscheme, and clisp. There's only a couple of show stopper bugs left in the system. If I can get through the bugs this weekend and make the web interface prettier, I'll announce it early next week.

One of the simplest and most forceful motivators is simply having someone expecting something of you.
Respect! Such a cool little script!
Life Entrepreneurs (Christopher Gergen, Gregg Vanourek)-- the title sounds gimmicky, but the content is excellent and gets you thinking about how to create the life you want, not just the business you want.

The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur (Mike Michalowicz) -- solid, practical advice. Goes beyond the usual business-book cliches.
In my experience, it is more likely to be 1% of all traffic. Usually, conversion rates are like this:

100 unique visitors => 10 free version users => 1 paid app user
I don't blame you, and its really a shame because you do make interesting comments. I intended to reply in the original thread, but just didn't have the energy, so I'll do so now. You wrote:

people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid

There is no clearer signal that you're doing something right. Keep it up.
Hmm, I'm imagining a clockwork-orange-esque scene where I'm strapped into a helmet wired to my brain, running on a giant white ball, screaming into a room projecting a scene all around me.
I think that there's a display bug under firefox 3.0.5 (ubuntu) : the order of the labels of the fields of the signup form is wrong.

By the way, why is it required to have a twitter account ?
Great, let me know if you need more conversion optimization advice. I am into the business of churning out endless supply of conversion optimization tips :)
It's not even wireless... This is definitely a joke.
And what a timing, just when Apple introduces the magic mouse with lots of movement functions.
It runs the whole Android system including Linux kernel. It doesn't perform that great on a desktop, it wouldn't probably fit into iPhone at all this way memory-wise. If it did, it would be extremely slow.
Maybe, or perhaps or is because they are white and college educated. After all, white male college graduates between 25 and 44 have the next lowest unemployment rate of any demographic group.
The ability to downvote brings out the bad in people. I made a suggestion before to experiment with only allowing up votes. No one's feelings get hurt but good comments still get pushed to the top.
"Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore

"Classic Drucker", edited works of Peter Drucker
try exponential back-off :-)
Sounds like you should not put your stuff in their SVN, and I really don't see why that would have to be that way, you can run a repository anywhere that has HTTP access.

As for trusting them, if you put your stuff on their servers they have access anyway... (unless it is compiled, that's a different story)
The c++ of mouses.
From the PDF:
"PDF export of profile button assignments"
I didn't find it hard at all, just not very interesting, so wasn't motivated to learn it (no offense). I think having more open-ended jam tracks would work better.
Excellent observations.
Sorry, but your attempted pedantry betrays some fundamental misunderstandings.

You claim that a closure is just an anonymous function, no more no less. But as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_science%29 points out, this is a common misunderstanding that arises because people are introduced to the concepts at the same time. But the concepts of closures and anonymous functions really are distinct.

A closure is a function that closes over some lexical environment. Whether the function is named or not is irrelevant. In JavaScript if I type

foo = some_function_that_returns_a_closure();

then foo winds up being a named function, but it is still a closure. Most languages require more gyrations to wind up with a named function. But dynamic languages that allow metaprogramming at run-time usually have some way to make a closure into a named function. For example:

; Scheme
(define foo some_closure)

# Perl
*foo = $some_closure;

; Common Lisp
(setf (symbol-function ’foo) #’some-closure)

Going the other way, anonymous functions are not always closures. What if you create an anonymous function outside of any lexical scope, it isn't a closure. What if you create an anonymous function in a language without the idea of lexical scope? Such languages exist. You can play with function pointers in C, anonymous functions in elisp (the Lisp built into emacs), and anonymous functions in vimsh (the scripting language built into vim) all you want but you won't get closures in those languages.

Now back to my example. I returned a data structure that had two closures that closed over the exact same lexical scope. The functions foo.set, foo.get, bar.set and bar.get are all closures. Since pairs of them share environments they can communicate through those environments. But the fact that they appear in a more complex data structure doesn't change the fact that they are closures. If you prefer you can pull them out into variables and manipulate them that way:

var foo_set = foo.set;
var foo_get = foo.get;

// time passes
foo_set("hello");
alert(foo_get());

See? Closures!

Don't be confused by the fact that JavaScript built an object system on top of data structures with closures. That detail is a red herring. Anyways you've got data structures with cooperating closures, anyone can build object systems. It is easier than you might think, as pg demonstrated nicely in his book On Lisp. (In section 25.2 he implements a reasonable object system in just 2 pages of code.) And the people at Netscape who invented JavaScript had been around Lisp enough that doing so was a natural step for them.

The moral is that what matters are the mechanic Any function that has variables bound to a lexical scope is a closure. No matter what context it appears in. Whether it is named, part of an object, some other data structure, etc, it is still a closure.
This is true but a large part of "knowing" a language is knowing its standard library, where to find the function you need, and which of several similar functions is the exact one you want. The syntax you can learn in a day, but the libraries need time.
I use twitter for that, mostly do a small search to find a target user, based on his location and direct him the question, he often tweet the question to his followers and come back with an answer, otherwise, I don't know of anything like a global forum for that.
Because it could get way harder ?
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The people with the highest rate of unemployment however, black men 15 - 24 without high school diplomas, are not eligible for welfare. In all 50 states, welfare is only given to care givers. That is, to people who have custody of children. In most cases, women.

That data kind of blows the, 'blacks will just use welfare' theory out of the water. Unless you meant, 'black women with children will just use welfare'. Which, come to think of it, is probably what you meant. But it just seems that the serious unemployment is borne by and large by black men.
I don't like the idea. I prefer playing with other musicians, not trying to beat them. That doesn't even sound fun to me.
I'm looking forward to it, sounds great!

(there's your motivation :) )
Did you even get a chance to explain, fundamentally, what your product was? I got the sense almost that it needed to be 80% self-explanatory from a 1 line description, and that already in that it had to set up the "this could be potentially big".
I saw that. I thought that was crazy too! There is actually a demographic in the US for whom there is little incentive for education with respect to financial success. I would never have believed this without being presented with the data. It is so antithetical to my beliefs in my country that a large part of me wants to question the EDIT(sp):veracity of the NYT data. Even though I know that data is probably accurate.

Just . . . Wow!
These are all drop-in replacement kernels for mach_kernel, run by hackintoshers, that accept patches from contributors

It sounds like none of these modifications are sent back to Apple. Its great that they can fork projects - that much, anyone can do. The original claim was that osx86 hackers had contributed code to Apple, that was now in Darwin and is used in shipping OS's. Thats far more interesting then any modification that's made on a fork.

And of the two kext's you linked to, they both look to be dead in development, with more then a few major bugs each. Thats more of a hinderance than a help for your argument, really.
MS uses and hosts free too. what is your point? i'm talking about progressing current successful open source projects. fyi, its library has overlap with jquery core too!
That's good advice in general, and I something companies interviewing would do well to be able to answer, but at least from what I've gathered from our interview and others we talked to is that you don't even get a chance to set up that sort of framing.
Thanks for being so supportive! I shot you an email from arthur@outspokes.com :)
I recently had a similar experience doing a 3-minute pitch for a startup competition. We didn't get it and assumed it was for all the wrong reasons. We later met with one of the judges and he said we had everything right, we just really didn't stress how we'd make money and that killed it for us. Lesson learned.
This reminds me of Jester

http://wiki.github.com/thoughtbot/jester/usage
I enjoyed the bit about differentiation:

"Another way of approaching this challenge is to think: what's different about what you're doing? If the only thing that's different about what you're doing is that the product is easier to use, then you need to think long and hard about a better way to differentiate yourself."

I would also stress the value propositions and benefits of your solution and how those are exemplified in the features. It'll make for an excellent transition into the demo and not read like a boring feature list.
Sure, you might prefer jamming with other musicians. But Fret War really is for guitarists who're keen on developing technical proficiency,, composition and improvisation skills. To be technically proficient, you always have to strive to be better than others, not necessarily "beat them".
It would be interesting to see what the salaries and job types are for all of these groups: education might help significantly there (or might not; I have no idea).

(also, I think you mean veracity)
It's not required, but preferred.
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How do you make mosaic of an image from a big collection of images?
Hey guys I've been working on a mosaic generator i Python. It works well for black-n-white images, while for colored images you need to have plenty of small thumbnails to fill space.

This is what it does - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ideamonk/4020798966/sizes/l/

Code - http://github.com/ideamonk/PyMos

Now I wonder how would you generate a mosaic??

In my case I'm matching images in a collection using euclidean distance and pasting over a magnified blank image so as to form a mosaic.
Ooops! You're right.

Sorry I'm just so bothered by that data.

Also, your other point is interesting as well. If a young black guy can get an education, let's say a high school diploma. He will have less of a chance of getting a job than a white man who does not have a high school diploma, we know that from this data. BUT, will the black guy with the high school diploma make more money than the white guy without a high school diploma IF he can find someone willing to give him a job? That's a great question. Prior to being presented with this data I would have been eager to get the answer. Now, I almost don't want to know, that answer could be even MORE depressing.
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I agree. And I'm sure AA are going to fix their site, even after firing the employee and having Dustin being crucified in the process. And good comes from bad, but it's by the bad eating the good.
A second part of the equation is that paying someone $4/hr is illegal, so the employers who are willing to pay at that rate will usually not consider hiring a US citizen for fear of a lawsuit somewhere down the line.
Your argument does not explain the discrepancy between the unemployment rate for white people 15-24 and black people in the same age range, unless you are implying that the young white person will take the job at the same pay rate as an illegal worker would.

PS: If you work at Walmart $8/her is par for the course
Lessons From the War Over Skype
For the record: on second reading, I should have said "that scope is bundled with nextcolor and returned as a closure", not "bound to nextcolor", since the word "bound" is usually used to talk about variable names ("identifiers") and their values.

Similarly, in the next sentence, I should have pointed out that when you call the returned value, you're not just calling nextcolor but the closure over nextcolor, which includes the bindings for cs and i.
This is kind of funny actually. They gave a sentence midway down indirectly referencing the TC drama, and the rest is the Times giving the industry the same praise its used to. Don't call it a recovery!
Ultimately hiring decisions are made in most organizations by people who got out of tech and into management early in their careers and believe that that is the "successful" career path. When they look at an older engineer, they see someone "unsuccessful" (and either don't care about or more likely don't even understand his or her technical accomplishments).

This isn't going to change any time soon and it's wise to prepare strategies in advance.
The arc forum (http://arclanguage.org)

OK, ok I kid, I kid... but you are inferring that there is a lisp of forums, and most fall in the blub category. Whilst this is entirely possible, there is a lot more scope for orthogonal directions in discussion.

It might be interesting to contrast some alternative discussion forums / mailing lists and discuss the relative strengths of each, rather than worry about becoming reddit or digg od 4chan or /.
I question the definition of "people like me".

If i could pick a few attributes about which I felt least influenced my character, race, age, education level would definitely be right up at the top.
Not confused. I guess hooks take a lot of sever's CPU while the js and things on client side are not lazy loaded.
You are not a precious and unique snowflake, and neither am I.
"Works like Windows" has been passing for "easy to use" for much too long. My 70-year-old mother migrated from MacOS 9 and Office 98 straight to Gnome without much complain and without any problem.
Depressing? Don't talk to me about depressing. I'll be over in the corner rusting for the next nine million years.

-- Marvin
Be that as it may, do you seriously think if you were the exact same person, simply hadn't finished high school and/or were a different race, you'd be a different person?

I just don't see how race affects anything at all, maybe this is more a specifically American thing? Official education likewise seemed a giant waste of time to me.
Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
True, but reading job interview questions, it seems to me that whether or not they require applicants to know the whole stack is one issue. How they think they can find that out is an entirely different and much more difficult issue.
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Then what has influenced your character?
If I could pick a few attributes which I felt most influenced my character, race and education level might not be at the top but surely there amongst.
Both directly and indirectly through how others perceive me and through how I perceive that others perceive me.
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Mr. X got fired because Dustin published his email.

What reasonable man could publish somebody's email in which author bitches about his corporate workplace and expect not to get him fired by this?

Corporations perceive them selves as saint. If anyone complains about the smell in their cathedral he gets kicked out. You can probably get away with such offense if you are customer but never if you are employee.

Another question is: Is money worth so much to justify visiting such smelly place daily?
Quite a lot of this seems US specific. I don't think for instance the UK has anywhere near the same level of racism.
In education, yes, of course I would. I'm not an incredibly motivated, dynamic person who could make stuff happen whatever the circumstance, those people are incredibly rare, that's why they're famous, like Richard Branson. I worked hard at school, went to a top college, went to work in high tech, fairly typical "geek" life. Would I be the same person now if I'd been stuck in the small town I grew up in, working a dead-end job, surrounded by people who were going nowhere?

I don't think my race has disadvantaged me professionally, but it certainly had an effect in that small town when there was at most one non-white kid in every class... My education got me out of that world and I've never looked back.
Thanks, but no thanks.

I'm still waiting for the Emacs mouse.
Maybe I missed it. Any videos available?
Even if this turned out to be a real product, they'd probably just claim that it was just a joke now.
Ask HN: What is on your playlist right now?
Okay, there were Ask HN for books, tools, paid services, FU money, and many other aspects. Here is the Ask HN for music. What is on your playlist? Mine:

* Waterfall by The Stone Roses

* Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve

* Losing my Religion by REM

* Radio Free Europe by REM

* Come Together by Beatles

* Dev D and Oye Lucky Oye (Bollywood music)
http://www.esendex.co.uk/

These guys are great in the UK (and work for the US, too) for SMS. I have also written a Ruby wrapper for their API using ActiveResource:

http://tastyrails.com/post/190454192/sending-sms-with-esende...
After the initial "people are terrified of change and will resist it" though, the ribbon turned out to be an improvement.
I just looked up my state's (Illinois) welfare application[1] and it doesn't mention anywhere that having dependents is a necessary condition to receive it. If being a care-giver is the policy, they do a good job of hiding it.

Also, those children have to come from somewhere so why wouldn't they qualify as dependents if you have court ordered child support payments?

[1]http://www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=33698
Spiral light bulbs
I hate to be negative, but this isn't Digg or Reddit. I'm not the grand poobah of what should be talked about on HN, but this seems really, really far from what most of us come here for.

Flagged.
This reads like a badly organized blog post, without the personal touch.

Given the event has resolved in some way, Id expect this article to summarize clearly the whole saga thus far with some perspective or insight.

It points to earlier articles, but I don't have time to look those up to get context - that's what I'm reading this article for.
'Shocking' racism in jobs market [1]

The figures show black, Asian and other ethnic minorities are twice as likely to be unemployed, half as likely to own their home and run double the risk of poor health, compared with white Britons. [2] (from 2001 census, sorry, most recent I could find)

[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3885213.stm

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-today...
Correlation does not imply causation.
http://xkcd.com/552/
...who also develop web sites...
Am I the only one who thinks breaking this down by race is misleading? Why don't they have it broken down into industry? Saying this is due to racism is a huge leap from the correlation here. A more apt comparison would be people with the exact same skills and background applying for very similar jobs.
Well, I guess that would be too hard. Let's stick to dividing everyone into little groups to make this easier for our brains.
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Yes, I think my life would have been very different. I probably wouldn't have gotten my first job since I got it through campus recruiting. The people I met there have again influenced me and has led me to where I am today and a lot of the views I have.

Of course, in some ways, I would be the same person, but to claim that I would be essentially the same had I not finished high school is, in my mind, pretty absurd.

With respect to race... it is something that happens in the US. I can't speak for other countries though.