skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you certainly don't have to divulge anything, but it's not the charity that makes that so.

Also, it occurs to me that if this were a truly charitable act (instead of a partially charitable act along with a plug for your business), then you would have done it and not told anyone, or at least you wouldn't have asked people to buy TarSnap at the end of your article.

So, as long as you are marketing me your product, please do tell me how much money you think this donation amounts to so I can judge your corporate giving appropriately.
You can also say to your users - we have a problem with this legislation we are moving our servers to Iceland/Bermuda/Switzerland.

When the government sees it hitting their tax take they will listen
Perhaps, but there doesn't seem to be any terribly good reason at this point not to always allow two children.
OTOH, learning about that stuff was much harder in those days; it was much more underground and word-of-mouth.
I use VPS for overflow. The hourly billing lets me add in a hardcore box for a few hours when something gets popular or a celeb endorses it. Im a big fan of the cloud, I just dont think it makes economical sense to run something on it all the time. The cloud makes sense to me only when you dont run your stuff on it all the time.
Maybe everything is just going to get a lot gayer in China.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it seems like a pretty good solution actually.
Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the new code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve without direct funding.

There's two routes for money to take:

1. People donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation, which then funds FreeBSD development.

2. People pay for RHEL, and then RedHat uses that money to fund Linux development.

Is there really any significant difference between these?
I'm not sure I buy this argument. You had to look up guides for how to set up something you are using because you find it valuable. How is this any different from any other tool you've found valuable and set up? I'm sure that too seemed arcane at first.
You might want to go over your figures there. Bandwidth is only 10 cents a gigabyte if you have done 150TB in transfer already. For common folk, its 17 cents a GB. == 170$ per TB

I did a rundown a few posts up where I price out the need for a fairly common php/mysql website that would cost 600$ a month on ec2 to run, yet it only costs 200$ on dedicated.

Also, Im not talking about single server setups only. Show me a scenario where its cheaper to run your entire business on EC2 than a mix of Dedicated + EC2.

Seriously, I want to know of one situation where it would cost LESS money to run my entire 24/7 business on amazon then on dedicated or a mix of dedicated and EC2.
I've been wondering for a while now why China doesn't back off to a two-child policy.

People with enough money or connections can have all the children they desire. Men who divorce and remarry get at least one child per wife, and women who can pay fines can have more than one child also.
I wonder if NSA already has their own quantum computers which can implement Shor's algorithm?
[Edit: pg had already made 'my' points about the first two drawings.]

The third is subpar even for a beginner rendering. Almost looks like some early attempt at cubism. In a bad way.
I recommend changing the link to point to a permanent archive of Geocities, such as http://reocities.com/tablizer/
No -- but for tax purposes I need to round numbers to an integer number of cents anyway. For some reason the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency only allows space for two digits after the decimal place on all of their tax forms...
In a declining economy, it would make sense that fewer children are being born, since the parents on average can't support as many, but in a growing economy, we would usually see many more children being born because times are good, and parents can afford to care for more children - something that isn't being allowed in China.

WWII dragged America (and the world) out of The Great Depression and into the post-war boom. Part of how that happened: American families were forced into having two incomes (so the wife could work in the factory and the husband could be in the army), no new children being conceived/born (what with hubby being off at war on another continent) and war time rationing forced very high savings rates on America -- as high as 50% at one point -- because there wasn't much to spend your dual income on (especially since they were also encouraging people to grow "Victory Gardens"). We went from people moving every 13 months to take advantage of new rental deals (where you got the 13th month free if you could make your rent the first 12) before the war to Levittowns sprouting like mushrooms to try desperately to meet the sudden high demand for middle class housing after the war.

So it's not like something like this has never happened before. Maybe nothing so protracted, but the precedent I am aware of is generally considered to be a good thing.
Neoteny Labs : What Joi Ito and his Band of Brothers Are Up To in Asia?
You haven't been to China have you.

Do you have any idea how many women from Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. etc. etc. are DESPERATE to get into China? SOLELY for the purpose of latching onto a man? Even African women are trying to get in on the action.

Student visa my @$$! Not unless they are studying for an M-R-S degree!

I have seen this first hand.

A shortage of 30 or 40 million women?

Believe me when I tell you . . . the Chinese Government knows this won't be a problem.

It really won't. Believe me.
What, hackers don't get enough sunlight? guffaw!
I don't know about that. Within a month or two of buying my first modem in 1992 I was on bulletin boards that had FIDOnet subscriptions, which quickly gave me enough information to be dangerous.
Your idea of science is different than mine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19296870
bringing up a new ec2 instance takes about .5 secs
But if you do this overseas you can easily support yourself.

As for teaching English, the best thing is to just go to a country you are interested in and look for work once you are there. I taught English in China last year (along with doing freelance work) and this is how I did it.

You could find work before going but this is actually riskier. They will most likely lock you into a year-long contract and there is a lot of bad schools that recruit this way because the candidates do not know any better. It's much better to move to a place and spend a month looking. That way you can talk with other teachers, see how the school looks and make sure it is not in the middle of nowhere.

In many developing countries you can live well on $500 a month so freelancing is always an option for you again if teaching isn't for you.
I've been building infrastructure a long time, and for even longer, I've been fixing bad infrastructure. When I first consulted for a company using EC2, they were using it because they were just bad at planning & managing their infrastructure. Three years later it's pretty much the same story.

These kids (I'm 30 now, I can totally pull off the crotchety old man thing) drink the cloud kool-aid and think "great, we don't need to think about our infrastructure". They slap together something that almost works, but is a management nightmare. It's no different from the startups I was consulting for in the '90s, except it's a lot quicker to use a brute-force scaling approach now.

I like S3 for what I use it for: cheap tertiary archival for ~20TB worth of backups. Beyond that though, it's hard to find ways for the numbers to work for the pure cloud hosting sites. Especially for services that are more than just simple CRUD apps. None of the startups I'm currently incubating can do more than maybe some simplistic web hosting there, since they all involve "complex" infrastructure needs. (I double-quote complex, because in my world, BGP route optimization or IPv4 anycast is just a run of the mill daily problem).
Google Web Toolkit - Making Your Apps Even Faster, Smaller, And Tidier
Is there an extension (could there be) for privacy protections similar to SRWare? I like SRWare ok but it'd be nice if these protections could be dropped into the latest Chrome.
I think it's more likely that the imbalance between the sexes will correct itself through any of the myriad feedback mechanisms before it has a significant effect on Chinese evolution.

For example, parental preference could shift back to girls (or at least even out) since couples will probably be expected to support all four parents in their old age, and eligible bachelorettes will become a valuable commodity. Having a boy becomes an evolutionary gamble: a daughter will surely bring grandchildren but a son may die childless.
This is old news, but always a fun page if you're a 2600 fan:

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2008/04/21/fun-from-yeste...
Have You Ever Noticed Why People Keep Their Distance From You?
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Test Pad
Let me know when it gets plugin support...
Eric Ries Lean Startup talk at MIT -- videos
Hypergame and Infinity
The beautiful thing about shutting down a service is that you don't have to worry about losing clients.
Money off the table
Ask HN: Maximum length of time to respond to an email?
Suppose a potential investor asks a question about your startup via email, what do you believe is the maximum length of time that should be taken to respond? Assuming the question is of moderate difficulty.
I'll repost here what I wrote for Tim's blog:

When putting together the contest we really wanted to make it a contest for anyone, anywhere in the world. Throughout the planning I spent more hours on the phone with lawyers than I’d care to admit to anyone. Unfortunately, as time when on, it became clear that it would be impossible to hold the contest anywhere outside the US without fundamentally altering the original concept.

Without going into too much detail, the crux of the matter is the classification of the contest as a game of chance versus a game of skill. Apparently, being good at selling stuff online is considered chance by many agencies and therefore would be governed by Lottery laws, as silly as this sounds.

That being said, you can still participate in this contest wherever you are. The prize money is significant, but don’t forget the spirit of the contest: to give a kick in the pants to all those people who have wanted to start businesses but haven’t. The real prize is having a business of your own at the end of the six months. You’ll still have all the same resources and guides as everyone else: support from the Shopify team, help and guidance from Tim and other experts, and more control over your financial independence.
Does Netflix Know Javascript?
What's wrong with Paypal's Website Payment Standard?
Good thought analysis, but in general, there will always be people willing to pay to be waited on (in your restaurant example). If anything it would be more accurate to say fast-food workers would be most in trouble. Being a waiter is a skilled job afterall =)
Data Structures in Go Programs
What debugging ought to feel like (video)
i thought Reocities' header detracted from the experience, but thank you the permalink all the same
It would seem to me that warfare is the worst way to solve the population crisis because wars must involves the destruction of existing capitals(Human capitals, mostly) and high opportunity cost(Delaying the introduction of television and other consumer technologies).
You might want to go over your figures there. Bandwidth is only 10 cents a gigabyte if you have done 150TB in transfer already. For common folk, its 17 cents a GB. == 170$ per TB

Thanks for pointing that out, my bad. Edited it as to not collect karma for false figures. I stand by my point, be it $140 more or less.

Also, Im not talking about single server setups only. Show me a scenario where its cheaper to run your entire business on EC2 than a mix of Dedicated + EC2.

Please see my first comment in this discussion where I said exactly that. It's exactly this mix which makes the most sense in most cases.

Also, Im not talking about single server setups only. Show me a scenario where its cheaper to run your entire business on EC2 than a mix of Dedicated + EC2.

I never claimed that - but yes, even those scenarios exist.

If your business is number crunching then EC2 might be a good deal. Likewise if your business is strongly saisonal (e.g. ticket sales for sports events or such).

Moreover there are many scenarios where EC2 enables things you could not realistically afford otherwise;
do you think dropbox could have realized their storage and scalability needs on conventional hardware?

While traffic might be "ridiculously" expensive on AWS, storage happens to be riciculously cheap. You don't get $.10/GB "infinitely" scalable random access storage elsewhere.

And finally, closer to your usual PHP/MySQL shop, in many companies the savings due to flexibility and availability simply outweigh the markup on the hosting bill.

You keep throwing figures in the 3 digit range. Sorry man, but your admins burn that per hour while they reinvent all the little infrastructure things that amazon already has.

Trust me, not all of amazon's customers running those 1mio-or-something instances are idiots.
What Hackers, Hot Babes, Douchnozzles and Social Media Experts Have In Common?
What happens when hackers and geeks do it up right when hiring. Screw Resumes. Results Matter!

A funny post about the Vidli.com social media job competition...Enjoy...
in terms of just fertility rate problem (not the gender ratio) the difference between japan, western europe, and china is that china has more or less the option to change policy and tune the fertility number where as others do not.
There are merchant account providers that specialize in industries with high fraud that would probably be happy to have your business but they take between 10 and 15%.

Have you had a checking/savings account for a while? Ask your local bank about opening a merchant account. In the meanwhile, sign up for a credit card and start using it and paying it off and a year from now your credit should be good to not have to worry about something like this.
There may always be those people, but convenience and price win over personal service. Example: Wal-Mart.
Yet, here we are. Welcome to the Social.
Google releases a Chrome extension to identify web app performance problems
Storage pricing is getting more competitive to Diomede Storage, but Diomede is still more than 50% less expensive, even for very large installations.
That isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds.
Anyway, you overall point is right. Using revenue as the metric opens this up to being gamed with some sort of low or negative margins setup.
Redbox = dvd for big screen and instantly accessible to the mainstream customer. It has already crossed the chas. When everyone has set top boxes it will be obsolete. But that is not happening for a long time.
you would have done it and not told anyone, or at least you wouldn't have asked people to buy TarSnap at the end of your article.

The more customers he gains through this, the more he can give back come the end of the month, so why not mention it?
Ask HN:  Rate a StartUp Zatista.com
I wonder how many of these 'researchers' actually smoke marijuana on a regular basis. I definitely found that a prolonged use had the complete opposite effect of "reducing anxiety and depression".

I understand that many professionals use marijuana, but how many marijuana users are able to maintain a professional career?
I used .aq domain with Chrome for my dev projects: it's real and mostly unused.
The article seems to suggest that twitter makes up a sales channel that generated M$6.5 in revenues. That isn't M$6.5 in profits for a margin-challenged business. Also, there is no indication this is incremental revenue. For all we know, Twitter simply displaced existing email newsletter revenue or RSS feed revenue.

It could still be a very good thing, for example if it lowers costs. But I would like to understand whether this is incremental business or simply replacing another mechanism.

I'd like to think that the retweeting phenomenon really could lead to Dell getting entirely new business from people who follow people who follow Dell. But I don't know.
I struggle with this kind of stuff too, I'll have drafts sitting around forever while I ruminate on my writing. Asynchronous communication provides the opportunity for perfectionism, and I have trouble resisting the urge to over-edit.

The best trick is to parlay it into another medium, or at least send a brief acknowledgement of receipt. Taking a complimentary tack works well: "Your question was so insightful I will have trouble conveying a satisfactory answer unless we chat"
VB Send Email [ VB .Net Tutorial ]
Excellent point! That explains it...
IE8 has a privacy mode.
Just because I have control, doesn't mean the data is safer.

It's the practical realization that Google is likely to have a more recent, redundant backup of my data than me. The amount of effort to ensure that P(losing my backup) < P(google losing a backup) isn't worth the effort except for a few very important pieces of data.
I ate at a place once where you ordered into a mic at your table and an overhead model train would carry your food straight from the kitchen. Apparently this was implemented as a cost-saving move during the Depression when they couldn't afford to hire servers, but they kept it around as a gimmick.

Japan already has massive vending machines to replace convenience stores, and supermarkets have more and more self-checkouts as quickly as store redesigns (and, I would imagine, grocers' unions) will allow.
I really do not like google's policy on updating. It presupposes that any organization has a lot of bandwidth and doesn't mind updates going off at inconvenient times. Since one of the places I work at has a couple labs of Macs and does video classes on the same internet connection, I see a real annoying situation.
Sex and The City Complete Seasons 1-6 DVD Special Edition HOT
It has had plugin support (at least flash) for some time now.
Thats interesting. How do you avoid the liability of possessing child pornography? Invariablly, someone needs to see it before it can be passed on, and it has to be stored somewhere + communicated. Is there protections in your local laws?
Colin, thanks for your ongoing contributions to FreeBSD!
talk about premature optmimization...
In that document, it says "Edits to the document are represented as mathematical functions that can be applied in any order, and have other special properties that make this realtime"

When the shutdown notice came a few days ago, and thoughts of trying to write a replacement were running through my head, I ran to "DARCS theory of patches" ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Understanding_darcs/Patch_theor... ) which sounds like that.

Consider EtherPad a load of people keeping local DVCS repositories (of 1 file) and merging them on a regular basis - every second, or every few key presses, say.

You would get: add/changing lines in separate places (fairly easy - adjust line numbers). Changes in the same place (no technical solution to which outcome was intended, so pick one method of resolution that is at least predictable - e.g. order the contributors by order of who joined earliest and do what the earliest joiner did. If they delete a sentence someone else is editing then it gets deleted. If they edit a sentence and someone else deletes it, it's kept with the edit). If you're working together instead of trying to break it that seems like it would give a workable system.

If you stored the patches instead of just applying them, you'd then get the basis for the time slider system too.

Still, there must be more to it than that - and more to making it nice too (but I didn't find out what since they reopened it and plan to open source it).
I'm honestly taken aback by the poor taste of this comment.

There's no such thing as a "partially charitable act", FreeBSD can use the help - Colin shouldn't feel compelled to disclose his company's financials because someone on the internet feels that he somehow deserves that information.

I guess if you needed some sort of baseline by which to base your donation (assuming you actually intend to make one instead of just being snarky on the internet), I'd suggest starting with donating significant portions of your time to the FreeBSD project as Colin has done.
There's no obvious solution to the tragedy of the commons for Redbox and scratched discs: people will probably lie about scratched discs to get a free return or new movie if you make it an automated system, but people will also scratch discs themselves and not report it.

Netflix has a lot of these problems solved just by virtue of their membership model: they can probably write off the scratched discs people return because of how secure their revenue stream is, and all you get from falsely reporting a scratched disc is the same disc mailed to you. (Maybe Redbox could just give you another copy of the same disc if you report it as scratched?)

On a related note, does anyone else think Redbox is angling for an acquisition by Netflix? It's almost obvious how to integrate the business models. They even have the same color!
I'm glad this article actually presents both sides. The latter paragraphs talk about another study in which THC did nothing to cell growth, and makes it pretty clear that the entire affair's still really uncertain. I don't think this shows up in many of the pro-marijuana (pseudo-)scientific articles on the web.
I can get back up and running in about 10 minutes from a catastrophic failure.

How often have you tried it?
Four big things for me:

1) Offline copies: Either because I have no internet access or the webmail provider is down. For my company e-mail "Google is down" or "I can't get online" is just not a good enough excuse when such an easy solution exists. Even if you primarily use webmail I would highly suggest mirroring a local copy via IMAP if you're dealing with important stuff.

2) I like being able to segregate my mail into its own space. I maximize my mail client full screen and have other windows on my second display such as individual messages or notes, address book, calendar, etc. I find this to be more appealing than opening half a dozen browser windows and clicking through different sections of GMail.

3) Nothing beats the performance of a local store. My IMAP server keeps a full backup so any one client losing its local copy isn't a problem. Searches are instant in Apple Mail, I can bounce between different folders/messages with no penalty waiting for another GMail page to load.

4) No distractions. When I have to sit down and pound through lots of e-mail being in a browser makes me less productive.
Sound Sleep: How to Get to Sleep Easier