skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you can stop buying disks from Amazon every few months

This is something that has been puzzling me. Many years ago I purchased 4x 2TB 5900 RPM drives for a 4 bay ReadyNAS (cost about ~$300 for drives plus ReadyNAS). They have been spinning nonstop for ~4 years [1] and haven't had to replace a single one. Not even an increase in errors to signal that the drive is going.

Yet - I've worked on a SAN that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would have to replace a disk about every month.

Granted the disks in SANs probably spin faster (thus faster data access/lower MTBF) - but that high failure rate seems rather suspicious to me.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/NRQCedj.png
What is the OTR (Off The Records) protocol?
strange, the thunder sounded like a train rolling in... was very cyclical.
Show HN: Minionify your chrome for a good cause
I like Codementor.
Prevent XSS Through the Content Security Policy
I wrote an explanation as to why I wrote this, what children.org is, what they do, and how you can help over.

Just trying to bring more attention to them.
I have a colleague who did this too; and he explicitly says that he did it to get a massive raise at his current position. Since Netflix pays a lot, he was able to get his current employer match Netflix.
Yes. One can build a system that holds a petabyte of data, fits in less than one rack, has multiple redundancy, for about a hundred grand these days. Multiplied by three locations, that'll get you to $300000. Add in another $35000 for three years of hosting at three different datacenters, and you get to $335000. Sounds like a lot, right?

Amazon's even more expensive. Storing one petabyte on Amazon, at the slowest, cheapest, glacier level, will cost you $10000/month, so at about 10 months, you've paid a hundred grand. At thirty six months, you've paid three hundred sixty grand. Plus, you have no hardware to show for it, while amazon sells that broken outdated junk to a reseller to regain some of their investment. Had you hosted it yourself, you could have sold all that equipment off to refurbishers and resellers and regained at least a portion of your investment back. So yeah, it is pretty terrible to choose Amazon.
Could be viable if you don't live in a first world country I think.
<Playing the devils advocate.>

Don't get me wrong, QM for example was ridiculously useful. But, pointing to past and saying these tiny particle accelerators where useful let's make a multi billion dollar one feels like cargo cult science for the lack of a better phrase. We just keep piling higher and deeper without a clear reason to do so other than we can afford to do so.

String theory is another example where lot's of effort from seemingly smart people with no practical basis.

Dumping all of LHC's money into say a large ITER style fusion project would have also been cutting edge, but there would have at least had the possibility of useful results. Hell, even ISS would qualify as vaguely useful.

How about a self sustaining bio-dome in Antarctica. Now that's probably harder and possibly more expensive, but would have real useful applications if we ever want to try and colonize Mars.

PS: Not that the 13+Billion for the LHC was all that expensive, but there are a lot of similar projects out there.
> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that

Here's an example of one such piece: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XkaWyrm8EQg/maxresdefault.jpg

It's from the Superbowl ad for the mobile game 'Game of War: Fire Age'. It has sweet f-all to do with the game. It's literally just boobs + live-action battle scenes (neither of which the game has). Just another sad attempt to appeal to such basic caveman instincts...

'Game? Boobs? Me...game...boobs...like'

I'm tired of junk like that, so at the moment I'm attempting to build an advertising platform for a project of mine to test the theory that advertising doesn't have to be trash (as mentioned above).

The platform doesn't allow any sort of custom images/text by the advertiser.[1]

The idea is that users decide if they're interested or not based on objective information (the same information as presented by organic listings).

For anyone curious, it looks like this in practice: http://i.imgur.com/iI4oon8.png

All the data for the campaigns is totally open for anyone to view & analyze [2] (although there isn't much data yet, as I'm only piloting the system now)

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't have enough boobs... but an interesting experiment to try anyway I think.

[1] http://getcurated.co/advertising

[2] http://getcurated.co/advertising/campaigns
Nice, and lol at the memory issue comment:)
Interesting data:

Banking - 65%

Bitcoin - 151%
I currently work at Netflix. Opinions contained herein are entirely my own, sorry for any errors I typed this on a phone. Hope I can help you make a decision. More than willing to answer any questions, just reply here. :)

The turnover rate you quoted is undoubtedly overstated or at least out of date. As for getting fired within a month, it won't happen. People are generally let go for a repeated pattern of major failures, and I can elaborate here if necessary.

I work on an incredibly high performing team at Netflix and would consider myself to be one of the bottom percentile people on the team. I don't fear for my job, and I don't have to. I get amazing coworkers, and I learn a lot almost every day. I can really depend on my team.

I'll address a few criticisms I've seen in other comments:

Unlimited vacation: It's not BS. My manager recently told the team to take more vacation. I responded by letting him know that next week if be taking a month off. His response "just so we're both clear, you're telling me, not asking me, because I'd be really uncomfortable if you felt like you had to ask."

Performance: Coworkers are generally really high performers, people genuinely care, but the tendency to hire senior employees means a lot of family people, and there is work life balance. There is no "stack ranking" system in place and to my knowledge there never has been.

Unlimited stock contribution being a bonus for already rich employees: Really? Really?! I say this as someone who came in with a negative net worth and no cash flow. You're taking risk in exchange for potential reward with the stock plan. Those who are rich can afford to take more risk, and they are taking more risk by putting more in. Sure maybe not risk of ruin but there is financial risk. What's wrong with this? it's been lucrative, I was considered a "heavy contributor" by company standards but pretty light compared to some I talked to.

Expectations: You set and manage these for yourself. Sometimes you screw then up. This is sometimes a challenge for me, but it's entirely within my own influence. This quarter I set lower commitments and took the first month off. It hasn't been an issue.

Again, opinions are my own.
It would probably be better to give the HN audience a link that will work on multiple platforms. Not everyone uses or likes Apple.
I don't think it would be wrong. You are there just for a week so i am quite sure you would not have a lot of dependencies yet. I just hope you are not changing just because of financial reasons. Try sitting down with the HR or the person who hired you and politely explain your situation.
The solar system is to the universe what a grain of sand is to the solar system.

"It would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the cosmos." [1]

[1] Neil DeGrasse Tyson: https://youtu.be/JQMuNImYzjc?t=4m21s
No surprise here: When controlling for education and respective position, Asians get paid the lowest out of any race in Silicon Valley. We always find ways of explaining it away (best explanation so far: visa issues lead to lower pay). For some reason or another, it's people attribute racism/sexism when other groups of people get paid less for the same work.
You make some good points about only actually interviewing competent developers and not wasting anyone's time. But in my experience, the take home assignments or coding challenges can often take hours to complete if they are to weed out copy-pasta or dumb luck. For example - "Create a basic CRUD app, with testing, in a configured environment" or some such takes time for me to set up, write, test, and package for delivery.

For me as an interviewee, to have to devote hours of my time doing work for free just to prove that I know how to code, all based on a short phone call, is just as crazy. How do I know your company is one I want to work for? How do I know you're offering the salary and benefits I need? We haven't gotten to that part of the conversation yet and I'm already putting in real hours of work - especially if I have multiple interviewers that ask me to complete code challenges.

It's a catch-22 really. If you have no hurdles, you hire people who don't know what they're doing. If you put too many hurdles, you scare off the folks who don't want to waste hours of their time proving they know the basics. For an interviewer, it's best to get this stuff right up front so you can more effectively screen, but for the interviewee it'd be best that this comes at the end of the process when they know they actually want the job.

All in all, I think this works better for junior level positions because that's where you want to know where folks are at, but hiring senior level people with years of experience, it just gets insulting to have to jump through hoops at every single interview. Of course, I'm a bit burnt out on interviews at the moment, so take that for what it's worth ;)
Cracked.com put together a pretty good list here: http://www.cracked.com/article_18839_7-planes-perfectly-desi...
It really shouldn't be considered as a zero-sum proposition. Once we start expanding out into space, it'll become more cost-effective as we bootstrap ourselves out of the gravity well. Eventually, assuming private parties are willing to push us to break out of the lull in LEO we've been in for decades when it comes to manned spaceflight.

The important thing to remember is that space exploration will eventually be able to pay for itself countless times once we start seeing mining operations. There's an incredible amount of mineral wealth out there in the solar system that makes what we have here on Earth look paltry by comparison. The economic incentives will eventually start to shift, and from there, it'll be a lot easier to fund basic research in space.
That would be interesting to see. There's GNUstep and Darling Project, but they're both a bit different.
At 50 dollars your actual earnings will probably be 1/2 to 1/3 of that. So yes I guess you can make a living in the third world at 25/hr or 16/hr.
Static vs. 'dynamic typing', part 2: The personality factor (2008)
>The average, reasonable person can't comprehend a webserver.

But weev could. We don't apply laws as if the defendant is some mythical "reasonable" person. We try each case based on it's unique circumstances. It's not that he "should have known better", it's that he absolutely did know better.

The comparison is clear, but it has no relevance.
Especially if they sign NDAs, which I am sure every Google employee signs
I've been using mynoise.net regularly at home and at work to help me relax or concentrate. It's surprisingly effective, especially after you've calibrated it to your hearing/headphones.

The basic concept is surprisingly simple: each generator is actually a collection of 10 looping sounds, each ostensibly covering a given frequency range. You can achieve really different resulting sounds my adjusting each channel. See for example the different presets (on the middle right of the page) for the Crystal Stream generator. [1]

I'm impressed by the quality of work that Stephane Pigeon put into each of these, and I'm glad he's marketing it well with rain.today :)

[1] http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/waterSpringStreamNoiseGener...
FYI, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/science/21birds.html?_r=0
This needs a Windows 10 (or applicable "other") option.
If you're good and what you do and have passed the interview process, you'll be fine. The fact that you are self-aware enough to understand the high performance culture and what it takes to meet that bar further indicates that you'll fit in.

There isn't a stack rank system at all. Nothing like it in fact.

High turn over - more so in the customer service side of the business; not the engineering side.

Source: work at Netflix, interview a lot of engineering candidates, have thrown things at diab0lic.

[edit 1]
Answering a few other questions:

Unlimited vacation - yup it's true and encouraged. Being unable to cash out 2-3 weeks of vacation isn't something I see as a big deal. I take more time off than that. My co-workers not my managers make me feel bad about it. Why? They're on vacation.

Work and work load - I choose much of what I work on. My job is to make things better at Netflix and I'm trusted to do so.

High salary - many other companies put some of your remuneration in RSUs, options, or other vehicles that may create future benefit. So you're gambling and you have to stick around to see if it pays off. Netflix pays you your salary in cash right now; no golden handcuffs in the form of vesting schedules or stock levels. (There is an optional options program)
What shortcut are you talking about? I spread SIP/RTP handling systems over many machines, load balanced with a SIP proxy. I would love to know how Erlang is going to make it magically scale even better. Highest record was only a billion calls in a day or two, so maybe I'm not at enough scale to be hurt by non-Erlang. (Stack was all C, plus F# for routing and billing.)
Are you suggesting that someone posting their own salary on a spreadsheet, one which they know is being broadly distributed within the company, might somehow not have consented to having it shared further?
Could you elaborate about the kinds of things that constitute a major failure?

Also, would you say your experience matches those of people you know on other teams with other managers?
Lessons learned:

- For firing squads, use rifles, not pistols.

- Dig the graves first.
I find the concept of paying people for their information and time fantastic as way to battle advertising.

In other ways, wouldnt it be great to have the right to not be subject to advertising? Adblock has been great at providing such experience on the web to me..how about billboards? TV? Eliminate product integration? Etc.

I dont like using the word "moral" to describe a problem, because it makes it very subjective. The amount of money that goes into advertising is ridiculous and in aggregate it has to be doing lots of damage by opportunity cost and mis-information.
Commodity cloud services (and pricing) are meant for the 99%, not the outliers. If you have a petabyte of data to store you should either be doing enough other business with Amazon that you can negotiate rates down or you should be rolling your own.
So every OS is it's own Erlang?
“We Consent” app records consent for sexual encounters
Why don't you lock the cat into another room or just put him out of the house? Who is the boss at home? You or the cat?
ok, wow. First, let me point out how ironic it is that a news agency that makes most of it's revenue from advertising is the source of this article, and also that ABC is owned by Disney corp which is a pervasive media company creating advertising, receiving revenue from advertising and spends over 2 Billion annually on advertising[0][1].

Services we use daily are funded by advertising. Virtually all news and media companies. Sure, it is a bit nefarious to do some of the things that get done on the internet like trackers and info siloing and such, but seriously? Is not seeing an advert a moral imperative?

> I want to keep using this free email, social network, enhanced and personalized search capability, free cloud storage, document collaboration, real time news updates, weather, be entertained by television, be entertained by blogs, participate in an online community, etc

ok awesome, pay us money then, $1 a month per website/service you use?

> no

Or even the more infuriating, of course I would do that. Would you? Would you pay for google, facebook, twitter, reddit, HN, new york times, bloomberg? Maybe, but how much would you pay to that website your friend linked in an email? How many of you have apps or work at companies that get paid by advert revenue?

In a world where is is insanely easy to block ads, or to just ignore them, surely this isn't a question of morality. More of triviality and annoyance. I have 3 adblock extensions + uBlock as well as a DNS killer. I HATE ads. The reason ads are so annoying is because I have all of these things. So now companies search exploits to get my data to sell it and load tons of JS libraries to break through all of the blocking software I have. The situation sucks, but it isn't morality.

tl;dr If you think Axe body spray will get you laid, you are weak minded. Advertising pays for everything you use on the internet, and entrenched protocols are hard to disrupt. Get adblock, ublock and don't buy things you don't need.

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/the-35-companies-that-spent-1...
[1]I still think comcast is a shitty company

edit: As pointed out NBC is owned by comcast, ABC is owned by Disney corporation and I have edited to reflect that.
What happens when a robot writes the news?
It's also kinda like a Smalltalk image, too, given that a program can be seen like a paused virtual machine image.
Corporations are not people. They are granted a subset of the rights and responsibilities that people have. This includes obvious things like the ability to enter into a contract, the ability to be sued in court, the right to own property, etc. They don't have all of the same rights that people do (e.g. they can't vote).

But that's just pedantry. The real issue is that your solution is far too broad and is likely to have unintended side effects. We already have laws curtailing speech of both people and corporations. Free speech is not absolute in the US. We already have "misleading advertising" laws that have been used successfully against corporations.

You can solve this problem if you want by just expanding the scope of existing laws. You don't need to abolish corporate personhood to achieve it.
Main reasons I use a separate device for music:

1) Battery life. I'm a rather heavy user and my phone tends to only barely last the entire workday and commute before running out (if it lasts at all). Having a separate device for music means I don't need to feel guilty about wasting phone battery when listening to music.

2) Storage. I tend to use very little storage on my phone, mostly due to the fact that I keep my 40+ GB music collection on a separate device. This means I can usually go for the model with the lowest storage for any phone I'm interested in, and not have to limit myself to phones with expandable storage (that seems to be on the way out as a trend).

3) Sound quality. I'm not talking about the placebo-heavy issues that audiophiles concern themselves with. Rather, I use very sensitive IEMs and when listening to music on my phone I can always hear intermittent background noise (I believe this could be interference from the cell radios). I've never had this issue with dedicated players.
On a second thought I can come up with 1) the rise of an unusually high number of billion dollar companies may signal an impending market correction and 2), a low number of billion dollar companies are founded during times of market over-exuberance.
Thrown work at me? Or are you in the CORE bullpen next to me and have physically thrown things over the wall at me? :P
install the sox package and then you can generate some white noise.
For example white noise with Star Trek theme:

play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20
My jaw dropped when I saw it was Elastomania. Love that game!!
StyleJS: Dynamic CSS styling
Can someone explain what's going on?
Pretty sure the economics work out in societys favor when it comes to H maintenance and those safe injection places, too.
Opportunity Village has 30-units. I love the idea but the danger of grouping any type of safety-net properties together in one bunch (such as section-8 housing, micro housing for the homeless, etc.) tends to ghettoize a desperate community. This has negative effects within that struggling community (drugs, Alcohol, psychosis) and the broader community at large.

I don't have a solution (who does) but 30-40 units is probably manageable for the police, fire departments, and mental health services but to prevent fires they really should include solar or something.
An immediate appeal to hypocrisy is a very weak form of argument, it does absolutely nothing to address the points being made, and instead is just an attack on the speaker.
Also, we haven't had enough time for some of the companies that have been started more recently to get to the billion dollar valuation?

I bet if you look at this in five years more companies are it's more of a straight line.
Eh, I'm sympathetic to the argument, when you literally have nothing else to go on. Uniform sampling is often a dream in sociology.
Unikrn: Why Buy the Game When You Can Bet on Your Favorite Player
http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-layoff-hardware-mobile/
Repeated major failures would be something like regularly failing to deliver or making a critical error multiple times. A pattern of behavior that doesn't fit the culture, NOT a one off mistake. A great example of this would be the engineer who accidentally leaked House of Cards a week early. The only consequence is that a "process" was removed to make doing what he was trying to do easier. I don't think firing this individual was ever considered. He didn't have a pattern of carelessness and this just happened to be a mistake.

I'm told the only "fuck up" that will get you fired on the spot for the first occurrence is sexual harassment.

My experience is fairly consistent with others I know, there are of course a few exceptions. Though please do bear in mind I have a severe observation bias here. I interact with significantly more people that want to work at Netflix than I do those who don't.
What about when "daily drill included exploration, learning and finding hidden tasty morsels" becomes the addiction?

Mmm, French cheese.... Belgian beer ...

I just spent three months gallavanting around Europe with my wife and young child, despite being technically homeless. During which time, I successfully quit smoking. However, many people's conservative rational/peer-pressure response to my situation would be "don't spend money" and "buy a house".

Conincidence, or not?
A subsystem to restrict programs into a “reduced feature operating model”
It costs about a hundred and fifty grand annually (fully loaded, base salary 80-90k) to have the lowest end person who could conceivably keep one of these things running well for three years.

n+1 means you need two of them in case one gets the flu.

Tell me again about how Amazon's a ripoff, please.
Isn't this whole discussion exactly the same old one made between salaried based wages and performance based wages? One side arguing that salaried employees could just roll their thumbs and still get paid, while the other side argues that you would get fired or simply that people who do so won't get hired in the first place.
A Canadian got a perfect score. Only one I found while checking around. No American nor Chinese got a perfect score.

https://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=19624

Also, only 1 person got 3 perfect scores in the history of the event: Ciprian Manolescu (3 for 3 perfect) https://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=3789