jedberg · August 29, 2025 20:48
diff --git a/jedberg_hn_comments b/jedberg_hn_comments
 When I was in college, I figured out that the education you get doesn't really change.  However, what does change is the people that you are associating with.<p>At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students, which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests that force you to challenge yourself.  Also, it is like the difference between the regular classes  in high school and advanced classes -- in the advanced classes you cover the same material, but with greater breadth and a deeper understanding.<p>And the number 1 biggest advantage of going to an elite college is that you have a much better chance of meeting the world's future movers and shakers -- the people that will be the educational and business leaders of the next generation.  That alone is a good reason to go to an elite college.<p>So I have to disagree, and say that there are indeed advantages to going to an elite college, just not the advantages that most people think.
 I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school.  I just read it again, and still didn't see anything.  <p>My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with.  Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
 Ah.  I guess being in the footnote made me think it was more of an offhanded comment than a major counterpoint to the premise of the essay.  Perhaps in an edited version, this should get its own paragraph.
 Paul, here is another point to backup your premise:  one of the best ways to meet potential investors/acquirers is to go to the same social events that they do.  If you live in the same place as them, even if you aren't going to a startup-oriented social event, you still have a good chance of running into them and striking up a conversation.<p>Case in point -- my cousin wants to make movies.  So he decided to move to LA and get a job as a bartender.  He went to bartending school and then got a job at a bar that is frequented by producers and other movie industry folk.  One day he served a drink to a producer, mentioned to the guy that he wanted to make movies, and is now working on a couple of movie deals.  That could have never happened even if he continued to live in his native Orange County, only 40 miles away.

 Are you sure about that?  reddit hit 50k uniques about 6 months after it launched.  I'd say the discourse was very similar to what it is here at that point in the game.
 "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
 ...
 Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."<p>These rules appear to be in direct opposition to each other.  Could someone elaborate on which is the appropriate method?
 You know, it really turns people off when you go around spamming your links all over the place (I've seem them both here and on reddit).  You may have a great site, but perhaps you should let your technology speak for itself.<p>If it is truly great, people will come through word of mouth.
 The risk is that if your startup fails, you've traded what probably would have been a great salary at a larger company, so essentially you gave up that guaranteed income for the more risky startup.
 I recently had to answer this question when my girlfriend's mom friended me.  I waited a while, but in the end I thought, what the heck, I don't have anything in there that's a secret.  I'm sure that decision will haunt me.
 As Trevor was kicking his legs and pushing on his knees, I was waiting for Dexter to turn around and slap him silly.  Guess I've been reading too much SciFi.
 We hope that it can't be gamed.  We have protections in place to make sure the top 10 reddits can't be gamed, and also, you can pick your own reddits, completely avoiding the problem.
 How is this different than user created reddits on reddit?  The only difference I see is that you can change the colors here.<p>However, I will say that the colors are nice. :)
 You don't so much fail at grad school as fail at finding lucrative work afterwards.
 There are plenty of middle class folks in the "biz".  These are the makeup artists, sound designers, animators, model makers and so on.  They all make a good living pursuing their dream.
 Im curious as to why you think reddit can't serve those niches right now?  You can create a private reddit just for you and your family, you can create a pet lover reddit, a reddit for you favorite sports team, etc.  Is this perhaps a marketing problem of reddit's?
 What about the fact that it is far easier to steal your credit card/identity and then just buy the stuff one wants, instead of trying to find someone with the stuff you want and then stealing it.
 I would not expect any correlation between IQ and success.<p>A good IQ test will give you a general indication of a person's logic, reasoning and spacial abilities.  It does not test one's ability to empathize or interact with others, two skills which are essential for "reaching the top".<p>Therefore, IQ is really only good for measuring a person's potential for gaining new knowledge quickly, not measuring what their future success should be.
 That's in part because Leopard's built in firewall is awful. I realize that was not the reason it was beaten so easily here (Safari was to blame in this case), however it seems like a good time to say this: I have no idea why Apple switched away from using iptables, a host based firewall that has been tried and tested for almost 20 years, to using a brand new, closed source, black box firewall.
 &#62; 2.) "It's not scalable enough." The Washington Post runs on Django; I doubt you're going to get more pageviews than them.<p>Just FYI, the Washington Post does not use Django for their main page.  They only use it for small side projects.<p>At reddit we tried to use Django, but had to switch to Pylons because, lo and behold, it wasn't scalable.  Specifically, it has a problem caching templates under high loads.

 You should look at some of the other reddits, where less crazy people hang out. :)
 The show will be broadcast online as well as on TV.  The reason to watch the show is that you get the opinions of some well known journalists discussing the issues back and forth -- at least, that is the theory.<p>And I believe you mean justin.tv.
 I guess the "save these changes" button needs to be made more obvious.  A lot of people seem to be missing it.
 One of my old bosses had a similar problem.  When she has her twins, both her and her husband had excellent carrers.  What they decided was that she would stay home with the kids for two years, while the other worked.  The idea was that should would be "out of touch" for a short enough time that she could get back in without much loss.<p>Then when it was her turn to work, her husband arranged to work part time from home.  The kids were self sufficient enough that he could focus on his programming for short stints during the day and for longer periods at night when his wife got home.  He was able to do enough work to "stay in the game."  In fact, he liked it so much he decided to do it for another 2 years.<p>At that point the girls were in pre-school, so had about 3 hours each day to get work done while they were gone, could then play with them the rest of the day, and finish his work at night when his wife was there.<p>The girls are now 6 and in school for most of the day.  He's looking at going back to work full time, but given how much he enjoys working from home, he may just keep doing that for a while.
 Heh.  If the teacher was REALLY well paid, even for the Bay Area, they would get maybe 80k a year.  The starting salary in Palo Alto (the highest in the bay area) is under 50k.  A teacher with 10 years of experience will probably be making about 75k.<p><a href="http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_salaries.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_s...</a>
 Actually, scaling twitter is a solved problem.  There is a company in India called SMS GupShup that does the same thing as twitter, except they have 3 times the number of users and more SMS users.  And they don't have downtime.<p><a href="http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/06/indias-sms-gupshup-has-3x-the-usage-of-twitter-and-no-downtime.html" rel="nofollow">http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/06/indias-sms-gupshu...</a>
 You already have that option with pretty much every phone except the iPhone.  Every carrier will let you buy the hardware at an "unsubsidized" rate, and then get a contract with a higher monthly price, but no lock in.  It's just that no one does it, because it is so much more costly.
 Melanie Griffith starred in Working Girl.  The rest of your post was spot on though. :)<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096463/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096463/</a>
 &#62; I laughed because I was sure she was kidding. Turns out she wasn't. ... It turns out she never did follow through on her threats.<p>I'm confused.  Doesn't that mean she was kidding?  Or at least, how does her making false threats reinforce your paranoia?
 We have used both at reddit.  Performace-wise they are comparable for us, but nginx was a lot easier to configure, and lighttpd had a nasty bug that made us switch away (for the life of me though, I can't remember what the bug was).
 We just use an http load balancer (haproxy) and have the app servers talk http directly.  No need for a web server, which makes things much more stable.  We use nginx for static content though (haproxy points at nginx for the static content).
 Yeah, the new version of haproxy has been shown to be able to hold up on a 10Gbps connection with no problems. We're using 1.3.15.2 with a couple of patches from the experimental version.
 Heh, no.  But that would have been funny.  Actually, teej reminded me what it was -- under heavy load, the load balancing algorithm would completely break down, and put all the traffic on the first few app servers on the list, and nothing on the last few.
 Yeah, that was it!  The load balancing algorithm completely broke down under load.
 Process management is done with a custom tool.  In theory we could have a dynamic number of apps, but in practice it is static.  Occasionally we have to take a few out of rotation, and haproxy handles it just fine.
 That doesn't say how many times the app had to be resubmitted before approval.  I'd like to see the rate of <i>first time</i> rejections.
 I wrote this on his blog:<p>I commend your resolve to continue, but there is one fatal flaw in your argument:  point 3.<p>Google has absolutely no intention of ever making money from their telecom products.  In fact,  Google considers them a cost of business.  Why?  Because they are trying to build the largest corpus of spoken text in the world.  They are simply collecting data.  The purpose of that data is to build the best text to speech algorithms in the world, so that they could then make it possible to search for audio.  For example, imagine the power of being able to search for a spoken phrase in a youtube video.<p>So I don't ever expect them to shut down the services or charge for them.  At least not until they have text to speech down pat.
 I used to work with the anti-fraud folks at PayPal.  Most of them jumped ship to Google about 2 years ago.  PayPal was data driven, but required a human to verify the results.  Google is simply data driven.  That should help explain why they seem even worse than PayPal.
 The answer was right in the article -- tractor feed paper.  10s of thousands of pages without having to refill a tray.

 Yet another feature Digg has copied from reddit: <a href="http://code.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com</a> :)

 You can ask me questions here or on reddit:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/a2zte" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/a2zte</a>
 Not sure yet.
 Our site is mostly text.
 Yes, but it is all dynamic content, which it why it needs so many resources, if that is what you are getting it.<p>Also, Akamai offloads a lot of the traffic from us.
 We still like PG and gang, we wouldn't want to crap all over them like that. ;)<p>Edit:  Since the poster deleted the comment, it said: "You should advertise Hacker News on reddit"
 By the way, if any of you want in on the beta, mention either YCombinator or Hacker News in your email to [email protected] and we'll put you on the top of the beta list.
 These are all great points.  However, I just want to point out that reddit has had sponsored links for 10 months now, and our advertisers have been quite pleased with their conversion rates.  We've also run some of our own ads in there, and had fantastic conversion.
 Competition is good for everyone!  We're more than happy to take your money. :)
 We run all of reddit on ec2, which includes a bunch of postgres servers.  Each one is running with a single EBS.  However, I've heard horror stories of people trying to run much less busy databases and having lots of problems, usually with MySQL.<p>Those databases are all on XLarge instances, so there is minimal sharing, and we've also gone to great lengths to make sure all of our normal queries are in indexes, so the disk gets hit less.<p>We also have a read slave for every database to alleviate read loads.<p>One thing you might want to do is run 'iostat -xtc' on your current box and put that in a log file.  Then go back and analyze it and see what your average and peak reads and writes are.  Amazon's max for a single EBS appears to be about 1000 ops / second (at least, that is what we were doing when they told us we maxed out the performance of the disk).<p>Good luck!<p>Edit:  I forgot to mention that on all the database disks, we use ext2 and noatime.  Both decrease the total number of writes necessary, and have very little downside (the biggest being that you have to fsck on a crash).
 I'm beginning to thing that MySQL does something very different with disks than Postgres, because everyone I've talked to that said they had a problem had been running MySQL, and everyone who has been successful has been running Postgres (myself included).
 If you're using Windows, I would stay away from EC2 right now.  They aren't quite mature enough for Windows yet.  If you look at the EC2 forums, the majority of complaints are about Windows bugs.<p>Actually, you might want to try and get in on Microsoft's Azure beta.
 We had some of databases at EC2 since November of 2008, and moved the rest of them over in May 2009.
 To buy physical hardware equivalent to that instance, yes, it would be cheaper.  However, you need to also factor in the costs of keeping that machine in a rack for 3 years with power and cooling.  When I worked out the costs, it ended up being cheaper to use EC2 by about 30%.  My datacenter was a bit expensive, but that is because I was looking at datacenters in San Francisco, since I don't want to have to drive to the middle of nowhere when I have to do maintenance on the physical machine.<p>Also, I was comparing against 1 year reserved instances, which is what I use now.
 I'm not at liberty to discuss reddit's revenues, but what I can tell you is that the entire operational cost of the site (about $15K last month) is small compared to the human cost (ie. salary and benefits)
 We use EBS for all of reddit's databases.  We occasionally run into IO limits when doing a vacuum, but that is about it.
 Hopefully soon!
 &#62; Do you RAID them?<p>No<p>&#62; What size instances do you use?<p>Databases are m1.xlarge.
 We actually looked at Cassandra and found it to be slower than memcachedb.  However, we readily admit that we probably configured it wrong.
 Just mdadm.
 Actually, we did work with Amazon.  The RAID was their suggestion.
 That's not entirely true.  Yes, it is true that getting servers was hard, and that was definitely a factor.<p>But the bigger factor for me was that I was tired of having to build, image and rack all those servers.  I liked the flexibility of EC2, and also not having to waste resources ordering a full rack's worth of hardware every time.<p>Cost was also an issue.  Datacenter space in SF is expensive, but it had to be in SF, because that is where I was.  EC2 proved to be much cheaper than physical servers.<p>I also like the fact that I don't have to run to the datacenter anymore when there is an issue.  I just file a ticket with Amazon.
 Blaming poor EBS performance would be like blaming Intel for their 4GhZ processor not being able to do your protein folding in 5 seconds.<p>It is simply a known limitation that has to be worked around.<p>Even if we owned the servers, we would have the same limitation -- eventually you just can't get the performance out of a single disk.
 Could have been.  Or possibly something Spez said.
 Interesting article, and it also explains who was pounding us with traffic. :)<p>Protip:  If you are going to scrape a website, put some sleeps into your loop so the person who runs the website doesn't curse your name while their automatic rate limiters kick in and block you anyway.
 What makes you think reddit stores passwords in the clear?  We haven't done that for <i>years</i>, ever since Steve learned his lesson.<p>You can see the code for yourself at <a href="http://code.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com</a> if you'd like to verify.
 Enough that they don't have to worry about working for a while.
 Check out <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience</a>  That might be what you are looking for.
 It's cool.  We call us (reddit) their R&#38;D department.
 No, not really. In fact, they don't even mention us when they release their new features that they get from us. ;)
 Out of curiosity, what is your definition of a "real" engineer.<p>Or to put it another way, why isn't someone who writes software worthy of the title "Engineer"?<p>&#62; Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?<p>That is kind of a broad question.  But I can tell you that at Berkeley, everyone in the School of Engineering takes those classes, whether you are going to be a materials engineer or a software engineer.<p>Edit:  I'll throw this out here too:<p>Definition of Engineering: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems.<p>I would posit that someone writing software uses scientific (debugging) and mathematical (algorithms) principles to practical ends.
 So would you be ok with calling people software engineers if they had to take a test to get a license and then be responsible for failures of their code in the future?
 Not when they limit you to 8 characters. :)
 You just need to head over to the smaller communities to find all the old users.
 We can't just switch hashing at this point, because none of the data would be in the right place.<p>Since we have to move all the data anyway, we figured now would be a good time to switch stacks.  Memcachedb isn't really a very solid product, so even if we scale it, it isn't a good long term solution.
 Yeah, that was a typo.  Memcachedb just isn't fast enough.  It used blocking IO when reading the disk, so if it is waiting on the disk for some data, none of the other requests can go through.
 We have had multiple discussions with the Facebook folks, and are well aware of the complexities of both sites.  I believe you are actually underestimating reddit's complexity.<p>Here are some examples:<p>When you load a comments page with 500 comments, there are 1000s of data points that have to be loaded.  For every comment, we have to check how you voted on it to draw the arrows, we have to check if you are the author, we have to check if you are allowed to remove that comment as a moderator, we have to check if you can edit it, if the author is your friend, and so on.  And we have to do that 500 times.<p>When you load a listing, we have to pull your subscriptions, and then merge the results from all the reddits you subscribe to.  Then we have to check most of the same things as we do for comments.<p>After all that checking, we have a to render a page that is customized just for you.  Some of that will come from the render cache and some from the data cache, but it is still highly customized.<p>The big difference is that Facebook doesn't have any logged out users, whereas we do.<p>Akamai takes care of our logged out users, but rendering the page for a logged in user is extremely complicated.
 The search machine is its own database.  It feeds its data from the masters for consistency, but the searches themselves run against the search database.<p>I think the MD5 thing was covered well below.
 Don't forget you need about $10K to file each idea as well.  That is probably the biggest barrier to entry.
 &#62; Can anyone point me to a startup doing something cool that has he potential to change the world?<p>As cliche as it is to say it -- Facebook.  Actually, they have already changed the world. How so?<p>I graduated high school in 1995.  At the time, a few people had email, but we didn't really use it to stay in touch.  When we graduated and went to different colleges, we pretty much lost touch.  We might see these people during break, but I stopped going home at break.<p>I've reconnected with a whole bunch of high school friends thanks to Facebook.<p>And you know what?  When you talk to kids that are graduating now, they don't identify loosing touch with their friends as a problem.  Even if they go to different schools, they just check out Facebook, and they are all caught up.  When they go home for break, they just pick up where they left off on Facebook the day before.
 Yes, but that is their own fault for trying to use a regex to validate email addresses. :)
 Was anyone else really thrown off by the strange choices in bold and italic?
 reddit uses the Wilson algo for comment sorting:<p><a href="http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...</a>
 I started college when I was 12, and yes, I was more mature than most of my classmates.<p>However, I didn't go full time.  I still went back to high school.  There is some social learning that you just miss out on if you don't spend time with your age-peers.<p>High School sucked, but I'd still do it all over again.<p>In the best interest of the kid, they should really send him to interact with some age-peers in some sort of activity, if not High School.<p>That said, I don't think UConn should be preventing him, especially if his mom will go at her expense.
 &#62; How many non-millionaires would have $25k lying around<p>Me?
 Just to clarify, I wasn't advocating holding the kid back.  I was just saying it is important to have that social interaction with your age-peers, especially as a teen.<p>As some anecdotal evidence, take some of my college classmates who also started early.  Most of us went back to high school, but a few just went full time college.  After two years, this one guy wanted to transfer to Cal Tech.  He was more than smart enough, but after the interview, they told him he wasn't social enough.  They suggested to him that he join some youth clubs and get some social interaction with his peers, and they would reconsider him.<p>So he joined every club he could find, and it made a <i>huge</i> difference.  He was much easier to talk to and just more fun to be around.<p>And then he transferred to Cal Tech.
 We (reddit) are not currently able to take credit cards with addresses outside the United States.  Hopefully soon we will be able to do so.
 I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience.  One thing to bear in mind is that we (reddit) also run affiliate links, so you were competing directly with us.  If they clicked on our link first, you won't get credit for it.  They may also not count the click from that user twice, which could explain your lower numbers.<p>Our traffic numbers come from the same system we use to track our own website traffic, so we work very hard to make sure it is as accurate as possible, since we sell our own advertising based on those numbers, and if they were over-inflated, our other advertisers would complain vociferously.<p>I suspect the error lies in the affiliate program, who has an incentive to under-report.<p>However, if you'd like to provide us with the numbers you got from your affiliate program, we would be love to take a look and try to figure out what happened.<p>Edit:  I forgot to mention that AdBlock blocks a lot of affiliate trackers, but a lot of reddit users specifically disable adblock for reddit, so that might also be a source of the discrepancy.
 &#62; Maybe reddit is consciously doing this.<p>Maybe. :)  In fact, we use reddit quite a bit, and the flashy ads annoy us just as much as the rest of you.  We do our best to keep the ads relevant and non-annoying.<p>If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to pay the bills somehow.
 &#62; What I personally took away from it was that you should run your ad for two days, and then not run similar again for a month or so.<p>Yeah, we try to tell people that.  The problem is that once someone acts on your ad, we don't show it to them again.  So your impressions are expected to drop off rapidly.<p>We need to do a better job of communicating that.
 &#62; This comment, however, isn't helpful, and obviously isn't true.<p>Sure it is true.  We would love to run the site without ads.  There are other business models besides straight ads, and we are working on moving towards those.<p>They just aren't profitable yet.
 Please stand by.  It is our most requested feature, and should be ready soon.
 Please send us the link when you do!
 Congrats to the team!  Also, thank you for featuring the reddit logo on your homepage. ;)<p>I think we can now conclusively prove that having a reddit logo on your homepage leads to a successful exit.
 You forgot to include reddit, which can help a startup build a community around their product. :)
 &#62; How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active?<p>The post office told them -- hey sell their customer list.<p>:(
 So deliver to businesses on the five weekdays and homes on Saturday but not Wednesday.
 To be fair, most billionaires do.
 Congrats to the embed.ly team for doing it right and making our job easier.
 We are trying to be a lot better about keeping everything in sync.<p>Our goal right now is to publish weekly, but we'll see how that actually works out.
 (I'm one of the reddit guys) ;)
 We used to do it that way, but we stopped because it was breaking people's installs.  Sometimes we have to push half-baked code, and if you sync at that point, bad things may happen.<p>Also, we stopped doing it because it meant revealing features before we were ready to reveal them, like sponsored links.  That is when we split the public and live repos. Before that, the public repo <i>was</i> the live repo.
 &#62; Well, part of the git workflow is branches.<p>Internally we use a lot of branches and tagging and versioning, etc.  The problem is if we published everything live, it would add a lot of overhead for us.<p>While we do eventually publish everything, we are still a for profit company, and occasionally have to keep things secret for business reasons (like new features).  Keeping track of what code is for a new features vs a fix to an old one would add a lot of overhead that we just have the time for.<p>In the name of reduced overhead, we only publish to the public repository once we have released a feature and it is fully baked.
 &#62; As for controlled feature revelation, I think that's counter to the spirit of open source community -- the community is not really on equal footing with the company. It like you're saying "aren't we nice to share our code with you" rather than "let's all work on this together".<p>We very much embrace open source -- we use only open source software and we contribute back as much as we can.<p>However, we are still a for profit company, and occasionally have to keep things secret (especially new features, for competitive reasons).<p>So yeah, unfortunately the community really isn't on the same footing as us.  The idea is that the code is modular enough that if someone wants to work on a new feature, they should be able to do so without having to worry about what we are doing, and for the most part that is the case.
 That's not quite correct.  Our original Cassandra nodes were on XLs.  Only the new ones were on Ls, and that was because we couldn't get XLs during the outage.  Later in the outage Amazon helped us get the XLs we needed.
 That's not quite correct.  Our original Cassandra nodes were on XLs.  Only the new ones were on Ls, and only temporarily.
 An homage if you will.
 If you have any suggestions for new ones, let me know.

 We know that our code is not our key advantage -- it is our community.
 We're not quite that talented. ;)
 Yeah, we use EC2.  We are trying to move towards your model, which is, I think, better.<p>But when we started no one really knew what the "right way" was, so we went with custom AMIs.
 Not a lot right now, but hopefully more with this release.
 Here is where we publish most of the info about search:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/help/search" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/help/search</a><p>In short, it used to be a fulltext search through the database, and now is is Solr built on Lucene.<p>However, I think PG's essay about why he doesn't have a better search on HN applies equally to reddit -- because there are much better things to spend time on.
 &#62;  That's a job skill right?<p>Depends on what you do with the VM.
 I'll tell you why I'd like to get there.  It makes updating the master image easier.  If you need a new package, you just update on the server side, and then all the new images get that new package.  No rebundling required.<p>It also helps when you want to upgrade your OS.  As long as the packages are mostly the same, you can just run your update script from the new OS and make a few changes.<p>The way I have to do it now, I have to build a whole new master image from scratch, because I can't upgrade Ubuntu in place on EC2 due to the way they handle the kernel and kernel modules.
 Sorry if you felt the title is misleading -- it certainly wasn't my intention.<p>It's just hard to fit all the info into 80 characters.
 Yes, it does.  But you probably aren't starting instances <i>that</i> often, and it only adds a few minutes.  If you really need a fast boot, then you can still use an image.<p>However keep in mind, on EC2 at least, that the images are actually downloaded from S3 when you boot, so if you have a huge image, it will take almost as much time.
 These are the only ones we know about (and I think 1/2 of those are dead): <a href="http://code.reddit.com/wiki/PoweredByReddit" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com/wiki/PoweredByReddit</a><p>The goal with open sourcing was never to have clones -- it was to get people to dev the features that they felt were important but we did not, or did not have the time for.  Being able to make an easy clone was just a side effect.
 I didn't say it wasn't useful.  I just said there are better things to work on with our limited resources.
 The most important piece of information was that the VM is fully functional, which your title omits.
 Lesswrong is awesome.  It is my favorite reddit derivative.
 If your username is the same on reddit as here, you don't appear to have ever been banned.  If that's not the case, email me and we'll try and figure it out.
 Did you have trouble running the VM?
 You need to not read the default list.  I don't.
 Your browser is mis-configured.  reddit gives you the language that your browser says you prefer.
 &#62; The problem with Reddit is that it does not localize content, only the interface. It should be either both or none.<p>That's not true.  It has localized interfaces and content.  The non-english content just isn't very popular.
 In your preferences, do you have it set to hide things that you've upvoted?
 As a Berkeley grad from SoCal, who attended Berkeley during the rise of hella, I am very much against this.  I did everything in my power to stop the spread of hella, but clearly I failed.
 That's cost for future R&#38;D -- they don't pay a dividend.  All that money goes in the bank.<p>They did say "costs for our continued investment in AdSense".  Profit is the continued investment part.
 But we right -- the mexican food IS worse.  It's made up for by the Thai and Indian food, so it's all good.

 I think the more interesting news here is that Apple is now the second largest company in America (about $50 billion behind Exxon).
 Thank you for doing this.  Much like <a href="http://www.searchreddit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.searchreddit.com/</a>, this is cool but missing a lot of data and features.<p>You may want to check out these links, also:<p><a href="http://www.searchreddit.com/faq.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.searchreddit.com/faq.php</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/help/search" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/help/search</a>
 Email me your IP ([email protected]) and we'll see if we can figure it out.
 I own a fund that owns shares of every public company on the market (VTI).  Does that mean I have to say "I own this" any time I talk about stock?
 You're right -- I should have either said "most valuable" or "largest by market cap".

 Hey PG.  Just wanted to let you know that the name of the alien was a secret... until 2 days ago. :)
 They have a large Cassandra node which they are using for some of their data, but it is not the primary datastore yet.<p>Much like how we (reddit) are using it for a chunk of our data, but we still have Postgres as our canonical source.<p>We are however moving slowly towards more Cassandra.
 &#62;#  Performance is better because data is accessed from memory instead of through a database to a disk.<p>&#62;# Scalability is linear because as more servers are added data is transparently load balanced across the servers so there is an automated in-memory sharding.<p>&#62;# Availability is higher because multiple copies of data are kept in memory and the entire system reroutes on failure.<p>&#62;# Application development is faster because there’s only one layer of software to deal with, the cache, and its API is simple. All the complexity is hidden from the programmer which means all a developer has to do is get &#62;and put data.<p>All but the first thing apply to disk based databases too...  At least the new ones like Cassandra, as well as the old ones with the right packages.
 I bought her a ring and then she bought me a TV and surround sound system.  I get a hot tub later.  Then we'll be about even. :)
 You're not their biggest customer, but you're up there. :)
 We don't discuss that, but Conde isn't a charity.  They wouldn't keep us around if it wasn't worthwhile.
 reddit currently has 73 instances with this breakdown:<p><pre><code>  25 c1.xlarge
  26 m1.large
  22 m1.xlarge
 </code></pre>
 c1.xl are generally app servers, m1.xl are generally databases (either postgres or cassandra) and the m1.l are other stuff.
 This sounds like "Pirates of the Silicon Valley 2"
 Yeah, I would have put HN at least 10x faster. ;)
 Thanks for the suggestions.  Some we have tried, others we would like to, and some are totally new.<p>The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest.<p>We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.
 &#62; but I can't really see paying for reddit now.<p>If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?
 &#62; But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?<p>Hopefully when you visit their sites, you are involving yourself in whatever their method of monitization is.  Subscriptions, viewing ads, whatever it is.
 &#62;  once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.<p>One of the main reasons we hesitated so long.  We didn't want to let down the community, especially those that paid.<p>As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a better job at it.
 It has nothing to do with that.<p>It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
 They're not actually one of the most expensive.<p>Yes it is true, they are more expensive than others, and if I were starting a new company I might not use them from the start, but they offer us one thing that no one else seems to be able to handle -- the ability to spin up a lot of heavy iron quickly to absorb sudden changes in traffic.
 The legal argument isn't that bizarre. :)<p>Our lawyers fear foreign laws and will not deal with them.<p>That being said, we are working on expanding into some of the other English speaking countries.
 We actually moved from a datacenter to EC2.  The problem is we all live in the Bay Area, where data centers cost a lot of money.  We can't afford to hire a hand on person in a cheap place, so it turns out EC2 (and other cloud solutions) are just cheaper.<p>Also, one thing that is nice with EC2 is that we can spin up a lot of big iron when we need to absorb new kinds of traffic.  I can't do that in my own datacenter.
 That was actually one of the things we already tried.<p>I think in a month we made enough for a cup of coffee.
 The problem is that we aren't just selling ad space.  We are running what might be considered an "auction" in some jurisdictions (it isn't in the United States), and that is what the lawyers fear.  They want to make sure we won't get dinged for running an illegal auction.
 &#62; Just curious -- why don't you start a new company?<p>Stay tuned. :)<p>&#62; It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers.<p>Hmmm, I've never really thought about it that way before.<p>&#62; Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?<p>It does.  I've worked for reddit officially for over 3.5 years, and I've been friends with Steve and Alexis for almost 5 years.<p>I've watched reddit grow from a tiny site to the huge site it is now.<p>And when Steve and Alexis left, the put it in our hands to take good care of it.<p>It's like watching your friend's kid grow up, and then one day becoming their guardian.<p>reddit's been a big part of my life.
 Actually, it isn't so much the traffic.  It's when something like Cassandra suddenly stops working correctly and we need to take emergency action to keep the site up by, for example, doubling our memcached pool temporarily.<p>None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly.<p>Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost.  It is less than 5% of our total bill.
 &#62; Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?<p>Pretty much yes to both of these.  With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
 Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution.  In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit.<p>That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.

 You forgot user page sorting. :)
 We were overwhelmed by the response.  We are excited that we are able to do things with that money already (more on that later).<p>But to be honest, the best part has been the postcards.  Every day a big stack arrives, and it is awesome.  I can't tell you how good it feels to get a stack of postcards all telling you how awesome you are and how you're changed people's lives.

 We use one year reserved instances because our budgets are done annually.
 The database is rarely accessed in request.  Almost all DB access comes from batch processes.
 About 20% of the users are logged in, and they represent about 50% of the page views.
 &#62; and I don't have access to their code/architecture/etc<p>Actually, you do! :)  <a href="http://code.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com</a><p>But to help you out, I'll tell you that a good chunk of the expensive loops are written in C.
 The bandwidth is less than 5% of the total cost.  It's about $2500 a month.
 We had dedicated servers.  It saved us 30% a month to move to EC2.
 Was there ever a question about that?  I thought that was pretty much a fact.  Of course static typed languages are faster.
 I don't want to commit for that long to a single type of instance.
 I meant that we used to have our own datacenter.<p>Yes, the dedicated servers might be less.  But when one of them breaks, I have to wait for the provider to fix it.  On EC2, I can replace it in 5 minutes.
 I meant that we used to have our own datacenter.<p>Yes, the dedicated servers might be less.  But when one of them breaks, I have to wait for the provider to fix it.  On EC2, I can replace it in 5 minutes.<p>&#62; I started out on VPSs and saved a lot  moving to dedicated servers once it made sense to. For the dedi servers I use I don't have to pay for RAM monthly, and I get bandwidth at a good price.<p>EC2 doesn't charge for RAM either and the bandwidth is at a great price.<p>&#62; The kind of money you're paying on servers is just obscene.<p>It's really not that much more than other hosting providers, and they offer features that the other ones don't.  The two biggest being the speed with which I can add new machines and the speed I can add more disk.
 &#62; I wonder why google, yahoo and facebook don't run their site on ec2... if it's cheaper.<p>Well, for one, they are A LOT bigger than us.  But you'd be surprised who DOES run on EC2.  The biggest one I'm allowed to tell you about is Netflix.  Their entire streaming service is run off EC2.  I guess they're idiots too, huh?
 &#62; But they don't. So they use none of the upside, and have all of the downside. Yay!<p>That's not true at all.  We shut down machines when we are over capacity (rarely) and we often have to bring up a bunch of new machines where there is a traffic spike.
 I'm too lazy to do the research, but what happens when you scale that up to the 23TB a month that we are doing (which doesn't include the 49TB of cross datacenter traffic that is super cheap)?  Amazon cuts us a price break at the higher tiers.  Do the other guys?

 This is all true.  reddit is a great place to work if you want to learn a lot, get some great experience, and have a really strong influence on the product.  But it is not a startup -- there is no big upside.<p>And I don't think Hipmunk is hiring yet. :)
 Or we just update it so it evals to the same answer. :)
 Aww shucks.  Thanks!<p>ps.  Still looking for a job? :)
 That's a silly reason not to apply.  If anything, you can feel good knowing that you beat the crowd.
 I've been replying as quickly as I can.  If you said anything that requires more than "Yep, you got it" it'll take a little longer.

 I think by far the most telling part of this was this quote:<p>"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"<p>No wonder he has no idea how horrible Windows is.  He resets it every day.
 Because my grandmother was insanely cheap, we had this thing where she would call and hang up after one ring, and then we would call her back.  Then the phone company got priority ringing, so we just wouldn't pick up when she called.<p>Anyway, your thing about double-ringing reminded me.
 I'm well aware of that.  I'm just saying that most of us hard core folks did not, which is why we complain more about Windows.
 Matt Groening figured this out a long time ago.  He says that whenever he creates a new character, it has to be recognizable in silhouette.  Look at all his characters.  Bart, Homer, Leela, Bender, Fry.  None of them need color.
 It's not just them.  YC has produced a good number of qualified investors at this point. ;)
 I'm surprised they got Paul in pants -- must have been a cold day to get him to not wear shorts.
 <i>sell</i> sugar water.
 I was the first actual employee (everyone else is considered a founder), and I was hired after the acquisition.  Yes, it is true that I would have joined beforehand too for a lot less, but just the same, it was nice to have health care and a steady check.
 We have a new guy starting in November, but yes, it is true.  We are still in the corner of Wired's office.<p>We figure we can get at least 8 people in there!
 I think that is all of us. :)<p>We're not in it for the money, because the money isn't that great.  Conde is a private company with no stock either.
 That's absolutely true.  If I had stayed at eBay, I would be making more money, and would be responsible for a tiny little part of the company.
 Yep, that was me.
 Lists like this aren't generally shared, because then the nefarious bots would know they had been caught.<p>Well behaved bots tend to use useragents that make themselves fairly obvious.<p>The best bet is to watch your logs for an IP or agent that seems to hit more URLs than anyone else, and then investigate by hand.
 No, a dream job would be all the responsibility with twice the money and stock and revenue sharing.  :)
 I used to work in the ResHalls as Berkeley, and I can tell you a couple of reasons they haven't done a Gig-E upgrade.  The first is that the upgrade from 10Mbps to 100Mbps was easy, because they just had to change out the switches and router blades, which require upgrades every few years anyway.<p>Going from 100 to 1000 is a lot harder, because the physical cables in the wall are on the cheap side (it is a University after all) and can't support Gig-E.  So it would require a complete rewiring of the res Halls.<p>That, coupled with that fact that generally speaking there is little difference in speed when talking to the internet at 100 vs. 1000, it just isn't worth the upgrade.  Most students don't notice/care, and also most of them just want to be able to move their laptops around without dealing with cables.  They just want the internet to work wherever they happen to be on campus.
 Presumably this is a good test of high end usage.  It seems like they are using this is a stress test, not so much a "regular usage" test.<p>Although, not all of those professors are Computer Science, and they have famillies that live with them, with kids and husbands and wives that have normal jobs.<p>Most of them probably use the Internet the same way as any well to do professional and their family would.
 Well, the biggest upside is that there are basically 4 of us running a top 100 internet site, so we each get <i>a lot</i> of responsibility.  Also, anything we do affects the lives of literally millions of people, which is pretty cool.<p>And yes, the warm fuzzies I get when see the reddit community do something awesome are what keep me coming back day after day.  Knowing that in some small way, I helped facilitate that awesomeness.
 I tried that once.  They cut me off after 5 temp numbers in one day.  I wasn't even trying to cheat -- I was just buying a bunch of stuff from different vendors.
 It makes it so there is less friction to spinning up more paid instances.
 At least he didn't taint the reddit name too. :)
 They run their entire streaming service from EC2, which at the best price is 8 cents /GB.  Assuming they worked out a deal (which I've never heard of Amazon doing), they might be as low as say 4 cents.  So I'd say best case you need to at least 1/2 your numbers.
 The purpose of a cofounder is not to help alleviate load.  It is to have someone tell you no, that your idea/implementation/justification sucks.  They question your moves and make you justify them.  Having a cofounder keeps you in check and keeps you from straying too far off the successful path.
 Why not rent it out as a coworking space to startups in Cambridge?<p>You could even extend the YC model a bit and rent it out cheap in exchange for some equity
 &#62; It's hard to imagine an hour spent managing the logistics of a coworking space in Boston that isn't better spent on one of the large number of startups YC is advising already.<p>I was thinking more along the lines of diversifying income while keeping what is a great piece of real estate.  If there is enough demand, it could even warrant hiring a part time real estate manager, so that precious time is not diverted.<p>&#62; That's in addition to the fact that YC was never really a coworking program itself;<p>Exactly.  Again, diversification in to a new area.<p>&#62; Also: who gives away equity for office space? Don't do that.<p>I would personally never do it, but I was just throwing it out there as another option.
 And maybe live in it too. :)
 &#62; This can be done by friends/relatives who are interested in supporting you without having the technical skills or free time to actually be co-founders with you.<p>Sure, but it is much more effective when someone is in the venture with you, and their success is tied to yours.  Your friends and family are much more likely to just say "yeah, that's a good idea".  No risk on their part.
 I don't think you understand what diversification means. :)
 I'm sure if you ask Jessica why she wrote founders at work, it was more about sharing knowledge than making money.
 I was kind of expecting this to link to a blank page.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a very logical and coherent article.
 And technically you are committing a crime.  It is your responsibility to report use tax to your state for things you buy from out of state.
 Thanks for the reminder, otherwise I would have totally forgotten!  It was a great experience doing a talk last year.
 Agreed, but it is worth it for how nice it looks.  As someone who looks at <i>a lot</i> of resumes, I appreciate the ones that are made with LaTex.  It shows that little bit of extra effort.<p>Also, I make the LaTex file I use for my own resume available so that others can copy it.  <a href="http://edberg.org/jeremy/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex" rel="nofollow">http://edberg.org/jeremy/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex</a>

 It depends where you live.  In San Francisco, 60K is just scarping by.  In Topeka, you're doing pretty well.
 I would personally say the opposite is true for me.  When I was in college (and poor, living paycheck to paycheck), I would try every new thing.  Mp3?  What's that?  Let me download some.  This thing has some kinks?  No problem, I'll figure it out and post my findings on a newsgroup.<p>But now, as my income has gone up and my free time has gone down, I find myself doing less early adopting, and waiting a bit longer till all the college kids work out the kinks for me.  Sure, I'm still an early adopter in the grand scheme of things (I dropped cable a few years ago for torrents, for example), but I'm definitely picking things up later in their lifespans than I used to.
 Actually, they would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec.  Our traffic is usually down in Dec.<p>We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.
 They would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec.  Our traffic is usually down in Dec.<p>We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.
 We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk.  Then we have to train them.  Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more stable.<p>We're just really constrained on human time right now.
 We saw about a 30% increase right after v4 was launched, and about most of those (25% of the 30%, or 83% of the increase) stuck around a week later.  It's been basically normal growth since then.
 We weren't really begging for money.  We needed money, we let people know that, and then we let people set their own price because we had no idea what the price should be, so we crowdsourced it.<p>We can't talk about our revenue, but I'll just say, we're still here and will be here for a while yet.
 About 12 million last month.  About 5 million last January.
 &#62; Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not surprising.<p>What makes you say that?
 Even the smartest person in the world will have to learn our architecture and codebase, our processes, our logins, our machine names, etc.<p>No matter how amazing they are, I'm not giving them the root password on the first day or letting them redo the databases or write major code changes.<p>Everyone requires training.
 We weren't trying to review our performance year to year though.  We were just showing how the beginning of 2010 compared to the end.<p>All the media decided to make it a year over year comparison, which it was never intended as.
 We don't need more servers, we need more people.<p>See here:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/efpn0/reddit_gold_gift_creddits_are_now_for_sale/c17qmvd" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/efpn0/reddit_...</a>
 Is this only pre-acquisition companies?<p>Where's reddit? ;)<p>FWIW:<p>Web Host: EC2 (Amazon)<p>Email Host: Self hosted<p>DNS Host: Akamai<p>Registrar: Corporation Service Company<p>SSL Issuer: None<p>Certificate Type: None
 I've been using inerleaved responses for 20 years.  It's the only right way.<p>The only time I top post is<p>1) If the reply is not a direct answer to a question, but instead a more general statement<p>2) If the email had a single question.<p>Why do I top post for #2?  Because most mail readers these days give a preview.  A short answer at the top will show up in the preview, so the recipient doesn't have to open the email.  This is especially useful on today's mobile devices with small screens.<p>I never bottom post, because scrolling all the way down is annoying.<p>* I also top post when dealing with non-technical "old-timers" because they seem to get confused with the interleaved responses.
 This isn't me being ageist, but I'm genuinely curious.  How old are you?<p>As I said in my own post, I think older people prefer top posting for some reason.<p>Just so you know, I'm 33, so I'm already "old" to a lot of the folks here.
 Yeah, when I said "it's the only right way", that was kind of a joke.  Should of had a smiley there.<p>I think we pretty much agree -- I tend to lean towards interleaved, but will top post when it is expected.
 This is how youtube got most of their initial employees.  Since all the core people were from PayPal, the first 100 or so people were pretty much all ex-PayPal.  It worked out pretty well for them.
 Sand Hill Road.
 Some of them did it as employees.  You can earn a million over your lifetime as a doctor in a hospital or whatnot.
 What better way to foster a community than interact with it, eh? :)
 Congratulations!  That's a very impressive achievement.  Certainly a much faster growth rate than reddit!
 Very nice!  That's a very small setup for so many pageviews.  Quite impressive.  Shoot me an email sometime, I'd love to talk shop.  [email protected]
 Yeah, usually up to about 1200-1300 per second, but that's just from our app servers.  Our caches can get up to 2500+ per second at peak.
 Did you adjust your subscriptions?  If you adjust them, you'll find all the old content you knew and loved.<p>Just don't read the front page.<p>I certainly don't (well, not often, still need to keep up on the goings on).
 Yes, we'll be doing some more hiring very soon.  Keep your eye on the blog.
 Can't I do both? :) I'm on my laptop hacking while sitting in front of the TV.<p>Also I'm watching my website traffic do this:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/tb/fgjid" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/tb/fgjid</a>
 People think that sports and programming are mutually exclusive for some reason.  As if you can't be a good programmer unless you hate sports.<p>Personally, I like to hack and I hold football season tickets.
 I just looked at your site, but I have no idea if I want an invite code. :)<p>Perhaps you could put at least some sort of teaser on the homepage as to what problem you might be solving or at least some clue as to the problem space.

 jedberg is known to be ironic like that.
 I can be slightly malicing sometimes. ;) (Did I just make up a new word?)
 Indeed I did.  I admit, it was a little underhanded way to get you to click.  But it worked, right?<p>We're just trying to get the very best people we can.  Apologies for the ruse.
 Each applicant owns their code and will be free to post it.  We've only asked that they keep it secret until March.<p>We will probably release our version as well at that time.
 Code reuse is fine for coding, but in language, reinventing the wheel is the way to go!<p>(Sorry, I'm a bit punchy at the end of this week).
 In between folks can choose either challenge.  tgrep is probably going to be more suited.
 <a href="http://code.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com</a><p>The point is to show off your frontend skills, not make a fully working clone.
 If you send it to me ([email protected]) I'll tell you how awesome you are. :)
 I understand your concerns, and we thought about it a lot ourselves.  "Are we asking too much?"<p>We came to the conclusion that what we are asking should be fun for you to do.  Something you might even do without us asking.<p>Also, it shouldn't take you more than a few joyful hours.  If it does, you probably aren't the person we're looking for.<p>We gave the task to a couple of trusted folks beforehand, people who we would love to hire if they weren't already doing something they loved, and they said that the tasks were pretty straightforward and quick to do.<p>We already tried doing it the other way around, and we realized that it just didn't work.  The guy that turned out to be the best was the one we almost rejected because he had a bad resume and cover letter.<p>We don't want to make that mistake again.<p>If you think it is too much to ask, well, I guess you just don't apply. &#60;shrug&#62;
 Actually, we won't really benefit at all.  We already have tgrep, and a single user local storage frontend won't really be useful to us (and already exists).
 That would be awesome actually.  But probably more than a few hours work.
 &#62; Tl;dr? That wouldn't surprise me.<p>No, I read the whole thing.<p>&#62; Obviously there are people who might apply even if they think it's too much to ask on spec.<p>First off, I don't think you know what spec work means.  It means asking someone to do work and then paying them <i>for that work</i> if you like it.  That is not what we are doing.  We are asking applicants to implement things that will be of no use to us, because we already have them, as a demonstration of both skill and determination.<p>&#62; except insofar as it's a pretty clearcut instance of your shirking all responsibility<p>What responsibility am I shirking?  If you want the job, then you do the thing.  If you aren't confident enough in yourself, then so be it.  It isn't my job or responsibility to be your mom and encourage you to apply and tell you that you are good enough and you should go for it!  You should know that already.<p>&#62; with the kind of callous indifference to the work and time of others captured neatly in your closing shrug.<p>As I said, if you are doing the task, you are doing it because you enjoy it and maybe you can use it as a learning experience or on your portfolio.  It isn't a callous indifference to work -- we're asking you to do different work.  Instead of a resume and cover letter, we're asking you to program.
 &#62; it's just their Ops Manager and Senior Product Developer using the term.<p>Information Cowboy is my title, actually. :)<p>And I was using it as linkbait, just to be clear.
 rockstar was tounge-in-cheek.<p>And spec work is asking someone to do work and then paying them <i>for that work</i> if you like it.<p>This is not spec work.  We already have the things we are asking for, so they are of no use to us.  They are to demonstrate skill and determination.<p>It is not spec work.
 You're right in that the front page now is very different from page of 2006.  You have to explore now and work a little harder to find the good communities.<p>But when you do, you'll find that it is just as it was in 2006, maybe even a little better.
 While some of the discussion can be quite distracting, others can be quite productive.  For example, if you're a web design person, you'll <i>probably</i> learn something from <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design</a>
 Hey there.  Can I get my invite code now? :)
 Did you even read the link you put in your comment?  reddit did not "censor" anything.  We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit to high.  It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.
 Did you even read the link you put in your comment?  reddit did not "censor" anything.  We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit too high.  It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.
 Did you even read the link you put in your comment?  reddit did not "censor" anything.  We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit too high.  It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.
 The number of subscribers is not the metric we used.  We use a metric we call "activity".  The behavior described in that blog post simply pointed out a bug in the activity metric.<p>Also, to be pedantic, it is not possible for reddit to censor anyone.  Governments censor things, private entities do not.
 &#62; is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints?<p>Yes. :)  I wish I could say more, but I don't want to give away the secrets to reddit's spam detection.
 I have to say, as someone who has to deal with the same problem every day, I feel bad for the Digg folks.  They are a good group of engineers, and spam is truly a hard problem -- much harder than most people realize.

 We keep the spam detection parts secret.  It is the only part of the code we hide.  We wish we didn't have to, but sadly, spam is an arms race.
 Actually, our uptime has been better for the last 6 months than the previous few years.
 Try turning admin mode off. :)
 We replaced memcachedb with Cassandra a while ago, because memcachedb pretty much hit a wall at some point.<p>As for replacing memcached, I'm certainly open to it, but from what I've read, the performance of memcache for what we use it for is better than redis.
 Yes, we are above 99%.  We just have a community that is very vocal with things are broken, and then continue to be vocal about it after it is fixed because it is funny.<p>For example, we heard "search sucks" for weeks after we switched to the new service, until we announced the switch, and then all of a sudden the tune changed. :)
 The fact that Quora is on there but Stackoverflow is not makes me question the veracity of the entire list.
 This makes me sad because some of my old fun games won't work anymore (well, without a VM at least), but since I rarely play those, I like the fact that all the other stuff I use will be forced to "go native".
 I think you read me backwards.  What I meant was that stackoverflow (and all the other stacks) are missing, and I find Quora seriously lacking, so the fact that it is on there at all makes me question the quality bar for the entire list.
 TL;DR<p>Yes, I know this is HN, not reddit, but it was just too apt not to do it.
 &#62; The differences here are that a woman in the younger demographic is much more likely to be spending hours on facebook and only minutes on a google search.<p>Yes, but here is the key.  It's all about attitude when presented with the ad.  Those few minutes on Google are being spent actively seeking information about that particular topic.  The hours on Facebook are about find out what friends are up to, with little thought about finding information.
 It's funny you mention that.  Just yesterday I made a graph of how many accounts were created each day since the beginning of reddit.  It's very clear which day Paul mentioned reddit in his essay, because there was a 3x jump in signups that day.  More importantly, it never receded from that level.  I like to think this is because people kept finding his essays.

 We're currently in the process of replacing every one of our hosts with new OS versions.  As we do this we are in fact going to the EBS based instances.<p>Those instances actually show the same problems, but they aren't too bad, because once you boot them, you don't need the root vol that much (that's what the instance storage is for).
 I didn't even get a chance to have a Guinness today. :(
 &#62; python on EC2<p>#1 tip:  Don't use threading.  Python threading + EC2 will not work well.  Instead rely on the OS doing the task switching and run multiple copies.<p>If you want more info, I did a talk at Pycon about this and other things:  redd.it/b5jyy
 reddit actually is a top 100 site, but we don't have nearly the need to host our own datacenter or co-locate.  If we do make a move, it will be to #2.  I don't want to hire people to be hands on -- I'd rather outsource that and let someone else pay to have spare capacity laying around.
 We're not that stuck.  We can be out of Amazon in a month if necessary.  We very specifically don't use any of their "lock-in" services to make easier on our open source users, which has the side effect of not locking us in either.
 Which provider?  Can you email me? [email protected].
 It's not a money problem.  We've got plenty of money.  We just weren't allowed to spend it on developers until recently.  Now we have a bunch of open developer positions that we are in the middle of hiring for, and will probably have more soon.
 Me too.  It is a total dis-service to hipmunk to not mention Chris or Steve.<p>But for now I think their tech team is full, so they won't be needing my services. :)
 Yes, I do dev too.  I just haven't done it in a long time.<p>A lot of our sysadmin time is spent tracking down bugs in the stuff we use (like Cassandra) and doing tuning and automation.<p>Also, I do a lot of the other business stuff, so at best I'm a part time sysadmin right now.<p>We do pretty much do "devops" though.  A lot of the work of Neil, our programmer, is tracking down bugs due to data inconsistencies due to hardware problems.
 Both are important.  A lot of work of a reddit programmer is finding bugs that come about because of the unreliable disks and also finding scaling inflection points and fixing them before they take the site down.
 I love this, and am sharing it with the rest of team reddit right now.  Thank you.
 Yes, they could.  It is an option.
 We have ~130 servers at Amazon right now.  We could probably do it with 50-75 or less, depending on how big the boxes are.
 Have some faith.  We'll pull through. :)
 Chaos Monkey causes chaos, it does not fix it. :)<p>But yes, you are right.  The goal is to have a system that scales itself.  Not an easy task for sure.
 Ubuntu 8.10 for us.
 &#62; Q1. I still don't get the use case for db storage on ephemeral storage.<p>We're still not sure either, so we're investigating to see if it makes sense.  One possible option will be to have the master on ephemeral disk with a hot backup on EBS so there is no data loss.<p>Another option is use ephemeral for the master and all but one slave, so we got hot backups without a slowdown.<p>Still need to look into it more.<p>The one that we are doing ephemeral right now is Cassandra with continuous snapshots to EBS.  Everything in there can be recalculated, and with an RF of 3, if we lose one node we can run a repair.<p>&#62; Q2. If EBS is the problem why are you migrating to S3 backed EBS boot vols? The problem with this is still the time in between snapshots even though it will be shortened.<p>They are just easier to use.  The root volume is rarely accessed after it is booted, so the EBS slowdowns aren't really a problem in that case.<p>&#62; Some Comments: It will only be a matter of time before S3 disks and hardware start dying like EBS...en masse<p>I don't think so.  It is a totally different product built by a totally different team with a different philosophy.  S3 was build for durability above all else.<p>In response to the rest of your comments, you are absolutely right, there are other options.  We will certainly be investigating them.
 &#62; once you get a healthy dev team would you guys look into maintaining redditOSS a little more thoroughly? I imagine personnel shortage has made that impossible to date, but if you had a sizeable group is that something you'd do?<p>Yes, very much.  We would like to make the open source software MUCH easier to run, so that it is easier for others to develop on.  It will probably be one of the first projects for a new hire, because it will make it easier for THEM to develop too.
 Or smart detection. :)
 An issue that we very much want to fix sooner rather than later.
 And sales people too...
 Yeah, something like that.  But the trick is with 60,000 subreddits and more being added every day, we'd really like to figure out a programmatic way to generate it.
 As someone who runs a site that receives similar requests (I paid for reddit gold, why don't I get faster access), let me tell you, it just isn't that easy.<p>Their architecture, like ours, can't just be split into fastlane and slowlane.<p>So while I appreciate what the guy is asking for, it just isn't that easy.
 It's like I'm a mind reader or something. :)
 No kidding!  They keep stealing my people! ;)<p>Seriously though, it's been making things tough.  We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments.  Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.
 99.9% of my job can be done from home.  Yet I still commute 2 hours every day to get to the office.<p>Why?  Because there is just something to be said for working in the same room as the other folks on your team.<p>Sometimes we'll all work from home, and we'll be in IRC all day chatting the same way we do in the office.  Yet when we are in the office, we seem to get more done.<p>The best example is when I hear some of the other folks talking about a new feature or a code change, and I overhear something that sets off my sysadmin alarm bells.  If we weren't in the same room, we'd have to wait until the code review phase to find out, "oh hey, the servers can't DO that."<p>This way we can head off these problems early with minimal overhead.  How annoying would it be to have to send an email every time you had an idea, and then wait for everyone to approve it?  When everyone is in the office, we just turn around and finish that process in a few seconds.
 Your slider could have a * at each end and one in the middle, and have it start randomly on one of the 3 stars, but make them unselectable.
 Hey, so I submitted it to reddit thinking it might get you a few more responses.  It kinda ended up being the number one link on the front page.  Hope that didn't hurt too much.<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gclpv/pick_a_number_from_1_to_10_for_science/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gclpv/pick_a_number...</a>


 Yes, they are. :(
 We (reddit) are seeing failures in all zones.
 Thankfully, no. :)<p>But yeah, right now we're shutting everything down to try and avoid possible data corruption.  Once they restore service, hopefully we'll be able to come back quickly.
 The server is still up, so we can serve it right out of the load balancer.
 That's like saying "yay for relying on a datacenter"
 Believe me, the last thing I want is to be up at 3am working on this.  I'd much rather be sleeping and letting you not work.
 This outage is affecting all AZ's in the East.  So even a multizone setup wouldn't help for this one.  Only a multiregion setup.<p>This outage is a lot like having your entire datacenter lose power.
 Same with us.  About 10% of our 700+ volumes are having problems right now.<p>It's hard to tell for sure since there isn't any load.
 Why do you get a 4 day weekend?
 Thank you.  I'm totally stealing this next time someone uses that "cloud is for idiots" line.<p>This is an excellent metaphor.
 Yeah, I'm one of the reddit admins.
 Don't worry.  If skynet is in EC2, we'll be fine.
 &#62; I thought AZs were supposed to be different physical data centers.<p>They are.  Which means this is probably a software issue or some other systemic issue.
 Go back to the building metaphor.  Building datacenters is not our core business, so we outsource it.  Much like building a building is not our core business, nor running a telephone system, so we outsource those things too.  All business critical, but still outsourced.
 They better be cutting me a check too.
 My original comment was "We're going Madagascar on the servers."  Then I remembered I was on HN, not reddit. :)
 Despite the fact that my site has been down for 3 hours, I'd still say Amazon is a great place for your startup.<p>Just don't use EBS.
 That is the theory, but all of our data is currently locked in the inaccessible EBS system.<p>I'd still say Amazon is a great place for your startup, just don't use EBS.
 Actaully, I'm on the couch in front of the fireplace, watching old SNL, waiting patiently for Amazon to fix their shit, and figuring out how we can not use EBS anymore.
 Send me the link to your ad (when we come back up) and I'll comp you a day.
 &#62; If the Reddit web server admins took availability seriously<p>We do.<p>&#62; they would have chosen to deploy across more than one region.<p>It's far too costly to do that.  We are deployed across multiple AZs, but this failure hit multiple AZs.
 We rely heavily on EBS still, so this is hurting us more than most others.  Hopefully they'll have us back up soon.
 &#62; I thought you could snapshot drives across regions and bring those EBS drives up under new instances in new regions?<p>In theory, yes.  In practice, those snapshots hurt the volume so much that it is impossible to take one in production.
 &#62; didn't you guys just have an EBS issue about a month ago?<p>Yes.  Since then we've moved about 1/2 of our stuff off of EBS, but we're still migrating away from it.
 It's the combination of the extra cost of having machines in US West plus the cost of keeping the data synchronized between them (which is a lot) plus the added development overhead of making sure that things work cross region.<p>We'll get there one day, but we aren't there yet.
 I think it would take a lot more time than we have to make that work.  Our code is open source if you want to give a proof of concept a go. ;)
 What did I just watch and why?
 We're moving away from the EBS product altogether.  The hard part is dealing with the master databases.  Normally I'd have a master database with a built in raid-10, but I can't do that on EC2, so I have to come up with another option.<p>So I guess that is the long way of saying that hopefully it won't happen again.
 At their level of income, this is true.<p>For us, we are just now staffing up to the level where we can make the changes necessary to do the same thing.
 That hurts.  But you're right, we've had a lot of issues.<p>I think the reason this is news is because it is a massive Amazon failure.
 I'm here all the time. :)
 No, I said that we have spent all we can, and at this point we need development.<p>However, in this case, the outage is not because of any issues with our setup, but with Amazon.
 Don't do that.  HN is not the place for memes.<p>reddit isn't either, but we lost that battle a while ago.
 Yeah, usually they are on our blog right after the downtime, or in /r/announcements on reddit.
 It's usually very rewarding.  The awesome community is what keeps me doing it.
 No one seems to remember that Amazon did this 5 years ago:  <a href="http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/5756.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/5756.ars</a>
 I was surprised that they got a single letter ticker symbol, so I looked up the history.  It turns out that P used to be for Phillips Oil, which gave up the symbol when they merged with Conoco.<p>I'm amused by the fact that a tech company is taking an oil company's ticker.
 &#62; This would be a good comment on reddit<p>No, actually it would be a shitty comment on reddit too.  Sadly, it is the kind of comment that is now tolerated in some of the bigger subreddits.
 The strategic advantage is that it lends a lot more credence to the case if the messages came straight from Harvard's copies, because Harvard is a lot easier to trust in this case than Mark.  ie. They would <i>probably</i> be unaltered coming from Harvard.
 Yes, that is what I meant. :)  But in theory Harvard would have records of such modifications, or backups, or something that is more trustworthy than Mark's copies of the emails.
 Thank you.  That really means a lot to me.
 First I have to clarify that nothing I did was single handed.  I couldn't possibly have done what I did without the support of the awesomeness that was the rest of team reddit.<p>As for hipmunk, I think they already have too much talent, since they have the rest of reddit. :)
 And let me tell you how awkward that was knowing that I was going to post this today!  And not being able to say anything.
 Thanks for clarifying that.  By the time I got to it, it was already fixed. :)
 We all got along very well and I'm confident that they will be able to handle it.  Also, I'm not dropping off the face of the planet -- they can still ask me questions. :)
 Someone sent me a cape once, but it didn't fit.<p>To be honest, none of those things by themselves really bothered me.  But I supposed the sum total of it always dragged on my subconscience.
 Cupertino.
 Thank you.  That's very kind of you.<p>The most dire time was right after raldi left, when I had just two tech people, a programmer and a sysadmin.
 Right now I'm going to enjoy the nice summer weather and take care of some things that I've been neglecting for a while.<p>Then we'll see where the wind takes me. :)  The last paragraph of the blog post has details.
 Thank you very much.  Your kind words are appreciated.
 Everything up to the bacon sounded good. :)  I think you sent me an email, I'll hit you up there.
 I always thought so. :)
 The thing that goes around the neck was too small. :)  It was a kids cape.
 I'm glad at least someone liked those.  It was hard to tell from the stage.  I imagine people were a bit more subdued given the late hour of the day.  At least, that is what I hope!
 Well, one of the ways we try to stay lean is by using new technologies that solve problems so we didn't have to.  I guess this was a nice side effect.
 Congrats to the Hipmunks and Dropboxes (and any other YC company on the list that I didn't realize was YC)!
 Interesting.  A couple of points:<p>&#62; The concept should make more sense to people as a standalone site than as a sub-section on another site. (Easier to explain, easier to link to, etc)<p>&#62; As a standalone site we can optimize the interface for this concept, which is really a very different idea than reddit.com.<p>reddit already has the capability of allowing the moderators do a different domain with a different interface -- the mods just have to decide to do it, so be careful here.<p>Otherwise, you make some interesting points.  I'm curious though, what is your advantage over Quora, which is also a clone of Iama, designed to be a standalone Q&#38;A site?
 My parents have a rule about new TV shows:  They won't watch anything in the first season.  Instead, they record the entire season, and once it is picked up for a second, they'll watch the first season and then become regular viewers.<p>I have the same rule with social networks.  I'll sign up right at the beginning, but I won't participate until I see a good chunk of my friends are on it.  I don't want to invest the time if it is going to flop.
 I agree, Studio 60 was awesome (I don't follow their rule).  But at the same time, I feel very unsatisfied that I got so little of the story arc with the cancellation.
 Right, you end up missing out on some great shows.  But those great shows leave you with a bad taste, because you only get 1/2 the story, since they are cancelled before their time.<p>TV shows, at least in the way they are currently produced, are only valuable if at least some subset of the masses likes them.<p>Just like social networks.  they are only valuable if at least some subset of the masses likes them enough.
 Thought maybe we could do a little HN meetup kinda thing.  I'll be there Mon - Fri.<p>I'm also judging the startup pitch contest on Thursday.<p>They still have tickets available if you live nearby.
 What I don't understand is why the players association doesn't do something about it.<p>In theory, they could do something like this: All monies paid to players go into a common fund, which is managed by the player's association.  Each player gets a small stipend from this fund for entertainment and housing.  The rest remains in the fund, and the player gets a statement every year showing how much they earned from playing and how much from investing.  Hopefully, after a few years, the investing is making more than the playing, showing the player that investing is good.<p>Then upon retirement, the following happens.  2 million is set aside and put into a fund.  From that fund 5% is paid every year to the player, with the rest being reinvested.  Then the rest they can choose to either remove from the fund, or keep in the fund and get earnings payments, or maybe take some out and leave the rest.  The hope being that they saw their statements and know that investing is good.<p>But even if they don't, they still get that 5%, which starts at $100K/yr and in theory goes up with inflation, which should be more than sufficient to keep them from being totally broke.<p>They could do the same for football players, who tend to have the same issue.
 A job with an amazing severance.
 Kind of what I'm proposing, except that they would get a lot more money on retirement and hopefully learn the value of investing along the way.
 I hate the fact that the relationships aren't 2 way on G+.  Today my wife was going through people to add on G+, and she kept asking me, "Who is this person, it says they are friends with you."  And I had no idea who they were.  They were people that had added me to a circle, but I never added back.<p>Yet Google tells other people that we know each other.  They make no differentiation between a 2 way relationship and a one way.<p>This looks like spam heaven to me.
 I would humbly suggest that you drop ELB in favor a software based solution that you control like haproxy.  ELB just isn't up to the job unless you are a really big customer of Amazon's.<p>Also, if you are using small or micro instances, you probably don't want to do that either.  Don't use anything less than a large instance if you want even semi-decent performance.
 Usually when I tell people about reddit, I tell them to skip the front page and go straight to the reddits page and find topics that interest them.<p>The front page has too many cat pictures and crap for my taste these days.  Hopefully they eventually have the time to implement one of the solutions I suggested to alleviate the problem.
 Netflix is expanding globally. They've already announced the expansion into Latin America.
 Los Gatos, CA<p>I'm looking for people to join me at Netflix and keep the streaming service running worldwide.  You can read the full description here:<p><a href="http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr" rel="nofollow">http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr</a><p>Some highlights:<p>You possess these qualities:<p>- You see the big picture delivering a 24x7 service<p>- You are effective working with multiple teams<p>- You have high standards in everything you do<p>- You can balance multiple tasks<p>You have these skills:<p>- Great communication skills, both verbal and written<p>- In-depth experience operating a 24x7 production environment<p>- Fluent in Linux: RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu<p>- Strong scripting skills in shell, Perl and Python<p>- Familiar with the Java platform, especially JVM configuration<p>- Knowledgeable in Linux packaging tools: rpm, yum, dpkg, apt<p>- Ability to quickly triage problems, determine root cause and drive resolution<p>- Ability to keep a cool head under pressure and effectively participate in system down crisis situations<p>You may even have these skills:<p>- Prior experience with Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud service providers is a plus<p>- Systems deployment and service management automation tools and methodologies
 I know Hiten personally, and I know that Kissmetrics operates in a most ethical fashion.<p>I would trust them over most any analytics company any day.<p>It's a shame that this meritless lawsuit even exists.
 To assuage folks who don't understand technology and will assume they are guilty until they "make big changes".
 Ah, but it is all about perception.  The same thing happened at reddit a few times.<p>The mob decided someone was guilty, we investigated, found absolutely no wrongdoing.  Told the community, they didn't care.  They would only be happy with swift, visible action.
 I would have to say you're naive for thinking the two are much different.<p>Any group, no matter how civil and educated, can dislove pretty quickly into mob mentality.
 Walking around the CTF room, it looked to be about 1/2 Mac and 1/2 non-mac, with about 1/2 of the non-macs running some unix variant (assuming people aren't running linux with a windows looking window manager or vice versa).
 The last article said it was mainly so they could use green energy like solar and geo-thermal.
 &#62; Once it's fixed (I'll let them know about it tomorrow and I expect it'll be rectified in a day or two) I'll update this page, but until that time, try it for yourself.<p>Sadly, it will never be fixed.  This is not a bug to them.  They are forcing every url on twitter to go through t.co for click tracking.  It is no longer possible to put a url into a tweet without going through t.co, unless you leave off the http, which makes it unclickable in a lot of clients.
 I keep mine here<p><a href="http://www.jedberg.net/vimrc" rel="nofollow">http://www.jedberg.net/vimrc</a>
 Yep you're right, but it won't let me edit. :/
 Speaking from experience, yes, yes it is.
 My wife is a teacher, and she tends to get sick at the start of pretty much every vacation.  It's like her body knows that she doesn't have time to be sick until vacation.
 All but one of those lines is bidirectional, and it doesn't indicate "who shot first", so it is quite possible those are all defensive suits.
 And in case it helps, I was about to write the exact same comment.  They are using Alexa numbers which are, basically, unsubstantiated guesses.<p>Heck, they didn't even bother to read the numbers reddit actually publishes.
 reddit was actually already bigger than Digg before they launched V4.  There was a lot of overlap of users and people were pissed off, so they thought it would be funny.
 The default is best, but if you've ever sorted by "top", it will remain "top" until you change it back.  It's a long standing bug. :)
 Oh yeah!  It was in the changelog.  I forgot, since I'm no longer responsible for memorizing the changelog. ;)
 The bug was that a GET request was causing an update, which shouldn't happen because then you end up updating your settings just by clicking on a link, usually inadvertently.
 &#62; or maybe small improvements as you see happen on HN like with voting, points, etc,<p>Hey, that reminds me.  I use HN every day, but I still don't have an handle on when the arrows appear and don't and when I can edit and can't.<p>Is there some page somewhere that actually outlines the rules, or do I have to read the code?
 People have been calling reddit "Usenet 2.0" for a long time.  In fact, usenet was something that often came up in discussions of how certain features should work and what features we should work on.
 I think they actually fixed that bug last week.  It'll ignore broken subreddits now.
 Oh,  I wasn't challenging you, I was just adding some additional context. :)
 I think it means Laugh out Loud in this context.
 I dropped my landline for the first time in my life 3 months ago.  Apparently you need one to <i>order</i> xDSL, but not to keep xDSL (since my DSL still works).<p>I haven't actually placed a call on my landline in about 5 years, so I figured there's no reason to keep it.
 As someone who has experience in this area, let me just say that it probably won't drive all that much traffic.  Most people ignore those little buttons.<p>It will however put an insane amount of load on whatever server it is served from.<p>Supporting buttons was the first thing that drove reddit to getting a CDN.  We also made it cache the score for a few minutes for non-logged-in users, which helped alleviate a lot of load.
 &#62; A running joke in the tech industry is that most of the CEOs wouldn’t know how to use most of the products they sell.<p>I would say that's the difference between a CEO who was a founder and a CEO that was brought on late in the game.<p>The founder-ceo's, like Gates and Jobs, are the ones that basically earned their spots by knowing their products well and being completely consumed by their company.
 Los Gatos / San Francisco Bay Area
 Netflix<p>I'm hiring for my team (although there are a ton of other jobs too)<p>The description is a little light on programming, but it really is more programming than sysadmining.<p>Netflix is a very open environment -- any engineer can push code to production pretty much any time with almost nothing in the way.  There is no release manager or schedule.  Maintaining reliability in this environment is a fun challenge!<p>Our team has three main goals:<p>* Write tools to help the other engineers know when it is safe to deploy.<p>* Create monitoring tools to detect issues before users do, fix them automatically if possible, and if not, contact the right people as quickly as possible.<p>* Take charge of outages and lead the calls until they are resolved and then follow up to make sure the root cause has been found and fixed.<p>So if this sounds like something interesting to you, you can send your resume to me at [email protected], and if you have any questions about the job, feel free to comment here (but don't email for questions, because I'd rather answer them here were everyone can see the answer).<p>Here's a discussion about the job on reddit:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/</a><p>Here is the full job description from the jobs site:<p>Netflix is the world's leading streaming video service, and our growth is accelerating. At Netflix, we are upgrading our cloud management tools and pushing the limits of using cloud-based technology, powering our explosive (and soon to be international) growth while presenting new challenges to build a reliable service with ephemeral commodity hardware in an engineer friendly environment..<p>As a member of the Cloud Solutions team, you will manage, support and operate the company’s cloud environment.  You will build tools to monitor, automatically fix and/or proactively notify service owners of problems before customers notice.  You will drive incident resolution and follow through on finding root causes and getting them fixed.<p>You are an expert in distributed, highly concurrent, web-scale systems that are fault-tolerant and run 24x7 with unparalleled availability. You are a talented devops engineer and you thrive on managing and maintaining a reliable environment that others depend on.<p>You possess these qualities:<p>* You see the big picture delivering a 24x7 service<p>* You are effective working with multiple teams<p>* You have high standards in everything you do<p>* You can balance multiple tasks<p>You have these skills:<p>* Great communication skills, both verbal and written<p>* In-depth experience operating a 24x7 production environment<p>* Fluent in Linux: RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu<p>* Strong scripting and programming skills (we’re going to ask you to write code on the whiteboard)<p>* Familiar with the Java platform, especially JVM configuration and JMX<p>* Knowledgeable in Linux packaging tools: rpm, yum, dpkg, apt<p>* Ability to quickly triage problems, determine root cause and drive resolution<p>* Ability to keep a cool head under pressure and effectively participate in system down crisis situations<p>You may even have these skills:<p>* Expertise in one or more of the following: Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, shell<p>* Prior experience with Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud service providers<p>* Building systems deployment and service management automation tools<p>* Familiarity with large scale systems and methodologies<p>If this sounds interesting then we want to hear from you!
 I've worked at both, and said the exact same thing.<p>Now I find myself at a big company (Netflix).  How did this happen?<p>When I was looking for a job, I was mostly looking at startups, but the Netflix job caught my eye, because they are solving a very interesting technology problem.<p>I brought up my concerns in the interview, and they convinced me by pointing out that a lot of people here had come from big tech companies that had transitioned from startup to big and corporate (two of those being Yahoo and eBay), and most of those people wanted to avoid that.<p>So a lot of what is done here is done as a way to retain top talent -- engineers are respected, process is a dirty word.  That's really important.  When something goes wrong, the response is not "what rules can we put in place to prevent this". The response is "how can we educate new employees so they have to knowledge to make sure this doesn't happen again, and how can we give them to tools to make this easier?"<p>That is why I chose to work for a big company again.<p>Also, it was pointed out to me that if you look at most people in the silicon valley, they didn't make their money working for startups -- they made it working for bigger but growing public companies like Yahoo and eBay and now Google and Netflix.
 &#62; The strategies by which they maximize their individual return now involve politics, power and control.<p>The problem is you are working with people who want to maximize their return -- they aren't interested in the problem at hand.<p>When I do hiring, I'm looking for people who are interested in the problem, interesting in making the product better.  As long as the money is "good enough", they don't really care about the payout.<p>They just want to solve hard problems.<p>Once you find those, you get a lot less of the politics.
 So I'm reading through this thread, and I see:<p>&#62; I even wrote a set of Perl scripts to keep track of how much time I spend sitting vs. standing, and how it changes over time.<p>And my first thought was "that's totally something raldi would do".<p>I didn't notice your username until two more comments down.

 Could Netflix buy a bunch of oil using their stores of local currency and then ship that oil to the states and resell it?<p>Just a thought.  I doubt Netflix wants to get into the oil shipping business. :)
 I believe they only have one person from within still there that could do it.
 I guess I was trying to make a snarky comment about the fact that most of us who would be reasonable choices left before it became an option.
 You can already do that.  You can assign a domain name to a reddit and they style it, which basically gives you exactly what you want.
 &#62; It’s taxation without representation.<p>No it isn't.  She still gets to vote in US elections if she wants to.  That's WHY they still collect taxes.<p>I'm not saying it is right, but that is the explanation usually given.  Because even though you don't live in the US, you still receive benefits, like protection from the military and other benefits that all US citizens get.<p>I actually don't think it is entirely unreasonable to tax ex-pats, especially since the first $80K is exempt.
 Fair enough.  I wasn't aware that you had to live in some state for 6 months.<p>But are you sure you can't get a Federal only vote?  I guess that would put you in the same place as DC, who also don't get representatives, which is jacked.<p>The should let you vote in the state closest to where you live or something.  Of course, that would mostly boost the coastal states, wouldn't it. :)
 They could make it work if they wanted to.  They would have you designate a "home" address for both federal and state elections, and then let you vote in all local elections for which you are entitled (because you own land).  That would be fair.<p>In fact, I know that as a Berkeley landowner, my in-laws are allowed to vote on the local Berkeley issues, even though they vote on the state and federal stuff at home.
 I'm slightly amused by the fact that Salesforce is one of their investors, so they just paid themselves.
 You have to wonder if Microsoft is doing this out of malice or just because they haven't thought it all the way through.<p>I'm going to go with option 2 -- I don't think they are clever enough to nerf linux like this.  They are probably just thinking, "how do we prevent viruses?"
 I'm amazed he didn't have any data prior to this.<p>We used to ask people all the time if the would send us their sanitized logs so we could see the "reddit effect", or at least give us the aggregate data.
 Fair enough. :)<p>I should see if I can get one of my posts to the top of reddit.  So far all my best submissions were on the reddit blog.
 From what I hear from my insider friends, the next iPhone has actually been ready for months, they just didn't want to release it so close to the iPhone 4.  In fact, they are almost done with the next next version of the phone, but don't expect to see it for at lest a year.<p>Until someone provides some real competition to the iPhone, they really have no reason to rapidly release new models.
 Los Gatos, CA
 Netflix<p>Looking for Senior SREs.<p>Basically, we're starting a new company to take streaming global and make it so convient that it is better than the free options.<p>I'm looking for people to help make sure that any time someone wants to find and play a movie, they can.<p>You can get more info here: <a href="http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr" rel="nofollow">http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr</a>
 Digg was always good at getting press.
 Woz's site was down yesterday.  I went there looking for this.<p>Anyone have a link to the unedited video?  I'm kind of curious what they cut out.
 As someone with a business process patent pending, let me just say, business process patents are ridiculous.<p>This is yet another great example of why.  For one, you already get a copyright on the software you write, as well as any books or pamphlets that your company might write to describe your business process.  So there really is no reason for the patent -- you can use your copyright for all types of business practices.<p>Second, the purpose of patents was to protect an inventor for a limited time to encourage invention.  They required you to turn in a prototype to get one.<p>I think we need to go to a system where you have to turn in a working prototype of a physical invention to get your non-renewable three year patent.<p>If you can't turn your prototype profitable in three years, move out of the way so that someone else who can execute better than you can do it instead.
 Just to clarify one thing, the founders in the AirBnB case were not selling anything to investors -- they were taking a dividend, which is even worse for the early employees, because the founders get rich without dilituing themselves, precluding the other employees from doing better in a subsequent round.
 Yes, I know.  I should have mentioned that in my comment, but my point was that the agreement as originally written did not line up with the OPs comment.
 Unless that role were an engineering role, I don't think he'd be interested.
 I'm sure he's quite capable, since he is a generally smart dude, but just the same, everything I've ever read makes me think he only likes building things.
 The problem here is that encryption is an overloaded term.  There are two different things happening when one encrypts, and both are useful independently.<p>The two parts are identity and obfuscation.<p>Obfuscation protects you from listeners who do <i>not</i> control the network, and identity protects you from listeners who <i>do</i> control the network.<p>Together, you know only your intended recipient is getting your message, but apart, at least you are protected from certain threats.<p>So even if we just had obfuscation, that would protect us from most threats. When people say "we need encryption everywhere", I think generally what they mean is "we need obfuscation everywhere" to protect from the worst threats, which are those of the uncontrolling listener.<p>The flip side is that the uninformed will get complacent and assume that obfuscation is giving them identity protection as well.
 &#62; On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of the ranking algorithm.<p>Those two things are one in the same.
 Because first he tried buying them, and when that failed, he built it himself (well, ordered the Apple employees to).
 My first thought was, "wow, infogami is still up?"  I guess I left it in a good state. :)
 Yeah, we did that a long time ago. I'm just surprised it is still running!  I don't think I even told the other reddit guys about infogami or where it runs or anything.
 Nope, it's static only.  But if you ask the reddit guys real nice, they might be willing to edit the file manually for you.
 Does that bluetooth cordless phone handle multiple phones?  So that my wife and I can both use it?<p>Also, got a link or brand?
 I'm not denying this fact, but do you have any evidence for your claims?
 The last version of BSD I used regularly was 3.2, and I've missed it since. Although, I've somewhat gotten my fix by installing via ports on MacOS.<p>Perhaps with this release, I'll try my hand at getting it to run on Ec2.<p>Alternatively, does anyone know of a good cheap vps that runs BSD?
 &#62; The moment a popular site like Reddit switches to the cloud, is the moment it becomes barely usable during certain times of the day.<p>That's completely false.  The moment reddit <i>blogged</i> about moving to the cloud, it was * perceived* as being slower.<p>The cloud move happened 7 months before the blog post came out.
 You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers.<p>You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years).<p>This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.
 &#62; Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Dedicated implies that only your bits run on that hardware which is huge for I/O.<p>True, but the blog post didn't say if they are using virtualization or not.
 Also, you don't necessarily take a huge hit in I/O with virtualization.  VMWare on dedicated hardware with all the virtualization extensions will be pretty comprable and a lot easier to maintain then straight up raw iron.
 I hate all the terms because they are all buzzword lingo. :)
 I realize I use the buzzword on my linkedin. I may hate the term, but I still have to play the game, right?
 Los Gatos, CA Netflix<p>Looking for Senior SREs.<p>Basically, we're starting a new company to take streaming global and make it so convient that it is better than the free options.<p>I'm looking for people to help make sure that any time someone wants to find and play a movie, they can.<p>We're solving lots of really interesting problems, like how do you maintain a reliable service on hardware that is unreliable and you don't control (Amazon Web Services).<p>Our group also gets to help teach other groups how to build for scale.<p>Come join me!<p>You can get more info here: <a href="http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr" rel="nofollow">http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr</a>
 Essentially.  The streaming part of the company is just a few years old, and we operate a lot more like a startup than like a 10 year old public company.

 reddit had the same problem.  We set up a separate server just for the google crawler with it's own copy of the database, so that the queries for old pages didn't slow down everyone else.
 &#62; Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?<p>Absolutely.  When I was in the security group for eBay/PayPal, we had a consultant come in for about a month, and at the end he gave us a list of projects to keep us busy for at least a year that made tangible improvements to our security.
 Alternatively, be the first member of a new team (like I did).  There are no expectations of what work you will do or how, so it's like being in a startup, except you have a lot more stuff to play with.
 How old is your set?  My TV, which is about 2 years old, isn't this bad.  I have 3 HDMI cables running out of it, and when I turn on a device (like the Blu-Ray) it turns the TV on and switches to the correct input.  Then I turn off the TV when I'm done and it shuts off the Bly-Ray.<p>It all pretty much just works.
 reddit used (and still for the most part uses) postgres as a schemaless storage (although they don't use hstore).<p>Also, I'm pretty sure Heroku uses hstore, because they're the ones that taught me about it.<p>So not <i>everyone</i> forgot about it.
 &#62; Crowd donating is legal. Crowd investing is not; currently, investors must be accredited or qualified.<p>That's not actually true (otherwise you couldn't do a friends and family round).<p>The reason a startup generally wants qualified investors is because the non-qualified ones can sue you if you they lose money, so it is in your best interest not to take their money.
 Am I the only one on HN who thinks this is a bad idea?  I can only see this going one of two ways:<p>- Minimally regulated so that it is easy to get money, but then full of scams.<p>- Heavily regulated so that it is hard to get money, which makes it not much better than the current system.<p>I'd love to see smaller investors able to invest in startups, but it just seems like a bad idea to let any old person invest.<p>Can someone convince me I'm wrong?
 Why would having a bank involved weed out scams if it were impossible for the bank to lose money?<p>This is basically what happened during the mortgage bubble -- the banks lowered their standards because they knew the government would back up the loans.
 &#62; I don't think we should be protecting people from themselves as much as we do as a society<p>That much I do agree with you.  This is definitely a case of the government protecting people from themselves.  Just the same, I'm still not sure it's a good idea because it will give entrepreneurs a bad name, so in a sense, it is protecting that reputation too.
 Back in the days of Old Man Potter, the bank solved this problem by being local and the banker actually <i>was</i> your friend, so he already knew your social graph.
 I use both on my machine.  Safari is my "Facebook" browser -- I use it for Facebook and Facebook alone.<p>Chrome is my everything else browser.  Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar.  I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up, but that's pretty much it.<p>Oh and also because all the google apps just seem to work better on Chrome.<p>I used use Firefox as my everything browser, but it got just too slow.  I mostly only use it for testing and doing front-end development.
 Not officially, no, but I'm sure if google goes to mozilla and says, "hey, we think you guys should support technology X, it's really great" I'm sure you'd listen and probably get a good nudge from the higher ups that, "hey maybe we should listen to those google people".
 You're right that Oakland is in Alameda County, but you're totally wrong about the highway.  Even in morning rush hour it's only 60 minutes from Oakland to SV.  I used to commute from Berkeley to San Jose every day.<p>With no traffic you can totally get from Oakland to the Googleplex in 45 minutes.
 I'm not sure I believe this and here is why:<p>At one point Highscalability covered the reddit architecture, but he didn't actually talk to anyone at reddit about it, and got a lot of it wrong.<p>I tried to contact him and get it fixed, but he never responded to me.<p>So I have to wonder where these numbers are coming from.
 I tried to contact you through the form on your site.  Regardless, I wasn't accusing you of making things up, I was just stating that sometimes you don't use very reliable sources (like blog posts that may also be unreliable).<p>I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!
 This is the best public information about how Netflix works:<p><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/global-netflix-platform" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/global-netflix-platform</a>
 Hey everyone.  I wrote an article for InformationWeek and I was hoping to get some feedback from y'all.  The target audience is CIOs, Technology VPs, etc., so a little bit less savvy than the HN audience.<p>I am looking for feedback specifically on high level topics I might have missed that I should cover next time, things that I didn't explain well, or any other feedback you might have to make this better.<p>Basically, I'm looking for the answer to, "If you worked in  a big company, would you use this article to explain to your CIO what Big Data is?  Why or why not?"<p>Thanks!<p>Here is the article: http://informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232301236
 Thanks.  Is there any way to make it clickable in the text above?  Markdown doesn't seem to work.
 Great, thanks!  I'll try to include more citations of practical examples for the next article.
 Good points about trimming the fat.  The main reason about going into depth was as a teaser for the next article.<p>You're right, I didn't spend enough time driving home the point about mining the data.  I think more examples (as mentioned elsewhere) would have improved that.<p>Thanks for your feedback!
 Let's keep the front page clean.<p>If you find a site that is blacked out, make a comment here, and then folks can discuss it by replying to you.
 <a href="http://reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com</a>
 <a href="http://thedailywtf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://thedailywtf.com/</a>
 <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mozilla.org/</a>
 <a href="http://www.wired.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/</a>
 <a href="http://www.fark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fark.com/</a>
 <a href="http://boards.4chan.org/co/" rel="nofollow">http://boards.4chan.org/co/</a>
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/</a>
 <a href="https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/</a>
 &#62; Vim is for coding.<p>Yes, and a lot more.  I use Vim for all my text editing.<p>I used vim to write my latest blog post.  It would have been (and will be) awesome to do that on my iPad instead.
 We thought about doing that a long time ago, but then figured all you would see is a bunch of comments that were just "." or something similarly useless.<p>There would be no reasonable way to force people to make a <i>useful</i> comment.
 When Digg went belly up, reddit already had double the traffic Digg had at peak.
 This happened to my Dad.  At 61, he has a long resume of experience, but it is experience in a lot of old technologies.  He finally solved the problem though, by moving out of state.<p>Last month, my Dad, a native a Los Angeles who has lived there his entire life, moved to Iowa.  He basically had to find a company that was still running on old technology that actually respected experience.
 They don't pay as well in Iowa, but then again, the cost of living is a <i>lot</i> less.
 Their ters of service make it very clear that they don't delete things when you choose to delete it.  I don't think you'd have much of a claim.
 JD Edwards and a bunch of other stuff I don't even know the name of. :)
 Right after 9/11, I got "randomly selected" just about every time.  This was when they were still calling out the last names of the people who had been selected.<p>It was basically a roll call of Arabic sounding names with a few Jews thrown in for good measure (me) and then usually a Smith or a Jones to make it seem random.
 Los Gatos, CA Netflix<p>Looking for Senior SREs.<p>Basically, we're acting like a new company to take streaming global and make it so convient that it is better than the free options.<p>I'm looking for people to help make sure that any time someone wants to find and play a movie, they can.<p>We're solving lots of really interesting problems, like how do you maintain a reliable service on hardware that is unreliable and you don't control (Amazon Web Services).<p>Our group also gets to help teach other groups how to build for scale.<p>Come join me!<p>You can get more info here: <a href="http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr" rel="nofollow">http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&#38;jvi=olLGVfwr</a>
 They got past that in 2008 and the SEC said it was ok since most of the shareholders were employees.
 Yeah, that wasn't very nice of you.  Now you've basically ruined their low bar filter and made the bar even lower, completely defeating the purpose.
 Well, from a personal point of view, when we did the reddit hiring, it really annoyed us when someone posted their solution to one of the problems, because there were clearly people who were copying the solution to get their cover letter to us.  So then we had to read those letter to determine that no, this person isn't actually qualified, and now we wasted our time (and theirs).<p>So that is where I was saying the harm comes from.  It's not hugely threatening, it's just annoying.
 That's pretty amusing.  Perhaps then I was wrong, and it is less annoying to them than it was to me.<p>&#62; &#60;/reddit_starstruck&#62;<p>I think that gets us both (deservedly) downvoted around these parts. ;)
 Right now Facebook looks just like Google -- almost all the revenue comes from display ads (it's in their S1).<p>And the thing with MS that really blows my mind is that they <i>lost</i> 8 billion dollars on the entertainment division before it became profitable.  Imagine if that had been it's own startup -- it would have never made it as far as it has, because they would have run out of money long before ever being profitable.  So in hindsight, we have to give credit to MS for sticking with it for so long.
 They mentioned that S3 is too slow for customers, so they serve the data from their app and cache it.  Later they mentioned the site is slow for non-US users and they are looking at a CDN for their static assets.<p>I wonder, have they looked at Cloudfront, which would solve both of these problems for them?
 &#62; Why is there a need for so many varnish servers?<p>Probably because a lot of their assets are static image files.
 One of the best ways to determine if you might have apnea is to ask your sleeping partner.  If they complain about you moving around a lot, or making lots of "grunting" noises or noises that sound like you are choking, then you are a good candidate.<p>If you don't have a sleeping partner, use a video camera and record yourself sleeping one night.
 I noticed a few things in the calculaton that bias it towards self hosting:<p>* Using us-west, the more expensive option<p>* Not including labor, which is signifigantly higher if you have to rack and stack yourself.<p>That being said, I agree with the conclusions.  If you're traffic isn't spiky or variable, then you might be better off self hosting.
 I think about it all the time.  Especially at the supermarket when I see the automated checkout line.<p>Then I head directly for the automated checkout line and tell my wife that the main reason I use those is because I like the idea of computers putting unskilled labor out of work, because I'm a bastard like that.<p>All the more reason we need to support education from an early age and more importantly get back to supporting journeyman and trade education -- so we have less unskilled labor.
 The main benefit for me is that because most people are afraid of them or don't see the benefit, the line is shorter.  When the regular line is shorter, I still use them.
 Command-Space opens spotlight, and if you're gonna search, you might as well already have your hand on they keyboard.<p>I actually like it better -- I'm much more likely to activate notifications with a mouse, so I'd much rather have that be the "bigger" target.
 My friends and I used to do a Safeway card swap party once in a while to avoid exactly this.<p>Everyone would throw their Safeway card into a pile and then randomly select one to keep.<p>Not even we knew who's card we had.
 Building a great product is step one.  Marketing it is step two.<p>Zynga is really good at borrowing step one and executing step two, but they're not the only company that does this.
 This actually kind of annoys me.  When I worked in that very same Wired office, I was constantly trying to get the (fairly tech savvy) writers to use git for their drafts and then just push to Wordpress when they had a final version.  They never thought it would work.<p>Well, I'm just glad they finally saw the light.<p>I can't wait until we can convince congress to publish laws this way.  Imagine if you could see which congrescritter made each change with git blame?
 That would be really useful to the community.  You should definitely open source it.
 I don't understand why this has to be queried against a server.  Time zones don't change that much.  Why can't this just be a standalone library download?
 If I want to share a link to your API, and you're using accept headers for versioning, how do share that URL?<p>I think that not only is using accept headers worse, I think it is flat out wrong.  That's not what the accept header is for.  It's for client specific things only.<p>The version of the API you need is NOT client specific.
 Ok, fair enough.  I can see how a web service could be useful.<p>But it seems like in most cases the use case is for an app running on an appserver somewhere, in which case it makes sense to have a library I'd say.
 Once every five years definitely falls in the realm of "download this library again". :)
 I love Sonic.  I wish I could get them at my house in Cupertino (hint hint).  I would drop UVerse without hesitation.<p>We got Sonic for the reddit office and it is awesome. One day, a Sonic rep stopped by, unannounced, just to make sure everything was satisfactory.  It was amazing.
 It's a filtering mechanisim.  If you aren't familiar with Etsy, then you probably aren't the person they're looking for.<p>Much like with reddit, we posted the jobs on the blog because we wanted people familiar with the site.
 Los Gatos, CA Netflix<p>Looking for Senior SREs.<p>Basically, we're acting like a new company to take streaming global and make it so convient that it is better than the free options.<p>I'm looking for people to help make sure that any time someone wants to find and play a movie, they can.<p>We're solving lots of really interesting problems, like how do you maintain a reliable service on hardware that is unreliable and you don't control (Amazon Web Services).<p>Our group also gets to help teach other groups how to build for scale.<p>Come join me!<p>You can get more info here:<p><a href="http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=166</a><p>Or here: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/comments/jyaqd/</a><p>Or here: <a href="https://signup.netflix.com/Jobs?id=oHxbWfw5" rel="nofollow">https://signup.netflix.com/Jobs?id=oHxbWfw5</a>
 Back in the day before "big pharma", medical advances came out of Universities, many of them publicly funded.  I think if the big pharma were cut off at the knees funding-wise, we'd see a resurgence in academic research.<p>Which I personally think is far better, because typically (not always of course) academics will share and collaborate, instead of being in walled gardens.
 Those are the inbound emails, not the outbound.
 As I said on the comments there, I'm excited about this change.  I just hope they gave him sufficient leeway to do what he needs to do.
 There is nowhere in Berkeley that close to the Bay Bridge.  In fact, that has to have been taken in San Francisco, so the caption is clearly wrong.
 Ah, I should have actually looked up what that meant, and my question would have been answered.  Thanks fennecfoxen.
 I do not.  As far as I know they are (and have been) a totally independent company since September.
 Not sure why I wouldn't be. :)  I'm a hacker after all.
 The .02 seconds is how long the actual search took, the rest of it is how long it took for the reddit appserver to respond.<p>You're just seeing slow reddit response times.
 Thank you I think?<p>I don't have a lot of time to update my homepage, so it's basic.  It's way down on the bottom of my todo list to update it at some point but honestly those links will tell you far more about me than anything I could write about myself.
 Well in that case I'm quite honored to be in the same category as Knuth regardless of what category that might be. :)
 My cousin's ex-husband is a pilot for Southwest.  He says he never turns his phone off because it doesn't matter and is a stupid rule.
 You don't break it into toxic and non-toxic.  You break it up by region, so you get small regional banks each with both toxic and non-toxic parts and the don't let them recombine.<p>ie.  Make Bank of America a wet coast only bank again.
 Given that he was 89, it sounds like he lived a long and full life.<p>I was expecting this to be the story of a guy who died young using his own product.  I was glad to see that wasn't the case.
 Couldn't each artist copyright their individual performance though?<p>I know that wouldn't make a difference here, just a tangential question.
 And if you want to consume the fruits of their labor, Netflix is hiring too!  <a href="http://jobs.netflix.com/" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.netflix.com/</a><p>(Sorry Jeff, I couldn't resist)

 Reddit keeps theirs in a wiki: <a href="http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/useragreement" rel="nofollow">http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/useragreement</a>
 The second part of the article was much more interesting, especially the graph at the end.
 It's a follow up to a story earlier, and an example for CEOs of other startups as to how to handle a layoff well.<p>I believe that is why it is relevant.
 Mars Inc doesn't compete in an industry where every employee expects to get shares of the company.
 It always boggles my mind that more people don't know this.  Every presentation I give, I always try to put in a slide about consistent key hashing, because it is one of the easiest things to get right and yet something I see most everyone get wrong (including myself the first time around).
 You just put it back into the system if it doesn't fit.
 I like this game because now I can prove that my house is in a very defensible position for a zombie attack.<p>Also I really liked the use of Google maps and the power that brings, namely being able to zoom in an out and being able to switch to map or satellite mode, both of which were a lot of fun.  And of course it's more fun because I was able to defend my own home!<p>I think I'll play again and defend my childhood home, which is much less defensible.
 What was your build out strategy?  Did you try and do full upgrades before building more, or did you build a bunch and then upgrade?<p>I'm trying your strategy right now and so far full upgrades before building more seems to be working.
 I put that in as a joke years ago.  I can't believe it's still there.
 I'm not a fan of the TSA, but this isn't exactly fair.  To put into perspective that a lot of people here might understand:<p>Hey, Sysadmin person, prove why we should keep paying you!  You sit here all day doing things, and yet nothing has happened to our servers since you got here.  Why do we need you?
 This article makes it sound like relational databases are the pinacle of security.  Sure, they have usernames and passwords and other controls, but the data is still usually stored unencrypted.<p>I don't think putting a few username/password credentials onto the datastore will make it much more secure, especially if I can put those same access controls into a database access layer.<p>In the end you need to defense in depth just like always, and that includes putting access controls, network controls, OS controls and everything else.
 The problem with Austin though is that once a company gets successful, it moves to Silicon Valley, destroying any sense of community Austin might be building.<p>Austin is a great city -- they need to figure out how to get successful people to stay there.
 Yes, it is different.  At the time he wrote that, there was literally one hosted FreeBSD box running all of reddit.  It was called... 1.reddit.com.  Eventually the database had to be moved to a separate machine called... 2.reddit.com.<p>reddit now runs on a few hundred Ubuntu EC2 instances.
 The Facebook deal was only announced today.  It will close in a month.  That month will be partially consumed with due diligence.
 It would be cool if I could see a sample before signing up.
 I've been legal to vote for 17 years, and I've voted in every election since I became legal.  That's about twice a year for 17 years (odd years sometimes only have one), so I probably have around 30ish voting records.
 It's not so bad if you are near any Caltrain or light rail stop, since both stop very close to YC.
 Soon, historians will need to become experts at processing big data so that they can make new discoveries.<p>Protip for the college kids:  If you're a computer science person who really like history, take courses that will teach you how to process large datasets.  Then you can be on the leading edge of historical research!
 Netflix uses all three major CDNs.  The client choses the best one.
 That's not true.  Netflix uses all three major CDNs and the client picks the best one.
 FWIW, I use Kickstarter solely as a way to fund art projects, a sort of modern art patronage system if you will.<p>I've never even considered that the consumer electronics projects are art in their own right.
 Well, I could point you to the presentations at <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/netflix" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/netflix</a>, but the first thing you'd find is my presentation, since I work there. :)<p>None of this is really secret insider information -- you can get it all by Wiresharking your connection, if you have Netflix.<p>Price has nothing to do with it actually.  The client downloads a small file from all the CDNs, and then picks the one with the best response.  If the quality of the connection degrades during playback, it repeats the process.  So "best" is actually the one with the fastest performance at that time.
 I guess I never really thought about it.  I've never gone looking for things to fund -- I've only funded stuff my friends are doing.
 I can totally relate to the part about an article coming out about you where they didn't even bother to contact you.<p>That used to happen at reddit all the time!  I'd see an article about reddit and think, "You know, all you had to do was read our blog if you wanted this to be even remotely accurate!".
 &#62; A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?<p>You can.  You need to become a contractor and only accept 20 hours of work a week.<p>I know that the guy that teaches yoga and step at my gym is a programmer as his "day job".  That's one way to stay healthy.
 (I work for Netflix)<p>It's funny that you mention the Chaos Monkey, considering that Netflix has 24/7 on call programmers for tier 1 support.<p>We do however also make great efforts to make sure that we are resilient as possible to failure of 3rd party services.
 There is a big difference between theory and practice. :)<p>While it is possible to model the large system, usually as a startup you don't have the time to make the model, nor the data to feed the model.<p>Part of the problem is that you don't know what the inputs to the system will be and which inputs will grow exponentially.
 It's not totally straightforward.  You can start here:<p><a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=GOOG+Insider+Roster" rel="nofollow">http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=GOOG+Insider+Roster</a><p>But if you look there you'll see that Sergey currently owns no shares, probably because they're all in a trust.
 On reddit one of the best things about the ads there, which include job postings, are that you can offer constructive feedback on the ad, which actually helps the advertiser better understand the message they are sending.<p>For example, for today's job posting, I'd like to offer them the feedback that "Social Hacking" has some very negative connotations, even amongst the HN crowd, and they may want to reconsider their wording.
 For reference, here is the original blog post on Data Gravity:<p><a href="http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/12/07/data-gravity-in-the-clouds/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/12/07/data-gravity-in-the-clouds...</a>
 That's fair.  But why not at least put public comments on the ones where the company isn't secret?
 I could, but it think it would be better for them if the comment were public, because then other people could reply and explain why my feedback might not be good.
 I think that is valuable feedback to the advertiser. :)
 I think the perks are fine and all, but it is clear to me that Google at least needs to keep some 15in monitors around for testing or something.<p>The new gmail interface is a perfect example -- all that whitespace is great when you have a 30in monitor with thousands of pixels in each direction.  Clearly it was never testing at 1024x768 at 15inches though, like my mother-in-law has on her desk at home.
 As someone who is trying to do hiring right now, I can agree with this.  With all the money flowing into startups right now, it's getting more and more difficult to hire talented people, because they are all (rightfully) working on their own thing.<p>It's definitely better to be an investor right now than someone trying to hire.
 Yes!  Web companies need to spend more time testing on small monitors with slow data links.  The world doesn't all have huge screens and fat pipes.
 We look all over the country, but Netflix (where I work and hire for) doesn't really do remote employees, so we ask them to move to Los Gatos.  Unfortunately this means we are looking at people who are already willing to move.
 Since we're all sharing our LaTex resumes:<p><a href="http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html</a><p>My resume and source code are both on there.
 #1 Neither are doctors.<p>#2 Yes you are.  It's called StackOverflow and a million other sites on the internet where you can google for an answer to your question.
 Most of these apply to politicians too.
 That's why I asked them to send me the documents ahead of time.  I spent the night before signing reading all the documents.<p>They said I was the first person to ever ask. :/
 It's a privacy issue.<p>Imagine I'm an Evil Doer(tm) and I decide to go to a porn site and download "Sick fetishes 3" just so I can publish the list of IP addresses that were part of my BT swarm.<p>With BT right now, you as a user are probably savvy enough to know that risk and accept it, but if it was built right into the the browser, a lot of bad things could happen.<p>It's too bad too, because I'd love to see a much bigger adoption of BT.
 I think you have some malware.  As far as I know Netflix doesn't use popunders or overs.
 &#62; It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".<p>This is what makes me miss working at reddit.
 This practice is illegal in the US.  A teacher can't take money for tutoring from their current students.
 &#62;  and pay nothing into FICA/medicare<p>They also don't get any benefits from FICA and medicare.  That pension they pay into is supposed to cover all of that but costs more than FICA and Medicare.<p>And much like a teacher "gets off work at 3pm" they do in fact work year round.  They may not be in the classroom, but in the summer they are usually going to workshops and conferences and doing long term lesson planning for the coming year.
 The problem with college education in America is that we have stigmatized vocational school.<p>Some people just aren't meant to be academics, and that's fine.  They will never excel at school.  So let's teach them something that is useful to society like plumbing or electrical of HVAC.<p>And now for an anecdote:  I was paying a plumber for a job once, and after I handed him $1000 for the 4 hours of work he had done, he told me that his kid (who had been his apprentice for the job) was in college on a sports scholarship, but planned on taking over the family plumbing business upon graduation because it was far more lucrative than anything he'd be able to get with his college degree in humanities.
 Here are some question for PG (or any of the YC partners):<p>How many of the YC founders are college dropouts?<p>How many of the YC founders that had successful (by whatever definition you'd like) exits were college dropouts?<p>And lastly, how do you feel about college education in general?  Do you agree with Thiel, that it is not a good use of time and money?  Is college education a big factor when choosing companies for YC?
 This is a fair point -- if vocational school were more widely promoted, there would be more people with vocational training and the wages would go down.  However, I still think it would settle into a reasonable level of compensation, and regardless, there will always be a base level of demand to be met as long as we keep using electricity and indoor plumbing.
 The stats are more of an interesting anecdote than data, but they are still interesting none the less.
 Ah my past comes back to haunt me!  I guess that's what I get for linking to it on my website.<p>Yes, I agree that I would have never learned what I did about computers if I hadn't had a chance to play with them like I did at Berkeley.
 You're missing the point.  The versioning isn't to help me determine the meaning.<p>The point of the versioning is so that I can see which representative made which change, and from there derive which ones actually have my best interest in mind.
 Because bitcoins are almost worthless since they are hard to convert into anything useful like web hosting or USD to pay lobbiests and other such folk?
 I'm looking for specifics on tools and workflows you might use.<p>I currently use Evernote to maintain my todos and tasks in a somewhat GTD way (I basically did this when it was on HN before http://ruudhein.com/evernote-gtd).<p>The problem is that I have two email solutions (gmail for personal and Outlook for work) and a lot of the emails I get become tasks.  I want to keep the context of the email, so ideally I want a way to keep the whole thread, including updates.<p>For gmail I can copy/paste a link to the thread.  I haven't found a good solution for Outlook yet (it should be noted that I can use any imap solution, so using another client is an option).<p>So, HN, how do you unify your email and tasks?
 My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork. RIP Mr. Bradbury.
 Your calculation doesn't account for the artificial barriers that some ISPs put up by charging the CDNs to peer with them (see Comcast and Level 3).
 They have that already:<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/</a>
 I'm pretty sure I was able to get one of these yesterday.  Or did they just rev the specs?

 This is super exciting for most AWS users, who had to solve this problem in some sort of "hacky" way.
 It would be great if there were a link to a primer on control and how it differs from ownership and how it is calculated.
 It just made me sleepy, not creeped out.
 I agree completely.  Every time I do a talk on Big Data, especially to practitioners, I throw in a little speech about how sharing medical data could lead to one of the greatest periods of medical advancement ever.<p>The hard part is getting the privacy right.
 I love sonic. We used them for the reddit office. They were the cheapest and fastest option.  Once one of their reps stopped by just to say hi and make sure we were happy.<p>I've been begging them to let me give them money for my home connection.
 Someone suggested we flip out affiliate links for our own on reddit. We thought that would be pretty evil.
 Maybe she threatened to leave if they didn't give her a seat on the board, now that she's got the billion in stock.
 Tomorrow, June 30th, a leap second will be added just before midnight UTC (5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern)<p>Most standard date libraries handle this edge case, but if you are doing any of your own hand rolled date/time processing, you might want to make sure you can handle this edge case (the existence of 23:59:60).<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
 Los Gatos, CA, Netflix<p>We have a ton of jobs open, but I'm particularly looking for Site Reliability Engineers.  After yesterday's Amazon outage, you can see we still have some work to do.<p>Looking for someone who can code who also has experience driving unix.  At the interview we ask you to code on the whiteboard and also tell us how to troubleshoot Linux.<p>Netflix is an awesome place to work with lots of smart people and top of market pay (and free movies!).<p><a href="http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=oHxbWfw5" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=oHxbWfw5</a>
 I'm pretty sure the entire site is built on the premise of "I don't like screencasts because I think faster than they talk and get frustrated waiting for them to finish".<p>Given that premise, audio and video would completely defeat the point.
 Paul, I'm sure your skills are top notch, but even you have to admit that the problem you solved -- a globally available write only system -- is a totally different problem than the one Netflix is solving, which is a read/write workload.<p>Also, as someone who was a user of your globally available service, I can tell you that while it might have been UP all the time, it certainly had no problems losing data all the time too.  Some months there was just simply no data for reddit at all, even though we were sending the service more than a billion data points.<p>So we could sit here and sling insults all day, or you can operate under the assumption I do -- that each of is a competent engineer who works for a business that has to make decisions and tradeoffs between costs and reliability.
 Compete just makes numbers up.  Those uniques are so far off for reddit it isn't even funny.
 I think his point is that you have to have money to be a rock star because even if you are amazingly good at 
 {music,programming} you still need food and shelter before you can practice your craft.
 The problem is the conflation of security and identity. You need security to guarantee identity, but not the other way around. I see no reason that we can't have encrypted connections without identity.<p>Ssh has basically solved this.  If you're like 99% of ssh users, you just accept the key the server gave you without verification. Your browser could do the same on the web -- just accept the server certificate and then indicate to you that the connection is secure but the servers identity is not verified.<p>This solves pretty much all the issues you bring up.<p>And if http 2 required it,then even better, because all the server would support it and all the clients would too.
 &#62; If your browser will accept the certificate that the server presents, anyone can pretend to be anyone and your browser will accept it.<p>Yes but at least the data is protected from eavesdroppers that don't control any hardware in the line of the connection, which is better than nothing.
 Wasn't there a movie with Paul Rudd based on this premise?
 Except that if I want to accept a self signed certificate I have to click 6 times through scary warning screens.<p>And that is a good thing because that cert is for both encryption and identity.<p>If it were JUST for encryption, there'd be no issue just auto accepting that certificate.
 Seconded.  Compete's numbers are just made up.  I know for sure they are off by more than an order of magnitude for reddit (or at least were a year ago).
 I've used them and they are quite performant.  Definitely lives up to its promise.
 The one that comes to mind is that you want to do a map/reduce job and need a large and fast working space to do the reductions.<p>Otherwise, as noted below, the most likely use case is in a reserved situation running Cassandra or Postgres or something.

 It's not just random I/O that's fast, but sequential is a lot faster too.<p>But what I'm thinking of is the tokenization of a large corpus of text into bigrams and trigrams for example.
 Netflix got a huge performance boost for Cassandra using the SSD instances:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4264888" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4264888</a>
 The whole volume is SSD.
 That would be a really bad idea unless you have real-time replication to another server.  SSD or not, you don't want to write data to the ephemeral store without a real-time backup, unless you're willing to lose it all.
 They're not off to a good start.  I just spent 10 minutes filling out the text boxes on page two, and it just lost all of that info.<p>I hope the site works better than the survey.
 I just filled it out again and it worked.  I think I got hosed because you changed the survey while I was taking it. :)
 &#62; This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.<p>I'm gonna have to disagree with you there.  It's a fairly complex transactional system.<p>&#62; One man can write a half-decent one in a week.<p>No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :)<p>&#62; And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.<p>That one I'll agree with.  Their initial scaling problems should be fairly well understood.
 Unsubscribe from the defaults and your experience will be much improved.
 &#62; That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.<p>That's either ignorant or boastful (or both).  Any decent programmer will admit that they can't build a good and scalable <i>anything</i> in a week from scratch.<p>If you count your "toolset" as an entire framework that does what you want already, then sure, maybe it's possible.  Otherwise you're just being foolish.
 So you know what to expect when you walk outside.
 &#62; Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care!<p>I don't think people realize how rarely we talked about or looked at Digg in the reddit office.  Every time I see founders who have a screen in their office dedicated to their competitors website I cry a little inside.  Luckily it doesn't seem to happen often.
 Somewhat unrelated tip:  The font on this blog is too small. I just measured and it is taking up only 20% of my screen.<p>I'd suggest a bigger font to make it more readable.  Over 85% of people use a screen bigger than 1024x768 [1].  Take advantage of that. :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp</a>
 I'm pretty sure their survey data comes from lots of websites, not just theirs.
 I concede the point.  I'm definitely wrong.
 If going back to the moon to examine the condition of the flags is the excuse we need to go back, then I'm all for it!  I just hope they do some real science while they are there.
 We actually have those too.  Right now in fact we're doing a series of latency simulations.
 You are mostly correct.  The infrastructure isn't <i>completely</i> out of our control, but it is indeed provided by a 3rd party.<p>By creating faults it means we know we can handle those types of outages.<p>As we experience new types of faults, we build tools and systems to make us resilient to those types of faults, and where possible similar but yet unexperienced faults.
 If this were reddit, I'd link to that meme about doing testing in production.<p>Since this is HN, I'll instead say that if you don't have the guts, you're only lulling yourself into a false sense of security.  AWS or not, your systems <i>will</i> fail.<p>By running the monkey, at least you can make it fail on a schedule that is convenient to you, instead of happening when you're drunk on a Saturday night (or whatever your vice of choice might be).
 I work on site reliability.<p>As for all the rest, I'm unfortunately not in a position to answer any of that. Adrian's probably right though.  I suspect our content licenses would preclude that type of account.
 What about all the lives your work might <i>save</i>?  What if you figure out how to crack the encryption of a network of evil doers so that the next bombing of civilians is prevented?
 How could we possibly know, given that most of the operations are I assume clandestine and we'll never hear about them, positive or negative?<p>For some anecdotal evidence, I worked with a guy who was a colonel in the Army reserve.  He was called up a few years ago to head up a base in Africa.  His mission?  To bring food and water to the citizens there.  The army was doing this because they had to fight off the warlords who would try and steal the aid that was being provided.<p>So sure, you hear about a whole bunch of things the government is doing that is evil, and I'll be the first to stand with you and agree, but there is a lot of good being done too.<p>Imagine if the NSA had intercepted the plans for 9/11 and been allowed to stop it.  3000+ lives would have been saved, and you would have never ever heard about it.
 I think his issue was that the meeting was in bad faith.  He was under the impression that he would be demoing his technology so it could get visibility within Facebook, not walking into a negotiation.<p>If they had been upfront about their intentions with the meeting, he probably would have never gone.<p><pre><code>  What do you think the purpose of the “platform developer relations” executive is?
  To advocate AGAINST Facebook and for random outside developers?
 </code></pre>
 Actually, yes.  Usually that is what someone in that position does.  They are the advocate for the customer, to help the company see things from the customer's point of view.
 His time is presumably valuable to him. The cost was his time.  Time he could have spent building his product.
 I think CNN covered it, but you're right, it would have been nice if it were on at least one major network.
 It probably has more to do with the fact that Infogami's other founder has said since the beginning that he was a sole founder, and never once mentioned a co-founder.
 I'm familiar with this one and folks seem to like it, but it hasn't been updated in a while:<p>https://bitbucket.org/akoha/django-lean/wiki/Home<p>What do folks using Django like these days?
 Why only startups?  Wouldn't it be interesting to know what non-startups use?<p>I can see how it wouldn't be all that useful to have a full stack of Oracle and Peoplesoft, but a lot of big companies are built on the same stuff that startups use.
 &#62; That said, the Apollo missions took a not-very-modified Hasselblad camera with them that worked fine, which is why we have much higher resolution pictures of the moon, despite it being decades ago.<p>That and the fact that they used sneakernet, which is still much higher bandwidth than wireless, especially in space.
 The other day when IV came up, I decided to check out their Careers page.  My mission was threefold:<p>1) See what kind of people they like to hire and what they claim those people will be doing.<p>2) See what their mission statement and recruiting copy looked like.<p>3) See if there was a job that I could apply to, not because I have any interest at all in working there, but because I thought detailed notes of the process might make a good blog post.<p>1 was pretty generic -- generally just lawyers to do lawyer things, and a few engineers and project managers for some nebulous "projects.<p>3 didn't really lead me anywhere -- I couldn't find a position that I could apply to to even get offered an interview.<p>2 was the most interesting.  Reading their website, it sounds like what they are doing is trying to make the world  better by helping inventors get their inventions out and defending poor inventors who have great ideas but are being crushed by big companies.<p>I really really hoped that they aren't so delusional that they actually believe their own hype, but I fear that they are and they do.
 It certainly doesn't help their argument that they are independent of Facebook.
 I've been using LaTex for my resume[1] for years, and I always get compliments on how "professional" it looks.<p>You can see the resume and source code here if anyone is interested:
 [1]<a href="http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html</a>
 Thanks for the feedback.  I've been meaning to update the website, but it's pretty low on the priority list.
 Yeah, that is another advantage.  I use a combo of commenting things out and storing all the changes in git, so I can easily pull back old stuff if I need to for some reason.<p>Git and LaTex play nicely together.
 That's why I published the source.  Because it took me hours to find all the docs for all the different parts and put it all together.  I figured I could help others out.  I'm glad I was right!
 Quite possibly.  Certainly doesn't hurt!
 It's interesting that Apple, despite their success, is basically in the same place as it was -- having a software company beat them by making an OS that runs on myriad hardware.
 One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes.  That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members.<p>To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into the hands of the older users.  However, HN has a different philosophy and it might make sense here.<p>To say it one more time, reddit doesn't do this and never did.
 This is an excellent opportunity for the Postgres community to step up an promote Postgres.
 That would be an ideal case, but turns out to be extremely difficult at scale.
 I had a professor, way back in the early 00s, who was helping solve this problem.  We had no textbook in the class.  Instead, our readings were all recently published papers.  On the class website he linked to all the papers so we could download and print them if we wanted to.  He also negotiated with the author of each paper for the rights to reprint the paper.  You could buy the "textbook", which was just a bound photocopy of the papers, for $10 (the cost of printing).<p>If more professors did this, then the problem would be solved.
 I'm curious as to what deficiencies reddit has that made you choose to create a site like this.  In other words, what features would reddit need to make you think that reddit solves the problem sufficiently?
 That does't actually answer the question at all. :)  You could easily accomplish that on reddit with some simple moderation.  What actually makes this different?<p>Note, I'm not just trying to be negative, I'm truly curious as to how this is different.
 HN has different technology that allows for unique moderation that creates a different community.
 Generally the changes are good, but I'm seeing one side effect.  Some workers in that group feel so entitled that they feel like they can just come in and work on what they want when they want.  If you say "here is a goal for the company" they say "eh, not interested" and feel like you owe it to them to let them keep their job.
 I love this product.  It makes a hard concept easy, it looks pretty, and it's fast.<p>I can't wait to see what this team does next!
 Having seen the demos yesterday, I can tell you that you will get "blackout" if you play.<p>However, I also want to note that this was the best set of presentations I've ever seen at a demo day.<p>Sure they use a lot of the same words and phrases, but that's because they are all trying to communicate the same thing in just 2 minutes:  We're awesome and you should give us money to be more awesome.
 After you do this for a while, please please release your data.  I'd love to see what kind of influence the star has on things, and the variation between least popular and most popular.
 &#62; Correlated with being the best batch yet!<p>I very specifically didn't say that. ;)<p>I know you probably meant it in jest, but really each batch has some great folks in it, and no batch is really "better" than any other.  I wouldn't want anyone else to get a complex, since startup founders can be a sensitive bunch. :D
 I did in fact seek out the founder of 9Gag to talk to him.  He didn't know who I was.<p>He's a nice guy with good intentions.
 Yeah, that completely threw me off.  I thought I clicked the wrong menu item, closed it, did it again, and was thoroughly confused.
 It hasn't slowed us down at Netflix.  :)  In fact what it has done is caused us to be really good about separating what needs auditing from what doesn't, so that only a very minimal set of services has to have separations and release processes that are in line with SOX controls.
 Los Gatos, CA -- Netflix<p>I'm still looking for an SRE for my team to help with our mission of keeping the largest internet TV network online 24/7/365 using one of the biggest Amazon EC2 installations.<p>We also have lots of other jobs open from DevOps to machine learning.<p><a href="http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.html" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.html</a>
 &#62; It has "thing"/"data" tables for every subreddit - created on the fly (a crime for which any DBA would have you put to death, normally).<p>That's not correct.  There in't "table" for a subreddit.  There is a thing/data pair that stores metadata about a subreddit, and there is a thing/data pair for storing links.  One of the properties of a link is the subreddit that it is in.  Same with the comments.  There is one thing/data pair for comments and the subreddit it is in is a property.<p>&#62; They'd very likely have done so themselves if NoSQL products were mature when they first developed their platform (I am vaguely recalling/guessing here on that one).<p>Actually, still today I tell people that even if you want to do key/value, postgres is faster than any NoSql product currently available for doing key/value.
 See my comment here:  <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468905" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468905</a><p>There isn't one table per subreddit.<p>I'm not a current dev, FYI, I left a year ago.  But as far I know, it still works the same way as a year ago.  Which is the same as it worked 3 years ago.
 You are correct that reddit has a fixed number of tables (waves hands a bit).  There is one table per type, so when a new type is created, a new table is created.  That rarely happens.<p>The reason you see those create statements in the code is for bootstrapping for open source users -- the first time they run reddit, it creates the tables.
 My wife has a 4 and I have a 4s.  Sometimes we'll both be looking up the same thing (like an address) and my phone will be done much faster than hers.  So while it is hard to tell the speed difference independently, side by side it is quite obvious.
 I think you're the one who is mistaken.  Amazon has multiple database products.  S3 is one of them.  In fact, some of the folks who developed S3 also developed BigTable for Google.<p>Dynamo is a new database product they have that is also a key value store.
 Neither of those things prevents something from being a database.<p>S3 is an excellent key/value store for large values.  It's also publicly available, which is nice.<p>For example, all the thumbnail images on reddit are stored in S3.  Essentially the client is given the key and then they can go look up the value themselves, and since it is publicly available http, it works right there in the browser.
 Mostly because it doesn't seem to have a very vocal community behind it.<p>It is a really solid product, and some folks have built their entire business on it.<p>It's also used a lot in enterprise setups, but again, those folks don't typically go around talking about it.<p>Since it isn't a hot new trend, it stays off the radar of a lot of "startup" folks.
 Yes, I've read the Dynamo paper too and I know all about it's history at Amazon.  I give talks on this subject all the time.<p>My point was that you're being short sighted by taking away the credibility of the author for calling S3 a database, which many people do, and especially did in 2010.
 People read it, they just ignored it because it was the hot new thing, and now they're getting their comeuppance.
 Alright, I can give you a better example.  Netflix uses S3 to store movies that haven't been rendered yet.  It's definitely a database.  The server says "I need to render this movie to the iPhone format, what are the movie bits" and the "database" (S3) returns the entire movie.<p>Also, I would argue that static content delivery is just another form of database.  It's just a massive key/value store, there the keys are the files and the values are the contents of the keys.<p>Let me ask you this:  What is <i>your</i> definition of a database?
 Here's the worst part -- as far as the IRS is concerned, that money is considered income and anything you don't spend in the same calendar year is considered profit and is taxed as such.<p>So after a year, assuming you spend no money at all, you'd still be in the hole to pay back your backers.<p>I personally only use Kickstarter to play "patron of the arts".  I fund art projects with the assumption that I will get nothing in return.  If I'm lucky, I get some nice art to enjoy (so far one of the projects has come to fruition, where I backed the recording and distribution of an a cappella album, and recently got my CD).
 Most of the folks on Kickstarter don't have the necessary business entities set up to take advantage of that.
 My favorite part of this whole writeup was:<p>"Epilogue: They each blame the other for the increased bill they're receiving from Amazon, leading to a breakdown in their relationship, and they get divorced a few months later. It was inevitable anyway: Cryptographers never really trust anyone."<p>Other than that, I think this whole post is spot on.  The product pricing is clearly not in line with everything else they do.
 What is the purpose of this website?  The landing page doesn't make it very clear why I might want to sign up.<p>Poking around the about page I found a link to the founder's status chart (why isn't that link on the main page as a sample?) and at least I can see what it does, but it seems like it would only be useful for folks who attend a lot of meetups or do a lot of conferences.<p>As it turns out I'm one of those people, but I'm still not quite sure why I might want to use this.
 I'm not sure if you're trying to be ironic or you really don't know that Exchange is just a (mostly) RFC compliant SMTP server and a (mostly) RFC compliant IMAP server rolled into one.
 &#62; My point was that Exchange is not compliant enough to be usable from a non-Outlook email client.<p>Well, you kind of have a point there.  I use Apple mail and iCal against our corporate Exchange, but when I have to schedule a meeting, I either have to log into the Windows terminal server or use the outlook web interface to do it reliably.<p>It would be nice if there were an RFC for calendaring protocols, even if that RFC was just codifying Exchange.
 It would be great if some of the stuff on the about page were on the main page instead (or also).<p>I would humbly suggest that at the very least you put an explicit link to your own status chart on the main page.<p>I realize that that image in the middle is clickable, but the fact that you can click on it is not readily discoverable (I only noticed when I went back to see if you added more copy yet :) ).
 Right, but CalDAV doesn't seem to support everything.  Or to put it another way, using a CalDAV client and using actual Exchange don't get the same results.
 But yet somehow banks stay in business while being legally barred from these same protections.
 When someone ships drugs via UPS, do you blame the drug dealer or UPS?<p>How could reddit possibly have monitored all that content?<p>Parents need to take more responsibility for the actions of their kids.
 Alexis was the less technical one, but make no mistake: he's no slouch when it comes to technology.
 &#62; Is PagerDuty worth it for $18 per month?<p>Yes.  We use them at Netflix.<p>The real value that they add is they take care of the edge cases you haven't thought of yet. :)
 I wanted to try the demo, but I'm not sure what to do with it.  I loaded up my resume, but since typesetting is disabled, what exactly am I "demoing" other than an input field?
 It's not as good as the native maps app.  In fact, I was just using it today.  It's still slow and buggy (doesn't respond to all the taps).
 People keep saying this, but it isn't anywhere close.  The web interface is buggy (it doesn't respond to all the clicks) and much more importantly, if you click on an address in any other app, it will take you to Apple maps.<p>A good chunk of my navigating is looking up addresses in other apps (like Yelp) and then clicking on them.<p>This is now horribly broken and there is no workaround.
 No, but since HN has a policy of using only the author's title, the OP can't change it.
 &#62; However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.<p>You'd probably be surprised.  I know I was surprised when I got to college and found more football fans amongst my engineer friends than my humanities friends.<p>It turns out the game is very complex and deep and discussing strategy can be quite interesting.<p>I wasn't a football fan when I arrived in college, but I was when I left.
 &#62; Hearing someone accurately predict what's going to happen before the ball is snapped, and then explain why (e.g. "they ran it up the gut because the linebacker had his weight back on his heels") really opened my eyes to the depth<p>I dunno, it feels like having every play predicted might get annoying. :)<p>But yes, I too was enamored by the depth and strategy that I started picking up using friend's extra tickets and hanging out on "tightwad hill", which is a place above the stadium where you can watch free Cal games.
 I've read/heard a lot about how the best way to get people to vote is by showing them which of their friends and neighbors are voting (it is all public record).<p>That being said, I honestly don't want to encourage people to vote who haven't done the research.  The last thing we need is a flood of uninformed voters.<p>When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California, it was pathetic.  They would interview people who were in line to vote and ask them who they were voting for.  They would say "Schwarzenegger" and when asked why, they would say, "because he's in that movie I like!"  No joke.  And they were proud of that response!<p>So I honestly don't know how I fee about this.  Yes, I personally go out of my way to encourage others to vote, but I only encourage people who I think are informed, intelligent voters.
 This is a brilliant strategy on Google's part.  Wait until enough people are unhappy, make them really miss Google, and then release it.  Suddenly, it becomes the number 1 app in the app store and really puts egg on Apple's face.
 Netflix<p>Los Gatos, CA<p>I'm still looking for SREs who want to help me run the biggest subscription internet video service on the planet with better reliability than the cable providers.<p>If you're interested mail [email protected] and tell them you saw my post on Hacker News.<p>Here's the official job link:  <a href="http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=NFX00315" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.netflix.com/jobsListing.html?id=NFX00315</a>
 Main way we solve IO issues:  We don't rely on EBS -- most data is stored on the local drives using Cassandra.<p>For cache throughput, our cache library adds zone affinity to memcache, so the clients are hitting the cache in the same zone first.<p>Also, we're now exploring their SSD options (<a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-performance-io-with.html" rel="nofollow">http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-perfor...</a>)
 I go to Notman House pretty much every time I'm in Montreal, and I learn something new every time.  It is definitely a very cool hacker space, and I highly encourage anyone who wants to see a thriving community <i>outside</i> of Silicon Valley to donate!  (I just did)
 In summary:  Make sure your sample size is large enough so that it is possible to get a statistically significant result.
 I'm glad to see them upholding the principles of free speech and expression that we fostered in the first few years.<p>I always told people, my job is to provide a platform, not be a tastemaker.  It is up to the users to be the tastemakers.
 &#62; In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.<p>What if they just plateaued and didn't really go beyond what you had done when you were there, and this is totally accurate to today?
 When I was kid, my flashcard routine was this:<p>Show the card.  If it is right it goes to the done pile, if it is wrong, it goes to the back of the current pile.  Repeat until there is nothing left in the current pile.<p>Then do the same thing the next day.  We did this until I could get through the entire pile in one try.<p>This method seems overly complicated for both child and parent.
 Yes, of course.  Any illegal content was removed without hesitation.  But we're talking about legal but distasteful content.
 &#62; Your system would have him spending 33x as much effort maintaining that knowledge as what we're currently doing. A factor of 33 is worth some bookkeeping on my part.<p>I will grant you that.  We only used this strategy for the times tables up to 12x12, which has a finite set of cards (144 if I remember my facts correctly :) ).<p>If I wanted to do an ever growing set, I might consider this method.<p>&#62; And, according to the research, long-term retention is worse.<p>Can you point me at some good research on this area? I believe you, I'd just like to read more, as someone who is interested in this sort of thing.
 Nano sales should pick up around Xmas time, because those seem to be what parents give to kids instead of smart phones (source: my wife is a 4th grade teacher and a bunch of kids seem to have them).
 I have to hand it to the Hollywood marketing machine here.<p>This article was written in 2007 and tells a story I had never heard.<p>Today I read the article and thought "wow, what an interesting story.  Might even make a good movie".<p>Then I came here and read the comments and found out it <i>was</i> made into a movie that was released last week.<p>Tomatometer gives it a 95% -- I'm probably going to see it now.
 Am I the only one who thinks this was someone's homework assignment?
 &#62; try to make up for it by getting 8-10 on the weekends, but that rarely works with children (It's hard to be mad when two little kids jump on your head to wake you up because they want to play).<p>Are my parents the only ones that locked their door at night?  My brother and I couldn't wake them in the morning, because we couldn't get in.  We learned at a very early age to entertain ourselves until Mom and Dad got up.<p>I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, I'm just saying that it seems like no one thinks of this solution. :)<p>I see this complaint quite often about the kids being bothersome in the morning and when I tell people about the "door lock" it seems to blow their mind.
 The only reason Windows XP "suddenly" became popular is because the next version of Windows that came out was so bad that everyone finally capitulated.

 I know I referred to myself in the third person, but it was easier than expecting people to look at the username. :)<p>Also, if you're attending or watching at home and there is something specific you're hoping I will cover, tell me here in the comments and I'll do my best to cover it!
 I can cover the rest in the talk, but I just want to comment that the Postgres object-blob store (as you describe it :) ) was not only NOT a disaster, but one of the strongest parts of the persistence layer.
 I'll cover that in the talk, since I'm sure others would like to hear the answer as well.  Thanks for the suggestion!  If I don't cover it sufficiently, you can hit me up for more info.
 A lot of it was EBS and also the replication system, which turned out to be breaking due to a bug in our own code when the whole thing slowed down due to EBS.<p>As a side note, things have been much better, from what I hear, since they moved to local storage.  Things work much better here at Netflix for the same reason.<p>I haven't had much of a chance to play with the new Provisioned IOPS much, but from what I've seen that is a pretty solid storage solution.
 &#62; In practise this didn't happen very often, I can only think of a few occasions off-hand, and generally the master's disk lag was so bad that a downed slave was the least of our problems.<p>It got progressively worse as time went on the EBS performance got worse.  It was happening every couple of weeks after you left, and I think it got even worse after that.<p>Luckily we had dug into the londiste internals and managed to figure out how to restore replication much faster, but that was still super painful. :)<p>But you're right, the disk lag usually caused the immediate problem -- the out of sync slave was usually pretty easy to deal with, depending on how many got out of sync at once.  It was just annoying and time consuming.
 I've had nothing to do with reddit's operations for about 16 months now. I didn't even know it was down today. :)
 We all see each other from time to time, often at events thrown by the current reddit folks.
 Have I wronged you in the past?  I ask because pretty much every time there is a thread about reddit or Netflix tech that I comment on, there you are slinging insults at me (which are incorrect, BTW).<p>I'd love to know what I did to harm you so that I can apologize.<p>Or do you just like giving me a hard time for the lulz?
 Ah, alright then.  Looks like danilocampos was right.<p>My mistake! :)
 It's funny, I was going to put my username in the title, but that just seemed a little too ... much.
 We (Netflix) have done a bunch of presentations on it which are on our slideshare page and across the internet.<p>After this issue is over I can give a longer answer.  In short, we've just evacuated the affected zone and are mostly recovered.

 Actually, that is completely true.  I was trying to post a link to my Airbnb talk, noticed reddit was down, and then noticed Airbnb was down too.<p>One thing we might start doing is actually having alarms when two or more major AWS sites go down.
 <a href="https://www.airbnb.com/techtalks" rel="nofollow">https://www.airbnb.com/techtalks</a>
 It would certainly make reservations a lot more important.
 Suggestion:  It would be great to have a page on your website that explains why RethinkDB is better than the other prevailing options.  Right now I don't know why I'd want to invest time setting up yet another database.
 I wouldn't consider someone with an MBA a black mark, but the author hits the nail on the head -- an early stage startup needs someone who can execute, not just come up with ideas.<p>If that person with the MBA has the skills and more importantly the <i>desire</i> to get in an get their hands dirty executing on their own ideas, then great!  But from my experience, most MBAs want to come up with the ideas and want others to execute them.
 For the ubernerd, we have this too: <a href="https://github.com/netflix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/netflix</a>
 We're mostly a Java company, but certainly not only a Java company.<p>We have a core of folks who use Python (like me), we just haven't open sourced any of it yet.
 This proposal is really important to cross platform vendor agnostic support:<p><a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html" rel="nofollow">http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-medi...</a>
 You'd probably like this interface better:  <a href="https://github.com/netflix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/netflix</a>
 This proposal is really important to cross platform vendor agnostic support:<p><a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html" rel="nofollow">http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-medi...</a>
 When you stream a movie in HD, it buffers up about 30 seconds worth of data, so if the connection slows down, you won't notice.<p>When doing a live video conference, you can only have about a 1 to 2 second buffer before the connection becomes unusably laggy.
 About two years ago I signed up for UVerse.  There was no modem fee.  6 months later, there was a $2 fee.  Six months again, $4.  And then 6 months later it was $6.<p>At that point I actually noticed the fee (I hadn't really looked before that) and so I went in to complain.  Here was basically my conversation:<p>Why did you raise the modem fee in January?<p>Because we hadn't raised it in a while?<p>Did you give me better service?<p>No.<p>How do you justify raising the fee on old equipment?<p>Because we hadn't raised it in a while.<p>But my equipment is getting older and less valuable<p>Oh, is your modem broken?  Do you want a new one?<p>No!  I just want to know how you justify raising the rates on equipment that is unchanged on service that is unchanged.  You raised your rate and provided no additional benefit to me and your costs actually went down.<p>Because we hadn't raised it in a while.<p>That's when I left.
 I was hoping this would be a way for me to choose which files I sync to which machines.
 If you have a mac, you can use this:<p><a href="http://www.sandwichlab.net/websaver/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sandwichlab.net/websaver/</a>
 I would give them lots of money if they would offer service in my area. :(<p>I loved them when I used them in SF.
 I actually paid Speakeasy more money for many years because the service was so much better.  I had to give them up too when I moved. :(<p>Sadly, my house is 12K feet past a remote terminal, so it is unlikely I'll be able to get anything other than UVerse or Comcast for a long time.
 Whenever anyone asks me about autoscaling, I always point out that making the autoscaling rules is more art than science.  There is a lot of trial and error, but in the end you have to kind of go with your gut on what the business needs.
 When the reddit team was 4 people, we would preference towards flights with wifi when we all had to go somewhere, because we wanted to be able to fix the site if it broke.<p>Also, when programming, I find I'm much more productive when I have the internet available for looking up docs, getting libraries, etc.
 I met David a few weeks ago to talk about patents and software.  I have to say that coming out of that meeting I felt a lot better about things than going in.<p>He has good intentions.  He worked hard to get provisions in the new law that would allow his office to fix the most egregious problems.<p>They are opening the first satellite patent office in San Jose specifically to address software and technology hardware patents.<p>I have to agree with him -- we need to give the new laws a chance to work.  They just went into effect a few months ago.
 Part of the problem is that there isn't just one Android, there are many, and they all behave just slightly differently.  Testing on Android is a nightmare because of this.<p>I wish Google would make some efforts at fixing this problem -- it's the same problem Microsoft had with Windows.  Windows on each piece of hardware was just slightly different and made testing just as hard.<p>Google, please learn Microsoft's lesson and make this easier for developers.
 If you look at the credentials of all the YC founders, it is undeniable that there is a bias towards folks with prestigious degrees, but the question is, is that bias causal?  There are plenty of successful founders without the degrees too, so at best I would say it is correlative.
 This is great!  I always thought the $150k was too much of a runway.  It allowed the poor startups to limp along for too long.<p>And besides, the real value from these investments isn't the money, it is the mindshare you get with the VCs.  This will help make that mindshare greater.
 It's often hard to step out and see that the idea just doesn't have legs, especially if you've invested so much of your time and effort into it.<p>When you come to the end of that runway, you need to make a hard decision.<p>Also, when you change plans, you can look for new investment in the new idea.  The assumption is that if you can't get follow on funding for your current idea, then it really is in your interest to come to the end of that runway sooner so you can be forced to make that hard decision and focus your efforts elsewhere.
 Netflix -- Los Gatos, CA<p>Looking for a couple of SREs to fill out our team.  The job is a combination of architecture, coding and evangelism of best practices.  Our team writes monitoring and alerting tools, runs reliability exercises and also act as call leaders for outages.<p>Skills required:  Ability to code.  We use mostly Python, so experience there is a plus.  Good communication, calm under pressure and the ability to quick grasp how all the pieces of a large complex system fit together.<p>Check out our github page (<a href="https://gitub.com/netflix" rel="nofollow">https://gitub.com/netflix</a>) for some examples of the type of stuff our team and our sister teams write.<p>Mail [email protected] if you're interested and mention that you saw the post on Hacker News.<p>Netflix is also hiring for a lot of our teams.  Check out our jobs page (<a href="http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.html" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.html</a>) for the list.

 When I was running the Postgres databases for reddit, I was constantly seeking people who could teach me better ways to tune Postgres on AWS.  Most people I would meet would just regurgitate what anyone could learn with a day or two of googling and reading.<p>At one point I got scared by the prospect that I might be an expert on Postgres on AWS, because frankly I didn't know all that much about it and thought we were doomed if that was really the case.<p>Then I went over had lunch with the Heroku team, and it was eye opening.  These guys truly knew how to run Postgres on AWS (and presumably still do).<p>I can't think of another org that is moving Postgres on AWS forward better than Heroku.
 It's been a while since I've been in the weeds, but this is what I remember:<p>It's a balancing act between max_connections and shared_buffers.  Each instance type will have a sweet spot for your use case -- you'll have to find it through experimenting.<p>Read this: <a href="http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Serve...</a><p>And this:  <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/kernel-resources.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/kernel-resources.h...</a><p>Give as much RAM to Postgres as possible -- let it do the memory management.  Sometimes going to an instance with double the RAM will give you more than double the performance.<p>No swap on the box.  The moment you hit swap you're screwed.<p>Vacuum often, maybe continuously, if the database has a lot of updates or deletes.  Do your capacity planning so you can vacuum all the time.<p>I'll update if I think of more.
 Just donated! Didn't realize there was a donation drive going on.<p>I'm a huge fan of BSD and would love to see it on EC2. :)
 Let me rephrase. I'd like to see it as a first class citizen along with Linux and windows.

 My red flag alarm is screaming right now.  I hope they have some amazing fraud protection here.<p>It's way too easy to compromise a twitter account, I'd to have that attached to my bank account.
 That too!  Every one of those apps that has write access to one's timeline can now send money wherever.
 I tweeted it, but I think I'll repeat it here:  Proud to know and have worked with more than a few folks on Forbes' 30 under 30. Congrats to all of them!
 Using sometimes 1000's of EC2 instances (for a bunch of movies, not just one).
 In fact, it is not unheard of for us to re-encode the entire catalog when a new, better format or codec comes along, or we add support for a new device.
 digeek is right -- they have GPU instances too.<p>We don't actually use the GPU instances yet, but I think I heard we're moving over to them (need to check on that).
 EC2.  1000s of instances. :)
 I think you misinterpreted.<p>We have $X to spend.  We have $Y left at the end of the year ($Y &#60; $X).  We go though our system and say "who can deliver us the quickest, most error free, content?  Ok, give them $Y for whatever they have that our customers might enjoy.<p>The reason you only see Elite Squad 2 is the same reason that you only see a lot of stuff -- because the price they wanted for the other one was too much.
 That's not correct.  It's because licensing movies on DVD is monumentally cheaper than licensing content for online streaming.  One requires a deal with the studio, the other just requires picking up a DVD somewhere (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine</a>).
 Netflix<p>Los Gatos, CA -- full time<p>Netflix is looking for a whole bunch of folks for the streaming service.<p>I'm specifically looking for Site Reliability Engineers.  If the idea of building a reliable system on top of AWS excites you, let us know!<p>Email [email protected] and let them know you saw my post on HH.
 &#62; Of course it's not possible to auto-scale stateful servers like databases<p>That's not entirely true. :)  It's just a lot <i>harder</i> to scale them elastically.  At Netflix we've done some proof of concept work on elastically scaling Cassandra, although we don't have it in production yet.  I think that is one of our goals for 2013.
 &#62; That said, this adds complexity to their systems with the only benefit being cost savings.<p>That's not the only benefit.  They also get much better reliability.  The systems scale down with load, but they also scale up.  As their load increases their system scales up along with it, giving greater reliability during increased load.  Since they have to architect for that, it makes scaling up in general easier.
 When I first started playing Starcraft, I only used the mouse.  It was still fun to play.<p>I can definitely see playing a quick starcraft game on my tablet as a fun little diversion while I'm on public transit or something.
 I'll grant you point one, but I can't agree with number two.<p>We used to play Starcraft as our after lunch activity in the reddit office. It was a great quick diversion.
 Spot instances come from both leftover on-demand instances as well as unused reserved instances. So it's quite possible to run out of on-demand and still have a low spot price.
 Many people aren't set up to handle spot instances.  You need to be much more resilient to single instance failures than when using on-demand or reserved instances.
 Why can't I sort by price?  Does that test better too?
 Awesome, thanks!  I think it will be a huge improvement for price sensitive folks (and people like me who are just cheap!)
 Amazon has no such policy.<p>I know this because we considered doing it at reddit (changing or adding our affiliate link to all Amazon links).<p>We weren't sure how the community would react, so we we opted not to do it.

 If they're smart, they'll allow the women to see the men's pictures, but not vice-versa.  It's not fair, but it will help solve the very real problem of women being leery of blind dates.
 It's all in the article.  You can either send the recipient the key in a side channel or include it with the link.
 Well there are two ways to go with that.  You can keep your number of outstanding shares small, and then only hire people who are good at math.  Or you can keep your number of outstanding shares enormous, so that you can offer people grants in the 100,000 or even million shares range, and get the people who are just looking for a lot shares.
 It's not the world's first infoshooter -- I used to admin linux boxes using the Doom interface to ps.  Want to kill a process?  Just shoot it!  Load a bigger gun to kill -9.

 That would make it too easy to game the spam system, because now the spammer knows they've been classified as spam, and can keep changing the message until it gets through.<p>This is why it's generally bad practice to reply to an email telling the sender it is spam.
 I used it for five minutes and found:  There is no way to search for a person in the Lobby and you can't reorder the tabs. These are two things I do a lot.
 It would be great if the help page popped up when I first load the site, so I don't have to guess and type "help" at the prompt to find out the purpose of the site. :)
 &#62; Do you think EME is actually going to prevent Netflix shows from showing up on thepiratebay?<p>No, and that isn't the purpose.  The purpose is so that Netflix can show you movies that Hollywood lawyers insist be encumbered with DRM because they won't try and understand that DRM doesn't actually do anything.  Maybe one day Netflix will be big enough to push back, like Apple did with mp3 DRM, but until then, this is the only way to show premium content to people without requiring a plugin from Microsoft.<p>&#62;  it will likely end up preventing Linux users from accessing content legitimately,<p>Actually, the inclusion of EME in HTML5 is exactly what would enable you to watch content on Linux.
 But once the model dies, why does it matter if it is in the spec?  If a company (say Apple) gets big enough to demand no DRM, like Apple did with music, then no one will use the standard anymore.<p>So why does it matter if the standard makes it easier to more widely distribute the content, which will only help in hastening its demise by allowing someone to grow big enough to push back?
 Ah, that's much better!
 Google owns this company: <a href="http://www.widevine.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.widevine.com</a><p>Which already has a linux plugin.  That is why they are pushing for the standard as well.
 It's not as bad as you think.  I saw someone walking around with it the other day and at first I thought they just had designer glasses on.  Someone had to point out that they were wearing Google Glass for me to even notice.
 Infinite scroll breaks the metaphor of the sidebar!  The indicator no longer tells me how much more content there is on the page.  I've hated it ever since Facebook started doing it with photos.
 No, Los Gatos at the Netflix Open Source meetup.  I'm pretty sure he was a Googler.
 I can definitely relate to the last part:<p>&#62; It might make us weirdoes, but when cabling looks this neat it is a sexy and sleek piece of art.<p>I always tell people that server cabling is as much art is it science.  When I was early in my career, I had some great mentors in this respect, and now when I see a well cabled rack, it really speaks to me.<p>Here is the reddit server rack just before we tore it down:  <a href="http://imgur.com/DlaX4" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/DlaX4</a>
 Oh no, I didn't know about this reddit and now I do.  Welp, there goes my productivity for the day!
 This entire business is predicated on a government sanctioned extortion of the airlines.  The moment this thing gets popular, the airlines would lobby the government heavily to remove the regulations and tank the business.<p>A good idea while it lasts though. :)
 I never use an ad blocker either.  I know that a lot of the web is only possible because of ads.<p>That being said, I'm pretty adept at using my brain for ad blocking.  I didn't even notice when Facebook rolled out sponsored posts.
 They turned it into a blogging platform when no one was looking, in an attempt to leverage their brand but get cheap/free content.<p>People are (obviously) starting to pick up on this and their brand is being quickly diluted.
 I just wanted to say congrats to the Objectrocket team!  Their founder and CEO used to be my boss at eBay/PayPal. :)
 To prevent having to log into root via remote console, set up a second backup account with an ssh key and sudo access, and then put that key somewhere safe.<p>The chances of both that and the deploy user getting corrupted at the same time is unlikely.
 I'm really humbled to see the architecture that we came up with at reddit with help from Heroku and JustinTV, which I then taught to Amazon and AWS, is still the one AWS is highlighting today (and presumably teaching their customers).  It's an amazing feeling to see your work live on beyond your involvement.<p>* They flew me up to Seattle to teach Amazon retail how to move to AWS back when retail had just started that process.  Amusingly, the guy mainly responsible for that move now works for Pinterest (a company that "does cloud right").
 I was surprised when they asked, that's for sure.<p>It was a little odd because I felt like there is no way I could teach these people anything they didn't already know, but I got really good questions and feedback so at the end I didn't feel nearly as weird about it.
 I just used it.  I needed to do some analysis on Netflix streaming data (about 700 million rows in my dataset).<p>I had a bunch of text files that are basically logs, so I wrote a parer that injected or updated each row in DynamoDB and then put a queue item into an SQS queue to process that row if it was new (since the same ID could show up in any number of log files).<p>After the initial parsing I ran the other script to do the actual work by sucking items off the queue and processing the rows, which at that point had a column for each log line for that ID.
 Python (using the boto library to interact with AWS).

 As one of the main drivers of Python at Netflix, this one is near and dear to my heart.  Let me know if you have any questions, or come visit our booth!
 I always tell people that I've spent the last six years of my life as a digital crack dealer.
 You've caught on to our ploy!<p>But in all seriousness, we like to share what we do because sharing is cool and it attracts other people who like to share cool technology, which are the kind of people we like to work with.
 I don't have any info about Sting, but we're working on some blog posts that go deeper into each of these topics.  I'll make sure that the interest in Sting is accounted for in the prioritization.
 I just posted this above: "I don't have any info about Sting, but we're working on some blog posts that go deeper into each of these topics. I'll make sure that the interest in Sting is accounted for in the prioritization."<p>So now that's +2. :)
 I like Python for the speed of development.  Also, at least for these internal apps, speed is generally of secondary concern, since these aren't typically high load applications.<p>At reddit we solved the problem by writing the most often called parts in C and using c extensions.  There is definitely more work to do there, but overall I think Python gets a bad rap as far as speed is concerned.<p>It's certainly not the quickest, but it isn't a dog either.
 I believe we do have one or two people here looking at Go.<p>Given our culture, there really is nothing stopping anyone from using it, other than the fact that they would have to figure out how to interact with the platform.
 FWIW, I knew he was kidding.  He's a reddit engineer too. :)
 You know, it never occurred to me to use iPython as my shell.  I think that <i>would</i> make me more productive.  I'll have to try that, thanks!
 Generally we want people to be in Los Gatos, but there are exceptions, mostly in the CDN team.
 I would, but I could probably find you people who know more about the tools, like the folks who wrote them. :)<p>Hit me up on email (it's in my profile).
 I don't think so.  I suppose it would be possible, but it might be hard to interact with the platform.
 This is how we felt every time we announced a new reddit feature on reddit. :)
 It's Paul's favorite color.  It's also the color of the walls at YC.


 Netflix didn't really pull the plug on the API -- everyone who was using it (which were only a few people) are still getting the same experience as they had before.  There will just be no new growth in the use of the API.
 That's not entirely fair.  What Netflix got wasn't production ready, but some of the ideas are still in the current version of the recommender.
 The repo you fork is just a readme.  Then you add in your submission, which you derive from all of the other open source software in the Netflix Github account.<p>Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this clearer?  I've seen this question a few times.<p>Edit: Thanks for the feedback everyone.  I've incorporated it into the page.
 Our first Python contribution is coming by next Tuesday, and that will be the bakery, aka Aminator.<p>More Python should follow shortly.  Python is much newer here, so we aren't as far along the open source path.
 Wait a couple of days and there will be a Python project.<p>You can also write a new monkey in any language you want.
 &#62; user account vs. household<p>Profiles are being tested now and will soon be deployed to all customers.
 Definitely!  Sounds like a perfect entry for the portability prize.
 Fair enough.<p>Disclaimer: I work for Netflix.
 I don't think you can reset a profile, but the workaround is to just make a new profile, which will have a clean slate.  Then you can go through and rate a couple things to help it learn.
 At Netflix, our general policy is that if it has to do with technology, open source it, and if it has to do with movies, then don't.
 Eh.  Email addresses aren't really that valuable anymore.  Spam protection is fairly sophisticated, even in the enterprise, so it is not really that big a deal.<p>Still shouldn't have happened though. :)
 I always advise folks who are looking to work for a startup to value their stock at $0.  Will you be happy and enjoy the work you are doing for the salary and benefits alone?
 That's my voice at the beginning. :)<p>I was really excited about the talk which is why I volunteered to chair the session.  I was happy with the result!
 It's more like IRC, and the one thing that really makes it better is the chat history (which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that).  The push notifications when someone messages you when you're offline are pretty nice too.
 One critical thing I recently learned -- Hipchat is run exclusively out of Amazon's US-East region.  If you're using Hipchat for anything operational, make sure you aren't also exclusively in US-East.  Otherwise, if there is a region-wide issue in Us-East, you're gonna have a bad time.
 If that's the cause of slowness then their network maps are broken.
 This is very true. :)
 Actually, her tweeting was also in violation of the PSF Code of Conduct, so she's equally guilty in that sense.
 Hey there.  Didn't intend to call you out, just wanted to make sure other's didn't get bit. :) You don't have an email in your profile, but shoot me one and maybe we can chat a bit more.
 I think you've hit a nail on the head here.  I grew up Los Angeles, and for us, driving 60 miles round trip for dinner was totally normal.
 And you're wasting it here. :)
 There is a viable middle ground.  Sometimes these days, when you build a solid business, an investor is willing to let you cash out with some of their investment.  Essentially, they are moving you from the left of the line to the right, so you can be rich and then focus on "king".
 I was just talking about the need for something like this the other day.  Brilliant!
 It would be great if that blog post ended with a big "Donate" button so that after reading the great story I can give money to help fund some scholarships for next year.
 The most important thing in this article, which should be H1 bold at the top, is:<p><i>If you didn't create the data, assume it is malicious</i>
 Awesome!  This right here is the best example of social media in action -- a suggestion for improvement was made, and the author liked it and implemented it.
 I'll agree that the conversation here tends to be better, but there are still pockets of reddit that have the same high quality and have the same potential for authors.  It is always made me happy when this type of interaction would happen.
 &#62; However, those photo's where clearly Photoshopped.<p>That's pretty much what the entire article was about. :)


 Ok, I want to <i>fund</i> a project, not propose it.  How do I do that?<p>If someone makes a project that is basically "work with Amazon and FreeBSD to make FreeBSD a first class citizen on EC2" I would totally put money into that, and moreso, would use my deep contacts at Amazon to help make the project a reality.<p>From what I understand, the technical part of the project is basically making the kernel and the hypervisor play nice.
 &#62; Of course, per-project funding on a wide scale gets into a sticky situation where the foundation no longer can make its own choices and do the right things instead of the popular things.<p>That's why I haven't asked the foundation directly. :)  When I made my annual donation to them this year I expressed my desire to see FreeBSD on EC2, but I don't want to start dictating what they should be doing.
 Ok, you've convinced me.<p>How do I "talk to the foundation"?  ie. What's the best way to bring this up with them.
 I've been meaning to reach out to Colin for a while, but now I've actually done it.  I'll let you know what he says.
 I am.  I've reached out to him to offer my assistance.
 Unfortunately it is HVM only, or you have to run it on Windows instances, which means a portion of that money goes to Microsoft.<p>What I mean by first class is that it will run on <i>every</i> instance type, including a micro, so I can make a FreeBSD shellhost for $8/mo, for example.
 Every day in elementary school, we were required to state, "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands".  From the age of 5, they make it very clear that you are to have an undying allegiance to the government.
 Netflix too (also has free charging).
 Because oftentimes the subdomain is irrelevant and would just make the display cluttered.  More often than not the domain would be www.<p>We did the same thing on reddit for the same reason.  A few domains get their subdomain when they are popular enough for people to complain.
 They've state repeatedly that this is a profitable enterprise for them.  As a public company, they couldn't say that if it weren't true.
 &#62; The computing power expended on mining is used to secure the Bitcoin network.<p>Could you expand on this?  I'm not sure I understand it.  Thanks.
 One of the most refreshing things I found when I started at Netflix was that they actually specifically call out in the employment agreement that what you do on your own time is your own, even if you use your work computer to do it.  As long as it isn't direct competition, side projects are explicitly encouraged.
 They just opened a Silicon Valley branch in San Jose, specifically so that software patents could get reviewed by folks more expert and connected to the field.
 I remember this exact same argument about 20 years ago when JPG started getting popular.  "I need a <i>special</i> program to see it?"<p>The viewers and OSs and browsers will catch up soon enough.
 If I have a static directory of files is there any way to leverage this same code to just perform the optimizations on my html so I don't have to have the webserver do it (or so I don't have to run my own webserver)?
 'In a statement on Thursday, Amoroso said he had informed the Yahoo board when he became chairman in May 2012 that he intended to serve only one year "in order to help Yahoo during a critical time of transformation."'
 Hmmm.  I don't really know C++ well enough to do this myself.  Oh well.<p>Seems like it would be super useful to have a command line version of this so I could take an html file, pipe it in and get out an optimized file, and then diff them so I can learn to make my pages better.<p>I suppose as a hack I could set up nginx with the plugin and then load each page through curl or something and diff them that way...
 I think he's leaving because when he started in May 2012, he said, "I'm going to step down in May, 2013".
 Philosophical question:  For companies that are conglomerates, or at least have very different business units (like Amazon or GE or Microsoft), should those companies be required by law to break out their earnings by major division?
 My own homepage?  1 (usually me)
 The last big site I worked on?  About 55,000 concurrent users on an average day before I left (now it's about 110,000).
 I guess more people are verifying then they had counted on, because the system appears to be down.
 So is the Google Site Search API.
 Site Reliability Engineer<p>Los Gatos, CA<p>Netflix -- we deliver movies on the Internet<p>We're looking for a few folks for our reliability org.  This is not a reliability engineering position like Facebook or Google however.  At Netflix our developers have the ability to push code whenever they feel it is the right time, and we don't want to get in their way.  Instead we want to build tools that make it easier for them to follow best practices.  We believe that a good process is one that is easier for the engineer to follow than work around, otherwise we haven't done our job.<p>The job is about 30% operational, where you'd be dealing with production issues and be the call leader for major outages, 30% evangelism, where you work with other teams to get them to adopt best practices and understand why they do what they do, and about 40% coding, where you'd be writing tools that help us maintain reliability, such as our alert routing system and automated production timeline tools, as well as our famous Simian Army.<p>If this sounds interesting, send your resume to [email protected] and mention that you saw jedberg's post on HN.
 And adds a whole bunch too, but no one seems to mention that in these doom and gloom articles.<p>The Netflix catalog changes almost daily, but the bigger changes tend to happen on the 1st of the month, because that is just when contracts tend to expire (lawyers like it that way).  Other big changeover days are Jan 1, July 1 and Dec 31.<p>The 1,794 movies represent a small fraction of the total viewing on Netflix.
 The reddit office was just next to Kevin's desk.  Kevin is a cool guy.  He's crazy smart and makes an excellent security journalist.  He married his defense attorney and they have a super cute kid.  And I talked to him once about the radio contest thing, because I was a teenager at the time and remember trying to win that contest.
 There is an option for you.  $0.  You haven't made any money yet from options.
 When I'm driving and I need directions a heads up display would be immensely useful.
 I have a nav system that talks, but I still have to glance down occasionally.  I'd much rather have it in my peripheral vision.
 Not if the map is displayed in your field of vision.  This is why airplanes have a display projected onto the glass.<p>I drove a Corvette with a heads up display once, and it was great not having to glance down at the gauges.<p>And also, you still have to glance down while driving to see how fast you're going, so clearly glancing off the road isn't that big of a deal.
 Great!  Now if only they would implement allowing HEAD requests and support for any of the various headers that would allow me to get a 304.<p>The reason I ask is because every time my Safari crashes, if I have 50 HN tabs open (as I often do on by Friday [1]) I'll get IP banned from HN because Safari will do a GET request on each page, but it can't pass any of the headers necessary to get back a 304, because HN doesn't support it.<p>[1] The way I consume HN is I load up HN once or twice a day, open up all the interesting links and their comment pages in new tabs, and then go back to work.  Then when I have some downtime (most of which is on the weekend) I read through all the open tabs.
 I think the author is trying to convince people that California should drill more.  But all this did was convince me that CA made the right decision.
 Maybe.  In which case, all the more reason to do it!
 Well, it drops every request I make for about 12 hours, so that's equivalent to a ban. :)<p>And I'm aware of how painful it is to handle HEAD requests for a dynamic page, having had to deal with it on reddit.  There are some easy hacks to make it work pretty well.  One is to just keep a cache of the last update time of each page, and then use that cache when you get a HEAD request.<p>I'm not sure what an fnid is, but if you have something on the page that changes so quickly that the hash changes when the content doesn't, then I'd contend you're doing something wrong.
 &#62; By that time most pages are probably updated, so you wouldn’t get any 304s anyway.<p>Actually, quite the opposite.  HN comment pages seem to peter out at about 12 hours in most cases, and after that you'll rarely see a new comment, so really the content stops changing after about a day.
 This reminds me: it blows my mind how far behind the publishing industry is in terms of technology.  I'm currently editing a tech book, and I get the assets from them as a Word doc and images for the figures in a zip file.  I have then "track changes" in Word, save the file, and send it back.  For the images, if there is an error, I have to take a new screenshot, write in the doc that there was an error, and then send back a zip file with the new image(s).<p>This would be SO much easier with github.  I could just make my edits and issue a pull request, which would work with the image too.  I could even use the commit messages to explain what the error was if need be.  Github even has tools to make this process easier for non-tech people (which honestly there shouldn't be since it is a tech book!).<p>This will be made easier by this tool, but sadly not for me.
 &#62; coming from a culture which pulls in media from all over the english speaking world<p>I really enjoyed this about Australia.  When I was there we liked to turn on the TV each morning to watch the cartoons, because they had stuff from England and India and all over the place.
 If you owned a retail store, and someone came in every day yelling and screaming and breaking things, would you say they should have the right to do so, since the store is open to the public?

 It sounds like they aren't trying to suppress the technology, just pushing for better rules around data retention.
 This is the first time I've seen that reddit case study.  I'm sad that they didn't use the part where they interviewed me 3 years ago and actually got the history part right. :)<p>(no offense to Keith -- he wasn't there after all)
 &#62; and I'm flummoxed when it feels as though the other person has simply dangled their appendage for me to interact with.<p>This was a wonderful turn of phrase.  It should be in some sales manual or something.

 My friend has spent the last year+ in China designing this and working with the fabs there to make this a reality.  It's a pretty cool toy. :)
 &#62; and I wish they had a way to do some sort of sponsorship<p>They do, just ask. :)  You can get an "ad" that shows up on the side that says "this reddit sponsored by foo", or myriad other options.  Just hit them up and they will work with you.
 They usually ask the moderators if it is ok for that particular sponsor.  Never had a mod say no though, since the sponsorship is usually pretty targeted and appropriate.
 &#62; Reddit could build profiles on people or even ask for that information in the signup form but their users will not like that one bit.<p>They could, but by not doing that, I think it makes the users much more comfortable knowing that reddit specifically protects its users from that kind of intrusion.<p>&#62; In addition I would be worried about the age demographic lowering dramatically (my opinion, not a fact) in recent years.<p>The median age actually goes up every year.  The kids just get louder. :)
 For now, yes.  This is because outside of those countries the way you purchase an ad on reddit could be considered gambling.  Once they switch to a pageview based system you'll be able to buy ads from lots of countries.
 Back Fastly with your S3 static site.  Works really well.
 "Ownership" of a reddit is not for sale, and never has been.  The most you can do is get sponsorship rights for however long you want to pay for.  However, a sponsor will never have control over the content (unless they manage to get someone on the moderator list I suppose, but they could do that regardless of sponsorship status).

 Who funded the study?  Is it some organization that would benefit from more charter schools existing?  $10 says it is.
 I was going to write basically the exact same thing.  The comparison isn't fair.<p>Public schools have to accept everyone, charter schools can be selective.<p>The ones with lotteries are self-selecting too, because you have to have an involved parent to even enter the lottery, which means only the kids with "good parents" go to that school, which again biases them towards greater success.
 Selection bias.  The poor performers that move schools do so because they have involved parents, and involved parents are the #1 indicator of success in school.
 I don't feel bad because I did read the article and I did see who funded it, and I still don't know the answer to my question.  What does "The Boston Foundation" actually do?
 &#62; Leaving for where? Departure posts without "what's next" feel like a cliffhanger.<p>People had the same complaint when I left reddit. :)<p>Sometimes it's just more fun to see where the winds take you.
 Netflix - Fulltime in Los Gatos, CA<p>We have a ton of positions open, but I'm looking for one in particular.  I'm hoping HN can help me come up with a good title for the position (We've been calling it Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) but the more people we talk to the more it sounds like that isn't quite right).  The job is:<p>1/3 of the time you'll be either the call leader for an outage situation or following up on a previous outage to determine root cause and what can be done to prevent that class of failure in the future.<p>1/3 of the you'll be working with teams throughout the company evangelizing best practices for reliability, scalability and distributed computing, such as helping them figure out caching strategies or how to use queues more effectively or avoiding global locks.<p>The last 1/3 of your time will be spent coding (mostly in Python) writing tools that help maintain the reliability of Netflix.  Some tools we have written are an intelligent alert routing gateway, and tool to keep track or changes throughout the AWS environment, and simple tools like one that keeps track of EIP assignments or collects tcpdumps to send to Amazon.<p>So HN, what do you think the title of this role should be?  Also, I didn't include the work DevOps in the description because it feels overused, but do you think it should be in there?
 Interesting.  We interviewed a Google SRE and he said that what I described was nothing like the job he was doing.  I think one big difference is that at Netflix the SRE doesn't block deployments or roll them back.  We leave that up to the teams.
 &#62; "Neutered SRE", then. ;)<p>Hah!  More like "respectful of the ability of our coworkers"<p>&#62; Or, "Reliability Ombudsman".<p>I like this one.  Might just use it.
 Not for a long long time.  The reason Paypal doesn't work everywhere is because of crazy laws, not technology.<p>And Paypal can afford many more hours of lawyering than most startups.
 Eat (lots of great restaurant)
 Drink (lots of fun bars)
 Hike (plenty of hiking trails in the nearby mountains, biking trails, etc)
 See a movie (lots of great theaters)
 Hang out (lots of great open spaces, big parks, and downtown sunnyvale is nice to just hang out).<p>Now, to be fair, I live in Cupertino (right next to Sunnyvale) and I would rather live in Berkeley or SF, because there is certainly MORE to do, but Sunnyvale isn&#x27;t THAT bad.<p>If you can&#x27;t find something to do, you&#x27;re probably just being lazy.
 That was in the book &quot;Jurassic Park&quot;.  That&#x27;s why the dinos change sexes -- because they have DNA from a reptile that does that.

 Sure, but it&#x27;s about as confusing as putting a trash can icon on the save button.  Consistent UI is a good thing, even across products.
 &gt; I&#x27;m not sure most Americans care.<p>And of those that do care, a majority feel that he committed treason and needs to be brought to justice.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;cnn-poll-majority-give-snowden-thumbs-down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;cnn-poll-maj...</a>
 A majority of Americans feel that he is guilty of treason:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;cnn-poll-majority-give-snowden-thumbs-down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;cnn-poll-maj...</a>

 This doesn&#x27;t even account for sites that are using AWS but fronting with a CDN (like reddit, for example).
 A lot less than you would think.  The majority of Netflix outbound traffic (the movie bits) comes from the CDN -- AWS is only the control plane.
 I&#x27;m not sure if you are saying that just because or because you know that what you say is actually true.  Tron: Legacy was actually the first movie where the soundtrack was made before the film was finished, and the film was actually edited to fit the music (all other movies are scored after the final edit and the music is fit to the film).
 I don&#x27;t have a linkable source.  I heard it directly from an industry insider and apparently no one seems to have talked about it publicly. :(<p>I guess you&#x27;ll just have to take it with a grain of salt.
 Except that his way all the traffic instantly switches, and your way you have to wait for DNS propagation, which about 15% of the users on the internet will not pick up for over a week.<p>DNS is an awful way to do failover.
 Yes, about 15%. :)  To be fair most flip within 24 hours, but about 3% or so take longer than a week.<p>Typically rural ISPs or Alaskan ISPs (they don&#x27;t want to pay to forward all the requests so they override the TTLs).<p>This is when we flip Netflix IPs.
 When we flip Netflix domains we see about a 15% straggler effect (although to be fair only about 3% take a week, but many take around 24 hours).
 The em space fell out of favor when HTML got popular, because HTML renderers (ie. your browser) will strip extra spaces.  So when looking at a web page, there actually is no difference between one and one hundred spaces (or two).
 Probably the same people who think sending a letter is private.  They just don&#x27;t think of all the external factors.
 &gt; SEO Specialist<p>As someone who has been called &quot;one of the world&#x27;s experts on SEO&quot;, let me just say this title and industry is BS.<p>Here is my expert opinion on SEO:  Write good content, make it easy for a human to read, and get other humans to share it with other humans in their network of friends.<p>I&#x27;ll admit that there is a very small set of things you can so to help your rankings in search engines:  have a descriptive URL, a unique title on each page, a proper robots.txt, a sitemap, basically all the stuff that is called out in the Google Webmaster tools.<p>Beyond that it is all snake oil.  I challenge anyone to show my objective metrics proving any one SEO technique works.
 I agree completely.  I would expect measured results.<p>I&#x27;ve just yet to see anyone show me objective results that show they brought in 10K users for $10K in revenue or anything of the sort.
 I will concede that the &quot;snake oil&quot; works in the short term.  If your business thrives on the one time short term burst (like the #1 for buy viagra) then sure, it works.<p>But if your goal is to build a long term sustainable business, then those things won&#x27;t work, as you point out.
 Funny story about that.  When we were owned by Conde, the accounting was a little different (they took on some of the charges, like Akamai), and so we were actually told we were slightly profitable.<p>When that blog post went up I was as surprised as you to see it wasn&#x27;t profitable when I was there.
 I don&#x27;t think I made any indications one way or another, but yes, it would probably be difficult to move.
 I wrote this just above but I&#x27;ll repeat it here:<p>Funny story about that. When we were owned by Conde, the accounting was a little different (they took on some of the charges, like Akamai), and so we were actually told we were slightly profitable.<p>When that blog post went up I was as surprised as you to see it wasn&#x27;t profitable when I was there.
 Yes. What point are you trying to make?
 Sorry that wasn&#x27;t clear.  The latency didn&#x27;t get better, but what happened is that instead of having to make a lot of calls to memcache it was just one (well, just a few), so while that one took longer, the total time was much less.
 Since this isn&#x27;t reddit, I won&#x27;t just say:  ^^this.<p>But yes, I believe he was trying to point out that I couldn&#x27;t have been involved if I didn&#x27;t know, but doesn&#x27;t understand the ins and outs of G&amp;A and other such accounting practices.
 I find this interesting, this is really great feedback for me actually.<p>Those are some of the important lessons, although use (postgres|cassandra) are really too prescriptive.  More like &quot;use the right tool or tools for the job&quot;.<p>Also, use consistent key hashing where appropriate is another important less that I should emphasize more.<p>And &quot;build for 3&quot; is another important lesson.  It makes scaling much easier.
 That&#x27;s a better explanation than mine. :)  Thanks for the link.
 There wasn&#x27;t actually a very large jump in traffic when Digg v4 was launched.  Most of those folks were already reddit users.  Traffic bumped a little bit, but not all that much.<p>It&#x27;s important to keep in mind that reddit was already doing twice as much traffic as Digg before they launched v4.
 No.  That&#x27;s generally because once something gets popular and jumps to the front page, it gets a huge boost in visibility, especially from people who weren&#x27;t looking at the niche subreddit it comes from.<p>A lot of those people aren&#x27;t interested in that content, so it will suddenly get an influx of downvotes.
 Each tool has a different use case.  Votes is a great example.<p>Memcache has no guarantees about durability, but is very fast, so the vote data is stored there to make rendering of pages as quick as possible.<p>Cassandra is durable and fast, and gives fast negative lookups because of its bloom filter, so it was good for storing a durable copy of the votes for when the data isn&#x27;t in memcache.<p>Postgres is rock solid and relational, so it was a good place to store votes as a backup for Cassandra (we could regenerate all the data in Cassandra from Postgres if necessary) and also for doing batch processing, which sometimes needed the relational capabilities.
 &gt; Doesn&#x27;t a prohibition period on hiring only work if you&#x27;re hiring children? ... Does immediate termination come with a three month severance package?<p>My thoughts exactly.  You&#x27;re asking someone to take a big risk with your company by bringing them on on probation.  They may be leaving a well-paying, stable job to do it.<p>You have to do something to temper that risk, ideally with a very large severance or something like it.
 I agree to a point, but it would be nice if there were some provided default configs for various classes of machines.<p>Especially defaults for the most popular EC2 instance types.
 More like the Zappos of consumer electronics.
 The problem with that is the user&#x27;s request may have generated a legitimate error, or it may not be a good test of all the functionally.<p>If you write your software with a dedicated healthcheck url, it&#x27;s much more robust because you can test all critical functionality with that helthcheck (just make sure you block access to it from the outside otherwise someone has a really easy way to DDOS you!).
 My bag set off the explosion detector and I had to have an &quot;enhanced&quot; pat down in private.  They agent later admitted to me that the machine I was tested on gives false positives about 50% of the time.
 Why not send a small postcard with the license key that requires them to sign to get the postcard?  Give them an instant key good for 14 days and then make them use the one on the postcard for long term use.  Then you&#x27;ll have your proof (and be pretty close to PayPal&#x27;s chargeback limit)
 The reason you don&#x27;t want to do that is because they can just reject the postcard.  That&#x27;s why you have to give them needed info on the card.  The point of the temp key is so they can get immediate satisfaction.
 Why?  You&#x27;d get one via email right away, you&#x27;d just have to enter the one from the postcard when it arrived.
 Which is an extra layer of fraud protection. :)
 By the time it hits the C code it should be sanitized, but yes, it does add some security overhead.
 Yes, I glossed over that part.  We didn&#x27;t use web.py very long.
 I think this kind of thing doesn&#x27;t really fly on HN, but sure. :)
 Amazon now provides a service to give you on instance keys: <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/iam/faqs/#What_is_IAM_roles_for_EC2_instances" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;iam&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;#What_is_IAM_roles_for_EC2_in...</a><p>Before that at Netflix we developed a service that would hand out temporary keys to the requestor when they presented a proper certificate.<p>At reddit we put the secret keys on the instance, which was bad. :)
 I wish they would put this disclaimer at the top of their articles. :(

 They really shouldn&#x27;t call it &quot;Netflix for books&quot; because then they&#x27;ll just get a constant stream of &quot;you mean a library?&quot;.<p>They should call it &quot;Netflix for ebooks&quot;.
 From what I can tell it is for ebooks, so not quite a library. :)
 The reason the unlimited vacation policy works so well at Netflix is because the execs set a good example by taking plenty of vacation.
 Isn&#x27;t this like SUP?<p><a href="http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fetch-updates.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.friendfeed.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;08&#x2F;simple-update-protocol-fe...</a>
 &gt; You can&#x27;t force a user to upgrade<p>Sure you can.  Netflix will sometimes have to do this.  The old software just isn&#x27;t allowed to talk to the server anymore.
 Tripit has saved me so much time (and helped my marriage too) by solving this problem.  I just started using it this summer when I was doing a lot of international travel.<p>Now, I just forward the email to tripit and I have an item in my calendar (that is shared with my wife) that has just the relevant info (flight time, number, conf #, etc) so I can see it any time and so can she.<p>No more looking at those awful emails (which I just archive as soon as I forward it).
 Because you&#x27;re a hacker like the rest of us. :)
 By multi-selection do you mean putting multiple things in the buffer?  Because you can do that if you use Vim mode (using the standard multiple buffers of vim).
 To be clear, Randy didn&#x27;t come up with the algo -- he just pushed really hard to get it implemented.  It&#x27;s a pretty well known algo.
 And this is why traffic sucks -- because people prefer to rely on anecdote instead of hard scientific facts.<p>The behavior you are observing is not zipper merging -- it&#x27;s people being assholes and trying to skip traffic.<p>If <i>everyone</i> merged at the last second it would move better.
 Your data is an anecdote because it isn&#x27;t a repeatable environment with a proper control.
 I&#x27;m one of those people that prefer automation<p>I&#x27;ll actually wait slightly longer for the automated checkout at the market, mainly because I want to see it in more places.
 It does.  You can start your own subreddit, point your own domain at it, and then style it to your liking.<p>It&#x27;s not super obvious, but the functionality has actually been there for years.
 In my high school you had to do a senior English thesis by reading three books of one author and then writing a thesis tying together the themes and characters.<p>I chose Tom Clancy.  My English teacher said I was crazy and &quot;would never find anything in those books writing about&quot;.<p>Somehow I pulled it off and got an A on that project.<p>So basically, I got to read Clancy books for school. :)
 I actually read the book before I saw the movie and it was great!  I think partly it holds up because he wrote it before anyone was making any media out of his books.<p>All the other books clearly are written with (movie&#x2F;video game) in the back of his mind, but that one was just straight prose.<p>Can&#x27;t agree with you more, folks should definitely read it if they haven&#x27;t.  Then watch the movie again with a much greater appreciation for the story.
 Anyone know who to talk to about being a mentor?
 That was always my biggest gripe with Shark Tank and the main reason I would advise people to stay away.  I&#x27;m glad they finally fixed that.
 Absolutely not.  I&#x27;ve interviewed people who had amazing Github profiles who couldn&#x27;t write a simple loop on the whiteboard.  Either they hadn&#x27;t written the code in their github, or they code only by copy&#x2F;paste.<p>ps.  It might be a good idea to be slightly more gender neutral in your question. :)
 I&#x27;m aware that technically he&#x2F;him are both gender neutral, as they derive from &quot;human&quot;(Latin) and not &quot;man&quot;(German).<p>None the less, in today&#x27;s common usage, it has lost that multifaceted meaning and the preferred language today is using the 3rd person as the gender neutral pronoun, or s&#x2F;he or he&#x2F;she.
 I had trouble believing it too until it happened multiple times.
 I&#x27;m using &quot;whiteboard&quot; here metaphorically.  It&#x27;s actually on a computer using a shared workspace.
 If you&#x27;ve been coding for 5 years, you should be able to write FizzBuzz on a board (or in this case actually on a computer) without the use of Google.<p>I agree that whtieboard interviews aren&#x27;t good indicators of programming ability, and we employ other methods of figuring that out.<p>But the first test is to write a loop that prints the numbers 1 through 100 in your language of choice.<p>If you can&#x27;t do that, you haven&#x27;t been coding for 5 years.<p>And of course good programmers use Google.  That&#x27;s not the point.
 It&#x27;s not an exaggeration.  They can&#x27;t do FizzBuzz.  I would expect at least that without the use of Google.
 Definitely not.  I ask FizzBuzz.  It starts with writing a loop to print out 1 through 100 in their language of choice.  They can&#x27;t even do that.
 &gt; I think the real test of a developers skill is to ask them to code something for you.<p>That&#x27;s exactly what we do.  I say &quot;please get on <i>your</i> computer and write a loop to print the numbers 1 through 100 in your language of choice&quot; and they fail to do it.
 &gt; Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn&#x27;t need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way.<p>You&#x27;d like to think so, but what I&#x27;m saying is that isn&#x27;t the case.<p>&gt; Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it.<p>I ask them to write regular FizzBuzz and they can&#x27;t. :(
 The fact that they are not helping people move their data is very un-apple of them.  Apple used to be a customer focused company but they seem to have lost that in the last few years.<p>Telling my mother in law to &quot;back up her computer&quot; and then giving her a new, <i>blank</i> drive that she has to install her own OS on and then restore from backup is completely useless -- she&#x27;d have no clue where to even begin.<p>So now Apple has told her &quot;you&#x27;re going to lose all your data and we can&#x27;t help you&quot;.  Not cool.
 &quot;You will be able to reinstall the operating system version that shipped with your product by going to the Mac App Store. Any other applications or other data should be restored from the back up that you made before the replacement.&quot;<p>Maybe they worded it poorly, but that to me sounds like you&#x27;re on your own.
 I got their by reading the entire page.<p>First, they warn people to back up their data regularly because there is a high chance of failure.  Then they tell you that if you come and get a new drive you have to restore it on your own.<p>Perhaps you&#x27;ve never had to support someone who isn&#x27;t technologically savvy, but basically if I show this to her she will be very scared that her sacred pictures of her grandson will be gone forever.  She won&#x27;t understand this page beyond &quot;my data will go away and Apple won&#x27;t help me&quot;.<p>Whether that is their intention or not I don&#x27;t know.<p>The only saving grace here is that I set up backups for her a long time ago, but she&#x27;s probably forgotten.
 If you really love reddit you won&#x27;t do this, because it eats into reddit&#x27;s own tipping product which means taking away revenue from reddit.
 For the last OS I loaded it up on my iPad and then took it with me for a weekend, reading it whenever I had downtime (we were doing a lot of shopping so there was a lot of downtime).<p>Managed to finish it up by Sunday.  I&#x27;ll probably do the same this time.
 To be pedantic, what we did was take advantage of Cassandra&#x27;s bloom filter.

 NAFTA.  That is what allows US companies to hire Canadian immigrants much easier than from any other country, and so it made it a lot easier for smaller companies (like startups) to actually hire immigrants at all.
 I wasn&#x27;t. :)  Working at Netflix now, I can see why.  It really is a great place to work, and I can&#x27;t imagine someone offering me something more interesting (but I&#x27;m not completely locking that out).<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure my next move will be to my own startup, as that would be the only place that might offer a better work environment and better opportunity for learning and growth.
 I have to admit I was wrong. I assumed it would flatline like FB.<p>Congrats to the Twitter team!

 We just launched a new version of our Github portal, and I would love to get your feedback on how to make it more useful to hackers and developers.<p>Thanks!
 It&#x27;s not like reddit&#x27;s traffic is a secret.  When I worked there, we had no trouble sharing our uniques and pageviews, it is still the same today.  Just ask them.<p>And for the record, the traffic doubles about once every 18 months.  The pageviews double about once every 14 months (so slightly faster then user growth).<p>In fact, the traffic is right here:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/about" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;about</a>
 Wouldn&#x27;t it be easier to just look at the public traffic information at <a href="http://www.reddit.com/about" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;about</a> ?
 Be careful though, those folks are wrong more often then they are right.  I&#x27;ve tried to point out their mistakes in the past, but they usually just accused me of trying to be deceptive, so I gave up.
 Whoever directed that video needs to go back to film school.<p>I understand that you&#x27;re trying to &quot;highlight the product&quot;, but causing nausea in your customer isn&#x27;t the best way to do that.
 I posted this on the blog but I thought I&#x27;d repeat it here:<p>The simian army isn&#x27;t AWS only. :) Some of it runs on other stacks.<p>And the best part is, it is open source! So if you wanted to leverage the simian army, it wouldn&#x27;t be that hard to modify it to run on whatever stack you want and then submit the changes back. :)
 Have you tried Chess960[0]<p>0. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chess960</a>
 This is why educators get crap wages despite having a union -- because they refuse (rightly or wrongly) to allow the student&#x27;s education to suffer by striking.<p>Which means their strikes are never effective.
 This morning I saw two articles on the front page about how HN should change their algorithms.  I would contend that an algo change is not the right solution.<p>Here is what we did to try and solve the problem on reddit.<p>First, there is the &quot;organic&quot; box at the top of the page.  The first link in that box is always an ad, but after that, it shows pseudo random links from the new page (more on that in a second):<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;89f6f1ad9c1babbf520b83c49fa27f509bb5d0ef&#x2F;r2&#x2F;r2&#x2F;lib&#x2F;organic.py<p>What this does is give exposure to up and coming links to a lot of people all at once, which helps overcome the luck factor of who is looking at the new page at any given time.<p>The second solution is the &quot;rising&quot; sort on the new page:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;89f6f1ad9c1babbf520b83c49fa27f509bb5d0ef&#x2F;r2&#x2F;r2&#x2F;lib&#x2F;rising.py<p>The rising sort accounts for how many times the link has been shown in its ranking algo, which helps better new links rise to the top.<p>The organic box on the front page uses this rising ranking to choose what is in the box, and also contributes to the view counts.<p>So I would humbly suggest that HN should do as it has done often in the past, and copy reddit&#x27;s solution here by implementing the rising sort and the organic box.
 I think this is the wrong solution.  I wrote my thoughts here:  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834705" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6834705</a>
 I don&#x27;t actually think HN has a problem, I was just suggesting that if I were wrong about that, here is an alternate solution.
 Why was my title edited?<p>It said &quot;How reddit tried to solve the &quot;new link&quot; problem&#x2F; why HN doesn&#x27;t need a new algo&quot;<p>How is this new title an improvement?  I would at least expect a comment here when a title is edited as to why so I can learn for next time.
 Your suggestions sound great on the surface, but I suspect 2-4 would increase the echo chamber problem.<p>Also, it&#x27;s computationally difficult to compute 2-4 in real time (reddit used to do a similar calculation a long time ago, under the now defunct recommended section).
 That&#x27;s great and all, but in a newsroom, when the editor changes your title, they tell you why so you can do better next time.<p>That is what is missing here.
 It wasn&#x27;t censorship.  Only governments can censor.<p>HN is a private organization and has every right to do anything they want with the content.<p>My only request was for feedback.
 I sat next to the Wired newsroom for a few years, and they certainly did it.
 Yes.  Remember, it is a function of both votes and views, so something with two votes that&#x27;s only been viewed a few times will still be higher than something with more views and two votes.<p>It&#x27;s not perfect, but it is better than just straight chronological.
 arjie covered it well.  I accidentally put on my Amero-centric hat, where censorship by the government is illegal, whereas by private organizations it is not.
 You&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s perfectly acceptable.  I just have an aversion to the word because people would often accuse us (reddit) of &quot;illegal censorship&quot;, in which we&#x27;d have to point out that it is only unlawful for the government to do it -- regardless of the fact that reddit wasn&#x27;t actually censoring anyone.
 You know how we avoided this problem at reddit?  We didn&#x27;t edit the user&#x27;s submissions. :)
 And share it with everyone.
 Did you do analytics of which HN users actually signed up?  Is it the ones that follow the Show HN twitter? ie. People highly targeted for signing up for trials of new products?<p>I would say your sample size is not nearly large enough to be conclusive. :)
 I found the ancestry information for more interesting than the medical part.  So all may not yet be lost.
 Yes.  Last line of the post.
 &gt; So the it&#x27;s up to the parties in that eventuality to work things out.<p>That&#x27;s usually a bad way to make a legal contract.  As an investor I&#x27;d want something a little more definitive.
 The problem with that is that you just get more of the same.<p>Microsoft really needs some outside influence, someone who hasn&#x27;t drowned in the kool-aid.<p>I think the last line of the article is the only relevant one -- that the people they are talking to don&#x27;t want the old guard looking over their shoulder, and the old guard doesn&#x27;t want to leave.
 You&#x27;re exactly the kind of person they are trying to get to leave -- someone who is only in it for the money and doesn&#x27;t believe in the mission.
 Why does not taking this offer imply taking a pay cut and small stock grants?
 Why would taking this deal imply you aren&#x27;t getting paid competitively?
 I mostly use Python now.  I got started by showing up at reddit and having Steve Huffman ask me to write some code and since everything was in Python I had to learn Python.<p>I kinda went from there.  I&#x27;m a shitty programmer so it was awful at first but I learned a lot about both Python and programming from Steve and Chris.<p>Now I&#x27;m a less shitty programmer.  :)
 No, it wouldn&#x27;t.  Do you really think you&#x27;re the first person to try and game the system like that?  You know who else tries that?  Spammers who think that down voting every submission but their own actually works.
 You would just blend in with all the spammers that try to do this already.

 &gt; Totally unrelated to this, but please look into the API returning a ton of HTTP 503&#x2F;504 gateway timeouts. It&#x27;s been happening to me across several servers in different regions of the world.<p>Ironically, that&#x27;s probably the rate limiting blocking you.  Are you hitting the API more often than once every 30 seconds?
 If you&#x27;re small you can just use the tools Amazon provides you and get pretty far -- CloudFormation and&#x2F;or OpsWorks, combined with AutoScaling (now configurable from the console! :) ).
 EC2 has had auto-scaling for ages -- this is just the web interface.
 This isn&#x27;t a no manager company.  This is a &quot;few manager&quot; company.  They still have managers -- the cofounders.<p>Reading through this series it looks like they basically just consolidated all of the management decisions to themselves.  I&#x27;d love to know how a truly no management company functions, if such a thing exists for companies more than 5 or 6 people.
 My main counter-example is how they do compensation.  Everyone does a peer review, and then the founders sit in a room and decide everyone&#x27;s salary.  That doesn&#x27;t feel like self management to me.  I think a self-managed way to do salary is to either say everyone gets the same thing, or everyone in the company decides and agrees on everyone else&#x27;s salary.  Neither of which seem very tenable.

 It&#x27;s interesting that your experience is so different from mine (I work at Netflix now).<p>for #1, I&#x27;ve never heard of someone being let go without having any idea.  When a manager goes to HR and says &quot;I&#x27;d like to let this person go&quot;, they ask, &quot;will it be a surprise?&quot; and if the answer is yes, they send you back to have the hard conversation first.<p>for #2, I have lots of friends from Netflix.  And some of them have even been let go and we&#x27;re still friends.  I was even friends with my boss, but like any company, when it is a relationship with a manager it must always be reserved.
 &gt; Working at Netflix seems to be a very demanding experience. Will you say that Netflix balance this demand ? In which way ?<p>It is demanding, but management sets a good example of taking time off and allowing for a work&#x2F;life balance.  If you&#x27;re there at 6pm on a weekday, the building is 1&#x2F;2 empty and by 7pm almost no one is around.  People do not work crazy hours.<p>Also, for the most part, no one is around for the next two weeks, other than being on call for critical issues.<p>As for the no bonuses and perks, that is deceiving.  Yes it is true, but instead they pay us what they would spend on those perks.  Then we can chose to spend it on that or anything else.<p>Also, there are no official perks, but management is really good about celebrating wins and making sure we feel appreciated.
 She was not fired -- she left on great terms and most everything she put in place is still there.  She had just been there a long time and wanted to help other companies.
 The slide deck is accurate -- we usually point people at it when we think they aren&#x27;t following it.
 That&#x27;s probably true, but even the sports guys are friends. :)  Even when they get traded and have to play against each other.

 Quantcast and it&#x27;s ilk are as accurate as a monkey throwing at a dartboard.  It still boggles my mind that anyone relies on them.
 https everywhere for reddit is actually a tricky proposition.  Mainly because the browsers have yet to be designed to handle an all https website that embeds content from other sites.<p>We tried running reddit in all https mode, but you get a lot of mixed content warnings, which makes for an awful user experience.<p>There are also a lot of edge cases of the opposite case where people embed reddit on their site.
 Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want.  Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority.<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.
 You would need a way for me to whitelist or discount senders.<p>I don&#x27;t want my wife to have to pay to send me an email.<p>I don&#x27;t want personal contacts to have to pay.<p>I don&#x27;t want people offering me (good) jobs to have to pay.<p>You have to figure out a way to solve these problems without me having to review each email to determine how much it should cost.
 Interesting. It&#x27;s actually almost flawless for me. Have you done bulk training?  Do searches for groups of messages you know are and are not priority and mark them in bulk. This seems to have helped me immensely.
 I just checked it out again and it looks like the situation is improved now that Youtube is http (the biggest source of external embedded content).<p>That being said, there is still a significant monetary cost, not in terms of servers, but in terms of the fact that Akamai, the CDN for reddit, charges an arm and a leg for SSL support.
 You do when you work for Google and the picture is going to be in a magazine. :)
 Every time I speak to a group, I take a quick survey as to how many people know what a bloom filter is.  Even at the most nerdiest of tech talks, it&#x27;s rarely above 50%.<p>It amazes me that this is not something that is taught in school these days (or maybe it is now?), considering it is such a powerful tool in a distributed environment.
 Yes, it was probably part of their employment agreement, that all public appearances are at the approval of Google.  That&#x27;s pretty typical, even for an acquired startup.<p>And if they get fired with cause, they most likely loose a lot of their acquisition payout, so it is in their best interest to follow the rules.
 &gt; And these guys are YouTube founders<p>And once they were acquired, no different than any other Google employee.  That is the cost of &quot;selling out&quot; as they say.
 Guys, before you jump on this bandwagon, do your research.  Common carrier is bad for everyone, including the consumer.<p>It means that a floor will be set on the price of peering as well as a ceiling, so ISPs that currently peer at no cost will be forced to charge each other and then pass that on to consumers.<p>I&#x27;m a huge fan of Net Neutrality, but common carrier status is not the solution.
 Congress can either give the FCC the power to mandate it without common carrier, or congress can simply legislate net neutrality on its own.<p>But I don&#x27;t think a solution exists that is soley in the pervue of the executive.
 Author kind of tanked their own argument with this one:<p>&gt; (which was great if you were on the East Coast, but West Coast &#x2F; Best Coast knew not to check the thread until after watching it<p>Same answer here -- if you haven&#x27;t watched it yet, don&#x27;t look at the threads.
 They&#x27;re all done together.  A typical show with a standard release cycle is actually holding back completed episodes.<p>The glaring exception is South Park, which is done pretty much days before release.<p>Also, sitcoms that are filmed in front of a studio audience tend to be filmed just a few weeks in advance, since they film whole episodes at once.  Something like HOC is filmed more like a movie, where all the scenes in one place are filmed together.
 I don&#x27;t intend this to put down the creators of this product, but Postgres is a SQL database with the scalability of KV store if used in a way that makes it scalable like a KV store. :)<p>It&#x27;s a great idea, but I think the &quot;mission statement&quot; needs to be restated.
 I&#x27;ve done an AMA that was pretty popular, it&#x27;s not that hard to keep up actually.<p>You start with the top voted comment, reply, go to the next, etc.  Then you reload the page and do it again.<p>It helps if you have gold because then you can highlight the stuff that is new since you last loaded the page, which helps you find the questions faster.<p>The trick for the user is to have a good enough question to get it voted to the top.
 I always enjoyed doing it to share my thoughts with the community, since they seemed interested.  It&#x27;s kinda like, why do you talk to people at parties when you have no immediate profit making venture to push?  Because it&#x27;s fun.<p>It&#x27;s also a great way to stay connected with your base, even for someone like Bill, who is still trying to accomplish things that are easier with broad support.
 It takes like 2 seconds to make one.  You don&#x27;t even have to give them an email address! :)

 Funny story about that.  We (reddit) had a long debate about what the default UI and content should be back when we internationalized (2008 I think?).  Should we use the Accept-Language header to select both the UI and the content, or just the UI?  We started by making the assumption that if your preferred language was French, for example, you&#x27;d want French content.<p>We got a ton of feedback from French speakers that they preferred the English content, so we ended up settling on selecting a UI based on the A-L header but giving the default English content (unless you specifically set it otherwise).
 There is a separate part of the site for French speakers:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/fr" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fr</a><p>There&#x27;s one for every supported language.
 People keep saying this, but you have to dig deeper.  Even the content producers don&#x27;t want this.<p>Common carrier means multiple things, but one of them is that it sets a <i>floor</i> on the price for peering agreements.  This means that currently free peering will have to become paid peering, and no one wants that.<p>It would actually give more money to the ISPs for something they are already doing.
 All of this data assumes that IMDB is a complete record of all films.<p>I don&#x27;t believe it is, and I think the further back you go, the more likely it is that only well-regarded films are in the database.
 If you jailbreak your phone you can put in any sim you want.  I did that when I went to Australia.
 If you cut programmers salaries in 1&#x2F;2 today, you&#x27;d still have enough programmers.<p>Just not very many good ones.
 Doesn&#x27;t revealing the identities of the key holders somewhat compromise the system?  Ot at least make it more vulnerable?
 &gt; Note, however, that not every country on the planet has a Craigslist equivalent.<p>Owned by eBay.  Kijiji is an eBay property and it&#x27;s the biggest &quot;Craigslist&quot; in most markets other than the US.<p>They also own 25% of Craigslist
 Histogram of word length.  Keep in mind that the median word length in English is 5:<p><pre><code>              5     1 #
              6    14 ##
              7   104 ###########
              8   326 #################################
              9   414 ##########################################
             10   380 ######################################
             11   320 ################################
             12   200 ####################
             13   133 ##############
             14    73 ########
             15    35 ####
             16    12 ##
             17     8 #
             18     1 #
             19     1 #
             20     1 #
             22     1 #
 </code></pre>
 edit:  Someone points out below I had an off by one error, which I&#x27;ve now fixed.
 I did this to make the above:<p><pre><code>    sort &#x2F;tmp&#x2F;foo |awk &#x27;
 { print length, $0 }&#x27;|sort -n|awk &#x27;
 {print $1}&#x27;|uniq -c|awk &#x27;
 {r=&quot;&quot;;i=s=$1&#x2F;10;while(i--&gt;0)r=r&quot;#&quot;;printf &quot;%15s %5d %s %s&quot;,$2,$1,r,&quot;\n&quot;;}&#x27;</code></pre>
 You&#x27;re right, it was off by one.  I just fixed it.  Thanks!
 I don&#x27;t think people realize that the purpose of elementary education is not to teach the kids how to do something -- it&#x27;s to teach them how to <i>think</i> about doing something.<p>This method is longer but it helps them grasp the concept of what division is so that they can then extend that thinking.
 Static site generators are the new Fibonacci generator.  When you learn a language it&#x27;s a fun little exercise, and possibly even useful.<p>Also, everyone has slightly different requirements, so everyone likes to build their own.<p>I will most likely soon build my own static site generator, because none of the ones out there do exactly what I want.  I will most likely borrow from at least a few of the examples out there and then post it on my github so there is yet another one.<p>I think we&#x27;re seeing a proliferation simply because it is so easy to share code these days.  Imagine how many Fibonacci generators would have been out there if it were as easy to share code when those were popular (I want to say 10 years ago but maybe it was longer).
 The templating is the easy part.  It&#x27;s all the parts that go around it that are the interesting&#x2F;fun part.
 Having interviewed folks from NSFW companies, I can tell you that it&#x27;s a great place to beef up the resume and learn lots of useful skills.  Their scaling and operations problems are fairly interesting and unique.<p>That being said, there is definitely a stigma that comes with it.  I have no problem at all hiring someone who worked at an NSFW company, but I definitely have friends who have said &quot;I wouldn&#x27;t want to work with anyone willing to stoop so low morally that they would work there&quot;
 Metacomment:  I like how you are copying PGs use of footnotes, but please copy his html as well and make them link back and forth.
 HN came in March of 2007.
 I don&#x27;t think they care, their target is not the consumer.<p>I suspect most of their business will be via referral, which is often in writing.
 $250M feels tiny for a tech IPO (and for an IPO in general).<p>Does anyone have any data around this?
 I understand that, but even that feels low.
 &gt; Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the &#x27;remainders&#x27;<p>This is a myth.  Both companies created their infrastructure businesses as separate entities by leveraging their datacenter expertise, but they were not &#x27;remainders&#x27;.
 If you hover over accidents in Google Maps, sometimes it says &quot;reported by Waze&quot;.  I assume there is lots of data mixing happening on the backend that we can&#x27;t see.
 It&#x27;s not reasoning per se, I&#x27;ve actually talked to both Google and Amazon about it. :)
 That&#x27;s not true.  If you build 3 chairs and don&#x27;t sell them by the end of the year, you pay inventory tax on the 3 chairs, i.e. you pay taxes on them without selling them.<p>This is why stores that sell physical goods to a blowout sale at the end of the year.
 By having good replication, either hand rolled or built in.<p>At Netflix we use Cassandra and store all data on local instance storage.  We don&#x27;t use EBS for databases.

 I was hoping you would hire Nick too so that he&#x27;d have more time to work on the code.  I&#x27;ve been trying to get some changes to the spam filter through for a while. :)
 &gt; HN is the slowest site in my bookmarks, by FAR<p>You must not use reddit.<p>(I&#x27;m allowed to say that since it&#x27;s partly my fault reddit is slow)
 You clearly didn&#x27;t read the article.  It only applies to sharing files, not storing them.  All of your arguments do not apply to shared files.
 I&#x27;ve been thinking about this for a while.  Last I checked, to be in the top 1% in the US you had to have about $250K of annual income.  In the Bay Area, pretty much anyone who holds the title of Director or VP (and even Senior Manager at some places) at any sizable tech company makes that much, if not a lot more.  So if you work at one of those companies, you might think your Director is doing well, but you probably don&#x27;t think of them as insanely wealthy.
 Libertarians still believe in a publicly funded police force (and military).  It&#x27;s one of the few things Libertarians feel should be publicly funded.
 I based it on the Libertarian Party platform.
 Between the amount of time people spend online talking about it, and interacting with the &quot;jokes&quot;, and the development time (hello Google), is there any way we can put an estimate on the cost to the industry?<p>I know that even when I was at reddit April 1 took at least a few days of planning and coding, and now they start planning well in advance.
 &gt; &quot;Cost&quot; is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not a zero-sum game.<p>That&#x27;s fair.  However development time doesn&#x27;t feel like it would be zero sum.
 &gt; Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that spending time on fun tasks &quot;costs&quot; the company.<p>Your own bias is showing here.  I didn&#x27;t say cost was a bad thing -- you just assumed it is.<p>Lots of good things cost money -- server time, employees, marketing, etc.<p>I was just interesting in figuring out the cost, not trying to say it is bad.  If I wanted to say it was bad I would have used a word like &quot;waste&quot;.  I did not use that word.
 &gt; proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources<p>I never said that.  It&#x27;s interesting however that at least two people assumed I did (the person you mention talking about bathroom breaks also assumed I meant it was wasteful).
 &gt; I allow myself 15 minutes of Reddit per day.<p>He&#x27;s definitely not the only one.  We noticed this trend very early on -- a lot of users have a fixed amount of time.<p>If we made an improvement to page loading times, time on site stayed fixed, but the number of pages each user viewed went up.  In other words, they were reading more in the same amount of time.<p>We found that fascinating.
 It makes sense for the <i>editors</i> to look at that data, and give bigger assignments and more resources to those that bring in more page views, but at the same time it makes sense to hide that from the journalists so that they don&#x27;t chase the page views, if page views is your business.<p>I personally think that things should be much more transparent, but the business model needs to be changed so that money is not made on page views but on something else that somehow rewards the quality of the work, not the quantity.
 This is a great example of marketing vs. technology.  Cloudflare is amazingly good at marketing.<p>This technology is not new, revolutionary or different in any way from what a bunch of other providers do (including AWS, who they even mention in the blog post as what they are a solution for).<p>But yet they write it like they have solved a major problem in a new way.<p>Super props to the Cloudflare team! (I&#x27;m being sincere here, they did a great job with the marketing part of this product)
 I like live shows. I would like a website that lists all the live shows in my area. Like &quot;show me all shows at Shoreline&quot;. I haven&#x27;t found a single site that tells me this.
 Yes, I should have said &quot;Show me all events near San Francisco&quot;, because as you aptly point out a single venue is easy to search.  The problem is that I have to find all the venues, do all the searches, and then do it again as they add more shows!<p>So yeah, a single site, maybe one where I can upload my iTunes song list or link to my Pandora or something so it can sort by why I like, would be awesome.
 Is it worth downloading and watching?
 I may be a bit biased since I work for Netflix, but I did notice a difference when we had the 4K and 1080p next to each other.<p>What was really cool with the 4k is that I could get literally 2 inches from the screen and still not see the pixels.  It still looked natural even at that distance.
 I used to use Hugin for all my stitching needs.  It did a great job creating what became my Facebook cover photo, which was stitched from 80+ images.<p>However, it would crash about 50% of the time, with some sort of random error.  If I slightly changed a setting, like tweaking the cropping or removing a single image, then sometimes it would work.  Sometimes it would work if I ran the exact same job again  -- the issue was not repeatable.<p>I eventually switched to a paid program, Autopano Pro (recommended to me by some of the Smugmug employees).  It works just as well, a lot faster, and doesn&#x27;t crash 1&#x2F;2 the time.<p>If you&#x27;re serious about making beautiful panoramics, I highly suggest you check it out.
 Heh sorry.  Here&#x27;s the final image:  <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10101519173406123&amp;l=5f01783041" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;photo.php?fbid=10101519173406123&amp;l=...</a><p>The nice part is that since it&#x27;s a cover photo on Facebook, the error on the bottom left is covered.<p>I don&#x27;t have a good place to put the 44MB full res version. :(

 You can&#x27;t.  To watch legally you have to have cable TV.
 Back in the 90s, I had a friend who was an instructor for Sun Certification classes.  He told us of a kid who, when he turned 18, was given his college savings by his parents to do with as he pleased.  He chose to spend the ~200K getting every Sun cert available.<p>He then became a consultant at 21 making about $500K a year, at least for a few years.  Don&#x27;t know what happened to him after those certs became useless, but I hope he converted somehow.
 I lost maybe 20 pounds on the diet, but I wasn&#x27;t religious about following it.  I only did it on workdays because it was hard to carry the oil with me, so I just kept the bottle at work.<p>It did however make me not hungry at all, I would barely eat throughout the day.<p>It caused social problems though, because at night I still wouldn&#x27;t be hungry, so I would just sit there at dinner while the family ate, and they would constantly be asking if I was ok.<p>I stopped losing weight when I hit the set point, and stopped the diet a while after that.  Eventually I gained the weight back.<p>Interestingly, a few years later I started exercising regularly as a way to loose weight, and now I&#x27;m once again stuck at the same set point, which is about 15 pounds more than I&#x27;d like to be.  Still trying to figure out how to lower that set point.
 The &quot;typical&quot; 9 to 5 workday typically only applies to blue collar workers who get two paid 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute paid lunch, with each break coming after 1.75 hours of work.<p>Most office workers go 9 to 6 or 8 to 5.
 The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of).  They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).<p>However, they don&#x27;t get to choose the day.  It is assigned to them.  The state is doing it to cut down on traffic and commuting, as well as facilities costs.<p>However, so far they say they haven&#x27;t lost any productivity by doing this program.  Of course:<p>1) They want it to work because the taxpayers are watching
 2) A lot of folks work from home on their &quot;day off&quot;<p>My point is these are all tough experiments to run due to human nature and not wanting to be perceived as working less than your peers.
 I saw a demo of CoreOS yesterday, and was super impressed.  I&#x27;d heard of it before, but never really understood the power until I saw the demo.<p>CoreOS is basically an OS with the fundamentals to force you to &quot;do cloud right&quot;.<p>If I were building a company right now on AWS (or any other cloud) I&#x27;d seriously be considering basing my infrastructure on CoreOS.
 Namely that it forces you to store your data in a shared service and design your app so that it can be destroyed at any time without severe consequences.<p>It also has primitives built in to get you thinking about fleets of machines instead of individual machines such as a default shared configuration and low level knowledge of the other machines in the fleet.<p>Lastly, since it is very Docker friendly, it gets you thinking in containers, which is a very neat way of making sure that your software is consistent across machines.
 This feels bad to me, but I&#x27;ll reserve judgement until it happens.<p>I use 4sq for two things -- keeping track of where I&#x27;ve been when I travel, and letting people know where I am when I travel in case we&#x27;re near each other.<p>From this description, it sounds like I&#x27;ll need two apps for that now.  In which case I might as well just use a Facebook checkin and not use 4sq at all, since Facebook serves both purposes.
 This feels bad to me, but I&#x27;ll reserve judgement until it happens.<p>I use 4sq for two things -- keeping track of where I&#x27;ve been when I travel, and letting people know where I am when I travel in case we&#x27;re near each other.<p>From this description, it sounds like I&#x27;ll need two apps for that now.  In which case I might as well just use a Facebook checkin and not use 4sq at all, since Facebook serves both purposes.
 If that&#x27;s the case, then I might just switch to Swarm, and it will be an improved experience, and I&#x27;ll be happy. :)
 &gt; but it&#x27;s not just evaluating your headphones, but also your DAC, amplifier (both of which are typically crap in most computers), and your own hearing limits.<p>That&#x27;s a good thing though.  I want to know which headphones or speakers work best with my equipment in my normal conditions with my hearing.  I don&#x27;t care which ones are &quot;the best&quot;.  I want &quot;the best for me&quot;.
 &gt; What will be interesting to watch will be how quickly Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, can accumulate stock in the company. Various performance bands that comprise a large portion of his compensation could net him nearly nine-figure equity in his first half decade in charge,<p>That&#x27;s not a bad compensation package...
 &gt; I wonder if [Netflix is] space limited or iops limited.<p>I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re asking the right question.  The more iops, the less space and the less cost.  I&#x27;d say Netflix is always optimizing for both.<p>The right question to ask is what is the break-even point between space and cost where these drives make sense, and that would depend mostly on how popular the most popular content is.  If everyone were watching the same few things, but enough that it can&#x27;t just all fit in RAM, it would make a lot of sense to have a lot of these drives.  But if the watching is spread out across a lot of content, then not so much.
 Google has a strange disincentive to buy Uber -- since Google Ventures invested, Google really wants someone else&#x27;s money to provide that exit, otherwise they&#x27;re just moving money from one pocket to the other.
 Excellent point that I hadn&#x27;t considered.<p>In which case I guess it is just a numbers game like you said.
 &gt; I&#x27;m still skeptical that a) they built a full replacement of the system in only a week<p>Keep in mind that Highscalability bases it&#x27;s articles on other 3rd party research.  They don&#x27;t talk to the people they are writing about, even when those people (like me) offer to help them get their facts right.<p>In all likelihood it&#x27;s just completely wrong.
 See, a first person source! :)<p>Nonetheless, my statement otherwise still stands.

 TL;DR:  The founder of Monster&#x27;s son, with no experience other than working for his dad, tried to single-handedly negotiate a deal with Dre and his record company.  He ended up having Monster assume all the risk and Dre retaining all the rights, and then Monster got pushed out just as they were really taking off.
 CoreOS is awesome and &quot;makes you do cloud right&quot; by forcing you to do things like make sure your app can die and restart cleanly and make you store your data in a resilient way.<p>I&#x27;m super excited by this release and look forward to this shaping the way people do cloud.
 PG isn&#x27;t <i>always</i> right you know. :)<p>He told the reddit guys that the logo was a distraction and if they <i>must</i> have it it should be at the bottom out of view.<p>Sometimes he does make a mistake.  This previous statement of his could be one of them.
 How do you type your password into your telephone, something this system has to support?<p>That&#x27;s why you can&#x27;t use Q and Z -- it&#x27;s not on the phone.
 One of my bank accounts has the same restriction, so that you can enter you password through the phone system.  It&#x27;s stupid, but at least it has a reason.
 It would be cool if Tesla Motors decided to make the museum part of their corporate function to fund the construction and ongoing operations of the museum.
 Canceling your streaming service subscriptions won&#x27;t be sufficient, even if everyone did it.<p>You have to stop consuming Hollywood content.  Stop going to movies.  Stop watching TV shows.  Stop listening to recorded music.<p>Then you might actually make a difference.<p>The streaming services are just stuck in the middle here -- Hollywood won&#x27;t sell them, or anyone, content without DRM.<p>DRM actually makes sense for a streaming service, where you only have a temporary license to the content anyway.  You&#x27;re buying the right to watch or listen one time -- how is that supposed to be enforced?
 You live in a very sheltered bubble if you think DRM is not effective.<p>For most people, DRM is enough to stop them.  It&#x27;s only a select few people with a deep understanding of technology who can defeat even the most basic DRM.
 reddit doesn&#x27;t really have any of your personal data.  They <i>may</i> have an email address, but that&#x27;s about it.  They may also have an IP address, but as long as your ISP is good, even if law enforcement gets that it won&#x27;t help much.
 Do you shave?  I&#x27;m just going to assume you do and then ask you why you choose to deceive the world about your hair growth.<p>It&#x27;s the same thing.  It&#x27;s not actually good for you (removes a natural defense for your skin), it&#x27;s deceitful and it&#x27;s a financial burden (you have to buy razors and supplies).<p>Human beautification is a many thousands of year old tradition -- it&#x27;s as much a part of being a human as expressing oneself through language.
 While you&#x27;ve brought up perfectly valid points, you didn&#x27;t actually refute anything I said.<p>Yes, some people are required to shave for their job, but most are not and still do.  Some women are required to wear makeup for their jobs, but most aren&#x27;t and still do.<p>Regardless, my initial arguments still apply to all the cases where one is not required by one&#x27;s job.
 When the dollar coin was first introduced in the US, you could order them online for no extra cost, as a way of increasing adoption.  There would be a $1000 charge on your credit card, and 1000 coins would show up at your door (shipping was free too).<p>A lot of airline miles were earned at the expense of the US government.

 Disclosure: The writer is a friend of mine.<p>That being said, she is one of the few science&#x2F;technology writers whose articles I read from beginning to end, because the fascinate and engage me.
 This was your subtle way of saying that the average lifespan for a typical Afro-American name is lower, right? :)<p>It&#x27;s ok to differentiate things amongst races sometimes -- it isn&#x27;t <i>always</i> racist.
 They recently had a multi-year restoration.<p>Before that it was almost completely black from soot and smoke.
 I think OP was commenting on the irony that the reason given for no nudity on tv is a religious reason from the same religion that puts naked people in one of their most sacred places.
 How can I apply this information to improve my Wheel of Fortune performance?
 I prefer to call it &quot;unmetered&quot; vacation, not &quot;unlimited&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been working with &quot;unmetered&quot; vacation for 3 years now and I&#x27;ve taken more time off than I ever did when I was earning 30 days a year of PTO.
 If you have metered vacation days but unlimited sick days, of course that is going to happen.  You have to unmeter both or it doesn&#x27;t work.
 &gt; if there is no overlap you just cant&#x27; trade no matter what the exchange does.<p>How does HFT change that?
 It already does that, but there&#x27;s only so much buffering you&#x27;re willing to wait for.
 How does HFT create the overlap when the seller is at 10 and buyer is at 9.9?  I don&#x27;t understand what the HFT provides that closes the gap.
 I&#x27;m under the impression that every request is a different random MAC, until you connect to the wifi network.
 Sometimes it isn&#x27;t worth the effort to fix the old, and instead just go to the new and improved.<p>When the load balancer for reddit broke once, we did&#x27;t bother fixing it, we just replaced it with better (though untested) technology on the assumption it would work better.  We figured it couldn&#x27;t be any <i>worse</i> than it was, and we&#x27;d rather spend our limited time moving forward instead of treading water.
 The HN code base is as much an experiment in Arc as it is a social news site.  Also the feature set is surprisingly different (although I wish some of the features were here like comment collapsing and async comment submission).
 When we upgraded LBs we didn&#x27;t have a continuity break.  We just flipped the IP when it was ready.<p>For most DB upgrades we did dual writing so we didn&#x27;t have to have a break.
 I had the same experience with the in store demo.  I was blown away at how terrible the quality was.<p>I actually have UVerse internet (in fact I just got them to double my speed and lower my price today because I&#x27;ve been with them so long).  My internet came with free TV for a couple months.<p>The quality was so terrible that I stopped watching after about an hour.  Also, I think it stole my internet bandwidth when I was watching.
 The human takes over until it can be cleared I assume.<p>This system is not a self driving system -- it&#x27;s basically a smarter cruise control.  You still have to pay attention and be at the wheel.  At least for now.
 No sports have enough data to say that &quot;the best team won&quot;.  There just simply aren&#x27;t enough matches.<p>But most people&#x27;s enjoyment of sports comes from watching the execution, not the stats.  The stats are just icing.<p>Yes, there are people who get enjoyment just from the stats (baseball is notorious for this), but for the most part the stats are just an interesting side show for the main event.
 I wonder if Aereo would be legal if they dropped the DVR portion of the service.  It seems like that is the issue here.<p>If it&#x27;s really just me renting an antenna it seems like that is still legal.
 Got it, thanks for the clarification.
 &gt; Women are forced into prostitution, either by being literally enslaved, or by economics.<p>But some women <i>want</i> to engage in that profession and can&#x27;t due to (mostly male) lawmakers preventing them.  So it really swings both ways.<p>And further, prostitution isn&#x27;t just women.  It&#x27;s mostly women, but not only women.
 The problem here is that it could create a huge loophole.  I&#x27;d love to be able to write off my donations to open source groups, but so would big companies.<p>Imagine a situation where a company that develops their software as open source, like reddit for example, setting up a 503(c) and putting all the developers and all the reddit gold revenue into the 503(c), thereby getting a massive write-off for the &quot;donations&quot; and not having to show profit on reddit gold.<p>Or worse, someone like IBM putting all their consultants into a 503(c) and taking all their consulting revenue as donations.
 The developers are already a write off, but they wouldn&#x27;t have to count the reddit gold &quot;donations&quot; as income.
 &gt; He is a Republican Senator from Alabama. He doesn&#x27;t need to look at facts.<p>Let&#x27;s be fair here.  That should read:<p>He is a Senator. He doesn&#x27;t need to look at facts.
 You forgot &quot;From the Earth to the Moon&quot;, which was an excellent miniseries produced by the same team that did Apollo 13.
 It&#x27;s useful in the same way that a historical text is useful -- to see where we came from.
 If it&#x27;s anything like it was at reddit, you&#x27;re not being compelled.  Each day an email would come saying &quot;lunch is ready&quot; and each day we would look at each other and say &quot;time for lunch&quot;, and then all go sit down together.  Sometimes we would look at the menu and decide to all go out.<p>It just sort of happened because we liked each other.
 &gt; except people rarely go out since our caterers are really good<p>Same at reddit. :)  We would go out maybe once a month.
 The best advice I ever heard about logos was from Mat Groening, creator of Simpsons and Futurama.  He said, &quot;Whenever I make a main character, I try to make them recognizable as a simple black and white silhouette&quot;.  Think about Bart, Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bender, Fry, Leela.  All of them instantly recognizable with just a few solid lines.<p>If you do the same with your logo, it will be super memorable and recognizable.  Think about all the best ones -- Nike, Apple, Mcdonalds.  The reddit logo and HN&#x27;s &quot;Y&quot; follow that rule too.
 Not really.  Even Apple will tell you that Excel is the best software to do serious spreadsheet work on a Mac.  Numbers is for consumer oriented &#x2F; home budget applications.
 One of the decisions we made very early on with reddit was to specifically <i>not</i> use a redirector.  In exchange, we gave up a lot of potential revenue in the form of selling usage information to people.<p>I still think that was the right decision, but I can see why Twitter relies so heavily on t.co.
 They can also just remove the link from the system like reddit does. :)  t.co makes it a little easier, but not much.
 That&#x27;s a fair assessment.  We banned link shorteners from reddit pretty early on, so we didn&#x27;t have to deal with that.
 There is an option in your prefs to turn off the calls to google.<p>HTTPS is coming soon, there were some technical issues getting a complete HTTPS experience without a huge cost due to the way the CDN was set up.
 They actually had redirection in 2005.  We turned it off sometime in 2007&#x2F;8 when it started breaking, right when bit.ly and the other shorteners (and the business around them) were taking off.<p>And actually, there is a redd.it link shortener.  Every link has a corresponding redd.it link. :)
 &gt; It looks like the drives are not hot-swappable,<p>That&#x27;s correct.<p>&gt; so I&#x27;d guess Netflix is able to remotely track loss of redundancy and will just send out an entire replacement unit when needed.<p>Exactly.  If a drive dies, the capacity of that box is just reduced.  Once enough drives die, the box gets an RMA.

 &gt; Well, they were in talks with Yahoo about being acquired.<p>You shouldn&#x27;t believe everything you read on the internet. :)
 It&#x27;s from here:  <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=motorcycle+sidecar&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=motorcycle+sidecar&amp;source=ln...</a>
 The definition I use is a piece of software that runs independently to encapsulate infrastructure libraries.  In other words it gives you a way to access the libraries without having to import them into your code.
 &gt; If that is what is being proposed, that sounds like a massive conflict of interest, with potential for serious abuse, even if the intent is positive.<p>Let&#x27;s say for a moment, for the sake of argument, that YC decided to be unethical and accept payment in exchange for &quot;accepting&quot; people to the program to get them a visa.<p>1) Would it be so terrible to have people who have enough money to afford such a bribe be in the US contributing to the economy?<p>2) Do you really think YC would stake their reputation on such an abuse?<p>3) O1A visas are often given to artists, actors and athletes.  Do you think that there isn&#x27;t at least a few theater and movie production houses (usually underfunded and desperate for cash) that are accepting the payments to list a rich foreigner as an &quot;actor&quot; in their show?<p>In other words, I don&#x27;t think this is actually a huge concern.
 Why is that a complication?  Wouldn&#x27;t it be up to the vendor if they want to lose the foreign business?  Or are you saying that the government doesn&#x27;t want it because they don&#x27;t want to exclude foreigners?
 This explains why it takes so long for them to release new features in AWS.  Fascinating.
 So War Games was right then... We really do need to replace the officers with computers.
 The problem here is that the Ars article was better.  It was better written and had additional information.<p>The original article was poorly written and harder to follow.<p>I would arguably say you made the front page worse by switching the link.
 There&#x27;s a difference between lifting content and journalism. :)<p>Ars practices journalism, which means they take a primary source and then enrich it with useful information while also making it easier to understand.<p>You&#x27;re absolutely right in that many blogs simply regurgitate someone else&#x27;s content, but Ars is not one of those sites.<p>If you want to be heavy handed in your moderation and become a content curator, you&#x27;ll need to get better at distinguishing the two.<p>this is one of the reasons we shied away from heavy handed moderation at reddit -- it&#x27;s just too difficult to do it well.<p>Also, primacy doesn&#x27;t always mean it is better.

 No.  Redis caches single objets, Varnish caches whole pages (unless you&#x27;re using Redis as a full page cache).<p>If you&#x27;re using Redis as your database, I&#x27;d suggest not doing that anyway, as you&#x27;ll start running into problems as your dataset gets bigger than available memory and it has to start swapping.  I&#x27;ve found it works much better if you use it like memcache with a richer set of data structures.
 A few years ago someone (I think it was actually the Zen Magnet folks) sent a bunch of Zen Magnet sets to the reddit office.  We kept them on a shared desk and you could often find a programmer playing with them while thinking about their code.<p>They were also far superior to the bucky ball set we had.<p>Even though I have a couple of sets already, I&#x27;m going to order another to support their cause.
 I remember in the first weeks of JTV when the crew would hold a weekly BBQ at their apartment, so that people would have something interesting to watch.  It was fun to go up there and joke with Justin about his shenanigans for the week while watching Kyle build ever smaller portable rigs.<p>I&#x27;m glad that that crazy idea (&quot;I&#x27;m going to live stream my life and people will watch!&quot;) has turned into the best live streaming gaming site on the internet.
 The problem with the California project, which hopefully isn&#x27;t indicative of the other projects, is that they&#x27;re building the wrong line first.<p>The plan is to build the Stockton to Bakersfield line first.  The one that will get by far the least traffic!<p>If you really wanted to show value and increase public support, you&#x27;d build the Stockton to SF line and the Bakersfield to LA lines first.  Those lines would get 1000&#x27;s of daily riders as people switched to the train from their 2+ hour commutes.<p>Then use those profits to build the connecting line.
 Ha!  You do have a point.  I suppose this is where private enterprise would be better. :)
 It&#x27;s mostly for moving things around your internal network.  I would love to have 10Gb to my NAS, because then my backups would take seconds instead of minutes. (First world problems, I know).
 Every time someone mentions Alexa numbers, I pull out this quote (by me):<p>&quot;Alexa numbers are as accurate as a monkey throwing darts at a board.  Having been privy to various website&#x27;s actual numbers, Alexa numbers aren&#x27;t even accurate <i>relative to each other</i>.  All they measure is the use of your website amongst people who run Windows and are willing to install an Adware toolbar.&quot;
 The author assumes there is a paragraph before that sentence that describes his snobbish behavior.
 OP wasn&#x27;t saying it in passing, they were summarizing the findings of the study.
 &gt; IGT&#x27;s Double Diamonds reel-spinning slot is over 25 years old and players still look for it.<p>It&#x27;s the only slot I&#x27;ll play because it has the best pay table in the casino.  It&#x27;s the only one that pays 1600 coins for a 2 coin bet with sufficient payouts otherwise.
 It&#x27;s described below, but basically the overall return is the same for the various machines, but some have &quot;lumpy&quot; payouts, with very little paid out and then a big win, while others have no big win but lots of small wins.  The ones I like to play are the second kind -- more likely to return a small win to me, but I&#x27;m going to strike it rich.
 The diminishing returns only applies to creative work, not physical labor.  (Yes there is diminishing returns there too but clearly you&#x27;re still getting additional useful work done)
 Honest question: How do we as users know when it is ok to editorialize headlines and when it isn&#x27;t?
 That may be true, but from the guidelines: &quot;Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.&quot;<p>So now I&#x27;m not sure which is ok, because the guidelines clearly state that I am supposed to use the original title.  That makes me think that any change would be considered editorializing.
 Then why do the site&#x27;s guidelines specifically state &quot;Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.&quot;?<p>I&#x27;m fine with the mods changing the titles, but I don&#x27;t like the fact that the rules don&#x27;t apply equally to everyone.
 The title wasn&#x27;t link bait -- it was a journalistic choice by the New York Times author to mock BuzzFeed.<p>Once again, I think you guys made the wrong choice.  Once again, I&#x27;ll point out that if you want to do heavy handed moderation, you need to spend more time understanding why something is the way it is, which means you&#x27;ll need to spend more time doing it.<p>Once again I&#x27;ll point out that this is why we didn&#x27;t do heavy handed moderation at reddit -- it&#x27;s just too hard to get it right.
 It wasn&#x27;t link bait.  See my reply above.


 When I was in college (mid 90s) it cost about $1 per blank CD.  They were rated at &quot;10 years&quot;.  However, you could pick up a gold blank for about $5 each, and those were rated at &quot;100 years&quot;.  I wonder how accurate that was.  I don&#x27;t have ready access to either one, sadly.
 They have no relation to each other.
 &gt; The fun part was finding adapters for the few 8 cm CD singles I had, so they&#x27;d play in a modern slot-loading drive.<p>I had no idea such an adapter even existed.
 That test was fascinating (especially the explanations).  I got a 39.  Thanks for sharing that!
 The Immunity Project pitch was truly moving.  I wish they had a picture of it.  I really really hope they make their goal.
 I was really fascinated by Beep.  They are basically providing the platform to turn your house into the Enterprise. :)
 It&#x27;s a non-profit.
 They do that to prevent speeding.  If all the lights were green you might speed through the downtown core, where there are a lot of pedestrians.
 It would have released pressure.  Every quake near the Hayward releases pressure on it, which is a good thing.
 In this case, a picture is worth a 1000 words:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/Sunh0Iy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;Sunh0Iy</a><p>That was from Napa this morning.  Imagine if someone were standing under that?  Now multiply by tens of thousands of homes and businesses.<p>The buildings themselves are designed to survive, but many are old and not up to code, because you only have to make a building earthquake safe when you sell it or renovate it.<p>Also, many people do not secure large objects to the wall.  And sometimes it is the small objects that are the problem.  Wine bottles, mirrors, anything that can shatter and fling glass everywhere.
 There&#x27;s also a fun Star Trek TNG about the crew finding a spaceship with three cryogenically preserved people from the 1990s:  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_Th...</a>
 reddit originally ran on FreeBSD.  They switched to Linux before I got there for ease of administration.  I wanted to switch it back to BSD, but never got around to it as it wasn&#x27;t very high priority.  I tried to switch again when we moved to Amazon, but sadly it wasn&#x27;t an option so I went to Ubuntu instead.<p>I&#x27;ve always thought that BSD is superior from an admin perspective, as in it&#x27;s easier to do it right and keep it solid.<p>I may be biased though as my first job was IT for a company that had BSD committers so everything we did was on BSD and I learned how to admin from arguably some of the best BSD admins in the world.
 I can make a living with my water off.  I can&#x27;t with my internet off.
 I always request to sit somewhere where there is at least some natural light, mostly for my well being, but the plants offer a nice excuse as to why I <i>have</i> to be near a window.
 This is a better article:  <a href="http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2014/09/17/richmond-restaurant-owner-encourages-bad-yelp-reviews/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;insidescoopsf.sfgate.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;17&#x2F;richmond-res...</a><p>It has the full emails back and forth between yelp and company, which are the most telling part.<p>Basically the company doesn&#x27;t want to be on yelp, but yelp won&#x27;t remove them.  Now they are &quot;buying&quot; bad reviews, so yelp has threatened to take action and the restaurant basically says &quot;bring it on&quot; since that is exactly what they want.
 They tried to get removed from Yelp and Yelp ignored them.  That&#x27;s what they really want, to be removed.  See my comment elsewhere with a link for more details.
 If you grew up in the US, they already have it.  Every elementary school kid in the US gets fingerprinted.<p>EDIT:  It appears I was wrong, this was only in LA county.
 Come on people, this is so basic.  If you didn&#x27;t generate the data, don&#x27;t display it on your web page without filtering it.  It blows my mind that this isn&#x27;t just everyone&#x27;s default.
 And the best part (for AirBnB) is that it doesn&#x27;t affect their profitability at all -- the money comes right out of the pockets of the renters and owners.
 I hope they&#x27;re smart enough to ignore retweets...
 I used to do rack and stack in the eBay datacenter.  We actually had double height racks (84U).  I always wondered the same -- wouldn&#x27;t it be easier to build a catwalk instead of having a bunch of ladders and lifts around that required two people?
 It was.  We call it the Konami code internally. :)
 Somewhat related, but have you ever tried entering the konami code on reddit.  At least, it <i>used</i> to do something cool.
 No biggie when they&#x27;re bolted to the floor.  :)<p>Also, cost of land trumps safety apparently.
 Don&#x27;t give them any ideas!
 Unrelated side note:  this is the first time I&#x27;ve noticed one of the new TLDs on the front page of HN.
 It&#x27;s only a rule of thumb.  Our Huskies (large dog) generally lived to be 15 to 17 years old.  That&#x27;s about 100 in human years according to the chart at the bottom of the article.
 My vet actually had the 15, 10, 4, 4... etc chart on the wall.<p>I think 7 came because at the end of the dog&#x27;s natural life you could get a rough estimate using the rule of 7 because it averaged out.
 I go to the eye doctor every year, which is far greater regularity than I see the GP.  I feel like if I could live with any handicap except blindness -- I consume so much information visually I&#x27;m not sure what I would do without my eyes.
 In California, a termination conversation usually begins and ends like this: &quot;Thank you for your time, your services are no longer required.  Please collect your belongings.&quot;<p>Anything else opens the company up to liability.
 And also, technically the YC entity has no investment in reddit anymore, only individual partners. :)
 I haven&#x27;t the faintest idea. :)
 If you go into an Apple store they&#x27;ll let you use their computers to do it.

 That&#x27;s still not good enough because a tiny one person elevator shouldn&#x27;t count the same as a massive 30 person elevator.
 &gt; f you go to a restaurant, you generally don&#x27;t ask to try out a meal for free, or ask for a second one if you don&#x27;t like the first<p>I most certainly do.  I usually don&#x27;t have to ask.  When they come out and ask how the food was, I tell them the taste wasn&#x27;t to my liking or wasn&#x27;t what I expected, and they usually offer to comp the meal or bring a new one.<p>I&#x27;m not saying I expect you guys to do this, I&#x27;m just saying you should probably find a new analogy. :)<p>Although I think what OP is saying is that if you provide a match and the other person rejects it, you should provide another match, since obviously you didn&#x27;t make a good choice.  In other words, you should be guaranteeing one <i>date</i> per month, not one match.  Not a successful date, but just a date.
 Actually that&#x27;s not true.  The <i>first</i> Star Wars had lots of input from others, because Lucas didn&#x27;t have the clout to do it on his own.  Same with the second and third films.<p>It was the prequels that were just Lucas.  And we know how that turned out.
 They weren&#x27;t bad, but they weren&#x27;t nearly as good as the first three.
 I just installed memory clean the other day, and it seems to work well.  I didn&#x27;t turn on the auto-clean because I was concerned it would effect battery life.<p>Any anecdotal data on that?
 Thanks for the reply.  I&#x27;ve actually removed it from my system after seeing that all it would do is remove inactive memory.
 If they want people to live&#x2F;work in Oakland, they&#x27;re gonna need to convince the BART folks to run past midnight.  That is probably the biggest thing holding Oakland back.
 People like to go out after work, especially on weekends.  BART ending at midnight makes that really tough.
 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Typically only people who get paid high hourly rates (like lawyers) do it, but it is possible.
 Number one is far easier to do than number two.<p>Sadly, it&#x27;s as bad as the banking industry.  Still today, they base a lot of their security on IP addresses.  Sad really.
 I don&#x27;t need a photo, but it would be awesome if you posted these on Flickr with a Creative Commons license!
 web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again.  The interesting thing was that Django still wasn&#x27;t up to the task when we did that, mostly because it&#x27;s templating engine was too slow.  So we chose Pylons instead.<p>It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.
 That version of web.py has little relation to the one that Aaron wrote.  The current version looks pretty good but I have no idea what it&#x27;s scalability and modularity story is.
 I don&#x27;t work there so I don&#x27;t really know, but I do know that I usually don&#x27;t use Django for the reasons listed in the blog post -- namely that you have to live in their world view to write Django.
 Ask the community. :)<p>That&#x27;s a little glib, but basically I ask other people with experience.  You can throw as much fake traffic as you want at a framework but there is nothing like a real world test.
 The switch to Git happened one day before we open sourced on June 17, 2008, I remember that day well :) So yeah, the history of when we switched to Pylons is probably lost forever sadly.  But yes it was right around when I started in March &#x27;07 that you guys started working on the transition.
 Keysersosa answered this better below, but basically maintainability.  There was no writeup, I guess because doing write-ups about internal software switches wasn&#x27;t really a thing back then. :)
 I think OP meant a writeup about the switch from web.py to Pylons.  I&#x27;m not sure we ever wrote that one down.
 It&#x27;s bad.  I recently drove to LA through the central valley, and in 18 years of doing that drive, I&#x27;ve <i>never</i> seen it so dry.  Whole farms are just gone, everything is brown.<p>There are a couple of problems preventing us from saving more water though.<p>#1, we had a drought in the 80s.  A lot of people learned to conserve then and never changed their habits (like me).  There is no way I could use 20% less water -- I already use the minimum.  I have buckets all over the house for reuse, for example.  My next step is a gray water system, which is expensive.<p>Which leads to #2, water is way to cheap in this state.  I would have expected my water bill to go up during the drought.  It&#x27;s gone down.  It&#x27;s insane.  Sure, let&#x27;s keep tier one usage cheap so we don&#x27;t destroy the poor, but tier two and up?  It should be 10x what it is.  <i>That</i> would make people conserve.
 They&#x27;re doing that here in the bay area too.  My question is, do I have to have <i>grass</i> to count as a lawn?  I stopped watering my lawn the day I bought the house, so at this point it is just dirt.  Can I still the the $3&#x2F;sqft to put in turf?
 Yes!  That is what I am saying.  I feel for the poor and the farmers, and I&#x27;m totally fine with paying more so they can pay less.  I know <i>I</i> won&#x27;t pay much more because I conserve, but the asshat down the street who waters the sidewalk will pay <i>a lot</i> more and I&#x27;m ok with that too.
 Yep it sure can.  They sent me a nastygram once so I watered for a week till they inspected and then stopped again.  It&#x27;s such a waste to water things that aren&#x27;t edible.  I was just ahead of the curve -- green is the new brown.
 This seems like an easy problem to fix.  There should be a quiet period between market close and after-market open when all documents are released, so that everyone has a chance to see and process the documents.
 Where I work, we have people doing the same job, some making 150K, some making 330K+.  And if someone applied and was really good and we needed to give them 350K to get them in the door, we&#x27;d do that.<p>Would you want to see the range as 150-350K+?  I mean I guess it at least tells you something, but at the same time, we don&#x27;t want to scare off someone who&#x27;s looking for 350 who would assume they either won&#x27;t get it or won&#x27;t like the people they are working with just because they might make 150, or maybe think the role is beneath them because it could pay as low as 150.<p>Basically, we want to have a chance to have a discussion with them about what they are looking for in a job and how much they are looking for.  Putting a range in there squelches that discussion, whether justified or not.<p>ps. To head off the obvious question, it&#x27;s the same job role but the expectations and criteria for success are obviously different for the 150 vs. the 350.
 But the expectations and success are defined by the employee when they arrive, based on what they think is most necessary.  We rely on their experience to come up with the best solution and provide them context to make the best choice.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say you have two people in the same role, one at the top of the range and one at the bottom.  The one at the bottom may do something like write a small script to audit resource usage, whereas the person at the top of the range would create an entire software platform for building such audit tools.<p>Both are doing the same job (auditing resource usage) but one is doing it at a much higher level, and both are needed, one to solve the immediate problem and one to solve the long term problem.  And both are getting paid slightly above what they could get if they left the company and went somewhere else.

 Sleep Cycle only works if you sleep alone though.
 I don&#x27;t think it is legal to use deadly force to retrieve stolen goods, yours or anyone else&#x27;s.  You&#x27;d have to staff your firm with off duty cops or something to skirt that law.
 People ran him off because they thought it was a group of people with a nefarious purpose.  Since he was so knowledgeable about so many things, they just assumed he couldn&#x27;t be one person.  And of course, any time a group of people are on reddit that spell bad news, right? &lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;
 Until I read this I had no idea that Dante was Youngluck.  It all makes so much sense now!
 When I saw this internally a few months ago, I said that I haven&#x27;t been more excited about a new project in a long time.  I personally think this will solve a lot of scalability problems people have while letting them keep their favorite database.
 With a replication factor of 3 or more you don&#x27;t need a vector clock, you can just choose majority wins.<p>That being said, I believe it is using a vector clock, but I&#x27;m not sure.
 It doesn&#x27;t support Postgres yet but that is on the (longer term) roadmap.<p>However, since it is open source, contributions are welcome! :)
 Whenever someone asks why Netflix&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;iTunes doesn&#x27;t have a show, I&#x27;m just going to point them at this article and say, &quot;the licensing rights to pretty much every show are this byzantine&quot;.
 For anyone curious like me, here they are:  <a href="http://www.ebay.com/sch/tbhs575/m.html?_nkw=&amp;_armrs=1&amp;_ipg=&amp;_from=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;sch&#x2F;tbhs575&#x2F;m.html?_nkw=&amp;_armrs=1&amp;_ipg=&amp;...</a><p>They&#x27;re going for between $50 and $500 (most seem to be around $50 right now).<p>They&#x27;re all in pretty bad shape. :)
 This post is interesting, but he should have just read the code:<p><a href="https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;r2&#x2F;r2&#x2F;lib&#x2F;norma...</a><p>This is an effect of the normalization algorithm, which biases towards trying to have a post from as may different subreddits as possible on the front page.<p>Edit:  At least we&#x27;re consistent! Ketralnis said the same thing about an hour ago. :)  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8568021</a>
 &gt; If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit&#x27;s traffic has doubled, then why haven&#x27;t the vote counts in &#x2F;r&#x2F;all also doubled?<p>The people who are joining reddit now are more lurkers than participants, so as the site grows, the percent of people who participate (vote and comment) gets smaller.
 I wasn&#x27;t discounting his research (apologies if it sounded that way).  I was simply pointing out that at the end he made it sound like this behavior was unexplained, when in fact that code explains it quite well.
 It&#x27;s actually the second python version. :)
 &gt; I&#x27;m not going to switch to Google Shopping because I can tell my phone to order things.<p>Have you tried Google shopping with Voice integration?  It&#x27;s pretty amazing.  You say &quot;Ok google, buy me Triscuts&quot; and four hours later, there&#x27;s Triscuts at the door.<p>If my grandpa were still alive I would totally set him up with this.
 Your other option is to keep the keys on the instances themselves (if you want keys in your Amazon infrastructure).  In other words, this is no worse from the NSA&#x2F;NSL perspective, but better from a security perspective.
 I’ve had a chance to use the service for a couple of weeks.  My quick summary review is that it’s a little tricky setting up the IAM roles and security groups, but once you have that going, it works great!  I see a ton of potential here in transforming the way people use AWS.<p>I also put together the Netflix use cases in the keynote so if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them!
 Interesting question.  I think some advanced apps already use these techniques.  For example we already do event driven things at Netflix.<p>What this does it make it a lot easier for smaller companies to do it without having to invest in all the infrastructure.<p>So I think yes, it will be revolutionary in the sense that it will get a lot more people using what I think is the future direction of compute and application building.
 I think it&#x27;s completely possible. Amazon has all the pieces you need (compute and storage). That being said, you may need to wait for ec2 events to do some really complicated stuff.
 As of today, no. Probably coming in the future though. I got the impression that eventually all Aws services will emit events.
 The 25 function limit is probably one of those small defaults that&#x27;s easy to change, like the 20 instance limit.
 This is huge.  When people ask me how someone could be a true competitor to AWS, my first is answer is usually &quot;autoscaling&quot;.  It&#x27;s the feature that AWS has that no one else does (now did).
 Azure has it and is a great platform for .Net workloads, but it&#x27;s pretty terrible for Unix&#x2F;Linux workloads.
 It does, but they don&#x27;t have nearly the capacity footprint that Amazon has.
 I think most users use very few features, mainly because they haven&#x27;t embraced a &quot;cloud native&quot; approach.  Most people just treat EC2 like a rented datacenter instead of using the whole platform.
 If you want to build a huge business, building a platform where other people can make money using it is a great way to do that.  eBay, AirBnB, Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;etc, Teespring.  Even Google, with their adwords product (and reddit with it&#x27;s self serve ads).<p>There&#x27;s lots of great businesses where people pay you for a service, but if you can create one where people make money when you do, they are heavily invested in your success.
 it&#x27;s in my profile, but it&#x27;s [email protected]
 You&#x27;re confusing region with AZ.  They&#x27;ve never had a multi-region outage (yet).
 Have you looked at rethink DB?  <a href="http://www.rethinkdb.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rethinkdb.com</a><p>I think it addresses most of your issues, except the SQL one, which I admit is a big one.
 Ok this is a little off topic but maybe someone can tell me.  These orgs make a huge deal about how salary is selected by your peers.  How does that actually work though?  Like the detailed logistics of it?  Who exactly picks what you&#x27;ll get?  How is the final decision made?

 A couple folks have mentioned some of the numbers being off and not passing the sniff test.  It&#x27;s important to look at the methodology.  All they did was calculate the median for all rentals within 1&#x2F;2 mile of the station, as the crow flies.<p>Glen Park is a perfect example of how this goes wrong.  It&#x27;s right next to a freeway, and the homes right on the other side in the not so good neighborhood, while far away from BART, are counted because as the crow flies they are very close.
 Agreed, but HN requires me to copy the title exactly.  Otherwise I would have changed it to appeal to a more global audience.
 See my reply below, but the main issue is that they didn&#x27;t use walking or driving distance from the station but a straight 1&#x2F;2 mile radius, which is grabbing neighboring not-so-good neighborhoods.
 It depends if you mean SF or are including the surrounding area.<p>The few people I know with kids in SF proper are either dual-income or did well on a startup.  Some people live in the Sunset, which is more suburban -- still expensive but at least a little more kid friendly.<p>Most everyone else I know leaves the city for a suburb.  Essentially having kids means your commute gets longer!<p>(Although in my case it actually got a lot shorter because I also got a job a lot closer to home in the South Bay instead of working in SF).
 This is exactly why I use a different browser for Facebook than any other web browsing.  As far as they are concerned, the only site I ever visit is Facebook.<p>Same with Google properties.  I only use Chrome to visit Google properties.
 Ok wait.  So the guy paid $3500 to clear $14,000 in back taxes, right?  Then the person who owed the taxes paid <i>him</i> $7000.<p>Why couldn&#x27;t the owner just pay the city $3500?  Or even the $7,00 she paid to the other guy?<p>Why is the city willing to take $3500 from a random person but not the owner?
 I&#x27;m assuming they don&#x27;t have the $14K, but have $7K.
 As crazy as it sounds, I actually like the other trackers, because then I get more relevant ads.  I&#x27;m also one of those crazy people that things adblock ruins the web (this opinion may be because I worked for a website that survived on ad revenue for a long time).
 Except that I&#x27;m pretty sure Elon&#x27;s life goal is to make an impact on humanity, not die with a ton of money.  He&#x27;s repeatedly shown that he&#x27;s willing to go all in to change the world.
 I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well.  It&#x27;s one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
 My only gripe was that he didn&#x27;t use any quotes from the two hours I spent on the phone with him. :)
 Actually there is a different reason music during your teenage years is the most meaningful to you.  It&#x27;s because it was the music you listened to while having your strongest emotional experiences.  It consoled you after that first breakup, was playing during that first kiss, etc.<p><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;health_and_science&#x2F;science&#x2F;201...</a>
 And yet, when I want to go from SFO to Cupertino, it absolutely refuses to offer taking 380 to 280, even when it is 10 to 15 minutes faster according to Google itself.<p>Apparently they still haven&#x27;t fixed the whole &quot;we have to go directly away from the destination for a little while&quot; problem.
 Why do you use RAID on your nodes if you have an RF==2?
 But then you might as well just use an RF of 3.  You get all the benefits you listed above, plus more storage (5.7TB vs 4.5TB), and less configuration hassle.  And greater horizontal scalability.<p>And a RAID 5 will never be faster than a RAID 0 or a JBOD. :)
 If you manage to leave, that&#x27;s going to be one hell of a takeoff.
 It would be unfortunate if their pricing model drove poor architectural decisions, but in this case that doesn&#x27;t apply.<p>I suggested getting more storage by using the same number of nodes differently.
 I think you misinterpreted what I said.  I explained it more clearly below. I suggested using the same 12 nodes but putting each one as a RAID 0, which would get you more reliability and more storage for the same cost.  In your current config, two dead disks possibly bricks the system -- in the config I propose, you&#x27;d need four dead disks before anyone noticed.<p>What I&#x27;m suggesting is that you think of the cluster more holistically, since I assume your goal is a reliable cluster, not reliable nodes.  As a nice bonus you get more &quot;free&quot; disk space.
 Yeah, JBOD is preferable to RAID if your workload supports it.  Less overhead and less things to break.
 FWIW we&#x27;ve called it Atlas internally for years.
 Suro collects arbitrary data, and Atlas is for numbers (time series numbers to be more specific).  So metrics generally go through Atlas and logs go through Suro.
 We&#x27;ve used it to predict failures as well as a data source to predict scale up and scale down events.  It hasn&#x27;t been used for DDos prediction, but I see no reason why it couldn&#x27;t.
 &gt; There&#x27;s no more good reason not to have HTTPS<p>Cost.  Today I host my website for 6 cents a month as a static page on Amazon S3.<p>To go https, I&#x27;d have to first acquire a certificate (lucky that <i>can</i> be free and with Let&#x27;s Encrypt will be).  Then I have to find someone to host that certificate.  I can pay someone hundreds to thousands of dollars in setup and monthly fees.<p>Or, the cheapest option I&#x27;ve found is to get a $6&#x2F;mo VPS as a frontend, put nginx on it, and put my cert there.  The problem is that costs <i>100 times</i> as much as what I pay now, <i>and</i> I have to maintain a server <i>and</i> it&#x27;s not served from multiple redundant servers like my site is now.<p>Or I can use Amazon&#x27;s free SNI support, making it so that older browsers can&#x27;t see my site and I have no way of blocking people from using http or redirecting them.<p>There is currently no good, cheap option to do SSL only that is viewable by everyone.<p>That&#x27;s why I haven&#x27;t switched yet.
 In a rack of multiple drives, their short lifespan isn&#x27;t a problem if the cost model works out.  Also, citation on that lifespan claim?  They haven&#x27;t been around long enough to know.
 &gt; Stereotypes of French waiters aside,<p>Which I found to be quite wrong.  I didn&#x27;t have a single experience of bad service in my week in Paris.
 So they seem to have at least some commercial software and hardware made by American companies.  Given that the US cannot trade with NK that means either 1) the companies broke the embargo or 2) they bought through a 3rd party or 3) the software is pirated&#x2F;stolen&#x2F;<p>I&#x27;ll assume #1 isn&#x27;t true since it would be stupid for those companies to do that for so little money.<p>#2 has interesting implications about trade embargoes.  Unless everyone in the world participates, it seems like all an embargo does is add complexity and middle-men to the transaction.  For example, if they legally acquired the software and hardware through a Chinese or Russian reseller, then all that happened was the Chinese or Russians took a cut.<p>#3 interestes me because what happens there?  Ok, they are using clearly stolen software, now what?  Are there any consequences?
 Exactly!  Which means the embargo isn&#x27;t doing anything but enriching the cut-out countries.
 Sure, but you probably take a 45 minute break somewhere in there to &quot;recharge&quot; your body, so recharging your car isn&#x27;t that big a deal.
 &gt; I really don&#x27;t understand any logical reason for this happening,<p>Maybe it is the federal government trying to bolster their case for stronger control of the internet with a false flag operation.<p>For the record I&#x27;m not a conspiracy nut, but at the same time, given what we know about our government now and in the past, I can&#x27;t completely dismiss the possibility.
 Allow anyone to immigrate, require they be paid an equal wage as a citizen of similar skill (hard to enforce I know), and then charge the employer a tax on the wage (10%?).  This would force employers in any industry to only take people who are at least 10% more valuable to the company.  You can change the tax appropriately to get the desired result.
 Whenever I watch a British show, I always feel like the writing is much better than American sitmcoms.  Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I love American TV too, but watching British TV doesn&#x27;t feel like &quot;TV&quot;.  It usually feels like a series of movies.<p>This completely backs up what you said, and makes a lot of sense in the context that it&#x27;s ok for characters to change and that most shows only get a limited run.
 This is an excellent point.  I only see the best British shows because those are the ones that Netflix picks up and&#x2F;or that are recommended to me.
 &gt;  and there are users who always need to be served by our main (uncached) application servers. This includes anyone who logs into an account, as they see a customized version of Wikipedia pages that can’t be served as a static cached copy<p>I keep hearing this, but it isn&#x27;t true anymore.  For something like wikipedia, even when I&#x27;m logged in, 95% of the content is the same for everyone (the article body).  You can still cache that on an edge server, and then use javascript to fill in the customizations afterwards.  This will get you two wins:  1) The thing the person is most likely interest in will load quickly (the article) and 2) your servers will have a drastically reduced load because most of the content still comes from the cache.<p>The tradeoff of course is complexity.  Testing a split cache setup is definitely harder and more time consuming as is developing towards it.  But given the page views of Wikipedia, would be totally worth it.

 Amazon has been really proactive in protecting against these kinds of things.  They seem to be searching the web constantly for API keys, because they&#x27;ll send you emails that say &quot;hey we found your key here, you better do something about that&quot;.
 I can&#x27;t tell if the webpage being down is the joke or if we killed site.  Which is too bad because I would be very down with some retro computing!
 This is great news for Alaskans.  The internet there is terrible and ISPs do a lot of caching that they shouldn&#x27;t to make up for it (like setting the min TTL for all DNS entries to 7 days regardless of what they get from the server).<p>Finally they&#x27;ll be able to get decent internet without all the shenanigans!
 At least this one is in June.  Whenever they do one in December, you have to suffer through a terrible explanation of what a leap second is from a TV newscaster, explaining why the ball isn&#x27;t going to drop for an extra second.
 What are the balancing loops in Monopoly?  Jail and Go?

 In 1999, I took a Sun Certification class.  The instructor told us a story of a kid whose parents said, &quot;we have a $200K college fund for you, you can attend 4 years of college or take every Sun Certification class&quot;.  He chose the certs.<p>In 1999, this 20 year old kid (only took two years to get every cert) was making $300K&#x2F;year.<p>I assume that got cut a lot in 2000, but at least for a while it seemed to be a pretty good strategy.
 It was a bad life strategy.  I&#x27;ve met other kids like this.  While they are super-smart in their field, they are terribly &quot;unrounded&quot; in anything else, including basic life skills like social interactions.
 While this is true, the point was that weak magnetic fields have an effect on human cognition.
 They need to rerun all their stats comparing only iPhone6 users.  I suspect a lot of their uplift is due to the kinds of people who buy an iPhone6.
 You should submit a pull request to fix it then. :)
 Think of the date on a written publication not as the publication date, but a version number.  This is the &quot;January 26, 2015&quot; version. The version number just happens to look like a date, but it isn&#x27;t.  Much like Windows 95. :)
 Until very recently, it&#x27;s been hard to get FreeBSD to work well on EC2.  When I started at Netflix 2.5 years ago, I asked them same thing.  I think we&#x27;re finally at a place where we might be able to start looking at making the move.<p>But to be honest, we&#x27;re pretty heavily invested in the Linux ecosystem at this point.
 Netflix has definitely afforded me the most work&#x2F;life balance I&#x27;ve ever had.  If you are still here at 6pm, it&#x27;s pretty much empty.
 Lately around 11 because I just had a baby, but before that between 9 and 10 usually.  If you get here before 10 you can get still get prime parking.<p>People basically work 9 to 5.  Yes, some people will put in a couple hours at home or on the weekend, but the nice thing is that no one expects you to be there, so you can definitely get all your &quot;group work&quot; done from 9 to 5.
 The problem with sample code is that I have no idea if you actually wrote it.  Maybe you copied it from Google, maybe your friend &quot;helped&quot; you.  I have no idea.  When I&#x27;m first interviewing you, I have no idea how honest you are.  The only way I know for sure that you wrote the code is if I watch you write it in front of me.<p>I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they&#x27;ve ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes, and <i>then</i> at least I can believe that their code sample is theirs.
 I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they&#x27;ve ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes.  I usually use it as my first question on the phone screen.<p>And you know what?  More than 1&#x2F;2 the people that claim to be doing a job writing code <i>right now</i> can not do it.  If you can&#x27;t write a simple loop in your preferred language, I have to wonder how you are doing coding right now and being successful.
 Ha!  No, not usually. That is by far the biggest powerpoint I&#x27;ve seen at Netflix in my 3+ years there.
 Nope, definitely full time. :)  The rest of that is extracurricular.
 I had the whole reddit team to help, but yes, I was on call 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365 for 4 years. :)
 Los Gatos, which is where almost all the engineers are.
 &gt; moot is never capitalized<p>Neither is reddit, but the press doesn&#x27;t seem to care and a lot of users don&#x27;t realize it either.<p>Protip:  Never make your brand &quot;always lowercase&quot; because it just won&#x27;t work.
 reddit is significantly smaller bandwidth-wise than 4chan.  reddit doesn&#x27;t host images.  I don&#x27;t remember exactly but when I left 4 years ago it was only single digit terabytes of outbound bandwidth.
 It&#x27;s not the price of Windows that was keeping people from adopting Windows 8.  It&#x27;s the irrelevancy and the fact that corporations don&#x27;t see the ROI.  The time it would take to upgrade their company isn&#x27;t worth the gains, which are minimal.<p>Unless Windows 10 proves to be a massive improvement in performance or usability, I suspect it&#x27;s uptake will be just as anemic, free or not.
 Hah, good point.  That might be the only one that actually works.<p>However, it has an advantage in that it&#x27;s rarely the start of a sentence (usually it will be The iPhone), and anyone using a Mac will have it autocorrect.

 It seems to be having trouble displaying the graph, but if you look below the text you can see the current price.
 OP is saying &quot;please don&#x27;t go into the business of shoving ads at me when the reason I&#x27;m following you is because you have interesting things to say.&quot;<p>OP is channeling the average user telling you that if you do this you will be unfollowed.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I agree with OP, it depends on the topic.  The HN crowd is not indicative of the general public.<p>For example, the fashion people would probably be happy to see curated ads.
 The first architecture using two ELBs has a long list of cons, most of which are solved by using HAProxy as your internal load balancer.  May want to considering adding that as another option on the matrix.
 Sure!  Here&#x27;s your list of cons and how Haproxy would solve it:<p>&gt; Some API requests need to get a higher priority over other API requests, and that is not taken care of. This was one of our main problems with this architecture, especially with a mix of real-time clients and clients that send batch jobs.<p>Haproxy would let you assign pools to different requests, each with their own priority and queue.  At reddit, we had it broken down roughly into four quartiles based on 95th percentile response speeds of each API call.<p>&gt; This architecture assumes that there is enough Processing Servers to handle all requests (peak throughput). If there isn’t the Processing Server applies back pressure on the API server (error or timeout), which in turn returns an error to the API user which in turn re-tries the API request (applying more pressure). To avoid this, the number of running processing servers needs to be enough to handle peak traffic.<p>Using haproxy in the middle, that tier will queue the requests, so all the back pressure builds up at that second load balancer.  Whether that is good or not is questionable, but at least you won&#x27;t return errors to the clients right away.  You&#x27;ll still have to have a pretty long time out depending on how long it takes for resources to come online, but then you could go back to the first part and have longer or shorter timeouts based on the api call as is appropriate for your application.<p>&gt; ELB was not designed to handle huge traffic spikes since it takes a few minutes to internally scale. You should contact AWS support to warm your ELB if you have a planned traffic spike. We at Forter are in the eCommerce market where traffic spikes are rare.<p>This is still true, and there is no easy way around it unless you also make haproxy your front end load balancer.  If you make it your frontend as well, you can have a hot spare on standby and spin up new ones pretty quickly.  That being said, I believe the ELB team is making improvements in this area in 2015.<p>&gt; API Server needs to handle retries. Not provided by the ELB itself.
 Processing Server must respond within the http timeout (configurable between 1 to 3600 seconds). Otherwise the protocol would need two phases which adds more complexity.<p>Still true, although it will have to retry less because of the queues in the middle layer.  Again though if you use haproxy as the front end you can solve this issue as well by sending the request to a &quot;retry pool&quot;.
 It&#x27;s important to note that MLK was not a street name before the 60s, so most every street with that name was renamed from something before that, often in a depressed part of town.  My racist relative used to say &quot;never live on or near MLK, because you know it&#x27;s a bad part of town&quot;.<p>Ironically I used to live one block off of MLK in Berkeley, and it was quite lovely.
 I have no hard data, but I have 10 years of anecdotal data (my wife was a 4th grade teacher for ten years and saw just about 1000 students over her career).<p>She says the younger kids definitely do worse by all measures in 4th grade, in large part because of their lack of maturity.
 I assumed this would be an article about there being a much more even playing field wrt information about pricing.<p>Back in the day, if you wanted a diamond, you went to one of a few local jewelers and that was your choice.  Now you can order from the internet.<p>However, unlike most other industries disrupted by internet information sharing, a jewelers entire business model was predicated on them knowing more than you, which is now lost.<p>However, the article makes a good point.  All the millennials I know care a lot more about their phones than their rings and earrings.
 Have you ever tried to sell a used diamond? :)<p>Their value drops precipitously.  Probably not quite as bad as an iPhone, but pretty close.
 I&#x27;m pretty sure Dropbox has been buying a company every few weeks for the last few years.  You just haven&#x27;t heard about most of them.
 Close, it&#x27;s 60 events per hour.  Ie. Once every minute an event is sent in saying &quot;they&#x27;re here now!&quot;.  It&#x27;s also sending a bunch of data about your quality of service and so on.  This serves two purposes -- one is that in case you suddenly disconnect, at least it knows within one minute of where you left off, and two, it allows for monitoring the overall health of Netflix by taking the average quality of service and making sure it isn&#x27;t dropping rapidly.
 Many devices don&#x27;t offer local storage to Netflix.  Also, if your device crashes or your internet drops, there is a good chance that you&#x27;re going to try and watch on a different device.<p>It makes for a much better customer experience if we don&#x27;t have to rely on your device saving the information and calling home appropriately.
 Technically anything over 55 inches is considered a public performance.  It&#x27;s leftover from an old law:<p><a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/110" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;110</a>
 The last line of the spec (or near it at least).
 The best tip I ever learned is don&#x27;t price by the hour, price by the job.  You can use an estimate for the number of hours you think it will take as the basis, but don&#x27;t tell the client your estimate, just say, &quot;This job will cost $X, and here is what I will deliver.&quot;<p>The reason this works well is because it benefits everyone.  It benefits you because you know what you are going to make, you don&#x27;t have to worry about the client saying &quot;oh can we make this one change it will just be an extra hour right?&quot;.<p>They benefit because they know the cost upfront and don&#x27;t have to worry about overruns, and they know exactly what they are getting from the detailed spec that is required to make this work.
 When I cared about logs on individual servers, I wrote a program to parse them to make it easy to find what I want, and I wrote it as a command line utility so that it could be used in combo with cat, grep, awk, sed, etc.  It&#x27;s on my github:  <a href="https://github.com/jedberg/quickparse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;quickparse</a>
 Licensed maps are great for GPS units telling a human where to go, but a self driving car needs much more detailed information that most likely only google has.
 I suspect it is more like &quot;this part of the company wants to invest&quot; and &quot;this part of the company wants to build&quot; and they are too big and dysfunctional to get both parts to talk to each other to come up with a single strategy.  Or they are doing the Microsoft thing and pitting the departments against each other.
 &gt; About 8 million English Wikipedia articles are visited every hour, yet only a tiny fraction of readers click the ‘edit’ button in the top right corner of every page. And only 30,000 or so people make at least five edits per month to the quickly growing site.<p>You know, I used to make edits all the time.  I stopped doing it because <i>every single one</i> was reverted.  I&#x27;m willing to accept that maybe a few of the edits were possibly incorrect, but I know for sure most of them were correct.  And yet the &quot;owners&quot; of the page are so uppity that they revert them anyway, so I gave up.
 Mostly grammar edits as I would see them while reading.  This was many years ago (before the thank button I think) so maybe things are better now.<p>I gave up trying to edit Wikipedia and instead I contribute by giving them money every year.
 At the risk of losing my nerd card, I&#x27;ve never played Nethack.<p>I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :)<p>BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment?  I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
 Do they still value speed over durability?  If so, thanks but no thanks.  I prefer my database to be durable.  If I want speed, I use RAM.
 Does version 3 fix the issue where the database lies to you and says the write was complete once it hits the network socket and doesn&#x27;t wait for the ack?<p><a href="http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackingdistributed.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;29&#x2F;mongo-ft&#x2F;</a>
 Ok, fair enough.  Then the answer is yes, they did fix it. :)<p>I guess I&#x27;ll give it another look then.<p>But I&#x27;m still a little wary of a database built by people who ever thought that such behavior was acceptable for a database...

 This was a big problem for eBay actually.  A UK seller could demand that bad feedback be removed for being libelous.
 Fun fact:  We did this exact analysis at reddit many years ago, and used it to figure out which subreddits were related to each other.  We never got around to productizing it, unfortunately, but the idea was to use it to suggest new reddits to you.
 As others already said below, the feedback loop was dangerous.<p>Also it took a lot of resources to calculate and we just didn&#x27;t have the time to build efficient map&#x2F;reduce jobs to do it regularly.  It was done by hand in Mathmatica.
 I guess step one is figuring out what this is.  Apparently I&#x27;m out of the loop, because I have no idea how one earns achievements.
 I&#x27;d suggest that if you want more people to participate, it might be good to add a small blurb at the top explaining what it is and why they might want to add things to it.
 I&#x27;m 38, but hopefully that&#x27;s close enough.<p>There is no suck thing as luck.  There is opportunity and the people who take advantage of it.<p>A &quot;lucky&quot; person is just someone who takes advantage of the opportunities they make for themselves.<p>For example, when I see someone who might be interesting to talk to, I walk up and talk to them.  CTO of Amazon?  Go up and say hi.  Then suddenly I&#x27;m &quot;lucky&quot; enough to get this:  <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/heroes/usa/jeremy-edberg/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;heroes&#x2F;usa&#x2F;jeremy-edberg&#x2F;</a>
 &gt; What advice would you give to somebody looking to get into a career with AWS?<p>I&#x27;m not sure what they are looking for, but I&#x27;d say learn your distributed computing theory.  Most every person I talk to there is quite competent in that aspect of CS.<p>You should be learning about things like hashing algorithms[0][1], bulkheading[2], backpressure[3], caching and cache invalidation and coherence[4], and eventual consistency[5], among other things.  Start with those and you&#x27;ll have a good foundation for your interview.<p>Heck, if you just read the pages on those topics you&#x27;ll be way ahead of the game, and if you follow the related links, you can give yourself a solid foundation in a day.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Consistent_hashing</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rendezvous_hashing</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/netflix-hystrix-fault-tolerance" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2012&#x2F;12&#x2F;netflix-hystrix-fault-tole...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_pressure#Back_pressure_in_information_technology" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Back_pressure#Back_pressure_in_...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_coherence" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cache_coherence</a><p>[5] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eventual_consistency</a>
 I don&#x27;t see anything on your web page about running on top of AWS...?  It looks like you guys only run your own cloud. Can you point me at some docs or anything about running on AWS?
 Which sadly completely dodges the main issue, which is that a foreign tribunal can extract potentially billions of dollars from US taxpayers and the US would have no say in the matter.<p>Our justice system is far from perfect, but at least it allows the accused a say in the matter.
 Electric kettle?  Having an Asian wife, I have learned there is an even better choice, a countertop hot water boiler.  It boils the water and then keeps it hot in a super insulated container so the energy use is really low and you always have hot water ready for tea, so you don&#x27;t have to wait!<p>We unplugged it once to take to an ice rink and it was still hot hours later.
 You can fill the kettle from the boiler. :)
 Actually. he rarely has comics in reserve.  He has a notebook of ideas and sketches, and each day a few hours before a comic is set to go up, he picks one and draws and inks it.  I&#x27;ve watched the process firsthand, and I was surprised as to how little lead time there is.<p>When he knows he&#x27;ll be busy he gets a few in the hopper, but it isn&#x27;t his standard SOP (at least it didn&#x27;t used to be).
 When he died the greatest contribution to his net worth was his Disney money actually.
 When has google ever cared about the user experience?<p>Edit:  I find it interesting that this comment got all the way to at least +5 and has now descended to -2 as I edit it.  Apparently what I said was more polarizing than I thought -- I honestly thought it was something that everyone agreed with.
 We&#x27;ve met a few times, but I learned this when I was escorting him around the Bay Area for a day during his book tour.
 I have mild apnea (not enough to need help, yet) and my Dad had a much more sever form.  In fact he was one of the first people in the world to have a sleep study done on him.<p>Anyway, signs you might have apnea:  Never feel fully rested, wake up to your own snoring, your sheets seem like someone pushed them all off.<p>If you have a partner that sleeps with you, ask them if it seems like you&#x27;re choking in the middle of the night and&#x2F;or your legs twitch at night.  Mine is mostly the leg one, so my sheets never stay on the bed and when I was a kid I would wake myself kicking the rail off my bed.
 The cliff just creates artificial scarcity from what I&#x27;ve seen.  When an employee is let go before 1 year, or quits because it isn&#x27;t a good fit, I&#x27;ve always seen the company give what they would have vested in anyway (leave at 10 months?  Get 10 months worth of vesting).  It&#x27;s really just the right thing to do, since they put work into your company.
 &gt; I&#x27;m not necessarily a fan of their titles today, but I grew up with them<p>I suspect that is part of what led to their demise.  I&#x27;m in the same boat.  I&#x27;d much rather run classic SimCity than any of the new stuff.
 You know, Amazon alone could provide this.  The retail cost of 20PB of Glacier storage is $222,100.96&#x2F;mo.  Assuming they have a margin of 50%, that&#x27;s $110K a month in actual cost to them, so basically their &quot;donation&quot; would be $1.2MM&#x2F;year, which is 0.01% of their revenue ($90B).  Even if their margin is 0, that&#x27;s still only 0.02% of their revenue.
 My experience is very different than yours.  I&#x27;ve never heard of anyone leaving before 1 year and <i>not</i> getting anything.
 DJB a software engineer who doesn&#x27;t listen to other&#x27;s input and believes that his way is always the right way.  Despite the fact that his software is solid, I try to avoid it all costs because it is a huge pain to configure and manage and doesn&#x27;t follow the UNIX way <i>at all</i>.  It follows the DJB unix way, which is terrible if you want to use anything that isn&#x27;t DJB.<p>Also tinydns is fundamentally broken because DJB doesn&#x27;t believe in split views.
 &gt; his software follows the Unix way more faithfully than most Unix server software: collections of small programs that communicate over well defined interfaces.<p>In my worldview, that&#x27;s only part of the unix way.  The other part is putting the files in well known and agreed upon locations, like &#x2F;usr and &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local and &#x2F;etc.  DJB software breaks these conventions.<p>Everything else you said is spot on.
 I wasn&#x27;t aware of that, and you&#x27;re right, that is probably more useful than split view.  So I stand corrected on that one point, but dang if it didn&#x27;t take him a long time to come around.
 I found this the most interesting:<p><a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005/F1.large.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;advances.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;advances&#x2F;1&#x2F;1&#x2F;e1400005...</a><p>The top institutions producing CS professors:<p>MIT<p>Berkeley<p>Stanford<p>Caltech<p>Harvard<p>Cornell<p>CMU<p>Princeton<p>Yale<p>Washington<p>You have to click through a bunch of links to find the actual study:<p><a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.figures-only" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;advances.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;1&#x2F;1&#x2F;e1400005.figures-...</a>
 I&#x27;ve worked for startups and for public companies.  All of my equity success (into and past your range) has come from my stock options in the public companies I have worked for.  The startups have netted me exactly 0 thus far (but the jury is still out).
 Knowing all the people mentioned in this post, I don&#x27;t doubt a single one of these stories.  Every one of those people is selfless and eager to help.<p>Jessica has done an amazing job of instilling a culture at YC that selects for people who are friendly and eager to help others.
 Shouldn&#x27;t AWS still count as a VPS?  A reserved micro instance is cheaper than most any of these options and serves the same purpose.
 How so?  The definition of VPS[0] doesn&#x27;t include a bandwidth part, and to be fair, Amazon has a free tier as well (albeit small).<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Virtual_private_server</a>
 Ah, that makes sense and is fair.<p>&gt; Huge fan of yours by the way. You should do another AMA on &#x2F;r&#x2F;SysAdmin.<p>Heh, thanks.  I appreciate that!  Maybe soon I will do an AMA.
 I went to your site but I can&#x27;t figure out how to download your game (it&#x27;s a game right?).  The &quot;tips for new players&quot; is lorem ipsum so I assume you&#x27;re still building it?<p>Regardless, if you can run the game on a Mac or Linux box, just open a shell and run this &#x27;sudo tcpdump&#x27;.  You&#x27;ll see a bunch of background traffic and then you should see the connections to your hosts.
 Ah I got ya.  Sounds like the other guys have you covered!
 FWIW, Netflix gives you 10 years.  Despite the fact that I left a few weeks ago, I still have about six years left to exercise them.
 I don&#x27;t think it was.
 At the moment, home to my 3 month old daughter. :)<p>I probably won&#x27;t look for something new for a while.
 &gt; He also can hedge by short-selling (and lock in a sure profit no matter what), but you&#x27;d need a big-value account at a brokerage to hedge on favorable terms.<p>It&#x27;s interesting, because I thought about this.  When I worked for the company I wasn&#x27;t allowed to hedge, because you can&#x27;t buy shorts in the company you work for.<p>Now that I&#x27;m out I can, but the problem is, the company gave me such good options there is no way I can buy an opposite option for the hedge.  For example, there is no retail short for more than two years, but my options still have between 6 and 9 years left.
 The memcache at Netflix is triple replicated, so if one node goes away, the clients ask one of the other nodes with the same data in a different data center, and then repopulate the node in their own datacenter if a replacement has been launched.<p>(I worked on the system)<p>There is also another project called Dynamite [0] that puts a gossip&#x2F;Cassandra-like protocol in front of redis.<p>[0] <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/11/introducing-dynomite.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techblog.netflix.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;introducing-dynomite.htm...</a>
 The awesome part is every dad I&#x27;ve talked to had either one of two responses:  1) I did the same thing and it&#x27;s the best thing I&#x27;ve ever done (like you) or 2) I wish I had done that when my kid was born.<p>Everyone has been very supportive of the idea!
 I&#x27;m curious too as I also have a 4 month old and I can&#x27;t find any well sourced studies with any solid conclusions.
 I think this just goes to show exactly why these systems will become more commonplace.  There are only so many security experts to go around.  Having all the very best concentrated on a smaller set of services seems like it makes more sense than trying to get a security expert for every service.
 &gt; You can&#x27;t prove your cloud provider is using security best practices<p>But you don&#x27;t have to.  They do.  Look at Amazon.  They publish their security audit each year, and now every company that uses them doesn&#x27;t have to do their own audit.  They can point their auditor at Amazon&#x27;s report and say &quot;see our datacenter passes&quot;.<p>Also, do you do a security review on your power company, or do you assume they&#x27;ve done it?
 Here&#x27;s the difference.  I&#x27;ve talked to some folks in the digital service.  They aren&#x27;t career government.  They have no risk in committing &quot;political suicide&quot; by suggesting something that everyone knows is the right thing to do.  Basically, if someone doesn&#x27;t like what they said, they can respond with, &quot;well I can always got back to my old job&quot;.  The government workers don&#x27;t have that freedom.
 Ticketmaster is a company designed to be the &quot;evil middleman&quot;.  There&#x27;s lots of info around the internet about how most of the money the collect goes to the venue without you knowing it.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure they are basically sending most of the money back to the Warriors, which is why they are so adamant about people using Ticketmaster.<p>They don&#x27;t want to set up their own marketplace because then they would be the &quot;greedy&quot; sports franchise, so Ticketmaster sets it up and take the heat.
 Because they might cheat or have someone else do it for them.<p>It&#x27;s definitely happened before.  When we caught the candidate and asked them why, they said, &quot;I figured once I got in here I&#x27;d impress you with my personality even though I can&#x27;t code.&quot;
 You didn&#x27;t get your Webvan delivery this week?
 Q2 is generally a slow quarter for a lot of businesses, so many of them have lower outlooks.
 Hey man, awesome writeup.  I have a suggestion for you:  try and architect off those EBS volumes -- as you unfortunately learned the hard way, they just aren&#x27;t that consistent.  DynamoDB is a good option, or adding some redundancy so that you can just use the ephemeral disk would be even better (and probably cost neutral compared to the &quot;consistent&quot; I&#x2F;O EBS volumes).<p>Happy to help if you&#x27;d like.
 &gt; when they were the only SSD option available -- they beat the crap out of spinning ephemeral disks.<p>No doubt!<p>What sort of stateful storage are you using on those EBS volumes?<p>If you&#x27;re doing key&#x2F;value, you might want to check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;dynomite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;dynomite</a><p>It turns redis into a dynamo-like key value store that might bootstrap your transition.
 So does this mean that since I&#x27;m better at Python than Javascript, I can now use this to make my web frontends in Python?  Because that would be pretty sweet.
 Quite possibly.  To be honest I never looked into it.
 Thank you for having a consistent policy that even sama isn&#x27;t above. :)
 I&#x27;ll admit that every time I see one of the self driving cars, I&#x27;m tempted to do something crazy nearby to see what it does, like cut it off or swerve towards it.<p>So far I&#x27;ve been a responsible adult and not done that  But it&#x27;s so tempting.  Until I think of all the lives I will put in danger.  Maybe they can invite me to a test track so I can be an a-hole to the self driving car in a safe and controlled environment. :)
 Having met the engineers who actually built Edge, I can say with some confidence that I think this will the Microsoft browser people actually like.<p>They built it from the ground up with security in mind, and with standards compatibility at the expense of backwards compatibility.<p>In other words, they have finally decided that it is ok to tell their lagging enterprise customers to get with the times.
 IT makes me sad that they have to specify this:  &quot;Checking off all items in this guide does not guarantee a job at Google&quot;
 I&#x27;m really torn here.  On one hand, as a homeowner, I would be pretty upset if my neighbors turned their houses into &quot;hotels&quot;.  There would be a lot of noise and a lot of people who don&#x27;t care much about the neighbors since they are only here for a few days.<p>On the other hand, I just got back from traveling to Europe, where all of the bookings we made were AirBnB.  My wife and I were traveling with our 4 month old baby, and there weren&#x27;t any hotels that could really meet our needs as well as the apartments that we rented.  The trip would have been much harder without AirBnB.<p>I think Santa Monica went too far here -- they should have left some wiggle room for folks who want to rent out their place on weekends and such, like the folks we rented from in Vienna.
 No, because I&#x27;m respectful of others.  But I definitely know people who have the attitude of &quot;well I&#x27;ll never see these people again!&quot;.<p>Also, when I stay in a real hotel, there have been many times when folks were noisy and disrespectful.
 Some companies and universities have given back their &#x2F;8s, but it&#x27;s sometimes difficult.  If the company has been using it for a while then they may have addresses all over the space, which means they need to re-ip their infrastructure.
 FWIW, EC2 does have limited IPv6 support.  You can get a v6 address for an ELB.  Netflix uses them so that you can use it on an IPv6 only network (there are some, mostly outside the US, but there is at least one ISP in the US that is IPv6 only).<p><pre><code>    $ dig AAAA www.netflix.com
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;www.netflix.com.		IN	AAAA
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    www.netflix.com.	178	IN	CNAME   www.latency.prodaa.netflix.com
    www.latency.prodaa.netflix.com.	47 IN	AAAA	2620:108:700f::36d6:2a51</code></pre>
 Using the cloud as a rented datacenter is never a good idea.  It will certainly cost you more.<p>If you&#x27;re going to use the cloud you have to do it right, and that means auto-scaling and variable resource usage.  Then this option will save you money.
 This article is good, but there is one thing I take issue with:<p>&gt; For normal operation, you want to be within the engineered capacity of the system. But emergencies do happen and you get close to the peak of the system.<p>If you&#x27;ve built a sufficiently monitored and auto-scaled system, then you&#x27;re better off running close to the peak capacity at all times.  You&#x27;ll save money and find bottlenecks sooner.
 I don&#x27;t agree with his fundamental premise:<p>&gt; Network Partitions are Rare, Server Failures are Not<p>Network partitions happen <i>all the time</i>.  Sure, the whole &quot;a switch failed and that piece of the network isn&#x27;t there anymore&quot; doesn&#x27;t happen a lot, but what <i>does</i> happen a lot is a slow or delayed connection, or a machine going offline for a few seconds.
 That&#x27;s incorrect.  Data doesn&#x27;t shuffle on a partition unless you do it manually.
 To be clear, I was in no way making a judgement about CouchDB vs. Cassandra.  I&#x27;ve only give Couch a cursory glance so I wouldn&#x27;t be qualified to make such a judgement.<p>I was simply trying to point out that while you may have a very good argument as to why Couch is better, the network partition argument is not sound, and you may want to look for a better argument to make.<p>I&#x27;m personally against single masters because they are SPOFs.  With a master, at some point there needs to be a single arbiter of truth, and if that is unavailable, then the system is unavailable.
 While this is true, I&#x27;m not sure why that&#x27;s a problem.  The system can still function while the data is in transit from one node to another.  As long as the right 2&#x2F;3 of the machines are up, the cluster can function at 100%, and as long as the right 1&#x2F;3 are up, it can still serve reads (assuming a quorum of 3).
 A funny and somewhat off topic story -- back in 2003, before the Google IPO, Google was doing a recruiting event at Berkeley.  They brought a few of their folks with them: their founder Larry, one of their female engineers, Marissa, and some others.  They did a little talk, and during the Q&amp;A, professor Brewer told Larry that there was an opening in the PhD program and he was welcome to it.  Larry politely declined.<p>Afterwards I asked Larry, &quot;so, do you think you&#x27;ll ever finish your PhD, either here or at Stanford?&quot;.  He said, &quot;If this Google thing doesn&#x27;t work out I might, but I have a feeling it will work out ok.&quot;<p>It amuses me that Professor Brewer is now working for Larry. :)
 Like I said, it depends on how you lay out your data.  Let&#x27;s say you have three data centers, and you lay our your data such that there is one copy in each datacenter (this is how Netflix does it for example).<p>You could then lose an entire datacenter (1&#x2F;3 of the machines) and the cluster will just keep on running with no issues.<p>You could lose two datacenters (2&#x2F;3s of the machines) and still serve reads as long as you&#x27;re using READ ONE (which is what you should be doing most of the time).
 &gt; The two major diseases people on planes should be worried about are measles and chickenpox. Both of which have excellent vaccines to prevent illness.<p>Unless you&#x27;re too young or sick to get the vaccine, or the vaccine is ineffective.<p>I just flew on an 11 hour flight with my 4 month old, and my biggest concern was measles since she can&#x27;t be vaccinated yet.
 So if he really wants a useful product, he should make a small insert you can put into your air vent on the plane to at least create the &quot;protective airflow&quot; for yourself.
 Last night I finally got to watch &quot;The Imitation Game&quot;.  I was already familiar with Turing and his life, but that movie really solidified with me how terribly he was treated despite the fact that he was responsible for saving so many lives.
 It depends how social you are.  The value of being here is being able to go to social and networking events, and hanging out with others in the industry, where you&#x27;ll make serendipitous connections and discoveries.<p>If you&#x27;re not into socializing, then you aren&#x27;t missing out on anything.
 Get a split keyboard.  I had the same problem until I switched to a Microsoft split keyboard.  It forced me real quick to learn to type with the  right fingers, because the wrong fingers don&#x27;t reach correctly.
 Side note:  A lot of people with good stories probably can&#x27;t tell you about them because most people are required to sign an NDA when they get severance.<p>My story:  I was laid off in August 2001.  It was the third round of layoffs for the company, so it wasn&#x27;t a huge surprise.  When it happened I thought I&#x27;d try out consulting for a while, but then 9&#x2F;11 happened and the economy tanked, so I went back to school.  It turns out that the government throws money at you if you&#x27;re over 25 and don&#x27;t have an undergraduate degree.<p>I finished in 2003 and called up some old friends who I had worked with in the past and had a job lined up about a week after graduating.
 &gt; I was given the choice to be laid off and collect unemployment, or to sign a resignation letter and receive a 6 week severance (I chose the latter).<p>Wow, that is some awesome game theory right there.  Basically you had to guess whether you&#x27;d be on unemployment long enough to make more money that way or through severance.  Kinda sucks that they didn&#x27;t let you do both though.  After you leave unemployment costs them nothing (they already paid into it).
 I meant for your coworkers.  :)  For you the choice was obvious.
 Part of the problem is that Powerpoint guides you to these terrible presentations (and Google Presentations is even worse).  At least Keynote <i>tries</i> to stop you from doing awful things to some extent.<p>But at the end of the day it&#x27;s really the people using the tool that are doing it wrong.  People just need to learn the difference between a Presentation, an Infodeck and an Essay, and when to use each one.
 It&#x27;s interesting that Microsoft seems to be using the same playbook they used with Windows -- make the software run everywhere and sell the software that goes with it.  While Apple keeps using their playbook -- make software that goes with their hardware so that people buy the hardware.<p>It will be interesting to see which one wins out this time.  So far it&#x27;s clearly Apple, but time will tell.
 &gt; Walk into a popular restaurant around here and the sights, sounds, and smells will be almost identical to Hong Kong.<p>Actually, most of the Chinese in LA are Mandarin speakers from places like Beijing and Shanghai.  If you want Hong Kong you have to come to the Bay Area or Sacramento. :)
 Do you remember the movie Independence Day?  You know the part where &lt;spoiler alert&gt; the aliens are blowing up landmarks in cities.  You probably remember the Empire State building and White House.  Do you remember LA?<p>It was the First Interstate tower (now called the US Bank Tower), a fairly unremarkable building downtown, other than the fact that it is the tallest building in California and tallest building west of the Mississippi.<p>So to answer your question, yes, the landmarks in LA are very generic and non-memorable.
 Not enough people to make it worth hiring the fleet of delivery people.
 &gt; She said thank you for the work, can&#x27;t imagine how frustrating it must be sometimes. He replied thank you for appreciating it.<p>To be fair, I&#x27;m 100% sure of the fact that it is theater, but I still chat up the agent and thank them for their hard work.  It makes my time in line go faster as I&#x27;m asking for an opt-out.
 I heard of a company that was just starting up that plans to offer credit scores based solely on your Facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc. profiles.  Be interesting to see if they get traction.
 Wouldn&#x27;t it be funny if reddit just randomly edited the comments to break the encoding...
 I&#x27;d only do it to people I know after backing up the original.  I wouldn&#x27;t want someone to <i>actually</i> lose their files.
 This is a great summary.  If you do a lot of speaking, there is a whole book on this stuff that is fantastic: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;presentationpatterns.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;presentationpatterns.com</a><p>It certainly made me a better speaker.<p>My solution to &quot;The Notifier&quot; is to take advantage of the fact that I can have multiple logins on my Mac.  I have a &quot;Presenter&quot; account that has nothing installed, and has read&#x2F;write access to my Presentations folder on my main account.  Then I&#x27;m 100% sure I won&#x27;t get a notification.
 It&#x27;s a book you have to pay for, and you can find it here:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Presentation-Patterns-Techniques-Crafting-Presentations&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0321820800&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1345753066&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Presentation+Patterns" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Presentation-Patterns-Techniques-Craft...</a>

 When you run a website, you have two choices:  spend a bunch of time implementing log analysis and paying for all the storage necessary, or using GA, which already exists and is free.  If log analytics isn&#x27;t my core business, why should I spend time implementing it?
 If people who made ad blockers were ethical, they would make their software easily detectable by the websites, so those websites could choose not to service those users.
 Except that the people who are running the ads aren&#x27;t hiding that fact.  The people blocking them and stealing service are trying to hide behind their ad blocker.
 Depends on what variable you&#x27;re optimizing for.  If you&#x27;re optimizing for cost, then you&#x27;re right, the choice is clear.
 A joke answer and a serious question:<p>A: &quot;Use BSD&quot;<p>Q: Why is there such a strong focus on trying to get Linux network performance when (I think) everyone agrees BSD is better at networking?  What does Linux offer beyond the network that BSD doesn&#x27;t when it comes to applications that demand the fastest networks?<p>ps.  I think the markdown filter is broken, I can&#x27;t make a literal asterisk with a backslash.  Anyone know how HN lets you make an inline asterisk?
 So in other words it&#x27;s impossible to have two inline asterisks without a space after the first one.  Oh well.
 You indented, which means there is no formatting at all.  You cheated. :)
 There was a good discussion about it on reddit about 10 months back:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2d5wzg&#x2F;linux_network_stack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2d5wzg&#x2F;linux_network_...</a><p>It was also linked to from HN:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8167126" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8167126</a><p>Both have some pretty good sources (and some not so good sources too)
 This is probably the best argument:  Familiarity.<p>However, we&#x27;re talking about very specific needs:  super high performance networking.  If you have that specific of a need, wouldn&#x27;t you want something unfamiliar if it solves the problem best?
 This happens all the time.  At reddit we would get requests from law enforcement asking for email addresses and other private information.  Luckily in our case we could simply reply that we didn&#x27;t know, since we didn&#x27;t require any personal information to sign up and didn&#x27;t keep IP address logs that long.<p>But having been on the other side of the coin, investigating computer crime, I can tell you why it happens.  It&#x27;s really easy to make a request for information, and in most cases, the person you&#x27;re asking will just willingly give it up even though they don&#x27;t legally have to, either because they want to be helpful or because they don&#x27;t know about their legal rights.  Even if the evidence can&#x27;t be used to build a case against the person in court, it can still be used to lead down a path towards finding the person and gathering evidence that is admissible.
 I never saw a bulk request.  Usually they were just asking for email address and IP address&#x2F;access times.  The types of issues were usually people who had &quot;admitted&quot; to a crime, and sometimes threats against the President.
 Not that I&#x27;m aware of.
 Keep in mind I stopped working there five years ago.  Bulk requests and gag orders weren&#x27;t really SOP at that point.
 All of the requests came long after 90 days.
 Tech IPO is a bad metric though because ever since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, no one in tech wants to go public, because the requirements for a public company are stupid, costly and time-consuming.
 &gt; Reddit, who was struggling at the time.<p>This is totally incorrect, BTW.  Our traffic was already double Digg&#x27;s at that point.  Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.
 I&#x27;m not sure, I&#x27;d already left reddit by then.  We tried to get him to do an AMA in 2008 but he wasn&#x27;t interested. :)
 Using Google trends basically shows you the people who type &quot;reddit&quot; into their search bar increased. :)<p>I know that isn&#x27;t entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit&#x27;s popularity <i>in the press</i> exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
 Digg spent <i>a lot</i> of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it.  They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team.  One we were a bit envious of.
 &gt; How did you get that early traffic?<p>Mostly word of mouth.<p>&gt; Was it just google traffic?<p>Google was a good source of traffic, but I seem to recall it being only 10-20% of new users.<p>&gt; What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?<p>The community and content.  Which is hopefully what gets them to stay now. :)
 Yes there was a definite uptick in commenting and submissions, but the overall traffic change (uniques and page views) wasn&#x27;t huge.
 Yes, but that was our traffic trajectory before Digg v4 too, wasn&#x27;t it?
 &gt; And when it comes to uniques, my memory&#x27;s pretty foggy, so please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.<p>My recollection was that when we visited them shortly after, we were shocked to learn just how much bigger we were.  But we might both be right.  It was a while ago.
 Keep in mind that commenting and voting don&#x27;t count as page views since it&#x27;s all AJAX.  If you make no comments, one, or 50 on the same page, it&#x27;s still one page view.<p>In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn&#x27;t artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.
 &gt; Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.<p>We call that &quot;capacity planning&quot;. ;)
 So if you spend 10 years building a company and then sell it for 10 million, you think that you should only get to keep 1 million(ish)?<p>The only way to make a long term gains tax fair is to allow you to spread it out over the time it took you to make the gain.  And even then it isn&#x27;t really fair.<p>If you make a company and sell it in three years for 50 million, why is it fair that you only keep 5 million?
 Combining this with just a bit of programming loops could get you pretty far at automatically creating indexes.  Basically take a query plan and then create all possibly indexes hypothetically until you get the most optimal query.
 I can&#x27;t think of a better person to replace their outgoing CSO.  He made a lot of positive changes at Yahoo and I can&#x27;t wait to see what he does at Facebook with the amazing team there.
 The top post as I write this: &quot;Delete your cookie and upvote forever&quot;.
 &gt; adultery and extra-marital sex are not crimes<p>It&#x27;s still illegal in 21 states[0].  Those laws however are rarely enforced.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theweek.co.uk&#x2F;62723&#x2F;adultery-laws-where-is-cheating-still-illegal" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theweek.co.uk&#x2F;62723&#x2F;adultery-laws-where-is-cheati...</a>
 Getting married was the worst thing I ever did for my taxes.<p>That being said, it has a lot of other benefits that outweigh the cost.
 They would probably place them all in a syndicate to avoid that problem.  They would technically be holders in the syndicate not AirBnB itself.
 There are many sites like this and I love what they are doing for raising awareness.  As one of the first people to ever fight phishing (I worked at eBay and PayPal fighting phishing before there was a word for it), I&#x27;m keenly aware that awareness is the only way to really stop it.<p>That being said, I don&#x27;t like these reports, because any time I get a phishing email I immediately load it up in a protected VM to see what it does, so it would count me as a victim.  Since the page you go to isn&#x27;t a real looking login page, you can&#x27;t differentiate between those who fall for it and those who just clicked to see what it was.<p>You need to actually set up the fake page and see who puts in valid credentials to get a true report.
 Most people won&#x27;t think twice about the link in the email.  They&#x27;ll usually stop at the login screen because it doesn&#x27;t look right, has a wrong URL, etc.  Having done a lot of work in this area I can tell you that I&#x27;m definitely not in the minority.<p>Clicking the link from a secure VM sure puts me in the minority, but just clicking the link?  Lots of people do that and then get suspicious.<p>That&#x27;s why you need two steps to truly know how bad it is.
 FWIW that happens even when no surgery takes place.  The women have just gone through a pretty traumatic effort.  It&#x27;s funny how terribly my wife recalls the first hour after she gave birth.
 I mentioned this to a psychologist and she laughed at me very hard.  She was a professor and said that she uses the movie 50 First Dates in her class -- by having them write down everything that is wrong.  She says it&#x27;s so horribly inaccurate that it makes for a good long discussion.
 We didn&#x27;t get into it deeply, but apparently the biggest issue is that it wouldn&#x27;t be a daily thing.  The recycle period is usually measured in minutes.
 Security is a business cost like anything else and there are tradeoffs.  All of these companies have decided that the risk of losing this data was worth the cost savings of not protecting against the attack.  So far they all seem to be right (not even Sony went out of business after their massive breach).<p>So it&#x27;s perfectly reasonable for them to say they take security seriously and then have these breaches.  They take it exactly as seriously as needed to keep their business alive.<p>Having been on that eBay security team mentioned, I can tell you that we did in fact take security seriously.  And sometimes what we recommended was done, and sometimes it was decided the cost wasn&#x27;t worth the risk.  But we were always serious about it.
 It&#x27;s interesting that people are currently lamenting the fact that a huge chunk of human history will be lost because it&#x27;s all digital now, while at the same time we are racing to digitize the past to prevent it from getting lost.<p>It almost seems inevitable that most of the details of human history will be lost regardless....
 That&#x27;s a fair nit to pick.  We won&#x27;t really know the EVs here, but the point was more about EV tradeoff anyway.
 &gt; For that advantage to be worth anything, the material has to actually be...copied.<p>This is they key. I think people are afraid of our all digital world because no one backs anything up.
 Unless they are loosing customers because they don&#x27;t have this clause, why would they do it?
 No offense as I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re a great guy, but I&#x27;m really glad they cancelled the project if that is what you were hired for.  There&#x27;s so many reasons this could never work (I would loved to be proven wrong though).<p>1) I&#x27;d say about 10% of the reddit user base even knows what bitcoin is, and far less have any.  I don&#x27;t see people willing to acquire bitcoin just to participate.<p>2) At some point you have to host the content on a computer somewhere.  Time on computers costs money.  In the case of reddit, this is 1000s of dollars a day (and would be even more in a decentralized system due to the overhead of coordination).  Right now the bitcoin economy is not robust enough to extract 1000s of dollars a day, and there isn&#x27;t any provider that will accept bitcoin in exchange for compute at that level, or even close to it.<p>3) Fewer and fewer people have the ability to host content anymore, be it at home or in a datacenter.  So you&#x27;d be relying on just a few people who would be willing to host content.  This basically leaves you very open to an &quot;attack&quot; on the network by a bad actor, who could take it over with reltive ease if they were just one of a few that were hosting content.<p>4) Child porn.  It would be way too easy for someone to put that on the network and then everyone would be at risk, further reducing the number of people willing to host (see the list of Tor exit nodes that aren&#x27;t government spy nodes as an example of how few people would be willing to participate).<p>5) Related to number 4, the laws in different countries are different.  If I host in the USA and you host in say Sweden, content that is legal for you may not be legal for me, again opening me up to liability unless I closely police the content, and unlike reddit Inc, I don&#x27;t have the lawyers and common carrier protections.<p>Like I said, I&#x27;d love to be proven wrong, but given my experience actually running reddit, I just don&#x27;t think the bitcoin ecosystem is big enough to support it today or even in the medium future.
 &gt; Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts servers that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course, and the company&#x27;s servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being the first and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they would profit (I call this business plan the &quot;Satoshi model&quot;). Note how in the article I explain that the users actually pay to download content - a possibility that was not available when reddit was founded.<p>At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy.  The way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things.  Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.<p>How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter?<p>&gt; Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full nodes. Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The people that do make a business out of it.<p>I think that&#x27;s just proving my point.  There would only be a few people participating as full nodes because it&#x27;s complicated, putting the entire network at risk of a bad actor.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t host content you don&#x27;t agree with.<p>That&#x27;s great but how do I find the content I don&#x27;t agree with?<p>&gt; There could even be a flagging system for stuff like this so that you never download it in the first place where possible.<p>Who would flag it?  Can I trust them?
 &gt; I&#x27;m not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point, considering how young it is.<p>I&#x27;m quite familiar with it, but you really can&#x27;t survive off bitcoin alone.  There just aren&#x27;t enough vendors taking it, but more importantly, this is because it is hard for vendors to price items since it so rapidly fluctuates.  Bitcoin is also tax disadvantaged because it&#x27;s classified by the IRS as an asset not as currency, so you get taxed every time you transact bit coin and it has &quot;changed value&quot; relative to the dollar.  Can you image trying to do business with dollars if you had to pay tax every time it&#x27;s value changed compared to the Euro?<p>&gt; You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around &#x2F;r&#x2F;bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?<p>Food and clothes yes (although very limited choices).  Shelter?  I&#x27;m not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.<p>You compare it to credit cards, but that isn&#x27;t really an apt comparison because credit cards just represented dollars in another form.<p>&gt; A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to &quot;bad actors&quot;. When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can&#x27;t overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.<p>But then you get chaos and a fractured ecosystem.  I would say that&#x27;s worse.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn&#x27;t know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with.<p>It&#x27;s not the stuff I disagree with that&#x27;s the problem, it&#x27;s the stuff that&#x27;s illegal -- ie. my government doesn&#x27;t agree with.<p>&gt; This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively,<p>I&#x27;m not even sure what to say here.  I know this is HN, but this XKCD explains it perfectly:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;</a>  (It&#x27;s the one about making the computer recognize a bird)
 As far as I know every one of those prices in USD and then uses an exchange to immediately convert bitcoin to USD.  I don&#x27;t count that as taking bitcoin.
 The difference is that a candy bar only kills the person who is consuming it (and kills them much slower than a cigarette), while the cigarette kills the people around the smoker too.
 My anecdotal evidence says otherwise.  I get a headache whenever I&#x27;m near a smoker, even if I didn&#x27;t know they were smoking until after I got the headache (I have a bad sense of smell and sometimes I don&#x27;t smell it).
 But then you lose a lot of the benefits of microservices, namely the scalability and reliability of being able to manage deployments seperately.
 It&#x27;s a requirement in the sense that sharing a datastore would break the abstraction.  Each service should be independent from the others, which necessitates a separate data store.<p>Consistency should be maintained at the application level if you want to build a robust service, because doing it in the database leads to a single point of failure (the database)
 I&#x27;m glad to see this because I cofounded a company to solve exactly this problem.  Link is in my profile if you&#x27;re interested, we just launched.
 I think Amazon just did, they call it Lambda.
 Absolutely, if there is an additional cost to doing it.  But if it&#x27;s an either or, why not build it right the first time?
 Even with a small project and small team, it&#x27;s nice to be able to scale up just the part that is overloaded.  Especially if you&#x27;re on a small budget.<p>And I was working on the premise that you are already doing microservices, so presumably you are already taking the overhead hit.
 Let&#x27;s assume that the premise is correct, that we are in a bubble.  Let&#x27;s further assume that you work in the tech industry.  Maybe you even live in Silicon Valley.<p>How do you protect yourself if you know the bubble is coming?  If your livelihood, property value and possible most of your net worth is tied up in tech (through say stock options)?
 &gt; only private money where people can take the hit is at stake.<p>That&#x27;s not true.  If the bubble busts a lot of people in the Bay Area will suffer, tech workers or not.  We saw it happen in 2000 and again in 2003.  Lots of small businesses closed, property values plummeted, etc.
 That&#x27;s great for rich people, but what if I can only afford one house and have just one job with stock options that aren&#x27;t sellable yet?<p>I&#x27;m genuinely curious, how are people diversifying?
 I don&#x27;t think you understand what YAGNI means.
 There was a whole paragraph in the article about why Docker didn&#x27;t work for them.
 You may not care, but for everyone who has already taken the plunge and has a large part of their net worth tied up in their house, they might care.  Especially if they have a mortgage that will then be underwater.
 I didn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s a reason to keep the bubble going, I was just saying that more than just the rich people in private equity would be affected by it.
 I didn&#x27;t say we should perpetuate it.  I was only pointing out that saying only rich people in private equity would suffer was wrong.
 aka A recruiter&#x27;s dream.  Now you know exactly how much you need to offer each employee to poach them!<p>I&#x27;m a big fan of internal transparency of these things, but external not so much.<p>However, I did make it a point at reddit to show our AWS bill to anyone who asked, but that was actually selfish in nature.  I was hoping that if enough people knew it would drive the price down.
 Hard to say.  They were driving the price down anyway and they don&#x27;t give special pricing to anyone (they just do usage tiers that get cheaper)
 If they grabbed it via the API then no, it doesn&#x27;t.  It also won&#x27;t include a lot of older stuff which is no longer accessible through the API.
 I&#x27;ve been at the receiving end of a layoff before.  I guess I&#x27;m more rational than most, because when it happened I went in and said, &quot;yeah I&#x27;d lay me off too, the current strategy here isn&#x27;t working&quot;.  I know the boss took it hard -- he couldn&#x27;t come back to the office for months afterwards he was so depressed.<p>I&#x27;m glad that 42floors was decent enough to provide what sounds like a great transition -- health care, severance, job placement, etc.  That certainly helps soften the blow and it&#x27;s really only fair to those who basically changed their lives to partake in the experiment with you.<p>I think it&#x27;s totally fine to do an experiment that may end up with you having to let people go, as long as you acknowledge that and take good care of them.  And plan accordingly.  Don&#x27;t call it off when you have no money left and then use that as an excuse to screw everyone.
 Yes.  That&#x27;s why anyone you let go should get a severance unless it was for gross negligence.
 That&#x27;s exactly how I would respond if I had failed to build a security device that lived up to its hype.
 I&#x27;d say you had a valid excuse for not paying severance.<p>Also, I suspect you&#x27;ve learned your lesson to never accept investment in payments, or alternatively, unless it&#x27;s in the bank it doesn&#x27;t count. :)<p>That was a pretty dick move on the part of the angel.  Did they say why they stopped paying?
 He&#x27;ll be a martyr in the DefCon community if they think the NSA stopped him.

 People have been saying that about reddit for years.  They overestimate &quot;average&quot; CPM by about 100x.<p>People don&#x27;t pay a lot for ads, and when they do, it&#x27;s only on a fraction of the page views.<p>Display advertising will not be reddit&#x27;s &quot;cash cow&quot;, it will be one pillar of many sources of revenue.  The good news is, Steve and Alexis both know this.
 It was last designed eight years ago and the design hasn&#x27;t changed much since.  It&#x27;s not surprising that you found it messy.
 &gt; I&#x27;m guessing the old Reddit guys aren&#x27;t touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole<p>I&#x27;m a glutton for punishment. :)  The comment was that they were shocked that the entire reddit team fit in a Toyota Yaris, including the beer we brought.
 Yay for automated trading!  This is exactly the kind of thing that everyone says is the danger of automated trading with NLP.
 I should clarify that I worked at reddit and speak from experience and not conjecture.  Selling ads on reddit is hard, I&#x27;m actually impressed that they made that much from display ads last year.
 You can&#x27;t make money from this and be outside their jurisdiction.  To move money through the US stock market you have to have a brokerage account that follows the rules (and fines) of the SEC.
 I&#x27;m really glad you&#x27;re here, because I was about to comment that you&#x27;re the only person I know who understands this stuff.<p>(for those that don&#x27;t know keysersosa was the guy who wrote the current hot algorithm)
 So a while ago there was an article that someone was getting close to controlling 50% of the network, which means that they could make arbitrary changes to the blockchain.  Whether true or not, if NASDAQ was using the blockchain to track stock ownership, it seems like there would be a HUGE incentive to try and control 50% so you could manipulate it.  This seems bad.<p>EDIT:  As I type this my comment sits at 0 points, as does every comment I make even remotely critical of bitcoin and the blockchain.  Why does HN hate people that are critical of bitcoin?
 &gt; I downvoted you because - while you raise a generally valid concern - your statement is exaggerated to a degree that makes it grossly misleading<p>Ok, that&#x27;s fair, however, I specifically said &quot;whether that is true or not&quot; because I didn&#x27;t know, I was just repeating the article, which is clearly wrong.
 Hey, question for you.  Have you found a good &quot;remote whiteboard&quot; solution?  Our company is all remote, and this is the one area where things could be better.  Sometimes we really want to just get in a room and whiteboard something, but we can&#x27;t.
 I&#x27;ve been on it for a couple months now.  I&#x27;ve used it twice:  once was to exchange AWS IAM keys for a consulting job and the other was for someone to give me their credit card details.<p>But in most cases it&#x27;s just to track someone.
 Yeah I thought about equipping everyone with a wacom and then finding a good way to share that experience.  Or maybe find an iPad app, since the iPad would be a lot more useful than the wacom. :)
 Dang.  Oh well.
 It sounds awesome if SEO is your field, but at the same time I have to wonder how much you&#x27;d actually learn.<p>I imagine they would not tell this person much insider info, because then they would be far too dangerous when they <i>left</i> google.
 We&#x27;ve known this for years.  The problem is that for a return on a desalinization program you have to wait longer than one political cycle, so there isn&#x27;t enough political will to get it done.<p>It&#x27;s a shame because with the access to seawater and sun, it would be a perfect combination to desalinate with green energy.
 It was already allowed.  I took an Uber from LAX a few weeks ago.<p>The catch was that they had to buy a $5 &quot;temporary taxi license&quot; (that Uber paid for) when they came in for each ride, which delayed them 5 minutes.  Now they won&#x27;t have to stop, which is nice.
 People have been <i>literally</i> saying this since the first month of the site.  It doesn&#x27;t seem to be holding back growth.<p>That being said, what reddit does need is a separate interface for people that don&#x27;t like the current one.  That already exists in the form of the various mobile apps.<p>With a few tweaks to the api, they could easily build a whole new desktop UI for folks like yourself who want something different, to run alongside the existing one.
 Not true, I rode an UberX without a TCP sticker.  That&#x27;s why he had to get the temporary license.
 I got the cab attitude at SJC once for the same reason.  I had to go to work, which was literally next door (property abutted the airport).  Unfortunately there is no easy way to walk and I had luggage anyway.<p>When I told the cabbie where I was going, he got out of the car and started yelling at the dispatcher.  They almost got into a fight until the dispatcher informed the driver that he is required to take me to keep his medallion.<p>He refused to talk to me for the entire 5 minute trip.<p>I felt bad because I knew he had waited in the long line, so I gave him $20 for the $9 fare.
 This was many years ago.  Also I was looking before we stopped.  It&#x27;s possible that it ticked up when he hit the &quot;finish&quot; button.

 Question:  In the future, should I attempt to summarize the article or use the exact title from the post (which I think is another HN rule?)<p>Because I agree that the title was terrible but I&#x27;ve been scolded in the past for changing titles.
 Cool, thanks for the clarification!
 I&#x27;m pretty sure you can just say pot, weed, or marijuana if you want to sound smart. :)
 No, this was Montreal&#x27;s first hacker space:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notman.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notman.org</a><p>Foulab looks cool too, and I can&#x27;t wait to check it out, but they should get their story straight.
 I&#x27;m amused that a top post when I joined was &quot;How long did it take you to figure out that the up&#x2F;down arrows next to the links are for voting?&quot;<p>FYI this was 8.3 years ago, which was about 200 days in, but very close to the public launch I think.
 Ok, my bad.  The article makes it sound like it just opened.
 Because you&#x27;re more likely to have sex on the first date, since that&#x27;s what most of the people on there are looking to do.
 Even on a proper responsive design, sometimes the images are too small to read (like this article for example, which has screenshots of other phones).<p>Furthermore, even on my desktop I&#x27;ll use zoom sometimes (you know you can zoom on the desktop too right?) because I can&#x27;t read something, and it&#x27;s a lot easier to zoom than to try and screenshot it and then enhance in some other program.<p>Further down you said you&#x27;ve been on sites where you wish zoom was disabled.  Can you show me even a single example?  Did you mean that you wish the designer hadn&#x27;t <i>relied</i> on zoom for their page to work?  Because that&#x27;s a very different thing than &quot;the site was perfectly ok on mobile but they had zoom on and I didn&#x27;t want it on&quot;.  In fact, if their design was good enough for zoom to be off, how did you even know they had it on?
 I think before that happens we need to separate religious&#x2F;spiritual marriage from legal marriage.  Legal marriage is a shortcut for a lot of civil laws, like rights of survivorship and power of attorney.  IT made no sense to let certain pairs of adults enter into this legal contract but not others.<p>Polyamory, or any type of other relationship involving something other than two adults who are old enough to sign a legal contract, would not fit that legal shortcut.  I have no problems with polyamory or plural marriage, but our laws just haven&#x27;t been designed to handle that case.  There would need to be new laws, but first there needs to be a separation.
 20 years ago is when I graduated high school.  We used to actually watch MTV.  Talk about nostalgia.
 Honest question:  Would you be ok if a website blocked your access because you were running those, since they interpret it as stealing, by denying them the data that makes them money?
 As someone who used to run a site that made money from tracking people by showing them ads (and we tried really hard to make those ads unintrusive and relevant), I have mixed feelings on this.<p>On one hand I totally get why people don&#x27;t want to be tracked (I don&#x27;t).  On the other hand, for many of these sites, this is their only source of revenue.<p>Whenever I ask, &quot;is it ok for those sites to block you if you are running adblock&quot; usually people say &quot;no, they need to find a different business model!&quot;.  But my question back is always: until they do find a new business model, if they can survive by blocking people who use adblock, why shouldn&#x27;t they?
 &gt; since I believe Reddit&#x27;s ads are self-hosted<p>I&#x27;m not sure where it is at now, but we had a mixed situation when I was there.  We self hosted some, but one of the things we &quot;self hosted&quot; was an iframe to an ad network.<p>We had to be really careful because everything you said was (and probably still is) true.  Bad actors slip through, networks get compromised, etc.  This is spot on: &quot;Even if it&#x27;s not often, it&#x27;s enough of a risk that it&#x27;s simply not worth it.&quot;.  That was exactly the conclusion we came to.
 That&#x27;s exactly what reddit did with reddit gold.  You basically get to pay $4 a month to not see ads (and therefore not get tracked).
 Where did they get the list of the top 360 packages on pypi?  I tried to find it the other day but it looks like it was removed?<p>Also, the ordering on the right seems to imply they are in order of popularity on pypi.<p>Does anyone know where they got their list or if they are associated with pypi in some way?
 &gt;  Does that mean I&#x27;m automatically disqualified because I am only just graduating college?<p>You&#x27;re not automatically disqualified but you probably don&#x27;t have enough experience, unless you worked a full time job in the past or had some really intense summer internships.
 Well I can 100% back up what OP said.  So now you have two data points.<p>And ironically, Netflix doesn&#x27;t have any data because they don&#x27;t track vacation time, not even just for data purposes.<p>The best &quot;data&quot; I can offer is that everyone I knew there took ample vacation except one person, who hated his family and like the excuse of &quot;I have to work&quot;.
 This is a problem we had to solve at reddit a long time ago.  It&#x27;s called the &quot;rising&quot; sort:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;c6f959504466333c0d7d51c131240473aaf78b04&#x2F;r2&#x2F;r2&#x2F;lib&#x2F;rising.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;c6f959504466333c0d7d51...</a>
 We did this on reddit (and they still do).  It works really well.
 I&#x27;m pretty sure your entire pitch is the doors go like this:<p><pre><code>    |   |
 </code></pre>
 instead of this:<p><pre><code>    -   -</code></pre>
 Most people don&#x27;t care enough to care about or understand how important campaign finance is, so it&#x27;s unlikely he&#x27;d even win the nomination, but hopefully he can get enough support to at least get into the debate and bring the issue to a wider audience.
 &gt; Why is it necessary for these news to be stored in some central news database<p>Amusingly it&#x27;s because of the hedge funds.  They want to have a limited list of places to check for news to make sure no one gets there ahead of them.<p>This is why they were so upset when the Netflix CEO made something public on Facebook -- because they weren&#x27;t watching his Facebook page for news (but they sure are now!).<p>The SEC actually has a very limited set of places that you can release financial news because of this.
 FYI you can target the datacenter you want for S3&#x27;s &quot;standard&quot; region and force it to always use Virginia by targeting s3-external-1.amazonaws.com
 &gt; On August 10, Russian censors complained that they were unable to contact Reddit&#x27;s administrators<p>I&#x27;m going to guess this is either totally false, or if they did reach out to reddit, they didn&#x27;t make it at all clear they were a legitimate Russian government organization.
 I know where you were going with your example, but amusingly you chose Time Warner, who actually owns HBO.  Which illustrates a totally different problem in the IPtv world. :)<p>In your example a better choice would be Comcast.
 I just watched your video and I think your tool is exactly what I&#x27;m looking for!  Downloading it now.<p>In the meantime, I was wondering if you ever compose on your iPad?  What is your workflow for that?
 Oh well, I was hoping I&#x27;d missed something.  I&#x27;ll just keep doing what I&#x27;m doing now -- write it in Evernote and then copy&#x2F;paste when I get back to a computer.
 Has anyone else noticed that the conservative rhetoric has quietly switched from &quot;global warming doesn&#x27;t exist so we don&#x27;t have to do anything&quot; to &quot;global warming isn&#x27;t caused by people so there is nothing we can do&quot;?
 I think OP means more along the lines of the fact that legacy systems were very hard to change, so changes went through a much more rigorous review process.<p>The problem with that theory is that because current systems are so easy to change, the cost of failure is much lower, so the upfront cost to avoid failure no longer has as good an ROI.
 I&#x27;ve been subscribed to this for about a year:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hndigest.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hndigest.com&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a great way to keep up on HN.
 The massive scale offers some pretty unique engineering challenges.  But not totally unique -- you can get the same challenge at say Facebook or Google (coincidentally now across the street from Amazon HQ from what I hear).
 &gt; if you don&#x27;t want to get a kidney stone (and believe me, you don&#x27;t)<p>To put some perspective on that, I recently had one and it was the worst pain in my life.  I asked some women who have had both a stone and a natural childbirth which was worse, and they said the pain is about the same.<p>The difference is that at least you know +&#x2F;- about a month when you&#x27;re going to have a child and can prepare; with the stone, you&#x27;re just suddenly in excruciating pain.
 I like how every office has a cork board instead of a whiteboard.

 The best part of that article is the end:<p>See also: Artificial Scarcity
 I&#x27;m seeing a lot of comments here about the format and how it&#x27;s not great to learn CS without a computer, etc etc.<p>I personally think this site is AMAZING and I plan to share it with many of my friends.<p>Perhaps this is because many of my friends, like my wife, are elementary school teachers and I&#x27;ve seen the kind of resources they usually have to work with.<p>As far as resources for elementary school kids, this site is far and away the best I&#x27;ve ever seen.  They clearly took their time to do things well, knew their target audience, made a site that is super useful to <i>teachers</i>.
 I know this is just anecdotal, but my experience is quite the opposite.  Some of my closest friends are friends I made at work.  I was in their weddings.<p>Sure we drift apart when we no longer work together, because we don&#x27;t see each other every day, but we&#x27;re drifting apart from being very close.  I&#x27;m still just as &quot;in touch&quot; with them as I am with my other friends.
 &gt; I asked a young man working at the Target store how visitors felt about their every action being tracked and he said that they’d come to accept it. And that was that.<p>I think this is completely true.  I&#x27;ve done research in this area, and people under the age of about 22 have no concept of privacy whatsoever (it should be noted that these people were 12 when Facebook started and basically hit their teenage years just as Facebook opened up to the general public).<p>Here is one of the anecdotes I collected: when one of them arrived at college, she posted a picture of her school ID and her key and said, &quot;I&#x27;ve arrived!&quot;.  I pointed out that with just the info in the photo someone could make a copy of the key and get into her dorm room.  She said, &quot;eh, that won&#x27;t happen&quot;.
 You can disable a human driven car the same way, and you don&#x27;t even need the Raspberry Pi.
 This data is from North America, and it gets cold and people stay in more October to January.<p>It would be interesting to see if the trend is reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, although you&#x27;d be hard pressed to find anywhere that gets as cold in the winter as North America does that has a similar wealth as North America.
 Star Trek TNG accepted unsolicited scripts.  Not exactly crowd sourced, but at least they took outside scripts.

 I found the Buzzfeed one very enlightening to explain why they do what they do.
 Do you pay for it?
 This movie came out when I was 18 and I very much related to the characters in the story.  My friends and I definitely stepped up our &quot;hacker&quot; game after seeing this film.  I also bought the soundtrack on CD (that&#x27;s something you did then) and it was what got me into techno&#x2F;house music.<p>Funny side story:  I grew up in LA and one of the things we got to do as teenagers was see pre-screenings of movies.  This was usually before they were finished and rated, as a way for them to tweak the final product.<p>Hackers was one of those movies.  They didn&#x27;t change much except that Angelina Jolie unzips her jacket all the way to show her breasts.  They cut the scene most likely to get their PG-13 rating, but 20 years later that scene is horribly sexist and a sign of the times.
 The sexism is that part that they cut -- the gratuitous nudity.
 This is very true of graduate school vs not, but I&#x27;m not so sure about undergrad.  A few points:<p>I stopped going to school after undergrad and started working, while most of my friends went and did grad school.  When they graduated I was already ahead of the salaries they were being offered and had 5 years of experience.  I&#x27;d also been earning twice as much as them for those five years and had considerable savings.<p>Also, I&#x27;ve hired people who never went to college.  They were fairly qualified but what I found was odd gaps in their knowledge.  They could write good code but then didn&#x27;t know anything about say bayesian probability, so I would have to design the software for them which they could then code.  They could certainly learn about bayesian probability, but the problem was they didn&#x27;t even know it existed so they were pursuing a terrible solution to the problem that had a well known and simpler solution, until someone who went to college came and informed them.  Perhaps the same applies to those who went to grad school, but I&#x27;ve never found that to be the case in practice.
 Have each person go out and interview for another job once a year.  Match their best offer if you think they&#x27;re worth it, or don&#x27;t and let them go be happy elsewhere.<p>This was basically what we did at Netflix, but since there were a lot of people not everyone had to interview.  We had a pretty good idea of what everyone could get elsewhere and then we just paid them that much.<p>But we were all encouraged to interview elsewhere to learn our personal market and find out if there were other jobs out that that we would like more.  It wasn&#x27;t good for anyone to have you stick around doing a job you don&#x27;t love.
 They are in fact top experts in their fields (1&#x2F;2 were computer science and the other 1&#x2F;2 were chemistry).  But even being the top in your field doesn&#x27;t outweigh 5 years of experience.
 You could also use the comments on reddit in &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming and &#x2F;r&#x2F;startups and other related reddits to help get more data for seeding your corpus.<p>Or if you want to get more complex, find the reddit comments for every link that was submitted to HN and use that (but you have to be careful that you use &quot;hacker&quot; related reddits or it will sound too &quot;reddity&quot;)
 As someone who commuted on Caltrain daily from 2007 to 2011, I got to witness the rise and fall and rise again of the ridership.  It is definitely a lagging indicator.<p>Other good indicators are traffic on 101 and and Dim Sum wait times on weekends.
 If all the intellectual property rights went away tomorrow, would you shut down your business because it would no longer be a worthwhile endeavor? (honest question, not sarcastic)
 No no they aren&#x27;t a taxi company.  They are a marketplace that matches people selling space in their car with people who need space in a car.<p>Until they get their self driving cars, and then the are a transportation and logistics company.<p>But they definitely aren&#x27;t a taxi company
 I have a long rant about logging, but the TL;DR is: aggregated logging in general is useless don&#x27;t bother, everything you need to know should be in your monitoring system.  Basically, if something is broken and it&#x27;s a problem, it will happen again, so you just start logging when something breaks.  How do you know something breaks?  Log your application metrics.  Log your customer experience in the form of metrics and monitoring.<p>But don&#x27;t aggregate every code exception and warning.  If they aren&#x27;t affecting your customer experience, who cares?  And if they are affecting it, then it should be expressed as an application metric in your monitoring system.<p>Edit:  To make my point a little clearer, I believe that central logging and aggregating should be available, just not turned on all the time.
 You can keep the logs on the local box and take a peek at them once in a while if you want to clean up the code (which you should), but there is no reason to spend a ton of money and time aggregating the logs.
 You can extract application metrics from the local logs as they are output (and then redirected to &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null).
 The longer version of my rant stipulates that you have a good application firewall that is looking at the incoming traffic and you are using immutable infrastructure for the fronted so an attacker can&#x27;t do much damage if they do get in.<p>Keep in mind I consider the <i>existence</i> of exceptions to be an application metric that should be logged, so if there is a security issue causing exceptions that should show up in the monitoring, and then you can look at the exceptions that happen going forward.<p>If the box is compromised, your local IDS should catch that (assuming you are allowing writes on the box at all)
 &gt; That doesn&#x27;t work very well if you&#x27;re using stuff like AWS Lambda functions, short-lived VMs, Docker containers that come and go regularly, etc.<p>Actually that&#x27;s the use case where it works best.  If you have constantly changing infrastructure, how useful are those logs anyway?  Unless its something that is happening across the fleet, in which case it should get picked up by your application metrics.  Also this is the perfect case for stream processing of the logs where you look for things in real time and then throw away the actual logs (no need to keep them around after you&#x27;ve processed them).<p>&gt; Plus, off-server logs are invaluable if the server is compromised.<p>Only if your systems are mutable.  If they are immutable then you&#x27;re much better off looking at the incoming data through an application firewall or looking for unexpected data changes in the data store.  The application server should just be a conduit for the user to interact with the data store.
 &gt; But sometimes the application crashes when a particular input is given. These are outliers, they don&#x27;t show up clearly in statistical behaviour. In that case I care about the details.<p>But my question is, why do you care about the outliers if the customer experience is not harmed by them?  And if it is harmed, then it should should up in your 99th percentile metrics, even as an outlier, at which point you can turn on aggregated logging to look for that one thing.  And if that one thing doesn&#x27;t happen again, then did it really matter?
 &gt; I will concede if you have a perfectly configured all-knowing security oracle in front of your application then you don&#x27;t need proper logging.<p>Heh, that&#x27;s not quite was I saying. :)  I was just saying that any analysis you&#x27;ll do on application logs you can also do with an application firewall.<p>&gt; How often do we see attacks, but then the attacked company doesn&#x27;t even know what data was compromised or exfiltrated due to lack of logging? It happens daily.<p>Again, I would contend that you won&#x27;t find this information in application logs anyway.  You&#x27;d find it in your IDS logs that are monitoring outbound network traffic.
 &gt; You have no idea what you&#x27;re talking about. It is clear you have not had to perform any incident response or forensics.<p>This was a nice ad hominem attack but I&#x27;ll respond anyway.  I actually have multiple certifications in computer forensics, and have done forensics and incident response for eBay, PayPal, reddit and Netflix.<p>&gt; Accept the fact that remote logging is necessary (and cheap) for both security and stability reasons.<p>I&#x27;m an open minded person and I&#x27;m willing to change my opinion in the face of new facts, but you haven&#x27;t actually presented any new facts.  Do you have any use cases that support your statement?<p>I have a few facts that counter them.  Central logging is definitely not cheap.  It costs a lot of money to store those logs at rest, and more money to store them in a way that is searchable, as those data structures expand pretty quickly.  It also isn&#x27;t necessary to stability, given that we made stability go up after we ditched central logging at Netflix (I will be the first to admin this is correlative and not causative, but still, it isn&#x27;t <i>necessary</i> for stability).
 &gt; Metrics -- including customer visible ones like &quot;zero HTTP responses per second&quot; -- raise the question. Logs provide the physical clues.<p>Exactly my point.  First your monitoring tells you that there is zero HTTP response, <i>then</i> you turn on central logging until you find the problem.<p>If the problem goes away before you turn the logging on, then it wasn&#x27;t really a problem, right?  And if it happens again, then you can turn on central logging until you find it.
 Individual transactions aren&#x27;t found in application logs, they are found in the data store.  Also, again, it&#x27;s important to stress that central logging should be available, just not on all the time.  If it&#x27;s a specific sequence of events that triggers a problem, turn on logging and then ask them to do the sequence again.  If they don&#x27;t need to do the sequence again, then it wasn&#x27;t really of consequence.  And if it happens for multiple users, then customer service should be able to turn on let the developers know to try and find the cause which they can do by adding more metrics or perhaps some temporary central logging.
 &gt; Anecdote: I&#x27;ve previously caught an in-progress exploit by seeing mysql errors logged from the application because the exploits were doing dumb things like SELECT * against a table with tens or hundreds of millions of rows. Sometimes the little things let you know.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t that require you to actively watch the logs going by?  In a sufficiently large system, you can&#x27;t really watch the logs scroll by and gain anything from it.  In which case you would need some real time filtering, which basically means hand coding an IDS. :)
 &gt; turning on logging post-facto won&#x27;t go back in time to catch a rare bug<p>I guess my point is that if a rare bug is rare enough, then it doesn&#x27;t really matter, especially if the effect isn&#x27;t catastrophic.<p>&gt; And since you need the added resources that logging requires to be available at all times anyway, you might as well just leave logging on. What&#x27;s your objection to having recent logs?<p>There are a lot more resources required to log everything all the time then to log a subset of things some of the time.  Even having recent logs of everything is a huge overhead compared to more detailed logs of just some things.
 I think this is their noise. :)<p>Their big conference is today, so I expect a few more announcements.
 So far I still find the value they provide in knowing that much about me to outweigh the costs and concerns.  I constantly evaluate this metric in my head, but so far Google is still on the plus side.<p>I find it really handy when I pull up Google maps on my phone and it basically already knows what I was going to type.  I find Google now to be super helpful.
 You&#x27;re absolutely right.  I was only talking about DevOps logging (should have made that clearer).  Logging for data science is a totally different ball game.
 I haven&#x27;t looked into it, so I&#x27;m not sure, but I&#x27;m also not yet convinced that server logs can increase the integrity of banking transactions.  I&#x27;d love to get some more info on specifics for this.<p>For example, a lot of people just assume that a bank can&#x27;t be eventually consistent, but if you make them stop and think about it, they realize that they can and are.  The ATM isn&#x27;t always connected to the bank&#x27;s servers.  That&#x27;s why your card has a withdrawl limit.  That&#x27;s how much they are willing to risk for eventual consistency.<p>I feel like the same is true for logging.  That other checks can be put in place to mitigate risk to an acceptable level.
 &gt; Resources are a matter of budgetary concerns, mostly.<p>True, but most people unfortunately don&#x27;t have unlimited budgets to work with.<p>Also, there is more than a monetary cost.  Every system in your architecture incurs a non-zero cost to maintenance, reliability, cognitive load, and management.  For example, if you are in AWS, every unused box adds time to the API call for listing the instances.  Every extra box that is there for &quot;just in case&quot; does too.  It&#x27;s important to balance these things.
 &gt; If you were just logging the exception, you&#x27;d have said &quot;huh that&#x27;s funny&quot; when you deployed the code, rather than when you have enough data to realise that you&#x27;ve already lost the customers.<p>I&#x27;m assuming that you still have the local logs on the local server and you&#x27;re looking at one instance as you deploy to find those exceptions.<p>I&#x27;m also assuming that we&#x27;re talking about a system too complex to actually watch logs go by in real time.<p>If the log level is light enough that you can actually read the logs as you deploy, then by all means do so.  But if you&#x27;re aggregating them just to be able to search them because you can&#x27;t read them as they go by, then I&#x27;m saying there are better things to be doing than storing all those logs.
 A good rule of thumb is that if you can send all your logs to one place and tail -f is still a reasonable way to consume them, just send them all to one place.
 It doesn&#x27;t change my opinion because the logging for data scientists is different than for DevOps.  For data scientists I assume it would be all application information going into either a queue or stream processor, or being inserted directly into a database, or being pulled out of a database during ETL.<p>Stuff going to syslog isn&#x27;t generally going to be used for data science.
 That and their cost is relatively low from a business standpoint (and I say this as a security person myself).  Even the worst breaches generally don&#x27;t have much effect on the bottom line (Target is a great example).  Ashely Madison and Code Spaces are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head that were bad enough to actually cause a material effect to the bottom line.
 I&#x27;m not sure how much detail I can get into, but yes, there is a large Elasticsearch cluster with a lot of application data as well as web application firewalls and IDS data.
 Those are application data logs, which if you have a compliance requirement will be stored directly in a database as the actions happen, by the application itself.<p>That&#x27;s not the kind of data you would get with stuff being spit out to syslog.
 Sorry what I meant was the kind of data you&#x27;d be collecting isn&#x27;t normally done through syslog.  Sure, you can use syslog, but it&#x27;s not usually the default transport for that kind of data.
 Why?  My whole point is that the data isn&#x27;t useful beyond the life of the machine so why store it?
 But why do you care if a request took down the application, unless it happens repeatedly?  Any sufficiently complex system will have transient errors.  Why waste time tracking them down?<p>If it happens repeatedly, then you add central logging until you find the problem.

 How do you address the problem that the longest lived participants get the majority of their payout when they are really old?  Basically you&#x27;re just concentrating a lot of wealth into the hands of the long lived and their offspring that they pass it to when they die shortly after getting their large payouts.<p>I&#x27;m now imagining a scenario where this catches on and in a few generations the life expectancy has a major bifurcation, as those that were already destined to live longer through genetics now get an extra boost via inherited wealth.
 Now you&#x27;ve got me wondering if that was intentional symbolism in the book or not. :)
 &gt; Surely Apple and Google are primarily worried about revealing their plans to each other and similar companies, not to nascent startups, right?<p>Generally not.  In most cases for a big launch like that the other companies already know about it, either through employee movement or more likely being launch partners in some respect.  For example, Google knew about the iPhone launch because they provided the Youtube and Maps apps.<p>Netflix knew about the iPad and Apple TV for similar reasons (and the Chromecast and FireTV for that matter).
 It&#x27;s not fair to compare the Model X to a Sedan.  Do you have numbers for other SUVs?  Remember the idea here is that it&#x27;s assumed you&#x27;ll be buying a car already.<p>Also, even if the total lifetime carbon was equal, it&#x27;s still better to buy a vehicle that produces all that carbon in localized places where it could possibly be captured instead of all over crowded urban areas.
 Unless you live in Germany you&#x27;re not really ever going to hit that top speed.  You will however have ample chance to take advantage of the acceleration.
 It&#x27;s actually superior in the rain because the doors offer rain protection from above when they are open.
 Because the people buying an X are not replacing a sedan.  They are replacing another SUV like an X5 or ML.
 Sure, but I start my car from a standstill many times a day.  I take my car to a test track -- once every five years?
 Not all the time but sometimes for fun.  I would do it a lot more in an electric because the &quot;gas&quot; is &quot;free&quot; (assuming it is charged with solar).  At least it is something I <i>can</i> legally do, as opposed to going 155mph.
 FWIW I&#x27;m in Vegas right now using exclusively Uber and every driver I&#x27;ve talked to has been ecstatic.  One even told me about how his first ride this morning was a cab driver getting a haircut, who prefers uber to cabs.
 Well I heard the story second hand so I don&#x27;t really know, but given that the guy needed a ride to get a haircut, I suspect he doesn&#x27;t own his own car (and therefore can&#x27;t Uber).
 This is why I hate the term &quot;growth hacking&quot;.  It encourages this kind of behavior.<p>I&#x27;d be curious to know if anyone on HN thinks that this is morally and ethically ok?<p>What happened to the good old days when &quot;growth hacking&quot; was building a good product that people want to share with each other and then making it easy for them to share?
 Except totally not because GA doesn&#x27;t give you the name and work history of your visitors.
 It&#x27;s because Ultra lets you do geo based routing by state and province and Route53 doesn&#x27;t (at least not yet)
 It&#x27;s unfortunate that potential LPs can&#x27;t be trusted to keep these kinds of things secret, because it makes it harder for founders to trust them in the future.<p>As an occasional LP myself, I always consider financial documents like this just as secret as my own bank statements and health records.
 I had this discussion with my manager once.  I was of the opinion that there is no need for secrecy, which is why we were very forthcoming with the stats about reddit.  However, he had one pretty good reason to keep financials and other stats secrets:  It gives your competitors information they may not otherwise have.<p>For example, one stat is cost per unit.  If your competitor knows that your cost per unit is say only 1% more than theirs, then they know how to undercut you to hurt your business.
 Not a bad idea, except that it&#x27;s illegal.  If they invest on your phony numbers then they can sue you later for lying to them.
 Those other options would probably be more legal but less likely to &quot;propagate&quot; to the leak.
 Except that there is also the cost to the environment.  Conserving momentum in a car means using less gas.
 I think the picture in the article sums it up perfectly.  It would be really hard to ever trust them again unless they were willing to put a contract in place with some sort of financial penalty to them.  And even then I&#x27;m not sure I would trust them.
 I was in college in 1998 when the Starr report came out, detailing President Clinton&#x27;s sex life.  Back then it wasn&#x27;t easy to download such a big document to your computer, so a lot of people came to the computer center, which I managed, to look at it.  But it was long and they didn&#x27;t want to read it in the computer center, so they started printing out the 90+ page report! (printing was free)<p>It go so bad we had to ask all the people that printed it if they could bring their copies back when they were done, so we could have a lending library of the Starr report.<p>My point is, you&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s a great time to be alive -- you don&#x27;t have to tell anyone about your interest in these things. :)  (although on the flip side there was a pretty good watercooler discussion of the report at the computer center)

 Apparently that&#x27;s not true anymore.  I was talking to some Uber drivers a couple of weeks ago in Vegas and they have to provide their own smartphone.
 It already is in parts of California.  You can get a $500 for washing your car.
 &gt; it doesn&#x27;t hurt Apple<p>They addressed this right in the article.  It <i>does</i> hurt Apple, because the best people won&#x27;t go work there.  That&#x27;s why they are so far behind on every AI thing they do.  Siri and maps are both way worse than Google&#x27;s offering, as is the predictive typing.  Probably because they can&#x27;t get the best people working on the problem.<p>I use an iPhone but it&#x27;s this lack of AI that makes me seriously consider Android every time it&#x27;s time to upgrade.
 You&#x27;re right, the difference isn&#x27;t good enough to convince me to switch yet, but that is in part because I can still use the Google products (with poor integration) on my iPhone.<p>So honestly if they allowed Google to better integrate on the iPhone, it may not hurt them at all since I&#x27;d keep buying their hardware.<p>Having actually been involved in the AI scene, I can tell you anecdotally that all the very best people refuse to work at Apple (or the NSA, to your point), because they know they can get the same budget and data access at Google, but still be part of the community.  Most of them in fact do work at Google, or at other startups nearby that work closely with Google.
 They&#x27;re not working on ads.  They&#x27;re working on maps, speech recognition, visual recognition, self driving cars, etc.
 This is intended as no way offensive, but your written English isn&#x27;t great (I&#x27;m thinking it isn&#x27;t your first language?).  The first step to getting an executive position would be to improve in that area.<p>The second thing about being a Director or VP is that it&#x27;s all about team building, not technical skills.  Technical skills are a baseline, but a good executive is an expert at attracting, hiring and retaining good talent.  So that is another area where you&#x27;d need to prove yourself out (you didn&#x27;t mention anything about hiring or recruiting).
 The big clue was missing definite articles (a, the, etc.) and lack of plurals.  There is some strange grammar as well.  If I had to guess I&#x27;d say your first language is probably an Asian one, like Chinese or Japanese?  These mistakes are common coming from Asian languages as they do not have these constructs.<p>I have rewritten a corrected version of your post -- I&#x27;ve tried to highlight the changes. Let me know if you have any questions!<p>I have near<i>ly</i> 10 years of experience. I have worked on ETL, Data migration, <i>and</i> CRUD applications. I am familiar with data warehousing and BI concepts<i>,</i> and have worked on many projects involving both. <i>The last</i> 3 years I have been working with Big Data applications on <i>the</i> Hadoop platform<i>,</i> mostly writing code in Java and using abstract language<i>s</i>&#x2F;platform<i>s</i> such as Pig, Spark, RedShift, <i>and</i> Hive.
 I am tired of ETL, data cleaning, <i>and</i> slicing and dicing projects now.<p>From <i>a</i> business standpoint I have <i>experience with</i> healthcare, insurance, advertising<i>,</i> and <i>a</i> little bit of finance.<p>I want to contribute to something big and grow professionally. I work as <i>a</i> manager for a mid size company in <i>the</i> bay area. I want to join <i>my</i> next company <i>at the</i> Director <i>level</i> or higher.<p>What are <i>the</i> things I should learn to grow professionally?<p>What are <i>the</i> things I should keep tab<i>s</i> on beyond technical knowledge for getting Director or VP <i>roles</i>? How do I cultivate <i>this</i> change?
 This is the perfect counter example to &quot;Open source is better&quot;.  IRC has been around for 20+ years.  But a company that is just a few years old blows it away feature-wise.  Sure, you <i>can</i> do all the same stuff in IRC, but look right at the article for why you wouldn&#x27;t.  The answer to every &quot;missing feature&quot; in IRC is to install some extra software and then maintain it.<p>I&#x27;m don&#x27;t want to waste time doing that, I&#x27;ve got products to build and maintain.<p>The closed source option is better because they have a financial incentive to keep it that way.  And I&#x27;m happy to pay for that because it saves me time and lets me work on things for my customers instead of myself.<p>I&#x27;m a huge fan of open source and used to be a zealot about using open source to run my business.  But I&#x27;ve started to see the light in my old age.
 This is really clever!
 Thanks!  The diagram at the top of that one made more sense than the entire OP article.
 I have the reverse problem at my company.  Our Australian cofounder was in charge of picking the logo, so he picked an emu, a bird native to Australia.  So now people always ask us why our logo is an ostrich, so I have to point out that emus have three toes and ostriches have two (a fact that I only learned when I asked our cofounder why we had an ostrich in the logo, that should have been my clue).
 When I was heading up reliability at Netflix, we considered, and even began evaluating, turing the whole thing into one big static site.  Each user had a custom listing, but generating 60+ million static sites is a very parallelizeable problem.<p>At the time, the recommendations only updated once a day, but an active user would have to dynamically load that content repeatedly, and at the same time, the recs were getting updated for users who hadn&#x27;t visited that day.  By switching to static, we could generate a new static site for you every time you watched something (which could change your recommendations), and increase reliability at the same time, so it would have been a much better customer experience.  Unfortunately we couldn&#x27;t get enough of the frontend engineers to buy into the idea to get it off the ground, and also they were already well along the path to having a data pipeline fast enough to update recs in real time.
 I used the beta for this, it was pretty slick.
 Well see that&#x27;s what everyone says when they think it&#x27;s an ostrich!  But emus don&#x27;t do that. :)
 Glad we could help!
 &gt; With this portfolio it is really easy to land clients at high rates from the HN whoishiring threads<p>How do you do that?  Do you just look for people hiring for javascript devs and then reach out and offer consulting instead?
 This brings up a really important question.  Are your banking transactions your&#x27;s or the bank&#x27;s?  I know in Europe the law says that you own your transactions, but I&#x27;m not sure if the US has clarity either way.
 &gt; On the other hand, starting a startup is not in fact very risky to your career—if you’re really good at technology, there will be job opportunities if you fail. Most people are very bad at evaluating risk.<p>It&#x27;s true that career risk is low, but opportunity cost could be high.  If you&#x27;re well into your career, taking a few years off to work at a startup that might fail could really be a million dollar tradeoff.<p>So you really gotta believe in your startup.<p>(Note:  I left my comfortable high paying job earlier this year to start a startup)
 Second time founders get this sometimes, if their first startup was a success.  Basically, they&#x27;ve already proven they can execute.
 Having made the same choice and taking time off after my child was born, I totally understand.  Thanks Garry!<p>Although I then went and started a startup, so I guess slightly different. :)  Turns out starting the startup has actually given me a lot of time to spend with the kid since I work from home!  Hint hint. ;)
 Glassdoor is wrong.  The pay at Netflix is much higher than it shows there.  GP is much closer to the truth, but still low.<p>Source:  I was a senior engineer at Netflix.
 &gt; It was a little tricky to put together with out interviewing someone.<p>Why didn&#x27;t you just interview someone then?  There are plenty of folks there who would happily grant you an interview.  If I still worked there I would have.
 Work life balance was great.  Sure there were crunch times, but for the most part it was 40 to 50 hours a week.  If you were at the office at 7pm, you were there pretty much alone.<p>When I started at Netflix, I asked for what I thought was a crazy salary, almost double what I was making previously.  My boss said, &quot;No, that&#x27;s not high enough, lets give you 10K more&quot;.  Every subsequent raise after that, my reaction was generally, &quot;oh, that&#x27;s more than I expected&quot;.<p>Netflix knows that there is no point in low balling you, because you will soon find out and then be upset&#x2F;leave.  They never want to lose someone over a matter of money.  They only feel good about losing someone because they no longer enjoyed their work.
 I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;ll find a company in the bay area where people work less than 40 hours a week as an engineer.
 Basically they either cover your health insurance, or you can opt to just get paid extra and not take insurance (if say you have it from a spouse&#x27;s job or something).<p>And yes, the other big companies total comp does come pretty close to Netflix.  The difference is Netflix gives you cash to spend however you want, and those other companies force you to consume benefits that you may not want to get your &quot;full comp&quot;.
 That adjusts brightness, not color temperature.  Color temperature is what changes your circadian rhythm and prevents proper sleep.
 Why?  It even has a feature to turn it off for doing color sensitive work.
 Once we have nanobot cameras we can send them in through the cracks.  All the more reason to invent nanobot cameras.<p>Well, that and the amazing medical imaging they could be used for.
 I was trying to remain positive, but yes, most likely the military will invent them -- heck maybe they already have.
 This is not entirely surprising given how hostile the US has been to Mexicans recently.  The fact that one of the top contenders for President is so anti-Mexican pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
 I&#x27;m not saying Trump is driving them away, I&#x27;m saying the fact that he is popular is a sign of the attitudes of Americans towards Mexicans.
 &gt; The acceptable error level is different when the electronic version is the original and there&#x27;s no external validation mechanism.<p>But that&#x27;s true about an all digital business.  I mean, I&#x27;m pretty sure most of Google and Facebook&#x27;s records are digital only.  There are plenty of solutions that exist to make sure that it is backed up and replicated safely.<p>The trick here is convincing not only the construction companies that it is safe, but their regulators.
 &gt; This is like the unspoken mantra of &quot;unlimited vacation&quot; really being only 2 - 2.5 weeks.<p>I think it depends on your company and management chain.  When I worked at Netflix I took more vacation than every before.  I&#x27;m not even sure how much, since it was untracked, but definitely more than 4 weeks a year.<p>Our management made sure to set a good example by taking plenty of vacation.
 Anyone have historical audits of NASA from 1960?  I&#x27;ll bet they were saying the same thing about moon missions back then.
 You send me an invite.  I choose to use it with my account that I set up while working at your competitor.  Now your competitor potentially has access.<p>At least the way they do it now gives some control to the org as to who has access to their account.  It&#x27;s inconvenient but it biases towards making on boarding hard to make control and off boarding easier.<p>Also, GitHub wants to avoid the same person having multiple accounts.  Their focus is the developer, not the org.  So they want all your work to be associated with you.<p>I still have stuff on my account that is associated with Netflix and reddit.  Because the account is tied to my personal account, those orgs can never &quot;remove&quot; my contribution.
 Today they would call that &quot;Growth Hacking&quot;. :)
 &gt; President tries to convince the US Treasury to mint a 7.5c coin (?!?!?)<p>It was because at the time vending machines couldn&#x27;t make change, and they wanted to raise the price, but doubling (from 5 to 10 cents) would be too much.<p>Instead they figured out how to make the vending machine make change.
 This essay focuses only on expanding knowledge within programming and business, but I think to truly be successful, you need to generalize outside of programming too.<p>My favorite example that I like to repeat often is that as a Site Reliability Engineer, more than once my knowledge of sports, entertainment, politics and current events have been quite relevant to my job.<p>When we were trying to figure out why people suddenly stopped watching Netflix in Mexico and Brazil, it was important to know that there was an exhibition match in Soccer&#x2F;Football between the two countries, and knowing that that was culturally important and something that they would be using the TV for instead of Netflix.
 &gt; 20MB was quite a lot of space in the eighties!<p>Yes it was!  I remember in 86&#x2F;87, when I upgraded my original IBM PC from having two 5.25&quot; floppies to having one floppy and a 40MB hard drive.  All of a sudden my word processor, with 11 floppies, could be loaded on the drive and I didn&#x27;t have to switch disks to spell check and it opened in seconds instead of minutes!<p>Back then the upgrade from two floppies to one floppy and a hard disk was way bigger than going from spinning disk to SSD (and that was a huge jump too)
 &gt; To be fair, if you work for Netflix, entertainment is part of your business domain.<p>That&#x27;s true.  But politics isn&#x27;t really part of that, but came in handy (knowing when the President was making a big speech or another country was having an election or debate, for example).
 That only became true when politicians started appearing on TV.  They even touch on this in Back to the Future.  When the only thing people knew of politicians was via printed word, and later radio, no one cared what they looked like.
 In 1974 the US basically had DST the entire year to save energy.  Being on year round DST would save us the most energy, because most people use energy at night for artificial lighting.<p>The main argument against it is that &quot;kids have to go to school in the dark.&quot;  Well you know what?  Look at these maps.  How many kids <i>already</i> have to go to school in the dark?  Why does it matter?  Even the kids would rather have more light <i>after</i> school so they can play.<p>And if you ask a farmer about it, they&#x27;ll tell you &quot;the animals don&#x27;t read clocks&quot;.  To them it doesn&#x27;t really matter, they get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.
 I see what he&#x27;s getting at, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right.<p>Meetings are caused by policies and the need for coordination.  Even companies with continuous deployment still have meetings.<p>You can eliminate policies, which will reduce meetings, but you&#x27;ll still need coordination.  You can move coordination to your issue tracker or agile board, but then you&#x27;ve just replaced meeting time with the time you spend interacting with the tickets and the agile board.<p>There really is just no way around it.  The bigger you get, the more coordination you need.<p>Running small teams responsible for small services is one way to reduce that need somewhat, which is part of why microservices are getting more popular, but at the end of the day I&#x27;d say coordination time, in whatever form it takes, is linearly (or maybe even exponentially) correlated with org size.
 &gt; But then you just end up with a bunch of microservices you have to coordinate changes between.<p>Not if you do it right.  As long as the API doesn&#x27;t change and you adhere to every service having its own data store (which is key and many people forget), you can make as many changes to your service as you want without any coordination.
 My company is building exclusively[0] on Lambda and API Gateway. It&#x27;s definitely got its warts and you&#x27;ll be paying an early adopters tax for sure.<p>My cofounder wrote a tool to help manage Lambda deployments:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa&#x2F;tree&#x2F;python-refactor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa&#x2F;tree&#x2F;python-refactor</a><p>[0] Well as much as we can.  We&#x27;re building a Slack bot right now so we still need a container running under ECS to maintain the connection to Slack.
 I would say changing the resulting data in a meaningful way is still changing the API.  The API contract is not only the verbs that they can use but the nouns that you send back.
 So would I.  I&#x27;m just saying it is still a tax you have to pay to be in a bigger org.
 For efficiency, to add new features, to change your data store, lots of reasons.  As long as you don&#x27;t <i>break</i> anything for your user it would be fine.  Adding features may require a heads up to the team the feature is for, but not everyone else.
 &gt; If my results are different at all I would need to notify people downstream.<p>Presumably your API says what <i>types</i> of data the caller should expect.  As long as you don&#x27;t change that, they should be able to deal with the response changing.<p>But really it&#x27;s more about the fact that if you have a single monolith, if you want to make a change, you have to coordinate with <i>everyone</i> at the company, whereas if you have microservices, you only have to coordinate with those who are <i>affected</i> by the change.
 The military isn&#x27;t paralyzed, but it also hasn&#x27;t proven that their method is the best.  There are tons of places in the military where needless duplicate work is happening (and any large corporate org too) because it&#x27;s easier to do the work twice than to try and coordinate the work once across all the people.
 &gt; In the US, you can&#x27;t enforce an employment contract if it involves forcing someone to work for you.<p>Well kind of.  Technically you can&#x27;t force them to work, but you can force them to pay someone else to work in their place.  Most teachers have this kind of contract.  They are not at will employees.  They can&#x27;t be fired during the school year and they can&#x27;t leave either.  If they don&#x27;t show up to work, they have to pay the school back for the part of their contract they did not fulfill to pay for the substitute teacher.  (This has nothing to do with tenure, BTW, it&#x27;s true for tenured and untenured teachers alike).
 Those were some of the things that they did first.  In her first month she made the meals free and gave raises to the top folks.  Then she authorized management to hire new people at top of market.  I had a few friends leave Netflix for Yahoo because they actually got raises and believed in the vision.<p>Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.
 Do you like Python?  If you do:  Go to Pycon.  Put your name on the job board.  Go to interviews.  Ask questions about the workplace, the work and try to really suss out the attitudes of the people there.  If you still think where you work is the best place, stay there, otherwise take another offer, if you got any, and if you didn&#x27;t get any, you still have a lot of data on how other places run their shops.<p>There is no downside to interviewing.  You&#x27;ll get practice interviewing and you get to learn about other people work.  If your current employer finds out, one of three things will happen. Either nothing at all, or they will realize they need to give you more responsibility and make your life better, or they will be resentful and try to make your life miserable.   If either A or C happens, at least you know where you stand with them, and if B happens, then great!  Your job is better now.<p>At Netflix people were encouraged to interview once in a while, because we knew everyone wins.  They either come back happy that their job is still the best, they bring back ideas on how to make things better, or they realize they don&#x27;t want to be there anymore and move on, in which case we&#x27;re all better off because we don&#x27;t have someone who isn&#x27;t excited about their work and they are happy in their new job.
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delicious.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delicious.com</a><p>Started as a way to make lists for yourself, turned into shared lists.<p>Heck, reddit&#x27;s original idea was pitched as Delicious with voting, so you could say reddit fits this group too.
 Zuck may not technically have an office, but if it&#x27;s anything like the other places I&#x27;ve worked where &quot;the CEO sits right out in the open with everyone else!&quot;, then he probably has a conference room reserved for his use 24&#x2F;7.<p>And this actually makes sense.  A lot of what he would talk about would be insider information.  You don&#x27;t <i>want</i> to hear that as an employee.
 My cofounders and I have gotten to the point where we don&#x27;t want to use our personal cards for the business anymore, so we&#x27;re trying to select a business card, but there are so many choices.<p>Some give airline miles, some points, some cash back, some have fees after the first year, etc.<p>Anyone have a favorite they like or any warnings of what we should stay away from?  Anyone know of a good web site to help us compare, or any cards that are geared specifically towards up and coming tech companies?<p>Thanks!
 Thanks for the great info.<p>Totally agree with you about spending time building a company instead of chasing rewards.  Basically my goal is to find a card where I just spend normally and then magic rewards happen, without any sort of planning (since as you said it&#x27;s mostly a waste of time).<p>I&#x27;ll check out those sites and the Starwood Amex.<p>Thanks!
 If you&#x27;re the FBI, what motivation do you have to implement the system?  No one ever use an FOIA request to get info about something good to praise them.  It&#x27;s always to get info to smear them.<p>Why would they want to make this easier?
 And everyone made fun of Netflix for implementing a secure protocol on top of http.  Suddenly that seems really useful for people in Kazakhstan.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techblog.netflix.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techblog.netflix.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;message-security-layer-m...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;msl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;msl</a>
 Yes, you&#x27;d have to sideload the initial keys&#x2F;code, presumably outside the country.  It works for Netflix because it&#x27;s baked into the client.  But at least once you&#x27;ve somehow gotten the keys you won&#x27;t get stopped by the government blocking it since it isn&#x27;t &#x27;https&#x27; and doesn&#x27;t look like &#x27;https&#x27;.<p>Until they figure it out and start blocking that too of course.
 You&#x27;re not quite correct.  In most cases, yes, but for JQuery specifically, your users will get better performance by continuing to use the Google CDN.<p>The reason being that most likely they&#x27;ve already got it in their cache and won&#x27;t make a new call to Google (or you) at all.
 Why can&#x27;t their motivation be charity like Mozilla?  Or maybe they just want to see a more secure internet?<p>They aren&#x27;t totally evil.  They want to use their power for good once in a while.
 They re-release it every time some company gets a crazy valuation based on a small investment.
 Small as in percent, not dollar amount. :)
 This makes me so sad, not because of the language issue, but because these birds are not being cared for. :(<p>Those cages in the pictures are <i>way</i> too small for an African Gray.  Also, you need someone who is willing to spend hours <i>every day</i> entertaining their bird.<p>The African Gray is like a three year old child that stop growing.  You wouldn&#x27;t put a three year old in a tiny cage and then ignore it.  You shouldn&#x27;t do that with the African Gray either.  And their average lifespan is 70 years, so it will most likely outlive you if you take good care of it.
 &gt; Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?<p>The cost of cleanup typically falls upon the person who builds there next.<p>If that new Walmart is built on a property that already had a strip mall, first they tear down the strip mall and bear that cost.<p>The new Apple campus is a great example.  They tore down a bunch of old HP buildings and had to bear that cost.  They reduced the cost by grinding up the old buildings to make concrete for the new building.  Also, they probably discounted the purchase price of the land to account for the cleanup, so in some respect, HP bore that cost too.
 They have lots of success, you just don&#x27;t usually hear about it.  Here is one of the few that actually got press:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecommercebytes.com&#x2F;C&#x2F;abblog&#x2F;blog.pl?&#x2F;pl&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;1320261605.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecommercebytes.com&#x2F;C&#x2F;abblog&#x2F;blog.pl?&#x2F;pl&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;1...</a>
 Because he already spent two years in prison.
 Actually it has, which is probably why they are avoiding it.  There are many broadband choices in SF, some with pretty high speeds, some totally wireless.<p>My guess is that the city, being as regulatory happy as it is (and being specifically anti-Google thanks to the bus fiasco), is not interested in working with Google to make fiber happen.<p>You&#x27;ll notice San Jose is on the list, and that actually includes a whole bunch of suburbs too (except notably Cupertino).
 I think you misunderstood me.  I didn&#x27;t say the bus thing was Google&#x27;s fault.  I just said the city doesn&#x27;t like them because of it.
 We did something similar at Netflix.  We had all the aggregations but also stored all the raw data.  The raw data would be pushed out of the live system and replaced with aggregates and then stored as flat text in S3.  If for some reasons you needed the old data, you just put in a ticket with the monitoring team to load the data back into the live system (I think this is even self service now).<p>The system would then load the data from S3 back into the live system via Hadoop.  Turns out it was pretty cheap to store highly compressible files in S3.
 I live in Cupertino and I&#x27;ve barely seen anywhere that even accepts it, and I can only assume that we have possibly the highest penetration of independent retailers anywhere on the planet.<p>In fact, the only place I see it used consistently is the Apple corporate cafe.
 At Netflix we liked to joke and say that Netflix is a logging platform that happens to play movies.<p>You&#x27;re sending a ton of real time data about stream quality and network congestion to help make sure you get the best possible experience. By adjusting your client to compensate for whatever local issues you might be having at that second and combining that with overall data, Netflix can do things like route around broken local routers and other sorts of things, as well as contact ISPs on your behalf if there are systemic issues.
 There are lots of reasons a reencode might be needed.  For example, a new compression algorithm is developed, a new device is supported with a new codec, a new way of giving users a faster startup is developed, etc.<p>Basically any change to the way video is delivered over the internet could trigger a full or partial reencode of the entire library.
 You could probably apply for the Amazon accelerate program and get $15K from them pretty easily.
 &gt; My problem with Netflix is that I rarely find streaming films I would be interested in watching<p>The Netflix TV catalog is very deep.  What my wife does is pick a show that has 7+ seasons, and then starts watching it.  If she likes it after the first few episodes, then generally it will occupy her for a few months.
 No but that&#x27;s hilarious.  I wonder if it was intentional.
 AWS is a sponsor of this, which probably means a bunch of free resources.
 Generally you don&#x27;t want to use latency based load balancing for short lived http&#x2F;s connections when you have more than once load balancer.  I had found a paper on this once with the math but I can&#x27;t find it again -- the gist of the paper was that you need longer lived connections otherwise your load balancers can never achieve convergence, so you just end up with a see-saw effect.<p>This seems like a pretty good solution, but I&#x27;m unclear as to why it is better than JSQ with a circuit breaker (or is that basically what it is?).  Maybe the second post with the algorithm will make it clearer.
 S3 is a key&#x2F;value store.  Appends don&#x27;t make sense in that context.  If you think of it as a key&#x2F;value store, then a lot of their constraints start to make more sense.
 &gt; † (and, to be clear, a friend, though a pretty distant one; I am biased here.)<p>Alex is good friend of mine and I&#x27;ve known him since college.  He&#x27;s definitely a good guy and understands the ins and outs of security vulnerability research, having done it himself for many years.  I&#x27;m sure he didn&#x27;t take the action of calling the researcher&#x27;s employer lightly, and probably had a really good reason to do so.<p>There has to be a side of this story we aren&#x27;t hearing, and probably never will.
 You have much higher leverage on options, and you don&#x27;t take a tax hit until you sell them.  That&#x27;s assuming the price goes up significantly.  That&#x27;s basically the tradeoff.
 Why would the NSA need patents?  I guess it is to prevent a private company from suing them if they come up with something first and somehow word gets out?  That would explain why they are granted in secret and only published when someone else tries to patent it.
 The best prior art is a previously filed patent application. :)
 &gt; If only I could short them, I would, but since I&#x27;m living in the Valley, I&#x27;m probably going to be negatively affected by this unfortunately.<p>Hey it&#x27;s not all bad.  The last time this happened, traffic on 101 got really great for a few years and you could get a reservation at any restaurant you wanted to (assuming you could afford it).
 You must not hang out with middle aged women much.  My wife is on there all the time, planning my daughter&#x27;s birthday party or getting ideas for her next craft project.  My sister-in-law is the same.<p>I think someone said it elsewhere in the thread, they&#x27;re replacing all those magazines suburban housewives used to read, and they can advertise more efficiently than those magazines because they have better data about you and can get between you and the transaction.
 I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done.  Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax.<p>This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.
 The problem with anything programing or computer based is that I feel compelled to learn something new if I&#x27;m not working on a project, so even in my &quot;off hours&quot; I&#x27;m reading about a new language or algorithm or whatever.
 For this vacation my solution was to go on a boat with no internet access.  Unfortunately I can&#x27;t really just do that at night. :&#x2F;
 That&#x27;s still a job I would consider one that can&#x27;t be turned off at home, because if I had that job I would be reading journals to learn about the latest advancements.<p>When I said factory I mean like someone who works on the line fixing the machines and works on a fixed schedule with a team of people who all do the same thing.
 Yes, to some extent, but I&#x27;m talking old school, working on the same machine for the last 25 years kind of work.  I have a family member with this job.  He makes good money doing it, but when he&#x27;s off he&#x27;s off.  There is nothing he can be doing to improve his output -- he&#x27;s reached the peak of his job and is perfectly happy with that.
 Not true.  Fixing the machines at a factory is quite lucrative but once you&#x27;ve learned it you really don&#x27;t have to do any more learning.
 &gt; (overpriced and ugly)<p>My parents bought my daughter a present and got the gift wrapping option and it was this amazing blue velvet gift sack.  We saved it so we can use it again it was so nice.  In fact, for the $6 my parents paid, we couldn&#x27;t get a bag that nice ourselves.<p>I guess my point is, YMMV.
 &gt; Cognitive scientists conjecture that our brains incorporate Bayesian algorithms as they perceive, deliberate, decide.<p>As a Cognitive scientist myself, this amused me.  The reason being because in the 1950s, Cognitive scientists thought that the brain worked like telephone switching equipment.<p>Basically, we fit our current model of cognition to the most popular model of computing at the time.  Looks like the trend hasn&#x27;t stopped (although to be fair we we were talking about the Baysian model of cognition 20 years ago, so at least that one lasted a while).
 You could also look at it the other way:  Using the same doctor and lab and procedure is the best way to eliminate a false positive, because if the cause was external, then the cause may not be repeated.  But if you went to a new lab&#x2F;doctor&#x2F;whatever, you&#x27;ve now introduced new variables that could cause a false positive on top of whatever already caused it.<p>Given that it could go either way, it makes sense to think of each one as independent.<p>Now if you really wanted to take advantage of Bayes, if you got a positive test then you should get two more tests, one with the same lab and one with a totally independent lab (or even if you got a negative test, assuming your first Bayes run gives a 50% confidence)
 AWS has a limit on the total throughput any one <i>account</i> can have to S3, so the more CPUs OP adds, the worse OPs performance will be on each one.  I suspect the other providers have the same restriction.<p>I either missed it or OP didn&#x27;t specify how many instances they was using at once to run their benchmark, but the more instances they used, the worse it will be per node.<p>This did not seem to be accounted for.<p>EDIT:  OP says below it was from one instance, so what I said doesn&#x27;t apply to this writeup.
 I don&#x27;t have any published sources, it&#x27;s something they told me, but it&#x27;s hinted at here:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AmazonS3&#x2F;latest&#x2F;dev&#x2F;request-rate-perf-considerations.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AmazonS3&#x2F;latest&#x2F;dev&#x2F;request-rate-...</a><p>They explicitly mention the RPS per account limit in that doc, which is related.
 That&#x27;s good to know, and definitely adds credence to my opinion that networking is the area where Google is definitely winning the Cloud Wars(tm)
 Hi OP, nice writeup!  I hope my comment wasn&#x27;t construed as dismissing the work, just a criticism of one small part.<p>It sounds like that wouldn&#x27;t have been a factor, except for the cap you seem to have discovered on Amazon that you called out.<p>My only suggestion then is you may want to make it explicit that you ran the benchmarks from a single instance.
 Unless that is a semi-recent change, that is not what I&#x27;ve been explicitly told.  To be fair my information is at least two years old now.
 &gt; However, if you expect a rapid increase in the request rate for a bucket to more than 300 PUT&#x2F;LIST&#x2F;DELETE requests per second or more than 800 GET requests per second, we recommend that you open a support case to prepare for the workload and avoid any temporary limits on your request rate.<p>You have to know how to read their docs. :)  This is basically code for, &quot;there is a default limit here that you have to get raised if you want to go above it&quot;.
 The amount of data one has in S3 isn&#x27;t really relevant to the discussion, only how quickly you&#x27;re trying to pull it into your instances.
 True but at least now Microsoft will be bugging them (and more likely their IT departments) to upgrade.<p>Even the most conservative CIO will have a hard time justifying <i>not</i> upgrading at this point.
 This is awesome!  Finally empirical evidence to back up what I&#x27;ve felt all along -- that those fake LED candles don&#x27;t look anything like a real candle and are actually kind of distracting.<p>That animation at the end really sums it up nicely.

 The map doesn&#x27;t appear to be updated yet, but it&#x27;s available in every African country.
 To everyone freaking out about the map not showing all the countries, it doesn&#x27;t appear to be updated.<p>If you read the press release it is available in every country in the world except Syria, Crimea, North Korea and China.
 &gt; I want to pay a monthly fee and get a Spotify for movies<p>Unfortunately that would cost you about the same as a cable subscription due to the licensing costs.
 Yeah the way they worded it was awkward but equally awkward would be &quot;and the area of Ukraine known as Crimea&quot;
 The purpose of Amazon Prime Video is to get you to sign up for Prime and then order stuff on Amazon.  It only makes sense for them to be where Amazon actually delivers stuff quickly via Prime.<p>The purpose of Netflix is to provide entertainment.  It makes sense for them to be everywhere.<p>I doubt we&#x27;ll see Amazon PV around the world anytime soon -- it doesn&#x27;t make sense for them to spend on the global licensing costs since it won&#x27;t boost Prime subscriptions.
 Netflix employees are currently locked out, and their internal ethics policy would prevent them from buying anyway.<p>I&#x27;m a former employee and knew this was coming, but it would still be ethically and morally wrong for me to trade on this info (and probably illegal too).<p>The reason it popped right after is because there are a bunch of computers that watch twitter for news and trade on it split seconds after it breaks.
 It was actually in Cuba a few months ago when the embargo lifted. :)
 Lack of features and&#x2F;or scale.
 Samsung makes phones that compete with Apple, yet is also one of their biggest suppliers.  This happens in business all the time.<p>AWS knows that if they did anything to harm Netflix&#x27;s business, it would reflect very poorly on them (and be morally and ethically wrong).<p>Also, while both offer streaming services, they don&#x27;t really compete.  Many people subscribe to both services.
 There is a lot wrong with this article, but here&#x27;s the main one that I think the author missed:<p>The quote there from Netflix&#x27;s Chief Product Officer is the most important part -- by offering offline downloads, Amazon is severely limiting themselves as to what devices they can offer their service on.<p>You can&#x27;t offer offline downloads on a Nintendo DS, because it doesn&#x27;t have the storage (but you can stream Netflix on it).  You can&#x27;t have offline download on a cable box (but there are a whole bunch you can stream Netflix on).<p>And what happens when I want to download something offline for my iPad but it&#x27;s full?  I can still stream Netflix (or Amazon  Video) but I can&#x27;t save it for later.  Or they could offer streaming but not offline mode on those devices.  What a terrible user experience.<p>I don&#x27;t think this will end up being that big a deal anyway -- most use cases I&#x27;ve heard for offline Netflix are I want to watch on a plane or cruise ship or hotel.  Open Connect[0] boxes can be put on planes and cruise ships, and most hotels have wifi already and some are already testing [1] the ability to let you log into your Netflix account from the hotel room.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openconnect.itp.netflix.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openconnect.itp.netflix.com</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macnn.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;15&#x2F;01&#x2F;20&#x2F;test.allows.marriott.guests.to.use.own.netflix.accounts.during.stay&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macnn.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;15&#x2F;01&#x2F;20&#x2F;test.allows.marriott....</a>
 Nothing forces them to do it, but it offers a fractured and confusing user experience.  There are other comments in this thread about how it&#x27;s annoying that some content is free and some paid.  Now add offline yes&#x2F;no, and you&#x27;ve doubled the possibilities for every piece of content.  And better yet, offline yes&#x2F;no <i>on this device</i> and you double the possibilities for every device you personally own.
 Hah, I doubt they do that, but it would be interesting.  Make it double blind.  Pre-select a couple of teams for acceptance to YC but don&#x27;t tell the interviewers until afterwards, and never tell the teams, so that the team still feels like they got in on their merit.
 5 shares?  Probably nothing, just let it ride.  You&#x27;d probably drop $150 on a dinner or two.<p>If you had 5000 shares I&#x27;d probably say the same thing -- this was already priced into the stock and almost all of the value in the stock is the Alibaba holding.<p>If the stock is up from when you bought it, maybe I&#x27;d say take some profit off the table, but honestly a sale of Yahoo&#x27;s web business would probably increase the value, but who knows.<p>I personally don&#x27;t invest in tech stocks because they&#x27;re too volatile. :)
 One way to train your model would be to allow people to tell you their current salary in exchange for the analysis.  Then you get more accurate salary data.  Of course people could lie, but that&#x27;s probably no better than the glass door data anyway.
 This was a great writeup with lots of great information.  One thing that bugged me though was the &quot;When to Raise Money&quot; section.  It says, in part: &quot;However, for most it will require an idea, a product, and some amount of customer adoption, a.k.a. traction.&quot;<p>There was a great comment on HN a while back (I wish I remembered who said it) that said, &quot;If you&#x27;re asking about traction or revenue, you aren&#x27;t making a seed investment&quot;.<p>Andy Bechtolsheim was a seed investor in Google -- he gave them a check based solely on their idea and who they were.  Paul Graham&#x2F;YC made a seed investment in reddit and Justin.tv and whole host of other companies -- none of them existed as more than idea when YC invested.<p>But VCs are risk averse people (ironic given they are in the risk business), so it makes sense that they would rather invest after a company can show a little traction, especially now that it&#x27;s so easy to get that initial traction.<p>I just think we need a new term besides &quot;seed&quot; to differentiate it from the true seed investments.
 &gt; Reddit, for example, launched without the ability for users to create their own subreddits, and many would describe that as one of the key reasons of Reddit&#x27;s growth. I believe they actually launched without commenting, but I can&#x27;t find a source on that.<p>reddit launched with only voting and submitting of links (no self posts).  Commenting, subreddit creation, self posts and all that was added years after launch.<p>(Source: I was there :) )
 Go to meet ups.<p>Go to conferences.  If you&#x27;re short on cash, go to where a conference is being held and hang out in the halls chatting people up.  Maybe security will kick you out, maybe they won&#x27;t.  Maybe they aren&#x27;t even checking who is going into the BOF sessions at night.<p>Go that one year old&#x27;s birthday party you were invited to being thrown by that older coworker of yours that you kinda know.  Maybe you&#x27;ll meet an interesting person who turns out to be your boss in ten years.<p>There&#x27;s lots of ways to meet people, it&#x27;s just not going to get thrown on your lap anymore.  You gotta go out and find it.
 It depends.  If they joined in the last three years, then no.  If they have been there for seven or eight years, I have to wonder a bit why they didn&#x27;t leave yet.  If they&#x27;ve been there for ten or more years, I&#x27;d have some serious doubts, because all the great people I know who used to work there all left about six to eight years ago and said that only the unemployable stayed behind.<p>That is of course not entirely true -- I have very talented friends who still work there.  But I would be more cautious for sure.
 This is very similar to a problem in linguistics (and in some ways &quot;is&quot; a linguistics problem).<p>You can define what an acorn is, and you can define a tree, but when does an acorn become a tree?  Same with baldness.  Everyone can identify a bald person and likewise someone who isn&#x27;t bald, but when do you go from not bald to bald?  This incidentally is part of the fundamental debate about abortion (when does a fetus become a child?).<p>And it is the same here -- we can define a human and &quot;not human&quot; but we&#x27;re having trouble defining exactly when it goes from one to the next.
 Let&#x27;s be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too.<p>Sadly, I feel like people won&#x27;t accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won&#x27;t happen for a long time, if ever.<p>Honestly it&#x27;s a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we should want them.<p>Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy climates.
 eBay did a great thing in this regard -- they offered a sabbatical every five years.  It was a win for the employee because they got a nice long vacation and it was a win for the organization because it forced everyone to figure out how to get along without that employee for an extended amount of time.
 Yeah eBay had that problem too.  People would save up all their vacation, add it to their sabbatical and then use the time to job search.<p>I think they changed their rules so that you couldn&#x27;t add your vacation time to it and you had to pay them back if you left within in X months.
 This is why Apple still tries to own their entire supply chain, to a point where their suppliers don&#x27;t have excess capacity to sell to others (or legally can&#x27;t).  It continues to protect their scale.<p>Amazon Web Services is in a very similar boat -- it would be hard for others to replicate their scale.<p>Ironically in the AWS case, it is their selling of such scale that enables a whole lot of other companies to buy scale (in this case infrastructure) and eliminate that advantage from their competitors.
 Do you still have to have a developer account to get the profile file?  Or is it publicly accessible?  I was the beta to try out flux (or whatever they call it) but I don&#x27;t write apps so there is no point in spending the $99 just for that.
 The top two answers are each interesting in their own way.  The second answer, about the alternating colors, shows an elegant proof by induction.<p>The first (And accepted) answer, shows how important it is to account for edge cases!  It also shows why legal contracts can be very long.
 4. (Which is related to 2)  Screening college graduates.  By releasing &quot;toy&quot; versions of their stuff, they get professors and students using their tools for projects, so when they go to interview with Google, Google already has some data on whether they are using the tools well, and it drives those kids towards google so they can work on &quot;the real thing&quot;.  It&#x27;s a great strategy.
 I think Google was unique in that most of the people who were hitting their sabbatical had done <i>very</i> well with their stock options, and realized that they didn&#x27;t need to work anymore and were quite happy not working, or working on their own stuff.
 I wonder if Apple tests for this edge case.  If not, good on them for some solid software!
 Looks like he was on wifi.
 &gt; What was amazing was just how rare it was to even see a keyboard and certainly gone are rows of rectangular buttons. Yay!<p>This actually makes me sad.  I liked the old days where I could operate my device without having to look at it, just by feeling the buttons.  This is especially true for car radios, but it would be nice to be able to work blind.<p>With a kid in one arm it&#x27;s a lot easier to have buttons than a touchscreen.<p>(And yes I&#x27;m aware that a touchscreen offers a much deeper UX experience, but still, buttons can be nice too)
 But once you&#x27;ve set up your bank account once, it will work on every site that takes Stripe.<p>That&#x27;s the big sell as a merchant -- chances are your user is already configured for payments.  And the larger their network grows the more likely this is true.
 Technically the French announcement should be first if they want to follow language laws. :)<p>I&#x27;m glad to hear this, as it was rather silly that a whole bunch of companies in Canada couldn&#x27;t use AWS because of requirements around where their data must be stored.  Now they will be able to.
 Blackjack is not like horse racing and poker -- in the latter, the player can use information that is available to them to have a positive expected outcome.  In blackjack, no matter how good you are you cannot create a positive expected outcome, you can only minimize your negative expected outcome.
 The smart winner would not claim the prize themselves, but instead find a huge law firm to set up a trust and then claim it for them, so no one will know who the winner was.<p>Also, why would this person be any more of a target than the publicly known shareholders of public companies that have more than a billion?
 Yes, you can do that.  In Nevada that&#x27;s cheating and in New Jersey it isn&#x27;t (but if they see you doing it they can make your life very difficult), but at that point you&#x27;re operating outside the norms of the game so I didn&#x27;t count it.
 Oh I meant it the other way around.  That Amazon was foolish for not doing this sooner.
 Touché
 &gt; Most states have rules that you have to declare your identity to claim the prize.<p>But there are ways around that.  You can transfer the ticket to the lawyer and then have a contract that says the lawyer will pay your trust $908 million.  Or whatever your $1000&#x2F;hr lawyer tells you to do. :)
 &gt; Field has 2 or 12 pay triple and the other pays double<p>&gt; Only do field, place, or come bets<p>The house edge on the field with those rules is 2.78%, which isn&#x27;t bad, but isn&#x27;t great.  Ideally you want one that pays triple on both 2 and 12 (good luck finding that!) because then the house edge is 0.00%<p>All the rest of your bets are either 0% or 1.4-1.6% house edge.<p>Also, if you&#x27;re really worried about one seven wiping you off the table and don&#x27;t mind being contrarian, play the don&#x27;t.  While the odds are basically the same (slightly better actually) in the long term, I find the short term odds much better (because of the aforementioned deadly seven).<p>However if you value the social aspect of the game or your casino player rating, don&#x27;t play the don&#x27;t. :)
 I was on their beta and still have it today.  I don&#x27;t watch it a lot, and only really use it for ESPN and background noise.<p>But every time I&#x27;m about to cancel, there&#x27;s a big matchup on ESPN that makes me say &quot;just one more month&quot;.  And then since I have it I throw it on as background noise again.  It&#x27;s a vicious cycle.
 &gt; However, what&#x27;s not a joke is what happens when the internet goes down. So does our heat.<p>As a couple of other folks have noted, that&#x27;s not normal.  You might want to get on tech support with them.<p>My Nest just keeps running its last program when it looses internet.
 That must be a UK thing or something.  I only have a single device.  I know because I installed it myself -- there is definitely no manual override button, and I&#x27;ve never even heard of this Heat Link before.
 I would love it if Vegas started shifting the rules back into the player&#x27;s favor so us degenerate gamblers could come back more.<p>I got so angry when I see a blackjack table with a 6 for 5 payout on a blackjack and the lack of surrender.
 It&#x27;s too bad they aren&#x27;t publishing this as an EBS snapshot.  That would probably be the most useful way their intended audience could consume it given that most universities get a ton of free Amazon credits for exactly this type of research.
 Commuting from Oakland, assuming public transit, it much closer to SOMA than even South SF.<p>And honestly, it&#x27;s probably a selection bias.  The people who live in those areas are families because they&#x27;re mostly single family homes.  They aren&#x27;t the young single people who make a lot of noise about housing prices.
 I&#x27;m super excited to see this!  This is my favorite Netflix OSS project and the one I thought had the most potential when I first heard about it internally.<p>I wish I had this tool about eight years ago...
 Presumably this is so you don&#x27;t forget about a bunch of small changes when making a large commit.  However, for me, right before I do a commit, I always do a diff to make sure what I&#x27;m about to commit is what I intended to, which has the nice side effect of seeing all the changes and reminding me for the commit message.<p>Is this not the common way most people commit?
 That doesn&#x27;t seem to do anything for me.  What am I looking for?
 I doubt that will happen.  Very few people list that as their deal breaker, and it&#x27;s their entire business model.  If egress were cheap you could easily load balance between providers.
 I do that as well, but in my branch.  When I merge to master I tend to squash into bigger commits so as not to pollute the timeline so much.  If someone really needs to see the small commits they can always look at the branch.
 I&#x27;m sure all those renters will be much better off and safer now.<p>I understand the need to register for safety and health reasons, but it seems silly to require it for a couch in the apartment.
 Their mobile app has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last year.<p>Also, payment is way easier than it was before.  Less bouncing back and forth.
 &gt; I usually camp at the bottom, waiting for the crowd to disperse, then grab the powerup and use it efficiently.<p>You do realize this means that you probably get to the top slower than if you just stood on it, right? :)
 It&#x27;s dangerous because the person in the middle can&#x27;t hold a handrail.
 It is, but people sometimes don&#x27;t list it as &quot;elite&quot; because it&#x27;s a public university.
 I used to use org mode when I did everything on my linux desktop, but I stopped when I got a smartphone (and later an iPad).<p>I loved org mode.<p>Does anyone have a good solution for syncing one&#x27;s org mode files to an iDevice and then using it (or even better, editing it)?
 This works for a while, until there is enough inventory to meet demand and then (gasp!) rents become affordable.<p>Assuming you build the place efficiently, you should still be able to make a profit, but that&#x27;s the trick.  A lot of developers right now are building luxury apartments with granite and fancy fixtures which look great now but will need to be replaced in a few years when they get worn out from mistreatment and don&#x27;t look so good anymore or worse yet aren&#x27;t in fashion anymore.
 You mean switching away from Linux?<p>Basically the driver was that in college and shortly thereafter, I had more time than money, so it was worth it to use an OS that required an investment in time to make it the way I like.<p>Now that I&#x27;m older with a kid, I have more money than time, so I&#x27;d rather have an OS where I can solve my problem with money.<p>I&#x27;d actually rather still be running Linux, I just don&#x27;t have the time. :)
 Absolutely (although you got the motivation a bit wrong).  The renters who are against new housing are doing it solely out of lack of intelligence&#x2F;education -- they don&#x27;t understand that more housing means poor people can rent more housing, even if everything that gets built is a luxury apartment, since eventually equilibrium will be reached.<p>The owners who are against growth, who are the majority of those against growth, are doing it simply to prop up their real estate prices.<p>I&#x27;m probably one of the rare homeowners who is <i>for</i> more housing.  I think my house is ridiculously overpriced and should cost 1&#x2F;2 as much, and would if they would allow people to build.  I don&#x27;t care though because I bought my house to live in, not to retire with.
 Easy enough to add in post.
 I&#x27;m advising a company right now based on Toronto who is fundraising, and it is definitely easier for them.  The CEO tells me that investors will literally say, &quot;I get 50% more for every dollar I put in!&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s totally true -- American investors love Canadian companies right now.
 I&#x27;m not entire sure many of the Uber drivers realized they are just a temporary stopgap until self driving cars are a reality.  Uber I&#x27;m sure will be one of the first, if not <i>the</i> first, company to have a massive fleet of self driving cars.<p>At that point their costs will be so low they&#x27;ll be able to undercut anyone still using human drivers.
 This is great!<p>One quick feedback, you should probably normalize the case in searches.  I searched for &quot;python&quot; and got nothing.  I had to change it to &quot;<i>P</i>ython&quot; to get it to work.
 It&#x27;s like how when PayPal is processing your payments and they connect you with really successful people who take in the same kind of payments so you can learn from them and get their advice, and then connect you with other people who just take in a lot of payments in general for their advice too.
 It&#x27;s funny because this is the digital version of an article that was printed in a newspaper about that newspaper going digital.<p>If only they had any idea of the pain they were about to cause themselves. :)
 &gt; And unlike Microsoft products, CHIP has both open-source software (Linux) and hardware.<p>That seems like an unnecessary dig.
 I used to run the FreeBSD box for sendmail.org.  When I left that job in 2001 it had already been running for 2+ years.<p>Considering that the datacenter it was in is now the Dropbox office, I&#x27;m guessing it had to be shut down and moved at some point, but 2+ years seemed like a really long time even then!<p>FreeBSD is just really good at lasting forever.
 Because even 15 years ago it was rare for a server to have such a high uptime, since you usually had to unplug and move it every once in a while, and hardware still didn&#x27;t last years and needed replacement.
 The most important thing I learned from this page was that American Apparel sizes small.  Since 3&#x2F;4s of all my shirts are startup shirts and most of those are AA, this is good to know.
 I wish I had this five years ago when I was dealing with Postgres query planning every day!<p>Nowadays I just avoid it by using NoSql (which to be fair gives me a whole different set of problems). :)
 Also a lot of systems strip anything after the + now, especially spam systems.
 Make sure you keep a list somewhere of which site got which email address.<p>I used to do this too and it was great, but then when I started trying to recover accounts that were a few years old, I had a heck of a time remembering what email address I had actually given them in the first place!
 I was doing that but some companies think you are &quot;hacking&quot; if you put the company name in.  Like I don&#x27;t think you can do [email protected] on Facebook.
 I&#x27;ll try to avoid ranting here, but <i>anything</i> is a legal email address per the RFC (even an @ sign in a username, or an email address without any @ sign).<p>RFC 821 is the original and 2821 summarizes it plus the few that came after to add and clarify.<p>The only true &quot;RFC email validity check&quot; is to send an email to whatever address they provide.
 The way it was done before patents -- government funded research institutions whose only motivation was to provide scientific breakthroughs so they could continue to receive government funding.
 Slightly off topic, but I find the fascination with ASCII-arting things interesting.<p>I grew up in the days of 2400 baud modems and even ran a BBS briefly.  At the time, ASCII art was the only thing you could do to differentiate yourself.<p>Nowadays I suppose it&#x27;s a combination of nostalgia and ease of transferring since pretty much every system ever has a way of reading ASCII.<p>But I wonder how long the trend will last -- the majority of internet users don&#x27;t have &quot;nostalgia&quot; for ASCII anymore [0] and there are at least a few image and video formats that are becoming almost as ubiquitous as ASCII readers.<p>[0]  I was recently on a discussion with some folks I used to work with at university about how our old workplace was no longer offering shell accounts to the students because they weren&#x27;t being used.  This made us all sad since most of us learned all of our command line foo at that workplace.
 I like how they added the detail of the fuzzy dice for the older car.
 &gt; And what about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?<p>That&#x27;s an interesting one, because that cost is entirely <i>caused</i> by the government.  The government could for example fund clinical trials, since they&#x27;re the ones who are interested in it&#x27;s results (as is by extension the public).<p>As for the rest, if the science were freely available without a patent from the scientists, companies could still spend money making it a therapy and making a profit by doing it better and more efficiently than their competitors, and they could still get a patent on their work.<p>We&#x27;re talking about making the <i>science</i> patent free, not the product.
 &gt; When Google shuts down Nest, people are left with non-working thermostats, and have to spend money and rebuild their systems to continue on.<p>No, they are left with a normal programmable thermostat with a nicer interface than most.<p>&gt; Even worse, if just the internet goes down – not that rare in areas in the US only served by one ISP which doesn’t have to fear competition – one is even left without heating.<p>This is not true.  The Nest operates perfectly fine without internet.<p>&gt; The reaction of the people on the recent case where Nest went down itself, and people were left without heating<p>That&#x27;s not exactly what happened.  What happened was there was a bug in the software that had an issue when their server became unavailable.  But this could happen with any device that is controlled by software.  And even if they had a totally open and accessible API right on the device, this problem still would have happened.<p>I don&#x27;t like the fact that they lock up the data, but we should probably try to stomp out the myth that the device is totally useless without their servers.
 I never understood why mandatory arbitration is ever allowed.  Someone should be able to decide if they want arbitration <i>after</i> the incident has occurred.  The default should be court and arbitration should only happen if both parties agree it is a better course of action.
 Since all the other comments here seem to be afraid to fully explain...<p>Cold makes the skin hard, especially the nipples.  This happens on men and women, but it tends to have a bigger effect on women, in part because their nipples are larger and in part because they tend to wear thinner fabrics.<p>If a woman is going to go out in a thinner fabric and she knows that where she is going might be cold, she&#x27;ll put band aids on her nipples to help smooth it out under her clothing to prevent them from poking out, which can draw unwanted attention.<p>The implication here is that the man can not control himself and wants them to cover up because he will stare at their breasts if they don&#x27;t.
 You have to hand it to the CIA for taking advantage of the XFiles reboot to boost their social media a bit.  Especially on 37 year old documents!
 What&#x27;s that quote from the movie producer?  &quot;All the good stories have already been told, it&#x27;s just a matter of how you tell it&quot;?  Something like that.<p>There are volumes and volumes of books about how every story can be described by just a few &quot;proto&quot; stories.  It&#x27;s not entirely surprising that there were proto stories before the written word.
 I was talking to someone in this industry, and he was lamenting the fact that there is  revolving door between Boeing and the FAA, who runs these tests.<p>He said the consequence is that the testing is less stringent for Boeing planes than for Airbus planes, since it is often their friends (and sometimes their own design!) being tested.<p>You would think these tests have a fixed set of outcomes, but it turns out there is a lot of flexibility allowed by the testers.  Which makes sense since they make the rules and want to make sure those Boeing planes are passing.<p>They justify it by saying that it&#x27;s only fair since Airbus is funded by the government (not realizing how much Boeing is subsidized by the government too).<p>It&#x27;s made me wary of flying on Boeing equipment.
 Wow, this throws me back to the early 90s, when we would basically have the same discussions about JPEG vs GIF.  At the time most graphics programs could open a GIF you downloaded with your modem, but if you wanted to view a JPEG you had to jump out to a separate program, and everyone said that as soon as there was native JPEG support no one would use GIF anymore.
 Unless you have some source of deal flow that they don&#x27;t, why would a consultant work for you and take a 20% haircut to help you fund a company that they won&#x27;t even get part of the upside for?
 Once again another problem that could be solved by a carbon tax that forces businesses to bear their external costs.<p>Even the staunchest Libertarian should be in support of a carbon tax, given that one of the planks of the platform is to protect the environment from harm [0]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lp.org&#x2F;platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lp.org&#x2F;platform</a> (Section 2.2)
 That&#x27;s a fair point. A carbon tax would probably be enough to push the price above where most people would do it, but there is no reason not to institute a noise tax as well.
 Obscurity is when the secret part is entirely based on one side of the transaction (I hope they don&#x27;t find this URL) whereas security involves secrets on both sides that must be discovered (here is a key exchange where we both know a secret thing).
 Right now my wife and I just use Google calendar and iMessage, but I can see a time soon when my child can speak, read and type where it might be handy to have a group chat.<p>Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.
 &gt; But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.<p>That&#x27;s a good point, although in practice I rarely have to search through our message history.<p>Also, since we&#x27;re using iMessage, it&#x27;s really hard to search anyway.
 This is not entirely surprising.  A large swath of their wealth was created via the government&#x27;s help, and they get that help by creating falsehoods that no one checks into.  That seems to be standard operating procedure in politics today -- say whatever makes the people agree with you, because most aren&#x27;t smart enough to see the follow up the next day pointing our you&#x27;re a liar.<p>And this isn&#x27;t limited to conservatives, the democrats do it just as much.
 The same text as the WSJ article is reprinted here:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.morningstar.com&#x2F;all&#x2F;dow-jones&#x2F;us-markets&#x2F;201602017502&#x2F;yahoos-mayer-to-unveil-cost-cutting-plan.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.morningstar.com&#x2F;all&#x2F;dow-jones&#x2F;us-markets&#x2F;2016020...</a>
 I feel bad for the 15%, but this was necessary.  They are severely over-hired.  I&#x27;ve gone over there a few times to talk to folks and it&#x27;s clear that they have a lot of people that are basically making work for themselves because no one has any work for them that actually helps the business.
 Some feedback for you:  I read your webpage and I&#x27;m unclear as to why you are better than, or even different from, Amazon.<p>And glancing at your pricing, I think Amazon is cheaper too.<p>I&#x27;d suggest adding a grid or a bullet list enumerating how you are different.<p>Also, something to keep in mind -- when launching a new product that replaces the functionality of another, you can&#x27;t be just as good, or even slightly better, you need to be <i>significantly</i> better to get someone to move.  So you should focus on showing why you would be <i>significantly</i> better than your competitors that you&#x27;re trying to displace.
 Getting a degree from an elite institution does three things:<p>1) It puts you in a network of other people who went to the institution, oftentimes people who have connections that can help you in life<p>2) It gives you a piece of paper that shows you can follow a long term plan and execute on it, that other people recognize as a difficult long term plan to execute.<p>3) Gives you an icebreaker when going to interviews where you can talk about either how you and the interviewer went to the same institution, or rival institutions, or you can talk about how your elite institution was different from theirs and the same.<p>What you don&#x27;t get is a &quot;better education&quot;. (Edit:  Some have pointed out rightly that I should differentiate here between top non-elite instututions and the ones that are diploma mills, so to be clear, what I&#x27;m saying doesn&#x27;t apply to the diploma mills.)  You do the same work as the folks at the less elite institutions.  Maybe you do it with slightly smarter people who help you learn new things that you wouldn&#x27;t otherwise, but most of the &quot;less elite&quot; schools still use the same textbooks and materials.  And heck maybe your professor wrote the book so you can get more detailed answers, but it&#x27;s unlikely that that access gives you a significant leg up unless you take advantage of it.<p>So it makes sense that in fields where skills matter, the elite college doesn&#x27;t add a lot of benefit, but where connections matter, it does.
 I guess it depends on where you go.  My assessment has come from interviewing people and getting into a discussion about what they learned in school and finding out they used the same textbook and exercises as other people I interviewed who went to elite schools.  So my assessment is admittedly anecdotal.
 In both cases you describe, the company with the higher cap is the more &quot;powerful&quot; company though.  In example one, they have a lot more control of their destiny since they have debt and not more shareholders.<p>In number two they have more control because if an opportunity comes up that costs say 10 billion, Company B can act on that and Company A cannot.
 And then there&#x27;s Hungarian, my ancestors, way off on the side, where no one really knows where it came from.
 Read your own examples again.  Example two was the one with the dividends.
 No, I don&#x27;t think all Universities are diploma mills, far from it.  But if you feel like the content at MIT is that much better than what you are getting, you may want to bring this up with your faculty and ask them why.
 &gt; Yet, in investor&#x2F;VC&#x2F;pitch&#x2F;roadshow decks, I usually see &quot;this is how many MIT and how many Stanford grads we have&quot;...
 Trust me, it&#x27;s not nearly as relevant as people think, but it must work.<p>VCs are risk-averse pattern matchers.  Their training patterns include knowing that startups with a high percentage of MIT and Stanford grads do well.  Despite the fact that correlation isn&#x27;t causation, they live off of that fallacy, so they would rather invest in a bunch of MIT and Stanford grads than not.<p>It actually makes a lot of sense for a VC to do that.  They have a huge incentive to have a lot of false negatives and avoid false positives, so it&#x27;s much better for them to use criteria that will eliminate good companies than allow bad ones.
 I tried to find the data but I could not, but I wonder, what did blender sales look like 15 years after their invention?  40 years?  I picked blender because it is a useful appliance that it seems most people have one of today, and some people have had the same one for 30+ years (like my parents).<p>My point is, I wonder if this is just the typical performance of an appliance -- at first there is a lot of innovation and sales growth, and then it slows down as there just aren&#x27;t that many new features to add and everyone has one.
 The NFL is greedy, but right.  The value of the tapes is 0.  The only entity in the world that can pay money for those tapes is the NFL, which means they are the entire market and can choose the price.<p>But this guy is also being greedy.  If he wanted the world to have these tapes, he could give them away to a museum.<p>Wanting cash for these tapes is basically extortion.<p>It would be nice if the NFL gave him some money, but I don&#x27;t see why they should&#x2F;would.
 &gt; but what happened to doing right by people and the community at large.<p>That&#x27;s not really up to the NFL, it&#x27;s up to the guy who has the tapes being willing to give them away for free.  The NFL is basically being extorted here.  Sure they have the money, but why should they pay?  The value of the tapes is zero, because the only possible buyer isn&#x27;t interested.
 Keep in mind that the people who make a lot more than that are highly motivated not to share.  I know for example that the Netflix salaries on Glassdoor are definetely too low, since I know a broad range of salaries there.
 The problem here stems from two things:<p>1) Net metering means that the power company is required to buy electricity at retail rates from their customers instead of wholesale rates, which puts quite a burden on them.  Why should they have to buy at a higher rate?<p>2) Electric companies for decades have been rolling the cost of transmission into the variable rate portion of people&#x27;s bills.  This means that larger consumers (who tend to be richer) have been subsidizing the poorer customers.  This is generally considered a good thing by most, since it allows poorer people to have electricity (because you don&#x27;t want to live in a society where some people have electricity and some don&#x27;t).  The solution here is to raise the fixed portion of the bill to cover the true cost of transmission, and then place a tax on those who go &quot;off grid&quot; to straight out subsidize the poor, so it&#x27;s more obvious that is what is happening (And presumably most people would still support).
 If you ask the community like this, you&#x27;ll probably get a lot of &quot;yes&quot; answers, because very few people like the tools they have.  But it probably won&#x27;t help you make a good decision.<p>Asking people how they feel generally isn&#x27;t a great way to evaluate your product -- you have to build it and see how they act.  You can ask potential customers what features they would like to help guide you, but I wouldn&#x27;t necessarily add or cut features based on their answers.<p>The best way to tell if someone needs your products is to just get it out there and see if people actually use it.<p>Some anecdotes:  I was in a focus group once about cell phones, many years ago.  They asked us all if we would want a camera in our phone.  All of us said no, it wouldn&#x27;t be worth the extra expense, because we couldn&#x27;t think of a single thing we&#x27;d use a camera on a phone for.  It&#x27;s a good thing Nokia didn&#x27;t listen to us!<p>On reddit, check out the &#x2F;r&#x2F;ideasfortheadmins subreddit.  It is filled with ideas users think they want, including features reddit used to have that no one used.<p>What I&#x27;m saying can be summarized by the (incorrectly attributed to Ford) quote, &quot;If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said &#x27;a faster horse&#x27;&quot;.
 &gt; Its going to be untenable to tax someone for no longer using the electric utility (I&#x27;m revolted by that idea personally, and am pretty far left bleeding liberal).<p>Which is amusing, because you already pay the tax in the form of variable rate usage pricing that is higher than it needs to be.  This is the problem with making hidden subsidies explicit -- people suddenly don&#x27;t like the subsidy anymore.
 For a couple of reasons.<p>- They aren&#x27;t transmitting it, which has a cost.  They aren&#x27;t providing value add like the power company.<p>- They could pay wholesale if they figured out a way to get the electricity from the power plant to their house, which is the value add that the power company provides.<p>- They have a choice in how much they buy, by turning things on and off.  The power company, being a regulated utility, does not have that choice.  They must buy as much as is demanded.
 That&#x27;s the problem they&#x27;re trying to fix with this change.  As the wealthy, higher consumption customers move off grid, they system as a whole is loosing the subsidies for the poor.  Even if you have solar, they power company still have to maintain transmission lines to your house and to the houses of poor people, which was being subsidized by they rich&#x27;s usage.<p>So they are trying to stem the tide of the rich leaving by making them continue to bear the cost of subsidizing the poor.<p>Instead of playing games with those on solar, they should just straight up call it what it is so it is more explicit.
 150 years ago, everyone generated their own energy.  100 years ago, most larger users still generated their own energy.  Over time, almost everyone migrated &quot;to the grid&quot; because the centralized power companies did it better, cheaper and more reliability.<p>I suspect the same will happen with computing.  At this point most of the smaller players (startups) are using AWS or another cloud provider.  Some of the more bleeding edge larger companies are doing it too.  Eventually even the largest companies will move &quot;to the cloud&quot;, leaving only the very largest companies (who incidentally still generate their own energy even today) running their own servers.
 Oh I wasn&#x27;t saying it would all be Amazon.  I&#x27;m saying it will all be 3rd party clouds.  The number of providers is up for grabs.
 We&#x27;re living in an interesting time.  The first group to get a working qbit based computer will be able to break all current encryption.  We will very rapidly have to switch to quantum encryption to protect ourselves.<p>You can be damn sure that the NSA and the other three letter agencies are working hard on this problem, and definitely would not share if they get there first (if they haven&#x27;t already).
 I&#x27;m not nearly well versed enough to speak intelligently on the subject, but my understanding is that only quantum computers can do a &quot;perfect&quot; key exchange, because the detection of interference by a third party can only be detected by a quantum computer.
 If you need a global lock in your distributed system, then you&#x27;re already in trouble.  In <i>most</i> cases, the best solution is to rewrite your software so that you don&#x27;t need the lock.  I don&#x27;t want to say all, because I&#x27;m sure there are use cases where it would be impossible to do so.  However, for my own research, I&#x27;m having trouble finding examples where a global lock is absolutely necessary.  If anyone has any examples, please send them to me.<p>For example, a lot of people say, &quot;updating a bank balance&quot;.  But even that can easily be eventually consistent.  You send increments and decrements and settle up at the end.  Yes, your balance might go negative, but that&#x27;s what ATM limits are for -- the most you could go negative is that limit.  Most other systems can be written the same way.  And for non-numeric values, there are always vector clocks or timestamps or quorum to determine which update came next, or you could send a client a list of all recent updates and let the client &quot;do the right thing&quot;.
 I think what you have provided is a far better solution than how most people were using redis. :)  I was just hoping to convince people that they should think a little deeper before going straight for the global lock.<p>Hope you&#x27;re doing well BTW!
 How would a global lock fix this?  Presumably you would have a process that is trying to decrement get a global lock and then crash, and eventually release the lock anyway, right?  So you get the same outcome.
 I don&#x27;t think so, there are distributed leader election schemes that don&#x27;t require a lock.  The simplest is using HRW hashing[0] so that each node independently determines the same leader.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rendezvous_hashing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rendezvous_hashing</a>
 &gt; I&#x27;d imagine it being pretty unsettling to watch a bank balance fluctuate.<p>Banks have generally solved this by batching updates, but yes, it could be unsettling for the customer in a similar situation.  There are ways around that though, for example you update a cache that stores the data instantly and then let the eventually consistent source of truth update the cache again if it is not in sync, or perhaps have a short timeout on the cache, so the customer gets a consistent and smooth experience but the source of truth is still accurate, eventually.
 &gt; Using less-consistent protocols to achieve a consistent view simply pushes the problem to a different layer.<p>Absolutely, but if you can avoid using global locks, which are error prone and reduce reliability, isn&#x27;t that a good thing?
 You can make your life as a programmer easier in exchange for making your life as an operator harder. :)  Locks are brittle and hurt reliability.
 I know someone who has, but I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;m allowed to say who.  They&#x27;re a really big site and you&#x27;d probably know the name, but they&#x27;re doing 1000&#x27;s of requests per second.<p>But other than them I don&#x27;t know of anyone else.<p>My company is built totally on Lambda, but we haven&#x27;t launched yet.
 &gt; The only downside thing is that it&#x27;s truly tough to figure out how to point your domain to s3.<p>It should be fairly straightforward.  In fact I just did it this morning.  What issues did you run into?  One tricky part that a lot of people miss is that you have to choose Alias: res in the record set properties.
 I&#x27;m sure adults said the same thing about video games.  &quot;What will these kids replace their video game addiction with when they outgrow it?  Drugs?!&quot;
 I use Chrome Canary, which doesn&#x27;t have flash at all, and it seems that most sites automatically switch to HTML5.<p>Sometimes I&#x27;ll go to a site in Safari or Chrome and and the flash won&#x27;t play, but then I load it up in Canary and it works.  I don&#x27;t understand why those same sites don&#x27;t just start with html5 if they already support it anyway.
 What&#x27;s the domain name?
 No I mean Chrome Canary.  But I&#x27;ve messed with the settings in chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;flags&#x2F; to disable it and enable default html5.
 You have that backwards.  Everything runs in AWS except serving raw video bits from very stripped down boxes in data centers around the world.  Those boxes in the CDN do literally nothing but serve video files via https very quickly.
 It&#x27;s important to keep this in mind:  For most companies, their infrastructure is the second largest expense after their employees.  For Netflix, the cost of both pales in comparison to the content licensing (which in 2016 they have said is 6 <i>billion</i>).  Cost isn&#x27;t a huge concern, agility is far more important.<p>That being said, the all in cost for Netflix on AWS is still cheaper than trying to run nine datacenters around the world, which is what they would have to do to replace their usage of AWS.
 I&#x27;m 100% sure it is https (I worked there).  But if you don&#x27;t believe me you can sniff your network traffic the next time you play a movie on Netflix. :)
 &gt; Beyond scarcely stretching the boundaries of obscure mathematical knowledge, what tangible difference has a PhD made to my life?<p>The same thing a bachelors degree does for everyone else.  You&#x27;ve proven that you can start, stick with, and complete a task that takes multiple years and a complicated set of steps.
 Reading HN, you&#x27;d think Java was dying (dead?) too.  But it&#x27;s not.  It&#x27;s an established language with a lot of very senior people still using it.  It has it&#x27;s issues for sure, but it also has a ton of libraries and support.<p>Python I&#x27;d say is in a similar boat.  Strong and established with tons of libraries, not popular amongst the kids.<p>Edit:  Apparently my use of &quot;kids&quot; as a sarcastic way of referring to those who won&#x27;t use &quot;old&quot; languages was missed. :)
 The other interesting piece of information is the incredible amount of access Chelsea gets given her experience level.  Obviously, her connections have helped her.<p>In her defense though, she seems to be living up to it.
 I didn&#x27;t mean her mother, I meant the other people she was traveling with.
 To save you some time, they did this analysis previously.  I can&#x27;t find it, but the summary was that the failures happen at the two ends and not a lot in the middle.  ie. a bunch die early (infant mortality) and the rest die pretty late (old age).
 Yep, that&#x27;s the one I was thinking of.  Curious, did you ever do a follow up?  Have 50% of the original drives died yet?
 At my last couple of jobs, I actually redlined the employment agreement and put an addendum that said that anything I work on away from work on my own hardware is mine.  They all accepted it, sometimes with a little back and forth (and in one case three years in came back to me saying &quot;we don&#x27;t have your employment agreement&quot; and starting the process over again).<p>There was only one place I didn&#x27;t have to do that -- Netflix.  It&#x27;s part of their standard agreement.  It even went one step further and said that even if you use their resources, if you do it on your own time you own it, as long as it&#x27;s not in direct competition with their business.  It was a refreshing change for sure.
 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;ft3FiPR" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;ft3FiPR</a><p>I blacked out all the parts that change based on the company, because I&#x27;m not sure how much I was allowed to share.<p>The list of inventions is basically and thing or idea you had that you might want to work on.  It&#x27;s a good place to list any open source projects as well as any ideas you might be working on for a company.
 Question:  What benefit do you derive from using org mode format if you aren&#x27;t editing it in Emacs, where you can collapse and expand?
 I&#x27;ve worked with the FBI and the Secret Service investigating computer crime.<p>The Secret Service is extremely competent when it comes to computer forensics, and when they don&#x27;t know what to do, they don&#x27;t guess, the consult with experts.<p>The FBI is the opposite in every way, mostly because of budget constraints and the subsequent lack of training.  I hope that this is a good learning opportunity for them and a chance for them to increase their training budget in this area.
 Ebay and PayPal. The secret service doesn&#x27;t like it when foreigners steal from Americans (their main job is to protect the currency, protecting the President is an add on).
 Many big companies will patent their internal architectures.  I&#x27;ve been involved in the creation of quite a few patent applications of exactly that.  My name is even on one of them.<p>It&#x27;s silly and ridiculous but necessary because of the way patents are enforced.<p>I can promise you that the existence of the patent system did not motivate us to build any of that software, but it certainly motivated us to patent it after the fact, so that someone else couldn&#x27;t patent it and then sue us for having independently built the same thing.
 I think the author is right about cars being next.  There is a lot of work by a lot of people in this area, and one of them is going to get it very right (my personal bet is on Tesla or Apple).
 &gt; You&#x27;re choosing Apple over all the existing car manufacturers?<p>Yes.  Much like smartphones and tablets, they hadn&#x27;t done much in the space until they exploded on the scene after sitting back and watching everyone else get things wrong.  That&#x27;s what they&#x27;re really good at -- seeing what others do wrong and not repeating those mistakes.<p>Unlike tablets though, it&#x27;s a lot harder to hide when you&#x27;re making a car.  They&#x27;ve already secured a test track and they&#x27;re hiring vehicle engineers.
 &gt; As for an individual it is difficult to see how AI will decrease our workload, increase our happiness, or increase our wealth.<p>You have to be the guy or gal creating the AI. :)
 I feel bad for the IRS.  They don&#x27;t make the rules, but they get the brunt of the vitriol because they are the enforcers.  And honestly, as enforcers, they are pretty fair and just, given the resources they have to work with.<p>They&#x27;ve used &quot;big data&quot; for years to target the tax cheats they think will give them the best return on their dollar.  That&#x27;s why they don&#x27;t go after the mega-rich -- their lawyers delay the process so much that their return is lower than going after small business owners.<p>As far as government orgs go, they&#x27;re probably one of the most efficient.<p>My personal experience with them was actually very positive, even though I was there for an audit.  They called me in, they said, &quot;here are our concerns&quot;, I said, &quot;here&#x27;s my documentation&quot;.  We went back and forth, and mutually agreed that some things were ok and some were not.  We decided I owed some extra money, but they waived the fees and penalties.<p>Overall, I think they&#x27;re one of the better orgs in the government.
 I didn&#x27;t say they were perfect.  I said &quot;one of the better orgs&quot;.  I&#x27;m sure they have their bad apples just like any organization.<p>But mostly my point was that they do not deserve the hate they get in most cases.
 &gt; They make and enforce regulations<p>Actually, they only enforce regulations.  Congress (specifically the House) makes the regulations.
 Yes.  Pretty much any investor you talk to will &quot;lowball&quot; with 2 on 6.  5M would be a discount.  I&#x27;ll make no judgement on whether this is bad or or not.
 A lot of people seem to be missing the fact that they plan to sell the building and then rent it back, turning an already paid CapEx into an OpEx.<p>Zynga seems to be really good at the CapEx&#x2F;OpEx game.  Back before they went public, they did everything on Amazon, so it was all OpEx.  Then they built the ZCloud, which converted OpEx to CapEx, which investors liked.<p>What a lot of people don&#x27;t realize is that they have been slowing dismantling ZCloud and going back to AWS (converting previous CapEx to current OpEx).
 I didn&#x27;t word it well, but basically instead of buying more servers (increasing CapEx) you spend more OpEx instead, but not all at once.  So it&#x27;s better on the balance sheet because less is being spend up front (Even though it&#x27;s more overall).<p>If you mean the building, it&#x27;s because they can take advantage of the gains and add that to their balance sheet and then slowly spend it back down.
 Does anyone know if it re-encryptes the data after I change my passphrase?  In other words, am I immediately more secure if I switch from a 6 digit pin to a passphrase?
 Then those people could turn it off.  But it would be a nice option.
 Awesome thanks!  Exactly what I was looking for.
 They all live in Houston (or near it), so they make a decent wage for being there.<p>But yeah, you don&#x27;t enter the Astronaut core to get rich. :)
 Yes, by default you can call it Amazon instead.  I have this problem because I have a cousin named Alexis and my Echo gets confused when she comes over.  But I still keep it at Alexa.
 Yes.  Yes you can.  Hilarity ensues.<p>The &quot;security&quot; is the you have to trust the people you invite into your house.<p>It&#x27;s not great security. :)<p>(ok, that&#x27;s not entirely true.  as far as I can tell, you can only reorder things they&#x27;ve already bought via the website)
 Just the other day I was discussing with some folks that Microsoft has made an amazing effort of the last two years to win back the hearts and minds of developers.  This is another great step in that direction.
 Sadly I&#x27;m stuck using Python 2.7 until Amazon Lambda supports Python 3.

 Yeobot, a Slackbot that&#x27;s a SQL interface to the Amazon API and soon a whole lot more.<p>It&#x27;s cool because it works across accounts and across regions, which their API doesn&#x27;t do, and it adds new information like cost, so you can do stuff like &#x27;select instance_id, monthly_cost from ec2.instances order by monthly_cost desc&#x27;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;yeobot&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;yeobot&#x2F;</a><p>Oh and we had to make a bunch of tools to make this work, since we&#x27;re building it all on AWS Lambda, so there&#x27;s these too:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;oss&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;oss&#x2F;</a>
 After a while if an article doesn&#x27;t get a lot of traction it&#x27;s removed from the duplicates list so it can be submitted again.
 &quot;The company has raised more than $900 million to date from Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Lightspeed Venture Partners.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s the biggest red flag for me.  General rule of thumb is that your VCs won&#x27;t approve an exit unless it&#x27;s for at least 10x the funding you&#x27;ve taken, which means they need a minimum exit of about 10 billion.<p>That&#x27;s a tough spot to be in, and really changes your thinking.  I know of at least one company that had an exit opportunity but it was only 2x funding, so the investors wouldn&#x27;t allow it.  They then slogged along for <i>8 more years</i> until they finally had an exit that was 0.2x and it all went to the series A investors with their preference.  Founders got nothing, angels got nothing, employees got nothing, and series B and beyond (the ones who blocked the 2x exit) got nothing.<p>Edit to clarify:  I&#x27;m not saying the VCs are doing anything wrong here or being irrational or anything like that.  I&#x27;m saying as a founder you need to watch out for this because the VC has a diversified portfolio and the founder doesn&#x27;t.
 Why not set up a render farm that&#x27;s always running and then send it job after job to keep the pipeline full?<p>You said that making it take an hour was ok, so I assume the processing time is somewhat flexible.  If you don&#x27;t have enough workload to always keep one machine busy, you could always wait until you did have enough workload and then spin up a one machine render farm, have it work for an hour and then shut it back down until you had enough work.<p>It&#x27;s true that per minute billing would save you money, but assuming what you&#x27;re doing is meant to scale up, once you get past enough work to keep a single machine busy, you&#x27;ve gained nothing.<p>However if you put in the work now to separate the jobs from the machines, you&#x27;re on the path to much better future scalability, because you can size the render farm to the work instead of having the farm and the number of jobs directly linked.
 &gt; Why would investors have veto power?<p>They often sit on the board, and also often control enough shares to outvote the founders.<p>&gt; In such a situation, might it make sense for all workers to drop those investors and recreate a similar company without them?<p>I&#x27;m not certain but that would probably be illegal?  At least immoral.
 There may not have been enough situations to give good data, but even if there were, my point was that it changes the thinking of the company leaders, who are now forced to &quot;swing for the fences&quot;, which is great for the VCs with their diversified portfolios, but not so great for the founders who have all their eggs in one basket (who admittedly put themselves in this situation).<p>To be clear, I&#x27;m not talking badly about the VCs, I think they are making the right decision for their situation.<p>I&#x27;m saying it&#x27;s a bad place for the founders to be.
 I&#x27;m seeing a lot of folks here talking about how to-the-minute billing would save them so much money on Amazon, but I think you&#x27;re not thinking about the problem correctly.<p>If you want to build for scalability, then it&#x27;s best to separate the jobs from the machines.  Having one job per machine isn&#x27;t granular enough.  It&#x27;s best to have a farm of machines that can take jobs and process them, and then scale the farm if the jobs aren&#x27;t processed fast enough. (Incidentally this is what Lambda does for you)<p>If you do that, then once you have enough jobs to fill a single machine, to-the-minute billing doesn&#x27;t really save you much money, if any, and you&#x27;re then on a path to much better future scalability.
 &gt; Completely true, but at that point we&#x27;re running a cloud within a cloud<p>You&#x27;re doing that anyway, even if you run one job per machine, you just loose granularity (one of the big advantages of any &quot;cloud&quot;).<p>&gt; In other words, a farm of huge machines will need a queue to keep them busy. Having a queue means there&#x27;s some delay before a job starts<p>But that&#x27;s only true if you can&#x27;t fill one machine.  Once you&#x27;re filling one machine, you&#x27;re queue processing time will be the same.  Presumably you still have a queue, it&#x27;s just that the queue drives the start of machines instead of processes on the machine.<p>&gt; That requires less engineering<p>Right, like I said, you can do less engineering now but pay more later as your workloads scale up in both money and maintenance costs.
 Actually, what I&#x27;m saying is that bin packing is a hard problem so separate the work from the machines, make the bins smaller, and then bin packing becomes easier.
 You&#x27;re absolutely right.  What I&#x27;m trying to say is that beyond the smallest scale, one hour is so small it doesn&#x27;t make a difference.
 I may have derailed my comment a bit by mentioning lambda.  My point was more about separating work from machines, which Lambda helps with, but you can also do on your own.
 True but as soon as you have two jobs you can saturate that cluster for an hour.<p>My point is at only the smallest scales does hourly vs minutely billing make a difference. Yes, it&#x27;s really nice, but doesn&#x27;t make as much difference as everyone says.
 I think you just said it yourself.  They gave <i>the company</i> millions of dollars, and now <i>the company</i> is more loyal to them than you.  The job of the company is to serve it&#x27;s shareholders.  At first, as a founder, you are the only shareholder.  When you take investment, you are bringing in more shareholders.  Sometimes you have to bring in enough shareholders that you aren&#x27;t the majority anymore.  But if your choice is to do that or have the company die, then you choose to give up control.
 If this were reddit this is where I would post a &quot;The force doesn&#x27;t work that way!&quot; memes.<p>I can&#x27;t stand it when people ask about a &quot;devops team&quot;.  That&#x27;s not devops then!  That just means your sysadmins can code too.<p>Now, if they are asking about a devops <i>software</i> team, that&#x27;s a different story.
 Praise the deity!  Oh how I wish I had this when I was running reddit&#x27;s databases.  It&#x27;s exactly the use case this was built for -- high write load where little changes after it&#x27;s written.<p>They solved the problem by moving the SSD after I left, but I feel like incorporating this patch might actually let them reduce the size of their Postgres cluster, or at least grow it slower.
 I probably wouldn&#x27;t want to hire an employee that only wants to work in one language, but I can definitely see a case where I&#x27;d want to hire a contractor that only works in Python.<p>Also, if my entire codebase is in Python, it might make sense to at least target someone who shows a preference for working in Python.
 Big disclaimer:  I haven&#x27;t worked at reddit in five years, so everything I&#x27;m saying was true five years ago but may not be today.  I also haven&#x27;t admined a production postgres box since I left reddit.<p>&gt; The general philosophy I got from it is that postgres is used for the source of truth, gets all the writes; and then reads can be offloaded to slave instances, or other specialized engines like Cassandra.<p>That was true at the time of the talk, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s true today.  I believe Cassandra holds the source of truth for some data now.<p>&gt; However there are no details at all about the replication solution. If you don&#x27;t mind sharing, how was you general experience around it?<p>It was terrible.  That was the part of Postgres that was totally unsolved.  I once spent an entire family vacation resyncing databases while sitting in a hotel room.<p>&gt; Was it trigger-based, WAL-based?<p>We started with Wal based replication, then moved to a tool called londiste (which is trigger based).  We liked that tool because it was in Python so we could dig into the internals if we had to (which we did have to on occasion).<p>&gt; Was it the postgres solution, or Slony&#x2F;Bucardo&#x2F;etc?<p>I think it was third party at the time.  It looks slightly more official now?<p>&gt; What were the hurdles&#x2F;gotchas you encountered?<p>A stable replication system. :)  The replication would keep dying because the nodes would get out of sync and the replication wouldn&#x27;t be able to recover.  They discovered after I left that the issue was an occasional pathological code branch that would make a write directly to a slave instead of a master.  I think replication got a lot more stable after they fixed that.<p>&gt; Did you have to compromise between synch&#x2F;asynch?<p>It was all async and we designed around that.  The nice thing was that anything we wrote to the database went to the cache too, so even if a read slave hadn&#x27;t picked up the change yet it didn&#x27;t matter because the read was never hitting Postgres -- the data was in the cache already.  Sometimes we did have problems where out of date data would be read from a slave and then cached, but it was usually fixed on its own, either by being written again or just falling out of the cache.<p>&gt; It is said that there are two big problems in computing: naming things and cache invalidation. Did you have to design a specific caching policy? How was it enforced?<p>The app developer could choose the level of caching they wanted for each piece of data.  There were multiple caches available with different levels of globalness.  For example we had caches right on the servers that were used to cache rendered html bits.  Since the html was the same as long as the data was the same, which was part of the cache key, then you never had to invalidate it.<p>Basically, to solve the invalidation problem, as long as you write your code in a way where the value is tied to the cache key, you never have to invalidate the cache because the changing data does it for you, so for things like pre-rendered html this worked great, but for things where a value was being cached obviously not so much.  In those cases, there was a global cache so you just had to deal with race conditions (but for something like points, the command that was sent was &quot;increment 1&quot;, not &quot;set to X&quot;).<p>&gt; How did you decide what to put to Cassandra vs postgres slaves?<p>It depended on the use case.  Things that were faster&#x2F;easier to store in Postgres were stored there.  For example, the list of the top 1000 links for every subreddit were stored there (and only there).  For every vote, that list was recalculated from the data in Postgres and put in C*.  So technically it was the source of truth for that data, but since it could always be recomputed from Postgres, we didn&#x27;t call it that. (BTW there were shortcuts for not recomputing on every vote).<p>&gt; Also, what features did you use in postgres? Did you chose it specifically for hstore?<p>Hstore didn&#x27;t exist when we started using Postgres (or even when I left reddit for that matter).<p>We didn&#x27;t use any special features in Postgres, we just liked that it was rock solid code and conformed to standard SQL better than MySql.  It also had a way better query planner.<p>&gt; From below: how on earth did moving to SSDs help Reddit avoid the Postgres autovacuum failure mode?!<p>It didn&#x27;t, it just meant that when a vacuum happened the node was still useable, as opposed to with spinning disk.  A vacuum on a read slave during peak sucked.  A vacuum on a master during most any time was disastrous.  I had to schedule the full vacuums for Saturday nights and hope that was sufficient.
 I find it interesting which people you chose to label with their company and which you didn&#x27;t.
 You could look into adding a few lambda functions behind API gateway for functionality that you can&#x27;t get natively from HTML5.  It would be about the same difficulty of installation and have the same management profile (ie. upload and basically be done with it).
 Amazon actually provides a transcoding service too. :)
 Because I do a better job than the accountant.<p>They usually bill a fixed rate, and even if they do an hourly rate, they try to do them quickly to get through more of them.  They don&#x27;t spend the hours I do playing &quot;what if&quot;.  Sometimes certain deductions can apply in different places for very different outcomes.<p>An example:  You manage a property for a friend.  You collect the rent and then send it over to them minus a small fee for yourself.  You can claim this one of two ways:  You can file a schedule C or a schedule E.  Each has a very different effect on your final total depending on the rest of your tax situation and the other forms you have filed.<p>For example, the schedule E increases your AGI, even though you can deduct all the rent you paid back to your friend.  The schedule C does not, because only the total counts against your AGI, not all revenue.<p>So now when you go to deduct your medical expenses, the 7.5% minimum is quite different.<p>That&#x27;s just one example of how the what-if plays into it, but only a very expensive accountant will spend the time doing those things and&#x2F;or have enough experience to know how to do it right the first time.<p>That being said, I&#x27;ll probably do a bake off this year again to see if the accountant can do better than I with TurboTax.
 Only if your IP hasn&#x27;t hit it already.  They switched from cookie to IP based tracking (or some combo at least).
 We did the same thing at reddit when we upgraded the search system.<p>First we put a little survey on every search result that said &quot;Are you satisfied with these results?  yes&#x2F;no&quot;.  After we collected enough data, we changed the entire search backend out, but told no one.<p>After a few months of collecting data showing the satisfaction go from ~70% to ~90%, we made a blog post explaining what we did.<p>Here&#x27;s the real kicker though that makes it different from Kraft -- we didn&#x27;t say that we had done it months ago, so we kept getting comments about how it was &quot;so much better this week vs. last week&quot;.<p>We did that a few times.  When we moved the site to EC2, we announced it months after the fact, and people would claim to have noticed the &quot;sudden change&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s an interesting look into the human psyche.
 &gt; In reddit&#x27;s case it was about completing a task and reaching a goal (&quot;I now can search for something and it works&quot;), for Kraft this is about perception and desire (&quot;This tastes good!&quot;).<p>That&#x27;s a fair assessment in regards to the search example, but the move to EC2 example is completely analogous.  If we had announced the change when it happened people would have said it was bad right away, but by announcing it after the fact we could point out that no one noticed until we said something (which we did in the comments after they said they noticed something).
 &gt; I only saw two pure-social apps in the list. Is that atypical for a batch?<p>Keep in mind that this only the first half.  There&#x27;s a second group tomorrow.
 Are there any open source companies that make even 1B a year?  The reason I ask is because anyone with a model of &quot;open source our core product&quot; makes me concerned for their survival. It seems like a tough business model and Redhat is the only (moderate) success I can think of.<p>When your biggest competitor is yourself at a $0 price point, how do you compete?
 Having worked for a company that followed his model (Sendmail) I still say it doesn&#x27;t work.  I think Cygnus was a fluke.  Also, assuming it was sold for 10x revenue, which is pretty standard, that means the revenue was only $60M a year.  That&#x27;s <i>tiny</i> for an enterprise software company.
 Sendmail&#x27;s original model was to get the best Sendmail consultants in the world under one roof and then deploy them building custom solutions.<p>Sadly a new CEO came in and declared that &quot;the margins are in boxed software, so that&#x27;s what we&#x27;re going to focus on&quot; and then fired all the consultants.<p>So maybe you&#x27;re right, maybe it would have worked if they had stuck to the original plan.<p>But even then, it still wasn&#x27;t a path to a huge business.  500M a year in revenue is definitely amazing and I would kill to own such a business, but it&#x27;s not &quot;rocket ship&quot; successful, which is what most of the folks with this model are aiming for.
 Hah!  Just yesterday I was talking to someone about what an amazing stage presence Justin has.  Couldn&#x27;t have picked a better person.
 This report is about top 1% of income, not wealth.<p>To be in the top 1% nationally, you had to have earned $383,000 in 2015.<p>In some cities that number is as low as $175K, very doable for a doctor or dentist.
 Yes, it&#x27;s household income, not individual.
 I wonder what this will do the the already established causal carpool for crossing the bay bridge.  At the moment, it&#x27;s free for riders, the benefit for the driver being that they skip the toll.<p>On the upside, I had a friend who was a rider, and had lots of stories of terrible drivers.  Once he witnessed the driver hit a person and then drive off, and then drop off my friend.  My friend called the police, but I guess with Lyft carpool this type of thing wouldn&#x27;t happen, or at least not as often?
 They need to grow within their budget -- Uber has way more funding than they do.<p>Lyft is scaling by leveraging technology to be better.  Uber is doing that but also burning cash opening in new markets.  The only way Lyft can compete is to out-innovate Uber.
 &gt; so what if my doorbell can&#x27;t talk to my thermostat.<p>Your doorbell and thermostat have little to do with each other, but having your camera or your smoke detector as mention sensors for your thermostat is pretty useful.  The smoke detectors especially, since they tend to be in the bedrooms, which is the place where you&#x27;ll stay 8 hours a day without walking in front of your thermostat so that it knows you are home.
 I wrote a blog post about this, but in summary, the most natural way for humans to communicate is through real time chat and people spend a lot of time in chat these days.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;chatbots-will-replace-humans-not-programs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;chatbots-will-replace-hu...</a>
 Considering Amazon is the registrar for .bot, I&#x27;m sure they have plans. :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nic.bot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nic.bot</a>
 Because the lack of squashing actually makes finding bugs harder.  Which checkin with the status &quot;change i to l&quot; or &quot;whoops, typo&quot; was the bug in?<p>It&#x27;s a lot easier when an entire changeset has a single checkin into master, because then when you&#x27;re doing your bisection there are a far few changes to bisect.
 Palo Alto is utterly stupid, and here&#x27;s why:  The last time a multi-unit building (ie. Apartments) were built in PA <i>was in the 70s</i>.  They haven&#x27;t approved one since, despite many hundreds of applications to build such things since then.<p>The middle class don&#x27;t need subsidies, they need affordable housing.  The best way to get that is to <i>let people build affordable housing</i>.<p>It&#x27;s the same as with SF -- the city won&#x27;t let people build to meet demand.  You don&#x27;t get to complain about the high price and then not let someone who wants to fix it actually fix it.
 I meant that when supply meets demand, all housing will be affordable.<p>But even barring that, you can still do it with only limited mandates.  You can put a limit on a property that says the rent can only be X% of the median, and as long as it&#x27;s possible to build housing for that price, someone will build it and make a profit on it.<p>One example of no restrictions working out is (was) the city of Berkeley.  In 1997 they got rid of rent control.  All of a sudden, tons of new buildings went up, and at first rents were very high, but then they stabilized.  It all got ruined in the last year when people in SF started to move to Berkeley in droves and shove out the students, but that&#x27;s really SFs fault, not Berkeley&#x27;s.
 Every time I played the discussion devolved into &quot;dank memes&quot; after we hit about 10+ :(
 An interesting take from a commenter on my Facebook feed:<p>&quot;It&#x27;s all good. Taxation is stealing, hiding wealth in off shore accounts is the only recourse left to the little man against large government greed.&quot;
 It&#x27;s interesting how so many people think this is a new problem because of IoT.<p>This problem has existed for years with games.  If you had a game that had to be online to play, and the company decided to stop running the servers, you were screwed.<p>Sure, sometimes people reversed engineered it, and while the company usually didn&#x27;t care, it was technically illegal.<p>We need some laws to protect consumers, that either say that they must release their API if they&#x27;re going to shut down, or at least make reverse engineering the system legal.
 Heh, I literally had the same quote in buffer and was coming to make the same comment.  Clearly they don&#x27;t know how GitHub works.
 Ugh.  The author just gave away all the good tricks.<p>This is one area where security by obscurity actually works (well worked, depending on how many fraudsters read this).<p>Fraudsters are generally pretty dumb when it comes to technology, so even if a lot of these seem obvious to the tech savvy HN audience, they weren&#x27;t obvious to the fraudsters till now.<p>The good news is that most of them don&#x27;t read HN.

 Just a warning, this isn&#x27;t a magic bullet to replace all A&#x2F;B testing.  This is great for code that has instant feedback and&#x2F;or the user will only see once, but for things where the feedback loop is longer or the change is more obvious or longer lasting (like a totally different UI experience), it doesn&#x27;t work so well.<p>For example, if your metric of success is that someone retains their monthly membership to your site, it will take a month before you start getting any data at all.  At that point, in theory almost all of your users should already be allocated to a test because hopefully they visited (and used) their monthly subscription at least once.  So it would be a really bad experience to suddenly reallocate them to another test each month.
 I wonder if they have any employees in the southern hemisphere, and if so, are the summer hours flipped for them, or do they just get winter hours instead?
 How do you enforce the minimum, and also how do you make sure people don&#x27;t mistake the minimum for the expectation?
 To everyone saying a Keto diet is great, a word of caution.  Going Keto gave me kidney stones.<p>I asked my mom, who&#x27;s had both children and kidney stones, which pain was worse, and she said the pain was about the same, but at least with childbirth you get a few months warning -- stones just show up and give you excruciating pain.<p>So it&#x27;s great y&#x27;all are loosing weight (I did too!) but just be careful and drink <i>a lot</i> of water if you do it.
 Why hasn&#x27;t there been a class action suit against the credit agencies?  Seems like you&#x27;d have a pretty good libel case.<p>I have no contract with any of these agencies, yet they say bad things about me to other people that are inaccurate.<p>In fact, I&#x27;ve been monetarily harmed.  I tried to refinance my mortgage, which would have saved me over $1000 a month, but was denied due to bad credit.  When I looked, it was all inaccuracies.  That was two years ago, so I can say for a fact that they caused me $24,000 of direct harm so far.  I finally just got all the inaccuracies cleared up.<p>I suspect that I&#x27;ve signed contracts with creditors that allow them to <i>send</i> info to these people, but I know that isn&#x27;t necessary, because I can file a derogatory mark about anyone I want to as long as I have their SSN.<p>So, what stops a class action suit against these guys?
 &gt; Did you get any lab tests done before and after starting the diet? If you did, how did the results compare?<p>Only my normal annual blood test.  Cholesterol was down after the diet, everything else was pretty much unchanged.  We never caught the stone for analysis, but the diet was pinned as the most likely cause.  To be fair, I don&#x27;t have enough data to say it was the diet for certain, only correlations that people who go on Keto have a higher incidence of stones than those who don&#x27;t.
 &gt; You wouldn&#x27;t sue Google for listing a libelous search result<p>That&#x27;s true, but they don&#x27;t calculate a number about my creditworthiness.  It&#x27;s the number that would be the problem.<p>If the agencies only passed information on I could see them maybe being allowed to pass, but since they calculate a number, they are now presenting new, inaccurate, information.  They have a responsibility to verify the accuracy of their data if they are going to create new data from it.
 &gt; the credit reporting agencies simply provided facts (reported to them by others) to the mortgage company, who made their own decision about your creditworthiness.<p>That&#x27;s not true.  They reported the information, <i>and</i> a number they came up with on their own.  That&#x27;s new information they created.  It is their responsibility to verify any data they use to create that rating.
 &gt; agencies do not make claims of creditworthiness about you.<p>Which is a load of crap.  They present a number and even say &quot;above 750 is excellent&quot;.  It&#x27;s in their own marketing materials.  How is that not making a claim of creditworthiness?
 &gt; most of the first world does not have credit agencies for consumers<p>Interesting, I didn&#x27;t realize that.  How does credit work where they don&#x27;t have the agencies?  Like if I want to buy a house in Germany or get a credit card in France, does the bank just do all their own research?
 &gt; Did going Keto give you kidney stones or were you always going to get kidney stones?<p>I can&#x27;t say for certain, I definitely don&#x27;t have enough data to prove it.  It was correlative at best.
 Possibly, I went pretty far over to the protein side.  I only consumed a tiny bit of fat at lunch and the rest at dinner.  Breakfast was pure protein until the end when I added a yogurt to breakfast.
 Interesting business model.  It&#x27;s free to submit, but if you want to show up &quot;quickly&quot; you have to pay $50.  Even though it hurts me as a bot owner, I think that&#x27;s really clever!
 As the person who wrote the code for the SEO part of the reddit URL, I can tell you that there is definitely an impact.  It made a huge difference at the time, because reddit wasn&#x27;t really on Google&#x27;s radar.  Today I suspect it would have less impact for reddit.<p>For HN, I get the impression that they don&#x27;t really want to be all that optimized for Google, so it probably hits their goals just fine, but it probably does hurt them a little bit.  But since the words are in an H1 right at the top, probably not all that much.<p>Edit:  The code in case anyone is interested:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;cfd979fa0119191257eadc4ccfcada60968984a1&#x2F;r2&#x2F;r2&#x2F;lib&#x2F;utils&#x2F;utils.py#L936" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;cfd979fa0119191257eadc...</a>
 We did not A&#x2F;B test it, but we didn&#x27;t release many changes at the same time either, so it&#x27;s hard to say for sure, but we were pretty sure it made a difference.<p>Also, SEO is not supposed to be easy, Google purposely makes it hard.  They don&#x27;t want you to be successful (with good reason).<p>They&#x27;ve always said, make good content that easy for a human to find and Google will find it too.<p>That&#x27;s probably the best SEO advice you can get.
 We could have only done the special URLs for 1&#x2F;2 the content and then see if the inbound requests from Google were more heavily weighted towards the ones with the special URLs.<p>Not a perfect test, but with enough links, it would have been a good indicator.
 If you&#x27;re in a position where you can spin up servers and get the job done, that means you&#x27;re just using the cloud as rented servers, in which case you are absolutely right.<p>If however you&#x27;re using the cloud as intended, and using all of the services it actually provides, I highly doubt you could run 23 data centers around the world with databases and firewalls and streaming logging and all they other stuff they provide at even a fraction of the cost.
 Pretty much.  They are hoping you don&#x27;t know the law.  They are also hoping that by encumbering you with one that a future poacher would know that they might have to spend money on lawyers to fight for you in case you get sued, even though they know you will win.
 I gave it a picture of a Captcha, and it said it was some giraffes against a fence. :)  So at least we know they haven&#x27;t broken Captcha yet!
 It would be great if you added a text box under the stars so I can (optionally) tell you why I didn&#x27;t give you five stars.<p>For example, I uploaded a picture of my daughter as an infant, and it said, &quot;This is a baby on a bed and he&#x27;s :D&quot; which I gave four stars to because it said he instead of she.  But honestly you really have no way of knowing that. :)
 Besides cutting off at 10 submissions,you should probably also throw away anything that got say 2 points or less.  Something like medium is brought way down by all the submissions that got 1 point, which means they probably never got seen.  HN lets you resubmit low scoring items exactly for this reason.

 You should always assume that employees of a third party are reading your messages and always read the privacy policy.
 The google trick doesn&#x27;t work anymore anyway.  They got wise.  Usually someone posts a pastebin with the content.
 A whole new product line.  See GE for an example of a company that has figured out how to just keep growing.
 Junior Engineer or Summer Intern | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;yeobot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudnative.io&#x2F;yeobot</a> | Cupertino, CA, USA | Full-time, Part-time, Intern, Remote | $60K to 84K &#x2F; yr<p>Our mission is to make DevOps easier for everyone, so they don’t have to waste resources on writing code <i>to run</i> their applications, instead of writing code <i>for</i> their applications.<p>If you’re interested in any or all of the following you should apply:  cloud computing &#x2F; AWS, conversational UI, chat bots, machine learning, Python, ElasticSearch, DevOps, distributed computing, or fully remote teams.<p>* What you will be doing:  We have a long list of features we want to add to our chatbot, Yeobot, so you’ll be writing Python code (and maybe a little bit of Javascript) to implement those features in our chat bot.  Since we’re building a fully serverless stack, which is a fairly new thing, there are a lot of opportunities to solve new problems around development and deployment too, like how do we automate deployment to AWS Lambda, how do we do tests, how do we manage code, etc, so you’ll be helping us figure out how to do that too.<p>We’re a fairly new company, so there will be a lot of freedom but also plenty of guidance if wanted.  Code reviews are usually a pleasant learning experience.<p>* To apply:  Send an email to 
 {anything}@jedberg.net (be creative!) with the subject &quot;job application&quot;.  In the email tell us why we should hire you over any other applicant.  What makes you better or more driven?  How will contribute in a way that no one else can?  How will you increase our diversity (and by diversity we don’t mean gender and race, we mean diversity in life experience and culture and opinions).<p>Then please attach a code sample of code you wrote the majority of, the more substantive the better.  If it’s public, just send the link, and if it’s private, add it as an attachment or add github.com&#x2F;jedberg as a reader, as long as you have permission to share from the owner (no secret corporate code please!).<p>We don’t care much about resumes — if you have one send it along, or just a link to your LinkedIn or equivalent is fine too.<p>If we like what you wrote, we’ll offer you an interview, which will be a video chat where we’ll talk about what you wrote in your email, and then ask you questions about the code you submitted.<p>Why CloudNative:<p>* We’re just starting out so you get to play a big part in the direction of our product and company culture<p>* Our founder (me) is an AWS Hero, as well as one of our advisors, and our other advisor wrote boto and the AWS command line.<p>* We’re building on a totally serverless stack with AWS Lambda, DynamDB, ElasticSearch and GitHub.
 Heh, and now the http is down.  I think HN might be the cause. :)
 I had one of these experiences when I was driving from Hungary to Austria.  I was just blindly following the GPS, which started taking me down some very small roads with lots of turns.  Since I had no idea where I was going I didn&#x27;t question it.<p>I eventually stumbled upon a sign, in German, that was big and red, and I knew I was on the border between Hungary and Austria.  I wasn&#x27;t sure what the sign said, and at the time I didn&#x27;t realize the two countries had an open border.  I looked around for police like cars, and then quickly crossed the border, eventually reaching my destination just inside Austria.<p>As it turns out the sign just said &quot;no vehicles over two metric tons&quot;, and that somehow I had gotten of the highway which had a very nice border crossing.<p>But a few years earlier and that mistake would have gotten me arrested!
 &gt; Interesting that the sign was in German while you were on the Hungarian side.<p>It was at the border to Austria, technically on the Austrian side.  It was just standard street sign seen across Austria that says no heavy vehicles.
 Not really.  HN traffic isn&#x27;t really enough for most of those sites to notice.  I&#x27;m certain that the only people at Bloomberg who would notice would be the reporters (who participate here) but they would probably have little sway over the technology and advertising platform, which would lose a lot of money getting rid of their auto-playing videos.
 &gt; The documents have revealed the hidden assets of hundreds of politicians, officials, current and former national leaders, celebrities and sports stars.<p>I feel bad for the celebrities and sports stars.  In all likelihood, most of them probably have no idea that their money is in a tax haven.  Some of them probably do, but most of them probably outsourced their money management.<p>The politicians I&#x27;m thinking probably had an idea of what was going on with their money, but maybe they outsource just as much.<p>I&#x27;m just saying a lot of the people in this database are probably just rich people who made a bad (or good depending on your point of view) choice in accountant.
 Legally there is nothing wrong with it.  Morality depends on who you ask.  Maybe for you it isn&#x27;t wrong, and that&#x27;s fine, but to others it is.<p>That&#x27;s why it is hard to judge morality -- because it is based in opinion, not fact.
 I&#x27;m not sure what your point was quoting that.  This quote says that the lawyers knew what they were doing was wrong, but it says nothing about their clients being involved.
 Very much so.  In my experience, most wealthy people don&#x27;t really know what is going on with their money other than it is in the hands of their manager who gives them occasional reports of how much they have.  Sometimes they may direct a specific investment or purchase, but don&#x27;t usually involve themselves in the details of tax and estate planning.  That&#x27;s what the lawyers are for after all -- so you don&#x27;t have to think about it, just like all the other people that work for them.<p>You don&#x27;t think they check all the grocery shopping lists from the cook or tell the cleaners which products to use?  No, they trust the professionals to be experts at what they do.
 This project scares me because it helps foster a bad practice -- keeping secrets in a repo.  You really shouldn&#x27;t be keeping secrets in the repo.<p>You should be using a secrets service that is designed for such a purpose, like Hashicorp&#x27;s Vault[0], so that you never have to keep a secret in the code.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;vault" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;vault</a>
 When you hire a mechanic, do you make them tell you everything they did step by step?  It&#x27;s your car, shouldn&#x27;t you know about what changes were made to it and how it is maintained?  Maybe, but you probably don&#x27;t.  You probably trust your mechanic do to a good and legal job.<p>It&#x27;s the same here, they trusted the lawyers to do a good job.
 You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.<p>However, storing secrets in a git repo is still not as good as a purpose built store, because the access control on git is not fine grained enough.
 If you use a purpose built storage though then you can deny access to the actual keys to just about everyone, so if a developer leaves then they won&#x27;t have the keys, and if they do you&#x27;ll know because it will have a built in audit trail.  And in many cases you never have to release the key from the purpose built store because it takes in crypto text and gives out plain text without ever revealing the key to the user.<p>They&#x27;ll have their own key, which will be revoked from the store, and they might have a single key that machines use to access the store.  You should be rotating that machine key all the time anyway, so rotating once more when a dev leaves isn&#x27;t a big deal.  It&#x27;s also much easier than rotating all of your actual keys, which in many cases is generated by a third party that may make such a thing very hard.
 The algorithms for calculating the best comments on reddit are semi-secret to prevent people from gaming them, but I&#x27;m sure you could convince them to give you a copy of the code if you want to see the math behind it.  If you need help let me know.
 Facebook already responded:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;tstocky&#x2F;posts&#x2F;10100853082337958?pnref=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;tstocky&#x2F;posts&#x2F;10100853082337958?pnr...</a><p>TL;DR:  We don&#x27;t manipulate the feed and we&#x27;re pretty sure none of our contractors have, and we&#x27;ve checked before, but we&#x27;ll check again.
 This is a constructed language designed to solve most of those problems:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto</a><p>People have been pushing for years to make it the standard worldwide language.<p>Incidentally, you can use reddit in Esperanto: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eo.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eo.reddit.com</a>
 It depends on the business.  For a consumer oriented business, it could be great to have a whole bunch of people with a vested interest in your success.

 For those that might complain about how this will make the rental market even worse -- you&#x27;re absolutely right.<p>On the other hand, this happens already, just much less transparently.  I&#x27;m a bay area landlord, and had a bidding war for my place last year.  I literally had people throwing money at me (take this $20 in my wallet and I&#x27;ll be back with a cashier&#x27;s check in 20 minutes!!).<p>However, since I have a conscience, I ended up renting to the group that I thought would make the best tenants instead of the ones with the most cash.  Most landlords I suspect are not like this.
 Their pricing model is strange though -- charging the <i>tenant</i> each month seems odd.  It seems like it would make a lot more sense to charge the <i>landlord</i> 25% of the extra, but I guess by charging tenants it makes it more appealing to the landlords who are already getting multiple bids anyway.
 Have you guys thought about becoming a reseller as another line of business?  In the post it says you need about 1200 drives a month (if  read that right) so you could buy 10,000 from the manufacturer, and then sell the extra as Backblaze Approved(tm) or some such.  I&#x27;d much rather buy a drive I know you guys have put through its paces, especially if I knew that purchase would help fund more data and research, by supporting your business.
 So you&#x27;re saying you have to have a four year engineering degree to be an engineer, and you don&#x27;t count a computer science degree?<p>Did you know that MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard do not offer Computer Engineering degrees (only Computer Science or Electrical Engineering or EECS).<p>Also you&#x27;ve completely discounted self taught practitioners, some of whom are often far more competent than people with actual Computer Engineering degrees.<p>Hence, it really isn&#x27;t &quot;put to bed&quot; yet.
 This isn&#x27;t entirely surprising to me.<p>For one, Edge only runs on Windows.  Windows is losing market share to Mac OS, iOS and Android (Firefox is on all three as well as Windows).<p>For two, I personally use Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome Canary on my box, each for their own purpose, but I have yet to find a need for Edge.  There is no site that I go to that works best in Edge.
 Facebook and Google have been able to do this for years, and you used to be able to also using their platforms.<p>For Facebook, does anyone remember when they released their auto-tagging feature, it would tag people who weren&#x27;t your friends too?  They quickly removed it when it started auto-tagging random people in pictures you took in public.<p>For Google, this was an initial feature of one of their mobile apps (I forget which), which they removed because people were creeped out by it.
 That&#x27;s a single course, not a degree.
 You could have just linked to the website. :)  I guess things have changed in 20 years.<p>But really you only proved my point.  OP said that a computer engineering degree makes you an engineer and a computer science degree makes you a developer.  So what does a computer science and engineering major make you?<p>My main point was you can&#x27;t decide if someone is an engineer based on the name of the degree they were granted.
 &gt; The people who guided that transition (Netflix&#x27;s) could offer their insights<p>I was there for the transition.  IT wasn&#x27;t all that much of a transition.  Netflix was always a company that was digital and used data to make decisions.  We just switch from delivering disks to bits and then had a whole lot more data to work with.<p>Apple would need a DNA change -- they treat their services as lead gen for hardware sales, as the article mentions.<p>There is no secret, other than they would need to treat their internet services as a first class citizen along with their hardware group, instead of as something to make their hardware worth more.  But that would mean acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.<p>One of the main reason Netflix is currently beating a lot of the other players is because they work on so many different kinds of hardware from many competing companies.<p>If Apple bought Netflix (as this article suggests), it would kill Netflix unless they let them keep making a 1st class Android app.  And that is what Apple has to do if they want their internet services to be taken seriously -- they have to start acting like Apple hardware isn&#x27;t the only hardware out there, and also that maybe people aren&#x27;t only using Apple apps on their iPhones.
 Oh man this is awesome. I can&#x27;t wait till people start calling thier ISPs claiming they aren&#x27;t getting the speeds they pay for, only for the poor agent to have to explain how peering agreements work.
 Your point is accurate, but I&#x27;d like to point out that the dataset isn&#x27;t actually all the comments on Reddit -- it&#x27;s inly what they could scrape, which is limited to 1000 comments per account. So basically it&#x27;s missing a lot of the historical comments of the oldest accounts.<p>I only point this out to try and correct a common error I see. You&#x27;re absolutely right that it is awesome that the entire data set can be analyzed in RAM!
 It looks like they got clever, so what they are doing is getting 1000 links from each subreddit, indexing the comments and linking it back to the user.  So yeah, they did figure out how to got back more than 1000 comments for some users, but they&#x27;ll still be limited by 1000 links per reddit per sort.  So for a very active reddit, you can&#x27;t get really old comments.
 It&#x27;s the timelines.  Let&#x27;s take an example:<p>A new 100 unit building opens in April of year 1.  25 new students move in.  This means overall the school district now needs one extra classroom.  Usually the schools are at capacity already, so they need to roll in a portable and hire a teacher.<p>The problem lies in the fact that these kids are going to be in school in September of Year 1. Assuming it took a year to build the building, that means the district had to start spending money for the construction in year 0, and the teacher in year 1.<p>But the building won&#x27;t get their first post-construction tax payment until Year 2.  And that won&#x27;t hit the school budget until Year 3.<p>So for 3 to 4 years, the school has had to front the costs of supporting those new students.  By year 4 they&#x27;ll have the revenue to support those new students, but they had to eat those first few years.  And they won&#x27;t hit efficiency until a few years down the line still.<p>If the developer has to make a direct payment to the school, it helps the absorb that cost.<p>As it turns out, in Cupertino at least, the developer has to pay $100 per new unit when they open the building, which at least helps offset the costs, but the school still comes out behind.
 Yeah, that might work too.  That would be pretty clever.
 Except practicality gets in the way.  &quot;Dear voters, please approve a bond that will increase your taxes to help pay for all the new people who are moving in, who will increase your traffic and suck away resources from your children.&quot;<p>Those don&#x27;t usually go very well.
 &gt; Why would you need to raise taxes to pay off bonds?<p>To make the interest payments?  A bond is a loan and it has to be paid off.  The taxes from the future residents will only cover the current costs, not the interest.
 Sounds like now is a great time to be a WM employee if you don&#x27;t mind taking bribes from criminals.<p>I love the WM, but this is terrible, because they don&#x27;t have controls around the chain of evidence.  Any page can be modified in the archive by an employee, both before and after a page has been identified as evidence.
 It&#x27;s not that simple though.  If you reduce residential use by 25%, there is no impact to the economy -- actually there is a boost because of the increased revenues for landscapers and home improvement stores.<p>On the other hand, if you reduce agriculture by even 10%, it would destroy our state&#x27;s economy.
 I&#x27;m well aware of the broken window fallacy and I didn&#x27;t fall prey to it.<p>Unless you think every law forces a broken window fallacy.  In which case, sure.
 I actually agree with you, I think we need to get rid of the farm subsidies.  I&#x27;m just saying the issue isn&#x27;t so black and white that you can just demand the farms reduce their water usage.
 &gt; It backs up the assertion that algorithm skills are not used on the job by most programmers, and atrophy over time.<p>This was the most interesting part to me.  I&#x27;d love to see more on this.<p>I&#x27;ve always found it silly to ask algorithm questions of senior engineers.  There seems to be an exponential falloff of that knowledge as one gets further from graduation.
 Actually no I didn&#x27;t. There is in fact an increase in economic activity, there just isn&#x27;t an increase in wealth. And I never said there would be.
 A note to the above since I can&#x27;t edit anymore: I&#x27;m basing what I said on a guess about their internal controls and assuming they don&#x27;t spend the time and money to maintain a chain of evidence, but I have no direct knowledge of their internal controls.
 Make some pull requests to fix it then. :)
 Part of the problem is that the big hosting services don&#x27;t even support Python 3 yet.  Google App Engine and AWS Lambda don&#x27;t support it, Heroku does but only for the past year, etc.<p>I&#x27;m building a brand new company and I&#x27;m being forced to use Python 2.7 because I&#x27;m using Lambda.  This was my choice, but the point is I can&#x27;t use 3 even if I want to.
 I&#x27;m not too worried -- we write all our code with Python 3 in mind (and import future) so the transition will be easy.  It&#x27;s just frustrating when I can&#x27;t take advantage of some of the newer language features.
 &gt; It’s ironic that nearly a century later, after decades of relying on road maps and atlases, so many drivers have gone back to turn-by-turn directions as their preferred navigational aid. If only Siri could flag the landmarks and throw out some trivia along the way.<p>Yes!  This is exactly what I would love.  Be able to tell Google &quot;tell me about interesting things within two miles of my route&quot; and then have it start to learn what I like by which things I actually stop at.<p>And while we&#x27;re at it, how about calling out cheap gas along the way. :)

 I take you didn&#x27;t read the article.
 I hated the headline too but the HN rules require you to use the original.  I edited myself because of the confusion.
 Doing some quick math, if the upkeep is $5M a year, and you do camp 50 weeks a year, it could work out.  With 80 homes you could probably easily house 400 people per camp, each camp is 1&#x2F;2 a week, so you&#x27;d need about $110 per person towards upkeep.  Probably $100 for food, $100 for staff.  It look like they charge about $700 for 3 days, so that still leaves almost $400 per person for all the stuff I didn&#x27;t think of.<p>The question is whether you could find 400 people 100 times a year.
 We built Kappa[0] to handle our production Lambda deployment.  It was built by the same person who wrote Boto and the AWS command line.<p>Here is an example[1] of a program built in Python that uses Kappa, and here is a video tutorial[2] on how I deploy that program with kappa.<p>Obviously I disagree with the premise.  It&#x27;s true that it is more difficult to use than other technologies and you&#x27;ll certainly pay the pioneer tax, having to develop your own tooling, but it&#x27;s ready for production traffic.<p>Error handling is ok, could be better (it takes a while for the cloud watch log to show up).<p>The real big problem is testing.  It&#x27;s <i>really</i> hard to test if you have more than one function because there is no mocking framework (yet).  It&#x27;s fairly easy to deploy and test with a test account, but local testing still needs to be solved.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JtLLkCt-lPY&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JtLLkCt-lPY&amp;feature=youtu.be</a>
 You could make the same argument about your power company, but yet most people just go with the local utility and never complain about &quot;lock in&quot;.<p>I wonder why that is...?
 Yeah, that&#x27;s the biggest problem.  It&#x27;s bugs me too.  I&#x27;m sure it is coming soon, but the again, most of the big hosted python installs don&#x27;t support 3.x yet (App engine being the big one).
 Mitch actually built Placebo alongside kappa, because he needed a way to test kappa.  He even submitted a pull request against boto to make it support placebo.  Sadly though, placebo is better for mocking the other AWS services, not so much a mesh of Lambda functions.<p>Have you guys figure out a way to do offline testing of one Lambda calling another?  I&#x27;d love to see it!

 The middleware would be best option.  Put it between your code and the calls and then have it able to throw random errors.<p>But it means you have to write the middleware and have it be it&#x27;s own source of bugs, which is still better than nothing, but another risk.
 This whole thing is making fun of asking fizz-buzz to a senior programmer, but yet I&#x27;ve found it to be one of the best phone screen questions possible.<p>For someone who is truly a senior programmer, they knock it out in about 30 seconds and we move on.  For the ones who pretend to be senior programmers on their resume, it trips them up and I know right away that their resume is either a pack of lies or their previous coworkers were helping them a lot more than they let on.<p>If I had actually had this person, I would have probably laughed as soon as he did the imports, said, &quot;clearly you think this is a silly question&quot; and then explained why I ask that question.  Hopefully we could have moved on from there.
 Generally today the cost of an exclusive license is more than the cost of the sum of all possible non-exclusive licenses.  So for the creator it&#x27;s more profitable to seek an exclusive license.<p>It&#x27;s true that &quot;Wider reach = more potential users who pay for it&quot; but it&#x27;s the amount they pay that&#x27;s more important.
 &gt; Shouldn&#x27;t a junior programmer be able to solve fizz buzz?<p>Yes, which is why when I would ask it of a someone who calls themselves a senior programmer I was dumbfounded at how many could not answer the question.
 I hate puzzles too, especially the gotcha ones with esoteric knowledge required.<p>But for FizzBuzz I explain the problem, explain that there is no trick and the simplest answer that produces the correct output will be fine.  To solve it you need to know about building a loop, what the mod operator does, and maybe keeping state depending on how you build it.  I tell them to write it in the language they know best.  None of those things should be &quot;gotchas&quot; in your favorite language.
 The page about the draft was fascinating to me.  I sent it to my dad because he was drafted in 1969, has a birthday in December, and had a super low lottery number.<p>Luckily he never went to Vietnam because his brother told him the workaround -- sign up for the Coast Guard before all the slots fill up.
 You&#x27;re right, it doesn&#x27;t (clever solution BTW).<p>Although we could debate that the way you call o and t is just you manually expanding a loop.  In which case I would question why you didn&#x27;t just use a loop. :)<p>I could also debate with you that you had to at least understand what mod is to build the sequence.<p>I would also give you bonus points for detecting that it is a repeating pattern.<p>But the point is, you solved it, you wrote code that could solve it.  So now I know that you&#x27;re at least capable of writing basic code, and we&#x27;ve got a couple of things to talk about!
 This is why Python 2 isn&#x27;t optional yet:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;py3readiness.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;py3readiness.org&#x2F;</a><p>Of the top 360 libraries, only 332 of them support Python 3 (but almost all of them still support Python 2).<p>This analysis was done in March and expected even support for Python 3 and 2 around now:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;pythonengineering&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;08&#x2F;python-3-is-winning&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;pythonengineering&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;0...</a><p>So maybe next year it will be optional, but not yet.
 <p><pre><code>    for x in xrange(1,101):
        if not x % 3:
            print &quot;Fizz&quot;,
        if not x % 5:
            print &quot;Buzz&quot;,
        if (x % 3) and (x % 5):
            print x
        else:
            print &quot;&quot;</code></pre>
 [ deleted ] -- I removed it because I got tired of trying to explain the nuance.
 [ deleted ]
 A couple weeks ago GitHub added merge squash as an option for accepting pull requests (via the UI, you could always do it manually).  As long as you don&#x27;t delete the feature branch you&#x27;ll still have the history of iterations in that branch.
 &gt; Muir Woods is the planet Endor!<p>True, but in the Planet of the Apes, it&#x27;s actually <i>supposed</i> to be Muir Woods, so they don&#x27;t dress it up to look different.
 Facebook owns Whatsapp. Anything that happens on Facebook will be in conjunction with Whatsapp.
 I agree with you, but I was responding to the request to keep &quot;all the history&quot;.  My understanding is the ref count would be the same if you merge in all the history or keep the branches around, so in those cases it wouldn&#x27;t make a difference.   I could be wrong though -- I don&#x27;t know enough about git internals to know if one is worse than the other.
 Even a VC fund would have a hell of a time investing that much cash.  The biggest VC funds are &quot;only&quot; in the single digit billions per fund.
 &gt; extremely dissatisfied investors,<p>I&#x27;m one of those investors and I&#x27;m not aware of any of my fellow investors being dissatisfied.<p>&gt; an estranged and angry founder<p>All of the founders currently work for reddit (and are quite happy doing so as far as I know).  Who are you talking about here?
 &gt; Even though Digg was on decline, it was still bigger than reddit<p>It most definitely was not.  reddit was already bigger than Digg long before v4 was launched.  v4 did cause a bump in reddit&#x27;s traffic, but it wasn&#x27;t nearly as significant as people think.  Most Digg users were already reddit users too. In fact, a lot of the power users were getting their stories from reddit.<p>That&#x27;s why at the time the joke was that if you wanted to see a summary of reddit the day before, you just looked at Digg.
 I don&#x27;t actually think it should be, but I can make a compelling case.<p>While it&#x27;s possible to have a dictionary of all of the words of a language, it will always be missing the proper nouns.  It will also be missing the data needed to take my very poor spelling and figure out what I&#x27;m trying to say.<p>Combining these two problems, I&#x27;ve found that oftentimes my local spell checker can&#x27;t figure out what I&#x27;m trying to say, but Google can figure it out no problem.<p>I don&#x27;t mind having to go to Google once in a while to do this manually, but that can is the case for a distributed spell check service.
 &gt; It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month.<p>I&#x27;ve never heard of this.  Do you have a link or something?  I assume it&#x27;s like a checkpoint they set up in poor areas so they can get money from the welfare checks or something?
 Ah so it&#x27;s not to catch them while they have money, it&#x27;s to catch them when they know the poor people with poorly maintained cars will be heading to town.  That&#x27;s quite shameful.
 If you&#x27;re interested in dirt simple Lambda deployment, check out Kappa[0], written by the same person as boto.<p>Gordon looks interesting and I&#x27;m definitely going to check it out, but from what I can tell, one of the downsides is that it uses CF.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I love CF for it&#x27;s reproducibility, but waiting for a CF stack to run on every deploy will be frustrating for rapid iteration.  CF is great for managing your infrastructure once you have a good idea of how it should look and aren&#x27;t making constant changes anymore.<p>I suspect my workflow will be something like using Kappa while I&#x27;m iterating, and then using Gordon for the final deployment once it looks like everything is working as expected.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa</a>
 It doesn&#x27;t support custom versions and aliases yet.  Curious what your use case is.<p>It sort of does custom aliases by giving the function an alias with the environment name, but that probably isn&#x27;t what you want.
 Yeah serverless is a little smarter and directly uploads lambda functions.<p>The main reason I don&#x27;t use serverless is because it&#x27;s geared towards web development -- the lambdas and the api gateway are tied together.  Most of what I&#x27;m doing is not web based.
 Maybe it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m in my 30s but I find the UI completely undiscoverable.<p>I know how to use it <i>now</i>, but it took me a while to figure out, probably because I didn&#x27;t have a friend group to show me how, as opposed to the teenagers I&#x27;ve seen use it, who have friends show them new features.
 Before anyone gets wound up about this, they posted an explanation <i>on voat</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voat.co&#x2F;v&#x2F;MeanwhileOnReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1083516&#x2F;5406839" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;voat.co&#x2F;v&#x2F;MeanwhileOnReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1083516&#x2F;5406839</a><p>Assuming that gets deleted, basically it says &quot;we just keep editing that post as we add more A&#x2F;B tests so we can point people at that post if they have questions&quot;.<p>This post on HN is really just trying to fan the flames I think, there&#x27;s nothing nefarious going on here -- they&#x27;ve been tracking how you move across the site for years, and if you don&#x27;t like that, it&#x27;s super simple to avoid.<p>You can block the cookie or just incognito mode.
 No I&#x27;m assuming Voat will delete the one comment that contradicts their conspiracy theory (although honestly I think HN should delete this because there is something fishy going on with the voting here).
 Yeah there&#x27;s something fishy going on for this to shoot to the number one position so quickly.  I hope dang looks into it if he can.
 &gt; when it comes to places founded by guys like Swartz.<p>He had nothing to do with the founding of reddit, and also had no problem collecting the payout when it was sold.
 Easy fix -- give the visas to the highest paid people in each job category.  After you&#x27;ve gone through each category once, do it again for the next highest paid.  Eventually you&#x27;ll run out of harpsichord teachers and so the more popular categories would keep getting filled until the quota was reached.<p>Then you get highly paid people and you get a nice cross section of skillsets, and it incentivizes the companies to pay the highest wage for that skill.
 &gt; Residents still have easy access to the main roads.<p>Except that we don&#x27;t.  It&#x27;s annoying to have to &quot;go around the long way&quot; every day.  That being said, I still think it&#x27;s the right solution.
 The best way to test a distributed system is to break it intentionally after you think you have sufficient monitoring to find all the problems.  Then you&#x27;ll know if you have sufficient monitoring.<p>And if you have an outage where you didn&#x27;t have sufficient monitoring, then you add it afterwards.  But at least by breaking it intentionally you can at least be watching.
 Worked, but yes I was deeply involved in that project.
 &gt; A few moments later, I was on eBay, where I started to bid on strangers’ dusty collections of early issues of Wired, all from the years 1993 to 1995<p>It&#x27;s interesting that the author never tried to get these from a library (or at least doesn&#x27;t mention it).  Do libraries not keep back issues anymore?  Growing up in LA, I could get back issues of almost any magazine from the library going many decades back.  Sometimes my local library didn&#x27;t have it, but the LA system did.<p>Also, since she lives in SF, I&#x27;ll bet should could just head over to Wired HQ and ask to use their collection, and they&#x27;d probably be thrilled that someone is interested in back issues.  They have them all on a bookcase since the beginning of time.  I used to read them when taking breaks.
 They have a pretty good point.  Right now people love their Tesla&#x27;s because if something breaks, Tesla bends over backwards to fix it for you.  Which is great if you own a Tesla, but it still means you don&#x27;t have that car for a while.<p>Right now, most of Tesla&#x27;s customers are the kinds of people who have a second or third car to drive while their Tesla is broken, and don&#x27;t have the kind of job that you lose if you show up late once.<p>As they move downmarket, they will start to get customers who may only have the one car and their entire life can be ruined if their car breaks down at an inopportune time.
 In fact everything in her account is forked from another GitHub account[0] -- he&#x27;s one of the lead tech consultants on the show.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emcmanus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emcmanus</a>
 He did that because he had to pick a party.  He could have just as easily run as a Democrat and used the same tactics with different talking points.<p>He doesn&#x27;t really alight with either party.<p>But he&#x27;s most certainly anti-free-trade.  All of his business and money is in the US (mostly in real estate).  It&#x27;s in his best interest to artificially prop up US industry by shutting down inbound trade.
 My thoughts on this:<p>Mathematically a single queue is far more efficient.<p>The psychology suggests that someone seeing a line makes them work faster.<p>First off, this is fleeting -- in a just a few years, we won&#x27;t need people at the registers anymore as RFID technology gets cheap and more people become comfortable with the ever improving self checkout.<p>Secondly, even if you assume we will have checkers for a long time, this is again an easy problem to solve.  You have a single queue, and then you make part of their pay based on average time per client or their evaluation.  They&#x27;ll work faster because of it (maybe).<p>A counterpoint to my own point is that Target does rate their checkers on efficiency, and I&#x27;ve watched them game it before.  The checker meticulously lined up all my items with the barcodes in a row, then hit the &quot;new customer&quot; button, quickly scanned all the codes and hit the &quot;total&quot; button, giving him a very fast time.  He figured out that they only measure from when he says &quot;new customer&quot; to total, so even though he was slower than everyone else, he had the fastest time.<p>But my overall point is that humans will soon be out of this loop anyway.
 But it&#x27;s the variance that you want to reduce if you want to be more efficient about resource usage (ie. cashiers and cash machines).  As variance goes up, your overhead for burst capacity goes up.<p>Also, variance is what people perceive as bad service, not the mean time.  If everyone takes a little longer they feel happier because of the perception of fairness.
 With respect, I have to vehemently disagree.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the site since the beta, have thousands of karma and twenty+ years of experience, and yet I can&#x27;t ask or answer a question anymore.<p>When I answer a question, it gets downvoted and then an inaccurate answer gets accepted and upvoted.<p>When I ask a question, it gets marked as a duplicate, and then they link to the question it&#x27;s a duplicate of, which is a question I found in my own research <i>that was exactly the opposite of the question I had</i>.<p>That community has become completely toxic and I can&#x27;t participate it in anymore.
 &gt; Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason<p>but then<p>&gt; Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers.<p>Maybe the school you went to is different, but the one I went to definitely was a place where we got lists of useful things and had professors and classmates who expressed their opinions, which we then discussed.<p>If you want to be a school, then discussions of opinions is the number one thing you should be <i>encouraging</i>.<p>But regardless of that, the problems go much deeper.  As I commented before, when I try to answer a question, it gets pushed down so that an inaccurate answer can be upvoted and accepted, and when I ask a question I get marked as &quot;duplicate&quot; when it is in fact the exact opposite of the question it is supposedly a duplicate of.<p>It&#x27;s a lot easier to get some points for marking a question as a duplicate than it is to actually read the supposedly duplicate question to find out it isn&#x27;t a duplicate but just happens to have some of the same words.
 One example is the spate of &quot;humans are warming the globe&quot; movies that came out a few years ago, many centering their plots around penguins and their lost habitat.<p>The message worked, my wife was teaching 10 year olds at the time, and those kids were literally afraid of it getting too hot to go outside for recess if they didn&#x27;t recycle.<p>I happen to think that&#x27;s a good thing, but if you&#x27;re one of those conservatives who believes that yes the planet is warming but no it has nothing to do with humans, than those movies will piss you off (as it did to some of the more conservative parents in our area).
 &gt; The discussion doesn&#x27;t generally go on in the margins of the textbook.<p>You&#x27;re right.  In my courses, the textbook was a written version of the discussion.  We had books that were basically photocopies of the most recent papers and essays, often disagreeing with each other.<p>&gt; you don&#x27;t get points for voting to close a question or flagging one<p>I&#x27;m aware that you don&#x27;t get SO points, I meant points in the &quot;brownie points&quot; sense.  ie.  Look how active this moderator is they must be good they are closing a lot of duplicate questions!
 Yep.  And it has a cap too.  In fact, that cap is so low that if you max out your connection for just over two hours you&#x27;ll be over the cap for the month.
 That&#x27;s true but how do I turn the volume down <i>before</i> a video starts.  As far as I can tell there is no way to do that.  In Youtube, even if my phone is muted, as soon as the video plays it will be 70% volume and I have to rush to turn it down.
 That calculation was based on the new &quot;increased&quot; cap.<p>And yes, for $30 you can have unlimited bandwidth.  And for $30 more you can opt out of them scanning and recording your activity for ad targeting.<p>So now the price has literally doubled to have decent internet.  How can they get away with that?  Lack of competition.<p>And that is what this thread is really about.  Until there is some competition, we won&#x27;t see ubiquitous, cheap, high-speed internet.
 I think AT&amp;T is the second one to admit that they do that and then charge you money to get out of it.  The first was a small local ISP that didn&#x27;t offer any way out and quickly backed down after pushback from their customers.<p>Chances are the other American ISPs do it, they just burry it in the terms of service.  So AT&amp;T figured out they could make some extra cash off of their privacy conscience customers who don&#x27;t know how to use VPN.<p>And chances are they still collect and aggregate the data, they just don&#x27;t retarget you specifically.
 Most decent companies will make it up to you by issuing you new options with the same value or otherwise compensating you for the expiration of options you can&#x27;t exercise, in some cases they will simply buy the shares from you, giving you your &quot;exit&quot;.
 You mean you haven&#x27;t found any Edge edge cases?<p>(Sorry I couldn&#x27;t help myself)
 The main issue with your proposal is that security and customer satisfaction are in opposition with each other.  The team that would win would be the less secure team.<p>ie. Take it to the extreme -- one agency would just say &quot;here walk on through&quot;, as that would be the easiest.<p>Unless you suggest that they still have to follow all the silly rules, but then you haven&#x27;t really gained much except efficiency at following useless rules.
 I understood about 1&#x2F;2 the phrases in this article.  Can someone who is familiar with shipping terms tell me what Panamax strings are?
 This is great, I&#x27;m glad that they are tapping into the many very smart Europeans who aren&#x27;t willing to leave Europe to work in the states.<p>That being said, I&#x27;m pretty sure this is almost an entirely tax based move.  By doing this, they now have a way to spend a bunch of the money they have &quot;stranded&quot; in Europe.
 That would be a case where you wouldn&#x27;t want to use a purely serverless model.  You&#x27;d want a persistent server that loads the data and then exposes it as an API for your other serverless functions.<p>That being said, it&#x27;s important to remember that Lambda doesn&#x27;t reload your function for <i>every</i> function call.  It loads it on the first call and then keeps it active for a few minutes as long as there are still requests coming in, so you&#x27;d only have to deal with that initial load once in a while (or almost never if your function is active enough).<p>Unless you had a way of extracting your model into a very fast database.
 Wait until October.  That&#x27;s why liability flips from CC company to merchant for any non-chip transaction.
 Plenty of Fish is the canonical example (although I guess it isn&#x27;t really SaaS per se).<p>For years he ran it by himself, eventually hired a couple people to help him out, and then sold it for $575M in cash, keeping about $500M for himself.
 I think they would.  If you can turn Yahoo around, you become legendary.  CEOs are already risk takers, it makes sense.<p>Also it wasn&#x27;t all that risky.  Even though she failed she&#x27;ll walk away with enough money for a lifetime (to add on top of the lifetime supply she already had).
 They do exist but they don&#x27;t work for commission.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with some amazing recruiters who would only send me people that were at least in the right ballpark.  But they were all in house recruiters who had a salary and were not evaluated on how many of their candidates were hired, but instead on how well they sourced and brought people in for interviews.<p>So I guess my advice to you is, if you can afford it, bring someone on full time, in which case they would be more of a bizdev person for you than a recruiter.
 Props to Dropcam&#x2F;Nest for solving this problem.<p>My brother gave me his Dropcam after setting it up for himself, and I had to prove my identity <i>and</i> he had to prove his to get them to move the camera to my account.  It was a hassle at the time, but I was glad to know that they at least had decent security.
 Wow they found a perfect trojan horse for this business.  They found a situation where you&#x27;d be likely to grant them permission -- wanting to rent a house, where you&#x27;ll usually give over your SSN for a credit report and background check.<p>And then once they have your permission, you&#x27;ll <i>probably</i> forget about it.<p>So once they go to release their dating app, if they have enough people, they don&#x27;t need your permission because the probably already have access to your profile through your friends who might have rented an apartment.<p>And this kids is why even if <i>you&#x27;re</i> secure, you need <i>all</i> your friends to be <i>just as secure</i>.
 It depends how they word it.  If they simply ask for your login, then that could imply permanent access.
 I can&#x27;t blame them.  I&#x27;ve been a huge fan of SQLite for years.  Anytime I need storage it&#x27;s my default choice unless there is a specific reason to use something else.<p>Another nice advantage of it is if you are distributing something that requires a small dataset[0][1].  If I give you both the code and the data already imported into a sqlite database, then you can use the code right away, or you can dump the data to a different database very easily.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;Postcodes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;Postcodes</a>
 When I worked at eBay, we constantly debated whether the policies should be pro seller or pro buyer.  You can&#x27;t be both in a two sided market.<p>Throughout my time there, we switched back and forth, but ultimately decided happy sellers brought in more revenue that happy buyers (but maybe that changed again).<p>Apparently Amazon has decided to be pro buyer right now, which fits with their general model of making happy customers.
 It&#x27;s actually really easy to game the trust system.  Back in the day a common scam was for a seller to sell a whole bunch of cheap books, and actually deliver with great customer service.  Then they would switch to selling TVs and other high ticket items, which people would buy from the highly rated seller.  Needless to say they never sent the TVs.<p>That one was easy to spot after a few times, but it&#x27;s always a cat and mouse game.  As soon as they figure out what the inputs are into the system, they game it to their advantage.<p>At the end of the day you have to have policies that aren&#x27;t tied to the reputation to make things fair and that is where the debate about pro-seller vs pro-buyer comes in.
 &gt; You&#x27;re right, it seems like there are a few cheap and easy fraud solutions<p>You&#x27;ll just have to take my word for it that eBay and Amazon, companies that have been dealing with fraud since 1995, have implemented all of the cheap and easy solutions. :)
 He&#x27;s the CEO of a multibillion dollar company. He&#x27;s legally required to be paranoid to meet his fiduciary responsibilities.
 Any decent company would give you a severance payment of at least two weeks when laying you off.
 In case you were wondering, the author is a NYC local.
 There were no vendors providing enterprise grade IPv6 routers and switches when they started.
 Of just click the &quot;web&quot; link below the title.
 I live in the south bay, but whenever I have a business meeting in SF it&#x27;s requested that I stop in Chinatown for veggies and meat, because it&#x27;s so much cheaper and better than what we can get even here just 45 miles away.
 SF
 Not at an enterprise level.  The support was experimental.
 They do, we get plenty of good food here.  It&#x27;s just better in SF Chinatown.
 Stockton st for veggies, Sunset or Stockton for meat.
 People who buy housing just to rent out on AirBnB would find it more economical to rent out to a long term renter (because the licensing is actually less onerous), thereby increasing the rental supply and lowering rents.
 Even with rent control it&#x27;s still better to be a landlord of a long term tenant than follow the licensing restrictions.  The license 1) Costs money and 2) limits the number of days you can rent.<p>#2 is the big issue.  Even with rent control, at least you can rent the place out for the whole year.  With the license you can only rent the place out for 90 days a year.  You must live in the unit the other 275 days of the year.  So your rent controlled rate would have to be 25% of market rate for the <i>legal</i> short term rental to make sense, and you&#x27;d have to live there when it isn&#x27;t rented.
 All of their datacenters around the world have batteries and diesel generators.  They don&#x27;t trust the local power anywhere.
 They probably aren&#x27;t using location but IP block.  In fact, I&#x27;m almost certain your IP block is used for both suggested friends and your Newsfeed.<p>I used to see my coworkers all the time in my Newsfeed, but now that I don&#x27;t work there (and therefore we don&#x27;t share an IP anymore) I suddenly started seeing them a lot less.<p>I go to their page and see they are posting, and after interacting with a few posts they started showing up again, but I have to go to their page and interact every few weeks to get them to keep showing up.<p>Also, whenever I go and visit the old office, if I use Facebook there, all of a sudden I get them all showing up in my Newsfeed again.
 One use case would be one that came up a while back here on HN -- The person had a large binary blob that they needed to load up every time their Lambda function ran.  If they could mount EFS from Lambda, they could put the large binary blob there.<p>Depending on how they wrote their code, if the Lambda could seek to the right part of the file then this would work, but if it has to load the entire file into RAM anyway, then it wouldn&#x27;t gain them much except perhaps a slightly easier way to get the file into RAM.
 This is really cool but also kind of a shame.  I feel like it will encourage bad behavior.<p>I can see people using this to deploy code by deploying onto the shared volume so that all their instances get an &quot;instant update&quot;.  Which is great when it works, but lord help you when EFS goes down and every app server you have is hung on a broken NFS connection.
 I&#x27;m not sure if you&#x27;re being sarcastic or not, but no, it isn&#x27;t.  It&#x27;s to provide building blocks for infrastructure.  Down time is still on you.  Only a lazy engineer blames their tools for their failures.
 &gt; What use case do you think the EFS is good for<p>Out of band big data&#x2F;data pipeline processing.  Something where you want an easy way to sync your data but can handle extended downtimes.
 &gt; how is that different to SNS et al?<p>It&#x27;s not really, and you should write your software to account for SNS outages, etc.<p>That being said, this is presented as NFS.  NFS has a nasty habit of freezing your system if it breaks.  If SNS breaks, you get errors and timeouts in your logs, but can keep going.  If NFS breaks, you pretty much just sit around waiting for it to come back.
 The difference is that all of those services are accessed via an API, which means your client can do clever things when it fails, like timeout, give a fallback, find an equivalent resource in another zone or region, etc.<p>With EFS, it&#x27;s exposed as NFS, which hooks in much deeper.  If it goes down, there isn&#x27;t anything you can do to work around the problem, unless you start hacking your own file system kernel modules.
 Right that was my point.  You most likely have to load the whole thing into memory, but in the rare case that you can seek directly to the right spot in the file, ECS might have an advantage for you in Lambda.
 Nike would disagree with you and point out that they consider themselves a tech company, especially now that they are moving into the health tracker business (not to mention their shoes require science and research to develop).
 &gt; AWS started in 2006 with EC2<p>Actually SQS was the first service.
 There is a nuance here that many of you are missing.  Up until 18F, the government procurement process was so byzantine that navigating it was core competency of a government contractors and one of their main competitive advantages.<p>What the lobbyists are complaining about is that 18F doesn&#x27;t have to go through that process while everyone else does.  OR more specifically, they believe that 18F is skipping the process but they don&#x27;t know because of lack of transparency.<p>They want the playing field to be even -- either make 18F follow all the same rules or allow them to skirt the same rules.<p>Part of the reason those government contracts are worth so much is because of all the forms and paperwork you have to file just to get one.<p>So the issue isn&#x27;t as black and white as all of us engineers want it to be.<p>Honestly, I&#x27;m all in favor of dropping all the regs for the contractors, but the downside to that is that the regs were put into place to stop corruption -- i.e all the contracts were just going to the (typically white rich male) friends of the government agents.  A lot of those government regulations are there to make sure that women and minority owned businesses get some of those contracts (although there is a ton of corruption around pass through entities there, but that&#x27;s a different issue).
 Yes that&#x27;s true but what they are complaining about is that the process isn&#x27;t transparent enough for them to know that is happening.<p>Also related is the fact that the admins at 18f are paid for by the government and so their cost isn&#x27;t included in the project budget whereas the private contract needs to pay for the staff that processes the paperwork within the project budget.
 When they had the affirmative action proposition on the ballot in California there were a lot of people against, and a lot of those people were the very minorities the law was intended to help.<p>The main argument against it was that it tainted their success.  What I mean is, for example, if a black person got into college, everyone would always question if they were truly qualified or if they only got in because they were black.<p>The other big argument against it is that it was fixing the wrong problem.  You&#x27;re fixing the roof when the foundation is crumbling.  They argued that the affirmative action had to happen much earlier, in elementary and middle school, not college admissions.<p>So those are some of the arguments people make against it.<p>And another one specifically against government contract anti-discrimination is the thing I mentioned above, about the pass through problem.  A minority will start a business, get a government contract, and then just pay a non-minority business as a subcontractor to do all the work, so they&#x27;re basically just skimming off the top.  So yes, a minority gets some money, but it&#x27;s basically just a government handout.
 This is where having a lobbying group would be helpful -- this really needs to be fixed through policy.<p>We need to get the tax law changed so that RSUs are taxed on liquidity instead of vesting.  Then you&#x27;ll still avoid the corruption the tax is supposed to protect against (paying an executives millions in what was previously untaxed compensation through RSUs in the 80s) but still allowing them to be given as startup equity compensation.
 These are all details that would have to be worked out, but the gist of it would be that you shouldn&#x27;t be taxed on it until you&#x27;re able to sell it.  But I&#x27;ll give it a shot:<p>&gt; Can I sell on a secondary market?<p>Sure, and then you get taxed on the money you made, where your basis is $0.<p>&gt; Can a bank let me guarantee a loan based on my current units?<p>That&#x27;s tricky because it would be a way for people to work around the law.  What if we made you pay tax if you took out a loan with the stock as collateral?<p>&gt; Can non-liquid units be transferred to my next of kin tax free?<p>Seems like it would be reasonable to allow that.  The value would still be $0, but when it became liquid, your next of kin would have to pay taxes on the value with a basis of $0, which would make it not a good workaround for estate tax since you would save money if you transferred it under the $5M lifetime limit.
 I think the assumption is that you have to be at least technically literate enough to know that you want Firefox and purposefully download it.  And if you&#x27;re that kind of person, you probably also know the difference between Yahoo and Google and probably actually care.
 As one of those talent, I have to respectfully disagree.  First of all, R&#x2F;W to the database was solved pretty early on.  We had queues many years ago for the writes and tons of read slaves for the reads.  Also, the servers that serve comments and listings were not the same ones that took in votes and comments.  It was most definitely a &quot;throw servers at it&quot; problem, with a few bottlenecks on caching that were solved as they came up.<p>The biggest issue was that we didn&#x27;t have the budget (both money and manpower) to deal with scaling a global transaction system, which is just plain <i>hard</i>.  Reddit gets almost as much traffic as eBay, but eBay has thousands of engineers and Reddit doesn&#x27;t even have 100.<p>Back when I was there, the site worked well enough, there were only a few of us, and we spent about 50% of our time on spam and about 25% on community management.  That didn&#x27;t leave much time for scaling and performance.  For context, we were serving a billion pages a month on a budget of $50K&#x2F;mo.<p>Today they are making great progress in scalability because they finally have the budget to hire the people to make it great.
 What privacy issue does reddit have that you can&#x27;t turn off with the preferences?
 San Diego is pretty much 68 to 72 year round.  In the summer it might get a little warmer and in the winter a little colder on select days, but it&#x27;s a pretty tight range.
 Ok, fair enough, the range is more than 68-72, but still pretty tight as far as places on earth go:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentresults.com&#x2F;Weather&#x2F;California&#x2F;Places&#x2F;san-diego-temperatures-by-month-average.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentresults.com&#x2F;Weather&#x2F;California&#x2F;Places&#x2F;san...</a>
 If you&#x27;re using Python, you might also want to check out Kappa [0]<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garnaat&#x2F;kappa</a>

 Even for companies that pay good salaries there is a shortage.  If you look at the H1B filings, you&#x27;ll see for example that the average Netflix H1B salary is just about $300K a year.<p>That being said, a lot of companies are abusing H1B and the system needs a huge overhaul so that the people who want to come work here can, the people who want to hire foreign works can, and we don&#x27;t have a few companies using imported workers as indentured servants.
 It&#x27;s legal.  It&#x27;s a huge pain in the ass to hire someone whose physical address is outside the US if your company is based in the US.  Heck, it&#x27;s a huge pain in the ass just to hire someone outside of a state you aren&#x27;t already operating in.
 I&#x27;m glad to see you guys finally got the resources you deserve to make these changes!<p>I&#x27;m also happy you guys are stealing all the best stuff from Reddit and leaving the other stuff behind.  Great set of new features!
 Forming a company isn&#x27;t all that easy.  Also, now that person has to pay their own SS and Medicare tax, or if they form a C corp, they have to file incorporation papers and tax returns and filing fees and...<p>Also, if I pay a person through their company like a contractor for too long, the IRS comes down on me because they assume I&#x27;m trying to skirt tax laws (and rightly so, because that&#x27;s basically what you&#x27;re suggesting).
 It&#x27;s fine if you do side gig&#x27;s 1099.  But if I have someone doing full time work for me where I set the wage, that&#x27;s not a contractor anymore according to the IRS and they get really suspicious when your &quot;contractor&quot; has worked for you and only you for many years.
 Outside the US is actually easier in some respects if the person is willing to set up a company in their own country, but I suspect in many countries it is as complicated as setting one up here in the states, and I wouldn&#x27;t have the expertise to help them.<p>I suspect a job listing that says &quot;remote anywhere in the world as long as you set up your own corporate entity with a foreign registration in the United States&quot; wouldn&#x27;t work very well. :)
 Earthquakes.  You&#x27;d be hard pressed to find a building in California with a basement.  Say nothing of even a few stories down.<p>Sure, it can be done, but it&#x27;s not that safe and requires a lot of extra expense.
 I got a $5K advance on an AWS book that never even came out because they cancelled the contract after they paid the advance (a bunch of similar books came out in one month and they just didn&#x27;t want to bother competing, especially since our book would be two to three months behind).
 Sort of.  We can&#x27;t make a contract to do something that would otherwise be illegal.  A very simple example is that I cannot put into a rental lease that I can evict a tenant in 5 days.  That would be in conflict with the law that says I must go through a 30 day process.  Even if I put it in a contract and you sign it, you can still sue me for not going through the 30 day process.
 My favorite quote from this article (and slightly off topic): &quot;On July 14 a group of 140 or so tech industry figures including Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, EBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, <i>and, for some reason, the Reverend Jesse Jackson</i>, released an open letter decrying Trump’s candidacy.&quot;<p>Does anyone know why Jesse Jackson was included in that open letter?
 I think it has a lot of up votes from people who want remote jobs but can&#x27;t find them.  They want to see what people say here so that they can better form their objections&#x2F;arguments for making a job remote.
 37Signals (now Basecamp)
 Not exactly what you are asking for, but I&#x27;ll throw it in here:<p>I run a fully remote company, and most of the objections I&#x27;ve heard from others we&#x27;ve found workaround for.<p>The biggest unsolved problem is whiteboarding - there is no good collaborative online whiteboarding solution that doesn&#x27;t require a lot of expensive equipment to be deployed to everyone.
 Not a bad idea, but it means deploying a surface to everyone, and frankly most people want to use Macs, so I&#x27;d have to give two devices to everyone, one of which would only get used for whiteboarding, which doesn&#x27;t happen <i>that</i> often.
 We don&#x27;t either, but it comes up occasionally.  Sometimes when figuring out a large architecture, it&#x27;s just easier to be able to draw it out.  So far we&#x27;ve solved the problem by waiting until we see each other in person every few months, so it hasn&#x27;t been a huge issue, just the main issue we can&#x27;t seem to solve well.
 That deekit looks promising, thanks!
 They need to add some aspect to the game that is playable at home.<p>An 11 year old kid can&#x27;t go out at night and catch Pokemon on their own, but they sure as heck can sit at home playing games.<p>I&#x27;m an old man but I do most of my game playing from bed at night and in the morning (terrible habit I know) and so does my wife.  I&#x27;d love to be able to add Pokemon to my daily games rotation but right now I can&#x27;t.
 &gt; I have over a decade of experience building web apps.<p>Were you also running those apps?  SRE means you understand the intricacies of running an app too.<p>When I hire SREs, I look for people who have the following skills, in this order:<p>1. Leadership under pressure.  What I mean is can you stay cool and calm <i>and</i> keep everyone around you cool and calm when everything is melting down<p>2. Experience operating a platform.  Do you know basics like networking, system startup, system and OS tuning, etc.  Can you diagnose a problem on a running instance?<p>3.  Coding.  Can you write decent code and can you understand good code.<p>The reason it is in that order is because staying cool under pressure is something I can&#x27;t really teach you, it&#x27;s just sort of innate for the most part.<p>Coding can be learned.
 I&#x27;ve seen 100s of demo day pitches, and here are three more slide tips that most do not follow but should:<p>1) Do not include the same words on every slide as a footer, like your twitter handle, website or company name.  It&#x27;s very distracting.  You should mention your company name a few times through the presentation, and you can finish with a slide that has your company name and website as a refresher.<p>2) Transitions should not be abrupt.  You should use a fade or other similar transition between <i>every slide</i>.  Watch any Apple presentation and you&#x27;ll see they always have a fade.<p>3) Do not use animations.  They generally look bad.  <i>Exception</i>:  If you&#x27;re a pro presenter, there are some animations and transitions that can look good if done right.<p>These tips come from my experience giving 100s of presentations and keynotes to sometimes very large audiences.  They also can be found in the book Presentation Patterns and on their website.  [0]<p>Edit:  Thought of one more.  Don&#x27;t use a pointer.  If you find a slide where you need to point at something, change your slide to highlight that thing, or add another slide, so you don&#x27;t need the pointer.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;presentationpatterns.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;presentationpatterns.com</a>
 &gt; MySQL supports multiple different replication modes:<p>&gt; Statement-based replication replicates logical SQL statements (e.g., it would literally replicate literal statements such as: UPDATE users SET birth_year=770 WHERE id = 4)<p>Postgres has that too (using a 3rd party tool, but it&#x27;s an officially supported tool).  We were using it on reddit 10 years ago.  It caused a lot of problems.  I wouldn&#x27;t call that an advantage for Mysql.<p>Honestly, reading this it seems like the summary is: &quot;We don&#x27;t follow great engineering practices so we need a database more forgiving&quot;.  Which is fine if that&#x27;s how you want to run your business, but isn&#x27;t really the death knell for Postgres.<p>A specific example:<p>&gt; This problem might not be apparent to application developers writing code that obscures where transactions start and end. For instance, say a developer has some code that has to email a receipt to a user. Depending on how it’s written, the code may implicitly have a database transaction that’s held open until after the email finishes sending. While it’s always bad form to let your code hold open database transactions while performing unrelated blocking I&#x2F;O, the reality is that most engineers are not database experts and may not always understand this problem, especially when using an ORM that obscures low-level details like open transactions.<p>Your developer should understand database transactions.  But you should make it easier for them by abstracting it so that they don&#x27;t have to.  And in this particular case, I&#x27;d say they shouldn&#x27;t be using the database to do locking around sending a receipt.  It should be put into a queue and that queue should be processed separately, which avoids the transaction problem altogether.
 Open db connection<p>get data for receipt<p>generate receipt<p>send email<p>write success to database<p>close connection<p>To a junior programmer this would probably look reasonable, and to be fair, it takes some experience and getting burned, or good training, to know it is not.
 True, but really your local MTA is just acting like a specialized queue, since the first thing it will do is send the message to your relay.
 Why does Startup School always overlap with a Berkeley home game? :P
 You can still do it in one transaction, sort of.  Replace &quot;send email&quot; with &quot;queue email&quot; and then either eliminate the step that writes the success to the database (pushing that off to the queue processor, who will open or already have open a database connection) or instead write to the DB that you queued the item.<p>The advantage you gain is that the queue is a nice buffer if something gets held up with email sending, and also, the queue processor can work in bulk, say sending 100 emails, and then opening a connection to the DB and writing them all in one statement.
 No you don&#x27;t.  But depending on the ORM, some of them batch writes unless you explicitly tell them not to, but will flush when you close the connection.  So some programmers will just close the connection because they don&#x27;t understand the difference or because they&#x27;ve learned that closing the connection guarantees that the data is written.
 Well there are pros and cons.  If you have already have a queue structure set up in your environment, it may not be a good idea to have to maintain a second queue structure in the form of a bunch of local MTAs.  You&#x27;ll need monitoring (how many messages are queued in each local MTA?) and a way to keep those MTAs up to date.<p>If you just put an item in to a queue, and then have a specific cluster of machines that does nothing but grab items from that queue and push them through an email infrastructure, then it&#x27;ll be a lot easier to maintain.
 Nah, they just don&#x27;t care about football.  It&#x27;s just coincidence that it overlaps every year.
 But it&#x27;s only an issue if you rely on lots of transactions for data consistency and my point was that it sounds like they are relying on transactions too much which is why they need a more &quot;forgiving&quot; database, which is the part I quoted.<p>Also they didn&#x27;t mention anything about the auto vacuumer, which mostly solved the issue they are talking about.<p>Their lack of mention of the vacuumer and not seeming to know that Postgres supports statement level replication makes me wonder if they took a deep dive into the wrong part of the technology.
 He means the cars.  When you buy a Tesla the first thing they do is send you marketing materials to get a Solar City install to charge your car at home, as they are an &quot;approved vendor&quot;.<p>So a lot of people with the cars have Solar City installs on their roof.
 I want to feel bad.  I really do.  I have a lot of journalist friends and they have made cogent and reasonable arguments about how this will set a precedent that will quell their speech.  Even if they are reporting something that isn&#x27;t libelous, they will always fear in the back of their mind that a wealthy person who doesn&#x27;t like them will bring a case against them that will bankrupt them, even if what they wrote was legit, just through having to defend themselves.<p>On the other hand, I don&#x27;t like Denton or Gawker because they have no ethics.  I was personally harmed by them when they decided to make their hobby doxxing controversial reddit users, and I know someone whose life was completely destroyed by Gawker but didn&#x27;t have the money to sue.<p>I&#x27;m also not a fan of the fact that a lot of their early content was literally them reposting reddit content without permission.<p>So if this were anyone else with any other media organization, I would totally be on their side and agree that this is a travesty of justice that Theil was able to fund this lawsuit.<p>But for Denton and Gawker?  Good, they deserve to go down in flames.<p>Edit:  I would like to add that some of those journalist friends work for Gawker Media, are upstanding, ethical, and wonderful people, and will most likely loose their jobs, and I feel terrible for them.  It&#x27;s just a few bad eggs at Gawker that ruined it for everyone, but it came from the top (Denton).
 I think in part because it&#x27;s well known and also because this might be the first time it&#x27;s been specifically stated as a personal vendetta.
 Not anymore, no.  The billing was the last big thing to move.<p>Everything except the CDN is on AWS (unless they moved something back to the datacenter since I left 1.5 years ago, but that&#x27;s unlikely and I probably would have heard about it).
 No, it was other people who I had to help after they were doxxed, but he was also seriously harmed by Gawker.
 &gt; The posting -- without permission -- of a sex tape made without Hogan&#x27;s knowledge and in a private location. This seems morally indefensible to me. This is where I get a bit lost as to people defending Gawker. Shouldn&#x27;t posting such a video be illegal?<p>Yes, probably.  The issue stems from the fact that someone else paid for the lawsuit, which is a moral gray area, and in fact was illegal for a long time, even before the US existed (in British common law):  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Champerty_and_maintenance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Champerty_and_maintenance</a>
 And this is why Gawker makes money.  Because as long as they are treating people <i>you don&#x27;t like</i> poorly, it&#x27;s ok?
 I never said what VA was doing was right or wrong, not did I say what they did to Hogan was right or wrong.<p>I just said I don&#x27;t feel bad because they were unethical in their journalism and caused real harm to people because of it (real people besides VA).
 I was saying that funding other people&#x27;s lawsuits was illegal for a long time.
 I never defended VA, and never have.  I think both were unethical and wrong.
 You&#x27;re right I should.  I guess I give them a pass because they aren&#x27;t motivated by personal vendetta.
 The place where bloom filters really shine is doing lookups on data where most of the time the data isn&#x27;t there.<p>For example, when you load a page on reddit, it has to check for a vote on every single comment on the page to see if you voted on it.  Chances are 99% of the time you didn&#x27;t vote on an item.  Using the built in bloom filter in Cassandra, it can very quickly tell if you voted on an item without having to hit the data store most of the time, which saves a ton of time.<p>(As a side note, there is an extra optimization that makes things even faster -- reddit tracks the last time you voted on anything as an attribute of your user, so if the page is newer than your last vote, it just assumes you couldn&#x27;t have possible voted on it, skipping the lookups altogether).
 TL;DR: If you&#x27;re interacting with a kid, try to avoid saying, &quot;you&#x27;re so smart!&quot; and instead say, &quot;You&#x27;ve picked this up really quickly&quot; or &quot;you&#x27;re such a hard worker&quot;.  If you tell a child they are smart then they will stop trying either because they assume they can get by on their intelligence or because they are afraid of failing and loosing your praise about how smart they are.
 You&#x27;re absolutely right.  Thank you for your suggestion, I think I&#x27;ll change my own phrasing if I didn&#x27;t witness the hard work.
 &gt; A list of votes per user per page would also work. ~90% of the time that list would be empty,<p>Not really.  People tend to vote on one or two things on a page.  So you&#x27;ll have a long list of people who voted on one or two of the 1000+ items, and now you&#x27;ve had to do an extra lookup.<p>It&#x27;s a lot faster to just go straight for the votes and take advantage of the bloom filter.
 Worked, yes.

 Sunk cost fallacy.  A director shoots bad material, they don&#x27;t go back and start over.  They make due with what they have because of what they&#x27;ve already spent on it.<p>Disney does the opposite.  Look at what we&#x27;ve heard about the Rogue One -- the studio felt that it was good but not great and sent them back for a whole bunch of (expensive) reshoots.  Pixar does the same.  If they don&#x27;t like the final product they&#x27;ll rip it apart and do it again.
 Box is a public company:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boxinvestorrelations.com&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;financial-releases&#x2F;box-announces-record-fiscal-year-2016-revenue-303-million-40-year-o" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boxinvestorrelations.com&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;financial-...</a><p>They don&#x27;t split out enterprise revenue but do talk about all their enterprise clients and that it is 59% of the Fortune 500.
 What I&#x27;m looking for is a chart of total medals vs. possible medals.<p>For example, for a country that only has one athlete in one sport, their total possible medals is 1.  So if they get 1 medal, they have a 100% success rate, which is pretty good.<p>I&#x27;ve seen charts of total medals vs # of athletes participating, but that&#x27;s not quite right, because it doesn&#x27;t account for team sports.  One country might have 4 people on the swim relay team, but that&#x27;s still only one possible medal (and if they win it should only count as one).<p>I suspect someone will link me directly to what I&#x27;m looking for soon, but I&#x27;ve yet to find it on my own.
 It&#x27;s a political 3rd rail.  There are laws about discrimination based on sex in the US, but you generally get a lot of flack for pointing out the unfairness if it benefits women, which is mostly considered ok since it&#x27;s making up for the many years that the discrimination went the other way (and I&#x27;m actually ok with that).<p>And to be fair, it&#x27;s a hell of a lot harder on a birth mother than anyone else.  You&#x27;ll notice adoptive mothers in this policy only get the 12 week benefit too, so this one is already fairer than most.
 There is a shortage of <i>good</i> software engineers.  There are many people currently employed who call themselves software engineers but I&#x27;m not sure what they&#x27;re actually doing.  I saw this a lot when I was doing hiring -- people who can&#x27;t even write simple loops or know what 12 mod 5 is.
 As my lawyer friend once told me:  &quot;Class action lawsuits are the lawyers&#x27; startup.  You get one good one and you&#x27;re set for life&quot;.
 As Paul said it takes longer than that to make it, but Twitch TV sold for almost 1B less than 5 years after launch, and just turned 5 in June.
 Cruise Automation -- Founded 2013 (three years ago), sold for 1B this year.
 With winter, and the colder weather, approaching, they really better figure out some game mechanics that you can do inside at home, or that user number is going to drop like crazy.<p>I&#x27;ve been saying this for a while -- it was fun to play for a few days, but I live in a suburb.  I have to walk at least .5 miles to get to a Pokestop and they never spawn near my house.<p>I&#x27;ll still play when I go to new places, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>Now, if there were some way for my wife and I to battle each other at home, that would be whole different ball game.
 True but there are a lot fewer people on that side of the world, and even fewer still who would be considered &quot;1st world&quot; enough to have the spare time and the smartphones with data plans necessary to play.
 Actually, I liked that it linked to mobile -- no paywall on mobile it seems.
 Oh internet, so stereotypical.  Of course the &quot;Top Posts&quot; for most of these is pictures of attractive women (and the occasional man).  The notable exception being North Korea.
 I know how to get around the paywall but it&#x27;s still a pain and a lot easier when it doesn&#x27;t show up, and it may vary, but for me, it shows up 100% of the time on desktop and 0% of the time on mobile.
 Yet Tesla maintains &quot;drive centers&quot; all over the place.<p>Also, if it weren&#x27;t such a racket, you would have a single drive center that sold Chevy, Mazda, Toyota all in once place, and then the dealerships wouldn&#x27;t have to worry about sending people there.  They would compete for people&#x27;s business.
 Did the exact same thing, had the exact same experience.  I had a lot of really old devices on there.
 Pretty much.  If they would add a knowledgeable salesperson who knows the pros and cons of the different brands they&#x27;d be all set!
 I&#x27;ve been there.  They tried to make it look like all those startups in warehouses in SF, and for the most part succeeded.  You see agile boards around, decent kitchens, people hanging out on couches talking work, and some people heads down coding.<p>The main difference is that they seem to be dressed in a bit more &quot;business casual&quot; than your typical SF startup in a warehouse.
 &gt; We have solved almost all of the technical problems twitch faces<p>A lot of those problems are a lot easier to solve with a smaller audience.<p>My point is, you haven&#x27;t solved Twitch&#x27;s problems <i>at Twitch&#x27;s scale</i>.
 The last time the rights were negotiated in 2013, they were $40B, with ESPN paying about double what NBC, CBS and Fox payed.<p>There is one company with the kind of money that might make sense -- Apple.<p>It would be a heck of a way for them to jumpstart a streaming service and make it only available on AppleTV.<p>Probably the biggest holdup would be the NFL itself, who makes sure those broadcast contracts reach the biggest number of people to keep their brand popular.
 The federal minimum wage for a food server in the US is $2.13&#x2F;hr. The employer only has to pay more if their tips don&#x27;t average out to $7.25 an hour.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tipped_wage_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tipped_wage_in_the_United_St...</a>
 You&#x27;ve clearly never worked with the 99% of people who use the internet who don&#x27;t care about https, much less know what it is.<p>They don&#x27;t understand that when someone says &quot;go to google.com&quot; that something isn&#x27;t wrong when the url bar says &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&quot;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&quot;</a>.  They think they something is broken.<p>Heck, Safari now be default doesn&#x27;t even show you the path, they just show the domain, because once people get to foo.com they don&#x27;t even understand about the paths, nor care.
 It&#x27;s not strictly better -- it gives a false sense of security.  As you plainly showed by believing that having https at a Starbucks with an untrusted cert is safe, which it is clearly not.<p>Security involve both a technical and social aspect.  While the unsigned cert <i>may</i> offer better security (but there is no way for you to know) it most certainly offers a worse social aspect, that being a false sense of security.<p>So I&#x27;d say you&#x27;re wrong -- it is strictly worse, because it offers no better security but a worse sense of security.
 It means that if I&#x27;m at Starbucks and I want to read &quot;bandrami&#x27;s&quot; blog, I know that the guy in the corner with the Pineapple hasn&#x27;t changed the content, because Thawte has at least verified that bandrami.com is the one who actually requested the cert.
 1) if you&#x27;re doing a certificate just for yourself, you can import it into your browser.<p>2) I&#x27;m pretty sure all the browsers work just like ssh -- where you can accept it once and then it doesn&#x27;t bother you again.
 I still say that the smartest thing we ever did at reddit was allow users to create their own subreddits and then decorate them how they choose.  The second smartest thing was making text posts official.<p>Both of those features differentiated us from the competitors, and as you aptly point out, it has a nice side effect of keeping people on the platform who might otherwise leave (although that wasn&#x27;t an intended consequence).

 Prop 13.  It&#x27;s destroying the market here.  People don&#x27;t want to sell because it could cost them dearly.<p>If I wanted to sell my house and move next door (our houses cost about the same), besides the fees to the real estate agents, my property taxes would literally double (from about 10K a year to 20K) and I&#x27;ve only lived here (Cupertino, right next to Apple HQ) for eight years.<p>My neighbor, who has been in the house for 35 years, would go from 1K a year to 20K a year.<p>Because of Prop 13, I&#x27;m highly unmotivated to sell.
 Schools and commute time.  If you work at Google of Facebook (or near them) PA is the only reasonable commute, and if you want your kids to go to great schools, it&#x27;s the only option.
 &gt; On the other hand, the only meaningful macro effect it can have is to reduce liquidity and moderately buoy prices.<p>Exactly.  The article is about the lack of inventory.  I was explaining why there is a lack of inventory.
 Actually there is an exception for old people in certain counties where they can keep their old property tax.  Which makes the problem even worse because they can sell their house, <i>upsize</i> and yet keep their old 1980s tax rate.
 In this thread:  A bunch of people who clearly never installed an operating system in the Time Before Automatic Internet Connections.

 The date on the top says February 2007 to August 2016.<p>Does anyone know which parts are new in August 2016?  I&#x27;ve read this before and it isn&#x27;t sticking out to me.
 The biggest value Mailchimp provides is <i>deliverability</i>.  They spend a lot of time working with ISPs to maintain the reputation of their IPs to make sure their mail ends up in the inbox and not the spam box.<p>You can&#x27;t self host that.<p>The mailing list features themselves aren&#x27;t much different than anyone else offers.
 Well yes that&#x27;s how SPF was designed.  Of course if you have an SPF record they will fail (and so will anyone else) if you don&#x27;t allow them.  That&#x27;s kind of the point of SPF -- to prove to everyone else who you trust to deliver mail for you.
 Yes but in Mailchimp&#x27;s case they are the provider.  They send the emails directly.
 &gt; This is the first time I hear Mailchimp (or any other company) has some special deal or treatment from ISPs in regarding to their sending emails reputation.<p>If you use Gmail and PayPal you can see this in action.  There will be a little key there.  You have to be an approved sender to get the key.  The key, besides being a visual indicator, guarantees delivery in the inbox.<p>Most people who admin big mail sites know each other.  When their mail is bouncing, they call each other and ask for help.  When they see their friend&#x27;s big site getting a lot of spam warnings, they call their friend and say &quot;hey this word in your email is triggering our spam filter, you should change it&quot;.<p>This is just how industry works.
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.kinja-img.com&#x2F;gawker-media&#x2F;image&#x2F;upload&#x2F;s--9UDz03_a--&#x2F;18fc45ad3slp9jpg.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.kinja-img.com&#x2F;gawker-media&#x2F;image&#x2F;upload&#x2F;s--9UDz03_...</a>


 This is like when teachers are getting screwed and can&#x27;t go on strike.  In the teacher&#x27;s case, if they go on strike it hurts the students the most, wheres the administration just has to deal with a small backlash.<p>In this case if we deny them help, we hurt the people of the DPRK, not really the administration.<p>So the global community are the teachers, who want to help the people of the DPRK, are angry at the administration, and can&#x27;t do anything but keep helping.
 &quot;The way to have a fully naked woman in a PG-13 movie is to fill her with bullet holes.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t know who said it, if anyone, but it&#x27;s true.
 I feel bad for Facebook here.  Having been responsible for managing this same problem for another (albeit smaller) multinational user generated website, it&#x27;s a tough problem.<p>Everyone around the world, and even within the United States, have a vastly different sense of morality and taste.   Which do you cater to?<p>Not to mention the legal issues, where some content is legal in one place and illegal in another.
 &gt; It&#x27;s, but not by design.<p>As a side note, when I read this, I thought you forgot a word.  Then I realized expanding the contraction yields a complete sentence.<p>Interesting choice of construction.  Out of curiosity, is English your first language?
 I believe it applied more in the past, but the point still stands.  At some time in recent history, a naked woman was considered worse than a naked woman with holes from being shot, which is just wrong.
 Contact everyone, tell them they have a week, then tick the box.  If they didn&#x27;t do it within the week it&#x27;s either not important to them or they&#x27;ll add it right quick after you tick the box.
 I&#x27;m pretty snobby about my music quality, but the muddy and boomy is &quot;good enough&quot; for me when I just want some background music while we eat or cook, which I can make happen with the power of my voice while holding the baby.<p>Mainly it is the fact that I can make it happen while holding the baby, I&#x27;m willing to forgive a lot of the sound issues.
 People keep saying this, but you can actually see a log of everything that is sent to Amazon.  And you can verify the log yourself by sniffing the traffic to Amazon.  You can see that it most definitely does not send data unless the blue ring is lit.<p>Now, you may argue that it is recording all the time and then sending its recordings when you issue a command, but I&#x27;m willing to take the risk that Amazon is not willing to risk their entire reputation on helping the NSA like that.
 They just today announced that it will work in the UK and Germany.
 My Alexa products would be <i>so much more useful</i> if I could push things to them.  Like even if you just gave me a way to subscribe my echo&#x2F;dot to an SNS topic.<p>I could do so many awesome things when combined with all the AWS buttons that I&#x27;ve won.<p>Push a button, make the echo say &quot;dinner is ready!&quot;.  Put a button outside and when someone pushes it say &quot;someone&#x27;s at the door!&quot;
 Chance of extremely high returns = Check (not so much in academia)
 1) Morality<p>2) GPS -- they know where the car is it all times<p>3) There is still a human in it.  Once the human is removed, I suspect the car will only work if it has a continuous connection to HQ, and that will give it a constant GPS signal.
 A relevant story.  I worked with a friend here in the Bay Area a while back.  One day his father in law got sick, and he was forced to move to San Diego.  When he started looking for jobs, they were all offing about 20% less money for the same work, despite the fact that at the time the cost of living was almost identical.<p>When he asked one of them, &quot;why don&#x27;t you pay as much as the bay area&quot; he was told, &quot;our weather is better so we pay less&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s only so much suffering you&#x27;re willing to take for &quot;better weather&quot;.<p>The same could of course be said for Silicon Valley too.
 This could be titled &quot;If you do things wrong it won&#x27;t be good&quot;.<p>A lot of his examples are of people doing things poorly or incorrectly.  I could make the same arguments about object oriented programming my saying it&#x27;s bad because someone makes every function a public function.<p>For example, microservices are absolutely more scalable if done correctly with bulkheading and proper fallbacks and backoffs, and proper monitoring, altering, and scaling.<p>But those things are hard to do and hard to get right.
 Anyone who thinks an SSN is a secret is naive at best.<p>Back in the day, your student ID at California State schools was your SSN.  It was on your ID card, which you had to present to do anything at the school.
 The lack of usage in static blocks isn&#x27;t entirely surprising.  A lot of universities got their IP space early and utilize it poorly.  I know this because it is in part my fault.<p>When we were assigning IP addresses for the dorms at Berkeley, we gave every dorm a &#x2F;24, and then reserved the first 50 IPs for &quot;future use&quot; and &quot;internal use&quot;.  Most of those were never used.  And unless 200 people signed up per building, some of the top end was missed too.<p>My understanding is that they have since fixed this on the wifi since many people bring three or four devices now, but the hard wired connections are still poorly utilized.
 Yes that&#x27;s absolutely true.  Everyone should not use micro services.  In fact most people should not.  I should have made that more clear.
 Got it thanks for clarifying.  My suggestion would be to make that a bit more explicit -- I didn&#x27;t get that impression reading the article.
 Wow.  I know at CSULA it was SSNs in the early 90s, but they were already phasing it out.
 &gt; His accuracy in the previous general election was based on the fact that he had visibility into private polling (WAY more accurate) and other forecasters didn&#x27;t.<p>Where did you hear that?  I&#x27;m not doubting you I&#x27;m just interested because I&#x27;ve never heard this before.  My understanding was that he was so accurate last time around because the election followed normal patterns and his math was just better than everyone else&#x27;s gut.
 &gt; Route numbers that are divisible by 5 are considered major routes, and with a few exceptions go from one geographical extreme to the other<p>They tend to be major, but only 11 of 19 (11 of 17 that exist) go from one geo extreme to the other.  Sorry highway numbers are a hobby of mine (yes I know strange hobby).<p>5 ^: Mexico to Canada<p>10 ^: Pacific to Atlantic<p>15 ^: Mexico to Canada<p>20: Mid-Texas to Mid-South Carolina<p>25: Southern Texas to Wyoming<p>30: Texas to Arkansas<p>35 ^: Mexico to almost Canada<p>40 ^: Eastern California, to Eastern North Carolina<p>45: Entirely in Texas<p>50: N&#x2F;A<p>55 ^: Gulf of Mexico to Great Lakes<p>60: N&#x2F;A<p>65 ^: Gulf of Mexico to Great Lakes<p>70: Utah to Maryland<p>75 ^: Southern Florida to northern Michigan<p>80 ^: San Francisco to New York<p>85: Mid-Alabama to Mid-Virginia<p>90 ^: Seattle to Boston (longest in the country)<p>95 ^: Maine to Florida
 You&#x27;re forgetting about taxes.  If you sell something worth $100, you probably aren&#x27;t going to pay $30 in tax on it (or probably anything at all).<p>If you sell something worth 100 million you&#x27;re going to pay 30 or 40 million in taxes.<p>With the loan you won&#x27;t pay any tax now, you might pay it later, or you might not ever pay it because you&#x27;ll have that loan until you die and the bank will be the beneficiary of 100 million of your estate.
 You&#x27;re right I missread but the point is the same.  Taxes.  The whole thing changes when you&#x27;re trying to be tax efficient.
 Sure, but you still have to pay taxes, whereas if you get a loan you just pay interest (probably a very low rate) and defer the taxes.
 Yeah but you&#x27;re dead so you don&#x27;t care. :)
 Every time.
 Us highways 50 and 60 exist and the location of Interstate 50 and 60 would be kinda close to where US-50 and 60 are, so they were probably skipped to avoid confusion.
 I agree with you on that one. I debated whether to count it as going from one extreme to the other since it stops about 150 miles short of the ocean, but I figured since it gets you most of the way, might as well count it.
 They have to compete with the rest of Silicon Valley.  That&#x27;s about what it costs to get a good engineer around here, when you count benefits.
 To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it&#x27;s actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind:<p>1) That includes benefits<p>2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley<p>3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people.<p>4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you pay for engineers with security expertise.<p>As someone who runs a business and has to hire talent, I can say that I&#x27;d consider myself lucky to get such a team for such a great price.<p>Edit:  A bunch of people are saying &quot;why not remote&quot;.  I think they are in fact mostly remote, but they still have to <i>compete</i> with SV wages because really good people command those wages whether they are here or not.<p>Edit2:  As has been pointed out multiple times, the blog post was not clear, and it is actually 200K per person, all in.
 The 100% overhead only applies to the &quot;average&quot; job.  Health benefit costs are typically the biggest piece of the benefits puzzle and don&#x27;t scale with salary.  In SV the overhead is more like 25%.
 They don&#x27;t (and in fact I think they are mostly remote) but they still have to compete with it.
 It depends a lot on corporate structure and actually HQ address for tax filling.  Each city has their own business license rates and deductions.  And some cities (like SF) have extra taxes per employee.  Their website lists their HQ as SF, but it would be impossible to know from the outside what their exact tax situation would be.<p>I guess my point is though from a company perspective not much more than anywhere else.  The biggest cost to a company here is competing on wages.
 Heh, I&#x27;m pretty sure OP actually works for Let&#x27;s Encrypt.
 It doesn&#x27;t make sense but it is true.  If you&#x27;re really good, <i>someone</i> will make you an offer for an SV salary, and now everyone needs to compete with that.  Besides, it&#x27;s only fair.  Your value shouldn&#x27;t be tied to where you live per se.  It&#x27;s true that people in some areas make less because they have fewer options in their area, but for a high caliber person, they have plenty of options whether they move their physical location or not.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure we&#x27;re going to see a trend as remote work becomes more popular where there will be a much smaller delta because of location of the employee.
 The Ars Techinca review is missing the most important section though -- the conclusion.  Usually I would just skip to that and do whatever they said, and then go back and read the rest while it downloaded.
 As covered elsewhere, most of the team is remote.  But they still get SV salaries because great people get those salaries no matter where they are.
 Yeah you have a point.  I guess living here and having many friends who make more than 300K&#x2F;yr as engineers (and some as much at 450K or 500K, and a few getting &gt;1.2M), I&#x27;ve become numb to it.
 Ah excellent. Thank you.<p>I wonder why they didn&#x27;t just call it &quot;conclusion&quot; like every other time.
 It&#x27;s rarely written about, in part because the private companies don&#x27;t want to share details.<p>Buy a beer for someone who has worked security for a big firm and they can tell you all about it.
 I&#x27;m not sure if you&#x27;re trying to make a sarcastic analogy to gun registration or not, but if you are, they aren&#x27;t quite the same, given that a gun is a physical object and an IP can change without the user knowing or being responsible for that change.
 Awesome.  The whole time I was reading I was thinking &quot;they need Rendezvous hashing&quot;.  And then bam, last paragraph mentions that is in fact what they are using.
 &gt; It is then justified that their creation is needed because &quot;no one else has these kinds of problems&quot; but then they open source them as if lots of other people could benefit from it. Why open source something if it has an expected user base of 1?<p>Two reasons.<p>1) Recruiting.  Check out our awesome code!  Don&#x27;t you want to work on this too?<p>2) Our unique problem today will be the problems of everyone in three years.<p>This has borne out with the Netflix opes source.  At the time it was a problem unique to Netflix -- now a bunch of people are using that software or derivatives.
 &gt; Cabin Overheat Protection<p>I hope that besides cooling the car it includes a feature that pulls down some signs in the windows that says &quot;no really the A&#x2F;C is on and my kid&#x2F;dog is fine, don&#x27;t break the glass&quot;.<p>I mean I&#x27;m kinda joking here but not really.  This has been a problem for Prius owners for a long time (they can have a&#x2F;c on manually when the car is off)
 No.  All the Praises let you run the A&#x2F;C whether you were moving or not.  Since the &quot;engine&quot; is always on, as long as the key is nearby and the on button is pressed you can run the A&#x2F;C.
 You don&#x27;t have to go to Boulder or SLC -- San Jose offers a lot of incentives for tech companies.  In fact San Jose doesn&#x27;t tax you on income at all (there is a per employee tax of $18 a year up to 25K but that&#x27;s it).  And if you&#x27;re a big enough tech company, you can get that waived too.
 Vomit most likely from some 20 something kid who just drank way too much with their expendable income. :)
 My definitions:<p>Wealthy -- I don&#x27;t have to work to maintain my lifestyle.<p>Poor -- I can&#x27;t afford basic necessities even when I work.<p>Middle-class -- everyone else.<p>Now for sure there is some variation on middle-class (upper&#x2F;lower&#x2F;truly middle) and that&#x27;s basically a function of disposable income.<p>But this definition at least accounts for variation in regional cost of living and even adjusts for personal lifestyle choices.  Your middle class might be my wealthy because my lifestyle is cheaper.

 Definitely.  Amazon would fire them after about the second time.  They have much better data and know exactly which one of their people makes a mistake.<p>When you give bad shipping feedback, if the same person gets bad feedback multiple times, they get retrained and then fired.
 What an odd coincidence that I just experienced Deja Vu this morning.  I was a having a conversation with my wife, and about two sentences in I was able to predict the next three, because this exact conversation had happened to us in one of me dreams month ago.<p>I was a mundane conversation about her preparing to go out with our child.  But it isn&#x27;t something that would be &quot;normal&quot; because she was meeting with a very specific friend, which was part of my recall of the event.
 The difference is that Jewish is actually an ethnic group as well as a religious group.  There is some overlap between them of course, but for example there are Asian Jews and Jewish Catholics.<p>The Jewish ethnic group are people historically descended from the people of Eastern Europe and the Middle East who practiced ancient Judaism (the religion).  That&#x27;s why 23andme can identify someone as X% Jewish.
 And yet, unless you go through the effort of removing every trusted CA from your browser, you implicitly trust them because Mozilla&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc. do.<p>And thus why the CA system is broken in a nutshell.
 &gt;It&#x27;s kind of sad when you realize that a lot of the code you write will eventually be rewritten or lapse out of use<p>It&#x27;s funny, I actually get sadder when I find out code I wrote a long time ago is <i>still in use</i>.  The deployment tool I wrote for reddit ended up lasting six or seven years.  Some of the stuff I wrote at eBay is still in use today.
 Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don&#x27;t vote and tend to vote Democrat.  Back in the 90s MTV had &quot;Rock the Vote&quot; (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.
 There is no published research I&#x27;m aware of.  However, you can find an article about every major tech company talking about how reducing their latency increased whatever their core metric was (not necessarily linearly though, sometimes it was and even steeper curve).  I know for sure this is true at eBay, Netflix, and reddit because I&#x27;ve seen the numbers personally, and I have friends at Google, Amazon and Facebook who have said the same.
 This is fascinating.  And I definitely trust data more than common wisdom.  Good thing for the Democrats that Trump doesn&#x27;t. :)
 &gt; just rear Glacier horror stories<p>In Amazon&#x27;s defense, their pricing is pretty clear and straightforward <i>except</i> for Glacier, which even they admit doesn&#x27;t follow their pricing model for all the other services.<p>Google&#x27;s is still the best though -- they automatically give you &quot;bulk discounts&quot; instead of having to buy them in advance like AWS, and their general philosophy is &quot;your cheapest option should be to finish your workload as quickly as possible&quot;, as opposed to AWS, where you have to do some acrobatics to fit into their pricing models efficiently.
 The 2.4 going out was probably whenever one of your roommates or neighbors used the microwave. :)
 I don&#x27;t know about Google, but I know that Siri and Alexa only collect and send data when you ask it to.<p>You can monitor the traffic of the Alexa and see that it is only sending data when you ask it to do something, and furthermore, Amazon gives you a log of everything you&#x27;ve said to it and it recorded.
 Amusingly the oldest living person happens to be tied for 7th today, but as long as she makes it to tomorrow, she&#x27;ll move into 6th place.
 Netflix doesn&#x27;t really &quot;own&quot; their originals.  All the Marvel stuff is still owned by Disney, they just have exclusive rights to distribute.<p>Also, from a technology perspective, it would actually be really hard to remove the DRM from just their own stuff.<p>The delivery and encoding pipelines are all standardized around the DRM requirements.  It would require a whole bunch of exceptions to remove the DRM just from certain content, on both the server and client side.
 Having been one of those engineers myself, I can tell you for sure that it is a hard problem.
 It depends on the headphones.  A good set of active or passive noise cancelling headphones will block all the sound even with no music.<p>I wear my headphones as earplugs on an airplane when I want to sleep, and I can usually keep my volume at 10% of max or less and hear everything crystal clear.<p>The biggest downside is that my headphones cost $350 and are only available in Europe or Montreal, CA.
 I guess I just found the magic pair, because with them in I can&#x27;t even hear my baby cry.
 With my headphones in I can&#x27;t hear phones or conversations or my baby crying.
 That&#x27;s a fair point, but my point was I don&#x27;t keep it very loud at all.
 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atomicfloyd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;superdarts" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atomicfloyd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;superdarts</a><p>But be warned, their customer support is terrible if you don&#x27;t live in Europe.
 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atomicfloyd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;superdarts" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atomicfloyd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;superdarts</a><p>But be warned, their customer support is terrible if you don&#x27;t live in Europe.
 Cost.  We could have implemented comment search 8 years ago.  Actually, we <i>did</i> implement it.  But it just cost way too much to maintain the index.
 Can you just contribute as you instead of as your company?
 Those only block the various sorts and individual comment links.  The main comments pages are still searchable.<p>Google was getting overzealous and indexing every page hundreds of times because it would follow every link, which included every &quot;context&quot; link and every sort.
 I tried to reply to you but HN blocked me.  See your sibling comment for my response.
 tl;dr:  They were helping the war effort by designing better camouflage.
 For those that don&#x27;t know, Russell co-authored the seminal book on AI with Peter Norvig, who was also a Berkeley professor and is the head of research at Google.
 At least 33 people disagree with you (that&#x27;s the current number of points for my tl;dr).
 The main reason is that licensing works totally differently for music.  For music, you go to a central licensing source and pay for the license.  They will license to anyone with money.<p>For movies, you have to negotiate separately with every movie producer for every title.<p>In other words, to start a music service, you need money.  To start a movie service, you need money and connections to every Hollywood studio.
 Who do you think does the negotiations?  It&#x27;s lawyers on both sides.
 This seems to come up every time serverless comes up.  There should probably be some better docs around this.<p>It&#x27;s true each function needs it&#x27;s own connection, but in reality:<p>1) The containers actually stick around for a while and get reused so if you write the code correctly it only has to establish the connection once per container invocation<p>2) Unless you are doing <i>a lot</i> of traffic you&#x27;ll probably only realistically have a few containers running your functions so it will only be a few connections.<p>3) If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have  been a problem anyway because you&#x27;d be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model.<p>In other words, the number of connects and set up and tear down is about the same as in a traditional setup, maybe just a little bit more.<p>Edit:  One more thing.  Sometimes a counter I hear is &quot;Yeah but every function needs it&#x27;s own connection&quot;.  I counter that with the contention that even with a traditional setup, a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database -- everyone else should be getting their data from that function.  Also if you do it that way that one function can do some smart caching (which survives at least a few minutes with serverless).
 I wouldn&#x27;t call it so much proxying the DB requests through it as all the other functions do business logic, only one or two actually marshal data into and out of the datastore.<p>So yeah it&#x27;s kind of like a proxy, but think of a monolithic application.  Do you make it so every object in your application talks to the DB, or do you have a DB object, which handles the connection pooling and all of that other stuff?  If you have a DB object, that becomes your DB function, and all the other functions talk to it for getting and writing data.

 This may interest you:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;442761531&#x2F;one-mans-mission-to-bring-back-hydrox-cookies" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;442761531&#x2F;one-mans-mission-to-...</a><p>It&#x27;s about a man who bought the Hydrox brand to try and revive the cookie.<p>People do it with old brands all the time.  If you google &quot;buy expired trademark&quot; you&#x27;ll get a ton of info.<p>Although most of those people are buying old <i>good</i> brand names. :)
 You could build the transaction support into the database service.  Then when you need to write multiple things, you put them into a queue as a single work unit, and let your abstraction deal with taking the work unit off the queue and putting into the database in a single transaction.<p>This has the added effect of making your system more reliable because you&#x27;ll be using queues and you have a shorter window when a process can die and hang a db connection that is trying to roll back.
 Netflix found what I think is a happy medium.  Back end services don&#x27;t have product managers.  The engineers decide what is going to get written and when and how.<p>Front end services do have product managers.  But the product managers are really conduits between the engineers and the customers.  They look at what customers are asking for, the results of focus groups, etc, and then create A&#x2F;B tests for those things.  Then they convince the engineers that it&#x27;s a good idea based on their well researched ideas.  Usually the engineer agrees.<p>So basically in all cases the engineers are setting the direction for the product, but for the front end services, the product managers help them by doing what they are good at, which is converting customer thoughts into engineering ideas.
 &gt; With the rate that tech is advancing, it&#x27;s becoming a problem how unfamiliar with it many in the justice system are.<p>People say that a lot.  But yet you don&#x27;t really hear doctors saying &quot;how can a judge hear a case about a medical issue!&quot; (look maybe some say that but not a lot).<p>The court has a solution for this -- they have expert witnesses and amicus briefs.<p>The problem is that technologists are allergic to politics (filing amicus briefs is basically politics as is lobbying), so they won&#x27;t do what they need to do to make tech issues heard.
 If I say you can put your diamond ring in my house and then give you a key, but tell you that if you want your ring you have to let me talk to you for five minutes every time you get it, and then you give your key to a friend who I don&#x27;t like, don&#x27;t I have the right to keep that person out, even though you gave them the key I gave you?<p>Basically this guy is your friend I don&#x27;t like.<p>I understand not liking the walled garden, but if you don&#x27;t like it, then you shouldn&#x27;t enter it in the first place.  Don&#x27;t go into the garden and then give your friend a key to the place just to avoid me.
 This title isn&#x27;t a great title and the article doesn&#x27;t explain the concept very well.<p>What this is trying to say is that human languages all over the world come up with color names in a similar path, but they stop at different points.<p>It&#x27;s all very fascinating, and interestingly is the argument some use against strong AI -- that is they believe that to truly understand language you must have a human or human-like body that can perceive the world in the same way as a human, because these color words develop based on the physical properties of your eye and brain.  For example, many people that are blind from birth have a hard time understanding the concept of color.<p>A few of you mentioned that Russian has two words for red.  Russian is actually at the end of the spectrum (pun intended) -- that is they have the maximum number of color words.<p>English is close but we don&#x27;t have separate words for blue and light blue.<p>You can see this as English speaking children learn words -- they will call &quot;pink&quot; &quot;red&quot; until they learn pink, and will almost always learn &quot;red&quot; before &quot;pink&quot;.<p>Some cultures just stop with &quot;warm&quot; and &quot;cold&quot; (which are red orange yellow vs green blue purple).<p>Ah the joys of being a CogSci major -- we had entire weeks of classes devoted to this.
 It&#x27;s an extra thing to remember.  When I&#x27;m coding I usually just do :w, so when I&#x27;m editing config files I do :wq because it&#x27;s the same thing (write the file) plus a new action (quit) in my head, instead of a totally different action (save and quit)
 None of those are the same as the russian color, but more importantly, those aren&#x27;t considered basic color terms[0]<p>Basic color terms need to be:<p>- monolexemic (&quot;green&quot;, but not &quot;light green&quot; or &quot;forest green&quot;),<p>- high-frequency, and<p>- agreed upon by speakers of that language.[7]<p>All of those words you listed aren&#x27;t high frequency.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_term#Basic_color_terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_term#Basic_color_terms</a>
 &gt; Is that perceptual or a cultural gender-specific difference<p>It&#x27;s perceptual.  Women have a higher cone to rod ratio, making them see colors easier while men see movement better.  Also women are more likely to be tetracromats (four different cones instead of three).<p>There are some unproven evolutionary reasons that this may be the case -- men needed better movement detection to hunt while women needed better color vision to detect bad food when gathering.
 Yes, but see my other comment about why they don&#x27;t count (they aren&#x27;t basic color terms).
 &gt; For instance, what is high frequency?<p>The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text.<p>&gt; And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?<p>Blind speakers represent a small portion of all speakers, so even if every one of them disagrees, the majority of speakers will still agree.
 &gt;  it&#x27;ll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times.<p>That&#x27;s true but their relative frequency will not change.  Ie. if your only words are warm and cold you may see each of those 6% of the time, but if your have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple then you will see each one 2% of the time.<p>But in both cases all the other color related words in the language would be significantly less than 2%.
 Because past 300 it very dependent on the specific corpus, so linguists have settled on 300 since just about any corpus gives the same top 300.
 Google is not a corpus of text.<p>Usually you remove proper nouns when doing a word frequency analysis.<p>Pink, Maroon and Navy are all proper nouns -- Singer&#x2F;songwriter, band (Maroon 5), and branch of the military.<p>Also, a Google search only gets you documents that have that word at least once, but removes duplicates.  So maybe the page with red has it listed 7,000 times but you wouldn&#x27;t know.<p>Trying using all the text in Project Gutenberg[0], removing the proper nouns, and then run the analysis again.<p>Linguists have done this for you already -- and the results were that your top list are in the top 300 and the bottom are not.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org</a>
 I as really hoping all the projects would be named after Disney characters, because it would be fun to say, &quot;I think we should run Mickey, but we may need to fork Donald to make it work in our environment&quot;.
 I dunno, I prefer to eat duck over dog or mouse. ;)
 I agree with you (I only got -3, but that is also an HN personal record).
 Lactose free milk lasts about 6 weeks, or about 3 times longer.   It costs about 25% more, but it&#x27;s totally worth it.<p>We buy 1.5 gallons at Costco for the two of us and never had it go bad.
 &gt; Do people complain that showers are meant to displace baths?<p>They did when showers first started replacing baths in the 1800&#x27;s.
 Sorry, yes that was my point. :)
 Yeah here in the Bay Area there are multiple store brands that have lactose free, and they are almost all cheaper than Lactaid (although Lactaid seems to go on sale here a lot bringing it in line with the store brands).
 &gt;  insulation (though I live in Canada)<p>Even here in California we have insulation.  It&#x27;s just a lot cheaper than where you are because it doesn&#x27;t have to be all that good.
 No they created ContentID so they could say &quot;look we&#x27;re doing the best we can&quot;.  If they got rid of it all the large copyright holders could sue again.
 As a person with a child and many small nieces and nephews, and multiple teachers in the family, I will tell you that you&#x27;re wrong.<p>The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will ~~mutate~~ grow stronger in the child as the weak ones are killed off and infect you anyway.<p>And there is a reason you can&#x27;t come back for 24 hours.  Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared.  If you throw up and feel better, it doesn&#x27;t mean the disease is now gone.<p>So please respect the science and herd mentality and keep sick kids away from kids and adults for at least 24 hours after symptoms subside, or at least make sure the other adults are explicitly ok with you being around them.
 Look at the sentence you posted.  You are contagious for one day before you have symptoms and then you are contagious until <i>all</i> the symptoms go away.  Usually the sick day that you stay at home for is the second day of seven.  So really, you should stay out for the week.  But 24 hours is a nice compromise.<p>Also, how do you know they influenza and not something else?<p>And as to mutation, you&#x27;re right, they don&#x27;t actually mutate.  But what happens is the weaker bacteria&#x2F;virus will not affect you but will affect your child.  After a while, the child starts to kill off the weaker ones and then the concentration of strong ones increase, and those are the ones that neither you nor your child can fight, and that&#x27;s when adults get sick too.<p>Most laymen call that mutation which isn&#x27;t correct, but it&#x27;s still correct to say that the bacteria&#x2F;virus that are stronger increase their concentration in the child until it is potent enough to infect the adult too.
 I&#x27;m not a contributor but I&#x27;ve worked with core contributors to major projects.  This is usually how I see things go down:<p>1) You work on an open source project and an altruistic company hires you to keep working on it.  This is ideal, and I&#x27;ve only ever seen it once (Sendmail hired a couple of core contributors to keep making Sendmail awesome back in the 90s).<p>2) You work on an open source project, people see the work because they use the project, and then offer you a job to keep working on the project, but slowly over time you are working less on things that are great for the community and more on things that are great for your company.  I&#x27;ve seen this a lot.<p>3) You get hired by a company that uses a big project, and they ask you to start making modifications that are useful for the company.  It turns out what you did was useful for everyone so you contribute it back.  Sometimes it turns out to be a huge win and so you keep working on it.  I saw this with Cassandra and some of the folks at Netflix.<p>4) You create a cool project and your company lets you open source it.  It becomes well known and then other companies want to hire you for either 1, 2 or 3.  I saw this a couple times were people left Netflix to go to Facebook or Google to continue work on an OSS project.<p>If you work on Chromium or Firefox, you&#x27;ll pretty much be limited to Google or the Mozilla foundation (with some exceptions).  So if you want to do it to learn some great code but don&#x27;t have a particular project that you love, I&#x27;d suggest one of the more infrastructure projects that are widely deployed if you want to increase potential job prospects.<p>In summary:  There are lots of ways to get paid to write OSS, but you may not like them all.
 Canonical and Redhat are usually 1 or 2, depending on the project.  Oracle is usually 2 or 3.
 If you want an interesting way to get paid for OSS software, check this out:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.io&#x2F;</a><p>Basically the idea is that the code is open and free, but if someone uses it a lot to make money they pay you a licensing fee.
 &gt; and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets.<p>So admittedly the last time I did this was in 2003, but back then, slapping linux on my Thinkpad tripled the battery life.<p>Has Windows power management gotten so good and Linux so bad that it&#x27;s swapped now?<p>In linux I could do things like turn off disk syncing so the hard drive didn&#x27;t spin up.  I know with SSD that&#x27;s not a thing now, but I always assumed there were things you could control with Linux that you couldn&#x27;t control with Windows.
 Technically that would be a subset of 1. :)
 I guess it gets interesting when you&#x27;re an open source company.  It could be argued that the people you hire fall into category 2 (doing things the company wants), but since the company is driven by community desire, it&#x27;s sort of a nice hybrid of 1 and 2. :)<p>(BTW I love GitLab and you guys are doing!)
 I was trying to give RH the benefit of the doubt. ;)
 Think of something you have to do every day that you don&#x27;t like to do.  Like flossing maybe?  Some people really enjoy flossing.  Some people don&#x27;t.  If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed, I would totally do that.  But some people would think, man how can you do that and take all the enjoyment out of flossing?<p>Sometimes when I&#x27;m working, I run to the fridge, grab whatever is in it and eat it while I keep working.  It usually doesn&#x27;t taste like anything because I don&#x27;t even bother heating it.<p>Soylent lets me do that but it&#x27;s a lot healthier than whatever leftovers I might grab out of the fridge.<p>Either way I&#x27;m not enjoying the food nor the company (I&#x27;m at my desk at home alone).  I&#x27;m also only spending 10 minutes.
 &gt; Does Tim Cook use an iPad Pro exclusively?<p>The answer is almost certainly yes.  I&#x27;ve noticed this trend for a while now -- all the execs at all the big tech companies are moving to an iPad only experience, since it does email and web and that&#x27;s all they need.
 In the past their stance was &quot;we&#x27;ll support the new thing and you can get an adaptor if you have the old thing&quot;.  And in that case, every iPhone 7 should have shipped with a USB-C cable and then you&#x27;d have to go out and get a USB-C to USB-A adaptor.  <i>That&#x27;s</i> how you drive people to move to USB-C, like they did with USB-A back in the day.
 It&#x27;s actually really easy to do spreadsheets on an iPad with a keyboard case.  My wife does it all the time.  It&#x27;s just like on the computer, but you can touch the cells you want to look at.
 This is true for now, but if enough states outlaw the death penalty, then it will be easier to get it outlawed federally.
 That used to be a hard technological limitation but they fixed it a few months back.  You should be able to get more now (but you have to have a good justification for it).
 This was exactly the demo they gave and their AWS Dev Day in SF in July.  Using Lambda and the IOT gateway to run a massively multiplayer game (they had everyone in the room play from the web via their phone).
 I mean it was a demo of a product they created using Lambda and the IOT framework.  It was a working game, it just wasn&#x27;t very fun. :)<p>The code was on GitHub but I can&#x27;t seem to find it.
 Technology in the sense that it was a hard coded variable, but it was picked arbitrarily.
 And yet even with DST, kids in Alaska manage to get to school despite the sun coming up at 10am. This whole &quot;for the kids@ argument is the worst one.<p>Most workers today would prefer going to work in the dark and having daylight after work. Even farmers will tell you DST doesn&#x27;t make a diffence to them anymore (or ever). The animals get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.<p>I agree with OP -- in today&#x27;s modern world we should just stick with DST all year.
 As others pointed out society adjusts.<p>In Anchorage for example elementary school starts between 9am and 9:30am to account for the late sunrise.
 Artificial lighting has long solved that problem.
 There&#x27;s a whole bunch of links here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;justgetflux.com&#x2F;research.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;justgetflux.com&#x2F;research.html</a>
 So far all of these just look like population maps of the US, skewed by time zone.<p>Basically if it&#x27;s a heavily populated area that is awake, then the dots are big.<p>Maybe as the day goes on it will level out to more interesting insights?
 Why would he?  He&#x27;s a hardcore Libertarian.  His core philosophy is &quot;do good for myself and the world will be better&quot;.<p>The only way he&#x27;ll help anyone else is if their interests happened to be aligned with his.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m a big fan of the guy (barring recent endorsements) but you have to understand where his philosophical basis is.
 The only policy position he really made clear that would affect SV was that he said he would find a way to severely punish Apple for making their devices in China.<p>Whether he follows through and has congressional support is to be seen.
 That&#x27;s why I use the capital L libertarian. The Ayn Randian type.
 Had a funny conversation on Facebook on Tuesday related to this.  It basically went like this:<p>&quot;It&#x27;ll take a while to find out how the election went in California because we don&#x27;t use computers&quot;<p>&quot;You&#x27;re the biggest state in the country and you don&#x27;t use freakin computers?!&quot; &lt;-Texas resident<p>&quot;You work in IT, you of all people should know why we don&#x27;t use computers&quot;
 You don&#x27;t need crypto.  You just need a machine that prints out a human readable receipt that the voter can see but not alter, which then drops into a secure holding area on the machine.<p>At the end of the day, you randomly select say 1% of all the machines and hand count all the ballots inside, making sure the counts and votes match.  If they do, then you can be reasonably sure it wasn&#x27;t tampered with, and if they don&#x27;t match, then you can hand count all the paper ballots using the old system to verify the computer.
 Not really.  We all know it&#x27;s easy to tamper with an electronic system, which is why we don&#x27;t trust them.<p>It&#x27;s a lot harder to tamper with a paper and pen system where many people are involved.  To many people to rat you out, too many people to have to all do the right thing at the right time, etc.
 1) Loop detection -- don&#x27;t let me shoot myself in the foot an make an infinite loop of two functions calling each other<p>2) Multi-datacenter -- I want to deploy to two places at least so my risk goes down<p>The lack of database and&#x2F;or storage would be a big showstopper.  It would mean that if I want build anything with state, I need to store it in another service, which costs money to move data out of.  Even a very basic key store would better than nothing.  You could actually build one pretty easily on top of Postgres or even SQLLite (although you&#x27;d need one per customer w&#x2F; SQLLite).
 If you just use Lambda, S3, and Dynamo, no not really.  It&#x27;s pretty easy to move to Google.  If you use more of the ecosystem, yes, but so what?<p>Are you worried about vendor lock in with your power company?
 So that the human who voted can verify it is correct and the person who might have to hand count it can read it.
 I made this comment on a related thread yesterday[0]:<p>You don&#x27;t need crypto. You just need a machine that prints out a human readable receipt that the voter can see but not alter, which then drops into a secure holding area on the machine.
 At the end of the day, you randomly select say 1% of all the machines and hand count all the ballots inside, making sure the counts and votes match. If they do, then you can be reasonably sure it wasn&#x27;t tampered with, and if they don&#x27;t match, then you can hand count all the paper ballots using the old system to verify the computer.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12924053" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12924053</a>
 What do you mean?  It meets all six goals:<p>- Be verifiable - you should be able to see your own vote.<p>You can view the print out of your vote before it drops into the secure box.<p>- Be auditable - anyone should be able to tally up the results of the election.<p>Anyone can count the paper ballots<p>- Be secure - it must not leak anyone&#x27;s vote to anyone else.<p>It&#x27;s on an unidentified piece of paper<p>- Be genuine - it should be cryptographically impossible to commit voter fraud.<p>Well, you have to rely on standard methods of preventing voter fraud, but since there have only been five cases of proven voter fraud in the history of US elections, it&#x27;s not really a big deal<p>- Be tamper-proof - it must be impossible to forge results from the inside.<p>Since the paper is in the machine and verified by a human, you can&#x27;t really tamper with it any more than you can tamper with paper ballots today, and since those or monitored by adversarial groups, it&#x27;s basically impossible to tamper with them.
 When you hear about how the latest Nintendo is sold out everywhere, it makes you want one more.<p>They have slow production on purpose.  If you could walk into any store and get one, it wouldn&#x27;t be nearly as big a deal.
 There was a study a while back that showed that the USA has eight times as many parking spaces as it has cars.<p>At first that seems crazy, but it makes sense if you think about the fact that all the places you go in a day need to have enough parking to meet their <i>peak</i> demand all year, so places like malls have huge empty lots most of the year until Christmas rolls around.  And then there is the spot your car is in at work that&#x27;s empty at night and the spot you park in at home that&#x27;s empty during the day.<p>Another nice benefit of self driving cars that are shared is the major reduction in the need to all this excess parking.
 The traffic reduction will come from two sources -- fewer cars and the fact that the cars can drive at optimal speed, reducing unnecessary slowdowns.<p>That being said, while some cars would need to be stationary, there are plenty of people moving around all day long.
 I&#x27;ve seen places where this situation exists, and the supermarket will charge some amount of money to park in the lot, but make it free if you shop in the market.  Seems like a reasonable solution.  The paid parking covers the extra insurance and maintenance.  Maybe you should suggest it to the market across from your bar. :)
 It asked me to draw a tree.  I drew a palm tree.  It said &quot;palm tree&quot; on the bottom, but then said it failed.<p>I drew the palm tree because I&#x27;ve studied AI and that&#x27;s a classic AI mistake.<p>If you go to Hawaii and ask students to draw a tree, almost all of them will draw a palm tree.  Ask them to draw a bird and it looks like a parrot (instead of the robin you see typically in the &quot;lower 48&quot;).<p>It&#x27;s interesting that this seems to suffer from the same selection bias.
 You may want to reevaluate your stance after you look more closely at the evidence.  For example, the supposed &quot;smoking gun&quot; emails about her rigging the primary.  Do you know what everyone failed to report on those?  The date the emails were sent.  They were all sent <i>after</i> Sanders had already lost.  Clinton was already the nominee.  Of course they would talk about how they are going to help her in the general -- because she was already the candidate.<p>It was important details like that that were intentionally left out of the reporting to make her look worse.<p>Edit:  Not that it should matter, but I voted for and contributed to the Sanders campaign. I wanted him to win, but I also believe in facts.
 Because he had already lost and they were trying to get him out of the race because at that point he was just dragging the party down.  Using his Jewishness was wrong, but not corrupt.
 FWIW, downvote == disagree is not how reddit is supposed to work either, and didn&#x27;t used to.  So good luck fighting that trend!
 As someone who works in IT, I know how easy it is to forge emails.  So far all those emails have been denied by their senders.<p>Using DKIM to &quot;prove&quot; they are real only works if you assume the attacker doesn&#x27;t have access to the private key.  If someone hacked the mail server, then they probably have the private key.<p>I&#x27;m saying it didn&#x27;t happen, but I&#x27;m saying that everyone needs to be a little more critical in their analysis of the &quot;evidence&quot; presented.
 Interesting idea.  They tried that with smoking and it only had moderate success.  I wonder if it would be any better with gambling.<p>&quot;Your most likely outcome at this table is to lose 20 cents for every 10 dollars you play&quot;.  Or &quot;If you play $100 at this table you will most likely leave with $98&quot;.  The problem is you&#x27;d need to find a way that actually sounds bad.
 That&#x27;s not true.  I just registered a six letter domain a few months ago (minops.com).<p>There&#x27;s still plenty of good ones left.  I created a program to help me find them:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;wordgen</a>
 Clickbait headline.  She was asked if we would reach &quot;the singularity&quot; in her lifetime and she said no, not in her lifetime (which arguably is on average 18 more years).
 The fact that I need a 3rd party adapter to connect my Apple branded monitor to my Apple branded laptop is patently ridiculous.
 Getting your flu shot should give your immune system plenty workout.<p>It&#x27;s like sparring at 1&#x2F;2 power with full pads vs. getting into a full on street fight.  Sure, the street fight will give you a slightly more real practice session, but at what cost?  There is a lot of collateral damage there.
 There&#x27;s a big difference between breaking compatability with a $39 mouse vs a $1600 monitor that you could have bought a few months ago.
 It doesn&#x27;t actually allow them to do anything they couldn&#x27;t legally do before, but it makes the penalties a lot stiffer to discourage large companies from breaking the law.<p>The problem before was that even if you had a contract, the company would basically say &quot;we have a lot more to spend on lawyers than you, good luck&quot;.<p>Now they have changed that calculation with this law, where if the big company loses it&#x27;s a huge cost to them.  So now their calculation is that it is cheaper to pay their bill than to fight you in court.
 This is on their website.  Therefore it&#x27;s already an accepted source of information for stock related material.  Since it is public and went out to everyone at the same time, it should be fine.
 &gt; Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.<p>I think our big clue was when you said &quot;after we released Nearline&quot;.  ;)
 I&#x27;m just impressed they actually got the semi on the stage.
 It&#x27;s more valuable to be in use than to sell it to you.  They are very limited on ipv4 space, so the charge is really a penalty for keeping that resource from another customer.
 I&#x27;ve been saying for years that AWS has secret DDOS protection.  Never confirmed, but I&#x27;m pretty sure the basic level is just them admitting that they&#x27;ve always had that service.
 I suspect during the beta they&#x27;ve asked their employees to try and steal things amd move things to the wrong place -- really push the software.<p>At least I hope they did. I assume they are going into this expecting a loss while they work out the kinks.
 A very smart statistician who worked for Amazon once said, &quot;estimates are useless without error bars&quot;.  The problem with Zillow is they really should just show a range, not a fixed number that appears to be accurate to the ones place.<p>Edit since I wasn&#x27;t clear:  I know they show a range in tiny text, but they main number they show should be the range if they want to avoid all of the &quot;is Zillow accurate&quot; articles.
 &gt; If you excluded trust sales and probate sales or family-to-family type Quit Claim transfers (where the property is transferred at a considerably lower value from its market value) shouldn&#x27;t the Zestimate reset to the exact amount of the property&#x27;s last sold price?<p>No, it should not.  My personal example:  When I bought my house, I bought it for 20% less than what Zillow said.  But Zillow would have been right on the money <i>if my house were in average condition</i>.  But it wasn&#x27;t, it was unliveable.  The first thing we did, before we moved in, was spend 9 weeks renovating it.  Even then we didn&#x27;t even bring it up to the local average.  It took us five years to finally finish all the work.<p>Zillow estimates assume the house is in average condition, because they have no way of knowing otherwise.
 Maybe.  Ours looked ok from the outside, was definitely worse on the inside.<p>Incidentally we bought it from the original owners who had owned for 55 years.  I wonder if there is a correlation between condition and how long the current owner had it.
 Customers has always been liable for these things. It&#x27;s only because of customer service nightmares that they aren&#x27;t. It&#x27;s really not much different except now they store has slightly better data.
 You can, but the point is that my estimate was based on average condition but my house was below average.  There is no way to edit your stuff to tell it that something is worse than average, only better than average.
 If the could publish their research other researchers would take their work in a new direction that they didn&#x27;t think of, which they could then bring back.<p>Basically they can&#x27;t provide that seed insight that motivates others.
 Since I can&#x27;t really say more than this:  there&#x27;s a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding in these comments. Don&#x27;t believe everything you read on the internet and don&#x27;t believe the conspiracy theories that this has anything to do with censorship or surpressing political (or any other) discourse.<p>It&#x27;s really just making the math less complicated.
 NIMBY is a huge problem.  I live in Cupertino, and we just defeated a couple of bills that would have allowed a nine story high rise of apartments right next to the freeway.<p>In this particular case most people opposed it because they didn&#x27;t want a nine story building.  I didn&#x27;t actually mind, even though I would literally live in it&#x27;s shadow.<p>But I voted against it too because the they were apartments, not condos, which means that they will send their kids to the schools but not pay for them.  Actually worse, their rent would have been higher because of the schools, but the schools would never see any of that money since apartments don&#x27;t pay parcel taxes, which is where a good chunk of the school funding comes from.<p>But my main point is that almost all of my neighbors opposed it because &quot;they don&#x27;t want high density housing to ruin the neighborhood&quot;.<p>I hate to break it to these people, but they said the same thing in the 1960s when <i>their</i> houses were being built.
 They pay a single parcel tax instead of one per home like the rest if us.
 It amuses me that you use ads to make money yet run and ad blocker...
 There&#x27;s lots of strategy discussion here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;generalsio&#x2F;top&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;generalsio&#x2F;top&#x2F;</a>
 Very proud of my first win, about five games in. ;)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;generals.io&#x2F;replays&#x2F;ryYQqycme" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;generals.io&#x2F;replays&#x2F;ryYQqycme</a><p>My wife was standing over my shoulder asking why I wasn&#x27;t doing chores, so she motivated me.  Also she gave me strategy advice.
 Use CloudFormation to do anything.
 My initial gut feeling is that you are moving out of the cloud for the wrong reasons.  Any performance gain you get with bare metal will be erased with the complexity of running a hybrid environment, namely moving data back and forth between your datacenter and the cloud, and also the mental overhead of programming to that model.<p>You also now need to gain internal expertise in networking, security, datacenter operations, and people who can rack and stack well.
 I have, it&#x27;s great.  Both are things that customers find amazing. :)
 My feeling is that asking for a site that works without Javascript is like asking for a car with a manual transmission.  Sure, it&#x27;s possible to get it, but it costs more and a lot of models simply don&#x27;t have it.  Why?  Because then you have to double your testing time -- you have to test every operation with and without (stickshift&#x2F;javascript).<p>Almost no one wants a JS free website (or a car with a manual), so it just isn&#x27;t worth the development effort to effectively build two versions of your car&#x2F;site.
 That&#x27;s true but it was just an example.  There are many other technologies where some people liked it the old way but most people are fine with the new way.<p>My main point, possibly distracted by the auto&#x2F;manual thing, was that testing time is doubled for every feature you add, and &quot;nojs&quot; is a feature like any other.
 Do you actually go to the brand stores though?  The other day I needed something that wasn&#x27;t on Amazon, so I bought it from the retailer directly.  And then I remembered why I love Amazon and Prime.  The ordering was terrible, and I had to wait 10 days for it to arrive.<p>With Amazon the purchasing is seamless.  That&#x27;s where they really win.  And they just keep making it easier.  Now I can order things with my voice (using Alexa).
 Availability barely matters though.  When I need a ride I open Lyft, see if they have a car nearby, and if the answer is no, I switch to Uber.  The switching cost is so low it&#x27;s negligible.
 Wait five years.  It&#x27;ll almost certainly happen.  The technology is solvable and lots of very big companies are spending billions to make it happen.
 Amazon will be willing to take the risk to avoid the trucking unions.  FedEx is pretty forward thinking and might also be willing to take the risk since they self insure.  Same with UPS.<p>Once those folks prove that it works and it&#x27;s safer than a human, the other companies will quickly fall as the insurance rates become lower than a human driven truck.
 I don&#x27;t know of anyone who was saying self driving is only five years away in 2011.  It was still a fantasy then.<p>Now we actually have working software and hardware, and real people are experiencing self driving.  I live in the bay area, but not a month goes by that I don&#x27;t see a self driving vehicle at some point.  And that&#x27;s not counting the Teslas that are autopiloting their way down the highway next to me that I don&#x27;t even know about.
 They&#x27;re more than just prototypes.  Their employees are using self-driving cars for their daily lives.  If you have a friend who works at Google (well Waymo now) who is using the car, you can get a ride.  Also, as a driver on Mt View roads, I have experience self-driving as someone behind and next to the vehicle.  They aren&#x27;t the &quot;robotic&quot; drivers you&#x27;d expect, but fit in pretty well.  They still show signs of being a robot (like the way they approach a turn with a biker is very mechanical) so you can tell it is self driving, but it clearly works.<p>And also there is Uber&#x27;s self driving fleet.  They are actually taking people from place to place who use the Uber app in a self driving vehicle.<p>In all cases someone is still at the wheel, but they aren&#x27;t doing anything other than monitoring and logging the ride and cases where the car didn&#x27;t behave like a &quot;normal&quot; driver.
 Do you actually have them in hand?  How is the sound quality?  What headphone did you use before the AirPods and are they better or worse in terms of sound quality?<p>I&#x27;m probably not switching soon because I love my Atomic Floyd&#x27;s sound quality (don&#x27;t get me started on their customer service) but I&#x27;m just curious how they did with the sound quality aspect, which feels like the most important thing to me.
 Do all humans stop when they see a ball?  Of course not.  Some of them miss it, some of them ignore it, some of them don&#x27;t make the connection.<p>The problem is people expect self-driving cars to be perfect on day one.  They won&#x27;t be.  But they are already safer than humans driving.
 That&#x27;s still true, if not for government regulation. :)  Wait for the new Republican admin to make nuclear cheap again.
 What limited use case though?  Driving around a populated city?  They can already do that.  And that covers a whole lot of use cases.<p>There are already autonomous Ubers taking people around Philadelphia and now San Francisco.<p>What limits do you think will exist?
 The idea of traffic reduction is twofold.  First is the fact that there can be a lot more carpools because you don&#x27;t need the owner of the car to be inconvenienced to make the carpool work, so there will be an overall reduction of cars on the road.<p>Second, and more importantly, when you have only autonomous vehicles on the road, you can make assumptions that all drivers are perfectly rational, and then your safety margins can be smaller, allowing closer travel at higher speeds.<p>I suspect in the future, much like how when we transitioned from horse drawn carriage to motor vehicle, at first they will share roads, but then there will be autonomous only roads where the speeds will be higher.
 Those traffic waves are in large part psychology though.  If every car traveled at the average speed you wouldn&#x27;t have them.  If even just 10% are self driving and have data on average speed for that section of road, they can not only avoid the wave but break them up, making traffic better for everyone.<p>I&#x27;ve even done this myself.  I see a standing wave in front of me and slow to what I know is about average for that time of time.  People cut in front of me as the gap gets bigger, but by the time I get to the choke point the wave dissolves as I pass through, and everyone behind me who was pissed about my slow speed is suddenly happy.
 Maximum breaking is still a possibility but you can do things like assume you won&#x27;t get cut off and you can safely ride someone&#x27;s blind spot and assume they will see you. Things like that.
 Oh boy.  I take it you&#x27;ve never actually moved datacenters before?  Last time I did it in 2007 it took weeks of planning, and the time before that in 1999 it was months of planning.<p>You don&#x27;t just get up and move.  You still have a ton of data to worry about.
 &gt; If disaster struck, are you saying it would take you weeks to get your site up and running again?<p>No, because I&#x27;m smart enough not to use bare metal. :)<p>But if I were running a full bare metal datacenter, then yes, it would.  Because I would either need to procure a whole bunch more bare metal or I&#x27;d have to move what I&#x27;ve got somewhere else.
 &gt; How many companies outside the Fortune 500 really have humongous quantities of data?<p>Well, just doing the reddit data in 2009 took many days to move, and that was with a planned migration.<p>And that was just text.  Nowadays with tons of monitoring and telemetry data and historical data, most companies probably have more than that.<p>Remember, the premise was that bare metal is better than the cloud because it&#x27;s easier to move, and my counter was that, no, that&#x27;s not at all true.
 You can&#x27;t just cp live data.  You have to migrate it with indexes and rebuild on the fly.<p>If you&#x27;re willing to take a downtime, sure you can do it in a few days.  But you still need servers to move it to.  Where do those new servers come from?  Are you going to buy a whole new set of servers?  How long does that take?<p>My point is that moving one datacenter to another isn&#x27;t easy and there is a lot of things to think about.<p>My point was that being in the cloud or not is barely relevant.<p>Also that dataset isn&#x27;t close to complete.  It was a lot more data than that.
 Read the OP I was responding to.  Their initial comment was about having to bail out of your provider, and their claim was that bailing out of your provider is easier when you&#x27;re on bare metal, so I countered that that isn&#x27;t true at all.
 Still cheaper than one good security engineer. :)
 These are basically the same rules for any distributed application, like something using microservices.  An app is just the edge node of a distributed system.<p>In any distributed system, the biggest cost is moving data between nodes, and therefore the biggest failure case is when data is moving slowly or not at all.  It&#x27;s a case you should always be prepared for.<p>If you write your app in a way that assumes the network is bad, which you should always do, whether it&#x27;s an app or two microservices, then you&#x27;ll have a more robust system.
 All mobile apps will be offline at some point.  Cell coverage doesn&#x27;t cover 100% of the planet yet.<p>The question is, how good of an experience will you be able to deliver when your client is inevitably in one of these places?
 You probably only thought that because you knew ahead of time.  Did you also notice the two rebel pilots who were CG?
 Thank you.  And honestly if you look at wikipedia&#x27;s notable deaths and IMDB&#x27;s, 2016 was actually a light year.  2015 and 2014 both had more per day.
 Yes but it was &quot;CGd&quot; onto another actor.
 Are you twins or just &quot;regular&quot; siblings?
 Taxis are replaced roughly every two years because they are driven so hard.  Passenger vehicles changing to autonomous won&#x27;t affect jobs, but taxis going autonomous will.
 Just out of curiosity, how old are you&#x2F;when did you attend college?  I ask because &quot;back in the day&quot; everyone knew.<p>If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.
 Larry loves flying cars.  I was visiting Google I want to say at least five years ago, and on that day they happen to have a &quot;flying car showcase&quot;.  Larry had invited companies with flying car prototypes to showcase their items, and they were for sale (for about $300K - $500K, well within the affordability range of the pre-IPO folks).  They were basically just cars with foldable wings, so they were more like cars that could turn into small planes.
 Yeah technically you could telnet in or do a remote X11, but you&#x27;d have to telnet to one of the machines in the lab, that someone was working on.  So their processes would get priority since they were on the console, and sometimes people were asses and would boot you out so they could compile faster.<p>Also we didn&#x27;t really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.

 The weather, mostly.  I grew up in Southern California, and moved to NorCal for college (and have been here ever since, so more than 1&#x2F;2 my life now).  Even the Bay Area gets a little too cold for me in the winter.<p>I love to visit the snow but most certainly don&#x27;t want to live in it.<p>Pretty much the only place I&#x27;d consider moving to is San Diego, the only major California city I haven&#x27;t lived in yet.
 I think this quote sums it up pretty well:  &quot;That&#x27;s the important takeaway here: these librarians didn&#x27;t monkeywrench their software for personal gain. They did it because they wanted to make the system better, to teach it how to weight the circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections and their patrons.&quot;<p>In other words, they felt like the data that the software was using to make a decision was incomplete.<p>A problem we are likely to see more and more as we rely more on algorithms.
 A somewhat related question -- why is the industry able to agree on a single standard for how data will move over a wire from a device to a display, but yet can&#x27;t come up with a single standard for doing it <i>without</i> a wire.<p>I can take my Mac laptop or my PC laptop and roll up to my TV and with a single cable make pictures and sound come out of the TV.<p>But yet neither one can talk to the TV without a cable, unless I get a special device (which is different for both and ironically uses the same cable).<p>And even worse, if I had a Samsung phone, <i>it could</i> connect to the TV wirelessly.<p>Why can&#x27;t we have a single wireless display standard?  Is there a technology problem I&#x27;m missing, or is it really just walled gardens?
 But the Cast system doesn&#x27;t send arbitrary bits to the TV.  It&#x27;s a protocol for handing off authorized streams which are then processed by the TV (or in most cases the device connected to the TV by, ironically, HDMI).<p>So it&#x27;s not really a method to stream arbitrary visual and audio data to a TV.

 I wanted to share this mostly to point out three things:<p>1) It&#x27;s interesting that we&#x27;ve gone from selling those little plastic overlays to full keyboards and<p>2) The fact that they want to do it for other professions, and all of them are about changing the function keys, is a pretty strong argument for Apple&#x27;s touch strip.<p>3) How does this actually work?  Is it basically hard coded macros?  Will it stop working when Word changes their API?
 It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1B problem.  The problem is that the &quot;body shops&quot; just file a ton of applications and then get the number they need because they don&#x27;t actually care who they get, they just need warm bodies.<p>And then there are the companies that actually need skilled engineers who pay really high salaries, but only apply for the people who they actually want.<p>So make it an auction instead of a lottery.<p>10,000 visas available this year?  Great, the 10,000 highest paid workers get in.<p>Edit:  It was pointed out below that this wouldn&#x27;t be fair to recent college grads, so perhaps it could be split on age or years of experience or something like that.<p>Another solution would be to automatically convert student visas to H1B after they graduate from an accredited institution.<p>You can see how this will help.  Check out the data[0].  Wipro, a standard Indian body shop, is paying their H1Bs a median of 69K.  Netflix is paying a median of 169K, with about 100 jobs over 200K (and a few above 500K).  Google and Microsoft are a little lower than Netflix.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;index.php?em=wipro&amp;job=&amp;city=&amp;year=All+Years" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;index.php?em=wipro&amp;job=&amp;city=&amp;year=All+Y...</a>
 Having someone who is cross trained is always better than not, but they will be harder to find and more expensive.<p>A frontend UI person who can write their own backends is great.  A backend developer who knows javascript and can build their own frontend is great.<p>A coder who manages their own cluster is great too, as is a sysadmin who who can write code.<p>And a developer who can do customer service, and therefore can fix a problem for every customer at once through modification of the application, is better than just someone who can answer the phone and make the customer happy.<p>All this is to say that someone cross trained will always add more value and will also cost a commensurate amount.
 If you claim to be an expert at more than two, then chances are you&#x27;re either 1) not really that good at any of them or 2) would make a great founder!<p>If you&#x27;re good in multiple areas the only way to really get paid what you&#x27;re &quot;worth&quot; is to start a company and use your skills to create an amazing product.<p>Because you&#x27;re right:  the market doesn&#x27;t value a true polygot.
 They really need to couple it with an automatic conversion of a student visa to a work visa upon graduating an accredited four year institution.  You would need some protections to make sure that the university isn&#x27;t just a funnel for back door visas, like requiring at least 50% enrollment by citizens or something like that, but it would be a great way to entice smart people to come here and stay here.  And in fact remove a lot of the stress of graduating for a foreign student.
 The WSJ is more agile than you think, and some of their devs read HN.  It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me at all that they built code specifically to break the workaround just for things posted to HN.
 A lot of them are also real estate investors.
 I still don&#x27;t understand why software startups get offices today.  I don&#x27;t see any value in pissing away half my capital enriching a landlord when there are perfectly good tools out there to collaborate without making everyone come to the same place every day.<p>And it&#x27;s even better for the environment if we don&#x27;t make everyone commute.<p>Can you imagine a world where all the software startups go fully remote and all that prime office space becomes residential?  You&#x27;d still need the restaurants and bars and whatnot, but instead of a bunch of office workers coming in at noon, you&#x27;d have a bunch of neighbors who are all taking a break from their jobs.  It would be glorious.
 Do you mean Jewish Orthodox, Christian Orthodox, or some other?  And can you describe the tradition?
 &gt; Collaborating IRL is more effective IMHO<p>I&#x27;ve done a lot of both, and what I&#x27;ve found is that in person works better if the company isn&#x27;t &quot;remote first&quot;.  Being one or a few remote people sucks, lots of stuff happens in the office without you.  But having the right tools for remote work makes it in some cases better.<p>But even in the case of an office, when everyone goes remote, suddenly it&#x27;s not so bad.<p>At reddit, since when I was there everyone else was just out of college, we always worked the last two weeks of the year from home because we had &quot;winter break&quot;.  So for those few weeks, we were a 100% remote company, and it worked out ok.  BUT, we didn&#x27;t make any big decisions or do any deep collaboration because even though everyone was remote we waited till we got back to the office, not because it was better but because we weren&#x27;t set up to do it remotely.<p>It&#x27;s really all about having good processes for remote work -- ie. as much async as possible.  And once you do that, even if you go to an office later, you&#x27;ve get better systems set up for tracking what happened and seeing history for new employees.<p>The worst thing for a new employee is having to get up to speed when all the meetings were in person and not recorded.
 I agree with you but not till the headsets get lighter.  I don&#x27;t think I want to wear that thing for even a few hours a day when all I&#x27;m doing is email and coding.
 Netflix and Facebook use P2P internally for large file distribution.<p>The big issue with P2P publicly is privacy.  A lot of people don&#x27;t want other people to know what they are doing.<p>Imagine for example youtube, or worse pornhub, using P2P.
 &gt; Wouldn&#x27;t that feedback be valuable to them?<p>The feedback is generally implicit in that if it causes problems for a lot of people then the test fails because you stop watching Netflix with that device.<p>That being said, if you call in to customer service they can remove you from the test if it turns out that&#x27;s actually the problem (sometimes the problem is that you are in two conflicting tests for example) and they do mark that down as feedback.  But they want you to call in so they can better understand and record the failure mode.<p>You don&#x27;t even have to call, you can do it via chat, if you&#x27;re not the kind of person who like to talk on a phone. :)
 So yes, that is the standard Libertarian answer.  But the problem is that it is in direct opposition to the philosophy of looking after oneself.  How can you give charity if you&#x27;re looking after yourself?<p>Charity in fact would deny someone else the ability to look after <i>themselves</i>, which would be denying them rights.<p>So charity doesn&#x27;t really fit with the morality of Libertarianism.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atlassociety.org&#x2F;commentary&#x2F;commentary-blog&#x2F;4271-charity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;atlassociety.org&#x2F;commentary&#x2F;commentary-blog&#x2F;4271-char...</a>
 The only thing that would have made it better would have been some music by James Horner.  Seeing that rocket land on a tiny ship in the ocean pretty much on the mark brought a tear to my eye.
 Actually, I wasn&#x27;t aware that was the name of the ship and was at first confused, but the proper use of english capitalization rules was my first clue it was a proper noun of some sort. :)
 Just because a few rockets explode doesn&#x27;t mean the whole program is doomed or wrong.<p>Many rockets exploded before the Russians or Americans got their first astronauts into space, and others exploded even afterwards.  That doesn&#x27;t mean those designs were failures.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...</a>
 That&#x27;s basically what it is.  The data is abstracted away so that when you do a write it just goes to both places as needed.
 They have a very strong web team.  In fact, they are contributors to things like D3 and other big JS libraries.
 The client proxies through their servers, so they probably just break your connection.
 This is handy, having a list of all the positions in one place with their filing deadline!<p>However, it is showing me a lot of &quot;Next Election&quot; times that were last year.  I guess the data needs some cleanup.<p>Also, President seems to be missing. :)
 12 of the 20 top ROI movies of all time were made after 2000:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;68552&#x2F;20-most-profitable-movies-all-time-based-return-investment" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;68552&#x2F;20-most-profitable-movi...</a>
 Lambda was designed to be functions that run in response to an event.  An item being put on an SQS queue is an event.  The clock ticking over to the next second is an event.  There is no reason why a lambda should not be triggered by these events.
 My aunt owns a children&#x27;s dental office and they have a bunch of older iPads out in the waiting area for the kids to use while they wait.  The iPads keep getting messed up so she asked me to fix them.  Here are the constraints:<p>1) They are used by other people&#x27;s kids so they should be content restricted<p>2) Older kids are mischievous so they should be protected from them too.<p>3) The staff at the office isn&#x27;t very technical so adding apps and refreshing the iPads needs to be very easy<p>Pointers towards apps or write-ups would be appreciated!  I tried Google first of course but couldn&#x27;t find any really good recent info -- everything seemed to be years out of date and suggest apps that either aren&#x27;t maintained anymore or are only available to education.<p>Thanks!
 Thanks!  I&#x27;ll have to look into it.  The reviews aren&#x27;t very promising. :(
 EDIT:  Read below, I am wrong.  I clearly didn&#x27;t know what I was talking about.<p>This is a great achievement in AI, don&#x27;t get me wrong, but the headline should read, &quot;AI beats the best four poker players we could find who were willing to play for a mere $200K&quot;.<p>All the actual best players play for millions and have a reputation to uphold.  They would never agree to do this.<p>They four guys they got are pretty good, and could certainly destroy me, but they aren&#x27;t the best of the best.<p>I&#x27;d love to see the bot play in the World Series of Poker for a few million.
 Anybody here?  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pokerdb.thehendonmob.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pokerdb.thehendonmob.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;</a><p>Or any of these people:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_World_Series_of_Poker_Main_Event_champions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_World_Series_of_Poker_...</a>
 You make a fair point.  I clearly didn&#x27;t know what I was talking about.  I edited my original post to reflect that.
 How closely do they check the undergrad degree?  Some second rate universities will trade you a degree for experience plus cash.  Most of them are non-accredited though.
 Finally!!  I&#x27;ve been saying for years that Google Cloud is technically superior to AWS but can&#x27;t capture the enterprise because they don&#x27;t have the sales team that enterprises need.  I&#x27;m excited to see you grow your team.
 The biggest issue is the courts.  I have a two year old, and her grandma lives one mile away.  I fully intend to let her walk there by herself when she is 6 or 7.  Crime rate data supports me in that this is perfectly safe.<p>But I&#x27;ll always have this nagging feeling in my mind of some local busybody parent (and there are a lot) reporting me to CPS and then having to defend my decision and hope that I get a data driven judge.
 In 1999, I worked in IT, and one of the graphs we had on our &quot;big board&quot; was a feed from the CA power grid, showing utilization vs peak generation capacity.  We had to keep an eye on it because if usage got to close to capacity, the state would start rolling blackouts, which might shut down the server room in our office, so we had to be ready and shut down any non-critical machines so that the rest could shut down after switching to the UPS.<p>It was not a good time.  It&#x27;s also important to remember that these things take a long time to build, so they were still being approved when solar was expensive and server rooms were still expanding.<p>I think it&#x27;s a good thing that they are over provisioned and anticipating future growth.  I would assume that generation will get closer to the demand curve over time as it levels out.
 At that time yes, but the point was being too close to peak generation is cause for concern, so having an overhead is a good thing and hard to predict in the timescales it takes to approve and build a power plant.
 The best advice I got was from a VC -- he said, &quot;I&#x27;m a salesman, my job is to sell you money&quot;.<p>If you look at it from that perspective, getting funding should be about as celebrated as the farm that buys a new combine or the factory that buys a new robot.  You&#x27;re celebrating a huge new liability on your books.<p>VC investment is something you buy that you hope will provide more value to your organization than it costs, just like any other capitol outlay.
 I made the assumption that they all come with loans and interest payments.
 A good documentary on the subject:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8o46HH-TfNY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8o46HH-TfNY</a><p>It&#x27;s called Born Rich, and it&#x27;s by Jamie Johnson, one of the heirs of the Johnson &amp; Johnson empire.  Ironically, he chose to do this endeavor despite not needing to work.
 It&#x27;s serverless in the sense that you (your entity, company, whatever) don&#x27;t have to admin any servers to make it work.
 It&#x27;s serverless because you (your entity, company, whatever) don&#x27;t have to admin any servers to make it work.
 I remember almost every one of these ads.<p>That thing that I remember most is that the ads were aimed at &quot;nerds&quot; and not consumers, so the specs were always front and center.  Everyone was really excited when the 486 first came out or the <i>Pentium</i>.  Or that there was more RAM or a bigger disk.<p>Nowadays I&#x27;m not even sure which Intel chip is the newest or fastest, nor do I care all that much.
 But if an app is not available on the app store, does that stop you from getting it?  That&#x27;s a consumer benefit but it has no corresponding benefit to the developer, so it&#x27;s unlikely to be a good argument for a developer to stick with the app store.
 Right but that is my point.  I don&#x27;t think anyone would be averse to buying an app outside the app store just because it doesn&#x27;t have that feature.<p>That could explain why someone chooses to buy it in the store if it is available both on and off the app store, but it&#x27;s unlikely that there is many (any?) people out there who refuse to install an app that isn&#x27;t in the app store.
 I suspect you are a tiny minority though and that the cut the app store takes doesn&#x27;t make up for losing a few folks like yourself.<p>However, I have no data to back up that claim, so I could very well be wrong.<p>I personally don&#x27;t feel like you do because I use burner cards and emails to solve the hacking and spamming problems, and apps still have to be sandboxed unless you turn off that safeguard explicitly for the app.
 But that&#x27;s my point.  I think there is only a tiny number of people for whom that particular consumer benefit is a make or break deal.
 When you get to work via carpooling, do you say, &quot;I drove to work&quot; or do you say, &quot;I carpooled to work&quot;?
 It&#x27;s a tough call, especially if your revenue model is ad based.  They ad networks only trust 3rd party analytics.
 Yes.  You can run your entire business without managing any servers using only SaaS products.
 This release shows the different philosophies of Google vs Amazon in an interesting way.<p>Google prefers building advanced systems that let you do things &quot;the old way&quot; but making them horizontally scalable.<p>Amazon prefers to acknowledge that network partitions exist and try to get you to do things &quot;the new way&quot; that deals with that failure case in the software instead of trying to hide it.<p>I&#x27;m not saying either system is better than the other, but doing it Google&#x27;s way is certainly easier for Enterprises that want to make the move, and why Amazon is starting to break with tradition and release products that let you do things &quot;the old way&quot; while hiding the details in an abstraction.<p>I&#x27;ve always said that Google is technically better than AWS, but no one will ever know because they don&#x27;t have a strong sales team to go and show people.<p>This release only solidifies that point.
 Oh yeah?  Which was which in that comparison?  I&#x27;m not familiar with that.
 Exactly my point.  I would say I personally prefer the Amazon way of forcing you to think about these things.
 Well, I&#x27;d say the &quot;old way&quot; is SQL with joins and schemas and transactions, and the &quot;new way&quot; is KV with eventual consistency.
 That&#x27;s a fair assessment.  But I&#x27;m assuming they will make it do more &quot;SQL&quot; things in the future.  I could be wrong though.<p>Either way, they are trying to abstract away having to think about eventual consistency with this offering.
 They claim to be device free, but yet everyone has their phones out texting and doing email as they wait in line.  I&#x27;ve <i>never</i> seen a border agent even say anything, much less march someone away.<p>As long as you aren&#x27;t taking pictures of the procedures they don&#x27;t really care.
 No it&#x27;s my backup I use when I travel because my main phone is expensive and I don&#x27;t want to risk breaking it.
 Yeah that&#x27;s all pretty accurate too. :)
 &gt; After a year there have been 0 Ops hires, it&#x27;s all Devs.<p>You say that like it&#x27;s a bad thing.  If you want DevOps to be successful, you don&#x27;t hire a &quot;DevOps team&quot;.  You hire a team of devs to make ops tools that are so easy to use that all the other devs can manage their own ops.<p>The idea is that doing &quot;good ops&quot; is so easy that everyone in the company does it.
 Sure. But you can usually find a Dev who used to do ops that can fill that role.
 I agree.  My point was that OPs complaint was about not having any ops hires, and I was saying that he shouldn&#x27;t need any.  He can find a crusty old sysadmin who figured out that making their job easier by coding is a good thing. :)
 Absolutely!  I always suggest to young folks who ask how to get into operations that they should set up a linux box and use it as their primary system.  There is no better way to rack up your own war stories than trying to use a linux box on a day to day basis.
 It has nothing to do with cumulative updates.<p>They push once a month because back in the day they pushed whenever they had an update, and enterprises really hated that because it meant that sometimes 1000s of computers were all out of commission running updates at the same time.<p>So MS and the enterprises agreed on a specific day of the month that updates would get pushed, so that the enterprises could plan accordingly as best fit their needs.<p>Some enterprises just run the updates that night and let everyone know to expect some slowness or downtime, and some of them only let the update run on their testing machines so they can validate the update in their environment before allowing it out to all the other machines.<p>But the main point is that the updates are predictable because that is what the customers asked for.
 If anything the cumulative patch is better, not worse.  It&#x27;s much harder to validate nine individual patches than a single cumulative update.<p>What happens if patch seven fails?  How about six?  How about six and seven?  There are an exponential number of failure cases with multiple patches vs one.
 So I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;m not at all familiar with LINQ and MSSQL, but from reading this, it looks like LINQ is just an ORM?<p>And if that&#x27;s the case, then of course it is easier and looks nicer than SQL -- that&#x27;s kind of the point of an ORM.<p>But I could show you a whole bunch of articles about Python and Ruby and Go ORMs too.<p>Seems like an Apples to Oranges comparison.
 But Linq literally generates SQL before sending it to the server:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;system.data.linq.datacontext.getcommand.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;system.data.linq.da...</a><p>Doesn&#x27;t that make it an ORM?
 &gt; Besides, GM building a self driving car feels like letting the people who make plastic grocery bags make doors for safes or something.<p>While it&#x27;s true that GM isn&#x27;t exactly known for their construction quality, they seemed to have somewhat turned that around recently, and have definitely embraced making good software.<p>Also, their self driving tech comes from the acquisition of Cruise (a YC company).
 If we did this in the US it would be terrible for me.  I still listen to the radio when I drive because I don&#x27;t have unlimited data on my phone for streaming.  My car is 16 years old so the radio doesn&#x27;t support digital and it definitely isn&#x27;t worth upgrading.  So I&#x27;d often be driving in silence which, while not the end of the world, would suck.<p>My wife&#x27;s car <i>does</i> have a digital radio, but on long trips around California there are often times when I can only get analog radio because they digital infrastructure just isn&#x27;t there.<p>Perhaps a forced change would make them upgrade, but I suspect there would be a lot more dead zones (because at least at the current power levels, the analog versions of the stations reach much further).
 &gt; Vultr and Lightsail don’t current offer this, but you could also spin up an instance that serve as a self-managed load balancer.<p>My understanding is that you can put an ELB in front of lightsail.
 It was FM and I have one so that I can listen to podcasts when I drive in foreign countries.<p>But it sure is a pain in the ass. :)
 I enjoy the curation of the music directors and the witty banter in the morning (despite the fact that a lot of it is from yesterday&#x27;s Reddit).<p>I can usually get six good stations in the Bay Area so commercials aren&#x27;t a problem. I just go to the next station.
 It&#x27;s not super clear from the writeup, but a big part of it is providing security notifications to users.  So when a backend system detects what looks like a suspicious account access, it can notify the user and ask them to confirm their action.  If they say, &quot;I didn&#x27;t do this&quot; than their account can be immediately locked down until the issue is resolved by talking to a person.
 Here is a program I wrote a while ago that is vaguely related to that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;61b2587b298af92adc5f985b11a20642" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jedberg&#x2F;61b2587b298af92adc5f985b11a2...</a><p>Basically, if you run &quot;watch .&#x2F;remaining.py&quot; on your command line, you can see a running countdown of how long is left in the day, month, year, and your life.
 Your analysis is suffering from the law of averages.  The US has <i>very high</i> upward mobility, as long as you were born in the right part of the country:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.equality-of-opportunity.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.equality-of-opportunity.org</a><p>But this is also exactly why Trump won -- to be President you must appeal to a broad coalition of voters, and the people with the lower mobility formed a stronger coalition.
 Remember Trello is separate from Fog Creek.  Until the acquisition, they were complementary products.  Now they are still complementary but being offered by a direct competitor.<p>So the question is how do the people who were left behind at Fog Creek feel about something that was spun out of them now going to make their biggest competitor stronger.
 This is great.  A long time ago I had this crazy idea that if we built data centers at the poles, we could solve a lot of problems.  Each one would sit idle 1&#x2F;2 the year, but you could power it with solar and cool it with the outside air.<p>Of course the big problem was latency.  It was one I couldn&#x27;t conceive of a good solution for.<p>This is <i>much</i> better.  It takes advantage of the same idea but you can park it right next to a population center and move it around the world fairly quickly as demand requires.<p>I love this idea!
 The pod is sealed, it doesn&#x27;t even have oxygen inside.
 Just to throw this out there as another possible optimization, if you find that you&#x27;re putting a big fat library into every function, one possibility is to run the library as its own lambda function.  You&#x27;ll be slowed down a bit by the network but it might be made up for by not having to constantly initialize the same thing.
 Yeah that was one of the many reasons it was a terrible idea. :)
 CS is the craziest of them all.  Those should be the easiest to replicate.  &quot;Here is the code, here is a manifest of the environment&#x2F;container&#x2F;disk image&#x2F;etc.&quot;  You should be able to take that and run it and get the same results.<p>Or are you saying that the code itself is the problem and that they&#x27;ve done the equivalent of &quot;return True&quot; to get the result they want?
 My feeling on swap is this:<p>1) If you&#x27;re ok with one machine dropping out of your system, you don&#x27;t need swap.<p>2) You should never build a system where losing a single machine is a problem.<p>3) Therefore, you should never need swap<p>4) Perhaps there is an exception for a desktop machine, since it&#x27;s doesn&#x27;t fit rule 2.
 To OP:  You site shouldn&#x27;t tell me I&#x27;m &quot;searching too much&quot; when I zoom the map. :)<p>I did a search for &quot;Cupertino, CA&quot; and it said there was nothing, so I started zooming in on Cupertino from the world map.  After I got to the city level it blocked me.<p>Otherwise, it looks cool.  I like the idea of using an app to get some real time data.
 Sure, dealing with legacy systems might mean messing with swap.<p>However, as pointed out elsewhere, if you&#x27;re hitting swap your performance will be so bad you might as well have lost the machine.
 To be fair, you were kind of a fool if you actually let Uber have your location at all times.  As soon as they announced that I blocked Uber from my location.  I only allow it when I take an Uber (which is almost never now).
 The &quot;Annual meeting&quot; section is the most entertaining.  It sounds like woodstock for capitalists.
 &gt; Major holders are still mega wealthy though.<p>EDIT:  I was wrong, that&#x27;s just what they are selling today, not the total value of their shares.  In which case, good for them!<p>It actually surprised me how little the founders got.  Their shares are worth about $400M each. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, but usually when you&#x27;re the cofounder of a 24 billion dollar company, you&#x27;re a billionaire. :)
 I&#x27;m curious if you could expand on:<p>&gt; AWS Lambda itself isn&#x27;t very good, for reasons that are specific to Lambda
 Oh I read the same article but I read it wrong.  I thought they meant that would be the total value of the shares they hold after the IPO, not just what they are selling today.  My bad.
 The monitoring system was not dependent on the thing it was monitoring.<p>The website that shows the public results of the monitoring, which is updates only by humans, depended on it.
 Looks like they are going to close with a market cap approximately three times that of Twitter...
 This is great, although I think these are some pretty advanced high schoolers!  It&#x27;s cool that they are learning this stuff.<p>However, rendezvous hashing is superior to consistent hashing because consistent hashing gets hotspots if you lose a node, unless you are using many virtual nodes (which then adds a large overhead).  Also, rendezvous hashing doesn&#x27;t require all the clients to know the state of all the nodes.<p>So maybe it would be good to update the lesson for rendezvous hashing. :)
 Here&#x27;s a video from a talk I did about rendezvous hashing:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;x-zwxuIb1lY?t=20m38s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;x-zwxuIb1lY?t=20m38s</a><p>Might at least give you a high level overview.  Then you can read this Python which is pretty straightforward:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikhilgarg28&#x2F;rendezvous&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;_rendezvous.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikhilgarg28&#x2F;rendezvous&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;_rend...</a><p>I think you&#x27;ll like it! :)
 &quot;The complexity and learning curve of vim will kill the project&quot;<p>&quot;The complexity and learning curve of Emacs will kill the project&quot;<p>&quot;The complexity and learning curve of LaTex will kill the project&quot;<p>&quot;The complexity and learning curve of Sendmail will kill the project&quot;  &lt;-- The only one that&#x27;s partially true and it took 35 years.
 Protip for all the younger workers out there:<p>HR is not there to protect you or help you.  They are there to protect the company.  Sometimes protecting the company happens to mean helping you, and sometimes the HR people are good people who look for solutions that makes everyone happy.  But don&#x27;t count on it.
 Sure, and MS Word is way easier to use than Vim or Emacs or LaTex, and has a much bigger market share, but it didn&#x27;t kill those projects.<p>Exchange is a lot easier to use than Sendmail, but didn&#x27;t kill that one either.<p>When you need power and flexibility, which is generally the case when your project gets to any reasonable size, then you go with the pro tool with the learning curve.
 It&#x27;s almost certainly a microwave or cordless phone.  I still forget sometimes and knock out my own wireless with a microwave.
 In 2004, shortly after Google launched Gmail, I put some ads on a friend&#x27;s website that had about 10 monthly visitors, using my gmail account.  The ads didn&#x27;t really bring in any money, and then we got a notice about &quot;fraudulent clicks&quot; where they took away the $2 we had earned.  So we took them down.<p>12 years later, my account is still blocked from signing up for Google ads.
 When people say, &quot;All the manufacturing has gone to China!&quot; show them this video, and say, &quot;No, they&#x27;ve gone to robots&quot;.
 Boston is actually trying to solve this.  They are redirecting the money they spend on homeless shelters towards paying rent for the homeless in otherwise vacant properties and providing lawyers for the owners in case the tenants cause any problems.
 The move was ethically challenged and morally bankrupt, but you have to admit it was a pretty clever hack.
 By inflating his numbers he was able to get funding from investors at better terms.  So basically he scammed his investors.<p>The difference between direct donation of services vs money to buy those services is that the direct donation would have actually lowered his order numbers and profitability, while the monetary donation raises those same numbers.<p>Also, by donating the money he gets to invest in his company tax free because the donation is a write off, gets filtered into the company which raises it&#x27;s value, but he doesn&#x27;t have to declare any capital gain, which he would have to do if he just put the money into the company (not to mention the tax on the money in the first place).<p>It&#x27;s all an accounting trick, but it&#x27;s all about the optics.
 &gt; first company policy would be to tell the candidates to tell why they were not hired in a polite way.<p>And your lawyers would <i>strongly</i> advocate against that.<p>In most cases they can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t tell you because it could open up legal liability.  If they say a reason for you, but then hire someone else to whom that reason also applies and you find out, you could sue them.  Or you could find a way to twist it into something against a protected class.  Too many ways for the company to get screwed.<p>That&#x27;s why they all say &quot;we&#x27;ve decided to go another way&quot; or something equally generic.
 I saw this and thought I was going crazy.  I could have sworn I just read it.  And I was right!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13672675" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13672675</a><p>You made the same comment on the Mulesoft IPO announcement. :)
 Yeah, it&#x27;s totally relevant to this discussion.  It just threw me off.<p>I happend to be looking at that 17 day old thread earlier to see what people said about the Mulesoft IPO to see if it was worth participating in.
 I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a coordinate hit.  I think one woman published her story, and then everyone else started digging deeper, and given their previous ethical issues, the stories, even the anonymous ones, are fairly easy to believe.<p>But to answer your question, Lyft, as well as cab companies all over the planet, would benefit immensely from people not using Uber.
 Except that, for the moment, paper note forgery is illegal but creating &quot;extra&quot; crypto coins doesn&#x27;t seem to be.
 Pretty sure this is almost entirely due to the fact that the videos must contain closed captioning and other accessibility options, which are too expensive to add.<p>It&#x27;s a tough spot to be in.  On the one hand, it&#x27;s great to make all the content accessible to handicapped folks, but on the other hand, is society better off not having this material at all or having it without accessibility?
 You don&#x27;t, that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s tough.  I truly feel bad for those who need these accessibility options and don&#x27;t get them, but I also feel bad for those who need this content and don&#x27;t get it.  It&#x27;s really a no-win situation.
 &gt; They just didn&#x27;t notice or didn&#x27;t care.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s either one.  If I&#x27;m a prof and I want to make my lectures more accessible, I&#x27;m going to put them online, and be glad that 95% of the population can see it.  If I have time and budget, maybe I&#x27;ll hire someone to caption it.  But still, I&#x27;d rather have it out there for 95% of the world to see than not at all.<p>&gt; In fact I am surprised that KLH&#x27;s auto-captioner didn&#x27;t already do this since the letter says this material is on youtube.<p>They were sued because the auto-captioner was wrong enough to be considered harmful.
 That&#x27;s because so far he&#x27;s been right.  Every news outlet seems to want to report on a &quot;signal hack&quot; and will go to great lengths to twist words to make it sound like that happened.
 We have three IPs, because my wife loves them.  Pretty much everything she makes is a one pot meal that is easily freezable.  She gets most of the recipes from various IP groups on Facebook.  Perhaps you&#x27;ll want to find those to get what you want.<p>She ends up not having to do a lot of experiments because the other people in the group do it and report back.  She&#x27;s actually started doing some reporting back too.
 We have multiple rings in the house, one designated &quot;sweet&quot; and the other &quot;savory&quot;, so that we can avoid this problem.
 I agree with your overall point but<p>&gt; If it&#x27;s safe enough for Western Europe, it&#x27;s probably safe enough for Americans.<p>Tell that to all the thalidomide kids in Europe.  That&#x27;s probably the best example of where the FDA saved a lot of lives.
 Yeah but those companies sell their drugs for a lot more in the US than elsewhere.<p>Basically, because the US is wealthy and much less regulated, drug companies from around the world make up a lot of their costs by selling things for more here, especially since private insurers have to pick up the tab in most cases.
 &gt; but on the other hand it makes me think of compelling you to give up encryption keys because well, they&#x27;re not &quot;papers&quot; like the 4th amendment refers to (an argument which HAS been used before).<p>That makes me think, what if I wrote the keys down on a piece of paper, and then told you I always copy it from the paper because I don&#x27;t remember it.  Then would I be protected by saying that my papers are protected and therefore so is the key?
 As an interesting aside, the CHP hates HOT lanes because they are very difficult to enforce.  My friend is CHP and he says it&#x27;s hard to read the lights as the cars pass and then make sure the car has a carpool in it if they skipped the toll.
 They set a max price on those lanes because otherwise poor people would get stuck in even worse traffic while rich people would be able to move quickly.  That&#x27;s already true but they are trying to minimize the disparity between rich and poor.
 They work a little better in LA than elsewhere, but yeah.  In LA they have solid lines, so if you see a cop and jump out, they can nail you for jumping the line.<p>Anywhere else, they can only nail you for the carpool violation if they catch you, but you aren&#x27;t as suspicious as someone jumping a double yellow.
 You could also make the argument that a rich persons time is worth less because they can afford to hire people to do what poor people have to do themselves, like clean the house or go shopping or drive their kids around. They are also more likely to have a job that can be done from home.
 Multi-cloud is a pipe dream.  It&#x27;s only slightly worse than hybrid cloud, which is also terrible.<p>Sure, you could use multiple clouds for a couple of small things, but it&#x27;s all about the data.<p>To properly do multi-cloud (or hybrid cloud), you need to have the right data in the right place at the right time, or you need to have all your data in both places at all times.<p>The latter will cost you a fortune to maintain.  Netflix does it across regions because their cost of operations, including keeping multiple copies of all the data, is lower than the cost of downtime, but that isn&#x27;t likely to apply to most people.<p>The former can only work if you are <i>really</i> disciplined about keeping the right data in the right place, or if you have a data abstraction layer that is smart  enough to put the right data in the right place at the right time (I&#x27;m not aware of the existence of such a product or that anyone is even working on such a thing).<p>The other problem with multi-cloud is that your software has to be built to the lowest common denominator.  In other words, you can only use features that all your providers provide, again unless you go back to having software smart enough to do the right thing in the right place at the right time.<p>It&#x27;s a nice thought but I think we&#x27;re years away from viable multi-cloud.
 I agree, there needs to be a product for this to work.<p>So far that product doesn&#x27;t exist and isn&#x27;t even a twinkle in someone&#x27;s eye as far as I know.  Everyone is focusing on &quot;running the same infrastructure everywhere&quot; but I haven&#x27;t seen anyone focus on putting the right data in the right place.

 It&#x27;s things like this that I use to point out why raising the minimum wage will only hurt -- because now this robot is cheaper than a human, so instead of getting a higher wage, the job is just gone.<p>Those displaced people need direct assistance, not an increased minimum wage.
 That&#x27;s a great methodology!  But you do you avoid your customers lowballing their numbers since they know you&#x27;re using the information to set the price they will eventually pay?
 Places I&#x27;ve worked have provide life, health, AD&amp;D, pet, dental, vision, and lawyer insurance.  So yeah, it&#x27;s a lot more than health.<p>But I still agree with you -- we need to figure out a way to separate insurance from a job.  Although I don&#x27;t like the idea of just precluding them from offering it.  If a company wants to offer insurance we shouldn&#x27;t stop them.  We just need to make it so they have little advantage to do so.
 &gt; But ... yeah ... in Estonia it just rocks. The ID-card based functionality for banking, digital signatures, tax ... just awesome.<p>That&#x27;s what happens when your head of state has a computer engineering degree and used to work on databases before going into politics. :)
 Holding transit money hostage to punish the state for other transgressions is petty and authoritarian.  Instead, step up enforcement of the immigration issue and keep the train issue separate.<p>And before you scream, &quot;sanctuary state!&quot;, either decide immigration is a state issue or not, but don&#x27;t say it&#x27;s a federal issue and then rely on states to enforce it.  That&#x27;s a pretty typical MO for the federal government -- demand that the states enforce things that cost money but don&#x27;t actually provide money for it.
 Yup.  The train <i>is</i> a huge boondoggle, mostly because they are building it backwards.  Building the middle part where no one lives is easier and will make a lot of jobs in a lot of poor areas, but then it is just a secret welfare program, not a useful piece of infrastructure.  Let&#x27;s just provide welfare if that&#x27;s the goal, and then build some useful infrastructure like electrified tracks in the Bay Area and bullet train to Stockton that people might actually ride and then use those fares to <i>pay for the rest of the train</i>.
 Because no one will ride that section.  If you start on the ends people will actually pay money to ride the train, which then funds construction on the other part of the train and provides steady jobs instead of only temporary ones.<p>If you want to provide welfare to people without jobs, then provide welfare.  Don&#x27;t provide secret welfare and call it a high speed train.
 The initial plan was to go from Stockton to Fresno.  They only extended it to San Jose when people complained about how useless that would be.
 Actually you&#x27;re the one pedaling in alternative facts.  The initial operating segment was going to be Stockton to Fresno until people complained about how stupid that was, and then they added San Jose.
 That dividend would be federally taxable income. :)<p>I mean I guess they could keep taking more and more money from you every year and giving more and more back, but generally any money they give you would be subject to federal taxes, unless they give it and take it all away again every year, just to give it back again.<p>It would be a huge headache but I suppose it could work.  Especially if they made it like a voluntary tax overpayment or something.<p>Edit:  Also, unless you have it all sitting around in cash, any money you spent during the year on non-deductible things you&#x27;d have to pay tax on.
 See the bottom of the page where he talks about the link to their internal (previously top secret) CIA crypto standards, which is probably one of the few cryptos that is actually any good (most of it was done with the NSA and just talks about which protocols are secure).
 Pretty sure that&#x27;s the plot of Sneakers.
 reddit&#x27;s is open source and available for anyone to see.  Knowing the algorithm doesn&#x27;t help you game it in this case -- it&#x27;s knowing the spam controls that do, and those are secret.
 Things I would do if I were a better JS programmer:<p>1. Figure out how many BPM I need to to have the music simulation generate digits at the same rate as the visual simulation.<p>2. Figure out how to press both start buttons at the same time.
 Awesome!!  I knew I couldn&#x27;t be the only one with that idea.
 Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise.<p>Google&#x27;s sales method is, &quot;There&#x27;s the docs, good luck&quot;.  Enterprises don&#x27;t like that.  They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out for lunches and dinners.<p>So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how to enterprise, and in fact it&#x27;s fairly counter-cultural for them.<p>If they learn to sell to the enterprise, I agree with you.<p>But right now, almost all the money in cloud is with the enterprise, and right now Google has no idea how to address that market.
 I did attend briefly, and I got a run down from some enterprise folks.  They said Google appears to be thinking about making an effort towards enterprise, but they aren&#x27;t there yet.<p>Also, they don&#x27;t have a sales force like Amazon.  A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product.   They are still trying to solve human problems with engineering, and sales is a tough nut to crack for a computer, even a really strong AI. :)
 Did they succeed?
 This is a fair assessment.  It will be interesting to see how it plays out now that they have a semi-complete enterprise offering.
 Selling GSuite is very different than selling compute.  Besides being SaaS vs. infrastructure, the GSuite contracts are tiny compared to enterprise infrastructure.  If a company with 100,000 employees paid list price for GSuite monthly, that would only be $1,000,000&#x2F;mo, which is peanuts for an enterprise contract.  Especially since they would probably get a huge bulk discount.<p>What I mean by counter-cultural is that at Google, they try to solve problems with computers instead of humans.  It&#x27;s worked really well for them so far, but it won&#x27;t work for selling huge enterprise contracts.  Yes, they have spun up a small support and sales team, but they will need to grow it a lot to support lots of large enterprises.  Also, in companies that cater to enterprises, the sales team drives the engineering roadmap, or it is at least a collaboration.  From talking to folks in Google, it seems that they don&#x27;t really allow the sales team any input in to product cycles or technology.<p>And I attended their cloud conference and I&#x27;m very aware of their customer base vs. AWS.  Their customers would all be considered fairly small to AWS, with the exception of a few big players.<p>Edit:  An additional anecdote, I saw firsthand how they support an enterprise install of thousands of GSuite users.  For the most part, it was &quot;there&#x27;s the docs, good luck&quot;.  Sometimes they would assign an engineer, who would never come on site, to tell us that what we want is impossible.
 That&#x27;s not how enterprise sales cycles work though.  They don&#x27;t call you, you call them.  Even when they want the hot new thing, they shoot an email off and say, &quot;please have a salesperson here to make a presentation on why we should switch to you&quot;.<p>And at the moment, AWS has them beat hands down on governance.  It&#x27;s one area where GCP still needs to play catch up, and it&#x27;s really important for enterprises.  I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll get there, but they aren&#x27;t there yet.
 I&#x27;m not saying Google can&#x27;t do it, and I agree that they did it right (build the technology first).  What I&#x27;m saying is that there isn&#x27;t strong evidence that they are getting good at enterprise sales yet.  If they can do it, then they will be very successful.  I&#x27;m starting to see signs that they might be doing it right, but the jury is still out.
 I did, yes.  They are starting to show signs of learning how to sell to an enterprise.  If they get it right, they will do well.  I&#x27;m just saying the jury is still out.
 I&#x27;ve been paying <i>very</i> close attention to what they are doing and attended Google Next.  I know what they are doing.  They seem to be doing the right thing, but the jury is still out.  They still haven&#x27;t proven they are good at the enterprise.
 Morality?
 I&#x27;m not sure if your comment is a joke or not, but it&#x27;s not a bad idea.  Find one of the few remaining Gros Michels, edit it so that it is resistant to Fusarium, and start growing them again.<p>And the same could be done with other monoculture crops.  It then becomes an arms race between scientists and viruses.
 How do you deal with the issue that most mobile apps have a baked in security key for their private API?  Or am I being naive to think that most apps have that?
 &gt; All they can do is pile on layers and layers of abstraction to make it painful. They can&#x27;t make the private API truly private if it requires something shipped with the client.<p>This is totally true, but the original premise was to do it just with a MITM.  I was being generous and assuming most apps do dynamic generation of their keys.  I&#x27;m probably wrong now that I think about it.
 I guess I was being generous in my assumption that the apps will generate keys dynamically, making that not useful for a repeat attack as it were.  I&#x27;m probably wrong though, most apps probably use a single baked in key.
 I&#x27;ve had my house in Northern California for 8.5 years, and I&#x27;ve mowed the lawn perhaps five times, and I never water it.  Normally I just let it do it&#x27;s thing.<p>In the winter and spring it&#x27;s full and green with beautiful white and yellow wildflowers, and in the summer and fall it&#x27;s a nice desertscape with a few small shrubs.<p>With all the rains this year the green is lasting a lot longer than usual.
 The service was operating normally, you just weren&#x27;t architected to handle a common failure case.  Don&#x27;t blame Amazon, they warned you in advance.  They specifically say that they don&#x27;t consider it a problem if the problem is isolated to one zone, because your app should be able to work across all zones in a region seamlessly.<p>I&#x27;ll be the first to tell you that their dashboard underestimates impact, but in this case it was totally accurate.<p>The system was working normally -- ie. you could still use us-west-1 without issue if you were in another zone.
 It&#x27;s probably not wise to rely on your provider&#x27;s monitoring for such critical things.  As AWS has proven, their alerts are slow, and even if they weren&#x27;t, they aren&#x27;t monitoring the very specific thing you need.<p>Your best bet is to monitor your own systems, and have enough monitoring in place to tell you that one zone is unavailable without having to rely on AWS to tell you.<p>Their dashboard has no effect on their bonuses BTW (at least it didn&#x27;t the last time I asked), but it is slow to update because it is purposely gated by a human so as not to cause false positives, and that human has to manually verify the problem before reporting it, which takes time.
 &gt; I don&#x27;t know what super heavy duty high end washer&#x2F;dryer you could get these days for $4500, but I bet you could find one that would last 50 years.<p>I&#x27;m hoping the Electrolux I spent $3000 on 5 years ago lasts another 45.  That would be great.  So far so good though.  No rust, no leaks, and the only problem we had to call a service person for turned out to be the fault of our electrician, not the appliance.
 HP recently started a new program where you can buy a printer subscription.  You no longer have to pay for any ink -- the printer phones homes and orders new ink whenever it gets low.<p>Instead you pay by the page.<p>Apple did a similar thing last year with their phone rental program.<p>If appliance makers are really worried about recurring revenue, maybe they should explore the subscription program.  It would then be in their best interest to make things that last longer, since they would have to replace broken equipment sooner, but at the same time, if they make it last long enough, they can get more revenue out of that with a  subscription than without it, and it&#x27;s much smoother revenue.
 Sort of.  The &quot;zones&quot; are just logical constructs.  They can be one building or many tied together with fat fiber links.  And you&#x27;re right that my &quot;A&quot; and your &quot;A&quot; may be different.  They are randomly assigned the first time you launch a resource.<p>Also, there are decommissioned zones that new accounts can&#x27;t see but old ones can if they&#x27;ve ever launched something there before (if they haven&#x27;t then that zone letter will be reassigned to a new zone with no one the wiser).  Typically they won&#x27;t let you launch new things in that zone, so it&#x27;s in your bet interest to move out of it, lest your resources get out of balance.<p>Edit:  Oh and old accounts can always see new zones as far as I know.  They just show up as new letters.  But it&#x27;s rare that they add new zones -- usually they just make old zones bigger.
 &gt; but only to maintain the current imaginary valuation. Where&#x27;s the upside?<p>If you were offered the job of President of Uber, say at the same salary you make now, would you take it?<p>I&#x27;m sure a lot of people would say yes.<p>Success or fail, you would now have &quot;President of a multi-billion dollar company&quot; on your resume.
 &gt; they need driverless cars. That&#x27;s ten years away<p>Maybe in the US.  But Uber is everywhere.  Given their penchant for &quot;bending&quot; the law, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they start deploying driverless cars in places with more lax regulation, which will 1) help their bottom line, 2) give them more training data, and 3) prove it works to make regulatory issues easier in the US.<p>That&#x27;s of course if they can keep their tech, which seems less likely given the waymo suit.
 Us-east actually has five zone, but one of them was decommissioned many years ago, so unless your account is very old, you can only see four.<p>As far as I know, that&#x27;s the only zone that&#x27;s ever been fully decommissioned.
 Millimeter scans only happen in US airports -- they&#x27;re banned in ~Europe~ the EU and not really used anywhere else.<p>Also you&#x27;re very wrong.  You can defeat a millimeter scan just by placing the contraband between your palms while your hands are clasped above your head.
 You&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s just the EU.  I fixed my comment.<p>The point is their technology is terrible and they are easy to defeat, as has been proven many many times.<p>They are security theater and they were only put in place because the guy in charge of what scanners were allowed at US airports happened to have a financial interest in the company that made the millimeter wave scanner.
 &gt; but the mm wave devices are not ionizing radiation<p>The science is still out on whether it&#x27;s harmful or not.  I got TSA pre so I can just avoid it, but before that I always opted out.
 Rapiscan, the maker of the device, was a client of Michael Chertoff&#x27;s consulting company, and he was the head of Homeland Security when the scanners were put in place by his department.
 So does Netflix.
 &gt; silicon valley white<p>Interesting term.  Does that basically mean Asian (both eastern and southeastern) and White?
 Did you know that 100% of the almonds consumed in the US are grown in California, and 70% of all almonds consumed <i>worldwide</i> are grown here?  It&#x27;s a multi-billion dollar industry in California.<p>Sadly, it&#x27;s not so black and white to just say &quot;cut &#x27;em off!&quot;
 Actually it&#x27;s the Secret Service that tracks money laundering.  Contrary to popular belief, that is actually their main job -- protecting the currency of the United States.  Protecting the President is just their side job.<p>You&#x27;re partly right though -- up until 2003 they were part of the Treasury department, but they were re-orged into DHS when it was created.<p>But your point is still valid.
 &gt; who knows why they have multiple overlapping ones.<p>Different ad networks use different provider&#x27;s numbers to determine how much to charge for ads based on which traffic tier you&#x27;re in.  If you don&#x27;t use them all, then you can&#x27;t sell on that network, or you get a really bad CPM.  And none of them seem to trust Google&#x27;s numbers except Google, even though those are far more accurate than any other provider.
 What makes you think it isn&#x27;t privately owned?  It&#x27;s true that the domain can&#x27;t be bought, but you still hit a Verizon server when you go there.<p>And if you&#x27;re using an iDevice, you might as well go to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;captive.apple.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;captive.apple.com</a>, which was designed for the purpose of authenticating to hotspots and Apple already knows who you are anyway. :)
 This is really brilliant.  It&#x27;s the first step in serving the unbanked or underbanked.  The next step after this is to allow people to mail their checks to Amazon and have the full amount show up as a balance in their Amazon Cash account, thereby skipping the fees check cashing places charge.
 jpeg wasn&#x27;t invented until 1991, so probably not. :)  Most likely they were GIFs.
 I&#x27;m going to have to respectfully disagree with a big chunk of this article.  Documentation is generally a waste of time unless you have a very static infrastructure, and run books are the devil.<p>You should never use a run book -- instead you should spend the time you were going to write a run book writing code to execute the steps automatically.  This will reduce human error and make things faster and more repeatable.  Even better is if the person who wrote the code also writes the automation to fix it so that it stays up to date with changes in the code.<p>At Netflix we tried to avoid spending a lot of time on documentation because by the time the document was done, it was out of date.  Almost inevitably any time you needed the documentation, it no longer applied.<p>I wish the author had spent more time on talking about incident reviews.  Those were our key to success.  After every event, you review the event with everyone involved, including the developers, and then come up with an action plan that at a minimum prevents the same problem from happening again, but even better, prevents an entire class of problems from happening again.  Then you have to follow through and make sure the changes are actually getting implemented.<p>I agree with the author on the point about culture.  That was absolutely critical.  You need a culture that isn&#x27;t about placing blame but finding solutions.  One where people feel comfortable, and even eager, to come out and say &quot;It was my fault, here&#x27;s the problem, and here&#x27;s how I&#x27;m going to fix it!&quot;
 &gt; Automation is the ideal, but is costly, and itself requires maintenance.<p>I would contend that the cost of automation is about the same as the cost of documentation plus the cost of having to manually do the work over an over.  It&#x27;s just a cost borne up front instead of over time.  But to your point in the article, you have to have a culture that supports bearing that up front cost.<p>&gt; Most of the steps we had to perform did not lend themselves to automation, also.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how that is possible?  Could you give an example of a task that can&#x27;t be automated?
 &gt; Your arguments contradict themselves - if the infrastructure is changing then there&#x27;s little point spending the time automating your response to its failure.
 Most attempts I&#x27;ve seen to automate tasks flounder for this reason.<p>If everything in your infrastructure is deployed with code, then automation is simply the act of making sure the infrastructure matches the deployment described in the code.  It&#x27;s true that automation is just as difficult if deployments are manual.  Then remediation becomes changing the deployment code to fix a previously unknown problem, instead of manually fixing a problem.  This then gains you the advantage of the problem being fixed in perpetuity.<p>So they aren&#x27;t in contradiction if your remediation and deployment are the same process, because then it by definition is always up to date.<p>I guess I should add the caveat that deployment should be quick enough to solve problems via redeployment.
 &gt; &quot;Check the logs for service X (they&#x27;re here &lt;link&gt;) and look for anything related to the issue&quot;<p>I have a long missive about how logs are useless and shouldn&#x27;t be kept, but that&#x27;s for another time.  I&#x27;ll summarize by saying that if you have to look at logs, then your monitoring has failed you.<p>&gt; If the user impact is high, write an update to the status page detailing the impact and an estimated time to recovery&quot;<p>I guess technically that would be a step in a runbook, that&#x27;s fair.  Although in my case that was left to PR to do based on updates to the trouble tickets. :)<p>&gt; The value of a runbook is that it can make use of human intelligence in its steps<p>I&#x27;d rather human intelligence be spent on triage by reading the results of automated diagnosis and coding up remediation software than on repeating steps in a checklist.<p>Sure, there are uses for checklists of things to check, but even that should be automated through the ticket system at the very least, which I no longer consider a runbook, but I guess some might still consider that a runbook.
 First we have to make the distinction between logs and metrics.  Logs are unstructured or loosely structured text, whereas metrics are discrete items that can be put into a time series database.<p>If you emit metrics as necessary to a time series database, then you should be able to build alerting based on the time series metrics.  Your monitoring systems should be good at building alerts based on a stream of metrics and visualizing the time series data.<p>Sometimes you might have to look at the visualizations to find something, but ideally you then set up an alert on the thing you looked at so you have the alert for the next time it happens.  A great monitoring system lets you turn graphs into alerts right in the interface, so if you&#x27;re looking at a useful graph you can make an alert out of it.<p>Sometimes logs can be useful, but only after your monitoring system has told you which system is not behaving, and then you can turn on logs for that system until you&#x27;ve solved the problem, but you shouldn&#x27;t need access to old logs, because if the problem was only in the past, then it&#x27;s not really a problem anymore, right?  If you have an ongoing problem, then maybe have the logs on for that service while you&#x27;re investing that problem, but then turn them off again.<p>But having a ton of logs always generating and being stored tend to be fairly useless in practice with a good time series database at hand.
 We were doing this with a team of sometimes one or two reliability engineers, but we were cheating, because our company culture meant that the engineers who built the systems are responsible for keeping them running, so they would invest their engineering time in fixing the problems along with us.<p>I personally found that runbooks were even worse for small size teams (like our four person reddit team) because they would get out of data even quicker than at the bigger places due to the rapidly changing environment.<p>I wrote down thread that if all of your deployment is automated than it is much easier to automate remediation, because you just change your deployment to fix the problem, as long as you can redeploy quickly.
 &gt; What is your source material for automated diagnosis? i.e., how was it trained?<p>Incident reviews.  If something happened that wasn&#x27;t covered, then it is added as an outcome of the incident review.<p>&gt; Are there cases where an automated diagnosis could not be made for an incident and if so was manual recourse possible?<p>For sure.  Manual recourse was to dig in and figure it out either with the command line or the monitoring system or whatever else.<p>&gt; How would you retrain the &#x27;diagnosing app&#x27; to handle the new case?<p>In most cases the &quot;diagnosing app&quot; was a dashboard on the monitoring system, with a set of relevant graphs, so you would add a new graph.  There was also a tool that correlated graphs, so you could add a new graph and correlation.
 &gt; I have to say, you have a tendency on HN to chime in from the peanut gallery and be a bit unrelenting and even combative because jedberg does things differently.<p>That&#x27;s a fair critique, and thank you for pointing it out.  I try to always back up what I say with the reasons for what I say, but sometimes I get lazy or don&#x27;t have time to write it all out.  I too worry about folks who speak in absolutes, although in this case I happen to actually believe it.<p>The medium isn&#x27;t always the best way to have a deep technical discussion unfortunately.
 What about the cost of moving the logs to storage, and the infrastructure required to move them around and put them in storage?  Especially if you have a micro services architecture.<p>Also the cost of the infrastructure to search the logs and view the logs.
 Well, ideally the person who wrote the code is fixing it, and should know how it works. Or at least a close teammate.<p>But if you don&#x27;t have that luxury, then it means you&#x27;re hoping that the documentation is up to date, but chances are that if you don&#x27;t have enough resources to have on call coverage from someone very familiar with the area that&#x27;s having a problem, then there is a good chance they didn&#x27;t have time to write or update documentation.<p>So ideally the person who wrote it has it in their head, or you&#x27;re figuring it out on the fly and hoping you have good comments in the code and good metrics.
 &gt; And your position is not that logs are useless (&quot;turn on logs for that system until you&#x27;ve solved the problem&quot;), but that retaining logs are useless - quite a significant difference between the two.<p>That&#x27;s an important distinction, one that I agree with, and I should make clearer.<p>Logs do have a purpose, but I&#x27;m not sure that retaining them does.<p>Sure, for a very small shop, throw them on a disk, use awk, sed, grep, and perl to look through them, and call it a day.  But once you get to the point of &quot;spinning up a cluster of log servers&quot; or something like it, I&#x27;d say you&#x27;re probably better off investing in monitoring instead.
 My advice would be to push as hard as you can to change the culture, or you&#x27;ll be drowned.  Engineers will not make it a priority to fix anything that causes outages because they will be evaluated on feature velocity, not uptime.<p>If you can make the company culture focus on uptime, or get engineers involved in remediation, then you&#x27;ll be better off.<p>If you can&#x27;t do that, try to at least push for the Google model:  The engineers are responsible for uptime of their product until they can prove that it is stable and has sufficient monitoring and alerting, and then they can turn it over to SRE, with the caveat that it will go back to the engineers if it gets lower in quality.
 Ultima 4 was the pinnacle of the series.  It&#x27;s also very different than most RPGs, it&#x27;s about figuring out the virtues of the world and sticking to them.  I&#x27;d suggest that one.
 &gt; I&#x27;m familiar with Banksy, but who is Selena?<p>Probably Selena Gomez:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;hollywood&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;selena-gomez-instagram-most-followed" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;hollywood&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;selena-gomez-ins...</a>
 Look at the context.  The previous paragraph talks about how kids are making a name for themselves on Instagram and Youtube instead of on the streets.  Selena Gomez made a name for herself on Instagram and Youtube.
 I attempted to do taxes for my startup C corp over the weekend.  I figured it would be easy since I just started and only had one check and a few expenses, but even using tax software, I kept running into questions I had to look up what they meant.  I&#x27;m pretty familiar with tax law for personal taxes, but the C corp just stumped me.<p>So what do most people use?  Is there a good online accounting&#x2F;taxes service that I just can&#x27;t find, or does everyone just have a local person that they trust?
 Deleware Corp headquartered in California.
 I live in the Bay Area and my wife is a teacher.  I know a lot of Bay Area teachers.  And the ones that live anywhere close to the school they work at are all married to engineers, without exception.  That&#x27;s the only way they can afford to live near school.
 It&#x27;s too bad they couldn&#x27;t figure out how to generate their own release forms!
 Your reasoning is excellent. The only problem is that Apple doesn&#x27;t have sufficient drive, talent, or reputation, in the cell phone industry to actually make and sell a good cell phone.
 No employee wants to leave Motorola to work at Apple. No consumer wants to buy a phone made by Apple. Hopefully Steve and the gang won&#x27;t blow through too much money before they accept that.
 They&#x27;re pretty good at making computers. They might want to focus on keeping that reputation in the meantime.
 It means &quot;readily convertible&quot;.  So stocks, mutual funds, other currency reserves, bonds, etc.  Things that if you needed cash right now you could quickly turn into cash.
 COOs don&#x27;t make good CEOs in general.  They are great at executing someone else&#x27;s vision, but not great at coming up with one on their own.
 Ballmer did a great job keeping the ship going for sure.  He just failed to turn into the wind. :)
 Eating meat.  I think in 50 years we&#x27;ll be looked back on as savages for killing animals to eat them.  I should note here that I am in no way a vegan or vegetarian and eat animals on a daily basis.  But I&#x27;m still pretty sure we&#x27;ll look back on ourselves in shame for doing it once lab grown meats are commonplace.
 Look at something like slavery. We look back in shame now but back then it was just the norm as it had been since ancient times.
 Man I&#x27;m dense. It was only as I dropped my tax forms in the mail just now did I realize why he chose today to release this.

 As I backer I got the exact same text in an email as on the website, but my reading says no refunds.
 Wow, good catch.  Even as a backer I didn&#x27;t realize this.  Sadly I can&#x27;t edit the title, so hopefully dang will take care of it.
 In their defense, until today they thought they were going to get funded and actually be able to deliver.
 I was going to say &quot;because hosted solutions don&#x27;t support Python 3&quot; but I see that two days ago Amazon announced Lambda support for Python 3, which was my big holdup.<p>So I guess it&#x27;s time for me to get on board with Python3!
 Berkeley made the same switch at around the same time, and it made me sad.<p>Having done the intro course in Scheme, I&#x27;d say it helped me understand functional programming far more than I ever could have with Python, and it opened me up to different ways of thinking.<p>Even though I never again used any Lisp variant, I&#x27;m still really glad I learned it and feel that what I learned using Lisp has informed my future decisions.
 &gt; There&#x27;s no impact by a failing e-filing system.<p>Unless you efile after the post office closes on the night of the 18th and&#x2F;or don&#x27;t own a printer and&#x2F;or can&#x27;t get there after efile fails but before the post office closes.<p>Or there are people like me, where my efile was rejected on April 19th.  Now what do I do?  If I try to efile again, it just says, &quot;sorry, you&#x27;re past the deadline&quot;.  If I mail in a form it will technically be late, although I guess if they say anything I can show them my failed efile attempt...
 To more specially answer your question, legally you don&#x27;t have to show up to an audit.  The audit is supposedly in your best interest, because it will stop the clock on racking up penalties and interest, assuming you pay them afterwards.<p>If you just keep ignoring it, eventually you will die and your estate won&#x27;t be released to your heirs until the tax man gives it a final audit, and your estate will have to pay penalties and interest back to when you failed to pay.<p>If you&#x27;re poor and&#x2F;or broke, then sure, ignore an audit, because they can&#x27;t get blood from a stone. :)
 He lives in California.  9% of that was to the state.
 Good point, he was subject to the extra wealth tax.
 As someone who just started a company in California, I can tell you why I did it.  The main reason is because I already live here.  My family lives here, as it has for the last three generations.<p>I like the fact that I get great weather year round, that I live amongst a diverse group of people, and can get just about any kind of food I want very close by.  I like that my child will go to school with people of all colors and religions and beliefs.  And my cost of living is lower in the sense that I don&#x27;t have to pay a ton of money for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer, nor for a bunch of clothes I can only wear 1&#x2F;2 the year.<p>As for the business, yeah, it&#x27;s not great, I&#x27;ll admit that.  I don&#x27;t like paying extra corporate taxes for no apparent reason (I&#x27;m incorporated in Delaware, why am I paying CA tax?).  And I may not even hire here, since I&#x27;m fully remote and hiring in other states is viable for me.<p>But if I were going to open an office and hire local, I would most definitely do it here in California, where a lot of the talent live and a lot of the people I would want to hire who like the same things I do.
 That&#x27;s great if your taxes are simple.  Mine is not, and one of the critical forms didn&#x27;t arrive in my email until April 16th, so I couldn&#x27;t finish till then, and it affected other parts.<p>And yeah, I know being late isn&#x27;t terrible, and in fact if you are owed a refund there is no penalty at all.  But it&#x27;s still annoying that it was late because critical government run infrastructure was broken.
 As all these cities convert to LED, not a single one is remembering one of the big advantages of sodium lights on the environment -- it&#x27;s better for the animals.  A lot of animals navigate by moonlight.  When it looks like there is a moon every 50 ft, that really screws them up.<p>Not to mention how bad it is for humans.  I installed a bunch of 1850K lights in my house as well as f.lux on my computer and night watch on my phone.  After 11pm, I try to avoid any light above 1850K at all costs.<p>And it has worked.  I sleep a lot better since I went &quot;all 1850&quot;.  But when I have to drive late at night, it screws that all up.
 It wasn&#x27;t easy.  I actually ended up getting the GE &quot;C&quot; bulb, which is the one that you can control with bluetooth.  At the lowest setting it goes to 1850K.  The nice thing is that it can go up to like 6000K too, if you want that.
 I use a Mac, in which Night Shift only works on the newest hardware apparently and besides, F.lux has more features.  For example, even during the day I set it to 5800K, just to cut the harshest blues.
 Yes, and the animals got all sorts of screwed up during that time.  That&#x27;s why a lot of cities switched to the more yellow sodium in the first place.
 That&#x27;s an interesting way to read it.<p>To me it says more along the lines of:  we know that media gets a lot of marketing through word of mouth, which affiliate links promote, but for apps, they usually spread though being useful, so we don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll loose a lot of money but cutting off the &quot;word of mouth&quot; marketing channel for apps.
 I think Lyft tries to avoid directly smearing Uber for a couple reasons:  1) Uber paves the way for them legally by using a lot of Uber VC money to fight regulation and lobby, which helps both companies. 2) Lyft is doing a lot of the same things that Uber is doing, they&#x27;re just less gross about it, but they still skirt laws and do other things government actors may not like, so it would be a bit of kettle and pot.
 You know what?  Good for her!  She clearly didn&#x27;t <i>need</i> the job after her Google success, which means she took the job for the fun and challenge.  She knew that if she was successful, her reputation would skyrocket as one of the most successful turnaround CEOs ever, and she would probably be rewarded in the billions of dollars for it.<p>She also knew that if she failed, her reputation would probably be shot, and she&#x27;d never get a chance to take a job that was challenging enough to pique her interest, so she negotiated a contract that made sure she was compensated for the risk to her reputation.<p>She should be commended for her shrewd negotiation skills.
 The landlords one makes the most sense.  Land is not elastic.  It is a limited resource, and so it doesn&#x27;t follow supply and demand.  The supply in a city never changes, only the demand does.<p>And building up isn&#x27;t necessarily a solution -- it&#x27;s exponentially more expensive to go up, because you start needing things like elevators and full time building engineers and so on.  So going up only keeps things the same, as the price per square foot of going up is higher, only elevating the cost of that land.<p>Building out also isn&#x27;t a solution, because people want to be close to the city center or the things they go to the most.  Self-driving cars may help with this issue in the long term, but not the short term.<p>This blog post[0] summarizes some of the issues.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetingthetwain.blogspot.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;live-work-commute-2.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetingthetwain.blogspot.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;live-work-commut...</a>
 There&#x27;s a fairly good solution. Start charging everyone the same tax, but the amount they <i>pay</i> will follow the old prop 13 rules. The rest will be a special lein against the property. You may optionally pay down the lein, or simply wait until the property is sold, when the lein is settled from the profits. Then add in some exceptions for the value going down, and maybe a reduction if the extra is paid early.<p>Then you won&#x27;t have people hold on to inventory just for the taxes, and eventually things will even out as people sell each year.
 Yes!  Excellent point that I hadn&#x27;t even considered.
 I signed up for Amazon&#x27;s repeat delivery, which not only reminds me to change it (oh look a filter showed up time to change!) but it saved me money too.  It&#x27;s way cheaper than that subscription program (I looked at that too).
 Correlation does not equal causation.  There also have been no successful terror attacks on a US airplane since they 1) Implemented reinforced cockpit doors, 2) stopped allowing people to line up for the forward bathroom, 3) added air marshals to the planes, 4) implemented TSA pre-check.<p>So we have no idea, if any of these, has actually improved security.   It&#x27;s possible that just no one has tried since 9&#x2F;11 because there was no reason to.
 Clickbait title much?  This basically has nothing at all to do with reddit.  You could replace the word reddit with Facebook in this article and it would be exactly the same.<p>That being said, it was pretty clever to take advantage of an enumeration attack on another service that wasn&#x27;t protecting against enumeration attacks on the feature because frankly, why would they?
 Your expectations were low then.  I expected an article about a guy who lost his reddit password and <i>used the features of the reddit website</i> to crack it.<p>This article, while interesting, is really just about general password cracking.
 One company I worked for had a benefit of paying up to $1000&#x2F;yr for a gym membership OR up to $1000 of gym equipment for your home per year.
 Which is really just<p><pre><code>    https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redd.it&#x2F;68sgew</code></pre>
 Oh man, even with pre-check?  So it completely defeats the point of pre-check then by making everyone take something out of their bag.  Ugh.
 It&#x27;s a good start, but as someone who live in Cupertino, my options are now:<p>- Drive to Sunnyvale (15min) and then take CalTrain to SF (45-75min)<p>- Drive to the Great Mall (30 min) and then take BART to SF (60 min)<p>Would be nice if they let them electrify CalTrail or bring Bart all the way south.  I can keep hoping!
 &gt;  I think that the rest of the world should return the favor and ban all laptops from US incoming flights.<p>I mean, that will basically be the case anyway.  If I leave the US, I&#x27;m not taking a laptop since I can&#x27;t bring it back.
 &gt;  I think that the rest of the world should return the favor and ban all laptops from US incoming flights.<p>I mean, that will basically be the case anyway.  If I leave the US, I&#x27;m not taking a laptop since I can&#x27;t bring it back.
 Does anyone have detailed instructions on how to make a full backup of my iPhone such that when I restore it, it will be exactly like it was?  Every time I do a backup&#x2F;restore, things seem to get lost.  It doesn&#x27;t seem to be a complete backup.
 Amazon too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;rekognition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;rekognition&#x2F;</a><p>Sentiment analysis for everyone!
 See, that&#x27;s the problem.  If it isn&#x27;t a <i>full</i> backup then it&#x27;s basically useless, because now I don&#x27;t even know what&#x27;s missing.  Maybe it&#x27;s something I really need urgently but only once a month, so it might take me a while to even figure out it&#x27;s gone.<p>And what about say my soft tokens for 2FA?  Will those survive the backup?  I&#x27;m kind of afraid to find out because if they don&#x27;t then it&#x27;s a huge pain to reset all of those.<p>I wish backing up a phone was as easy as backing up a computer.  :(
 Flywheel definitely improved the UX around getting a cab, but it still relies on an artificially limited supply of cabs.<p>Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x27;s main innovation is creating a way to increase and decrease the supply of drivers when needed.
 I was reading an article today about the head of the census quitting, citing lack of funding from the Trump admin.  In the article, is says they requested $1.4B to take the 2020 census, $936M of which was for &quot;computer system upgrades&quot;.<p>I understand they need staff to go around and hassle people who haven&#x27;t filled out the forms, find the homeless, etc, and also marketing expenses to get people to fill it out.<p>But $1.4B seems ridiculously high, and so do $936M for computers.<p>Is anyone familiar with what is involved in a census that can tell me why it costs so much?  I&#x27;m having trouble finding good (digestible) info with Google.
 The problem is here are the things I use my phone for when I travel:<p>- email<p>- social media<p>- maps<p>- podcasts<p>- pictures<p>- soft tokens for 2fa<p>The first few can be handled by a burner, but for pictures I want my nice phone (I guess I could carry a separate camera) but I have no idea how to deal with the 2fa tokens.
 As someone who had to deal a lot with SOX compliance throughout my career, I would love to see the regulations loosened.  They are overly onerous and in many cases downright bad, because they are so broadly written.  At the same time, enforcement is terrible, because of the same broadly written rules.<p>Basically, you and your auditor work together to come up with an overly complex set of rules that somewhat meets the requirements, then your auditor brings in a bunch of consultants to help you implement their rules, which usually just means checking a lot of boxes, and then everyone calls it a day.<p>So really all it does is create a lot of work for a lot of people for very little gain.  In a lot of cases we were going to do some of that stuff anyway, but now we had to slow down and show the auditor all the work.  An auditor who usually doesn&#x27;t care -- all they want to do is be able to say &quot;yep I watched their presentation on this&quot;.<p>So I was quite surprised by the headline, that the auditor firms would want to roll it back.  It&#x27;s basically just a huge money maker for them.<p>And then I saw what they want to change -- they want to make the rules looser on <i>how the auditors are audited</i>.  Basically they want to be able to keep being lazy.<p>SOX had great intentions but was one of the most poorly implemented regulations ever.
 Look at they article.  What they are lobbying for is looser regulations <i>on the auditors</i> so they can keep being lazy.
 &gt; My first question is how much of a burden is it really? Are we hearing the squeaky wheels, or is it actually pretty bad?<p>It&#x27;s pretty bad.  It was bad enough that we had to hire multiple full time people on our side just to deal with the interactions, people with engineering backgrounds who basically just did paperwork, who could have been doing much more useful things given their knowledge and experience.<p>&gt; My second question is how much does it help. It&#x27;s fine to say that it codifies practices that companies mostly do anyways (and if so, how bad can it be), but it was also a response to some troubling behavior in the market. How many problems does it prevent for the burden it exacts?<p>It&#x27;s important to remember that there are two aspects to SOX: Operational and financial.  I don&#x27;t have a lot of experience with the financial side, other than to say they have just as much overhead, but perhaps it prevented a lot of things.<p>But from the operational side, it made us do things in bad ways so that we could show the auditors, and also slowed us down.  For example, production access to financial data must be limited so that it can&#x27;t be modified in production after the transaction but before it gets to the financial systems.  Sounds like a good idea, but then when you have an outage, you have to scramble to find multiple people to unlock the access keys and watch over your shoulder while you make fixes on production systems.<p>Or instead you rearchitect your entire system so that only a few machines are actually handling financial transactions and keeping the rest out of scope.<p>Either way, it&#x27;s a huge burden.<p>Another great example is password rotation.  The law demands you have a password rotation policy.  It doesn&#x27;t say what that policy should be.  Most auditors have settled on 90 days.  Most researchers have shown that forced password rotation is bad. Without SOX, I would just follow the recommendation of the people who actually used science to figure out that password managers are better than password rotation.  But with SOX, I either just follow the auditor&#x27;s redone checklist, or spend a whole bunch of time convincing them that my policy is better than rotation. Either way, a bunch of overhead either for me or for all my coworkers.
 I understood it perfectly.  They want to provide more services so that they can say &quot;this is out of compliance but pay us money and we can fix it&quot;.  But their &quot;fix&quot; is just looking over your shoulder and checking a few boxes.<p>But the other part of what they want is then not have the government looking over <i>their</i> shoulder to see what they did.
 I&#x27;ve personally been part of it at two public companies, and my friends have been in many other public companies, and we&#x27;ve all had the same experience.  So sure, maybe it&#x27;s different elsewhere, but amongst the people I know, that&#x27;s how it works.
 &gt; It can be implemented badly if neither party truly understand the requirements, which looks to be the case here.<p>On that I totally agree with you.  But my main point is that the law is so poorly written, almost no one, including most auditors, don&#x27;t understand it, and you end up with a lot of &quot;better safe than sorry&quot;.<p>If you&#x27;re someone who truly understands the law then I applaud you and I wish you were my auditor, but is seems that almost no one is as well informed as you, which is the crux of the problem.
 That&#x27;s a fair point.  I&#x27;ve only ever worked for responsible companies.<p>If the checklists are actual implementations at the other companies, then yes, maybe there is some value there.  But then the law could still be improved to allow a little more leeway for companies that are responsible.  I don&#x27;t know how that would work though.
 Your data is actually wrong.  For the most part, immigrants put more into the economy than they take out, especially their children.  They tend to start businesses at a much higher rate than native borns, which means they pay more taxes and create jobs for others.<p>But even ignoring that, generally UBI doesn&#x27;t apply to non-citizens.  They would have to earn citizenship first, which would mean paying in taxes without getting anything out for a while.
 I almost tripped over one of these last week!  Then I stared at it as it rolled away, wondering if they were being remote controlled or had some basic AI and pathfinding.  Sounds like a little of both.<p>I think it&#x27;s a great start, but the clearly have a lot of work to do.  They should start by adding a pole and flag so you can see it coming. :)
 I wondered the same.  I was actually shocked to see one on the street with it&#x27;s camera still attached, moving unmolested past a bunch of people.
 You&#x27;re welcome. :)  Not sure I wrote it on there, but you can substitute plain yogurt for the sour cream for a smoother taste.  Also, my brother sometimes adds a little powered sugar right before blending for extra sweetness.
 The interface is the result of tens of thousands of A&#x2F;B tests.  Every change is tested and produces greater general happiness.<p>There is a probably a bimodal distribution on happiness, but they only optimize for the bigger curve instead of both, to reduce complexity.  So while you, and an advanced user, might want a lot of advanced features, those same features scare away the majority of casual users.  So it&#x27;s a business decision to cater to the majority at the expense of the minority to reduce overall development cost.
 Those stories get clicks and sell ads, but they aren&#x27;t really true.<p>Yes, it is easier to fire someone at Netflix than elsewhere, but it doesn&#x27;t happen all that more often than anywhere else, and it&#x27;s also easier to hire, promote and give raises to them.  So it all balances out.
 I would never use Glassdoor for evaluating a company.  It skews towards people who are upset, they don&#x27;t verify that you actually worked there, and they combine hourly workers with salary workers, which could be two <i>very</i> different experiences.
 I&#x27;m not using it at this moment, but in a couple of weeks I&#x27;ll have a newborn, and I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo with what ends up being the resolution (feed, change, or nap) and seeing if I could build a classifier that could figure out what he needs just from a picture of his angry face.<p>Semi-related, but if anyone is using the AWS tools for their AI, please ping me.  I&#x27;m looking for a speaker for a community event in SF in June. (contact info in profile)
 That&#x27;s a great insight to use Kiva as training data, because I agree that not recognizing dark skinned people is a huge problem with current facial recognition datasets.<p>This will get worse as more retail establishments use image recognition in their every day operation.
 I already have a kid, so I know how noisy (pun intended) the data can be.  I honestly don&#x27;t expect to work at all, but it will be fun to try!
 OP works for Pornhub, so I suspect it is on their site.
 I was actually planning to do both and see which, if either, produced any useful response. :)

 This is a fairly uninformed opinion, but I believe Google could sue Levandowski directly, perhaps for the $680M his company got, and most likely the purchase agreement for Otto included a clause that said they would defend him against lawsuits that arose from the sale whether he was employed or not.<p>Which would put them right back where they are now.<p>Also, there are probably a whole bunch of legal maneuvers they could use to unseal the laptop and get it separated from the 5th amendment protection.
 I can tell you why there is discrimination against Enterprise programmers.  Two reasons:  Most people who have worked in an enterprise have had at least one bad experience with an incompetent programmer who was just a seat filler.  That means that the enterprise isn&#x27;t a good filter, and even worse, it means that even if you are good, you&#x27;re willing to suffer working with incompetence.<p>The other factor is that enterprise programmers tend to prefer places with a lot of process in place.  They want to see a well defined pipeline with tests and approvals and gates and so on.  Pushing untested code to production isn&#x27;t even in their mental space, but sometimes you just gotta do it at a startup when you got a press hit and your traffic just doubled.  Basically, they tend to slow things down by demanding doing things right.<p>Now, for the first problem, that&#x27;s just wrong -- just because you were in an enterprise doesn&#x27;t mean you are bad or you are willing to deal with bad people.  It&#x27;s just a cognitive bias.<p>For the second problem, those people are right, there should be good process and it will be better in the long term.  But in the short term it <i>feels</i> like they are slowing things down, because startups generally don&#x27;t have the luxury of investing more time now for a bigger payoff later, or at least they don&#x27;t think they do.
 Your best bet is a side project.  Do something fun in a language you enjoy, and talk about that in the interview instead of the work you do.  Make it big enough that it warrants an entry on your resume.  Or contribute to a well known open source project.
 &gt; With all due respect to the &quot;move fast, break things&quot; evident in many startups, it leaves behind a big technical mess for the people who help transition the company out of startup phases. I&#x27;d bet most would do well to incorporate a few more stodgy enterprise devs earlier in the process to help steer the software toward a sustainable path.<p>I agree to a point, and tried to address it above.  It&#x27;s a tradeoff -- do it right now for a big payoff later.  However, you have to <i>survive</i> to the payoff.  So maybe you spend a bunch of time doing it right, and then die when you haven&#x27;t actually sold anything yet.<p>I&#x27;d rather have a company that made it to the &quot;we have to clean up our technical debt&quot; phase then building something beautiful that never sees the light of day.
 As far as I know, that South Park is where the meme came from.
 This is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.  No one person feels the impact of abuse, but ends up ruining it for everyone.<p>Clearly they didn&#x27;t intend for this service to be a general backup system.
 &gt; continuation to work around AWS&#x27;s low 5 min timeout limit, and local testing.<p>If you had to work around the 5 minute limit then lambda may have been the wrong technology choice. It&#x27;s really neat for short quick bursts of compute, not long running processes.
 I was at a Tesla dealership the other day, and the &quot;sales associate&quot; or whatever they call them was really pushing me away from the Model 3.  He said, &quot;Think of it like an electric Civic.  It has no luxury features.  The dashboard is a flat board like a picnic table.  It has no speedometer or any gauges in front of the driver (it&#x27;s all on the touchscreen in the middle).  It doesn&#x27;t have air conditioning on the passenger side, or even a glove box.  The entire $30K of the car is for the battery.&quot;<p>It almost made me want to pull my Model 3 reservation.
 &gt; you&#x27;d think a well-equipped Corolla will be competitive with the Model 3.<p>When I was at the Tesla store, this is what they said.  Their exact words were, &quot;Think of it as an electric Honda Civic&quot;.
 &gt; I drive a BMW 3-series, which would be the Model 3&#x27;s main competitor.<p>See my other comments about how at the Tesla store they describe the Model 3 as a competitor to the Civic and Corolla, not the BMW and Lexus.
 I think they are hoping to capitalize on the folks that want electric to save the planet or find the autopilot software worth paying extra for.
 Sunnyvale
 You don&#x27;t believe me or the sales person?
 The model X too. I drove one for a day and it felt like a $25,000 car inside, not $125,000.
 He literally said &quot;no vent on the right&quot;. But maybe he was exaggerating.
 &gt; Actually doing any work is shunned upon.<p>You clearly don&#x27;t understand what a manager does if you believe what they do isn&#x27;t work.
 I never play on a table with an auto shuffler.  As a player, the house already has an advantage over you.  The auto shuffler means the house always has the same advantage on every hand.<p>At least with a hand shuffled deck, most humans can&#x27;t get a perfect shuffle, so the odds of any one hand shift slightly back and forth.  If you&#x27;re good at counting cards, you can find the spots where it is slightly in your favor and bet bigger.<p>At least, it&#x27;s more fun for me, because I win a little bit more and also get the fun of practicing counting cards.<p>It&#x27;s hard to find the hand shuffled decks though -- they pretty much only have them on high stakes games ($25&#x2F;hand and up).
 You&#x27;re right, the CSM is terrible and is what I was actually referring to.  However, I will still try to avoid the traditional machine shufflers since they still get more random shuffles than a hand shuffle which rarely has more than 3 or 4 riffles.

 &gt; what is a GA solver<p>Genetic Algorithm solver, I assume.
 Survivorship bias (of the most real kind). You can only be great if you live. :)
 What I&#x27;m saying is there may have been other great climbers that we just don&#x27;t know about because they happen to have one small slip early in life.
 &gt; FaunaDB Serverless Cloud remains the only multi-master, globally-distributed cloud database.<p>Cassandra or Datastax?  Cassandra has been doing this for years.<p>Or did they mean the only hosted option?<p>Edit: Made me sound less rude.
 Fair enough. :)  But just FYI, reading that set off my BS alarm, and I was highly skeptical of the rest of your claims.  You may want to clarify that so as not to turn off folks who are deeply familiar with the space.
 FaunaDB Serverless Cloud remains the only 
 {hosted|SaaS} multi-master, globally-distributed cloud database?<p>I don&#x27;t really like those either.<p>Just something that says &quot;you don&#x27;t have to set this up for yourself like Cassandra or Riak.&quot;<p>Although that reminds me that you can get a turnkey Riak setup, so your claim is still a bit dubious.<p>I now get what you&#x27;re trying to say though.  That you guys host a multi-master database, and with all your competitors, you have to run infrastructure.  I&#x27;m not quite sure how to express that succinctly.
 As a previous student and renter, and a current landlord in Berkeley, I can tell you exactly why this happens.<p>Students don&#x27;t vote in city elections for the most part.<p>The city council represents the homeowners and long time residents.  The homeowners want their property values to go up, so most of them oppose more housing.  The long time residents inexplicably hate students and &quot;what the students do to this city&quot; despite the fact that the University was there before every single person who live there now.<p>So the city council does everything it can to keep those property values high, since the students are a captive audience and will rent no matter what, and for the most part don&#x27;t care what the cost is because their upper middle class parents and&#x2F;or the federal government is picking up the bill until they graduate.<p>I personally do my small part by keeping the rent on our place below market, as close to our actual costs as possible.  The appreciation on the property value is nice, but the steady income is really what Berkeley property is good for.  In 19 years I&#x27;ve had three months of vacancy, and two of those were because I was renovating and one was because my tenants left in a odd month.
 &gt; Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics.<p>Quite true.  Also, they don&#x27;t actually care all that much, because most of them have their housing subsidized by federal loans or their wealthy parents or both.
 &gt; Wouldn&#x27;t &#x27;as close to costs as possible&#x27; be exactly what it costs to maintain the property (insurance, maintenance &#x2F; upgradtes, rates, etc) thereby eating all the steady income.<p>Yes.  We basically break even, including the cost of the mortgage.  The idea is to own the property outright in 30 years, and then slowly ramping up the profits but still staying below market rate.  Or simply sell the property.<p>But the point is it&#x27;s a long term investment and savings account, that doesn&#x27;t depend on the value to go up.  If I wanted to be more rational I would add in a small return on capital as a cost, which would still have me be below market, just less so.
 &gt;  they are squeezed like sardines to a room though<p>Yeah but that&#x27;s been true for a long time.  When I attended I had a friend who rented a piece of wood suspended above the laundry room of a frat house for $150&#x2F;mo (while I paid $400&#x2F;mo to share a one bedroom unit).
 This is for people who are in stores owned by Amazon.
 That&#x27;s not true.  I&#x27;ll buy things at Costco knowing full well that the item is cheaper elsewhere.  Why?  Because of their excellent customer service and return policy. I know that if that item breaks or has any sort of problem, I can return it no questions asked.<p>Also, their model is pretty good as far as membership goes -- if you spend enough at Costco, your membership is free, because you get cash back.  And a little known fact, even if you don&#x27;t spend enough to pay for your membership, if you ask them, they will increase your cash back reward to make up for it anyway.
 Or he has 12 1&#x2F;2&quot; screws. :)
 Not just the way you draw shapes but the shapes you draw are influenced by culture and geography.<p>Draw a tree.<p>Did you just draw a stick with something puffy at the top, or something like a christmas tree, or a palm tree?  If you live in Hawaii, you probably drew a palm, for example.
 &gt; Where do you see yourself in five years:<p>You know, in my 20+ years of experience, there isn&#x27;t a single moment I could go back to where I could even fathom what I was going to be doing five years after that.
 It&#x27;s not quite the same though. It would be more like if the store said you could pay $50 to enter and fill a cart with whatever you want, but you can use as many other carts as you want but only for their store brand items.<p>Then the local government comes in and says that they are the only store allowed in town.<p>Now, is it fair to General Mills that they have to compete with the store brand cereal when the store brand is effectively free and there is no way for General Mills to get their cereal to you any other way?
 That would be ideal. Then competion would sort it out.<p>But the FCC doesn&#x27;t have that authority and it&#x27;s a nonstarter in congress. So the stop gap is to force the government granted monopolies to play nice as a condition of their monopoly status.
 &gt; Sunday shouty shows<p>Never heard that before, but I&#x27;m totally stealing it from you.
 When MIT rolled out IPv4, the world wasn&#x27;t ready for it either.
 Because they are replacing their &#x2F;8.  They want to make sure they are never constrained.
 Casandra and Riak are AP, and both can certainly be used as sources of truth.  You just have to move the &quot;C&quot; part up into your app, which may actually be a better place for it, since what is &quot;consistent&quot; can be dependent on the data and application of that data.
 You can live outside year round.  It gets kinda tough in the winter, but at least you won&#x27;t freeze to death.<p>Also super homeless friendly rules and laws.  For example, in the city of Berkeley, you are required to have the front door of your commercial establishment set back from the street and covered, and the police won&#x27;t remove homeless people while your business is closed.  In other words, you must provide covered shelter each night to the homeless if you own a business there.
 I feel like Django has too much magic.  I agree that it is easier to get quick wins with Django, and if you&#x27;re building a small hobby site or something, then it&#x27;s great.<p>But if you&#x27;re building something that you hope you&#x27;ll have to rapidly scale, Django is going to hurt you.  It&#x27;s way harder to scale due to both its heavy reliance on hidden magic its tight integration with its data store.<p>When you want to rapidly scale, the easiest way to do that is if your data store and application aren&#x27;t so tightly intertwined that you have to scale both to solve a bottleneck in either.
 Mostly the ORM.  If you rely on it, you can&#x27;t really lay out your tables in any way except the way they do it, at least not without a whole lot of headache.
 I never said Flask was better...
 I love the idea but I&#x27;m very wary of piping shell output directly to a third party.  Command line tools are notorious for outputting sensitive data to stdout.<p>Any chance we can get a self hosted version?  It would be awesome if I could host it internally!
 Oooo time for my x.com story!!<p>I worked at PayPal 2003-2007.  At some point my team had a meeting with the CEO of some vendor, and at the end, the guy pulled me aside and asked, &quot;Do you know what happened to x.com?  I used to work at PayPal, and when PayPal was acquired by eBay, part of the contract said that we could keep our x.com email addresses forever and that they would guarantee delivery would keep working as long as eBay still owned the domain.  But it stopped working a little while ago&quot;.<p>So it turned out that eBay was contractually obligated to keep running x.com and the email addresses, but no one in ops knew that, thought it was unused, and shut it off.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if they ever got it working again, but I would guess that Elon didn&#x27;t pay much for it, since eBay wasn&#x27;t using it and technically was obligated to keep running it for Elon.<p>He may have just said, &quot;Hey, I&#x27;ll run it myself if you don&#x27;t want it anymore.&quot;
 The value in serverless is not the serverless itself, but the ecosystem.  If you&#x27;ve already got petabytes of data in AWS, you&#x27;re gonna use Lambda.  It&#x27;s true that Google will win the truly greenfield serverless applications, but I suspect those are few and far between.<p>In most cases people are trying to enhance what they already have which means needing access to what is already there.
 &gt; node has better warmup time than java lambdas (not sure of python)<p>Python and node are both sub-second, compared to Java&#x27;s 10+ seconds.
 &gt; The &quot;interesting&quot; part is how to secure user credentials to login to the RDS instance, and manage connection pools etc, but it&#x27;s not that difficult<p>You can run your RDS instances and your Lambda&#x27;s in the same private VPC.  It doesn&#x27;t secure your credentials per se, but it does prevent anyone else from accessing your database with Lambda.
 The most frustrating no I&#x27;ve gotten, repeatedly, is &quot;We&#x27;d love to get in on this as soon as you find a lead investor&quot;.<p>Translation:  We don&#x27;t really believe in your idea or you, but if you get a big player to put some money in we&#x27;ll be happy to follow them.
 Because I&#x27;d rather my cap table have three really well known people who can add a lot of value to my company other than money, like experience, advice and connections, then 1000 people who have a little bit of cash who may or may not be great evangelists for my company.<p>Also, crowdfunding only works with consumer products -- crowd funding a B2B product is almost impossible.
 Heh, it&#x27;s like that scam where you email people your predictions for who will win each football game for a particular team, where different groups get different winners.  Each week some of the emails are right and some are wrong. After six weeks, 1.5% of your original folks will have seen six correct predictions, at which point you ask them for $1000 to see the 7th prediction which they are likely to pay for since &quot;you&#x27;re so accurate!&quot;.
 I like this.  Unfortunately today, you&#x27;d be unlikely to find students with coins!
 It&#x27;s a technology issue.  The VPN blocking is done at a different layer than the content.  It doesn&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re watching, so it can&#x27;t allow VPN for some content and not others.
 Maybe I&#x27;m in the minority here but I don&#x27;t have a problem with this.  If they raise the price based on demand, and I still deem it a good price, then who was harmed here?  Sure I paid more than I needed to but I still paid less than I felt it was worth to me.
 But that&#x27;s not what they did. Their algorithms automatically raised those prices based on demand. The demand just happened to be driven by being part of prime day.
 I see a lot of people questioning who is a solo founder or not.<p>To me, a cofounder is someone who has enough equity to veto your decisions if they don&#x27;t like them. Everyone else is an employee, whether compensated in cash, equity, or thank yous.<p>Most of the objections I see here are, &quot;well, they had a support group of X and Y&quot;.<p>No one does it alone.  The issue is whether you have ultimate authority (and therefore responsibility) for the success or failure of the company.<p>I&#x27;d say everyone on the list of solo founders was personally responsible for the success of their company.
 I understand that what he did was morally abhorrent, but I don&#x27;t understand why it was illegal?  Maybe a lawyer can give a quick summaray?
 The article didn&#x27;t have any of that when I read it.
 &gt; Do people really want to run around wearing glasses&#x2F;headsets all the time?<p>Absolutely!  If I could wear some regular looking glasses that could identify objects, give me directions, etc, I would totally wear them.<p>I&#x27;m really good with faces, in that I can see someone after a long time and know that I know them, but I&#x27;m really bad with names, so I can never remember their name.  If I could have glasses that looked in my contacts or Facebook or whatever and told me the name of the person I&#x27;m looking at, that would help me be less awkward at social gatherings.
 Hopefully they would be subtle enough not to be distracting.  Like my smart watch. :)
 At one point there was an Android app that could identify strangers.  They nerfed it so that it couldn&#x27;t do that anymore.  I&#x27;m sure they could do the same for the glasses.<p>But yeah, that&#x27;s why it would have to be real subtle.

 I did.  It was cheaper to own a car (but not by much).<p>My specifics: I live in Cupertino and work at home.  I have a wife and kids.  About four times a month we have a situation where we need two cars, because one of us has to be somewhere other than where they kids need to be.<p>Unfortunately, most of the time that&#x27;s San Francisco, which is about $80 round trip with Uber&#x2F;Lyft.  I could sometimes use public transit, but usually the times don&#x27;t work out and it takes a really long time, and I&#x27;d still need a ride to and from the train on both ends.<p>I have a five year old car so the payments and maintenance still come out to a little be less than Uber&#x2F;Lyft, and since I&#x27;ve already got another car, the cost of insurance doesn&#x27;t add much.<p>It&#x27;s pretty close in cost, and the convince pushes it over the breakeven point.
 It&#x27;s for all the entrepreneurs who just thought to themselves, &quot;maybe I won&#x27;t take money from Benchmark&quot;.  They knew it would leak.
 The best tip I ever got (other than to use f.lux at all) was to set it to 5800K during the day.  It&#x27;s an almost unnoticeable difference, but makes a huge improvement in reducing my eyestrain.
 &gt;I&#x27;ve long thought that all universities should run under this model<p>I did too, until I though about it a bit more.  You&#x27;d end up with Universities cutting all of their &quot;non-profitable&quot; majors, but those things still have some value to society.<p>Perhaps a hybrid model, where the &quot;profitable&quot; majors are free but you pay afterwards, and the unprofitable ones you pay up front.
 Where do I find that?  I&#x27;m using the latest f.lux but I can&#x27;t find all the new features...
 I still use f.lux because it has way more options and control than the built in Apple product.  I wish I had it on my phone too, but I just suffer with Night Shift instead.
 The lack of programmability, like I have with f.lux.<p>I can only make it come on and off at a certain time, and the color temp is just a slider with no numbers.<p>With f.lux, I can have day, evening, and night, and it adjusts automatically to my location.  When I travel, I have to adjust the time on my phone.<p>All little things, but it shows how f.lux is polished and Night Shift is not.
 Fascinating.  On my Mac only have a few of those:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;wycKzdS" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;wycKzdS</a>
 Because time zones span ~15 degrees of longitude, and the sunset can be up to one hour difference between each side of the time zone.  Also, I move north and south during my travels, which also changes sunset, and is not reflected in the time zone.
 I want candlelight.  I replaced a bunch of bulbs in my house so that before I go to bed I have no light sources warmer than a candle, other than my phone.
 My main gripe is that it only has a single color temp setting.  I use three with f.lux and it makes a huge difference.  5800K during the day, 3400K in the evening (between sunset and 11pm) and 1900K after 11pm, until an hour after sunrise.<p>My phone is jarring in the evening because it&#x27;s way cooler than my display.
 I actually downloaded a copy of the NYT article I was quoted in in 1996 specifically because I feared it would fall off the internet at some point.<p>It&#x27;s behind a paywall now, but at least I have a digital copy!
 I owned (and still do own) this book!  I would spend many hours as a teenager going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book.  This really brings back memories!<p>And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford library, and then send the telnet &quot;Break&quot; command at exactly the right time to break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access.  Good times.
 It&#x27;s on my website, which is a blatant copyright violation.  So far the NYT hasn&#x27;t asked me to take it down.<p>It could potentially be considered fair use, since I&#x27;m not making a profit and I provide commentary.
 My company is 100% remote, but it is not without it&#x27;s challenges.  As you mention, the whiteboard is a big one.  There isn&#x27;t a good digital equivalent yet that isn&#x27;t a fortune.<p>But not everyone wants to work remotely.  I asked my friend, and he said he would never work at a remote company because, &quot;I enjoy having face to face conversations with my coworkers about work.&quot;
 It&#x27;s a matter of math.  The average public company CEO has 7-10 C level reports.  When that CEO leaves, they can&#x27;t all get promoted.<p>I mean it happens at all levels, it&#x27;s just more news at the C level.  If you want to be the VP of sales for example, and you&#x27;re currently a regional director, there are probably a few other regional directors who want to replace your VP.  Not everyone can do it.
 When my wife and I travel, we try to buy a magnet that is representative of the place.<p>It&#x27;s small enough that it isn&#x27;t an issue, and it&#x27;s nice to look at the refrigerator and remember all the places we&#x27;ve been.
 There&#x27;s still a second day of companies today.  There may be more in day 2.
 I just bought a new van. It was rediculously easy for me to get a loan for 105% of the retail price (and I didn&#x27;t even pay retail). I opted not to get the full loan for obvious reasons.<p>But the fact that I could is frightening.  There will be so many people underwater on their loans.<p>The car bubble is coming and it&#x27;s going to pop hard.
 If you consider any marketplace the &quot;Uber for X&quot;, then Uber is the eBay for seats in cars. :)
 3% is barely less than the mortgage, and it wouldn&#x27;t be worth the hassle.  Also I would never pay down my mortgage early.<p>Which means I need to find an investment that will have a greater than 3% return.  Since I can&#x27;t really guarantee that, it&#x27;s not really worth it.<p>I&#x27;d rather not put myself into a situation where I&#x27;m that badly underwater.
 The most interesting thing to me here is that they can actually deliver a cheaper service by going over the public internet.  I would think their private net would be cheaper because they don&#x27;t have to pay for transit.<p>I guess transit is still cheaper than maintaining ones own lines...
 This is a very valid observation and I hadn&#x27;t thought of that. You&#x27;re very right.
 They have offered a more featureful product for a while: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;waf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;waf&#x2F;</a><p>That being said, the simplicity of this product is elegant and solves a lot of use cases without a lot of headache.
 &gt; We treated test pilots with the highest regard because they were separated from the technology&#x2F;machinery itself. There was no personal stake in it for them other than making it out alive and exposing issues with the systems being tested.<p>I think this is an extremely salient and important point, and I&#x27;ve never thought of it before!<p>Test pilots only care about a good product, not success or failure of the product.  That&#x27;s not the case anymore.<p>Maybe this would be a good time to propose a new &quot;test pilot core&quot; for cars, made up of perhaps some elite drivers who don&#x27;t work for any car company.<p>Or heck, maybe the army wants to test self driving cars!
 I think the author is trying to paint a picture of just how unprofessional the setup is, how it&#x27;s just the corner of a house, etc, but it sure comes off as rude and unnecessary.
 <p><pre><code>    In [7]: a = &quot;foo&quot;

    In [8]: b = &quot;foo&quot;

    In [9]: a is b
    Out[9]: True

    In [10]: b = &quot;foobaljlajdfsklfjds l;kjsl;dfj ls;dfj l;skdj flsdjluejsklnm &quot;

    In [11]: a = &quot;foobaljlajdfsklfjds l;kjsl;dfj ls;dfj l;skdj flsdjluejsklnm &quot;

    In [12]: a is b
    Out[12]: False
 </code></pre>
 Seems to work with small and big strings too.

 Amazon could optimize the supply chain.  The could also bring their technology expertise to minimize overhead (such as replacing all the cashiers with their &quot;no checkout&quot; system).
 Amazon ships a whole lot more stuff than Whole Foods.  They have a fleet of trucks and even their own planes.  Amazon is really a logistics company.<p>Basically, they have a whole lot more experience moving things around than Whole Foods.
 Most likely their website was designed to redirect anyone who isn&#x27;t logged in to their login page, but then they configured the web server to just server the farewell notice no matter what page you are looking at.<p>If you put any URL in, it redirects to &#x2F;password.
 Although she seems to be much less caustic than Ray.
 It was called that because it hit all of North America, and very little outside of North America.  It&#x27;s not really so much nationalistic as it is descriptive.
 &gt; Another finalist is Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. While Whitman has previously said in the media she has no interest in the job and plans to stay at HPE, sources say she is very much still in the running.<p>I worked for Ms. Whitman at eBay.  She is exceptionally smart and very good at being a leader.  I met her a few times, and after the first time, she remembered who I was and what I did at the company every time after, even though I was inconsequential to her.<p>This skill however was also her downfall.  I was at eBay when it grew from 3,000 to 13,000 employees.  As it got bigger, she could no longer know what was happening everywhere.<p>Her leadership success comes from knowing everything that is happening and being able to make sure the right people are doing the right things and talking to the right people.  But it breaks down when she can no longer have total knowledge of all happenings.<p>I think she&#x27;ll make a good leader at Uber, but given that they are already at 12K+ employees, I wonder if she&#x27;s learned to delegate better since I last worked for her.  I hope she has, because it was really her only weakness.
 &gt; I think that Sikka and Travis would be quite compatible with each other.<p>I think that&#x27;s what they board is trying to avoid.  They shoved Travis out because they didn&#x27;t like his style.  I don&#x27;t think they want someone else with his style.
 I&#x27;m willing to give her a pass on that as pandering to the Republican base (remember she ran for Governor), because the few interactions I had with her indicated that her personal feelings are much more moderate.
 I hear a lot of people in here saying, &quot;Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system!  If sites start charging instead of ads, I&#x27;ll totally pay!&quot;<p>Let me add a little perspective.  A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold.  At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads.  This was in direct response to people saying, &quot;I would rather pay you then use adblock&quot;.<p>You know how many people running adblock started paying?  Not a lot.  Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience.  The ads on reddit weren&#x27;t even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise.<p>My point is, I don&#x27;t think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you&#x27;d be willing to pay if the site removed advertising.<p>In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don&#x27;t provide that much value to you.
 Sure.  Like I said, some people bought it and then disabled ads, and that&#x27;s cool.  Some people even bought it and left the ads, that was even cooler!  But a lot of people, people who directly said, &quot;I will pay you if you let me remove the ads&quot;, did not.
 &gt; Well why would I do it if I don&#x27;t have to?<p>You absolutely don&#x27;t.  But if you say, &quot;I would pay you to get rid of ads&quot;, and then I get rid of them and you don&#x27;t pay, that makes you a bit of a hypocrite, no?
 I think I said as much above.  That most people don&#x27;t get the same value that the advertisers do.
 If you don&#x27;t like the rules, you are welcome to not participate.  But that&#x27;s a terrible excuse for knowingly causing damage.<p>Or do you also think it&#x27;s ok to steal from Walmart because you don&#x27;t like their corporate policies?
 But we&#x27;re talking about people who install a program that purposely defrauds advertisers.
 We&#x27;re talking about people who install a program to defraud advertisers.  The complaint was, &quot;we&#x27;re sticking it to people who censor and use social control.&quot;<p>&quot;The rules&quot; in this case are that censorship and social control (presumably) exist on the platform.  If you don&#x27;t like that, don&#x27;t participate.<p>But don&#x27;t say, &quot;OMG censorship&quot; and use that to justify defrauding advertisers while continuing to use the free site that you deride.
 I don&#x27;t work for reddit anymore, so I don&#x27;t offer anything.  But no, I don&#x27;t think reddit offers that, as no site does.  That&#x27;s a perfectly fine excuse to run adblock, but my original thesis was that people say, &quot;If you let me remove ads I&#x27;ll pay&quot; and those people are being disingenuous when they don&#x27;t pay.<p>It still doesn&#x27;t justify the topic at hand, which is a program that attacks the ad networks and defrauds the advertisers.
 That&#x27;s pretty typical for a new CEO.  2-3%.  In fact, that&#x27;s a bit low.
 The FaaS platforms of the three big providers are basically undifferentiated in their feature sets.  If anything, the one from Microsoft is the best because it supports more languages.<p>The real differentiator is the ecosystem that it exists within.  It is the glue that binds.  And in that regard, AWS is the hands down winner.  One, because you can do more stuff with your FaaS, and more importantly, it has more triggers than any other platform.<p>It is the list of things that can trigger your functions that truly make a FaaS useful.<p>The problem with self-hosted FaaS is the limited set of triggers, because all the other stuff you run doesn&#x27;t support triggering the FaaS (yet?).<p>It&#x27;s a great programming paradigm, but the true value will come when all the other self hosted projects can emit triggers.
 In this particular case, they are applying a very digital solution (machine learning and vision processing) to an old industry (medicine).  So it makes a lot of sense.<p>And also, there are plenty of cases in the past of 20-somethings disrupting established industries.  Einstein developed his first disruptive theories in his 20s, for example.
 At that point it&#x27;s just a semantics debate.  I mean if you include the ability to use shims, then they all support the same languages.<p>But I&#x27;d still rather run C# on Azure than anywhere else.
 I have an off topic question that you might be able to answer.  Have you figured out any programatic way to configure your Alexa skills?  It&#x27;s not supported by CloudFormation.  It seems like the only way to do it is via the console.  Thanks!
 It&#x27;s really easy to tell if a company pivoted or failed. If they ran out of money, they failed. If they still had money and started doing something new, they pivoted (and their previous product failed).
 This article felt more like an ad for active money management (and ignoring index funds) than anything else.<p>Which makes sense. It&#x27;s driving active managers nuts the techtonic shift to passive investing.<p>This was a good podcast on active vs passive investing:  
 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;stupidest-money&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;stupidest-money&#x2F;</a>
 That absolutely will not look at your data under any circumstance, even if you specifically ask them to.<p>Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to &quot;just log into the database&quot; and they said they have very strict policies against that.<p>There is no way they have any of Target&#x27;s data.
 That&#x27;s true on average.  But if you split the US into wealthy and non-wealthy, the wealthy get excellent care and have better outcomes than almost any other country, whereas the poor fare significantly worse than even many 3rd world countries.<p>That&#x27;s why people get upset when we talk about this.  Some wealthy people point out that their care is far better than Canada&#x27;s (which is true) while other wealthy people who care about other humans point out that while their care is better than Canada, not everyone&#x27;s is.  And then of course the poor in America just want to not die of totally treatable diseases.
 Nine Inch Nails solved the scalping problem, and I&#x27;m not sure why their solution isn&#x27;t more widely adopted.<p>You had to give your name to buy the ticket, and you could only buy two. Then upon arrival at the venue, you got in line, went through security, and <i>then</i> went to will call. At that point you couldn&#x27;t leave the venue. You never even took the ticket. Will call handed it to the ticket taker who let you in.<p>So if you were a scalper, the best you could do is scalp your second ticket and then attend the concert with the person you just screwed with an overpriced ticket.
 It was no worse than any other concert I ever went to.
 I&#x27;m really hoping Nintendo will screw these people by releasing a huge number of units at release, but I suspect that if someone wants one they&#x27;ll just have to pay 3x. :(
 Sure, they participated willingly, but they aren&#x27;t happy about paying an unnecessary middleman who adds cost but provides no value.<p>Hence the &quot;screwing&quot; part.
 That&#x27;s just the venue being cheap. For safety reasons the 54,000 seat stadium would be definition have twice as many entry&#x2F;exit areas as the 22,000.<p>They were just too cheap to use the full capacity.<p>I had the same problem at the U2 concert in Santa Clara. 1&#x2F;2 the doors were closed.
 Here in California, pretty much any house built before 1980 is single glazed, unless it&#x27;s been retrofitted.
 You&#x27;re counting the panes of glass. So look sideways where the glass meets the frame and count the grooves.
 &gt; while Airbnb meets all three<p>Heh.  Given that AirBnB is a year older, really we should call Uber the &quot;AirBnB for car rides&quot;.
 H1B data is public.  You can see exactly how much they are offering H1Bs, which most people assume to be lowballing.  The median for Google is $127K, but that includes junior engineers.  Sort by salary to see the senior roles.<p>And then remember that this is just base salary.  Usually, the RSUs are almost equal to the salary when granted, and sometimes double in value over the four years they vest.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;index.php?em=GOOGLE&amp;job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&amp;city=MOUNTAIN+VIEW&amp;year=2017" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;index.php?em=GOOGLE&amp;job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEE...</a>
 &gt; then it is difficult to have 3 roommates to an apartment<p>Well technically you still have the roommates, they just make a mess everywhere and you have to cover their rent every month.
 I think it&#x27;s the reverse.  I think it&#x27;s so that in the future when one of their self driving cars has an accident and kills someone, they are only liable for however much money that division has, and not all of Google.
 Does anyone remember the movie Demolition Man(1993) and the scene where someone calls into the police department, and the human picks up the phone and says: &quot;Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you&#x27;d prefer an automated response, press 1 now.&quot;<p>At the time, they were making fun of automated phone trees and the joke was that they would get so good people would prefer them in the future.<p>I think many people already think that day is here.  How many folks prefer to use an online form or chat instead of a phone call?  Most of those systems are just automation with a human checking their work.<p>Soon the human will be out of the loop.
 Maybe, but the main lament is that some great IP is lost (ZFS, etc.)<p>If Google had bought them for the IP, then at least that IP would live on, which is what everyone really wants.
 Sure but who owns the rights to it?  That&#x27;s what we mean by lost.  It&#x27;s locked up in a way to make it less usable.
 The IP has enough shadow over it that it precludes Apple from using ZFS, even though all the tech was developed outside.  That&#x27;s the main issue.  Things are murky and is scares people.
 I wish there were viable commercial solutions for this.<p>The other day, when it was 106F outside and I had to dry some clothes, I found it quite unfortunate that I was spending a bunch of energy to move hot air out of my house, while at the same time spending a bunch of energy creating hot air in my house to dry my clothes.<p>It would have been so nice if there were a reasonable way for me to take the heat already in my house and push it through the dryer.<p>(I could have hung them to dry, but I live too close to the freeway to do that -- they would have been dirtier than when I washed them)
 So I&#x27;ve only ever seen articles lambasting the guy for claiming to have invented email (and rightly so from my view as well).<p>I&#x27;m curious, is there <i>anyone</i> who supports his claim other than him and his family?  Is there anyone on his side?
 Yeah I literally know the people who invented email long before this guy, I guess my question was more along the lines of &quot;is anyone fooled by him&quot;.
 At the end of the day this is a failing of the government (both State and Federal).<p>We have a Federal oil reserve.  The government bears the cost of storing it (and in turn all taxpayers bear a small cost) so that when something happens and we need oil, we have it.<p>The state of Florida should have a bottled water and canned goods reserve.  They (and their taxpayers) should bear the cost of storing those goods so they are available for a disaster.<p>Then there wouldn&#x27;t be price gouging.<p>You could do the same with planes.  They could store planes for times of emergency, or they could repurpose military transports or at the very least they could let the airlines set demand based prices and then subsidize people&#x27;s purchases based on income and need, so that the airlines are incentivized to send more planes, but everyone can still get out.<p>If you believe that the government is the ultimate collective risk pool then it makes sense for it to act like one.
 So when I told my daughter the Tesla X is a rocket ship car, I wasn&#x27;t entirely lying?
 That&#x27;s very hard to get right.  If you don&#x27;t have exactly the right cool downs and back offs, you get oscillating load.
 If it&#x27;s a foreign <i>government</i> it&#x27;s considered and &quot;act of god&quot;, (I.e. Something out of their control) which releases a lot of liability.
 My 2018 Odyssey minivan has a wireless charging pad option, right where I always keep the phone.  Still have to plug it in to use CarPlay though. :(
 There is a difference between goals and vision.
 Reddit has had embeddable comment threads for over two years.  It was a feature I actually worked on <i>nine</i> years ago, but the standards weren&#x27;t there at the time to make it work with voting.<p>I know I&#x27;m super biased, but I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing).<p>Is it really just bad marketing it on Reddit&#x27;s part that keeps others from using their embeddable comments?  As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control.  You may not get quite as much data as Mozilla&#x27;s solution, but in exchange you get the benefit of Reddit&#x27;s 12 years of spam data that train its filters.<p>I just don&#x27;t understand why more sites don&#x27;t embed the reddit comments.
 You think that, but it&#x27;s super noticeable.  Muliple times I&#x27;ve been in a situation where I&#x27;m in a conversation with someone who is constantly glancing at their watch.  Depending on how well I know them, I either say, &quot;You you like to just look at your phone?&quot; or &quot;Is time moving faster on your side of the table, because you seem to be very concerned with your watch.&quot;<p>Or I say nothing and just think about how rude that person is.
 &gt; On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting)<p>You can just collapse it.<p>I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating.  But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.
 Did you talk to someone at Reddit about this?  I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;d like to know how you feel.  If you haven&#x27;t, you should send them this feedback directly.<p>BTW, it&#x27;s clear as day that they do this on their help page:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddithelp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;categories&#x2F;advertising&#x2F;targeting-your-audience&#x2F;targeting-subreddits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddithelp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;categories&#x2F;advertising&#x2F;targeti...</a>
 Reddit is missing. ;)<p>Edit:  Actually it looks like you&#x27;re missing all of S05.
 But that feels like a marketing fail.<p>You don&#x27;t have to accepts reddit&#x27;s culture to embed it&#x27;s comments.  You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don&#x27;t like.<p>As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.
 As someone who was on call for 20 years straight, I&#x27;m well aware of that. :)<p>And yes, I would rather they pull out their phone than stare at their wrist every 10 seconds.  I don&#x27;t have a problem with someone looking at their notifications, I&#x27;m just pointing out that people think they&#x27;re being sneaky with the watch when they really aren&#x27;t.
 &gt; would Reddit ca. 2004 had done that instead of building their own?<p>Maybe, but probably not, largely because they could not fully control the content, like WaPo could do today.<p>In this day and age, commenting on the internet is pretty mature, and the best systems have years of data to feed their anti-spam algorithms.<p>Just like you can run your own mail server today, most people don&#x27;t because it&#x27;s a pain in the butt and it&#x27;s a lot easier to take advantage of someone else&#x27;s expertise.<p>It&#x27;s the same with comments.  It&#x27;s a lot easier to let someone else do it.
 Collapsing only hides it for you.<p>With enough karma you get a downvote button.
 Google&#x27;s remediation systems are terrible. If you can&#x27;t convince their algorithm you&#x27;re a good person, you&#x27;re out of luck.<p>My adwords account has been locked <i>for 15 years</i> despite my repeated appeals (they seem to let me appeal about once every five years).<p>I have no idea why it&#x27;s locked and no one will tell me nor fix it.<p>So I have a separate adwords account which annoyingly I cannot tie to my primary gmail account because apparently at some point <i>after</i> it was locked they got tied together.
 You mean like movie stars?  We&#x27;ve had at least four generations now obsessed with movie stars.  It&#x27;s also been the century of greatest achievement for humankind.<p>Correlation isn&#x27;t causation though. :)
 Just replace Youtube Star with Movie star.  At least growing up in LA, lots of my friends wanted to be movie stars and rock stars.  Some of them actually are now.<p>They apparently provide value to someone, because they make millions of dollars.
 She may not be an actress (although she&#x27;s still probably better than many out there), but she is certainly a savvy businesswoman and marketeer.  Don&#x27;t discount her skills just because you can&#x27;t recognize them.
 Tour and Travel Guides is one of them.<p>I basically went to the circles thing in the middle and started moving my mouse around till I found one that I thought might have been female dominated in the past, then I checked it in the box below.<p>Would be nice to get the data though.
 Well to be fair, the Trello notifications don&#x27;t distract you from using Trello...
 Off topic, but man do I hate looping gifs in my articles.  It&#x27;s so incredibly distracting.<p>Sure, play it once, maybe even twice.  But an endless loop?  That&#x27;s just unnecessary.
 Unpacks the object into a dictionary.  It&#x27;s syntactic sugar:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;2921893&#x2F;66202" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;2921893&#x2F;66202</a>
 I have javascript on and gigabit internet.  It still took over 10 seconds for this page to show me readable content.<p>This doesn&#x27;t just apply to the people with JS off.
 Maybe the mean by total dollars spent. Which given the high prices at least passed the snug test. Maybe.
 REmber though that a retail investor can buy this stock, and pay 25% to get in on a unicorn IPO.<p>To get in only paying 7% (i.e. at the IPO), you have to already be a wealthy investor so you can get some of the IPO stock.<p>The 18% difference is your fee for deal access basically.<p>I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s right, but it explains why it makes sense.
 If you set any arbitrary number, the ad networks will simply report that number as the size, or chunk the video into that size and make the page keep requesting small video after small video.
 Ok, done!
 Out of curiosity, do you have kids?  It&#x27;s mighty convenient to have a car with all the stuff in it and plenty of space to park that car nearby, and also lots of space for the kids to play outside.
 That would be a risky defense because while they may get off on the insider trading charge, they would open themselves up to a huge shareholder lawsuit.
 The funny part here is that their defense seems to be, &quot;no really we had no idea&quot;.<p>Which may get them off the insider trading charge, but opens them up to one hell of a shareholder lawsuit.
 I&#x27;m guessing you don&#x27;t have young kids?  I say that because if I want to watch any R rated content (like Bojack Horseman for example, which I did last week), the only place I can safely do that is in my office with headphones on, since the toddler tends to creepily sneak up on us in the middle of the night after climbing out of bed.
 &gt; “I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.”<p>Or the Rec room.
 Nor mobile chrome.<p>Guess I&#x27;ll have to check it out later.
 I&#x27;m surprised they don&#x27;t have a box at the bottom, after you get your results, that says, &quot;How did we do?  What is your current salary?&quot;
 Yours must be different than mine:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;xCsE9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;xCsE9</a>
 I&#x27;d be interested to know how many PyCharm users were using standard editing mode vs Vim mode.
 Not for me:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;agXEb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;agXEb</a>
 Presumably any UBI system would be limited to citizens only.<p>In combination with open borders, you do risk having a class system, where the citizens have money and immigrants don&#x27;t, but at the same time, it solves the issue of certain jobs not being worth the time of someone who gets UBI (and therefore being for immigrants).<p>It&#x27;s a tough balance for sure, and one of the main arguments against UBI (accidental creation of a class system).
 It&#x27;s ok to say &quot;fucks&quot; on HN, especially if it&#x27;s a direct quote (and in this case fairly relevant since he was a fairly crass man).
 The thing Apple has going for it is that they already build a headquarters a long time ago, and also outgrew it a long time ago.  Their employees are already used to working in buildings near but not in the headquarters, and being moved around in and out of the HQ campus.<p>Also, the new HQ is only a mile from the old one and they&#x27;re going to keep the old one too.<p>So it&#x27;s not the huge cultural shift of a new HQ -- it&#x27;s more like just a new set of buildings.<p>It&#x27;s true, they spent a lot of money making a nice new HQ, but not even 1&#x2F;2 the employees will move into it.
 It cuts the shareholders out.  It leaves the valuable part of the business in the hands of a select few, and leaves the crappy part of the business in the hands of the shareholders.
 Read their ads, pay them money, or don&#x27;t read their content.  Seems like a pretty fair trade off.

 The driver rating system really puts drivers in a tough spot.  When someone asks them to make an illegal maneuver, they can either say no and risk damaging their driver rating, or say yes and risk a ticket.<p>Taxis don&#x27;t have this issue because you can&#x27;t rate the driver if they say no.
 Yeah I had a similar problem in Canada.  Got to the airport, tried to buy a bus ticket to get downtown from the automated kiosk.  It asked for the pin on my credit card, which it doesn&#x27;t have of course.<p>I was stuck.  I eventually found a shop inside that would sell me a bus ticket if I bought something else.
 There is a movie called &quot;The People vs. Larry Flynt&quot;.  It stars Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love.<p>It&#x27;s an excellent film, and it&#x27;s the story of how he got started and ends with his case in front of the Supreme Court.
 The advice I always give to a new college grad is try and get a job at one of the big tech companies.<p>The work and the mission may not be exciting, but there is huge room for growth and often the large companies have programs especially designed for career growth for new college grads.<p>But don’t get stuck. The job will comfortable. After a few years it’s time to move on. Maybe you’ve found a few folks to cofound with, or maybe you just have a good lead on a much bigger role. But the only way to really advance is to leave — most big companies have artificial limits on salary growth and promotions. You can always go back later.
 Maybe it was just the firm I worked with, but they got the same requirements doc that the software was eventually written against using an American outsource firm.<p>The Indian firm wanted requirements so detailed that I had to tell them where to put the for loops and while loops.  It was faster to just write the code myself than explain such easy details.
 &gt; I refuse to invest in serverless until I know that I can run the same code on minikube on my laptop as I can in &lt;insert cloud provider here&gt; because vendor lock in is real and will bite you in the ass one day.<p>If that is your concern, then you may want to consider that serverless isn&#x27;t the right solution for your problem.<p>All the serverless runtimes across all the providers are basically identical.  But that&#x27;s not what makes them interesting.  What makes them interesting are the ecosystems around them.<p>Lambda is the glue that binds AWS together.  Most of your lambdas should be AWS specific, enough so that your vendor lock in won&#x27;t be because of the specific Lambda runtime, but because of the services that you&#x27;re using with your Lambda.
 FreeBSD still has a plethora of 3rd party applications, it&#x27;s just that they enforce things like what you can put in &#x2F;etc and &#x2F;var and so on, making things much more regular.
 Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share:<p>I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.<p>My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous” and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.”<p>So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck.<p>I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site could send <i>that</i> much traffic.<p>If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!
 I assume synchronization with your Windows PC (bookmarks, passwords, etc).
 Not surprising.  My 18 year old cousin only seems to use Snapchat.  He only got FB right before going to college so he could participate in the groups.
 I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn&#x27;t a founder, or doesn&#x27;t have a high degree of ownership.<p>When the CEO controls a lot of the stock, they seem to care a lot less about quarterly results, whereas when the CEO gets most of their money from bonuses tied to stock growth, that is when you see most of these games.<p>If that&#x27;s true, it seems the lesson here is to give your CEO a bunch of stock instead of a bonus based on stock performance?

 You’re using the phone and set it down, it hasn’t auto locked yet.<p>They have your lock screen password but not your iTunes password.<p>You thought they were a friend and let them borrow your unlocked phone.<p>Even for a security conscience person there are plenty of situations where someone could get your unlocked phone.<p>And most people aren’t security conscience. It’s to protect them, not you.

 When I&#x27;ve looked at the reviews of places I&#x27;ve worked, I&#x27;ve found them to be reasonable, but often painting an incomplete picture.  Most of them seem to be from people who never really understood the work or the culture of the place, and therefore didn&#x27;t perform well.<p>Also, it will bias towards bad reviews.  I&#x27;ve never posted a review of a place I loved working at (and therefore never posted a review).  I guess I should, but it would probably just be assumed to be astroturfing.<p>One other issue is when there are multiple classes of workers.  For example Netflix has a lot of negative reviews from the folks who work in the DVD warehouses.  But their work environment has nothing to do with the software engineering part of the company, which is the majority of the company, so it skews negative.  Amazon has a similar problem, where a lot of the reviews come from the warehouse workers, who, for better or worse, get treated differently.
 Here&#x27;s why I&#x27;d never invest in the Uber for dog walkers:  Once someone finds a walker they like, they&#x27;ll just do a deal with them.  Dog walking isn&#x27;t like needing a ride.  Usually when you need a ride, you need it now, and you don&#x27;t care who provides it.<p>With dog walking, it&#x27;s usually at a scheduled time each day, and you care a lot about who is providing the service.<p>Dog walking is not a good candidate for the Uber model.
 I bought one online from Costco.com.  After I ordered, they sent me a fabric sample and made me sign a sheet that had things like &quot;I have checked the fabric sample and the color and texture are to my liking&quot;, and &quot;I understand that this couch is firmer than most&quot;.<p>When it arrived they put it together and everything was fine.  Then a month later a seam popped.  I called them and they said, &quot;We can send someone to fix it, no charge, or give you $230, your choice&quot;.  I assume $230 was the cost of repair.
 Someone on reddit pointed out something the other day that made  a lot of sense.<p>The GOP is afraid of subsidized health care and subsidized&#x2F;free college, because it would remove the two biggest recruiting tools the army has -- free lifetime healthcare and money for college.<p>Without those carrots, few would sign up for the military.
 Congressional Republicans.  Particularly the ones on the Armed Forces committee, who are acutely aware of the recruiting problem.
 I&#x27;ve been drawing dinosaurs for years.  Sometimes my wife draws them for me (for purchases on my card, in front of the cashier).  No one seems to care.
 That might just be because you are getting older and value your time more.<p>I used to try every new app, every new service.  I used to run Linux on my desktop.  Doing those things was fun and challenging, but took time.<p>I have kids now.  I value spending time with them over fiddling with the latest app or spending an hour tuning my kernel so I can run my window manager at max resolution.  I use a Mac and it just does that for me now, albeit with far less customizability and fun, but that is the tradeoff I&#x27;m willing to make.<p>I&#x27;m not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but I&#x27;m saying your sample group has an age bias. :)
 No offense, but that&#x27;s kind of the fun of linux on the desktop.<p>Also, if you really haven&#x27;t updated in three years, that means that you&#x27;re still running kernel 3.16, which has 81 known vulnerabilities[0], 12 of which are critical.  That&#x27;s the kind of stuff I don&#x27;t really want to worry about anymore.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;vulnerability-list&#x2F;vendor_id-33&#x2F;product_id-47&#x2F;version_id-169910&#x2F;Linux-Linux-Kernel-3.16.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;vulnerability-list&#x2F;vendor_id-33&#x2F;p...</a>
 I find it interesting that you measure your desk in mm and not cm.  Is that common in metric countries?  For me, here in the States, I would say I moved from a 24in to 36in desk (which incidentally is also 2 feet to 3 feet, but I wouldn&#x27;t use feet).
 Remember folks, the acceptance rate for YC is lower than Harvard.  If you didn&#x27;t skip college because Harvard rejected you, then don&#x27;t stop doing your startup because YC rejected you. :)
 That was me and my wife.  I&#x27;m pretty sure our baby stuff accounts for most of that growth.
 Protip.  Put expensive stuff you want for yourself on the registry.  It&#x27;s unlikely that anyone will buy it (but hey if they do great!) but after the due date they send you a coupon for 20% off if you buy everything left on your registry.<p>We got a bunch of lego sets for the older kid that way, and the discount counted!
 I&#x27;m sure you wouldn&#x27;t be the first.
 Oh good.  I was going nuts trying to figure out why I suddenly couldn&#x27;t communicate with my coworkers and Slack kept saying I didn&#x27;t have internet when I clearly had internet.<p>Ah, the downside of relying on a third party for critical communication infrastructure when you&#x27;re a full remote company...
 Oh man.  I was driving right by there the other day, and it was the Friday before a Stanford home football game.<p>I thought those RVs were all tailgaters who were just trying to get a good spot.<p>I feel terrible now.
 Sounds like they would be perfect for Cassandra, or anything else that uses SSTables.
 I’m part of group one. I have two kids. Putting them in the car to go bargain shopping sounds awful.<p>Being able to order online and have it magically show up later that day or the next is worth the markup.
 I definitely do.  I automatically give plus points in my head even though I know I shouldn&#x27;t.
 My car doubles as a &quot;everything I need when I take the kid out&quot; storage.  We always have:<p>- diapers<p>- changing pad<p>- strollers<p>- extra clothes<p>- kids movies for the tv in the van, queued up to where we left off<p>Sure, people in places like NYC just carry all that stuff with them when they take the kid out, but they also take the kid out less often or move to the burbs because it&#x27;s a huge pain in the butt.<p>I&#x27;d much rather own the car simply so that I can keep all my stuff in it that I need when I go out.
 Right!! I totally forgot that part because it&#x27;s just always there.  But yes that&#x27;s actually the worst part.
 Yes, we&#x27;ve done all that too when traveling.  But it&#x27;s a lot easier to just hop in the car and go, knowing that all that stuff is already there.
 Sure, I can totally see us ditching the second car for a self driving subscription.  We barely use the second car as is, but we use it just enough that it&#x27;s still cheaper than Lyft&#x2F;Uber.  Unless the self driving rental were even cheaper, it wouldn&#x27;t make sense.
 Yeah I know it goes down over time and then won&#x27;t be an issue anymore.  We did in fact get a van that I plan to keep for Peak Kid.<p>I fully expect to be using at least one driverless vehicle before they leave to college.  I&#x27;m just not sure if it will be exclusively a rented driverless car or something else.
 For reddit, all the content was submitted by Steve and Alexis at first, then they got a couple of friends to start submitting.<p>To make submitting for themselves easier, Steve made a special submit page that would also create an account at the same time, and then make the submission from that account.<p>After a while they noticed people they didn&#x27;t know were submitting, and then PG mentioned them in an essay and things started taking off.<p>They knew they had something the first day they didn&#x27;t have to submit anything.
 There was no commenting at the time, but yes, there were sock puppets for voting and submitting links.
 I worked in University IT and made over $30K working part time during the school year and full time in the summer, as did most of my coworkers.  Also, we made slightly more than the normal person because Social Security tax is waived for working students, so that&#x27;s like a 7% bonus.<p>When you&#x27;re in the Bay Area and your students can choose to work for the University or go get a paid internship down the road, you have to compete on wages.
 Protecting children from harmful drugs.  I&#x27;m not saying it does that, I&#x27;m saying that&#x27;s the argument to be made.
 Wow, look at that steady and consistent base load generation by nuclear!
 I&#x27;m a big supporter of legal weed, but even I know better than that.  It&#x27;s less harmful than alcohol, and about on par with caffeine.<p>There are definitely effects from long term use.  Both science and my personal anecdata of long time smoking friends tell me that.
 Theil didn&#x27;t just hurt a bully.  He took it a step further.  For one, he financed someone <i>else&#x27;s</i> lawsuit, because his own was unwinnable (they did in fact print the truth, that he is gay).  More importantly, he hurt free speech through the chilling effect of his suit.<p>What he basically did was say, &quot;don&#x27;t ever print anything negative about a billionaire because they can take down your entire business&quot;.  So now if a billionaire really does do something newsworthy and negative, places like the New York Times might think twice about publishing that story, for fear of the cost of defending a billionaire&#x27;s lawsuit.<p>That&#x27;s why people dislike him (other than his Trump support, although to be fair I haven&#x27;t heard anything about him supporting Trump anymore).
 I don&#x27;t think that is right.  They <i>participate</i> in other people&#x27;s lawsuits as additional council.  The don&#x27;t just give money to other council.
 I agree, Gawker was awful and deserved to die for many reasons.<p>But it&#x27;s important to remember that the judgement was only the death blow -- defending the lawsuit was what gave them a slow death.  Even if Gawker was right and won, they still would have died.
 I hate Gawker too, but you need to see the bigger picture.<p>It was defending the suit, whether right or wrong, that killed them.  The judgement was just the death blow.<p>Would you feel the same way if the suit had been against a more reputable organization like the New York Times?
 Pretty clever take on an old technique.<p>At reddit we would store a field on the user recording the last time they voted on something.  If they loaded a page that was newer than that timestamp, then we could skip reading any votes for that page since we knew they couldn&#x27;t possibly have voted on anything on that page.<p>This basically takes the same technique and puts it a level down and reverses it, saying &quot;this database has any update this user could have made&quot;.<p>I like it.
 Every ICO I hear about just sounds like a scam.  Maybe I don&#x27;t understand it, but I have yet to see a case where as an investor I thought &quot;that sounds like a good investment!&quot;.<p>Can someone describe a scenario where an ICO is a win for the investor?<p>For example, at least with stocks, I get a share of ownership in return for my money.  So as the value of the company goes up, the value of my share goes it.  It&#x27;s based on tangible ownership of a real thing.  But with a crypto coin, what is the value tied to?  Is it really just the perceived value of the underlying asset?  And what happens when the company shuts down?  They sell all the assets, the real shareholders take all the money, but what happens to all the coin holders?
 That explains the philosophical  reasons, but just like cryptocurrency is weak compared to fiat currency, ICOs still sound even weaker than stocks.<p>It&#x27;s nice that there is no regulation, but in the case of both fiat currency and stock, it is the regulation that gives it value, because they are backed by a system of laws and an army to protect those laws.<p>Like with stocks, they are already somewhat subject to the psychological whims of the shareholders, but what keeps most stock prices fairly stable is the fact that everyone who holds it knows that the worst case scenario is that the underlying company is liquidated and everyone gets some money back.<p>With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn&#x27;t worth anything anymore, then it just isn&#x27;t worth anything anymore.  It has no backing in reality as far as I can tell.
 &gt; So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you get through traditional investments.<p>This was the best explanation yet, thank you!<p>It almost sounds like gambling, in that I have no control in the outcome nor any way to recoup assets, expect that I can&#x27;t even calculate the odds of my return on an ICO. :)<p>I guess my question is, what is the end game?  Doesn&#x27;t someone end up at the bottom of the pyramid so to speak, stuck holding the bag with the whole thing goes spiraling down?
 My opinion here is highly biased, since I developed it while working at Netflix, but I think you&#x27;re dismissing a lot of non-technical benefits of microservices.<p>I&#x27;ll start off by saying that I agree with you in that when it comes to small teams, microservices is probably not the best option, as it adds additional unnecessary complexity.<p>But one of the best benefits I saw of microservices was that it allows small teams to work together mostly independently.  It meant that each group could run in whatever way was best for the four of five folks in the group.<p>If the auth group really thought Go was the best solution for their problem, then they could do that.  If the API team wanted to do a deployment every two weeks on Wednesday, they could do that.  If the tools team wanted to deploy on every checkin, they could do that.<p>It meant that the 1000 engineers didn&#x27;t have to all agree on a particular language, development method, or development cadence.  Each team could do whatever worked best for that team, and was most in control of their own success or failure.
 &gt; I&#x27;m not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side&#x27;s supporting arguments are<p>My friend was a lawyer for an ISP and now works for the FCC (I promise she&#x27;s a good person otherwise).<p>The main argument is that small ISPs can&#x27;t compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can&#x27;t build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube.  If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.<p>The other main argument against it is that it&#x27;s not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.<p>They&#x27;re both decent arguments, and would totally make sense in a world where multiple ISPs could reach everyone&#x27;s home.
 More likely Senate.  Feinstein is up in 2018 and the tides are turning against her.  It would be a tough slog but doable.  Oh and she&#x27;d have to run as a Democrat.  I don&#x27;t think a Republican could get elected in California in 2018.
 Exactly.
 Something about this is sitting right with me.<p>I know Joe (the ousted CISO). I’ve known him for almost 15 years, and worked with him professionally in the past.<p>This is not like him. He was the most ethical lawyer I ever met. Everything was by the book. He cares about privacy. He cares about users. He’s prosecuted the worst of the worst.<p>Something here isn’t right.
 It’s already happening. George Takai’s accuser seems to not be believed. Also Al Franken’s accuser backed off when the photos of them hanging out being friendly came out along with a ton of witnesses who said they saw the two being friendly the whole time.
 &gt; They dont have to do fuck all for public comments<p>That&#x27;s not true.  As a nonpartisan federal agency, the must show how they accounted for public comment and why the choice they made is either in line with the public comments or why it is justified to not be in line.<p>They have to do more than just accept the comments.<p>But by allowing all the fake comments, they were able to say &quot;see everyone wants this, what we are doing is in line with the public comments&quot;.
 Because it&#x27;s cheaper than out-innovating your competitors.<p>But I&#x27;m pretty sure FB still supports NN anyway, since a lot of the value to users of Facebook are the articles their friends link to, and that gets hurt if some links are more expensive for some people to click on.
 That&#x27;s what the judicial branch is for.<p>They have to pass the crappy rules first so that someone who was harmed can sue them.<p>Congress can stop them now, and the judicial can stop them after the fact.  Congress is corrupt, but thus far the judicial is not.
 Before I clicked I was expecting this to be a &quot;random numbers as a service&quot; announcement, based on lava lamps or something.<p>And yes I know CloudFlare did the lava lamps thing, like a bunch of other people did it before them.  But it would be totally inline with Amazon to have a random numbers as a service service to compete with random.org.
 Right, but that doesn&#x27;t use <i>lava lamps</i> or <i>background atmospheric disturbances</i>. :)<p>It said &quot;better random numbers&quot; so I was hoping for something better than KMS random numbers.
 And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing.  Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time.<p>I&#x27;m not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it&#x27;s more of a &quot;we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work&quot; kinda thing.
 They own Twitch. They want to expand the games market so there are more people to stream and watch games.
 Yeah my anecdata backs this up.  My kid has a ton of toys, but she only plays with one or two a day, for quite a long time.<p>But when we go to her cousin&#x27;s houses, she has to play with every toy for five minutes.  Same with when they come to our house.
 There is definitely an education bubble.  It&#x27;s way too easy to get money for college.  You hear a lot of stories about the increasing costs of college and crushing debt on graduation, but you don&#x27;t hear a lot of stories of &quot;I wanted to go to college but couldn&#x27;t get a loan&quot;.  Almost everyone gets approved, regardless of their future ability to pay it back.<p>We need a fundamental shift in the way college is paid for.  Some (many?) would like to see a government funded system, others would like to see the removal of subsidized loans to bring prices back down (and leaving many unable to afford college in its wake).<p>Another solution is to let you go to school for free and then pay a percent of all your future earnings back to your college, or at least into a pool that pays for the next generation&#x27;s college.  Of course with that system, colleges would bias towards people who are pursuing profitable majors, so you&#x27;d probably see a lot more STEM degrees and a lot fewer of everything else, until it got oversaturated, but there is a very long lead time between &quot;too many degrees&quot; and &quot;no one studies this anymore&quot;.<p>In other words, the fundamental problem is that we tell kids that college is the only path, creating insanely high demand for the product, when in reality there would be plenty of people much better served learning a trade or skill instead of four years doing something hate for a useless degree they&#x27;ll never use.
 It&#x27;s good in theory, but most new parents don&#x27;t have the spare cash to start saving at birth, unless they are already fairly well off.<p>I was lucky enough to have kids late in life and I can afford to put money in their college fund now, but most new parents sadly can&#x27;t.
 That&#x27;s an interesting solution to the problem of state funding.  I wonder if they&#x27;ve done any studies on the educational effectiveness of the program.
 What happens if you need to encode a lot of videos during peak streaming?<p>The beauty of the cloud is that when that happens, they can burst up and use on-demand instances to increase the overall pool.  With bare metal you either have to keep a bunch of spares or not be able to handle that situation.
 What&#x27;s wrong with the math?  They saved a significant amount of money doing this, which is why it was worth doing.
 You could do all those cost reduction things, but until you either decrease demand or decrease the supply of money, costs will never go down -- profits will just go up.
 It would be similar, but it would be an additional tax that only college graduates pay and is entirely redirected back at the colleges.
 Apologies if I offended, I should have put &quot;useless&quot; in quotes.  I meant degrees that society does not give as much value to as to what you paid to get them.
 Exactly, which is why this would be a special additional tax that is just for college graduates and just goes back to the colleges.
 &gt; In the end, she started her own wedding photography company instead.<p>That&#x27;s awesome!  I wish more people had  smart person to sit down and explain these things to them.
 I was a former insider so I can&#x27;t get into details, but if you look you&#x27;ll see that almost the entirety of their cost is content acquisition.  The next biggest cost is salary.<p>Servers barely even register as far as costs go, and also, it&#x27;s a 92% savings over what the cost would have been without the system, not an absolute 92%.  The farm keeps growing all the time as movies become higher resolution and more encodings are supported.
 I worked there so I&#x27;m well aware of how it works.  My point was sometimes they need to do a massive encode during peak, and having the cloud allows them to do that when necessary.
 We have that.  It&#x27;s called insurance.
 The number you don&#x27;t know is how much the encoding workload grew in the time it took them to develop the system.<p>Let&#x27;s use your numbers.  Say that two years ago computing costs were $50M, and encoding was $46M of that.  Now say that their costs are currently $100M, but the encoding workload grew 6X.  Under the old system, that would have cost $276M, but under the new system it is on $22M.  That would be a 92% savings, and would totally be in line given that in the last few years they have drastically increased their machine learning output, which would have overtaken encoding work.
 Usually when a large company relies heavily on a cloud provider, they have an additional contract that specifies, among other things, advanced warning of any pending shutdown, often measured in <i>years</i>, to give them enough time to adjust and also to appease their shareholders and auditors.
 Based solely on the pictures in the article, I just bought a copy of this book.  It will arrive Monday.  If I like it, I plan to buy at least two more as gifts.<p>I&#x27;ve been looking for a book like this since I had my first kid three years ago!
 Having studied how humans learn, both are important factors.  Genetics determines the upper limit, and teaching and practice determines if you reach that limit.<p>But when it comes to teaching, it is important to teach both how to learn, as well as basic concepts to build upon.  By teaching the child these words and concepts, they can then expand from there.  They can get curious then use their training on &quot;how to learn&quot; to learn more about the topics presented.<p>To successfully teach a child, you have to do both.
 I&#x27;m more interested in which cloud provider doesn&#x27;t allow benchmarks.
 He wrote the fanfare too (the one that comes before Star Wars, which was an adaptation of the original).
 Goodbye.  :(<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0</a><p>Since everyone is sharing their AIM memories:  When I was in college (1995-1998), AIM was the #1 way to flirt with people.  Today the kids worry about whether they got a like or not.<p>Back then, you&#x27;d sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn&#x27;t respond but remained online.
 Maybe in some places for some people, but for us Berkeley nerds it was definetly online. Of course you had to flirt in person to get their screen name.
 Yes!  You had your alt account to check for blocks.  I forgot about that.

 This is clearly targeting tech companies, who are the majority of companies that give this benefit.
 Oh the irony if this actually increases the cost of real estate development.
 I&#x27;ve had this problem from the other side.  I haven&#x27;t been to the bank to withdraw cash in years.  Usually I got all the cash I needed by splitting bills with friends, where I paid on the card and got cash, or Chinese New Year money.<p>But since having kids (and the invention of Venmo and its ilk), we&#x27;ve stopped going out with friends and splitting checks and when we do it&#x27;s all digital, and now I have to <i>give</i> the New Year money instead of get it.<p>We have a house cleaner every couple of weeks that I like to tip, and lately it&#x27;s been a struggle to find cash lying around for the tip.  Also when I get a haircut they give a big discount for cash, and that&#x27;s been a struggle too.  Like the girl in the article, I just forget to go to the cash machine, it&#x27;s not a priority until the time comes.<p>I may have to visit the ATM for the first time in a few years this holiday season to give holiday tips.
 I hope it&#x27;s because services for them have picked up, funded by both public money and private (digital) donations.<p>But I suspect the real answer is something closer to &quot;starving and dying&quot;. :(
 The ostensible purpose of the doorman is to add a layer of security.  Someone who is always there watching, looking for people who don&#x27;t belong, receiving packages and securing them, etc.  They are basically a crime deterrent.<p>So is the elevator operator to an extent (although that one is really more just for impression of being fancy).
 There was a great Freakonomics podcast[0] where they interviewed a Koch brother.  It seems like they truly believe that is what would be best for the country.  They are Libertarians and believe in it&#x27;s tenets to their core.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;why-hate-koch-brothers-part-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;why-hate-koch-brothers-part-...</a>
 We used to do that too, but that couple hundred came from the meal splitting and New Year money. :)  Now I actually have to remember to stop a bank when they&#x27;re open, because the ATM only gives 20s, and I need 5s and 10s, but since no one uses cash I have no where to break the 20s anymore.
 Well it used to be that if they grabbed a package for you, you would tip them, so the people who got more packages &quot;paid more&quot; for the service.
 I don&#x27;t really ask. They advertise it on the window though, so it&#x27;s not like the IRS would be all that fooled.
 No?  I mean, we used to just always have it around, but now we don&#x27;t.  But I can&#x27;t think of a single emergency that would require cash to solve that credit or venmo can&#x27;t.
 Hmmm, not a bad idea.  But they only give like $20 back, right?
 Well it&#x27;s $12 instead of $15, so 20% off.  But keep in mind that for a small merchant, besides the 3% processing fee, there is also a base fee, and when you talk about a haircut for $15, the base fee eats up a whole lot of the profit.
 The problem with that is a lot of those stores will kick the homeless person out.  We used to buy meals for homeless people on the street when we were getting fast food in college.  Oftentimes they were afraid to come into the McDonalds with us, even though we were taking them in, because they had been kicked out in the past.  There&#x27;s no way they would have gone in to use a gift card.
 I&#x27;ve said this many times:  Google&#x27;s AI services are superior in every way. They have better results and are easier to use.<p>Amazon is the master of the &quot;good enough&quot;.  Their service works well enough that you can check the box that it exists and then point it at all that data you already have in AWS.  And that&#x27;s all that most everyone needs.<p>If you are using AI and your competitors aren&#x27;t, it doesn&#x27;t really matter all that much how good the AI is -- you&#x27;re gonna do better and be more efficient.<p>It&#x27;s only after <i>everyone</i> is using AI that it will start to matter how good your particular implementation is.  Right now we&#x27;re at the stage that any implantation is better than none.
 I was recently having a discussion with the founder of a very successful company.  I was asking him how they got their start and their initial customers.  They were not from the Silicon Valley originally.<p>He said it was slow going at first, until they moved to the Bay Area and started going to meetups.  He said that meeting potential customers in person was what really accelerated their initial adoption, far more than their write-ups in the press or their &quot;free customers&quot; from their accelerator program.<p>My point is, that will be hard to replicate anywhere else for a long time.  The density of startups and the opportunities that presents will be hard to have somewhere else -- it&#x27;s a chicken and egg problem.<p>I had a friend who started a VC in Montreal.  You know what happened as soon as the companies got successful?  They took a round from a VC in the Bay Area and then moved here.  They kept their dev office in Montreal for the &quot;cheap labor&quot; but made their HQ here.<p>I suspect that is what will happen with these investments too.  Most of the companies will probably leave Ohio when they get successful.<p>And then they&#x27;ll exit and have a bunch of money to invest where they now live -- the Bay Area.
 I should have clarified, I meant the services that they had were better, but you&#x27;re right, they don&#x27;t have the breadth of services that the others do.
 Filmed yes. But then where does the film go for editing, color correction, adr, and other post?  Hollywood. And then the executives screen it and then it’s dostributed and all of that is in LA too.<p>The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it’s easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.
 Absolutely.  I myself run my company as fully remote for this very reason.  But I think I&#x27;m pretty leading edge in that respect -- most companies still believe having an office is important.
 Well the post we&#x27;re discussing has some hard data. :)<p>But generally speaking when I talk to AI experts they all agree that for the services that Google actually has, they are better, with MS being #2.
 &gt; Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not in ML).<p>Since you work there, hopefully you can see this feedback and filter it up:  I love your tools.  They are the best.  I have tried using your tools.  They are hard to use, despite the fact that I have a pretty solid understanding of how to use them.  I would like to use your tools more, but getting support is hard (partly because the docs aren&#x27;t great, partly because there is no community, because see #1).<p>I don&#x27;t know how to fix this, but it would be great if maybe Google spent some time focusing on building a community around your tools, like AWS did.  At the beginning they had a lot of employees hanging out on the forums and on other forums, answer questions and building a community of users, and especially helping third parties who tried to build libraries for their tools (like boto for Python).  It would be great if Google did that too.<p>Thanks for listening!
 According to this[0] there is still a Falcon 9 Zuma launch scheduled for 2017.  Anyone know if that is still happening?  I ask because it happens that I&#x27;ll be in the Canaveral area right after Christmas and would love to see the launch in person!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kennedyspacecenter.com&#x2F;launches-and-events&#x2F;events-calendar?pageindex=1&amp;categories=Rocket%20Launches" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kennedyspacecenter.com&#x2F;launches-and-events&#x2F;event...</a>
 Thanks!  I really should have thought of that. :)
 As someone who ran a fairly large, mostly reputable website (reddit), I agree that you are off by an order or magnitude or more.  There is no way they get close to $1 CPM.  They&#x27;d be lucky to get 10 cents, probably closer to 1 or 2 cents.<p>They most likely barely break even after paying themselves a modest salary.
 There two good use cases I can think of.<p>When you do a captive portal with some sort of timer (hotel, airplane, etc), they will sometimes do a pop under with a timer that has the option to pay more to renew.  That can be slightly useful.<p>Or when you visit a site, and it does a pop under of a survey about that site.  Then you see it when you close the window and maybe fill out the survey.  That one is less useful but at least legit.
 Most markets don&#x27;t do CPM anymore they pay per click, so you end up with an effective CPM below 10 cents if you have poor click through rates and&#x2F;or low payouts per click.
 &gt; Not just for unlocking the phone but the fact all of my apps (banking, etc) also support it makes authentication be a problem of the past...all friction gone!<p>Those all work with TouchID too.  But with TouchID I can add my wife&#x27;s fingerprint, so when I&#x27;m driving she can unlock my phone and use it to do banking or set up the navigation for me or whatever.  Or when I&#x27;m showering.  Or bathing the kids.  Or cooking, or working in the yard, or....
 Unless you moved around a lot, the cops would probably catch on to you and ding you for some sort of city code that prevents living in a van.<p>Back when I was in college, I actually seriously looked at buying a boat and docking it Emeryville, as the boat payments and docking fee would have been cheaper than rent.  Unfortunately the marina had a 10 year wait list for live-aboard slips.
 Yeah but those cost a lot more because of the premium on already having a slip.  Also you get an old decrepit boat that needs a lot of maintenance.
 Ah yeah if you moved around a lot it could work.  As long as you can actually find a place to park. :)  You might waste a lot of time circling during the day.<p>I assumed you&#x27;d stake out your parking late at night when there is lots of space and then sit all day.
 Most everyone will get a break.  There is a weird crunch for people making between $200K and $400K in a high tax state like CA or NY who will come out behind due to the loss of deduction on their property tax and state tax, and since they live in CA or NY, are probably barely middle class at those wages.<p>The bigger issue is that, for example, the Walton family <i>alone</i> will get 5% of the 1.5 trillion dollar tax break.  The Trump family will get a huge break too.  It&#x27;s unlikely that the Walton family or the Trump family will suddenly start making a ton of economic activity because of their windfalls, but in the meantime government revenue is down, which means they have to start cutting services.<p>So most of the tax breaks for the lower earners will be eaten up over the next few years in paying for things the government used to subsidize for them.
 I&#x27;ve had this argument before, but basically, with $400K a year, you can afford two cars and a 2000 sq ft house with good schools, and maybe a nice vacation.<p>So yeah, you&#x27;re not hurting, but you&#x27;re not wealthy enough to retire and maintain that lifestyle.<p>Sure, you could &quot;live frugally&quot; and retire after a few years, but you&#x27;d literally have to live in a tent and then retire somewhere that isn&#x27;t California.  That might be ok for some, but for others it isn&#x27;t.<p>I don&#x27;t know how people making less than $200K a year live here comfortably.  I mean I do know, because I know people like that.  They live in a house that they inherited from their parents, they don&#x27;t do anything out of the house, and they live near bad schools with high crime.
 Let&#x27;s look bottom up.  A typical house in my neighborhood is about 1800 sq ft, 3&#x2F;4 bedroom, so enough to have say 2 kids.  It&#x27;s about 2.2 million to buy said house.  So that&#x27;s about $8000&#x2F;mo in mortgage, assuming you somehow managed to save $400K for a down payment.  You&#x27;ll also pay about $2000&#x2F;mo in taxes.  So that&#x27;s $120K&#x2F;yr just on housing costs.<p>But my neighborhood is the &quot;poor&quot; neighborhood.  Most of the folks who live here make about $200K-$300K a year.<p>Over in the $400K neighborhood, their houses are about 2000-2500 sq ft, and cost about $3.5M.  Keep in mind the median home in the US is about 2200 sq ft, so these houses are right in line with the US median.<p>At $3.5M, assuming they can save a 20% down payment, they&#x27;ll be paying $14,000&#x2F;mo in mortgage and $3,000&#x2F;mo on property tax.  So that&#x27;s $204,000 a year <i>just on housing</i> to live in a median size home with good schools.<p>Using your math, after taxes and 401K, that leaves $38,000 a year for everything else.  Or if you skip the 401K, it&#x27;s $78,000 in post tax money.<p>So like I said, you aren&#x27;t hurting, but you aren&#x27;t crazy rich either.
 Yeah it was like you say. My cousin was on Price is Right. He came with a group of 20, and they were guaranteed that at least one of their group would be in contestants row.
 &gt; I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they&#x27;re addressing.<p>You know old time journalists had a solution to this.  Interviewing subjects with first hand knowledge.<p>I know I rag on highscalability a lot, but I feel like they deserve it.  They&#x27;ve written multiple articles about topics in which I would be a first person resource (Reddit and Netflix), and not once have they ever contacted me or anyone I worked with for an interview.  They&#x27;ve <i>quoted</i> me from presentations, but the quotes were out of context and wrong they way they quoted it.<p>All of this could have been cleared up with a single interview of anyone who is a primary source expert.
 A good idea, except I haven&#x27;t worked there in almost three years, so a lot of my knowledge it out of date.<p>I have to start by interviewing my old co-workers! :)
 Why would I build new supply if I&#x27;m going to be stuck renting it out under rent control?  If I already own a property, how can I build more if I can&#x27;t raise rents on my current properties to market rates so I can afford to build new buildings at market rates?<p>Rent control causes supply issues.  Look at the City of Berkeley.  Their supply increased massively right after rent control was lifted in 1997.
 &gt; What is going on with the cars on the top floor of this parking garage in Queen Anne? They seem to stay in the same spot for months at a time.<p>Most likely city vehicle parking.  They are all painted the same because they are probably part of a fleet.  Most likely they are different cars that all look the same.
 There are lots of reasons to love AMP.  If you look at my profile you&#x27;ll see that I have no monetary connection to Google.<p>As a consumer, I love AMP.  I always preference for the AMP pages because I know they&#x27;ll be fast and that they will most likely load even when I&#x27;m on really bad internet.<p>As a content producer I&#x27;m not a huge fan, for all the reasons outlined in the letter.<p>But for people who only consume, I can see why they would be big fans of AMP.
 Wow, I knew it was a limited beta, but I didn&#x27;t know it was <i>that</i> limited.  As one of the lucky few that had it, I now feel both special and sad that it&#x27;s gone.<p>But not that sad -- I didn&#x27;t use it once after a few easy questions the first day I got access.  It would occasionally pop up some suggestions as I was typing messages, but I would always ignore them as they were irrelevant.<p>I think the biggest issue is that they weren&#x27;t up front about it.  They tried to make it seem like it was an AI doing all the work.<p>I think if they had straight up said, &quot;this is a human and we&#x27;re training an AI&quot;, it would have been a lot better.  It would have allowed them to do things to get stronger feedback, like asking, &quot;was this the right suggestion?&quot;  Then when I got irrelevant suggestions, I could give them feedback as to what was wrong and why.   But it never asked me for that so I never gave any feedback.<p>I thought I was just one of millions training the AI and that they would get plenty of signal with all those users.  I had no idea it was so limited -- I definitely would have been much more active in giving feedback had I known.
 Ah, I didn&#x27;t realize those were separate.  I actually have both.<p>But in that case, most of what I said still applies!
 It isn&#x27;t set yet.  This is basically a leak -- the process isn&#x27;t done yet.<p>The day gets set much further down the line.
 You&#x27;re not asking the right question.  The answer was right in what you quoted:<p>&gt; generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners<p>They are already so used to being watched that they don&#x27;t find it odd to be watched.
 If you&#x27;re invested I wish you the best.  But here is why I think all cryptocurrency is worthless:  It is backed by nothing.<p>The USD is backed by the courts of the USA, which in turned are backed by people with guns (law enforcement and the military).  The YEN is backed by guns.  The GPB is backed by guns.<p>What is BTC backed by?  If someone literally steals your BTC, what recourse do you have?  There is no court to go to, no one to back it up.<p>Even the most hard core Libertarians acknowledge the need of a court system and force to back up contract law.<p>So I will never invest in cryptocurrency because of that.  Maybe I&#x27;ll be wrong and miss out, but that&#x27;s a risk I&#x27;m willing to take.<p>Distributed ledger is a good thing, but it isn&#x27;t a store of value in and of itself.
 Exactly.  There are laws and rules about moving USD from one person to another, and if someone violates those rules, you have recourse in the courts.  And if they don&#x27;t follow the court order, someone with guns will come and force them to follow it.
 Don&#x27;t be silly.  We&#x27;ve already seen multiple examples of stolen coins with no recourse -- exchanges taking the money and going bankrupt, people issuing new coins and then just taking the money, etc.<p>And I don&#x27;t have to guess your secret key -- I just have to steal your computer.  Even if I get caught stealing your computer and have to give it back, if I&#x27;ve already compromised your wallet and moved the coins, there is nothing you can do to get them back.
 Gold bars in a vault are at least something of value, and not just bits on a drive.  The physical gold can be used to make things.  What can you do with the bits on a drive?
 &gt; All of this is just the justice system, though.<p>Only if you&#x27;re in the USA.  USD is subject to the US legal system regardless of where the transaction takes place.
 I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re supposed to feel anything.  I think this article is just a PR move.  Probably went something like this:<p>Kid: I&#x27;m gonna publicly tarnish the family&#x27;s reputation if you don&#x27;t give me my money<p>Dad: I dare you, but if you do, you won&#x27;t get a cent.<p>Kid: I care more about hurting you than the money because (I feel that) you abused me all my life
 Architecture schools always seem to be ugly for some reason.  The one at Berkeley[0] is hideous.  Legend has it that it was build to look &quot;inside-out&quot; so the students could have a better understanding of how buildings are built.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ced.berkeley.edu&#x2F;images&#x2F;made&#x2F;images&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;features&#x2F;wam_400_300.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ced.berkeley.edu&#x2F;images&#x2F;made&#x2F;images&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;features...</a>
 Technically your &quot;that&quot; is superfluous. ;)<p>&gt; In all seriousness, I greatly appreciate corrections like this in a way so few people do.
 What a shame.  The best flying experience I&#x27;ve ever had was coach on an A380 from SFO to Frankfurt.  It was the only time I arrived feeling awake and fresh.  The air felt cleaner, the lighting was great, and it was <i>so smooth</i>.<p>I get why it isn&#x27;t popular, but it&#x27;s just too bad.  I really liked flying on one.
 &gt; It has everything to do with being a new plane with new technologies<p>That&#x27;s true, and I still am looking for a chance to get on a 787.<p>Although I don&#x27;t think anything can replicate the smoothness of the A380, it&#x27;s just <i>so big</i>.
 Banks use eventual consistency for your balance.  You just don&#x27;t notice because it&#x27;s usually really quick.<p>The reason the ATM has a limit is because it&#x27;s eventually consistent.  It&#x27;s possible you just went to another ATM and drained your account, but that hasn&#x27;t reached the main office yet.<p>They are limiting their risk by allowing you to defraud them of up to $500 (or whatever your limit is).
 I used to agree until I was forced to use an eventually consistent system.<p>Both have their place, but I think you get better architected, more reliable software with an eventually consistent system.<p>In and eventually consistent system, the programmer must consider what to do in the case of data failure.  I think this is a good thing.  When building a user authentication system, who better to decide what to do when you can&#x27;t access the user database than the person writing the user auth system?  Should it fail open or closed?  Well if you&#x27;re a bank, you should probably fail closed.  If you&#x27;re Netflix?  Fail open.  The programmer should know the business case better than the database, which will alway fail closed.<p>Sure, in a consistent system the programmer <i>could</i> think about that, but they aren&#x27;t forced to, which I think is good.<p>Also, it means that joins must be done in your application.  Sometimes its good to have the programmer deal with that too, because it means they will have to really consider what data they need and be much more familiar with how much data is needed to create the join.  If you&#x27;re just relying on the database to do the joins, it might be hiding a lot of load from you, especially if you inadvertently create multiple table scans.  In an eventually consistent system, you <i>know</i> if you created a table scan, because you have to pull back a full table&#x27;s worth of data (or not, because you saw that issue and fixed it).<p>I just feels like the programmer gets better insight into what is happening to the data and can make better decisions on what to do when they are closer to the business cases the software is being built for.
 &gt; Is anyone actually &quot;failing open&quot; for user authentication?<p>Netflix did for a while at least, may still do it.  Worst case is that someone didn&#x27;t pay for the month.  The partitions happen rarely enough that it is better to give the user a good experience then not let a legit user in because of a network partition.<p>But the nice part is that this was a business decision, not a database decision.
 This is a fair point.  Maybe the engineer doesn&#x27;t think about it, but at least some engineer wrote a library that takes care of it, instead of relying on the database to do it.  And even with a consistent system, maybe they are still using a library.<p>But my point was eventually consistent systems, in general, force you to think about these things earlier on.  Of course there are exceptions in both directions.
 It would only fail open if the connection from the auth service to the database was down.  It&#x27;s all server side.
 It was only for playing a movie.  But that right there is a perfect example of why the logic should be at the business level and not the database level.<p>Allow them to watch a movie, but don&#x27;t show billing details.
 It allows the person writing the business software layer to make a decision that fits that business use case independent of how others interpret it.  But no one else needs to know how it works.<p>If the &quot;play movie&quot; service calls the auth service and says &quot;should I let this play&quot;, the auth service returns &quot;authorized&quot; or didn&#x27;t give a response or said &quot;maybe authorized&quot; or whatever.  The &quot;play movie&quot; service makes the business decision that makes sense for playing a movie, in this case, &quot;go ahead&quot;.<p>But the billing service maybe says &quot;I&#x27;m only gonna let you in with a confirmed yes&quot;.  So it&#x27;s possible the billing service will give you an error in the same conditions that the movie service does not, but those are business decisions instead of technical ones, which is good.
 Your point is valid, but it makes me sad.<p>We basically come from opposite viewpoints -- I think most devs will do the right thing, you think most will do the wrong thing.<p>Honestly, you&#x27;re probably right and I&#x27;m probably wrong, but I like to hope that I will always work in a place where I&#x27;m right. :)<p>(It was Netflix BTW, not reddit.  For the most part reddit used strongly consistent databases (Postgres), but we did use some eventual consistency in the caching layer).
 I was using &quot;eventually consistent system&quot; as a shorthand for &quot;multi-master database that is eventually consistent&quot; which may have been confusing.
 I was using &quot;eventually consistent&quot; as a shorthand for &quot;multi-master highly-available key-value distributed database&quot;.  Most people who don&#x27;t work in the space regularly consider them the same thing.  Basically Cassandra&#x2F;DynamoDB vs Cloud Spanner.<p>&gt; Eventually consistency has nothing to do with data failure; the real-world effect of eventually consistency is stale data, which you can&#x27;t generally tell is stale.<p>You&#x27;re right, that is the highly available distributed part, but it goes along with eventual consistency because if you plan for dealing with stale data then those same concepts protect you from unavailable data.<p>&gt; I think you&#x27;re talking about availability, not (eventual) consistency.<p>Again, the two go hand in hand.  Deal with stale data and you&#x27;ve dealt with unavailable data.<p>&gt; There is nothing preventing you from doing joins in a strongly consistent database.<p>You misread -- I was saying that with a multi-master key-value system you have to do joins in the app.<p>&gt; This also has nothing to do with eventual consistency.<p>Same, I was talking about Dynamo-like systems.
 It sounds like your root problem was dogmatic thinking, not any sort of consistency model.<p>There is a time and place for eventual consistency and multi-master, and there is a time for strongly consistent SQL servers.
 I know that.  I&#x27;ve talked with people who work on banking systems who have confirmed it.<p>It&#x27;s true there are other reasons for the limits, such as the ones you listed, but if you are with say Bank of America, your limit and my limit can be different.  The more credit history you&#x27;ve built up with the bank, the higher the limit will be.  This is mostly because they trust you more and therefore consider the risk for defrauding smaller.
 &gt; If what you are saying is true it would be possible to go overdrawn at an ATM.<p>It is most definitely possible, it just rarely happens because the network doesn&#x27;t fail often.<p>See here for more sources:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=eventual+consistency+atm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=eventual+consistency+atm</a>
 If the threat of regulation drops it 25%, that&#x27;s not a very good store of value or medium of exchange.
 Equally angering is when they set the conservation target as a percent of your previous usage.<p>I <i>already</i> conserve water, drought or not, because I&#x27;m cheap.  When you tell me I&#x27;m not meeting my conservation targets because I can&#x27;t go down <i>another</i> 20%, that infuriates me, especially since my usage is already 50% lower than my neighbors!
 Both?  Most likely it&#x27;s because those countries have strong traditions of record keeping and have been fairly stable culturally.
 NN is technically anti-business, if your business happens to be &quot;large nation-wide ISP&quot;.
 All the libertarians are now learning the downside to a fully unregulated market.<p>On the flip side, basically this means that if you&#x27;re willing to accept a 10% risk of total loss, ICOs are not a bad investment --  knowing that going in.
 &gt; The third party company would take a management fee, purchase insurance to protect against theft of the assets, and be a registered US corporation so legal action could be taken if they committed fraud.<p>Doesn&#x27;t that basically mean your ICO is subject to US law, essentially eliminating the main benefit of a &quot;trustless transaction&quot;?
 Usually when that happens someone makes them whole again.  Either the perpetrator of the scam is sued, or the government steps in and reimburses the losses.
 Yeah that&#x27;s true, I wasn&#x27;t actually advocating for ICOs as an investment, I was just poorly trying to be sarcastic.
 Netflix has assets too.  They own a whole bunch of original shows and movies.  For comparison, The Big Bang Theory has been worth a couple billion to CBS just in syndication.<p>They also have a worldwide CDN capable of delivering high definition video around the world.<p>And lastly, they have 20 years of movie viewing history.  Their prediction models alone are probably worth many billions to the movie studios.
 Q4 is always big because people get new Netflix capable devices for Christmas.
 &gt; Though the mote interesting graph would be views. During major sport events I can bet there is a big dip.<p>I was looking in my archive but I can&#x27;t find the graphs right now.<p>Yeah, during big sporting events, there is a flattening of viewing.  But what is really fascinating is that if you dig in, you find that it only affected devices that were typically connected to TVs.  So streaming was normal on portable devices like iPads and Phones and the 3DS, but down on the big TVs.<p>However, the biggest dip of all happens during the Oscar telecast, second only to the Golden Globes. :)<p>New Year&#x27;s eve was pretty flat too, but again only on the big TV devices (kid&#x27;s devices were unaffected).
 Delivery of video bits costs next to nothing compared to the content.  Netflix will spend 8 billion on content next year. They won&#x27;t come within even an order of magnitude of that on infrastructure.
 Yes, exactly.<p>So how is having an escrow that is subject to US law an answer to &quot;I want to have a trustless network with no government intervention&quot;?
 Montana&#x27;s former Congressman.  It said so... about four words later.
 Yes I understand that your criticism was about journalistic standards.<p>My point was that they didn&#x27;t violate any standards, by telling you who Zinke is right after mentioning his name.
 Yes, but most of those devices come with free Netflix.  Also, a lot of people get them specifically for Netflix (and not so much the other services).
 &gt; Netflix doesn&#x27;t even own a studio, they pay others to produce their content.<p>They have a very large studio actually:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-netflix-bronson-20170105-story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-netflix-bronson-201701...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;netflix-expands-lease-hollywood-sunset-bronson-studios-1202493352&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;netflix-expands-lease-h...</a><p>&gt; They don&#x27;t syndicate their shows, they don&#x27;t sell much merchandise, and they don&#x27;t sell their &quot;prediction models&quot; or user data.<p>The OP said &quot;Amazon has assets&quot;.  But using your argument, Amazon doesn&#x27;t use any of their assets either, except for themselves.<p>The point is they have things they could sell that have value if they had to, just like every other public company&#x27;s assets.
 That&#x27;s exactly why In-N-Out is pretty much only in California, with a few exceptions.<p>Because they only use local suppliers, and they haven&#x27;t figured out how to get everything they need locally anywhere else.
 &gt; Frozen peas are just as good as fresh after all.<p>In what universe?  Fresh peas are significantly better, and I&#x27;m not even sure that&#x27;s an opinion as much as fact.<p>Edit:  If HN had controversial markers, this comment would have one.  I&#x27;ve watched the points on it go up and down, negative and positive, for the last hour.<p>Apparently frozen peas is quite controversial.
 My understanding from folks who work there is that it&#x27;s basically impossible to get a job there unless you know someone who already works there and can vouch for you.<p>As in, they won&#x27;t even interview you without a recommendation from a current employee.<p>I guess this helps them maintain quality hires.
 I can definitely tell.  Previously frozen peas taste floury.
 To me at least (and my wife) previously frozen peas taste floury.
 Faster than an airplane though.
 Don&#x27;t take a pay cut unless you love the work.<p>In other words, assume the stock will always be worth zero, and then make your decision to work there based on that assumption.  Will you be happy doing what they want you to do for the salary they are offering if you know the stock will be worth nothing?<p>The answer isn&#x27;t always no. Sometimes you&#x27;ll get to work with amazing people, or on a really hard problem, or get a lot of responsibility you couldn&#x27;t get at a big company.  All of these intangibles might be worth the pay cut.
 &gt; said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.<p>On a side note, I think that&#x27;s the first time I&#x27;ve ever seen a quote from Apple&#x27;s COO since Tim Cook left the job.
 The other day I learned that ACH transfers are going to become same-business-day sometime around April this year.  Not quite instant, but a lot better than before.<p>Still doesn&#x27;t hit the use case of cash on the weekend, but at least now the American banking system is only 20 years behind Europe instead of 50 years...
 Yeah but if you do that usually you&#x27;re only limited to about $100 of that check being available until it clears three days later.
 Unfortunately the only targets for ACH modernization right now are same-business-<i>day</i>, which means if I send money in the morning it won&#x27;t get there till the evening, and if I send it Friday at 6pm, you won&#x27;t get it until Monday at 5:30pm.<p>The downside to Zelle is the sending limit, which is pretty low for any sort of business transaction.
 Because by making it a long time the bank can charge you $45 for a wire transfer, which is instantaneous and can be for any amount.
 Why would anyone invest in these bonds?  By doing so, you&#x27;re essentially investing in the State of Illinois as your hedge fund&#x2F;bond manager (depending on the returns promised).<p>Usually with a muni-bond, they are using the money for some sort of public infrastructure and then paying the interest either from fees gained through the use of that infrastructure (like a bridge or power plant) or through taxes.<p>Here though the state is flat out saying, &quot;we&#x27;re gonna invest in the market, which you can also do, and hope we get better returns than you do so we we can skim some off the top&quot;.
 &gt; People don&#x27;t pay individually for private security&#x2F;police. We don&#x27;t pay for fire.<p>Sure they do.  Rich people hire private security all the time.  Heck, not-rich people do it too.  Like your local Chuck E Cheese who hires a security guard on Friday night.<p>Same with fire protection.  There are plenty of private fire protection companies.<p>Everyone gets those basic services paid for out of their taxes, but some people want more than basic service, and there is nothing wrong with that.<p>The OPs system would work great and you could modify it simply enough to account for your system too -- everyone pays a health tax, which is then redistributed as an HSA payment to every American, setting a base level of funding.<p>I&#x27;m actually a big fan of single payer, but not because of the social impacts, only because of the ease of administration aspects.  But if you did OPs system and made sure everyone could participate, it would probably work just as well, because there would need to basically be a health payment cleaning house to make it work.
 &gt; there&#x27;s no room in a just society for a &quot;basic service&quot; which does not provide the best possible care.<p>Unfortunately health care i
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