zorked

> A lot of the newer IPO's represent companies that have significant assets in new areas that we haven't necessarily found the most efficient monetization scheme for yet. In other words, their i…

It's great design I think. It attracts exactly the kind of people they want as customers.

There is no such thing as "raw performance". It's all very, very application-specific.

My bet is that this is supported by Google as a "here's a neat hack" feature, not as a "this is a vital feature in our ongoing to-the-death competition with Wolfram Alpha".

I read somewhere that suicide is correlated with post-traumatic stress disorder. People who live in a constant state of trauma are unlikely to suicide, which is also why suicide rates are believed to …

Hacker News is all about Python/Ruby/Clojure/Scala/Haskell most of the time, but then we find that there is this huge group of very happy Windows/C# developers that are passionate about their environm…

Moving from MySQL on EBS to a Cassandra cluster on locally-attached ephemeral storage was the first time I was happy with a database on EC2. EBS is convenient as a permanent root for instances, but fo…

SSL Client certificates can be easily and completely stolen by worms and botnets. So they can't be used by serious applications like online banking. For everything else, there are much simpler solutio…

"that group of recent and fashionable databases which are primarily key/value stores with some traditional database features added in to varying degrees" is exactly what the term means. So I guess it …

I don't know if $13 is conservative. $9/mo is the most expensive plan available to me. Presumably in places like China people pay by the hour and therefore way less than that.

It still amuses me to no end that I can buy DVDs and CDs at Amazon but I can't buy a MP3 or stream video. Which is why I think this situation is less about contracts and more about pure technophobia.…

Same in Brazil, where free ISPs owned by small telcos in the then-recently deregulated market were incredibly important in making the Internet popular during the 90's. The free ISPs became so good tha…

Exactly. Managing hardware sucks.

São Paulo is one of the ugliest cities ever created by man. Being a Stalinesque ghost town is a huge step up from what they were before. (and you only thought it looked like a ghost town because the p…

Well, who cares, pretty much the only market where Linux lost was the desktop, which is the most boring, stale market to be in right now. Linux is everywhere from my company's cloud provider to my pho…

Yes, I had to fill a form for a an American corporation once that asked me about my ethnicity and it was very weird. It was the first time I saw anyone do that, much less in an official form - I was w…

Considering the fact that Google has had such easter eggs for years* I don't think getting this one through was that hard. * "ascii art", "what is the answer to life the universe and everything", "til…

I happen to be re-reading Aldous Huxley's Island now. It's a utopia, and it isn't creepy at all: it's warm, tropical, physical, intentionally low-tech, productivity isn't a priority and technology (wh…

The big question is, if you don't trust it, why use it at all?

Huge focus on digital stuff. You have to use a drop-down menu to get to physical goods... And this used to be a bookstore.

I find it amazing that the geekiest of all books ever written gets put aside in the geek canon in favor or space robots shooting lasers...

It's something like the Big Mac Index. You can't derive the entire state of the economy from it but it sure helps put some things in perspective. It's certainly easier to visualize than saying "the ne…

I suggest that you read the whole sequence of articles, particularly the ones where he tries to implement Pac Man in a purely functional way. Keep in mind that he is an Erlang fan, and he is not tryin…

I don't think it's ignoring robots.txt, it's probably just cached at another thread/machine/datacenter. It will pick up the new robots.txt eventually. This behavior is well-known.

Yup, the fact that he didn't share anything about how the server was hacked is a bit suspicious.

The definition is obviously about potential: the last healthy Tasmanian Tiger could mate with another healthy Tasmanian Tiger and have baby Tasmanian Tigers. A healthy mule can't mate with another hea…

Around 2000 or so Microsoft had a Windows Media Player binary for Linux and other Unix systems (Solaris, and HP/UX at least). It used to crash a lot but could play some .asf files. If I am not mistake…

I think that comment of theirs was meant as irony. The Dreamcast is known for its radical fanboy community, so they made a comical reference to that by mentioning the Dreamcast and "aligning" themselv…