digeridoo

Nice, I've been looking forward to seeing games like this.

> If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way.

?

So is murder of an 80-year old worse, or murder of a child? I'm confused, because I don't really think that way.

I'm also not buying into this self-obsessed view of "value". Americans and Europeans do more damage to the world per capita than anyone else in terms of of energy consumption, pollution, and creating economic inequality. Their charitability does not really make up for it.

For me the only distinction is that I value people I know more than people I don't know. However, everyone is someone I could get to know.

Honestly, that never happens.

The loss is tiny and indicates profitability is in sight. GroupOn currently has a market cap of about 1.8B, which seems reasonable for a company that size, though perhaps still a bit on the high side given how low their margins are likely to remain.

They went through their childhood years thinking they were going to take over the world, and not too long ago Google offered $6 billion for those dreams. No wonder investors still had some hopes that this was something more than an ordinary business of an ordinary scale. It's not.

If anyone would like to keep dreaming, AMZN was running over $300 million losses on a ~$600 million revenue every single quarter around the year 2000.

I can see this going into Windows 8 phones... I'd buy one.

If only the kindle fire shipped to countries where most people live.

That's actually a problem academia should take on, but unfortunately that's not the direction computer science has taken.

To be honest, EBS is the special sauce that makes me stick with AWS. There are so many little things that become so much easier by having network storage. To me the cost of upgrading or migrating machines using local storage is just not worth the perceived reliability gain to me.

We shifted from services that fail often independently, to services failing rarely all at once. Clearly the former is going to be more noticeable and has greater societal impact, but as a business I'll take the latter any day.

Much sits in the way between invention and nirvana. We have to face the fact that earth is over-crowded with global infrastructure, rules, economic barriers, borders, financial systems, controlled by a small number of distant, territorial governments. This prevents us from moving forward in some of the areas most critical to human civilization, such as transportation and energy.

What I would really like to see is a revolution in governance. There is a tremendous mistake in current thinking that global problems require global solutions. As a result, government and economic power is moving in the wrong direction. Today's global problems were caused locally, by every car, every meter of asphalt, every gram of sugar, every cheap t-shirt, every plastic bag, every poor mortgage, etc. These problems require local solutions.

National borders are enormous societal barriers. If one country has better governance than another, only a small percentage of people will consider moving, if even allowed. As a result, better national policy is slow to attract, slow to spread, slow to evolve, and limited in its effectiveness.

Instead of empowering national or supra-national governments in a quest for global solutions, we should face global problems at their root and empower the central pillar of human civilization in the 21st century: the city.

The human economy has the remarkable characteristic that greater population density and better lives can go hand in hand. If great technologists, artists, teachers, scientists, merchants, politicians, industrialists, and laborers come together, that's when great things happen. That's when ideas start to take root and become reality.

National governance and poor economic policy is squeezing the city into a menial role. They do not have the economic power or independence to make different rules or undertake great projects. The benefits of the existing population density is the only thing that still makes cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles attractive. A trip to Dubai, Singapore, Macau, or Hong Kong will give you a glimpse of what cities can do once empowered, even when relatively isolated. Imagine a nation of cities trying to out-class each other and trying to attract and keep their citizens.

a. proove it

b. pi as a decimal number is an approximation that is only as long as you calculate it to be. Moreover, decimals do not contain non-numeric information. That's just your own interpretation. Imagine a number system where pi is 1. Clearly no names in 1. Now imagine a number system where pi is expressed as π, like... the number system that we use. Clearly no names in π.

Be 20 guys?

I wish that for OAuth 3 they would make it such that client and server can separately sign the request and you don't have to share keys between the two. That would be a great security enhancement.

I never quite get the excitement over game of life (is emergent behaviour really that surprising?), but this is extremely impressive.

It's not like performance is a fundamental property of the language, it's just a matter of which tools are available. JITs outperforming compilers is just a matter of specialized compilation approach being able to outperform a generalized compilation approach, which is actually a far more fundamental truth than abstractions having a performance penalty. LLVM outperforms GCC in some cases.

However, in general JITs do not outperform GCC. The JIT overhead only pays off in a limited set of cases.

Most people publishing performance benchmarks on the Internet barely know how to compile a C program for production, let alone write or benchmark one. Google did a thorough benchmark of several languages and C++ was the clear winner: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...

In principle, duplicating results is a good thing, it's what prevents fraud. The incentives are wrong here, and it isn't proper academic conduct, but it's still valuable science.

TV is coming. Radio is dead!

Actually, radio is as big an industry as it ever was. Mobile phone and app sales may eclipse PC hardware and software sales, but the products are just too different to expect one to replace the other. Perhaps there is more money to be made in Mobile/TV, but that's just because it's a plain old risk/pay-off trade-off.

Works for me.

Apple is in the same branch as sports clubs and religious institutions. They have wildly different products, but a similar way of working: speaking to people's basic desire to be part of something greater than them. With the same vigour that religious devotees promote their book, and sports fans promote their football club, Apple customers promote their phone. That's fine, it's human. In many cases there is some truth to it. I'm guilty of at least one of these 3. It's also perfectly normal that you view your behaviour in this regard as being rational, while it actually isn't.

Why not fire up the 3D printing market?

Europe as in: the 4% of Europeans that live in Scandinavia.

Glacier to EC2 traffic is free if your instance is in the same region as the Glacier endpoint and $0.01/GB otherwise.

10Gbps EC2 instances start at $0.742/hour. Welcome to the cloud. ;-)

I assume the cost is in retrieval though and counted per the Job Creation API, regardless of whether and how quickly you download the data.

but you're right that the 3TB/hour use-case is very hypothetical. Internet archival is just not suitable for those kind of volumes. I think the point OP was making that mistakes like using archives that are too large, or requesting many at once could cost you a lot.

At 10Gbps I can retrieve 3TB within an hour.

At 1GB/hour retrieving a 3TB archive takes 6 weeks...

You mean like http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ ?

I used to believe in <div>, but nowadays I just believe in whatever works. I haven't noticed any rendering problems on HN, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

There's nothing simple about that. :)

or you just use a better hashing algorithm...

Anyway, you're better off going for EC2 GPUs. http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/amazon-ec2-enables-...

I'm not sure about the OP, but I'm pretty sure you have built distributed systems in practice. :)