Hacker News Reader

photorizedon $500k of Azure credit for YC startups

You should give them another try. Azure has become much more stable. There was a major global outage a month or so ago, but then again that's something that had happened with other cloud providers. Overall, I find them easier to use than AWS, for example.

photorizedon How Verizon fixed a recent backbone provider issue

As a (smaller) CDN, we routinely solve these sorts of problems. Never occurred to be to blog about it in such manner. But then again, we suck at PR.

photorizedon What should I do about YouTube?

You aren't serving ads, and provide free accounts. What's your model?

photorizedon Don't Talk to Corp Dev

Happened to me once or twice when I was young and naive.

photorizedon A Node.js powered interactive illustration tracking Christmas on Twitter

Would love to see this in action. However, when I opened the app on my iPad in Safari, I couldn't scroll down as instructed, and then the app crashed the browser after a few seconds. Is this a known issue?

photorizedon Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

photorizedon Lessons learned while starting an online business

thanks - sorry I forgot to include the link.

photorizedon Lessons learned while starting an online business

The best part about it was predicting demand for something that hasn't plateaued in Australia yet, based on other, established, markets.

This is essentially how Rocket VC etc make their money.

photorizedon Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says

That's because those companies are doing it wrong. They view social as yet another mass marketing channel, one where you spam, convert, etc, and the use the same Google Analytics/Google Ads type of approach to CPM and 'conversion'.

What they are missing entirely is that, unlike the traditional web marketing world of clicks and IP addresses, social media gives you an opportunity to understand your target audience, see what interests them, what influences them - and lets you interact with them.

Once you truly know the audience, it opens up whole new opportunities for marketing (subtle product placement, indirect promotion via influencers etc) - which almost nobody is doing effectively right now.

What we see instead is the same tired web banner concept, clumsily applied to FB or Twitter, and we're getting inundated by ads (that annoying DOMO 'are you still using Excel for your data?' ad comes to mind) - no wonder they are not seeing any ROI.

photorizedon The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype

They have a separate startup section now, but even that's getting repetitive.

photorizedon The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype

I remember doing a very basic analysis (via Google search) of TC headlines back in 2012, but I was curious about their preference for funded companies vs bootstrapped, in terms of coverage. Predictably, they were mostly covering funding rounds:

http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2012/07/23/no-coverage-for...

Your data is very interesting. Any change you could also "group by" company and list companies which are more frequently (repeatedly) covered by TC? I have a theory about that, would be interesting to test.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

To answer your question: some parts of our SaaS (e.g. data gathering/processing) are on both AWS and Azure, but the customer-facing portal web app is 100% on Azure (in two regions North East and North Central), so we couldn't just swap the DNS.

We're changing that now, will need to replicate across different cloud providers, too. We're changing a lot because of last night's outage.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

My VMs appear to be up mostly, but they are primarily in North Central.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

Thank you.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

They all have outages periodically, in my experience.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

Azure + AWS

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

Mine have been gradually coming back, too.

Timing couldn't have been any better for me. Some Alanis material there:

https://twitter.com/bizspark/status/534858596748906496

Now I'll have to distribute between AWS and Azure, too.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

Microsoft, you've got to be kidding me. Just tried opening a billing ticket, completed the forms in detail, attached screenshots, clicked Submit...

'Unable to Submit Request We are unable to complete the incident submission process at this time. Please refer to this page for phone numbers to call for Azure support.'

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

I suspect a human config error. I don't see how else multiple services, in multiple regions, can all be affected at once.

Looking forward to the post mortem.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

I feel your pain. My startup was featured on TechNet today, I was quoted saying how great Azure worked for us so far... lots of folks were checking us out, and then Azure went down hard, taking our production systems with them. Talk about negative publicity.

photorizedon Microsoft Azure Outage

I feel like an idiot. MS featured my Azure startup today, quoting me about overall stability etc (which has been the case for us, until today). They then proceeded to go down, taking all our production systems with them.

(yes we do have AWS, too)

Sigh.

photorizedon Dallas health worker who tested positive for Ebola wore ‘full’ protective gear

looks like During Duncan's first visit, he wasn't being treated as an Ebola patient (he was given antibiotics and painkillers, and sent home). Once he was readmitted - that's a different story, but his initial interactions could have infected a lot of people.

photorizedon The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966

This reminds me of my visit to Centralia, PA, where the underground fire has been burning since 1962. Took lots of interesting pictures.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

photorizedon I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral

He's back promoting a new game.

photorizedon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2014)

iTrend (www.itrend.io) in Stamford CT - data discovery and social analytics SaaS - hiring:

1. Sales (experience with SaaS or Cloud Hosting sales is preferred) - close deals. Location: NYC, Stamford CT, or San Francisco.

2. Customer Success Manager - make sure customers are getting good results from iTrend. Location: NYC, Stamford CT, or San Francisco.

3. Tech Writer - discover and write about interesting topics. Location: anywhere (REMOTE OK)

4. Marketing Manager - define our voice, messaging, PR. Location: NYC, Stamford CT, or San Francisco.

Competitive salary, stock options, benefits.

Job details are available on Indeed (search for iTrend).

photorizedon The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World

Is this the thread where everyone is sharing how much they are paying?

All of my companies are bootstrapped (and bandwidth is the largest expense item), so some of the rates quoted got me excited.

It sounds like there are a lot of knowledgeable folks here (on the buy side), would you mind sharing some info?

I typically buy between 2..5 Gbps per POP in the US and Europe.

What's the best rate I should be able to get, you think? Tend to buy L3 or premium blend (no Cogent or HE). Any insights would be appreciated.

photorizedon Amazon has sold no more than 35,000 Fire phones, data suggests

I've been trying to estimate their sales from monitoring twitter activity. Given the very low volume (200-600 mentions daily) since launch, I believe that low sales figure.

photorizedon Create your own machine-learning-powered RSS reader

That'd be useful as well, thanks.

photorizedon Create your own machine-learning-powered RSS reader

I was referring to the smileys displayed next to each article, which were probably meant to indicate sentiment.

photorizedon Russia enacts 'draconian' law for bloggers and online media

http://rupolitics.blogspot.com/2014/01/blog-post_17.html

This is your blog, correct? Then I understand why you wouldn't see any problem with this new law.