zhoutong

I thought it was a merchant account with NAB? (According to the application forms I have received.)

AFAIK only NAB has multi-currency acquiring solution at the moment.

It seems that Braintree's pricing isn't attractive at all, so I'll probably still go for eWay.

You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on NameTerrific.

Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time.

https://www.nameterrific.com/

Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.

Thanks for telling me that! I realized that I can make the same mistakes locally with comparable frequency. Perhaps it's just that I feel annoyed when I have to backspace with latency.

A even more challenging task (at least for me) is to type a lower case letter after a symbol that requires Shift.

For example, I frequently type :Wq instead of :wq, especially in a SSH session, which adds some latency to the release of Shift key.

EDIT: SSH has nothing to do with this. It's just an emotional impact on the extra hassles of backspacing with latency.

The press loves to talk about changes, because news only comes out when something changes. The timeless pieces only exist in opinions section.

In startup's context, fund raising is definitely a change, and revenue numbers may be a change (when they are surprising or previously undisclosed). But building a sustainable business, treating customers well or even being profitable should be long-lasting and timeless. It's interesting to keep reading about these issues in Hacker News, but these are not exactly news.

It's like business fundamentals ("common sense"). The press never talks about them but it doesn't mean the industry doesn't care or doesn't treat them as important.

It may be true that we spend most of our time thinking or communicating, but doing anything creative is all about the flow. Slow typing interrupts thinking and it takes time for our brain to re-construct the "blueprint" after this interruption. For a programmer, typing is a more frequent activity than say, drinking coffee. I don't think anyone can work productively if we need to sip some coffee every 10 seconds.

I need to improve my typing speed and reduce the interruption as much as possible.

I always prefer compiling and gzipping the whole site's assets to just one .js and one .css file and serve them through CloudFront. It's usually around 100-200 KB and CloudFront's latency is very low at most places.

This saves a lot of requests and waiting time between page loads (i.e. the first page is always slower, but subsequent page loads take almost no time because there're very few (or even just 1) requests needed to make.)

Especially with the development of IPv6, internal routing becomes transparent and the appearance of protection offered by NAT is gone. Possibly these printers all have been assigned a public-reachable IPv6 addresses.

AFAIK the keys are managed by Amazon, just like S3. It's more for compliance reasons rather than real security. Encryption still has to be done yourself to protect the data.

The dividends issued historically are gone, entirely separate from the company. Assets and liabilities can exist in different forms, including tricky ones like depreciation and intangible assets. If such 'value' is accounted for important uses, manipulating it will be much cheaper and easier than manipulating market cap anyway.

It's a [failing] attempt to make sense of hard figures. Pretty much like 3 times the distance between earth and moon.

There is a possibility of the advertisers getting rebates or unrecorded discounts after they pay the large-amount invoices. This can exaggerate the income figure for the publisher, and possibly help the advertisers to cut taxes as well.

It's illegal, of course. But I guess they are doing exactly like this.

iBookstore is still possible. With the release of iBooks 2, interactive content can be built fairly easily and I believe that most features in OP's apps can be converted to iBooks easily.

I wonder if it's possible to launch an orbiter in Mars synchronous orbit. That'll eliminate the bottleneck.

Also it seems that there is exactly one distorted word and exactly one "proper" word. I would assume the distorted word is the control word. I should try a few reCAPTCHAs to see if this is a correct assumption.

EDIT: Confirmed. The "proper" word is taken directly from book scans and I can type anything to pass the CAPTCHA. It seems that the control word is very Google-style.

I can't seem to understand the "Onightsl secretary" CAPTCHA. We all know that the first word is extremely hard to identify, and according to the author "secretary" wasn't the control word.

This means that reCAPTCHA knows the first word. Identified by OCR? Not possible unless reCAPTCHA deliberately distorted the image. Identified by N other people? Not possible to determine such a word with confidence either.

Or am I missing something?

It's all about value creation. Assuming every party here is rational: Google decides to pay for the Sparrow team only because the potential value of these developers is much higher than the price they pay. And Sparrow team accepted the offer only because the big pay check exceeds the value all their own customers combined.

If we hate this, we can either make such talent acquisitions less attractive, or increase the value of software customers.

Talent acquisitions become less attractive when:

  - The number of talents available increases significantly
  - Economies of scale in software business is less substantial
  - There's ethical pressure from online communities
  - The act of "selling customers" (through data collection or ads) becomes less profitable or costs more (with things like DNT or ad blockers)

The value of customers increases when:

  - More people are willing to spend more money on independent software development
  - Access to software market is easier (with things like app stores)
  - More revenue streams with higher payouts (like high-quality ad networks such as Deck and Carbon)
  - Higher potential to get big (with VC money and building platforms/ecosystems)

The sad truth is, independent software developers tend to be less entrepreneurial than startup founders (but I don't think the line can be drawn clearly). They are only a little bit more entrepreneurial than consulting developers (which are even more likely to be hired by big companies, but we don't care much about them). Therefore they may not be willing to actively improve their revenue by taking risks, and hence the acquisitions happen.

It analyzes the performance of your sequence compared to the benchmark random sequences. It's no longer a black-and-white comparison in cryptography.

Agreed. But one of the team members explicitly released the source code and that caused the hacker to correctly guess LastPass account. (At least this is the most "right" version of the story I've heard.)

Well I do agree with you that Bitcoinica was not 100% secure. This hack really has nothing to do with the app or its infrastructure.

- I didn't set the password. - I didn't have the power to change the password. - I shouldn't have access to the account.

The root cause is LastPass account being stolen.

The default button in Tender (which is the support software they are using) is "Reply and Close". It's easier to do that and I think the support guy got used to it.

Yeah. I hope OpenStack can catch up soon.

[The first line of the comment was intended to keep this on-topic. I didn't really have any financial interest in Bitcoinica at the time of the hack. A major management handover took place three weeks before that and the 100% of company was sold in 2011. The community assumed that I was still the owner but it's simply not true. The hacked mail server (the "root cause") didn't belong to me either. But yes, I learned a lot by being both an insider and an outsider, and these are fortunately free lessons. I still follow some of the valuable experience in dealing with Bitcoinica's infrastructure in my new project, which doesn't deal with money. Startup infrastructure has a big market. Now I use KVM to build a small private cloud for my new project on top of dedicated server(s) simply because I love the flexibility of cloud deployments. If someone brings that to developers who are not sysadmins, it'll be cool.]

Database distribution is definitely a pain for RDBMS. A completely re-invented distributed database system like Cassandra is what's needed. But this simply means that a random blogger can't deploy WordPress on this kind of highly available hosting too.

In any case, AWS is probably closest to this kind of revolution, as they already have different types of managed database services (relational, object, in-memory and key-value). They also have Route 53, which is Anycast-based and CloudFront.

[What's right/wrong/surprising with my identity?]

> The big disadvantage of all of this is you're now spending a few million a month on salaries, infrastructure (various PoPs, network gear, etc.) before you've bought a single server or served a single page. Not so lean.

So a business opportunity kicks in. That's how the cloud revolutionizes computing.

Well, disregarding the design decision, or the RFC, it's basically wrong to use CNAME alongside of other records, especially MX records.

Considering most active domains have MX records under the root host name (like example.com.), CNAMEs won't work for these hostnames.

If there's native implementation for an "ALIAS" record which only points to the corresponding A record of the target, then it will work anywhere.

The load balancer itself can always be a single point of failure, no matter how many layers of packaging you have. By default, DNS system doesn't support failover because multiple A records will result in round robin. So there are two possible solutions: 1. Use a DNS with health checking so that records can be changed dynamically for failover. 2. Use Anycast for load balances to broadcast only healthy nodes with the same IP prefix. Both ways are imperfect and not widely used in production systems.

AWS officially recommends CNAME records for ELBs, but the IP addresses don't change regularly and also CNAME for root host name won't work if other records are present, so many sysadmins straightaway use A records with the ELB IPs.

It takes time to boot up VMs, basically. System booting is one of the most expensive operations in virtualization, especially when the disk image is somewhere in the network. There will be a lot of random I/O, memory allocation and high CPU usage. It takes a few seconds of CPU time for a decent server to initialize a KVM VM. Try multiplying that by hundreds of thousands of instances.

The problem is that a lot of inconsistencies are caused by the software, not I/O or cache. For example, if your database is in a middle of transaction and everything is in the memory, you can't "let the stuff complete" without installing a software on the database server to monitor power failures.

On a small scale, petitions will work better than a hash tag on a Google-owned website. The person that made the decision is the judge. So a rational way to protest is to protest the decision itself.

On a large scale, make something disruptively innovative to fight back.

#BoycottApple may work by alarming and reminding Apple of their unethical act (to the crowd). But the effect is small because it has nothing to do with Apple's product quality and customer service. If no one buys Apple products any more, we won't necessarily be better off.

That said, I think Apple seriously doesn't have to go this far. If they have the energy to continue innovating there shouldn't be any fear.