bk

12 ms·

61.
by bk 18y ago
This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another. The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc n
62.
by bk 18y ago
Overall, good idea for a service. My criticism/questions: - Price is way off: $10-100 CPM for simple message delivery? Does it come with delivery guarantees/retries? In fairness: What's the use case with which you would justify this pricing
63.
by bk 18y ago
> I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case? If it leads to more (non-CS) students taking a programming class, I'd cal
64.
Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?
15 points by bk 18y ago|16 comments
65.
by bk 18y ago
I was going to build a service based on cloudfiles over the weekend, but it was pretty much unusable, because I got timeouts all the time. It was certainly disconcerting to see the failure of a component that was supposed to be the core of
66.
by bk 18y ago
Rather than thinking of these steps as a strict sequence, one should think of them as parallel processes with shifting resource allocations. Ultimately, the development process comes down to the experience and habits of the developer. If yo
67.
by bk 18y ago
This is rambling link bait for the blog's author to build a reputation and audience. Fair enough, but not enlightening.
68.
by bk 18y ago
Gmail is free. People still pay for hosted email. If you get locked out of gmail or they lose all your email, who are you going to call? Would you host mission critical email that millions of dollars hinge on on gmail? Even if that's addres
69.
by bk 18y ago
Glossy screen - instant disqualification. It's really sad how the proverbial "average consumer" who runs into a consumer electronics store, gravitating to the glossy displays "oooohhhh shiny" ruins it for the power users who then get stuck
70.
by bk 18y ago
I would use them, but their data center is located in Germany, which really sucks latency wise for Asian traffic. What latency do you get between DE and US? Also, I tend to saturate ram much faster than bandwidth, so getting cheap ram can b
71.
by bk 18y ago
I guess that's why Ruby has been called an "acceptable lisp". I take "everything is an expression" so for granted by now, and it makes for beautiful, terse code. The non-working python if statement/assignment example from the article works
72.
by bk 18y ago
Informative, fast-paced talk. From an entrepreneur's perspective it's an interesting behind-the-scenes perspective when dealing with angel investors.
73.
by bk 18y ago
Paying for something makes (many) people value it more/be more serious about it. In that sense paying for "signaling intent" makes sense. Eharmony, for example, has always charged high rates and branded itself for more serious relationships
74.
by bk 18y ago
AFAIK, the AIG he's talking about is a small (formerly) Swiss/international private bank (now owned by a company from Abu Dhabi). It's not the US insurance. (Google 'swiss AIG').
75.
by bk 18y ago
I guess it would be the standard constraints for anything over a network, particularly a WAN: latency and throughput. If you have a lot of small queries latency might kill you, and if you have large result sets throughput might kill you. (A
76.
by bk 18y ago
FTA: > Many perfectly smart people I know have one strong password they use for one or two online banking type sites. Unfortunately, banks are among the worst offenders when it comes to disallowing special characters and limiting passwo
77.
by bk 18y ago
> It takes a fraction of the amount of time to do native data structure stuff than it does to touch the DB several times. And app processes are much easier to scale than a database. Even in "slow" languages (Ruby in my case) array opera
78.
by bk 18y ago
For those who are wondering, they're funded by YC. Just posting it because I had to look it up.
79.
by bk 18y ago
Completely minor factual amendment: It was Ed Koch (and his police commissioner) who initiated the broken windows based policing. Giuliani took it to the next level and as you correctly phrased it, is the one with whom it became most associ
80.
by bk 18y ago
Nice execution. I drew up a site exactly like this about a year and a half ago, but never got around to building it. One less thing I have to build. :)
81.
by bk 18y ago
Part of his point was calling out the pure consumers ("you non-contributing zero"), who are not the ones making the amazing stuff. I generally agree with you though.
82.
by bk 18y ago
He makes a fair point, but his argument would have been greatly enhanced if he had presented a specific example/redesign to illustrate it. Solving the "how" is the hard part. Oftentimes, when people keep a point abstract, it's because it do
83.
by bk 18y ago
Just as a side note, nuts are hardly a primitive food source, or just "chimp food". Mongongo nuts are the traditional staple diet of southern African hunter-gatherers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongongo ). Per 100 grams shelled nuts (fr
84.
by bk 18y ago
I think the biggest increase in popularity for ubuntu (or any linux) installs would come from providing images that include all the necessary drivers and config settings to work with specific notebook models. (Notebooks is where it's at for
85.
by bk 18y ago
This article is rambling and lacking substance. Wikipedia has some more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
86.
by bk 18y ago
On top of that you can't scan, skim, skip, and search it nearly as well. It's thus much harder to assess the value of video/audio content up front.
87.
by bk 18y ago
It should be pointed out that there is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Not everyone who is alone is lonely. (That's why the article speaks of "perceived loneliness"). Aloneness is crucial for productivity, flow depends on not
88.
by bk 18y ago
From the author in his site's comments: "What’s changed is that they’re not trying to build their own walled gardens, they’re trying to fence in the commons." This is very important to keep in mind.
89.
by bk 18y ago
Practically none of the grid systems accommodates the most common ad widths (120, 160, 180, 300)px well ( https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AdFormats.html ). I use malo ( http://code.google.com/p/malo/ ), incidentally by the same
90.
by bk 18y ago
I should have been more clear. My point was intended to be more general than just mobile apps. Both MS and Apple have business strategies and practices that strive for lock-in and monopolization, which is their prerogative, but it clearly d

More ›