chrisboesing

TechCrunch has list with 159 companies atm. http://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/

Are you from Germany or do you have your Browser set to German? The first time I visited the site I got redirected to https://blog.lastpass.com/de/2015/06/lastpass-security-notic... (notice the "de" in the domain), which has the German words. The second time I visited the site I didn't get redirected to the German site and didn't see the English words. Maybe some weird automatic translation bug.

Khan Academy has a nice 12 minute long video on this topic: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

From the Wired[0] article posted above[1]:

"Oschwald[Co-Founder of Swiss Fort Knox] can tick off blue-chip companies such as Cisco Systems, Novartis, UBS and Deutsche Bank among his clients."

[0]: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612298

Do you plan on supporting direct debit in the future or is your focus on expanding to more countries before adding more payment options?

Without looking at the source, I would say it is using the History API introduced in HTML5.

Here is a nice article describing it: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html

A simple example with source can be found here: http://html5demos.com/history

Here are the AWS alternatives I could find when I was searching for them 2 months ago. They are both hosted in Germany and operated by German companies.

I haven't played with them yet, so I can't say if they are any good.

EC2 alternative: http://jiffybox.de Not as feature rich as EC2, but they do have an api to launch, stop, and resize instances.

S3 alternative: http://www.hosteurope.de/Cloud/Cloud-Storage/ They say it works with S3 compatible desktop software, so I guess it uses a similar/same api.

(I'm on my phone right now and can't find the English versions of the sites, I have linked the German sites instead)

I can totally understand that.

What I don't get is why the F1 officials haven't learned more out of that tragic accident. Sure the cars are much safer than they were when Senna died, but why do they have to at more and more races in city centers? Sure, I can understand that they want to keep Monaco for historic reason, but there isn't a good reason to have races in the city centers of Valencia, Singapore, and soon New Jersey.

Driving that close to walls at the speeds they do, will sooner or later lead to another tragic accident.

For everyone who isn't a F1 fan check out this video from the race in Singapore to see what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qYwC2qov44

Thanks a lot for doing this.

I'm trying to choose a framework right now and TodoMVC is really helping in doing so.

I have one question though: Would you mind if I ported your apps over to CoffeeScript? I prefer CoffeeScript over JavaScript, but haven't done that much work in CoffeeScript. I think porting the apps would be a great learning experience and would help others too. Of course I would put it up on Github.

Maybe a little off topic:

Red Bull's marketing is impeccable. They started out with all the actionsport athletes and moved upstream to more mainstream, and I guess, more expensive sports (two Formula 1 teams, more soccer teams than I can count), while still doing these crazy things. From Parcours in Santorini, to Air Races all over the world. Seems like every crazy sporting event is sponsored by Red Bull.

I think these have allowed them to be still seen as "hip" and not just selling sugar water like Coca Cola.

He talked about it a little bit in the video mentioned in the post. He thinks about "open sourcing"(his words) or patenting the idea and giving the patent to someone who has the financial resources to build it. I guess because of that he hasn't gone into much detail but here is a list of things about the Hyperloop I remembered:

-from downtown LA to downtown SF in 30 Minutes

-cheaper than airplane ticket

-solar panels on the top to make it self sustaining

-energy would be saved without batteries to run at night

-under no influence of the weather

-safe

(-Sarah Lacy made a reference to a TV show/movie with a tube as transportation system, and Elon said it was kind of like that [can't remember the title])

-Sarah Lacy: "Is it possible?" Elon Musk: "Yes!"

GigaOm now has a confirmation[1] with a short Q&A that says "VDIO and Rdio are run by separate teams".

[1] http://gigaom.com/video/vdio-janus-friis/

Just a quick note: App Engine hasn't left preview.

This[1] blog post from today says at the end: "[...]and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!"

They just rolled out the new pricing.

[1]: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/08/50-credit-for-ne...

I have just browsed through the blog of the project manager at http://tagebuch.miniatur-wunderland.de (it's in German). Until now the only thing I could find regarding the programming are the following numbers[1]:

The control software has 145.000 lines of code[I guess for the whole model, not just the airport]

Just the airport control software has 70,000 lines of code.

He has added 200,000 numbers just for the configuration.

[1] http://tagebuch.miniatur-wunderland.de/eintrag/aus-dem-leben... (German)

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl... (English with Google translate)

An EBS node in a EBS cluster is connected to two networks. One is used for the traffic to and from the EBS volumes(Primary network), the other is used to replicate the EBS volume on a EBS node to a different EBS node(Secondary network). Amazon wanted to upgrade the capacity of the primary network. Their standard step doing this is to shift the traffic to a redundant router. This step was executed incorrectly. This resulted in the traffic not being routed to the primary network but instead to the secondary network which has less capacity. All this traffic satured the secondary network and resulted in the EBS volumes becoming "stuck". When the traffic got routed the right way all the EBS volumes were trying to remirror. Part of the remirroring process is that the EBS volumes search the cluster for free space to remirror to. The EBS cluster couldn't handle this load and new capacity was needed for the EBS cluster.

Amazon offers a 10 day credit equal to 100% of their usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances. This credit will be automatically applied to the next bill.

Reserved instances would be nice, too.

You could use the tag system. The questions would be at ama.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/Joel+Spolsky. The person who posted the question just had to accept the answer of the person who he had asked.

I wonder who the "competitor" is that bought delicious.

The first one that comes to mind is Digg, since Kevin Rose said he would like to buy it and Yahoo contacted Digg if they would by it[1]. The second one that comes to my mind is StumbleUpon, especially two days after raising a Series B of $17 Million[2].

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/kevin-rose-yahoo-contacted-...

[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/09/stumbleupon-stumbles-onto-1...

I agree that it would much more even if your load is consistent and heavy, but if it gets too heavy you run in a lot of problems with EC2.

If you max out one instance, you would need to add another instance and as a result of that you would need a third instance as a load balancer. So if we take the numbers from the example I gave above and assume your instance maxes out add 100k requests and you get 110k request your cost would go from $72 to $216 ($72 for the load balancer and 2* $72 for the web/application server). That is 3x more but only an increase in traffic by 10% Of course the same math applies to your database server.

GAE pricing scales linear no matter how big you are and you never have to worry about maxing it out. Of course you have some trade off's because of that, but that is what the article was about.

I guess it's a question how you define heavy traffic. I've read somewhere that Zynga runs 10,000 EC2, at that scale adding another instance wouldn't have a huge impact, but I think if you have less than 15-20 instances (which is still huge) you're cheaper off with GAE.

(Even though it sounds like I'm affiliated to GAE I'm not, I'm going to use EC2 because of the trade off's mention in the original article)

You only pay for CPU if you really use it and not for "standby".

So if you have 100k requests in one month and each request takes 0.1 seconds you only have 10.000 seconds(or 166.66 hours or 2.7 hours) so you only pay $0.27 for that month. EC2 would bill you for 720 hours(30 days *24 hours). At a rate of $0.10 you would pay $72 instead of the $0.27.

(For this example I'm not taking the free quota into account)

Maybe he uses it for his designs or his writing.

That is exactly the position I'm in right now. Was going to use GAE but now I'm rethinking that decision. A micro instance of their relational database service would be perfect for my use, but I guess the ram would be too small.

Check the date, november 10, 2008.

I meant, that the VCs didn't gave them the money for the old style of StackExchange sites. Before this change the StackExchange plattform was licensed from StackOverflow and operated by Fog Creek.

I guess the questions that now comes up is:

Did they make the change because they raised money and are now able to do this, or have they changed it because this was the only way to raise money?

Joel and Jeff wanted to raise money for StackOverflow, not for StackExchange. But maybe the VCs couldn't see the value in having three site and licensing the software to another company(Fog Creek), so the obvious way was to fold StackExchange into the StackOverflow company. I think only time will tell if this was the right decision.