adamt

I believe they did - I've used this - full instructions here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=17337655031

Switzerland is not that densely populated. It’s 219 per square km. For context Florida is about 150 and California about 100.

Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territori... https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/switzerland-p...

Better align executive pay with business performance from the beginning. If the business is failing then parting company with the CEO is working as intended.

Agree completely.

The biggest threat I see to this though is Apple Pay (for mobile web). When sites integrate with this properly, it enables them to match the Amazon experience. No need to register or enter any details, just one fingerprint, and all done.

Indeed - Monzo has 50% of challenger bank market share. N26 was almost behind Revolut and Starling and had little traction in the UK.

Source: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-7647253/M...

It's a lot smaller than you think these days with all the effort that has gone into it.

Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.

Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain

[1] Definition of PUE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness

[2] Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

That is extremely rare at google these days. The average tech manager has more like 6-8 directs.

A checking account is what is called a current account in several other English speaking countries.

There's many factors at play here, but note that the majority of Internet subscriber growth is in developing countries.

As the spending power of the average Internet user decreases, then CPC/CPM naturally falls with it.

What makes you think that?

3/8 or 3.0.0.0/8 means the IP address range from 3.0.0.0 to 3.255.255.255 - this is 2^24 or 16.7M IP addresses.

Why does Amazon want it? - Amazon has a lot of customers who want EC2/ELB instances with their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource.

Why did GE have it? When the IPv4 address space was formed, various big US companies managed to get the initial IP address allocations. You can see more on these allocations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Why so many upvotes? It's relatively rare to see what is 1/255th of the IPv4 address space sold.

It's not entirely true that in Europe that software patents don't exist.

From: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html "The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions". "

There's 20,000 hits for a Google patent search for patents assigned to SAP (https://patents.google.com/?assignee=SAP+SE+)

Note those charts are FY2016. With the growth of cloud, I suspect those ratios have changed considerably.

It’s not been hard to get more than those returns in recent history.

The Nasdaq-100 total returns have been 32% last year and 155% over the past five years. This is a average of just over 20% a year.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/indices/nasdaq-total-returns....

augmented reality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

This misses the fact that much of that UK figure is FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet). E.g. I live in the rural UK and have a 'Cable' line that is 200Mbps down/12Mbps up.

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

If you look at the value of ARM's $-denominated ADRs

  http://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=662445

The phrase that Amazon used when launching lambda was 'deploy code not servers'. To me this sums up what 'serverless' means. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about servers in any way.

With AWS Lambda/API Gateway (and arguably with Google App Engine before it) you take away the toil of having to:

  * Manage/deploy servers
  * Monitor/maintain/upgrade servers
  * Figuring out tools to deploy your app to your server
  * Scaling an app globally.
  * Coping with outages in a data-centre/availability
  * Worry about load-balancing & scaling infrastructure 

I think this is more than just a marketing gimmick. It is part of a big change in application architectures.

At one end as a small developer of of web/mobile app this can considerably reduce the amount of code/maintenance you need.

At the opposite end of the spectrum the likes of Google (Borg) and Facebook (Tupperware) have developed their own in-house solutions where by servers are largely abstracted out as an entity that developers need to worry about.

Managed docker services (e.g. Google Container Platform, Docker Cloud) are another approach of achieving a largely 'serverless' goal.

(edits for formatting)

From: http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/about-eurostar/press-office/pr...

"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."

2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.

But that isn't an immediate expense it's a balance sheet asset written off over a period of time.

Singapore has a very impressive GDP per capita, but it is massively skewed by external investment (with money that often flows straight back out of the country again), construction and being a major regional hub.

To say Singapore has a higher GDP than any Western country isn't quite a fair comparison. For contrast, the GDP per capita in London (pop 8.5M) which benefits similarly form being a regional hub has a GDP per capita of $73k [1] vs about $55k in Singapore (pop 5.4M) [2].

For a different picture try looking at a figure that looks at household wealth, e.g. household final consumption per capital. These numbers are less skewed by external investment and look at the real purchasing power of average people.

On these figures (US$) taken from: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.PRVT.PC.KD

Singapore: $12,355 Switzerland $33,284 USA: $31,469 UK: $25,828 Germany: $21,769

By this metric Singapore is far behind most Western economies and is in the same basket as Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Portugal.

Don't get me wrong, the progress that has been made in Singapore is amazing. I just think it is far too easy to be dazzled by high GDP figures, and miss out on the bigger picture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_... [2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD

I agree completely and like you for a long time I didn't use ad-blockers on morale grounds.

Personally I don't get overly excited about the tracking/re-targeting, but what did bother me was how ridiculously intrusive the ads on some sites that totally destroyed my user experience, wasted my batteries and cellular data and at times prevented me from (on mobile) from getting to the content I actually wanted.

With mobile it was also the stupid number of accidental clicks when scrolling, or pop ups with really small 'x' to close that and a non-zoomable viewport.

Wasting my time (and somebody else's money) on ads I never wanted to click does't seem like a good or sustainable economic value add.

Sometimes ads can be useful. On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Similarly I have discovered things of interest in Facebook & Twitter ads where they were relevant to me.

It does seem that online advertising is in need of a bit of a 'reboot'.

There is a similar story appearing in UK in places like London and in my home town of Cambridge. This isn't yet not he same scale, but it is affecting the property market.

In Cambridge 1 in 20 new-build properties is purchased by non-resident Chinese buyers, which has been one of the contributing factors that has seen prices rise by 50% since 2010 [1] and are 47% above 2007 pre-GFC peak [2]. Note - unlike Vancouver that has a a big (30%) local Chinese population, only about 1.4% of the Cambridge population is Chinese or of Chinese ethnic origin [3]

To some extent this is just about free markets and a movement of capital. But it is starting to price out many local people out of the property market that does have a social impact.

There are other factors at play including a booming tech & biotech sectors, restrictive planning, stock-piling of building plots etc, but the foreign buyers issue is a major contributor.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/22/china-cambridg...

[2] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-328...

[3] Guardian data - available in a Google doc https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yc8W1SiCbWd9V4I9KmTl...

The deal is probably similar to the way an airline buys planes. E.g consider when Ryanair bought 200 737s for $22Bn [1] which is about the same in it's entire market cap.

An order like this is probably:

* For a delivery spread over 10+ years

* The vehicles will almost certainly be leased/finance

* Each vehicle will probably assume a 5+ year working life and have a residual of about perhaps 25% of list after 5 years given the likely mileage

* There will be a big initial discount given the size of the order

So assume each car, is $100k new, but given an order that size is perhaps a 40% discount. So that's a $60k sale. After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k.

So the unit economics are that each car costs (before financing costs) 40k over 5 years, or $8k a year. This is a relatively low cost given the number of rides it can take and the cost of the driver who will be driving it.

On that basis is doesn't sound that expensive.

[1] http://corporate.ryanair.com/news/news/14908-ryanair-places-...

Sensationalist title and also misleading.

Most articles I can find on this say the US FCC already has laws in place that ban this, so why is the title blaming Europe for doing what the FCC has already done in the US?

Sources: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/tp-lin...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3044594/open-source-tools/tp-...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/11/tplink_kills_plan_fo...

I've been using their ARM Servers for a while as a build/test servers for some embedded Linux stuff. Overall a positive experience and things have 'just worked' with a Digital Ocean style interface. That said I've not been hosting critical websites or similar.

Unlike Digital Ocean I like the ability to add flexible storage volumes.

That was really impressive. Other than playing very accurately, I felt it played far more human-like than most computer chess engines.

I've written several chess engines, and have often wondered for some time whether or not there was a chance for a more AI/pattern-driven approach.

Are you using your AI just for evaluation? E.g. do you have a traditional PVS/negascout (or similar) search? Presumably an 'extreme Type C' (no search) would fail to recognise various draws (50 move/repetition)?

Good work :-)

Note in there are a lot of prepaid cards (that can be mastercard/visa cards) that focus on children.

E.g. Osper (https://osper.com/) in the UK is a pre-paid Mastercard that targets 8-18 year olds.

Load average measures how long is the queue of processes waiting for the CPU

I don't think that's quite right.

Load averages measure the size of queue of processes runnable and waiting for CPU or disk.

If you ever have a webserver/cache that has disks that have become the bottleneck, you can often get to a high load (lots of runnable processes, blocked on disk) but low CPU util (everything is blocked on disk, CPU relatively idle).

In my experience high UNIX load on busy systems is far more caused by disk IO utilisation rather than CPU utilisation.

E.g. if you run "du -s / &" 4 times, you can watch your UNIX load go to 4 (after 1 minute), but you will have idle CPU time. This will be more obvious if you have slow magnetic disks rather than a fast SSD.

London has become a massive tech hub. The digital technology sector employs 200k people [1] and is makes it one of the biggest global tech hubs outside of the Valley.

[1] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500248323/London-steams-...