"Then I reserved a business-class seat, sent a quick text message to my girlfriend telling her that I was leaving the country forever, and was off."

Brilliant.

Wow... good job man. My first experience with programming was QBasic, and that was about 16 years ago. I only did it for a couple of weeks but when I picked up on programming several years later as a young adult, it all came back to me - assigning variables from user inputs, printing on screen, if then else, all the basics. Good stuff!

We are supposed to care about privacy, yet people can't stop trying to find out who is the creator of bitcoins, even though this person clearly doesn't want that to be known. I think we are all naturally hypocritical beings or something.

Are people actively trying to find the creator of bitcoin? Personally I don't care enough to actively find out. If someone presented themselves, then I'll have a passing interest - a few articles, HN comments, etc., but I'm not going to change my day-to-day at all.

Good point.

And who forced Wright to claim he was Satoshi?

Wow.. I feel super provoked by the question "What's cool about you?". I wonder why..

Probably because being 'cool' is highly subjective and of marginal, perhaps even negative, relevance to doing valuable work.

It is presumptuous and pretentious: 'Are you good enough by my own arbitrary and vague standards to be around me' is the underlying question.

"Why should the House of Saud govern, and not be replaced by a democracy?"

That is a very, very naive question tho, don't you think?

Mandela: Why should we have apartheid, and not equality?

eric001: That is a very, very naive question tho, don't you think?

Democracy is sown via stability. Stability is sown via dictatorship.

Sometimes it takes a dictator to bring about democracy, simply because he dictates it that way.

You know the answer ?

if he'd knew, he wouldn't ask.

Metaphors like that only makes it even more confusing. It's a marketing scam, let's call it for what it is. Servers. They are servers.

We have a sticker for this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVKwDixXAAAmRaI.jpg

It's one of the most successful marketing scams I've ever seen - the whole tech world bought it, and here I was thinking at least engineers are mostly bullshit-proof.

There can be difference between hosting on bare metal boxes and hosting on cloud providers.

If you are connecting different services (message queues, databases, storage, transcoding), and spinning up and down instances based on current demand and spot prices, then cloud hosting is totally different. On the other hand, if you are just renting a couple of dedicated cloud instances, then yeah - they're just (virtualized) servers.

Yeah. The problem is, "cloud" now means both of the things you described and then some. Probably the best definition corresponding to present usage of this word would be "not on localhost".

(Because yeah, if I host a Dropbox clone on my Raspberry Pi sitting on the wardrobe, I have my files "in the cloud" now.)

We need a new word for automated, dynamic allocation/deallocation/management of remote instances for various services. Something that would differentiate it from buying a VPS.

Agreed. Amongst non-technical people, 'in the cloud' just means 'somewhere on the internet'. For example, if I backup my iPhone onto iTunes on my laptop then that's not on the cloud, but if backup to iCloud then it's on the cloud.

I guess it's frustrating that cloud means quite different things depending on the context, but I guess that's true of a lot of language.

I would probably go with auto-reply as soon as he post something, receive the text message and then edit the reply to something meaningful. Fun read! :)

Ah, great idea. I did not think of that :)

well, are you going to try it?

Probably not, I am pretty convinced at this point that Mark ignores those comments anyway.

Well, I know this wasn't your intention, but you could always "sell" that top spot and edit in the content from a top marketer, keeping it subtle enough that it looks legit.

Also, Mark is just one person. Imagine if you opened this script up for use targeting the fans of any celebrity / influencer. Companies would be willing to pay a LOT of money to be able to reach those audiences.

Can't believe I'm advocating comment spam, but sometimes the opportunities jump out at me. :)

It's a valid point, but I personally wouldn't want to build a business build on spamming.

The idea was just great akras14...sadly you're not interested in effecting that again. Would've loved the outcome.

eric001... Perfect, just perfect logic

You don't have to care about it, it was just pointed out for you a possible reason for the name. You can go on and care about the price, speed, etc now.

Dude, that site is very difficult to understand. Just saying.

Thanks, what about homepage https://comment.ws? What do you find difficult here? Would appreciate your or anyone else's feedback!

I honestly have no idea what this website does or what its purpose is. Is it for commenting? I couldn't figure that out. It seems like you've glued together various websites and search engines into a single page. Why would I use this?

Thank you for the feedback. Yes we are for commenting. We will try to make that obvious with UI changes. You are right that we are using Bing, Twitter, Youtube etc. They frictionlessly provide good content to users. We are also building our own features. Hopefully they will be our usp

It's not like I'm thinking "Ah, just remove that thing over there, move this little thing down a bit and maybe make that thing bigger." I'm thinking "What the hell am I actually looking at?". That's what difficult.

Hope you don't get offended, just being honest. Too many people are spending energy on useless things instead of working on real solutions to real problems. That is a problem.

I'm not entirely sure what comment.ws does from the website. Its a bunch of vaguely familiar faces and logo. A page that gives a 1 sentence explanation of the site will be cool. Hope that's helpful

Thanks for the feedback, please refer to my answer above

Your website seemingly doesn't load at all for me. Firefox on Win7 with uBlock Origin and Disconnect plugins. Just shows a search bar that doesn't work and the rest of the page is blank.

Sorry, will look into it.