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That's good; a reminder in general: it's a serious crime in the USA to bribe foreign officials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

If by hacking project, you mean, "writing my senior thesis," then yes!

And if by "writing my senior thesis," you mean, going onto HN instead, then double-yes!

It would not seem prudent whatsoever for someone - especially with no local knowledge (or language ability?) to go to Shenzhen and attempt to bribe anyone, much less government officials, to solve this problem. Guanxi aside, even if you think some local cadres are very 腐败, not a good idea. Cannot emphasize enough how many potential problems could arise from this course of action.

@OP, I would concur with the "lawyer first" strategy. While it may be worthwhile to go to meet with your supplier(s) / contact to try to resolve the issue, the first step you need to take is to better understand your current legal posture and options, lest you find yourself in unpleasant territory once you hit Chinese soil.

You might find this thread I started a few months ago to be valuable, it discussed a variety of different online backup tools at length:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946416

+

Other options, taken from there or elsewhere:

Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com )

Crashplan (http://www.crashplan.com )

Backblaze (http://www.backblaze.com )

DropBox, Arq, others as mentioned already...

Hybir: https://www.hybir.com/

Amazon S3 (in conjunction with some services like http://code.google.com/p/duplicati/ or http://amanda.org/ or https://www.jungledisk.com/)

I didn't find a solution that matched my needs exactly when I found myself in your shoes, but at least there are a fair number of choices there!

Dear AT&T customers, All the great things you hear about Verizon are lies. Please, don't come over to this network - it's really horrible, I swear! That's why I'm a lifetime Verizon customer. I mean, er...

Signed, A VZW Subscriber Panicked about AT&T Refugees

This isn't really a fair comparison, as has been noted elsewhere here. Heathrow is an exceptionally poor example of airport construction and operation. There were fewer constraints at hand in the construction of the new Beijing terminal as well - so if thing X went wrong, I think there was probably less ability to delay matters.

Service industries in China can't be expected to be superior based on their personnel numbers alone. Cultural paradigms can produce good and bad results - as when poorly paid workers with no expectations of tips and customers accustomed to certain things lead to a custom where to summon waistaff all you can do is loudly yell '服务员'...

Pro-tip: If you're in China, and a Bank of America customer, you can withrdraw money fee-free at the China Construction Bank. Cash may be less convenient than a Bank of China account, but, just saying.

Better response: more often than I should.

Nice, but the link from your name misdirects, and the image there is also labeled as http://twitranking.me/twitter.com/images/getrank.png, so it doesn't seem to work properly (because of the extra twitter.com in there). It also doesn't degrade 100% gracefully when given malformed input (like <'>, etc)

But cool! I tried it out and it's a handy tool. Add some stats to show off.

First, ask what the purpose of GA is: ultimately, it's bottom-line justification is that it helps prove to advertisers just how effective their ad spend is on Google. Use AdWords / AdSense, see how much money you are making per conversion etc., spend more money in a virtuous cycle.

From this perspective, real-time results might not help so much - how long would someone want to run a campaign to see if it was effective, after all?

This being said, I think that even within that context there is a business case. Given the distribution of ad dollars on Google, if P&G or Ford or some other big client was doing huge ad spends, it could be meaningful to tweak things in real-time throughout the day to try to find the best results of A/B/C/.../X tests without wanting any real lag. Now it could be that GA responds faster for certain accounts and this isn't a problem; I wouldn't know first hand one way or another.

I think that conceptualizing the problem from a business perspective helps explain why, for most cases, it isn't important that Google offer a real-time product. But, as we see with Google Instant, there is always room to improve even when things don't appear to be 'compelling' of their own accord!

I think this is an important point to raise, and it brings us back to the matter of how important it is to "define your objective." Is your objective to be your own boss? To pursue a dream? To try to make it rich? Etc...

While the "jackpot" target is small and elusive, I think a more _reasonable_ but still far-fetched goal is to search for a place where you are 'impactful.' You may not be rewarded in some strictly remunerative way, but if you are passionate about changing something and can make it happen - better CRM tools, better ad exchange software, better reverse osmosis technology, whatever it may be - then that is something great, completely aside from whether $$$ follows.

Lifestyle stuff is great too, but for myself - as someone very young but idealistic and ambitious - what moves me most is the possibility of making a difference in the world. Businesses - and one where you define the rules and set the agenda - are one way to do that.

You can do useful mental exercises for Google interviews, or other interviews, by working through "puzzle questions" and similar problems. But if a world of limited time, this might not be the best use of your prep time.

A good source for the history of these questions and interview style, as well as a bevy of sample questions, can be found in "How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?" http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...

Great to hear Miguel, sorry we never got to really catch a proper meal together last summer... (can you guess who this is? ;) )

Let me know if you are out NYC / Boston way.

To chime on on this subject: Several internships at Google have offered tremendous learning experiences and network-building opportunities, and the subtleties picked up by immersion in the communities around the SF Bay area - or wherever you might fight yourself - are truly valuable. Internships are great, if you are a student reading this - go forth!

The other category to consider are those domainers who hold websites which are _not_ typically covered in ads; they might just have a notice on them saying "contact firm X for details." In many cases, I have even written such outfits saying, "is XYZ.com for sale?" and been told no, it isn't, or something like that. I have seen this for some domains which are more high-end, more generic useful words and less just pure spam.

This said, it's still a disgusting waste of internet real estate.

Wow, this looks great - a game that can really make use of fingers if ever there was one. Super helpful for the World of MOM levels, I bet.

I'd definitely get it if I had an iPad... and didn't have the PC version. :)

Keep it up, 2dboy!

FYI, Thomas searches time out after 30 min; can you give a direct cite to the congressional record or a permalink? (Click Share/Save, e.g., "http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111hr4259)

Good news, but yeah, would love to see exactly the bill that you are referring to. Thanks!

There was this, too...

I was saying to myself, OK, time to learn Python so I can try to make something cool with Django. What Python to learn? Oh, wait...

I wasn't sure why I would write the code in Python 2 and then convert it to Python 3, if it could just be run in Python 2 anyways.

In any event, thanks for some of the clarification, HN-folks!

Yeah - I think the advice is great if you happen to have a few tens of thousands of dollars, though at that point it isn't especially profound. For a startup with little to no capital, 5-10k is a lot of money.

Certainly I wish that I had some better names available to me for some projects of mine, but if I were to focus on the project first, I think the rest would follow. I look forward to the day when I can be incredibly frustrated at having to overpay to buy a better domain name - once I've already had some minimal success.

I know what I want for christmas now! I have seen and made Stirling engines before, but none that are so beautiful and efficiently low-temperature differential.

Does anyone know of some other good kit vendors? Something cheaper than ~$134 would be ideal.

HN has a certain bias towards entrepreneurship and start-ups, so let me try to offer at least a few morsels of support for working at Google or Facebook, though I definitely advocate for start-up or small companies too.

At Google or Facbeook, you would be well-compensated and comfortable while learning new skills in a still quite fast-paced environment. You will be surrounded by many very smart people, and that's probably the most important part.

Your ability to learn new things is definitely greater if you can wear many hats and accept a lot of responsibility at a small company, but at the same time, you may find that you are ultimately better equipped by working at a larger firm full of bright people and building not just your skills, but your network.

Who would you want to start a company with? While it is often difficult to entice away workers from such enviable jobs, you will find a large pool from which to recruit! This is something that you would find rather more difficult at the smaller company, though if it were in the SF Bay area, you could still do a lot of socializing. That's not quite a substitute for getting to work closely with people, obviously.

That's one line of argument there, but really, I suggest going where you think... A) you like the people best and B) you will learn the most. The rest is ancillary and will come out in the wash (a bigger bonus, etc, is much less important than being able to grow a little bit more someplace than somewhere else).

I struggled with many of the same questions myself recently, ultimately choosing something quite off the beaten path from what I originally imagined - we'll see how it works out next summer when I start work!

I got the quote, appreciated the reference.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this argument, am male. I would say that I'm OK with the quote for artistic purposes, perhaps vary the call to action in other contexts to avoid arousing any problems of bias...

[O__o]

Ah, I understand: my grammar was unclear. I just saw the first page, where it said "free," and I was confused about what the economics of the plan were. I don't care if it is free, and in fact that free factor was a concern, since I was wondering how it stayed in business. Clicking through and seeing the pricing, I understand now. The question was more "how does it stay in business," not, "in what way is it free." : )

As soon as I am a gazillionaire, I will do this. It will be my opportunity to test out all the theories I have learned in my political science studies.

If I wanted to store everything, 100 GB would be too small.

I like this, but... how is it free?

I like it! I used to use some various commercial products to this end, but found them rather unpleasant. I like the aesthetic here and might put this to use even for some side projects. Thanks!

Anything I was uploading to the interwebs for serious storage would already be lovingly encrypted in a TrueCrypt container... usually.

It seemed like it would be relatively more complex to set up / run, and more expensive to store large bunches of files. Good middle-range option. I like to dual-boot sometimes, which might mean hairier fixes, but more than that I don't want to have to do any tech support for my backup solution if anything goes wrong. Experiments, software, I'm fine dealing with the consequences, but with my data, I don't want too many DIY fixes since the results can be really unpleasant!

I had heard about this before, and I think it is really great - for small amounts. For backing up my laptop hard drive (~250 GB) and everything I normally would keep backed up (another... 1 TB?) or even some fraction thereof, this would get SUPER expensive. :(

What I really need backed up: - Documents (~5GB) - Photos (~20GB)

What I would _like_ backed up includes everything to do a full drive recovery, but beyond that, music [40 GB] and other harder-to-replace things.

If I can't backup all my backups, that's fine, but I think under even the bare-bones situation, rsync would be outside my budget :)