These days, closer to 1/2.

Interesting. Tarsnap and rsync.net seem to alternate coverage on HN, and for the longest time I kept forgetting they were different, even though I had vague sense of confusion.

This one is Colin Percival's project.

We hold tarsnap in high esteem and wish Colin the best of luck. Further, we appreciate all of the good work Colin has done for the FreeBSD project.

Glad to see you on the front page.

Nope, I'm not rsync.net, but they provide a great service and contributions to FreeBSD, so they're obviously awesome people.

> on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about,

Uh, bringing a billion people onto the Internet for the first time, and turning the 3rd world into the 1st world, isn't most people's definition of soul-sucking.

The Hadoop team quit Yahoo to start HortonWorks last year.

Most of those Flickr users are dormant accounts, like mine.

....and you just said the manufacturer's name on a unrelated forum, so their ad campaign was a success.

So it's impossible to discuss unsuccessful ad campaigns, as doing so immediately makes them successful?

If you're thinking/talking about the ad campaign, it wasn't unsuccessful. The unsuccessful ones are forgotten.

Funny, i'd seen that ad a dozen times and up until now i had no idea who made the ad.

Apple has a team devoted to making Apple products easy to use in productions, and aggressively courts producers. But they don't "pay". It's exactly the same as how companies send press releases (and demos) to lazy journalists to reprint as news.

Most of Netflix doesn't have ads.

Are there any ads on Netflix? I can't think of any.

There's product placement in some programmes, for example the Netflix-produced House of Cards contains jarring product placement for the Playstation Vita.

That was surprising and disappointing. I guess they need product placement, but some of the Playstation stuff was a bit heavy handed and ham fisted.

There is a lot of product placement in most TV shows this was just poorly done. If someone says a brand name or you see a logo long enough to read it than chances are that's product placement. EX: Someone's drinking a beer/soda I'd you see the label it's deliberate.

There are not ads on Netflix. I wasn't being clear enough. I meant that if there are video on demand services like Netflix without ads then people will see ads as a discomfort in vod services with ads, like Hulu.

My understanding is that the Hulu subscription pays for fixed overhead (and profit), and the ads pay for marginal licensing. That might be a lie, though.

TV shows are written in "acts", they are designed to be broken up. Ads may be a horrible distruption (so I suggest muting them and blocking or averting from the images), but for a good TV experience, you should take a break for a minute to let the previous act sink in before watching the next act.

So what about when TV shows are released on DVD/BluRay? Are we are to guess when the act ends and the next one starts?

Sorry, but I don't buy this. An episode of, say, Breaking Bad does not need several-minute "act breaks" to work, so that something will "sink in".

There is no series in existence so intellectually or emotionally overwhelming that one needs ad breaks to deal with them.

(Though admittedly I frequently have to pause shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm because I need some fresh air after all the social embarrassment, but that's different.)