skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many page views per visitor? How many and which ad units are you showing? What is your content area?
$1.5 for 1K banner views isn't to bad. But for 1K visitors viewing 4 pages each with 3 ad units then you'd have reason to be dissapointed.
I think it's a combination of both. If you give people money now and tell them they have to pay it back with interest later, some fraction of them will spend it anyway without any regard for whether they will be able to pay it off later. This drives up the price for people that are financially prudent and refuse to spend borrowed money on consumer goods. They get priced out of the market by folks who don't care about future repayment, and so either have to do without (not practical for basic necessities) or get caught up in the borrow-and-spend spree.

This is a lot of what's happening in the college tuition and real-estate markets. Because lots of loans are available for education, the price of a college education goes up to accommodate the extra money floating around, pricing out the people who want a college education but are not willing to spend borrowed money on it. Because lots of mortgages are available for housing, the price of a house goes up to accommodate the extra money floating around, pricing out folks like me who refuse to take a 0% down interest-only loan and forcing us to rent or live with our parents.

It continues until people either come to their senses (leading to a deflationary spiral that bleeds all the excess credit out of the system) or lose all sense entirely (leading to hyperinflation, the fall of whatever government is in power, and an economic "reboot" where the government issues new currency and declares all savings and debts denominated in the old currency as invalid). I'm betting on deflation, personally, since I think Americans are too smart to get sucked into hyperinflation. But I could certainly be wrong about that.
Hands on With the GooglePhone, aka Android Phone
My bad. Thanks.
Now I'm wondering to myself if there's a graph or chart somewhere that plots people's adsense returns.

(goes looking)
The amount you make has more to do with the value of the ads and the ratio of impressions to clicks. If your goal is to make money, modify your site to maximize those values, not just the number of eyeballs that see the ads.
So I said, Jerry, if you’re feeling down, do what I do — go shopping
It seems like questions like this are trying create some kind of Hacker monoculture. That's lame. Watching TV doesn't make you a bad hacker.
There are many ways to optimize your earnings.

There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)

You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.

You should use section targeting to tell Google which content sections to emphasize for relevance:
(https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...)

To increase your click through rate you can place your ads in a better position, follow the heatmap:

(https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...)

There are many other variables that come into play, something known as smart pricing can lead to huge swings in ECPC / CPM.
The Wire, Lost
What dumber things are done in the USA today?

Playing lottery was the first thing that came to my mind, although this is done all over the world. This is a laundry-list question, so I'd have to ask, what kind of stupid? A low return on investment stupid? A Darwin Award stupid? A Pointy-Haired boss stupid? I actually like your question; it's pretty open-ended.
doubletrue.
Bootstrapping has worked well for my company, but I see some missed opportunities where taking outside investment would have paid off earlier on. I think this is especially true when being first to offer a new service or product makes all the difference and you use your outside investment to bring your product to market first.
DVICE: Top 10 Valentine's Day Gadget Gifts for Gals
there's an element of truth to this (freedom to use good tools, for example).

i've followed both models, but one of the best things you get from outside investors is forced accountability; it's a good kick in the ass to regularly take hard looks at your plan and have to meet deadlines and ship stuff.

if you're bootstrapping or part time, it's easy to kind of fart along and spend years on an idea that would have either succeeded or failed quickly if you had been forced to execute to a plan.
that's against google TOS
sammyo is asking if the site has been brought down due to heavy traffic. Although if YC is nailing your site, you have serious problems.

See "slashdotted" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdotted

I thought everyone knew that term by now...
Venture Capital Secrets: How We Screw You Over
The question is so vague I don't even know where to begin.

What site/market are you in?

Where are the ad placements?

Is it a blog, service, forum?

Is it 1000 visitors daily? A period? Is traffic ramping up? Down?

How new is the site? Are the visitors organic?

Are you counting pageviews? Hits? Uniques?
Fuck Google.
Real coders sit down at 2am, close their eyes and scream like a banshee while pounding the keyboard furiously. After about 2 minutes of this, they calmly stand up, grab a Jolt, and watch while the custom operating system they just wrote in their own custom language (implemented in Arc and Javascript) compiles...

(The screaming is important. It makes you look like a mad scientist.)
If you have a very targeted audience, you could look for relevant affiliate programs...
Pure Css Icon Sketcher | Css Globe
I was 13-14 when gave it up for good, saved me a lot during the years. Now we are a family, living happily without turning it on, it's reserved for DVD's and SuperMario only.
The central point is the <form> </form> tag set. When you write <form action="page.html" method="get"> [other code] </form> the browser well make a request for page.html and add the form data as part of the URL. Otherwise if the method is "post" it'll send the form data via request arguments.

I probably can't explain this too well, so check this out: http://www.javascript-coder.com/html-form/html-form-tutorial....

Forms are only a small issue though, and learning Web app development piece by piece, in random order, may not be the best way to go about it. I really suggest learning Django from www.djangobook.com and following their tutorials step by step; I believe they have a tutorial where you actually create a working application, which is the best way to learn.

BTW I sent you an email earlier did you get it? Didn't know if your addy was "emailadrian" + "at" or "adrian" + "at".
That's because 6% of users generage 50% of ad clicks [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/12/2037223&from...]
Adsense payouts are now 10% of what they were in 2004.
So UNBELIEVABLY FUNNY ... not even 24 hours after you posted this, the firm in question is cited in a recently posted article on this forum

http://venturebeat.com/2008/02/11/thefunded-penalizes-ventur...

Where they nabbed vcs for trying to create multiple accounts and artificially up their own ratings on the system to make themselves seem to have a good rep ...

Who is mentioned prominently?

Check article.

So unbelievable.

I was shocked that their rating was so high ... almost too high ... and I though perhaps the guy had a serious spiritual soul-searching session after 9.11 or something and decided to play it square.

Instead he will now be forever branded, through nobody's fault but his own, as "the guy who tried to manipulate his own Funded rep in that Venture Beat article.

Unbelievable.

Karma worked, in this case at least - in this lifetime!

Unreal.

I feel ... sniff sniff ... sob ... vindicated ...

It's been a long journey.

I'd like to thank my manager, my hairstylist, my dance coach ... there's just to many people to keep track of so don't be offended if I miss you ...
I realized that 99% of what's on TV is pure crap and wasn't worth paying $70 / month for, so I cancelled my cable service. I use Netflix now so I can watch movies and some TV series, but I no longer just sit in front of the TV and do nothing for a couple of hours a night.
TV came with AT&T Uverse (FiOS) so that I'd have a decent internet connection. Fortunately it also includes a DVR so I can watch my shows when I'm too beat to get any real work done.

Honestly though, for the first 14 years of my life, we didn't have TV. My younger siblings have had TV for all the life they can remember, and I can tell there's a difference. When I was younger I spent my time doing much more productive things... like building a battlebot. I never got to play it though.
I've got Ubuntu running :)
Is your name "Keshav"?

Because if it is I got your email and will reply shortly; if not the email is "emailadrian|@|inbox.com" with "emailadrian" together as a term.
Probably better to just use straight water on a cloth. There shouldn't be that much stuff on your monitors that you need to use isopropyl alcohol.

I tried using isopropyl on a CRT back in the day and it took off some kind of coating that was on the monitor, and I've been afraid to do it again ever since.
Living in Pittsburgh, I don't see myself being able to give this up. Sunday lunch at my parents or in-laws, with the game on, is an entrenched family tradition. Formula 1 or Calcio when the Steelers aren't playing (my father in law is an Italian immigrant, if you hadn't guessed).

I have surprised myself, though, by totally forgetting about some weeknight Steelers games this year. I guess that's progress. Your analysis of elapsed time is sobering.

For those of you who haven't lived here, the Steelers are basically the city's religion. pg would understand what I mean:

http://www.paulgraham.com/gateway.html (grep football)
I agree, in-memory hash table controlled manually by the application has a million ways to beat any SQL-server caching.

What I am saying is that I suspect that memcached is way overused by people who don't know much about SQL. I am not posing like a DB snob, in fact my skills are fairly modest, but even I know that query caching is just one of the many caches SQL servers employ, and well designed servers easily service thousand+ of requests per second. And that's just one instnace.

Very very very few web sites ever reach such loads. In theory memcached should be more like a very niche product for such rare sites, yet it appears that everybody is using it.

I am against it because it increases the complexity. Memcached deployment and cache control become two more things to get right.

That's all.
Easy. Cancel your cable/satellite subscription, then wait a month. Suddenly TV doesn't seem very important.

If you want to use the pseudo-nicotine-patch method of weaning yourself from TV, do the above and download your current shows off the internet and watch them at your convenience. Eventually those shows will die off, and since you don't have cable/satellite, you won't have any new ones to replace them.
I'm a Lost addict. And now Heroes.

I find one of the most edifying things to watch (as TV programs go) is the Charlie Rose show. He basically invites interesting people and lets them talk. Much better than the chopped up sound bites that pass for interviews on American "news."
No. Although I do still watch movies at home, and occasionally I'll get into a series and watch it on DVD. Don't have actual TV service though.
Um, no.
At about 16, when I first got a gig writing reviews I decided TV took up too much time. At that point I simply pulled the cable out the back of the thing and just continued to use it to review games.

Now I simply don't have a TV, I still own one but it's in storage. I have a small problem with DVD's, but mostly because it's rather boring eating alone, and I barely play games on my PC anymore since reviewing them made pretty much 90% of games detestable. I literally had to force myself to play through Metalheart: Replicants Rampage, description claimed it was like a new Fallout; I believe they mixed up the game with the feeling of "Oh dear god, that pain is my life draining away" of radiation poisoning.

Now I have so much time without TV that I'm going to blitz out a novel I've been working on over the next couple of weeks. It's been a while since I tried to get anything published, so its about time I _did_ get something published.
Please don't do this. For one thing, posts are dynamically reordered. But it would not be a cool thing to do anyway.
Kevin Kelly: The Bottom is Not Enough
There is more stuff, but it's also cheaper. It's possible that all of the "essential" stuff now costs less in percentage of income than all of what was considered essential then cost then.

There are actually very few goods and services that objectively increase your productivity or quality of life. Almost all of them were already mentioned in this thread. The rest are bought for social status or out of delusion.

Edit: I am only talking about things that are bought by general public. If you are rich, there are certainly worthwhile things to spend your money on, like travel.
Personally no, but I can see the appeal. You've got to remember those things are being developed in Japan, where they have serious relationship problems; relatively of course, I don't think people in many western countries manage much better on the whole relationship field.
The $2.7 Million Question: Do Super Bowl Ads Pay?
Rambo's Death Chart
Remembering The Search For Jim Gray, A Year Later
I think that Vista should be made immune to piracy hacks.

The reason? It would encourage more people to try alternatives.
Yes or no: Should web startups host on Amazon?
We're bootstrapped (servee.com), I'm in my first few months, and it's hard making the transition from freelance work to startup work, because the freelance is currently paying the startup bills, and my bills.
Well whaddya know! I attended Magnatune's workshop presentation at WikiMania; nice to see the founder here.
love the name
From your other comments, I surmise that you're in Germany. Has anyone done/is doing something like this in US (for technical/engineering jobs, not McD's)?
Bill Gates Deletes Facebook account
I'll be self-funding after school's done this summer. My day job is as a nurse, so I'll be able to work 3 - 12 hour shifts a week and be able to code for 4 days. If I work my PTO right, I work for 5 days in one week and take a week off.

It'll also be rather easy for me to cut back one or two days a pay period without taking a bit hit. My other founder, my wife, isn't working a 9-5 right now, so she'll be able to devote quite a bit of time to it as well.
Looks like you can delete your account if you have sufficient connections.
I'd be surprised if he really deleted it and didn't just do the "suspend" option Facebook has.
The store I'm talking about is actually in Chinatown. I've been to Mondo Kim's in the Village, and their anime section (all half of one side of an island) left something to be desired.

Is there another store in the Village that I don't know of?

Don't worry, I know about Anime Network, and I purposely don't get it.

I won't google anything either.
Caffeine: do stupid shit faster!
Reduce it to 150 minutes? Yikes! How much TV do you guys watch? That's an epic film a night and thats considered a target?
Ask YC:  Who benefits by not requiring mandatory voting in the US?
Could someone shed light on this?
Seems to be down again...
Don't Like Anywhere.fm?
I love the idea of variable increases in cost as resource requirements increase. I massively over-deployed in the dot-com era. Oops.

How have S3/EC2 affected funding and acquisitions - is anyone aware of an example of either? (I know jtv uses aws)
CREATIVE STARTUP PEOPLE (Number 3 of a series) : Do you have what they have?
What do you mean by "take off the brakes"?
sorry, brain not connecting the dots,
yea I know the term, didn't connect the dots , brain is YC dotted as well
i dont watch tv, i download it :V
just checked , is working now, sorry for the problems. finding problems along with getting the feedback
No, and it's given me lots of extra time to concentrate on my drinking habit.

Actually, there was a period in my life when I had neither TV nor a computer. I'm not sure what I spent my time doing...
Internal Software
Yeh but you know right after you down-modded me you went straight to Amazon and were like, "Oh yeah, The Prisoner, almost forgot about that - wonder if that's available as a box set."

Whatever you do, please do NOT think of me as you're watching it if you wind up getting it on DVD.

And besides ... I just know I'm going to lose most of my points for this one ... I'm making a perfectly valid point.

Everybody talks about Wufoo here ... yet when I ask for honest, useful feedback, nobody responded for most of the day.

Yet if I were to put up a post like, "Do you think it's better to code in rooms painted blue, or rooms painted green" I'm pretty certain I'd quickly get over 50 responses ASAP.

Here we go ... here come the down mods ... sigh ... 52 points my all time high ... oh well it was nice while it lasted ...
simple, no tv in the room, wait for the season final of the series like lost, heroes, battlestar and get the whole season from torrent, watch them all non-stop : )
Well I'm just using that as an example.
Everyone.
Well I actually forgot the name, but I'm pretty sure it's not Mondo Kim.

It's like straight out of a movie where you find this old, eclectic store and it has all these buildable, multi-scale Gundam models, etc.

I try not to go becuase the first time I went it was like, "Dragon Ball Z - the Uncut, Unedited version" and it was like, "WTF? There's an edited and an unedited version"?

Basically everything they have makes me realize just how much I haven't seen ... by the time I got done with my wish list I had like $15,000 worth of anime I really, really wanted to see.

That's when i realized I lost control, walked out and never came back.

But if you want to chase the anime dragon, let me know - I"ll ask around for you.

But I don't take responsibility if you walk into the anime den never to see the light of day again ...
I stopped watching a lot of TV when I went away to college (didn't have one in the dorm room the first couple years). After I graduated and moved into my own place I never bothered getting cable hooked up, but I still use my TV for DVDs and games. The kind of addiction some people have to TV, I have to the Web. I think that and not getting enough sleep reinforce each other.
http://reddit.com/info/68jye/comments
Ask YC: Thinking of joining a startup - is this a red-flag?
I'm considering joining a startup as an early employee. The company has a promising product, a smart and passionate team, and a big client. However, the team hasn't decided what share of equity everyone will get and doesn't plan to until they have something to divide. While I trust the team and I'm sure they intend to fairly distribute the equity, I worry that this could potentially cause tension in the team. Am I worrying too much, or is this something I should be concerned about?
I think Amazon should be part of your hosting strategy, but not the entirety of it.

We use Amazon (EC2, S3, SQS) but only where appropriate. EC2 for compute intensive but ephemeral data (logging, etc since your storage can disappear). S3 for hosting data files served up to HTTP clients (images, video, music) and SQS for, well, queuing :)

Most importantly though, we host the primary application in a typical data center. It's reliable, supported, we have an SLA and we can expand in any way we need to.

Like I said, use Amazon for part of your hosting strategy but not the entirety of it.
Well, keep in mind what I'm describing is one special program in math. Also, everything I know I heard over beers, while complaining about our advisors.

Regarding teacher quality, he found the best fit was a failure model. Most teachers perform adequately, and these teachers are statistically indistinguishable. Some teachers fail, with varying degrees of failure.

Basically, think hard drives. Most work, and these are all the same. Some fail, with varying degrees of data loss.

If the sample in the study you mention comes from the partially failing region, they could easily find an increasing relation. Or possibly this program was special, that I don't know.

However, I do stand by my statement to leave teaching to those who aren't great at other things. That's just basic comparative advantage.

You are comparing your students with you as a teacher to your students with no teacher. The proper comparison is "you program, joe blub teaches" vs "you teach, joe blub programs." If joe blub teaches almost as well as you, but you program much better than him, then it's far better if you leave the teaching to him.

Of course, if you enjoy teaching, you certainly are not obligated to do the most economically efficient job. I'm certainly not (postdoc in math here).
I'd be very concerned if I were you.

To me, that indicates that they haven't really thought the whole financial model through very well, which isn't often a Good Thing.

Lot's of good opportunities out there right now, don't make a fast decision that you'll later regret.

One thing you could do is get them to agree to some rough bracket, like you'll get 10% of what the founders get, or at least 90% of what already-existing employees similar to your role get.
From my (recent) research, I would say 'not primairly' I agree with bmatheny that using it for some things may be a good idea (if video-to-flash conversion is eating up resources, EC2 is good, if you're running out of HD space, S3 is good) But, I would go with somebody else for your primary 'web hosting' needs. EC2 isn't a web-host, and for us, it came down to 'is it worth the time resources to manage DNS and another API and resturcture part of our program for it to work with AWS?' and the answer was no, but We'll probably offload Processing and Storage pretty soon.
Mostly, I don't. I was watching almost 0 tv when somebody gave me some Lost Dvds and then I started seeing that. But apart from Lost, I don't see tv. I don't like it... it's very, very boring.

But I like going to the cinema (and I like seeing good movies on tv when I'm on the mood, but that's not usual).
http://www.linein.org/media/screen_clean.swf
No. EC2 isn't a web host it's, well, an elastic computing cluster.

My (minimal, but real-world) experience shows that for an app that runs fairly continuously, EC2 can end up costing 1x-3x as much as a simple dedicated server with similar resources.

EC2 is great if you need the computational power of 2 or 10 machines for a few hours a day (like to chew through and analyze a bunch of log files, or to process some batch of data nightly), or you need a temporary increase in server resources for a day or two (like if you have a popular link from digg).

EC2 isn't such a great fit if you need a 24/7 always-on server that's doing tasks continuously (even at low volume).
It doesn't have much to do with willpower, it's more about realizing if you don't waste your time on inconsequential stuff, then you'll almost necessarily spend it on something worthwhile.

I don't think it's hard to convince yourself TV is a waste of time...
No. But sometimes I watch some new TV series on DVD. In 20 years will be something called 'TV' or just 'The Internet'?
issue of real estate and equity are not verbally binding. this has the potential to turn bad. they have something to divide, the equity. are you saying they have not incorporated and dont have stock? seems that you are not paranoid and this is indeed a red flag. Keep looking or wait until the equity issue is resolved.
The 90% problem with learning Haskell