skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our http://darkmists.org MUD has a similar position to this, especially with our niche -- fewer people want to play an online RPG for the RP than for the PK aspects. The topic has often come up about making money from this game, at least to pay the server bills. There is some concern that once we start accepting money, we lose some of the freedom to manage rule-breaking or to involve people's characters in various RP events that may or may not be to their personal enjoyment. We can come up with ways to make the money, such as selling virtual items, but there is a certain responsibility to ensure people derive sufficient value from what they buy, such as equipment that sticks with their characters and is not easily stolen by the neighborhood thief or taken by their next killer. Still, we have enjoyed this for about 13 years without making the money; would involving money ruin that experience for us and our playerbase?
You mean a big migration away from the app store of companies that make boob jiggling apps.
You will still be able to watch videos in IE6 and other old browsers. It's only other, new features of the site that won't be supported.
Maybe in farm towns in the US. In the rest of the world, people actually appear to like sex.
There's a component that has some weighted shortest-path algorithms: http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Graph-algo

Please let me know if you find anything that can handle negative edge weights well while efficiently tracking shortest paths. I've found some papers with efficient implementations for frequently updated edge weights, but haven't found anything implemented or accessible.
It's very unfortunate but it's a hole they dug themselves into.
Why would you rather get a rev-share with twitter for ads, when you can just put your own ads up and get 100% share of them?
The top mobile app contests: your app can win big
Google Testing Blog: Interview with Copeland
Pretty interesting reading (my group at MS did automated market making.)

Did this make anyone else cringe?

> In addition: an SQLite database, sitting in a Dropbox directory, can be used by different instances and computers in different locations, running atop different platforms.
I reject the idea that you should settle in parts of your life and gain happiness elsewhere. Personal preference and standards.
This is an awesome idea. I wish I had thought of it. Best of luck to you.
Everyone Who Knows What They're Talking About Agrees with Me
I don't know why they don't just move these off to their own section, like NC-17 rated section and make it so they don't show up in the charts. The room at the back of the movie store has worked for decades and seems like a perfect strategy here.
I thought this was going to be much dirtier than it was.
Sounds like the author should just go back to PHP. No need to worry about excessive abstraction there.
Yes, that's what I mean, exactly. When you are building a business you want to know that you are basing it on a firm economic foundation that will last. Just like building a house. You want to use good wood that will last a long time.

Further consider that I can build many of the services myself. In a way, I'm paying someone else to save me the time in development and maintenance that it would cost to do myself. How do I measure those costs as a small business?

I'm also considering it from the POV of a provider. How do I structure a business that is profitable and long lasting? As an entrepreneur, I have many curiosities in areas that are not my traditional money making mechanisms. Software vs. Hardware for example. Not a lot of employers can afford to allow their employees to play around with robots, but as a small business, it's possible to do both and be profitable and even create some residual.

How do you attract customers by being that kind of business?

The question is doubly important for entrepreneurs. Perhaps more, but I am finding it increasingly more difficult to measure risk and reward and make predictions about longevity of organizations and services.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145511

Again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145060
Before someone says, "You can make money off your passion" or "Do what you love and money will follow", I'd like to see their own personal evidence. I'm walking that road and I know how hard it is. Possible? Yes. But definitely not easy, and it takes waaay more than just passion. It takes late nights, hard work, thick skin, and a good bit of luck. Oh, and forget about "fail fast." If you do what you love, be prepared for a long, hard slog up the mountain to profitability. I love my community and my chosen subject matter, but it's still work and it's still hard.

I apologize if my post was irritating to you, and you're right that I didn't elaborate on how difficult this can be, but my point wasn't that it's easy, just that it's almost certainly possible if you're willing to put in the work. And if you're passionate about it and you enjoy it overall, what do you have to lose? Your story is a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about.

And no, I'm not quite to the "making a living" point with the niches I'm monetizing (though I know others who are), though I think I will be in the next 12-18 months, assuming growth continues as it has been. I also don't put as much time and effort into them as I could/should, primarily because of my startup.
Original source (via discrete link at the bottom): http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13325

Choice quotes from original:

The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons

The next steps, Atwater says, are to increase the operating voltage and the overall size of the solar cell. "The structures we've made are square centimeters in size," he explains. "We're now scaling up to make cells that will be hundreds of square centimeters—the size of a normal cell."
Grasshopper grew out of Babson college, which is the top entrepreneur MBA program.

So Babson has been promoting this video, so it is cool to see it being a part of the NEW.
I've made over 20,000 posts in programming forums, most of which have been around a decade or more, but none at Stack Overflow. Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site, no matter how popular that site, is rather arbitrary.
Of course, an A/B test would tell us definitively which is the better option, but I suspect you are correct.

We have the field, but set it based on the credit card number on the back-end.
But I hear younger programmers bitch about how hard it is to write code in manage memory, etc.

That's because we like to create applications, not program computers. Memory management is programming for the sake of programming, it doesn't do anything user-visible. The computer can do it automatically, so why pass it off to the human?

(Also, C does have automatic memory management. Ever "free" anything you allocate on the stack? I thought not.)
tl;dr: Author has hurdle updating app to Rails 3, so Rails has now jumped the shark.
The only extra "configuration" I have experienced with rails 3 is adding routes as I used to abuse the default routes. But yes they decoupled a lot of things but it's not like you have to require them through xml config files there is no change in set up. It still works as usual in the default configuration This is just link bait.
The bubble companies had no intention to monetise their audience. The very phrase 'burn rate' is indicative of why it was a bubble. Their plan was simply to grow audience, even at a big loss, buoyed up by huge valuations and ridiculous IPOs.

Most of the dot-com failures were just straight out bad businesses, making a loss on each unit but making up for it in volume. Pets.com is the obvious example, selling cases of dog food at a loss because the shipping cost more than the dog food. The common theme of the dot-com failures was the desire to grow as big as possible as fast as possible, regardless of everything else.

A niche audience is completely different to a mass audience. They are inherently valuable by merit of being a niche. A list of pet owners isn't worth very much, but a list of people who own German Shepherds with arthritis is. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has ever sold anything. Just the list of names is worth proper money, let alone the community and the goodwill and trust that it carries.
Are you hiring people to support your developers or are you hiring developers? I am sure a lot of people answering questions on SO are great developers, just as I am equally sure that there are more great developers out there working on software that have never answered a SO question.
How competent the owners of these sites might be in monetization is irrelevant, as my point is that the audiences in question are sufficiently engaged and passionate to be willing to pay for stuff, and thus it's possible to make a good living from them.
Is Google trying to singlehandedly kill IE6? Interesting when you think about the implications for Chrome... and the fact that an IE6 vulnerability allowed for the China hack debacle.
I highly disagree with you. The less roadblocks you put in the way of a customer purchasing something, the more likely you are to get a conversion.

By this logic, Amazon's One-Click purchase would be a failure because people "expect" to have to enter their address and billing info every time. That's simply not the case.

Furthermore, some sites require this piece of data, some don't. I don't think this is like asking for the customer's email which they'd expect, selecting my card type is only present on ~50% of places I check out. (purely observational, no evidence to back that up) My point being that since entering your card type is not an expected piece of data every customer expects to put in for every transaction, they won't miss it to the point that they think your site is untrustworthy when it's not there. You have just made their life a little easier behind the scenes by not requiring them to supply it manually.
Twitter Stats: Are New York Twitter Users More Sophisticated Or Shrewd?
Seems like a really small niche. Wouldn't movies be a better thing to match on, or music?
Are you really going to market this as a dating site? Because you will be steamrolled by actual dating sites that provide substantially more.. flesh.. Dating sites make money because people are willing to pay money to get laid.

Doing dating through book taste doesn't exactly signal hookups, so why even label it as a dating site? Make it a social site around book taste and let dating happen in the community by itself?
Yes, we definitely need this.
Maybe you've ever seen the cool proof that "Tetris is NP-complete". I loved the paper and it was very entertaining. But it involved a much broader and general Tetris problem than the one found in Nintendo Gameboys, because the width and the height of the pit in the reduction was larger than all the console based tetris games I've ever seen.

My understanding is that Gameboy tetris, given the sequence of all future blocks as input and an empty pit starting state, is actually easy to solve computationally.

Similarly, I have to believe that the market as we know it contains some constraints, and all the historical data will abide by those constraints. To show the market problem is NP-hard, you would need all 3-SAT reductions to lead to a valid market problem. Going back to Tetris, IIRC, a large number of the reductions would lead to Tetris games that could not exist on Gameboy Tetris, because you would need a block-pit that is far taller than the game allows.
I ditched rails long ago because it's simplicity was an absolute nightmare when you actually wanted to build something that wasn't a clone of basecamp.

From my experience so far, Rails3 is a breath of fresh air. Easy to get up and running, and also easy to extend and replace the pieces you dont want. My current Rails3 app doesnt use any ActionView at all (used my own view system) and its working great so far. This wouldn't have been even remotely possible in Rails 2.3.
I'm pretty sure they never will be. The speakers couldn't be candid if they were.
Enjoying sex and looking at porn are very different things.
http://alpha.alikewise.com/Profile/danalotus was the featured profile for me and it scared me. The eyes have eerie glowing spots in them from sharpening. I would recommend either asking that girl for another photo or not featuring her. :(
"Ubuntu likes to reset the MOTD on boot, how would you set it so this doesn't happen on boot [hack expected] (2 marks)"

Heh. So does that mean you wouldn't accept "edit /etc/default/rcS and change EDITMOTD to no"? :-P
Modern Benchmarking in Haskell with Criterion and Progression
OK. Then name a US department store chain that carries sex toys. Bonus points for an upscale department store, which is what Apple wants App Store to be.

For all practical intents and purposes the US (and not say liberally minded Sweden) is the App Store market. And point being is that in the US there is an expectation of porn and adult stuff not to be mixed with the "general purpose" goods at the retail outlets.
I always suggest avoiding the "pay the bills" mentality. For most of us, running a site costs less than cable tv. If you want enough money to pay the hosting bills, just work an extra hour at your regular job each month. Enjoy the site as a hobby and forget about money. There's nothing wrong with that.

Only try to monetize if you really want to make serious money. Otherwise, it's just not worth the hassle.

As to your specific points, I try not to let people lord it over me that they're paying money. You have to assume that they knew what they were signing up for when they click the "pay now" button. A paying user complaining about something isn't much different from a non-paying user. Plus, we've found that paying users tend to complain much, much less than free ones. They tend to be fanatical supporters who also understand that I'm not going to cater to their every whim.

So, don't let paying users pull you away from your vision any more than freebies. If they get too angry just refund their money and move on. The heartache (and time) isn't worth the price of 1 subscription. Plus, this is rare. I've only come close to doing it once in almost 2 years of charging subs. I was about to do it when the guy shut up and stopped complaining. He didn't stop paying, though ;)
Firs of all, YC is about amazing people, and only later about amazing conferences.
Ask HN: What is your favorite event management software?
Seems to me that the event management market is full of many relatively similar competing services.

In ticketing, eventbrite seems to be the undisputed leader and well on its way to totally dominate the market. But in other segments like participant management, event promotion, I don't seem to be able to find any single or even handful of services that enjoy a similar market position.

Just wondering what are some of the event management software you guys use or love.
This worked pretty well for me. Right up till the moment she bought it behind my back :-p
Yes, government backed trusts can make lots of money - see: railroads and phone system.

That does not mean that is the best state of affairs for most other businesses. I am pro free-market competition, but the trouble is most big businesses are not.

Do you seriously think it would have been a good idea to have exactly one phone company in the US during the dot com boom? Can you imagine how long it would have taken to get a T1 provisioned from Ma Bell? Instead because the government sued AT&T and broke them into 7 smaller companies and forced them to open the CO to competitors we had many companies to choose from.

I say companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they are small enough to fail - i.e. I am not on the hook for paying off their bad bets
I love the /idea/ of using StackOverflow Careers to identify and retain talent. But there just aren't enough candidates there to justify the $1000/month fee.

You used to be able to see the number of candidates that would be returned for specific searches without paying for an employer account. A recent search for Ruby developers in the DFW area came back with only 5-10 hits. I can no longer find the search page. I wonder why?
It's too bad the author doesn't appear to have (virtually) attended the recent Rails online conference (http://en.oreilly.com/railswinter10). I don't think anyone who did could possibly think that Rails is going to do anything but totally crush going forward.

Rails 3 will still have opinionated defaults; it will just be easy to swap them out for other options. Most newbies will still use the default stack,* but experts (who always insist on customization) will have a much easier time than they currently do.

* Readers of my Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/book) will use RSpec instead of the default Test::Unit. Currently (with Rails 2.3.5) this requires some fiddly configuration but---thanks to the modularity the article's author disparages---RSpec will feel like a default test framework in Rails 3. For example, by configuring Rails 3 to use RSpec, commands like

$ rails generate model User

will automagically use RSpec instead of Test::Unit.
We'll just have new conferences on the same topic. Answers evolve anyway.
No kidding. Apparently getting your city to build its own fiber network is a sure fire way to get a telecom off its ass, as demonstrated by a Minnesota suburb:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=907617
Mint.com should be a platform
doesn't a lot of a/b testing refute what jason is saying here? I agree that if design gets in the way of the user, then of course it is going to have a negative effect. But it is my understanding that effective use of colors, borders, etc. can influence the actions your users take on the site.
I greatly enjoyed my experience of self-publishing on Lulu.com. It is truly satisfying to hold a physical copy of your own book, in my case it was my National Novel Writing Month book.
When it Comes to Tweets, the Key is Location, Location, Location
I used to feel this way, but as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that there are a large number of things in life that are completely outside of my control. Accepting that doesn't mean "settling", it means that I've realized that I can't control those situations, but I can control my reaction and how it affects me. Marriage may or may not fall into that category for some people, but generally the behavior of others, health issues, macroeconomic events, etc. are things we can't control and must learn to live with.
As for "Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site. . . is rather arbitrary":

I never in my post say that's the only mechanism we use to qualify - we get candidates from all over the usual candidates (monster / cb / hotjobs / dice / etc) but we use SO to help qualify.

I see lots of value in SO when trying to filter through the HUGE amount of resumes that come through the door.

I hire lots of technical people, this system works for me.

Their business model is charging $500/month to hiring managers for access to candidates and slapping in some advertising.

The fact that they’re out on the road raising VC says that they’re probably having a lot of success in this model because it works for others too.

StackOverflow centralizes, VERY VERY SUCCESSFULLY, a huge talent pool of programmers.

And it gives hiring managers a lot of data that is hard to collect (multiplied x30 resumes a day) from a variety of “programming forums” to make hiring decisions.
I agree. I'm getting a boner just thinking about this YC Conference.
Ask HN: Review my debt tracking app, Piggy Back
Drizzle, Licensing, Having Honest Conversations with your Community
Whoa, while the state paving roads might be socialist under Marx's definition, doing so with a workforce of slaves who would be systematically murdered shortly thereafter is not.
Gah! I wouldn't put it past the Twitter team to find an interesting way to deliver ads. BUT, this is really not what I wanted them to make money off of. There is SO much I'd pay Twitter for:

* A way to stagger/schedule delivery across time-zones (my tweet gets delivered at 10AM your native time zone)

* Really cool analytics ("more people reply to you when you talk about Ubuntu")

* Behavior recommendations ("I'd send that cute animal YouTube video at 10AM on a Saturday if i were you.")

* Info about my followers: ("74% of your followers have talked about coffee in the past month.")

* more info about my followers: ("these people just send links most of the time.")

i don't even use Twitter for corporate use, and i want that stuff. I bet folks using it for corporate/org use could think of even better stuff to pay for.

I think there are non-advertising corporate services Twitter could offer. I'm not 100% against advertising, i just feel like there are a lot of us scraping and hacking at this data through various tools, when we'd really rather pay Twitter and not turn into accidental Twitter developers.

Also, some of this stuff is not available over the API, and they could totally exploit that in a cool, fair way without being creepy.

Ah well... I'll hear them out on the ad stuff. I'm not gonna be one of those premature haters proven wrong by history.

I will NOT be the Slashdot ipod naysayer :D
I like how HN readers take a blog post, tear it apart word by word and make really healthy discussion out of it.

I tried a forum thing 2-3 years back with help of few friends, but with ad sense couldn't even pay for hosting fees. Had to shut it down.
I tweeted a joke earlier today that with Rails3 we have to go from complaining about Rails being monolithic to complaining that it has too many dependencies. Right on cue...
They have a very long history of this behavior - probably as long as their existence (anonymous's existence not 4chan's).
My anecdotal evidence is that in Dallas my AT&T iPhone drops about 50% of all calls I make that last longer than 5 minutes.

I am weary of AT&T's recent marketing barrage that boasts of impressive download speeds.

Seriously. When was the last time you heard anyone complain about downloads taking too long on AT&T? Even the above referenced study defines 'reliability' as 'the likelihood that a user can connect to the Internet at a reasonable speed.'

Like I give a crap.

AT&T's plain and simple problem is call reliability. Not download speeds. Not the ability to make or sustain a broadband connection.

It's there miserably voice service that has me contemplating to leave my beloved iPhone behind and run to pick up a Palm Pre on Verizon. For the record, I think the Palm Pre is an inferior phone. But I'd like to be able to make phone calls with some confidence that they will be completed.
Invest in America Alliance to Fund American Technology Companies
MagicJack dials wrong number in legal attack on Boing Boing
They don't do that because they can barely keep up with the AppStore popularity. Everything is knee-jerk in the AppStore right now. If you check out the forums you'll notice that not all devs are unhappy about this: there was a massive problem with auto-generated apps polluting the AppStore & Apple responded to this in this way.
My general complaint about journalism regarding these sorts of studies: Normally the study did in fact find the effect the journalist reports on, and the effect was indeed statistically significant, however, 9 times out of 10, the effect is tiny. Frequently the effect doesn't affect all people the same (e.g., in clinical trials, even when a treatment is statistically significant, some people under the treatment effect will get worse rather than better). And yet, even though these effects are tiny and not universal, the journalist almost always reports it as though it is some ironclad rule of human behavior.

I have no idea how strong the birth control pill effect is; maybe it is indeed a strong one. But this sort of reporting leaves you absolutely no way of knowing. And I have a problem with that.