skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that's true, that's really too bad - ASK HN posts are one of the great differentiators about this place. They are almost always valuable, and the insight and answers provided by the community always remind me why this place is great.
It depends where the ads are running. Ads you see on big content sites are almost always on a CPM model. Fixed price ads (like you see on TechCrunch or TheDeck) are generally based on a CPM rate.

Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good.

There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.
This is a shot in the dark, but have you tried inserting a \parbox or minipage environment into the table?

I solved this problem in the past, much more simply. I think I embedded a \vbox in the table (back when I used TeX rather than LaTeX). Sorry I can't be more specific-- I poked around on the hard drive of my current machine, and didn't find it, so this must have been many years ago, on a project that didn't merit copying over.
He's talking about 7200RPM HDDs, but nine years down the road, shouldn't we expect SSDs or whatever comes next to replace moving-parts technology?

Nine years is a long time. Back in 2001, most drives will still sitting around 40gb.
Hmmm, continues a theme of his that there is often much less difference between consumer and enterprise drives that one would like or expect. Quoting the paper he's discussing, after a bit how power-law distributions model this much better than the more commonly used geometric and Poisson, he bolded:

"We find no significant difference in the statistical properties of LSEs in nearline drives versus enterprise class drives."

But he then noted that they do have 4X the error rate.

As I recall, it may have been the predecessor paper based on the same data set that pointed out that today's disks do not follow the bathtub curve WRT to failure. (Instead they have very few infant failures, after one year or a little more in service they start failing, and the failure rate is then well behaved (at least through year 5).)
Same here... what's the problem being solved here? I get search through Mail.app just fine, growl notifications, drag&drop + copy&paste...
My father spent about 40 years managing a lab in a University and as soon as he was retired participated in starting a business doing the exact same thing. For one thing, the layers of red tape disappeared completely and instead of wrestling with people who didn't care about what he did he was out actually doing science. For another, he certainly wasn't ready to just hang around the house pruning the bushes for the next 30 years.
TeX (and hence LaTeX) does this.
If you dig Mailplane and have an iPhone, check out Mailroom: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mailroom/id355023563

We've been inspired by (and are also addicts of Mailplane) but hated Mail.app, so we started enhancing Gmail's Mobile UI.
> if a guy doesn't want to go to a party and get terribly drunk with everyone else in the company, then he obviously has some element of his outside life — a girlfriend, a hobby, et cetera — that is more important to him than the company

god...
Bing Search Bans All Sex-Related Terms In Middle East
I think google just needs to expand the sdk- and of course- update everyone's OS.
To be fair, Hackety Hack is built with shoooes, so it's an easy mistake.
Why it's so hard for Toyota to find out what's wrong
Also, I only seem to get titles on the right for items 24-30, down at the bottom. It doesn't look like the rest are rendered (although hovering over them helps).

Could I suggest using Google visualization and dropping flash all together? Ever wonder why any page that has flash on it comes up with W3C validation errors?

(EDIT: I know this was an exercise to learn AS3 and Flash, but that begs the question - why?)
In all these countries as soon as you try to connect to a website where nudity or other banned content is displayed the mighty filter will divert you to a screen telling you that the website displays prohibited material - Bing settings or no Bing settings. The actual search engine you use is immaterial and this is just a gimmick by Microsoft. Most people find this very annoying and would use https vtunnel or something similar :)

disclosure : Currently in Qatar
I'm eagerly awaiting patio11's comments on the smoking/meat/Sararīman culture.
I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short. And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per page), or tables. Enough said.

Pages on a Mac gives me all of the typography features outlined in that article. Actualy, it gives my pretty much everything I need, except for unbreakable spaces (argh) and good support for numbered figure captions.

Positioning LaTeX as a "competitor" to WYSIWYG is wrong, instead one should mock Word and OpenOffice for poor typography features.
Mandatory paid subscriptions for content that is of value to the subscribers does work. Case in point our local newspaper, which requires a subscription to read content other than the classified ads. If you are not a subscriber, all you get are the headlines and a "teaser" sentence. Because the local news published here is not generally available on wire services or other sources, there is not really an alternative to paying for this content if you want it (other than buying a physical copy of the paper itself).

It's really a question of the value of your content. If enough people are interested in it that you can make significant money with ads, you probably could also get people to pay for it directly. I think micropayments per individual piece of content would make the most sense here, i.e. I'm a lot more likely to pay $0.10 to read some interesting sounding thing than I am to commit to a much more costly paid subscription to your site.
Nope, but it very well could work. The solution I did come up, though, also works. But this is all part of my larger point: Latex can be fragile, and getting it to do what you want is often nonobvious.
pclark, can you explain why you like mailplane so much?
This is absolutely amazing. Would you consider putting some sort of companion web site for your UIO thesis style together? I'd love to use it in my own work, but I'm not proficient enough in LaTeX to just start with your class file.

Fantastic work!
After funding, the founders may be only high single digits themselves.

wow, this is normal? I guess when you're playing flip-lottery you don't care.
Lets be clear: advertising has value for us as a consumer (imagine removing all advertising for a moment; how sucky and inefficient would that be). How exactly would you find stuff otherwise :)

It is bad, unethical, gawdy or inefficient advertising that has huge negative value. And boy do we see a lot - the net result being advertising appears to be pretty shoddy in general.

This post didn't really suggest any effective solution.

What we need is:

- alternative revenue models that work instead of ads

- efforts to prevent annoying or unethical or just plain shoddy adverts
WATCH 2010 OSCAR AWARDS CEREMONY ONLINE
4 equal cofounders + an employee pool, pre-funding, and you're already in low double digits. Now give half the company to financiers. Twice.
I use LaTeX specifically because I have lots of figures. Word's handling of figures is monstrous: moving them around at the drop of a hat is just awful.

Tables are definitely easier in WYSIWYG.

Some sort of typographic valhalla would be Markdown syntax with LaTeX equations and figures, BibTeX bibliographies and WYSIWYG tables.

EDIT: It looks like Pandoc does this! Awesome!
That works for small papers like that - especially if there is no alternative.

What about national or international media/news outlets. Paywalls simply drive people away because there are alternatives - which are free (and ad supported).

If enough people are interested in it that you can make significant money with ads, you probably could also get people to pay for it directly

The numbers dont work out though. Look at any big website's stats and they will almost certainly make more out of advertising than subscribers.

I'm a lot more likely to pay $0.10 to read some interesting sounding thing than I am to commit to a much more costly paid subscription to your site.

This gets said a lot.

Firstly I dont believe it is actually true; it's easy enough to say but would you really do it. Often it is just rationalisation of current behaviour.

Think again to all the content you read today on blogs/media outlets that run advertising. How many would you "buy" into at $.10? How much is that adding up to?

Speaking personally I could be paying about $2-5 a day for content.... that's quite a lot.
The effects you cite are not independent: 'costing them money' and 'denying them revenue' are the same thing, and both flow from 'nullifying their business model.' But lots of companies have their business model nullified (ask BlockBuster). They either find another one or they go out of business and a smarter outfit with a better model takes their place.

If everyone blocked ads, no one would serve them. They would charge for content. This is probably the fairest model for everyone. But content providers like Ars want to mislead their customers into thinking they are getting something for free, so they make their money from advertising: that is, they don't sell content, they use content as 'bait' to attract attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. An ad-blocker is acting perfectly ethically and rationally by refusing to give their attention---after all, Ars is pretending to be free, you can hardly blame the viewers who take them up on the offer. The only ones being screwed by this are the non-blocking viewers, who are forced to give more of their attention to compensate for the blockers.
The article doesn't really discuss the upside of hiring a development team for a startup. It mostly focuses on if I don't know how to code or manage people you should. But if you don't know how to manage you probably won't get good results out of a dev shop.
I just hired a "dev shop" to build a prototype for my brother and I, despite being able to do it myself. I elected to this because:

* It's pretty straightforward, I'm probably overqualified to build it.
* I'm better off keeping a full time job and paying for someone else's time. Both monetarily and for networking reasons.
* Since I do know enough to build it, I can take it and run with it if/when it becomes a good idea.

Depending on your perspective, you may not consider this a "startup". Until we have a prototype, I don't see how it could be. The potential for it is huge though. :)
> I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short. And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per page), or tables. Enough said.

There are some editors that make this much easier, like Gummi. You can just type in the info and it inserts it for you.
The Reddit problem: Learning from mistakes
> I'm sure if you held a fair vote over the whole affected population, a clear majority would favour the games going ahead.

Why are you sure of that? It seems like every time another country wins an Olympic bid, the vocal local voices are those who don't want it at all, not those who are welcoming it with open arms for the benefits it will bring. Maybe that's because those who live in the typically downtrodden regions chosen for Olympic "regeneration" are frequently displaced afterwards, as more wealthy folk move into the newly updated area post-Olympics.

> It's a numbers game - the greatest good for the greatest number.

Sure, and in surveys, nearly everyone wants a reduction to 20mph speed limits by the parks their kids play in, yet when observed, the majority will happily drive at well over that speed through residential neighbourhoods other than their own.

> And the simple fact is that the appearance of your home, especially regarding commercial advertising, is and always has been regulated by local government.

You're playing games. There is no law, under normal circumstances, that prevents me from putting a poster in my window advertising a product or making a political statement.

> Why would anyone think the rules have suddenly changed, just when the media of the world is focussed on the area?

Because the rules have suddenly changed. Indeed, IIRC it is now a condition of winning an Olympic bid, imposed by the IOC, that the appropriate government take steps to prevent ambush marketing, including legislation if necessary. Yes, you read that right: an external, commercial organisation is dictating to an elected government what laws it must pass.

> The Powers That Be have decided that the Olympics will be great for London, a decision with which I tend to agree, so stiff upper lip, eh?

Our Powers That Be don't exactly have a great track record of doing things that will be great for London, or anywhere else, just lately -- unless you count bailing out those who pursued failing business models.
Wow, this guy sounds like a lot of fun!
I'd honestly just say "supports these OS's and these Phones" and tell everyone else to bugger off if they wanted to complain from a different handset or donate to the cause to get support for their platform.

Discontinuing development and making a dramatic blog post about it doesn't really benefit anyone, including him.
"When you buy Super Famicom games in used game shops, the gray plastic is very often stained deep, ugly yellow from existing in houses packed to bursting with cigarette smoke. Sometimes, the consoles themselves are so yellow."

That's actually due to the plastic used, it's not from smoke.

http://vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189
From Buffon's needles to $1 million per day. Fascinating thought! Thanks for the link. Can we take you up on your offer for a few more recommendations?
I can't imagine living in Japan as a vegetarian teetotaler. There's nothing wrong with that lifestyle but, man, pick your battles. Those things—the working, drinking, and meat eating—are part of the culture and it's not exactly a well kept secret.

I know that I love booze and meat so I'm not going to relocate to Bangalore any time soon.
Haha made me smile, I hope my retirement is running a business writing code, designing hardware and running circles around the youngings.
...usually when you shouldn't have tried putting it there in the first place.
It misses a key decision factor: Is the technology going to be a competitive differentiator for your company.

If so then having it in-house is much more important because your business strategy is going to be closely tied to your development work as the company evolves.

However if you primarily compete on other factors (i.e. content, sales ability, marketing, etc.) then outsourcing the dev work and focusing on your core competency makes a lot more sense.
Might not be a bad idea to relocate to Bangalore. It is the so-called Pub capital of India.
Fred Wilson's post on this is the best source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/founder-dilution-how-much-is...

If by "flip" you mean sell the company quickly, it would actually be a different story. VCs wouldn't fund you if that was what you wanted to do, so if you raised money it would be a smaller amount, from angels, and there would be much less dilution.
Why Super Nintendos Lose Their Color: Plastic Discoloration in Classic Machines
Either you're confused or I am. TeX and LaTeX are not aware of rivers. (Nor of lakes, though I would guess that the TeX line-breaking algorithm makes lakes very rare.) The comment you were replying to was saying that TeX does do hyphenation and line-breaking cleverly but doesn't detect rivers and lakes; it looks like maybe you thought it was saying that TeX doesn't do any of those things.
Makes perfect sense from a over-logical, geeky point of view. (Disclaimer: I am a geek.)

What I've learned over my years is that our view of the world isn't necessarily most people's -- if it was, then this guy would be totally right.

But he's not.

Online advertising isn't optimal, but given the number of "normal" people who make Google tons of advertising cash every quarter, this "mind pollution" argument doesn't stand up.

usually only a tiny proportion click on (or notice) an advert

That's right. A tiny proportion -- generally something like 1-5%. As a geek you'd think: highly inefficient; find another means. But marketing people think differently. They think, for instance, that if you're cold-calling 100 people and make just one sale then you're doing well. 1 out of 100.

So that's why online ads work -- you go in expecting a 1% click-through rate, and if you do better, cool.
The problem with anime and animation becoming dumbed down and trashy is a global one.

(incidentally did anyone else struggle to read the start of this article - it didnt flow very well)
you cannot stretch a parabola into a circle because a circle is a closed loop, while a parabola is not. any stretching would necessarily have to tear the circle. a topologist would say they have different fundamental groups.

the author of this article should stick to what she knows...english literature, not algebra.
In World War II, the first file-sharers nearly cost the Allies the war. Every time a Jimmy Dorsey record was "loaned" (pirated) out to a fellow soldiers, Hitler won another battle.
Hi, I'm not trying to be a jerk and it's very kind of you to offer a freebie here :) ... but I believe Google Checkout already does this for free (I recall helping an ebook author set this up) - but maybe I am missing something you offer than Google Checkout does not.
You can also add Rapportive as a UserScript to a Fluid.app instance of Gmail.
I also often find them interesting. I recommend you read them through http://ask.searchyc.com/ as even popular questions disappear from the front page so quickly I rarely get to see them.
Lua on iPhone for rapid development
Also find out whatever you can about the current cap table. A cap table will tell you a lot about the history of the company any demons hiding in the closet that might prevent a buyout or later stage investment in the company. If say, a pool of 30 dentists owns 30% of the preferred stock with a 3x liquidation preference, run and run fast.
Facebook makes it very easy for everyone. As a developer, there is a place in the Facebook Connect settings to put a url that they will send the user's id to in the event that the user disables their Facebook account but wants to keep their account with your site.
The whole thing seemed amateurishly written. Left me thinking: does Kotaku not have editors? Why did he suddenly directly address the reader as "man" three times in one paragraph? Why did paragraphs seem rambly and disconnected? If one's going to take the "asshole" tone, one needs to be likable or at least amusing... maybe the author should read some Bukowski.
Please consider making it possible to change your username.
Sites built using the StackOverflow platform
Can't you have multiple wives in some Arab nations?
Wow, I had no idea that human beings were such simple creatures that they could be compelled to purchase goods and services against their best interests by a simple flashing picture.

While advertising is primarily persuasive (there is still a significant informative portion of advertising), there's nothing wrong with being persuasive. You're attempting to be persuasive with your replies in this thread. If being persuasive is being unethically manipulative, then we had better stop all debate right now.
I'll join you in being annoying that she got published in the Times and I'll agree there are blatant inaccuracies in the article, but there are more effective arguments than insulting the author or the humanities at large. There's plenty to disagree with in the article without resorting to that.

As for mathematics being a superset of the humanities, that is just patently false. Here are a few counter examples [1,2,3]. I always find it interesting when fellow engineers/scientists argue for the superiority of their discipline when compared to the humanities. Personally I find the hard sciences awe inspiring enough to stand by themselves.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Brueghel-...

[2] http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1760/

[3] http://books.google.com/books?id=lZDCequ4E4kC&pg=PA170#v...
Sample Lua source code for simple iPhone application: http://tuomaspelkonen.com/iphone-source-code/office-space-ou...
Know when 80% is good enough

I consider this an important strategy when executing most tasks. It is an on field guideline in the Marine Corps to aim for a 70% solution to problems in some cases. It is sometimes a better strategy to implement an imperfect plan than to roll out the perfect plan by the time it's too late.
List of StackExchange sites
Developer Certification WTF
http://www.quantlib.org/ is a good place to start
On the joys of creativity as a software developer.
I can think of another very good reason to hire a dev shop: you already have a developer or two, but want to try out a feature that's well outside of their areas of expertise. For example, your core application is a Rails-based website, but you want to try offering an iPhone app. Note that if that feature is successful, you will probably need to train your developers in that technology or hire someone, and rewrite it from scratch.
I resonate with this article. More often than not, I find ads annoying and obnoxious, and give me a negative impression of the advertising company. Maybe my awareness of a brand is increased, but I end up going out of my way to avoid brands or products that pester me with annoying ads.

The problem is that advertising is broken. I shouldn't see ads for feminine hygiene products, cars, McDonalds, or Verizon. I'm not the right market for any of these things. It's a waste of my time and the advertiser's money, and I do experience these things as "mind pollution". On the other hand, I'd be happy to watch ads for Google, Apple, books, local restaurants, good movies, and good beer.

Whoever figures out how to apply Permission Marketing to mainstream advertising is going to make a lot of money, and will make the world a better place.
Advertising is mind pollution — if you have a mind. If everyone was like us there would be no advertising.

Personally, maybe once a year I give at least some thought to an advertisement I've seen, and I remember a couple of occasions where I've actually bought something. But mostly I find advertisements boring and generally just avoid them because usually I already know what I'm looking for, if I'm looking for something.
I should point out that I am not actively working on this anymore--after it launched a few months back the traffic died out pretty quickly and I moved on to bigger and better things.

The titles, along with the awkward order of the points for some of the items, should fix itself in about 30 minutes.
That's exactly the response I was looking for - Thanks!
Donation Networks to fight Advertising.