skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on Facebook ads for the past year so I know that some of the claims in this article are just wrong, but I think the average reader can figure that out for themselves.

> People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google.

All true, all what Facebook tells its advertisers. www.facebook.com/ads

> They spend hundreds or thousands or more on Facebook ads. At the end of the first run, they see bad ROIs.

Because advertising on Facebook is not typically about buying something, it is often difficult to measure direct ROI in $. In this, it is like the majority of all advertising.

> ...Facebook ads are worthless. Everyone I've talked to who has actually bought Facebook ads knows this

Have you talked to Zynga? They make Facebook games. It is speculated they are making $300M+ a year. You can see their ads all the time on Facebook. Either they are incredibly incompetent, or FB Ads delivers positive ROI for them. Search google for "zynga revenue estimate".
Writing correct code, part 1: whatever happened to invariants?
The inherent problem is as follows:

I have observational evidence of people who like the strictest of silence to work. They are unable to concentrate with even the slightest amount of noise in their environment - they are, applying your theory, addicted to silence.

The other problem is that addiction is a difficult study; you can't sync your theory with nicotine or alcohol because those sorts of addictions are metabolic - in that there is an actual physical/chemical addiction.

And, finally, if you are right and music can be addictive - what's the problem? It's entirely non-harmful, no side affects and helps you concentrate. It sounds like the ultimate drug :)

You've constructed a very strange theory :)
I use win7 in a VM on OSX in order to do my day job. Prior to that I was using XP. I tried Vista, but resource wise it was horrible. Win7 stays out the way for the most part and it works - a lot like XP.

Am I going to switch back? No, but you're right that for most users win7 is just fine.
Their site is also painfully slow to begin with. Thank god they are doing something like this.
"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

John von Neumann to Claude Shannon
Thought experiment: Imagine a stock market with active participation by time travelers. Would surprises and risk be eliminated?
The biggest challenge I had with hiring people who were job hoppers is they didn't have the sort of mentored growth you see in people who spent several years working to grow themselves. Basically, they were doing the same 10-100k line of code projects they were when they got out of college but expecting to be paid more because they had "7 years of industry experience."

I'm sorry, but if you haven't learned to take on larger projects --- and learning two different platforms and a language a year don't cut it --- why should you be paid more than someone with the two years of experience you need to learn to estimate and deliver simple tasks at quality?

This may sound like a hypothetical argument, but it was a serious hiring quality issue I ran into with entire industries that are pro-hopping (finance and startups were the biggest). After a few years of hundreds of phone and in-person interviews with dud "superstar" candidates, you get cynical. As it sounds like the article author is.
Summary: SF baby boomer makes money in the corporate world in marketing. Starts a startup which goes public in early 80's. Becomes a CEO again. Takes earnings and then invests in emerging area of web and IT startups in 90s, with larger than average angel funds he setup. Burnt in the dotcom bubble, but saved by stakes in Google and Paypal. Says 'no' more often these days, but continues helping people out wherever he can and seeing continued deal flow. Good on him, I wonder what his technical knowledge is like.
I agree for the most part. The only problem I see in this post is that it mentions one specific form of ad (and one example) and then vaguely expands it to cover all forms.

It should be immediately obvious that the specific example mentioned is going to have a very poor ROI. Who sells on Facebook?
I don't tend to find these varieties of ontological reductionism that compelling, though it is interesting to read when people propose new ones. Sure, you can construct a coherent account of how everything really is just X for a lot of X, and everything else is merely higher-level structure on top of it. But picking the X always seems to be a bit arbitrary. Here he argues for the primacy of information; traditional materialists argued for atoms; some dynamicists argue for dynamics and state spaces; phenomenologists argue for conscious experience; Cartesian dualists argue for both atoms plus consciousness (everything reduces to those two, but neither reduces to the other); social constructionists argue for human social relations; some mathematicians argue for atoms plus math; etc.

Although I don't like everything else they write, I sort of like the manifesto of the Object-Oriented Ontologists, which is more or less that, while objects like televisions undoubtedly are made up of atoms, can be analyzed using information theory, are phenomenological entities, have a (perhaps socially constructed) role in human society etc., those are each just methods of investigating televisions, and televisions themselves "really" do exist as well: http://ooo.gatech.edu/
Origami! It's always fun and there are a ton of resources/guides/tutorials online. Most projects are usually short and practically all are doable in a day. Plus, many projects are cool to show off. Some are even useful! Here's a favorite of mine (simple, takes a couple minutes):

http://www.ehow.com/how_4563591_origami-bookmark.html

However, don't go overboard with the paper :-)
Mistaking the deepest abstraction you are capable of for the fundament of all reality is hubris.

What's important is coming up with a theory that can make accurate predictions. No need to worry about whether it actually corresponds to reality.
A talk on Ruby internals - Patrick Farley
Three.js: Javascript 3D engine
Everyone says they aren't influenced by advertising.

The fun part of that conversation comes when you point out that they're wearing Nikes.
This American Life had an episode a month ago that went into previous attempts of GM's to fix their problems. It has some great details on why their corporate culture is so messed up, and why they're so incapable of fixing their problems: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...
low end of AdSense.

I'd be freaking ecstatic if my Facebook campaign had performed on the low end of my AdSense performances. Instead, I ended up paying about $50 for each signup to my free trial of a $30 product.
Totally agreed here.

I have seen too many articles lately that examine Facebook's strategy and business model based on the present. FB has been extremely agile for a large company, and they have proven this fact again and again. They are not afraid to throw things away and try new tactics.

Even if they aren't doing well with their ad system right now, there is a big chance they will stumble upon an even bigger goldmine through their concerted and iterative effort (ie. Zynga + social gaming).
This feels like a 1960s article stating:

TV ads don't work because people change the channel when commercials are on!
Though the video is about an year and a half old, its quite useful and interesting. Good learning!
I'm wearing Pumas. I can't recall ever seeing a Puma ad on TV.
"To claim success at this point is nonsense ... The bailout was and is a complete failure."

So it's too early to claim success, but evidently not too early to claim failure.
I haven't seen any emails which clearly show Goldman lying. All I saw were emails which could be vaguely interpreted that way. Could you post a link?
Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them.

I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
> One peeve: an "undocumented feature" is not a feature that was advertised but doesn't work, it's one that wasn't advertised but does work.

"Documented" simply means "has documentation written for it". Being documented or not is independent of whether a feature (1) works or (2) was advertised.

Where the author wrote "In some of the talks they admitted that although these features are live right now, they are not yet documented (ie. you can’t use them)", I think he meant that some features were announced, but since they are currently undocumented they cannot be used, simply because you can't figure out how they are used. (And they might or might not work.)
Facebook | Amen El Ghezal
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Having good code on github will get you an interview, but it won't make up for a bad one.
has anyone looked at this through the eyes of the engineer? they are clearly not sold into your vision if they're job hopping--how is this the engineer's fault? your startup can only keep top-notch people as long as it's committed to changing the world. the smartest people i know want to work on hard problems that impact a lot of people. if you can't fulfill that in an engineer, what incentive do they have to stay?
Indeed, and that's why I prefer the way the Off-the-record handles user interaction and its security guarantees.

I just wanted to point out that authentication and security for emails is possible.
What isn't a Ponzi Scheme?

-- Sorry I edited my question, and then reverted it back.
Anarchy.
It's so interesting that the most vital journalism in America is from the margins: TAL, Daily Show... I wonder what's out there that I'm missing.
To where should my future questions be posed?
I have to admit that I find Zed's comments about DiP to be spot on. I hate saying that, because I actually have a favorable opinion of both Mark Pilgrim and his blog.
I confess to loving a good conspiracy theory (some of them must be true, we just don't know which), but this "GM paid everything back 5 years ahead of schedule, with interest" story is making my propaganda Geiger counter beep. Just like the Toyota takedown did a couple months ago.
JS is not perfect but is good enough. It is everywhere and will be used everywhere in the future, from browsers, to servers, mobile, etc.

Maybe it will be perfected as new versions come along. We should push in that direction if we feel there are rough spots right now.

I've learned to love it. I wish there is JS hosting solutions as simple to run as php for newbies. Remember the first one giving such a service, appjet, was bought by google by millions. There is market for JS on the server.

There is market for JS on the mobile world too. APIs are wonderful, see all you can do with canvas, svg, websockets, etc. all managed thru JS and you can do wonders with them.

If the whole iPhone/iPad experience could be accessed using JS apis, it would grow the ecosystem by tenfold. I hate objective C, but I could easily build a thousand apps in javascript overnight. No kidding.

JS is here to stay, and I am happy for that.
I guess so: I just read all the comments in this thread :/
The beauty of Haskell and other languages with a powerful type system is, that you can express a lot of invariants with the type system.

E.g. it is possible to express the Red-Black-Tree invariants in Haskell's type system.
Your statement doesn't follow from that quote. The bailout failed, so to claim success is nonsense. At this point, or at any point in the future.
Good idea. But how do you make money?
Ask HN: Breadth or expertise in programming?
Is it better to have breadth or depth in your programming knowledge, skills and experience?

When you set out to learn something new in programming, how do you choose between delving deeper into tools and languages you are familiar with or discovering something completely new?
The GM bailout marked the arrival of state corporatism to America. Truth is one of the casualties.
I quit Facebook late last year. I have no patience for the games they are playing.

Sadly, this seems to be the way of Web 2.0 sites: build an audience and ruin it by trying to make money with it. I've seen it with Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. I really like Tumblr but I would bet that the same thing happening with them at some point in the future.
If you want to get into architecture in its own right, Hennessy/Patterson. But I think a far better book on the subject for programmers is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective."

This is a textbook out of Carnegie Mellon that I was exposed to in grad school. It goes into all kinds of details of processor architecture, memory, I/O, assembly programming, etc. while staying focused on its audience of a systems programmer in C. It's wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...
Sac dokulmesi, sac bakimi, bakimli saclar, bitkisel sampuan, kepek sorunu
Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial
I highly recommend noagendashow.com if you're interested in media deconstruction
Mid-career salaries by college
Ask HN: EC2 network environment and UDP? (debugging a project)
I have written a crawler for a pair of major file-sharing DHTs (Azureus/Vuze and Mojito (used by Limewire)) for a graduate-level distributed systems project, and I'm at a bit of a loss as to why it's failing only on EC2 and only for Mojito.

The crawling process is very similar to the crawler described in http://www.eurecom.fr/util/publidownload.en.htm?id=2495 . Briefly, it works by breadth-first search: the crawler sends 8-16 find-node packets to a node it has not yet interrogated; the response to such a packet is a list of more nodes in the network. It adds the nodes that it has not yet seen to its list of nodes to crawl, and repeats the process. The scan is limited to sending 9000 packets per second, and terminates when there have been no packets sent for 30 seconds. netstat -su shows <100 UDP receive errors on the offending EC2 box.

On a local box, it sees 1,163,777 nodes, and gets responses from 300,638 of them (the difference can be attributed to stale routing table entries, NATed nodes, etc.). On EC2, where I was hoping for greater network visibility, it sees only ~200,000 nodes, and gets responses from only ~2700. It is in fact the case that EC2 seems to have greater visibility for Vuze.

I am running on two high-CPU extra-large instances, one for Vuze and one for Mojito. They are both in us-east, but different availability zones. The Vuze one has been working great for hours; I am wondering if there is some kind of EC2 global bandwidth limit or DPI that could be whitelisting the Vuze traffic but not Mojito, or perhaps some other EC2 networking quirk? Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
I doubt it. Maybe if he said "monetization the root of everything".

Most philosophy of science arguments remind me of old costume dramas. They tend to say more about the times of the people who made them than about the times of the people depicted in the story.
Classic opposing interests.

Employers want employees that will stay for reasons that are anti-capitalist. (because it's cheaper for them)

Employees will stay for reasons that are capitalist.

The recent bits about interns working for free, deriving the company gain, is right up this alley.
I think this is important. The article also mentioned that this group of people doesn't read newspapers or listen to the radio, so the loss of their usual media cuts them off even more than might otherwise be the case.

(I'd be curious as to whether they still had landlines available.)
What to you think about vmtouch'ing the ~/.mozilla dir periodically in order to keep it in a fs cache, instead of artificially having it on a shm fs?

Btw, vmtouch: http://hoytech.com/vmtouch/
As I've said here before, it turned out to be a great stroke of luck for us all that Eich had recently read SICP when he was handed the job of making Livescript. Sure, the pieces that made it in may be mangled and half-digested, so much so that it took 10 years before people were able to even recognize them, but enough of the original greatness survives that amazing things are possible with JS. Imagine if he had been infatuated with, I don't know, Ada instead.

Edit: "it took 10 years before people were able to even recognize them" isn't quite right. It would be better to say that it took 10 years for people to reassemble the pieces that were left, like a vase from antiquity or one of those fragmented biblical codices.
Daily booth doing a great thing
good book about the memory:
http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Programming-Concept-Frantisek-F...
I believe that Marty was saying it is too early to claim the bailout failed. Gm has not gone out of business, and while I would not place any money on gm thriving in the future, it is still within the realm of possibilities that they could. If the point of the bailout was to save gm from failing, you cannot declare the bailout as having failed unless gm fails. Likewise, you can't claim that gm won't pay back the money eventually as long as they remain in business. You can say the bailout is likely to fail, but that is hugely different from saying it has already failed.
Involve important peoples (in software design)
He does not define information. He relates to the general accepted definition of information by Shannon. There is a whole research field on this area, called information theory.

The base of this definition of information has nothing to do with time. It is rather a mathematical measurement for entropy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Some of the server-side JavaScript stuff is really slick. APE ( http://www.ape-project.org/ ) runs JavaScript on the server-side, for instance. You basically write a client and server in JavaScript and it uses Comet to push events to the client, rather than a JavaScript client needing to constantly request updates -- a great paradigm, that could lead to much more robust multi-user JavaScript applications.
The interface is frustrating because there are only hooks to the questions, not the answers.
Corresponding Lectures: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html
Shannon does not define information but the entropy of information.
That (sort of) substantiates the parent post's claim. If only 50% of your advertising money is effective, then spending more will still be more effective, no?
No idea. It's probably very expensive, though.

(The goal of our IT department is to spend the most money implementing the worst possible solutions. If it doesn't cost $5,000,000 per user per year, we're not interested. Example: I have to type 3 passwords to connect to the VPN!)
I seriously doubt tens of thousands of geeks buying AAPL stock instead of their products would have changed the valuation.
Matchure: pattern matching library for Clojure
The problem is: plenty of kids like burning ants with magnifying glasses, and pulling the wings off flies.
Climatologist sues, wants paper to erase all traces of libel
Helps you understand how he's more than just the ultimate networker in SV

since joining yc, i've met a lot of people and come to realize there's two types of 'networkers' and it'd be unfair to class Ron as a 'networker' without defining the distinction (as i see it):

- empty networkers: people who spend the majority of their time meeting other people, ensuring everyone knows their name, telling entertaining stories with a drink in their hand and promoting their personal brand at every opportunity. the only email you receive from them are ones asking you to do something for them or their company without offering anything specific in return. a lot of biz dev people fall into this description, especially old school ones at big companies.

- connectors: people who make a real effort to know who you are, what you're working on and how they can help you. these people follow up via email and make intro's for you, without you even asking. they're universally well liked because there's a large number of people they've helped in some way, who are continually telling other people about the story of how X helped them.

Ron is the definition of the second type. In just three months, I've lost count of the number of useful introductions he's made or things he's helped with. Granted he's an investor in YC so he has a reason for doing so but he goes beyond the standard level of being helpful into something more, it's that bit extra he doesn't have to do. I intend to model my approach to 'networking' entirely upon how Ron does it - by being genuinely benevolent and helpful to people I meet.
In general, most trades are a wash, not a huge up or down swing. It's the big events, like betting against the dotcom crash, betting against enron, etc, which make or break this size fund.

Those are the 9 or 10 events I'm talking about. These people are probably rarely betting on something more than 1:10 odds. But for those huge cases, they were probably getting 1:100 or 1:1000. Those are the ones it is so important to be on the right side of, and dampen quite a bit of suboptimal whatever in the meanwhile.

He quite specifically bet against the housing and dotcom boom as mentioned in the article, therefore shows to be betting most importantly on those 1:1000 events.
Perhaps he was a job-hopper.
I've been in love with JS ever since I started with it in '06. Learnt about closures, prototypes etc all through it. Loved the FP side of it so much that I went and read SICP as a result of that.

On a side note I recently wrote up a sliding puzzle in JS as a pre-loader for Cadmus. Might not be as complicated as the Tetris game but it was fun to write (and test).

http://blog.anomalyinnovations.com/2010/04/a-sliding-puzzle-...
No, it's actually really horrible. In a Ponzi scheme you:

1. Fraudulently promise returns.
2. Payout imaginary returns with other people's money.

>at a certain level a Ponzi scheme is any business that lives entirely off a positive and growing first derivative while heading faster and faster toward a certain death.

This is really silly because you don't even specify what quantity you are taking a derivative of.

Ponzi schemes are a certain type of fraud. There are many kinds of fraud. Amazingly, the author never asserts any sort of fraud.

I think you and the author of the blog post are thinking:

"Ponzi schemes are bad and I don't like facebook so they are kinda similar."

Anything substantive you'd like to add, or would you like to concede that absurd contrarian claims usually just confuse and waste everyones time?
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom" - Edward Osborne Wilson

That's something I keep in my mind while I'm coding my one-man-startup project. We have a large amount of information disponible but not enough time to consume it, or even we don't get relevant stuff to read. I've been researching NLP, Semantics and TextMining since university but
never faced a real word problem to work with.

My actual project register your interests based on your previous
bookmarked/visited websites and suggests summarized content from
mainstream information hubs like digg, reddit and HN.

Once I get my cloud/infrastructure done with hackspace, I will release a beta test for the first 2^8 pigraph's twitter follower.

http://pigraph.com/