skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Years ago I read about a study that went on and on with interesting things about the people of Beverly Hills California. What the people doing the study hadn't figured out was that virtually everyone in it had made up their info and wasn't in Beverly Hills at all. In picking a ZIP code other than their own to use the first thing that came to mind was 90210, the name of a tv show.
This is actually interesting enough that I'm trying DDG as my default search engine for a bit currently. I probably should've already (I intellectually like what they're doing, and check it out occasionally), but Google just works well enough for inertia to keep me there. Getting content-farm results is a common daily annoyance, though, so this is the sort of thing that could make for a noticeable improvement in my Search Happiness even in the short term.
There's two explanations for that difference:

1) Forrestor's 3.8% was collected in June 2010, whereas our data was collected from March through May. Clearly the iPad is gaining momentum, as time goes on more people are planning to buy one (at least for now).

2) More importantly, Forrestor said that "no time frame was specified in the survey question". So they asked people who don't own an iPad if they intend to buy one. That's fairly different from our question, which allowed the respondent to choose from:

1) plan to buy one
2) want to play with one first
3) will wait for later versions
4) waiting for the consensus opinion

Clearly, with the variety of options, some people who might have simply answered "yes" to the "intend to buy" Forrestor question would pick 2, 3 or 4 in our question.

Does that settle that? And by the way, these are people who wanted to take a personality quiz, not answer a poll. Their motivation had nothing to do with the iPad, that question was randomly inserted into the personality quiz.

While you seem to be "amused" by a blogger who in your mind completely makes stuff up, I'm amused by a commenter who after 5 minutes of review feels confident enough to slam a study that took multiple people dozens of hours to complete.

We're not publishing this in a science journal. That's not what we're going for. It's not complete BS either though. We do normalization, we have lots of data, and our psychological measures are based on the best contemporary research. The results are worthwhile. I'll say again: I challenge anyone to point out a major flaw in our data (not my interpretation of it).
Sure. OSS is great and I am a big fan. But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again?

Your argument in the present context is exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned RMS!

Also, f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for.

:-)
My iPhone 3G worked perfectly in Australia once unlocked. Vodafone month-to-month with the 100MB data plan was the most economical option at the time.
so the google one was what, flash?
You're assuming that dissatisfaction and regret mean the activity was bad. What if you overindulge in learning and regret knowing all kinds of details about Lisp? Some outside observers don't consider your time wasted, quite the contrary. But by your measurement, regretting knowing Lisp would mean that knowing Lisp is bad.

My point is that you can always pick opposing activities that people will feel are time wasted or well-spent. But why? Because you have some implicit notion of ultimate value that helps you weigh time spent on one or the other.

In the absence of such a theory of good and evil you might as well criticize pg for becoming addicted to hiking or addicted to insightful thinking. Cool for him, but he's wasting his life if he doesn't have all the achievements in Team Fortress 2.

There is no way to create this kind of theory out of the subject's reflection on their own activities. After all, the subject might be wrong!
EusLisp now open source
Keep being defensive and you will receive no more advice - accurate or not.
$130k/year with your numbers.

That'll cover the servers, easy, but what about salaries?
Do you really think that they could pull $8 CPM?

What's digg getting? A bit of googling shows that most people who get front-paged see ECPM of <$1...

Why do you think that reddit would be so much higher?

(I agree, they should be showing more ads)
Update: I am rewriting the entire website and getting a share in the company.
14.3 million pageviews per day comes to 163 per second, on average. Reddit's traffic, like most sites of its kind, probably peaks during lunch hour during the workday and probably peaks at 5x that number. So we're looking at 815 pageviews per second. Given 80 servers total, we're looking at 10 pageviews per second per server.

Let's compare this with Facebook. In October 2009, Facebook announced they had 30k servers[0]. In September 2009, there was a rough estimate that Facebook served 200 billion pageviews per month[1]. That implies 73k pageviews per second, or 2 pageviews per second per server. Clearly the pageviews are a rough estimate, but even if facebook served 1 trillion pageviews per month they still wouldn't be beating reddit for efficiency.

I have a feeling if you run the numbers for any other highly dynamic site at scale, you'll find that amortized over every server in use, you won't get a lot better than 10 pageviews per second.

[0] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/13/faceb...
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-estimates-for-faceboo...
Car DVD Player GPS navigation Map : IGO GPS MAP
The overwhelming majority of reddit's pageviews are users that are not logged in, which is very very cacheable.
Wow, ok. It was an attempt at humor. So now my question is is HN not the place for that? Or do HN folks generally get behind RoR? Or...do I just need to be more thoughtful and not thoughtless in my postings?

Help me be a better HN commentator, please.
Awesome! Thanks for the feedback.
I haven't studied their arch, but I could imagine scenarios where spot instances would reduce the bill some, but yeah. Bandwidth. Ouch.
You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step. And I suggest that the will comes from knowing what you seek in life, rather than knowing what you wish to avoid.

EDIT: I see what you mean now, you were focusing on "same is true for any other addiction". I was mostly talking about "digital drugs" like facebook and the like that pg is worried about, rather than about chemical drugs like heroin. I guess I don't really care that much about heroin and the like, and don't want to argue about it as it gets away from the main topic.
Just another day it dawned on me that an important part of the overwhelming success of television (specially cable television) is that it's another unpredictable-rewards skinner box. There are the good shows you know and expect (and their fixed schedule induces lots of tradeoffs, like "why get up now if X is in half an hour") and the possibility of finding something nice zapping is akin to a slot machine.

Video on demand makes it easier to watch a specific content, but harder to just zone out in front of the tv, which is the most addictive and destructive activity.
You've got it wrong, BADLY wrong: For "novel programs" I don't give a rat's ass.

"I can't figure out how that's apropos of anything"

It's about charging into Web 2.0, 'consumer Internet', 'information technology' entrepreneurship, and the future of computing in business, that is, exploiting cheap cores, bytes, bandwidth, and infrastructure software, and making money, $1 billion, 10 times that, maybe 100 times that, maybe from one project, much more in total, and where for this some selected work in math is the crucial key.

E.g., just sitting right in front of us is an opportunity to suck the air out of old media, and for that a key is some math.

"so I imagine there's something that I'm missing".

Yup.

I can't explain it better than I did.

In communicating any of this, there are two BIG problems:

First, there are nearly no examples in, say, 'information technology' entrepreneurship. Lacking examples, it's super tough for people to see it.

Second, the math I'm talking about is not often taught, even in the best US research universities. It's rock solid math, but it's just not very popular.

So people are missing both the examples and the math. So, the whole thing looks empty or worse.

Sorry 'bout that.

I'm telling you the truth, but I can't explain it better than I did.

If many people readily understood the work, then the business opportunity would no longer be there. A good business opportunity and difficulty understanding it are love birds.

Broadly this situation is not very surprising: Anyone talking advanced math in Web 2.0, etc. is doing 'field crossing', but that technique, say, using clipper ships to bring pepper from India to Boston, make enough in one trip to pay for the ship, has to its credit a major fraction of the best business successes.

So, bringing math to Web 2.0 is field crossing. I'm here to advise you, for the future of cheap cores, etc. in business, a major key is selected work in math; I tried to give the reasons at a high level, e.g., about 'information'. Maybe someday I will underline this point with an example. For now, that's the best I can explain.
"Apple will be happy to take PC reference designs from Intel (or AMD?) and repackage them in nice mobile and desktop enclosures—effectively outsourcing PC R&D to the chipmaker—while focusing its own engineering efforts on differentiating its post-PC products from the rest of the market... a market that will soon include Intel-made smartphone reference designs."

Since when has Apple outsourced R&D of anything recently? Pretty sure the iPad A4 chip is not a repackaged Intel chip. The research and design that went into the unibody macbook pros doesn't seem like they are raising the white flag just yet either.
I ran a web app with identical pageview numbers using Ruby on Rails and EC2. My server costs were 10x cheaper than what reddit is paying.

Scaling is caching and architecture, not writing your app in Java.
That was one of the more difficult pacman implementations I've played.
> But which major OS is f.lux not available for, again?

FreeBSD

> f.lux does work as advertised on the OSs that it is available for.
Yes and no. Because trademarks are market-specific, it is possible that someone else may have a trademark on "Groupon" in the context of say, dog food. So the trademark is not exclusive in that sense.

However, each trademark holder would have the exclusive right to use the mark in their particular market.