skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I didn’t really expect to find a whole lot of interesting things, and found what I expected."

Which is a great way to conduct research! Nice work.

This reminded me of my senior project in number theory, when I manipulated a large data set, wondering what I'd find. Eventually, I found quite a bit.

Also reminded me of this quote by Wernher von Braun:

"Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
I don't think it is . . . I believe understanding the idea behind the answer hinges on the definition of "know".

He pointed that out in the answer.
The interesting thing about karma.. I find that I can't/I get tired of posting insightful comments day after day..and take breaks and lurk..edw519 I don't know how you do it. I probably won't make the "leaders" (but I don't think its important)
Productivity rises when companies are facing closure
"Select All" should help. (I feel your pain though)
Highly suggest you find someone that likes marketing:

kluster.com
cambrianhouse.com

You should be prepared to give equity in return for services.

Cheers
Focus is the reason that search advertising is so wildly successful. If you’re looking to sell Budweiser, what better way is there to reach customers than to show your ads to the guy who goes to Google and types in “beer”? You know every single one of them wants to know something about beer.

http://reddit.com/info/verc/comments/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=beer+&btnG=Goog...

Great examples! Could be worse:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/1207345/
Interview with Neil Young on Music Piracy, MP3 Hell and Finding Freaks on the Web
AJAX may be on the way out, if only that people are more interested in AJSONC (asynchronous javascript object notation with callbacks). Most people have realized that any code that writes XML from internal data structures can easily write JSON, which is more useful if you're using Javascript and not exchanging hierarchical data structures.
For starters,
http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech...

I am sort of lazy right now finding replies to [citation needed], but read threadwatch.oorg, I am sure can find a few.
More exciting than P=NP :
Does Turing Complete = Human Complete?
It isn't as though the medical community hasn't known this. I had a serious back injury over 10 years ago while still in high school. Semi-reclining to about 120 degrees is what my physical therapist suggested way back then.

Sitting upright puts a lot of pressure on your discs, but most people's back problems come from lack of strength in the abdomen, lower back, and "core" muscles connecting everything together. You can sit in whatever position you want so long as you keep in shape.
I'm not trying to defend his essay, merely stating that it argues something different from what's in the title.

That said, I'd caution against using your imagination to assess ad spending. Ask the nearest small businessperson what they spend on yellow-pages listing.
Wow. I had no idea 'the Phillips Curve' (positing an inverse relation between unemployment and inflation) was named after such an interesting tinkerer/economist, who built a hydraulic computer in the 1940s.
My suggestion would be to change the title to: How not to write an Essay.

It's one of the lamest articles to make the hacker news front page in ages.
we at tipjoy are designing a new payment system. If you have any ideas or design requirements for an API, especially for micropayments, let us know: http://tipjoy.com/feedback

I've used both PayPal & Amazon's FPS. I would accept both if only because enough people feel strongly about one.
Time to play devil's advocate: can you blame them? On paper, Crysis was a near flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

Crysis has been on Pirates Bay since last November and still has over 600 seeders. For most of Dec and Jan it was the top game! (http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3883491/Crysis-Razor1911) The stats were impressive enough to drive Crytek towards console development.

PC gaming is a tricky business. The counter-argument going around today is that MMO's are a billion+ business. Granted, but they phone home every time you sign on.
Is it your idea of what "marketing" is that turns you off? If so, I suggest you take a look at Bob Walsh's eBook "MicroISV Sites That Sell" at 47hats.com. It's a book aimed at developers who need to market their work, but don't consider themselves marketers.
If the buyer tells you he has not received the item or that it is not as agreed, you perform some kind of resolution.

This is the hard part, especially if either party is dishonest.
All bad sales people overpromise. A real solution would not be shopping a list of 'could have' 'should have' 'currently have' 'will not have' to the partner company as 'already implemented and will have' so that the requirements are realistic on both sides.
a much shorter article gets the entire point across

I so disagree. First of all, the article has more than one point; I'm surprised that's not obvious. For another thing, its supporting evidence and reasoning are considerable, relevant, and fascinating. More than that, I personally found it to be rich in subtleties, of the kind that would draw me back to reread and reflect. Does a vitamin C pill get across the entire point of an orange?

I know 35 pages of blah blah blah when I see it. This piece deserves closer attention. Look again.
True, attracting enough buyers and sellers will be a challenge, even if a scam-free model is invented.

This actually reminds me of the story of the Arizona Stock Exchange, which was technically a better model for selling stocks, but couldn't convince enough traders from NYSE and Nasdaq to give it a try (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/09/b3516129.htm).
outsource boredom!
I think this is probably why YC looks for co-founders.

Personally I handle boredom by doing something else. This works incredibly well for programming and incredibly badly for interacting with the government. To be more specific, if something is boring, I won't do it, so if you're the government, and I haven't been paying my parking tickets, your only option is to make paying my parking tickets more interesting. In practice this has meant stealing my car.

It's actually very unwise to create incentives for the government to make your life more interesting. The only leverage they have there is various forms of bullying.

I now motivate myself with fear as well as curiousity, but unfortunately, curiousity remains much more effective.
Linear fits? Why? Why?

Karma is a function of time since joining, participation, and quality of contributions. And it starts at 1. 'Participation' can be determined by looking at contributions per length of time. Quality is average score of each submission -- separating it from participation is a useful way to extend this to a more complicated model taking into account the fact that people stop using HN. So the line of best fit should be something closer to 1 + t * q * p, or the sum of 1 + (t0 * q * p0) + .... (tn * q * pn) to describe folks who are off-and-on contributors.
Sometimes you can work out trades. Do you know anyone that works in marketing that could use some web work done? (I've done this before with programming in exchange for graphic design.)
| (but I don't think its important)

I think that's the crux of it. Somebody could monitor all the various news sites and spend an hour a day here posting comments and stories and so forth, but I suspect most folks would rather spend that time doing something else.

That said, edw519 is a pretty cool guy.
The same was suggested for IM clients but that never worked out so well. People don't click on ads while they are communicating.
I find it helps to remember that if I don't do the boring stuff my company is going to fail, I'll be working for someone else again and the only reason for failure will be that I was too bored to do the work that was essential for success (which is a really lame excuse).

If you can't focus today, get outside for a bit and stretch your legs. Watch the pretty people in the park. Get a coffee, sit on a sunny patio and revel in the fact that you're an entrepreneur driving your own destiny and can take a goddamn afternoon off if you need it.

Then, when you're recharged, return to your office and get back to it, because that work isn't going to finish itself.
But I think reality is slowly setting in. Because what we’re finding is that when people want something specific, they go to Google. When they want to kill time or just communicate with friends, they go to Facebook. And that isn’t changing.

Let's say we split the market into two parts: Consumer A already knows he wants a particular product -- advertising is just a way to get him to buy it from you. Consumer B doesn't know what he wants -- he doesn't want anything just now. Advertising is a way to change this.

Isn't a list of Consumer B's interests, hobbies, friends, their interests, their hobbies, etc., a fantastic resource for targeting him? And isn't he an incredibly valuable customer? Apple didn't succeed by telling existing Mac users to buy more Macs (though they do!); it succeeded by getting people to switch. If Apple could target people whose status is "SP3 crippled my machine," or "Zune broken" or whatever, I'm sure they'll pay more for those users than they will pay for "Buy new Macbook pro" to link to Apple ads for Macbook pros as well as the Apple website selling Macbook pros.
I agree, I think the ad model is a red herring.

What might make more sense is aggregating the topics people are discussing for trend-spotting analysis.

There's a mini industry dedicated to "cool" hunting, so Twitter data might be valuable to market researchers, somehow.
I kind of like this one better: http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=1100000&fromSeries...
aka the best way to kill Twitter
For people backpacking in Europe, Facebook is the new email
Nice work. I love manipulating large data sets :)

Which program did you use to produce the plots?
Can someone explain this? It seems the connection between quantum mechanics and free will are being dismissed out of hand. However, this seems like a deep question that probably has no simple answer. Is this just a 'religious' issue? Or is there a simple explanation why there is no connection here..
>It seems like "creating demand" is a much bigger market than "meeting demand"

I think that it's just easier to spend money on creating demand - Maroon's whole point about Google being the theoretical limit for targeting is that it's a hard task. Most people spend much more free time consuming media than discovering things, and it's the search part of discovery that is applicable for targeting.

Hmm, I wonder if you TiVo or the cable companies could mine your channel-surfing behavior to improve ad targeting (but that would require customized TV feeds instead of broadcast, yada, yada, yada). That would be interesting to identify other "discovery" activities that people do.
I haven't found a solution to boredom. That said, as someone who's been programming at home for years, knowing that I was going to go out at lunch would destroy much of the benefit of working at home. In order to start work in earnest, it's important for me to feel that I won't have any interruptions indefinitely.

Today, for example, I'm expecting to go to dinner, and here it is before 2pm, and I'm reading news.yc instead of working, because it's really hard to start working when "I know I'll just have to stop", in spite of also knowing that I could get a lot done before then.

Nevermind, I guess this is just a personal failing. :)
streety, my point was to point out the irony of the situation to his roommate, i am sure they will work it out.

This film class seems like a great class, both of them are learning something. I also think that the roommates father is trying to teach him something, and its up to our young entrepreneurial hacker friend here to offer some learning back.

My parents have gotten involved in a similar way to our YC friend's roommate, and the only thing it did was make things more complicated. Yes I learned about contracts at an earlier age, but what my folks should have been teaching me was that I WILL HAVE THOUSANDS of great ideas, its not the idea that is important, its the ability to follow through on it. I fear that this 17-page contract has already jeopardized that.

I don't think any of the parties involved here should be trying to put all of their eggs in one basket. Their goal should be about fostering the relationship, if this project turns out better than a failure, then the next one has an even better chance of succeeding. I think the goal here is to try to learn as much as you can about building business relationships, and not about the project. I still do business today on handshakes, and sometimes, i move to a contract, but it all depends on the intended length of the relationship.
Fundamentally important -- this belongs in the instruction manual to the human brian.

I do wish this author's prose style was less excellent at concealing this fact.
Brand advertising on the net is all about clickthroughs too, just like any other ad. That's why you never see a banner with no link. The brand advertising is Budweiser's website, not their tiny banner. Since clickthroughs are whats relevant, the same laws apply.
He also says that creating demand is less profitable, so if the best you can do with your ad inventory is to create demand, you'd better have a much lower cost structure to accommodate that. I can't see into their wallet, but I'd imagine Facebook is burning through money pretty quickly.
They are free to make any choices they want, and in return I'm free to stop buying from them.

It's pretty safe to assume that any good game will be cracked whatever they do. They might manage to make it so that only one twisted genius can figure it out - but one is all it takes. Once the crack is on bit torrent every one else only needs moderate intelligence to use it.

At that point the free version is superior to the version you can buy, not just because of the price but because you don't have to deal with the DRM system. Not a good way to encourage people to pay up. I'm generally against piracy but I have sympathy with people who just want their game to work without the CD or when they are away from the internet for a while.

Mind you I was never likely to buy their game in the first place - the last game I played was NWN and I only bought that because I wanted to support Linux game developers.
I agree, v-hacks is a very good blog source.
I wonder how many of the downloaders were simply kicking the tires to see how well it would run on their paltry 2007 vintage hardware.

Seriously though, to play god's advocate: check out this article from the CEO of Stardock games: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-develo... (Ignore the Pirates)

Back to devil's advocate: Stardock has a good reputation among gamers for being a scrappy independent publisher, so they get some respect from would-be pirates. I don't know that a faceless megacorp like EA could play the same hand.
When Should You Jump? JSR 308. That's When.
Customers have custom needs. You have to give the customers what they need and if you don't have it then you have to build it. That means promising things and hiring people to create those things you promised. You can't tell the customer "take what we have or nothing" and you can't tell the customer "come back in a year". Sure there is some stress in getting the programming done and tested and yes there are bumps along the way, but so far the "take it or leave it" approach has not been working out and it seems like someone at least is trying something new... its the "pay us and we will build it" approach.
a thought:

why are you ok coding alone, but with marketing you feel like you need someone around?

i wonder if it has anything to do with confidence? when i am doing something i know. being alone is fun, because i feel productive. when i am doing something where, i might have at least a moderate amount of learning to do, i like to bounce the ideas off of someone. i also find that doing things like:

writing business plans

graphic design

marketing

etc.. other socially reflective processes

I find its really hard to do it alone, I usually need people to bounce the idea off of. I also, find that customers are great at playing this role for marketing. They know what they want, and why they would like your service. They have given me plenty of ideas in this realm.
Funny, I just wrote an article similar to this yesterday - http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-value-is-in-th...

"So if social networks are such a great experience, why aren’t people paying for them? Well, the networks let people sign up for free, because they want to have everyone on their network. But then they’ve immediately set the market value of the network at $0! Also, social networks are only a good experience because interacting with people is a good experience! If social networks vanished, people would still have friends, but if your friends vanished, you’d have no use for the social network. Whereas if computers and TV went away, people would still play games (board games? sports?), act, sing and dance."
Knowing someone's intent is a sufficient, but not necessary condition for effective advertising. I may have no intention to attend a concert this weekend, but if I saw an ad for a nearby concert by an artist I like I would be likely to click on it. For this kind of advertising, Facebook can be much more effective than Google.
Eh, the click is there so they can measure it and get more transparency than a billboard. But even if you don't click on it, it's about as effective as a billboard - not useful for a specific sale but one more incremental bit of brand awareness.
Personally, I had to uninstall Alcohol 120% before SP3 would even install. (It somehow locks up atapi.sys) It was a bit of a pain to find the source of the problem in the knowledge base, and I imagine the problem would have been a total deal-breaker for anyone who isn't a geek.
"work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project."

I've found this helps me a lot. When I was first starting out, I found boredom to be a real problem, because there were only so many things that I could do productively on my project. If I didn't have the storage backend done, I had to work on that, because otherwise there was nothing that'd have a concrete effect. Same with the basic UI skeleton - it needed to be done before anything else in the UI was useful, so if I didn't want to work on it, tough.

Now there are many more potential "attachment points" to the project, and it's easier to find something interesting to do. If I don't want to work on this UI widget, I can find another UI widget that needs doing. If I don't want to do UI at all, I can work on the backend or runtime libs. If I get really desperate, there's always things that need to be refactored or tested further or documented.
I mentioned some in a comment yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185105
John Gruber: BlackBerry vs. iPhone
fifth thirds for the bank account, braintree for credit card processing, and homegrown-turned-SaaS billing software corduroy: http://corduroysite.com/
I can vouch for Ivan's responsiveness re. API requests. Thanks to tipjoy's Platform API users of my site can now add tipjoy buttons by checking one box.
Brand tags
"can offer no deep, astonishingly insightful commentary"

So what?

Can you ask "deep, astonishingly insightful questions"?

I thought so.

You'll be fine.
It's probably more like my personal failing :)

I work great for a few hours at a time, but then I need an extended break. My best hours are in the morning. So I usually work from around 8am to 11:30-noon, and then go out to lunch. Granted, sometimes I don't do that and work through lunch at home and go out to dinner instead. But often, I need a break about then.

I usually read the papers (WSJ and local) during lunch, and then when I come home I'm up for a few more hours of work before dinner.
But calling this price fixing is tantamount to saying that Apple has the right to set the royalty rate for the entire digital music industry.

I find it amusing to be talking about whether they have the right to specify their price structure. As far as I can tell, it's still some healthy market forces at play, I don't think the line to monopolistic behaviour has been crossed just yet.

What I don't quite understand about this whole debate is the variable pricing part. If I go into a shop selling CDs these days, almost all the albums are going for almost exactly €18 (~$28) except for the occasional special offer on albums that are a few months old. (as opposed to new releases or the back-catalogue) There's hardly any differentiation in price going on there. Are retailers playing the Apple game as well? Or is the whining about price fixing really the record industry complaining that it can't charge crazy money for all music? (if you ask me, €18 is more than enough - and we in Europe don't even get to buy cheap-ish MP3s from amazon)
We use jira, svn, maven _and_ j-unit. Jira I think is pretty good. But that's only in comparison with what I was using before, which was clear..quest? Clearcase? One of those. Man, what a terrible program.

In comparison, despite jira having a UI that was clearly created by developers, it seems quite dandy for tracking (and logically linking) bugs.
For anyone who doesn't feel like clicking on nostra's link, CLICK ON IT and read his comment - it's excellent!
This is a great article and timely because my friend just asked me yesterday if I'd like to go to Thailand with her this Christmas! But I'm going to Nigeria so I guess this article is spot on.
Physics wonder boy to test Einstein theories
Firefox Smart Keywords
It's worse only in the narrow context in which it's allowed to be dominant. This isn't a zero sum game. Taking the time differential between when a contribution was posted and when it first met a "value" threshold (say, 5 upvotes) and rewarding one of the people who voted in the affirmative by giving them, say, .25 karma points for it, does not reward the lowest common denominator. My hypothesis is that it might have exactly the opposite effect by encouraging those who might otherwise be excessively frugal with their votes to use their voting opportunities in a meaningful way.

In other words, if you want to look at this in absolutes and think that when I say that I think it's a good idea to take a given variable into account that I am somehow implying that the variable is free of all bias and in every other way perfect, you are making a mistake. You will never have high confidence for all of your variables when they describe human interaction, but that low confidence doesn't speak to the utility of the variable, it speaks to its importance in the overall calculation.
I guess Wasabi is a pretty good idea after all.

May I ask if this company you used to work for has now embraced open source?

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
The single most important thing is to get the inviting party's name in the subject line. A personal note from the inviting party is golden, rather than a form mail. If you have to do a form mail, keep it brutally short.
I wish I were smart enough to understand theoretical physics but this article reminded me of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.

It seems that string theory is coming along just nicely - it's mind boggling to think that the world consists of 11 dimensions.
I disagree. For a long time I used to get confused by LinkedIn and Plaxo -- and Plaxo sort of spams people, so the category of professional networking sites (excuse me i'm getting this category wrong) isn't particularly reliable to me.

Personally, that LinkedIn is a professional site doesn't make me take it more seriously.