skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pro: I understand the reasoning behind affirmative action better after reading this quote:
"People mistakenly assume that affirmative action is about granting minorities undeserved privileges. In it’s purist form, affirmative action is about allowing minorities natural talents to flourish by removing artificial, unfair barriers and decoupling the true skills required to succeed in a profession from the cultural baggage that builds naturally within an insular community."

Con: The author seems to try to be fair, but quickly falls into the trap of characterizing men in the field as "socially-challenged-uber-nerd[s]". She says that "a lot of men would rather not live like code-cowboys", but goes on to recite a litany of bad traits that are "masculine qualities" and contrasts them with the traits of a "good developer". That's a good way to alienate male readers who would otherwise be sympathetic. Perhaps men do advocate for themselves more actively in the workplace, and that should be corrected for by affirmative action; saying that men "pester the boss until she finally relents to send them to a conference" doesn't accomplish anything.

Con: spelling.
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> Ranking for the extreme head is pretty much SEO free

Can you explain what you mean by this?
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It doesn't translate to coding skills, but the underlying task is similar:

You must act in a system with lots of arbitrary, human-made rules and must figure out the rules and how to use them to your advantage.

The difference to other games - board or sports - is that figuring out the rules is usually part of the game. They are never - fully - explained to you.
Review our idea and MVP: Sell your Flickr photos
Quick Summary:

Saas app allowing Flickr users to create a portfolio site automatically and Charge for them via Paypal.

MVP Site:

www.flickrcommerce.com

More details:

We(agiliq.com/whoweare) built it over a period of 24 hours, for the Yahoo Hack Day, Bangalore event.
All code for this is open sourced at http://github.com/agiliq/yahoo-hack-day-2010 . I cant think of licences so we can
keep this opensource, but still keep a reasonable competitive advantage, so I am open to suggestion there as well.

I am looking for feedback mostly on the idea, as we have a lot to work for the site. (But it should be usable anyway).

API's used.

Flickr API with flickrpy
Paypal Website standards payments (until we can get our Paypal app approved)
Paypal adaptive payments.

Also this looks a very obvious idea to me, so I cant think of why this has not been done before. :)

(Also, if you have not looked at Paypal Adaptive Payments API, you should look at it. Its much saner than their older API, and allows some neat things like chained payments, which means you accept payments from a single user to a single user, and transparently split it, which means we can make a simple cost structure with percentage of Photos sold, without having an upfront charge.)

Edit: Also asked on onstartups: at http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/13098/review-this-idea-and-mvp-sell-your-flickr-photos
I think many of the jobs will return, but fewer than before. With each economic cycle the amount of work which can be automated increases. This is a long term trend which began a couple of centuries ago, and eventually I expect it to culminate in campaigns to divorce income from jobs, with the introduction of a "Citizens Income" based upon taxing mostly automated companies (each citizen assigned some percentage of GDP per capita). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend
I don't think this example, however sad, is valid:
- addiction should harm the addicted, not somebody else
- from the article: "The girl, who was born prematurely and weighed 5 pounds (2.25 kilograms), was often fed rotten formula and was beaten when she cried out of hunger, the affidavit said." so what killed this child is not "Internet addiction" but being born to abusive parents...
Have these clowns never heard of redundancy? Did these clowns not think to fix/replace a system that had, quote, "been seizing up for weeks"? or stop anything risky until it was sorted?
Is .org the new .com?
Anyone noticed an increase in the number of websites that use .org?
> men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career.

If it's plausible enough that millions of young women can have their career and life choices distorted away from STEM by a little sexism (a distortion in the dozens or scores of percents), then why isn't it even more plausible that millions of young men can suffer from well-known traits linked with autism or Asperger's (which are known to be vastly more common in males) and make choices distorted towards STEM?
This might be a risky comment for me, but I'll bite the bullet.

Why I'd like to see more female developers?

* I wanted to have more women (girls) around at university. Yes, one reason is sexual attraction (I hope it's not a problem, that I mention this, but I am a human being after all), but I also found that girls are an essential part of how human groups are formed. You might become really good friends with another guy at uni, just because you like hanging around the same girl at the beginning; on the other hand, you might not chat up and start hanging out with that other guy initially.

* It would be far healthier for (young) people to socialize in a mixed environment.

* A lot of women that I know are more social and caring than me in day to day communication. I'd also love to have and learn more of that.

* Women tend to think differently. They have a different approach to problems, which is what teams are all about; having people with many different approaches, so that when a there is a problem, someone can think of the easiest possible solution.

What I'm not sure I like about this post, is that it seems defensive. Tries to prove that "there are female developers who are just as good as men" too hard, while it forgets to focus on what women are better at, and also what the tech community would win if we all _actively_ knew that the community needs more women.

I'd love to work in a mixed community of men and women.
I think you are completely wrong about that. Even at a very low conversion rate subscriptions pull in an awful lot of money. Typically my subscription income outweighs my ad income by about 5 to 1 in a given month. And my site is far smaller than reddit.

The key to this is user retention, and if reddit users are loyal to reddit (which they seem to be, especially those willing to pull their credit cards) I wouldn't be surprised to see retentions on the order of 6 months or more.

What do you base the 2% on ?
You'd kill a random person in the street for a world without alcohol, and you think PG statement is "extremely, unbelievably selfish". Why the idea of sacrifying yourself instead didn't come first ?
A few months ago we launched a tool http://www.tomsplanner.com to create Gantt charts. One of our main objectives was that is had to be easy to use and user friendly. It is easier than MS Project and a lot more efficient than Excel.
We found some potential duplicates.
I feel compelled to point out that high-speed passenger rail isn't likely to be anywhere near as successful in the US as in Europe even if heavily subsidized.

One problem is population density. The US is geographically twice the size of the EU, but has three fifths the population. Germany is the size of Montana, but has 90 million people. Typical travel distances are short, and the number of travelers on any given day is high. Fixed costs would be proportionally higher for a US service as a result.

Local transport upon arrival is a big issue. Most European cities have public transportation systems that are effective enough for large portions of the population to not own cars. This is only true in a very small number of US cities (probably fewer than 5). For many people, any cost savings from taking a train instead of driving would be offset by the cost and inconvenience of securing transportation at the destination.

A final issue is that very long distance train travel still takes a long time compared to air travel. Using a generous estimate of a 100mph average (remember, the trains have to make stops), a high-speed train would take 20 hours to get from LA to Chicago. I think few people would opt for that over a 3 hour flight even given a significant difference in price.
I believe pg's contention of why more things become addictive is too simplistic. Sure, we make more of what we want, but not everything we want is addictive, and not everything we want has the capacity for becoming addictive.

While reading the article, I couldn't help but think back to a David Foster Wallace essay (I think it was E Unibus Pluram, on the nature of television) that proposed the following definition of addictiveness:

Something is addictive in the worst way if it proposes itself as a solution to the problems that the addiction itself creates.

For example: - I enjoy practicing Judo, but Judo isn't addictive. It isn't because it isn't a solution to the problems associated with it (i.e.: I don't play more Judo to elevate injuries). Whereas if I drink and feel guilty for drinking, I can drink more to elevate the guilt, which just leads me to feeling more guilty, and so then I drink some more, etc et all.

(Or if I feel guilty because I'm on the Internet so much, I can go find a game or surf Facebook or do fake work to elevate the guilt - so I can 'worry about it later', and this leads me down a vicious cycle of procrastination.)

The point I'm making here is that not everything we want will turn out addictive - that is, not everything can propose itself as a solution to the problems it creates. Those traits are limited to only a few kinds of things.

And so it would perhaps be better to say that addiction is accelerating because accelerating technology allows us to create more things, and some of these things are bound to have those addictive traits.
Apple’s Official Response To DMCA Jailbreak Exemption: It Voids Your Warranty
"Sky burial" in Tibet (contains graphic images)
Quite simple, I rewrote a medium sized app in about a day, and actually fixed a few things too.

I found it really easy to upgrade from either rails 2.3.x or merb.
"To which I shall counter, but you should have. This is an attitude of entitlement."

Clay Shirky has written about this at length [1]; the basic point being that women are socialized their whole lives to not be entitled or aggressive but to stay quiet and in the background, while men are constantly socialized to take what they want, step forward, go for it, "be a man" etc. Obviously there is much variation, and yes, geeks tend toward the not-so-aggro end of the table, but I think it's still an important point.

I'd also suggest that, sure, there are lots of men not speaking at conferences, but I suspect proportionally there are even more women for whom that is true.

[1] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/

(edit: added link)
If you look at the internet as a whole, the number of $ revenue from 'subscriptions' vs number of $ from advertising, then the % is probably far lower. <1%. Also my personal experience has been that it's far far easier to make money from advertising. Especially for something like Reddit where there is little incentive for people to pay.

For Reddit, yes you'll get a number of die-hard fans who want to subscribe. But I don't believe that there is a big enough value proposition for the userbase to do that en-masse. They may as well just set up their own reddit since the code is open source (And wouldn't be that hard to recreate if it wasn't).

It might be different if:

A). Reddit wasn't spending crazy money on servers
B). Reddit wasn't owned by a multinational corporation
C). Reddit hadn't pandered to, and cultivated a staunchly
anti advertising userbase.

Right now though, it's looking like they're going to try a subscription based news service. Which fails time and time again. People don't want to pay for online news.

Also from their latest blog post, it looks like they're just spending the 'reddit gold' money on more hardware! Instead of fixing the underlying issues.
i believe it's called domain exhaustion.
Who cares?

Whether meaning to or not, these posts always degenerate to a laundry list of why men are slobs | jerks | adolescents who are living in Mom's basement | a disgusting unwashed bachelor pad | a van down by the river.

Guess what - the reason that there are so few women in CS / programming, is because most women have decided to do something else with their lives (for whatever reason).

That kind of thing tends to happen in a free society.
> Isn't every single subreddit cachable?

For logged in users, you're still going to need the voting status for the current user on every single submission as well as that submission's hidden status for the current user to decide whether or not a submission should be displayed in the listing.

I believe they almost never hit the DB directly, so these are probably recached immediately (or submitted to both the cache and the DB at the same time), but that still means quite a lot of traffic.
Exactly. Not to mention if you know you're going to be working on it, there's always the chance new bugs can emerge as a result.

If I install the final version I'd expect that means it's the exact same version as the most recent release candidate and no critical bugs were found during that period. Not the most recent release candidate, plus a bunch of tweaks that were made while everyone was testing. And if you're already assuming there will be another release candidate before a final, then this isn't a release candidate.
Where are you looking? I am drawing from positions on Jobsite.co.uk. The lowest salary I can find in the posts of the past seven days is 22k:
http://www.jobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/advsearch?rownum=476&am...;
Even the lowest one has a range up to 50k, and the next one up has a floor of 44k. These results are ranked in order of descending salary. NB: The OP did not say what kind of development post he is seeking.
Although, I agree with your point. This bit offended me a bit;

>>>content mills make this happen for women, the elderly, and the technically disinclined.<<<

----

On the other hand, have you ever thought about making an interface that does this at a glance instead of an algorithm? Why should a person go to pages at all? Even better why can't people see how pages related to their queries are interconnected?

For e.g. you enter a few search terms. Google calls a few results up. Now, maybe you can do meta-parsing? It is simply too computationally expensive to parse the entire internet using NLP, but if you can do it at two levels then you should be able to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

After that you show the results in a tree like structure with screen grabs of the page in question and an automatically generated summary. Now, the user can select any one of these pages and you open them up again according her/his query. You keep on generating this tree until you hit a semantic dead end i.e. the pages that are about to be opened have no relation with the original query.

Something like this should be impervious to content farms for a simple reason. The user has the ability to skim over the content presented and can visit what s/he likes. So, the content farms can't bait her/him. Moreover, since several sources are displayed visually side by side and their interconnections and sub references are shown the user should be better able to judge what to visit and what not to visit.

Moreover, you can make it smart and tailor it for users so that links they seldom visit get omitted from subsequent trees.

I've wanted to make something like this for a long time, but I don't have the knowledge to do so. I would love to learn though. I think that the next frontier of search isn't optimizing the algorithms, but to change the way results are presented through more intuitive UIs.

[I am assuming that content farms simply set up pages without verifying the validity of the content]
Sky burial or ritual dissection was once a common funerary practice in Tibet wherein a human corpse is cut in specific locations and placed on a mountaintop, exposing it to the elements or the mahabhuta and animals especially to birds of prey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
Reminds me of a quote from James Hutton, the "father" of geology in relation to deep time:

"we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end"
You can't have salary nor be hired even by your own company

Why to look for being directly paid by US company? Why not to establish local company and outstaff yourself to it? It's even possible to save on taxes in some cases. Getting B1 visa is not so complex and it allows to stay in US long enough to hold all crucial meetings and then return in 3-6 months.

Yes, this approach has a lot of inconveniences. But it's much more doable than knocking on the closed door.
Can't find the relevant blog post, but I believe this was known in the SEO community as the "Vince Update."
Better salaries?
They could get more than $8 because there would only be a single ad on the page. Roadblock rates (ie. when a single advertiser buys out every ad slot on the site) are $65+ CPM on sites like Gawker and Techcrunch. If you assume a 50% fill rate on reddit, it would be very realistic for the site to achieve a $20+ECPM.

The users now have an option to not see ads (ie. buy a gold subscription), so they can't really complain about having a single ad slot on the page for non-gold users.

To go further, they could not show the ad slot at all if there isn't a campaign running on the site (ie. don't show 'backfill') which would further increase the value of the slot.

$100k+ a month from that ad slot would be very very easy to achieve, and with minimal sales work (they could outsource it to Doubleclick or another network). Sites like Techcrunch and Gawker make millions from ad revenue with a fraction of the traffic - reddit could hit 6 figures a month with a single unit that isn't even displayed all the time.

It would be a perfect balance of retaining the style of the site along with bringing in revenue

TBH, when CN bought reddit, this is what I thought they would do
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I am assuming that the business Max Klein is in, is web-based? In such a case it may not matter very much where in the world he is physically located.
You might want to get a new name / domain. You may have problems using another company's name as part of your own.
I agree that their hardware strategies are bordering on the insane, I can host much (and really, like 10 times or so) cheaper by simply getting dedicated servers with fat pipes than I could ever do using EC2, that part makes no sense at all to me. Scaling issues aside, if they ran an efficient shop serverwise I think they could easily operate the whole thing from their subscription potential. Typically you can count on between 0.5 and 2% of your users signing up for a 'gold' service, provided you give them some extra goodies on top of the free product.

The 'news' angle is a silly one, but they could definitely think up features that people would pay for that are not available right now in the free product.

The real issue with reddit making money from advertising (aside from the ad blocking) is that the CPMs that are quoted here (between 2 and 9$) are not realistic for their number of pageviews. By the time all the unsold inventory is taken out you probably end with $0.05 ECPM or maybe 10 cts per click (and that would be pretty good).

I'm really interested in how much they were paying before for their bandwidth and hosting if going to EC2 actually lowered their costs, they must have had the worst deal on the net for that to be true.

Right now, $30K / month buys you 20 (very) fat servers and 20 Gbps flat rate, managed hosting.

I'd really like to see someone make the case they can get that kind of performance out of EC2 for a similar cost.
One word: ARM.
How great artists have fought creative block
I understand the budgeting logic but you're telling me you can't stagger the 3-year buys so that they work within your budget? It's a 15% savings long-term, seems definitely worth some number futzing.
I was sitting at work and think I did the ultimate thing in procrastination
Why not just admit we don't know?
Last time my wife renewed her green card it took them 16 months to process it - and this is for an employed, property-owning, doctorate-holding, non-crime-committing, citizen-parenting immigrant who's lived in the States for 15 years. I.e. a textbook rubber stamp. We had to get a special note to return from our vacation because we'd only left a year for processing....

I've always taken the libertarian stance that open borders are the most sensible way to run a country. More so since I've seen the ridiculous way the immigration system is run.
1) Conde Nast owns them. To say they don't have some involvement in all of their decisions (even if not directly) is a bit naive.

2) You're right, I mis-spoke and should have said "they may be" instead of "they're". That being said, I would hope any frequent internet dweller wouldn't argue semantics and would give me the benefit of the doubt with respect to tone and inflection.
I wouldn't put much weight on that study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm
http://www.slate.com/id/33569
There are plenty of other extensions to choose from.
any tool to get this trend??
There is no point proposing them to use dedicated servers as already many did. They are 100% sure dedicated servers cost more, so let them keep their ec2's and let them fail!

I wonder why google, yahoo and facebook don't run their site on ec2... if it's cheaper.
Wouldn't the plural of tedium be tedia?
I've had bad luck trying to draw large graphs client-side, though I'm admittedly not an expert on optimizing such things. But once you're trying to push 10,000-node graphs to the client, browsers tend to explode. Much easier to rasterize them first and push image tiles.
I like the design and the site seems responsive - who are you using for hosting?
I think failure is looking more and more likely the more I read of their blog and details of how they run things.

It's a very interesting case to analyze though - perhaps acquired too soon, never had enough pressure on monetization until it was too late... Questions over how well the site was architected. Sounds like they're using a lot of 'new' unproven 'hip' things. Casandra? :/

Seems like the founders and YC have been extremely quiet about the problems... It'd be interesting to hear their take on things.

Also can't imagine how Conde Naste could be happy with things.
Seriously, this is not for the faint-hearted.
If you don't fill them in, they calculate your points anyway.
Seems like a good way to recycle the dead.
ZumoCast Is Like Cloud Storage Without The Cloud, Or The Cost