skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's be careful here. Patrick, you and I both know how the conversion models in this area work, and while the info-marketing world is filled with scammy sleazebags, there are also some very credible ones.

For example, I sell information products as well as a New York Times best-selling book. My students do very well, whether it's learning how to automate their finances or earn more via freelancing. If they don't, they request a refund and I eat any costs of my online products.

Virtually every info-marketer offers generous guarantees and has to live up to their product's hype...or they go out of business. This is an extremely competitive area.

Vaksel, let me also offer some feedback on your numbers. You're analyzing them without knowing how the field works, and frankly every Web2.0 company could learn a LOT from studying the direct-response field. Want to know how to increase your AOV by 200% or 300%? How about finding undiscovered 6-figure revenue sources in your business (like I did 2 months ago)? Why not look to the people who have been doing this for decades?

You assume that most of the money is made from the sale of the ebook itself. That's not correct. Most of the revenue is actually made from the "back end," or other products that are either cross-sold, upsold, or repeatedly sold. Every direct marketer knows that you profit more from having a dedicated group of customers who buys from you time after time...which is why the very best ones take INSANE care of their customers. I'll speak for myself, but I continue to send lots of free material to both my free users and my customers. I email them free stuff. I call them. I write them hand-written cards (seriously).

As a result, on the rare occasion when I sell something, I can sell it for premium prices (often 100x more than my competitors charge for their products) and people happily pay it because they trust me and they know it's the best.

Here's another example. I know an info marketer who pays a 200% commission for any affiliate who sells his book. So if you sell his $27 ebook, you get $54. How does he afford that? Because he's systematically built a funnel that offers his customers more products that they want and are willing to pay for, making it a simple no-brainer customer-acquisition cost -- even at 200%.

A skilled direct-response marketer could take a $27 ebook and turn it into $500 of LTV...and the customer would be DELIGHTED to pay it if the material is of outstanding quality.

IMHO, a lot of Web2.0 companies should stop poo-poohing marketing and learn how it really works. Virtually every Web2.0 company should be doing upsells, cross-sells, and partnerships...and as a guy who co-founded a venture-backed startup and know a lot of other startup CEOs/marketers, I know that very, very few do.

I've put together several bookmarks that might be interesting:

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/emarketing (direct-response stuff)

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/marketing (general marketing)

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/monetization

Hope this helps.
I think you're looking at the quote backwards. It's about protecting (or not) the team working on the product, not the company.
That is one of the authors points -- no one has done self replication on a macro scale and nanotech just assumes self replication at the molecular level
I really haven't seen this problem, like, ever. All coder's are vastly more likely to preoptimise the hell out of everything, and we end up with the opposite problem - thousands of hours of wasted programmer time won't even reach 1 saved hour of user time. Bear in mind as well that the actual speed of execution isn't always the main cause of perceived slowness - if something runs 10 times as slowly, but runs in the background and never causes the user to wait, it's actually running infinitely faster, from the users perspective.

A much better solution is to write things in the easiest way for coders to change - that way, when something is found to be the actual cause of slowness, anyone can easily go in and optimise it or move it to a background thread. Optimising EVERYTHING in the hopes of obtaining speed is a fool's errand - due to the 90/10 rule, 90% of the code you optimise will never be the bottleneck.

--
Ayjay on Fedang/coding
See another experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5ml9e2THw

It sonifies the following algorithms (from http://www.algolist.net/Algorithms/ )
- Bubble sort
- Selection sort
- Insertion sort
- Quicksort

You can also see their sonograms.
Oh, his point is perfectly clear - I particularly like the example that follows. It's just the choice of words is so unfortunate as to obscure the rest of the message.

For what it's worth, though, he underestimates the harm that a politically naive junior employee might be capable of wreaking - by simply being ignorant of political undercurrents that might exist.
I just googled it, and 1976 seems to be the common release date, but without any references. On this page[1], it says that BSD (1977) had ex, and 2BSD includes vi, so that would make the first public release 1978.

Considering the age of Unix, calling vi new in 1984 would still make little sense, but maybe the book mentioned was actually written long before that date.

[1]: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
Is helpful software really helpful?
On a Mac, Safari is at around 50% cpu and chrome is 99%
It sounds like his system for minimizing politics is to be inflexible, secretive and dishonest.
Skepticism is generally the rational position - unless the evidence contained in one article is overwhelmingly conclusive.

The whole idea of the Scientific Method is to not believe something until proven. Just flat out believing anything you are told without questioning it is what leads to flat-earth maps and golden chariots pulling the sun across the sky.
Open mouths and closed minds in open source
Here the clickable links:

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5ml9e2THw

CodeSounding project: http://www.codesounding.org/indexeng.html
Rapid prototyping as burnout antidote
It worked fine for me:

$ gcc --version

i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)

...

$ gcc lisp.c -o lisp

$ ./lisp test.lisp

> A

> (A B C)

...
I don't see the problem. If you are struggling, then you are probably doing it right. If there were no struggle involved, then everyone would be doing it.

One idea, go to Flippa and look at all the websites people are offering. Maybe you can get an idea from the listings there. One advantage of looking through Flippa over general browsing of random sites on the internet is that people post information such as how much money their sites are making. Perhaps you could even buy a site and improve it.
george orwell (who also wrote 1984) conducted a similar experiment in the late 1920s and wrote a book about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Londo...
Hm, where's vgr when you need him :) His Office posts tend to nail this particular point of the story nicely.
That's what they get for sharing their bed with the Gnome interface nazis[1].

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00...
Wow. Really?
Only if that employee feels that the compensation policy is not fair to begin with and that that employee does not stand a fair chance of having their skill-set properly evaluated.
They do a lot more than search, and as far as I know App Engine runs on the same distributed system.
While I don't exactly agree with his general assessment of C# as a language, I'm more baffled by the fact that he doesn't seem to get that Go is supposed to be a systems-level programming language, which precludes any virtual machine. It's not meant to replace C++/Java/C# as a language to build large enterprise systems/GUIs, but C/C++ as server/OS-level implementation languages. The sweet spot is a bit different.
Steven Frank - “Collector” is a word with ugly connotations. ...
I know guys with lists like that.

Lists like that get a 15-17% open rate(# of people who view emails)...and out of those 3-5% click rate(# of people who click on the link)

So that 50,000 list = ~400 clicks.

Even if every one of these converts(not going to happen), that's only 400 sales.

Even the biggest names who sell these info products, the guys who have their own lists with 2-3 million emails, and who have tens of thousands of affiliates...only manage to make 5-10 million a year in revenue. Before you take into account the 75% commissions they pay to affiliates(pretty much a must have now).
I didn't mean the 32/64 as the only difference. They targeted an architecture - it was i86_64/amd64. That affects memory layouts, pointer lengths, available instruction sets, etc. Changing from amd64 -> armel for example will also affect some of those properties.

If you write clean ANSI C code, you're basically compatible by default. If they failed to run on i386, that means they did something special that assumed a different architecture. In that case you're likely to hit the same problem whether they use arm, alpha, infineons, intels, or whatever else.
The community values articulate cleverness, and sometimes folks optimize for this by trying to be more clever than the author of the article under discussion.

The easiest way to move community norms is to write the comments you want to see on the site. (I'm trying to be better at this myself.)
Of course, faster horses and more importantly other car manufacturers were Ford's competition. That's the whole point of the article.

Even as the bona fide leader, Ford was less than 1/3 of the entire industry.
Also, the employee knows that she will not have the same negotiating advantage when the alternate offer expires. If anything, the whole episode will be a disadvantage by then.
I think if you look at what she said about Ozzy there is a bit of truth in it. He may not have had a short career but at the end of his career you couldn't understand him at all. Moreover, in that show he did a few years back he is almost completely incomprehensible. Maybe it's from drugs? Maybe alcohol? Maybe he did it on purpose? It always sounded to me like he had a cat in his throat.
The name is all about the funding. There are many 'nano'-technology grants, which focus on devices that are tens of thousands, or even millions of nanometers large. Micro-techology, however, doesn't get the same funding from the NSF et al. MEMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems) has come a long way in a very short time, and, research-dollars willing, will shrink further, so the author is wrong when he says nanotechnology will take another century.
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(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_the...)
Definitely missing 'monad'. I completely understood the first comment in your list, but the monad stuff always loses me quickly.
As a Canadian living in the US, I have to take exception to his remark that Canadian and American cultures are the same. The differences might appear subtle, but I'd say the differences are huge. They just run deeper beneath the superficial similarity. I'm speaking of English Canadians BTW.

Vive la difference!
When Do You Know Your Startup Is In Trouble?
Pitching for Management: In London and looking for experienced non-tech people?
Everyone needs to do something like this at least once.

It's a lot harder to believe the bullshit peddled about other nationalities when you've toured through their country and experienced their hospitality.

Personally, traveling for a year changed me and the way I approach people...I was and still am an introvert, but I'm a lot more confident in social situations.

Also, if you're a Bible belt type, prepare to come back a lot more liberal and tolerant in your outlook, not a bad thing.

If nothing else, you'll also discover what the author discovered, how little you actually need to achieve a base level of comfort, and how embarrassingly high your six figure salary actually is, comparatively speaking.
He suggests keeping the cart clientside in (e.g.) a javascript array.
For the same reason, it's "machine learning" rather than "non parametric statistics".
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To be fair, he did say 'I don't get go', that just illustrates that he's right, he doesn't get it.

Go is an improved C, not a modified Java, C++ or C#.
That's kind of the point of the article, materials do not behave on a nano scale the same way they behave at our macro scale. You absolutely cannot scale down, you have to design from the bottom up instead.

The author thinks this is impossible because progress is slow. That's not really an argument, but I'll agree that "just you wait and see!" isn't one either.

However, biology shows us that it's not impossible to do self-replicating "machinery" so I think we'll get there one day, but it might probably be a lot more organic and a lot less mechanical than we currently envision when we say nanotech.
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That's not really true, we self-replicate all the time (thanks mom and dad). What we don't know how to do is design things that self-replicate from scratch, but we do already have plenty of existence proofs.

Also, self-replication is actually easier at the molecular level because all the parts are perfectly regular.
We do have things that can manipulate objects at the nano-scale. They're called catalysts, and when they're made out of amino acids they're called enzymes, and you and I are built out of them.

Yes, you can assemble molecules with AFM. The problem with this idea is that either (a) the molecules don't stick together at temperatures much above absolute zero, or (b) they do, in which case they might be stable at useful temperatures, in which case it's better to figure out how to get them to self-assemble or to find a catalyst/enzyme that helps them self-assemble. Because your nifty molecule just isn't that nifty if it doesn't exist in quantities of order 1 mole, and 1 mole is... a lot. You just won't believe how vastly mind-bogglingly big 10^23 is.

All of which boils down to this: This essay is great, but the meat of it really is in the first paragraph. Nanotech is a euphemism for chemistry and biochemistry. It is 100% possible -- indeed, nanotech is older than any human-invented technology by many orders of magnitude, by definition, because humans are built out of "nanotech" -- but it's all just chemistry. The real question is why the word nanotechnology is so much more fashionable in grant-writing circles than the old words.
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"We don’t even have micromachines. Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist."

That's not exactly true. See, for example

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/09/14.html

for a 60 micrometers by 250 micrometers robot from 2005.

Of course, that's not nanotechnology, and the article's main point might well be valid. Still, there seems to be a good deal of exaggeration in it.
Importance of leadership qualities of a founder
How much does the leadership qualities of founder/s factor in the success of a start up?

We all know that most of the startups are founded by whizkids. And not all of the startups, even those with good ideas end up being successful.

Could it be because some of those whizkids lack the leadership skills necessary to nurture, lead and take input from a talented team to take his/her idea to the next level?

How much does this lack of leadership skills contribute to the failures of good ideas?

Even if a founder gets the involvement of the most brilliant VC's in his/her start up, would it succeed if he/she gets stuck up on his/her 'brilliant' idea and does not consider input from them?
So, viruses don't exist then?

Because those seem to operate perfectly happily in a nanoscale environment, manipulating things around them.
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This is very true. The only problem with this approach is that you can end up with a lots of "little fish" projects instead of making headway on your "Moby Dick" one.
I know what it is. I don't really watch TV shows much.
I have always liked FogCreek's policy (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html) as a way to minimize frictions due to compensation.

Trilogy (where I used to work a while back) used to do this.
Yes, this really works.

Sort of the way some teams seem to keep a set of blog posts on the shelf, ready to go, we have a list of small tangential projects.

These are all three-days-to-a-week type things where we are already pretty familiar with 80-90% such that we can move through it quickly, but also get exposure to something new that we've been meaning to pick up. That combination of quick tangible progress plus learning really clears out any negativity.
Yes, I just tested them (9:20AM EST 8/24) and they work fine. What's probably happening is that the site is shutting down processes (including audio streaming) as it gets overloaded (wow, there are lots of you guys!). But the site is also resetting itself in response to overloading, so if the site or any of its processes are down, just wait a few minutes to see if they're back online. Thanks for the link and the interesting discussion here! Due to popular demand, there will be a sequel at some point featuring other metal singers, including possibly ones mentioned here.
This is a good point and something I should have made clearer. As PM, you ar first and foremost the customer advocate. Drop the ball here and you fail.

Engaging at a more technical level needs to be about ensuring focus, not meddling where you don't understand. For example, cootdinating architectural decisions does not mean designing the solutions (your senior devs do that) but it does mean infusing those discussions with customer centric decision making. The worst thing a PM can do is act like they know something without actually doing so--as others have noted, you need to listen and learn.

My experience may be a bit different; when I started, my boss was checked-out and looking for a career change. To learn the role, I got to know our developers really well (in the end, they have lots of power) and asked them what the PMs did well and didn't do well.
How did you gather to get all the comments ?
I really wish that the author would have, when complaining about "Drexler's Book", been clear about which one he was talking about.

Also, "Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist" is gratuitously false, we even have really simple mechanical objects (like cantilevers) on the 100nm scale now.
Personally, I don't think it will be that big of a deal to upgrade to Rails 3 from a 2.x app. They have done a good job of deprecating stuff, so Rails 3 should naturally lead to a leaner Rails 3.1. While it might not be a standard app-maintenance upgrade, I think it's worth it if you have decent code with some tests.

Also, not sure how it will compare to the 1.x => 2.x upgrade, but I was able to get a very complex application with horrible code and no tests upgraded from 1.x Rails to 2.x Rails. It only took me 3 or 4 days to get 90% of the app working. The rest was just stuff that I didn't find was broken. Since the app didn't have any integration tests, none of those features even got tested. I had to rely on traditional QA to find the errors, and this process took just under a month.
Build a free application that draws people in to the site. Not necessarily like the freemium model, just offer something cool for free. Either give away great software, or become an authoritative source of data, or both.

This worked amazingly well for me with my fantasy football website. I made software to let people do free mock drafts. Over the last five years it's grown substantially with virtually zero advertising. I then sell premium fantasy football software to those visitors. Also, I aggregate data and have become a reliable source that people link to. Building the free app and becoming a source of data has led to my site becoming the #1 result in Google for just about any search term that I care about.

It's sort of a twist on the freemium model. The conversion rate is very low, but the customer acquisition cost is virtually zero, so it is still profitable.
Rig Survivor Blames BP's `Screwed-Up Plan' for Gulf Oil Blowout
For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be amazed.

Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology.

The problem is that we seem to have a hard time translating our hard won knowledge of mechanical engineering to the nano scale, I expect some time will pass before the SF visions will become a reality but I think eventually we will get there. Figure another 50 to 100 years or so?

As long as we keep thinking in terms of conventional mechanics (wheels, gears, levers, wires and so on) it's going to be slow progress because we are trying to push down the size limit on our macroscopic ingredients without a real appreciation of what you can do with molecules 'as is'.

I think at some point the 'genetic synthesis' crowd is going to meet up with the 'nano technology' crowd and that's when we'll see some real action. The first little bits of progress in that direction have already been made.
Yep, and we can make those using bacteria machinery. But, it is actually pretty different when compared to some of the possibilities set out by nanotech folk. Viruses passively work in a system where their structure is intrinsic to the system. Most nano-techs can be better explained as catalysts, surfactants, anti-bodies, etc. Technologies and phenomenon long studied in existing fields.
It seems much more likely that they'll use this to recover stolen phones (which makes them money), than to spy on jailbreakers (which makes them no money, and will probably get them sued).
The author raises some valid points, but I would add another important basic principle: Maintain constant open and honest communication with the entire company.

Simply interacting with employees either in person or through e-mail updates every once in a while goes a long way toward making people feel appreciated. Employees do want to hear about the company's latest big sale, the possible new direction for the company, etc. in a personalized or semi-personalized manner. Furthermore, these things provide a motivation boost and unified company vision, as well as open up the possibilities of feedback from lower level employees.
what a bunch of bull
YC Summer '11
Do you know the dates for YC's Summer '11 cycle?
Hitler was smart enough and knew Germany's neighbors well enough to defeat them. However, as the war showed in a dramatic manner, he had a very poor understanding of the "Anglo" nations (e.g. he thought that the UK would make peace with him and that Roosevelt would never be able to put an effective army in the field). Any opinions he expressed about society and the system of government in Britain and the US should be considered false by default.
There's more to Singularity studies than Kurzweil
Very true. In the life sciences it was 'biotechnology' in 2000, 'nano-technology' in 2005, and now it is 'synthetic biology'; but they're all the same and have changed names to get the funding.
If you can name all the stars of Jersey Shore and talk about the latest episode, that's something you should be incredibly embarrassed about.
And we can think too, and you can see where is AI in that moment. :)

And ducks can fly with flexible wings.

And the Sun is a thermonuclear reactor.

You can find demonstrations of this type of things everywhere, that doesn't means that we can make them work with our materials, techniques and knowledge.

Nanotech seems to my like AI, always there, at just two steps... that's the type of problems that smell to vaporware from miles.