skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm .. not an expert, but I do manage one website that's got a little more twice your number of page views but brings in vastly more money.

First thoughts: Your ad placement is bad. Ditto on the colors. (I had to actually look for the things in order to spot them.)

You want the big 728x90 leaderboards at the top or the big square rectangles (300x250 minimum) in the sidebars or in the page content.

You also want to choose colors that pop off the rest of the page (black on gray is practically invisible).

Consider mixing up flash/image/video ads along with text ads.

Place them so they're highly visible but not obnoxious. Look to the bigger publishers (like Gawker, Wired, or Vanity Fair) to see where they place ads. You'll notice almost all of them place ads in a similar. There's a reason for that.

Start checking out sites like http://www.problogger.net/. You may not want to be that gung ho about monetizing a personal site, but it'll give you a lot of ideas to play off of.

Other posters here have the right idea too: It's not so much about AdSense or Amazon (at least not at first), but attention economy. If you can manage to become viewed as a content-area expert, you'll get more book deals and people will start hiring you for speaking gigs at conferences and tradeshows.

Good luck!
From the company's perspective, it's really hard to effect real fairness in pay. For example, how do you weigh someone who has 30yrs of 2-4% annual raises with a new hire who may be a hotshot but is never going to be brought on with an equivalent salary? Or, how do you handle geographically inequality? Or, what about collective bargaining agreements and mandatory increases that only affect a subset of the organization?

If everyone's pay was published it would lead to lots of unpleasant questions, questions that don't have satisfactory answers in many cases.
Let us know how it turns out.
Face authentication
Really? They still do business with Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon etc. daily.
It reads like he wrote it with a thesaurus, and didn’t really know what the chosen words meant. It’s possible to figure out what meaning is intended by each word, but every sentence or two there’s one that doesn’t quite fit. It makes for very tiring reading.

But, as you say, the message is otherwise quite interesting, so it’s not the end of the world.
Libertarian accountability for all. Individual democracies of 1 person. All human beings becoming literate craft-tech-open-source-hardwate tech people. Pantheism. Gaia.
"Monetizing" a personal web site means getting job offers/more salary/consulting opportunities. You are never going to make a significant amount of money with ads, so optimize for what can benefit you (at some point in the future) and consider removing them completely.
Care to Review my soon to be Beta RC. product: mcsquare?
Thist story is incredible and much better than all the sunny day stuff that often gets promoted around here. We all know it's not all rainbows and ponies, but this is a good reality check. As the father of a 4 month old, I have no idea how you are able to have done everything you have. Makes me feel like a lazy slug. I feel like I don't even have time to breathe.
3 months rent + unemployment
It totally depends on where you are living and what your general lifestyle costs are. I'd have at least a year worth of savings put aside before thinking to start of a startup. This will act as a security nest, which will help you survive while you are searching for a job in case your startup doesn't work out. Oh, and definitely take health insurance first before you dive into startup world.
You'll still confuse people (generally outside Anglo-American culture) who are used to 24-hour digital clocks.
...after all, they benefit by their mother/father having a college education......
Well there likely a world of difference between "working for Yahoo" as an engineer and attempting to run your business (Yelp) within the organization and Yahoo's management structure. If I was management of Yelp, I'd be concerned about the latter, not the former.
Root Accounts - The Root of All Evil?
Why we know our tech CEOs
With a Facebook movie in theaters, a look into the site's future
Google: Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions
Here's a simple test for the curious. It's not a benchmark.

import math
num_primes = 0
for i in xrange(2, 500000):
if all(i % j for j in xrange(2, int(math.sqrt(i)) + 1)):
num_primes += 1
print num_primes

Here's the code above translated to C++ by Nuitka: http://pastebin.com/41ueyTEB

# CPython 2.6.6
$ time python hello.py
41538
real	0m6.377s
user	0m6.350s
sys	0m0.020s

# Nuitka & g++-4.5
$ time ./hello.exe
41538
real	0m4.573s
user	0m4.270s
sys	0m0.300s
The free content is still on the internet, you're paying for the presentation and the format.

From a business point of view, it may be good or bad. I wouldn't like to guess.

On the one hand, they might sell more copies. Without a free PDF cannibalizing sales, it will be much easier to convince people to buy something. On the other hand, it will decrease their circulation, which will devalue their ads and job listings.
Yeah that caught me off guard as well. I'd be upset if I were an advertiser because it means not as many people are viewing my ads.

I always looked forward to the beautifully laid out PDF version.
Indians denied the marriage of Robin Padilla and Mariel Rodriguez
Indian nationals in the Philippines are doubting the reports that Robin Padilla and Mariel Rodriguez got married at Taj Mahal in India
Eiknujomorp | Writernia
And just 4 years short of the centennial of the beginning of the war!
Helper script to create new posts using jekyll
I've read that there are three stolen Microsoft Authenticode certificates being used by stuxnet authors to sign the malware. I've used these sort of certs myself to sign executables. They require passphrases to use. I could believe that they cracked one passphrase to use one cert, but three? All from different companies too.
It will be interesting to know how the circulation numbers have changed after PDFs have been made paid.
Eh? The implication/speculation is that a government wanted to create and spread a worm.
Actually now that I think about it, given the nature of their readership, the marginal value of the ads should be above the $3 they charge.
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Very nice idea, I wish you success !
Ads on FB are most of the time reviewed by humans. This means his website may have some problems due to it's domain name. I would test ads on AdSense instead of FB first.
why not? I mean, why should I be forced to use a lossyless image format just because I want it to blend with the background (if the image compresses better with jpeg and the image quality is fine)

Are there technical reasons to not implement an alpha in jpeg-like compressions?
Ask HN: a bad ass jobs market?
I just started reading "Bounce", which seems to be a variant of the "Outliers/10000h to become great" theme. One thing I saw while flipping through the pages: the "winners" don't only put in more hours, they also try harder challenges.

Which reminded me that yes, my day job is probably rotting my brain :-(

In fact, a lack of challenges has been a problem with all of my jobs so far. So I had this thought: would it be possible to create a job market exclusively for challenging jobs?

Thoughts, ideas? In itself, job markets don't seem to exciting to me, on the other hand, the allocation of resources is perhaps the most important economical problem...
Doctest for Javascript
How to find Websites for Sale (35 Sites Ranked and Rated)
Just so you know, your HN comment history meant my boss said we could not buy your Catalyst book. I, personally, think your comments are nearly always valuable, but I could not sell it.
I don't know much about AdSense, using it only on one site, but I think I have about 500 uniques/day (15000/month) and it amounts to ~70€/month at the moment.

So it seems to me you should be able to earn more.

The sources might make a difference, though - my visitors seem to come straight from Google (in fact 500 might be uniques from Google, not total uniques, it's the only number I looked at lately).
Good luck! I can't find the recent discussion around a C&D someone got because they had the word book in their URL. So I might be a little worried if I were you about using "facebook" in your URL.
Processors have also gotten dramatically cheaper. How much computing power can you get with modern hardware if you spend the same amount Xerox PARC would have? That cuts out a good portion of the discrepancy.
Is it me or Google is slowly turning evil?
Agreed, it's really easy to do it yourself.

Two areas of possible confusion: specifying the 'Goods and Services' description and the 'Class', e.g. 'IC 042' for 'Computer services'.

Just do some searches at http://www.uspto.gov/ebc/tess/index.html for trademarks in the same general market as you, and copy the class they use.

E.g. this is the 37 Signals Basecamp trademark:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:f1...
Well, the benefit of writing a Lisp-ish interpreter in Lisp is that you can focus on the semantics, rather than how things like garbage collection, type tagging, and symbol interning are implemented. When using another language, the relevant infrastructure might not already be lying around, but you can take advantage its novel features instead.
What I am saying is that the whole concept of doing the heavy logic in the high level language and do the work in the C implementation cannot work when your logic depends on handling many objects.

For example, I wrote a few years ago a small audio app to track frequencies lines in audio. Each track was a list of positions (integers), generally a few tens items max, and I needed to handle millions of such lists. Now, just optimizing the track object to be in C is not that efficient because I needed to access the content of each list in the high level logic.

Basically, If your logic needs to be able to handle those millions small objects, you end up writing almost everything in the compiled language. Abstracting this becomes very difficult.
What an odd thing to say, particularly in a public forum - jrockway's profile lists an email address; wouldn't direct contact make more sense for this sort of thing?
Wrong Bathroom
Beerby - find beers near you
Not when we're discussing royalties based on public personae.

jrockway and I have no personal relationship. I don't feel any need to create one, certainly not based on not buying his book. I'm just guessing he has more interesting emails from Nigerians with inheritances.
I don't think his intention is to find and match perfect market prices, he's just throwing this out there to see what happens. Note also that given his skill set, if one was marketing to a technical audience, $12/hour might be cheap...
The first thing to do is to divide your revenue numbers against your page views: you get an eCPM of 22 cents per 1000 page views from adsense and 24 cents from amazon, for a total of 46 cents.

That's pretty good for a programming blog, in fact, the best I've seen. Programming blogs don't monetize well, for quite a few reasons:

* Many programmers refuse to buy software and other programming tools
* Outside of a few special enclaves, programming is a relatively low status and low paid occupation. (Yes, you'll find people in the valley who get paid $120k a year, but every one-horse town has a job shop that wishes it could pay programmers $30k a year and may or may not offer health insurance... Sure they get turnover, but they think they'll make it up in volumes)
* Programming blogs attract a lot of people from India and other developing countries who are very poorly paid, cheap and don't have credit cards anyway
* There's just too many programming blogs... The cost ofadvertising is set by supply and demand if there's a lot of inventory and not enough advertising, the price is going to be low

What to do? You may (or may not) be able to double your revenue by making your ads more intrusive; if you make your blog look like hell, you'll lose the social traffic, however.

The best things to do are:

* Not blog. Permanent content that attracts search traffic pays better than blogs that are driven by social traffic. Blogs aren't all bad, because (1) you write a lot of content and (2) the social traffic results in a lot of links which helps you in search, but a search-first strategy is better still.
* Pick another topic. One reason so many people make so little money on ads is that 80% of content creators create content about 20% of the topics. If you put on a blindfold and threw darts at a thesaurus, you'd find something that monetizes better than the average fool who "follows his passion"

Oh yeah, if you need to "make money fast" don't forget the value of your domain name. You could get $5000-$15000 in one lump sum for a three-letter name. That's 8 years to two decades worth of your ad revenue...
>But I can't think of any rational reason why I would want to know it.

Are you serious? How about finding out where your market value actually lies for example? If you find out everyone on your team makes 20% more than you then you know (a) to quit and (b) what to ask for at your next position.

Why do you think it's forbidden to reveal salaries? Because companies don't want to pay full market price if they can avoid it. The only way to do that is to hide what the actual value is.
Features shouldn't be there 'just because it's possible', at least not if they may impact other features(1). If greater compression can be reached by leaving out the alpha, and if there's no compelling reason to put it in, it should be left out. 'why not' is not a reason, there needs to be a business case for each feature, in everything.

In my experience, and this seems to be a widely held position, the main use case for jpgs is in pictures, as in photographs. The main use case for png (gif) is for graphical elements: borders, menus, etc. Those last ones you want to compress with a lossless format anyway - you need to be sure that a flat menu background is not dithered or doesn't have other artifacts. I understand the question mostly as 'do you need transparency in photographs' and 'do you need non-rectangular photographs where the non-rectangular nature is encoded in the photograph itself, and not part of another rendering in stage in the presentation layer'.

Thinking about it more, maybe things like drop shadows or other fancy borders could be case where you need transparency in photos. Otherwise you have to work around it by having the picture as jpg and the border as a separate (or several separate) png's. More requests, harder layouting, etc. I'm not convinced yet that this use case alone is a compelling argument.

As for technical reasons to not implement it, I don't know - I'm assuming there are because I'm quite sure that someone at Google must've thought about it and decided against it, they must have had their reasons.

(1) I'm reasoning from the assumption that including transparency has adverse effects on file size and/or decompression complexity. Maybe there aren't in which case balancing features becomes a different matter and most of my argument is moot.
How Microsoft went from 30 million Windows Live bloggers to 300,000
It's much more likely that the certificate used were stolen (from Realtek Semiconductor Corp.), than cracked.
The song on the video is rather wonderful! It's a cover of Radiohead's Creep by Scala:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=evG2DDmSdxM
There's plenty of other reputable places besides Flippa to sell a website and some will probably get you a better price. There's a list here - http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2010/10/01/how-to-find-websit...
If it's not Turing-complete, it ain't TeX.
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-...

http://web.stonehill.edu/compsci/History_Math/math-read.htm

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-devel...

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/latex.html

http://encosia.com/2010/08/18/dont-let-jquerys-document-read...

http://symkat.com/35/ssh-tips-and-tricks-you-need/

http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/977179815/in-praise-of-quitti...

http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-hackers-why-you-...

http://alexisohanian.com/keep-calm-carry-on-what-you-didnt-k...
Yes but would you like to be the programmer that wrote it? You would also be a witness. Again, movie stuff.. :)
You're making the assumption that a government would not pay for the development and exploitation of those vulnerabilities, which is de facto false considering the current "cyberdefense" capabilities of developed countries.
The reason you're headed for another solar system is to get access to more matter and energy. You can't find that in interstellar space, so eventually your supplies will run out.
Here is what I think you should do:

1)
Do some research online about legitimate ways to make money. Make a very long list with no fewer than 100 entries. These don't need to be things that you're interested in, but each one needs to result in some form of income. None of these things should cost any money to make money or require you to pimp out your friends and family for referrals. Don't limit yourself online either, remember that people earn money in easy ways offline as well and that something as easy as personal shopping for an elderly person in your neighborhood can bring in $50 a week for something you're doing anyway. Be creative and constantly add to this list.

2)
Create profiles, sign up or apply to each one of these money making methods. In some cases, you'll need to create basic websites (storefronts), etc to facilitate income. Do not spend any more than 4 hours of a single day stetting up any single method.

3)
Start thinking about a portfolio. It doesn't matter what life goals you have, you need a portfolio - especially if you're going to be earning money this way. Think about what your "perfect" job / gig / startup looks like and carefully collect items for your portfolio that support your expertise in your target area. Opportunistic portfolio work is the only type of work you should ever do cheap or free.

4)
I bet you have already started to do these things. You've identified 4 very general things on your website that you can do. However, you've put out a general call for work in common areas. Think about your skills (starting with the 4 you've listed) and look at the looong list of money making opportunities.

5) Once you get a couple of bucks in your pocket and you get the bill collectors (if any) off of your back, a really fun experiment is to have your bills paid by passive income. One-by-one, if you can slowly discard one bill at a time using things like affiliate programs, ad income from your blog, whatever... you'll really start to have fun. The only rule in this "game" is to define a small number of maintenance hours per week to maintain your passive income. The natural progression of passive income using this strategy is to take an item from your looong list of income sources and modularize / mechanize it to reduce the amount of labor it takes to complete the task to the absolute minimum. Sometimes, leveraging the low cost labor of others to preform tasks that are easy to repeat is a great way to move a task completely passive.

6) Above all else, keep your chin up. Remember the setbacks and failures but don't let them put you in a bad mood. Staying upbeat and creative is the key.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book. It should be required reading in school.
agree with scala. you'll enjoy it.
Create Musical Squares
$3?! you're aving a giraffe!
Thanks for sharing your idea about alternative domain names, but I think a public comment is not the best way to do that.

Someone else might grab it before the author can -- therefore please suggest domain names directly to the respective author via email. (I know benjamins email is not in his profile/website, but a whois reveals it).
Hacker
everything for hacking in www.karga.gr
You'd need someone to decide what's "bad ass" to include. Voting/filtering might come in to play, but it's hard to tell, and you usually only have the company's explanation of a job to go on (and those usually aren't accurate).

TheLadders.com has made a nice job of segmenting off and servicing a "100k" jobs market, but salary is one thing that's pretty easy to determine in a job. It may be a horrible job, but if the ad says "$130k", you know what you'll get paid.

"bad ass" is in the eye of the beholder too - your job is rotting your brain. Someone else coming in to the field might consider it a real challenge and growth opp. I don't know your job, so perhaps that's not accurate, but I've seen it myself. Other people have come in to positions I've hated and they've thrived.

On the whole it sounds like a tempting idea, but my thought is that, without some serious time/effort to filter and interview the employers, it'd be really hard to do well.

Now... you could charge the employer a decent fee, but give them a few video slots, with interviews/pitches from various team members you'd be working with - turn the interview process on its head slightly. Companies willing to go through the process of really selling themselves and a particular position beyond just one simple list of bland bullet points might be considered badass just on that point alone.

mgkimsal@gmail.com if you'd like to consider dicussing or pursuing this more.

Rereading your post, I don't think the issue is particular jobs - I think it's you. You're ready for freelancing. The most challenging/particular things (I've found) have come from short term consulting projects. Come in , problem solve, execute, leave before rot sets in. This is the sort of thing we'll be promoting at http://indieconf.com in November :)
Ten horrifying display ad placements
whoa... nice angle. I wouldn't buy it myself, but it seems plausible that lots of people would.

One thing: consider slightly different angles on this. For instance, a mosaic of all photos in which a person is tagged. And/or in which their friends are tagged. Furthermore, you could break this down into years, such that a person could have one poster for 2010, buy another one next year for 2011, etc. etc.

Also, think about the corporate angle here: I'm sure corporations would live this kind of thing... visual represenatations of the community who connect with them on FB. Hopefully you could sell premium versions to corporations to hang in their foyers: larger, better quality finish, whatever (you'd know better than I). Good luck :D
Are the previous digital versions no longer going to be free once the next version is released? The digital edition for September is still $3.
Get a job and continue to earn money while working on your project on the side at first. You have more energy than money right now, so use that to your advantage.
The Future Looks Bright for Small Social Game Developers on Facebook
Perhaps the leading article next time will be "Why paid plans don't work". (This months was 'why free plans don't work').
HTTP Roundup: What’s Up with the Web’s Protocol
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"There is just no place in business for that kind of crap"

I completely agree!
Only the first 3 issues are free.
Malleable Web Surfaces
Sigh...this is helpful, but something about it makes me sad.
An Analysis of Linux Scalability to Many Cores [OSDI'10 PDF]