skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with the your premise..

You may bot be asking the right question..

It snot as a whole is facebook making a profit??

The right question is have advertisers found out where the ads on FB work the best and is that revenue growing?

The ads are working the best in games such as Zynga's as the ad can better targeted to engage viewer...

Has FB made a profit yet form advertisers using in-game ads, etc on fb's game/app platforms?

We do not know yet as they are still a private company with no breakouts in revenue to answer that question.

And comparing Zynga to Fb only gives a micro picture not a whole one..

But, it only works if FB can keep its users and community bases(users, developers, advertisers) there on the FB platform. If we see a sudden decrease as in Digg than it is a ponzi scheme..
You're right about revenue, but I'd contend that Zynga and Groupon are incredibly bubbly companies.
Oh boy when I get those I'm generally also completely zoned out of my mind. It's like everything else shuts down.
Communicating a Vision
> their backers were betting that Mr Obama would push through an energy bill that would force America to embrace alternative sources of energy more aggressively.

Give him a break, getting healthcare reform passed already involved flame-baiting half of congress to the extreme. There's a thing called filibustering that massively slows down all legislature once anyone bill becomes flame-baitable enough. There is no way any president could have halted the greatest financial collapse since the great depression, passed education reform, passed healthcare reform, AND also gotten to a new energy\immigration policy in 18 months, while filibustering exists, without assuming dictatorial power.
Another vote for Lighthouse - we use it and love it at Off & Away. Powerful w/out the bloat.
I like to think of it as how much you are worth to society (including yourself).
Probably older, as "hack mode" in the Jargon File: http://people.kldp.org/~eunjea/jargon/index.php?idx=hack-mod...
Wealth = Money + Power
Nonsense. We sponsor H1b's. I'd be surprised to hear that we were more than a stddev larger than the mean 2-year-old YC startup.
I think a lot of Obama's difficulties stem from having to steer a massive federal bureaucracy.

To my eye, he's only making the weight of bureaucracy worse.
guess that settles it, it IS a netbook, http://i.engadget.com/2010/04/08/tsa-netbooks-e-readers-and-...

;)
This speech is the perfect blend of humor and sound advice:

"I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average."
Pet peeve: Vim should be spelled "Vim," not "VIM."(1) Consistency in case would also make it easier to read in my opinion, Vim/VIM seem to be used interchangeably throughout the article.(2) Other than that, this is a good crash course. =)

1 See spelling in use at http://www.vim.org/about.php

2 "Vim has a small footprint in RAM and on the CPU. A given system can support a great many VIM users at once."
I agree that some agencies are like that but if you look for a good agency that will sit down with you and find all that information out and analyze the results you will get further.

Also don't go for an agency that gets payed a percent of spend or per thousand clicks. You will usually get more conversions off an agency that charges a flat management fee per day.
In a bit of meta-irony, my own comment illustrates itself. The core here is that we care about good stories much more than true ones.
The less congress does the better - every time congress starts to act they increase the amount of uncertainty about the future which makes it hard to predict what the appropriate investments are.
When Carol Bartz couldn't even communicate a clear vision for Yahoo!, i knew she had to go.
The $200MM for the datacenter is amortized over that datacenter's lifetime.
This is a spammer, please also remove the other posts of this account.
The ability to satisfies ones needs.

The entire economy is built around providing individual humans with the means to satisfy their needs.
Yet ExpertSexChange is still near the top of Google search results - 'tis a mystery. Still, it validates the SEO business model that gaming the algorithm can get you higher ranked than real actual content of the kind SO has in buckets.
I don't know which is more relevant for the HN audience - a) the discussion of how to balance and deliver promises and priorities in the government or...

b) the fact that the comments section of The Econimist is apparently completely vulnerable to spam bots.

On (a) I'm inclined to take a long view on this presidency and say that the real rubber will meet the road after the midterms. As for (b) maybe the folks over at TE would like to take advantage of the recent "Offer HN" meme.
Businesses seek confidence on what their costs are going to be, and the fact that such confidence has always been impossible doesn't really affect that.

This raises the question of what changed when Obama took office that caused the complaints of uncertainty to start. Then again, at this point, I don't expect the people I generally see complaining about uncertainty to acknowledge that it has always been there (and that they were just giving Bush a free pass).
I really think Flattr is misapplied to blogs, to be honest.

I don't want to go around giving micro payments to bloggers to be honest. The things that make me want to Flattr are, well, THINGS.

Applications, tech demos, pieces of art. Things that make me have fun and feel appreciative, rather than things that make me go "Oh, that is useful information" or "Oh, that is an insightful comment".
Can someone link to some pictures or videos as an example of what this looks like?
Carving pumpkins with my daughter.

Taking my family to the Renaissance Festival and not having to worry about the cost of a Henna tattoo, or the cost of an elephant ride.

Time to sit down and play with the inner workings of celery, RabbitMQ, and just how exactly am I going to be able to leverage the subtask module for some high-latency network operations.

Vacations across the country, with the ability to go to Long Beach's quirky downtown and pick up novelties for my wife without worrying about what else I might be giving up later.

Taking my 8 year old daughter to breakfast and discussing how well her steak and eggs were prepared.

This isn't much of an answer, but looking over the past few months, these are the main reasons I enjoy making the money I make. The TV in my living room is broken. I'm in no hurry to fix it. I drive a Jeep Wrangler, though I can afford a much nicer car. I don't have to worry about the cost of gas (for now), which means I don't have to live in dirty old DC, and can instead enjoy being by the water in Annapolis.
Offtopic - how on Earth did Apple give you a 12+ rating for an app about programming questions!? Another mystery.
For maybe $700,000 a year, between public servant wages, benefits, and rent.
Ask HN: Your Glorious Non-Startup Success
How is the better half of your life? What new did you learn? Who was the last person you met that blew your mind? Are your worried about anything? Hmm?
If you would succeed that is. The question is what happens if you dont? Try another seven years of doing sth only for the monies?
Apple feature the A4 regularly in keynotes, product introduction videos and websites.

They used Samsung ARM chips in every previous iPhone and were happy to leave it at that. Since the iPad they have been presenting the A4 as "custom-designed by Apple engineers to be extremely powerful yet extremely power efficient."

This could be considered flat out lies, at the very least it gives the wrong impression. If you want to be charitable then they could mean "engineers employed by a company later bought by Apple" when they say Apple engineers, custom-designed could mean simply "designed to achieve certain goals" rather than "specifically for Apple" or it could just mean that someone at Apple picked certain features from a Samsung catalog.

With that background it is understandable (though still faintly ridiculous) for people to take the hints that Apple is dropping and go off on flights of fancy about the A4.
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Google probably also has some of the lowest costs for bandwidth and infrastructure in the industry; very important for youtube, as it uses so goddamn much.
Discouraging immigration of skilled labor encourages the development of those skills in this country.

In a vacuum, you might be right, but companies in the US increasingly compete on a global scale, and since other countries are more friendly to immigration of skilled professionals, we risk losing our global competitive edge. It's a nice idea to think that artificial barriers will result in us ramping up education, but that's a process that will take decades. You can't just start teaching advanced computer science to high school seniors who can barely read and struggle with basic math. So what's more likely is that the lack of skilled professionals in this country will gradually reduce our pace of innovation relative to other countries and cause a relative decline in our wealth, causing us to fall further and further behind.

It's far faster and more efficient to let the hoards of skilled professionals in other countries come here, especially since many of them are willing to risk almost anything to move their families here and would stay forever if we let them. Instead we severely restrict them and then we compound the problem by letting people come here to go to school and then make them leave if they can't find a job. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
This eliminates 90% of distraction:

vim /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
127.0.0.1 digg.com
127.0.0.1 reader.google.com
127.0.0.1 stumbleupon.com

Add whatever sites you visit that are massive firehoses of information. Sites that just serve bite-size chunks are safe to leave off - you most likely don't visit them much anyway, and even if you do visit, you'll quickly leave because they don't offer that constant stream of content that submerges you and drags you off into the net with that overwhelming "just one more click" reward system.

On the mental side, I find that it's easiest to stay focused by harnessing the same mental pleasure/reward cycle but hooking it to concrete tasks that are a part of what I'm working on. Breaking down your todo's into very concrete steps so that you never have an opportunity to get distracted by wondering what you should be working on next helps you keep the flow going, and also helps you by providing that miniature rush of reward every time you complete a task. Avoid having large ill-defined projects because they quickly grow mentally draining and feel like an endless slog that you want to escape because there is never a concrete feeling of accomplishment.
Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged.

I think this is a feature, generally, but I get what you're saying. With any criteria you present for deciding what is worth posting you run the risk of it being the only criteria. Ideally, we'd all only care about our karma insofar as it helps us avoid making lousy posts, and ignore it entirely otherwise, but idealism doesn't scale.

"How will this influence my average?" is definitely an oversimplified heuristic for deciding what is worth contributing, but it's reasonably accurate and I think it's the best one we've got. (Better than total karma at the very least.)

As I said in the above comment, the voting on comments is the closest thing we have to an indication of their quality. It obviously doesn't always reflect reality, but what that points to is that some comments--the ones that we want around here but that would bring your average down--are undervalued. Those comments should result in positive feedback (via average karma or otherwise), but they don't.

That is to say: The site has a reward mechanism (karma). There is desirable behavior that is not being rewarded or is under-rewarded (e.g. replying to less popular Ask HN posts). Is there some way to reward that desirable behavior?
Another option is to set up an affiliate program and pay for leads / sales. That way people will start on the one hand to create landingpages or put your ads on some pages, but they will also try to earn money by bidding on keywords and sending traffic to your site.

If you are sneaky you can track the sources and adwords with a tracking software like google analytics to find out which keywords are working well and then start to bid yourself on those. (But that would drive away those affiliates doing the research for good keywords... but depending on the attractiveness of your affiliateprogram there might be others...)
This is simply not true. Enabling query strings in the config breaks all of the html "helpers."
Sure. But the other comment was posted during the time when I was composing mine. So I didn't get to see it until I submitted my post.
Um, normally when I go through TSA the exchange goes like this at the X-Ray belt:

"Is that a laptop in your bag?"

"Yes."

"ALL LAPTOPS MUST COME OUT OF THE BAG AND RERUN THROUGH XRAY"

I don't really expect saying "Yes, but it's an 11-inch Macbook Air!" is going to get you a different response from the typical TSA worker.
There are certain topics which are more likely to be downvoted - criticism of Steve Jobs is an example (and conversely criticism of Steve Balmer is likely to be upvoted).

There's nothing wrong with caring about HN karma, so long as you care about karma less than you care about speaking your mind.
Why do you want to narrow the definition? What about it isn't working for you?

I'm going to guess that you intuitively feel that there is "good" wealth, like a bicycle repair shop, and "bad", like speculating on housing prices.

The problem is that, at any given moment, you can't tell between the two -- they're both useful, and both have their places, and in some circumstances both are useless and counterproductive to have around.

I think the difference happens when you consider how useful they are over time. The bicycle shop is more useful in the set of all possible futures. Is there a word for that?
My interpretation of him saying be hated is to speak and do the things you believe in even if they dont quite resemble with the audience you are in. So I think it's not in searching of people to hate you but in having the guts to speak your mind and do the things you believe in no matter what others think of it. And hatred of other people because of you doing it and them not having guts to do it sometimes comes along with it.
They mention that their data actually admits the opposite, that they're less economical, costing about $100/foot. They don't mention what the alternative ladders cost, but it sounds like their argument is because wood ladders gain them advantages that others don't: nonconductive material, heavier weight against winds, etc.
The reason seems to be that HNers feel like they have to project an ultra-logical persona at all times. Even Spock-like. How'd it get started? I wish I knew.

It's not just jokes. I've experimented: I can make the most insightful and practical comment in the whole thread, but if I use "cuz" or "gonna," or "man," or more than a single (maybe two) exclamation points in the whole thing, no upvotes for me! But the more pseudo-intellectual trappings I pile on -- for example, eschewing contractions -- the more votes I get.

Mentioning a logical fallacy, even if it is itself fallacious, always works a treat.

It's pretty silly.
To add another example of Apple's details of industrial design, Apple makes two keyboards from the space they stamp out for the iMac's screen. Apple is very efficient.
I want to measure the worth and contribution of a comment; here's how I tried.

(defn v-rat
[uv dv]
(/ (expt uv 3/2)
(+ uv dv))))

(define nest-weight
[comment]
(/ 1 (+ (nest-level comment)
(/ 3 (nest-level comment)))))

weight::
(+ (/ ak 2)
(v-rat uv dv)
(reduce + (map (fn [c] (* (nest-weight c)
(v-rat (upvotes c) (downvotes c))))
(remove (fn [c] (= user (user c)))
comments))

Where ak is the average karma of the user (only on comments, if possible), uv and dv are upvotes and downvotes respectively, and comments is a list of comments in reply to the comment we're weighing.

=====

Abstractly, I'm trying to consider the comment based on both its individual value as well as how much good discussion it generated. I also take into account, plainly, the average past worth of their comments.

This could certainly use some tweaking, but I like the values I've plugged in so far, and it promotes discussion as well as thoughtful contribution, and gives a nod towards users who have high quality comments in the past.

I'd be interested in tweaking it some more if this seems at all a step in the right direction. I think I could use a better heuristic for replies, as well as a more sophisticated v-rat. I also wonder if it would be possible to see which users downvote and upvote, and give those votes more power (technically possible, that is), and also take into account the users who are replying, and to what effect. This would require a lot more testing, and maybe more CPU cycles than PG would like.

I'm not sure taking time into account is a great idea past the first ~10 minutes of submission. For those first ~10 minutes, perhaps weigh the comment solely using the avg karma of the user + some constant. After those first x minutes, rank by the algorithm.
Don''t MySpace demographics paint a different picture? I was under the impression that MySpace had a higher prevalence of non-whites and lower income members. (Sorry, I can only find indirect references to this claim)
Review my site- www.announcelive.com
Please let me know what you think of my new site. www.announcelive.com Basically it lets people commentate on live events (ie. you don't like the World Series announcer you can goto the site and find someone else streaming their commentary or do it yourself.) I think it maybe be really interesting for non sports events too like the Oscars or a political debate. Almost like DVD commentary but live. Any ideas or thoughts would be awesome. Thanks.
We'll be making some rapid changes to appleseedproject.org in the next few days, so you'll see newsfeeds showing up as the top priority feature.

Newsfeeds are now live on the beta site.
The title should probably be something like "Koobface Would Infect Linux Systems Too, If It Could Be Bothered".
This is a link to the meego wiki. It's more of a brainstorm.
That's a good list; thanks for linking to it. I didn't realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" was a well known catchphrase already.
http://www.announcelive.com/
How to Run a Fearless Small Business
IIRC in that interview Jason said they filed everything to incorporate themselves, they didn't use any service. That means doing some leg work to find the documents.
I absolutely agree. To which I'd add: what you described as under-rated doesn't even have to be the limit for "outsiders" who don't aspire to the HN ideal.

37Signals is, by the definition of HNers, a lifestyle business… and they're absolutely rolling in money and prestige.

Personally, I think we should rebrand "lifestyle business" as "profitable business."
I don't know of any others aside from the poll privilege, but it works whether there's one or 100 levels.
If you have a high average are your comments better? Are you bad at commenting with a low average? What should this number tell me?
Of course you CAN do it without logging lots of hours... And working smarter is better than working harder. There's truth to the statement: "If I do the right work efficiently, I can get done in 40 what most people get done in 90."

But surely hours worked correlates with output, doesn't it? There might be a point of diminishing returns and there might be burnout risk (though the latter can-- and often is-- solved with fresh bodies to throw onto the pyre).
Tiny USB business card
I'd agree that groupon (unless their CEO's statements are to be trusted) is not entirely sustainable, but i don't think they are going to disappear completely. Additionally I don't think social gaming is going to go away either. It might look completely different as browsers, and users evolve, but its going to be here for a while. There is always going to be a social platform, and right now its facebook.
It might be Goldman Sachs. This chart from Business Insider from July, says the same thing but attributes the information to Goldman Sachs: http://www.businessinsider.com/you-cant-appreciate-how-compl...
Completely agree. Part of what makes these communities thrive is the passion and innovation of everyone involved. If there wasn't constant discussion going on at every level, there wouldn't be anything to fund in the first place.

I think Brad's points exemplify why New York City will succeed as Silicon Alley. It's NOT the same as Silicon Valley, which is exactly why it's needed.
I am old enough (late 50s) that settling down on just one programming language would not be a bad strategy if I was not a consultant. Maybe.

Over the last several years, I have been hoping to mostly just use Ruby for future work, but in the last 5 years almost half of my consulting jobs used a Lisp language (Common Lisp or Clojure) and the rest mostly Ruby, with some Java.

The Clojure language and libraries are very nice, and I am sure that problems with the development experience like poor stack traces (good work already in progress), etc. will get ironed out soon.

If you are an entrepreneur with your own product or web services based company, then pick one great language and use it until a better great language comes along.

For those of us who enjoy consulting, we will mostly use what best fits customers' needs.
What problem Silicon Valley really was solving?
Personally I do high fidelity right away. I want to get as close to the final product as possible which includes the actual flow between the clicks.

The wireframe step is fine if you are dealing with client's and don't want to get into the aesthetic discussion before you have started working on it (believe me you wont). But more often than not it's a wast of time.
The opinion of the operator of the website is not necessarily representative of the developers. And the project leaders don't own the copyright to Remi's thousands of contributions, so they can't choose to re-license it or give Apple permission to release the app under any additional licensing or obligations above and beyond the exact stipulations of the GPL.
While I am not a fan, I would have to say that on OSX, it performs better than Flash.
Behavioral methods in ActiveRecord
Ask PG:  Banning religion from hacker news harmful to innovation?
Some religions are very good at spreading. Doesn't it make sense to see what makes them spread so well when trying to compete with sites such as Facebook? Perhaps similar ideas can be used?
Hrm, maybe. I think social/casual gaming with virtual goods are here to stay (they've been growing like crazy in asian countries for years and years). Groupon isn't particularly defensible, but the model seems to scale infinitely, and restaurants.com has been doing it with less splash for years. Groupon's 50% margins will get trimmed over time and certain types of merchants will realize that it's a pile of fail for their business... But why won't Groupon and it's ilk always be a great deal for businesses like restaurants and spas (especially if they start allowing for blackouts on weekends?).