skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One explanation would be that the people who you "scammed" into viewing the site, turned up and didn't find the content they expected, so they went and found something else to click on - i.e. your Adsense. Good old bait and switch.

I don't know if it particularly invalidates Adsense as a business model (if we're calling it that). Lots of forms of subterfuge or gaming of click-through advertising systems can increase your earnings. It doesn't mean that people who garner legitimate revenue can't do well (although presumably they do have to pay for the cost of the people using the system illegitimately).

However, I've always found Adsense totally useless for the sites I run. I have a niche, high-tech audience, so Adsense CTR are ridiculously low for me - particularly compared to what I can get selling CPM rates to advertisers directly. Again, that doesn't really invalidate Adsense as a whole - just that it isn't suitable for everyone.
Live webcasts from the Google Developer Day 2007 (starts at 12:00 BST)
Does anybody know if Gears contains spyware? I expect that it doesn't, but I don't really trust Google. I would never install the Google toolbar, so if I ask my users to install Gears, I would have to be sure that it is spyware free. It being Open Source might be helpful to avoid that problem, though.
So let me see.

Xobni showed Khosla people that they have some "cool" desktop app (or plugin, whatever) and Khosla Ventures love it and thought that it has a huge growth potential so they gave them money (in the area of millions).

I think that's 1/3 of the whole story. I'm guessing they also show their business model (or at least business plan).

Think about it carefully, this isn't YAW2.0 (Yet Another Web 2.0). This is a desktop app (or plugin). It's not like you can throw in the wild and put Ads. And remember, these guys are playing in Microsoft backyard.
Why not? If they can get someone who knows C#, more power for them. The faster for the new guy to adapt with the code given he/she knew Java/C#. Java is a language close to C#. I still don't understand your objection.

Product Managers and QA? Why not? Who will test the product? uh-huh, it's the QA.

It's not like your ruby/php/python code can be tested just by a simple unit test. It's not like your desktop app not need to be tested (UI wise).
Warren Ellis on internet "Burst Culture"
Meaning: don't make content sites for tech-oriented people. They'll ignore the ads completely.

My online journal (http://journal.dedasys.com) is mostly about high tech with some business and economics thrown in, and it gets zilch from adsense compared with other sites I run.
Wow... Steve Jobs is just an order of magnitude better than Bill as a speaker.
Worse of that, this crazy acquisitions game makes it hard for a startup with a saner plan to succeed. A startup aiming to create a good product and try to survive the old-nice-way charging for it needs to compete with rivals that are not trying at all to be profitable since the goal is to burn money in order to give everything for free and get acquired.

I think this is starting to have serious effects in the quality of web software. An example: if email web clients has a cost, exactly like any other real good, let's say 10$ a year that's ok for everybody, a lot of startups could really enter the market in order to make a better product of gmail (and there are a lot of ways to improve it).

This is happening at all levels. Even worse it's clear that many kind of startups are hardly profitable with advertising. I don't like this system, and I could say it does not seems liberal to me, in the highest sense at least.
True! Adsense works only if visitors are coming from google (in search mode... they end clicking because there are a lot of chances they didn't found what the were looking for so - adsense to continue navigation), or if you have a site with a user base of average people with IE6 and Windows XP without any kind of navigation skills, those will click.

Adsense is not a business model for 70% of the web startups out there.

Google will instead pay you a lot if you are a spammer. Copy the wikipedia DB or other public available information, mix it together, get few backlinks, and put adsense in a prominent position, and you are set. You will earn 5$ for 1000 pageviews more or less that's exactly ok given that you have millions of pages generated in 1 day of work.

With few domains and different free contents around you can get a living in few months. This was my Ycombinator, the source of money I used to take me alive while developing the code for my startup.

Google will hardly block spam from the SERP.
As I use news.yc more I think this is more and more vital. Not only so the OP's comment stays with the URL, but that comment also needs to go into the RSS feed, otherwise I just get a load of one line titles which give little clue as to whether I want to read it or not. I end up wasting time on crap.
I'm now sure it isn't stable, which makes re-finding your place and making sure you've read everything more awkward than it need be.
I used three books in this order

Agile web development with Rails (for learning rails initially)

Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper (for learning ruby)

Rails Recipes (for doing useful stuff)

While reading these I also worked on converting an existing web app into rails.
Idea about a service to make it easy to outsource small projects and get quality work
I'm figuring out a service that'd let you get quality work, easily, outsourced, for things like html+css, page design, logos and such. http://sourceitgood.com/ has some details, love to get feedback!
Google Gears - Enabling Offline Web Applications
Warning: RoR is slow
Another one is to tell the user the email is used in order to send lost passwords.
First of all, i don't wish to try to start a flame war. Just want to share some of my experience with RoR.

RoR, to me, is the pinnacle of web programming orgasm. It's fun, it's fast, it's super productive. Hell, i never enjoyed web programming till i tried RoR.

Unfortunately, RoR is slow, or specifically ActiveRecord is slow. No matter how many machines you throw at your app, there is still a noticeable page loading time lag compared to a straightforward PHP script. People hate it. Yes. They do. Users will complain and the only way you can improve the loading time drastically is if you stop using ActiveRecord. But heck, half of the joy in using RoR is with ActiveRecord. Either that or you cache page fragments. But trust me, caching page fragments is not fun. You need to keep track of which fragments to invalidate based on which model actions. Multiply that with many models and you get the same PHP messiness.

So what's my point? My point is that i'm looking for a new FAST mini-framework to replace RoR. Any recommendations :)?
"Our approach: only approved providers on sourceitgood."

A good thing IMHO.
The problem with rentacoder, guru and other outsourcing websites it that there is, maybe, 95% of bullshit on them (from both sides of the game).
Gears' positive feedback loop may, after years, possibly lead to wide-spread adoption but Apollo will be definitely ubiquitous in a very short span of time.

I think this is an interesting move for Google and maybe I'm missing something, but so far it doesn't look like it has a prayer.
Almost all the browsers are XHTML1.0 compatible (with the OpenWAP DTD). The only problem we've encountered are font size issues across phones.
There's a difference between hiring someone who is a C#/Java programmer and someone who can program in C#/Java. That's my point.

As for Product Managers and QA people. They have a tendency to slow development down to a level they can manage and test. I avoid them both like the plague.
My point was that the example problem in that submission has been solved for a number of years. I'm also not sure multi-touch is necessarily an improvement over point-touch, in a greasy restaurant environment.
Groovy on out Grails, perhaps? Not sure about the performance, but at least it uses the Java VM.
Hehe, we've just had a big "fight" (discussion, but for an outsider our discussions often look like we're having a fight ;)) about it.
We decided not to do so: most people (or at least, the people we're marketing to) will probably fill in their real address anyway.. And if they don't, they're smart enough to use a "dump"-address.
Um, what's so bad about being a Java/C# programmer? Is the hubris of the scripting crowd really that sky-high?
What have you tried doing to speed it up? Granted, RoR is no speed demon, but it seems to be "fast enough" for quite a few people. Perhaps you are doing something wrong?
Yes, exactly. So fixing that problem should improve the experience enormously. Not sure it can be done, but we can try :)
Weebly gets press from alma mater Penn State
It would be very nice if Ruby would be taken in similar approach as PHP is. mod_ruby for apache and templating system like smarty. that's my orgasm. no frameworks no orm. oh my! :)
I agree with another poster--try to speed it up first. You've got a couple caching levels to try, at the page/fragment level and at the ActiveRecord level with memcached.
Not sure. I didn't say anything was bad about being one. I don't speak for any crowds either.
YouTube videos on Apple TV soon, Jobs promises / CEO says iPhone will also be coming in (very late) June
Agreed, building an advertising-supported startup is complicated...as starting any company would be. Advertising is VIABLE business model, but this certainly doesn't mean it will always work. Many startups will rely on advertising and many will fail, but that doesn't mean that they would have succeeded if they tried a different business model.

There are, of course, both advantages and disadvantages to an advertising-based business model. As you say, advertising is likely to be volatile during a downturn. Also, the type of sites which rely on the eyeballs--advertsing are often easy to 'spoof'. (Low attachment.)

The advantages of advertising is that it's simple to implement. For a YC-type company, with a few $K funding and a few people writing code, there is probably no easier way to start generating revenue. No sales team neccessary, no 'critical mass' of business customers, no need for corporate partnerships.

There are risks in any business model, succeeding will alwyas take incredible skill and incredible luck, but with $12 billion in advertising spending each year, many successful companies have been and will in the future be built upon advertising.
You can use mod_ruby + eruby. This is the setup I'm using currently to develop our next application.
tried caching at the activerecord level with memcached.
Yes, there was a speed increase but still there is a noticeable page loading time lag. It doesn't load craigslist fast.
I read your comment yesterday in another thread Salvatore :) and tried to find some contact on you, but without success. Yes I can but it's not widely supported by hosting providers. That's pity.
Why Google loves developers
Yahoo's chief technology officer resigns
Notice, that Apollo is in alpha

The problem is, it is so new, that I dont know if it has overcome the problems Java Web Start has.

From the adobe site:

"What are some of the features that are not included in the Apollo alpha?
Below is a partial list of features planned for Apollo 1.0, which are not implemented yet in the Apollo alpha:

PDF support
Online/offline APIs "
For me, the first step was to want to build something. That gave me the drive to want to find out how.

AWDR & Pickaxe are pretty indispensable (although I picked up Pickaxe much later). There are also loads of really great blogs (jamis buck, err the blog ..) and forums (railsweenie, ruby-forum ..) out there worth checking out regularly.
Why Apple TV is a dud
First thing, when you use activerecord, do you know and use the include option when doing find?

An example, suppose you have two models Professor, and Lessons
A lesson belongs to a professor and a professor has many lessons.

Now, a common mistake is to do things like
@professors = Professor.find(:all)

and later to have some code that does something like

@professors.each do |professor|
...
professor.lessons
...
end

What happens? well you have one request to the database and then one request for each professor. (so the number of request is equal to the number of professors + 1).

If however you do Professor.find(:all, :include = "lessons")
it will fetch the lessons right from the beginning and your code will only do one request....

There are a lot of small mistakes like that that beginners do.... And while rails isolate you from the database stuff, you still need to understand what it does if you want things to work well

For more information on all this:
http://i.nfectio.us/articles/2006/09/20/mysql-query-analyzer-rails-plugin
it's a plugin that you can use to analyze what mysql did (it uses the explain statement for this

http://railsexpress.de/blog/
This blog is a good read.

Cheers....
Scientology is a cult, and methods that they use should not be used by any god fearing person. It's all just trickery and real value is not created by trickery.
I've been enjoying web programming for 13 years, most especially the past 10 using BRL, which I wrote. If you're totally in love with ORM it's not for you, though. Basically it's SQL, HTML and as little in between as possible. If you like SQL and Scheme, you'll love BRL.
Screw 'hosting providers':-) If you're going to do anything serious, you need to be root on the machine yourself. You can get a dedicated box for under $100 a month. If that's too much initially, you can split it with a few friends - I did that for one machine, and it came to something like $20 a month, for a machine that I have root on and can do basically what I want with.
What you did those first three days was wrong; learning something from it is no excuse.

FYI, I will berate you for three days and then stop.
Your startup is not popular. Do you really want to know why?
eBay acquires StumbleUpon for $75 million.
So what exactly was the point you were trying to make?
David, a day without your comment is a bad day :)
A dedicated box for $100 per month? Can you tell me where coz that's a very good price.
I have had pretty good luck with these guys:

http://layeredtech.com/dedicated-servers/specials.php
Will justin.tv have an impact on computer science enrollment and if so in a positive or negative way?
Sure, justin.tv may encourage some people to enroll in computer science so that they can pursue a web 2.0 startup soon afterwards.

But seeing people working on computers for long periods of time might discourage people from enrolling in computer science.
LiveJournal Founder Brad Fitzpatrick "actually, little-known fact: I don't work on LJ, and haven't in a while"
SixApart bought LiveJournal over a year ago and it looks like the honeymoon period is over. SixApart also added additional advertising that Brad objected to. Now they're causing a "user revolt".
I don't need PDFs for anything. Why is that an important feature?

The only thing that really matters to me is storing lots of data on the client. Apollo already has a "Full file I/O API". What's missing for me is a Linux version so I can use it on my laptop, where I need it most. Adobe sucks for lagging Linux versions.
Interview with Eric Goldstein of Clipmarks
So maybe my startup idea isn't so far off?

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15030
It can be done: http://gigs.37signals.com/

In that case, they're using price ($100) to filter out people who don't care about quality.
slicehost.com. Dedicated box for 20/month. 70/month for 1GB.
I'm thinking it be different from a job board.. the 37sigs board has good jobs, but how can you be sure the people that apply are any good? Also, people there don't post projects so much as just generic posts to hire people. Interesting to consider the differences in the model...
We've got a GoDaddy dedicated host for $79/month. Bottom of the line model: I believe it's a 1.6GHz Celeron with 1G of RAM or something like that. It's perfect for straightening out the last few deployment issues and seeing if we can get traction before investing a lot in the site, though. We've got full root access to the box.
The current trend is not requiring email to signup. Anyone, including bots, can verify an email address so email is not a reliable qualifier anyway.
YC merges lines = bug. I think that was

1) PDF support

2) Online/offline APIs
"MVC takes a little while to wrap your brain around if you've only ever done things like PHP."

Good PHP code typically uses a MVC architecture as well. The model is the database, the controller consists of PHP files that take your $_GET and $_POST parameters and grab result sets out of the database, and the view is PHP files with no PHP tags besides your basic echoing, looping, and conditional HTML inclusion. Some people prefer to use a templating system like Smarty, which gives a prettier syntax but is conceptually the same.

Good examples are vBulletin, Phorum, and Pligg (well, the Pligg codebase has some other issues, but it's a MVC architecture). Bad examples might be stuff like PhotoPost that mashes all the code together. I highly suspect successful PHP websites like Flickr and FaceBook use a MVC architecture too, but I have no inside knowledge of their codebase.

Rails isn't that hard to learn if you've seen PHP code written like that. A Rails controller is like a collection of PHP entry pages: each method responds to a particular URL, and is responsible for populating dynamic content and rendering a template (which implicitly defaults to the method name). An ERB template is just like a PHP page, but with embedded Ruby instead of embedded PHP. An ActiveRecord object is like a PHP result set, except that changes to the object can be easily reflected back to the database. That's basically Rails in a nutshell.
Unless you've really got a Ruby fetish, there's just not much of a reason to use it.

If you want a similar language with similar productivity, Python gives you that and speed, Unicode support at the language level, and lots of libraries.

And in web frameworks alone you've got Django, Pylons, Turbogears, web.py, etc. Django has the community and 'push' that Rails does in the Ruby world, and Pylons feels a lot like Rails. So what are you waiting for? Checking them out can't hurt anything.
Active record is also use in Hibernate/nHibernate for java and .net as an o/r (object relational) mapper. There are a number of things someone can do to speed/ or tweek the way that data is accessed. From what I have seen about the web.

You want to design your functions in such a way that you are not doing anything complicated at first. This means that you should focus your API, webservice, or website around operations that perform a single DB call, and are linear in their search time, sometimes page-ation can help too. If you have an api that, for instance tries to find friends of friends, you are opening yourself up to disaster if you are going to do that in real time for a web service. You would be better off offering a service that gives you the friends of a user, pending you have the rights to see that users friends.

Something else we discovered was that if you are using MySQL on a different box in the cloud, your data access times are going to be SLOW, but if you have the DB running on a machine connected through a 1Gb connection you might be alright, but if you have MySQL running on the same dedicated box, then DB calls are almost as fast a calls to memory. Especially if you set up your db connection to connect through some sort of piped call or something similar in linux. At that point your call avoids going through your network interface and you skip the TCP/IP stack, which is a huge latency boost.
this is a great story straight from the founders. My key takeaway was its going to take longer than you thought.
And don't underestimate the legal/admin costs and time.
Not sure why they need 3,200 sq ft. of class A office space, they obviously have a big vision that investors are jazzed about
The world is full of crap marketing. That&#39;s your opportunity.
my number one responding add for my blog read:

"open a cold beer and read my blog"

this drew thousands of page views per day, and ended up costing thousands of dollars. it was an expensive experiment, but it taught me that relevance has nothing to do with advertising. according to google analytics not one of those visitors came back to my blog within a months time. Something else I noticed what how many web spiders were hitting my site very day. Today, out of the maybe 20 page views a day I get on my blog, 5-7 of them are google bot indexing my site.
The last minute request in this article is known as a "nibble". It is a standard negotiation trick.

There are a few solutions:

1. Say no.
2. Ask for a reciprocal concession.
3. Think of a win-win way to get them what they want.

Read "Bargaining for Advantage" for more: http://www.amazon.com/Bargaining-Advantage-Negotiation-Strategies-Reasonable/dp/0143036971/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5417622-0009467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180628056&sr=8-1
aplus.net has dedicated "value servers" for $50/mo. It's just last-generation hardware, but it's more than enough for me (for now).
What name are you submitting patches for AR under (I'm not finding any under your username here, http://dev.rubyonrails.org/search?q=keiretsu&wiki=on&changeset=on&ticket=on) ? I'd like to check some of them out to see what your doing. I'm assuming your not just complaining about a free open source project and that your actually doing something about it, since just complaining is pretty bad for your karma.
They might slow the development down but to what advantage?

Better design docs, better func spec, better docs, better quality.

If your startup has a room to grow, this is one option to go. You don't just hire all developers and hope your software doesn't have bugs.

Cowboy code a.l.a Agile (the bad Agile) is very dangerous and this is what some people warn these young startup people. The whole RoR (or Python/PHP, whatever) + Agile is like playing with fire; if you know how to stop it, you're in a great shape, if you don't, it'll burn your product faster than any other mistakes.
Why don't you try Code Igniter? Heard pretty good reviews about it. It's a framework for PHP.
Anybody know how to hack the Brightcove video (rss feed) onto my iPod (preferably just the sound!)?
It's no longer okay to complain? If I didn't like something, I'd prefer to complain and not use it than waste my time fixing something I find fundamentally flawed.
That reference link refers to Ruby 1.6.

You'll find more current info at http://www.ruby-doc.org
Good point. There's like no elaboration at all. Even if he doesn't want to use Twitter, he can use other companies out there.
I tried Python; didn't care for it. Something just didn't click.

Later on I tried Ruby, and it was a better fit for my head.

There are differences in the underlying design principles of Ruby and Python, and they can make a big difference in how well you internalize the language.

I also took a look at Django, and it struck me as astonishingly clunky compared to Rails and Nitro.

There are issues of aesthetics at play; I can't argue that my taste is right or wrong, but it certainly matters that I use a tool that aligns with it.
While Open Source, I think Ruby on Rails is still a commercial project. Just think about the buzz it generates for 37signals, which probably converts directly to revenue. So I don't see why somebody shouldn't have the right to "complain" about it, or have an opinion about it, or decide to use something else.

Maybe the 37signals don't give a damn about who is using their framework. That would also be an indicator against using it, because it would mean bad support. If they do care about who is using it, then they might also care about people's opinions about it. I think Open Source projects DO compete - just think about the submissions you request. If an open source project is not popular, nobody will submit patches or features for it, either. Then it won't grow, and eventually die.