skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a place in the comments of the last article in this series where a guy called Tony says, "I have one word: Scheme." And chromatic replies, "I wonder if a language that sticks so closely to the lambda calculus is comprehensible to non-math geeks."

This kind of perspective (chromatic's) is a problem. The thing is, programming languages with the property that you can build powerful abstractions and still keep the program comprehensible and maintainable almost certainly will be closely coupled with some areas of mathematics. Things with such powerful and peculiar properties usually are.

It doesn't mean that the thing in question can only appeal to math geeks. One thing you can do with Scheme's abstraction power is build abstractions that do not seem especially mathematical.
It's the effect Kathy Sierra described: http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/loveandhate_7.jpg
You know you've been on news.yc too long when...someone submits a question asking if you're an automaton -- and other curious users mod it up.
"""So, if you are a student, don't get that summer job just to fill the summer."""

A huge regret of mine.
I believe this even consciously occurs to many employers. It's part of the reason why very few companies would be okay with you working 4 x 10hr hour weeks vs 5 x 8hr. Even 4 x 12hr wouldn't make them feel secure.

I suppose it's jealousy and greed. And this exists in almost every culture (from what I know) -- I hope things eventually change. Even Google is guilty of this form of "Evil".
Really great writeup, thanks for sharing. I, for one, certainly don't mind people submitting their own stuff.

This is a great topic for people who are still working for someone else. One issue I've had is that I'm basically incapable of treating anything like a "day job". I want work really hard and pour passion into anything I do. When I have a day job I tend to give my best energy to it, draining me from my own projects.
dn't s th bnft f rmvng vwls frm trlls psts.
Lovely idea but I'm not so keen on surviving by running up debt.
And WAY too much text all over your site. One simple command is all that people will read. If you want me to recommend a designer to you, I can do so.
you have a good point, it's much better to be working from passion than working for money. but when you're young, it's more about gaining experience. so the real question is "what should i do to gain the most relevant experience to prepare me for the future?"

summer jobs are a place where you get paid to learn. not only do you pick up technical skills, but you learn an assortment of soft skills (e.g. managing people, communicating, success metrics, company culture, etc). if working on your own projects will yield more relevant experience than at any summer job, then go out on your own.

in the end, summer vacation is long enough to learn a ridiculous amount, but short enough so that if you don't like it, you can grind through it.
Very 'graham-esque' ... Enjoyed it and logged in for the first time in ages to vote it up.
Comments on "UK tech inventors defeated by cash drought"
24/7 Real Media Bought by WPP for $649mm
karthik, please dont hijack this thread!
"drop his dependency on ActiveX _AND_ Java"

Yes, it is my top priority. But I have a day job to pay the bills, and no one else to help.

My business plan is that they will pay $5 to upgrade from Viewer to Editor.

Until it is in better shape, I am only asking for donations. Donate $5 helps people focus on a specific amount.
[deleted, dupe. Oops]
Actually, on a site like Facebook, this idea will obviously be challenged to work AS well as it would on a site like Stardoll or Gaia. That said, the poster is absolutely right, this model is making money hand over fist. For many of these sites, VCs are superfluous. Even Angels are superfluous!

I still say that the first kid to come out with a FULLY hardware accelerated 3D game world in the browser WITHOUT security warnings or downloaded plugins will be very rich indeed.
Actually, Google does give employees time to work on their own ideas. It's just that they own anything that comes out of that time. Arguable this is just as evil, so your point stands.

I think the solution may be to think of your job as buying you time. Set a baseline salary that'll let you live a simple life with adequate health & safety. For a single guy, that's about $20K/year (= grad student wages); for a married guy with a couple kids, about $40K. If that seems low, remember that 50% of America lives on that.

Then take the difference between your actual salary and your cost of living, and think of it as time. For example, if you graduate with a $60K/year job, set aside 2/3 of your salary as savings, and every hour you work is buying you 2 hours of freedom. When you have enough time saved up to accomplish what you want, quit and "spend" it.

For example, I'm currently saving about 2 hours of time for every hour I work. I'm looking to quit after slightly more than 2 years at my job (that'll be another 6 months or so), at which point I'll have 4-5 years saved up.

I met an innkeeper in Alaska who followed this strategy. He and his wife decided when they got out of college that they'd live like grad students. They worked in the computer field. After 15 years, they each quit their jobs, bought a sailboat, and sailed around the world with their son, stopping at every port they came into. They finally settled in Seward, Alaska (pop. 3000), bought an old building, and fixed it up as an inn.
Yeah I looked at your FAQ and I personally like that language a lot more.

Sorry if I came off harsh about it. Nothing about what you're doing or you seems dishonest or untrustworthy.
I don't see any reason to assume that Jaiku will scale better than Twitter a priori.

I would hope it's running more reliably than Twitter know since it has only a fraction of the users.
Perhaps you could only track specific sites? My digg/reddit/slashdot/blog traffic is already quite public, so thats the kind of stuff I wouldn't worry about. I'm not totally sure if that kind of approach would limit you too much. I'm thinking something like the way ad blocking software has large lists of ad servers, etc.
What's up with the images with white backgrounds on a blue webpage. And the old school style tables.
Personally I think virtual gifts is a dangerous business model. In some scenarios it can work, but you need a really good reasons to create artificial scarcity or else you'll piss people off and be very vunerable to competition.

Raise your hand if paying $2 to download a 200k ringtone makes you happy. How fast would that business model disappear if people were able to upload whatever they wanted from their PC or iPod?

Making money from virtual property is a great idea, but it can definitely "go against the flow" just like ads. You have to be really careful to only charge for things that people will buy because they want to pay for them.
New Google Uber Search -- I like it
It's easy to get to your Docs and Calendar from almost any page, so I envision more non-technical people using those features and recommending them to their friends.
"We will also share revenues with anyone who can help us by implementing improvements ...
Fair Notice: There is no guarantee that revenues will be generated. Many internet companies never generate revenue."

I suggest that Juwo should try to gain traction first before even thinking about a revenue sharing model with their users.
It's a good example of how to handle a PR crisis. If your site gets popular enough, you will face one. The natural reaction of an executive is usually one of two:

1.) Ignore the problem, eg. Intel with the Pentium bug.

2.) Blame the user, eg. most customer service reps nowadays.

Stewart didn't do either of these - he took full responsiblility, explained why the action was taken (no matter how misguided), and enacted policies to prevent it from happening again. And you can see that the result is even more customer loyalty.

We had several of these crises situations when I was at FictionAlley. They're much more difficult to handle than they seem from the outside, because there are always considerations that your users don't see (legal issues, other constituencies, privacy considerations). Users really appreciate you being honest with them, though, and if you make a good-faith effort to communicate what you can without defensiveness, you'll usually get their understanding if not their support.

Also, a random observation - these crises always seem to occur when the people in charge are away. I remember having one erupt right after my laptop had died and having to deal with it all from the university computer labs, and then another blew up while the site owner was returning from her brother-in-law's funeral.
With Friendster, they got progressively more complicated the more users they got. On the other hand, MySpace was able to grow without any problems because they had a much simpler setup.

The question to ask is whether a competitor can do something better. I don't use twitter, but it sounds like any competitor would also have to be doing a similar number of database queries.

So, any competitor would still have to go through what twitter has, so twitter is still ahead by now focusing on the scalability.

Twitter has to move people to a non-rails platform as soon as possible. The whole point of rails or visual basic 6 is to develop a prototype really quickly and change your ideas to find the one that works. If the problem now is the speed, just pretend you're a competitor and do what the competitor would do in your situation. A competitor wouldn't be recreating the failed versions of Twitter; they would just copy the current idea in C or whatever the fastest method is, since the business idea and execution is more valuable now than flexibility, now that the business idea has been discovered and twitter doesn't have to spend time making so much changes. Except, Visual Basic 6 programs are very fast on modern computers, and they run on each user's computer separately, so you wouldn't want to rewrite them for Windows if it already exists and works.
isn't SMS pricing controlled by carriers?
Thanks. It would be nice if the site allowed comments to be submitted along with a URL so that readers know what they're meant to get from the article.
Is Web 2.0 Really About the Users? ( Some Truemors Bashing Involved)
I was actually going to post a discussion prior to reading this article.

I have been reading the headlines that have come from Truemors via RSS on iGoogle. Anyways, when I added it, I thought that maybe I could figure it out. I started off confused and have remained confused.

I don't feel anything about the site at this time. I am neutral as I can be, though for some reason, the concept interests me. Anybody else?
http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1077/members/3290974/
http://bluwiki.com/go/Sam_Odio

Google says Sam is real.
I think you're right and that is a great strategy. I know programmer who works 6 months in a major world city (it varies) then spends 6 months in Missouri at his cabin on a lake. He's also slowly bought quite a bit of realestate as his nest egg.

Where's your Buying Your Freedom As a Modern Day Wage Slave essay? ;-)
nice url: http://www.where.com/

I wonder how much they paid for that...
Why not start one when you are 10?

Seriously though, I started my first one when I was 11 -- and no, it was not a lemonade stand ;). Profitable too.
A very bad idea. I was shortly in the commercial software market, and nobody pays $5. It's too small to make it worth the bother of bringing out your credit card. Price $20 or above, else you won't have sales.
How many page views does a website need to produce a month before it can get advertisers?
Last month when my startup signed up our first groups we did about 25,000 page views, and this month we're on track to do about 50,000. My current average pages viewed per visitor ranges between 20 and 30, but what I don't know is how many page views does a website need to produce a month before it can get advertisers?
Thanks... it's probably so 'graham-esque' because I have been rereading his essays lately for mental fortification.
The thing is, advertisers will pay a lot to be on google's network because their ads can sit next to google search results. AdSense will always be exactly as competitive as google wants it to be, since they have the money.
It's the connections, not the age, that counts
Meet the inventor of the mouse wheel
I agree with the stuff about summer jobs, as I had a few totally useless ones in college (2000-2004).

However I had no idea what else I could be doing. I didn't realize that you could make a decent web application and attract users, for instance. The problem was that I didn't have any friends or mentors to guide me in the right direction.

To the people who are working on their startups full time now - how much money are you spending in living expenses per month?
Do you hate it when a company gets lots of press coverage for a feature that can be implemented and tested in less than an hour?
of course it is...but a service which sends 1.000 or more messages, can negotiate a good price for the sms. For example let's say 4 cents. If you charge the publishers 4 cents for each ad, you'll be able to pay for the messages. If you negotiate a better price or charge more for the ads, you'll make extra cash ;)
Advertising on mobile phones is a really hot topic these days. But most of the implemented solutions are like this: you agree with the service to receive advertising messages, and you get something in return. This is not very efficient because the users can delete the messages without even opening them. I'll give more details in a dedicated article so stay tunned.
How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days
hey rms, thanks for thinking of me - I appreciate it!

I have a comparative analysis matrix - including veotag.

From it, Here are some ways IMHO juwo is better:

1) veotag can annotate only text even though they claim otherwise on the front page. see http://www.veotag.com/whatis/?page=5

juwo can annotate with Text, voice, audio, video, links and documents.

Other reasons:
2) Veotag has a subset of juwos functionality.
3) Veotag is tied to a single AV clip.
4) It cannot be used outside of broadcasts.
5) Not a standalone productivity tool.
6) Limited privacy.

7) Can veotag Share and edit indexes
and annotations in a community? Limited. Share link to index. No concept of overlay.

8) Can veotag have Multiple uses for application? Not now. (skip to important parts of a single clip and see titles and notes)
please see my reply above - to rms.
comparing veotag with juwo.
I'll wait until I actually have my freedom. ;-) Advice falls rather flat when the advisor is still working his tail off with both a day job and a startup.
Becoming an entrepreneur: What qualities do I need?
Oh, that's my fault: I could've posted a comment on it immediately after submitting. I've done that with a couple other submissions that weren't immediately obvious. For this one, it was late at night, I wanted to get some hacking done on my startup, and I was curious if people would understand the point without an explanation. Evidently not. Mea culpa.
Here is my business model:

NP will have two versions: The Editor and the Viewer. This is similar to Adobe Acrobat, which has the Publisher and the Reader. The Editor is full featured. For business users, a license fee of $150 will be charged for the Editor. It will not display advertisements.The Viewer has restricted functionality. It cannot create, nor add to the juwo indexes. It can only annotate or enrich existing indexes and share them.

The Viewer is free. It will carry advertisements that will be served dynamically on the landing page by a 3rd party advertisement server. Home users can upgrade the Viewer to the Editor for an online payment of $5. However it will still show advertisements.

Revenues are from three tracks:

License fee (free)

Consumer paying to upgrade from Viewer to Editor.

Banner advertisements ( e.g. Google Adsense)

Revenues per AV site = license fee + number of AV downloads percent upgrading to editor upgrade fee + revenue from banner advt.

see VC Fred Wilson's blog for calculation of banner advt. revenues for youtube.com which had 100M downloads per day and 19.8M unique visitors in June 2006. ($420K per day, 660K unique)

for a site with a free juwo license and only 1% of youtube's traffic. i.e. 1 million downloads

with only 1% upgrading, can potentially make $1.65M per year.

Unfortunately, right now all that is simply castles in the air.
I am not a web designer. No money to hire one. I simply used a template from Dreamweaver. Isnt it pretty? with the sea.

The flame is juwo's logo.
Can you please suggest how I should get users? Even better can you get me some? I will pay a percentage of all donations to you.
What are the top programming languages? The fastest growing?
I promised God that when I started working on juwo it would be used for His glory and for my profit, and He gave me the subsequent ideas to make it stronger. So I am going to keep my end of the deal.
Did you actually play the demo? Why hasnt anyone actually played the demos?

Everyone is simply commenting on the website.
50k pageviews a month will not draw too much attention unless you are in a specific niche and someone notices you.

You can always throw up some google ads in the meantime. If you have good cpm/ctr numbers from google it will help.
Sorry. I was thinking of Paul Buchheit. Isnt he part of YC?

I am not "demanding" they help me. It was simply an observation.

Frankly, I dont need their help in order to succeed. :)

Though I am grateful to PG for this forum, news.YC

I am waiting on Someone who is greater than all of them put together, to help me.
It's fascinating to see the synergy between the Microsoft Office division and the Hardware division in pushing this revolution. I guess MSFT gets it right sometimes.
Sam Odio is a Scam Artist - Trying to Sell Dinars?
Lean Development
depends on how you're selling the ads, who you're selling them to, and (especially) visitor demographics.
I'm sorry Sam but this is really shady of you. I know you have some semi-legit businesses like computer repair and selling used textbooks, but this is in the snake oil range. A hint of the sketchiness on his site is the comment, "Bookmark this page, otherwise you will not be able to return to these prices at a later time."

Haha, right Sam. Very smart.

For starters, you can all visit http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic and see the actual conversion rate. It's current float rate is 1 US Dollar (USD) = 1,201.40 Iraqi Dinar (IQD).

His package for 5,000,000 Dinars comes out to $5499 which translates to 909.26 IQD per 1 USD. Sounds like Sam Odio is royally screwing people on that - basically giving you about 75% of what you deserve.

Furthermore, Sam actually ships the Dinar's too you. That's really shady. Real currency investors rarely take hold of any physical holdings.

Basically, he's selling snakeoil.
Sam Odio is a scam artist. He's trying to sell Iraqi Dinars - see the full post at http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22812

How shady is that?
You should stop because Sam is one sketchy person and it decreases the credibility of whatever you are saying.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22812
The demo needs to be simpler to access.

People are just not going to go through download/installation/browser configuration hoops.

So you've got to figure out how to make the demos run without "Java 1.5.X" (but not 1.6) on "Windows XP", using "only Windows Media Player".

That requirement list is just too restrictive.
Bah. Fooling google into my existence is AI 101. It only took a week for trevor to program lifelike profile creation capabilities into me.

Programming my witty sense of humor, however, is taking longer. He's been working on it for the last 6 years; and my jokes still fall flat.
Hmm 5 Million dinars are a lot cheaper at http://www.gidassociates.com/

Only $4200 here.

Sam claims they have a very rigorous "authentication process". Right. He sits in his dorm counting how many suckers he can find. That's the authentication process.
To be honest, I say well done to their PR team. If you get can get great coverage with a simple piece of functionality then that's dream stuff! Do you have specific examples of this?
VB was my first programming language (I was 15 at the time) it is a good way to produce results fast and learn about conditional statements, loops and functions. Later, I switched to C and C++.
I know some are based off unique visitors such as tribal fusion (min 2k visitors)
thats per day
It happens all the time. See for example the "Google Navigation Bar":

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/16/lots-of-product-announcements-at-google-today/#comments

It's really depressing that the press could get excited over such things.
The flame reminds me of the evil eye from the Lord of the Rings.
So juwo is better than veotag, yet veotag has 750 k.

You need to take a page out of their book and communicate that better, otherwise you're going to be stuck here forever.

BTW, if people in this crowd (alpha geeks, generally smarter than your average bear) don't get it, you are really going to have trouble reaching out to a wider audience.
See, juwo, I + another YC user + the friggin w3 organization say the same thing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17339
& parents of this link, plus many more.
You can't believe everything you read on the internets.
right, if advertising revenue greater than cost of SMS, then there's potential for profit. that part is easy to get.

but i still don't understand technically how such a transaction would work. how will you get a carrier to not charge me when i send SMS to someone? where is it that you step in the process? will i need to SMS you, and then it parses the number and message, and sends from you to my intended recipient?
the carrier will charge for the sms. but the user won't pay for sending the sms. I/my service will pay for the sms. The money will come from those who'll want to insert ad messages.
It's more like a two week rule. We give groups we invite to interviews all the deal terms two weeks in advance. So when we tell them we want to fund them, we expect them to have already made up their minds if they want to accept.
Using Lean methodology for Software development is a great approach, but implementing it with cards and whiteboards we've found a bit hopeless. To do it right, an integrated system that manages priorities and processes is needed that is virtually transparent in its ease of use. That's why we're making (shameless plug) StreamFocus.
Has marketing and customer service become a game of fine print and exceptions?
Hate? No. Envious? Yes.

That's just a sign of being out-sold. Bravo for the PR team that leveraged an idea.
It would have been pretty hard to avoid making that remark Steven Levy quoted. He hung out at YC over several months and I probably had 10 different conversations with him. It's hard to remain guarded for so long. How was I to know this would be the sentence that stuck in his head?
Sam: There's a lot of haters at the top huh?
Ok, you win. I shall change the "Click here" for the demos to Download and Run
I'd go with AdSense to start -- and/or maybe some others.

Does anyone know if Google cares if you run other networks' ads on the same page as AdSense ads? I think I've seen people do this.