skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few thoughts on this:

1) Cross platform availability is amazing. There's been a number of times when I've wished I had a game on PC that I bought on a console instead, and it's awesome to see this available now. I would have never predicted they'd offer something this nice, but they have. I'll probably purchase more PS3 games if they offer this, because it means I can play it on my choice of platform.

2) What about saves? It's nice to have it available to play for both, but if I can't continue where I left off, then this is somewhat less useful.

3) This is going to cause some issues in competitive FPSes if from cross platform play is enabled. Keyboard and mouse have been shown to general outperform controls (not to mention bots and hacks being easier to get on PC), and I wouldn't be surprised to see some outrage from console gamers.

4) And last, holy crap this is awesome I love Valve and Steam is just completely wonderful. </fanboy>
Comrades raise your pitchforks and take back the neighborhood
Yes. Most events would have 1-2 (out of maybe 50 or so that showed up) that were new and we'd ask them how they heard about it. Most was from word of mouth, a small amount from Facebook and I don't remember anyone saying it was because of a flyer.

Though one thing I don't remember asking was whether "Facebook" meant Facebook ads or the other strategy for promotion on Facebook: create an event, invite everyone and tell all those people to invite everyone else.
Well it's good to know I'm not the only one that found SICP difficult. I started it recently and many of the exercises are tough.
disagree - awareness may have different metrics but definitely is valuable
There weren't many games for a guitar controller until Guitar Hero came out. Didn't seem to hurt.

Video games are like $60 already, and even more with a custom controller bundle. I'm pretty sure if anyone actually wanted a smelly videogame they'd buy the bundle.
Software licensing option(s) question
New guy posting here but have been reading HN for 1 year. - I come from a legal and business background. I came here to find every article on how non-tech guys can start a company and it helped.<p>I recently had a passion to create my own startup which I did and had lead to additional opportunities for me. I've now been hired for busienss developement at a highly capable tech software company. I've been asked to develop business models for licensing different technologies we have created.<p>Is there someone that can send me a good reference or link about different kinds of licensing types and/or strategies? For example, what are the different types and when/why should they be used. Any help would be much appreciated.<p>Thanks in advance for your understanding and time.
> As far as I am aware Plastic Logic was never a product company, they were a technology company.

As I understand it, Plastic Logic started as a technology company, but as their investors poured more and more cash into the business were encouraged to become more of a product company. The desire to move up the value chain seems to be a reasonable ask, but it also appears that it meant that Plastic Logic never built a foundation to their business.

I'm awed by the technology, too. But I highly doubt any of the investors will make their money back.
Well it isn't a "false" argument it's an argument you disagree with. But your circumstantial evidence (that you click on ads) is no more or less compelling than his circumstantial evidence ("that he doesn't"). The question boils down to which of you more accurately represents the public at large.
i think you'll find more success with Facebook-like thinks if you Think about it less, by which i mean don't strategize or mull over it. try acting from your instincts on what feels right in your core. you'll find yourself taking more honest actions and appreciating how you spend your time, rather than consuming your mind with judgements on yourself and others. "wasting time" sounds to me like a product of taking actions without consulting your gut, like you're chained to your mind instead of your whole being. the fact that wasting time is so much in your vocabulary is like a secon meta level of focusing too much on your mind and strategizing instead of doing.

i haven't yet figured out the right words, but there's something important i'm trying to communicate. feedback welcome.
Scientists Create Real-Life Pac-Man Using Microorganisms
I stopped advertising on Facebook a couple of years ago because the ROI just wasn't there, but using Google's Display Network I can easily get to 1.75 million impressions pretty quickly with a bid of $0.50 CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

That means $875 could buy 1.75 million impressions.

Facebook might be more expensive, but even if it's $1 per thousand impressions, that's only $1,750.

I think the 1.75 million number in the article is incorrect.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: people aren't on Facebook to spend money. They're on there to see what they're friends are doing and communicate. If a friend posts a cool link in their feed, sure you'll get a few visitors following that link. But if the link is in an ad to the right, people just aren't interested.

This differs from certain aspects of the Google Display Network. For example, if you're on a Transformers fansite, you're probably there to geek out about anything Transformers. In that scenario, if you see a banner ad with a really cool Transformer's T-Shirt displayed on it, the ad almost becomes part of the content at that point. You're much more likely to click on it and actually be interested to see where it leads. (As opposed to accidental clicks, which makes up a huge percentage of cost).
The core feedback loop that would make that analogy mostly coherent doesn't exist. Facebook ads do not convince people to buy Facebook ads.

A better argument would be that Facebook's valuations are being driven by large amounts of investor money injected into the Zynga symbiote, who throws nine figures a year at Facebook to continue identifying new pieces of brain matter to feed to their mad cows. I don't think that is a great argument, both because Ponzi schemes are not the kind of racketeering one should be worried about if one is worried about there, and because I think that Zynga is probably sustainable. They may be the only business on Facebook whose advertising is sustainable... but that would, by itself, justify a gigantic valuation for Facebook. (Perhaps not any particular valuation.)
It would be great to have everything as one integrated experience. Perhaps you can have the calendar and services side-by-side (services on the left and calendar on the right). You can dynamically change available options as the user makes their selection(s). For example, if a user selects a date and time for which trimming isn't available, then that option is dimmed (also, tell the user why).

In lieu of such a setup, simply ask for services first (as you are doing now), then introduce the calendar.

The scheduling conflict seems like an edge case. Not sure what to tell you.
this is the most BS post ever... I know many people that made a fortune with facebook ads... Maybe his friends lost money with facebook ads but that does not mean it is a ponzi scheme or anything evil... learn to optimize and split test your ads to reduce your cost then come back with something smarter to say ...
Usenet is at least a decentralized thing owned by nobody and governed by a mixture of elected representatives and popular vote. Or was, back in the day. Therefore, usenet users weren't anybody's zombie army.
The anger, the sense of entitlement, and the overriding theme that I owe them
Vancouver, but I'm biased :)
One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.

Facebook doesn't have this feedback loop.
I'm starting to wonder if the persistent "no home button" rumor isn't coming from other device makers. It seems utterly unlike Apple.

And I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone else was floating their design concepts as Apple rumors, so that people would see them, talk about them and consider them through the prism of deference to Apple's design track record.
جلبريك 4.2.1
To me, it seems that Valve probably sees this as a great opportunity to try to steal some of the PS3s userbase for their PC/Mac steam platform. Anyone who has played an fps with a mouse/keyboard combo knows how superior it is to console controllers, and once all the regular ps3 gamers start getting thrashed by PC gamers on the cross-platform multiplayer they'll know it too.

Now that they can switch to the PC, install steam, and improve their own game without having to buy another copy, valve has given them a serious incentive to give steam a chance.

The only problem is that, based on what I've seen so far, the portal 2 multiplayer doesn't seem that competitive or that dependent on twitchy control responses. If Valve were to do this with the next Call of Duty (a difficult deal to negotiate to say the least) or perhaps a Counterstrike sequel, they'd probably get a lot more switchers.
More than banks its the credit card companies that could get short circuited. If itunes gives an option to associate a bank account with the account then you can pay direct to vendors and split the merchant fees with the place youre buying things.
Causality of Scalability
Goldman will soon be offering the public the ability to, basically, buy Facebook stock through an intermediary.

The author would like to make a similar investment, but make it a short, basically sell, bet that the value of the stock will go down, through an intermediary.
The technical terms you're looking for are demand generation vs demand fulfillment. The former is that pepsi ad where you suddenly feel thirsty, and the latter is the coupon in your spam snail mail. Facebook is the former and Google is the latter.

What you might not know is that demand generation spending is 10X demand fulfillment. You should definitely take that into account when assessing facebook.

Also, the reasons users like facebook is unrelated to their ad platform. I would say that alone makes it not a ponzi scheme.
If the NYT puts their logo on it, they have to take complete responsibility for its contents like they would an article written by in-house staff.
Relational Cloud: A Database Service for the Cloud [pdf]
Relevant: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6140/creating_dedicate...

There are real technical difficulties in enabling cross-platform play.
I for one am very happy you decided to write this article. I've been thinking on this exact question ever since I read your comment, and while I don't have answers yet, your article has given me a lot more food for thought.
You are simply listing all the internet services and arriving to the conclusion that people will use it because they already have a facebook account.

They will not replace Flickr. Anyone who cares anything about photo sharing or has slightest knowledge about sharing photography will not diminish the value of services like Flickr. First of all "just being able to view high resolution images" is not as easy as you think it is. Can Facebook truly scale providing support for it? Will people who share pictures on facebook even care for those things? Wouldn't you rather have ease of album creation over viewing exif data? Flickr and Facebook are different. I think Flickr cannot be replace.

They have the potential to become the internet ID but would you want to create a Facebook profile to have an ID? Many people would rather support things like OpenID. And would you want to login to sites using your Facebook ID, where the website could really scrape info about you?

They can compete with Skype just as GTalk is trying to or countless other messengers are trying to. But I am sure there are many who prefer Skype over these services in the offices and at home.
The background-image property is supported since old plain CSS1.
Few people seem to entertain options between Facebook addiction and account deletion. I have a simple practical use for it: easy access to acquaintances. Here's a recent story I can share.

I was on vacation in DC with friends, and I walked right past a girl I was certain was a friend of mine from college. I found her number on Facebook, sent her a text, and found out that it was her. We met up for drinks the next evening. Do we chat regularly as a result of having met up? No, but we enjoyed reminiscing and sharing our stories.
There's a difference between being antisocial and anti-Facebook. Don't conflate the two.
Golden Globes go geeky: Facebook movie, Big Bang Theory win
Node.js precompiled binaries for Windows with NPM
you mean you've run a successful ad campaign on Facebook?
Upsides of this - "before conception" means that it avoids the whole abortion debate.

Downsides of this - once the insurance companies realize this, if you score badly on the "might create offspring with medical problems" they'd figure out a way to charge you for doing such.

Weird angle - if you were looking to have kids, would a good score on something like this be worthy to put on a dating site?
How To Disrupt AND Save Academia. Hint: Use Startup Investors
Do you know that people are making money off Facebook ads for a fact?

I'm not necessarily agreeing with the author as much as I'm trying to point out the fallacy of believing every ad platform is effective. Your argument seems to be "if the ad is failing it must be the ad that's ineffective". But that logic only works if we're sure the platform itself is an effective ad delivery system.

This author's theory is that Facebook is not an effective ad delivery system and your comment doesn't really offer evidence to disprove that.
It's not clear exactly if there will actually be cross-platform play or if Valve simply decided to give PS3 gamers a free Steam copy, which they would have to play on a PC. It looks as though there will be some chat integration, though.
Advertisements work when they get people's attention. Google advertisements get people's attention because they're relevant to what the user is looking for, TV advertisements get people's attention because they take up the whole screen and are often funny or dramatic in themselves, Groupon emails get people's attention because they're actionable coupons that users really want to get, and "GOLDENPALACE.COM" painted on the back of a streaker at a professional sporting event gets people's attention because, hey, a streaker! Facebook ads are virtually hidden in a margin on the edge of the screen where users are more or less trained to ignore things.
Turns out that music really is intoxicating, after all
They run them on the bottom margin during soccer games. Not that anyone is making money from soccer broadcasting in the USA.
I agree with your first line.

I'm sceptical as to how scientific this study can be, when as you say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A measure of beauty changes over time and from culture to culture. I'm sure, if you selected a different data set of beautiful people you could prove the exact opposite.
Oddly enough I have the exact opposite take on it. My wife and I both don't have Facebook accounts, and while most of my friends also do not have accounts, many of my wife's friends do. These friends live in the same state as us, and while we don't live in the same city we still manage to get together frequently. In the last few years we have noticed quite the trend: everyone of these people on Facebook would do a double-take whenever we didn't hear about some large event in their life. They assume that because it was on their Wall, that everyone knew about it. They didn't think to _call_ all their friends to talk about the great news, they simply threw it up on their Wall without thought.

No longer do you have to think about your friends as individuals and how you're going to break news to them, or how they are going to react -- now you can simply throw up a general message and lose the individuality in a flood of responses.

The depersonalization of communication has been exacerbated by a number of different technologies (such as email), however Facebook has allowed us to perfect the art communication without soul.
I really loved the book, but I do think the title is misleading - for me, it was really "familiarize yourself with the concepts of seven languages in two or three weeks". It's clearly a marketing title, which is a bit off-putting, but a great introduction to the included languages.
So Yelp is valued in the billions?
SEO has diminishing returns. the basics don't take long and provide great results. trying to micro-optimize to jump up a spot or two takes tons of time and energy, and since there's some voodoo magic in the mix, might not yield positive results.
HeyWatch - AWS-Powered Video Encoding
No, buy a farm so that you can get in on the increase in subsidies.
So it's not obvious to me that Go computers will be at a world-class level in a shorter timeframe than 20 years.

Don't get me wrong: I agree with you 100% on this. I'd more likely go further and wager against that happening. Go has an absolutely silly branching factor, no solid method of pruning, and no straightforward position evaluation function. Material doesn't work nearly as well as it does in Chess, and the sheer amount of information contained in the board makes the "mean value of this board position in past grandmaster games" approach completely infeasible.

My only point is that researchers are, indeed, making progress. It's just very limited.
Full-text Search Workshop, 1/26 6:30pm at IndexTank (San Francisco)
pre-IPO, means a company that is not publicly traded on the open markets.

securitize (i assume) means to make their stock, or some portion of facebook liquid enough for buy/sell on a market. If there aren't people out there willing to buy or sell facebook that last part won't work.

Shorting something (in financial terms) is to bet against the product. For example, in normal publically traded stocks, you could pay someone to borrow their stocks of a company, sell the stocks off, wait a period of time (duration dependent on deal with original owner), expecting the stocks to loose value, then you rebuy the stocks, hopefully at a lower value. You make the difference between what the stocks started at, and what the ended at, minus the fee for borrowing the stocks.

Shorting stocks is tricky, really only works well over short timelines, and has unlimited downside (unlimited loss potential). For example, if you attempted to short google stock, and then the stock went to some astronomical value, you have to shell out the money to re-buy those google stock to give back to the original owner.
Dr. Ben Goldacre on the Nocebo Effect. (video/interesting/funny/short)
Why Do Smart People Do Such Dumb Things?
Special Delivery
I am not sure how this could work out for the people who live with the player.

Video images are pretty non-intrusive - if they annoy you, just dont look at the screen. For sound/music, the player could put headphones and annoy no one but himself. I have a hard time imagining some sort of headphones for the nose to limit the sensory input to the player only. And i definitely won't dare wearing anything that comes to my mind.

And yeah, I'm sure your SO would go nuts at the smell of burnt flesh and gasoline coming out of the gadget box waay faster than at the faint sound coming out of the headset.
Hacking for Health
Are you familiar with memcachedb? it's a berkleyDB back behind memcache with a lru key destruction in memcache that persists to disk using berkley db... you definitely don't need to re-invent the wheel here, you can possibly use innoDB as a key val store also if you can find the source/binaries for it....
Tracking study finds that kids don't learn much in college
Yes, and also on billboards circling the pitch, and on the players' shirts, and in the name of the stadium.
I'm not so sure about the thesis of the blog post, I haven't used org very much. But ReST is so much better than the dominant wiki syntaxes in the Ruby world, it's not even funny. ReST actually had significant effort put into it's design, whereas Markdown was a quick hack Gruber designed just for himself and "thrown over the fence". Even so, it's better than the other common one, textile.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/peps/pep-0287.html
What's with attacking the big boys at HN these days? First a wave of Google's-on-the-ropes, now Facebook?

Honestly it may be interesting news to hackers, but that's a lot of bandwidth that could be spent talking about startups. Just sayin'.
All-Seeing Blimp Could Be Afghanistan’s Biggest Brain
HTDP (How To Design Programs) and the Schemer series I highly recommend. The Schemers are really easy to read and HTDP goes into greater detail on many of the topics.

This was my order of execution in learning Scheme: Schemer series -> HTDP -> SICP
Decentralized bit torrent
I went to an article on Facebook which starts off by explicitly discussing the portrayal of events in a movie I haven't seen yet (and intend to).

How's that not a spoiler?
"TV channels also rely on subscribers, I believe."

Not necessarily - in the UK, ITV is free-to-air and entirely funded by advertising and sponsorship.
Heroku does have experimental Node support if anyone is interested:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/9/20/an_update_on_herok...

And Joyent's Node service is pretty good too:

https://no.de/
Jailed Pirate Party member becomes Tunisian government minister
Inside a somewhat breathy post there is a superb point about why "stick some advertising on it, that worked for Google" is not always a solution:

People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google. People go to Google to find something they need, possibly ready to buy, which a good percentage of the time can in fact be solved by someone's ad.
Awesome, thanks for these tips. I'm going to start working through SICP in about two weeks.

I love what Eli Bendersky did here to track his progess as he was going through the book: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/
More nonsensical and harmful Internet regulation in Europe
Groupon and its ilk also do VERY well on Facebook. If you buy that they can maintain the margins that they currently have, I'd wager they can contribute quite a bit to Facebook's bottom line.

Definitely NOT a ponzi scheme... Many companies with amazing revenue (and PROFIT) come back to Facebook ads again and again.
The Amiga had an m68k-series CPU, so Linux will run on it too, just as it will on old Macintoshes.

For more info, http://www.linux-m68k.org/
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you. A very basic SEO strategy might get you ranked for your basic brand related search terms but if you are in a niche with any real level of competition that is all you'll get. If you have a deep understanding of SEO and the ability to implement complex SEO strategies you hold the key to significantly improving the quantity and quality of your traffic. Moving from position 5 to position 1 is likely to increase your traffic for that term 5-10x.
Farmville & friends?
If I am not mistaken, Plastic Logic is licensing their technology for the Barnes and Nobles Nook, right? If thats the case, then having an end product such as 'Que' doesn't seem as profitable as making money on just licensing the IP.
> Is anyone actually planning on using standards compliant HTML5 in isolation, apart from corresponding advanced Javascript and CSS3 features?

Probably not, but I'm sure there's people planning to use advanced Javascript and CSS3 in HTML4 pages.