skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Net Profits.

Seriously, the bottom line is the only one that really makes sense, every other metric that you track you track to analyze its effect on your net profits. If a decision impacts your bottom line in a negative way look at it long and hard if there is a way to modify is to that the damage is mitigated and if a decision impacts the bottom line in a positive way (and it's legal and matches your sense of ethics) then by all means go for it.

Almost everything you do impacts the bottom line in a measurable way.
Tried to install this and it doesn't really work. Cloud9 looks _much_ more mature, and I like that the server is also written in JS.

Development is definitely going online, but I doubt that Eclipse will have a significant part in this transformation.
i doubt they would kick anyone out--the site would just close.

sites like stackoverflow are possible because hosting costs are cheaper than advertising. even as ad profit per user decreases, hosting costs per user decrease as well.

similarly, i wouldn't underestimate the value (to the advertisers) of impression advertising--the masses of people who watch TV and click facebook all day define pop culture by these impressions.
Damn, well caught. I normally check the dates but didn't notice this was already a year old. Sorry for the old dupe. Wonder if it's now actually available anywhere. The description of this stuff is almost unbelievable and I wonder if they have found any downsides to it in the past year.
Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook? (Infographic)
He's probably referring to the last paragraph of this: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
The second problem doesn't use the word "ascending".
Par for the course, as far as modern generations go.
The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of wifi worries me, especially with stuff like this and "cellular" phones.

The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of CRT screens worries me, especially with stuff like this and "digital" displays.

The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of GMO food worries me...

The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of inert silicone gel breast implants worries me...

Someone over 30 can fill in earlier examples: "The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of $NEW_TECHNOLOGY_I_DONT_UNDERSTAND worries me. I'd just hate to find out 20 years down the road that $NEW_TECHNOLOGY was slowly killing us. "
I had that essay in mind when I wrote that comment. I agree with Paul, to an extent. It certainly does make economic sense both for individual founders, and for angels, to view entrepreneurship as a ~3 year endeavour, with the exit strategy being acquisition or bust. I don't, however, think it's ideal for the market as a whole. Google is only around because Yahoo refused to give Larry and Sergey $1M for it, so they decided to see what they could make of the endeavour. Yet Google's impact on the tech world and marketplace has been staggering. What would have happened if eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, and Youtube had all sold to Microsoft?

I don't have a problem with people launching websites with the intention of selling them in a couple years, but I do dislike the notion that that is what constitutes successful entrepreneurship. The tech world needs its Googles and Facebooks, which means we need entrepreneurs with vision who are willing to stick with it for the long haul.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how not playing video games or watching TV is a creative constraint. I can see it helping with time management, but I don't see how it directly helps you improvise. Also, TV is in a golden age right now. If I had to pick, I'd take the quality episodic TV shows coming out of HBO, Showtime and the like over movies anyday.
I usually don't write the type of code to find users within two degrees, so I thought it'd be a fun exercise in my fun-time language, Python.

And did you mean users instead of friends? If a user is already a friend with someone, that means they can only be one degree away.

Here's what I came up with. Is this about right?

# Set up a mock DB holding users and relationships.
# 1 is 1 degree from 2, 5 and 6
# 1 is 2 degrees from 3, 4, 6
# 1 is 3 degrees from 7 and 8
# 1 is 4 degrees from 7 and 8
people_store = [''] #0 -- put blank in 0 so we can have a one-based list.
people_store.append([2,5,6]) #1
people_store.append([1,3]) #2
people_store.append([2,4,6]) #3
people_store.append([3,6,7,8]) #4
people_store.append([1]) #5
people_store.append([1,3,4]) #6
people_store.append([4,8]) #7
people_store.append([4,7,9]) #8
people_store.append([8]) #9

def find_users_within_x_degrees(user_id, degrees):
"""Given a user ID, find other users within two degrees."""

# Users that are within the degree range.
# Start by adding current user's friends (1 degree).
users_within_range = set(people_store[user_id])

# Keep track of user IDs that have been checked.
checked_ids = set()

# Start at 2, because we have already handled 1 degree above.
for degree in range(2, degrees+1):
# Get other users IDs and get their friends. Only do so for users we haven't checked.
for other_user_id in users_within_range.difference(checked_ids):
checked_ids.add(other_user_id)

# Add other user's friends.
users_within_range.update(people_store[other_user_id])

# Because friendships are reciprocal, if the number of degrees is > 1, the requested user_id will be in the set, and should be removed.
if degrees > 1:
users_within_range.remove(user_id)

return users_within_range
I mostly agree. I don't think anyone would defend this woman's maturity level but it is her personal twitter account. She clearly wasn't representing the company and MG's been posting non-stop attacks on AT&T since the Verizon announcement. It's almost like he was trying to goad someone higher up at AT&T but when that failed he settled for a low level support rep.

Getting a young mother fired to take a cheap shot at AT&T is certainly not what I consider classy.
So you reckon dump google app engine and get going first?
No worries, it's really cool stuff. I haven't heard of any further developments yet.
It depends. If the advertising is interesting enough, I will click it. For me, it is about once in two months that something interesting catches my eye
Coolest spacecraft ever in orbit around L2 [2009]
Google's (core) ad business has less in common with traditional media advertising, and more in common with paying the store to put your product in a special display. They realized that people were using their search engine as a big storefront, and adapted the same basic model.
Twitter is not your friend.
Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform Orchard just hit version 1.0
I wonder how many people click ads for ideological reasons or out of a feeling of sympathy for the person who runs the site, rather than a need for the product advertised.

It would also be interesting to see ad clicking behavior broken down by socioeconomic status and education level.
Would you mind expanding on what other sources you're using? I ask in part because I'm taking the first steps on something similar (trying to aggregate product data from various sources). My email is in my profile if you'd prefer to discuss it there.
So, who wants to form a team to get that 1st place prize?
> Now, even though the new application is basically anonymous, I still occasionally glance at the messages that are posted — basically as a QA measure, to make sure that it's working correctly and nobody's posted anything that has broken anything.

dear author: I'm sure your privacy policy exempts you from any wrongdoing, but dude, wtf. You're also probably in violation of facebook's terms: "For all other data obtained through use of the Facebook API, you must obtain explicit consent from the user who provided the data to us before using it for any purpose other than displaying it back to the user on your application." [1]

[1] http://developers.facebook.com/policy/
It's Chua (蔡), not Chau. Thanks.
Relative to other Rails resources available (like the amazing Railstutorial.org by Mike Hartl) it's very expensive. Relative to a university course, not so much. If the format is one in which students can get one-on-one feedback from the instructor then it's definitely worth it. If not, I'd pass.
I believe that 8% of visitors account for 85% of clicks metric is for display advertising, if I remember correctly.

So you need to define what types of ads your talking about.
It's somewhat true. If you listen to Barry Schwartz's TED talk "the paradox of choice," he cites a few studies that show if you give a consumer too many choices, there's a better chance they won't buy anything at all. I think that's a definite advantage Apple has had over its competitors: the product lines are clear and simple.

link to talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
I'm used to living in Canada where customer service is a joke, but Verizon customer service is unreal! I've never had to wait more than 2 minutes to speak to someone, and they actively look for ways to discount my bill when I call in.
True - there's nothing exactly like www::mechanize, but really, you can usually write what you want with scrapy, beautifulsoup, html5lib, any of the tree/xpath implementations, etc. (I know, because I did, writing a quick form processor + wrapper for common functions in <1k lines for my page scraping needs)

You will rarely find an exact port of some other foreign library that will work exactly like you expected the original to work. That goes both ways - for example there's loads of async frameworks in python, but it's really hard to find a good one in perl. Sure - there's AnyEvent and POE, but they're just bizarre monsters compared to much cleaner simple solutions like diesel. There's Coro... but that's a longer topic than I'm willing to discuss here ;)
Agreed that the bottom line is the most fundamental, but depending upon your path to monetization, your net profits may be zero for quite some time. For us, the metrics that matter most are acquisition and engagement, as well as measuring potential paths to revenue (clicks on mock ads, mock deals, etc).

Plus, net profits is quite a large forest. You still need to see the trees.
Only if it's a competitors advert or something I'm actually interested in.
Tell HN: First sale (I hope it was the hardest)
I quietly launched Swappa, a marketplace for used Android devices, about a month ago. A buyer and seller connected for the very first sale this afternoon... a used Motorola Droid now has a new home thanks to Swappa.

(I really hope the first sale was the hardest.)

Thanks, HN. I've learned a lot here.
Zynga Acquires Flock Browser
You might want to change the name to something that is not already the common name of an illegal drug. I assumed before clicking that your business was putting on raves or selling glowsticks or something.
A very rational intelligent species might go out of their way to exterminate other intelligent species. The logic goes something like this:
The resources of the galaxy may seem vast, but on a long enough timescale they are finite and will eventually become scarce. On such a long timescale, any other intelligent species has the potential to compete with us for those resources. If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

The Greg Bear novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars dealt with this scenario.
> If I came to computers as a 14-year-old given an iPhone or iPad instead of a PET, I probably would have played with the thing for a few months and moved on. I'd never have experienced the beauty and creativity of crafting a piece of software

Xcode is free to download and use (you have to pay $99 to deploy your app but not to develop it). I have been learning Objective C for the past month, and I fail to see how is it that I am not experiencing "the beauty and creativity of crafting a piece of software."

Try it. I have used Visual Studio back in the day (before .NET, so I can't compare to today's Visual Studio), but Cocoa made me understand design patterns such as MVC and Delegate with much less pain and with much more pleasure than I would have had in some other framework that does not rely on them to such an extent.

I have been a tinkerer myself. I have been lucky enough to have my own little chemistry lab at my house when I was 10. I used Linux since 2003, and my daily living depends on it even now (at work I program software that runs on Linux servers). I understand where you're coming from. But I have also understood the other point of view, namely that the computer is just a tool, and not an end goal in itself, and as a tool it should just work, even if it means making some concessions to users who don't care about tinkering.

Just because you tinkered with electronic components, and today's hardware is more integrated, preventing you from doing that, doesn't mean that there isn't something else to tinker with. Also, you can still tinker with the iPhone -- as a photographer it made incredibly happy to find out that somebody had written a lightmeter app for the iPhone which uses the built-in camera to measure the available light so you could then enter those settings to fire up a manual film SLR from the 1970s. Just because today's tinkering is different from yesterdays doesn't mean it disappeared (or that yesterday's tinkerers are somehow inherently superior to today's).
Nexus One was released Jan. 5 2010 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One

iPhone 3G was released Jun. 9 2008 -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone_3g

How are you doing your math?
Ask HN: Python/Javascript dev coming to SF, any startups looking for help?
I will be in SF from the 17th thru 21st to check out the city more before I make the final decision to move away from KC. While there I would like to meet with any startups looking for Python developers.<p>If anyone is interested I can pass along a resume/details and see if we can meet up. My email is unhappyrobot@gmail.com.
This is OT, but I'm surprised that AT&T hasn't come up with some way to automatically detect that your call has been dropped. It's not a trivial problem with solutions that are prone to exploitation, but it'd be a step in making customers happy. Your bill would have something at the top that says something like, "We noticed that we dropped 2 of your calls this month and are terribly sorry. We're going to credit you $X for the trouble. Thanks for staying with our company, and we value your business".

As it is, the best they came up with was an app where you could complain.

Imagine a mobile company that could detect that they had really bad coverage where you lived, and directed you to a competitor with better coverage. Wouldn't that inspire confidence and loyalty? That they're there to provide a great service?
there has been some discussion about how google has incentive to lead people to spammy sites, because people click the adds. as people get better at the internet, spammy per-click adds become less profitable.

i speculate that advertisers are over-paying for per-click adds, and as that market settles, google will no longer have incentive to send people to spam pages, and make more money by sending people to legitimate sites with clean adds.
eh, I would bet you five bucks that I have much lower per customer margins than AT&T, and I'm fairly certain that giving a refund to 'every crazy person' is by far the best business decision.

First off, it means that you don't wear down your customer service representatives dealing with people who can't be helped. This person has been 'worn down' and is probably not going to be very helpful to your customers at all. It's a common thing; customer service is a hard job. It pays poorly and offers few opportunities for advancement. If you keep customers who can't be helped around, your customer service people often spend the majority of their time on people who can not be helped, something that would be incredibly frustrating even if the job paid okay and had reasonable opportunities for advancement.

Secondarily, even if the person still feels like you gave them poor service, the 'at least I got a refund' quite often mollifies them to the point of not complaining (or at least complaining less) in public. I mean, I don't want to let myself be held hostage by public complaints; some people will complain no matter what you do. But, I think that a refund when a customer is unsatisfied is quite often the easiest, most polite, and in the end, cheapest way to fire a customer who needs firing.
The only adverts I've ever clicked are The Deck adverts.
Dear Mr. Einstein
How to raise your social status
My future career may depend on what's on my LinkedIn profile. It terrifies me to think of logging in to a 'game' with my LinkedIn ID.
I click on search engine ads sometimes, usually when I'm looking to buy something.

But display ads? Only by accident.
I would think "out of principle" would matter too. I know multiple people who refuse to click adverts, not because they're uninterested, but because they "hate" adverts. Never because they never like anything and never because they refuse are different, although I guess they don't matter too much to the advertisers/publishers, but it'd be an interesting metric.
The lack of understanding about possible adverse effects of asbestos worries me...

Oh wait, it is actually pretty nasty stuff. Now, while the "20 years down the road" thing is a bit silly, a lack of understanding about potential adverse effects is a reason to investigate further, not to dismiss anyone who's cautious about it as paranoid.
I'm a huge of the series, I've read them all.

The series is called Lensman

http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Lensmen-Triplanetary-Lensma...
This is why I always find it sad that people are averse to learning about "abstract, impractical" concepts like monads. Monads are abstract, but they are far from impractical: they solve problems which you are already encountering, and even already identifying as problems.

The best solution would be to add monadic syntax to javascript. You would get CPS, coroutines, error propagation, early failure, and several other capabilities all using the same syntax. Shit like generators or coroutines are just ad-hoc special-cased versions.
Story about something someone said on quora, story about something someone said on twitter, story about a tweet in response to a story about someone calling me fat on facebook, story about an idea seen in the comment section on hacker news, story trashing a competitor.

There, I saved you a few days of reading TechCrunch.
Having a fragmented standard or no standard at all is usually better than having a very bad one. People can always encode to multiple file types if they want to serve the increasingly large audience that doesn't support h.264.

And, BTW, Android phones just passed their iOS competitors, so, it doesn't matter how popular they will be, Android devices will be more popular. If Google decides they won't support h.264, it will be a serious hit.
Expensive compared to what? (This is a six-week instructor-led course.)

If your time is more valuable than your money, you could definitely slog through a book or whatever to learn this. The idea with a class is to be able to ask questions and get answers quickly, and to reinforce what you're learning in the structure of a class.
This is not that evil given the fact that she called ATT customers horrible things a.k.a "Crazies", but this is rather personal post. These type of personal posts/opinions are appearing more and more in TC, instead of publishing them on TC these authors should post them on their personal blogs.
>> FYI this is referring only to display ads. Also, I'd take this with a grain of salt since the study itself states that view-through impacts are not to be ignored.

Actually, a different study than the one linked by the OP states this. A study they are careful not to elaborate upon in this press release. I worked for StarCom 1997-2000 in their new & shiny online advertising group. StarCom is heavily incented to produce research proving the effectiveness of all types of advertising. And they own a much larger share of online display advertising than they do of paid search engine marketing. I can't prove that their current research is biased. But when I worked there, we were quite careful to present our results in the best possible light. For example, we ran a very large banner ad campaign for a Proctor & Gamble product. There were two reasonable ways to determine if it was effective: Ask an online panel if the recalled seeing the banner ads in question. Or look at the actual grocery store / drug store sales data to see if the banner campaign caused any lift in sales. The first argued that the millions spent on this campaign produced OK brand awareness; the second demonstrated that it did nothing to move the product. Guess which of these two results went into our sales and marketing materials and which was omitted.
The title is misleading. The 8% are probably fairly normal.

The headline should read "92% of people hardly ever click on ads". Much less surprising.
Thank you!

I am going to try this out at work where I am forced to use a windows desktop.
> Can you name a language beside assembly, c and (in some cases) c++ that executes faster than java, in any significant way in anything but very uncommon circumstances?

The VM is great, but the Java community's "best practices" are insanely stupid. It doesn't really matter how fast your VM is when web requests are going through a couple dozen filters or getting serialized/deserialized to XML.
Sure. Occam's razor just means that the most simple explaination is the most likely.

For example, a car accident could be caused by a driver attempting to SMS while driving, or an extraterrestrial life form stealing the drivers' thoughts and consciousness temporarily.

Occam's razor would suggest that the simplest explaination (in this case, texting) is more likely to be the correct explaination, rather than a more complicated (though technically still possible) explaination.

Occam's razor has its place in science (where it consistently holds true), but also applies to things like conspiracy theories.
Build a CMS, no forms allowed.
I do. If I visit an anime fansub site or tracker, sometimes I click on the ads just to help the guys to pay their hosting or to say 'thanks for your effort', without actually wiring them some money from my own pocket.
All ads, across the board. I think that's actually more interesting because 'display ads' is a term that refers to more traditional forms of online advertising and I'd like to include keyword ads and all other forms in there as well, anything that entices you to click on it and that has been placed there for a third party is fair game.
Ironically, I use custom css to hide many ads. Yet, I click on many ads from The Deck & Fusion Ads. I suppose they appeal to my personality.
Why is this on the front page? The course is expensive and there is nothing indicating the quality of the course or the the tutor.
Is it possible that the Twitter-er in question is not a real AT&T rep?
Personally, as an interviewer I would be looking for a graph traversal a la breadth first search within an arbitrary graph structure (adjacency list, et al). This seems like it could work though.
Those are very cool projects, but the main issue is that their source transformation is pretty aggressive. Until someone comes up with real, usable debugging facilities for those, they're not going to catch on.
customer service rep is an "insider"? Technically, they're "inside", so yes. But usually, the word indicates privileged information, not random bloviation (which is what this CSR was doing).
I would like to try to do something like that! Do you have thought about how a syntax like "do" would look in JavaScript?
I usually have AdBlock on, but it was off temporarily when I installed Windows 7, during which time I clicked an ad for a TV show that looked interesting. Turned out to be an awesome TV show. I'm still not going to turn AdBlock off though.