skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also the 0.68 cents is cost of search-related revenues divided by number of searches. However, presumably there are only revenues when someone clicks on an ad on the search results page. So a more accurate number would also factor in the ratio of ad clicks to searches. If there's one ad click per 10 pages on average, these numbers are off by an order of magnitude.
A much better policy would be not to write people that don't want the letter from you, and pg would definitely want to hear from any billion dollar company that wants him as an investor

Anyway, I've now ingested my USDA daily recommended amount of trolling, so I won't be responding any deeper in this thread
Ask HN: Disqus authentication?
I sometimes visit blogs I've never been to before, and they have IntenseDebate or DISQUS. What's strange is that these comment systems already know who I am, and my facebook uid, even though I have never been to that domain before.

Doesn't that violate http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/26/widget-entrepeneurs-await-clarity-from-facebook-on-4th-party-connect-policy/

According to this policy,

"The widget developer can have a relationship with the site owner, but not directly with the user… The user has established a relationship with two parties: Facebook and the website. A widget developer should not create a third connection."

But it seems that somehow, DISQUS is saving the facebook uid it obtains, probably in its own session. That is my guess. So when I visit a new blog the widget recognizes me. I want to do the same, but I am just wondering if there was something I was missing.

I guess it's fine, but if someone else signs in on my facebook, DISQUS will continue to have the old identity for me on the blogs, not that of the person who signed into facebook.
One of the beauties of programs that teach Scheme and ML (or OCaml or F#) in introductory CS is that they level the playing field. The typical high school computer hot shot has never seen anything like functional programming before, and is no better off than anyone else in the class. Follow that with the theoretical foundations of CS and you have plenty of hot shots at the bottom of the class. A professor of mine once said, "Some kids just can't hack the math."
Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks
Scientist Plans to Clone Woolly Mammoth
ASCIImeo: Vimeo in Text
>It would be just like creating your own competition.

I guess director's cuts of DVDs create more overall profit? Why not the same for a book?

However, my main thought was that if the original sells better one could consider ditching a costly full-edit and simply having it sub-edited or even skip to proofreading only.
While all the sarcastic responses are funny there is a serious point here. If you're a technology VC you get a skewed view of the world because...

1. Everyone you interact with (Entrepreneurs, Journalists, Fellow VCs, etc...) is crazy for Social Networking which makes them very active.

2. You see abstract statistics like "55% of all adults over 12 use Facebook" or "73% of all U.S. Internet users are on Facebook"

These two facts lead you to believe Facebook is this massive, unstoppable movement that will rule the world. But in my experience (as a passive Facebook user myself) only about 10% of the people I've friended on Facebook actively post material on a regular basis (maybe a little higher if you count status updates alone as activity).

I saw this same thing when I worked in the Valley at the very end of the 90s. The people there thought ideas like Webvan and the original Pets.com were genius because everyone they knew wanted to do all their shopping online. Only after those startups failed did we realize the rest of the world wasn't as enamored as we were.
Partially agree.

It's a different sales pitch than big companies though - our pitch is we'll cover your living expense and give you the chance to work with a small team and see if a startup is the right fit for you.

Instead of equity - many of the TEC participants get to own an entire product or initiative. Ali Shah out of NYU came on board and over the summer designed and built the entire VodPod iPad App. Andrew Boni at BC was a core part of the team that helped design and push code to the GigaOM site redesign.

At an internship for a major tech company, you're pushing some live code, but its for a small part of a major property. Much like joining a startup early, you get to own major parts of product and get to understand how your work fits into the broader company building process.

P.S. Doesn't feel antagonistic at all - I'm just trying to shine a light on how we think about the situation internally. We know we don't pay participants as much as Google, Apple, etc - but we think it actually helps attract the right type applicants to the program.
It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School.

Careful, this could be similar to saying that it's not advantageous to have mathematics be a field where people who prove non-trivial theorems in high school do better in university courses.

Some people have prior background or a special talent and that's not a bad thing. It's just important that this is also not required to succeed in the given field.
If there's anything more amazing than how the wheels keep turning, it's that we're sixty years into the computer revolution and people always think this is the last turn. I don't think we're quite done with the back-to-the-server swing (or "cloud" as they are called today), but a combination of still-ever-increasing horsepower available cheaply and the development of replication-to-the-cloud technologies already in progress replacing the only-in-the-cloud storage will bring a swing back to personal servers in the home. We're still in the early phases of this work.
They have become a tidy little bank. Holding the cash and stashing the interest.
It's hardly the only such major. Art and music schools require you to have a lot of prior knowledge - your portfolio is part of your application.
I run through so many companies, I usually forget where I found them within a few minutes of finding them. My guess is that I actually heard about you guys through HN or something that I found on HN. I really should get better about tracking where I find stuff!

If you guys put a press page together, be sure to add a link back to our article. (To other HN readers, this can be a really great way to build links for SEO.) Also, feel free to comment on the original post. We encourage employers to join and add to the conversation.
What would also be interesting to know is what the average CPM of the Google Search Engine is, and compare this with Bing or Yahoo.

I would think (but cannot confirm) that Google makes more per search than Bing or Yahoo.
Well the point is here that in many cases (I'm looking at you iBookstore, among others) the cost of the physical book is lower than the ebook, but the profit on the ebook is higher if they were at the same price point.

In what possible set of circumstances would you want to discourage people from making you more money?
I found out about the events in Tunisia through the Wikipedia homepage, which lists significant current events.
The key to getting more females in CS

All sentences that start with these words are misguided. It is a complex issue with contributing factors at EVERY stage of a programmer's development.

Yes, let's help middle school girls get a chance to program. But let's also change CS curricula to draw on more skills besides programming. And let's make intro programming classes more welcoming to nonprogrammers. And let's find new venues for promoting startup job openings. And let's give grants for women making open source contributions, and, and, and....

The same is true of promoting literacy and bike friendly cities and fighting racism and most every other kind of activism. This is not a world of root causes.
> software engineering a codified, professional field.

So after getting your degree you can only be a CEng by working for an existing CEng in a company that certifies CEngs.

Sounds like a perfect way of weeding out all those women who do pick a CS degree. Unless all traditional big-iron firms are looking to hire more women, and all 60-something male senior engineers are really clamoring for more women to certify ?
Using "rockstar" reminds me of awful job advertisements for awful companies.
Perfect, the feedback is much appreciated.
I think you're mistaken, his calculating is not dependent on click-through rates.
It's bullshit because the biggest part in the price of a paper book is for printing and distribution. and VAT too in some countries, 20% instead of 5%, but it's going to change.

So the Agency pricing scheme is only changing the pocket where money goes.

And keep in mind that in countries like China, the same books cost usually $3, after translating rights, printing, distribution and publishers costs. And publishers still live on this, in a country where people buy much less books.

So what is fucked up is that someone is making money, and it doesn't even benefit the authors.

It's more or less the same problem as in music.
Sure. Pausch had a connection to Fred Brooks, who founded and built the CS program at UNC-CH. And Brooks was on Azuma's (the article's author) committee.
This is also a nice one: http://www.serverzen.net/2010/11/8/getting-started-with-pyra...
That's more or less the way IBM, HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, SAP, Keane, Red Hat, and Pivotal work. As I understand it, they all get paid some for selling software, but they get paid a lot more for performing professional services — a lot of which are pretty closely analogous to manning the support lines.

The old statistic was that about 95% of programmers were working on company-internal projects, which means they don't get paid royalties for their code, because there are none. Instead they get paid, at least in theory, for satisfying their company-internal clients — whether that involves writing good working code, writing nonworking code, or answering support calls.
True, but you're not required or even expected to have prior knowledge of computer science before undergrad.
Yes I'm sure I used to have to handle this.
I'm sure that's right. There are more eyeballs doing searches on Google, and there is an auction between advertisers pay to put their ads in front of users. More advertisers chasing users probably gives them more revenue per search.
In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101 hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no experience at all.

How do you know this?

At the school where I went, the distribution for CS101 was bimodal; higher peak were the experienced ones, lower peak were the neophytes.
I still have a ZX-81, as well as a Epson HX-20 which is sadly not shown in these ads. It's amazing how far this technology has come in such a short time - and I love the prediction in the Compuserve ad about doing all shopping online by 2000.
Ask HN: Why isn't there an option on here to always open links in a new tab?
Even a simple chrome extension to apply target blank to every link. Anything! I'm surprised it isn't like this by default.
The fact that you've gone on to be successful doesn't mean that they 'failed'/'lost out' because they didn't back you.

For a start it could be that the startups they did back have gone on to achieve even more (or they expected to).

You're calling it as if it is black and white, and it isn't.

Still, I hope you continue to see success in your venture.
I have to agree. I bought it after the new year and am having a great time with it. I think the documentation is great and the author seems very committed to doing a fine job and perhaps more importantly continuing with his project.
Interesting, I didn't know that.

> Giving line-item veto to a user is a terrible idea.

Giving the user choice about whether or not they want to give up their personal information is a great idea. Suppose I don't want the app to have my email and phone number. Without finer-grained control, my only option is to say no to the entire app -- so they lose me as a user.
Sounds like you didn't read the study. The study showed that some kids thought education was uncool and 'being white'.
I'm not referring to just CS101; I'm talking about the whole curriculum. That bimodality tends to go away once you're done taking classes that are a re-hash of what the experienced kids already know as freshmen.

And no, it's not just the effect of "weeding out" the inexperienced kids -- as I said above, a number of the best students in my program had no prior experience, and a fair number of "experienced" kids flamed out once they hit the non-coding portion of the curriculum.

I went to a small school for undergrad, so I knew everyone who graduated with me, and everyone who started with me. Later, I went to a very large graduate school, and while the same patterns seemed to hold, I can't say for sure.
That screens me out of basically every FB app there is. I don't like being a spam conduit.
Stop tracking what days people are working & what days they aren't and you'll realize you've missed the whole point of "no vacations"

We don't have vacations because we judge people by what they do — not how often they're working.
middle click?
"Yeah, it would be great for most of us (his interested readers) if he just supervised a few post-docs to grind it all out. He could easily get the funding, but it's not his style."

Why should he let them have all the fun?
Correct about the swarm -- indeed it's not a multiagent problem -- but perhaps a bit unfair regarding the "dumb machine" part.

This appears to be a "multi-body" problem (rather than a "multi-agent") problem: that is, there is likely one primary decision-maker which dictates the construction task ordering, likely computed via a partial-order multi-body planner. That's part 1 of the AI.

But there's another part that's equally interesting. The multi-body planner produces a series of construction steps. Each step is ordered with regard to certain steps, unordered with regard to other steps (these can be done in any order but not simultaneously), and explicitly declared parallel with yet other steps (they can be done simultaneously). The quad-roters grab the steps and perform them in parallel when possible, and at least form a queue otherwise. Last, the quad-rotors have to perform these steps without hitting one another, so there's a significant real-time multi-body path-planning problem involved.

Multi-body planning, scheduling, and plan monitoring is nontrivial and should not be so lightly dismissed.
Eck - thanks. Corrected. I need to stop writing entires on my phone!
Not everyone has 3 buttons, or is even using a mouse at all.
If you're just doing a GET request then this doesn't solve the problem.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you're trying to solve the problem of reliably displaying uptime status to answer the "huh it's down for me, is it down for you?" question that users sometimes have.

Just sending a GET doesn't really solve this, as it will only give you the status of the server from the point of view of that node.

Anyway, it depends what your intended use-case is.

If it's for publicly displaying uptime and therefore taking the reputation of the client company into your own hands, I would make sure that the method of reporting is as accurate as possible. I don't even think multiple nodes is the answer. You basically have to have a daemon installed on the client server.
i think the issue here is that a search is one service payed by another (adwords) and so on.
for the cost of a search you have to devide all employees into their group and take out only the cost for searches. but than comes adwords and pay for it...
tough the adwords code probably runs on the same servers that deliver searches (unified system)... i guess its really hard to cslculate but i would guess a search is only a fraction of a cent even before balancing it out win profits.
I agree it doesn't particularly mean they lost out, but well done for getting your startup off the ground without VC support.

It can be much better for you in the long run anyway. Although now that you have a business going some VC support might enable you to expand quicker.
Maybe you ought to look up your examples.

> Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab".

That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.
This timing is perfect! Just yesterday I was reading the post about how sitting for hours at a time increases risk of heart problems significantly (regardless of exercise) and... began to wonder if it'd be feasible to work at my computer standing up. I use a laptop but I think I could definitely work something out.

It'd probably make me an overall happier and more motivated (to do other things) person. I've noticed that sitting down all day staring at my laptop makes me feel like crap and not really care to do anything else.

Again... perfect timing for this article. Now I just need to figure out how to make the transition...
I've always been a minimalist desktop person. My wallpaper is usually just black with a few (non-standard) icons on it. I like keyboard shortcuts for everything. Mostly dark screen is also my preference. For me information should be the light, no the other way around...

That also applies to browsers. While Firefox was not really good yet, I was going with AvantBrowser in compact mode. I almost never used a browser without the "small icons" option set. I do hate those toolbars every application wants to add to your browser. So, for me, using a direct, simple and minimal broswer window is always the best way to go. I also rarely maximize a browser window.

Regarding the screen size I believe the 1024 columns and many rows as the aspect ratio requires is a good choice currently. If you target audience will certainly use smaller screens a more adaptive page sould be created. If that's not the case, users will be expecting to roll the page oftenly anyway. I read HN on my mobile (using Opera) and it adapts quite well.
Right, but we're talking about the "weed-out" class effect here. If the girls get weeded out in 101 whatever happens later isn't relevant.
Shouldn't there be some sort of parity?

A user is a user is a user. Unless google users are that much more likely to buy something after clicking my ad, why would you pay more per individual view? Sure the absolute numbers should go up with more views, but it doesn't seem like money well spent to pay more for similar adspace.
Sorry if this is off topic but how has been your experience with backbone.js. There is some information out there but no first hand account of building a large app with it.
Loved this article. And this question - how to find the best co-founders - is what motivated me to start Venturocket in the first place.
I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field.

I personally couldn't disagree more, but luckily in this case there is no need to speculate since we have an almost perfect natural experiment available. Virtually all of the other branches of engineering - including the ones which you're presumably basing this idea on - have exactly the same gender imbalance issues as software engineering.
Xfce 4.8 released
Making CAPTCHA's Your Business
You're right... I misunderstood it.
Having read this I searched around for other figures on how many searches Google serves each month, and while I didn't find any better sources, I did come across a Google blog entry [1] about the environmental cost of searches.

It interested me to know that, based on the average MPG of cars in the US [2] and a rough cost of a gallon of petrol [3], it would cost 1.6% of a GBP penny, or 1/40th of a USD cent, to emit the same amount of CO2 in a car as a single Google search (0.2 grams of CO2 [1]).

I'm not sure why I felt the above was interesting enough to write in a comment, but for some reason it does interest me that, if Bill's calculations are correct, it costs Google 27 times as much per gram of CO2 emitted as it does drivers (excluding car costs etc.) Even assuming I'm showing signs of insanity chosing to work that out, the amount of CO2 emitted is good to know.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-searc...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2009_United_States_EPA_...

[3] http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html
The short answer: it depends. For a personal one-off without any chance of profit? $10 (or whatever a 1-yr reg is). For anything else, it would be some spectrum depending on how profitable/viable the idea was, balanced against how important the domain name in question might realistically be to success.

But usually, it seems that the domain matters far less than just about everything else (so long as it is usable, reasonable length, etc).
That's the entire relevant context of the quote. It occurs in a list of what JavaScript is good for, and that's one of the items, with no further clarification. It definitely implies (though it doesn't explicitly require) client-only validation, since it talks about saving the server from having to do "extra processing" without qualification.
I think the real take-away from this is to just stay legit. Don't try to do anything shady because it will most likely come back to bite you in the ass. The guy is actually pretty dumb for not realizing they could figure out who he was while using a handle that contains his real name.
That really is incredible. I've been using Skype for years and always knew they had a ton of users, never imaged they were quite that big though.
It is rarely the case that they'd be paid (by someone outside the project) to work on a particular feature? Companies that sponsor OSS development basically just say "here's a paycheck, go have fun"?
YC definitely lost out, and I'm sure that pg (and the others) would be the first to admit it.

Any good VC or Angel knows they can't always make the right call. In fact, I'm fairly confident that YC has that written down somewhere. Possibly in multiple locations.
I've always used Chrome because it has the least browser chrome when maximised: tabs, address line with 4 icons, no status or frame or anything else.

If IE9 is refined to the point where it only has tabs, address bar and a few icons all in one row, it could be a winner from an interface perspective.
Technically there is no difference. I guess it is how we perceive things.

When we destroy we expect no specific outcome, hence you have a very large scope on what you will see as destruction. You can just blow something up and see everything fall down around.

With creation you expect a specific outcome or result and hence the range of what you can do is generally more limited. I want to blow a small hole (create a hole) in a wall will require more planning.

The basic actions to create or destroy are no different.

So you could say destruction is done by those with no specific vision and creation is done by those with a well defined vision.
So, human workers and ordinary, loud construction equipment buzzing away all day for 2 years is ok, but robot equipment - quite capable of working 24/7 and likely capable of going faster - buzzing away for 8 months, thats unacceptable? I think unions are gonna scream louder than any NIMBY concerns.
That's a sad way to approach a career. Really, most industries are an "underpaid ghetto" by those terms, especially for women.
Wouldn't any person be better off "psychically" to do a job they enjoy and are driven to pursue? I don't feel like the same person who is passionate about coding would neccesairily be so passionate about marketing.
Wouldn't that be zero at most off-peak times? Machines are gonna use electricity whether you're using them or not.