skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just cannot believe that Microsoft has gotten 15+ years of mileage out of the "Just wait, the NEXT version of Windows is going to be great!" pitchline.

Every time a new version of Windows is about to come out we get this great line about how Microsoft has finally gotten their act together and released a real OS.

I don't mean this as a Windows-bashing post, but, c'mon, we've heard all this before.
How to figure out value per member?
I have a subscription based web app, and would like an accurate way to track lifetime value for each member. This would help figure out what is reasonable to pay for AdWords, for example.

Our app goes back to 2005, but we still have hundreds of members still paying from back then. So, the "good" customers skew any results based on customer cancellations. Is there some kind of formula for this? Without a solid number, for those of you that advertise your app, how do you set a budget?
<sarcasm>Developers their best chance to stay in the game? Ballmer knew that a long time ago... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE </sarcasm>
Hilarious.

-_-

Thanks, dick.
I wish Facebook Connect would be compatible with OpenID.
Also posted on the main Yahoo! blog: http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/28/were-open-have-at-it/
Yahoo Opens Up Big Time
Yes, I agree! We can debate the conversion rates. My whole point is that simply asking whether Facebook will be ever profitable is a simplistic question. They can become profitable already. The question is that there are probably much better ways to monetize their site and typical audience than requiring subscription.
Like PG mentioned, when Google came along, the best way to monetize search engines was to become a "media" portal and pollute browsers with ads and pop-ups.
Now that you mention it, it fits more into Churchill's type of humor -- a little more build up than self deprecating one line zingers.
I stand corrected. It still sounds wrong to my ear, though.
There are some good tips in here, but I'm not sure "get you started" is an appropriate title.
Right, you don't count on Digg to generate conversions or repeat views or anything like that, because almost by definition, they're the sort of people that flit from news story to news story and never go deep into anything.

However, they're also the type of people that like to tell people about their great discoveries on Digg. The Mavens, on Gladwell's Tipping Point adoption curve. They don't spend money, and promptly lose interest a day later, but one of the people they tell may start using your product or telling people.

When we first launched Diffle, we put a game up on Digg to gauge response. We got about 1200 visits off that. Of those, 6 came back later. But one of those 6 must've told their friends, because 6 months later, we were back up at about 1200 visits/month with no additional publicity. (And there it stayed because the site sucked, but that's another issue.)
With the release of the half-baked 1.8.7 a few months back, and now 1.9.1 being called the "first stable version of the 1.9 series" I'm a little bit confused as to what "stable" means for Ruby now.

Is 1.9 still going to be considered a development series, not widely recommended for most apps until 2.0 is released? Or is that starting to gradually change?
#4: Just think of the clickbait possibilities!
Dead cat bounce?
Monitor to become the first national newspaper to ditch daily print edition for website
the system tray on windows is the annoyance that it is for one huge reason: There is no other (decent) way to have a windowless app that can be interacted with. Because, there is no application list (aside from ctrl+alt+delete). I really think that Windows needs to move beyond windows as the highest level of organisation and allow the user to work with apps directly. I cannot see myself willingly using Windows until this is the case.

OSX for example: The dock is said list, and it performs the bulk of what the system tray ends up doing. the menu bar utilities on OS X perform what the system tray was intended to do.
This is more than just a giveaway, though, because:

1.) He tied it in with the current presidential election

2.) He framed it as a challenge with a lot of chutzah (really, running CodeWeaver is nowhere near as complicated as running the U.S.)

3.) The reason he "lost" has to do with a current event (the economic crisis) that has nothing to do with the original challenge (Bush didn't lower gas prices, the crude market did).

4.) The press release had a funny, irreverent tone.

That seems tailor-made for a viral story. It's not that they were giving things away, it was that they were giving things away and relating them to current events in an offbeat way.
Google Announces Labs for Google Apps
adcenter is their answer to adwords/yahoo search marketing(overture).

I'm still in shock that the xbox doesn't have a browser. That's really scary. Either they are just amazingly arrogant and want everything locked down walled garden, or they are still in denial about the importance of the web, or they just don't get it.
Right, I've heard Ballmer scream "Developers, Developers, Developers" just like everyone else--but what are they doing about it (when it comes to search)?

The best I can find is Live Search API: http://search.live.com/developer/

Which is nothing compared to what Yahoo! is offering.

Edit: Sarcasm doesn't work on the Internet ;)
too bad, that concept looks really good.
im not the biggest fan of connect. but i there are some neat potential uses.

for example, would be useful to know what my friends watch when im on netflix.
Your comment reminds me of people at the turn of the century saying something like: We're at the cusp of BIG advances - very fast steam trains, Zeppelins that can transport a hundred people...

My point is that what we think is the next big this rarely is. Nobody saw social networking coming in 1999 etc.
"Update: Microsoft clarified in an email that these apps will use HTML and AJAX, but also Silverlight components."
I had said active users specifically. Facebook has exceptionally active users. Yahoo has a lot for sure, and I wouldn't want to underestimate them (they may be hurting in the stock market, but they do have a real and large online presence still), but also a lot of inactive users, accounts registered because someone had to in order to use one of their services like Yahoo Groups. Myspace I would bet has a huge number of inactive users too. Plus, the perception is that Facebook is on the rise and Yahoo is on the decline. That makes YOS seem like a desperate move and FB Connect seem like innovation, when they're very similar in reality and both innovative.

As for OpenSocial, yeah it is pretty similar so we'll see. OpenID on the other hand has yet to be implemented in a way that makes sense to non-techies and that makes non-techies actually care about it. FB Connect, with the right partnerships (which seems like that's their strategy) could really take off, and is dead simple for the end user, unlike OpenID. I have my doubts that OpenID will ever be made easy enough and gain widespread use.
If I buy a plant and a Monet painting for my home office, does that count?
Cool. Do you know Ryo?
I would never rely on it as my only means of allowing a user to log in, but I would definitely and plan to use it as an alternate way they can. If Facebook cancels or cripples Connect, then I'd still have the users and a means of letting them continue to use my service.

But I agree 100%, never depend solely on a free service from a commercial company assuming it has anything but its own interest in mind. If you no longer fit their best interest, you're toast.
The biggest vote fraud issue is non-citizen voting. Since voters aren't required to use ID proving citizenship at the polls, video ain't gonna help.
Try searching for Rails EC2 AMI if you're interested in hosting on EC2: http://pauldowman.com/projects/ruby-on-rails-ec2/
Meh, sorry about that.. I was just ranting with a friend about how iPhone still doesn't have flash.
“Downturn” roundtable event is tomorrow: What questions are on your mind?
"500 million monthly users" means users who are active at least once a month, which I think qualifies as active. That's not counting every registered account at all (I'm not sure there's any official numbers on that but it's a lot higher than 500M). Sure it's arguable Facebook users are more engaged, but point taken. Facebook is cooler and on the rise in peoples minds. I'm not sure I see how Facebook Connect is any more easy to authenticate with than OpenID from a user perspective.
did yahoo just "out whataburger"* google app engine, by letting us use any language we want?

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbCiOkcAo0I
Sounds good. Too bad winter is almost here, it'll be way too cold to work outside. Also, I think I need a new laptop...
Slightly off-topic, but not completely:

I would LOVE to see some quantitative measurements of the effect that opening up a platform to developers has on the respective company.

End of the day, is (extra_revenue_from_custom_applications_and_exposure - resources_to_maintain_platform - customers_lost_to_crappy_apps_or_platform_issues) > 0?

Obviously the formula is more complicated and varies from company to company, but I would love to see a good discussion from an insider who's gone through it.
Origins of the Google Chrome Logo
The drop.io of LBS social networking: seemywhere.com
Hedge fund shorts squeezed like a bunch of lemons.
Facebook Connect has been a rushed mess. As a developer for one of the launch partners, I have been frustrated with constant instability, lack of / incoherent documentation, fuzzy launch dates, and most importantly - unclear reasons as to why I should spend time integrating Connect.

The whole idea of FB Connect seems to be getting outside developers to contribute to a closed version of openID.
Yeah, I do. Very smart guy. We lost him to Google, tho :’(
Actually, App Engine is a different kind of thing.

GAE is a platform where your app is hosted on their servers.

YAP is a (mostly) open social compliant app delivery platform that lets you create apps and deploy them on our web pages.

GAE is a competitor to Yahoo Small Business, I suppose, since it's a paid hosting service. We're working very closely with Google, MySpace, and a bunch of other partners on making Open Social a success. (NB: you can also create Open Social apps for those other platforms, as well.)

In addition to Open Social, there are things like YQL and other extensions that Yahoo has developed in-house. Some of those may make it into the OS spec, where it makes sense to do so.
Any artist in any medium will tell you that trying to abstract design from the materials you will work with is a bad idea. It's been recognized since the time of the Greeks that your materials will dictate largely what comes out and if you don't take an organic approach, your design will feel forced. The is true for HTML/CSS as for stone and paint. Knowing what your tags are capable of is as important as knowing what you wan them to do.
If we are going to look at profitable online communities then look at MMORPGs. It may be outside the realm of facebook and linkedin but there is plenty of profitability to be had beyond myspace clones or even websites.

World of Warcraft takes in 12.99 - 14.99 per user per month and has approximately 10 million active subscribers. Plus additional profits whenever an expansion comes out.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

faq...

http://www.mmogchart.com/faq/

[EDIT: added "per month" to second paragraph, first sentence]
You should be banned for that. Seriously, are you a 2nd grader?
Not to beat it to death :) but I look with a bit of skepticism at their 500m active users. I'm not saying it's not a true figure, but I know I personally fall into that number since I log in about once a month to do something on a Yahoo Group for example, and while I'm definitely a monthly user I'm certainly not an actively engaged user, and Yahoo will have a hard time getting someone like me on board with their social efforts. I bet a substantial portion of their users are in the same boat. Maybe they use their mail or groups or sites or something else, but I think it will be tough turning that into a coherent social network just like I think Google would have a tough time doing the same with their user base, and their accounts have been synchronized across services from the get-go.

All my friends and family are already on Facebook. They all use it actively, and daily, for posting photos, events, keeping in touch, pokes and eaves dropping, etc. It's the new email, it's the new IM, it replaces our need for flickr and a bunch of separate services, and so on. It provides a personal experience you don't get with Myspace et al, and you'd be hard-pressed to pull them away from that.

If a site I go to, or they go to, has the little FB icon they can click it, they may already be logged in and simply click "allow this site to access my profile" or whatever. If not, they enter their FB login info which they'll remember because it's a) their email and b) a password they enter all the time, and they're off. Since the Connect portion is on Facebook already, Firefox may already pre-fill their login info too. Compare that to OpenID where you have to remember something that looks like a URL on top of your username and password for your OpenID provider. The fact is, average users aren't grokking OpenID (didn't Yahoo themselves just publish something to this effect?), and I personally think it's a failure in the design of OpenID itself, which makes it particularly hard to fix.

The biggest play for OpenID right now I think is Windows Live becoming a provider. That may change things, but Yahoo being on board I don't think will do it. But we'll have to wait and see.
[citation needed]

I think given the experiences of 2000, 2004, and some of the horror stories already emerging, "non-citizens" voting isn't on the radar compared with vote-suppression, and technology that appears custom-designed for fraud.

But please show examples, I would be interested in the scope of ""non-citizen" voting.
Everyone is going slap happy with these open app platforms! Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple...
Well, seen this one coming since AppEngine was launched. This should make their Apps offering even more compelling and help steal more marketshare from Microsoft. Seems like a great way for enterprise software startups to get their product in front of customers too.
I never get why those companies receive that amount of money of a second round of funding. It isn't that the whole service takes 17.5 million to build or to host or to mantain, even when you add that all up.
This is really interesting in the context of recent news about the New York Times cashflow issues. Internet killed the print newspaper star?
I've had good luck with hosting Rails on Dreamhost. They have a good wiki page on how to set it up with capistrano (http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Capistrano) and you get shell access.
Hey, I just found another review on gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/5069661/windows-7-walkthrough-boot-video-...

More screenshots and more detailed explanations, including a notable change for connecting to wireless networks. Nice. From this, it actually looks like there are some pretty sweet and much needed improvements in here. Hopefully MS is finally "getting it" after all :)
The stories behind the apps
YQL: SQL for the Web
I hope more newspapers follow their lead. Printing paper editions daily sounds inefficient and wasteful. By the time the morning newspaper hits the streets everyone already heard about the news on TV or read about it online. I expect daily print to go away as we get better choices for reading news on the go and more people start using Kindles, netbooks, iPhones, etc.
Yahoo Security Flaw Fixed in hours
A directory that's incomplete is almost always worthless.

Many directories are incomplete but still highly useful (e.g. Yelp is far from a complete directory even for cities like San Francisco, but it makes up for its lack of completeness with the quality of its entries). The question is just whether the directory is complete enough to be useful.
Windows 7 is the new vista. :)
Fair enough. (Are you a little smitten with Facebook? :P)
I like the interface of reading certain things in physically better than online. This includes, for example, the New York Times as well as Edge Magazine.

I think it will be a while before non-PC devices are the primary way people get their electronic news (at least five years).
Satellites approach the Shannon limit
Lambdas, auto, and static_assert: C++0x Features in VC10, Part 1
Keep in mind that developers can be expensive. Also the idea with raising money is that when you do get around to raising money to raise as much as possible, since you never know how long before you can do another round. I know nothing about their numbers but for example while 5 million seems awfully high it's only 2.5 years of runway for a 10 person company if you estimate 200k per year per employee in average costs (salary, office space, benefits, etc).

Seems like they have a decent product with a business model, I'm more worried about the sites that get 10 million to build a social network for wine lovers.
blueprint is not a framework for something you should deploy a site on, it's a framework for prototyping and hacking on your layouts. the idea is to change it to something more semantic once you've figured things out (same way as an earlier article today mentioned using HSL instead of RGB for color prototyping and switching to RGB once you've figured it out).
Hoff's poem bemoaning security in the cloud
A nice little diddy on the prospects of security and risk within this industry push towards cloud computing-
I've found something even simpler to be true: real things relieve the fatigue I feel when working on the computer for a long time. It could be coming home and washing my car, doing the dishes, or even just writing something on paper during the day that makes a big difference in how I feel.
5-seater,
240 miles per charge,
0-60 under 6 seconds,
$60,000

Wow. If Tesla can live up to these claims, they will completely change the landscape of automobiles in the US. Right now it sounds way too good to be true!
Amusing/disgusting, depending on your perspective:

For laughs, this means that the following is valid C++0x:
C:\Temp>type nokitty.cpp
int main() {
[](){}();
[]{}();
}

Unfortunately, it seems that GCC 4.4 doesn't support lambdas yet:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/cxx0x_status.html
5 years sounds reasonable. Given that it took them 2 years to plan this out (that's how I read the article at least) this would be a good time for others to start thinking about this. Also given the cost savings of not having to print daily it might be worth it for many newspapers to switch much sooner (say by 2010).
Essentials - 2008 Edition
crap. Forrester is always wrong.

Although it will be different. 2001-2003 was a tech bubble, dumb tech "companies" died. The pop was in the context of a relatively strong economy. This time we have a strong tech industry, but a crashing economy. Dumb tech will die, but so will some quality companies that would have done well in a hospitable economic environment. Most tech companies produce real goods with real benefits (no more dog food by mail companies out there), but when people and companies start worrying about just getting to next month a lot of tech products will get filed into want not need.
Steve Ballmer sends Executive Email regarding Azure
Hmm, maybe I am simplifying this but can't you do:

Fraction that convert to paying * How much they per on average per month * Average months before cancellation * Some sort of Discounting for value of future money (unless you plan to increase price) = value per member

For avg months before cancellation count all those that are yet to cancel as 2x there lifetime (seems reasonable). Would give you a fairly reasonable guess. Then you just have to make sure that the value of a paid member is the same.

discounting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount
Ask HN: Review my new startup: clickthatbutton.com
Every time I read "!important" it comes out in my head as "not important" :/
What's the point? There's already video footage of the NH primary hand recount where the people in charge leave the boxes of unsealed ballots outside of the vault and go home for the night. When the people in charge are asked why they aren't following procedures, they respond evasively, stating that they don't feel like putting the ballots away, and that the ballots are safe because they said the ballots are safe.

Regardless of if there was actual tampering, the blatant disregard and even contempt for maintaining any sort of security means the whole election was fraudulent. But of course nothing has come from that, and I doubt anything will.
In most cases, yes, because I see the broader picture and have information that I did not have as a young person. But of course experience tells me that I am mostly wrong at the moment, too.

I guess at my death bed I will convert to religion... (no, I hope not).
I like the simplicity, but not sure how will monetize it? Maybe offer it as widget for other sites? Or perhaps create a FB app? Certainly lots of potential. And people really like clicking buttons.
"Go ahead, click the button... That'll be ten million dollars."
Unless I'm missing something, that's not a "startup" it's a webpage with a clickable button.

What's the point? What's the business model? (seriously).
How Many Mongrels?
A hierarchy of pitches (how to pitch your startup)
I didn't click the button.

I didn't want to. Too many people had done it already
With the Internet I find I get more instant "this just happened" news (without analysis, with lame analyis or with inaccuracies). I'd be willing to go to a weekly format with more thoughtful analysis. Take The Economist for instance, it's not what I read to find out what's happening now. It's what I read to find out why things are happening.
I couldn't imagine standing around with a video camera... this is the United States not Russia or Iran.
Well, your 15 minutes should be up any time now...
I really liked the first tip.

"rake notes"

Before I read your blog, I would put all my TODOs in the README, that was obviously a bad design choice. Thanks!
Take the average length of time that a user stays with your service.

Find out the average number of purchases they make.

Multiply to get average lifetime value.

Spend less than this number on your customer acquisition, ie Adsense.

Example: The average subscriber stays with you 1 year. It's a monthly service, so the average customer makes 12 purchases. You have a low/no cost service with a gross profit of $2/mo.

12 x $2 Profit per Unit = $24 LTV of the average customer

If you have some sort of viral component where users are getting other users, you'll want to account for that as well.
Sometimes that's true. However, it usually isn't, and the gen-y's usually can't admit it when they're wrong.

Most of the gen-y's I've worked with produced utter crap, and I've left a few jobs now because I got tired of fixing their stuff while they were busy taking credit for it.
I thought it was interesting. Ordinary daily random fluctuations aren't, but something on this scale is. And while any reader here could easily obtain such info, most probably don't check the market closes every day. I don't. So if something dramatic happens it's handy to see it here.
What's missing here is an overview of randomized protocols. For example, the "Lamport papers" deal to a large extent with how to achieve consensus in the presence of faults.

He never mentions anywhere in those papers the existence of randomized solutions to these. In practice they are often easier to implement and are only randomized in so far as reaching agreement with probability 1. Which I'm happy with :-).

A good survey is www.cs.yale.edu/~aspnes/randomized-consensus-survey.pdf
Sorry, but :yawn:
Simply Hired Looks For Jobs Overseas
Why Venture Firms Tighten the Purse Strings in a Down Market
E-Ink's AM300 developers kit
Hand-waving. If I could find a link to the original publication(s) I would read that instead.