skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can turn eyeballs into money, but it helps if they're the right eyeballs. The less discriminate you are in who you target, the less you understand your audience, and the less money you'll make per visitor. For some websites, this value will approach zero.

Knowing specific people who will use your product is important, if only to better understand your own value proposition. To rely on people discovering your site and immediately understanding what it offers them is silly. This is true regardless of your business model.
this may be a stretch, but I would say its appropriateness could be tied to the social engineering involved, and how far astray and damaged these people became as a result. In the building of our social web we need to be aware of such cases and make sure that our networking is truth-friendly. I guess this is a huge discussion, but I find the article very relevant to say the least. In any case, the 'virality' concept that is so web 2.0 was discovered by religions millenia ago.
A Spot on myPunchbowl
Memiary + Lessons of a Weekend Entrepreneur - Rev2.org
Author here. You almost have it completely right.

The features are not stored in a tree. They are an ARRAY of trees. So we hold face1 and face2 constant, load up the tree for feature 1, descend it, record the value. Then we load up the tree for feature 2, descend it, record the value. Etc. If we have 1000 of faceA, faceB, and 5000 features, that means we'd do 5000 descensions of -different- trees, then iterate to the next face, a million times.

You are absolutely correct about the data sizes mattering in that the reason this fails is because you cannot, over the course of a million matches, cache all 5000 trees (given their size).

The new algorithm, however, held the tree for feature 1 fixed, and iterated over the faces, which, in this case are simple vectors. This results in using the -same- tree for 1 million consecutive comparisons, then switching trees for feature 2, and so on.

In spite of this correction, pretty much everything you've said is accurate. The primary difference is this scenario is much, much worse on cache than the one you've described.
Ask HN - Now a good time for a services company?
So I'm looking to start a new development services company, its in a small, but growing technology field. In other words from a technology perspective, right now is a great time to start a company. However the economy is obviously an issue, and many of the budgets I'd be looking to tap may resist spending their dollars on what is still an "experimental" market.

I'm told that consulting right now isn't horrible as many companies may look to outsource many development services since they may have to reduce (or not increase) their number of heads.
To put it simply, the heated air is your reaction mass. Push cold air in, heat it so the pressure goes up, blast it out the back through a nozzle.

As mentioned elsewhere already, this is commonly referred to as a "ram-jet". The heat in such an engine usually comes from combustion, but any old heat source will do.
You have to get on a project that you do like. If you don't have enough "political pull" to make that happen right now, try to make it clear to your boss or other people in the organization that you'd really like to be doing something else. Taking long breaks is only a temporary solution.
CodeWeavers to Distribute Free Licenses as Result of "Lameduck Challenge"
Soooo, your client was Papa John's?
Windows Live Adds Support For OpenID, Calls It De Facto Login Standard
Welcome to the morass of professional life.

Is your career progressing? Have you accomplished anything in the last year that you'll put on your resume? Yes? Good, continue. No? Consider other options.

Is the project proceeding? How does your manager feel about your work? Good? Maybe it's a perception problem on your part. Anxious? Perhaps you're not being applied well and should be moved to a different project within or without the company.

Things checked out OK so far, but you're still not happy? Perhaps you should consider trying to flip your role in the company to something that would be more beneficial to both you and the company.

My productivity plummets during certain phases of projects. If you're feeling that way perhaps you just need to get past a milestone onto a better or more interesting task.

Don't panic about it! Some corporate structures can withstand an almost malicious amount of unproductive behavior; in fact, managing the spectrum of productivity is in large part what corporate management is about. That said, don't abuse it -- long term it will definitely hurt you more than them -- but think of it as productivity insurance while you figure out how you can succeed.
A bit of feedback:

I would be hesitant to start using this because there is no way to anticipate the pricing scheme whenever it shows up. Last thing I want is to commit to a platform andthen find out it's cost-prohibitve. Also, google promises to keep certain level of usage free which makes me more likely to try because I know I won't get suddenly hosed with high prices.
In a bad economy, companies are busy trimming expenses and cutting staff. Finding a job is like finding a needle in a haystack. Why not start a start-up? If you are rolling down a mountain in a car that has no brakes, wouldn't you prefer to be the one behind the wheel? I would.
I don't think boom-bust is a bad thing, it's a strategy more than anything else. The other day I ran-walked a half-marathon, first time I'd tried that strategy. Set a new PB and finished in the top 10% by a decent margin. Boom-bust economies massively outperform planned ones too.
Seriously, calm down. What's up with the assumption these days that everything done in our work is supposed to be fun? It's work. Sometimes it sucks, it's un-interesting, it's laborious, sometimes maddeningly menial. You're not always going to be learning at a fast pace. You could just quit and go somewhere else, get assigned a crappy project and find that the grass isn't any greener. Or you can suck it up and take the good with the bad. Put your head down and get through it and you'll learn how to deal with work that's not fun.
I'm a second year student and all my programming experience has basically been volunteer work either for my LUG, or more recently as part of the http://fedoraproject.org
The latter has been especially rewarding both in terms of knowledge acquired and the fun involved in participating in a FOSS project.
Well, lots of people fail to understand "make something people want", right? And I'm getting doubly annoyed with the "less is more" UI advice so often repeated, and then not followed!

well known and obvious to everyone != not worth sharing.
Looking Back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic
Thanks! Assume six months is a reasonable amount of time to have passed for me to dupe.
Senator "series of tubes" Stevens  convicted on 7 felony counts
Just out of curiousity, where do you live? I can't name an international airport [1], in the USA at least, that isn't in a part of town that has traffic issues during rush hour. Industry pulls itself to airports possibly faster than any other physical attribute.

[1] This assertion definitely excludes small potatoes airports that earn their international name by serving the one country closest to them (i.e. small town WY or MT airports serving Canada).
Close! But nope.
Summary:

Credit crunch is bad for people who borrow money. It's good for people who don't borrow money and doubly so when competitiors are of the former kind.
It also depends on your business model. If you are going to be invoicing clients/tracking time you should check out something like freshbooks.com it will really cut down on wasted time and improve organization. If your company is ad-driven, email your favorite websites and tell them that you are new, but love them and that you would like to put up an ad for them for $5 a month or something. 2 out of 3 times they will happily do it.
Consulting is often an ok business... you can get by, but unless you really nail a good formula, you are not going to grow a lot and make the big bucks.
MARZAMEMI: UNA FRAZIONE CON DUE COMUNI
Agreed. Look at going.com, is that footer for a human or for a robot?!
PDC 2008: More Nitty Gritty Details on Azure
It may not be a unique idea but it's certainly the best execution when it comes to familiarity. Not only does Pixlr look and feel like Photoshop, but it supports Photoshop keyboard shortcuts, while the other two apps do not. As an experienced Photoshop user, my efficiency with the tool depends solely on those shortcuts.
This happens to everybody. I think I've commented on it here before: a lot of nascent entrepreneurs here appear to be working under the delusion that they'll redline at their peak productivity levels throughout the lifetime of their startup.

Here's what you need to remember: the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional comes and in and delivers work they'll stand behind all the time, whether it's fun or not. You are always going to work harder and faster when things are fun. Things are not always going to be fun. If you're a pro, you're going to keep going regardless.

Obligatory essay (not that they've set the world on fire either, but the sentiment is good): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html (Fire and Motion).

Best of luck.
Wow. If you'd told in October 2001 that in seven years people would be seriously proposing putting nuclear reactors in aeroplanes I'd think you were crazy. And yet, here we are. Have we forgotten? How quickly we swing from one kind of hysteria to another.

in the worst-case scenario, if the armour plating around the reactor was pierced there would be a risk of radioactive contamination over a few square miles

And that's supposed to make us feel better? Fun fact: the area of Manhattan is 23 square miles, and 1.8 million people live there.

Seriously, I'm a supporter of nuclear power if it's used sensibly, but strapping wings to nuclear reactors and sending a couple of hundred to fly over every city on Earth every day doesn't sound like "sensible" to me.
I'm not defending MS's decision. In fact I think it's stupid and short sighted (I did say it was holding them back). All I'm doing is stating what I'm seeing in the market.

For me 360 is still too expensive to watch TV shows and movies; and I'm not really excited about the Netflix deal considering you still need to be some premium Netflix subscriber for it to work.
What materials are proven unbreakable in a 500 mph aeroplane-meets-hard-surface collision?

Also, what about a surface-to-air missile?
Scribd may be floundering?
A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variation of a ramjet with the distinction being that some or all of the combustion process takes place supersonically.

(from wikipedia on Scramjet)
It's retarded posts like these that make me with HN had downmods...
OCaml kicks ass on Tim Bray's Wide Finder 2 benchmark challenge. Again.
You can see all the results here: http://wikis.sun.com/display/WideFinder/Results
ASH HN: How do I turn my Beta into Pay-ta
Ok so fool on me, I thought I'd found a nice little niche market that needed to be fulfilled which I could do easily. You know, something small and simple. So I built it, and launched the site looking for Beta Members to try it out, of course offering those that qualify free access. That was last Friday. Today, Monday I have over 13000 hits and 4000 beta applications and growing at about 1000 a day. So what the heck do I do with the other beta applicants to entice them to become clients? What kind of buy-in can I expect? 30%, 5%? And does anyone have any ideas on how I can suggest this to the other applicants without turning them all away or insulting them?

Usually I just do what I would want done for me but I have never had this kind of momentum before.

Help.
hi, if I got you right, are you using some kind of decision tree-based boosting method for feature extraction & compare? It looks like so. Just curious, if you do not want to answer, never mind.
Microsoft has destroyed their brand so completely that I don't even consider this a viable product. I don't trust Microsoft.
Typical "conversion ratio" is 0-2%
RPC Server for Erlang, In Scala
Why a Bad Economy Rocks for SaaS Startups
He didn't say "hiring SEO consultants is bullshit". He said "SEO is bullshit". Those things I listed are part of SEO.

And, FWIW, you can do ANYTHING without paying ANY consultants. File your tax return, sue somebody, build a bridge. You don't need a professional-- all you need is the time to self-educate.

With SEO, the questions are: "How easy is it to learn the SEO stuff I need to know?" and "How important is SEO to my business?"
sometimes javascript just can not handle them all. Their are only one implementation of actionscript (as least only one major implementation). But there are at least four individual implementation of js engine. IE's creepy js even do not have canvas yet. that makes it nearly impossible to create some all js based pic-editing service.
First, what's your site's url? There could be many more beta testers here that would be valuable. Also, what you're selling certainly guides how you want to go about handling this issue.

With that stated, generally, I'd say close the beta application process and let in the first x number of applications you got. Send each application a thank you note and tell them that you'll let them know once you've moved out of beta. You may piss off a few people here, but 100% of zero is still zero, so you're better off with the money.

That's my take, but again, background information would be nice.
For people who want a more detailed follow-up: http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-still-bullshit/
I/O models: how you move your data matters
That's a fantastic essay.

Somehow I always thought that no-one else had this problem. Seriously.

I hope I can finally give up my youthful arrogance. I always believed that when people spoke about getting experience they meant learning more about writing software (and how I scoffed at that). But it's just as much, if not more, about learning how not to turn around and run away.
A lesson for bloggers: go to the source or look like a fool
Thanks for the clarification. I admit I was having to make assumptions because I didn't know your data structures.
If NYT makes you login, clear your cookies. Easy peasy.
Microsoft Windows Live Supports OpenID
And I think yours is a knee-jerk immature response to an issue you haven't thought carefully about, all the more irritating because you're closer to the issue than the reporter who wrote this article.

Whether or not the reporter is making a value judgement on "hacking" --- and I didn't read one --- it's bringing up a real issue. Idiot teenagers are in fact a few clicks away from a felony conviction, and the Internet does in fact facilitate, encourage, and amplify behavior that is far more likely to get you in legal trouble online than offline.

Believing that doesn't mean one needs to support substantive policy changes for how we "regulate the Internet"; it just means we're attentive to a new risk faced by modern stupid teenagers.

Exemplars/evidence:

* The stupid kid who hacked Palin's Yahoo mail account

* The stupid kids who are getting themselves sued by the RIAA

* The stupid kids who break into DoD computers for IRC bragging rights

I was 17-18 not long ago, and it was nowhere nearly as easy for an 17 year old then to commit theft and fraud as it is today. It does bug me that the Internet is so "unreal" that a careless person could easily fuck things up in the real world by accident on it.
Fair point, but perhaps approach it from a different perspective. Her father did not even complete grade school, but built a highly respected empire in a field most people would not think much about. He lives frugally and champions diligence. His children (and children-in-law) also live by admirable principles.

As a legacy, it is grounded in good principles. You take and you give back. The wealth follows, but is secondary. It is inspiring to see leaders in this class, no matter if they accumulate millions or billions.

The hyperbolic attitude, I think, makes a world of difference, and makes a terrible comparison.
you are on the right track, bro

if you've got your "ducks in a row" which i guess is the PC version of "shit together"... then you'll always be prepared for whatever comes. it's when you're not prepared and have these glaring flaws in your organization that everything falls apart when cliffs are spotted :D

it takes a true complete meltdown to kill a business that's "properly" run. we can only dream of that kind of perfection, though. i personally feel that ad-driven businesses are afforded a little extra cushion in bumpy times because their revenue is not directly from the consumers. of course sufficiently mountainous bumps are still felt O_o

thanks for your input
The only way to get higher search rankings without improving the overall quality of the site is by gaming the search engine's algorithms. If someone is selling that service, overall site improement, they are not doing SEO but traditional design and HCI work. And if they are getting better search rankings without making the site better for users, then they are selling snake oil.
Campaigns Hit Economic Themes in Key State of Ohio
The email did say "do not reprint."
There was demand for debt, because it was the raw material debt-backed securities were made of. So companies were working much harder to convince consumers to get into it.

Is that really a revelation?

Financial firms have been doing this for years now (debt-backed securities were originated in the 1980s), and the pitches to consumers have been incessant, just look at all the credit card and loan offers people get every week.
"Anything that 'matters' you should be doing anyways for a good user experience."

Not true 'tall. I'll speak up. Here are a few SEO things that don't effect user experience positively, but do help SEO:

1) Meta descriptions (unless you're counting the SERP as your user experience)
2) Avoiding AJAX to expose more content and increase spiderability
3) optimizing anchor text for internal links to match the target keywords you get from thorough keyword research
4) systematically building backlinks with good anchor text. Yes, they "naturally develop". So what? If I spend 40 hours a week working on accelerating this in a non-sleezy way, which of our businesses is going to naturally develop faster?
5) Flat site organization, minimizing # of clicks to content pages (MIGHT benefit users, but not necessarily)
6) Tons of cross-linking on detail pages (again, MIGHT benefit users...)
7) SEO optimized title tags, header tags, etc. Is the best markup/text for users ALWAYS the best for SEO?
8) Keyword in domain name (vacuum-cleaner-house.com is better than suckit.com for SEO-- is it for the user or the brand?)
9) Age of the site (a "used/established" domain name) might be better for SEO
10) Keyword research. Understanding not only what people search for, but WHICH PHRASES ARE COMPETITIVE. You might sell shoes online, but learn that the search phrase "shoes" is locked up tightly-- and referring to it as "footwear" gives you business-critical traffic because you can get on Page 1 of the (less searched for) phrase.

I could go on.
I appreciate that but I already posted it here and the response was mute. That aside, I'm keeping it quiet until I launch as I still want people to sign up so I can at least market to them when it goes live. Besides, I have already set a close date at the end of the month and I'd hate to sound disingenuous from the start.
I appreciate that but I already posted it here and the response was mute.

It happens.

You have our attention now, though, so you should try it again.
Australian scientists say bees can count to four
Are New Video Networks In Trouble?
I'm so glad Tom shared this. I've always wondered how Gravatar got started, grew, and ended up being bought by Automattic.

N.B. As many people here know, Tom is one of the GitHub founders. And yes, GitHub uses Gravatars.
Here's a great approach along those lines (i.e., research an idea among prospective clients before investing a lot of time building it): http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
The tel URI for telephone numbers
As usual, I'm amazed at how cheap it is to buy off our Congressmen. Abramoff was sentenced for picking up a few $100 restaurant tabs. Now Stevens is heading to jail over things like a free massage chair and work done on his house.

With the price so cheap, I wonder if I should look at buying my own Congressman as an investment opportunity? I'm sure I could think of useful things for him to do.
> 3) there are a million services that are provided almost exclusively by very large companies. Quite often they do a horrible job. There's a million opportunities there.

How do you find these opportunities? I guess there is no easy answer, or there would be a lot more startups, but if you have any thoughts, that would be great.
John Carmack's team wins XPrize's $350,000 Lunar Lander Challenge
Pebble reactors anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
> Working on my second book for O'Reilly

woohoo !

(loved your first)
How do idiots like this get reelected for forty years?
I'll be a contrarian: if you really don't like what you're doing, find a way to transition to something else.

That doesn't mean quitting immediately (and potentially jumping into another bad situation).

Rather, start making inquiries (either internally, at other companies, or start your own) and see what else you could be working on.

Just don't accept the idea that "work/life sucks, get used to it" as that's the surest way towards becoming a drone.
Haha,thanks for getting it back on track!

What company? Couldn't see anything on your profile.
could there be similar exploits in the iphone we just can't find them cause the source isn't open. Some would think it is a case for closed source applications, but I think in the end Android will be a stronger OS than the Iphone
Apple to sweeten Snow Leopard with more Cocoa
Heh. Nice user name.

Don't commit seppuku. That's an overreaction. Suicide should never be an option until you have exhausted literally everything else, and "everything else" is such an immense field that really, suicide never makes sense.

You have a choice. Either you keep what you're doing any try to find meaning in it, or you change your life and do something else. If you're not satisfied and have something better to move on to, then do that.
Video of the launch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhnY5tT4YeE
Twenty Questions You'll Be Asked By Investors and VCs (If You Get That Far)
The next time someone bitches to me about scaling, I'm going to point them to this article. It's a perfect example of why designing to scale from the beginning is usually bullshit.

It's only worth scaling once you know you have something worth it. Why design all sorts of crazy cache schemes, redundant load balancers, and master-slave databases when your actual product is crap? All you end up doing is slowing yourself down. Get some validation first that anyone is going to swallow your idea.

Sure, he had some late nights and some angry emails, but that's because he was dealing with the growing pains of being a success. Better that than the loneliness and depression of working endlessly and never getting anything out the door.
True 'nuff. And the OP was not attacking SEO consultants-- he was attacking SEO.
Google Opens Android Market to Developer Submissions
Amazon’s WindowShop Offers A Sleek Interface For The Online Megastore
Did you read it? They were not powered by the reactor. They just carried a reactor on board.

Actually powering a jet from a reactor is a lot more complicated.
I decided to start with a little python...just a little bit to add or subtract a number repeatedly. He was able to follow it, but not, of course, do it the first time. Maybe if his interest remains, he'll start playing with it be himself!
Helium Raises $17 Million, Lays Off 30 Percent of Employees
Is surfing the Internet altering your brain?