skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personalized TV Show recommendations
I thought this was a poorly researched article. Our CPMs are up year over are, as are most other AdSense supported sites that I'm aware of. The latest numbers that I've seen, including those recently referenced by the Economist, show online advertising growing again in 2009.

It's print advertising that's falling off the cliff.

Of course multiple revenue streams is preferred. But we'll certainly continue to see ad supported business models get funded.
I wonder if google will ever open up the labs for outside contributors (or has google already done that and I have just been clueless for the past few weeks/months)?
Warcraft Map in Google Maps (my startup originally inspired by Startup School 05)
I've heard of it going the other way, i.e. one SSN maps to multiple people (or at least multiple names).
Any sufficiently volatile form of gambling has big winners. That doesn't mean it's +EV. The markets (especially forex, from what I hear) are such that even if it were impossible to outperform the broader indexes, you could very well know multiple people who did so over a period of years or even decades.

See Fooled by Randomness for a more detailed explanation.
What would you say about http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381492
Diary of a Failed Startup: Aftermath
This seems like it would pair really nicely with the Feedback Army site we saw recently. It might be interesting to incite Turkers to do virtual usability studies with this technology. Especially if you could give them a task to accomplish.
It can. If someone has a large limit order and your small order hits their trigger price, whereas the next person might have done the opposite and moved away from it, you could have caused a huge change in the direction of the market. Or the same is true of a cascading series of smaller limit orders, etc.

And since making money is presumably based on volume, if you did small trades, you'd end up doing a lot of them to make it worth your while. But in almost all forms of betting, it's better to make fewer, better wagers.
I think you both just disappeared in a poof of logic...
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50 Skills Every Real Geek Should Have
I'm a solo startup founder. Hoping to find other hackers to share this really cool space in a great neighborhood.
Usability! ;-)

In all seriousness, Viviti and typeroom share some of the same features, but it looks like typeroom is an editing tool, not a hosted solution, and that's not a market we're interested in.

Synthasite is also a useful tool, but when it comes right down to it, the design of any tool makes some things impossible, some things doable, and some things easy. We're aiming to make some previously impossible things doable and some previously hard things easy, and I think so far, we're succeeding. ;-)
There's so much money to be made in the stock market (most of the money on Earth) and so many people searching for that data with so much resources (including math PhDs by the hundreds, some of whom I know) that looking somewhere nobody else is is virtually impossible. You're much better off focusing on your career and buying ETFs.

And thanks!
To create.

To leave this place just a little better than I found it.
Arduino and XBee Battery Test Results at Rob Faludi
Google at Macworld Expo
Given the information presented, and assuming I felt I could get another job in a year if things went poorly, I'd probably go for it. That's just my first impression based on decent but not complete data, and applying my own loathing for having to be somewhere at 9 a.m.

I find it interesting that his comments were killed, even though they seem reasonable, due to some very unpopular comments on other posts.
I follow the philosophy of the Divine Porcine. Briefly stated, followers of this philosophy believe there must be a divine being, since how else could you explain that bacon, ham, and pork chops all come from the same wonderful animal?
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I wrote about this too: http://scriptnode.com/article/the-last-in-a-loop-bug/

I like your reasoning for moving "var" further down where it's used in a function.
The word 'meretricious' has always irked me because if you didn't know what it meant you might mistake it for a positive one.

Way off-topic I know.
A little ironic I think.

Newspapers Counting on Ad Sales? Good Luck!

They've been in trouble for quite a while thanks to Craigslist and the web in general. Plus didn't news get out today about the NYT mortgaging their HQ to alleviate the hit they've taken from falling ad sales themselves? If I recall, a few other papers filed for bankruptcy or went up for sale.

Regardless, I was surprised by that Economist article posted last week that pointed out that online ad sales were, in fact, still growing, but at a lower rate than previously projected.
A tip for entrepreneurs raising money: Don't make an investor wrong
Gvke - Women best at assembling Ikea furniture
I don't know that anyone really counts on ad sales from the beginning. I think most startups just subscribe to the "get users now, figure out how to monetize later" lunacy, and that usually means advertising.
The better question is what you need from the user's identity. If an identity is simply a means to authenticate the user on your service only then an email is more than good enough. If you don't need anything else that is associated with the person's identity (e.g. his social network, real-life address, etc etc) then I don't see a problem with using email.
I just live in the moment
What more data points would you need to make a better decision? Some more info below:

Revenue - $200 last month (Ad - 80%, Premium Services - 20%)
Average time on site: 7 mins
Bounce rate: 21%
Daily new users: 27%

Business: Its a sub category in a mature and proven industry.
People have, throughout the ages, attributed to randomness (or now non-determinism) things they couldn't understand.
Web controllable I/O board
What are his non-mortgage expenses? How long can he last assuming he wants to eat? (Those always add up to more than one thinks until he tracks them.)

Does he have people counting on him? A wife or children?

What are the benefits of quitting rather than continuing it moonlighting? Does he need to seek funding? Is that a preferable option to continuing on with the job? Might be if his runway isn't all that long after all expenses are counted.

Would he be better keeping the job and plowing the monthly profits into AdWords for the time being?
I was originally referring to stories, although for the stories that I disagree with, I'll get a massive karma beat down. So I guess it's more of a personal thing for me.

Maybe an informal etiquette reminder displayed with a "confirmation" for potentially bad comments. The downvote never hurts either.
You can't. You can only know your algorithm was successful. The market is changing, so even if you could prove, given variance and sample size, that your algorithm was +EV and not merely lucky, you would only be proving that it was +Ev and not merely lucky. Not that it will be in the future.
To all those who were against Telstra’s privatisation: this is why you were wrong.
Right you are. Let's figure this out.
Gladwell : Most likely to succeed : How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?
I have a query for the userbase: how much do you think the quality of this site would go down is URLs from Techcrunch were banned?

I suggest that it wouldn't be very much :-).
Young graduates struggle for Silicon Valley jobs
The History of twitter in HD
Web Developer Needed
I have literally have been to each corner of the web trying to find a web developer to help me out with a new project and I obviously have had no luck. Everyone seems to be booked with other projects, which I fully understand. That is why I came here.

I've been on Hacker News for a very long time now just acting as a sponge and absorbing as much information as possible. I love the community here on Hacker News, they make everyone feel welcomed and a part of the community in some way. But I have a problem and that is why I am laying it out before the community I trust and need.

So basically this is the description we came up with:

We'd like someone who knows the web and its entirety to help us bring our exciting new product to market. Being proficient in PHP / MySQL / Javascript / CSS is essential. Design skillz is a big plus. Really we're looking for anyone that is interested and that can help in any way possible.

We're also going to be working with many API's, so whatever that requires as well.

Thank you so much.

Please email jeff@ampley.com
Socialism at its finest.
There are hardly any non-mortgage expenses.. Wife earns and can contribute 30-35% of the mortgage. mortgage is about $1500/month

Don't want to seek funding but want to invest more time in promoting/marketing the product and also launching similar products in other sub-categories...

"Would he be better keeping the job and plowing the monthly profits into AdWords for the time being?" - That makes me think!!
Wow. Didn't realize the layer of cheese I slapped on that throughout the middle. Oh well. We need help and that is the bottom line. Thank you everyone once again.
Dec. 9, 1968: 40th anniversary of The Mother of All Demos
Some of us geeks like to spend our time away from computers climbing, kayaking, hiking, snowboarding, mountain biking, sailing, or camping... for such a life, Vancouver Island is hard to beat :)
Studying the 3D cartoon eye
I think that the article is a bit naive. While the growth of ad revenues is undoubtedly decreasing and most likely spending will greatly dip as the "panic" continues, this doesn't mean that a web businesses cannot be successful on ad revenue.

Newspapers succeeded during the Great Depression as did radio and other ad-based businesses.

But this time, newspapers are going out of business because people are getting their news from the web (the classic Innovator's Dilemma pattern). Indeed, with the recession, people will have even more time to surf the web so web traffic and the importance of the web will continue to increase.

Where the eyeballs are, ads must go especially during a downturn. In the next 2-3 years, especially after we move away from "panic" and back to recovery, it seems to me, web ad spending will start growing again.

I should also mention that I currently work at an start up that depends on web-based ad sales. I've had opportunities to move somewhere else but my gut feeling is that a lean business with a high quality product is the place to be right now, even if it depends on ad sales for its profitability.
I thought this was a well-written, very honest, write-up.
Hi, Steve Jobs Here: The First Apple Tech Support Call Ever
Objectivism.
http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points

Is this a better list?
This is pretty slick... I've been putting off creating a site for some side projects. This may be just the ticket!

My question/feature request: Is there a way to share edit access with more than one user? This would be especially useful for the blogging features, to allow multiple contributors.
That is the wall street boolean, what do you expect?
Its absurd, and there's no excuse. My guess is that it solves a problem that hasn't arisen yet. Not many countries have had sophisticated e-warfare capabilities until recently and most countries have communicated over encrypted means since WWII. Up until recently this was enough to ensure identity, because heads of state communicated rarely, and they were the only ones who needed flawless verification. As we proceed into the next century, there's going to be a greater need for authentication at all levels of government, and in private life. For example, I'm surprised we don't see more forged emails that cause serious damage.

This reminds me of something I can't put my finger on. It was an article that hypothesized a state who's authority was controlled by authentication mechanisms. I feel like I may have even seen it here... Any help?
Not yet, but there will be. We have some pretty cool plans for multi-user stuff for reasons you've stated, and others :)
Or maybe it was just that the "simple" Linux solution wasn't really that simple to the person who didn't already know Linux and the software used there? And the the "complex" Windows based solution was already well known, both how it works and what quirks it has and really quite simple to the person which already managed it.

I've seen ton of Linux people presenting so-called "simple" solutions, which while not mindstaggeringly complex, requires you to familarize yourself with a whole new toolchain, new commands and new concepts.

While they have seen the light in Linux-based solutions, they have also stared themselves blind by not recognizing that a lot of things which are simple or obvious to them are skills that need to be learned.

Basically it boils down to not fixing something which is not broken and sticking to the tools you know.
The hacker's lament
I don't think it's lunacy if your startup is cheap enough to run. If you can support a million users on $100/month, why not... It's worth that just to put it on your resume, or just for the knowledge learned from scaling. Then you just have to figure out how to make $0.0001 per user/month and you're into profit.

I do agree about the ones that take a ton of funding and have a ridiculous burn rate though.
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Actually, Costco does NOT take credit cards, with the only exception being Amex.

They will takea Visa/Mastercard Debit card, but you have to enter the PIN. Debit charges are processed at a lower rate, since they're essentially an interface for ACH, and having a valid 4-digit PIN entered (plus buying stuff on a membership card) supposedly eliminates fraud.

(I was there this past weekend to capitalize on their great deals on flat screens.)
Chatterous (YC W08) brings chatrooms to Twitter
The pursuit of truth mixed with novelty drives me. I honestly cannot answer why I exist though ;-)
Really great way to communicate with a group.
Given the informal nature of software development, there are going to be a lot of grey areas when it comes to implicit standards and best practices. But it's the principle that matters. Some people believe that open source can do no wrong. I think that belittles open source.

As for this case.. well, Capistrano is a Ruby lib and Ruby libs tend to work on any platform Ruby does, unless otherwise specified. Plus, it used to be supported, which means people invested their time, thinking it would continue to be. It's a weak complaint but it deserves at least a little recognition.

But the attitude bothers me more than the action. Read that message again and then look at this sunshine enema: http://www.capify.org/

Can you put that site online and then claim you're not beholden to anyone? Questionable.
I'd rather be a haiku
That's called flow. I've been reading a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly on that ( http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik... ).

That's what drives me, too.
There's also a Hacker News Chatterous group: http://www.chatterous.com/hnyc/
There's also profiting when someone else makes something that didn't exist before. That also feels good.
Show You Trust Your Customer
Is the hunt for extraterrestrial life misguided?
It'd be nice to look at the same list, but for the last N months. Subjectively it feels that the number of TC stories on the front page has gone down.
Like many hackers, I often pondered the idea. The closest I got was automated trading in a stock market game run by the company I was working for. I never got round to programming a sophisticated strategy, so basically it was just "sell and buy random new stock if price has risen or fallen more than x%", where I think x was something like 15%. Even with that the algorithm was in the middle of the field (with 10000 participants), but it still lost a little money. As it was 2001, losing money was to be expected, I guess.
eh, there's something to be said for near universal participation; I mean think of the problems we would have if only 90% of doctors went to medical school; or if only 90% of drivers licensed their motor vehicles.

In this case the difference between being able to assume with near certainty that someone you need to do business has at least potential access, versus a 9 in 10 chance that the person whose attention you need for your business to survive is online.

Of course if your business doesn't depend on people who use the internet, you're fine with less than full participation, and it being a second class mode of business for another decade or three...
The DNS Dead Drop
> Why exist?
Just ask yourself why you don't commit suicide...
Yeah I'm also not really impressed with this first draft. The first 2 chapters seemed more about telling me why rdbms is better. It's a shame too because CouchDB has a lot of potential that this book isn't doing it credit for. One of the guys working on it gave a really good interview on Twit back in April. Look at twit.tv under FLOSS from earlier this year.
It's becoming enough of a problem that it is being suggested that the government support some form of credential that could be used online.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/technology/09security.html

And yeah; I'd rather the government than facebook, thank you very much.
This was posted yesterday - but not to worry - it deserves a bit more attention although it might be a bit long for some folks.
By reading it, you caused it to collapse into a modded state. :)
To be clear, the field of genetic algorithms is split into two groups: one primarily concerned with function optimization for engineering application, the other at providing a laboratory for understanding evolutionary processes.
IT solutions yorkshire 
d2 can bring together networking, web development and security skills to allow you to make as much of your standard environment available to mobile workers as required.
Well, I don't know if you'll ever get a better chance to do it in your life.
After that, server side JavaScript gets a bit thin.

I came to this after writing a lot of client side JavaScript which made me realise just how cool a language JavaScript is. I found it disruptive to have to change languages when I wanted to do part of an action on the server - after all it was all part of the same integrated process. This was why I took a good look at running JScript on the .Net Framework. Must admit that I did not end up using that though.
I'm on the Nietzsche 3-step program.

http://books.google.com/books?id=v5DFOleeTeAC&pg=PA13...
Founders at Work and how Viaweb was done
People can also be bent. I saw a documentary the other day where neurologists explained that much of our perception of the world is a construction of our brain, that's why it can easily be tricked by illusions.

One of them concluded that since your world is shaped by your view of it, changing the way you think changes the world. This was the neurologist who had studied meditating people. No one explicitely mentioned philosophy as way to change your thinking though.
I listen to my conscience. I can really tell when I'm going in the wrong direction.

I am surprised no one else has mentioned anything of the sort in this thread.
Be excellent to one another
I encountered a bug in your signup page. After entering a phone number with more than 10 digits, it became impossible to select a carrier (the pull down list was empty). I hope it's reproducible so you can fix it :-)
I would prefer to-do lists in google calendar instead. Google calendar is available via the iCal standard, and it can handle to-do lists as well.
That's part of it but equally important is the idea of separating language / syntax changes, Objective-J, from the real goal of the library, Cappuccino. The other frameworks mentioned blend the two together, for example you can't get the JavaScript extensions implemented by Prototype without including all of Prototype.

But, with Objective-J you can write for example, some math library that has nothing to do with Cappuccino and not load Cappuccino.
I'm not familiar with the chat space, but it looks like you've got something going here with the SMS, IM, and email updates angle.
the site is very good, but i'll have to agree with op (of this comment). analytics is very important. i would switch from wordpress to this because this has a lot more options than a blogging engine but it still can be used as one.
Just an ad - I've flagged it.
And I for one would love to know what the fitness function is, and what the physics being used is. And then, why not, what were the parametres that the ga was acting on...
If there's scaling involved, you're spending a lot more than $100 per month. The only websites I can think of that could get high traffic for low cost are blogs, since they can just run on TypePad or something, but I don't really consider them startups generally. TechCrunch and HuffPo maybe.

There's almost nothing that's profitable at a fraction of a cent per user per month. The net is cheap, but it isn't that cheap.
I beg to differ - evolution, in the 'life on Earth' sense has a very very specific goal - to reproduce genes as successfully as possible. To date, we know no life that does not seek this primal goal.
If you mean that there is a 'designer' of the system, then sure, there is. But if you mean that there is a 'designer' of the little model cars, then no, you are absolutely wrong (except in the sense that the GA itself, a mindless mathematical process, is a designer).

In other words, this is a pretty faithful model of evolution if we postulate that once the first self-replicating organism came into being (once the programmer had written the model/fitness function), no further interference is necessary - a purely mathematical process will lead to artifacts that appear 'designed'.
Ask HN: demo video do's and don't's
Just about every app homepage these days has a teaser/demo video showing off the goods. I'm about ready to make videos for a couple of my apps, and I'm wondering what are some "best-practices"?

- What software should I use to record the video? - Which video host is best? blip.tv? vimeo? - How long is the ideal video? - Voice narration or graphic pop-ups? - Anything else you can think of?
"we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to."

That means eliminating politics stories, because those:

* Appeal to pretty much anyone with an opinion, including lots of non-hacker types.

* Really suck people in. "Someone is wrong on the internet!"

Look at how many comments there were on the Obama/Broadband story. Were any of them really that interesting? I would expect the hacker mind (at least those who are not devout followers of the 'keep the government out of it' school) to have already arrived at the fact that it's some sort of monopoly/oligopoly situation and to cast about for research on what sorts of policy approaches might cause what effects, and have what sort of consequences, both positive and negative. One minute with Google scholar turns up this, for instance: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstrac... Most likely, someone who actually knows something about economics might be able to point to others of interest.

But that takes a lot more effort than the simple sorts of debate that tend to surround those stories.
You or may not be interested in the book "Fuck it: The Ultimate Spiritual Way". (probably not)

http://www.amazon.com/Fuck-Ultimate-Spiritual-John-Parkin/dp...
I don't think I have a philosophy. Do you need one?
The decline & fall of an ultra rich online gaming empire
I exist to kill boredom