skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
think about ways you could market products to your customer base... affiliate sales is an easy way to begin as it doesn't require much time.

however you could probably get bigger margins if you handled more of the sales process, but this is a bigger time commitment. paypal and google checkout have made it easy to minimize the hassle and risk of merchant accounts. find a distributor that does drop shipping so you don't have to manage the inventory.

Here's a free idea:
what if you packaged your own "travel" kits for each region that offered small products tailored to the region's experience? this include general things like quick-reference languages book, but also more region-specific stuff for snake bites, malaria, etc... for less of a time commitment, you could put these together in an organized manner on the site and just link them to amazon and affiliates so people can a la carte shop. would also give you an excuse to stir conversation to get community's feedback on what they commonly bring to the area.
They make an exception for Ron Paul fanatics, oddly enough.
If you hate ads, you should just show more of them to non-logged in users.. It can even be an incentive to get them to sign up if you mention it on the site :) Do you know the % of pageviews between logged in users and guests?
On a barely related note, this article reminded me of how much I enjoyed Typing of the Dead. Unfortunately, the only legitimate place I've been able to find it is on GameTap, which requires a subscription fee. Does anyone know of similar games? It seems there is a market opportunity for genuinely entertaining typing games for a post-elementary-school audience.
Interestingly, one of the developers on the Lua mailing list uses Lua in part because he is functionally blind, and the pronunciation of Lua code is unusually human-friendly. This makes both voice synthesis and dictation easier. There have actually been changes to several Lua projects to make the code itself more accessible to the blind, instead of just the end application.
Does anyone else think that this is incredibly creepy? If this goes on unchecked, it's just a matter of time until you're not allowed to code unless you have a license from the RIAA...
Try www.lipstick.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Some_sample_scripts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Example_game_2
Play with the position and style of that ad (if you don't want to ad more..)

So put it in the middle of the article, under the article, etc.. Measure what works best.

Even better would be to have it randomly change color (you can set this when you create the adsense ad) though that could be annoying..

Or simply randomly change the format of the ad: small rectangle, big rectangle, banner, etc.. you will need to code this yourself, but it should help with banner blindness.
I just took a look and I think Boudica is a bit too strongly targeted towards women.

Boudica has four main categories to keep it simple. News, for any breaking news stories relating to women. The Arts, covering theatre, cinema, books, art shows, etc. House, anything to do with interior design, architecture, gardening and so on. Finally, Time Off for anything that you enjoy when you're not working, a great restaurant, a wonderful hotel or destination.

Why can't it just be a place for women to discuss whatever they want to? I know that there are potential problems with women being a minority online, but if the topics are categorized in this way to encourage women and discourage men from posting, I think that's limiting.

Digg and reddit are male-oriented because most of the posters are male. Is there some way of achieving a female orientation without making the sign-up process onerous? (Or by having an easy signup but making the site stereotypically targeted.)
Started to sign up but stopped when it asked for my email.
From Jeff and Steve:

The One Thing Every Software Engineer Should Know
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001177.html

Every week some thing is more important than the old thing from previous week. Next, we'll hear about stuff like "food", and "friends" and "love".

This necessity to shock is a gimmick. It does work for sensationalized news for example, where from time to time a certain crime gets more coverage and importance than others, even if the same type of crime is happening simultaneously.

Typing is cool, ok, and so is marketing. But the germinating view is simplistic: All things being equal, an awesome engineer who types faster is better than an awesome engineer. But things are never equal.

"Learn Typing" plays with a primal human necessity, apealing to the easier denominator. It makes people feel good to tell them that they can be better professionals in two weeks.

"Learn Marketing" plays with our frustations. So many people have lived this situation: The product was perfect, but maybe if I had just told about it differently, if I had just made my boss understand, if I just knew a way to convince others how much awesome I am, etc.

And let's not forget about yesterday's article about Honda, thriving in dificult times, but run by engineers. The truth is that we (human beings, not specifically the HN crowd) like to hear about what we like. I see so many indications of the little club that exists in here (reddit is even worse nowadays), but that's not the point, because this is normal. The point is that all this shit doesn't matter, but we like to pretend that it does because we get to be happy for five minutes.

Managers have this disease too, with their self-help books and curiosity to know who moved their cheese. These things are like happiness injections, making us feel good until the next shine stuff appear.

BTW, I do believe typing and marketing is important, but in no way they're even near the top qualities I am looking for in a programmer.
An application you can download? Maybe I missed something, but it looks like a CMS for live content, not a desktop app.
I don't care whose fault it is. The flash plugin is the only thing that ever causes performance problems for me when browsing, and it happens all the time. If it's purely a flash developer problem I'd say every single flash developer out there is bad and churns out resource hogging code. Either that, or it's the fault of Firefox and Chrome.

Whatever the reason, the flash plugin is a nightmare and I cannot wait to wake up.
There aren't even 5 points in the article. Just the same complaint "I don't like Digg content" 5 times. She gives examples of what she doesn't like, but at no point offers examples of the kinds of things she likes. Also, I'm honestly not sure if the core group of women who would power a site like digg would be very different than the guys on digg. There's roughly only 1% of digg users submitting content. Would the 1% of women submit Martha Stewart or Steve Jobs? I suspect the difference between the über geek girl isn't to far from über geek guy.
The Scoop on Pandora for the iPhone and Other Platforms: Tim Westergren Speaks
You should watch the new episode of Mythbusters called Motorcycle Flip, as the side myth in it is testing if someone can actually escape from jail like some newspapers state the 'facts' like using human hair, bedsheets and toilet paper. As all three get proved plausible, it shows what can be turned into a cable.

When someone can make a rope out of single ply perforated (the easy-rip kind) of toilet paper, I think someone will find a way to make a cable out of nanotubes.

From what I've read of nanotubes, you might not even need an adhesive to hold the cable together as they have high levels of van der Waals force. If you simply splice all the ends together it's possible you'd have the worlds strongest material held together by the universes everlasting and powerful adhesive.
10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming
Eric Sink on Starting Your Own Company
Artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, and spimes
Flash is in no way the internet. Browsing the web without flash is actually a pretty cool experience. The only thing missing is some video, which should be fixed with the new <video> tag.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and-au...

(I don't know if the iPhone supports this yet, but I'm guessing it will).
VideoEgg Extends Its Ad Network To the iPhone, Disses AdMob
Star Trek gets a sexy makeover in new film with love scenes, motorbikes and hunky stars
Why would I start a business based around a patent when I have no guarantee the licensing fee won't be onerous?

There is always a toll--if there is a patent. Why would I pat someone on the back for licensing me something that was once free, until a BS patent was created and sold to an extortionist?

>> lowering the barrier to entry

I think the difference is that I am stepping outside of the current system to make my point, and you're saying patent trolls and licensing improve the current system. It seems clear to me fees in general are disincentives. I agree with you that a lower fee is a lower disincentive, but still more of a disincentive than no fee at all.

Individuals without defensive patent portfolios are at a severe disadvantage in the current environment.

Without the current sham system, there is no "toll for patents I didn't register." This is not to say that there should be no system--only that the system is broken and does not accomplish its aims effectively.
I'm a guy, and I couldn't care less about the NBA, Howard Stern, or James Bond trivia without spraining something.

What exactly IS "girl stuff"? The article didn't mention a single example of what a "girl link" is, except jokingly mentioning a few sexist ideas.
...the site has a core userbase of boys who spend hours each day posting stories and Digging stories posted by their friends.

The problem here is that a small core group of users is able to exert undue influence on the site. If the ranking system on Digg were better balanced, its featured stories would better represent the interests of its broader (and presumably more gender-balanced) user base.
Two 'Random' Headlines from Boudica:

Jennifer Lopez wants another baby
The other side of Angelina Jolie

Granted those were 'cherry picked' to make my point, but this Girl-Digg site seems like the same stuff you'd see inside the popular glossy and rather crappy women's magazines that are sold in supermarkets and bookstores nationwide. All that's missing are the "10 Signs Your Husband is Cheating" and "47 Ways to Lose Weight Fast" articles.
kirtsy.com
There are a few -- try http://www.kirtsy.com/
I wonder if this limitation (not merely banning Flash, but banning interpreters) will turn out to be the weakness that allows a competitor to one day beat the iPhone.

There are cases where you really do want to ship code-- not merely to get around a license restriction, but because that's the right way to build something.
On a somewhat unrelated note, my wife and sister absolutely love The Howard Stern show. I'm amazed after all these years his show and success are still criticized as being too male-centric and shallow. Real fans of HS tune in to hear what Howard/Robin/Artie/Fred and the rest of the crew are up to. The strippers and pron stars are just accessories to the real show (also, anyone familiar will know that there's more peen shown on Howard TV than female bits)
Sad, but I'm sure the laid off programmers will have very marketable skills from their experience with Rubinius.
"Maybe someday we'll perfect the mindreading interface which rearranges text based on pure thought"

So, the post you reply to does foresee a future without keyboards.

What intermediate stage do you see between keyboards and mind reading? As pointed out, handwriting and speaking code have significant drawbacks over the keyboard.
Y'know, that gives me an idea. Why not a foot-controlled mouse? That way I'd never have to take my hands off the keyboard.

(quick googling)

Oh, they already exist. Has anyone ever used one? They're three hundred bucks, so I'm not gonna buy one just to try it out and see if I like it.
Top Headlines from Digg right now:

Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam
First Look at Johnny Depp- Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland
New honeycomb tire is 'bulletproof'
If TV Shows Had Truthful Titles
Phil Gramm Has No Remorse Over Destroying the US Economy
Chinese pirates crack Blu-ray DRM, sell pirated HD discs
Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners
30 Rare & Expensive Gamecube Games
New MythTV Interface Preview
Mark Cuban charged with insider trading.

Anyone see a male bias there? The Johnny Depp article would actually tip the scales to the female side in my opinion.
Maybe some sort of OLED keyboard which predicts what you're going to write and presents the logical options for you in obvious places?

For example if you're writing java, there's only a small number of valid syntaxes you could start with, so the 'morphing keyboard' could just present those, then present the next options etc.

As you got more used to it, you'd know what it was going to 'morph' to, so would probably be able to go pretty fast.

I don't know what might work well though. I'm just saying the keyboard is not the ultimate input method, I'm sure we'll see a whole raft of changes before we get to mind reading.
"Now take Europe and shrink it until it all fits in about the same land mass as Ithaca."

I'm pretty sure that Ithaca already is just Europe condensed into ten square miles.
A SmartNav head mouse can be had for less. I've bought two for my girlfriend who has RSI. Yes, they work quite well, but you'll need practice, and a way to hit a mouse button without using your feet. (Hard to move your feet without using your head.) There are programs that will emulate a mouse button for you.
It's not ridiculous at all. You may spend very little time actually typing in code, but most developers spend a lot of time typing things like API documentation, design proposals, e-mails, IMs, etc. The slow typists tend to write inadequate documentation and not exchange enough written communications with their colleagues.

Keyboards will continue to be the primary means for entering code and English text for quite a few more years. So it's rather silly to put off learning touch typing now while waiting for practical speech recognition or some kind of BMI to show up.
What in particular do you find unpleasant about Objective-C? I find it quite a nice language to work with, actually.
1. It's suing over software used to share files, not software that breaks or circumvent DRM. So, as the article says why not internet browsers, email clients, etc.?

2. I'm confused as to what a French law can do to Sourceforge and the others.

Being French, I feel kind of embarassed by that...
I hope it ends up well.
Sensationalism.
The problem, of course, is that every time somebody runs into a restraint due to DRM, there's a chance of them turning to piracy - which is pretty addictive once it starts.
Here's another: http://www.kirtsy.com/
Ask HN: Good Common Lisp blogs? (new to CL)
Just starting to learn Common Lisp. Got the gigamonkeys book. Any recommendations for some good CL-related blogs to read?
Rails/jQuery UI sortables with single UPDATE query – The Pug Automatic
I'd love it if Google released an API for this. You could upload sound files and get text back. I can think of 100s of things to do with that.
> Being French, I feel kind of embarrassed by that

While I understand how you feel, you have to realize that all of us will be severely depressed if we feel guilty for the actions of our countrymen.
> So if a bank is booking earnings on home mortgages of 50% (due to people flipping property in 5 years),

Flipping properties doesn't give the bank higher earnings.

As long as it is current, the return on an mortgage is the interest on the remaining balance minus the service expenses. When a mortgage ends while current, the return ends, whether that "end" is due to a prepayment (which is how refis and sales work out) or the end of term.
Integrity-178B Secure OS Gets Highest NSA Rating, Goes Commercial
I thought that was a perk.
> Social Democrats are predictably reading this as an example that markets do not protect themselves against unacceptable results.

Yes, but Social Democrats haven't figured out that regulation doesn't eliminate risk. Financial regulation in particular concentrates risk. The "most effective" reduces the probability of a loss but increases the magnitude even more, increasing the expected value (which is the product of the probability of a loss and the loss's cost if it occurs). This can be a bad thing if the expected value is catastrophic, as we're seeing.

We're much better off with continuous small failures than we are with occasional large ones.
Don't they remain unbroken only because there are currently paths of lesser resistance? And iTunes is already routinely hijacked to strip DRM from the iTunes Store.
I think the idea is to prune deadwood - apps which are no longer maintained and just sit there occupying the virtual shelf and distracting users.
The CEO Mark Cuban spoke to doesn't recall what he said
Women spend more time playing flash games than men do so a "light" gaming site with a good message board would probably be more female centric.
1) Q- We spoke earlier about you were telling Mr. Cuban in words or substance : “I have confidential information for you”.

A- Right.

2) Q- Do you recall anything Mr. Cuban said in response or reply to that statement by you ?

A- No, I do not.

The SEC knows this-they have the transcript, yet they brought the case anyway. Why? Do they have a different statement from Mr. Faure ?

Thats a valid defense? Really? WTF
> What kind of punk keeps a diary of how bad his contract is?

I don't, but I always use a paper notebook where I keep track of precise start and end times, work done and what bosses ask me to do in each moment. In addition to keep me focused, it's sort of a CYA diary, and a couple of times it has been useful.

On the other hand, there's people like the woman in the story, that shows hostility from the beginning, not because others did something wrong, but preemptively being an ass just to intimidate and keep others under their thumb.
"The future of the universe"? Who can predict that? Let's stick with "in the working lifetime of anybody reading this".

And "transfer data from ourselves to machines" is far too general as well. We're talking about programming, right? In the future -- in the present, really -- we're all going to use cameras and mics and touchpads and accelerometers and (god help us) mobile-phone keyboards for most of our human-computer interaction... but for writing software? Am I going to write software by doing an interpretive dance?

(Actually, that would be kind of fun. And it might be great to have a system that can, say, watch a human move some stuff around on a monitor and then mimic the moves N times using a robot. But we're not going to write Javascript interpreters with dancing. Some tasks require precise specification.)

So, yeah. I don't see it. I'm still a believer in precisely formatted plain text, and keyboarding is a great way to create that. Although I'm really looking forward to using the table-sized multi-touch handwriting-aware Minority Report megadisplay of the future, I'm not confident that writing code is one of the things I'll do with it. Can anybody from (e.g.) the Media Lab, or another place where they have such displays today, point me to a substantial piece of software that they've written using handwriting recognition, or voice recognition, or intelligent circles-and-arrows recognition? That might help me to transcend my blind spot. But it seems like, when they sit down to code, the smart folks all use emacs or vi.

Obviously, just because I don't see it coming doesn't mean it won't happen. You're right: Most of the folks born before the typewriter became practical didn't foresee the typewriter. They just got really good at using pens.
I'll give you my opinion here: It's not so much about the content, as it is about the community that evolved around the content.

For me, Hacker News is a great example of this. Why do we need Hacker News when we've already got Proggit (i.e. the Programming sub-Reddit)? Truthfully, Reddit's social news technology is more advanced than HN, and there's a lot more people and stories there. Right?

As you'll probably agree...no, not exactly. What sets HN apart (for now) is that it's smaller, more serious, and arguably more intelligent than Reddit's. I see the same links posted here as I do on Reddit; the key difference is the conversations that ensue and in particular the tone of those discussions.

This is long-winded way of saying "girl stuff" isn't about having gossip and fashion articles, but more about a culture evolving around those stories. I do think that the male-dominated culture surrounding sites like Digg, Reddit, and even HN can be off-putting to women.
Someone should just set this up as a web service.
iTunes is not "routinely hijacked". The current incarnation of iTunes DRM hasn't had a published break since iTunes 6, several years ago.

The conventional wisdom maintains that all DRM schemes can be broken, and that's true, if you ignore cost. It is far from proven that all DRM schemes can be broken with costs proportional to the rewards.
If you can look at that image and that video and not call it depressing than the word should be retired.
If they we're charging their end users a fee, in order to guarantee they won't use and "bad" applications, while allowing the bad applications to exist, then that would be considered a protection racket.

Charging the applications to be certified sounds like good business.
I thought I read this somewhere before...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/27/dziuba_apple_app_sto...

Guess Arrington still has a man-crush on Dziuba. Rip-off post is full of fail.
Suppose there is exactly $1,000,000/year worth of demand for product X.

If there are 20 teams creating product X and they all do reasonably good job then each one will make on average $50,000. This much money is not enough to invest into actually developing product only in sustaining it and doing small, insignificant improvements. So user will have to chose between 20 mediocre apps.

However, if there are only 3 teams going after the same market each one on average will make $333,000 and will be able to assign two full-time engineers to work on improving the product. Users will have 3 higher-quality products to chose from.

Now if there is exactly one team doing X they will capture entire $1,000,000 and do abslutely nothing as there is not competition to push them. That's bad for the users.

Therefore, a balance needs to be maintained to ensure optimal user experience. In real life economy this balance is maintained by boom-bust cycle where weaker business are regularly purged and consolidated. In fast markets like web boom-bust cycle takes far too much time and an artificial pruning mechanism is neccessary.

Of course if you do not believe in making money then none of these applies - you can have a thousand develoeprs chaising market of X and each one making only a thousand dollars/year. Since they will all have to take up day jobs they will end up spending only 5 hours a week to work on the app and you will have a thousand of half-assed apps. Kind of like on the iPhone.

A yearly fee may not be ideal pruning mechanism, but I can't think of anything better.
> If everyone knows that 90% of any ensuing corporation will go to the top 6 developers on the project, they are much more likely to commit valuable resources.

You're confusing "my plan will work if other people behave this way" with "other people will behave this way".

Moreover, it's an open source project, so you can't say anything about "any ensuing corporation". You can only make committments for corporations that you control; you can't stop other corporations from getting most of the benefits.

And, who's to say that 6 is the right number? What if a given project takes 10 people to do reasonably? Why will those last four people contribute?