skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else think that saying, "Best of all, it's free" is not that big of a selling point anymore? At this point, I assume all services worth using have some free version or demo, and maybe a paid premium version, if it's going to cost anything. If something isn't good enough that I'd want to actually use it, I won't use it regardless if it's free or not. If it's worth using, I'll gladly pay a reasonable amount of money, or at least gladly rock the free version until I need to upgrade. As long as it's free enough to see if I want it, that's all that matters to me.
Thanks to sheff for mentioning my non-profit experienced-people.net forum which discusses website purchases and sales. This site has sent us a fair bit of traffic yesterday :-)

Flippa is one of the many avenues one can use to sell a site or find one to buy. It has a high profile but in dollar terms accounts for a small proportion of online businesses sold. However, it's a popular location for webmasters and lower end websites and I recommend the flipfilter.com site for stats on the Flippa marketplace.

My own analysis is somewhat different. As I commented in the sparklewise blog (the OP link), figures you see in Flippa are deceptive. The $200K site mentioned at (D) in his blog post was sold a month later by the same seller for $40K. The chances are the first sale didn't go through. That's not an isolated case. I would advise that readers exercise caution, it's easy to get carried away with the large figures :)

I've been doing my own analysis of some Flippa stats (http://experienced-people.net/forums/showthread.php/6331) and the numbers are just not adding up for me.
This post was discussed constructively on the Julia mailing list some time ago, and spawned a long and interesting thread. Worth perusing for some followup.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/julia-...
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Sorry. I don't know how I made that mistake... I meant 128 Kilobits per second (16 KiloBytes per second). The best you can get is 1 Megabits per second (128 KiloBytes per second).

I have a 256 Kbps connection. It's really, really slow. It took me 2 days to download OS X Lion from Mac App Store (about 3.5 GB).
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I agree, but lets say your car breaks down somewhere in the middle of the road.

Now you have two options. One is to learn the entirety of automobile engineering before touching your car, second is to learn enough fix the problem for the moment. Needless to say any normal person will prefer the second approach.

Now some mechanical engineer may make an argument that this small quick fixes are harmful for long term mechanical engineering practices. But for the guy who does this quick fixes, none of this matters or is even relevant.
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Perhaps its because "finding a cure" is so much more lucrative than actually finding a cure. But by all means, keep walking your way to a cure lol. Im sure all the fat cats appreciate your efforts :D
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I tested the demand for this and my experience is that there aren't enough buyers willing to pay for the kind of expertise required to curate listings based on some basic due diligence checks, filtering out obvious fakery, and using standard business valuation models to suggest a price range for sites being auctioned in Flippa. You've got to bear in mind that it's very time intensive work to get to the real figures. For example, most sellers don't deduct a nominal cost for their own time. To "normalize" their accounts you'll have to first decide how much of time/expertise is required to run their business and what that would cost.
> And lets be honest here, you would most definitely use a knife in self defense if it came down to that. It's a preposterous argument to say that in a life or death scenario, you'd opt for a lesser source of protection in order to not use a sharp object.

Really?! Well, I guess it's different if, thanks to your gun laws there's a good chance the intruder might be carrying a firearm. No scratch that, if they got a gun, then you're still screwed with a knife.

First, do you know where to hit them to disable them at once? If not, you're now standing really close to a really angry, bleeding intruder.

Second, even if you do, they now bled on the walls, the furniture, everywhere. Have fun cleaning that up.

Third, you just killed a person. You can't really "disable" someone with a knife, either you kill them or you don't.

My advice? A big stick. Like the wooden handle of a broomstick or something. Keeps people with knives at a distance, you can hit them, poke them, and pin them to the ground while you call the police. (stick locks below the chin, behind the jawbone, base of the neck, pushing backwards. very uncomfortable)
This article has very very little to do with climate change and a lot more to do with local climate, or weather, as it is talking about the temperature of North America, which is not the global climate.

As for claiming that understanding of a variable at one scale requires the prediction of other variables at smaller scales in the same system, consider signal to noise.

What this article is saying is that the US is very hot, early in the year. Somewhere else might be very cold right now. Or it might not, this article does not say either way.
I don't like the gold/VIP association. The thing is, RGB gold is not real gold. So the message is really that you are a sucker if you fall for it.

Also, if a company plates it's offices with real gold, it means that they are taking too much money from me.
Am I the only one who thought this blog exploded their monitor?
"And then if it doubles again it becomes 25, and then it becomes 12, and then it becomes 6. only 4 years away to Facebook being a blue chip stock - so all that the 100 PE ratio is telling you is that they do believe that revenue and income will grow pretty quickly over the next few years."

Those are some BIG ifs. I'm going to contrast Google and Facebook to explain why I think Facebook is overvalued.

When Google was in it's fast growth phase, it could perhaps justify a P/E like what Facebook has now - because of the way in which Google makes money. For roughly 1 out of every 14 Google searches, a user clicks a Google ad. As the amount of people on the internet grows, that means the amount of searches grow, meaning the number of ad clicks grows in tandem. Even today, with all the smartphones and tablets and people from the BRICS coming online, Google only has a P/E of 21[1].

Now contrast that with the way in which Facebook makes money. Targeted ads. The revenue they generate doesn't grow in tandem with Facebook's userbase. Granted, the revenue goes up as companies chase the eyeballs, but it seems to be a mixed bag of results selling ads on Facebook, so some companies aren't going to get the results they want and will quit Facebook. People there don't go there primarily to look at products (completely different to many Google searches). And of course some companies will get great results, but the overall point is that there isn't a direct correlation between user growth and revenue growth.

Ah!, you say, but there are other ways for Facebook to make money (off the top of my head):

a) Premium celebrity pages (pay Facebook for a prominent page to get fans)

b) Somehow charge for user accounts, maybe for premium features

c) Selling user data to third parties

d) Zynga etc. profit sharing

e) Others

Maybe they could make some revenue from premium celebrity pages, but not enough to justify a 3-figure P/E, IMO. Charging for premium features would be highly controversial, if they did this it would be a sign of desperation and a complete departure from where they began. They probably will do some form of c at some stage (don't worry, your data is completely anonymised!) but users would probably abandon ship to competitors in droves if they did. They will continue to make money from social gaming, but it's fickle and short-lived, plus Zynga is trying to wean themselves off Facebook to grow their own revenue.

Overall I think they will continue to make billions from ad impressions and social gaming profit sharing, but nowhere near enough to justify a $100bn valuation IMHO. If they bow to Wall Street pressure and really try to squeeze their userbase data for every dime (you could call this 'doing a MySpace', i.e. shooting themselves in the foot), people will leave in droves to the next social hotspot. So it will be 'interesting' to see how they will justify the lofty valuation over the coming years.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG
Lycos still exists and their new site is beautiful.
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Where is the casual carpentry? Why can't I make my own tables and chairs? How do I know which tools to buy? Why so many different types of screw heads with no clear indication in the box as to which kind should I use? Tapered shank what? How do rivets even work?!
And it's not like it's a new thing either we have had wood manufacture for millennia!

IMHO some things will never get past the hobbist-accessible stage.
Before I dived into abyss of overthinking I've got a dead simple solution to my need called "How to detect the valuable discussions on HN". What do you think about opening the links in 2 frames? One contains the source page and the other contains the discussion thread on HN? It still doesn't solve the main problem "Should I even click on the link?", but would be nice anyway.
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well, the rasberry pi didn't pass on the first go due to a misconfigured HDMI interface, so it seems it's not too hard to accidently breach the rules.
"1b is not expensive yet?"

Well, let's assume FB gets somewhere near a 100b valuation when they go public. Is a tool that drives engagement, and ensures your users continue engaging with your site multiple times throughout the day worth a 1% investment not only to have it for yourself, but also to keep it from competitors? In one purchase, they've not only captured one of the leading mobile photography communities, but they've also purchased a tool that is used to seed those photos through other social networks. Now you'll have more "Facebook photos" appearing on to Twitter and Google Plus as long as users continue to use Instagram.
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Where stung is $55, because he didn't realize databases use bandwidth when you connect to the over the Internet.
Somehow i find that very comforting that such a heavily trafficked site relies on it. I 'm a happy PHP programmer for at least 10 years. Not overly happy about it but in the end not disappointed about it. I haven't found an overall better alternative tool for the domain yet.
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The Internet, as it currently is, needs to die. Just put a bullet in it's head an move on. It was a great starting point, but it's all monkey patches and quick 'fixes'; ala https, dns, et al.

I auctually wanted SOPA to pass. Maybe it will get people thinking.
>JavaScript has its bad parts, but it's nowhere near as bad as PHP in its bad parts.

I am not familiar with any precise quantification of the bad parts of JavaScript and PHP which could serve as a basis of that conclusion. That said, both PHP and JavaScript are web scripting languages that are full of bad parts. Extrapolating outwards, the entirety of modern web development is flawed.

> Plus, it's actually quite easy to code in JavaScript avoiding the bad parts.

In a sense it is harder to avoid the bad parts of JavaScript because it is tied to the browser platform, with PHP you can avoid basically all of its bad parts by simply using a different language like Clojure or Scheme.
Recognizing that all languages have their problems is one thing. Arguing that all languages are essentially equivalent in the larger sense is another.

Sorry I just don't buy it. Tools aren't the only factor but they do matter.
Interesting points, the matrix edge cases seem a bit weird. I program in Matlab all the time, but I basically can't imagine leaving it for Julia no matter how good the language is.

The main reason being that the single most valuable part of Matlab, for me, is its amazing IDE. I've seen a lot of people caught up in debates about languages, obsessing about this feature or that one but it is much more rare to see people argue about the IDE, as if it was merely an afterthought. I find this article guilty of the same crime. The author also dismisses Matlab because a statement with no semicolon prints its result (something I take advantage of often) and other small issues , but there is no mention of everything else you lose when going to Octave. Really?

Maybe I'm spoiled, but I now can't live without seeing all my variables and their size, types and values listed, my ability to quickly execute blocks of code at random, jump around all files, super fast and flexible visualizations, great debugger, profiler, docs at fingertips, etc etc etc all integrated into a single package that just works out of the box. It's development on steroids and I've never seen anything that lets me code faster. I feel sorry for people who code in vim.
The authors seem very receptive to feedback -- which is encouraging. Maybe I missed if they addressed this, but I wish they'd consider the IDE to be an important part of the language ecosystem. A web REPL is good... but I suspect that (despite Steve Yegge's prediction that the browser is the next IDE) that programmers will expect a serious language/environment to be called interactively through emacs as can R, matlab, and python/ipython (I heard vim can also do this with R?). Or, possibly through an IDE like Rstudio with optional local/server access.
I can attest to PHP deployment being an absolute nightmare. Of course, the difference is that we're not beginners here; far from it, really.

While the beginner will love being able to open up an FTP client (probably one that's a browser extension) to upload a few files they've changed, that's not going to fly for us.

We want proper deployment, source control, and for it to be used properly. We don't want to go anywhere near patching code directly on the live server. Just make sure the fixes are committed, nothing's broken, and run the deployment script of choice.

The requirements for 'simplicity' are completely different. And it's for this reason I think Rails and Django* and the like become attractive prospects for developers who want a more reliable, consistent environment.

* I'd struggle to list a PHP framework here because each one has a different vision of what the 'PHP way' is, probably because there is no 'PHP way'.
That would be a very valid analogy if no other trenches had been dug with teaspoons, but a high percentage have, including some of the largest and most successful.
You can get really excellent, easy $10/mo Python hosting but if you ask for 'free,' beggars can't be choosers, so you will get whatever they feel like giving you. This is not a function of the underlying technology.

Well this is why I guess php wins. Because the other communities have complete disregard for what the common newbie considers valuable.

The question is whether something matches php's economic model. If the answer is no, its no.

You can get the hosting for $x/mo is not an answer nor a solution for most people.
In similar news I created a MMO Snake, you can try at http://bfilmhelden.de:8080

My backend is running on Go -
Would be really interested in what firebase is exactly. Looks like it would make this much easier.
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I'm intrigued they went with XFS for the filesystem. Is there any more info on the thinking behind that decision?
Who says Silicon Valley forgets you if you're over 40?
Oh come on dude! Nobody is really asking for PHP to be a clone of Python. Why can't PHP have a nice module system? It's not FUD to complain that it doesn't have one. It's commonsense!
I think that there is no widely known cure for cancer not because nobody know one but because currently used cancer therapies are much more profitable. For example there is something like Gerson's Therapy, I've never heard that someone proved it wrong. Why it's not used widely? Because there is no money to earn, there are just fresh vegetables so noone want to prove it right.
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You know what I've never actually programmed in? English.
The problem is defining the black market.

Anyone with software affected by a 0-day is effectively a legitimate buyer of that bug.
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I love the instagram app and concept and execution, but I wonder why they even need 100+ EC2 instances (my guess is that almost all of them just serve photos). It appears instagram has little web traffic and it's not so heavily loaded with users 24/7 like facebook is.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/instagram.com/
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That may be enough to get you through - realistically - but students are usually taught more. Data manipulation is frequently needed and doing that by clicking buttons is seriously no fun. Again: I was talking about what students are taught, not so much what they actually need to pass. I guess technically you don't even have to know how correlation coefficients are calculated (as in: have an intuitive understanding why they are calculated the way they are calculated), clicking a button in SPSS is all you need. But students are taught how correlation coefficiencts work in detail.
True, like the guys at Rovio. It took years before they had success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment
You are ranting about your own confabulated view of cancer research.

Crizotinib is a case in point. It is a small molecule that works very well for lung cancer, but only if a patient's cancer has a particular chromosomal fusion. This drug went from being a 'candidate' molecule to having gold standard data and FDA approval in 5 years. No fantasies about billionaires required.

The way you conceptualise a cancer patient's plight is also insulting and grotesque. They are not nihilists willing to try anything, who we can gladly sacrifice in our pursuit of cure. They have family and friends, and they really want to go their granddaughter's wedding next month and if you harm them with loosely justified bullshit science, you haven't helped anyone.
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I agree. If the OP was talking about mechanics, he could be saying: "I want to build a hotrod from scratch, but oh look so many little parts!".

I think that what many people fail to realize is that although the intended purpose seems simple enough, the tools to do it are sitting atop so many levels of abstractions that without prior knowledge you just have no way to figure where to start assembling the parts. The only way for a hobbist to manage that, would be with the right tools pre-assembled for some finite set of purposes that could guide most of the work.
But when starting a project you still have to make all those decisions. So knowing that PHP sucks is useful information.
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I think because such naming is used in all standard C library.
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Moreover, there have been similar spies in the US probably since we first started as a country. Klaus Fuchs is perhaps the most well known example for his work during the 1940s in informing the Soviet Union about the US atomic bomb research.

I have a fictional book written during the 80s where one of the characters is a foreign industrial spy.

Then there's the false negatives, as with Wen Ho Lee at Los Alamos.

For that matter, it goes the other way. The Russians regard the researcher Igor Sutyagin a spy, and convicted him as such, even though he and the US deny it.

So I think the right way to see this report is as a reminder of how the world works, and not as a specific call to action in response to recent increases in the amount of espionage.
How long will it take to change the mindset at Apple to think about security before shipping? Microsoft did their job years ago, now Apple has to follow.

How long will it take for Mac users to learn that viruses are indeed a threat on all kinds of computers, not just PCs? I can only hope Apple will take a more active role in educating them.
What they say publicly may not sound rational, but its pretty rare that somebody just ends up in the driving seat by chance.
I don't think you are reading that correctly. If you look at the dip after the spike then all of the spike has already disappeared. Also, as you move to the right it takes an ever larger difference to move the number. Think of it this way, after 10 samples it takes a number 11 above the average to increase the average by one, but after 20 samples it takes a number 21 above the average to increase the average by 1.

So, while the 1998 graph and the 2012 graph look close at the end the actually daily values in 2012 needed to be significantly higher than 1998 values to create that much separation when they so recently crossed each other.

Infact it's actually 1976 that had the most comparable march from the sample given. However, because those years where chosen because their jan - march average was so far above the average it does not really show how abnormal 2012 was. Consider, where the average is and how many colder years it takes to average out to that.
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No plotting, except in the web REPL, and only very simple (if pretty) 2D plots supported.

This is something I'd miss. I use R sometimes only because it's plotting features are so fantastic.
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