skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two points people should be thinking about:

Yes, Pinterest has a good monetization scheme compared to Facebook (http://cdixon.org/2012/05/15/facebooks-business-model/), because of the natural placement of affiliate links and purchase intent.

But, Pinterest is so new (relatively), we don't really know whether it's just a fad or something to stay and I oftentimes feel like that risk of being replaced or simply forgotton about is not taken into account. We have seen dozens of growing companies that ended up nowhere, the sheer number of users just covers that up these days.
Wolfram Mathematica coming to the iPad
It is 100M. Not 120. AllThingsD corrected their headline
The other interesting part about Pinterest is that they mostly gained traction outside of the traditional early adopter segments.

Not sure any what's the right way to value this kind of company: obviously if it was an established public company, a $1.5b figure might be scary (as far as I understand Pinterest does not yet have revenue). However, it isn't: venture capitalists valued it this high, in the hopes that there's a realistic (compared to similar companies, funded at the same stage) chance that they will have a $7.5b-$15b exit.

It _would_ be a sign of bubble if Pinterest were to go public without revenue (which has happened during the 1990s) , with pension funds (that have a very different risk/reward profile from VCs) buying the shares. You could say "it's 1999 again" if as a result Sun (hey anyone remember them?), Cisco, and Oracle stock rose exorbitantly as a result of Pinterest buying a record number of servers, routers, and commercial databases (hey, remember when companies used to do that?) and their shareholders expecting (with great certainty) that there will be more and more companies like Pinterest sprouting up, i.e., that sales will keep growing.

I've only caught the tail end of the bubble (I had an internship in a startup junior/senior year of HS, 2000-2002 -- and participated in SVLUG, meeting folks who worked for Webvan, RedHat, Va Linux, et al).

I still remember just how differently it felt from today: for starters you couldn't drive from Sunnyvale to Fremont (over the bridge) without being completely stuck in traffic (as early as 3pm, and as late as after 8pm), and without driving past at least 3 or 4 Sun campuses.

Nowadays: there is still commercial real-estate in that area that is empty (including the former Sun East Bay campus, where manufacturing happened), the Dunbarton Bridge is fairly traffic-free even during the rush hour.
What about stylus?

http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

http://visionmedia.github.com/nib/

More?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945633

Some compiler geek should create a tool to translate code from one preprocessor to another, so mixin support would not be an issue.
Serious question: how does a company like pinterest spend $100 million? That's enough money to keep SpaceX running for an year, hundreds of engineers building space rockets.

They don't seem to have, or need, a sales force. They hire mostly developers and designers, and I imagine having hundreds of them isn't of much use unless their service will change radically in the future. Ideas?
Anyone have any insight on what they're gonna spend it on?

I don't know anything about valuations but why would a company like Pinterest need 100 million dollars cash?
This is a really good writeup and I really appreciate the bit at the end about pull requests and issues as I do feel that developers should stay on top of their communities. That said, I like the mixin syntax of Less better and my favorite project Bootstrap uses Less, so I'll stick with Less.
I would agree that DRM that breaks basic functions of an OS is unethical. I believe that DRM that prevents a user from using or accessing something for which he or she has paid for, at any time in the future for any reason, is unethical and legally dubious.

The free or nonfreeness of a particular piece of software is as much of a moral question as the color of sand on a beach.
What if you don't agree that Facebook is worth $100B?
I'm really surprised this company received money from so many VC's.

They're offering photo & video sharing by email ! Seriously ? Is it that hard for someone to login to Flickr or YouTube and click the email icon.

I feel like any 1/2 way decent engineer could make a clone of this company in 8 hrs
There are many other mistakes. The author also says "Fifty years ago Medicare and Medicaid didn't even exist, and federal spending on other health-related services made up a tiny sliver of the whole"

This is only true because 50 years ago veteran's benefits and many other related military benefits were part of the defense budget. In 2011 this amounted to $141 billion dollars. Cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Ot...

This alone represents a false 20% reduction to the "Defense" budget, at the expense of increasing the appearance of social services budgets. If one adds up all defense related spending not by Federally published categories but by actual expenditures then the picture changes radically -- and it looks a lot closer to the budgets of yesteryear.
oh dear lord! diameter is totally insane. other than the base protocol, everything else e.g. the gx, s6 specs are impossible to decipher. with multiple versions etc. things are even more insane, and hunting down for duffs boils down following the cr's for the version. aghhh! I have been using the above site that you mentioned, but it still doesn't take the pain away...
The 'let's give parents the ability to shop' ethos is what directly led to the current clusterfuck that is the US public education system, through NCLB and its state equivalents.

I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.

Signed,

A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.
That, although, turing complete it is not always the right choice. This weakness is common to all programming languages.

Forgetting this and getting into technological pissing wars is a common weakness of programmers and people who fancy themselves programmers but mostly just write blog posts and lurk forums.
That multiple-choice remark was a copout. Knowing material well seems like a sufficient condition to do well on multiple-choice exam.
I love learning. Am currently using a lot of my spare time to teach myself 3d printing technologies, some basic fluid dynamics, the voronoi/delauney maths stuff, and the thermodynamics of engine design.

Plus there is all the stuff I have to keep on top of professionally as a programmer, which is an inexaustable and ever growing list of often arbitrary methods and technologies.

As for university, turns out I disliked it almost as much as I disliked school, so I dropped out and went into industry for a while.

Dropped out of that too for ages as I got bored of all the corporate nonsense, although I have been back into it in the past few years to try and raise some cold hard cash for a few projects I've got going.

Am considering going back to university at some point however, as I wouldn't mind doing either nanotechnology or neurology and most of the equipment involved in those is out of my current price range.

To be honest though, most of my heroes are dead philosophers of one form or another, so I am pretty happy with a roof, food, clean clothes, regular showers, access to the internet and a large pile of books.

Besides, in my experience the majority of people at university aren't there because they want to learn, but rather because they are expected to go by their parents. The people who are there purely for the pursuit of knowledge and without being pushed are the exception rather than the rule.
Ask HN: under-paid, when to leave? 
Facts:
-Have been employed by co for 5+ years
-Hired as a programmer, but now do programming, embedded systems hw engineering, network security assessments, and computer forensic consulting,
-25 years old
-Masters of science in software engineering (graduated this month)

The issue is I feel I am underpaid, after my post-graduate raise. The root of the issue is that I enjoy and like my job so much that I do not want to leave, at all. I am told and do believe that my boss is unable to pay me what I would like and think I potentially deserve (double what I am making now), but at the same time I do not *know that he is paying the maximum he can while still surviving. Even more, I have trouble thinking of more than one or two ways to pressure him into the maximum, other than show-boating another co's offer for me to him.

I do realize interviewing for another offer would solve the question of what I deserve, but I am so torn on leaving for something new. My idea is that change is good, embrace the uncomfortable. But two reasons compel me to stay: one, I love what I do, especially how dynamic it is and I do not want to pick a niche. I imagine that moving to a new company would require choosing a position in either programming, forensics, or network security, not all three. Two, I have always seen this job as a 'run away train' or 'shortcut' - in other words, it seems the smart move is to start your own company, and as I am one person removed from the owner, and have (unsurprisingly) been offered partial ownership of the company, this potentially can be a trade-off for salary.

I wish for some mentoring from those with experience with this. How wrong is it to stay in the same co for more than 5 years at this age? How long do I stick around and wait it out before it is too late?
No.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
oh, if only.
Have you been injured in Seattle, Tacoma, or anywhere in Washington State?
John is admitted to practice before the Washington State Superior Court and the U.S. District Court, and is a member of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association and the Washington State Bar Association.
versus 2006? i doubt it's more than double the number.

maybe it's the comfort level of the audience that helps with monetization?
"Turning the browsers of pictures into buyers of products" is an excellent turn of phrase, but I think it kind of misses the point. In actuality, Pinterest is about to become the HSN of the internet. It plays to all of Facebook's weaknesses:

- Pinterest makes money on sales rather than ads, through referral links

- Pinterest makes identical money on users with accounts and anonymous users

- Pinterest has exactly the users who have money and want to spend it

- Pinterest runs on greed, envy and materialism rather than lust and boredom

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. They've already had a big setback in that they were rewriting or inserting referral links and they had to stop. I'm not sure what the conception is moving forward, but I'm sure $120M will help them figure it out. Unlike a lot of the other big names being bandied around now, there is a sense that they're trying to build a company rather than find the fastest largest way to sell out.
All other things being equal, I'd still prefer a free (as in speech) game over a non-free one. The idea that I could go in and change some behavior is so compelling that I would probably spend more for such a game than its closed-source counterpart.
I think we may be talking about two different sets of numbers. It sounds like you're quoting GOOG's penetration into US (or OECD) total population. (I'm guessing from the percentages.)

I'm saying that the aggregate number of people using the Internet has grown much, much faster. I don't have exact numbers handy, but it's certainly possible that the total Internet population has grown more than 100% over this period.

You also raise an interesting point about frequency of usage, which would also contribute to valuations.

In 2012 it doesn't require huge leaps to see how a company Pinterest rapidly could get to revenue numbers that support this valuation. At YHOO's current revenue-multiple-margin mix, this would imply revenues of around $400m-$500m. I don't know what their revenues are now, but given their growth and reach I'd be surprised if investors didn't pay a higher multiple for Pinterest than for YHOO.
Can Tumblr Turn a Profit?
“…sibling element. That is, an element that shares the same parent.”

Unfortunately, that is not true. It only matches following siblings.

See my JSFiddle demo: http://jsfiddle.net/alanhogan/sSVCG/

(Also, HTML comments between elements apparently mess up IE7 and IE8.)
"Unlimited" mobile plans tend to be bullshit.

I know people who have signed up for these and been given heavily restricted handsets that won't allow tethering, won't allow web downloads or app store downloads over a certain size unless of wifi.

Plus they tend to be significantly slower than my 1GB/month account which costs less and I never use even 1/2 of.
Or more neutrally (and accurately): delicious with pictures.
I went mostly for the social aspects (to make friends and party basically) and to get me the piece of paper that helps getting a job. Some of the courses at university interested me, but most of what I learnt that benefited my career I did outwith my courses.

It was still some of the best years of my life and would recommend anyone to go, but I dont think a thirst for university prescribed knowledge is the only valid reason to go.
No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating. There are dozens of parallel projects that demonstrate this; perhaps the most obvious is Bitcoin. There are breakins with Bitcoin, but the threshold is very high, and it's pretty clear that only the most intelligent and savvy attackers make off with cash.

In general, people sometimes ask this question about FOSS and security. Isn't FOSS bad for security, they say, since attackers can look at your code and find the holes so they can break in? What this assumes is that the holes are inevitable and obvious, and all anyone needs to break in is find them. It turns out that this isn't true, as many security-sensitive open source projects from OpenBSD to Mozilla Firefox have demonstrated. Security holes shouldn't exist; help from the community to prevent this is key. The hope that code will be more secure if we only keep it secret - otherwise known as "security through obscurity" - is a pipe dream.
You are thinking of http://www.aerofs.com/
You built this in a single weekend?
> "gets a very small slice of the overall profits from a sale, the rest of which is swallowed by a useless industry".

Yet every day new bands are signing up with this 'useless industry' trying to gain more exposure and money than they would without this 'useless industry'.

> Am I obliged to pay you? No. You demand to be payed for the costless act of copying your book. That's ridiculous.

This statement is utterly ridiculous. Just because something is easy to copy means it should be free? I can easily copy a 100$ bill on my Xerox machine at work, I should be able to do this without consequence? You must not be in the content creation industry and rely on it to pay your rent. The art, creativity and experience are where the value lies in a book, not in the 'copy', so yes I as a content creator do have a right to charge you to enjoy my art.
This is such a cynical and negative comment. The only purpose it serves is to belittle the founder's motivations, as well as belittling YC's tireless efforts. Ugh, just thinking about such a negative comment has put me in a bad mood :(
I disagree -- plenty of fast growing teams and companies treat employees well, even during hyper-growth. Sure, it's a lot less stable than an established company, but what people are talking about in this Quora question doesn't seem to be related to growth.

I know a fair number of people at Facebook during the 2006-2010 period (and some from 2005+), and they paid people well, didn't measure productivity by butt-in-seat hours, etc. Facebook was growing at least as fast as Square.
If I'm understanding this correctly, my 3G iPhone 4 on my currently grandfathered unlimited plan is safe for now, and in February when my contract expires, I should be able to keep the same plan. If Apple comes out with an iPhone 4G and I choose to get it, then it's goodbye unlimited data.

Still, I suppose Verizon is doing things adequately. Their throttling for heavy data users applies only when the tower is at capacity, and speeds return once the congestion is gone. (Compare this to AT&T, which artificially slows data speeds, even when capacity isn't an issue.) As for the plans, any way you slice it it's a worse deal to go from $30/mo for unlimited to $30/mo for 2GB. At least overages are billed at a sane rate ($10/GB seems appropriate to me, although I've only used 0.5GB this month with 4 days left in cycle).
When is a good time to get started?

When my daughter was 4.5 years old she started piano playing based on a specific early children education. Now 3 years later she is doing really well and still enjoys it a lot. It sounds early, but if the education is done right I believe there is nothing wrong exposing them early on.

For learning how to code (a little) I am not sure when it is a good starting point. It seems to me at 4th grade they have enough comprehension to learn some basic coding skills. For a parent finding the right balance for the child of having fun, learning and accomplishing something is probably the crucial part.
Startup Nation: Community vs. Success in Australian tech startups
Netflix Changes Terms of Service, Makes It Difficult to Sue
Two things very wrong with your last suggestion:

1. total lack of semantic value - you cannot possibly get more meaningless than “span inside a div” there. It makes for extremely brittle CSS.

2. You should be using classes rather than elements in your selectors when possible, not only to make the code more maintainable and flexible, but also because it’s more performant (if you care).
Fun: Brave Boy - Free Online Games
This board actually has fairly elaborate scoring mechanisms for dealing with trolls and other undesirables. You might wish to research what they are doing.
Oh, that’s what he meant by slider?

Why do some people call these sliders?

Things that show a series of images are called carousels (because they rotate!). And what if your “slider” (carousel) fades instead of transitioning with a horizontal wipe? Not sliding then! Sliders are things you drag and drop to select a value within a range (like a volume slider).

Had not seen carousels called “sliders” until two days ago, but I hate this misnomer more than anything.

Please also note that both Bootstrap and YUI call this pattern a “carousel,” and some of the most popular jQuery plugins do, as well.
The userbase is 80% women, and the percentage of active users who are women is probably even greater. Not sure of the demographics of delicious, but I'd guess roughly the inverse.

Also, the fact that the userbase is mostly women is materially important in valuating the business, since female users are generally worth much more than male users.
AT&T has already specifically talked about throttling restrictions on unlimited plans: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/technology/some-wireless-c...

Especially as we get into next gen mobile speeds, where mobile could increasingly replace broadband, I can't see this changing. (And I'm not even convinced that pricing shouldn't push heavy usage towards wired infrastructure.)
Meteor and Firebase and other novel web app frameworks are one thing... MMO Asteroids, or any multiplayer game, is another. Game developers have been doing multiplayer for a very long time; the frameworks promise to blur the line between client and server, but MMO Asteroids is still trivial with traditional client-server code, without any funky security model, making it a bit of an odd showcase.

Anyway, I doubt those frameworks have lag compensation (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...), so good luck avoiding jitter :)
Entrepreneurship: A Bad Deal [on Shark Tank Season 1]
He posted that to a newsgroup, not the Web. I'm sure he wasn't using the Web to do that, especially given the content of that post!
Why they wouldn't?

It's a very solid regulated monopoly.

Name one thing you can do.

only answer is "exchange one $120/mo plan at company A to the same at company B"
I'll bite. The second gulf war was officially called OIL (Operation Iraqi Liberation). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoSBqs6y8uM and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Military_...
Both look useful, but aren't exactly well-supported by the library ecosystem. In Go, faux-blocking I/O is standard, and all the libraries support it; it's not something bolted on as a handy afterthought.
Same here, Bootstrap has a ton of momentum and the mixins abstract away worrying too much about the vendor prefixing stuff anyhow.

Horses for courses, the real story is that these pre-processors are getting serious traction.
I'd imagine a notable chunk is likely going to servers and infrastructure costs and another chunk will be reserved for current or potential legal expenditures.

But yes I agree its hard to understand how they are able to put all of that money to work - probably a lot goes into an "emergency fund".
Well it is a bit strange that they do not for example endorse Debian, which is really principled on free software but lets the user decide what to install.
I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping sites in a core search group.

Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod in electronics and sorting by price.:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipod%2C...

I get a usb connector, stereo speaker, some other mp3 players, etc. all among the top 6 results. Only 2 ipods on the first page. At least there is a link to a department containing just the ipods.

So in order to avoid doing really badly you don't allow searching by pure price, but rather use a combination of price and relevancy (and this can only take you so far as the results above demonstrate.)
How Google makes their profit - How Google makes their huge revenue?
Interestingly, most bubbles end in a scenario where the decline of a popular asset causes a domino effect through out the system. Silicon valley might by in a 'facebook bubble' - we anchor all of our prices on facebook, and then hope like hell that it isn't over valued.
Step 1 should maybe be purchase train tickets to bulgaria where you can stretch your 10k GBP out for a year.
The Ashton Kutcher model. Good for him.
2 Tips To Help You Get Your Ex Boyfriend Back
It's not his business savvy per se - its his savvy in ensuring he has sound advisors to encourage and assist in this.
The word "bubble" (counting this comment) appears 12 times in this page :)
Verizon: profit margin 5-6%

Apple: profit margin 29%

Google: profit margin 27-28%

Who's screwing who?
Maybe politically correct people don't think others are stupid, but smart or not, there are definitely some morons out there.

I for one, do not need to be PC to be smart. I don't claim to know everything, but that doesn't mean there aren't people who know less who also decided a long time ago to stop learning/embracing new ideas.