skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of Neil Gaiman's recent commencement speech at the University of the Arts. I definitely recommend checking it out if this little tidbit of advice from 37signals was inspiring at all.

EDIT: forgot to link to the speech: https://vimeo.com/42372767
Do you think taking the Facebook PE and comparing it to Apple is some major revelation that investors, or most people who read a newspaper, do not know? Every FB thread on HN has somebody pointing out PE, and then a thousand responses on what is wrong with that argument. So lets do it again.

The PE works out to be so high because there is a growth expectation from Facebook's one billion users. All that it says is that the market believes the chances that Facebook will be able to grow revenue, and in the future, profit, is very high.

PE is not an accurate indicator of the value of this stock. PE is used to compare mature yield stock, the type that all those Warren Buffet books talk about. With Facebook still being a young company the numbers to track are revenue growth and price/revenue.
Writing a Geography Dissertation
http://redeafined.blogspot.com/2012/04/debunking-fourth-grad...

Short version: the stat is 15y old and mostly measures the unbelievably bad teaching theories (oralism, mainstreaming) that hurt a lot of deaf kids and are still being fought over.
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Dan Benjamin: Regarding The Talk Show
This whole argument is asinine. You need to consider that each company is floating a different number of total shares. Buying one share in FB and one share in Google would not grant you an equivalent stake in each company. You need to see how many outstanding shares each company has on the market (and what fraction of the company is public).

For your purposes (comparing valuations between two companies), it would make more sense to compare market caps.
That's good to hear. Do you have a source?

edit: All I've found is something that sounds a lot like the current bill, in fact. Are you saying that income tax is not taxed as though you are an American citizen for the ten years after you renounce your citizenship? I'd really like to confirm that.
More Men Enter Fields Dominated by Women
I am wondering,

The Gal that made the atari game machine that fit into a single joystick use to run an IRC chat where her bot would voice out the chats to her while she was at her workstation building things..

We have openCV, etc. why not an IRC bot that translates text chat to Sign Language?

My bias, grew up with a neighbor who had a deaf daughter..I ended up learning sign language but I was extremely young at the time so it was easy.

Myth about child not learning spoken language is wrong, Greg Gass had deaf parents and even jokes about it in his act as not holding him back from picking up spoken language skills.
Please stop submitting your blogspam here.
I had this problem in FF, but not in Chrome. Maybe some redirect issue? Who knows.
This was a great overview, thanks. One off-topic thing though: I'm browsing on my kindle fire, and unless I turn off javascript, your site crashes the browser after a few seconds.
exactly. same to everybody who thinks that it is facebook who are getting screwed with the stock falling today.
People who use FB are unlikely to buy pizza or packaging from you via ads.

Audience is totally wrong. I'd never try to sell anything in FB.
This part really struck a chord with me, and forced me to stretch beyond merely doing slightly better than the average:

"a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."
This is a different twist to all the discrimination and related discussions on the gender in the workplace topic.

“The way I look at it,” Mr. Alquicira explained, without a hint of awareness that he was turning the tables on a time-honored feminist creed, “is that anything, basically, that a woman can do, a guy can do.”
I've never liked it. Probably as it was a blatant rebranding exercise. It just feels so pretentious. Just like 'Google' would if it were a new name (great in it's day.) All the web 2.0 names, seem so naff now. I pretty much cringe whenever I read one. (I think the only clever part was naming it after Bing Crosby - which you have positive associations with). Perhaps they wanted Ping. Or perhaps it's some play on Bill Gates' name!
I guess the MS green shoe ran dry.
You've failed to factor in growth rate. Your calculations for how long it will take to earn back the share value are assuming no growth in EPS over that timeframe.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's EPS growth outpaces Facebook, but these numbers are completely meaningless until you at least make a stab at adding in projected growth.
Wow, thanks a lot! I wonder why it's not in default somewhere.
Technical purity and premature optimization do not matter in the beginning. You can always achieve these things at a later stage when you bring on more experts and specialists.

The things that matter are: productivity, mature and stable framework code, and a solid set of libraries to pull for common tasks/integrations. These are the areas where Rails really shines and it's one of the reasons it has become so popular among early stage startups.
A list of the 90 Startups from the 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon
I'd be interested to see that link!

Perhaps it's this? DEFCON 19: And That's How I Lost My Eye: Exploring Emergency Data Destruction

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXbq0BFzQQg)
Dan Benjamin is a class act.
I attended a hackathon a little while ago that had an interesting cash arrangement (I'm not naming names as I signed an NDA, and in all honesty I am not sure what I can and cannot say). It was an invite-only event, and each team attending was paid $5,000. The winning team was paid $15,000. The company holding the hackathon owned the rights to any work done.

I think this is a great arrangement. Developers get paid a reasonable sum for a weekend's worth of work, and the company holding the hackathon gets 7 or 8 app concepts pitched to them at the end of 48 hours. It probably costs them a lot less than getting one concept the traditional way. Cutting out the middleman, I suppose.

To answer the post itself: I think it's all about visibility. I have discovered APIs through hackathon sponsors before that I have consequently used later on. Maybe one week later, maybe one year later. But it means they are on my radar.
P/E ratio does already correct for number of shares: it's a ratio of your share's price to your share of the company's earnings, based on the percentage of the company your share represents. Alternately, if you take totals, it's market cap divided by earnings.
Summary: Dan used to listen to podcasts daily, used to get a real feel for the people he was listening too. So he thinks it's a bit of a shame they can't even do a "one last show." But he wishes all the best.

I love listening to 5by5 episodes. Mainly the siracusa one, and at some point I'll check out Grubers new podcast. My thoughts are that losing Dan from the show is a negative, he's a great speaker with a soothing voice and I enjoy the smalltalk he makes.
Well, in the case of one partner of my startup, it tells you that the KPI for a given marketing campaign is number of likes added, and some companies are willing to pay out the nose to get them.
The editing does work for me, no buttons show but I am not sure if the demo is tailored to show that off.

On IE7 nothing really happens.
Workfu: About the prettiest jobs app around
Maybe a price can steer devs towards a specific tech but in general I participate in hackathons because it's a relaxed and easy way to learn new coders. You build something together and it's fun, much more fun than having some small talk at the usual networking events.
Yeah. And I use ipython's %ed command for that kind of long scripts (emacsclient as editor). Also really great feature.
... it would take Facebook 107.66 years to afford to buy themselves.

Only if their earnings were constant for the next 107.66 years. People expect Facebook's earnings to continue to grow. Apple's earnings, by contrast, are considered mature.
Facebook Fallout - Business Insider
Could the Yankees patent a particular trajectory to the plate and keep all the other teams from pitching that way?
Problem is, when you hit 1 billion users, you've run out of "exponential growth" headroom. All you can do is multiply that by 6.5ish (therefore, linear growth), and even finding new sources of revenue doesn't get you exponential anytime soon.

Certainly, most future growth will come from extracting more cash from the pool of users (or people selling to them), not growing the pool.
Oh, I'm sure he wants to grow the company and make it successful. And I'm sure that he will do, he's shown the ability to make it happen.

I don't, however, think it will ever live up to the price they floated at. I suspect that Facebook will be a successful company worth about a third of what they launched at.
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Paper.li - Be a Publisher
Reliability and lack of information. The problem with a "format" such as timestamps is that there is no defined parameters, especially cross language. I cannot rely that sending a timestamp in seconds will be read in seconds the other side (for example JS does not use seconds, it uses ms), there is no way to tell what one is over the other, either. I cannot look at a ms timestamp and say "This is in ms" over a second-based timestamp. It also lacks information, such as tz, and is of a fixed specificity. What happens when I want higher resolution time due to customer feedback? Go back and change the whole system to use MS over S.

ISO8601 defines its parameters within the body. I know I am parsing seconds from an ISO stamp because it is appended with an 'S'. It can support variable specificity, so I don't have to be second-accurate if it isn't needed.
Social media strikes me as inappropriate for the vast majority of B2B businesses.

In the course of some freelance work I came across a dental supply company where you could "share" or "like" every single product. I have yet to see business case for a customer publicly "liking" spit cups or custom-engraved toothbrushes. Or their FB friends wanting to know about it. Or any of that resulting in a sale.

For any marketing to work, you have be where your potential customers are. Yes, technically your B2B customer is on FB or Twitter, but for personal, not business reasons. Would you want your company's office supply company calling you at home?

Online marketing dollars for B2B are much better spent on search ads, where you have demonstrated interest and intent, or on display ads on industry-specific sites, or a social media presence where an industry-specific community already exists, e.g. on forums, or talking directly to your customers on Twitter.
I'm not from the US and I don't have a lot of knowledge about US law, but it seems strange to me that the executive branch of the government is hosting petitions for what in most other countries would fall under the legislature.

Isn't it the task of Congress in the US to set policy about what requirements are attached to the expenditure of public money, does the executive branch really have any impact on stuff like this?
New state law holds parents criminally responsible for child's... | www.ktvu.com
To paraphrase your own comment:

Timestamps are human readable. You just need a machine to change them into a human readable format
Facebook has over 900 million active users as of May 2012. [1]

LinkedIn has maybe 23 million active users. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
[2] http://www.quora.com/LinkedIn/How-many-active-users-does-Lin...
> Some people just want to write code. No matter if it needs to be written or not. It's like nervous energy.

Maybe it's an attempt to play catch-up with the ``My Github is my resume!'' folk.
Auto generate a coupon / QR code for everyone who likes you
Then if any of their friends uses that coupon code (by flashing their iPhone at the till) then that original person gets ten points on their loyalty card

I think frankly that a social graph is best employed using graphing friendly rewards - mostly that is the social dopamine thing in our brains, but affiliates also work

In fact - is this being done?
WillyF,

I'd be more than happy to know "your" expected growth rate. Facebook has not disclosed its business plan, views on the online ad market, ongoing capital expenditures and working capital needs.

Who's failed to provide future growth information is Facebook, not the other way.

More importantly, the Tech audience keeps looking at P/E as a valuation metric, but what rigorous and top asset managers do is look at Free Cash Flow to Equity, not Net Income. On a FCF to Equity valuation, FB IPOed at +220x.

Even at a generous P/E or FCF/E ratio of 25x, Facebook's Free Cash Flow needs to go from $450m to $4,000m in the next 24-36 months. Do you think that is possible? After looking at their infrastructure needs I think not.

I think it's you who has failed in the calculations.
That's true, but the www/no-www/http/https cases are very likely to refer to exactly the same site. Besides, Google's algos, through crawling, should know that it is the same site. It seems unfair to punish the site for this.
I think, if as a business you have not bought your likes, then they do imply something.

For example, some of our competitors have around 10 times to 50 times the likes as us. But the difference in reactions to a post we might make is no where as much - they could be just 1.5 times to 2 times or even less.

Also, businesses indulging in purchasing likes, to showcase their fan base(really?) has perhaps contributed a lot to FB Ad purchase so far. So the past year or so, can be called the 'like' wave of FB/Social. The future is interesting!
Context: One thing that liveblogs can’t do at the moment
Help Trade School opensource their software
It's really going to be a different show now. But John clearly has a completely refreshed voice in the new series, it seems like the move is going to be a net gain for everyone. Many others have pointed out that TTS on 5by5 has not been the same recently. I look forward to listening to the new TTS even though it won't be the same.
I haven't downvoted you, but WTH does unified Matrix mean?
P/E ratio can also go down if annual earning per share increases. I think it is too early to comment on that. They have HUGE user base and I hope they have a good chance to increase their profit. Lets wait and see :)
Guess Morgan Stanley cannot support the high price past the first day
... you have the clarity to make things drastically better. You won’t miss the non-sense the veterans have long since accepted as the norm. Once you’ve acclimated to the temperature of the pot, you’ll get boiled alongside all the other frogs.

The message of this one paragraph is kind of ok but the rest and in particular DHH's choice of words is as usual awkward and feels like flatulent talk from a self-help book—too many adjectives and over-zealously constructed metaphors.

What he is talking about is not about being a beginner or that you only get one chance to be a beginner, it's just about change:

- That you face change all the time

- That you should always be prepared for change

- And that you should actively seek for change the entire time and see change as something beneficial

Thus, you get a chance to be a beginner more than once with every change.
Dan truly is a class act. His shows have been a huge source of insight and entertainment to me over the last few years. I'm clicking the "Donate" button on the 5by5 site.
Avoid Unwanted Permissions (777) and Unwanted Services on Your Server
Direct marketing doesn't get discussed much on HN and realted posts don't seem to get much traction (c.f. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=direct+mark...). I think it's a topic that could use a could hand-holding tutorial for startups. How to select a DM agency, how to build a target mailing list, and so forth.
So, what does performance look like for complex data sets? Any benchmarks?
Total Valuation / Total Earnings. Increasing the shares will not change the math...

Think about it in your head with an imaginary company with 1, 2 or 4 shares.
The Endangered Public Company
I like that idea. Visibility is key though. I guess you just need to put a price on that visibility.
I prefer epoch time for all the reasons you mentioned, but there are situations where you need something else. For example, you can't represent a holiday in epoch time (July 4th has four different start times in the lower 48), and if you need to do precise calculations epoch time is ambiguous around leap seconds.

I wish there was something simpler than 3339/8601, it really is a daunting mess of incompatible implementations and optional elements, but time is hard.
I'd go with 1. The only people you help with 2 are the bankers and whoever they deem to be worthy of stock at the IPO. I'd rather help the investors who have been with the company for years.
Post-Mortem for NASDAQ issues related to the Facebook Inc. (FB) IPO
So, can I patent route that ship takes through the ocean? Or air corridor?
Google's running TV ads for Chrome as well; so at least 2 major browser vendors disagree.
Yes. I'm too lazy to write code, so CPAN means I just pick the pieces I need and glue them together with Perl.
Looks like somebody (Morgan Stanley again?) keeps trying to create a floor around $34, and every time it goes under that it goes into freefall.

The technicals don't look good either.
Not exactly the drama I think everyone was looking for, but I never expected any reaction other than this from Dan. Whether this is the 100% complete truth, we'll never know and we shouldn't care. Time to move on folks, nothing else to see here.
NASDAQ's Handling of Facebook IPO: "Not our finest hour."
i bet he will get more business from this one free HN mention than with anything he can do on FB, especially in his business. not all business models lend themselves to social marketing, not by a long shot. i'm a developer for a US floor heating manufacturer and we recently started the whole social thing, other than people posting reviews on our fb page and liking us (which is good), there have been no direct sales...it's just a bad fit.
Software Development Metrics that Matter
I found my ability to perform well at certain board games (even those previously unknown to me) to improve after spending some effort studying chess. I attribute this to the improved ability to analyse abstract positions, to construct an increased number of possible moves and opponents' responses in my head in a short amount of time. Though confirmation bias etc.
I suspect infrared time-of-flight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera

You can get pretty impressive accuracy and precision at short distances, and the plane of depth points matches what their demo video shows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d6KuiuteIA&feature=playe...
YouTube users upload 72 hours of video every minute
Does this have no lag or is that a concept video?
"Will people continue to use the Mobli API once this hackathon is over? ... Will anyone build anything meaningful on Mobli that lives on for more than a week or two?

I guess the real question is whether developers can be bought off to build at hackathons and if this is a worthwhile route for companies to take or just a waste of money?"

That's a good question, but I feel that there's more ways to measure the value in having a hackathon than just whether developers will continue to use the platform afterwards. Having real people try to make actual applications out of your platform and be creative with it could lead to greater innovation within the company when the powers that be see some of the interesting ways it can be used. Plus, having a hackathon can be great dev karma and raise your profile in the hacker community and the wider community.
I agree that most future growth will come from extracting more cash from their current pool of users, but I can imagine a situation in which new sources of revenue would lead to exponential growth.

The world economy has never seen anything quite like Facebook before -- that's why it's so exciting. They could become Google/Netflix/LinkedIn/Zynga combined. I'm not saying they will, but they've got the prerequisites: 1 billion active users.
How can I fail in the calculations when I didn't offer any calculations? All I said is that if you're using P/E ratio as a metric without a growth rate, you're doing it wrong.
Scripting News: We *can* do better than Facebook
So, if I understand you correctly, the owners' goal is to set the IPO price as high as possible and then to hell with the future stock price? I was always under the impression that the owners' goal is long-term growth of stock value, but of course I'm not an economist ...
CRM has been trading well in excess of 100 P/E for almost 3 years- and they were negative last quarter- yet everyone that owns an S&P 500 index fund owns some of that. Maybe that's your point though, diversify...
Startups Are All About the Execution, So Tell Me How
What's missing from this iPhone app?
> we even had a Muslim fundamentalist who is very concerned about things in Pakistan

I'm never clicking another FB ad again - it's kinda scary how much information the advertisers can get about their fans!
I don't get it, why would it be priced perfectly ? Why would you want it to decrease ?
Show HN: Cull.io: Easily Screen Candidates by having them develop a real web app
I think he knows. He specified that not all of Chrome is open source.

Edit: he got it wrong, though. The Google features of Chrome are not open source.
Question to libertarian-minded HNers: what are the downsides of banning such practices by law?
This is how a web version of a magazine should look
It's not just about the costs to Elsevier. It's about the costs of keeping information a secret that could have a much greater financial and societal impact if it were unleashed.

This is the age of the individual contributor. Open Source has taught us all about the power of appealing to and capturing the output of people working at home, in small groups, at small startups, etc.

So this isn't so much about recapturing the piece of a fixed pie that Elsevier takes. This is about making an incredibly larger pie by opening the information up to a wider audience and allowing us to compound the benefits in a much larger ecosystem.
I don't know if it was possible, but something told me to short that stock on Friday. Oh well. I think this will be a disaster in the immediate future
I think he's implying that if the price drops to $10, the PE would be at a reasonable level.
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Not a new project, no. But I've been thrown into the perl fire recently. I've been assigned to make some changes to a million-lines-of-code perl project created in 1996. Had to teach myself perl 2 months ago and I've been hacking away at this monster ever since. I've made some progress but very slowly. Just trying to trace through an execution path is difficult since I still don't totally grok regexes. They won't let me hook up my linux box to the internet for various reasons so I can't connect to any repositories or download a debugger/IDE. Did I mention this is also my first experience with linux? I'm using a 5 year old version of redhat. So I use gedit and log files to figure out what's going on. Oh and it's a server/client program and for some reason there are tons of redundant copies of files in the server and client folders, not sure why.. Also fun to see 3,000 line functions with 6,000 lines of comments from the previous 30 programmers who've worked on the project over the past two decades..
Michael Moritz to Step Back at Sequoia Capital
Two 'mad scientists' create sleep mask that lets people CONTROL their dreams
Why I don't take vacation