skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On those numbers Digg has revenues of approx 3 US cents per unique visitor. Not too bad, surely? How much could they charge for advertising?

It costs Digg about 5 cents per visitor. Where is that going? Seems excessive for bandwith + servers. The content is user generated, I cannot believe that they are spending much of that $14m on development or administration.
I think judging a language by "Hello-world" is a mistake.
Sure, some languages have a fixed overhead for creating a program. Some have needless syntax fluff that doesn't do all that much, but it's actually a good skill IMHO to be able to identify and see through that fluff to the core elements of the code.

When we pick up a book do we judge it based on the index at the back and the preface and the publishing info at the start? We probably just ignore those bits.

I think in these sorts of classes it'd actually be a good idea to spend several weeks looking at other peoples code and analyzing what it does. Being able to read code properly is a really important skill I think people should master before they even start with writing hello-world themselves.
If you're going to editorialize in the link title, at least spell properly. Or did you mean they're just taking the money to the park and setting it free?
Law tries to increase the cost of the practice by penalizing those who participate. Slavery is impossible to eradicate in a society that is beyond the rule of law.

Slavery would probably be very profitable if allowed in America today. The productivity of labor is much higher than it used to be in the 19th century, and the cost of subsistence maintenance of a human being probably hasn't increased very much. However, our laws and cultural biases are effective at preventing it.

Slavery is a side-effect of poverty and the weakness of law. Do-gooders will not be able to end slavery until prosperity and the rule of law become common place.
I don't really see this as being a particularly big deal.

Editors overstepped the mark on very short single-paragraph articles by reproducing content in full rather than providing a short summary or blurb. The sites administration has now been made aware of it and have, rightfully, since fixed it. Their intentions seem honest as a link was provided to the original content. Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
In the quest of self-research I've come across http://www.curdbee.com and http://www.invoicejournal.com/ and http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm - has anyone had any experience with these services?
The advice in the article seems good..
digg.com/movies ads related to movies/blockbusters
digg.com/music music ads
....
ads targeted according to categories...
New York might be shocked, shocked! to know that some states (like Texas) actually manage to run financial surpluses while still maintaining low taxes. They could learn a thing or two from other states.

The same goes for you, California.

Also, I wonder how many of the budget "cuts" are actually just reductions in the amount of planned increases. Politicians have ruined my faith in the English language's ability to mean what it sounds like it means.
It REALLY depends on page views. Unique visitors has nothing to do with revenue. 3 cents per visitor is very low if they have high pageviews per, which I'm guessing they do.
2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.
You are correct. I'm not sure exactly, but I suspect that it would be entirely within the realm of reasonable possibility for two equal groups of 250 to end up 5 points apart with an SD of 15. You could find out pretty easily with a script and a Gaussian RNG function if you were so inclined. My curiosity on this one is just slightly overpowered by my laziness though.
I'd say, I would want to be treated by a doctor who is a professional and loves his job. Credentials obviously cannot guarantee both.
I don't know what dictionary you're using, but here are a few definitions from mine:

scalable - How well a hardware or software system can adapt to increased demands.

scalable - the ability of a product or network to accommodate growth

The ability to scale hardware and software to support larger or smaller volumes of data and more or less users.

the ability of a computer system to shrink or grow as requirements change
Now that I reread that, you're totally wrong. Angels are individual investors. They can and often do participate in equity rounds. They often contribute the entire amount. You can have an angel-funded series A. VCs could also do a convertible. It's called venture debt and it's rare but it happens.

No company that I've ever heard of specifies in their Articles what amount forces a future round to be equity rather than debt. It's all up to the company and investors. If your lawyers told you all of that stuff, seek new representation.
It needs serious debugging.
Sounds like an interesting option for developers who would like other people to try out non-trivial Windows applications like Resolver One in a safe way: put a trial version of your app on a public AMI for anyone to use.
To hire sufficient good TAs, schools would have to pay much more than they do, as they are competing with a lucrative commercial industry. However academic hierarchies won't tolerate paying elevated salaries to people with lesser paper qualifications just because they are talented. So every year you get the people who want a bit of cash on the side, but aren't yet good enough to do part-time contracting.
anyone try this?
Amsterdam is amazing and it is possible to spend days just wandering around and exploring all the markets, fresh meats, cheeses etc, it is a short trip on the ferry (behind the train station) to some of the inter-connected islands with large parks etc. And I recommend visiting Rotterdam which is only a train ride away.
I was under the impression that Texas had a deficit of a few billion dollars. http://southwestfarmpress.com/news/farming_budget_deficit_to... supports this, however it's not dated so I don't know if its recent or not.
Yeah, VCs are looking for massively scalable businesses. Lawfirms require man power, and thats not scalable, or at least not on the scale that a website is....
As far as I see Digg has about 10 times the staff of Reddit. That seems a bit excessive to me. What are all these people doing?
Definitely. A doctor without credentials is not a doctor, he's a witch doctor.
Didn't you get the memo? The latest terrorist plans inlude clogging your tubes, raping your dog and drinking all your beer. Nothing is safe anymore, nothing.
NY has an estimated 1.7 Billion deficit this year, and an estimated ~15 Billion deficit in 2009/2010. It is pretty bad right now.

As far as what i read in the newspapers (I'm on Long Island, so this is pretty heavily covered), The tax on downloads isn't limited specifically to iTunes. It's a more broad tax for "digitally delivered entertainment services" bought over the internet in general.

If you really want to be disgusted, look at the tax on sugared drinks - and Paterson (NY Governor) is trying to claim that it's to "reduce obesity". Or take a look at what he's doing with the state university system; raising tuition by ~600/year for the next 2-3 years and then instead of using the money to fund the SUNY system that it's being paid to, it's being used to cover other state agency costs.

While, yes, there are some things that should be cut (cosmetic surgery being covered under medicaid for elderly? unless there's a serious accident, this is a big 'wtf'), theres other things - teachers salaries and funding for schools that was already low before the cuts were proposed (One district on Long Island got its budget cut in half completely, just as an example) :\
2009, The Year Social Media Gets Standards (Hopefully)
New york housing rentals "rental listings"
I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success.

Why? Anybody know?
Rule of law is a myth. A leaky abstraction. Laws can't rule people because laws don't have minds. People, on the other hand, do have minds, and they use them to create deceptive abstractions like Rule of Law.

If you look behind the abstraction, all Rule of Law means is that those who have the most authority tell you what to do by writing laws, instead of by shouting at you. It then becomes obvious that Rule of Law can't stop slavery, because the rulers can simply tell some people to be slaves by passing a law (which has actually happened before).
I could have sworn that most "programming" editors support macros, just not to the extent that emacs does.
Maybe it's the memorable name?
This one is dated:

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Texas-Budget-Surplus-Makes-...
seriously, Digg just spends too much money. I guess that's fine and all for expansion when the VC money is coming in, but they spent $10.4 million in the first three quarters of 2008? Doesn't that figure seem insane for a company like digg?
Because it's free as in beer, and it's not intimidating or filled with Flash like some of the others (the "good enough" design derided by web design snobs).

But it's still a dating site, and even the best, most functional dating sites aren't very good. A friend of mine signed up at plentyoffish, he lives in an urban area and is reasonably attractive.

What he found was a lot of women who like to chat and email, but don't want (or can't) go out on actual dates.

Dating is a lot like teaching. Those who can, do. Those who can't habituate dating sites.
Don't underestimate the power of one person with a passion and determination.

I think plentyoffish got some good press early on and that got it the momentum. Plentyoffish is the only free dating site I've heard of, so there's a big reason to go there instead of other free dating sites.

The site design is actually pretty good IMHO, and sort of suggests that you're going to quickly get what you want to see and not a ton of flashy useless stuff.
I had a number of other jobs before I got to programming in my thirties. The big difference is, you keep coming up against totally novel problems for which there are no ready-made solutions. It's very challenging, and it places programming as a job in a league of its own in terms of creative problem-solving. It doesn't make me happy, but it makes me look forward to my work every day, and that's saying a lot. It's also given me the liberty to change job and even business sector as often as I please (typically every couple of years) which again is unusual and refreshing.
>Slavery would probably be very profitable if allowed in America today.

I completely disagree. The problem with slaves is you have to feed them if you want them to work. While Americans (afaik) spend the smaller percentage of their income on food than any other country in the world, the food isn't the cheapest. That is, you can pay some other country for weeks of work for what it would cost to feed a slave for one day (and I think I'm being conservative in this estimation).

I think the flaw in your statement is "the cost of subsistence ... hasn't increased very much". I think it's vastly more expensive then it was.

Just as a quick data point: How large is a standard farm in America today and how much does the farmer make from it? Enough to live on for a year, right (and he's probably in debt for the equipment)? And he's in fact being paid for the food he produces. In middle ages and you had that same land, you lived like royalty no? And that's while producing much less and feeding all the people who work for you.
Ringo - Distributed key-value storage for immutable data
At the moment it's showing me adverts for women's weightloss products, digg really should be able to figure out I'm male.

There are women on Digg? Knock me over with a feather. If you've ever been to (or seen photos of) their events, they fairly scream "sausage fest." Hell, when you look up "sausage fest" on Urban Dictionary, they might as well put the Digg logo up there in lights.
If Programming Languages were &lt;T&gt;
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What Easter Eggs have you placed in code?
That's funny; I've used Python extensively in webapps and I'm very happy with it. I use Mako for templating. http://www.makotemplates.org/
How An Idea Is Presented Impacts Its Appeal
I agree, Google can be replaced just as "easily".
Meebo works well in the iPhone browser.
Early SEO (when it meant a lot more than it does now) + the network effect. An incredible success, and as strong an outlier as ever exists.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-a...
Is it winamp people?

I hope so because if not their use of the llama and online radio will cause confusion.
> Funny, I actually do use Excel a lot to edit a lot of these things

How is that even possible? I'm not trying to be snarky or anything, I seriously want to know what your workflow is. It never would have occurred to me to use Excel for editing SQL queries; and as for Lisp or config file or HTML... how?
Yes, I was thinking unique visits, rather than visitors - my mistake. They probably have a lot of people who visit daily, so the number of visits is easily hundreds of millions, page views could be billions.
Nope, that would be ed :) I had to use ed to rescue an OpenBSD VPN endpoint a year or so ago.
I guess you have the right to believe whatever lets you sleep well at night :)
Digg’s Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product
Benjamin Graham on bear markets
Banks May Be Challenged Over Unfair Loans
This year, has not been a favorable one for the banks especially here in UK. The banks are now facing a new challenge posed by the unprcedented discovery of thousands of unfair loan deals. According to Consumer Credit Act (1974), consumers can challenge the validity of their loans under the pretext of “unfair relationship test”. If you have a personal loan with a current balance of £5,000 to £25,000, which were made active before April 2007, you can be eligible to make unfair loan claims after appropriate scrutiny. With these unfair loan claims, the UK banking industry can lose billions of pounds in consumer debt. It has been estimated that a shocking 60% of personal loans are unfair and as per insurance experts, around 79% of the loans are vulnerable to full legal challenge.
Moxie is to muxtape clones what ikiwiki is to MediaWiki and friends.
A lot of what I do is taking data from one source(ie an HTML table) and throwing it into a database. Sometimes cutting/pasting into excel, then quickly formatting it, is easier than writing a regex to get it done.
its funny how this is the only response that included a hard number estimate. i take that to mean the improvement from a text editor versus an ide is not an order of magnitude.
Thoughts on education from a UT research fellow and high school dropout
He's done unbelievably well, apparently in 2006 he was making $10k a day from adsense, you can only wonder what that is now.
Zack's been my friend since 7th grade. We started a game company together and succeeded in making the "#1 Game of Alltime that Nobody Bought", according to C-Net. I also helped out with his interactive art stuff. The science piece is worth reading for geeks who wonder why exactly they are in school for so many years: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9228040/Zack-Booth-Simpson-in-Scie...
Never used SAP or Siebel then? ;-)
So, is that a twitter name squatter whining?
To people who wonder how a company like this might happen, here's my take.

A developer constantly talks about his company (that also happens to cater to software developers/hackers) under the pretenses of how well a small software company is growing, which attracts software developers/hackers to read about it from blogs and hear speeches mentioning it at startup conferences, causing them to join the site to see how the site actually works, play around, and report how well they liked the site on their own blogs. This increases the userbase, which of course increases growth, which leads to more blog posts and speeches about how fast the company is growing (same content, but different and much more impressive numbers every month, so the story only continues to get more and more interesting.) Eventually, word grows about it and regular folks start caring after hearing about the user numbers. Mainstream media becomes interested, causing more growth, and so on.

The approach for creating something for fellow hackers, growing the user base, and telling fellow hackers information about how well it's doing for marketing purposes is the approach taken by 37Signals, FogCreek (JoelOnSoftware), and some less known but up and coming startups. Creating something for fellow hackers has been described by Paul in his essays. One young company that I can think of right now that is good at this cycle is GitHub.

The key is to be the one who starts something, not the one who keeps reading and reading about others'.
Economic analysis of religion: The Invisible Hand of God
Well I admit the 5 points don't so dramatic after all ;-)
Very nice site. I agree with others that the compare feature needs to be improved.

Also allow me to chose kg vs lb and cm vs inches, most of the world is metric.
You know you can get refrigerators with integrated MP3 players, right?
Refactoring with codemod.py
2009 KPSS Tercihleri - Dsi
Link Your Adsense account with Google Analytics
Well, I think Python has one obvious preferred way of doing things, but then tends to let you do it anyway you want. Which I guess is a part of the whole "Python supports multiple programming paradigms (primarily object oriented, imperative, and functional)" thing. Not that I know that much about Python either but it is my preferred language.
One Suggestion:

You want people to have positive feelings about your company (you are putting a lot of work into it in order to help people, right?) so drop the negative advertising. Figure out ways to differentiate and complement others so that people who use and like other services don't feel personally threatened by your advertising.

Even if it is really obvious you are competing with someone, don't say it that out loud, since you are likely to fork into a different business model from them as you grow and find your own niche. Playing nicely with others will get you more positive buzz from the community, and you'll be perceived as a better partner by others if you play nicely.:

"Adsense for X, Wozad for Y".

Also, if you want to fight Google head on you're likely to lose. Better to find a niche, start making money and use that to improve your service.
I'm in Saudi Arabia. It's near dial-up on a 4mbps DSL link. Though loading sites seems to have more trouble making connection than downloading on an established link (if you've used a satellite connection, it's like that). Our Sysadmin sent this today:

(from http://www.francetelecom.com/en_EN/press/press_releases/cp08... )

A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):

- Djibouti: 71% out of service
- Egypt: 52% out of service
- United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
- India: 82% out of service
- Lebanon: 16% out of service
- Malaysia: 42% out of service
- Maldives: 100% out of service
- Pakistan: 51% out of service
- Qatar: 73% out of service
- Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
- Syria: 36% out of service
- Taiwan: 39% out of service
- Yemen: 38% out of service
- Zambia: 62% out of service
That's not true. It needs to scale from 1M of data to 1G to 1T and beyond. You seem to think that scalability only refers to concurrency. It doesn't. It means that you're as close as possible to O(n) or better yet O(1) as your workload increases, whatever that workload is.
Yep, memoization is often a big win, and so easy to do in Python with a decorator.
Yes but I think his argument is that ranking apps by volume creates an incentive to compete solely on price in order to get the volume in order to get the visibility in order to get the volume... Kind of like if expensive low volume laptops at an electronics store were stacked away somewhere in the basement.

But I don't agree with his conclusion that this is not a free market. Every market is organised according rules that someone artificially creates. It is up to sellers and buyers whether they want to use that market or not. So there is a market of markets and that's what makes each of them free.

Of course Apple's dominant position in that particular market of iPhone app markets is a problem for everyone. That's why I would think very hard before I creating apps on top of someone elses proprietary platform. I'm not saying I wouldn't do it or that it's somehow unethical. I'm just making the observation that these are the problems that come with proprietary platforms.
He is talking about commercial success.
And "lie, cheat and steal" was best strategy for ages...
Also, fix your email. I just sent feedback to customer-support@wozad.com and...

"Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."
How much do you trust IT analysts?
What Motivates (Some of) Us
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I wish people would just release these types of libraries without any dependencies on Prototype, jQuery, etc. Then people can just write the Prototype or jQuery bridge/bindings/helpers and distribute those as well.

There's no reason for a physics engine to depend on one of these libraries, or even the DOM or Canvas. It's just crunching numbers.

Perhaps it is cleanly separated, I haven't looked.
There is a certain socioeconomic scale to the people that populate certain sites and plentyoffish is not at the top of that scale.

Tell your friend to try OKCupid, Craigslist, or one of those sites that cost actual money. He can probably afford the $20/month. It's cheaper than hip-hop dance class.
MySpace being #1 is worse.
MySpace isn't nearly as bad.
Economy May be Slow, but Online Sales are Going Strong
Thanks for your feedback George, the email problem is fixed.
We did put a lot of efforts in this startup and our resources are very limited, both in financial and human resources terms. Perfection at the moment it's well beyond us.
We mentioned the big Google with the intention to create some buzz and focus on the similarities between the two systems. Similarities that anybody can observe.
Anyway your point of view makes perfect sense and your feedback has extreme value for us, again sincere Thanks.
MythBusters Co-Host Adam Savage on Obsession
This is really fascinating and reminds me a lot of the feeling I get sometimes when I code something.
Obama is in the Zune not Mac | TechJaws
That's a really interesting idea.

Did you come up with that yourself or has this been discussed elsewhere in more depth?
That's probably because the author of this article comes from a collective of people who think it's rhetorically correct to use phrases like "iPods and MP3 Players" circa hanging displays at Circuit City. It's a (bad) generalization just to help get the audience to the central point.
3c per visit sounds excessively high. How often do you click on advertisement?
Google Image Search Gets Style