skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seth's point is good, but there's an answer to, "Why not have an unlimited budget for positive-ROI advertising?" In fact, there's three answers:

1. Cashflow
2. Budgeting
3. Things change

First, you don't get your lifetime value of a customer right away. If you have a huge pile of money, then yes, go for it. But if you bid $100 to get a $20 sale, knowing that you'll get an average of $20/month for two years, that's a really solid buy. Awesome. But if you've got $1000 in the bank right now, you can't go unlimited on that very good buy.

Second, budgeting. In a small business, there's probably lots of things that you really can, would, should, and would like to have. A new hire. New tools. More money into advertising is great, but you've got to put money into some stuff that'll never show a positive ROI to fend off barbarians. A bit into legal, a bit into accounting, more than a bit into customer service, upgrading fulfillment/turnaround/uptime, etc. Those are things you can put off forever in name of profit, but it's not such a good idea.

Third, one day the world's going to change, and if you have an unlimited advertising budget the month that your super positive ROI stuff produces zero return for whatever reason (might not be the advertising's fault!) then... you go out of business.

So you have budgets. Smart businesses immediately pour most of the cashflow from good resources back into them towards the limit, but slowing down and building the foundation so you don't get crippled later is a good play. It's not sexy, but cleaning up and locking down means you don't die when things get ugly.
"I'm curious to see how this will stack up against OK Cupid, where I met little but cautious hipster emo girls whose photos came from webcams and off bathroom mirrors."

OKCupid is the new MySpace? :-o
A little bit, sure.
the difference being that you pay them. Give me free education and labs (paid by the university, not the state) and the university can have a huge cut of all my ideas.
You could not die, which would be pretty valuable.

But come to think of it, you could also make tons of money. An ordinary educated person today knows way more about medicine than medieval doctors did. So your optimal career goal should probably be to become a court physician. You could become as rich as minor nobility doing this, and (most importantly) without having to take sides in power struggles.
The Untold Story of How a San Diego VC Backed Broadway’s Jersey Boys
IPhone Gloves: Would You Buy Them?
Depends where you were. In feudalized, agricultural bits of Europe, everything did, at least nominally. But especially in 800 there would have been large expanses of uncultivated and mostly depopulated forest.
Update: Is that a photo of Jason Fried on their upload directions page?

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b124/bflora/fried.gif
Where's with the macroeconomics? There is a generally accepted, narrow definition of macroeconomics, and this isn't it.

None of the four basic principles in this post are exclusive to macroeconomics, which deals with the economies of nations at a (you guessed it) macro level, eg. GDP, inflation, unemployment, etc. What macro-level indicators are there in information and attention?
You were able to sign in?

I tried signing up for an account, did not receive any ACK of its creation in my email, and it will not let me sign in.

Maybe they're still putting it all together, but the design sucks. No login, no browsing, no fun.
Apparently not. Last indexed by the Wayback Machine January 15, 2008, and then only the first few pages; actual blogs seem to be missing. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hometown.aol.com
Under the Danish system, it appears that seizing the collateral (in this case homes) is much easier and quicker when the borrower stops payment. Also, under the Danish system, the home owner must have a minimum 20% downpayment which they would lose in case of a default.

I think if we just had the simple 20% downpayment rule in the US, we would have avoided a lot of these subprime issues.
They're running adsense next to the profile I just made. That doesn't bode very well for them.
Someone else has already mentioned installing compiz-config-manager. This is crucial if you want to do any kind of customization with Compiz; a lot of little annoyances I've found with it can be fixed.
The 20% is not a required downpayment in cash, but you have to finance it using normal bank loans. The (sellers) estate agent normally takes care of the complete loan taking, so the buyer just has to provide proof of income for the last 3 months and sign the papers. The rest is taken care of without the buyer needing to do anything himself.
(There's no buyers agent in Denmark).
There's a nice list from a previous thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132082
Update: I started running searches.

Search #1: Women, 24-28 within 30 miles of Chicago's main zip code.

EPIC FAIL.

Results: 18 profiles. 9 without photos. 9 with photos. None that I wanted to click on.

Search #2: Women ages 20-30 within 30 miles of Chicago's main zipcode.

SMALLER FAIL

Results: 45 profiles. 15 without photos. Five that I've clicked on to learn more about.

Of those five, one has no info and only a stock shot. That means it's either an early adopter guy testing it out or a Nigerian scammer in my book. Three aren't that interesting upon further look and the other one is gorgeous and seems interesting but is also about 4 years older than me. Not sure what I'll do on that front.

Not impressed.
The support has gotten better over the past few years, but I would hardly say it's top notch. And it used to be really bad.

If you're running a business where unexpected downtime costs real money, as I was, Joyent's ticketing system was totally inadequate. We've since switched to a dedicated box at Rackspace (for quite a bit more money) and I've been extremely satisified. It's expensive, but Rackspace support really is top notch. (For example, I once fat-fingered an iptables config rendering a server totally inaccessible. Rackspace detected the problem, sent someone into the data center to bring up the console, fixed it, and sent me some tips on iptables before I could even file a ticket.)
right, reality never imposes frustrating conditions on people.
I agree, geography is becoming less important. I've done a lot of my best work from tiny outposts in rural Canada where the internet was my only lifeline to people who even knew what Javascript was. The internet has really transformed possibilities for a lot of people who are otherwise trapped in intellectual wastelands.

I think culture far outweighs other factors. Hacker News is useful because of its culture, not its algorithm (otherwise Digg would be just as good) or the size of its user base. The internet lets you find and connect with a culture that amplifies your instincts and interests. When that can lead to in-person interaction as well, all the better (and there are definite advantages to that).
Not that I know of from your profile, but you can always bookmark the page, email yourself a link, or use something like Read It Later (http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/launched/read-it-later/), which saves you from cluttering up the comments.
An important subject which wasn't touched in the article: In Denmark jingle mail doesn't exist: you cannot run away from your debt (they would just laugh and send the keys back to you), and if you seriously fail to pay your obligations, you're completely stopped from getting any kind of credit in any bank or shop.

This means that banks in Denmark doesn't end up with the debt as easily as they do in USA. So the Danish banks have lost money primarily on business loans and not private mortgages.
Some nice blog posts on buying cheap eyeglasses:

http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/29/adventures-40-eyeglasses

http://glassyeyes.blogspot.com/2006/11/from-3mew-eyeglasses-...
Does anyone here use Guake? I have an addiction for Quake style dropdown console terminals. http://guake-terminal.org/
I agree, and I'd say these differences between cities fall under the label of 'culture'. Population density and personal interaction are necessary but insufficient.

I taught SAT prep in China for a couple of months. If population density and personal interaction were all that are required for innovation, my students would have been creative geniuses. Instead, the results of cultural patterns such as fear/obedience/submission to authority dominated my impressions of all but a few.
a reality check on these tests...chances are any of these webservers could saturate the outbound connection on static content. what is the resource use? how secure is it? is anyone using it who might help you with problems? these are the more important questions when assessing a webserver. chances are if there is code to be more deeply reviewed, it is your own app logic.
This is for twitter users who want more people to see their tweets (e.g., so that they can direct more traffic to their site).

It's sort of like a banner exchange, but with tweets.
nginx has proven itself to be a pretty stable webserver for both proxying and static file serving. It's really useful to put your Apache process behind because you get the advantage of lightweight keep-alive for static content as well as the fact that the proxy keeps Apache from being overloaded. Really nice.

I don't know as much about the other two, but they seem somewhat Erlang-centric. Which isn't a bad thing, but makes them less useful for me.
It will never happen. If there is no paid dating site, plentyoffish will become one.
What about lighttpd?
Wow, it prints my HTTP referral.
Just out of curiosity, why did you go with Slicehost instead of Linode? For Rails hosting, RAM seems to be limiting factor if you only want to spend $20/month. On a Linode 360 I'm running 3 mongrels, nginx, and MySQL with some RAM to spare for crons and such. I'm just curious what advantages a Slicehost 256 would give me considering RAM seems to be the main difference between the two.
Jason Fried: welcome

Frank Zappa: not welcome
Google cache, perhaps?
Well, the Mac equivalent is TextEdit. I use xPad to take notes, and it has a file drawer. Nice freeware app.
http://powerbandinternet.com/howitswork.php

"Dedicated virtual desktop" hmmmm....
Safari supports using gmail as your mail client. I just wish I could get mobile safari to do the same.
Oh, bring it on, wheels.

First, take tries and B-trees out of consideration: they aren't generic search trees. Tries have a higher overhead than binary search trees. You use a trie when you need prefix search. You're wanking if you break out a trie otherwise. B-trees are for building external indices. Most people here have never written one.

If you don't agree with either of those, I'll still just say you're cheating by taking what I clearly meant as "binary search tree" and overgeneralizing. But I'll stand by my take on tries and b-trees. Tries are neat; I even wrote a pretty popular blog post about them:

http://www.matasano.com/log/1009/aguri-coolest-data-structure-youve-never-heard-of/

... but I wouldn't try to make std::map work in terms of them.

Second, if you need to cache search results, you should cache search results explicitly, with a cache structure. Splay trees suck. They aren't balanced. They have worst case O(n). And they change on read; lookup can invalidate iterators. Lots of people write splay tree code. My theory as to why: splay trees are easy to write.

Finally, and most importantly: nobody in the history of the universe has written and put into production a tree ADT library (at least, not in C/C++) that didn't have catastrophic bugs. A balanced binary tree is something you want to have written once and tested and debugged, and then never touch again. If you're going to get balanced trees right once, what's it going to be? AVL? Actual 2-3 trees? The industry already sorted this out, which is why all the STLs use red-black.

(For the record: I agree with you on hashing being overrated and binary trees being underused, but I'm still more likely to use a generic hash table than a tree for simple lookup).
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu

Rails On Ubuntu < You cannot miss this.
If the largest site is free, who are the leads being sold to?
As much as I like couch, declaring that it is better than mysql is overgeneralizing. The couchdb developers themselves declare that couchdb is not a replacement for mysql, nor should it be publicized as such.
lighty is comparable in speed to nginx but has more stability issues.
Oops... meant to reply to my own post above, not edit it. For clarity sake, it used to ask for notepad equivalents. (I know see the installed editor is very nice, unlike os x). I'd fix it, but the edit link is gone...
That's probably the clearest explanation I've seen so far on this thread. Thanks.
SaS = Soaps and Sterilization. Hmmm, interesting, but seems like you'd have to violate your second rule ("no opinions"). Maybe if you could manage to out live most other folks into your late thirties and forties (steering clear of all sorts of bugs - water, food, and transmission-based) the marketing would be your very aliveness. People would have to solicit your counsel rather than you having to actively sell it.
Power Twitter: Firefox Add-ons
Power Twitter: Inline Media, Integrated Search And A Lot More
Resource usage can be a major factor in this too, and nginx stands alone in that respect. Having yaws using 80%+ cpu under load might be more comparable to having nginx use 40% plus the overhead of an app server.
The idea for this btw is not a new one. I remember this reading Micheal Crichton book called Timeline ~ http://www.crichton-official.com/books-timeline.html which in itself is based on an idea by Leo A. Frankowski who wrote a book called Cross-Time Engineer ~ http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...
"... What one invention would you introduce ahead of its time? ..."

The fireplace chimney as it wasn't introduced before the 13th century and fire smoke is a major cause of lung ailments.
It's official, a brand new dating site doesn't have many profiles.
Considering some of the very provocative pics I've seen on FB, this does puzzle me. I"m sure its a reaction from their advertisers. But what a poorly thought through reaction it is.
I would print out plans or at least a description of something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_jenny

This machine was not invented yet at the time, but could have been made by any decent medieval carpenter. I could probably do it with an axe and a saw. It would have been quite valuable at the time, and could make you rich if you played your cards right.

Of course, that doesn't help solve the problem of immediate survival in a world where you don't speak anybody's language...
In fact, most people running heavy-duty mochiweb or yaws servers will still proxy them behind nginx. Mochi or yaws can stand alone for a lot of use cases, but a good load-balancing proxy and static page cache never really hurts...
I would be more interested in building a small practical operating system based on Linux, but with new user interface components (i.e. building your own configuration, terminal, and GUI portions).

I want a new Apple II.
I can't exist without Compiz and I'm amazed that HN audience is unaware of the benefits. Here are just a few:

1. Expose-like effect for quickly tiling all windows and picking the right one with the mouse/touchpad. Works MUCH faster for s witching between apps when you have many of them.

2. Very useful and informative animations for tossing windows between virtual desktops and switching between them: without Compiz there's no animation and you're left wondering which desktop you're on.

3. Window groups - a fairly advanced feature which also helps navigating among too many windows.

4. On some video drivers Compiz speeds up 2D graphics (especially scrolling) in regular everyday apps like Firefox.

5. Ability to quickly glance at your desktop (whenever all windows fly offscreen until you release a hot key).

6. Ability to "pin" certain windows into predefined positions automatically or by a configured hotkey. Helps enormously with buggy apps that can't remember their last position.

Basically it all comes down to window management. Without Compiz all you have a basic and primitive Alt+Tabbing plus basic virtual desktop functionality. I switch between Ubuntu and OSX and I use these tools on both very heavily. When I get a hardware which doesn't run Compiz I tend to stick to OSX until the issue is resolved. When I do have Compiz-enabled machine my Mac becomes a backup - OSX isn't as powerful/flexible at managing windows as Metacity/Compiz.

Besides, I find that windows without shadows look very flat and somewhat antiquated in 2008 :-)
This post is part of a series that goes through the ten principles from Mankiw's Brief Principles of Macroeconomics (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregor...) and uses them as a jumping off point to analyze information and attention markets. The last of these do try to apply the notion of inflation to these markets.
Should the Internet be regulated
How to fight & argue in a relationship, how to fight fair
Strangely, it appears that, on the basis of one year of college Spanish combined with lots of practice from being the closest thing to a bilingual person at a job I had, I would be better off in Spain than England.

There's a comparison of El Cid in Old Spanish and modern Spanish at wikipedia (see link below), and they don't appear to be very different. Spain was not conquered by non-Spanish speaking foreigners between 1000 and now, so it's not surprising that the language has changed less than English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language
I thought it might be instructive to implement both algorithms side-by-side in the same loop:

import random

jeff_stats = { 'boy_and_girl': 0, 'two_girls': 0 }
paul_stats = { 'boy_and_girl': 0, 'other': 0 }

for i in xrange(100000):
children = [random.randint(0, 1), random.randint(0, 1)]

# Jeff's algorithm
if children[0] or children[1]:
print 'I have a girl'
if children[0] and children[1]:
jeff_stats['two_girls'] += 1
else:
jeff_stats['boy_and_girl'] += 1
else:
print "Oops, I'm a liar - I have no girls, so don't count me"

# Paul's algorithm
print 'I have a ' + ('girl' if children[0] else 'boy')
if children[0] != children[1]:
paul_stats['boy_and_girl'] += 1
else:
paul_stats['other'] += 1

print "Jeff stats: " + str(jeff_stats)
print "Paul stats: " + str(paul_stats)

Output (ignoring the actual printouts for each person):

Jeff stats: {'boy_and_girl': 50027, 'two_girls': 24949}
Paul stats: {'boy_and_girl': 50027, 'other': 49973}

I liked tromino's explanation best: it's really an ambiguity in the English language. Under your 2nd algorithm, 1/4 of parents can't truthfully announce "I have a girl" - but in ordinary conversation, this doesn't matter, because they'd just truthfully say "I have a boy" and we don't make a distinction. It's only when we explicitly filter out parents who don't have a boy that we change the probabilities.
I know of a company that is adopting this exact business model to distribute vaccines around the world.
porn sites for people who can't get dates?
viagra advertisers for those that can?
I would add a AK-47 with plenty of rounds.
As was pointed out in comments on the original article, that's only of small comfort, as archive.org doesn't capture scripts or some images. Besides, because someone else can help repair the damage doesn't mean that it's OK to deal the damage in the first place.
Ad Agencies Create and Market Their Own Brands
I thought this would be a good idea but there's a problem (as has been alluded to by someone else) in that anyone can add everyone they know so that they can find out who has already selected them and then get a notification whenever anyone selects them in the future. Your data's not safe, not in the least ;P.
I've been using power twitter for a while and it was great, showing images and videos inline. The 1.0 release however is terrible with on hover overlays, inserting its own branding and obtrusive javascript which breaks middle clicking for example. Find an old 0.93 version if you can.
Luxury holidays to Kenya
The Free2 site is great for exotic luxury holidays and honeymoons to some of the most romantic locations on earth. The site features honeymoons to destinations such as Mauritius, Kenya, Maldives islands and Bali. All the luxury holidays and honeymoons offered are fully ATOL protected.
Ask (and beg) HN: How will I pay for college?
I felt great these past few weeks. I finished the last of my college applications and heard back with notices of acceptance. Today I feel crushed.

The recent and current financial crisis has hurt my family to say the least. I guess I have been in denial until now but today my dad put it pretty frankly. Affording the school I worked so hard to get into would not be difficult, it would be impossible.

I am asking, pleading for ideas.

For those that can afford it, I humbly ask for a small donation. I can't believe I just wrote that.

I know so many others are probably going through so much worse. I know this is utterly, purely selfish. But every little bit counts, and if everyone donates just one dollar, well.. the effect would be tremendous.

One of the links from "Best HN threads in '08?" said to take chances. Here I am, holding tight to a small shred of hope as I work on several alternatives and brainstorm ideas.

I've worked so hard and taken so much pride in monetizing the internet since a very young age. It's been disheartening realize that it all makes such a tiny dent. I still remember the day I got a check from Google Adsense. It was $103.61. The money is still in my savings. I know there is more that can be done and I will work my ass off in order to peruse the very best education for myself.

I would appreciate any encouragement, ideas, and stories of your past experiences. Maybe I have this all wrong.

I don't really anticipate much. This is just a very selfish and uncreative attempt.

But for those that have read this far, thank you so much for your consideration and your time. For those that donate, I promise to contact you personally and keep you updated unless you want otherwise. I hope that one day I will be able to turn this situation around and donate an equal or larger sum to charity when I can afford to do so.

Every penny counts.
Thank you so, so much.