skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read the fine print -- it's top sites by pageviews, which is a very different (and less meaningful) metric than top sites by unique visitors.

That same Alexa data you quote has POF at 168 in the US and 466 worldwide, with 21+ average pageviews/visit (Compete has them closer to 30). According to that same data, Flickr has ~9 PVs/visit, and CNN has ~3.5.

It's not inconceivable that with a few differences in the data between Hitwise and Alexa, you could come up with POF in the top 20. It just shows you how meaningless pageviews are as a metric of success or engagement.
In many fields, there is a growing mismatch (in terms of time, effort, and expense) between securing credentials and securing an education.
Madoff could have written that.
I bought a 30 inch this summer and I love it. I really do like coming home and working. Now I need to setup a tiling window manager because it is an annoyance dragging windows all over the place.
I agree - methodical scientific thought processes are the talent. I disagree about degrees though. When someone says they have a degree in computer science, I'd always be very weary.

If you were to commission a portrait of yourself, would you choose an artist based on his previous works, or based on some certificate saying he completed a course on art at some college? I know which I'd base it on.
is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

This is a statement one might expect from a pure juvenile. No, Mr. Krugman, the investment industry serves a viable purpose, in deep contrast with a Ponzi scheme. There are good and bad methods in the investment industry, but Ponzi schemes, in every instance, are indelibly insolvent, unproductive, and unprofitable.
one fellow grad student got exasperated at me in a study session and said, "I don't care about the principles, just give me the answer so I can get an A on the test!"

IMO it's a serious bug in the educational system that people are able to pass by following that approach.
you might not, but I do =)
I wasn't claiming a degree was necessary, or even an indicator of success in programming, merely that it tends to filter out the people who have no interest in the subject. Sadly, many people who are interested are ruined in college by being taught Java.

Past work is always a better indicator than any recommendation, be it on paper or verbal, but past work is proof of skill, which I already mentioned.
There are cases in which you would not want your audience to know that you are running your operation from your apartment let alone that it is a one-man-show. Twitpic is a free service geared towards consumers. So the founder can do whatever pleases him and does not have to act big. But if you were to sell SAAS to small businesses you had better design an enterprise like website and imply (however you can) that you have hundreds of customers, dozens of employees etc...
Activity Streams - SlideShare
1. Collect an audience of rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents.

2. Put up banner advertising.

3. ???

4. Profit
Haha, ya that was me. There were a couple others too.

That was in 2006. It was so well hidden in the code that no one found it until I mentioned it to someone at the company this past spring (I had hidden in the jar of a 3rd party library). Within a couple days I got a call asking how to remove it. They obviously didn't see the humour which is unfortunate because it's a marketing goldmine.
MOTOROLA EM28 UNLOCKED
Motorola EM28 its one of the best invented phone with dashing good look includes 1.3 megapixel camera which captures your every moments with your choice with video recorder and also java MIDP 2.0. Internet surfing in this handset.
Heresy! First you start with self-funding single-founder startups and next you'll be talking crazy things like "charging users money" and "making profits" and then where would the world be!?
but hang on, before you get all up in arms about privacy and rights, this is a possible google adsense / adwords killer and there is going to blood shed before privacy gets in the way of profits.
btw I like it!
3 Weeks to Startup: Week 1
For some probably. For most it won't be to late. A lot of people on there are writing books or articles that they plan on publishing way later.

Plus its always a good thing if a reporter knows about you in case they have future stories.
I'm interested in both. I'm a fan of Common Lisp, but also of Clojure.
The new coolness -- or, rather a completion of the cycle -- is to convince everyone you're just a two-bit operation. In a time of firings and recession that's real geek cred.
I hardly see that as a counter. Both Kling and Krugman are right! The government is a ponzi scheme, and lots of the financial sector has been ponzi-like, too!

(And a point that Kling might make but Krugman tends not to: much of the financial-sector ponzi-ism was propelled by government policy, which inflated the housing bubble with tax benefits, Fed-lowered interest rates, government-sponsored mortgage-underwriting, and regulatory favoritism for dubious mortgage-lending. And policy which then further insulated finance institutions from existential risk with the implied promise -- now delivered -- of giant bailouts.)
He's mistaken. There is a real structural difference between a Ponzi scheme and an investment fund.

And as for the high incomes of money managers, it seems reasonable to pay someone a lot to manage a huge fund. So much is at stake that it would be a false economy to hire someone cheap.
It's one thing to conclude one specific article is offtopic (in which case please just flag it instead of commenting), but are you really saying that nothing Krugman could ever write would be interesting to hackers?
So, you do something superficial and annoying, and then your defense is that you do it a lot. Well played!
Actually that's the retardedness of philosophy. See Dennet's TED talk. By the way, thanks to those posting on this thread for introducing me to Daniel Dennet.

I had mentally categorized philosophy as "verbose wanking by a bunch of people who would rather win debates than understand things," until watching his lecture.
Can't you just look up any of 2343243432 other internet discussions about libertarians, austrian economists, centrists and more leftist types arguing until they are blue in the face? Do you honestly think there's going to be anything new said here?
The power of editing and revising printed text with a keyboard is not something that can be easily duplicated using voice. Consider trying to write code in this way. It's easy to say words but faster to type when you need custom spellings and editing words at a character level. It seems awkward to have to edit text with speech (easier to type something like C-space down down C-s quote . right C-space C-k M-x end-of-buffer C-y than to say it). Maybe some combination of keyboard and voice would work. Voice is not be ideal for a workplace situation, unless it is subvocal silent speech, which it sounds like is a technology that is almost ready.
Yeah, because no way could Google have figured out how to do this.
How is it that nerds, who question everything, never seem to doubt the relationship between chair comfort and price?
This hack can only tell you what sites a user has visited out of a list of sites you specify. A general ad platform based on this hack would presumably have a list of sites to query against, acting as a litmus test for determining a user's interests and socioeconomic status. I would argue that such a list would be difficult to compose (javascript/JSON size vs. generality vs. granularity) and no better than the cookie / flash cookie / geo IP lookup technologies currently being employed by doubleclick and others. Such a list would necessarily have to target sites in the top 500 whereas networks like doubleclick can mine niche sites that may serve as better indicators of a user's true behavioral profile.
I think a great deal of what Krugman says is interesting (perhaps minus the Bush bashing, that just gets old), and occasionally something on reason.com, too, for that matter. I also like to read Kling, Thoma, Cowen and Mankiw, as well as The Economist's Free Exchange, and a few others from time to time. I suspect that I'm not alone in those interests.

However, I very rarely submit the articles I find that I like. My fear is that the ensuing discussions tend to be very much about ideologies and create lots of heat, but little light - they're about 'firm beliefs' rather than something that can ever really be proven in an internet discussion forum. These sorts of discussions, in my opinion, attract people that want to talk about politics and economics, which are sort of low-hanging fruit - everyone, not just hackers, has opinions on them. Also, there is so much written about those topics that it would be extremely easy to crowd out hacker/startup topics with economic ones, even restricting economics/politics postings to relatively good ones. My gut feeling is that if these articles prosper, this site will, with time, decline. Your site, your call though - if you say economics and or politics go, I will no longer comment or flag them. Maybe I'll even submit a few of my own.

BTW, one of my favorite articles of Krugman's is this one:

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html
> This is a great question, and one that will never be answered by scientific naturalism.

Why not? This is a very strong claim.

> It's clearly powered by a physical entity (the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

A word is not a physical entity. Does that mean that we can't learn anything about words through science?

> and it will never be explained unless we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

Well, I can agree that this is probably the easiest way to explain it. Create a consciousness that you can pause and non-destructively examine (assuming that's possible).
The correct way is

int ch;
while ((ch = getchar()) != EOF) {
// ...
}

If ch is declared as a char, it's buggy regardless of whether it's signed or not, it's just the failure modes are different.
A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
XCVB (replacement for Common Lisp's ASDF)
Well, I'm guessing most of you guys are in the US anyway. But if you find yourself in the county of Somerset, UK, and get a chance at an interview with a company providing IT services to a well-known defence contractor, and they tell you it's web development, systems administration and "a bit" of support work, just ask them to define "a bit" rather more precisely.

I can't be too specific because we have some rather repressive libel laws over here.
Wine dev release 1.1.11 is now available.
I'm loving his server rack. http://twitpic.com/ulfk
It's interesting that Krugman, a Keynesian, is so down on Madoff. During a recession, I would think that Krugman would want some form of economic stimulus that causes people, in the aggregate, to spend more money compared to how much they save. What better way to do so than a ponzi scheme, wherein Bernie spends the money he knows he's stolen, and his investors spend the money they think they've earned?
I feel like he wrote the whole article just to get in his clever one-liner at the end.
he deserves it. awesome!
No, but I've used Taleo and Peoplesoft, so I know where you're coming from. Taleo is so egregiously bad that I want to start a company specifically to wipe them out.
I believe that's called Nerd ADD (even if you're a geek).
I wonder why he chose to buy vs rent.
I found this video much more compelling:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4yhPSQEzo&feature=relate...
In 1998 a friend and I were furiously writing a business plan for a 'business plan contest' held at our college. After 2 weeks of continuously writing and editing, at 3:00am, we couldn't come up with anything for the closing paragraph so I type this out:
"We are 2 strapping young men willing to do whatever it takes for this company to succeed".

We forgot to replace it. And we won. $25k. It was probably the most honest thing we wrote in the whole plan, and the only part of it that turned out true. (except the "strapping" part)
Repost of my comment on rishi's blog:

I’ve been subscribed to HARO for awhile now. I got one of my projects featured in a blog about writing and I made a contact that may result in some press around February. It is the real deal.

Oh I’ve also referred several reporters to friends of mine. So its good for karma too.

Rishi is right though, it takes time to go through all the queries each day. Several times I’ve pondered writing software to help “smartly” filter this (meager AI background on my part).
I normally disagree with Krugman, but he's closer to the truth than you think.

A Ponzi scheme is defined as an operation "that involves paying abnormally high returns to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from the profit from any real business. "

In 2007, the dividend yield of the S&P 500 was 1.5% People were not buying stocks to obtain the cash flow of a real business. People bought stocks under the assumption that eventually they could sell to someone else for a higher price.
> So much is at stake that it would be a false economy to hire someone cheap.

This is probably net true, but maybe there is a also a flip side: do these products exhibit some negative price elasticity? (i.e. a fund that charges high fees and pays it's managers highly may actually be more attractive than one that is cheaper but otherwise identical). Given the intangibility and the expectationary-nature of the product, it is possible.
If you learn C from a text that is worth anything (K&R comes to mind) you learn how to address this so called 'EOF error' from the beginning. If I remember right, K&R does not even introduce the character primitive until after it introduces getchar(). All of the examples use an int.
I think everyone has to go through that cycle at least once.

At one point, I had 12 servers in our study. Eventually the wife decided that the ungodly humming and tangle of wires had to go. Haven't hosted "in-house" since.
Point. I've had to use ed as well, but generally speaking, in all but the most dire of circumstances, vi will run -- I think on Solaris that vi is still statically linked. Even so, ed works very simmilarly to vi (including movement, search, save, and so on), so it's a lot easier to fix something with ed if you're a vi user. :)
Actually, if words are encoded similarly in different brains, then there is a physical manifestation of words (other than typography) that we can study.

I suspect you would argue that "this isn't really a word," just some physical shadow of the true word.
cooked in a small animation (south park style) presenting me and the other guys in the project inside the 65 series phone of a now-dead mobile manufacturer from germany (S65, SL65, A65, etc - can't tell the name for NDA reasons, but I guess it's easy to figure out, no?). You just had to open the file explorer app on the phone, type *666#, and there you'd have it... ;-)
One of the big advantages of a library like jQuery is that it abstracts away browser incompatibilities. Stuff "just works" in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
I think the evidence surrounding this technique is mixed in terms of brain functionality.
Twitter/Weather Mashup I put together over a few nights.
From K&R:

We also declare 'c' to be an int, not a char, so it can
hold the value which getchar returns. As we shall see in
Chapter 2, this value is actually an int, since it must be
capable of representing EOF in addition to all possible
'char's.
how do I downvote you, then?
I didn't get much out of this. Their traffic numbers are unremarkable. There's the standard "databases are hard to scale" meme, and their software stack is also pretty standard. Gnip as a business are interesting, though: there's a ton of money to be made in data integration, ETL and related services.
Motorola did the same bet on WindowsMobile in the past, and never actually came out with more than 2-3 devices...
If you want to use the CSS History hack - here is something to get you started: http://pastie.org/343984
I'm not sure if it's the tiredness. The impending deadlines push me into overdrive, which I use to finish work.

But if an all-nighter is truly the only option, then 20 minute naps every 2-3 hours works well combined with a cup of coffee.

Method: Drink a cup of coffee, immediately nap for 20 minutes, wake up and work for 2-3 hours. Rinse and repeat.
This is the second post I've seen from wozad.com where clicking on the headline simply leads to their top-level site (where they try to sell you their service). Smells like spam to me.
Is anyone here a gnip user? I hadn't heard of it before now. I have no clue what problem it's trying to solve.
Steve Jobs' option backdating move, anyone?
It's not necessarily quite that bad. The list can be made modular.

One option would be to start of with a list of the top 500 sites and then determine from that information what demographic the user fits it. Then you could load a list of sites pertaining to that demographic and further narrow down the user's behavior.

Also, if you're talking about ads on a certain site, the publisher can make a list of the sites in their niche and then you could load that list and move on from there.

All in all, this has some very interesting potential. The question is, why hasn't Google done it already?
I went through that cycle too. I had a couple of profitable websites hosted in my garage in a rack cabinet. They had a UPS.

I went on holiday which was a 6 hour drive away. On the way out, I got word on my mobile that the sites were down. It was too late to turn back with the kids in the car etc.

That night I drove 6 hours home, reset our houses power switch which had tripped for some reason, and spent another 6 hours driving back. (This time I left a key with a neighbor). I got back to the holiday house just in time for the kids to wake up...

2 weeks later when we returned from holiday I got a dedicated server at a hosting co.
I think you did not understand that much..
The other thing was that these lambs were prepubescent, quite literally you have to fish the balls out. I saw the episode and it took one person to hold the lamb, one to hold its legs apart and one person using both hands to get the balls out of the body so it would be highly inefficient to add yet another person to this process to clamp and pull them off.

There are other ways to do this, just none of them do it fast enough. One method is to put a big elastic band around the scrotum and wait two weeks for them to drop off, the problem with this is that some of those lambs become mature in that time and then you get multiple Rams that end up trying to kill each other, one of which is likely an ideal breeder you need alive. This method supposedly only takes 2 people to do, however it takes 2 weeks to complete, where as biting takes 3 people and 2 minutes to complete so you've got the entire herd done before you've fully castrated your first lamb using the technological method.
agreed. at least lead us to a page where you talk about the css hack and why it is better than cookies, etc.
Well, the first post title wasn't clear, it has been ignored. I decided to post again because i do think that the matter is at least "interesting".
Claims philosophers do useful stuff but doesn't mention the best example: Karl Popper (who most philosophers don't like because he had the audacity to actually solve a philosophical problem!)

Meanwhile, fails to distance himself from Wittgenstein, and responds to pg's claim that philosophers argue semantics by defending it! (BTW Popper is one of the philosopher who does not argue semantics.)
This showed up: "Homemade migas this morning; cold brewed coffee & client work the rest of the day"

How about you match only if at least two words are weather-related? Or at least 1 weather related + 1 location related, like "cold in new york."
Grow my company.
If a philosophy is valid it doesn't need a defense.
Well argued, although I am not well versed enough in Philosophy to make a comment about its completeness.

One of the most interesting things I find about pg's essays is that they always take such an interesting position on a problem or issue. I've always thought that there is at least one interesting counter position for all of his essays. We need to see more of these; I think it would lead to many fruitful discussions.
You're very protective of this community, David, and I appreciate it. But this economic crisis is not only a once-in-a-lifetime event, but it has tremendous consequences for start-ups.

It's better just to flag what you don't like. Personally, I find this article to be both insightful and important.
I use ASDF because it works and everyone uses it. But this monstrosity still makes me wince every time I see it, or worse, have to type it, or worse still, have to explain it and then feel compelled to apologize for it:

(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :some-package)

It's somehow emblematic of a larger (cultural, or something) issue too.

So a replacement for ASDF is probably a good idea, but it's the sort of thing that won't get off the ground before it's mature, and might have a hard time getting adopted even then. ASDF is just good enough, or rather just not bad enough.

Edit: there are other attempts at this too, like http://mudballs.com.
Tell that to all the significant ideas in the last several thousand years that were ridiculed and suppressed.... starting with evolution.
Thanks! Yea it's definitely imperfect, but I'm limited by the functionality of the twitter search api, what i have been doing and what I can improve on is filtering out of common terms that involve weather related words, so for instance "ice cream", or in your case "cold brewed", which I am about to add to the exclusion list. granted this whole app has only about 15 hours of dev in it, so such a list is going to be FAR from perfect.
How is it well argued? He concedes that pg is right about most philosophy in the conclusion section. He protests, protests, protests, then concedes. lol. His conceding does come with an assertion that philosophy came clean recently, but he doesn't bother giving some citations for that. Which philosophers admitted philosophy was mostly junk? Who came clean? What did they do to fix it?
Simply put: that was awesome
Ask YC: Health Insurance?
Hi,

I've been using a personal health insurance plan that is left over from the last startup I worked for in the summer of 2007, and recently learned that my rates would be going up by 23% as of January 1. I'd much rather be on a group plan, but there are a number to choose from, and my company is only one person right now. I expect that part of the reason for the overwhelming number of options is that different people have different health issues, and so there's no one-size-fits-all solution, but it is probably also true that some insurance carriers are simply easier to work with than others.

So, who do people use for insurance? (And is there anyone in or around Palo Alto who needs a LAMP developer job that offers health coverage? Because if there is, I'm hiring...)
fear tends to work well.
Conceding that pg is right about most philosophy doesn't take away from his argument. If I conceded that most programs written in the last 5 years are garbage, would you conclude programming in general is also garbage?
The guy says:

"The simplest flaw in PG’s account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present"

That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that all philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.
Two ways to deal with "no"