skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook's Future Billions: The Platform has to Die
Wired had a piece today about FB's revenue streams:
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/07/facebook-ads/

Unfortunately, the revenue streams outlined in the Wired article seem decidedly... stale. Daily deals ("Facebook Offers"), Sponsored Stories, "Karma" (virtual gifts), and sponsored App recommendations. Facebook’s ability to monetize a billion users seems a bit underwhelming.

Here’s what I think is happening: Facebook is selling itself short by trying to be nothing more than "the platform." This largely limits Facebook's revenue possibilities to advertising – as per the Wired article, and talk of funnels.

My premise is that instead, Facebook should be focused on what it is people want to buy in a social setting, and providing the best possible experience to do so.

One example of such thinking would be tickets to events. Events are a product that is consumed socially: When I go to a show, I do so with a group of friends. It would be pretty compelling if we could all buy our seats together (and next to each other!) with one click through Facebook, find out who else we know is going, walk into the venue with our phones as our tickets, and then share our photos/posts/etc of the event on Facebook in an "event timeline."

A really killer ticketing experience would be a perfect way to leverage the FB social platform and deliver a tonne of value to all of the stakeholders.

Facebook as a platform certainly works (see: Zynga), but I can't help but think that Facebook should be taking on certain transactions - like event tickets - themselves. Today, the Facebook way is to be hands off: Facebook provides the social platform and advertising venue, Ticketmaster builds a ticket purchasing app on top of it. Facebook loses out on the margin, and Facebook users get a sub-par experience (or have to leave the site entirely).

Thoughts?
Stanley Kubrick on mortality
Mobile Payment Chips Could Let Hackers into Your Phone
Buying from overseas is all nice to avoid stupid price hikes for things like HDCP (die in a fire already!).... but what about useful regulations? like amount of lead, etc?

you're totally in the dark for anything like that.
Peer-to-peer room rental has life left in it yet
You make a good point. What I was trying to get at is that HuffingtonPost has a DNA that's different than many of the previous "new media" models that didn't perform nearly as well.

It's not that book publishing's success stories will exactly resemble HuffPo. In fact they will likely look very different. Rather, I expect the internal process to be very similar, in that the winners will use data to win arguments, will move fast and break things, etc.

And maybe the book culture could use a bit more medium/low-brow culture to better expand beyond its core audience. An analogy would be how a blockbuster movie like "The Dark Knight" manages to both be very entertaining but also appeal to a huge audience.
The infantile level of discourse surrounding gun laws saddens and disgusts me. And no, I don't believe either the military or the police are corrupt. I think that is a pretty anecdotal remark.
If you hate onscreen keyboards, try Swiftkey, it genuinely is an amazing thing. It's practically psychic.
Someone's gotta be first, right? And if it did work, the payoff could be huge. I see what you're saying tho--we're hesitant as well. I would love to see an example of an iOS app released that integrates Betable. This FAQ (https://betable.freshdesk.com/solution/categories/17300/fold...) makes it sound like it's at least allowed.
sweet! let me know at dzz0615(at)gmail(dot)com if you need anything!
Isn't the pixel orientation geared for landscape? Every monitor I've used just doesn't look right in portrait. I've tried turning off ClearType (I'm using windows) but just looks strange. I don't know exactly how to communicate what it is, but it's just not good. I've tried it with 3 generations of mid-range Samsung TN panels, and most recently with Dell 2007FP and U2412.

There is a guy I work with who uses two 20" 16:9 TN panels in portrait orientation, and it always looks bad to me. He says it looks fine.
The CAT dataset includes 10,000 cat images
Out of curiosity, how many times did you do that? And how many jobs did you find?
I'm pretty sure you haven't read the statements right before the table:

W3Schools.com is for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% true for the average internet users. (...) Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over ten years, clearly shows the long term trends.

But if you're not convinced, you can read in their forums:

- The w3schools Browser and OS statistics are based on the data
collected over the w3schools site or do have more sources?
- Only the W3Schools site.

http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=35566

By the way: http://w3fools.com/
Would you do an AMA while it's still fresh in people's minds?
Study opens book on evolution of English
Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Released
In 2009 a company called localbacon.com tried just that experiment: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/tc50-job-seekers-pay-localb...

It seems that the experiment wasn't a great success, at least as a job board business model, because the company shifted course after a relaunch six months later: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/22/jibe-localbacon-relaunch/
I see what you're saying but I think you're mistaking me for a different type of programmer. I'm not at all Microsoft-dedicated. I know 5 languages very comfortably, and quite consciously choose C# when given the freedom, because I like it most. I strongly doubt this will remain the case, just like I doubted that I would stay on Ruby forever when that was what I spent my time hacking. Most projects I work on professionally are a mix of languages, usually at least (cross-platform) C++, C# and JavaScript.
What kind of students are we talking about here? I assume they're not explaining how Pinterest is scaling to eighth-graders. If we're talking about adults here -- and apparently just 10 of them --, why not let them quickly huddle together and figure it out?
Great stuff. Bought myself a copy after reading that you're strongly influenced by SICP - good enough for me :)

Edit: Forgot to mention, I spent a weekend writing a bunch of similar music manipulation tools in clojure if anybody is interested in checking it out: https://github.com/dmansen/composition-assistant
I've seen a number of posts on HN from developers saying, "I won't apply for a job if they require a {cover letter, resume, code sample}." Depending on your point of view, adding hurdles could either remove self entitled prima donnas or all of the code ninjas. The risk is that you create a selection bias the wrong direction.
> When my startup was acquired by a publicly traded company it was great for the employees because their vested stock turned into publicly tradeable shares overnight. Sort of like an IPO if you squint :-)

It is sort of an IPO if you squint. With all the potential downside:

I was an investor in a startup that was acquired by a publicly traded company. The deal was cash+stock, for a ~3X return on investment after a year. Not bad.

Except for SEC rule 144, which meant the stock was locked up for 6 months, during which the acquiring company dropped 50% (for reasons unrelated to this acquisition).

Had the deal been all stock, that would mean 1.5X return the day I could realize .... except that I've already paid 48% taxes (35% federal + 13% nyc) on the 3X number. So it wouldn't have been a 3X return -- it would have been COMPLETE LOSS OF CAPITAL on a successful investment - or 100% loss.

Luckily for me, the stars, dates and cash/stock percentages aligned in such a way that it ended up being a modest 20% return after taxes. But a deal such as this could end up a significant net loss. (and so can an IPO).

Luckily for the other employees and most other investors, the acquired company was located in a country that has a reasonable tax regime - in which you only ever pay taxes on realized gains, and only on the day you actually get any cash into your hands. Unfortunately for me (and a couple of other investors), I have to deal with the US tax regime.
I was just thinking the same thing a couple days ago. Reddit feels like you're hanging out a bar with friends but also meeting new people. Quora feels like a salon where librarians shush you if you speak too loudly.
The Humble Music Bundle
Get it here: http://www.humblebundle.com/
Perhaps in the same way,

"since 9/11 was a real terrorist attack, we MUST respond by invading this list of countries and enacting this list of restrictions on freedom"

is analogous to

"since global warming is really driven by carbon emissions, we MUST respond by subsidizing these industries, enacting these stealth taxes, and forcing consumers to engage in these behaviors"

On both sides, we've got the wacko conspiracy theorists. But we also have those who recognize the problem is real and want to push stupid solutions. That's another part of "drowning out the moderates".
>Craigslist ToS doesn't grant them exclusive rights, thus by that judge's definition they don't have standing to sue.
That is not what the judge is saying. By "exclusive" rights he does not mean wholly exclusive in the colloquial sense (i.e.,, sole person with such rights); the judge meant "exclusive" in the legal sense that Righthaven could exclude non-licensees from using such rights.
Getting Started with JSON - Codular
TalkTalk launches service it claims will 'revolutionise' pay TV
Although if you really think about it, what other option does yelp have.

Have a competently professional security policy with recourse to appeal at the door if they're going to host events for people?

Or, you know, just look like amateurs.
As a programmer/engineer/developer/etc. and marketing enthusiast, I agree with your post. I know I'm quite rare in regards to my understanding of both fields. I find more similarities that differences. Where some hackers might see marketing as voodoo, I see it in the same way I see code: Just a collection of steps that are meant to achieve something.
One of the best examples I can share is the one of designing a marketing campaign using code. Yes, code. I sit down and just create a list of "objects" which are the marketing tools. Then I create the main program and write in the possibles scenarios using conditionals and loops. If I feel like having fun, I use Ruby's blocks (DO...END). It sounds really weird, but think about it. Marketing is just an object oriented program.

For example. One could sit down and write the following for an email mailing.

class Mailing:

def __init__(self):
self.name = "name"
self.email = "email address"
self.subject = "mailing subject"
self.campaign = "mailing campaign name"

Then:

class WeekendSaleMailing(Mailing):

def set_name(name):
....

#basically define the mailing using code.

The you go on to __main__ :

weekend_sale = WeekendSaleMailing()

#set the details of the mailing (customer names, offer, etc.)

Then you go on and describe every scenario that you can think of and describe it using conditionals:

if client responds_to_mailing():
#...

elsif client open_emails_but_does_not_buy:
#you might want to then write more code describing what to do in this case.

You might also want to include a loop to describe what iterative process you will use to market to a customer.

For example,

while customer does_not_buy():
#send a different mailing or marketing tool.

and so on.

It may seem like a lot of work, and it is. But it just shows that marketing is just like code. In the way that you abstract away your marketing plan and design it as if it was a complex object oriented program. This way you still feel that you are programming and not outside of the scope of your skills.

Try it out. It works. And it takes away the sense of weirdness of marketing. After all, it is not marketing anymore, its code.

To add,

Same with doing marketing tools. I write my ads by using code. I have a basic template of an ad, and then I run through it the different headlines and paragraphs until I find an ad that works. Then its just testing to see which ads pull better than others. Testing is super easy because you now have a framework to work with. You dont go blindly into it, you have a set of parameters to measure. For example, Headline 1.a might pull more than headline 1.b, because it added the more "FREE" at the end, instead of using it at the beginning.

Anyhow, what patio11 says is true. If you approach marketing as if it was software, you are going to really get ahead because most people treat marketing as if it was black magic. It isnt.

email in profile for questions

PS. Its not real Python, btw. Just pseudo code.
I always found it annoying I couldn't discover my facebook friends twitter accounts. This seems in line with the above.
Sorry, just restarted the service. Thanks! I need to add monitoring to that service since it's now past the experiment stage (was being tested against a video at one time).
What makes life exciting?
Should be good now, thanks!
please write this up. I gave up trying to figure it out myself.
Why would the author believe 600+ applicants for a semi-skilled entry-level job posting in NYC is an unusual number? How does that number compare to a similar job posting in London, Tokyo or Shanghai? This experiment is silly, contrived and unscientific. The data is without context, and essentially meaningless.

Also, while I wouldn't exactly call it unethical to do something like this - it is dishonest, and something about it feels slimy to me.
Japan had nowhere near the gun culture or level of gun ownership the US has. There are enough unregistered guns in the US to supply the criminal population for decades.

Most criminals steal or buy there guns on the black market. What do you think is going to happen to the hundreds of millions of guns sitting in people's basements when guns are banned?

Also if they passed the exact same law in the US, the result would be violence and insurgency. There are thousands of heavily armed people sitting around waiting for the day the government bans firearms.
TechCrunch appears to be mostly unreadable on the iPad, thanks to their fancy template reloading/redirecting... Smart.
Brightcove is a great team, and Jeremy Allaire is a great executive. I don't know as much about Zencoder, but they found a really good place to land.

It seems to have gotten lost in the other chatter, but BCOV nicely beat their estimates and guided FY2012 revenue up, too.
Why cp doesn't have a progress bar like wget
Notch isn't the one working on this code, and it's not released, just open.
In case anyone is interested, I watched the network requests go by to see how it works. Google is doing the detection server side (no surprise there, but it was smooth enough that I had to check) and receives the drawing area (writing_area_width, writing_area_height), the "ink" which is an array of points and any already existing characters in the search field. The return data is the best guesses for the input. Curious that multiple options are returned, I'm not sure how those are used. Another AJAX request is made for Google Instant.
Comcast installs a piece of software that drops shortcuts to comcast.net and stuff on your desktop. It also installs whatever antivirus thing they have a contract with. McAfee?

However, they only have Windows and Mac versions of the stuff.
"... I always found it annoying I couldn't discover my facebook friends twitter accounts. ..."

Are you annoyed enough to pay money for this?
Tie Society- Netflix for Neckties?
So I've been checking out this service, Tie Society, and wanted to gauge the public opinion. It seems a lot easier to use than some of the other sites and has a pretty strong selection. Do these subscription model fashion sites have a future? www.tiesociety.com
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little... oh fuck it.
The student was an adult not a kid. There is a requirement of age 21 and over for the event since they were serving beer. That was very very clear weeks in advanced.

It's not like we are talking about a young child here. The security staff turned an adult away.
Qosmos tech company accused of aiding Syrian regime
TL;DR version: Chris Griffin (Betable CEO) gets Alex Konrad, a "journalist", to ask Zynga to acquire them.

Seriously, journalist in scare quotes there because any real journalist would say to Chris, "Dude, if your so hot to sell yourself to Zynga just call the guy, its not like its hard to find his number or anything." Instead we get a long piece about how Zynga has to get into real money gambling and how Betable will accelerate that move if they were to be acquired.

Except that its illegal to offer online real money gambling in the US, the US government has gone so far as to violate world trade organization rules [1] to shut down non-US companies from offering gambling, and regulatory constraints such as Sarbanes-Oxley would put uncomfortable personal liability on a US based company officer if that company was even capable of violating the rules here.

That is why 'getting into real-money gambling' is at best a 3 year plan and more likely a 5 year plus plan. Change the laws, change the regulations, and then figure out how to operate under them.

[1] http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5icdh9Q_kfrAZTnf22OUpjZvu...
Dealing with “Xerces hell” in Java/Maven?
What the film "Taken" is really about.
This is pretty interesting, I have a related project (plug, hadoopy.com). The way I went about this (in an experimental branch) is to use Celery running on Redis.
Reminds me of when Apple's Ping had an option to bring in friends from Facebook, which quickly disappeared.
I would love there to be some kind of hacker's hardware gadget that allowed people to take various panels and connect them to computers.

While you're talking about big high res panels, I'd be happy with an extra little low res panel; any of the Nintendo DS screens, for example. But being able to use these old little panels could prevent some of them ending up in landfill.

I guess the other problem is the weirdly sub-optimal nature of multiple monitors - despite years of people wanting to use multiple monitors it's still a bit kludgy.
biased: "showing an unreasonable preference or dislike based on personal opinion".

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-english/...

Can you show that the benchmarks game is as-you-say biased?
Probably with a gigabit in bandwidth, it's possible that OnLive could use some kind of predictive modeling based on what you're currently doing and what you've done in the past to see what actions in the future are likely. It could then run (in parallel) all the likely actions and send them down simultaneously (example: simultaneously send what would be displayed if you panned right, left, up and down one or more frames before the user has given input and the client caches these frames and renders the one that the user ends up doing).

Sure it would be a "waste" of compute power and network, but that's certainly one way to, in a sense, "push data across distances faster than the speed of light". That's exactly the kind of approach which would be unimaginable in a scenario where you have to worry about compressing media in order to get a single stream across in a timely manner (read: now), but might actually fall within the realm of possibility when gigabit bandwidth is ubiquitous.
Thanks for sharing.

I don't think it was much the raising prices part, but the re-branding your product to resonate with the market. This is something a lot of people out there don't get. That is why you don't purchase used BMWs anymore, but certified pre-owned BMWs. The branding is very important.
The awesome thing is that you went and took a structured approach to it, and then used the data to re-focus your brand to the market that will buy your focus. The money will continue to pile on if you keep using such approach. I would suggest looking into offline marketing tools to broaden your horizons.

Good luck.
You cannot prove that those things would not have come about without Bell Labs. Seeing as Google is doing this, Mozilla is building "Rust", and HP created a memristor, I'm pretty sure a similar list of inventions (transistor, laser, C language, UNIX) would have come out without Bell Labs.
There was just an HN post on portfolio sites: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284663. One of the things mentioned in the articles was a portfolio blog, mainly for coders where they talk about the technical stuff they did behind the scenes while showing some pictures of the final products.
Will Facebook's Recommendations Bar Drive Content Sharing?
So I'm insanely fond of these cheapo RC helicopters. Syma S107Gs etc.

What about a hackathon ABOUT those helicopters? Everyone gets helicopters, there's lots of parts, and the winner does something cool?
Not for something down the line though, for the current Drive search indexing.

https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
Facebook Margins Squeezed on Higher Spending as Growth Slows
Facebook barely hits Q2 revenue marks, stock tumbles 9% after-hours
And your point is what exactly. That Google is far more diversified with its income than Facebook. That Google doesn't break out Google+ P/L so we can't do a direct comparison. That search advertising has different dynamics to social advertising.

I mean did you also want to compare Facebook with Exxon Mobile or Starbucks ?
I'm surprised that I wasn't able to find the word privacy mentioned in the first page.

I think that Google is clearly losing the "don't be evil" credo, whatever you may think about a specific industry.

Google is trying to do everything, Google is not satisfied with ads and is trying to remove the middlemen, all the possible ones.

They tried to attack the fashion ecommerce niche with Google Boutiques, they tried to attack Groupon with Google Offers, now they become an Internet Provider, but why? Here are my two cents:

-they will be able to know everything, and I mean everything, their users do online, and they are one of the few organizations actually able to parse and exploit this size of data
-they will be able to know the identity of their users
-they may be able to control the speed or stability of the connection to specific sites, they may even hijack specific banner ads without anyone noticing
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was no risk involved, the market would drive up the prices on these panels to where Apple/Dell/HP charge.

There is obviously risk. You're ordering from the other side of the world, little customer support, the manual is in Korean, the description itself states that the panels are inferior to the type you'd get from the big boys ... not to mention anything of the electronics, and the units come with a funny plug to top it off.

And that's just the stuff you know off the bat.

For the majority of people, this alone, is unacceptable.

Then again, I'm the sort that's perfectly fine opening up the LCD and replacing a blown cap with a soldering iron. Been there, done that.

Making this a fantastic opportunity =)
It also handles diacritics too, which is handy.
Me too - exact same issue, and the same experience; apart from the hold time the support people I spoke with were polite and helpful, and the second person resolved the problem with my original RMA request over the phone. Turned out I gave the first person the wrong serial number (there are two with very similar acronyms, marked SSN & CSSN). They got a replacement device to my desk within 24 hours once they had the correct number.
Google's market cap is $200B vs Facebook's $57B. It's closer to 4x than 2x. They also make significantly more profit than Facebook does revenue.
Facebook Stock Hits New Low
4 Ways Startups Can Make Money
It's a private office, they can exclude whoever the fuck they want for any reason they want. They can also use any criteria they want.

Don't like it ? Too fucking bad.