skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the head of software engineering for a decent sized porn company so I know a little about this. I personaly wouldn't worry about your VC concern but then again I don't see myself ever doing a project where I need VC money. That's just the reality of me disliking the large VC firm approach. I doubt angel fund types would give a rat's ass about whether or not you did porn related work in the past. That being said, if you're doing anything that is easily traceable or even moderately traceable then I would say don't do it. Why? Here's why:

The only way you can make decent money quick in the porn business is if one, you know how to get and drive traffic to the right sites and two, you can optimize which sites to send your traffic to based on their conversion ratio and payout amounts. There's no way to make money quick as a porn producer...just as an affiliate or some other traffic referrer and even then you are going to wait a minimum of a month to two months before you see that money because porn companies are going to make sure you're aren't scamming them with signups where you are buying memberships with stolen numbers. And as a true distributor? Well, that's going to take a while because you have to shoot the porn, edit the porn, get the bank to approve the type of porn you're doing, setup an affiliate network, get the traffic to come to your site and actually sell it. And that's after paying out a bunch of money to models and other folks. Therefore, I'm concluding you are going to be an affiliate. Good luck. Even sites like YouPorn don't make that much money from affiliate sales and they drive a crapload of traffic...although admittedly their traffic is sucky because they like free porn. It takes a while to get going as an affiliate. I have a friend that drives traffic to dating sites and he makes decent money at it but it's a time sink to be honest. Also, vanilla porn is way down from what I hear...there's so many companies making it and there's so much free stuff out there that it's just not the money maker it used to be.

I'd ask your friend how long it took him before he was making REAL money. I mean, unless you guys are just amazing and finding good quality traffic (that's the rub) it's really hard to make money quickly in the porn affiliate world.

Why don't you just have him "hire" you to make rent money and start up a bunch of new sites or projects for him so it's under his name and you never have to worry about it. He can keep them going later and reap the profits. You can even do it under the table if necessary so there's no messy legal trail for someone to find. Seems a lot easier to me.
Yes, I would agree with you.
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If you're making money on merch, your business is your brand, not the t-shirts themselves. The article's only critical of people who think they're witty enough to sell t-shirts based just on the screen-printed content.
Yup, I had exactly the same reaction (I was even just about to post the wikipedia url, before I read your post).

I may have been getting a few ideas mixed up though - certainly someone with O- is quite rare, but O+ is very common. And then there is the fact that if you are O-, you are guaranteed to have the lowest likelihood of finding a matching donor.
To cheer things a bit, here are some higher numbers:

Flickr: 5-10%
Ning: 3%
Online free-to-play games: up to 25%
TurboTax Online: 70% (!!)

Source: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-...

My opinion: it depends on a lot of factors. From my experience without much effort you can get 1% users convert. But like I said there a lot of variables that can mess it up or down.
Thanks for all the info, much appreciated. On the off chance you see this old thread, the "category"-type links from a few posts above are implemented now. I'm not sure if it'll help people find the pages, but I'll find out soon enough I guess. :)

The best type of ad that came to mind was a programming-job-ad, since that would be very targeted and possibly useful, but I suppose Joel and 37s have that market covered pretty well.

Haven't fixed all the UI bugs people noticed or added too much more data/languages yet... next weekend I guess. :/
doesn't a good interface help to make user workflows work well?
Hmm, I get this:

We haven't been able to serve the page you asked for.

If you typed in a URL, please make sure you have
typed it correctly. In particular, make sure that
the URL you typed is all in lower case.

I don't, therefore, know what the poll actually asked. Probably reading the article wouldn't help anyway.

The problem is that most people don't actually seem to know what Darwin's theory of evolution is, and still follow the disinformation of the time, in which it's claimed that the theory says we are descended from apes (for example). If those being polled think they're being asked "Are we descended from monkeys?" Then the answer is "No".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390413
I think you may have missed the point. Playing a wedding or bar mitzvah is custom work on contract with a single client who to some extent directly dictates your set list, etc. Playing a giant stadium concert is you putting out your product and thousands of individuals autonomously buying in.
Even though I had none of the ideas he mentioned, reading this article gives me a strange urge to start a business in each of these categories, just to prove him wrong.
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Calling the death of Windows Mobile
Yep, but it doesn't necessarily need to look good, it just needs to be intuitive. Sometimes that requires a good look, sometimes just a good feel.
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That porn didn't insert itself in the final minutes of the Super Bowl.
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Something like this, from the Financial Times' chief economist, Martin Wolf, might be a better treatment of what's wrong and how to fix it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Global_Finance

The Economist has been dedicating a lot of space to the topic as well. Neither one of them advocates throwing the baby, bathtub, and one's self out of the window.
This isn't terribly uncommon, particularly for senior teachers in well-to-do suburban school districts. The "teachers are one step away from starvation" meme is, well, suffice it to say it was never universal and that we have excellent PR in a lot of ways.

As to whether this will last or not: well, that pension has been available for thirty of the last thirty years. One of the two political parties in the United States would rather scrape out its belly with a rusty fork before seriously taking a whack at teachers unions, and the other is the Democrats[1]. I'm not predicting rapid change with respect to the employment market for teachers in the US.

Do you want to be the political candidate cutting education funding and then facing, quite literally, a NEA warchest and a small army of very popular people in your district who you just made enemies of for life? Who will mention, in a totally non-partisan and objectively true manner, that you are cutting funding for the school Little Davey attends? To Little Davey's dotting parents?

[1]: Edited to add -- in deference to readers from outside the US, I should add the common knowledge that makes the joke work (at the expense of killing the funny): there are two major political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats. Organized labor and, in particular, the national teachers unions are inseparable from the Democratic Party.
Or Apache Thrift:

http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/
You already have all the other demographic information to make correlations from the poll results.
From the article

Indeed, it's arguably the case that the proprietary software model, generally, is largely dead in mobile.

Yep, those guys at Apple sure do seem to be struggling with that phone platform of theirs... whats it called again? I haven't heard anyone mention it in the last 10 minutes so clearly I must have forgotten it.

While it is true that Apple and Research In Motion seem to be doing quite well with their end-to-end

Understatement.

Overall, I believe that we're just seeing a diversification in people creating their own OS's for phones (see new Palm stuff) which is drawing attention away from Windows Mobile.. I don't think Windows Mobile will die, which is what is being suggested in the article.

Linkbait imo.
In my view, a good teacher is still underpaid at 100K per year.

In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.

Wait... Maybe it's coming... with YouTube, HubPages, and Google's 10^100 contest. Who knows.
Seems difficult to make money with this, but here's a few ideas.

They could charge new link sharing sites for the privilege of being available in their widget, or for better placement.

They could start their own link sharing site / link aggregator based on the data they gather from the widgets, then of course also get prominent placement in the widget for the new site.

They could show a small ad in the widget.
Not flickr or last.fm, but... 16 out of 757 users on one of my sites. I work that out to be 2.1%-ish? (The site opened in November 08)
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Do you know the definition of (christian) faith?

Faith informs us: God himself talked to us (see the Bible), and even visited us (see Jesus Christ). But you need faith for that, and faith is not something that we can produce or create, it's something we only can accept or deny.

So, it's not that it's impossible (as you say) to tell anything about God. It would even be enough to observe Nature.

As I said in another comment, many of the best scientists converted to some kind of deism, because they saw the great Intelligence inside Nature, and they could not find any other explanation than the existence of a Supreme Intelligence.

2 examples? Albert Einstein; Antony Flew.
What's wrong with m4w?
Thanks. I was kind of planning on saying something like that, but thought someone with more experience (either from my side or the manager's) might have a better suggestion. Oh well, I guess it's a good problem to have.
Go to Barcelona, in Europe, and walk around anywhere in the city. There are a few Starbucks, but full with short-term tourists only, who need the reassuring familiarity of ordering exactly the same thing as they do home.

The long-term tourists, aka those in love with the city and who find themselves unable to leave it, enjoy the "bars i cafes" that exist all over. Many, many of them privately owned, not part of a chain.

A big difference between San Francisco and Barcelona is the following: people's houses and work places are all in the same place (which does not mean that the inhabitant's don't commute anyway). If anything, this overlap provides business throughout the entire day. This overlap provides "eyes on the street", that Jane Jacobs described, in her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities", as the source of safety and comfort (and thus business opportunities) in any city street, along with very small blocks so that walking around the local neighborhood is possible.

Perhaps in the big cities of the USA that match the Los Angeles sprawl model, like San Francisco does to some extent (as opposed to Manhattan & Brooklyn), only chain cafes may survive, riding on the low costs of mass production and distribution.
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So...it detects a specific pattern in front of my webcam and draws an animation over it? And the animation reacts to me blowing into a microphone? I don't know, I didn't find this that exciting; a bit disappointing given the title. Maybe I'm missing something.

Also, FYI: If you want to try it without wasting paper/ink, I was able to play with it by putting the PDF with the pattern to one side of my screen and using my iPhone's screen to reflect it to my webcam.
You can do it using setVars, but unfortunately you are allowed to use only a single var.

Thus my first remark at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461349.

This analytics feature is one of the most precious one, but is too limited for now.
Atheism is getting older and older. I know that I'm offensive now, but atheists seem to me like people offending their own intelligence.

Let me cite Louis Pasteur: A little bit of science moves away from God, but much science makes return to him.
I completely disagree. The best teachers should be compensated, but there is no reason to spend 100k on high elementary school & high school teachers... Hell you could have a grad student teaching the course -- the material isn't hard. The trick is getting the kids to work and be motivated, and that's primarily caused by setting high standards and having parents emphasize the importance of education.
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See my reply here for tracking individual visitors
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462121

If you really want a movie of your visitor checkout http://www.clicktale.net (#4 at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461349)
Contrarily, I would have surprised had it been hacked through a vulnerability in PHP. For two reasons.

1) as the custodian of the forum software, I wouldn’t expect them to keep a vulnerable edition of the software in the production server.

2) PHPBB3 is assumed to have come of age compared to the notoriety that PHPBB2 was.
I completely agree and have been wondering about this lately.

Any studies or articles to back it up?
The video, as it was said above, is probably a trash. But it introduced me to the topic, so I read a few things on the subject including this book: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Debt-Shocking-Truth-System/dp/0979...

While certainly a bit hysteric, it's still a nice intro to the history of english-american monetary system. According to the book, the main problem is not the debt itself, but the banks that control it - they are all private. It turns out that federal reserve system is completely under private banks control: they issue new money to the government to raise the national debt and the government has to pay interest on it (which it wouldn't have to, if it had issued money itself).
Simple but functional site! A fine start.
As you and others have said first concentrate on the local market. However, you do have a great story to sell, when you go international. I am no PR pro, but the story would be something along the lines: Here's a story of a young man who proved Nigeria can do web right.
Do not discount a value of a great story.
The given link doesn't work for me. This one does:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/01/evolution-darw...

More details on some of the "questions" in this article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4410927/...
I'm curious... what is your ultimate goal?
With languages, my experience has usually been that it's easy and gratifying at first. Then it gets tough and demoralizing. And then you sort of break through that wall and it becomes quite gratifying again. So hang in there. :)

Oh, and to get past the level where you can hold a simple conversation I have found immersion necessary. My Hebrew improved as much in a month in Israel this past summer as it had in the previous year.
I always thought AB was the most common, but it appears to be less than 10% almost everywhere.
The trick is getting the kids to work and be motivated, and that's primarily caused by setting high standards and having parents emphasize the importance of education.

I think a good (grade school) teacher is not necessarily one who is an expert in the material (though, of course, base competence is necessary) but one who is an expert in motivating and engaging students.
But that's kind of beside the point. I'm guessing that Apple's real objection to Flash on the iPhone is that they don't want Adobe to be in charge of something that important. Apple likes to be in control of their own destiny, and they're one of the few companies with the clout to get away with something like that.

I think it's something similar, but slightly different: that Apple doesn't want any code running on your iPhone that didn't go through the App Store.
Sure, I agree with you. Makeshift interfaces surely have their place and I was duly impressed by the demos. They are fucking cool, and cliché, I'm not typically interested in higher math unless it's showing me insights related to me earning money.

But.

This is all well and good, unless you title linkbait "Why Spend More than Five Minutes on a GUI?".

It wasn't "Build a Nifty Mathematical Experimentation GUI in 5 Minutes in Mathematica," or even "Build a Nifty GUI in 5 Minutes in Mathematica," or "Explore Math! 5 Minute GUI," any of which would have been accurate and still interesting.

Instead, it appeals directly to the base (and incorrect) belief that so many developers have, that UI is an unimportant afterthought that can be dispensed with, if they only find the right combination of readymade widgets.

In 5 minutes!

Ugh.
From recent, direct experience:

9 out of 10 people you come across in that industry are not people you want to deal with.

Trust me.
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"What is AI? Whatever a computer can't do".

One implication seems to be that the human brain is itself not a computer.
Sure. It was really the "who are conditioned to see women as body parts for their own enjoyment" which I thought may well be sarcastic.

I don't think most people need much conditioning to have a sex drive...
I wouldnt be surprised if there's a few kids at that very same school making 100k a year. I was hacking for 30/hr in my spare time in high school (10 years ago), and these days, all a kid needs is a bit of motivation to learn all the web development stack and start consulting.
I was about to recommend that book.
best of luck!

(and of course I'm really curious what it is that you're going to do).
>>> My question is this: Would you (startups/entrepreneurs/VCs/funders/anyone in the industry) do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry?

No. Don't do it. Your name will get associated with porn and you will not be able to get rid of it completely in the future, even if you will want to. Just my advice...
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These kinds of arguments make me tensor.
One of the main take aways I had, was the fact that banks can lend more than they have on deposit. Then that money can be deposited with another bank, and again multiplied indefinitely.

So for example,
I deposit $10 at bank A
Bank A can now lend 10x ($100) to you
You deposit that at Bank B, who can again lend 10x ($1000)

Can you explain what value has been created there? To me, it seems like the bank has been given a license to create money indefinitely, which seems like a very bad idea.

For me, that is the scam. Why can't we exist only allowing banks to lend out what they actually have instead of creating money out of thin air?
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thank you!

I have a couple of ideas; not sure which one I'd work on (time to do some research). I'll stay on here and be in touch with the community and ofcourse, ask for feedback when I have something to show.
I have to second this point. Mises.org is a propaganda site, an echo chamber for people with a rather extreme political philosophy. It is not a source of balanced information on any topic.
I don't think you are looking for managers, but rather advisor's. At your stage you need people who have "been there and done that". I imagine that you and your team are technically focused (building the tech and filing for patents), but you need advisor's to help you shape the business.

My experience is that I am too technically focused, but my advisor's help me and teach me about the business side of things. At a later date, when I have employees, then I will think about getting managers, and I will also try and keep hold of my advisor's as directors.

People who have done it before and raised funding will help you shape the business to raise funding, not managers.
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You've had lots of positive feedback, and I'm sure it's a good idea, but it's caused me nothing but trouble.

Firstly - and you'll see this in my earlier comments, it simply didn't work for me on IE7/XP Home edition. Now it works (Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 on SuSE 10.1) but when I closed the tab the "music" kept running.

How many browser/OS combinations have you tested this on? I'm left with a machine that I may have to reboot to get control back of the sound system, and I'm not a happy customer. If you do this to people "in the wild" you may get some comment significantly more negative than this one.
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Instead of charging for food or drink, and then letting you have the space for free, how about switching the two? Charge for the table by the hour (or with a monthly subscription), and then have free little snacks and drinks to go along with the seat.

This was suggested 7 days ago by noonespecial: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449914

4 points by noonespecial 7 days ago | link | parent | flag

Seems like there's a market for a place full of private cozy nooks where $20 buys a bottomless cup of coffee, an all day wifi pass and a plug at every table.

The problem is that street-level storefront space is expensive. Street-level shops - including coffeeshops - rely on continuous flow of customer traffic. A people-storage business model does not work at street-level. It might work if the space to be rented were not at street-level.
Teachers are respected like that in Finland.
If you'd take the money (and if you have clients it's really hard to take the money because they hired you) and you'd start the next thing, you're the perfect startup founder.
Bill Gates disagrees.

"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school." Bill Gates

http://2mm.typepad.com/usa/2009/01/it-is-amazing-how-big-a-d...