skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have a look here - there is a whole interview with the CEO of ClickBank (the company that specializes) on this subject that might be useful to you:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516821

The value of services such as ClickBank is that they provide you access to a large established affiliate network - something that is very hard to build yourself...
You bring up a good point. It bothers me a great deal that companies aren't actively supporting the software that they depend on. The Python Foundation will take your donations. A thousand dollars a year is peanuts and the dividends are huge.
Straw polls are interesting, but full of bias. For example, older users are more likely to be in a relationship and/or have children, making participation on a weekend less likely.
Cute, but having trouble seeing how that's any better than the grade-school algorithm it's based on. (What, we have to add in unary now? This is progress?) You still have to carry, you still perform n^2 operations for n-digit numbers; the difference is you need a lot more paper and time, and it makes for a better video. (And God help you if you have to multiply any nines...)

Now, someone show me a convolution-based n log n multiplication algorithm you can do quickly with pen and paper and I'll be impressed. :)
Surely it's incorrect to make a blanket statement that voluntary response data is worthless. Worthless means there is zero information in the data, which would only be true in extreme cases.
Maybe because raw excution speed matters so little in most applications that they're rather focussing on lower hanging fruits such as improvements to the core language or standard library. - But that's just a wild guess.
Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch
Ask HN: Good Programming Books to Teach Programmers New Languages?
What are some good books to teach a programmer a new language they've never used before? For example, I'm decent at Java, but haven't gotten into Python much yet. It seems like all the Python books I've skimmed are one of two types: so basic that they spend most of the time teaching basics of programming, which I'm already familiar with, or so advanced that they already require good working knowledge of the language.

I'm looking for a good balance between these: a book that assumes you know about programming basics, but focuses on what's DIFFERENT about the new language.
http://kosmix.com

http://meehive.com

I work there, and our team spent a bunch of time on friday trying to get them to add the link. They claim they still haven't figured out implications of this 'internet' thing on their editorial policies, and trained all their copywriters..
Amazingly, it does. Trust me, I'm as surprised as you are. I've tried both designs, run split tests, the salesletter always wins. I know plenty of other people who have also run tests, same result.

I have no idea why. Maybe people like to read?

The same tests also show that the less graphics the better. You'll notice that the Parrot Secrets site has almost none. Not even a logo or a header graphic. That's on purpose. The tests I've seen show that fancy graphics just destroy the conversion rate on a site like this.

I have no idea why this is the case. But I'm going to do what works, not what looks fancy.
Damn, I only have 4 years left.
Yes, it does work.

The long copy is about building excitement. You're trying to stream the user down to the buy button -- but make them read the testimonials and the bonuses so when they get to the call to action, they'll have no reason not to buy.

The key to it working is getting interested parties to read. If you don't care about parrots, no amount of copy is going to convince you to buy the book. If you've got a problem parrot, you'll be hooked after the second paragraph.

When I used to work for IMC (http://www.marketingtips.com -- company that teaches these techniques), I remember reading an internal news letter about a successful client. The site was about fitness/building muscle -- something I was interested in at the time. I clicked to his website and started reading. I knew about all the tricks in the sales letter, yet I still found myself wanting to buy his product. I 'snapped out of the trance' and didn't buy his ebook, but that was the day I realized long copy really works.
Hopefully, this version is better.
Dare Obasanjo - Some thoughts on news feeds and activity streams replacing email
It may be that when people pay $80 for a parrot book, they actually read the whole thing and apply what they've learned. If they had bought it for $20 from Amazon, it might sit on the shelf.

The self-improvement market is very much like that. You could sell people a video of a Tony Robbins seminar for $20. But when people pay $1000 and devote a long weekend to it, they're more likely to change their behavior as a result. The $1000 product is actually worth more than the $20 product.

If you're going to spend 4 hours reading a book and your time is worth $100/hr, you can see that the price of the book itself is irrelevant.
I have read several Pratchett books- and I have found every one of them hilarious! The BBC movies aren't too bad, either.
you still haven't noticed?
It's the same with the Chicago Tribune.

Their excuse is that the CMS makes it difficult to add outbound links directly into articles.....

...so they instead fill them with automatic inbound links to their spammy topic pages!
YouTube - [RonF] Sekirei Episodio 12 Final Parte 3/3 Sub. Español
Both Java language and C++ suffer from backward compatibility. Of course it is a must from business point of view, but it is also a major obstacle. Once bad design decision is made, no one could fix it. The Python doesn't strictly follow that rule and perhaps it is the reason why it seems to have a bright future.
Programming in Lua is an excellent example of what you're looking for. The first edition is available online at http://lua.org/pil/. Slashdot has a good review of the Second Edition at http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/147203.

For Python, I believe you're looking for http://www.diveintopython.org/
33 1st time entrepreneur. I use to feel old as when I started at 31 YC seemed to only fund the 22 to 27 yr old age group.

Though I graduated college late too @ 26, which I thought then too I was way old. Now as I get older I don't care so much, but understand this mind sets comes from society saying college 18 to 24 and 25 to early 30s married w/kids. If you don't follow you feel like an oddball or that people view you that way and unfortunately they do; experience w/extended family.

Overall ... Im enjoying my entrepreneurial ride and hopefully in time will lead me to the supposed societal normal life.
"Let's talk about wizards and witches. There is a tendency to talk of them in one breath, as though they were simply different sexual labels for the same job."

This is one of the many reasons that Harry Potter is so subversive. Witches and Wizards are just words for the same thing in different genders, and it's ingrained in every kid's head.
Being able to subvert the type system is different than having no type system.
Could it be because a significant percentage of them are on lower bandwidth communications?

Did you qualify your niche the same way - by reading newsgroups?
apple.com is very difficult to navigate for me. It is optimized for people who are conditioned to click on large glossy pictures. Examples of good usability would be http://cr.yp.to/ or - if you are looking for a corporate example - amazon.com.
Ask YC: Review my startup: See'n'Report - People Powered News
We are a bootstrapped company from Pakistan. We've built a Citizen Journalism news service (www.seenreport.com) which allows ordinary people to report text messages, photos and videos of unfolding news events directly from their cell-phones, as and when it happens. Readers of the news website can discuss, share and rate the news, vote stories up and down and syndicate the content on thier blogs.

The service also allows people to run their own "channels" to cover their events.

For instance, my country is going through political turmoil as the citizens across the country are carrying out long march for the restoration of judges deposed by former dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The current government has violently tried to curb the movement by force resulting in violence. The government has also put a ban on segments of media. People across the country are sending us their eye-witness accounts via SMS, MMS, email and web-upload to make news, be heard and bring change. All of it can be viewed at http://longmarch.seenreport.com/

Please take a look at it and let us know what you think about it.
Too bad AT&T doesn't have a femtocell product that can route iPhone traffic over local internet connections.

Oh, wait, they do! It's in testing with their own employees. See:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Femtocells-in-2009-99...

Not deploying a few to SXSW would seem a major blunder and lost opportunity -- unless the units are currently so awful they'd be even worse then the current complaints.
Here is the clickable link:
http://longmarch.seenreport.com/
I don't know man .. I'm coming up on 30 in August, and I'm not sure I feel that great about it .. the whole closer to 40 than 20 thing, without feeling like I've done enough that really matters yet ..
I don't care how much coverage your unit tests have, basic sanity-check assertions are the foundation of defensive coding.
A little over a year ago, we created a DVD and companion ebook on the topic of SEO for photographers. We serve that niche market and were finding that most photographers a) had Flash sites and b) had no clue how to get on Google at all–let alone rank well. We were doing service work for people and they were lining up faster than we could help them. So, we decided to sell the info.

I decided to do a DVD because I wanted to include a lot of screencasts. The companion PDF is more of a checklist/workbook. We did a 1,000 DVD run at DiskMakers and also let people access it online.

We're pretty much sold out of the initial run of DVDs (I have a few left in my closet) and we've sold the online version to a lot of overseas photographers who didn't want to wait for it to ship. We charged $79 for the DVD so you can do the math there. http://www.photographyseo.com.

One thing I want to emphasize is that we did absolutely no marketing other than linking to it on our main website and blog. No AdWords or other online campaigns. If I had tried hard, I imagine we could have sold 2 or 3 times the amount we have by now.

I'm considering doing a revised version that is an online/ebook version only–or possibly doing a version that has a slightly broader audience ("SEO for wedding vendors" for example).

If anyone wants to see the PDF or browse the videos, drop me an email.
I like what I've seen of clojure so far, and have written a couple small programs in it for fun, with an eye towards game programming.

Plusses:

-JVM at your disposal

-STM for concurrency (haven't used this much yet but what it offers is nice)

-built-in collection types like you'd see in perl, js, python, etc., which is a much nicer syntax over the more traditional lisp dialects for those of us who aren't hard core lisp programmers.

-nice emacs/slime integration - REPL for debugging, etc.

Minuses:

-The language is still being actively developed and while most of the core features are there, there are some things that I've found missing and some things that are still changing (have had trouble with the project/module/package heirarchy a bit, would like metadata on anonymous functions).

-Debugging can be tricky, stuff will come up from the JVM without an associated line number in the clojure code, though I've seen a patch for this online

-Complexity added by the plusses. The java interop has a lot of power but it takes some getting used to. I also came into this with no recent java experience so YMMV.

-No native OO syntax, and I didn't want to write a hybrid of java/clojure code. Still, it has structs, and the idea (I think) is to use closures as the "glue" rather than objects.
If you upmodded it, it's bookmarked under the "saved" section of your profile.
Sometimes I forget how accomplished some of the people here can be. I just think of it as 'the blob.'
It's still baffling to me that Apple chose to tether themselves to AT&T. They built a mobile browsing device that almost 2 years later is ahead of the competition (at least for now) then tethered it to the worst data network available. It's like they built a Ferrari with wheels that fall off at 65 mph.
"Researchers have found that peoples' mental abilities peak at 22 before beginning to deteriorate just five years later."

The 5-year gap doesn't make sense. If you're at your peak at age 22, wouldn't you, by definition, begin to decline immediately after? :-)

I suppose you could level off for 5 years, but then it's misleading to call 22 a "peak".
Torrent search engine Mininova earning €1 million a year
On the LEF site (the first link I posted) there's a description of the various specific and measurable benefits of various high quality supplements, as established by various studies and published in respected medical, nutritional, and biochemical research journals.

That page has 182 separate citations. Click the "References" link to see all of them.
I am guessing they didn't have a choice. When they approached carriers, they didn't show them the phone. It was a "trust us, this will be awesome" situation. If you remember, when the iPhone was announced, a VP at Verizon bragged about passing up the deal. It seems that AT&T was the only carrier to trust Steve, much to their credit.

Apple also had stipulated very strict and unusual terms regarding revenue. AT&T was smart to see the upside potential of a radically new device causing users to switch to their network -- again, something that Verizon ignored. You have to give AT&T credit. Even though they have a horrible network, they are very strategically savvy.

Here is the whole story:
http://thewickedwoman.com/2007/07/08/why-apple-chose-att-for...
I do respect your criticism, though I think it's a bit hyperbolic. While no one held a gun to my head, I was repeatedly misled by people who I believed, mistakenly, had at least a small amount of integrity.

I am always reminded of the classic Hugh McLeod cartoon:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/zzzzazzdggg...

Perhaps I'm in that bottom part of the pyramid, but the top section is well populated too.
Those references are not enough for me to search for. I need article titles. (Edit: They also don't clearly mark which claims are associated with which reference.)

That site looks like its primary purpose is to sell products, not dispense genuine medical advice. As such, I view it with extreme skepticism. In more blunt terms, that product looks like modern snake-oil.

Also, "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."
Unfortunately, this is not true in the case of type punning. C used to be the language you used when you wanted to access bits. Now with C99 you cannot * (int16* )((int32* )x).

NB, all compilers make exceptions for unions, but the type punning rule stands, and at work we've actually seen code like the above (for a dynamic typing system) compile to NULL instead of the appropriate reference with GCC. Grrrrrrr.
If you know a little Python, I recommend the Python Cookbook by Alex Martelli http://www.amazon.com/Python-Cookbook-Alex-Martelli/dp/05960... It is completely different from other types of books which are either references or tutorials which build some kind of project. It has hundreds of little recipes with discussions. The book is very readable and very useful, starting with simple functions, ending up with some pretty hairy stuff. 5 stars.
I got a little press coverage recently (or more properly our team did):
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/02/27/tripadvis...

Also I'm going to be a keynote speaker at the Dutch PHP Conference in June:
http://www.phpconference.nl/

Mostly working hard and getting paid very well at my day job, saving money, trying to unload my digg shares ;-)

And rent-a-coder wasn't involved in digg in any way. Nor really was elance. That's part of the mythology they dreamed up.
After 40 your reflexes are slower and you are less likely to have your world shattering idea.

For some people, creativity increases with age.

But still, quick thinking and high energy levels are useful. I think it's crucial that we compress schooling as much as possible so people can do something important while they still can.
An article on Kosmix in NY TImes.
If you want real subversive fantasy, I recommend Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish and the other of books from the saga. It has everything: The main character is a male witch (or witcher), the female wizards have formed a secret society to take over the world and nonhumans (elves,dwarfs) are subjected to human racism and bigotry.
If you're going to use the code tag, please be kind enough to wrap your sentences.
What kind of software allows you to sell via the newsletter format? I though the reason that format works was because the buyer were non-techies (i.e. grandmothers who have parrots etc). Does it work on techies as well? If so, pretty amazing.
A Programmer's Plea to Laptop Makers
I recommend Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition by Alex Martelli. It is very concise, without the newbie stuff, and does point out some specifics that might surprise someone coming from Java and other languages. It's a good Python library reference to have on your bookshelf, too.

This book covers up to Python 2.5, but you could then read about the changes in Python 2.6/3.0 at:

http://www.python.org/doc/
Kicking heroin addiction is nowhere near as hard or as dangerous as kicking alcohol addiction.
This guy is a person, too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_kurzweil
I'm sensitive to your accusation of jealousy because I probably am a bit jealous. However I (and most people who know the whole story) think it's justified. I have gotten a little notoriety out of the experience, however, and it's worth something (it got me my current job, for instance), so I intend to speak up about it as often as I can. There's plenty of people who joined digg long after me who are much more extreme about self-promotion. Probably why you haven't heard of me.
Equal Rites, which came after that book, deals with this topic more directly. A seventh son has a seventh son...no wait, a daughter. She has raw magical power, and with some help gets to the wizard university. I'm not going to say any more; I don't want to spoil anything.
I met the founder a couple weeks ago when he was in the US. I work for an Angel fund and the moment he showed it to me, my first response was, "how do I invest in this?" But he was already on to the VC phase.

It's clever execution.
It's well done, and good luck. Are you as an organization in support of the long march protest, or is this subdomain "owned" by the organizers?

Another thing... I have worked on both traditional and "citizen" news sites. I think there is a fundamental problem citizen news sites ignore:

On a typical day for a typical citizen, absolutely nothing interesting happens.

You are in a crisis right now so it may not seem that way. But for every 100,000 people perhaps 2 or 3 witness something actually newsworthy.

You need to develop truly innovative ways to gather actual news better than traditional sources. Giving out a mobile text number is not enough.
I raise you 41. I am way past the peak, though I still enjoying programming as much as I always did.

I just use guile and experience, rather than brute force. I'm working on iPhone apps now, and trying to rely on taste and thoughtfulness to separate myself from the crowd (barely working).
A lot of us young whippersnappers like to state our age. We feel that youth, for some reason, makes us more likely to know things. We young whippersnappers are kinda dumb that way.
In case anyone is worried about their twenty-something cognitive performance, bear in mind that the refutation of this study will probably not surface in the media; http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...

-An unconcerned twenty-something ;)
Link to the original paper.

[PDF] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/fc09optimised.pdf
As long as they don't start burning wizards on the stake...

I think it'll be interesting to observe how fantasy terminology evolves within the next 30 years, as leagues of Harry Potter readers start writing fantasy.
So was my answer, but it was missing a smiley or two and the right tone, I guess. Tired/busy, as I said:-)
Raw execution speed matters when dealing with Google sized data sets, but Google and organizations with similar requirements can just throw more hardware at it.
Hello,

There's a small thinking shift between writing a game in an imperative style and writing it in a functional style. In particular, it's smaller, I think, for games than for other kinds of applications.

In a typical game, you have a global state - a series of objects describing the properties of the game world at a certain time. You continuously update these objects, based on what input you receive from the user, and then present those changes to him, by way of video and audio rendering.

In pseudoC it would look like this :

gameState s;
int time = 0;

int main() {
load_resources();

while(!game_exit()) {
get_input();
update_state();
render_video();
render_audio();

time = time + 1;
}

return 0;

}

Switching to a functional language, a way of thinking about the game flow I've found useful is this :

The main loop becomes a function of two parameters : the current game state and the current inputs. From these it computes the next state. After the current simulation tick has passed, the next game state become the current one, whatever video and audio you have is updated and new inputs are gathered. It would look like this :

int main() {
game_loop(load_resources(),init_inputs(),0);
}

gameState game_loop(gameState currentState, gameInput inputs, int game_time)
{
render_video(currentState);
render_audio(currentState);

game_loop(next_state(currentState,inputs),new_inputs(),game_time + 1);

}

Yeah, in C it will blow your stack, but functional languages have to deal with recursion much more often, and what you see there will be optimised away to a loop and be executed in constant space.

Other things to note are that you see the state passed explicitly between functions (no relying on it inherently existing as a global) and that the shift is from modifing an object as the game progresses, to creating a new object to represent the new state of the world, and discarding the old one.

Languages, be it lisp, haskell, calm, scala, f# or python, java, c, c# (used as functional languages) are relatively easy to learn. What's hard is adapting your thinking to the strengths and limitations imposed by them.

Hope this helped.
The NYTimes has a schizoid relationship with the internet.

The NYTimes was the first paper on the 'net. Brewster Khale (founder of Internet Archive) helped them get there. In 2004 they started threatening the Internet Archive to get them to stop archiving their internet pages.

Then they started threatening Google. Then they put up the registration wall. But then they started paying "reputation" companies to spread their links all over the web. Then they started protesting that they should not have the burden of being the "paper of record", but still maintain "all the news that's fit to print".

The Old Grey Lady has gone batty.