skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ROI/valuation of web site
I have a friend who has an unmaintained little web site, he's not interested in working on it any more. The site generates some income from google ads.

I have some ideas for the web site and I can work on it to increment traffic etc, so I'm interested in buying the site from him.

This is a simple valuation question; if the site is generating, say, $1,000 a year in revenues, what would be a typical price for it?

I know it depends on publicity projections etc, but to simplify let's say it's going to keep like now for a few years. The domain name alone is pretty good too, but let's also disregard it for the moment.

I have an estimate in mind but I wanted to get some ballparks from other opinions.
Good stuff. It's that second level of indirection that got me (your STRINGIFY2/STRINGIFY combo).
50x faster? Unlikely - when I'm downloading BitTorrent files (with say >100 peers), my connection's bandwidth limit (Cable modem, 1MBps down) is usually the bottleneck. So no matter how much faster the blin.ch protocol is, I'm not getting 50x faster downloads.
Interview with GridGain
Interview about the compute grid model.
Main reason I didn't mention that is because speed is rarely the main problem in my field (embedded systems). People have used bytecode interpreted Forths (usually a 10x slowdown) on slow micros and it's often good enough. In fact, a C-to-bytecode compiler might be a good idea for size reasons ... but there probably are some out there already.
Interview with Terracotta
Interview that talks about clustering JVMs and the Network Attached Memory.
Interview with GigaSpaces
Google for everyone.
PG: If you read through an application where nothing "jumped out", but the team had a fully functional web app to look at and the idea was interesting, would you ignore the web app?
I wish you the best of luck with the venture. ;-D
As a CS student in my University, we have access to Vista for free as a part of MSDN-AA. Many students are taking this benefits. We can use the Vista forever as long as it is not for commercial (which doesn't matter much).

Office 2007 ultimate cost 64 bucks forever (or 22 for a year)
Or maybe I know my limits and minute level of influence compared to PG,
Screen Readers and display: none
I saw Portal for the first time just the other day. Been a long time since a game immediately made me want to play it like that.
I wish he'd elaborated a bit on his transition from unappreciated coder in a cost-center IT shop to his current gig. I'm glad he did it, but if he told me how - now that's something I can use.

Anyone got any good stories on that topic to share?
Facebook Vs LinkedIn for Business Networking
zaidf, you are wise, my friend.

To have compassion for such a person is unique and uncommon. I join you in hoping life does get better for that person, because it must be so very sad to be in trapped in such a life.
U.S., British Militaries May Deploy Flying Saucers
Well, from your POV, the closer you can pay to 0 the better.

Normally, I suppose you could use the 3X annual revenue formula as a start, but in this case, your friend admits he isn't interested in developing it out anymore.

Why not low ball an offer of $500 to start the negotiations, or ask him what he thinks the whole thing is worth?

Your high number could be $3000 or more, but this way you might end up paying less.
Silicon Valley is the Only Place for Startups (based on PG article)
And then writing Logo as a project my soph year.... ah, the full circle of education.
That's an interesting point. Then depending on the tilt of their planet, seasons go full cycle in about two weeks. I wonder what implications that has for the equivalent of photosynthetic life there. Are they "awake" and soaking up the sun for about a week before "sleeping" the second? Or do they just kinda ride it out?

That would also influence the "animals" (i.e. non-photosynthetic life) there and its behaviors.

That's all assuming they get energy from the sun. Maybe they can produce energy in other ways.
Vernor Vinge had an excellent novel named "A Deepness in the Sky" that dealt with the development of intelligent life on a planet whose star would extinguish and re-ignite itself predictably. Something like 3 decades of ignition and then 7 or 8 decades of darkness. The dominant life form was a spider-like being that could hibernate and ride out the darkness by creating a "deepness" (essentially a den).

Great book, with interesting insights about unusual planetary configurations with life. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes hard science fiction.
This 'rejection without a stated reason' is common practice - and poor practice wherever it may be found, ie recruitment, vc, men/women relationships, record companies and many places else.

The ease by which even minimal feedback can be given which can lead to great benefit to the recipient is obvious, and therefore should be embraced. There may be risks that the recipient makes some kind of rebuttal and wastes time, the reasoning itself behind the rejection causes bad publicity or the feedback process takes time however the benefits to the [in this case YC] ecosystem I think outweigh the disadvantages.
Think of what it means to the answer of these questions:

Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
Is Language Syntax Important?
The guy has a point. I don't remember where I read it, but as the saying goes, "There's always brass in the muck" If you do things that other people can't or aren't willing to do, you can build a business out of that.
Good! It's about time! Gmail has lost its glamour a long time ago (in internet years). I'd like an integrated address book, calendar, rss reader, smarter views (think iTunes), account protection, guaranteed backups + real customer service, search by date, spam filters that can distinguish between my friends are viagra ads, etc, etc.

And I'd pay for it! Actually, I prefer to pay, because paying turns me into a customer instead of a user.
Thanks Paul. I added this to the article:

"A limited partner can tell you who was the best VC with fund performance data from institutions like Cambridge Associates. He may also question whether past performance predicts future performance in venture capital; see Don't Bet the Farm on Serial Persistence.

"But entrepreneurs shouldn't select their investors based on how much money they have made for their limited partners."
Cool idea, but I really don't see my flatmates hanging out on social networks.
Logo hasn't disappeared, though it's evolved a bit. Northwestern University has a version of Logo called NetLogo.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

It's a decentralized version of logo, where you can control multiple turtles at once. It's useful in simulating distributed systems, such as "turtles, termites, and traffic jams."

There's a book by Mitchel Resnick by the same name.
http://books.google.com/books?id=K8P1rX8T4kYC&dq=turtles...

If you get a chance, run some of the simulations on their demo page. They're available as java applets. It's pretty amazing to see complex patterns stem from simple interactions, also a theme of Wolfram.
Actually, many markets that only use play money still work quite well, the Hollywood Stock Exchange being one prominent example.

An active market could be great with real money, though. I haven't heard any examples of someone making a huge amount of money by trading predictions, but if such a person emerges, the real-money markets would see a very nice spike in interest.

I wonder if these things are more or less susceptible than stock exchanges to people who profit by manipulating outcomes. If the number of people in a position to perform a manipulation is fairly small (and therefore relatively traceable), that danger is avoidable. The pool of potential manipulators gets pretty big, though, with certain types of predictions, like when a person will die. (In other words, someone could kill the target and make a lot of money. Let's call it the democratization of insider trading.)
I'm not entirely sure they look at referenced URLs. They were seemingly entirely taken by surprise that we were launched and had paying customers when we arrived in Boston for the interview and had a demo to show. (But, maybe they'd just forgotten, based on the fact that they'd seen 300-400 applications, and probably at least half as many websites.)

Which brings up the advice I've given to folks that I've talked to about getting to the interview: Demo early. We only had a couple of minutes to demo, after running through everyone's questions...and it was almost certainly only on the strength of the demo that we got the yes.
There is probably a better chance if we can become cyborgs fast enough.

Another possibility is that everyone, or better everything that has ever been, can be ressurected providing Heisenberg was not completely right. It seems reasonable that sometime along our civilization we will find a way to trace back and reconstruct every part of history.

Most importantly, when we do eventually meet an alien, always remember to count in radians.
One paradox is that a failure at the right point in time may give one the motivation they need to succeed.

For example, a person applies to YC. They get rejected and use that as incredible motivation to succeed in spite of that. If they had been selected, would they still have had that motivation?
The appendix does have a use
great link bait
I'm not a big fan of LOGO either. Drawing lines gets boring quickly.

I'm reminded of picking a university. I went to two introductory CS courses.

One had us drawing Mickey Mouse in Pascal on a old Mac, which gave me a deep hatred of Apple that lasted until I discovered OSX.

The other was an introduction to MINIX. And the end, we all received a disk with MINIX on it. I didn't even know at the time that there were alternatives to MS-DOS, and was deeply impressed.

Moral: Don't be condescending to kids - it's better to overestimate them. And LOGO is a condescending language.
Using the Six Laws of Persuasion
Here are the six laws of persuasion and how they can be used to enhance your business.
"Vested interest" can include all sorts of things: money, reputation, glory, play money, prestige, etc.

And there are all sorts of markets that use real money to trade predictions. They're called futures markets.
Why women & men might interact differently with the same software
> with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in.

This is nice and all, but how hard is running "gem install" ?
This article points out common sense. Of course the "home" button is useful. It has become web convention that the logo in the upper left corner is the "home" button. I'm also not sure why the author is trying to tie in the use of the home button to advertising, because to me those are completely separate interface elements that should not be considered together.

It seems like there have been a lot of design-related articles on Hacker News lately from sites that are either poorly designed or that completely ignore their own advice.

PS: rainsill only submits articles from this fishtrain site. Is that grounds for banning?
So after getting downmodded, and no one actually correcting me, I decided do a quick Google search and see what came up. Oh, looks like I was right. In an interview, Twitter developer Alex Payne blames the Rails framework for scaling issues.

Interview:
How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner
than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it's not just
cost, it's time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t]
reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's
mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It's great that people
are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
now, it's tough. If you're looking to deploy a big web application
and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twi...

And just to be clear, I wasn't knocking Rails. I have absolutely nothing against it, I haven't even used it yet. I was just trying to point something out. The developer's words, not mine.

The fervor among some of you is disturbing.
> Ruby is just PHP 2.0, or at least it seems that the same crowd that sweared by PHP few years ago, are attracted to it and "have seen the light".

Ruby is PHP 2.0? Have you spent any time with Ruby, or have you only looked at Rails, one of several Ruby Web frameworks?

I suspect few ex-PHPers are doing straight-up Ruby coding.
Notice the part where I said Kawa isn't really a solution? It was meant as an example of something like what I'm talking about, but not quite.
Why do people (sci-fi writers and scientists alike) generally seem to assume that extra-terrestrial life would be Earth-like life in Earth-like conditions?
Should HotorNot Become Just a Facebook App?
Ever since HotorNot abandoned it's experiment with going totally free last month, the traffic to its destination site, HotorNot.com, has predictably leveled off. Meanwhile, its application on Facebook is doing pretty well, already accounting for about a third of its daily logins, and 40 percent of it total unique visitors (although the two remain separate services at this point).
Wow. Well, TextDrive sure had a short reign.

Thanks for the pointer.

But the idea of an "official" Rails host still deserves a WTF.
Or downloading Locomotive....
Whoa, I checked out their website and it looks to be a pretty sweet school. I was homeschooled for a significant portion of my life, and I really liked the open endedness of it all. That's when I was truly motivated to learn for its own sake. I read voraciously and taught myself to program so as to make games. Then I started going to public school where they happened to not like new Americans much:P Anyways, here's hoping that model of education catches on much more widely.
I went to a Summer School in Collective Intelligence this year, and chose Netlogo to implement a project. It was definitely fun: quite messy., but you really could get an experiment up and running very quickly. In fact most teams chose Netlogo for their experiments.

So Logo is alive ;-)
I'm sure this has been on here before but this is a good follow up to that article and it's also from the chaps at Twitter:

----
For us, it's really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby haven't been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. The performance boosts associated with a "faster" language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January.
-----

http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10...
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon release on the 18th, that is the date I look forward to: http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/04/ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibb...
Before you hear back, you could do what we did - assume you got rejected.

What would you do today if you knew you were rejected already?

Hint: for bonus points, assume that YC is out to get you, and gives your brilliant idea[s] to some other shmucks.

Strap down and build. Don't get bogged down in details.
But can that get working visas? I don't think a UFO-1 visa category exists yet.
Free 18-Week Ajax Online Course
Unenterprising Ireland
"I would like to caveat this section myself and ask the readers a question of even Paul himself should he notice this article, does the more aggressive investor demand a larger percentage of the business for the same amount of investment dollars offered by a less aggressive investor?"

In Silicon Valley, you'll get more offers from investors for funding since the investors are more aggressive, and as a result, you're more likely to get a fair market price for equity in your company. More importantly, the quality of the investors in Silicon Valley is likely higher since they have more experience with them and have more connections that could help your company in the future.

I don't think there's any way to compare investors in Silicon Valley with those in other areas without the Silicon Valley investors coming out on top.
There's a fairly easy example of how this can go bad here on earth. Cats and dogs don't innately hate each other, but everyone knows how they get on.

The problem is that cats and dogs have opposing body language; when a dog acts excited and happy, the cat interprets that language as aggression. For example, a cat with its ears down and tail wagging is a cat that's about to fight. A dog doing the same thing is being submissive.

Of course, this all assumes that any intelligent extra-terrestrial life even has any sort of body language or capability to communicate that we can even recognize.
YC App - no news so far - is it good?
So far we haven't heard anything. does it mean still there is a hope or does YC will inform yes or no on 18th only?

I am counting days so had to ask :)
And it would be one less source of information that Google has on you.
Hi Dcurtis,

Sorry if the article I wrote seemed like common sense. I was trying to point out why the home button has become web convention. And point out placement of content in relation to that.

FishTrain is my site. Why should I be banned for submitting articles from my site? Are there rules against this on YCombinator?
We tell everyone on the same day (whatever day we said).
Paul McKellar of Social Moth at Community Next
Submitting your own stuff is fine. We only ban people who do something crooked, like submitting the same thing over and over, submitting spam blogs or habitual linkjack sites, or upvoting submissions using sockpuppet accounts.
Way to go! Really good news.
hopefully religious folks would loosen up a bit
I think it is, but this post doesn't touch on it deeply enough. For instance, I like OO's 'object.operation' syntax; mentally it's usually closest to how your brain seems to want to 'unload' itself of the tension of what you're wanting to say / do. It's the 'topic, comment' structure - considered lazy and weak (I believe) in human languages, but easy. Also, not syntax, but I like Ruby's habit of returning 'self', allows for things like 'foos.fold().spindle().mutilate()' - it rolls off the fingers.
I see this from various different authors, they write something on there blog then login here and submit it. I don't believe HN is meant to be the place to write the article it is more geared towards linking to other sites, Linking to your own where you could go in depth, provide images and downloads makes more sense.
Clearly God is testing our faith with such tantalizing discoveries.

What will those Satan-worshipping scientists think up next?
No, I think they just broke the URL. The main page seems to be full of bile and trolling as usual.
where did we come from? The explanation I can piece together through memory is that we most likely come from organic matter that (though processes that are not yet well understood) formed the basis for cellular life. Random mutation and natural selection over hundreds of millions of years led to the speciation that includes homo sapiens.

I'm not sure that finding life on another planet would change the science much. Maybe there would be some connection, maybe not - they could be parallel processes, or maybe some kind of seeding function took place.

Either way, it would still be immensely satisfying discovery, one of the greatest ever.
Contrasts in presentation style: Yoda vs. Darth Vader
Heh... I wonder how many people don't even know that Contact was originally a book by Carl Sagan. Although the movie was more true to the book than most, the book was much better than the movie, as is usually the case.
Hey, the technology doesn't exist yet. The atmosphere, rocky, etc.. are all speculations based on theoretical modeling. If you're curious, go to http://www.oklo.org/ and download Systemic. This allows you to fit models to data, to see how the planet-hunting game is played.

The planet was found by repeatedly observing the same star over and over, and measuring how fast the star is moving away or towards us. This wiggle is produced by the motion of planets. It's really small. Currently the best team (full disclosure: one of my advisors is on it) can measure velocities of 30 centimeter per second. Pause and reflect. It's an amazingly difficult and important detection.
Agreed. I want something like Mint that runs locally on my computer. Something that I could sniff with wireshark if I got suspicious.
It's unhacked now. Here's a screengrab of the site as hacked:

http://www.scrutinyhooligans.us/?p=4201
You know, it's funny, I work with one of the competing teams (the best one.) Every time I hear about planet-hunting in the news, I think to my self, "screw startups." :)
Microsoft packs commitees, effectively owns ISO
This conference was organized to promote Second Earth as a new startup hub, so it's very rude of you to come here and say that.
The last 2 pages is the best part, and there's no way it could get into a movie.
Speaker for the dead is the second ender book. No?
That's what I thought.

Although the discovery is amazing, there's a bit of over-selling in the article. It's a detection based on a wiggle that means the model says there's a world where the model says it would be mostly rocky where the model says....

I guess I can stop painting those "Welcome E.T." signs now.
The answers can be inferred on Earth. Most photosynthetic organisms on Earth are not deciduous trees and don't have seasonal cycles. All of them do maintain circadian cycles to cope with the much faster and more dramatic day/night cycle.

Or most? I know the cyanobacteria do and I'm pretty sure the purple bacteria do. The bacteriorhodopsin-users might not. If you call that photosynthesis.
I think I overreacted, and I apologize. The home button is web convention, and the purpose of your article was to me somewhat confusing.

I was under the impression that it is in bad taste to submit your own articles to social sites like news.yc, reddit, and Digg. It appears that you submit every single article you write. (And some, honestly, are good-- far better than this one.)
Rails was included with Tiger, but you had to do some funky things to update it and use it properly. This is just their way of saying you no longer have to do that.
They are not my numbers so I don't want to defend them, but I think that what we are seeing is some of the differences in "localness" in angel markets. Knox's group mostly invests in enterprise software plays which are a bit more capital intensive then web apps.

Of course you are a "friend" of startups.:)
Phone credit low? Africans go for "beeping"
The Future of Software Development
This reminds me of applying to college...