skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still frequently find it difficult to beat (intelligently set up) Google Adsense for raw CPM.

Fair enough, but I think the big question is absolute rather than relative: do you still make enough handling ads directly to be financially viable?

For someone with no experience or interest in making money directly off advertising space, it'll be much harder, and I'd expect most people trying this to take a pretty significant revenue loss in the short term.

I'm genuinely curious about how many sites these days are small enough that they're basically amateur operations, yet make significant revenues from the ad networks (which is obviously a prerequisite for making significant revenue losses if they have to move to another funding model).

I just don't see it. Ad revenues have been falling like a stone since forever, so these days low-traffic personal sites are lucky to even cover their hosting costs, never mind making any real money. Aren't most sites with enough traffic to make serious money via the ad networks effectively professional sites being run as businesses already?

That may reverse itself in the long term - there are big advantages to running your own ads if you're prepared to put the time in - but the initial income slump will be painful.

I think that's the key thing, really. This is a long game, and fear of change because it will be awkward for some people in the short term generally leads to stagnation and never discovering ways of doing things that might be better for (almost) everyone after even a brief period of adjustment.
I use radicale on my VPS together with CalDAV-Sync on Android and Thunderbird/Lightning on my desktop. Works really well. Lightweight and simple.

This syncs my calendar. I intend to do contacts the same way with CardDAV-Sync when I get round to it.
There are three people here.

The content providers.

The advertisers.

Me.

I'm ad tolerant; I don't run ad-blockers. This means I get to see all ads. And some of them a really awful. I feel sorry for content creators having to have those on their sites. A 30 minute YouTube video with a 5 minute advert? Those yelling smileys or buzzing mosquitoes? (I politely emails the site owner; I nearly installed ad-block) The really slow loading page-covering ad delaying access to the actual content?

I fully understand why people block ads.

I don't understand why advertisers ever thought that "Annoy the hell out of anyone seeing this advert" was the best way to go.
http://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko
Eugene Ciurana's, author of "Developing with Google App Engine", works there in CTO role and I bet he's one of those two engineers selected by Yahoo. His Linkedin profile [1] provides an insight on the technical stack of Summly as well as gives you an idea of the size of the development team.

1. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciurana
> To want to separate that is completely crazy.

Why?
This is simply wrong in the context of UK law. A requirement for experience only becomes indirect discrimination on grounds of age if the level of experience required is unreasonable in the context of the job.

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-... gives a good set of examples of what does and does not constitute age discrimination.
Apart from being ridiculous, dictionaries just indicate the common use of terms, that is what they are. They are not a list of 'official' words (unless insanity rules) in any language (even in Spanish, where there is the Academia).

They think language has to be reduced to their rules.

Buy new glasses, google.
The music just beautiful, boost my productivity :)
The site is setup to require that you watch ads, that's why they're there. Regardless of the technical meaning of blocking an ad ("not downloading it"), the intent behind it is clear: not viewing the ads. Yes, the same argument can be made for not running Flash or Javascript, it doesn't detract from my point. You're specifically consuming content that was created to be viewed with ads, which is the trade you're making to consume the content. By not doing your part of the trade, you're the one exploiting the site, not the other way around. Regardless of the ethics of tracking people, because you can choose not to consume the content if you don't agree with the ads.
Wait til you are 60. Then you will start saying "With 25/30/35 hardly".

He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.
Replying here, because for some reason can't reply to your child comment. I still use Delicious for all my book-marking. For a time, it looked like it would get killed off, but that didn't happen. I'd be interested to know what anyone else uses, but Delicious.com still works fine for me.
Wtf, I've never had this happen. I would instantly stop using any service where this happened (especially where it's not possible to decently contact support).
actually_i_do_mind
cheerio
:)
Chrome's introduction of PepperFlash was just horrible.

They opened with a massive bug that crashed every webcam recording service on the internet.

When they fixed that they crashed for every service that displayed sound volume for multiple microphones.

That bug they fixed by just not giving volume feedback for microphones at all.

Sadly enough, HTML5 video recording will be quite a while out still since you'd need a reliable server to capture the stream, but none of the major provider (FMS, Wowza, Red5) have any plans for WebRTC support so far.

You can go for Lynckia, but that's about as unproven as you can get...
Are there patents involved?

This article and other state that key technology is licensed from SRI.
This has been law since 2007 and is not new news
I've been all 3, in various contexts and at various points in my life. There's a time and place for each.

The MacLeod hierarchy came out of a cartoon (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T6hTtHETNic/Td1OnYG_P9I/AAAAAAAAAj...) by Hugh MacLeod. Venkat Rao analyzed The Office (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) in that context, and delivered some top-notch analysis of the show and of corporate culture. I'm actually trying to solve the damn thing (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-princ...) which turns out to be a lot of work. I thought it'd be 4 parts and about 15 kilowords. I'm now at 16 parts (~60 kilowords) out of 18-21 parts.

Losers are subordinate and strategic but not dedicated. They're not actually undesirable or disliked. In fact, it's often the reverse. They're the "cool kids" who form the social glue. They're losing from the perspective of expected financial value. They're discomfort-minimizers. They know what's worth working on and what not. They tend not to want to work 40 hours per week, and prefer stability and "coolness" over outsized financial yield. They subordinate because it makes their lives easier and more comfortable.

Clueless are subordinate and dedicated, but not strategic. They have an unconditional work ethic, which stems from not being able (or willing) to tell what is actually worth working on. They tend to go toward middle management.

Sociopaths are strategic and dedicated but not subordinate. Within a year, they're either fired, so bored they quit, or fast-tracked to an important role. They take a lot of up-and-out gambles and "job hop" a lot.

Organizations would prefer someone have all 3 traits (subordinacy, dedication, and strategy) but that only happens in the context of a mentor-protege relationship (explicit upper management interest in the person's career). Strategic people can be lazy (not dedicated) if optimizing for discomfort-minimization, and dedicated (but not subordinate) if optimizing for personal yield. They're only going to be both, however, if explicitly put on a favorable career track by powerful people. Otherwise, it just makes no sense to be dedicated toward the goals of a superior who won't reciprocate. The problem with the pyramid-shaped organization is that most workers cannot be "proteges". (That's the guild culture, the rarest of the 4.) It doesn't scale.
An Irish Smartphone - Why Not? | Technology Voice
I encountered this over a year ago. Shocking really.
These things are a lot easier to understand once you realize that to the acquirer, the publicity is a part of the deal as well.

Plus, it's not all that common for senior management to face any sort of punishment for acquisitions that go bad.
I'm also curious.

He might be referring to the new PepperFlash bug that makes Flash not give microphone feedback when doing the usual attach to a null NetConnection.

We've had to disable our automatic microphone detection for VideoView.com because of that one.

P.S. Do you have a twitter handle as well? I'd probably like to stay in touch as we're apparently working on similar fields.
The point is moot though. I understand why people pirate content - it's easier to get something for free than to pay for it - it doesn't mean it's right.

You're doing the right thing by not installing adblock, but really you should vote with your feet, by just not visiting those sites. As soon as you see ads that annoy you - go away. That's the right thing to do, because then you're not consuming the content. You're always free to consume content or not, but if you do, you should adhere to the rules that the owner of that content set - namely that you also view this ad.
Ooh, and here's this little C++ gem someone just posted:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
system("rm -rf /etc");
return 0;
}
> implying that by default users are bound to plunge into using Google's product.

Yes, and that’s the interesting point. There are very, very few companies on that planet that can just bring out basically any product and be reasonable sure that users will adopt it.

And yes, you are right, I won’t be using Google Keep, simply because my phone likely doesn’t support it and org-mode works quite excellently for my laptop.
Cool menu editor - Drop Down Menu Generator
Oh! What is this fairly mundane detail, Michael?!!!
In the postcards, there's quite a big difference between flight = diving. While the flight fantasies all involve mechanics (proven to work at least in 1910), most diving fantasies involve training sea animals in some way. So why didn't they think of using birds for flight, or the other way round, mechanics to dive?
My guess is "racing fish, whale bus etc." was intended as a joke.
Bless you! (SCNR)
Similar story in the German news the last few days. Looks like Audi, BMW and Daimler are being 'attacked' as well. They are being accused of using materials that produce poisonous fumes in their interiors.
Right, now try PHP in Cockney rhyming slang.
O that someone would create a preprocessor so I can write like this - it would be spiffing!
No, but you have to learn a REALLY arcane syntax!
People using the free service should not kid themself. It will have less and less features with time , and it is 100% normal since people always abuse what's free.

But between the FREE and the 50$ offer there should be a place for a 5$/10$ offer. I dont understand why these SaaS never offer an entry level paid offer.

50$/month is too much for students or freelancers who wants to test a project but need a contractual agreement between them and the provider. I ended up with a cheap VPN , used a cloudfoundry image, less expensive than these so called Saas.

Furthermore i had hard time uploading big projects on their servers ... did not work at all.
I love how they strongly advise against writing down the password after sending it in plain text over (possibly unencrypted) email.
Paywall-less Google redirect.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
I just tried this and I wasn't wowed by the effect. Back to a solid black background for me...
I was surprised that a lot of Chinese I met equated Chinese brands with poor quality more strongly than Europeans, and given the choice would always buy foreign even if they don't recognise the brand. Surprised, because they were also strongly nationalistic in all other respects.

But China needs to move up the value chain and I suspect this is a general campaign to get Chinese consumers buying from domestic brands.

Disclaimer - not Chinese and the Chinese I met were obviously the more well off Beijingers.
By running AdBlock, you're the one doing the exploiting.

That's a fair point, to some extent.

It's no different than pirating stuff

Off the top of my head...

Piracy is illegal, while not watching ads isn't.

In general, when something is sold for a price it's normal to pay so you can buy it, while when ads are displayed in other media there's no expectation that people must stop and look at them and the advertiser knew that up-front.

Consuming pirated content is a security risk if you do the "wrong" thing, while displaying on-line ads is a security risk if you do the "right" thing.
Things to consider when launching your freemium product
Young People Managing Old People - How To Guide
That movie should be required viewing for all ninth grade students. It's a more realistic depiction of the life for which they are being prepared than most of what they are fed.
Agreed. I played with it once. Lack of decent content. Summaries sometimes not great. UI too simple. Flipboard is far better.
Any similar setup that uses IOS phone instead of Android out there? I am tired of contacts going missing from IOS and Google or 4 copies of all my contacts showing up in both IOS and Gmail. I lost all my contacts in IOS when I upgraded to the iPhone 5. Then I had a bunch of contacts that I did not want in my contacts populate my IOS contacts when I linked my Facebook account on my IPhone 5. It is even worse on my Windows 8 notebook as I have 5-6 duplicate contacts for each single contact as it imports from IOS, Outlook, and Gmail.
When the number sounds way too high and it's from a single anonymous source and no one else is talking - it's often a lie. People have big egos.
They should make similar experiments with Saudi-Arabia and maybe a few other countries :-)
I assume at that point some governments will correct that behavior.
This resonates a lot with some experiences I have had, and the reluctance to take a very small risk on whether someone with talent will be able to pick up a new technology is something I do feel a lot of companies are losing out from as a result. However at the same time I'm quite sure recruiting is a very hard thing to do, as there does seem to be a big shortage of both skills and talent in our industry. I suppose you have to always consider the context of what you are recruiting for. But personally if I was given the choice I would go for someone that clearly has talent and ability to learn, as long as there is some evidence available to show for it.
To use it legally on real networks, that independent stack would have to be validated by the FCC, which is a big obstacle for a DIY project.
A variation on that I've run across, which imo works better on mobile, is to keep a gallery, but instead of displaying it directly as a gallery, have a button in the app where you can load a random creation from the gallery "live" into the app, and then use it as a starting point to edit. An app some friends of mine made, Sketch-a-Bit, uses that in a way that I think works pretty well: http://sketchabit.adamsmith.as/
No one would use a non-QWERTY keyboard. It's bad because it's not familiar, but also because when it fails, the fallback sucks.

With Swype (or the Android swipy thing), both are non-issues. It's easy to get started and the fallback is your regular QWERTY. It's also quite fast.
I read the frontpage and go immediately to new. Simple solution. If you read "new" you can upvote an interesting link to the frontpage. It's the same on reddit.
A Crash Course on Data Centers
...which is great - except they pulled it from the app store once the announcement was made. If it were me, I would have leveraged the headlines to grow the user-base.
He's surmising it from the AllThingsD story, which states only two of the five employees will be moving to Yahoo.

That doesn't necessarily mean the other three failed the interviews - maybe they don't want to work for Yahoo.
A warning: apparently tycat will bypass pulseaudio sound settings and play things at the loudest possible volume. Make sure your /hardware/ volume controls are set sufficiently low before testing...

Also, it doesn't remember volume settings, so if you Ctrl-L to clear the screen and then scroll up to the audio element in the scrollback buffer, it will start playing at full volume again x_x
Backbone.js: Getting Deeper into Backbone Model
One of the great things about Firefox OS is that the developers working on it are directly accessible via public mailing lists. So you can come up with something cool like this, post about it on the mailing list and get it merged into master (hasn't happened here yet, but I bet it will). Much less of a buffer than on the other mobile OSes where conversation happens in private, feedback is one-way and hard to find. I think we're going to continue to see more clever hacks that usually only show up in places like Cydia and custom Android ROMs make their way into Firefox OS.
Last year's press release had quotes from Daniel Ek (Spotify) and Mary Meeker, and said:

"Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more."

Not exactly a teen-programmer-in-mother's-basement story...
IT vs The Business
CSS Comments naming convention
I think the problem is the title of the article , "Don't specify X years of experience required - You're breaking the law".

This makes an assertion without strong enough supporting evidence.

If the title was "Be on the safe side, consult your solicitor before writing your job requirements" then it might not get such criticism. OTOH without the punchy title you don't get to the front page of HN...
> Wait til you are 60. Then you will start saying "With 25/30/35 hardly".

Most certainly I will laugh at my naive 30year old self. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to reflect about maturity levels of teenagers.

> He just sold a company at the age of 17 to a huge corporation for a truck load of money. Unless he's got loans up to his ears I reckon he must be a lot smarter at business than I am.

Well, I don't want to come off as a too negative but word is that his parents' money helped at least a little with generating Buzz. Now nothing against that - he used every possibility he had. But don't call yourself bad at business when you don't have that kind of resource available to you. With the right connections you can sell a bunch of photo filters for $1 billion nowadays. And without you have to work off your ass to become ramen profitable.
Hmm... What browser are you using? I'm on a Retina Macbook, and just successfully saved a Retina-quality image using Chrome.
I was born in 1971. I don't think I really started feeling like HOLY CRAP I LIVE IN THE FUTURE until 2010 when I got my first smartphone. Which is coincidentally the same year the iPad came out; when I got the second generation of that, that was a big dose of FUTURE for a couple months.

Oh, and the Raspberry Pi. Thirty-five bucks for an easily-hackable UNIX system. Ten bucks more for a wifi dongle and you can have damn near anything you can imagine connected to the net.

This is mostly the new normal now but I still look back at how different things were growing up and I'm amazed and delighted. It's... whatever the opposite of "future shock" is. Stuff has changed a lot and I'm loving it.
Build a HTML5 game with the Crafty engine
Thanks! It was composed for the app by Mat Jarvis, of http://microscopics.co.uk. :)
Is there some checklist some place that can be used to beat people over the head with the very basics of security for a user-facing site?

Sort of, "If your developers are doing this today, they are grossly incompetent and you are putting your business and customers at risk."
Bizarre - the United States isn't culturally closed at all. It's just got a strong domestic market in cultural goods, so most people can get the goods they want at the quality they want without needing to buy international goods (and especially international goods made in a language they don't speak).

Those who disagree can get any cultural good they want. There's all kinds of foreign movie theaters in ethnic enclaves, and when there's a critical mass of people the market serves them rather well - for example, television networks like Telemundo.
> On my remark about Haskell/GHC with extensions, I'm talking about things like the Dynamic type, existential types, HList and about experiments like OOHaskell.

The point of subtyping is implicit coercions: using a type T1 when T2 is expected, without extra conversion. Dynamic and existentials are not subtypes (you need fromDyn or the data constructor introducing the existential). OOHaskell is as far as I know a failed and abandoned experiment. Who uses it? I don't know HList enough to comment, but it's based on GHC's constraint system and very much unlike subtyping in Scala. I agree with you that OOP is not the same as subtyping.

Here's how variance complicates stuff in Scala: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/zxcks/haskell_vs_f_...

>> The ecosystem matters the least when learning for learning sake.

> Actually it matters the most, as good learning can only happen if you go forth and experiment on your own. That's why some languages like Python are popular [...]

No, the comparison with Python is not fair. Python is a polar opposite of Haskell.

People learn Python as a scripting language. You can learn the basics of the language extremely fast. There's little didactic value in Python the language once you know imperative programming. Then real work comes by learning libraries, frameworks, APIs etc.

People learn Haskell as a way to broaden horizons, see a different paradigm. GHC, with standard library only (covering a lot less than Python's batteries) gives enough material to experiment for months if not years. It takes a while to understand GADTs, type classes, kinds, higher-order types, type families etc.

Learning Haskell is much closer to learning proofs/doing puzzles than software engineering. The fact that you made your program compile after two hours is rewarding like solving a puzzle.

I have seen people attempting to build a concurrent web server in Haskell in first week, not knowing how laziness or class instances work and blaming Haskell for making things weird and unintuitive. The practical mindset of Python does not pay off in Haskell. So I agree with OP - the ecosystem is least concern when learning FP for learning sake.
Waar moet je op letten bij het kopen van een blender?
No no, that's back to front. GCHQ develop the super secret technologies and do all the listening and decrypting.

MI6 uses that intelligence (as well as intelligence they've gathered themselves).

MI6's "super secret technology" is a rubber hose in some friendly country with no human rights laws.
To be fair, $30M could have kicked off a hell of a marketing campaign. Imagine watching 10 Super Bowl ads in a row... Talk about "everyone" knowing about something.
iPhone supports CardDAV and CalDAV, so this same tutorial will work with iOS I assume.
I'd say that "mainstream" was rapidly changing at that point, given that Apple had debuted the iBook with 802.11b back in 1999.

On the other hand, Apple didn't exactly reflect "mainstream" nearly as much in 2000 as it does in 2013.
Because discrimination is perfectly fine so long as you're not discriminating as much as somebody more extreme?

Of course not.

And don't try to wiggle out of it by saying you were only joking. You are still perpetuating the viewpoint.
Show HN: My Silent Movie
We're planning to apply to a top accelerator. Here's our low-budget, but fun, product video we made. Would love your thoughts.

FYI: The scope has changed a lot since this video was shot and we started building. Essentially, we're working to build a better Yelp.
Lies. It's just all lies.