skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Issues with the article's arguments:

1. Costs
>> Since the majority of Google’s costs for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a linear basis.

Costs of bandwidth and storage will continue to decrease, perhaps geometrically, in the foreseeable future, and so is Youtube operating cost.

2. Monetization
There must be other ways to monetize the eyeballs that have not been fleshed out in full yet. It's still very early days. The author assumes that YouTube has mostly run out of ways to monetize through ads (although he did point out a subscription model, esp. for marketers.)
Check these 31 sample examples. http://www.appsamuck.com/day1.html
The mathematics of most sites, especially the super large ones like Youtube and Facebook, simply do not add up. They are putting all their chips down on some profitable future that I just don't see materializing. Giving aways tons of content, functionality and bandwith is simply not a sustainable operation. In my opinion, the future of the internet will contain a lot of toll booths or perhaps we will find a better way. These large monolithic web services just does not seem the way to go.
It's very handy when you're working with delimiter-separated data. I've never bothered to learn the more powerful features of awk, because Python is generally better for sufficiently complicated text processing, but for little one-off scripts, awk is a nice thing to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

This is the only way we have right now of traveling at speeds anywhere close to c.
http://phonegap.pbwiki.com/

Go down to tips and tricks
Yeah, the Emacs and Linux fees these days are outrageous.
YouTube never made sense. It was geared to be bought out from the start.

I like watching videos on youtube as much as the next person, but according to the numbers ... youtube is in the red (never mind that Google will keep pumping money into it for the time being).

Serving up content costs money. Period. And youtube serves up a lot of content. The only reason Google bought youtube and continues to run it at a loss is because they hope to monetize it somewhere in the future.

This kind of strategy isn't new (cough XBox cough) and it may or may not pay off somewhere along the line.

Google's acquisition of youtube was a gamble and an attempt to move into yet another market. Will this pay off? Who knows, but one interesting aspect is that Google isn't identifying itself branding-wise with youtube. If they flush youtube down the toilet tomorrow it will have an almost minor impact on the Google brand.
i'm not really human. :-)

signed,
the collective.
Why in heck was this voted down?

Marginal Rev is a fascinating blog, and it this comment is by the guy who posted an article that rose to the front page, explaining "not only is this article fascinating, but there's a lot of other fascinating stuff at location X on the internet".
If endurance running has significantly affected human evolution, why are there not more pronounced differences between men and women? Anthropological evidence is unequivocal, I thought, about the fact that men hunted far and women gathered nearby. So you would expect men to have evolved much higher endurance running traits that women, if their primary hunting technique was running animals down. Yet many of the modern ultra-distance runners are women, and last I checked my toes were shorter than most men's :-)

Yet bipedalism has effectively made human reproduction a nightmare (due to the orientation of the pelvis with respect to the birth canal). So if there is an evolutionary reason for bipedalism I would expect it to apply at least equally if not more to women. Naively, anyway.
Stories like these are often a pretext for pushing laws that flood the U.S. market with cheap foreign labor. If you're hurting for a niche expertise and can't "find" someone here, fine, open an office in wherever you think the grass is greener talent-wise. Google can afford that, right?

I think I have a better use for my startup capital than an immigration lawyer; plenty of good people here, I mean, after all, they only built the greatest economy in the world.

If any American wants to down-vote me for this, just go ahead and try to get a _job_ overseas. Your ass will be chewed by local taxes, foreigner taxes and nationalist laws. And I say this as a _recent_ U.S. national; I came here with just a carry-on bag and $50 when I was 16.
I think it's important to note that the "major strategic decisions" he is involved in while he is out: "particularly...the user interface of the new iPhone"

UI design as a major strategic decision is pretty underestimated.
> Their product uses flexlm, and it sucks just like most consumer DRM, only worse, because it's buggy. I imagine that MF sees it as another form of copy-protection.

I meant that they see the bugs as a form of inadvertent copy-protection because their resolution requires a support call.
Wait a second here! This guy is saying Google can't monetize a video site made up almost entirely of illegal content with an enormous user-base consisting mostly of people with an intelligence level and attitude roughly equal to a toddler on meth?! That's just crazy talk! YouTube will make tons of money, just you wait! Just like Facebook! I mean, there must be some way to monetize millions of users no matter what!
Paper Tigers
Framework Inertia, CouchDB and the case of the missing R
One could easily have said the same thing of Google's search business itself, which gives away tons of functionality and bandwidth.

The real question is whether online advertising will ever bring CPMs in line with TV or print advertising. Personally, when I hear about YouTube not being able to place ads on most of their user-generated videos, it makes me immediately stop and think: is this perhaps just a huge market hole, and a big opportunity for anyone willing to pay for ads on those videos? Are the eyeballs on user-generated videos really worth less than those on professionally produced ones, or is it just that most of the big advertising spenders are nervous about associating themselves with lower quality or potentially offensive content?

Further, are online eyeballs really worth that much less than TV eyeballs?

I still think it's possible that reduced online CPMs may come up naturally over time as more of the entertainment market shifts online. If this is the case there's not much Google can do to help the situation, but it may be worth holding out a while longer to see if things normalize a little bit.

Then again, it's also definitely possible that either a) print/TV advertising rates are a lot higher than they "should" be, and the only reason TV has been able to sustain itself on ads is that advertisers were getting ripped off but couldn't figure out a way to prove it to themselves, or b) online eyeballs are inherently worth less, perhaps due to demographic issues. If either of those is true, free video on the Internet may be fundamentally unsustainable until bandwidth costs come down substantially.
That sounds like he stole it from Peter Weinberg:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
-- Steven Weinberg
I don't want to comment on the grammatical correctness, being a non-native English speaker, but on the subject of the passive in general I can safely say I sure wouldn't mind some code to screen it out of our bug reporting system. Quite often the primary response is "The reason this is happening is because of X. X should be modified to trap this" or some such. Invariably, I have to enquire "so who will fix X and when are they likely to do it"? The passive construction has been used to mean "I will fix X now", "I would fix X but I am not going to", "I am addressing this to Joe, and I naturally assume that he will understand that he is supposed to fix X along the lines I described".
Right. Awk is great for the sweet spot of 1-3 line filters, and the subset of the language needed for most of those could fit on half a page. You could do bigger stuff with it, but at that point it's probably better done in another language. There are surprisingly many cases where a few lines of awk is good enough, though.

Perl is logically a superset of awk, but there's so much more in the core language that I kept forgetting parts of it.
One must be totally stupid to get Skype back for $1Bb cause VoIP is very incredibly competitive area. Even if Skype's userbase and minutes grow, their revenuve will most likely decline.
> If it really is valuable, I don't think Google would have a
problem paying however much a license costs.

I'd agree but keep in mind that their data may not be available. Facebook has signed an advertising agreement with Microsoft and twitter has their own search engine that they bought.

If they thought having google crawl their data would cost them revenue then you can be sure they wouldn't let google access it for any amout of money.
This argument only makes sense if you believe Google's ability to generate money from YouTube will actually get worse as YouTube becomes more popular.

Why? Because bandwidth is getting cheaper. It won't be long before running YouTube costs half as much per visitor as it does today, so even if their cash potential per visitor stays the same, they will eventually break even.

On top of this, Google has some of the lowest bandwidth costs on Earth. They have massive peering and lots of their own wires; to suppose that they pay anything near what a startup video company would pay for bandwidth is ludicrous. But if you want to make YouTube look unsustainable, it helps to subtract a profitable network business from the bottom line.

Yes, YouTube might cost a lot for a few years, but if it retains its dominance for another three to five years, it will become ridiculously profitable.
I have the same usage pattern as you (and I would like to see a bar on HN as well), however there's a huge difference between Digg and Reddit in this regard: the Reddit bar is opt-in. If you haven't opted in, the URL will simply forward to the page, without ever showing the bar.

The Digg bar, in contrast, is on by default. You can shut it off, sure, but that's not how it is for new visitors, which may have gotten the link.

So yeah, it's the same difference as between a useful newsletter and a spammer: opt-in vs. "opt-out".
Anyone know whether the problems of that Stanford programming course are online? It'd be fun (maybe!) to test oneself against the benchmarks. Of course, I'm sure the correctness tests aren't available even if the project specs are.
I'm seeing a connection between passive/active and declarative/imperative.
Yeah that's another article claiming "According to a credit suisse report". I can't see the actual report anywhere...
That was exactly the point I was trying to make. "What about" arguments can be valid.
Men and women have a lot more similarities than the males and females of some species, and we'd hardly be the first species where a genetic trait hurt one gender but helped the other.
>> 0.1 $/GB (BW cost, based on AWS S3 prices, again a highball)

I'd say that's insanely high. I've heard for large amounts of traffic you can get 1TB for $8 - instead of $100.
Pullum's article is so thoroughly substantiated that your comment suggests you didn't read it.

It explains things that have bugged me for years. Where did I get these vague ideas about split infinitives, beginning sentences with "However", and "which" vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down versions of Strunk and White, who turn out to have been just plain wrong.

My sense of my own native language just got clearer.

Edit: it's possible that the harm was done more by over-rigid promulgation of S&W's rules than by S&W itself, but I still think that Pullum's phrase "unhappy state of grammatical angst" hits the nail on the head.
It's a bit more than that, because it is an attempt to accuse the other party of hypocrisy.
Reinventing the wheel: the fluent interface design pattern
Some are well-known, but I hadn't seen the Italian Power Generator company. I guess ambiguous interpretation is a kind of intellectual hack.
Column datastores ... like making the finest buggy whip in 1920
I love how this article ends saying that the stock is down since the summer when his health concerns were revealed.

Yeah, I'm sure that was the reason and not the fact that the market lost half its value over the same period.
I think you are factually wrong on a few points.

1) Though Obama is the legal president of the United States only, it is trivial to see that his actions influence people in other countries.

2) It's hard to define "world's financial capital", but, by most accounts, New York is still the front-runner. See http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=...

3) The concept of decoupled economies is false. The US is actually doing better than a lot of countries that proponents of the theory had expected to fare well. See http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/no-shelter-in-thi...
The author is a regular contributor the the Language Log (recommended).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
Do you mean a far greater return in terms of votes? ("far more people care deeply...") I care fairly deeply about UHC, but mostly that they put some sensible cost ceilings on it.
Apple's dev docs. See http://developer.apple.com/safari/ for the Safari dev center. It covers everything WebKit supports and how to interact with it.
These companies have a government-approved oligopoly on the public airwaves, and make big money with it. It is not unreasonable to say that first amendment rights extend to the public airwaves, even if access happens to be managed by a private corporation. And yes, that would by inference mean that the KKK or NRA could run ads, too. You can't have free speech for only the speech you like.
Stanford's classes are for native apps, not webapps.

However, iUI is an awesome framework for making iPhone-oriented webapps with.
"Yes, you’re right! It looks remarkably like the “with” control structure available in Delphi/Pascal and VisualBasic!"

Those who do not understand Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. :-)

Fairly good intro article though.
Forever is a ways away.

Of course, this line of argument is rather vacuous...
Much discussion already over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556750
Either can, technically. Redefining the "italics" tag to be rendered as, say, smallcaps, is, however, not especially sensible. What you mean to be doing is placing an emphasis, however you may want to style that.
don't try to write like the one who is a master in language that ignores the rules

Who says S&W is "the rules"? When Mark Twain begins a sentence with "However" or Oscar Wilde says "none of us are", those are hardly avant-garde artistic leaps.

British English is different from... sorry, different than American English.

Which points of Pullum's critique, exactly, do you claim fail to apply to American English?

p.s. Your comment is so verbose that it ruins the readability of this entire thread.
Very cool, shows allot of personality and a sense of humor.

Don't take anything less than a top-notch "internship", somewhere you can learn real-world project management, marketing, planning, etc. A small shop will just not use you to your full ability .. unless it's your own startup "small shop".
Since in English the correct grammer is whatever people use (there is no Academie Anglais) then if skunk&white is used by the majority of people then by definition it is correct.
Here's a quote from Strunk himself (from the original introduction):

"It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature."
Feedback on our new site (before it goes live)
Your second point is the most salient for me - I've worked in the US on a J-1 visa and will be returning soon on a TN... going home to see my folks is a concept that scares the bejeesus out of me.

Something most Americans don't fully appreciate is just how bad their border situation is - power-tripping customs officers who will turn a non-citizen around for no reason at all. Unreasonable searches, rudeness, and downright being an asshole.

I cannot recall a single instance of crossing the US border where the customs officer was courteous. When I crossed via Vancouver airport, there was an elderly gentleman who had trouble walking, and was shuffling slowly up to the counter when called. The officer in charge berated him as he walked to the counter, and insulted his inability to walk.

This is what we, non-Americans, deal with when we visit your country. FIX THIS.
Clearly these are niche apps, but we are 2 dude team out of S. Fl. - let us know your thoughts? Thanks!

(Note: AppStore links are not active)
I doubt any seasteading community will ever give a government something to worry about. These kind of intentional communities always look attractive on paper but are very limited in practical ways. If they are small enough that they remain philosophical uniform they can't harness growth; and if they grow, they quickly diverge ideologically.

I live in the middle of the ocean - on an island of 200,000 people, and I can tell you no amount of money or intellectual curiosity would make me take my kid to an even smaller, more insular community, with fewer opportunities, no matter how sympathetic I was to their governance model.
Agreed, but tomsaffell's point is that even with these insanely high assumptions, the cost is still a lot lower than the number from the article.
I agree with you in the short term. But I think that the long term absence of employable Americans may be caused, in part, by the programs that make it easy to hire foreign nationals instead of Americans in engineering and science.

There are a lot of really smart Americans working in law, finance, medicine, and so forth. Do you think these folks are too dumb to work in software? Or are they just rationally responding to a market glut, driven in part by the presence of the H1B program?

I think our policy has driven young Americans out of engineering. To just consider the few Americans who did get these degrees is shortsighted. You have to consider the eighth graders, high school students, and first year college students who have been deterred from entering the field. Because we controlled the wages of engineers with a visa program, but not finance or legal professionals, we deterred our own from going into these fields (creating a more severe shortage, necessitating more visas, creating an even worse shortage, until we had finally reached the point where Americans were no longer even remotely interested in this field).

Basically, America "foreignized" engineering to the point where we no longer have a home grown, self sustaining engineering profession. This has left us extremely vulnerable - even if we do offer the visas, there's no guarantee we can staff these jobs in the US anymore.

By the way, I do think that a robust home-grown engineering field would be enhanced by the presence of many foreign born practitioners. But I think we pushed it to the point where actively undermined the careers of young Americans in engineering, and the next wave of students voted with their feet.

Yes, allow in talented engineers. No, don't leave the level so high that Americans are deterred. A bit of a shortage that causes wage growth and stimulates interest would be a good thing.

Just remember: once bitten, twice shy.
Posting and management tools are important, in other words.
Search for:

wiki Joan of Arc

wiki Elijah Wood

wiki Somalia

wiki Molybdenum
For a standard/easy to implement UI, check out iUI: http://code.google.com/p/iui/
That's totally wrong. The point of this style of programming is allow a series of function calls to be written as a linear chain of expressions. It comes from Smalltalk via Eric Evans, who popularized it in the Java world (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html). This style is favored by people who agree that side effects should be avoided but who don't like to build functional expressions with many levels of nesting (à la Lisp). Evans compared these composite linear expressions to noun phrases in English and argued that they can be a more natural way to express domain concepts in code.

The "with" control structure only resembles this in the degenerate case where every expression in the chain evaluates to the exact same object. Not only that, the "with" keyword expects a series of statements (as opposed to expressions), and that is the exact opposite of what the chaining style is about. This is easily seen in the author's own example: each member of the sequence has to end in a semicolon (i.e. is a statement rather than an expression), so you don't have a single composite expression at all, only a slightly more compact procedural script.
Whether or not you feel what I said was interesting or relevant is completely up to you.

I will just mention that for the parent post, at least 20 people found it interesting or to the point (since it has a moderation of 21).

In any case, it is still more on topic point (emigration visas) than your discussion about my post.

EDIT: I find your posts a little bit harsh. Why not tone it down to at least leave a semblance of civility? (This is after all not Digg or Reddit).
Bad Credit Problem Solution
Thanks very much for the correction, unfortunately the submission title can't be edited (hopefully I'm not wrong again on this...)
I think the purpose of Dasher and the other input techniques mentioned is to be able to quickly enter text in constrained situations, whether its due to size restrictions of the device or due to limitations on the input vehicle (e.g. single finger, one handed, thumbs only, etc). I think in any of these situations, I would be more then happy to be able to enter input as fast as I could type on a standard keyboard.

Now if someone could invent a faster then keyboard text entry system that had a decent learning curve, I would be all in. I tried Dvorak and never was able to type faster then on Qwerty, plus it took way too long to adapt too
"[S]pecifically target candidates rather than to post a job ad. I would suggest targeting a company you think has great people[.]"

Like Rapleaf? Or was 'everyone but us' implied?
Sounded crackpot-ish to me. Anyone know wtf he was talking about?
The class is CPSC 323, but it won't let me access it on the Yale server:

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/

If you're really determined, you could email the teacher (see his homepage here: http://sce.cs.yale.edu/).

I think a better way to figure out your ability would be to do the problem described in this study and see how you measure up to the participants:

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpp_cacm1999....

You can see Peter Norvig's solution and commentary here:

http://norvig.com/java-lisp.html
As one dedicated Lisper to another, I think you're missing the point here. S-expressions are inherently nested, and the chaining style is about avoiding that (while still being side-effect free). I wrote about this a long time ago on HN... let me see if I can dig up the link.

Edit: here's one, though I remember writing something else with examples. Oh well. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304871
It is, through http://jobsyndicate.com
Mount Snow in Vermont wanted to use a bomb to create a back bowl for skiing in the 60s.

http://books.google.com/books?id=FOhrjSuy6rsC&pg=PA49...