skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Calling it inept internet advertising is missing the point. Adwords created a market for what is essentially a raw input very quickly. But all of the rest of the ecosystem had to be in place to drive bids up to their current level. I see this in action every day. We build or modify sites specifically to get the most out of adwords. Run the ad campaigns. Tinker with ads. Gather data. Tinker with the sites. Modify campaigns. etc. This drives up the value of a click via higher conversion rates. Because the environment is competitive, this drives up the price of the click. This is an economic cycle with powerful extremely powerful feedback effects.

The market matured over time and in some places faster then others. I think that in some places opportunities still exist, adwords bids remaining relatively low.

Remember that the adwords system is DIY platform, which got this system hyper-charged. The conventional sell-washing-powder-on-TV system took decades to bid up th price of air time. If you want to build a conventional sell-to-the-CEO channel, then the US, with its existing sales channels is going to grow faster. That doesn't mean South Africa will never get there.

- Credit System Issues

Adwords in not driven by online shopping. Bids for things like roofing, insurance or loans are higher then bids for phones, laptops or books. No credit or trust necessary, just a capacity to purchase services somehow.

Anyway, facebook & youtube do not have 'native' monetisation systems yet, so it's hard to say whether or not they will work some place.

- Penetration (of internet access) is beside the point. No access = no cost to internet services.
A Modern Mama
If MS strips out deprecated APIs, won't they have to include virtualised XP with all new versions of Windows, and not price discriminate on it? They don't want horror stories of Aunt Tilly not being able to run her favourite apps on her new PC and blaming Windows.
I'm sure it didn't hurt ;)
Suppose in a company of N employees, you allocated an absolute cap of 1/N of the total upstream bandwidth to each Ethernet port. You wouldn't do that, because it would be slow. So you have to recognize that what you're doing is over-committing bandwidth. You are relying on less than N users sharing. But, bandwidth is a freebie to employees. They gain and don't lose if they maximize usage. That means that they can and will pour effort into subverting any and all firewall controls. That's a race you can't win.

Looking at it economically, what's the answer? Obviously, you have to start charging for bandwidth. Treat it as part of the department's budget.
Online video cpms can't hold up
I got it off eBay for £38,20 GBP on 2006/06/04 :)
Which is rather a big deal when you benchmark a persistent kv-store versus a volatile one, don't you think? The persistent one is eventually i/o bound.

Furthermore whatever he is measuring, it is neither tokyo tyrant nor memcache. Memcached doesn't break a sweat doing upwards of 10k ops/sec on moderate hardware, especially when all you're doing is increments. He managed to get 2000/sec out of it.

So again, whatever he's measuring, it's not the "performance of key/value stores". Both the article-title and the linkbait HN title are wrong.
I can vouch for it too. I'm reading Hacker News on my work laptop at midnight on a Sunday night, while also SSHed into my workstation and working on a tool to make tomorrow's task go a bit quicker. This sort of blending is somewhat inevitable when you encourage people to work "just whenever" - if I couldn't use my work laptop for personal tasks, I'd just use my personal laptop (which is what I do when I'm doing non-employer-related code), which means I wouldn't be working on work tasks, which means less productivity for my employer.
Numbers Can’t Begin To Describe Twitter’s Impact
Thanks for posting that. It addresses one of the questions I had. Namely, why use a line chart if you have only two points?
The author fails to take into account that many(?) open source developers aren't dependent on or motivated by market forces. Regardless of its virtues in a business setting, GPL will still live on.
I think you'll be too busy running from the spiders.
On Twitter, Cyborgs, Mark Growden, and Tentacles
Please do some drawings (or just doodles, even.)
Drawing? http://www.cowboybooks.com.au/html/acidtrip1.html

I think one of the most important things you can do is meditation. By meditate, I mean completely stop your thoughts at will, clearing your head entirely and then maintaining that state comfortably and indefinitely. If you can't do that unassisted, practicing in an alternative mental state can help.

It will definitely go beyond altering your perceptions to altering the way in which you think. You will have new thought patterns that you have never had before, just like with cannabis.
Try to do some coding.
I've never taken drugs (apart from prescribed medication, pain relief, coffee, and similar). I've never smoked, and I've never had alcohol (except inadvertently in cooked food). Si I have no experience.

I have too much respect for my brain. I live my life on its ability to do stuff that's rare and unusual, and I don't want to mess with its abilites. I've occasionally been curious, but not enough to "mess with the machines" and Feynman put it.

I'm told that first trips can be benign, but equally they can be really bad. The risks are real, and experts are still divided over how much long term damage can be done even from one experience.

But you've clearly thought about it, and since you've decided then I'm sure you've already taken all this into account, and some stranger saying "Don't Do It!" won't make much difference.

But if you deliberately affect the mind's ability to think and perceive, why should you trust any "observations?"
Just an aside - I don't know if Steve works at google or not, but I am put off by the attribution to googlepages.com above.

It makes it seem that the content is google's, rather than Steve's.
Wow, why... and get off Hacker News
Sorry to veer off the topic, but I've never registered for the NYTimes and have always been able to read it online. Perhaps it's different for overseas users...?
Apple and Verizon consider iPhone deal
Twitter it.
I admire your scientific mind, but I have to wonder what made you decide to try this. I agree that experiments would be interesting, but what would be even more interesting are your results to outside observers. I would record yourself so you can go back and see everything (and hopefully put the pieces together). Make sure whatever you use has a good timestamp. I wouldn't recommend being alone, but that might not be possible. All I can say is be safe.

Do you have a blog? I would write up your findings and post them there (maybe the video too, if it's appropriate), then submit it as a link here.
>I'm told that first trips can be benign, but equally they can be really bad. The risks are real, and experts are still divided over how much long term damage can be done even from one experience.

One tab is a mild dose in the range of LSD dosages, it is likely to be 1/4th the strength of one unit of LSD from the hippie era. The risks are indeed real but are overstated. Flashbacks as discussed in DARE are effectively nonexistent and are a symptom of PTSD. It takes a monster of a trip to trigger PTSD. The greater, somewhat realistic risk is triggering latent mental illness.
Have someone who is sober to document the experience for contrast.
Business: "The practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce."

Charity: "Generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering."

I don't see how business precludes charity 'by definition'.

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."[1] They don't qualify that with 'only if it makes us money.'

[1]http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/
LSD is ingrained in the hacker/Bay Area counterculture. Steve Jobs referred to his LSD experiences as one of the most important things in his life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
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I don't want to spoil your experience, but here some well meant advice.

- Please make sure you have someone you trust with you, in case your trip goes bad. In general, you should be in a calm environment.

- The effects of LSD last up to 12 hours, and in rare cases can trigger psychosis. Maybe a reason to reconsider?
Generally speaking, psychoactive drugs will radically alter your state. Your state will scale according to your mood and well-being. If you trip with a group of people in a good mood and adventurous spirit you will have a great trip. On the other hand, if you are tripping with a group of individuals who are emotionally unstable or generally prejudice towards new experiences, don't do it.

As a rule of thumb, do it with people you're comfortable around and would trust with your life, pick a controlled environment, stay positive, be curious, and mentally prepare yourself for a ride you will never forget.

Otherwise, test-drive some psyclocibin (shrooms) first, as it is a much more mild psychedelic.
End the University as We Know It
"So if I have nothing to lose, I may as well try it and see what happens"

What a sad waste. Do something better with your life.
Spin a web.
Surely curiosity is a virtue intrinsic to hackers.
Maybe a url shortner.

I wonder if onac.id is available?
Haha, reminds of that scene from the Pirates of Silcon Valley.
I've never done acid, but the one common thing I've heard from those who have is that texture and repetition become very intense. Try to find a few things before your trip with cool patterns or textures, and record your perceptions of them.
The first piece of advice is good. Do it in a safe environment you control, ideally with someone else who has already taken psychedelics before. Oh, and make sure you both take psychedelics, at the same time. Otherwise you might get a bad trip form feeling paranoid about them.

The second piece of advice is only useful if you want to give him a reason to freak out and have a bad trip. LSD is one of the safest mind-altering drugs around. As far as I know the chances of it triggering psychosis based on a single dose, a single time, are pretty much nil. Regular users might go nuts, but then anyone who spends a significant portion of their life on LSD is pretty much nuts to begin with.
See if you still discern stereograms. In fact, try it before and after the acid and see if there are any differences, like how fast you see the hidden image, etc.

Good luck.
Not mind altering stuff. I kinda value my brain.
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Ask HN: University of Michigan or Washington University in St. Louis?
I'm trying to choose between these two schools. I have to decide by Tuesday. I've spent days researching and talking to both staff and people I know at the schools, and can't come to a decision. Both are very different when it comes to student life, which is fine with me. When it comes to academics, I can't distinguish between them. Any thoughts?
"We were trying to go after what [SOBE] had done because we were seeing the success they had with that young market," says Hargis, now the company's CEO."

http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/eating-drinking-plac...
But if you deliberately affect the mind's ability to think and perceive, why should you trust any "observations?"

Why should you trust any observations now?

Psychedelics have one important side-effect: they make you realise how tenuous the link between your brain and reality is. You may think reality is something tangible, reliable, objective... what you find after a psychedelic trip is that actually, things can be otherwise, and all you need is a few micrograms of a simple molecule. Considering that your brain manufactures enormous amounts of other chemicals, that should raise questions about quite what this "reality" thing is and how much it can be trusted.

Worth adding: those are good questions, worth asking.
I'd say don't do it. Seriously, why? What if it has some funamental negative impact on your brain? You'll satisfy your curiosity (well, with one tab you will probably only wonder what it "really" feels like because that probably isn't enough to get much of an effect) but at what cost?
is a url shortening service the newest "hello wrold i cna rite programm"? sure feels like it.
Read http://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD.shtml

LSD can be very intense. Given your prior inexperience, it's probably not a "good idea" right now.
Shrooms are not always "much more mild"... the only advantage they have is that shroom trips are much shorter. However, LSD has a "speedy" side-effect which kind of puts you in a good mood as you get higher, whereas shrooms usually have the opposite - a slight feeling of malaise centered around your stomach, which can help start your trip badly.

That said, I agree that starting easy is a good idea.
Oh they joy of edge cases... try http://www.com (that is a valid url by the way... points to some crappy parked page so don't bother visiting it).
Only if you want to get a good chance to become paranoid about them.

No, have someone there, but be sure that they are someone:

1) whom you trust

2) who is taking the same dose as you

3) who has done this before
"The original system requirements for Windows XP are almost comically low".

Is an operating system to only be taken seriously if it requires a significant amount of resources to run?
I have never done LSD; I decided years ago to wait until I raised a Series A round, in solidarity with Steve Jobs.
He now works at Google but didn't at the time he wrote this particular blog.

Googlepages was Google Page Creator - it's kind of like having an x.blogger.com site show as blogger.com or x.geocities.com show as geocities.com.
I violently disagree with not learning assembly. Absolutely learn assembly. Just pick anything else other than x86 assembly. After learning the basics of assembly you will never have any trouble understanding pointers or any of the "hard" concepts in C.

x86 is a convoluted horror. A lot of it makes no sense except in the context of backwards compatibility, which the documentation won't necessarily point out. I highly recommend picking up a microcontroller to learn on instead of a microprocessor. Microcontrollers are mostly self-contained systems, while microprocessors are just a small piece of the picture and have complicated interfaces to the rest of the system components.

I recommend picking something in the Freescale 68HC* family. The addressing modes and instruction set are fairly clean and the architecture is simple. Something based on ARM would probably also be straightforward to learn. Don't worry about choosing a 32 bit chip, 8 or 16 bit is fine. 8 and 16 bit chips are typically simpler and will still teach you the important concepts.

Spend a couple of weeks on this and your understanding of C will be easier to come by and more thorough.
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Very appropriate. Karry Mullis, Nobel prize winning inventor of polymerase chain reaction (a widely used technique for taking a small amount of DNA and amplifying it billions of times, useful for DNA testing and beyond) conceived of PCR with the help of LSD. There is less well substantiated rumors that Crick also had help from LSD.
It is a 2004
Another fun fact: the power output of the sun is 4 * 10^26 Watts.
Here's the making of that Sony Bravia ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1bEOtpqYpA

People in riot gear outfits and shields and stuff to protect themselves from thousands of bouncy balls. :)

Also the guy at just after 4:00 is hilarious....
check out erowid.org.

It's basically impossible to overdose on acid, but it's certainly possible to take too much and have a bad trip. Since you've taken salvia you should be able to handle it though.

Make sure you have a day or two afterwards to relax. LSD completely alters perception of reality. You'll need a day or two to reconstruct what it means to be a normal human, preferably not spent in a cubicle.

I strongly recommend getting a sitter, someone you trust who can quietly keep an eye on you.

have fun, stay safe. and remember

frankly, I suspect as soon as you start tripping you'll lose all motivation to perform experiments.
/so ive heard
He said he already did salvia which makes a good introduction because fully 50% of people have negative experiences on it and it's magnitude of alteration is stronger than LSD's magnitude of alteration. Getting through an experience like that unscathed is a good sign of one's general aptitude for not freaking out.
One non-GPL solution is to have a very broad group of people who rapidly develop the open version. Think Apache or Postgres. Sure, you could hire a developer or two and make a closed version, but that person will end up spending all their time merging in the open source changes, which will outpace whatever value they can add to the closed product.

In theory, at least - and I think that sort of strategy works in practice too, in some situations. And therein is the key - there are no general answers - some projects are better under a GPL style license where everyone knows that no one is going to 'take the code and run', and others are not.
And the thread gets killed. Surprise surprise. I wish I knew why, so I know what bad behavior to not repeat here, but nobody is required to provide a reason for killing a thread, so I'm just confused. Maybe it was an editor with a prejudice against drugs? No way to know.

I put a lot of effort into this post. Many longstanding members thought it was intellectually interesting. I was trying to contribute, in good spirit.
In short, this sucks.

I'll do a few drawings for you anyway. What's your email? Or send me a note at palish at gmail dot com.
For the record, we're still here.

It may have been killed for the drug-specific talk, or maybe because it was considered 'off-topic' in some way. But the site has been designed to be as transparent as possible, which means many of us have 'show-dead' on so that we can see past the editors.

The discussion lives. Good luck, and be safe.
For CS? And how does the financial situation compare?
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You're an idiot. This has nothing to do with Hacker news.

Try http://www.drugs-forum.com/index.php
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You're lucky. My company used to name it "CPU" department.
The editor that killed this made a mistake. Editor, you should ask yourself: "what would pg do?" I really do not think the answer is kill the story. You, editor, have been offended by one of the taboo Things You Can't Say and reduced to censorship. Being offensive to a sizable minority is absolutely not a reason to kill a story and without your clarification there is no other reason. The Steve Jobs connection alone should give this story sufficient hacker cred. It certainly is intellectually interesting and is being discussed maturely. Keep in mind that Ask HN stories are already vote weighted.

Fortunately, there has been good discussion anyways and anyone that already commented will continue to see the story. I wouldn't worry about the killing too much.

I can't believe this has never been submitted... I checked with and without the www. subdomain. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581050
Thanks for pointing that out. It has been a while since I last built something for fun. Learning is a great motivator.
WashU: Lots of rich kids. If your parent(s) make under $400K you'll feel poor there. It's a boutique school.

UMich: Huge lectures, cold winters, football fans, etc. The honors program and engineering schools are both great.

If you're motivated you'll stand out from the crowd at Michigan, whereas at WashU most of the kids are fairly motivated, they just didn't quite get into Ivy. At Michigan, you'll meet quite a few people who got into Ivy League schools but didn't go for various reasons.

Both are great schools, though, so I think you could almost decide this with a coin toss.
How many people flagged it? I'd expect a large number.

Just because Steve Jobs tried it, doesn't make it useful. I'm sure some entrepreneurs have killed people or been tried for fraud. Undoubtedly those actions altered them as people, and perhaps even led to their eventual success. But it'd be a mistake to start copying them.
Yeah, it is amazing how cheap Honda is offering the Insight.

I've been working on a Hybrid related project and done some research. One of the most interesting was an informal interview with the guy who headed the development the FSI technology at Audi done by a colleague of mine. This guy and his team introduced the technology to Audi's Le Mans racing efforts and then within 3 years brought the technology to regular cars. When we asked him to estimate the costs of a full hybrid powertrain including everything (R&D, Marketing, Party, Assembly etc.) he threw out a number around 20'000 € (which is around US-$26'000) which means that Hybrid cars currently must be highly subsidized by the producers of such cars as the Prius and especially the Insight.
Fun is a great motivator for learning.
By the way, what framework/language did you use to develop it ?
You're right that C's lack of namespaces makes for funky names. However, note that "static" functions are visible only within their compilation unit, which can bring some order to the madness.
It's possible that it was killed for liability reasons. LSD possession is illegal in the U.S; if they didn't kill it at #1, they might be seen as encouraging illegal behavior. I remember that when I was an admin on a decent-sized web forum, we had to kill all threads that were about drug use, filesharing, or any other illegal activities, no matter how stupid the laws in question were.
Excellent question. I've no idea how many hours I've put in it currently. If I add up the codebase of the classic version plus the under-development new version, I get to at least 150,000 lines of code (including comments and whitespace). I know LOC is a crappy metric, but it does give a sense of scope.

I haven't tracked the amount of manhours at all. Ten hours a week gives me 2000 over four years, that seems realistic (although a little low considering the amount of code). At market rate that would make the project cost about $100k but of course something is only worth what a buyer would pay.

To answer your question: I'd be a happy camper for a couple hundred each month. Enough to pay for expenses (hosting) and justify a day off from the day job. To spend on projects like this of course.
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Yes, you're right. In Seaforth's case inter-processor communication and I/O shouldn't eat cycles on its own.

I wish we could use some of this technology.
It does seem likely that it was flagged to death without editor intervention. I would hope an editor undeads it, offending a minority of people is not a good reason for a story staying dead.
This is apparently one of those things: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580981
Meh. I tried salvia a few times and the only effect I got was feeling light-headed from all that inhaling...