skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Find out how much space they propose to fill with your content - half a page, say. Find something similar in around the same place in the paper (the advice column or whatever), check on the advertising section of the website(or have a friend call them) to see how much they are charging for the adverts surrounding content of that size. ask for about 2/3 of that.

for example, you give them 1/2 page of stuff every week, and it's surrounded by 1,5 pages of ads, which they sell for, say, $1500. They pay a 10-15% commission to their sales person for selling the ads, and want to make a similar level of profit for themselves. So ask for $1000.

They'll probably say no and you'll have to negotiate...so your trade-off will be 'OK, you want to pay $500...but in return I want a 6 month commitment and my logo/website address in the top left of the box'. Researching how much they're getting for the surrounding space should give you a ballpark idea of what the content is worth.
I think it was supposed to be Kerouac with up-arrows or something, but the style just doesn't translate well to business writing.

The gent's previous blog posts were more coherent, so this appears to have been an experiment.
I owned one of these when I lived in a studio in Avalon Apartments in SF. They're not very good at drying though (or at least my model didn't work so well).
Why do only some ants sting?
I don't even like it when Kerouac does Kerouac.
This is the most inane headline for the topic.

A. Journalism isn't going to die. Newspapers might, but Newspapers != Journalism
B. They don't need hackers, they need entrepreneurs. As cool as hyperlocal news is, it's mostly just an iteration on the newspaper. It's not changing the game in any way.

The only thing I see wrong with newspapers is that the medium doesn't sell advertising very well. It only worked for so long because it had all of the market. Where else would you advertise in the 50's or 60's? I don't buy the "Yesterday's news" argument. I don't think that matters to 99% of the people. If that really mattered, TV would have killed off the Newspaper with CNN. Hell, radio would have killed off the newspaper if it mattered.
You are absolutely right, I copied and pasted it without realizing this, I've added paragraphs now.
Teens Turn Tenners into Tonnes
Facebook is not a value system!
Well, we know that many primates in the zoo are addicted to nicotine. Perhaps the nanny-state zoo administrators forced her to quit cold turkey "for her own good."

I'd McGuyver an escape attempt myself if my boss put an electric fence between me and a pack of smokes.
That's why I use a second iPhone to take pictures of the first iPhone taking said pictures...
> [patents are not the type] of monopoly is not what I was talking about

Since you were responding to my message where I explicitly mentioned a patent-based monopoly.... I note that you also didn't bother with the govt franchise monopolies.

Instead, we have vague references to cartels and the like that are supposedly not supported by govt action but were instead "busted".

> "I'm confused why anyone would think that a govt that "busts monopolies" couldn't also support them."

>And I never suggested that a government cannot support a monopoly, or that no government has ever done so.

You'll have to take that up with the person who wrote "Given that, in the US, government intervention mostly seems to consist of busting monopolies, I'm just a bit wary of the statement that no monopoly can exist without government support."

> A single large established entity, or a group of such working together, can easily manipulate factors such as supply chains, prices paid by the ultimate customers, etc. to cripple or destroy any competition.

Can "easily" requires some support. There's one big example, standard oil, but it manipulated prices down, for both customers and suppliers.

> prices paid by the ultimate customers, etc. to cripple or destroy any competition.

The argument for monopoly profits requires that the monopoly eventually raise prices. If it can't do that because competition might come in, where's the harm?

> What's more, parts of the history of the US abound with examples of precisely that behavior -- non-governmental entities subverting or disabling the operation of the free market for their own benefit. Do you dispute this?

I dispute that more than a handful have managed to maintain high prices without govt assistance. There are, of course, many examples where high prices had govt support.
questions are boring, but the talk is quality. he doesn't say much new - emphasis on hiring the right people and that good businesses don't happen overnight, they take a lot of time and effort - but it was really the contextualization of that information and the genuine optimism which made it a quality talk.
A digg-style grocery store, where customers can vote online for new products.
Hi Tom, Thank you for your comment, it is an experiment as much as it is a change in writing style (not based on Kerouac but I understand the reference). It's no longer business writing for others, it's writing I do for myself. I am putting it on my blog for those who are interested.
The author laments: "Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering."

Really?
every day one person dies in a high speed chase. street spikes work if you can get them down and back up again before the chase car runs over them. there must be a way to shut a car down by addressing its computer system with rfid or something.
Um, I've seen this asked before, but I'll ask it again:

a) Eventually you'll convert Twollars to real dollars.

b) Everyone starts with 50 Twollars.

Isn't that a REALLY high customer acquisition cost for a free application?
> one can easily imagine cases where the benefits of creating a positive right would outweigh the harm.

Houw about three really good/strong examples?

I'll even stipulate one - trial by jury with competent representation. (I'm pretty sure that health care won't qualify.)
Groupon.com actually does this - not travel, but experiences/discounts.
A positive right infringes on the rights of others. For example, a right to health care means doctors and nurses don't have rights to their time; a right to housing means existing home owners don't have a right to their homes.

There are certainly positive rights that could be net beneficial. And taking away negative rights could also be helpful. E.g. the negative externalities of imminent domain could be reduced by censoring anyone who tried to talk about how it's a bad deal -- this would temporarily reduce the negative effect on real estate prices. But it sets bad precedents and leads to bad decisions.
this is a naive viewpoint. It would be nice if all govt activities were beneficial, but they're not.

Also, commercial enterprises can do very large scale tasks such as build dams, road systems, and the like. It's not much good at doing military defense, but for making stuff....
Won't Somebody Think Of The Noobren?
The next big user interface: your car windshield. The windshield communicates with billboards that look empty from outside your car to beam images appropriate for your consumer tastes and demographic. In addition you will be able to interact with various mediums: webmail, ipod, video conferencing etc when your car is fully stopped. It goes on from there.
The program I was in didn't even try to do things like this. Web course? Use perl. OS course? Use C. Soft Eng? Use Java (people demanded at least one Java course). If you can't learn the appropriate language within the first week of the course, you probably should have a different major.

Naturally some people were very upset about this, but it definitely made for a better program all in all.
Is there a counterexample on the horizon?
All of these ideas could lead to serious injury. :)
i've found that black text on a white background is much easier on my eyes than the opposite, at least on the newer, brighter LED LCDs, especially the glossy ones like what ship on current macbooks.
The only exception would be a positive right to something previously unowned. For example, you could have a right to own any island you discover, without violating someone else's preexisting claim.

But if you have a right to be fed, it violates someone else's right to the food they own; if you have a right to medical care, nurses and doctors don't own their own time, etc.
Which is like having a C pointer to an object controlled by a GC, and the GC does not know (or care) that you have a reference to one of its objects.
Innovation is term thrown awfully loosely.

Apple did not invent the MP3 player, smart phone, GUI.
Google did not invent Web search, web mail, online maps.
Microsoft did not invent the OS, IDE, Office suite.

Innovation is not a core-strength of these companies. As most large companies they focus on quality (creating a really good user experience) and marketing.

Companies like IBM, Philips, Amazon.com, Toyota run on innovation. AT&T and Apple (pre-90s) used to.
try Incosolata at 18pt, it's gorgeous, and you can read it from a full arms-length away (how far from the screen you're supposed to be)
That's true lsb, however, the paper's site will be marketing ads directly to those small venues and making $ directly from them, most likely. Ads are the key revenue there.

Also, starnix, you'll def have 2 be careful about overpricing like olefoo mentioned, bcuz if they think they can do it cheaper, they will.

I mistakenly bid too high when asked about something for a newspaper I work with and there was no negotiation... My contact said something about checking on it. Next thing I know, I see 'my' project done by them, albeit not as well and with mistakes, but obviously they didn't pay my price. :(

Next time I'll ask what range they're thinking of first!
It's better than having continuous anxiety or returning to your house to check whether the door is locked for example.
Additional bonus points for predicting when a spot or one of a group of spots is likely to become empty.
I dunno how a little email gadget made him billions.

His research centre is the exciting thing, not the NHL.
looks like 61a at cal is still scheme based (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp09/) and still taught by the incomparable Brian Harvey. damn I loved that class.
A compartment inside a car's engine to keep food warm while travelling.
5 Moms Who Built Great Companies
Instead of tagging, have cameras in all the rooms. You show it all your objects and it visually tracks them throughout the house.
> How can we count the links to the IHT in Wikipedia?

Someone didn't do their research. It's easy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LinkSearch/*.iht.com
What similar things would people like to be able to do using a photo? Does anyone know of other fields where people have to identify things using a cumbersome book, etc.?
A DBUS like system for the internet (for message passing and multi casting events to registered handlers). It's like twitter, except for application to application/people communication.

You first visit the site and create a data structure and register it at the X service website. Then a application can send messages in that data structure to the X service. Other services/applications/websites/people can register (like following on twitter) various handlers on the X service. Any time the main application publishes a event to the X service, it's pushed out to all the listening handlers...

I guess when I write it down, doesn't so outlandish. Anyway, up for grabs.
That's called cardboard.
There is no company called MAC, there is a company call Apple which has a line of computers commonly referred to as "Macs".
as an every-guy, who only at various times has "suffered" mild OCD fits: I can see the value to be had by the clinically compulsive.
If someone could put the drop-box GUI on the git content tracker backend...
Great idea, I need this software right now. But I think it should be combination of Software, video cameras and green screen. Would pay a good money for that.
not really, just change it to call by value lazy evaluation semantics (sort of). The solution is to have your webserver be designed so that for every (static?) link that it serves, to have both a cached / archived version, and a link to the live location.
This is Not a Game (Walter Jon Williams)
and the irony is now I can't even read the article without logging into NYT.
So, what we want is transparent cardboard.
A screen-less laptop that projects images into the mind so as not to make us all blind

That rhymed!
I've used at least a dozen different ones. They all suck compared with dedicated washer/dryers. Besides that, it seriously slows you down if you want to wash a lot of stuff.
Think pmsbuddy.com meets Babelfish meets the Mechanical Turk.

The idea is simple: submit transcripts of your conversations with your wife to the site, and women will translate for you.

"she said "fine." She really means she is pissed off."

For a fee, the site may also offer real-time chats for those situations where you need to figure out what a woman is thinking NOW.
I do mind, actually. I did read your other post in this thread, and you've made some unwarranted assumptions.
Don't friends often share values?
6 Archetypes of the Advisor - Pattern Interrupt
A startup factory. A collection of hackers, marketing people, business minded people, and their product is making startups. The basic infrastructure very very fast. Then selling them out.
You actually just gave me a great idea...CPA porn. Complete CPA offers, get access to porn. Perfect, because that way no credit card is involved...
Why not extend it into a Cory Doctorow Woofie system?

I do a favor for you, woofies.com gives me a couple woofie points, which I may redeem for pron. My favor backfires (buggy code, typos, etc) and my woofie karma suffers and I must suffer pron of worse quality.

Viva la Bitchun society irl!

Note that this is completely unrealistic because no one pays for pron anymore anyway.
What remaining classes do you think best exemplify the old curriculum?
To me it's pretty clear that they mean, "we don't know how to make web advertising pay the bills around here."

As for "ambitious news gathering", there I kind of agree with them; I'm not sure that there's much of a future in the broad, frequent and relatively superficial net that the New York Times and similar papers throw. Newspapers are set up on the premise that broadly disseminating a variety of news is hard, and requires a mediator, but that's not the case anymore.

Blog-level coverage is just fine for a lot of things in the popular sphere. In depth and investigative stuff I'll get from The New Yorker or The Economist (which I would pay for).
No need to make it that complicated. In this case, the NYT deliberately "free"'d the "memory", even though they knew it was still in use. "It's the caller's problem now."
Also, partner up with Whole Foods/Winn Dixie/Publix so they have your groceries packaged and ready to go, skip the actual shopping part.
We have that already: http://www.fmylife.com/

;)
A good summary of OAuth, but as the author, I assure you I do understand this key benefit of OAuth. Admittedly I didn't make a point of it, but there are alot of sites that do a good job of explaining this (as well as your comment).

The issue of the article isn't that. It's when one is actually building a desktop application from scratch. You end up building a web site with a user login... just so you can store the application secret securely!

Note that when I say application secret, I'm not referring to the user's access token & secret that you point out. I agree that storing that info locally on the desktop is fine.

Thanks for replying.
If one can simply make up any rights someone feels like having, even when they contradict fundamental rights (see my earlier post), I don't think they can be considered "real".

If you believe in equal rights (i.e., nobody is king of the universe) then you can't support the infringing of some people's rights for the benefit of others.
CouchDB on Wheels
It is unbelievable how paper still wants to compete with electrons, and how cardboard-CEOs refuse to accept the same fate of music, videos, books and now news.

There is nothing they can do. If it can be electronically consumed, it will be.
Installing Windows 7 RC1 on your Mac... for free
*{ Code Like I Do
What you're describing is really the right to seek internet access, and I agree with your analysis of it. For anyone to proclaim the existence of a "right to internet access" is dangerously vague, however.
Something cool would be to actually inventory large markets in other countries, or go there and give them a web presence.
A online grocery store comparison shopping. Data is customer driven and pulled from the weekly shopper. Reciepts can be scanned in and processed to keep track of shopping. Shopping lists can be entered online to be cross checked against the closest grocery stores (you get to decide if going to 2 stores is worth saving $10 extra) and sent to your phone. Online grocers(amazon) even get in the mix to provide deals and free shipping. And why stop there, why not alcohol too...
Rogue is on the iPhone. Nethack and Dwarf Fortress would be amazing. Does anyone have any inside info?
Maybe we should use call by value: make a copy and link to the internet archive. (When legal)
In New Zealand/Australia there is a site for one of the airlines that sort of does this: http://flightbookings.airnewzealand.co.nz/vgrabview/en_NZ/

Its specific to only that airline, but they sometimes have packages too and refresh every night, kiwi standard time i think
Yep. It's amusing that people go on about how compilers catch their errors and then spend hours debugging InvalidCastExceptions.
Depending on what 'large markets in other countries' you're talking about, I see a few immediate problems:
-monetizing: a lot of these people don't have the money for additional services like this. Additionally, they /know/ the markets well, they're their markets! It's home!
-customer base: this is similar to monetizing. How many people are you going to reach that would actually want your service?

This is an interesting idea, but it seems like we're too far away from the potential userbase to make something that people would actually want.

Now, if you're actually in India, I apologize for the last critique, but my first two statements stand.
There are certain ritualistic and tactile aspects of newsprint that I'll dearly miss. Just something about waking up, drinking coffee, opening up a fresh paper to read the front page... There's something primal about that that can't be replicated virtually.
Newspapers are a product sold for personal consumption and priced accordingly, but they have enormous positive externalities. The traditional solution to dealing with something with positive externalities is via government subsidy; doing so for news in a direct manner is obviously a bad idea, since the primary positive externality provided by reporting is the check it provides on the government and other centers of power. Doing so through a government funded voucher system could be one possible solution.

Everyone would receive $X of money with a mandate to give it to any news organization they wish. A condition of the money is that the organization receives it blindly, e.g. they don't reward you with anything in exchange (this isn't a subsidy for you to buy a daily newspaper).

The primary difficulty with this solution is that under such a system, how do you ensure the money is spent on news? As one example, how do you prevent Bob from spending his voucher on his neighbor's sham "news organization", and his neighbor doing likewise on Bob's sham "news organization"? You can easily craft legal language to remove a one-level tit-for-tat situation like that, but how do you do so robustly for the many other manifestations?

If you allow the government to choose who constitutes a real news organization and who doesn't, the voucher system loses many of its advantages (the primary one being proportional representation through the "individual choice" a voucher system provides, rather than monolithic "majority choice"; of course in both cases there is still a monolithic decision made on how much funding will go towards news).
I'm a big fan of Terminus; it proves easy to read and alleviated a lot of eye strain I had been getting.
I agree - after freshman year, don't worry about whether the students have prior experience in a language or not. My first experience with Java was in a Database class: The teacher gave us a project, said "use Java". She linked to the Java tutorial, and I learned enough for the project in a day or two. I learned Perl the same way (for a bioinformatics course)

Of course, if they had been languages in a different paradigm, (e.g., Scheme, Prolog) it may have taken me a bit more time to get going. Still, no reason to not use these languages.

Any computer science student should be able to learn a new language quickly to get a project done. It's an important practical skill for their careers anyway.
Intro to Microcontroller Programming Final at Cornell: Fart Intensity Detection Station
I think it has more to do with SXSW Interactive, which is what inspired his post. 80% of SXSW is a bunch of people who want to get rich or famous on the web paying hundreds of dollars for the chance to sit googly-eyed in the same room as a few people who have become rich or famous on the web, or who at least worked at a company that made somebody else rich or famous. It's inherently boring. The fact that it's nominally about technology can't rescue it.

I managed to see a couple of interesting panel meetings -- yes, exactly two -- when I attended in 2008. They were quite good, and since I got a combined Interactive/Film pass I didn't feel like I got ripped off. (I did feel like I was living beyond my means -- hence my non-return this year.) But I spent most of the panel meetings googling the panelists trying to find something interesting to read about their work, while they answered questions from adoring fans (and from each other) by saying, "Well, what you really have to do, which I really learned the hard way at MyFamousWebSite.com, is give the customers what they want." "Yes, that's right Jim, especially when they don't know what they want." "<appreciative chuckle>." This drivel at panel meetings with awfully interesting and high-concept titles. I'm not surprised SXSW Interactive inspired some reflection about the trivialization of human knowledge.

Half the panelists were just promoters or PR hacks representing a company. They may have been the original founding CEOs yadda yadda yadda but they were acting as PR hacks, present solely to project the right image for their company and convert their minor fame into web traffic. Some panelists who were there flogging their companies recognized that they had an obligation to the people who paid to see them, and actually said interesting things and tried to answer interesting questions. That's actually an effective way of promoting a company, if anybody's wondering. I don't care what a guy talks about -- his new product or alpaca cheese -- I'm going to check out his company and their products if and only if he gives me something worth thinking about. Partly that's because I want to reward him for being a good speaker, but partly it's a natural mechanism: anything substantial enough that it can't be completely digested on the spot will pop up later for further mulling over, which is a logical occasion for finding out more about the speaker and his company.
I wrote about a lot of the "concentration desert" articles in a post on laptops, students, and distraction at http://jseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-... . Maybe the answer is disconnecting ourselves from the Internet when we need to really, deeply work.