skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it's wrong, it's not far off. I run some Facebook RPGs. I did an estimate using their user numbers (not hard find since the networks publish them) and assuming similar revenue per user (RPU) to our games and guesstimated $75m. Their games probably also have higher RPU than ours, so I could totally see $100m or even significantly more now that FarmVille is taking off.

On the other hand, as MixPanel pointed out, they buy a LOT of traffic. Not just on Myspace either. On both networks you can build a compelling enough game to get your RPU above the cost of buying a user. The difference between the two is that on Facebook, your app can succeed without that.

Zynga's spending what has to be at least $2m/mo in ads, maybe 3 or 4. They're also using ads on their games to cross promote with other games, and those ads could be bringing in money too. When you factor that in, as high as 50% of their revenue could be going right out the door to advertising. (I don't think that's the case though, if I had to venture a guess I'd say 20-25%).
I would like to see this, but I am not in US nor UK. Regionalism in copyrights has to stop in global world that it is today.

edit:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-545930454338776455
Good solution but it only tracks bit.ly tweets as far as I can see so the number displayed is wrong. I prefer the Backtype WordPress plugin as a solution that tracks most short URL services. It's like Tweetmeme but better.
Well, it doesn't solve problems for you. In a nutshell, by lowering the firing threshold of your neurons (especially within the visual cortex) it's as if you've had everything amped up and given an echo. This makes pretty much everything appear novel and different - when I used to go to a lot of raves, you could often tell who the first-time acid users were because they would spend extra time looking at their hands, and with good reason.

If you've taken the right-sized dose, it's not unlike having the novelty factor of childhood combined with the intellectual development of adulthood. Much also depends on your mood, flexibility of mind and so forth. It doesn't combine well (for me, anyway) with directed activity like coding or trying to record (rather than play) music since you space out continually. If you try to push too hard in a specific mental direction, it'll push back and you may get frustrated or confused, which can lead to upset.

If you just go with the flow, on the other hand, all kinds of new perspectives and insights will pop up. These are not all equally good, qua the oft-repeated stories of people jumping off balconies in the belief they can fly and so forth. These do have some basis in reality, though generally the people involve tend to be massively loaded, sometimes on more than 1 drug. Unless you have one of those Jekyll & Hyde personalities where you turn into someone completely different when you get drunk this is probably not an issue, but you do need to be responsible to yourself and considerate of other people - there is nothing more irritating than an acid asshole that thinks the world should adjust to their trip rather than the other way around. The right way to handle is to store your insights (your memory will wok fine) without getting overly caught up in them - some will turn out to be purely frivolous others can have deep lasting value.

Having said all that, the scope of the experience is very hard to articulate. It's like the difference between experiencing a videogame as a player vs. firing up the level editor and/or reading the source code. On the other hand, you might go from wondering who moved your cheese to concluding that you are a lab rat in some bizarre cosmic experiment. Or indeed, both at the same time.
The Choice Engine: Hunch, Bing, & others make consuming easier(podcast)
Having once cast an aluminum cornbread pan in high school shop class, I can understand how using such a printer for mold making could be extremely useful. And, I can see how it could have niche uses in various industries. But, the people saying that the 3d printer will change the world as we know it (or whatever other grand predictions) haven't explained to me how it will be anything more than a great proto-typing/mold-making tool for casting/machining operations or customers of those businesses. Am I missing something?
It's still far too complicated. Use

http://search.creativecommons.org/
http://www.everystockphoto.com/
http://www.picitup.com/picitup/index.jsp
reminds me of a joke:

a farmer has a bunch of chickens that aren't laying eggs, so he asks a physicist for help.
the physicist leaves, does some calculations, etc etc, and comes back with the following answer.
"well I've solved your problem, but it only works for spherical eggs in a void"

I'm sure that economists have much the same issue. All of their theories work just fine with rational humans in a vacuum.
Anti-aging/life-extension stuff is all very interesting, but I fail to see how such technology would ever become accessible to the public at large. For that to happen, I'd think that there would have to be a significant economic benefit.

As it stands now, we have an overpopulation problem. We also live in a world where, whether we like it or not, segments of the population can be considered either a drag on society or a benefit. Who decides?

I have little doubt that someone will crack the code to indefinite lifespans within my lifetime, whether or not this breakthrough is publicized. But do we have any reason to believe that life-extension technology, even adding 10-15 years to the average lifespan, would be accessible to anyone but the super rich?

I just don't see how regular joes would be allowed to have this, but I'd like to be convinced otherwise.

ALSO: If you're going to downmod me, can you please explain why? This is a serious question, and people seem to want to shy away from it whenever it is brought up.
I would much rather go with the machinist I've met quite a few veteran machinists and they are very good at what they do, especially the ones who have learned to use cnc in conjunction with traditional work.

Leno however probably has enough money that he employs multiple people who know very much about engines and cars that they are the ones worrying about the molds.
In addition to using Safari for rich web development, I assume we should all be using Textmate and working on our Macbooks in dimly lit coffee shops.

Give me a break. Use whatever you want to use for web development. As long as whatever you're doing works across _all_ A Grade browsers, I could care less what you use.
This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie. Yes, I realize how West-centric the point of view is, and that's unfortunate. But it's exactly why we have "dot-com businesses" and the "dot-com bubble", as opposed to the "dot-com-and-net-and-org-and-co-uk-... bubble".

At least keeping the set of TLDs small and restricted to standardized names, or countries that people using them will recognize, helps to keep the recognition problem manageable. But allowing anything and everything for a domain name removes all hope of recognizing one without context.
The Art of Making Money : Story of a Master Counterfeiter (podcast)
"And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO."
Like you want to do marketing the old way, print ads or something? Without SEO there is no online marketing, Without the Web your marketing will fail in 2009.
Misleading headline. The article posits the existence of a bacteria in obese women, it does not go into the issue of causality as the headline suggests.
This is so called irony not a "lie".
See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irony
I dont think he was calling techcrunch a failure of a website, but as a failure of "blogging as journalism". They regularly print speculative, inaccurate articles, rife with spelling errors. Additionally, they try to explain technical concepts that they do not understand (like the map-reduce description above), and their attitude when someone points out the errors is usually along the lines of "whatever".

Passing techcrunch off as "journalism" is what is laughable. Its just gossip and insider PR-hype.
Poorly consructed sentence. The emphasis should have been: "I don't mean read the web to learn about SEO". Reading is a passive activity. You can read all day long, you will learn a lot, but you still won't have accomplished any of the useful marketing activities of engaging with your users, key influencers and so on.

Of course SEO is useful and the web is a must. But you must write, not just read.
This is good stuff, but the important part is just briefly mentioned: It's the Fadal CNC machine. The other machines scan and build plastic prototypes or occasionally functional parts if plastic is sufficiently tough for the job.

But once the plastic prototypes are tested and proven, the Fadal CNC machine then makes them out of metal. I would still like to know what kind of metals the Fadal can machine?

And then there's the bet that this technology would continue to get cheaper. This is certainly true of semiconductors and software but will it be true for this, for CNC machines?

And lastly, manufacturing "works" on a large scale. You buy raw materials in bulk, manufacture and then sell the now transformed materials in small units. Buy in bulk, sell in small is where the profit is made.

But this is very long tail stuff. No one will need a large volume of a special custom widget.

Would individuals buy this tech to use over a life time, like a good expensive tool box? Or would a small business buy this and then offer to ship custom parts in a small area where shipping is cheap?
It might just be me but I'm getting the impression a lot of the people here are talking about taking these drugs very much not on a physicist-advised schedule or dosage ;-)
I don't know, he seems like a pretty big old car/machine geek and isn't the fun of that hobby getting your hands dirty.
There is not even close to enough Gold in the world to back every currency on a global scale. Simple calculation value of the entire world's goods vs. all the worlds Gold vs. value of all the worlds currency in circulation. Trying to use gold on a large economy would create significant economic harm as the rest of the world stayed the way they where.
> This is clearly more efficient

Animal feed is only grown on this land because it is subsidized. Growing plants on it is economically inefficient. If agriculture in the US were unsubsidized, nobody would try to grow plants on this land. It would be grasslands. And the only human use for the land would be to graze animals on it.
I think that's focusing in the wrong direction. The costs involved set a high-enough barrier for the first world, let alone impoverished countries.

The focus should be on simplifying the technology these communities need and making it more robust, as well as showing people in the community how to repair and maintain it.

Not to mention that this technology would represent another point of failure -- sure, you could print out parts for the well, but what happens when the roof over the printer fails and everything gets soaked by a monsoon.
This was the point of the article. The natural language query interface doesn't work, the user has to divine the interpretation the system will ascribe to his query.
What do you mean by "high IQ"? Last time I measured mine at 16 I got an IQ of 120. So do you want to sell to intelligent kids? Or do you actually mean educated people, intellectuals, early adopters or similar groups?
Or do you mean nerds? High IQ doesn't mean much. You can be a serial killer with a high IQ.

Viral marketing works for different kinds of people depending on the campaign, product and desired audience.
Can apt launch EC2 instances and execute scripts (that are not part of the package) before and after installation? Can it update security group settings and request and assign static IP addresses? My understanding is that apt does not help with these problems, so we write scripts or use tools like Fabric to do this.

Well apt does not launch EC2 instances, you launch them, after you defined their role in your central configuration server.

The first thing a launched instance does (in rc.local) is "apt-get install bootstrap". The bootstrap package contains everything a node needs to come alive. Ours consists of not much more than a script that immediately runs via the post-install hook. This script is where the magic happens, it connects to the "hivemind" and gathers the configuration data, based on the node name that the instance was parametrized with at startup. According to the role it is asked to assume it will install the appropiate application packages (we call them "logic bombs"). For sanity it makes sense to just name the packages after the role. We have packages for "faceplate", "db", "queue" and such.

The packages will depend on other packages as needed and most of them contain pre-install hooks for initialization tasks (e.g. mount an EBS volume for a database node, claim an elastic IP, mangle DNS, etc.).

Well, long story short, I think the key mistake of capistrano and fabric is to assume Push where you really want Pull. Once that is realized life becomes much easier.

My understanding is that apt does not help with these problems, so we write scripts or use tools like Fabric to do this.

Apt is ofcourse just one part of the toolchain and scripts will always be involved either way. My point is that a toolchain built around apt most likely has no need for something like fabric. Fabric is just not a very useful abstraction in a scenario involving more than a handful of hosts.

In an ideal world this is true, but it does happen. For example, one vendor my require a specific type or version of OS from the rest. A business may also choose to change the OS from one release to the next.

Well, these are problems technology can't fix. These are problems only the HR department can fix.

I'm suggesting that it's helpful to not tie your process to a specific one unless you have complete control over the environment, now and for the foreseeable future.

There is a word for systems where nobody assumes "complete control": abandoned.
Sure, I'll give it a try. Thanks :)
The book of the same name that accompanies the series is well worth reading and is bound by no such regionalism.
I've seen some people suggest hitting the ctrl key with the 'side' of your hand instead of your pinky. I've found that using the bone directly below your pinky (towards your palm) also works (at least in my case), and is fairly comfortable.

I was inspired to do this by Aikido, where one of the techniques is a pressure-point application using the bones on the inside of your hand to apply specific pressure while holding someone's wrist in a grip.
Personally, I'd copy/paste it into the global find/replace dialog the first time I came across it.

Without bothering to understand why it was done that way or discussing it with the team? That wouldn't be a good way to last very long.

why would you do this to your code in the first place?

I was careful to include a phrase which explains this: for very common primitives. Perhaps your code doesn't have those; ours does.

It certainly doesn't make things more readable.

Considering that I just finished saying it did, that's quite the claim.

screwy symbols

Most programmers I've observed are closed-minded about deviations from their comfort zone. Faced with something that doesn't conform to the way they always do things (a.k.a. the Right Way), they reflexively condemn. Your comment is remarkable insofar as every single one of its sentences suggests this mentality. I hope that's just my mistaken impression.
"antisocial" in China probably means they visited the wrong websites, those the dictatorship does not approve of. Especially Chinese "students" tend to thought crime.
Welcome to Canada ;)
I would love to hear further detail about the balance between freelancing, college, and eventually running my own "real" company. That seems to be the path I'm headed towards.
I think you are a bit naive to assume that the invigorated elderly will forgo any benefits already coming their way, or cheerfully waive them. If anything, I see them exerting a tighter grip on financial and political capital, to the detriment of their generational successors; some would argue that this is already happening. Of course you are correct about the importance of fusion, but I'm not sure of a free lunch there either.
A patent license protects you from suits by the licensor. It may protect you from suits by others IFF the licensor warrants that his patent is valid. Edit note that this presumes the patent is granted.

DO NOT FORGET YOU SAW IT (sorry for the all caps pg, but this is important). If you are successful, you are liable for all profits, and revenues that would have been due under the standard licensing agreement (or a reasonable % if none is established). If you aren't successful, you are still liable for a portion of revenues.

However, don't worry about the patent until you are ready to bring a patent to market b/c you don't violate the patent by prototyping or researching; you only violate a patent by putting an infringing product on the market.

IAALBYANPM, so hire one if you really want to proceed.
I like this idea, simply because the world needs a place for radicals to be radical. Sure, there may be a lot of crazy floating cults, but there will probably also be some great advances from societies free of today's regulations and taboos.
Every mice cure story should include a specific explanation how this could apply in humans.

For example we have cured cancer in mice many times over using things which are ALREADY in humans, because we are much bigger and live much longer then mice.

Therefore all those mice cures, do absolutely nothing for us.

That's why I want to see specific mention of how this applies to all mammals or just humans.
And, while we are at it, please include some wi-fi in the bundle. It's a shame to market it to students and not letting them use on-campus wi-fi data links. 3G when there is a wifi link available seems such a waste of spectrum...
No, balance the budget.
I would buy immediately if it supported GSM networks (or, at least, wi-fi)
It's physically harmless in normal doses or even normal overdoses, but I guarantee that if you inject a couple grams you'll drop dead or at best into a months long catatonic state. It's not realistic, I'm just saying that everything has its lethal dose.
Convert ugly block of XML or JSON to "pretty"
Actually, "ask a lawyer" if the only correct response when you need a legal questions.

The lawyer provides legal advice. Their job is to be pessimistic and bring up all potential issues because that is what you pay them to do. A lawyer is a risk assessor. It is up to the client decide upon a course of action based on the lawyer's legal advice.

A lawyer does not provide business advice, or scientific advice. Do not blame your lawyer if you kill a perfectly valid business transaction based upon the lawyer's advice regarding the legal risks of the transaction.
They should have mentioned http://superfeedr.com : that is exactly what we do ;)
In case anyone is wondering what he means:

http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/02/lotus-notes-aol-corporat...
Low-Calorie Diet May Extend Life in Primates
Thing is, the 'printers' are expensive but getting much cheaper, and the materials are very cheap. It's not a panacea by any means, but a versatile low-volume manufacturing facility might have greater value than a specialized high volume one in places with mediocre industrial and commercial infrastructure.

I see your point 100%, but these are basically the same arguments people made about cellphones and they turned out to be better option than trying to deploy the simple and robust technology of landlines. I suggest ad-hoc communication and manufacturing technology may be the best thing in an ad-hoc economy.
Oh my, another handwaving article about Big O Notation. Why does everyone and their mother feel the need to explain this thing in "plain English".

"Big O notation seeks to describe the relative complexity of an algorithm [...]"
Relative to what? To the moon and the stars?
Big O is a notation to describe the growth rate of functions.

Therefore, you can also use it to describe the memory usage of an algorithm. Even if the author of the article thinks otherwise.

And so on and so forth.

Seriously, I understand the wish to explain this thing clear and simple. But what is so hard about a clear and concise description using maths and some plots?

Or, in John McCarthy's words:"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.".
I recently switched from firefox 3.0 to safari 4 beta when it first came out, and then back to firefox 3.5.

Originally I switched to safari 4 beta because I'm on a machine that has limited ram and firefox 3.0 would buckle my system. Safari 4 is slick and runs much lighter and faster than firefox 3, however firefox 3.5 really levels the playing field and makes the comparison about features rather than resource consumption.

When you compare the two on features, safari is lacking. While safari has clean tools built in for web development, they are more for looking at a page rather than messing around with it. I find it a pain to go and change styles or elements in safari and also you can't delete elements out of the dom in safari which I find very annoying. Firebug is not as polished looking, but it definitely has the best set of features. Also firefox's extensive set of plugins is tough to live without.

I enjoyed my time with Safari, it was a very elegant polished experience, but web hacking is rarely both, which is where firefox and its plugins feature set really shines.
Now that the word is out--not too much.
Is this even unlimited? I have AT&T with a non-iPhone, and they want $40/month for 5G of tethering. Paying the extra $40 removes the "unlimited" limit on non-tethering, too.

Needless to say, I tether without paying them extra and will be dropping AT&T very soon.
T-Mobile's tethering is no cheaper. I want unlimited tethering, but I don't see any US carrier that will provide me with that service. (Sprint will in one city that has "4G", but I don't live there, so ...)
3D Scanners typically cost 40-50K - but this one is under 3K !!?

Looks like they've got quite a big of use cases on their website. www.nextengine.com

People scanning in faces, rocks for research. It's not just for mechanical parts.
Ask HN: How many links to Chrome OS comments are enough?
One? Two? Three? Four? Five? Six? Seven? Nine? Ten? A hundred?

Seriously, I now want to make something that filters my feeds by negative keywords.
Interestingly, we worry about conquering space but accordingly to the article we are still a long way to colonizing the oceans. It seems that this is really the next frontier.
I managed to get my Amazon.com Kindle affiliate link onto the front page of Reddit. It got several hundred upvotes, and based on my experience with Reddit, at least 10,000 clicks.

End result? I sold 4 kindles, and made about $120. Not bad, but don't expect high conversion rates on this kind of thing.
If the government can't afford it, and of course it can't afford to pay pensions to perfectly healthy people for a hundred years, then they won't have a choice.

Anyway, I think society would change. The stigma that comes with a perfectly able young man sitting on unemployment benefits would also be applied to the able 90-year-old collecting benefits while playing golf. Assuming, that is, they could stand the pathetic trickle of cash pensions are, compared to their worth on the job market - and quite a wealth it could very well be.

Anyway, don't people like working?