skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a point to remember: the less popular your website, the lower your CPM average will be.

If you only attract 1,000 unique visitors - your CPM maybe well under $1. But if you cross 20,000 or 50,000 visitors - your CPM could go as high as $2 to $5. (I've seen websites earn $10 per CPM too - but that is very rare.)

Most money in selling ads is made if you sell the ads privately. Without allowing Google or anyone else to take a big hefty cut.

But you won't be able to sell out all your inventory on your own if you're not already popular.

Anyhow - general rule of thumb: if a website can cross over the half a million visitors mark - he can make $5,000 from ads per month. (6 ads per page at $2 CPM on average.)

So aim for 500,000 visitors per month.
I do agree with you that data analysis is of growing importance (it's what I do after all). But I object to inventing a new fancy term for what you describe as "dynamic programming plus immediate feedback". We had that for ages.

"Illustrative programming" is just a classical case of a consultant inventing fancy marketable language. In Excel the illustrative parts are not the ones that involve programming in the sense of Turing completness. I think we need to use Turing completeness as a benchmark, or any interaction with computers can be called programming.

And I stand by my claim that programming something like KWIC has not become much more productive in the past 20 years. You could do it in Perl or in Lisp just as easily in 1989 as you could do it today. Even in C it's not that much less productive to flip and sort a few words than, say, in Java.

But productivity is admittedly a complex concept. Of course we have a much greater effect writing software today, but I think that has very little to do with the core techniques of programming. We may be more productive on average, simply because more people make use of techniques that fewer people were using in 1989.
No. Many pure math classes require no (or very little) calculus. Abstract algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory certainly fall into this category. Topology does, too, depending on which area you study and what you consider calculus. Sure, there are obviously fields that do rely heavily on calculus, as well as certain branches in the above fields, but my point was that it's nowhere near universally needed. I'm a graduate student at UCSD, and I can't remember the last time I used calculus in my research.
10 questions, and the secret of success
> I would also suggest picking up a Number Theory or Combinatorics text; they're practically useless

Useless? I dear to say that number theory is currently the most lucrative field of mathematics. Without number theory, modern day cryptography would not exist and thus everything that depends on secure communication of information would not exist. So forget about commerce over the Internet, bank wire transfers, credit cards, administrating computers remotely and, most importantly, hiding your huge porn collection from your wife.

And, combinatorics is useful for the study of algorithms. It is pretty much the foundation of computer science.
Does this still apply if the attractive profits were never there to begin with?
Assuming that the compiler, any libraries you use, the hardware, and the interfaces to that hardware all behave correctly, yes, you can formally verify code.
To solve your problem: in Google Reader, click the dropdown in the Subscriptions pane and click "Hide unread counts".
Aside from some special-interest forums, I've ended up reading just HN.

(Warm thanks to you guys for being my filtering function.)

One by one, I dropped following various news sites from my Mozilla toolbar. I must say I never really bought into the RSS boom as the best sites I read were pretty simple and looked much like a beautified RSS layout.

First went Slashdot. This was years ago, about the time Reddit started. Reddit lost it last year: too congested with useless links with a low signal to noise ratio. I've been dropping many of my national news sites, too -- tech news and otherwise -- leaving only those of best quality. Then I dropped them as well because nothing much in the mainstream doesn't really interest me. This was a big thing I had to accept. I really don't have to know the details of some crisis that is 5000km away no matter how civilized or educated that may be considered; if I start hearing about a major change in the given situation only then I'll look up for some more news.

Last spring I dropped reading the website of the main newspaper in Finland. The news were mostly uninteresting except maybe for some local things. I still check their news listing maybe once a week but I rarely read any news items. I realized that I'll hear about anything important from other people anyway. So I'm effectively using my friends and co-workers as a live filter.

TV and TV news I dropped 10 years ago.

So HN it is. Then, plus a few web forums / mailinglists but those provide a mix of both information and connections to people. People are usually more interesting than the latest "facts" of random subjects.
My adsense stats last month: 200K page views, $1300, CPM of around $6 for a very narrowly targeted website. As other posters have said, it's highly domain specific.
I'm aware of their applications; by "practically", I meant "almost". There are certainly compelling uses for number theory and combinatorics (though I'm not convinced the study of algorithms is one of them), but they're nothing compared to calculus.
Have to agree with you. If this guy can't do his homework and realize just why AOL and Myspace are sinking ships, then he shouldn't be writing for the WSJ. Comparing all tech companies to those two is, of course, ridiculous.
I'm happy to hear I'm wrong.
In 2004 I moved to a city where my AT&T TDMA phone was permanently roaming. I didn't pay roaming charges because my plan with AT&T covered my roaming charges.

Months later, AT&T set up a single TDMA tower in my area. Because AT&T phones were service provider locked, my phone and hundreds of others like it were forced to use that single tower. Overnight my phone went from having perfect signal everywhere I went, to just short of useless.

Every single AT&T representative that I talked to swore up and down that the reason I was getting poor service was not their fault, that the problem was with my phone and that I should get a new phone.

Since this happened just as AT&T was moving from TDMA to GSM, I am guessing that this was their way of forcing their customers to move to GSM. I can understand the business case for moving customers to GSM, what I can't understand is why AT&T would do so by using trickery and lies.

I will always remember AT&T's shady tactics and blatant deceit and will never give them another cent of my money - I will purchase an iPhone the second it is officially available on another provider.
True about the uselessness of the chips.

But adding a PUF is not expensive. For example the last option listed on the wikipedia link: a random magnetic strip costs fractions of a penny.
Alt Text: Rate Your Internet Dependency Level
Interesting, but I don't know if it's so valid.

Precedence in the US is if someone sold something in violation of copyright, the purchasers don't have to return it, instead the publisher is fined, with the money going to the copyright holder.

Just because Amazon could delete it, doesn't mean it should. At least not until ordered to do so by a judge.
You certainly can get away with programming on a laptop, but I find the lack of screen real estate causes me to work a lot slower. The best option, for me, is getting a very powerful laptop with a connector for a second monitor while you're at home or work.
This completely contradicts my experience. (in total roughly 1M uniques / day on all the sites that I'm involved with).

The larger the site the lower the CPM in my case, and that is significantly lower. Bulk traffic seems to get lower CPMs than niche sites, the smaller sites make as much as $5 and the larger ones are way down, some all the way down to $0.12.

What sites do you see this opposite effect on ?
dated.

also, now there's cython, which is a more advanced variation of pyrex.

edit: okay, that link was useless. sorry for that.

cython and pyrex are trying to be mostly source-compatible, but cython often includes features faster.
It may seem obvious, but it's easier said than done.

It's also very enticing to want to believe that a real shortcut exists, and there's plenty of writing out there in that vein. It's refreshing to have someone be honest enough with you to tell you something you may not want to hear, but you really need to hear.
Complain to the FCC.

http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm

Just be sure to reply to every piece of mail that you get from the FCC and AT&T on time.
A fast lens might help (if you're into SLRs). f1.8 50mm prime is cheap, though anything faster will cost you.
Those figures sound about right, with the caveat that CPMs can vary wildly over time even with the same audience and website. There is a market out there and what holds today will most likely not hold tomorrow.
No they aren't. They are an implementation of the template method pattern, perhaps with some cross polination from an observer pattern.
Always use more than 1 text, always do the problems, & always keep up a steady pace. I haven't found anything else to be really important.
What he means with 'fast lens' is a lens with a large aperture so that more light reaches the film/sensor in a shorter time.

There is nothing inherently 'faster' about the lens, it is just a figure of speech.
Working on a laptop to me feels like trying to paint my hallway through the keyhole.

There is so much going on when writing software that even with two monitors I feel pretty cramped, as soon as I switch to a laptop I'm lost.

There was a time when I could do dev work on a laptop. No IDE required, no browser required (for testing or to look up documentation), just a text editor in a shell window. That time is now probably more than 5 years in the past and the more I'm doing this the more screen real estate I feel I need.

The other day I was wondering how hard it would be to connect four monitors instead of just 2 and how I would place them on my desk to get any kind of improvement over the current situation (with windows overlapped at least 3 deep on each monitor).
First make sure you have a solid operational foundation on the basics. Advanced topics will feel so much easier.

For that I can recommend Discrete Mathematics and its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen.

Optionally supplemented by Student's Solutions Guide for more elaborate answers to exercises.

Do as many exercises as possible.
In computer terms: the CPU(s) and RAM of humans -- the wetware, if you will -- are presumably much the same, on average, as they were 100 years ago.

But it seems indisputable that we know how to deal effectively with more of life's threats and opportunities than we did back then.

(Again in computer terms, our libraries of event-detection and -handling routines are much more sophisticated than those of a century ago.)

As a simple example, just think of how much more more the average person knows about, say, healthy eating and the downside of smoking -- this isn't to say, of course, that there isn't still a lot of work to do in disseminating that knowledge.

So yeah, there seems little question that we are indeed 'smarter' (in the sense used above) than we were 100 years ago.
Practice makes perfect. tl;dr
Sed vs awk
I'm not sure where i am in this.
I recently discoverd that my solutions started to be too complete, too much complexity analysis, too much enduser friendlyness.
And that a 10 line POS script could do the same, if only the users would know how to code.
Please do. Email address is in my profile.
I disagree to a certain extent. I see your point on using a feed reader for irregular sites but I think you’re just as likely if not more likely to accidentally miss something on a site like HN or Digg because there’s such a high volume of posts.

The fact that you’re trusting "the crowd" to do your filtering at all presents a problem. Because even in a community of likeminded people like HN we all have our own special interests which aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd (one example, I program in .Net but most HN readers don’t so a lot of good .Net stories never make it out of the "New" section)

So in the end that's the problem the author is laying out. How do you take a large number of messages and make the feed reader as effective as it is with the small sites? I don't know the answer either but I think it's still a huge problem being left on the table.
Oracle runs on both RHEL (and Oracle's crappy respin) and SLES. Albeit the installer is broken and packages are only provided for Express.
You should budget for your free service under the assumption that people will create multiple accounts. Then you should allow merging multiple free accounts into one paid account to provide a tempting upgrade path for multiple-account people, who after all are among your most dedicated users. If you can detect multiple-account people then you can advertise the account-combining feature to them directly.
This logic makes no sense to me. To me the whole point of a feed reader is to not miss items. So you're saying you went to Twitter so you could "ignore it when you don't want" but that means you never needed a feed reader in the first place.

I mean, if you don't care about missing important items and Twitter works for you that's great. But to me it doesn't solve the problem feed readers are trying to solve.
American health care, like America, is innovative and wasteful.
Sorry, 100% disagree. I had an AMEX here in Europe and the customer service was way below expectations. We returned all of them.
So what us the reason that mapping om 0 is allowed anyways ?
Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever
So why isn't gcc throwing big warnings and errors about dead code paths?
As others have said it depends on what your site is about. If your site already exists there isn't much you can do but if you are planning to create a site then you can find out what the CPM average is by using Google Adword tools to find out how much people are paying for the key words. That will give you a fairly good idea of what you can charge. As others have already said you will make more money if you sell adds yourself but I would only budget two or three times the price not ten or one hundred times markup.<br><br>
Also a pure add model isn't generally the best idea. If you link to a realted product you can often get comissions that are much higher than the CPM average that you will get for adds. Without context you can only assume that you will get $0.15 CPM. Social networking sites are probably slightly less.
It's Moof, not Moofr.
I guess you and I have different conceptions of what's "perfectly sufficient".
On a site with a desirable niche audience, you can hit $4 CPMs averaged across 6 ads, so you'd only need ~200k page views to make 5K.
I think I've been stuck at '4' for the last 20 years or so :)

But seriously, the cycle is endless, there are always new depths of understanding waiting to be found and every couple of years you sort of go back to square #1, learn a new paradigm, only to find out after much hard work that the new is the same as the old only in different clothing.
Nokia E72 Game: Sudoku
59 Twitter Mobile Apps
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Now You can use Twitter on You Mobile Phones also.
For a web search default, you generally want the least worst engine, unless you habitually check multiple search sites. Favour consistency over occasional excellence.
Norway: Visa or PayPal, please.
A laptop may be enough for development. However, it feels very comfortable if you have a desk with a large screen (or screens) and perhaps an external keyboard and mouse that you can all attach to the laptop for heavy duty work. (As well as external hard drives and whatever tertiary storage you may need.)

If you are going to carry it around, make sure to back up religiously. Laptops often tend to be abused and thus have a noticeably shorter lifetime than desktops.

And in some cases, as people have mentioned, you may need a desktop simply to get as much power per buck as you can -- depending on your project.
I should stress that I'm talking about selling ads privately.

$2 CPM per ad at 6 ad spots = $12 CPM for the website. You will very rarely earn $12 CPM from Google.

FreelanceSwitch.com sells 125*125 ad spots at $900 (raised from $800 recently). And gets 500,000 page views. (Pretty close to $2 CPM).

SearchEngineJournal.com sells ad spots for $1000. And gets 300,000 page views ($3.3 CPM).

If you're selling ads privately - and show your analytics to your advertisers - they won't say that reduce my CPM rate as your traffic has increased. And if they do - you can just put up an ad-rotator so that their ads are only shown to as many people as they can afford.

And if you show your analytics that has a trend of increasing traffic - you will start finding better quality of advertisers too - people who will not mind paying a higher CPM.

So yes - as your traffic grows and you attract enough advertisers to sell all your ad inventory - you can increase your prices slowly and steadily. The trick is to reach a stage where you can sell all your ads privately.

Its supply and demand after that. (Supply of ad spots remains the same. Demand keeps on growing as your website grows in popularity.)
My guess is that GCC's dead code warning is produced in a pass that runs before the optimizer and isn't smart enough to prove the code is dead.
Using Neural Networks to Model the Behavior and Decisions of Gamblers
t-mobile us on my iphone has been fantastic. Best decision I ever made. :)
neither does yours: anecdotal experience doesn't speak for the majority.
2009 ESPY Awards Live Stream, Nominees, Winners
I know there is money to be made this way, but if you're going to go the 'computer-assisted-gambling' route realize that you are essentially cheating your opponents.

The same goes for people using card-counting programs and analyzers.

I'm not a poker player but if I compare it to let's say the 100 meter sprint it would be less of an interesting race if some guy showed up on a motorcycle.
Nice job on the layout on FreelanceSwitch.com very clean!
Right. this time around, Smartronix are working with one of the firms who spoke to the Sunlight Foundation about doing the 'right thing' - talk to #transparency on freenode and @cjoh on twitter.

I think there's lots of reasons to believe this project might work, and it's seen as being fairly cheap- the rest of the bids were in the 50-60MM range.
Valid reasons for government regulation of space travel 101:

1. We have a technical term for a simple, rapid-to-launch vehicle (like Falcon 1) that can deliver c. 400Kg into LEO: we call it an ICBM.

2. Even in the absence of a CBW payload, a well-targeted RV can do a hell of a lot of damage. KE at orbital velocity is an order of magnitude higher than the equivalent chemical energy stored in the same mass of TNT, so even if that hypothetical 400Kg payload is cement, it's going to do one hell of a lot of damage to anything it hits.

3. Accurate targeting of RVs was considered to be a very hard problem ... in the 1940s and 1950s. Let us recall who the initial cash cow customers for Fairchild Semi and (subsequently) Intel were, and consider the implications.

Anyway, upshot: no government in their right mind is going to allow orbital launches (or even sub-orbital) without at least some oversight, if only to ensure that the customer isn't Dr Evil.
Google PageRank visualized
Things Twitter's Stolen Docs Taught Us
A small demo of how google pagerank works, this throws up a fictive 8 page 'web' with a bunch of links between the pages and then calculates pagerank.

Sometimes pagerank can be very counterintuitive, I've found cases where adding a single outbound link to a page actually increased(!) the pagerank of that page.

The numbers next to the arrowheads are the pagerank contributions coming in to that node.

To make the display easier to read there are no bi-directional links in the networks generated.

Pages without outgoing links have their outputs evenly distributed across all the other pages.

I hope I got it right :)
Though I never understand why. I think I might be different from their target audience but I have an immediate negative reaction to anything that looks like an ad.
Whoever made that screenshot has excellent taste in music.
18 million is still way high for that.

Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.

It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.

Also, why are they contracting this out? Why not hire a small team, and release in stages via some agile project management techniques?

I doubt this is a big deal in the grand scheme of things however its the sort of thing that sort of reminds you that no matter who is in power, things run the same way in Washington.
Book recommendation: Princeton Companion to Mathematics

It's a good way to skim a lot of different mathematical topics for further exploration.

http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timoth...
I self-studied math for 2 years. I just attended lectures without officially enrolling to the university. I also did about half of the homework problems given in these courses (My math-student friend was envious of me: I could choose the interesting questions out of the homework paper, and ditch the boring ones!)

Some of my studies I also did with books, video lectures, and articles I found on the internet.
Signals defines a fairly concise interface for interacting with events.

You're not "stealing" control from the loop. Rather, think of it more as listening and attaching something to an event.

For me, it helps to think of signals less as interrupts in a traditional program loop, but as something more akin to events in event-driven environments.
Could you explain, because I am not understanding any of it (except that Zed Shaw seems to be involved somehow - did he hack a Wordpress Blog???). Not that I read much of the actual site - I did not understand why I should, as it seemed unappealing.
"It is wonderful to have a beginner’s mind." -Steve Jobs
Felt the same, like it's the most cliched investment ever.
Those systems are broken - user binaries are non-critical binaries for everyone. There are more binaries in this location than anywhere else.
Instead he suggests highway building companies. Several car manufacturers just went broke. I suspect highways are not the hottest thing on the planet anymore.
That's a different meaning of shock. The shock in A Modest Proposal doesn't read like "I have no self control" or "Look! A drunk in the gutter."