skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adobe explains it as: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/images/omgraphi...
And can't read or write. Wow. WOW. http://www.willard-wigan.com
I'd rather Seinfeld end positively than continued until it had dried up. I don't think it's really fair to call him washed-out, Seinfeld was incredibly successful, how does anyone ever expect him to top it? He just has the bar for what's expected of him set too high to achieve that again.

It seems a majority of actors on a hugely popular syndicated TV show really fail to jump start their careers afterward, likely because people expect the same performance quality every time, no room for error.
I think they worked better when Facebook offered them free to promote things. There were a lot of Dark Knight icons being passed around when the movie came out. I don't know any friend that's actually bought one.
Does anyone have any actual stats/data on this, beyond Facebook's own vague statement and the Techcrunch hype?

Cash flow positive at any point in time, even sustained for a few quarters, does not equate to "profitable". They have raised almost a quarter billion dollars. Their investors would likely want a multi-billion dollar equity event out of this, if that were even possible.

Facebook has become very deft at public relations in the last few years. Things like the "$15B USD Valuation" spin when Microsoft bought some ads are one example. I am very hesitant to believe that this announcement is anything more than PR based off of something like "well, if you look at the numbers just right at a point in time we can claim to be CFP...".
Having bigger banks is not necessarily all bad. One of the reasons the Canadian financial system was rocked to a lesser extent than the rest of the world's is because our banking industry is dominated by a handful of big stable players. So their growth strategies recognize that they can't possibly take huge market share away from competitors. Instead, they focus on taking less risky gambles that will provide sustainable growth and minimize the risk of losing existing market share. The American banking sector seems to have a lot more competition but the competition breeds some idiotic pissing matches as each player jockeys for a better position while the opportunity exists.

All this said, Canadian banks are notorious for being super conservative due to the lack of competition. During good economic times, this can be bad because they're less willing to say, provide small business loans.

EDIT: was looking for marketshare stats and came across this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124268900278332309.html The top 5 banks in Canada have 85% of the banking assets.
Anything you hear out of them refers to active users.

That's an interesting statement. Is there any way of independently verifying this? And is there any way of independently verifying churn of Facebook users who give up being active users by anyone's definition?
"More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day"

Jeez, think of all of the valuable things that time could be used for instead of "looking at picture of people I don't know, but did go to high school with". sigh
facebook goes out of their way to understate their numbers

As above, I find this to be an interesting statement, and I wonder how it could be verified. Is there a way for anyone outside of Facebook to identify unique users who post content in the most recent month? What means exist to check how many former Facebook users give up using Facebook?
The YouTube favicon.ico is 318 bytes long. I threw together a crappy SVG mockup of the logo with absolutely no size optimization, and it clocks in at 429 bytes. When gzipped, they clock in at 233 and 248 bytes, respectively.

If you're worried more about the 15 bytes than about compatibility, then just have the logo scale up and use it for your main logo as well; it should actually save bandwidth that way.
Interesting article.

One thing to remember is that evolution != progress
It is good to see the M&A activity picking up. Zappos, Mint, now Omniture. The fact that companies can get enough cash to make acquisitions is a good sign the worst is behind us.
I find IRC is great for general questions like these. people don't mind helping newbies and since it's so ephemeral you don't feel bad asking lots of beginner questions.
"More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)"

How does that figure of about one minute per day for the worldwide population compare to time spent on such activities as talking on a voice telephone or watching television or World Wide Web use as a whole?
Cash flow positive at any point in time, even sustained for a few quarters, does not equate to "profitable". They have raised almost a quarter billion dollars. Their investors would likely want a multi-billion dollar equity event out of this, if that were even possible.

Those are very important financial points. It seems to me that the real estate business in the United States was largely cash-flow positive as recently as three years ago, three years after I was sure that it was all a bubble.
"I'll come out of the closet about this and just say what everyone knows: If the DataMapper community had more of a focus on addressing known, ticketed, reproducible bugs and less on pouring thousands of man-hours into writing specs it would be usable today. Frankly, I would recommend against considering it for your next project in the strongest terms possible.

Considering I created the project, nursed it through it's first couple years of development, and invented patterns like Strategic Eager Loading and Lazy Loading Contexts, which no other O/RM has to this day to my knowledge, that should say something. It's an epic fail of a project at this point."

-- Sam Smoot

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/162764036/why-do-rubyists-...
What I don't understand is how they can say the blue-eye mutation occurred in one single individual. I would think it is just as possible that the mutation could have occurred multiple times, and thus there would be multiple origins to those with blue eyes.

I did find a different source that would tend to support the randomness of mutations, and that also indicates that there are two different mutations that can lead to blue eyes, and as such, it is unlikely there is only one ancestor.
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=160
That's a lot money to spend on an analytics platform for Flash.

I can see that it might be big for video analytics (since most web video is Flash/FLV), but ...

Perhaps Adobe is hedging it's bet on Flash being a dominant web platform in the future? ... maybe they have plans for other (HTML5?) web publishing products/services?
It's not that great for deep personal conversations. But it is good for easily finding out whats going on in your friends and acquaintances lives. It keeps me connected to people I don't see a lot. It has usually been how I have found out about old classmates engagements and other major events.
I can see productivity gains in that more can be done without messing with a server side web framework, so there could be less maintenance.
It prevents honest mistakes. Here, somebody wasn't honest. I wonder what will happen to the guy at Apple who made the decision to set the "Yes, we're encrypted!" bit. (Probably he'll be forced to fire whoever he issued the order to. Poor guy!)
look for a mentoring or tutor list for your language

http://rubymentor.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

http://railsbridge.org/

http://www.railsmentors.org/

and python

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/
Similar to www.topcoder.com
The Downside of Transparency
Hm, $1.8 billion. That's roughly 2.5 million copies of Photoshop CS4.
Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned...The study of 267 pupils aged 11 to 18 found 63% felt addicted to the internet and 53% to their mobile phones.

Wow.

I wonder what has to happen before society takes a hard look at learning and technology. The only examples I can think of where laws or ethics have been created is the case of texting and driving, which is killing people as fast as drunk driving (or faster).

You'd think if the next generation were being made 40% stupider (a number I just made up) we'd care at least as much about that as people plowing their cars into each other.
The usual reason that you don't want to give up too much equity is because you're selling control of the company -- not because you're worried about losing a small percentage of your exit. The difference between $10.7 and $10 million isn't all that worrisome.

I don't see much of a reason to worry about that in the YC case. I'm not worried about them trying to take over the board or block an exit or forcibly change a product strategy.
My evolving view of open source licenses
There are plenty of other talented and well connected angels out there. You have to remember that before yc PG was just another dot-com millionaire (well he had the essays + lisp fame + anti-spam fame but in business terms not that much).

It wouldn't make much sense to go to YC if for example you were building b2b enterprise apps or targeting non-english speaking market where YC lacks expertise, but other YC-style programs might be much more suitable.
Guy Gavriel Kay starts journal for next book Under Heaven
http://spritegen.website-performance.org/
is similar. It has you upload a zip of your images and I think it gives you a bit more control over the sprited image it creates.
>I know that you believe you have them, and that I believe I have them, but that doesn't mean that they have any tangible reality

It does in the case of experiences. I can't even conceive of what it would mean to be mistaken about the very fact that you are having experiences. It would be a very different sort of mistake from that of being mistaken about the _object_ of an experience (thinking that you are hearing voices when there aren't any, etc. etc.)

Also, your use of the word "tangible" is very odd in this context. Almost by definition, nothing could be more tangible than an experience.

>[I know that] I believe I have them

So, do you believe that you have them or not?
Heh, I have made 2-pixel-wide text before. I certainly wasn't as pretty as the 3-pixel one here... but it worked! It always impresses people, but there are so many "gotchas" that it's really not practical.
> You'd think if the next generation were being
> made 40% stupider ... we'd care at least as
> much about that as people plowing their cars
> into each other.

Color me cynical, but I don't think so. Being intelligent isn't valued in society, whereas with cars everyone thinks everyone else is a danger to themselves and society and need to be constrained/curtailled. Generally person A doesn't want others to be intelligent, because it makes them feel stupid. Person A also doesn't want others to text and drive because it puts them (person A) at risk.

Hence laws will be passed to prevent text and drive, but not to prevent stupidity.
> I find myself hesitant about putting
> my business logic essentially on the front-end

Leave the business logic on the server where it belongs - but hide it behind a REST API, and leave the rendering to the browser.

I think that's the core argument, if you omit the "CouchDB as an app server" part (which is orthogonal).
Appearance, and not authenticity, was his goal. And the illusion of 'train' is excellent.
SpriteMe seems to only sprites images that are already used in a background. It would be more useful it had the option of spriting all images on a page and then gave you the HTML/CSS code to display each sprite.
This strikes me as a poor fit, way too expensive, and betting on the future of the Internet playing out in ways that are bad for open standards and thus bad for consumers. Betting on bad outcomes for consumers is a dangerous business.

Every major player except Adobe wants to see changes to how video and rich content are delivered on the web, and some of those changes (the standards-based ones like HTML video) tend to align with what consumers want (more widespread availability of video and rich content on their phones, netbooks, other operating systems, etc.)...and this acquisition is betting that Flash and Adobe content delivery mechanisms will become more important to the web ecosystem in the future. $1.8 billion is an awful lot to spend on something that seems very likely to decline in importance going forward.

Of course, I could be misunderstanding Omniture's value and how diverse their products are. Their website is a bit vague and confusing. Then again, I don't have an MBA, so I might just be missing something.
Live Social Semantics, part 01 on Vimeo
Top states for entrepreneurs
It wouldn't make much sense to go to YC if for example you were building b2b enterprise apps

On the contrary, I'm pretty sure YC are not only interested in such startups, they've funded some.
Perhaps western societies will implement technologies that have similar effects as opiates and then third world countries will produce the next generation of intelligentsia. As these third world nations develop, they'll sink in output as well.

Kind of like a Peter Principle for cultures.

Of course it may not play out that way. It may be that we end up with three strata of people: the non-connected, the connected-and-addicted, and the creatives. If so, it would be in the creatives interests to keep as many people as possible non-connected. (!)

Not sure. But I know we're headed into uncharted territory here. It has that runaway train feeling about it to me.
You can't link words. But any URLs will automatically be linked to themselves.
For more details, the corresponding paper may be found at: http://tinyurl.com/ksbobg
An example of how you shouldn't find software cracks
Yeah I have to agree it would be used for no good ;)

Hmm, maybe I'll just send him a link to this thread so that he can see that his behaviour does actually effect people.
The same can be said about dumb TV programs, flash games and even video games.

Never underestimate the "value" of "entertainment", especially on the internet.
I love it when a company you've never heard of gets acquired at these huge valuations. Its the type of motivational story that works for me.
What I've learned in 30 days since launch (and looking for a cofounder)
Introducing Google for the Public Sector
Yah I understand where it fits in their value chain -
I'm not saying that this is a bad acquisition for Adobe - its just a bit strange.

Here's why its strange to me. The web analytics space is very competitive and not very defensible. 1.8B for a company seems like a lot of money to spend when there are likely many smaller players that could be gotten for less.

Even as I write this though here's why I could see it making sense.

1. If Omniture is profitable. So you don't really lose too much if the investment pays itself back. (edit: they're not right now, but their stock is at about 1/2 where it was at the end of 07 so it could be considered a value?)

2. If Omniture is way ahead in the app tracking space. Web traffic isn't really new, but app tracking for Flash and other types of apps isn't as crowded a space, Omniture _might_ lead by leaps at this.

3. Turns on the Adobe as a service model. Adobe isn't a company with a lot month over month service revenues. Omniture fills this gap nicely.
The problems we're trying to solve:

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time...

The problems with the proposed "decentralized" solution:

Most users wouldn't trust their laptops (much less their mobile devices) to store content and serve it up 24 hours a day, so they would need a cloud service... A backup service is also necessary... impersonation and unsolicited communications (spam) are hard to solve in decentralized systems... nobody can be banned from a decentralized social network...

Has anybody asked a customer whether this tradeoff makes any sense?

And, incidentally, the idea that "RSS never goes down" is preposterous. When the blog goes down, the RSS goes down. When the blog changes URLs, the RSS goes down forever, or until you track it down again by hand, whichever comes first. I have a tiny handful of RSS feeds compared to most people, but I still have to routinely garden the darned things. And when the RSS feed isn't full-text, or has a weird error [1], it's not exactly down, but it does kind of suck on a permanent basis.

---

[1] For me, Roger Ebert's RSS feed can't be read properly in iPhone NetNewsWire. The first paragraph is full width, and then

it tends to shrink

like a crazy

EE

Cummings

poem,

until we're down to one word per line.. Only that one feed has this problem. I wonder whose bug that is -- NetNewsWire, or the blog software, or the configuration, or Ebert? I wonder why I would want to have to routinely deal with such bugs on a feed-by-feed basis?
It wouldn't make much sense to go to YC if for example you were building b2b enterprise apps or targeting non-english speaking market where YC lacks expertise, but other YC-style programs might be much more suitable.

While that was possibly true of b2b+YC in the earlier days, they have since funded a number of those kinds of companies. Ours was among the early examples in 2007, and we certainly have no complaints about their contributions to our business. pg has said on several occasions that the reason they fund the kinds of companies they do (leaning heavily towards web 2.0 consumer businesses) is because that's who applies. Viaweb was b2b at its core, so one can't really say they don't know that kind of business.
Is anyone actually using this architecture?
It's basically the only way I maintain online relationship with most of my non-technical friends. Most of them just use email and FB. If your only circle is tech savvy folks, then FB's value is probably not very high.
Something that people often forget when dissing vectors and SVG in particular, is that they're _scalable_ - so you can use the same version everywhere. So, you send the logo SVG once, and you could use it for the main logo on the homepage, smaller footer logo on the rest of the site AND for the favicon, because it'll scale. Browser just downloads one SVG file once, instead of 3 different bitmaps. Obviously, this is in everything-is-made-of-marshmallows ideal world where Internet Explorer doesn't exist, but hey.
The things we wish we knew when we started.
Yep, that is crazy. He's a good man too. In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjUXiwn9djU He talks about using the hair off the back of a fly to paint with and jokes that he'd never kill the fly, because it might have a family or something.
Android 1.6 SDK is here
What about a paint-style program where the user is presented in one side with the magnified version of the image that is actually split into RBG, and the actual image on the other side? This could allow to do similar things much more easily.
It is if it's just that.

I was thinking it'd be also like pdf and that other format adobe's been working on for ebooks (basically similar to pdf but better about reflowing text for different screen sizes) would wind up having fine grained analytics platforms built in (obviously in supported readers only) @ the chapter and paragraph levels or whatnot.

That kind of thing.
I was just guessing anyway - but I think it does not have to be a fully different ethnic group, maybe often people are attracted to someone who looks quite different. Of course there are those pysch experiments were people seem to rate the average face the highest, but I have heard the "attracted to exotic" variant too often, so I am a bit skeptic of that research.
To me, this is Adobe's play at being everything that it takes to build websites. Start with the tools and popular platforms and move right into the measurement and optimization.
Also, it doesn't mean the blue gene aids reproductive success - it might just be related to another gene that is adaptive.
Well they are a publicly traded company (OMTR) so it wasn't like the valuation came out of nowhere and the founders have already had their payday (though they have kept plenty of stock around). It was a 24% premium on share price or so.
I keep only 22 friends, and treat Facebook like an almost-private journal. Deep personal conversations work if you use Facebook like that. It's up to the user.
It's not clear that it was replacing productive time.
What is a fad? Is their staying power in line with IBM or AOL or are they something completely new an unexpected?

If we define fad as "something that exists, becomes engrained as 'the way' or a 'hot item' in the vernacular for a period of time, then fades away" everything is a fad. IBM still exists, but their fad period is over. The same goes for AOL.

The services may not be fads, but their periods of rampant popularity are. All the talk and attention will fade when people discover the next big thing to coddle their self esteem and egos.
wow, that's a tough quote from Smoot. I use datamapper for an app in production and have no problems, but to be fair, my RDB access is very straightforward and I don't use any of the relations DSL stuff.

Although I think a lot of Sam's work, his boast of inventing patterns of "Strategic Eager Loading and Lazy Loading Contexts" is hard to take. I wrote stuff like this in Samlltalk in the early 90s and again in Java in the late 90s.

From my perspective, I don't trust any of the ruby ORMs. I constantly watch the SQL they generate thinking any day I'll catch an error. This isn't to berate the developers, but to acknowledge that the approach to solving this problem domain is too "magical" for my tastes. This is one reason with my new app I'm going with mongodb. I get a less trusted DB, but my ruby code accessing it is closer to the metal.
Posting links, photos, videos, are all painful with twitter. Not to mention the ridiculous 140 char limit.

Doing so requires other startups! twitpic twitvid bit.ly etc etc

Startups, to add features to twitter that should already be there :/ madness I tell you.
It's the old institution that fears the rapid change and tries to cling to the traditional view of education and intelligence.

To those young people, they communicate clear as day with each other. To them, the propers are out of touch, boring, and slow.

I'm a young person and thus far have tempered my internet addiction quite well with a social life and plenty of book reading. I also follow the train of thought of the propers, clear, focused, and concise thought is expressed unhurriedly and deliberately.

I love writing clearly and professionally (albeit I am a bit lax in comments and discussion forums such as HN). But youth should not be forced to find that appreciation for the ancients; they should find it through their appreciation of what they are becoming and what the came from which is only something they can do on their own.

Technology isn't changing things for the worse, it is simply providing so much information that people (youngins especially) are trying to keep up with ALL of it. This is what creates the unfocused and distracted state of mind, not the technology itself.

I have high hopes for Linked Data, the Semantic Web, and more broadly: the data, information, knowledge pipeline. The more meaning we give our data; the easier it will be to have technology manage that mass of input for us: allowing people to refocus on the knowledge. The meaning.
If you don't want to sit through the whole thing, check out the segment 1:20 to 1:50.

When a gamer can do something that surprises the designer, that's pretty damn cool.

Interestingly the Ars Technica review said that this is a game you want to play with kids, because adults often are too linear in how they try to solve the problem.