skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about selling a video version for those who don't know what to do. Download and install Captasia, Create a video that explains how to do it visually, and then put a link in your page to buy it for a small price. Also consider a PDF version with more screen shots and very percise instructions (supported with comments from your post) etc... But keep this post free as it's the launching pad. Also don't over sell it. Just be honest and say "EDIT: I noticed that this page is very popular so I made some suplimentary material that you might be interested in buying if you found this post hard to understand". Hell I'd even go so far as ask for donations.

But the trick is not to make it sound like your wanting to make a business on it. Then people won't be put off because honestly, you probably won't make a mint on this post. You'll probably see less than 1% of visitors monitizing.
Anyone has counter-arguments for Redis? Because seen that way, it looks pretty awesome (or even more, perfect). I really have to check it.
Kinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3 letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any 3-digit number).
I'm not convinced that redefining Pi as 2*Pi would cause an equal amount of complications (besides confusing everyone with the change). The radius is more fundamental to a circle. The diameter is just derived from the radius. The idea of a circle with a unit radius is so widely used that it is simply called a "unit circle" with the obvious implication that the radius is what the "unit" refers to. Every time I've done math with radians, the fact that Pi is only half way around has added a subtle but noticeable disconnect. I have to force my intuition to fit the definition.
Improved AbiCollab, collaborative document editing using AbiWord
He mentions using Typinator. Does anyone know how it compares to TextExpander or TypeIt4Me?
How is that different from the current $100B+ advertisement business? TV, press, Google all sell "our time".
Thanks! Yes, when you grow in a direction at right angles to yourself, you don't increase in magnitude. So the turning arrow is the same length at the end as it was at the beginning.

This is actually a slightly tricky point, because it requires the direction of growth to change as you grow. If you grow by a finite amount all at once, then you do get slightly longer. So you might expect an outward spiral.

But a point moving round in a circle is always moving at right angles to the radius connecting it to the centre.

And in the same way, an arrow whose tip is moving at right angles to its shaft isn't extending. If the length is changing, then the direction isn't 90 degrees.

To reason about this properly I think you need some sort of theory of infinitesimals and continuous motion.
Faith, Terror and Response
Imagine, for example, if professors routinely sold part of their lecture time to any startup that wanted a few interns.

I don't need to imagine. Most of the conferences I've been to work this way.

There are many ways to look at this. One is to note that, if I needed a job, I would probably pay cash money to attend a series of 3-minute commercials by companies that were looking to hire interns. Indeed, this is a lot of what Stanford students are paying tuition for. In the building next door to your college classroom is a job placement office that specializes in exactly this. So I'm kind of dubious about the assertion that this is some kind of terrible disservice to the students.

Another way to look at it: "sustainable growth" is highly overrated. It's not merely that it wasn't a criteria of the original problem -- which it wasn't -- but also that judging what is and isn't "sustainable" is an exercise in predicting the future. And, like all exercises in predicting the future, it tends to miss a lot of the good stuff. You find yourself saying things like "This business plan won't scale past the first 5000 customers!" or "If Netflix catches on, Blockbuster will get into the business and crush Netflix like a bug!" or "How could I ever make a million dollars doing something this trivial?" or "How can Twitter succeed after the open-source open-protocol Twitter Substitute comes along, as it surely will, any minute now?" [1]

But the most obvious conclusion is: Just because you can't do it twice doesn't mean it isn't worth doing once. If I were a student in that class, I would surely have been happy to sit through a three-minute presentation, though I'm not sure I would have heard much of it, because I would have been too busy rolling on the floor with laughter at the scope of the other students' awesome hack. But, yeah, it won't work a second time. Everybody knows the punch line now.

---

[1] Hey, if people didn't believe stuff like this I wouldn't see it pop up on HN every three months, like clockwork.
Xerox develops breakthrough in printable circuits
Haha - that was a great video. Thanks!
The real lesson here is: Break the rules.

The rules were, 2 hours and $5. No one spent only two hours and only $5. The first suggestion from the class was a $50 house party. Tire pumps cost more than $5. The restaurant reservation scheme occurred the next weekend.

The last, most creative team was perhaps the only one that actually followed the rules, assuming they sold the class time in those two hours.
Nice! I didn't know about this forum. I'll ask around in there.
Ad man behind '1984,' 'Think Different,' and 'I'm a Mac' stepping down
Cool idea. Any ideas for monetizing the microsite?
Within its particular sweet spot (in-RAM data structures) I think it is probably the best option out there. I also like the fact that it seems to be moving in the direction of becoming "memcache++"; providing a useful superset of interesting data structure operations in addition to the standard set of memcache features that most people have come to rely upon. It almost seems that memcache is now so tightly coupled to the standard RDBMS mindset that there is nowhere else for it to go. This does not diminish its utility, but it makes something like Redis more appealing by offering the same set of features plus a few nice additions for some other common data types.
Well, you've got an engaged audience, and you're telling them how to do something for free. I'd probably focus on related products or services. If they're on your page, you know a few things about them: they don't know how to transfer an iTunes library, and there's a good chance they just got a new computer. You might try affiliate programs for tutorials, must-have Mac software, utilities, online backup services, etc. Generally speaking, CPA makes more than PPC, and PPC, generally makes more than impression-based advertising. Do some A/B testing to see what works and what doesn't. With the traffic numbers like yours, you should know pretty quickly if something is working or not.

If you want to try more short-term, sleazeball tactics, you could always do paid linking, affiliate payout-based "ratings/reviews," popunders, zero-click redirects, etc. They work well on sites with short life spans, but really drag down sites over the long term.
See 2 year old sample photo here: http://sites.google.com/site/vlisivka/zatoka
Glad to hear. There are a ton of reasons why Sequoia might not invest in a company they have priority access to, many of which say nothing about the company. If I were an angel their lack of involvement wouldn't deter me.

On the other hand, I'm not an angel and probably don't think like most of them.
For me, on Mac OS X, flash is much more inefficient than JQuery animation, especially in Safari and Firefox.
What CouchDB brings to HTML5
I did the same with Now and Laters. Buying them in bulk and selling them individually to kids at school.
And again, none of these can be done in 2 hours or leverage the $5.
Bravo. You have a gift for explanation. This is exactly the sort of explanation helpful for someone (like myself) who has been through all the foundations at one point or another, but sometimes forgets the big picture.
First of all, that will go into an infinite recursive loop and blow your stack.

Second, why would you call the upvote function here? The name suggests that it's a pure function that returns a boolean, but for some reason you've introduced side effects. Naughty, naughty!

Third, you seem to be using Common Lisp, but you're using Scheme's naming convention for predicates. In Common Lisp, you would name it should-upvote-p, for consistency with everybody else's code.

(I've been grading papers all morning for an introductory programming class, so this post was a reflex.)
Thanks for the resource link. I can't wait until Firefox can do this. I want to use webkit animation in my website, but for now they would only work in Safari and Chrome.
I'm amazed by the number of people in this thread who have gotten the challenge wrong.

They didn't only have 2 hours to conceive and execute their idea, nor did they have to limit themselves to the $5.00.

They were given an envelope that contained an unknown amount of seed money, and then they had 4 or 5 days to decide how to make money with it. They would only have 2 hours once they opened the envelope to make as much money as possible.

The challenge wasn't what people could make with $5.00, it's how the teams dealt with a set of unknowns in order to make money.

(Edit: Someone disagrees with me, but I'm not sure why. If you watch the video, it's quite clear that this is the case. I'm not just stating an opinion here.)
Why would you waste 25% of your time making balls you could buy for $5? Go to a 99 cent store, there are tons of balls in there for under $5.
$4 would be a pretty reasonable RPM for this page. Anything less, and you're probably losing money to poor ad relevance or poor ad provider revenue sharing.
There's not really much substance to this article. It would be interesting if the somewhat recent threads regarding nocebo/placebo responses were extended to ghosts.
They had 4-5 days to plan before opening the envelope and discovering $5.
How about adding a Mac Mall (or similar) affiliate link for iPod cases, sleeves, FM transmitters, even those big ugly clocks that you can "dock" your iPod to.
Great thinking on Mac software, utilities and backup services!

It's funny, I've noticed, year-over-year, the traffic spike on this post on Christmas day tends to grow at the rate of Apple's market share. So, anything that is good for a new Mac user would be good for these people. Would love to hear more ideas on this from everyone!
You could experiment with donations. It seems you already have a decent amount of data on AdSense. It'd be interesting to see how, say, PayPal donations perform.
Howabout not monetizing it? Will you not rest until every piece of useful human discourse has an invoice attached?
I learned Python by reading the official tutorial and hacking away until it made sense. I did the same for O'Caml, and later for Haskell (although that one took longer). Isn't that normal?
Ah, so it should be more like $64?
This happens all the time in the material product world. You go to customers, get their orders, then have the products made. Watch some Shark Tank on Hulu. Anyone with a product and tons of inventory is scorned by the panel.

They all say, "Get the sales, then make the product." Why are you going to invest thousands of dollars stocking a product you aren't sure you can sell?
Great find. I just tried to submit it to HN, but the domain seems to be dead-listed?
See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912500
In the real world you probably wouldn't have constraints unless you were working for someone.
Link to Amazon Affiliate link for latest iPod model?
Yes but those long lost people also have friends... closer friends that they would actually care about reading the status feeds of.
It's just a back-of-the-napkin estimate, but yeah. Try as many options as you've got time for, analyze your performance data, and get a higher performing option in place before your holiday surge.
But to maximize the $5 was NOT the exercise...
Well I understand what you're saying here, but you're over-thinking the problem (like an engineer). The point of the exercise was to get the students excited about entrepreneurialism.

The real world (read Wall Street) has plenty of constraints and people are always gaming the system to make a buck. So in this sense, it's a valid exercise.

Edit: In terms of "gaming the system" I'd like to think of this as leveraging opportunities in the system for a particular gain, not "cheating" the system.
I'll tell you any easy way. It's less than $5. Get a hot girl, a free blog account, a PayPal account and take tasteful pics of her - ask for donations to get access to more pics of her.
"Enough said."

No, not really.

I don't get the use of this phrase. It feels smug, as if there's some special understanding that everyone is just supposed to "get", or else you're just not with it.

Either say something, or don't, but please don't play coy in telling me that you're not going to tell me something.
Suggestions:

(1) figure out what who the users are specifically.

(2) sell sponsorship to advertiser

- - - - -

(1)Who are the users?

I would encourage you to create a POLL in the top right hand corner of the white area where the story text is.

Use polldaddy.com or similar.

Survey the users with selling the advertising space in mind.

I am going on the assumption that you are correct in the after-Christmas boom, that most people are coming because they are switching computers.

So poll is "Why are you here?"

a) I just got a new Macinosh computer!

b) I just got a new PC.

c) Transferring the files to a new computer I already own.

Once you have that data, you're ready for part (2)

(2) Sell sponsorship.

Right now you have a "follow me on twitter" link, you have a email opt-in box at the top.

These users are not nearly as valuable to you as they are to companies with businesses focused on new computer users.

If your poll conclusively proves that you have 10 - 30k people showing up with new computers each month I would sugget that you:

a) Create an advertising box in the same spot that your poll goes - top right of the article.

b) Sell this box to an article Sponsor and tell the sponsor that you'll let them plaec a special offr, a follow us on twitter / facebook, and an email opt-in box at the top.

Finding companies that would be interested in sponsoring a post with thousands of people that just bought a computer shouldn't be too difficult. Best way to start is to think about all the bloat-ware that comes with a new computer:

- anti-virus
- live customer support help
- ISPs
- accessory manufacturers
- publications like macworld / pcworld / etc

If you average out 16,000 views a month and have strong advertising messaging in that box, it's not out of the question that you could achieve a $20 - 30 ECPM (earnings per thousand impressions) taking you up to $300 - 500 a month in revenue vs. current $40.00

Hope this helps.
On The Wisdom of Elders and [Its] Decline
We've been using MogileFS for the last few years to host all our avatars. It's fast and powerful, and has had very few issues.

It's definitely a solid system, though was certainly overkill for our needs (if I could do it again, I would just use s3).
Yes, because the lesson I really want people who are thinking of working on Wall Street to learn is that they should be trying to cheat the system.
Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud:

Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely.

What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus, which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under five bucks?

Yeah, they probably had to already have the tire pump and gauge. I presume that "what do we have in our closets" was an important part of the process of choosing this business plan. ;) And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own. This isn't accounting class.

did they make the reservations at 6pm and then sell them before 8pm?

Why not? Remember: They're doing this in parallel, using multiple team members and multiple restaurants. And, given the anecdote ("this works better for restaurants that hand out little buzzers") we're not talking about the sort of reservation that needs to be obtained hours in advance. We're talking about people paying for the privilege of jumping the line and turning a 40-minute wait into a 4-minute wait. You can get through quite a few cycles of that in two hours.
<i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i>

Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.
Agree. My argument is only that you won't know whether the changes you make are positive or negative until after you try them, so change lots of stuff and see.
For anyone that was momentarily confused by johnaspden's explanation of how (0,1) squared became (-1,0), there is excellent explanation of it here:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/answers/imagexist.html

I'll gratuitously paste the relevant part here, but the summary is that to multiply two tuples, you simply take the cross product, as you would a binomial.

---

Remember that any collection of objects for which there is a definition of what the objects are and when two objects are equal, there is a rule for how to add two objects, there is a rule for how to multiply two objects, and these rules obey familiar arithmetic laws like commutativity, associativity, and distributivity, is, by definition, a number system.

These properties are all satisfied by complex numbers.

We have a definition of when two complex numbers are to be considered equal: they are equal if and only if they are the same pair of real numbers.

We have a rule for adding two complex numbers (which, remember, are nothing more than pairs of real numbers):

(a,b) + (c,d) = (a+c, b+d)

and a rule for multiplying two complex numbers:

(a,b)(c,d) = (ac-bd, ad+bc)

The rule for multiplication may look very strange, but there's nothing wrong with that; one can still verify that these rules do indeed satisfy the familiar properties of arithmetic.

Therefore, complex numbers form a number system.

Within this number system, is there an object which, when squared, gives -1? Yes. It is the pair (0,1). When you square it using the above rule of multiplication, you get

(0,1)(0,1) = ( (0)(0) - (1)(1), (0)(1)+(1)(0) ) = (-1,0).

Strictly speaking, the complex number (-1,0) is something different from the real number -1. After all, it's a pair of real numbers, -1 and 0, not a single real number.

However, complex numbers of the form (a,0) behave identically to the way ordinary real numbers a behave. They add and multiply in exactly the same way that ordinary real numbers do:

(a,0) + (b,0) = (a+b,0)
(a,0)(b,0) = (ab,0)

Since numbers are just abstract concepts anyway, and since real numbers a and complex numbers of the form (a,0) are completely identical as far as their arithmetic behaviour is concerned, it is perfectly legitimate to view them as just two different representations of the same underlying concept.
Aw, c'mon man, it was a joke. I know it wouldn't run...I was trying to express the ambiguity of the recursive irony, or something. I would never put side effects in a real predicate if I were really writing this.

But I would still name the function whatever the hell I want because it's Lisp and I can. ;)
Fucking amazing. Thank you!
Hindi Arabic Chinese characters in your domain name registration
This is merely an academic "bounding/framing" exercise in every sense of the word. Pure entertainment.

A better measure of business creativity would be to allocate the same fixed budgets of labor and materials to all teams and record revenue, profits, and judge the sustainability of the solution at the end of a more reasonable operational timeframe--say 1 week.

The "winning" teams operated under entirely different working budgets for materials and labor during their prep time and 2 hour window.

It's made even worse as the professor immediately demerits the 'party' example due to the costs of the party supplies and setup. Apparently, Stanford student time & attention is "free" for one team, but worth $650 for the other.
Agreed - delivery is the important aspect, when it comes to just-in-time order fulfillment. If they don't deliver, then you don't deliver either.

On your last point, I agree again: scale is critical. You describe something that might work once, given that there are no supply chain screw-ups or customer service problems. At the scale you describe, you can probably absorb any costs associated with these problems, but you will eat into your time and/or profit to do so.

My whole point is that the risk doesn't disappear just because you haven't invested any capital; you've just shifted the risk.
The objections are essentially "I believe that the AGW science but I don't believe the mitigation science." Since the latter is mostly a subset of the former, this is interesting.

The science behind the mitigation effort may be wrong, but none of the objectors are making an argument that turns on specifics. They accept AGW on faith or because of values and they object to mitigation for the same reasons.
Boys and girls, he is a dying breed. No, I don't mean a dying breed of creative genius, rather the dying breed of individuals who are actually with a company for 30 years. How many of us last more than 4 years at a company now-a-days?
Google’s GPS Move May Not Be Fair, But That’s Business
If you want to max out the value for a lower-traffic site or page think "sponsorship". It's a little more effort to sell. Find a single advertiser who will find this article to be more valuable than some random CPC or network CPM advertier, and sell them the page exclusively for a period of time. Someone who sells a paid iTunes utility, maybe. Allow them to brand the whole page -- like the background. For the right advertiser it could be a no-brainer to pay over $10 CPM.