skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually glad the comments here are a debate on the technological aspects and there's little commentary here on whether this is right or wrong. This kind of commentary is exactly where HN should be and often is, I'd like to take the time to point out to everyone who regularly bemoans HN is turning into reddit: it clearly isn't!

I find the CG rhetoric to be aged and irrelevant. The paranoia is so prevalent they sound like two kids smoking up in a dorm room, they use no explanation and cite no information for the paranoia than 'its the man'. It's pathetic. It's a tech website and there's barely even a passing mention of the technological feasibility of this project, and what examination of the feasibility they have is very weak and based on poor assumptions.

The assumption that the NSA will have thousands of HDD permanently running is absurd. Quite literally 1 cubic meter of 50GB blu-ray discs easily stores ~2.75 petabytes of data at an expected lifespan of 10-100 years (this is based on pure physical dimensions alone, and not storage dimensions). A single 100 disk stack of 50GB BR discs should store ~4.8TB of data. This makes the mass storage solely dependent upon write capability rather than size requirements.
You should add that NO landing page analysis is near complete without numbers from testing.

My experience with landing pages is that your deepest assumptions of what is better can be proven wrong by your visitors.
I am genuinely curious if people here on HN calculate monetary value attached to their website visitors. I know patio101 (from BCC) must be doing that but does anybody else here does that?
you really do sound angry about it. and not in the constructive way. take a deep breath and get on with your life.
Celebrating its death
How the Internet is changing Halloween ?
How Halloween - the most web-friendly of festivals - has been twisted and embellished by creative online communities.
It's very challenging for ad-supported models especially during start-up stage where there is a lot of fluctuation in ad rates. It can become easier to calculate after a couples years when your company's settled down and you've some consistent ad rev sources.

I think a lot more folks that sell a service get into this kind of calculation from the get go. Isn't this what conversion rates/ROI are all about?
Yep, right. I think resolution of regional conflicts hasnt taken far. Plus solution to arbitrarily defined regions called countries hasnt taken too far
Ha, you've been to my website. Thank you for your words--I do feel better.
Why not just get one of those 0% apr for 12 months credit card offers and use that?
I agree with you completely.

This whole weekend (including Halloween!) I have been stressing about a paper I need to write on a topic I am not remotely interested in. This reminded me that I need to both relax about the unimportant stuff and make sure that when I am done I look for the most valuable next step.

Truly, an excellent quote, and an excellent article.
There is no good argument for semicolon insertion except to be newbie friendly. And, as pointed out in the article, semicolons can be inserted in unexpected places causing hard to find bugs. In the end, that isn't friendly to anyone including newbies.
22 points for this? Really?

1) Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night bull session.. Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be starting to be reined in..

You do realize that Schmidt has been there since before they went public, right? ie, he was there for the hiring. They currently have slightly less headcount than at their peak, but they say (in their last earning call no less) that their main limiting factor is their ability to hire good engineering talent.

2) "Collapse of advertising.... New market makers will enter and take Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit)"

Any evidence to support this? Given how effective AdWords is, it seem unlikely that people will stop paying for it?

"Ads on such a "decision engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not CPMs"

You mean kind of like the "Action based commissions" that Google is trialing with selected vendors now?

3) "They seem well on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize what system software runs on them."

What does this even mean? You mean they haven't open sourced their BigTable implementation? They did publish the BigTable paper - that hardly seemed "closed, arrogant" to me.

"They wound up, a few years back, outrageously overcapitalized."

Do you mean how they left money on the table when they floated using their dutch auction style of stock allocation?

Or do you mean their stock price peak of $700? That is around 20% above it's current price, and given that the US is on the tail end of a recession it would seem to me there is a fair chance that peak will be beaten within 2 years.

GOOG's current P/E ratio is around 34. That's fairly comparable to APPL (29), and Goldman Sach (36) - all seem fairly reasonable for companies showing strong growth in earnings.
How is this defined? The stories from the past week with the most votes?
Agreed 100%.

I get the feeling that many of the people who tout the iPhone/Tablet as an eBook reader have never tried a Kindle or something with e-ink. The experience just doesn't compare, and you don't have to worry about an hour of reading doing serious damage to your battery.

Also I lost all respect for Om's analysis abilities after hearing him talk on This Week in Tech a month or two ago.
Yep, it is mostly about conversion rates. But this metric includes retention rate, which almost every website (including ad supported ones) should optimize for.

I agree with you that for websites just starting up, it can be hard. In that case before full knowledge is there, industry standard conversion rates and value of goals can be plugged in. Replace those estimates by actual values as soon as you have a good idea about rev sources, as you say.
My favorite data-driven decision: one company I worked at ran a contest for the best-converting copy for the homepage. The secretary came in first place, the marketing guy came in last.
Right. By "eventual vision loss," I meant the permanent kind. It's everyone's responsibility to go stare at some mountains every once in a while :)
You are right! I added a bit at the end. Reminder to always do testing when you can!
Medical Imaging and Oil Exploration. A lot of the really fast packages are using ARB Assembly instead of GLSL to minimize the number of instructions per voxel. It adds up if you are doing 4D imaging in real time for instance.
I have to agree with this article. Since getting the Kindle app for my iPhone I haven't used the Kindle itself once.

There's no doubt that the Kindle is better for reading than the iPhone. But I always have the iPhone with me so it's easier when I have a few spare minutes to get some reading done.

And I often read in bed and the iPhone screen can be read without supplemental light whereas with the Kindle I need a light on.

The app has some useful features to reduce eye strain, too. You can change the font size, lock the auto-rotation, and change to white-on-black for night reading.
Interesting.. Don't know why the OP would recommend they have a foreign accent though.

I think the accent should be relevant to the country you're in... Unless your product is Beck's beer or Outback steak house..
It's not Hacker News until someone corrects you with facts.
Actually, 'Social Contract' is a term on its own, that is many things to many people, but in general, it is the idea that societies have unspoken rules in order to maintain order. I do not think he is diluting the term, as it (or at least the concept) has been around for quite some time.
Is that study documented? Looks interesting..
The article strikes a chord with me as well, although I'm probably not as much at the limits as you describe yourself. Your responses herein strike similar chords. Ignore the hecklers. So far as I can tell, your conclusions are correct.

The mass of humanity isn't up to your standards, being far more interested in 'having a good time' than 'doing something useful'. The problem is that this mass of humanity is practically the only tool you have to work with. How do you decide what's useful without considering how it will be used by other humans?

For me, the answer is something like 'produce tools that others can use to further their own goals'. Some of their goals I'll agree with, others will seem like a waste. Time will tell which are really which.

In the meantime, it's nice to meet others who share similar goals. Surround yourself with the best people you can find, according to whatever standards you establish. Be kind to those for whom you lack respect, but don't let them set your direction. Iterate rather than trying to figure it all out in advance --- better to die trying.

I'd be interested in knowing what your other account is, so I can follow your posts in the future: <nate@verse.com>.
Contrary to popular belief, assembly is not only used for performance. Ask the security industry for more info.
I've always heard that expressed as the Simulation Paradox: either full-fidelity simulations, a la The Matrix, are impossible, or we're already in one.
Umm...just FYI, Microsoft is still very much a tech leader.
If you take one thing from the "agile startup" folks, take this: refactor your processes so that testing is not a "nice thing to do when we can" but is central to your business, such that you can scarcely imagine changing code without A/B testing it.

It is amazing how much more I A/B test now that it is one line to do. Previously, I'd go back and forth with myself about whether I should add a feature or not, worried whether the marginal utility would offset marginal complexity. I don't worry about these things anymore -- I just implement it and, toggle it with an A/B test (1 line of code), then track conversions at the next step in the funnel (1 line of code), and wait a week.

Concrete example: Next up on the development roadmap is a color selector. I've put it off for three years out of the fear that color selectors will befuddle my core user, but every few months someone asks for it. Why worry when you can implement it, wait for data, and rollback (almost) instantly if it doesn't pan out?

Writing a landing page? Write two calls to action. Takes essentially as much time as writing one since you mentally brainstormed six anyhow. No problem, chuck Mr. Second Best in there. It only takes a line. Customers will humble you with how many times Mr. Second Best trounces your best writing. (Customers will humble you with how many times Mr. Total Garbage trounces your best writing, too.)
Anything that's worth spending time to do fast is worth spending time writing SIMD assembly for.

You can get 5x, 10x, 20x, or more performance increases just by using the vector instructions given to you by the CPU. Until a magic compiler appears that can make proper use of them (read: never), hand-coded assembly will be critical for almost any application for which performance is critical, especially multimedia processing.
Multithreaded TCP Proxy Tunnel
Sometime back I posted a guide in the HOWTO section on load balancing across multiple ISP connections. This is great in certain instances but certainly doesn’t replace line bonding.
This "third unlawful copy" really highlights a glaring incompatibility between copyright law as it exists and digital technology.

As it now stands, it is possible to argue that purely incidental copies of digital data are subject to copyright law. The law that used to regulate what a mid-sized or large enterprise did with its printing press now regulates what happens when someone presses "play."

That's not to say that copyright lawyers and "big content" aren't pleased with the law as it stands, but it increasingly fails to generate a beneficial tradeoff between incentivizing content creation and supporting a rich public domain.
It might happen. German has many of the same ablaut series as english, so where english has sink-sank-sunk and wink-winked-winked, the corresponding german cognates have sinken-sank-gesunken and winken-winkte-gewinkt. But many people now use the early 70ies joke "gewunken" and think that "gewinkt" sounds weird.
That's the problem with affiliate offers, the legit ones don't make any money, so after a few months you either decide to join the scammers, or you pack up and cut your losses.

Facebook can't really fix this. The affiliates are always 2 steps ahead of them. If you get banned as an affiliate, it literally takes like 5 minutes to setup a new account.
I posted a comment on the blog, but I wanted to share this and generate a conversation on Hacker News also. I found another low-budget way to do this :

I have a good friend who is a budding film student. One night over drinks, I was discussing my recent endeavour - trying to create a great and simple text advertisement that summarises what Webnet IT does. My friend, who is a naturally creative guy, started coming up with a whole bunch of ideas, which turned into video ideas, and then over the course of the evening we worked out a plan to make a video together.

In return, I gave him plenty of exposure, provided all of the locations, bought all of his coffee (a not insignificant expense), and talked him up to everyone I came across who was looking for a corporate or private video to be made.

Here is the end result which we're really happy with : http://www.webnet-it.co.jp/index.php/en/content_page/nice_to...

Our target was to create a simple story that a typical company that needs our services would regularly face, and turn that into a fun and hopefully engaging story.

If you're looking for something similar, I recommend seeing if you or your friends know any film students, and try to work out a reasonable and mutually beneficial deal with them.

I'm very interested to see how other people on HN in similar situations have created videos to communicate their businesses.
This is cool/appreciated.
But I don't quite understand why it doesn't appear on the top nav unless you're already viewing it. (At which point the nav is less needed :D ).
Co-founder here. Did something similar for start-up costs (about $18k).
How is that paradoxical?
To become so bureaucratic that all the smart people leave.
Original Gift Company
All the latest articles from OGC.Original Gift Company articles, scotts co, OGC October articles.
Inner loops of graphics algorithms - Picasa, Photoshop, etc.
Could play into Google's hands though if they tried to directly compete against windows, they would now have a great angle to convince people why they should make the change to a more open and neutral system.
I am 34, have used one at work for about one year, and love it.
Like Yahoo!
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How much were you willing to bet?
This recent new yorker article gives some interesting background on wittgenstein's extremely neurotic (and intersting, of course) family. Apparently three of his four brothers committed suicide, as did one of his sister's
husband. I personally didn't understand his books - I guess a lot of what was revolutionary in his ideas (language games?) had already been absorbed and taken for granted by the time I was born.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/04/06/09040...
I did some assembly optimization for an internal RTL-level simulator. We had ~1000 machines on a three year upgrade cycle, i.e., we upgraded 333 machines / year = $333k / year. Lets say I cost the company $200k / year. Several days = perhaps $2k, so I'd only need to get a .6% speedup for it to be worth it, not even including the cost of powering and maintaining our machines.

When I worked on it, our simulator was an order of magnitude faster than commercially available simulators (Synopsis VCS and Cadence NC-Verilog), which cost between $1k and $10k per license per year. I worked for a tiny hardware startup; established hardware companies use a few orders of magnitude more compute power than we did, so the equation is probably at least four orders of magnitude further in favor of doing assembly optimization in a commercial simulator.
You are in an uncomfortable but probably sustainable position bootstrapping the business by "working two jobs." If you raise a small amount of money that doesn't allow you to "bridge the gap" (i.e. replace your salary for long enough to allow you to become sustainable) you now face some very hard choices.

This is a recurring topic of discussion at the bootstrapper breakfasts (http://www.bootstrapperbreakfasts.com). We have seen folks do better bootstrapping by "working two jobs" (or consulting and building a product).

If you come on board "full time" can you consult on projects with newspapers to replace your current income? That might be an alternative that would allow you to align all of your work efforts more closely than two unrelated jobs.
Debugging and performance monitoring.
That has more to do with reading assembly than writing it by hand.
http://news.cnet.com/Web-ad-blocking-may-not-be-entirely-leg...
MLComp - The Best Method for your Data
Supporting backwards compatibility in vtable lookups. This is becoming increasingly important with COM.
Wittgenstein was a terrible person who hit children, hard, on the head:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

> His severe disciplinary methods (often involving corporal punishment, not unusual at the time)—as well as a general suspicion amongst the villagers that he was somewhat mad—led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of his students' parents, and eventually culminated in April 1926 in the collapse of an eleven-year-old boy whom Wittgenstein had struck on the head.[29] The boy's father attempted to have Wittgenstein arrested, and despite being cleared of misconduct, he resigned his position and returned to Vienna, feeling that he had failed as a school teacher.

But Wittgenstein was a much worse philosopher. He wrote, for example, confusing/obscure attacks on the value of philosophy itself. Not having any philosophical problems one is interested in or finds fruitful is completely understandable. And of course a person in that situation won't make any useful contributions to solving philosophical problems. The weird thing is why he's considered a philosopher, let alone a good one, by anyone.
Good point. But on the other hand, companies like JetBrains, Atlassian, Unfuddle, GitHub, BitBucket are still around making good money.
Well to be honest, I am shocked that the illegitimate ones make so MUCH money. That is unbelievable.
Check with your lawyer, but the SEC has some overviews here:

http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm#eod6

Sounds like a lot of hassle for those 35 non-accredited investors you get with Rule 505/506. I'd also be interested if anyone else used that mode for non-loan investments.
Ask HN: Renumeration working part time with a start up
I'm talking with a friend about helping him take a technology he is licensing from a university and productizing it. In essence, I would be the product manager for this product/company. The technology is very interesting and about 70% of the way to "shipping quality."

My job would be pretty standard product management: Determine the feature set needed to ship, figure out how to position the product, ensure launch readiness, and probably roll over into marketing as we go public.

While I'm sure I could put in as much time as I wanted, it will likely be around 15 hours per week until we get the company to a point that its either making money or is ready for seed funding.

The question is what should I ask for in return? If I went straight-percentage of the company, what is a reasonable percentage? Would there be any reason to ask for cash (discounted rate) and stock?

Thanks much!
The figure of merit here is really hard drives/square foot. Mainframes use the same hard drives as rack-mounted or blade servers, and it is unclear how much the computational substrate matters in the context of storage capacity per square or cubic foot.

Additionally, your wording seems to imply that you think a mainframe would be significantly more dense. While you may cut down on extra NICs, power supplies, cases, etc. by moving to mainframes, the high degree of redundancy in mainframes in general, and their storage subsystems in particular, may well cancel out this advantage as it pertains to density.
If people doing SEO found tricks that Google isn't able to overcome, and those became prevalent and persistent enough, people would start to lose faith in the quality of search results. Then they would go looking for other search engines.
Karl Popper was in that century. And Richard Feynman. That's two good philosophers.
Very true. In my life time I hope to see "they/their" as both singular and plural. It would save me a lot of time because I dislike having to write "he or her," "his or hers," or think of a creative way to write around the idea completely.

I also hope to see the alienation of the comma-quotation rules (always inside). -Maybe I ask for too much
Microsoft Research: Making the Shortest Path Even Quicker
not really surprising. The rebills make a hundred bucks or so in revenue for the company that basically just sells sugar pills/ringtones, so they can afford to pay well to affiliates, since these guys are willing to spend thousands of dollars to push the offers.

A legit company has to spend money on actually providing a quality product. + the legit company has to give the full information up front, while the scammer can trick the user into pulling out a credit card.
this isn't for a CD by the way, it's for a digital download.
IMVU hand-rolled its SSE skinning loops and parts of the software 3D lighting code, because only 2/3 of our customers have GPUs. We need to run well on five-year-old Dells with Intel graphics. (Direct3D on Intel isn't as good as a dedicated software renderer. We chose RAD's Pixomatic.)

In addition, look at how popular netbooks are becoming. The Intel Atom is an in-order CPU. Imagine a hyperthreaded, 1.6 GHz 486...

On the iPhone it's even worse. It's got a decent vector unit, but the CPU is very slow. You'll see great wins by doing your 3D math yourself.

As we continue to become multicore, I could imagine somebody shaving a couple cycles out of the core message passing routines, though you're almost certainly bus bound in those situations...

Computers are getting smaller and people want more out of them; assembly language is back in style!
Spam from me (I know the author of this book) about a recent book on LW:

http://www.amazon.com/Wittgenstein-Flies-Kite-Story-Models/d...
There is plenty of good music playing software; furthermore, one may end up saving money by not paying the itunes store =]

I like this unofficial solution.
It's all about programming in bed, while lying down.
Let's kill the OS upgrade disc
Signal processing algorithms on the phones made by a certain company I worked at are mostly written in assembly. The cellular protocols, at least those that use time-division (e.g. GSM), have strict real-time constraints, but mostly they use assembly because every microsecond you can shave off those algorithms is a microsecond you can sleep and conserve power.
Oh, I forgot about another huge case for writing assembly language... These days, we have tons of different languages talking to each other, all in the same program. In Mozilla, for example, JavaScript talks to C++ objects via XPCOM/XPIDL. Since the C++ objects expect data laid out on the C stack in a certain order and JavaScript has no notion of the C stack, there is a bit of platform-specific assembly code in the middle that takes the JavaScript values, places them on the stack, and jumps into the C++.

I'm guessing that most languages with built-in foreign function interfaces (like Python's ctypes) have similar thunking layers.
Best ride on for kids
Best ride on for kids at reasonable Prices from Toy Electric
A compiler can't be made to make proper use of vector instructions? Why is that?