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Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | kloncks: It certainly makes Google acquiring you that much easier :) |
Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | oscardelben: Make sure that you are not violating their TOS tough. |
Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | koenbok: If you build for appengine, you have options. Take a look at http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/.PS. I'm sure you know what you're doing, but from my experience the gae stack is really bad to build anything search at this point. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | cloudkj: Amazon Associates is a pretty good program that you can integrate into any consumer-facing site. When the Facebook app platform first came out a few years ago, I whipped up an app that integrated with Amazon associates in about a week's worth of time. Almost no maintenance since then (save for changes to reflect Facebook UI/platform upgrades), and it probably averages ~$40-50 a month, and makes several times higher during holiday season.Amazon's Product Advertising API provides access to lots of their data, so if you so choose you can make mini niche shopping sites with significant dynamic data.The only thing I'd be concerned about is receiving payments if you're not in one of the Amazon locales. Don't know if you need a valid tax ID or something. I think you can choose to get paid by checks though, if that works for you. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | LavaBrain: I would love everyone who has input on this to take a look at my topic ... which I created after reading all the great comments here.Thanks!http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172170 |
Can we help each other? | jolie: I'm not sure anyone should get money just for being themselves. "Selling out," a.k.a. having a job, is kinda how it's done. |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | jolie: How do you perceive the culture of the groups you'd be working in? |
Can we help each other? | LavaBrain: Clarification: My full-time, paying job is being said public figure. Just for fun, lets say I'm one of the top-rated personalities at one of the news stations in town. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | volomike: * Create Wordpress Plugins that do small tasks and sell them inexpensively.* Create small sitescripts that do only one small task and sell them for like $70. For instance, paid and free listing directory scripts, a twitpic.com clone, etc.* Create really nice XHTML/CSS and/or WordPress themes. I used to think those themes didn't make money, but then I heard that WooThemes pulled in $2M in 2009. So, that sent me for a loop. It's all about execution, presentation, helping the buyer make a decision on what they're getting, the right price range, etc.* Think up all the areas in your life you are excited about and knowledgeable about, and create blogs on each of these niches. Use a WordPress theme that supports ad blocks on the right, with space where you can either put your VideoEgg.com ads and things like that, or sell the slots. Create a CAN-SPAM compliant opt-in subscription list form where one can get your feed announcements by email, as well as receive pitches (once a month) for an eBook offer. To entice them, give them a free eBook for signing up. Send them only a monthly email. Start with other relevant eBook offers, but eventually you can create your own and sell those. Connect your blog post announcements to Twitter. Revise your WordPress RSS code (via custom theming or a plugin) so that occasionally a vaguely relevant CPA offer is injected in there every 6th post, or an eBook offer -- just as long as it's relevant.* Create the same sort of concept as the blogs, but with forums.* Add a live podcast or screencast to your blog, and make available the video or audio later on. This creates stickiness and excitement to your site such that the ads might get clicked.* Use multiple whitehat affiliate marketing strategies but in niches that you feel passionate about. So, if you like Model Railroading, that's what you bring up websites about, mixed in with different ad strategies such as eBooks, toolbar downloads, CPA, PPC, and CPM. Just don't overdo it and, as well, try to keep those ads a little bit relevant.* It's easy to write an eBook in an area you are passionate about, and then sell it. You could even purchase some inexpensive ones in a given niche you like just so that you have an idea of how to compose yours -- but don't plagiarize. There are tons of facts and statistics you can reprint if you follow proper copyright laws for these things.* Eventually once you get rolling a little, you can briefly hire a web traffic expert to see what suggestions this consultant may have.* Stay away from dropshipping, websites that supposedly make it easy for you to do something (like build a dropshipping business), selling offers you are not passionate about, greyhat or blackhat affiliate marketing strategies, or get-rich-quick schemes and guides.* Once you get strategies working, you need to go back and design them better, and collect feedback for a little while to make the sites look more fantastic.* Experiment on each of these things to see which systems bring in the most revenue.* Automate all of this so that you don't have to spend so much time fiddling with it. For instance, with forums, there are many "lost souls" out there who want to be moderators, and who would do well in that role for free even. You could then sit back and moderate the moderators. If it's a good year with earnings, then around Christmas-time you can ask the moderators for a paypal ID and send them a small financial gift of say, $200 to $500 USD and just preface it with, "I don't always have an opportunity to do this, but we had a good ad revenue year and your skills as moderator were partly responsible, so here's a holiday gift as a token of my appreciation."* Take 15% of all your profit, from day 1, and give it to charity. Clearly let your site visitors know this, and also provide them a donate button if they want to do that too. It boosts public perception of your site, the quality of guy you are, and so on. Plus, it's a tax write-off and for a good cause. Most of the time, this kind of goodwill increases participation on your site, rather than deflect it. And once a year, do a charity drive on each of your sites, using one of those thermometer things to show how much was achieved towards a goal. Start with a very low goal of like $2000. Compare your visitor levels to how much donation cash you received for a particular cause, and challenge your visitors to increase the needle on that goal every year.* Most of all -- don't over-strategize. You can polish later. Just keep it legal, keep it fun, be mindful of your visitor's interests, don't overdo it, reinvest as necessary, identify and avoid time-waster tasks, automate like mad, and watch and sometimes emulate what others are doing to help their sites. But most of all, just --do-- something rather than nothing.* And when you get bored with a niche after you've grown it, sell it for 30% to 50% more than last year's total earnings from it, even if you have to put the site on the market for awhile to catch a fish. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | dons: In 10 years I've had maybe 5 bugs in Haskell caused by foreign language code mutating objects under the hood, and that breaking referential transparency guarantees in the Haskell code.I would not consider this "dangerous". It's a side condition you'll need to check. The language can make this more or less easy to establish.Typically it looks like your value is changing under the hood. It's relatively easy to debug -- since the result is so unexpected.It's rare in Haskell. I imagine it is a bit more common in Clojure, where they rely more on Java code than Haskell does on C code.I don't believe Clojure is an optimizing compiler -- it's not doing any optimizations based on static guarantees of referential transparency -- so that simplifies the issue. If the compiler can't guarantee purity, there's less it can do with to your code to take advantage of that, so less unusual semantics. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | Confusion: If I understand the problem correctly, then it's much like a problem that plagues most hashmap/associative array implementations: when an object that is used as a key is modified (without removing and re-adding it around the modification), you'll often not be able to find it again.It takes some debugging to find this is happening, but in five years of writing Java and Python, I've only had it happen once in either language. |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | sz: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-origins-of-facebook-and-m...This is who you would be working for at Facebook. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | jacquesm: It sounds like it should be relatively easy to write a function that checks in case of doubt if any of the objects have their contents changed compared to their hashes.You could enable something like that during the debugging phase of your development to get 'peace of mind' that such behaviour is not the source of any bugs. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | cemerick: After using clojure as my primary environment for ~ 18 months, and leaning heavily on existing Java libraries for a lot of foundational stuff, I'd say that this is a non-issue. Of course, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble in any environment, but (at least for me and other experienced Clojure programmers I've worked with and whose results I've looked at) it's rarely nonobvious where unrestrained (i.e. Java-related) mutability is in the mix -- and in those areas, you take all the usual precautions that you would if you were using those mutable libraries in Java.The upshot of this is that if you're using a Java library, you'll generally want to either:(a) build a clojure wrapper API so as to enforce some sane semantics on it (see clojure.contrib.http.agent for a good example of this, where HTTP interactions are wrapped in clojure agents and a good set of convenience functions that make working with the JDK's HttpURLConnection and friends way more pleasant than usual).(b) confine the usage of key Java libraries in such a way that there's a clear line of demarcation between clojure's mutability and concurrency semantics and the free-for-all in the rest of Java. This is where the big win is in programming Swing interfaces, for example, where your core data model would ideally be implemented using persistent data structures and clojure's reference objects to ensure sane concurrency semantics, and you take all the usual precautions when touching the Swing APIs. |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | jacquesm: Google without a doubt.Facebook is just another chapter in the geocities/myspace/facebook sequel, true, they've done a better job than any of their predecessors but they'd almost have to by definition.One day there will be the 'next' facebook, I doubt we'll see a 'next google' any time soon.I'm no friend of either company (Google to me is way too opaque given the amount of control they've got) but when choosing between those two the choice for me would be easy. |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | sayrer: Mike Shroepfer, VP of Engineering at Facebook, hired me at Mozilla. I'm quite happy where I am, but let me tell you, that is someone you want to work for.* http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mike-shroepfer |
Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | TY: Thanks all for the replies!I'm leaning towards using GAE at this point, with a contingency plan to switch to a third party (most likely AWS) if needed. I do hope that the wall that separates App Engine team is high enough and Google has internal controls to prevent anyone from peering into our data. We don't compete with any of Google's core products (search, email and etc).Benefits of GAE are compelling enough for a scrappy startup to use it, even with all the reservations. What attracts us to GAE is:- opportunity to concentrate on the product and not worry about administration- this translates into tangible savings for a bootstrapped company, as we don't have to hire sys admins- it's easy to leave if we must:- our product is being written in a generic framework and all GAE-specific functionality is abstracted in a separate module.- Google does not lock in the data: since release 1.2.5, it's now possible to bulk export data out of GAE- low starting costsI'll keep HN posted about the progress. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | callmeed: There are some good suggestions here, and I'll chime in on a few things that have worked for me. Keep in mind that I have no experience with adsense or affiliate links.1. I second what peter said about screencasts or ebooks. We've made a good amount of money selling a DVD on SEO for a niche industry. Ours is basically all screencasts and basic SEO knowledge. If you have skills in that area or know someone who does, it can work. Granted, we did physical DVDs but you can just as easily do an ebook or web-based videos.2. Take the BSD-licensed iui code (http://code.google.com/p/iui), style it up, and tie it into some PHP scripts so businesses in a niche industry can create iPhone-compatible websites (i.e. "iPhone sites for plumbers and contractors"). Give them simple install instructions for basic web hosts and it will sell. We've done it and it's worked well.3. Niche industry WordPress themes. We just started doing this and it seems to be working. If you spin it for a "niche", you can charge more than the $30 themes you'll find other places.Hope that helps. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | jrockway: I don't want to start a language war, here.Then it's probably not a good idea to use the word "horrendous". Your commentary is not what would start a language war; your tone is. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | barrkel: Hash functions should generally hash based on a value's identity. Mutable objects passed around by reference have an identity independent of their value; mutable objects passed around by value, on the other hand, change their identity when they're modified.For example, one list isn't equal to another list, even if it has the same elements, if modifying one list doesn't modify the other. If they're not the same, then they shouldn't compare as equal.This is one reason I think Java's implementation of hashCode() on collection classes isn't very smart. I think .NET gets it right, having GetHashCode() return a consistent value for mutable collections. (Similar comments apply to the corresponding equality operation.)But mutable objects passed around by value are bad for other reasons, such as the risk of modifying copies when you think you're modifying an underlying value. |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | mark_l_watson: I use a lot of my (sometimes ancient) Java code with both Clojure and Scala. So far I have always written wrappers that copy Java data into Clojure or Scala 'native' data types. If you do this then there is little chance of having problems like those you are concerned about. It might be more efficient to use Java types, but not worth the hassle in most cases. (I also use (J)Ruby a lot, and I have found the secret to happy use of (J)Ruby is to give up the desire for good run time performance :-) |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | alttab: Doing targeted advertising that is utility is the best way to make ads not suck.The main reason advertising is annoying is because we are looking for something else, we don't need it right now, or its the wrong audience.If you had a huge spare tire and wanted rock hard abs, and the advertisement could prove the safety of your purchase, you would say "HELL YEAH!"When I was 16 the advertisement for Proactiv was very engaging. It worked and I was amazed. I'm no longer a zitty teenager so now I find their advertisements annoying.I recently joined the Spiceworks team, and it is free software. It is advertisement driven, but most in the case where you need it. It is IT management software. As an example, if you see your SQL server getting slammed, you could see an ad that offers you RAM for that specific machine. Does this advertisement suck? Probably not.One reason advertising could suck is due to audience. If you go to Digg (which has a wide audience) you are going to get wide or undirected ads. This is why targeted advertisement is all the rage these days - because its less annoying, and more to the point effective and win-win in more cases than not.I'd say to make advertising not suck, don't involve yourself in communities without a common interest or goal. If you are an IT manager and you are in an IT community, you will more than likely get IT advertisements. If you are watching MTV... well... |
an ad blocking compromise? | jacquesm: Wow, it seems to be ad-blocker day :)Yours seems to be a pretty well reasoned idea, I think it was Patrick that first suggested that ads in fact function as a micropayments service.I think the whole adblocker debate is overrated, after all it's not like everybody is using an adblocker, it's just a percentage of the users. And if your business suddenly fails because of that percentage then you didn't have much a business to begin with.Starting a service on 'eyeballs' is like working with an unwritten contract that you expect the owners of those eyeballs to honour. But they weren't party to the negotiations, and if they disagree they can simply erase that part of their screen, and really, not much is lost.After all, those ad-conscious enough to use a blocker are probably not exactly the people that would have clicked those ads to begin with. And most ads nowadays are performance based so the loss is really not nearly as big as some people make out.Blaming ad blockers for failing businesses is dishonest because it will change the bottom line only so much.A much bigger problem is the fact that a good bit of the advertising market is not transparent to begin with and that so much of the content out there really is hardly worth the bits it is stored on.Videos on news sites are a nice example of where we're headed, non-skippable ads tightly coupled to the content.The web equivalent is an interstitial page that you have to sit through before being allowed to view the content you came for.Personally I have no problem with advertising, as long as it is relevant and not 'in my face'. If I get a negative feeling with a site a few times when visiting because of overly intrusive advertising then I simply stop going to that site.Salon.com is a nice example, I used to read it frequently, since they started their overly intrusive campaigns I haven't been back. Chances are they've reverted in the meantime but I'll never know.As for the blocker-and-micropayment system, I don't think it will fly, people that go for freebies are not going to be turned in to people that pay, no matter how you dress it up. Think about it, simply seeing an ad is already too expensive sometimes.Until they have absolutely no other alternative. And on the web there are so many places to get your 'fix'. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | dabent: A lot of the ads I see that "suck" are for scam. Most, if not all of those ads are driven by rebills. If we can get rid of rebills, we can get rid of a lot of the crap ads. |
Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | 1010011010: You can. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | dpcan: We should be able to tag ourselves within our browsers.When I install FF, I should be asked what applies to me (tech, baseball, family) and then all advertising can look to this public info first and display what's relevant only.THIS should replace ad-blockers. Then we don't have to destroy our favorite sites' revenues and I don't have to see any prescription medicine ads.And get rid of ads I have to "skip", ads that "pop-under", and ads that cover what I'm supposed to be reading. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | shareme: considering cheap Android apps, that is cheap as in 2 week dev time, are easy to do..that may be an option to consider.. or as someone else has suggested take a well known CMS and start developing themes to sell for it.. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | petercooper: Bring down the editorial/advertising wall. Seems to happen a lot online but I think it's going to explode even in the established media once the efficacy of advertising tumbles. More payola, more "product placement", more links within the actual content to advertisers..Industries tends to find a way to win (or at least fight hard). Our content is going to get a lot worse rather than the advertising better, IMHO. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | vijayr: 1. Get rid of scam/cheating ads (rebills etc) and also pop unders2. Don't autoplay audio/video on the ads. Heck, autoplay is bad for content, its super annoying for ads.3. Increase relevance4. There are sites where I need to search the content inbetween ads. Would we tolerate if just 30% of our TV screen was video, and the rest were ads? (text, scrolling text etc). Maintain decent ratio between content and ads.5. Most websites don't even bother to experiment with other ways to make money, like subscription etc. quizlet turns off ads for a donation of 10$ (donations get some more features). Seems like a good experiment. May be others can try that? this could also be an option. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | bugs: Some things to consider for me:- Don't put ads where content should be, I hate when I'm scrolling and there is an ad where I should be reading (unless it is displayed at the end of an article)- Put ads in a designated area, and stick to that single area- Only display relevant ads if your site is about web design I don't want to see ads about belly fat or ebay- No flash or animated ads, this is so annoying and probably makes me leave sites the most because it is just distracting from both your content and my train of thought- Don't display too many ads, this is also a major problem and just makes me assume that there is no real content and you just want to make money (news sites seem to do this a lot) |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | tel: Imitate The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/). They produce beautiful, low impact, relevant ads which I frequently consider carefully and often click-through on. They do an amazing job and I've deliberately reduced the power of my adblock blacklists to see those ads.An example ad: http://hivelogic.com/They're clearly not even attempting to scale, but they have the ideas that -- if brought to scale -- could make advertising less sinful. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | sh1mmer: I normally write at least one article a month for ~$100 each, I could easily write more if I felt like it, but I'm not really in it for the money, since I have a well paying day-job.An article for an online programming 'zine normally takes me between 4 and 8 hours to write well (2000-4000 words). |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | lotharbot: 1) Advertise real products or services. Seems like 3/4 of the ads I see on facebook are scams or vapor. Carefully vet your advertisers to make sure they're legit.2) Make ads relevant. I'm a happily married stay-at-home dad. I'm not interested in dating ads, but ads for better bottles could get my attention. Keyword-driven or site-demographic-driven ads are a start. As dpcan suggested, browsers could allow us to tag ourselves and our interests, which would be even better.3) Get rid of common annoyances: flashing ads, ads that eat CPU and grind my browser to a crawl, ads on sites I might visit from work or with my kids that aren't safe for work/kids, popups/popunders, ads that block my view of the content I'm looking for, and misleading ads. (Again, if you're a host, vet your ads!)4) Do not compromise user privacy. Don't track my browsing; base ads off of the site I'm on or information I voluntarily tagged myself with.Many of the webcomics I read use Project Wonderful, and they seem to have a pretty good model. I regularly see interesting ads, and almost never see offensive ads, scams, or CPU killers. |
What happened to Vidly? | snissn: apparently Something incredible is happening..
http://twitter.com/vidly/status/10098033744 |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | keefe: Google does more right and contributes much more to the world than facebook. |
Submitted startup looking for feedback | keefe: Two minutes into the video I lost interest and moved along. The entire first minute can just be cut. A lot of the video looks like a test script on your site vs a demo - do I really need to see you enter your CC#? I also don't need to be told what a picture or a description are. Why not just completely cut all that and just run the demo while explaining to me why I don't just search google maps on my android phone? |
How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption? | jganetsk: This is a problem in Java too. Any object can mutate, effectively breaking any ordered collections that hold it. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | chrischen: > Google does well because the ads shown on search bring forth some form of utility.As far as my personal experience goes, I can't remember a time I encountered a Google ad that was useful for me, unless I was searching for "Amazon.com" and Amazon.com shows up in the sponsored links.But to answer your question, ads can not suck by simply being perfectly targeted. Even though perfect is impossible, that should be the goal of all advertisers nonetheless. Get as much info about people, and send them only ads you know will be useful. Advertiser wins because they got the word out about their great thing, consumer wins because they got a great thing. The only thing this ideal wouldn't help is a shitty product. Shitty products aren't great, so if they get undeserved attention, they just screw over more people. |
an ad blocking compromise? | swolchok: Your post is the weaker for its grammar and spelling errors. You would do well to fix them, because people notice. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | Rauchg: I think it comes down to specialized, targeted advertising outlets. A perfect example is what FusionAds is to the developer community. I enjoy clicking those ads (although I think they should allow more websites to display the ads). |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | apowell: A friend and I developed a proof-of-concept system in 2006 to address this opportunity. The central concept was that publishers would receive offers via our advertising marketplace, and then use their own selection algorithm to select ads to display (publishers could choose to use our hosted selection tools, use our open-source selection algorithms, or build their own). This would allow the publisher to use any combination of factors, such as ad format and perceived relevance -- not just eCPM. It is a flexible system that give the publisher the final decision to display or veto an ad.If anyone wants to read the whitepaper, feel free to send me an email. The truly adventurous can check out the patent application (#11948995). |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | mquander: It's impossible to make ads not suck. Fifty years ago, perhaps ads didn't always suck, before we had Metacritic and Amazon reviews and a million professional critics and reviewers writing online and social media telling you your friends' opinions about everything. All of those things are way more useful than an ad, no matter how well you target it. And soon, with augmented-reality stuff, they will be easier and easier to see whenever you are thinking about buying something.With all that, what the hell is the point of ads? They're just wasting the time of the people producing and consuming them. They do nobody any good at all. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | MichaelGG: What about voting/rating ads? I've seen it in a few places, and it seems so simple -- someone has to have information on how it worked out in practice.I would expect that having an easy, obvious rating meter on each ad would work in two ways. First it could improve targeting by having the user reject ads on a case-by-case basis. Second, ads that get rejected by a wide range of user types can be determined to be bad in general (ugly, offensive, annoying) and thus removed from circulation, automatically.Does anyone know why this isn't in place more? (Or perhaps I just haven't noticed it?) |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | jasonlbaptiste: What other verticals can you apply "thedeck" model to? |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | apsurd: How? Don't serve ads.Frequently on HN we get a lot of people who are great at building stuff but fall when it comes to finding and growing a userbase.We then have people that are great at developing a community, have a popular niche blog or forum, and are itching to monetize their community.Serving ads to solve this problem is like strip-mining for gold - ridiculous sediment to gold ratio.So what if we concentrated on the affiliate model. Rather than serving ads to your community, you vet actual products and services that your community would actually use and genuinely endorse the product openly. You could run a drop-in type of "marketplace page" for your endorsements. It would be clear to your community that you receive (large) commissions on these sales, but I reason happy users would want to help your site. I'm talking 50%+ commissions so you can easily profit share in terms of offering a better price than they'd pay going directly anyway.For product and service providers, I can't see a downside. They pay only from actual sales. The product is seen in a positive light (endorsed) rather than overlooked as an ad. And product providers could/should work closely to community moderators to iterate on their product.As of now this seems like wishful thinking I know, but this could definitely be worked out, and provided it was dead-easy to get started from both ends, it's worth testing.Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers. Develop community around connecting the two in a vetted environment. Profit off transaction fees. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | zackattack: I think one secret is community-based ads.
I'm happy to receive ads about products directly related to sites I frequent. For example, things produced by YC... I would be happy to peruse an "ads" tab (next to "jobs"/"submit") by my own volition. 2600 magazine does the same thing... ads by subscribers only... and they're always interesting. That's the key. Find ads that people WANT to see, so much that they're almost willing to go out of their way to see.Then again, if you really have high enough volume, why can't you just try EVERYTHING and then only show ads that get high CTR? Isn't 5k impressions a sufficient sample size?What about using graphs of campaign clickthru rates for individual people (a la directededge)? |
an ad blocking compromise? | _delirium: Doesn't this have, as a huge issue in the critical path, someone solving the holy grail of the past 15 years: actually getting a micropayments service off the ground? It needs to work, to be not so much of a hassle for people to use that they won't bother, to have fees low enough that they don't swallow all the cash, and to have enough of a critical mass of people who already have accounts so there isn't a hurdle to sign up to some new obscure service just to donate your $0.05... |
Can we help each other? | jasonlbaptiste: Would be more than happy to shoot the shit: j@jasonlbaptiste.com |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | zackattack: For every youtube video, i should see ads on when the artist is next coming to town by me. Find out where i live by simple ip address geolocation. Get commissions on ticket sales. If the artist isnt coming soon use the panoply of recommendation systems to just find out when similar artists are comin instead |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | 3dFlatLander: I like the 125x125 image ad format. It's just big enough to get my attention, and small enough so the publisher can stack in a few of them without taking up too much space. I think it's been gaining a lot of popularity lately for those who sell adspace directly to businesses.A few examples that come to mindhttp://betterexplained.com/http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee (bottom of the page)http://37signals.com/svn/ |
an ad blocking compromise? | gfodor: I dunno, this whole "I'd pay for the site if only it were easier to do so" argument reeks of the "I'd pay for music and movies if it was easy as downloading MP3s" argument.Nothing is stopping you ad-blockers from sending them a check in the mail. This isn't a technology problem, it's a "why pay for what you can get for free" problem. I don't doubt there will be folks who would pay if given a easier option, but I'm having a hard time believing they would come in droves to offset the lost ad revenue. |
Partners and Expenses | bkrausz: 1) Consider it company hardware such that if one of you leaves they must give up the hardware.2) Each of you has to sign off on the other's purchase, that way neither of you can spend too extravagantly. You should trust each other enough not to work to game the system, and this should put a good enough check in place to prevent it (again assuming some amount of trust). |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | Kaizyn: I was going to suggest Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but several others already did so. While this would take you some startup time and money, you could go the ebook sales route as suggested here:http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/I wish you the best of luck with trying to find a way to make a decent living. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | khangtoh: I have a domain and an idea, I pay you $400 and you work on this project and launch it in a month. Revenue is advertising. I own the site/code, you get the revenue from ads up to $400, anything excess is mine to keep. How's that? |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | starkfist: facebook is still pre-liquidity event.google has more options for working outside of mountain view. if you're on the right team, you can go work in nyc, london, a farm in arkansas, etc.there are more Bs and Cs at google. they hired a lot of duds during the great hiring spree of 2007-2009.google is almost like having a regular job. if you don't have a psycho as a manager, you can live like a semi normal human being, leave work at 6pm, have hobbies, etc.facebook will be more life-consuming.I find it hard to believe that you got an offer at both places and didn't get a gut feeling about which one you'd rather work at. |
Mario AI, Google AI like contests ? | skant: Links ..
http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/ |
How many of you are working on an iPad-optimized web app? | jiggity: I think the issue with webapp fart apps is they'll be dependent entirely on ads. What fueled the novelty apps for iPhone was the fact that you got paid first through the app store. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | mmrath: ^_^ Just Do ItI learn to make money online and adsense same as blogshttp://bydholding.blogspot.com
http://makemoney-mrrath.blogspot.com |
Mario AI, Google AI like contests ? | _delirium: There's a Starcraft AI competition at a conference in Palo Alto this fall, which is probably the hardest in this category of competitions (playing a full Starcraft game well is pretty nontrivial), though there are also three categories for restricted versions of the game: http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | mmrath: Your can make money online with Affiliate Program.
So., It's have many Affiliate Program ProviderLearn at. http://forum.digitalpointcomMy regard ^_^Blog sample for makemoney with Affiliate Program
http://bydholding.blogspot.com
http://makemoney-mrrath.blogspot.com |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | rms: If you happen to live in Southeast Asia or Oceania, email me, I sell a plant that grows in that part of the world but is mostly unknown by the inhabitants of those areas. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | PeterCaan: Are you skilled in RoR, Wordpress/PHP or Vbulletin? If so I have work for you. Please let me know your skype. |
Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users? | bobfunk: Tsung could be a good option: http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/It is a very technical tool, and it sure could use a bit more documentation for getting started, but it does what you're asking for.You can set it up to run as a proxie and connect a browser. Then you record various sessions of typical browsing of the site you want to test and Tsung will save them in an xml format.Based on these xml sessions you then setup a test plan for Tsung where you can define phases. The idea is to make the phases increasingly tough on the site with more and more users arriving per second.Once you have the test plan you let Tsung loose on your servers and you will get some nice graphs and reports. If you made the later phases brutal enough you should get to see at what point the increasing traffic makes your site die and you will know wether that point is something that could realistically be reached during normal use... |
Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users? | revorad: There were recently some threads about problems with wifi at conferences. They might be useful:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870554http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870489 |
Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users? | iamdave: http://www.solarwinds.com/products/toolsets/WANKiller.aspx WanKiller is a pretty capable tool. |
Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search? | rms: Google and Facebook have somewhat different corporate cultures. You may be more comfortable with one culture than the other.Otherwise, go with Facebook. Your Google stock options can't appreciate that much faster than the broader US stock market. With Facebook, you still might have the (not?) irrational exuberance of an IPO. |
Writing for Americans | JacobAldridge: I think if you're writing for an international audience, stick with whatever comes natural to you. I know (I'm Australian) that I use BrE spelling here on HN and around the web.If I had to think about using AmE then two things would happen:
1) I would almost certainly miss some. If you use the word Defense ten times and spell it Defence once then it looks like a spelling error.
2) It would interrupt the flow of my writing. Anything that interrupts writing is bad. Why let the writing itself get in the way.But of course, know your target market. I'm working on a product for the US right now, and the extra effort checking for BrE is annoying, but necessary. |
Writing for Americans | AnneTheAgile: I tried to google and find your post but could not see it. I would think the word scrumbut is a typo [or perhaps crass], but without seeing the byline or the article I would not know for sure.Please don't curse in your writing but any local color is very nice! Personally, just as I enjoy hearing foreign accents in real life, I enjoy seeing them on the web. It helps remind me that the web is a many splendored and located place :). |
Writing for Americans | jamesbressi: Maybe I speak for myself, but just like accents, I like reading the English spelling of words--and dare I say prefer it?I think it is absolutely fine. Now, if your bigger worry is getting the SERP pages on Google, then I can tell you it is very rare that I do a search and come across an English or Australian article in my results with the English spellings.I know that wasn't your original question, but it is a fascinating one that I just thought of while replying to you. |
Writing for Americans | billswift: As long as they are the standard spellings, it shouldn't make much difference. It's the unexpected spellings, especially the ones that make your readers stop and wonder what you are trying to say that are problems. Anyone who reads much will be as comfortable reading the British spellings as the American. I use some spellings interchangeably - I am more likely to write "grey" than "gray" and I spell "defence/defense" either way (it is possible that I have even mixed them in the same essay - which is generally a bad idea). |
Writing for Americans | jcdreads: Write in your most natural voice; and with your canonical spellings. The only British-isms that I have trouble getting my head around quickly are the over-casual dropping of place names and neighborhoods in London. But we Americans grow up reading plenty of Dickens and Orwell and Shakespeare and whatnot, so just like a British accent we can handle it as long as it's consistent.In general, you will do quite well to have even your American audience think, "Here's an well-written Brit." |
Writing for Americans | niels_olson: We have an Australian resident in our surgery training program. He's going bald, has bushy eyebrows, and wears glasses. People have been treating him like a professor since day one. Even the faculty revere him. |
Writing for Americans | j_baker: I wouldn't worry too much about spelling. That isn't a big deal. However, you might be careful about some words. For instance, I might have to pause for a second if I read lorrie instead of truck. |
Writing for Americans | byrneseyeview: It's better to be consistent. If you try to Americanize (Americanise?) your text, you'll probably miss something, and it will look like a typo.That said, in some professions, affecting British spelling will make people trust you more. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | SnaKeZ: Create a simple site and publicize it :) AdSense or Sell Links and you will earn more of $300 a month.
Be careful with Google penalty ;)This is my experiment: http://www.readthislink.com |
Writing for Americans | neiljohnson: Guys, thanks for the feedback, based on the discussion I've decided to stick with the British approach even with titles, and have submitted the article here.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173473ThanksNeil |
Writing for Americans | anamax: It's not the different spellings of common words (gray/grey), it's the different words (scrumbut?) and different meanings (we call it the hood, not the bonnet) that will interfere with communication. |
Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users? | wendroid: Can do you 1 millionhttp://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/sandia-co...They use that to model Botnets etc. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | pg: Anyone getting stock from a startup should know what percentage of the (fully diluted) company it is. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | tptacek: This question comes up all the time here. There's a very simple answer: Yes. If equity is a significant part of your compensation, you need to be informed of how to value it.Here are all the caveats and wrinkles I can think of:* Ownership percentages are deceptive. If you're an employee (meaning: you start with a steady salary), 1% is a big number. With 19 employees preceding you, you're probably not getting 1%. After funding, the founders may be only high single digits themselves.* 90% of 0 is 0. You need to be asking questions about how equity might become worth something. This isn't as hard a conversation as you may think it is. Startups often sell for rule-of-thumb multiples of revenue. Ask: two years from now, what's the top line revenue of the company going to be? Will the market value the company at 2x that revenue (a consulting company multiple), 4x (a product company), or 8x (a product in a red-hot market)? Take all the numbers you get and work back what the company is saying you might make if the company gets bought, and then scale it by the likelihood that any private company gets bought favorably. Otherwise, all the "percentage" you get is is a point score for your ego.* (most importantly) Even if you know what the shares are worth today, you don't in fact know anything about what they're worth by the time they become liquid. That's because every single financing event in the company will reallocate ownership. Every round of funding is going to impact them. In extreme but not (unfortunately) rare cases, your shares can be worth nothing even in a tens-of-millions-of-dollars acquisition --- this goes double if you leave the company before the liquidity event. A company with a stock plan and 20 employees has spent a lot of money on legal to ensure that you have no rights.I just got back from a huge industry convention in San Francisco, and after talking to a lot of friends there, I've come to this conclusion: tech people are unbelievably awful negotiators. Let me make a suggestion. Do what you'd do if you were buying a car. Negotiate the value of the transaction in an objective currency: dollars. Then, when the company tries to "finance" the deal in shares, you at least know the dollar value they're trying to assign to the shares. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | tyrelb: You should know at minimum the current value of the shares (i.e. last funding round price) and the number of shares + options outstanding.Options are also horrible - unless you have some agreement which allows you to exercise them upon a liquidity event (i.e. buy-out, IPO). Get shares vs. options when given a chance. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | krav: If they won't give you this information, ask yourself if these are the type of founders you want to work with? |
Functional Programming Differences | dget: I think numbers 2 and 4 are going to be the most valuable in introducing functional programming. I've been using Scala to learn functional programming, and the hardest conceptual pieces for me have been been staying immutable and using recursion.Another point I'd consider is "avoid side-effects". |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | johnrob: Equally important is the reverse question: if a prospective employee doesn't demand this information, should I hire him? |
Writing for Americans | wrs: Don't worry about the spelling. What strikes me as odd about British writing is the scarcity of commas. I feel rather breathless reading British writing, and often it's difficult to parse. (I'm pretty sure most Americans would have put more than one comma in your >100-word question.) Not to worry, though, it just adds flavor. |
Functional Programming Differences | lnp: Programming with expressions (functional) vs programming with statements (imperative). |
Functional Programming Differences | scott_s: "Our programming model does not have to match how our computer works."I think one of the biggest intellectual hurdles with functional programming is that we know, deep down, that modern computers don't work like that. They do have side-effects and changing, carried state. It's a revelation to realize that the programming model you use to write programs doesn't have to match how the computations will be physically carried out. |
Functional Programming Differences | unignorant: You might include something more explicit about function composition (e.g. the power of currying).Closures might be another thing to mention. For instance, you could show how they can be used to implement objects (which should be familiar to C# people). |
Functional Programming Differences | eru: I tend to avoid naked recursion whenever possible. It is not much better than loops. Combinators like foldr, filter and map reduce the cognitive overhead. |
Functional Programming Differences | eru: How about using an application to illustrate the power of FP. Combinatorial parsers are a neat non-trivial, but (hopefully) understandable, choice. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | naner: > How can we make ads not suck?If there was some kind of nonprofit "respectful advertising alliance" that enforced consumer-friendly practices and provided a whitelist to import into adblock plus, I might use it. It would be hard to define what is consumer friendly and enforce the rules, though.The only site I've disable adblock on is Reddit. This is because their ads use inside jokes and are sometimes humorous and always non-intrusive.I don't see what is so nice about Google ads. They look crappy on most sites and are rarely useful in my experience. Also not a fan of Google's tracking with adwords. |
Functional Programming Differences | lambdom: Functional programming make testing easier.
Functional programming make threading easier.
Functional programming make understanding things easier. (i.e. easier to understand something that will never change vs understanding all the possible permutations of something)(Sorry for my bad english) |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | qjz: Try a classifieds model where content providers don't place any advertising on their pages at all. They then put a "Classifieds" link on desired pages, that takes you to another page filled with targeted advertising relevant to the article or site as a whole. As a bonus, let the content providers have an opportunity to select or vote on ads to reward quality and improve relevancy. The classifieds page doesn't even need to come from the referring site, as it is completely separate from the content. If advertising is so wonderful, this model can't fail. It's less intrusive and encourages the advertising industry to provide something of value. |
Functional Programming Differences | caffeine: My version would be slightly bigger-picture (some are the same as yours, though):- Functional design is about breaking a problem up into a series of transformations (functions) on data, rather than modelling object states and behaviors.- Compose the transformations by treating functions as first-class citizens. Introduce map, filter, foldr, etc. here- "Functional" = Avoid side-effects! (wrap an I/O layer around your pure core processing instead) Otherwise the composing breaks.(optional):- "Start little, grow big", "factor relentlessly" - these are good concepts in ALL programming, and they apply here too.I think if you just get those points in an hour, along with a nice example (I think F# comes with a web crawler that illustrates all these points), you'll have done very well. |
Writing for Americans | Qz: I think people who read tech blogs are educated enough to know that defence is not a typo (despite firefox trying to spell correct me as I type that). |
Functional Programming Differences | icco: I'd focus really heavily on "stay immutable", "use recursion", and lambda functions. I think these things take a little effort to get used to, especially if you are stuck heavily in a certain programming paradigm as many Microsoft focused guys often are. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | jokull: I've taken numerous conscious and subconscious decisions to eliminate ads from my life. I don't watch broadcast television and I don't listen to broadcast radio. I don't regularly visit sites that whore out their pixel space (and even the content pixels with floating ads). It's easy for me because I know where to get good content without these media channels. I like to believe the net result is less fatigue at the end of the day. |
Functional Programming Differences | baguasquirrel: "stay little, grow big" is probably one of the less-appreciated points there and I'm exuberant that you noted it. It's also something that they likely won't encounter until they've actually tried writing something more open-ended in a functional language, like a full-blown program of any sort. It's like telling people to use MVC for a GUI. Important to mention it, but it's going to take some experience before it's down pat. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | bfung: Repost of a link that was on HN before that answers this question. I liked it so much that I bookmarked the submission. http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees |
Functional Programming Differences | alan-crowe: I think that there is a stepping stone, half-way between "talk" and "code". I remember a question on comp.lang.lisp. A student had the task of writing a "sublist" function, for example, (sublist (a b c d e f g) 3 2) => (d e). He task was to do it functionally and he was stuck.But would supplying code unstick him? It seemed unlikely. Thinking about the equation "Concepts + details = code" I wondered if there was a way of conveying the concepts first, before getting down to the details, and wrote:Put on your Dijkstra robe, and sit in your arm chair, with a
cup of tea, and write on a pad of paper, made from dead
tree, using a pen with real liquid ink. This is mathematics
not computation :-) (sublist (a b c d e f g) 3 2) = (sublist (b c d e f g) 2 2)
= (sublist (c d e f g) 1 2)
= (sublist (d e f g) 0 2)
= (d . (sublist (e f g) 0 1))
= (d e . (sublist (f g) 0 0))
= (d e . nil)
= (d e)
compare this to peano arithmetic (- 7 3) = (- 6 2)
= (- 5 1)
= (- 4 0)
= 4
If you want to learn recursion you should move quite quickly to writing code because that animates your recursions and clears up any lingering misconceptions. On the other hand, jumping from the words "learn recursion" direct to code is a big leap. Recursion has its own soul, separate from its embodiements in various programming languages. |
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