Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project? - <AUTHOR> Have a side project which is an analytics web application based on 100k+ records. I was initially thinking to get a small payment from each user. But it appears to me that - information provided can be easily scrapped from site (if someone really wants) and it won't make sense.
So I am thinking of revenue model based on ads. At its 'full' potential web application can draw a million visits per month (in 2-3 years may be).
Adrevenue calculators show adrevenue of $2000 dollars for a million visits[0] with 2 pages/visit and $1 RPM.
How realistic are these adrevenue calculators ?
Can anybody share their experience with real numbers and insights.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/business/website-ad-revenue\
edit: reformed sentence <comment><USER3> I make about $600/mo pretty consistently with a typing game ([http://zty.pe](http://zty.pe)) - about 200k visits/mo.

I once managed another project that had about 14m visits/mo and made a meager $3000. Bad target demographic.

<comment><USER4> Wow, [http://zty.pe](http://zty.pe) is really fun!

<comment><USER5> Oh yes! :-) First try: 1866, wave 15, 96% accuracy, 244 streak.

Should have a donate button on the page (because uBlock..). Edit: Or: Register to track progress over time with a login, for a low fixed(?) fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It varies greatly based on type of content. The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site. We had Netflix and Hulu advertising on in through Adsense for awhile and their ads were specific to the individual TV shows we were writing about. The RPM's were amazing.

I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month.

More tech content sites or other more general sites I have ran haven't gotten anywhere close to those #'s.

Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well.

Ad placement also makes a difference. 1 well placed in-content ad can make you a lot more than 3 ads. That one well placed in-content ad can generate a higher CTR and CPC vs. if you place 3 ads. When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC. I have tested this extensively.

<comment><USER7> > The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site.

> I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it > made $9k/mo

Congratulations. That is pretty impressive, and you repeated he success twice. Do you still run those? Is that your full time job?

> When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in- > content ad is much lower as well the the CPC.

Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions? Isn't that how it works and why you see sites with 1000000 ads?

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I don't run either anymore. The TV show site started off as a side project to train a new employee and ended up turning into a nice little business for awhile. When summer hit, the site plummeted in traffic & revenue and when the TV show seasons started again both Hulu and Netflix where not advertising the same anymore. That combined with the TV show line up was horrible so the traction just wasn't there anymore. It was fun while it lasted.

I shut down the Minecraft site about 6 months ago. Traffic also plummeted being that mods are not as popular because lots of the kids are now playing Minecraft with the app or consoles.

It's not my full-time job. It's always been more of a side thing. I don't think I would be able to sleep at night if it were my full-time job. Way too much risk with it.

"Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions?"

You would think but actually no at least not for all of the tests I did and I did a lot of them. You don't really make your $$ from impressions. You make $$ when people click on your ads. If the ads that are displayed are very relevant and your CTR is really good, you make more money.

<comment><USER7> Isn't Minecraft still popular? Why shut it down rather than let it sit there or sell it?

I'd think with the increasing popularity of Netflix that'd still be popular as well.

<comment><USER6> It was a site about Minecraft mods which don't garner as much traffic as they once did. I did consider selling it at one point and even spoke with a web broker. The biggest concerns were trademark stuff especially now that Microsoft owns it. Letting a content site just "sit there" is the same thing as letting it die, which is what I pretty much did. You gotta keep on generating good content if you want to make $$ at it. In addition to that, the content you do generate needs to be able to garner enough traffic to make that $$.

Yes, Netflix is still popular but they were not pushing as many display ads as they once were when the site was doing its best. Plus the TV show line up sucked after that summer and nothing really was sticking. After taking into account the cost to hire and manage contract TV show writers, cost to advertise it, hosting, etc. the revenue it was making wasn't enough for it to be worthwhile. Especially considering our SaaS products and Advertising Agency were growing.

<comment><USER8> I run a modding site and are always interested in small sites even if dead. Reach out if interested it might fit what we are looking for

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife's blog[1]

A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here's more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4]

Caveat: Things take off once you cross around 700—800K US traffic. Until then it can be frustrating.

[1]: [https://alittlebitofspice.com/](https://alittlebitofspice.com/)

[2]: [http://d.pr/i/bIBobD](http://d.pr/i/bIBobD)

[3]: [http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M](http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M)

[4]: [http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA](http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA)

<comment><USER7> Wow I had no idea food blogging was a profitable thing. Congrats to your wife.

> If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between > networks

Isn't that impossible to get 100% filled? I recall reading a while back that getting even 40% was challenging which is why the ad quality online has gone down and they're more intrusive?

Lots of interesting stuff on this thread, thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER10> Food blogging is an enormous market. The best foodies don't get money from Adsense though, it's through sponsorship/affiliate deals, books if they hit it big.

It's quite a stereotyped field though, and I would imagine it's a saturated market. Everyone wants to be like Deliciously Ella [1]. Don't even try unless you have a studio setup for the photography. Lots of food authors are pivoting towards more (usually female oriented) "lifestyle" blogs which happen to have recipes.

A lot of food blogs target healthy eating, or niche diets like keto/paleo. There are also tons of specialist food blogs covering bread, cakes, etc.

[1] [https://deliciouslyella.com/](https://deliciouslyella.com/)

<comment><USER9> You are right. We have around $3000 worth of lighting equipment, lens, etc. But we acquired them along the way.

Sponsored content is a good chunk of money (close to 30% every mom) but its nonscalable.

<comment><USER11> Can you elaborate some more on this? What kind of equipment and resources for learning more about this?

<comment><USER10> Typically: DSLR, large aperture normal zoom lens, 2 or more external strobes, softboxes, reflectors, tripods, and flash triggers.

Have a look at Strobist which is specifically aimed at flash photography.

Otherwise just look in photo or recipe books, food blogs and shamelessly steal until you get the hang of layout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have couple of small side projects that which are monetised through ads. Portfolio of those web apps are 7 years old and traffic is growing linearly. The problem is revenue, which is basically cutting in half every 12 - <USER2> months: both CTR and revenue is going down.

There are a lot of people with adblock these days, but also mobile traffic is not that profitable and people learned to ignore the ads as a noise. I am also using just one small rectangle per page and not going for more aggressive tactics.

During those 7 years I am down from "these apps are paying my rent" to "I can have a one meal in a nice restaurant each month".

The point is: it is getting much harder to make money by having ads in your app. Also make sure that all the information are recent and comes from your market sector as is changing real quick.

<comment><USER7> > There are a lot of people with adblock these days

And it is soon to be built into web browsers, you have to wonder the impact that will have.

<comment><USER13> isn't ad block easy to thwart? Sites like forbes and fortune do

<comment><USER12> Yes, I can do it, but I respect choice of my users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if YouTube counts here.

On the weekends I upload videos for artists from my home country. I have one channel that is fairly popular. The artists themselves are not big enough to attract many people to their own channels so the use mine. We split the ad revenue. I pay them locally. My take home after deductions is anywhere from 5k to 8k per quarter.

EDIT: added payout period. I give payouts per quarter because as i said, they are not big artists, so it would be tedious sending small amounts to tons of people each month.

<comment><USER15> That's pretty impressive. I'm curious to hear how your YouTube account gained enough followers to make this possible. It would be difficult to convince an artist to upload it into your account before you had traction.

<comment><USER14> I started the channel by posting some videos that were not allowed to be played in the country, then some protest videos that became very popular and were taken up by news outlets. So at that point, it got a lot of subscribers. Sat on it for a while doing nothing, then i realized there was an opportunity. I tried to explain to some artists initially what YouTube could do for them. Most of them didn't understand. They'd just put up their stuff on Facebook or Soundcloud. So i initially did it without their permission. I took 2 really popular artists' material and put it up on the channel then sent a letter at the end of the month with a report and asking them how they wanted to be paid. Out of the blue, they had someone offering them money. So then we had a conversation.

Some other artists already had channels, so they were hesitant, so i approached some of them and tried to explain momentum. They didn't understand either, so I took the same material they had on their channels and put it up then gave them the reports and checks at the end of the month as well. Then they understood it would be tough to go it alone. From there onward, it was much easier getting artists to post on the channel.

I am now looking for ways to move the thing forward. I am getting to a point where I have too many uploads which sometimes dilutes the attention, so I might open another channel. Unfortunately I am not large enough to manage other personal channels as a small MCN.

<comment><USER15> That's a great story. Thanks for sharing.

I think it's common on sites like HN for us to see your original post and think "he uploads videos and gets how much?" But it's the backstory that's interesting. What events led you to have this unique opportunity that you are now capitalizing on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have some YouTube videos that total half a million views, which is not much, but enough that I could be monetizing. I don't turn on monetizing because I don't feel okay pushing _more_ ads on people. So my total is zero.

I would like to make a living producing positive value to the world. I don't want the additional job of promoting advertisements that I would not necessarily endorse just because my work is popular enough that advertisers will pay to take some of the attention I've gotten. Ads are inherently manipulative, and I'd rather encourage everyone to use an adblocker rather than have a conflict-of-interest with what's actually good for my audience.

<comment><USER17> I got YouTube Red for the purpose of contributing to content providers without watching ads. I would just use an ad blocker otherwise.

Unless your content is for kids, where they probably don't have the choice to watch them or not, why not monetize?

If it's your viewer's choice whether they see ads or not, and if the money might help you provide more or better content, it could be a win-win.

<comment><USER16> (A) I don't like specifically supporting Google's efforts to tie direct- funding to their ad-platform (they specifically have made many efforts to make it so that direct funding is connected to removing ads _because_ it cuts out people like me who refuse to use the ads… using their direct-funding approaches is actually an _increase_ in advertising, not a reduction)

and (B) I don't like the "viewer's choice" argument that I see as basically suckers-deserve-to-be-suckered. People who aren't thoughtful or knowledgeable enough to install an adblocker are just the people most susceptible to advertising manipulation. I want no part of _increasing_ that. My understanding is that YouTube doesn't just give me a cut of revenue or not, they actually _increase_ the ads tied to my videos if I "monetize". I won't be able to control the ads either to make sure they aren't manipulative or promoting products I would not be comfortable endorsing.

The money would totally help me provide more and better content, for sure. I hate this dilemma, but I've ended up sacrificing a lot in my life to work on building a more ethical economy around all of this via [https://snowdrift.coop](https://snowdrift.coop) (approaching launch, not fully operating yet) rather than give in to this whole ad-based economy that I would have trouble with even if it were _only_ advertising typical corporate crap let alone engaging in the far more unethical tracking and other shit they actually do. [https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing- mechanisms#third-...](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing- mechanisms#third-party-ads) expresses my views on this.

I hope this doesn't come across as me shaming everyone else who uses ads. I think the problems are systemic and recognize fully the way any individual going against the flow isn't necessarily the answer. That's why we need systemic change. I just wanted to share my perspective so this thread at least had the critical issues brought up, even though it's tangential. (Although my story of $0 ad income is an answer to the question)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm small fish here, but since question was asked I will share. [https://random.country/](https://random.country/) brings me around 40$ passive income monthly. Around 5K visitors monthly. Probably it could bring me more money with one more ad.

<comment><USER19> I like the quiz, but I wish it told me the correct answer when I guess wrongly. You could give the correct answer either immediately or at the end of the quiz; either way would be fine.

<comment><USER18> Agree, good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> @csallen could probably jump in with some interesting insights. His site Indie Hackers was generating $5K a month from ad rev before it was acquired by Stripe ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14090063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14090063)).

He actively reached out to relevant companies to ask them to place ads on his website.

If you brokered these type of ad partnerships, you could easily make a few thousand with your audience.

Ad types include: send a targeted email promo to users based on their analytics data, ads on the pages, etc.

<comment><USER10> I mentioned this in another post, but I believe this is how most seriously profitable bloggers make their money. They don't go for Google ads, they go for affiliate deals and sponsorship.

It's a smarter way to do it because the adverts are usually far far more relevant to the audience. Nothing annoys me more than generic clickbait advertising ("Release your equity!", "What did these 10 people do to get rich?", etc) which I'm never going to click on. On the other hand if I see a food blog sponsored by e.g. KitchenAid, I might have another look at their mixers.

If you have the readership and a trusting community (or reputation), it's a no brainer. This is how Daring Fireball does it too.

Affiliate links are another good way of subtly making cash - look at people like Ken Rockwell, who was once the de facto "Nikon Guy". His site was (is?) the go to place for Nikon camera/lens reviews. There are no ads on his site, but every damn link is affiliated (and why not?). This is also a very sneaky way for airline reward bloggers to make tons of points: they find the deals, everyone goes through the affiliate links and earns their meager 100 avios, while the blogger makes a tidy referral profit. The guy who runs Head for Points [1] made thousands when the Curve Card was released.

[1] [http://www.headforpoints.com/2017/01/12/curve-rewards- launch...](http://www.headforpoints.com/2017/01/12/curve-rewards-launched/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> $100/month for the Pi Searcher + the Splat Calculator. More on Pi day. $1-2 RPM. 100k page views per month. One built in 1996, the other in maybe 99. [http://www.angio.net/pi](http://www.angio.net/pi) and [http://www.angio.net/personal/climb/speed](http://www.angio.net/personal/climb/speed)

Neither is designed with monetization in mind. I just threw some ads on them to cover the hosting costs (the pi Searcher needs a few gigs of RAM) -- but it turned out that learning about the ad ecosystem was pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER22> 2 niche blogs: archimodels.info / archidrawings.info

Adsense revenue accounted to half of my monthly revenue ($100) 4 years ago. Nowadays, thanks to adblockers, it's only 10% of it and my monthly revenue is down to $50. Most of my revenue comes from a direct ad that adblockers can't detect.

Adsense is dead to small publishers.

</comment><comment><USER23> I run a couple of ad-based websites. The largest one being [https://www.dailywritingtips.com](https://www.dailywritingtips.com)

The key aspect to estimate how much you can earn is the page RPM you can get.

The average I have seen across my sits is around $2. Some niches have lower RPMs (e.g., programming, in my case at least). Some niches have much higher. I had a site about investing in gold that had $12 page RPM on average, if I remember well.

In your case, I believe the number would be higher than $2000 per month if you reach 1 million visitors. I am guessing twice as much at least.

<comment><USER24> Is that RPM for AdSense or a different ad provider? I tried multiple providers for my site (gaming / MMO niche) and I end up around 0.13$ RPM everywhere. Or is that value for multiple combined ads?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of my sites ([https://riddlesbrainteasers.com](https://riddlesbrainteasers.com)) has been a wild ride, reaching a peak of $18k/month and down to an average of around $500/month now. Monthly traffic is generally around 300k unique visitors.

Another site ([http://coincollector.org](http://coincollector.org)) was making $300/month as long as I kept posting but after several years I grew tired and now it earns next to nothing.

<comment><USER26> How did you go from $18k/month to $500 month? ad blockers?

<comment><USER25> The site got hit by one of Google's black box algorithm adjustments. I spoke with folks on the Adsense team and followed their advice but it's never rebounded. It was mostly organic traffic, which means it depends on the whims of search engines. (It's not a reassuring position to be in).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hate to hijack, but I'm facing the exact same issue you are. The rates that I've heard quoted for AdSense just aren't happening for me. My rates are very similar to yours, samblr.

I think that part of my problem (and it could be yours) is that I don't have a ton of written content around my free giveaways, which is the core of my site. Basically: plenty of cake, very little frosting.

Can anyone offer advice for increasing AdSense revenue for a site without much written content?

I run a site called Preset Love ([http://presetlove.com](http://presetlove.com)) which gives away free Lightroom presets (Lightroom is an image editor for Adobe). My ad rates are abysmal and I've thought of walking away as a result.

I welcome feedback.

<comment><USER6> Every single one of your pages I visited shows me a remarketing ad. This tells me that Google can't find good matching advertisers for your content so they show remarketing ads instead. Remarketing ads always pay out much, much less.

<comment><USER27> Good feedback, thank you: it certainly means that I'm not doing a good job giving clues to AdSense what the site is about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have an adwords site that sends affiliate traffic to a few merchants.

I currently pull in about $300k/year in revenue and $80-$100k/year in profit.

I use a number of credits cards for the ads to get points, so I consider it a source of revenue and vacations.

It's not easy to make a site like this and it as been a long road, but a worthwhile one.

(Posting anon as I prefer not to disclose revenues publicly)

<comment><AUTHOR> At what point you approached an affiliate and what analytics you use to bill an affiliate ? in short how is deal made and managed.

<comment><USER28> Use affiliate networks like impact radius or affiliate window / Zanox. Apply to and join programs there and they handle analytics and payment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> -11$ this month for my blog. One article hit HN front page 2 weeks ago and I'm left with a small AWS bill, I had no ads :)

Since then, I tried to activate ads via disqus comments but their revenue program seems like you have to be selected first in order to earn money. What would you recommend to monetize a tech blog ? (at least to cover the hosting fees)

<comment><USER30> if your blog is static data on S3, you can put cloudflare in front of it with the free plan and pay next to nothing due to the caching which they dont charge for

<comment><USER31> hey, that's pretty good

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Somewhere between -$30,000 and -$60,000 I think. Even though they weren't successful (two) projects, it's always disappointing to see how few people are willing to spend their own money on something.

<comment><USER33> their own money on a similar project or your customers?

<comment><USER32> I'm sick of seeing people running to get capital to start a project instead of actually putting their own money down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Once upon a time, [https://tweepsect.com/](https://tweepsect.com/) would get upwards of 650,000 visits/mo so I slapped some Fusion Ads (now Carbon Ads) on it and it brought in about $200-300/mo.

It has slowly declined down to tens of thousands of visits per month, which comes out to around $15-30/mo.

I really didn't want to try and monetize it for too long and ultimately regretted not slapping a simple clean ad on it earlier. Could have made more with more non-exclusive ads but it was about right for the amount of effort it took (very little). Not bad for a completely unattended service with zero overhead.

</comment><comment><USER35> For some years, I got a check from AdSense about once a year or so. Then with the adblocker wars, I didn't see a check for about two years. Their payment threshold is $100, so I was making something like $100 or so a year-ish. With getting more traffic, my numbers in recent months are looking more promising than that, but it is still looking like "not enough to be obligated to report it on my taxes." (In the US, that means under $600 annually, which I am not on track to be anywhere near. But I might get a second check before the year is up?)

I have always done better with getting cash from my audience than with ads. I used to have donate buttons on my sites, but at some point I switched to a tip jar and my take improved. Instructions how to make a pay pal tip jar can be found here (on my website):

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to- make-...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-paypal- tip-jar.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> I write the blog [http://datagenetics.com/blog.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog.html)

In 2016, it delivered 4.3 Million PVs

I have a single Google AdSense advert on most pages and revenue generated in 2016 was $1,124.95

It pays for hosting, and the occasional steak dinner, but no, it's not a fulltime job :)

<comment><USER37> Just wanted to say that I absolutely love your blog. I purposefully bought my younger brothers Battleship for Christmas a few years ago just so that I could crush them with the strategy I read on your blog. ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > So I am thinking of revenue model based on ads. At its 'full' potential web > application can draw a million visits per month (in 2-3 years may be).

Please don't. Find a way to charge money for it, or accept that it's really not that valuable.

Sad how everybody thinks merely hosting a website entitles them to revenue now.

<comment><USER7> People are accustomed to paying nothing on the web, unless it's a physical product nobody is paying for anything.

<comment><USER38> Yet Github, Dropbox, Fog Creek, Atlassian, and thousands of others aren't shutting down.

Maybe it's time to raise the bar a little bit and stop funding these services that nobody really values but will use because they're "free".

Ad supported companies have a strong tendency to invade people's privacy, track people around the internet, provide almost no customer support, and refuse service (or shutdown) on a whim. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. do it all the time, and it's the same way all the way down to the smaller players. Generally they're just not very good companies.

<comment><USER39> I agree. But I've noticed a similar "downvote" in physical conversations with people.

I think there's a strong desire for the whole "build a huge audience for your free product, then monetise somehow" model to be valid still (if it ever actually was). Because it's easy, I think.

The fact that it doesn't actually work any more is upsetting to people. So they downvote. That's my guess anyway.

Not that you'll be able to read this, because this post is about to be downvoted to oblivion too ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have got two sites averaging about 50K a month and used to earn close to $50 a month. But I got bored and earnings and visits crashed. I have now got a renewed interest to look at it and try to establish a basic business model not based on ads which is just not sustainable. Affiliate networks is something that I am excited about or a job board site. Tl;dr ad revenue is nothing as compared to what you can make due to affiliate networks or a paid service. For people who were asking: [https://jquer.in](https://jquer.in) and [http://angular-js.in](http://angular-js.in)

</comment><comment><USER41> I wanted to practice a little more more with nodejs. To me it's pointless to learning a programming language without a project. Eventually, I will convert it from PHP (codeigniter) to angular 4 so that I can learn angular 4.

I also was banned from adsense, for machine generated content. Regardless, I really like amazon and my product you can't really use adblock, so I put together a website that monitors amazon daily prices.

I get most of my hits on facebook feed.

Regardless I don't make as much money as I would like, but it gives me something to do when my job is annoying me.

Http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals

I might be looking for a growth hacker...

</comment><comment><USER42> I am completely a Rookie here. [http://groupsone.com/](http://groupsone.com/) targeting whatsapp/telegram group aggregation. Biggest problem I see for my Ad targets is the country based traffic. Currently integrated with Chitika and they need US traffic. So I have been earning <10$ with about 10K visits per month. Just posting here to help newbies out here. I Will be waiting for other 4 months for Adsense approval which can help much more revenue to me . Let me know if any one have suggestions that can help me out as a newbie.

</comment><comment><USER43> Android video game: [https://traveler208.com/](https://traveler208.com/) Not making much, spend more in ads trying to make it works (300$) then what it brought me (about 100$).

Other old android apps are still bringing me 8$/month such as: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pervychine...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pervychine.spanishincar)

</comment><comment><USER44> For searchcode.com I am getting about 300,000 uniques a month and ad revenue around $700 a month using carbon ads. It's enough to pay the bills which is all I really need for it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm curious if anyone can answer this from the perspective of iOS, particularly games. Which ad exchange do you use (fb, google, other?) and how do you present the ads?

</comment><comment><USER46> I have a site with Hebrew verb conjugations ([http://www.pealim.com](http://www.pealim.com)), which generates c. $150/month with 60k visits and 6 pages per visit.

Re: scraping - I don't think it makes a big difference whether you have subscription or ad revenue here. My site can be scraped of course but I don't plan to make serious money on it anyway.

Your project can do better or worse depending on the visitors' demographics.

</comment><comment><USER47> \- for domain and hosting

\+ I have learned about delays in click detection on mobile

I have created [http://morebeer.today](http://morebeer.today) some time ago and I was waiting for more visitors before I include some ads.

Based on the discussion it looks that no content -> garbage ads -> it doesn't make sense to introduce ads. Also 1$/1k views is not realistic. Should I rather try to figure out what would be good affiliate links?

</comment><comment><USER48> A couple of years back, I used to make about $1000/month from about 150K page views. Nowadays, it is about $400 from 50K pageviews despite better CPC but ad impressions have come down.

Such calculators are worthless. There are tens in not hundreds of factors to determine ad revenue.

Site is [http://www.gtricks.com](http://www.gtricks.com)

</comment><comment><USER49> I no longer have the original domain name, so traffic (and income) have been down since then, but [http://user-agent.io](http://user-agent.io) earned about $30 a month in AdSense revenue after ~6 years of slow growth.

I'm hoping the "see someone else's UA" feature helps the new site grow a little faster.

</comment><comment><USER50> [http://www.samurai-sudoku.com](http://www.samurai-sudoku.com) makes about $500/month on 170k page views/month but it only has one ad block for a better user experience. Also one page view can take hours solving the puzzle.

<comment><USER51> I like the sodoku designs. What technology do you use for the site?

<comment><USER50> Thanks. The site runs on plain old javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> My trash mobile apps got me a cool $0

</comment><comment><USER53> Seems pretty plain logic. Yes most of if you use adsense you will be making around 1-2$ per 1000 pageviews if your niche less competition else around 5-10$ per 1000 page views if it has competition and traffic is from tier 1 countries.

</comment><comment><USER54> on avarage you should be getting 1$/month per unique _returning_ visitor. but you need some volyme so you can sell directly to advertisers or be very lucky that your ad network can match you with buyers. if there are no good matches you'll only make 1 cent or less per user. you need 10k+ monthly users or they will not talk to you. there are other ways to make money though. instead of selling your users you can sell _to_ your users. ask around what they need and want, then sell it to them. you do not have to produce what you are selling yorself.

<comment><USER7> That sounds astronomically high. There are sites with billions of visitors and they certainly aren't making billions of dollars. Some of the popular news sites would fit that bill and they surely have access to the highest quality and best paying ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There are many countermeasures to scraping (some of which I employ)

Google is your friend

</comment><comment><USER56> Slightly off topic: there's a lot of discussion in this thread about CPM and RPM for different types of content. Does anyone know typical CPM and RPM for adult / NSFW traffic?

</comment><comment><USER57> Many people have commented that their revenue has dropped due to Ad blockers. Can you suggest any alternate business model for side projects other than ads

<comment><USER58> Charge money for your product/service/content?

<comment><USER59> I understand the concern with some ads/ad networks. But advertising can be the best way to provide no-cost content and resources. As this thread shows, ad- blockers, though understandable, cause harm to those providing valuable and genuine content and services.

I pay for many services, but there are also many services I would never pay for, but happily would put up with ads. To me, your suggestion implies that enough people with ad blockers would otherwise pay for all ad-supported services. I doubt that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Whatever you do make sure you can host the ad banners or so yourself. A slow ad-network is killing for your traffic.

</comment><comment><USER61> Is it possible to have a side income while having a full time Software Engineering job in California?</comment>


Google Search By Image - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/google-search-by-image-use-a-snapshot-as-your-search-query/

<comment><USER2> TinEye and Google Goggles applied to the entire Internet? Yes please. I can't wait to play around with this.

What will be even more interesting is if they release an API for it in the future. Sites like imgur and reddit could then suggest if you're uploading or submitting a similar image to one that already exists.

<comment><USER3> I just tried TinEye (hadn't heard of it before) and it appears to only look for images that are modifications of the image being searched for.

I wonder if Google's will work the same, or if it will be possible to find other images that are similar, but not based on the same image? That's what I really want.

<comment><USER4> Here's an interesting article about image hashing and fingerprinting algorithms: [http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Loo...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Looks- Like-It.html)

<comment><USER5> Everything from that blog is interesting, do you or anyone else got any suggestions for similar blogs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use TinEye a lot and I think this will be great. My typical uses of TinEye, that will probably be improved with the bigger stock:

\- somebody put text over a nice image and I want the unmodified version

\- searching for bigger, better quality versions of an image (e.g. wallpapers)

\- finding other images from the same author/gallery (since it links to the sites that hosts the copies)

\- finding the name of the movie, person or object pictured (because copies will be hosted with different, probably meaningful names and in pages with subtitles)

</comment><comment><USER7> Though I do sometimes use these services, since a few years I block these spiders on my own sites and those of clients.

Often this would happen: Client or user finds an image through Google Image Search on another blog or website, with unclear copyright. Then the client or user would upload this to the server. Then the client, or me, would receive a letter from a (GettyImages) lawyer: If we would please pay for the full licensing right of that 160x160 pixel image.

Thinking about it, I find accommodating to these services can lead to nothing but trouble: Either legal trouble, or hit-and-run users stealing your images, because you paid for higher resolution.

I hope I can separately block this Google service from Google Image Search. Although Google Image Search isn't as good to webmasters as it used to be (especially for those that rely on advertisement clicks) and the users it can send can be negligible: Ranking higher in Google Image Search seems to correlate to ranking higher in Google Web Search.

If it is part and parcel of Google Image Search, I might reconsider my robots.txt directive for Googlebot-Image. They just now opened this up for the public, but it is likely they are already using this internally to gauge (media) quality factors on-page.

P.S.: It would be interesting to see what happens when Google doesn't partner up with GettyImages or iStockPhoto, like in the early days of TinEye you could abuse that service to find the same stock images without watermarks, on the sites of people that already paid for that image.

P.P.S.: Now you can add RDFa or Microdata to mark up your images with a copyright statement, what would happen to sites that host copyrighted images, tagged "not for reproduction"? Google should be able to find the canonical image and "punish" those that don't comply with its copyright.

</comment><comment><USER8> From my understanding, TinEye makes money from corporate B2B deals. Their consumer product is mostly just a technology demo/marketing piece rather than a part of their core business.

So they probably don't have much to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER9> Retrievr is a prototype of a similar idea: search for Flickr photos by drawing (or uploaded image).

<http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From QAs: it won't perform face recognition

<comment><USER10> It actually should. Probably put FBI out of business too.

<comment><USER11> Clearly it's not being omitted for technical reasons. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial- recognition-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial-recognition- google_n_869583.html)

<comment><USER12> Maybe what Schmidt said about Google's intentions was true, but another reason they haven't done it is because _it's not possible right now_ , or at least not in a fully-automated way across most images on the web. The state-of-the- art on the easier "verification" problem ("are these two images of the same person?") are shown here: <http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>

The best results are under 90% accuracy, which sounds pretty good, until you realize that random chance is 50%, and for recognition ("who is this person?"), you're essentially exponentiating that 90% by the number of different people you want to recognize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of apps like Shazam. While they definitely serve an amazing purpose (recognizing songs by finding a similar region of sound) what I would really like is an app that could recognize my humming a song--which probably sounds nothing like the actual song itself (different key, speed, entirely different voice, etc.)

<comment><USER14> Check out SoundHound: <http://www.soundhound.com/>

It does exactly what you ask for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this is based on the search-by-image that Google Goggles (on Android) already does.

<comment><USER16> Either way, hopefully they've improved it - I was never able to get Goggles to work very well at all (versus TinEye).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From QAs: submitted images will be treated like any other query and they'll stay private

</comment><comment><USER17> Rightheaven clones jump from joy :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Love this! But I really only see a mobile use for this, rather than a desktop use.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how it'll compare with TinEye.

<comment><USER20> Easy, indepently of how good is, just trying to fight against Google resources will crush TinEye. Today must be a terrible day for them.

<comment><USER21> Idee's business model has little to do with TinEye. They're probably not very worried.</comment></comment></comment>


Peak Abstraction - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4442?repost <comment><USER2> > He has not yet learnt the fine art of simplicity.

So true. Great pattern discovery!</comment>


How to get an app logo designed for $42 on Fiverr - <AUTHOR> http://burstcommerce.com/shopify-app-logo-banner-fiverr/ <comment><USER2> Relevant: "What Kind of Logo Do You Get for $5?" [https://medium.com/swlh/in- the-past-couple-years-startups-ha...](https://medium.com/swlh/in-the-past- couple-years-startups-have-started-realizing-that-good-design-can-make-the- difference-2fdeb90d390a#.625swmivu)

<comment><USER3> Yo, those original logo designs weren't horrible - the colors and fonts are questionable but the actual logo itself is reasonable!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, if I ever want to abuse a designer, now I know where to turn. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Hah I thought that on one hand, but on the other hand the initial logo had some issues. What is a fair revision request count for a $42 logo? Maybe 1?</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Christmas App I Built for my GF - <AUTHOR> http://jacobirw.in/saysmerrychristmastoalexconibear/

<comment><USER2> that's a pretty rad painting. did you make it yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and it is all my girlfriend's work. Alexandra is an interior design major at Academy of Art University SF - but as good as she is with architectural design programs (e.g. 3d max), she's just as good as a hobbyist painter.

Note: Credit for the original source in my app goes to Dave Taylor (jQuery.kinetic, see: <http://the-taylors.org/jquery.kinetic/>) and Stephen Hamilton (see: <http://stephenhamilton.com/>)</comment></comment>


Morphing Hexapod Robot - <AUTHOR> http://robot-kits.org/2012/04/02/morphex-video-part-iii/

<comment><AUTHOR> The demo of this robot in youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuC6q9kbryw></comment>


Ask HN: How can I maximize my first Defcon? (Tips and Tricks) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This will be my.... shit, 16th DEFCON? Damn it....

Anyway:

Rule #1 Talk to people

Rule #2 Go to the parties/off-con events. This is where the majority of the magic happens

Rule #3 Go to as many talks as you possibly can.

Rule #4 Do not get too trashed so that you cannot make the talks. Get up in the morning, and get to con.

If you follow those rules in that order (On top of the 321 Rule -- 3 hours of sleep, 2 meals, 1 shower) you should have a great DEFCON.

Welcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep your Ballmer peak on point.

Have fun!

</comment><comment><USER4> Qualify for the CTF, then win it. Giving a talk is also good.</comment>


Lego $228m losses to the largest in the world using customer-centric approach - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/leonagano/status/1266004564957937664 <comment><USER2> This is like some bizarre kind of spam. The Twitter thread doesn't make any sense, the diagrams relate to 2014 events, and it all ultimately leads to a (paid?) email newsletter.

But I'll admit I got a laugh from the Twitter user's business insight on the Where's Wally franchise: "Practice for 26 years, be in the right place at the right time. Instant success!".

I think the author is a non-native English speaker, so I feel bad criticizing... but when the other retweets are "how to get $56k ARR in six weeks with paid newsletters", I'm very suspicious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, yes, I'm non-native English speaker. Got lost on the title itself, but the article is how Lego made a turnaround from almost bankrupted to the largest toy maker in the world.

I've been weekly writing free articles about pre-internet companies, the newsletter is not paid.

Re: the Wally one, I tried to be funny with followers, because some people think those big hits happen out of the blue

<comment><USER2> Aha! Thank you, that helps explain the title and the Where's Wally. Because of the tweets around it I missed the sarcasm of the Wally one :)

Not sure if this helps, but to me the tweet analysis seemed a bit shallow. I know there's not much room in a tweet, but it was making each analysis remind me of the South Park episode with the business empire of the Underpants Gnomes (Step 1: Collect Underpants, Step 2, Step 3: Profit!).

I think if you had submitted a link to a blog post rather than a tweet, and the blog post had more depth explaining everything that happened with Lego, I wouldn't have thought of it as weird spam.

I like the idea of analysing business events from over 30+ years ago though, and I wish you good luck with the newsletter! And especially trying to write it in a second language - I've tried learning foreign languages but I'd never be able to write a regular business newsletter in them!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, I'm learning the best way to do some businesses analysis on Twitter.

Here is the link to my newsletter where I write in more details [https://before90s.substack.com/p/lego-228-million-losses- to-...](https://before90s.substack.com/p/lego-228-million-losses-to-worlds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone clarify the title for me? I am not sure I understand.

<comment><USER4> It's like they copied and pasted two unrelated things together. Bizarre

<comment><USER5> It seems that it's telling about the company's positive turnaround. They were making 200 million of losses, but they did some changes and now they became "the largest" \- whatever that means.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The largest toy maker in the world". Messed the title though

<comment><USER3> Gotcha, thanks for the clarification</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Major Stripe Functionality Downgrade - <AUTHOR> https://profsmallpine.com/writing/major-stripe-functionality-downgrade <comment><USER2> Edwin from Stripe here. I'm really sorry about this trouble. I couldn't immediately find your emails—would you be able to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I can look into this right away?

<comment><AUTHOR> Big thank you for getting this resolved so promptly Edwin. I will update the original post when I get a moment to reflect the whole story.</comment></comment>


Dad thinks he's the family's tech guy, family says Hah - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57454639-71/dad-thinks-hes-the-familys-tech-guy-family-says-hah/?tag=txt;title

<comment><USER2> Previous submission (no comments):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121600>

(The duplicate was missed because neither submission was of the canonical URL.)</comment>


What Is And Is Not A Technology Company - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2012/05/08/what-is-and-is-not-a-technology-company.html <comment><USER2> Kinda, you can tell what kind of a company is by where it makes it's profit.

IBM is a services company that develops technology so it can service that technology.

Microsoft is a desktop operating system and office suite company that develops software to sell desktop operating system and office suites.

Apple is a consumer electronics company that develops technology to sell gizmos.

Facebook is an ad platform company that develops software to sell ads.

ARM is a licensing company that develops technology so it can sell licenses.

Wal-Mart is a retail company that develops technology to deliver lower prices.

Technology means far more than just ICs and software.

<comment><USER3> "ARM is a licensing company that develops technology so it can sell licenses."

I think ARM falls nicely into "technology company". Calling something "a licensing company" doesn't make sense when they license their own technology products.

Same for IBM. They might service software from other vendors, but I suspect most of their profit is by servicing their own. As such, again, it doesn't make much sense to call them "a services company".

<comment><USER4> IBM also makes a large amount of money servicing and implementing other company's technology products, specifically SAP and Oracle (and probably a lot of Microsoft too). To me, they are a technology services company providing consulting, implementation, and outsourcing services, and they also happen to develop some of the technology products that they sometimes implement.

<comment><USER5> That assessment of IBM is way off. They service other company's products insofar as is necessary to develop complete integrated systems for their customers, systems they build mostly with their own technology elements. In some cases, they build systems entirely with their own elements (a Power7 machine running a DB2 server in AIX, for example). Their relatively recent acquisitions of companies like Rational and Telelogic were moves to own more of what they service. Owning and developing the hardware and software they sell and service is core to IBM's business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to suggest a simple litmus test that lends a similar, though slightly different, definition of a technology company:

 _If one or more people at your company need to constantly read recent scientific research papers in one or more fields of one or more of the hard sciences in order to build a critical and central component of one or more of your central products then you're a technology company._

The only difference this will have with the OP's definition is that even if you decide not to license your applied science to others but merely sell an application, you're still a technology company. E.g. if you actually read physics papers in order to come up with a novel microwave emitter, you're still a technology company even if you've decided to just sell microwave ovens.

OTOH, if all you need to develop your product is news about the latest web framework, or even a blog post explaining some nice sorting algorithm - you're an applications company.

</comment><comment><USER7> The "software is eating the world" meme when put into perspective is like saying "accounting practices are eating the world" or "sales strategies are eating the world" in 99% of real world cases. In most businesses, software has become another staple support of a competitive business but it is not an end in itself. In other words, software is a means of trying to achieve maximum efficiency of existing processes and this has been the case for a long time.

We probably don't like to acknowledge it but software is predominantly a support role in most of the companies it is so called "eating." It is utilized to streamline the business process once it has been defined and proven to have an impact on the bottom line.

<comment><USER8> Accounting and sales is now done with software. And not only "done with software", but with increasing amounts of domain and business knowledge embedded in the software.

 _That's_ what "software is eating the world" means. It isn't just that every business needs software in some vague sense, it's that every _thing_ the business does has software in its foundation. Accounting, sales, billing, analysis, development, logistics, pretty much everything except high-level executive vision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a useful distinction between companies that sell technology and companies that use tech for competitive advantage.

However, language is defined by how we use it. In common parlance, "tech company" means the latter kind of company. Normatively decreeing otherwise is futile.

Should we talk more about the former kind? Yes. But I disagree that the latter kind is not a useful category. Distinguishing between "factory companies" and "non-factory companies" was probably very useful at the beginning of the industrial revolution. We're still in the early days of the information revolution.

By "software is eating the world", we don't mean that every company uses email or has a blog. That's not software that gives a competitive advantage, precisely because everyone already has it. "Software is eating the world" means that Uber is a better taxi dispatch service than traditional taxi dispatch services, because of software they developed. It means Netflix is a better movie rental service than Blockbuster, because of software they developed. It means Apple and Google upended every mobile phone manufacturer and carrier, because they could develop better operating systems and browsers.

"Software is eating the world" does NOT mean that every company uses software (duh), but rather that companies with software competency (or even excellence) will have a significant advantage with which to edge out their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER10> The part of this article I really associated with is the focus on "startup drama". The startup drama has its place -- stories of founders fighting through the hard time or working out when to throw in the towel are wonderfully didactic in nature whilst getting across the human story. It's why Founders at Work is one of my favourite books.

Most tech blogs however have distorted these startup dramas to the point they look like poorly scripted television shows. They've discovered, just as gossip magazines did, that more drama => more eyeballs => more revenue. Very few sources I have come across prioritize information over hype and it feels like the tech community is paying for it.

What I disagree with in the article though is the focus only on wanting to hear of tech startups. I asked an entrepreneur on advice about Natural Language Processing startups (of which he'd founded a few). He said "To bake banana bread you need to be able to bake bread". Tech startups, as different as they are to normal businesses and startups in other fields, share a great deal as well. We'd do well learning from their trials and follies too and hence why HN is so open to articles from all over the map.

</comment><comment><USER11> Kevin Kelly's book _What Technology Wants_ defines technology very broadly, so that it includes just about anything invented by humans (i.e. not already in the cosmos prior to humans), including language and sewing machines. That makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't reflect popular usage.

My favourite definition, because it aligns most closely with typical usage:

"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."

— Douglas Adams

<comment><USER12> Technology is anything invented after you were born.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most companies are "Technology Companies" because they would fail to function in a meaningful way if their technology no longer functioned correctly. To divide companies in the way the author has is perfectly reasonable, as are many other arbitrary lines in the sand.

<comment><USER14> But I fear that definition does just what the article decries- lumps too many companies into the "Technology Company" category. For example, all of the banks in my town fail to function in a meaningful way when their technology no longer functions correctly: the data line goes down, they can't cash checks; all the PCs go down, they can't accept deposits ... never mind that 30 years ago there were still banks doing every thing on paper because no one is trained to Do The Job now, they're trained on how to operate the software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a software-centric company is more in the "technology" company mold if they have secret sauce somewhere in their apps that give them an edge and the implementation of said secret sauce is not necessarily something that is obvious from the end effect of their app(s).

That is, you couldn't just hand a spec of the company's app to another group of generic developers with the full expectation that it could be reliably replicated in due course.

So some of the magic is in the underlying algorithms - this is what I call a technology driven company, as opposed to a market driven company, wherein the magic is in recognized some business opportunity in the market and applying rather mundane, if laborious, software solutions to them.

This is a spectrum, few, if any companies, are purely one or the other.

Another good test is whether the engineers are considered a profit or a cost center and how the company treats them. This applies more to bigger, established companies rather than smaller companies that may have been started up by engineers even if they are fundamentally market driven.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on your point of view.

Is Best Buy a tech company? If you're talking about the stock market, probably - their fortunes align with tech. If you ask me, a potential employee, I would say no. Their focus isn't in developing tech, it's in selling it.

As an employee, I'm more interested in what your employee pool does when determining if it's tech or not - not what you're selling.

<comment><USER7> In terms of business speak, BestBuy is in the services sector and in the business of retail. I think most would qualify it as an electronics retail company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Market-speak is cyclical, buzzwords come and go the moment it becomes too overused and washed-up.

Remember when everything had to be "interactive"?

What about "multimedia"? you just can't buy a toaster that isn't multimedia!

"Pivot" is already frowned upon, 2.0 is totally 2004, just to show some buzzwords are about to disappear.

</comment><comment><USER18> This resonates more with me:

"Airbnb makes its money in real estate. But everything inside of how Airbnb runs has much more in common with Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Oracle than with any real estate company. What makes Airbnb function is its software engine, which matches customers to properties, sets prices, flags potential problems. It's a tech company—a company where, if the developers all quit tomorrow, you'd have to shut the company down. To us, that's a good thing."

Marc Andreessen <http://m.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1>

</comment><comment><USER19> Another interesting industry to look at through this lens is game development. Game companies develop and sell software (and sometimes hardware) to consumers, so they must be technology companies, right?

Wrong. The games industry is not a tech business, it is an entertainment business that just so happens deliver entertainment through software. Looking at things from this perspective can be very illuminating, especially if you're looking at things like the success of Nintendo's Wii six or so years ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> Similarly, after reading this blog; the writer's daily starting point, I checked once again techmeme; and this does not provide much technology news really, it is not the place to check if you are really in tech. Individual tech blogs are better in this case imho.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you come up with a new definition of "tech company" and it doesn't include Google you're probably not on to something. Google lives and dies by their technology. They are _the_ technology company.

Reductio ad absurdum and all that.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised that the OP doesn't consider Simple a technology company. Isn't it solely selling an experience via software?

If so, making good software must be its top priority.

<comment><USER23> You could say the same about the UX for any company that sells primarily online. I think the author's point is that just depending on a website as a critical part of your business doesn't make your business a technology business, anymore than having a fleet of delivery trucks makes a furniture store a transportation company.

<comment><USER24> Couple of things:

If a furniture company is unable to function without having an in-house fleet of trucks (as opposed to outsourcing it to a transportation company and/or contracted drivers), then they are really a logistics and transportation company (which could readily start selling or transporting other goods, if they so wished).

If whether or not they did this in house didn't make a visible impact on their growth rate, they would still be a purely furniture company.

Pre-AWS Amazon.com, on the other hand, was an entirely different beast: they built a highly scalable, relevant (they built out a whole division in Palo Alto devoted to machine learning and search relevance), web application. This would be akin to a furniture company building their own trucks (even if on somebody else's chassis).

Likewise, Google doesn't just display advertising they build their own advertising technology. If they merely used banner advertising, they would be (at _most_ a) $100 million company, and not a $200 billion one.

<comment><USER23> _If a furniture company is unable to function without having an in-house fleet of trucks...then they are really a logistics and transportation company..._

Perhaps, but we would still refer to them as a furniture company until they started selling something else. The author's point is that the term 'tech company' has become a meaningless distinction when the 'tech' in question has become ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Over breakfast, we'd divvy up the newspaper. I'd go straight for the > Business section

Impressive. When I was a kid, I went straight for the comics.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can anyone explain why should we be having this discussion? How does it matter whether or not you are a tech company.

</comment><comment><USER27> Was/is Pixar a technology company?

Or were/are they an animation studio?

<comment><USER28> I think Pixar is similar to Apple, who Alex addressed:

 _Apple is a technology company thanks to some of its lines of business (hardware, software), but is not a technology company in all of its lines of business (music, movies, books)._

i.e. Pixar is a technology company thanks to some of its lines of business (e.g. RenderMan), but is not a technology company in all of its lines of business (e.g. Toy Story).</comment></comment>


Dell Grants Exclusive Photo Shoot of New Adamo Line of Luxury Notebooks - <AUTHOR> http://bub.blicio.us/dell-grants-exlusive-photoshoot-of-new-adamo-line-of-luxury-notebooks/ <comment><USER2> Adamo: Japanese for "attempts to look like a Mac in the same way Vista attempts to look like MacOS".</comment>


Intel's new AI chips can crunch data 1k times faster than normal ones - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613964/intels-new-ai-chips-can-crunch-data-1-000-times-faster-than-normal-ones/ <comment><USER2> The linked article is a little short. Here are some extra links with some more information.

Original press release: [https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intels-pohoiki- beach-64-chip...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intels-pohoiki- beach-64-chip-neuromorphic-system-delivers-breakthrough-results-research- tests/#gs.pm0cl3)

Arstechnica article: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/brains-scale- better-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/brains-scale-better-than- cpus-so-intel-is-building-brains/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. It might be a good idea for you to post the ArsTechnica article</comment></comment>


Unmanned aircraft flies in UK civil airspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.nats.aero/news/unmanned-aircraft-flies-in-uk-civil-airspace/ <comment><USER2> I was a little disappointed that article was about a pilot flying a plane from the ground and not about a plane that flew itself.

Having a human in the loop does bring to mind some fun possibilities though. Imagine one pilot managing several planes at once only interceding at times too out of the norm for the autopilot. Or perhaps imagine a network of Uber pilots all over the world managing planes in their spare time (1).

Either way unmanned aircraft certainly would have made Castaway a much different movie (2).

(1) Whimsy not position.

(2) Two hours of a camera-shot of an empty beach.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        > unmanned air freight

There are some pretty interesting possibilities there. I wonder what percentage of price the pilots in the air adds to current costs.

<comment><USER4> I see this more as reducing the risk for current air freight, think an emergency delivery to a ship or oil rig in severe weather conditions.

<comment><USER5> Current generation drones don't handle severe weather conditions very well.

Even larger military drones, such as the well known Predator, have severely limited crosswind components.

[http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/predator- ua...](http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/predator-uavs- weaponry.htm)

"According to the Project on Government Oversight, the Predator "cannot be launched in adverse weather, including any visible moisture such as rain, snow, ice, frost or fog; nor can it takeoff or land in crosswinds of greater than 17 knots.""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That particular drone, the Watchkeeper, has a not-so-illustrious background:

[https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/10/02/boxed-up- ba...](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/10/02/boxed-up-barely-used- and-4-years-late-watchkeeper-the-armys-affordable-1-2bn-drone-programme/)

</comment><comment><USER7> More about the plane:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_Watchkeeper_WK450](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_Watchkeeper_WK450)

Are these being used in the UK for civil surveillance?

</comment><comment><USER8> seems pretty easy to build, not many obstacles are in the sky. surprised this was a break through at all...

this just feels like a video game basically. all i need to do is bring out my xbox controls and i can do exactly the same thing in my video games.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK, the technology isn't really anything new (see drones), but I took the article to mean that the "breakthrough" was in doing this safely within civil airspace. My use of scare quotes is really just because it's the first time (in the UK, don't know about elsewhere); it's more of a milestone than a breakthrough.</comment></comment>


Facebook 'memorialises' profiles - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8327607.stm <comment><USER2> At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future.

Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net.

Sounds strange, but that's the trend.

<comment><USER3> It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are "memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for someone even after they are gone.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. I think it's going to take a long time to get the tone just right.

But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things.

Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.

<comment><USER4> Technology has _not_ waited. People need memorial rituals. I realized this the other week, when we held such a ritual on HN.

I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.

(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk calling attention to oneself instead.)

Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances on that web, is going to outlive us all.

<comment><USER5> I'm the editor of an online magazine (volunteer-based, no ads) that allows comments. On a few occasions when we've posted reports on deaths, those reports have attracted comments from people who knew the deceased and wanted to leave a message somewhere.

It's strange and touching that a site intended to discuss urban issues might also serve as a _de facto_ online memorial, but there you have it: people will find their own uses for any reasonably open system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would they remove status updates?

I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's online history, just to remember.

<comment> a-priori I think they should allow the next-of-kin to choose what they want memorialized, what they want kept private (or perhaps family-only) and what they want destroyed.

I would imagine most families would want to keep the deceased's status messages, but not all of them (in cases of suicide, for example, as riklomas pointed out).

<comment><USER7> If I died, I wouldn't want my parents to have access to my Facebook page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wanted to know beforehand how to delete a Facebook account permanently

<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703>

[http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit...](http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit_facebook_and_delete_your.html)

and shared log-in information with immediate family members, so that we can decide what stays up and what gets deleted if one of us dies.

Based on other Internet businesses I have dealt with over the years, I think it is a lot more likely that my Facebook info will be permanently lost than that I will die while Facebook is still a going business, but I could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hm:

 _When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article._

So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer.

\---

[1] Only _tasteful_ gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is going to require a very careful touch.

[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press. This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for free.

Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper". Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.

<comment><USER9> My first thought is...what's the easiest way to make a fake obituary so that I can prank my friends and get their profiles marked as memorialized? This is going to happen, and it's going to happen a lot.

<comment><USER10> gonna be hard for that to work if your friend updates their status message in the time that you reported them deceased and the days it takes facebook to get around to looking in to it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Your Friend is now dead.

<comment><USER12> Surely it'll be a news item:

"Fred changed his status from Living to Dead!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am torn on this. For some folks, this will be a wonderful persistent reminder of the deceased and a place to leave memorial messages. For other folks, it could become an awkward persistent reminder that just makes it hard to grieve and move on.

<comment><USER4> It is _always_ hard to grieve and move on.

And, though I have met quite a few people who have lost friends and family members, I don't recall anyone whose response to losing a loved one was to destroy all the mementoes. One is far more likely to cherish them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember the feeling of stumbling into the profile of someone that had passed away, IMO it's better if they'd just allow family/friends to shut it down and have a way to backup the photos/updates.

</comment><comment><USER15> A very good friend of mine just died yesterday, so I kinda understand why it's a really good idea to do that =/

<comment><USER16> Someone in my community of friends passed away recently and continually shows up in the new "reconnect with" recommendations. This is timely and appropriate I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems really coincidental considering that Mark Zuckerberg got a question about what facebook was doing to preserve our data for the next 2,000 years.

His response was "I like thinking in the long-term, but not that long-term". Anyone else get the impression that this is a compromise?

<comment><USER18> I think they've been doing this for a long time: [http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-08-facebook- vate...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-08-facebook-vatech_N.htm) . But it's a smart PR move to talk it up after the "next 2000 years" question. (Certainly better than waiting for a tragedy, like last time.)</comment></comment>


Humans were once an endangered species - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/print183278038.html <comment><USER2> The Earth is a rather hostile place when you use a megayear scale. Paleontologists and geologists have also found a variety of events (e.g, megacaldera such as Yellowstone cutting loose, meteor impacts) that are correlated with mass extinctions. We shouldn't tarry in establishing self- sustaining habitats off the Earth.

<comment><USER3> Is there an organization who is carrying out the necessary task of establishing off-world colonies for humanity?

If so, what is the website and how can individuals help?

It is one thing to posit a need, but quite another to do it.

<comment><USER4> A large number of private space companies (eg masten space) are working on building cheaper spacecrafts. That is the first step. Once we have a way to reach potential off-world colonies more cheaply (and thus conduct more extensive research, create a commercial payoff for creating one etc), establishing one will be a real possibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nitpick: volcanoes cause 'volcanic winters', not 'nuclear winters'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't worry, I'm sure we'll eventually kill ourselves off.

<comment><USER7> After millions of years of being forced to use our wits to survive combined with periods of inbreeding (resulting in a relatively narrow genome), humans are now a super-race of genetic mutants ahead of our time on the evolutionary scale. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if being too smart for our own good contributed to our demise.

Edit: By "inbreeding" I mean - if the human population were reduced to a few thousand breeding individuals, and those individuals were also spreading or migrating into different areas of Africa, the middle East, Europe, etc. at the same time, that would mean much smaller groups of people who breed within their "community." It may have been thousands or tens of thousands of years before those different communities met up with each other and combined genetic material again.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't inbreeding cause the _opposite_ of a super-race? Inheriting different genes from both parents can prevent a lot of problems; for example the fact that women have two copies of the X chromosome makes them a lot less likely to be color blind. Having a uniform gene pool means that people would end up with similar genes and be more likely to have diseases.

I'm not sure if/why recombining after a long period of isolation and mutation would be better than staying together and just sharing mutations gradually. It's an interesting question though, there's problem some research paper somewhere that could tell us...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The brotherhood of humankind is more than just a metaphor--it's a reality.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor>

</comment><comment><USER9> we've been through the eye of the needle several times already. we just had (still have?) the nuclear one. we have what is IMO the biggest one coming up: AI.</comment>


Networking: The last bastion of mainframe computing - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/12/19/NetworkingTheLastBastionOfMainframeComputing.aspx

<comment><USER2> "Burrows"?

"Burrows"?!

I must also disagree with the idea that the x86 ISA and BIOS that created the commodity server encourages hardware innovation. If it did, we would not be in a x86 world. If we look back, the hardware market had much more innovation in the 80's.</comment>


Amid abandonment and failures, is Firefox the walking dead? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-firefox-the-walking-dead/ <comment><USER2> Just as Netscape Communicator was forked and decrapified to make Firefox, I'd love to see a decrapified fork of Firefox right about now.

<comment><USER3> > I'd love to see a decrapified fork of Firefox right about now.

That was possible when a bowser only needed to know HTML and CSS and a bit of javascript.

But browsers now are delivering app functionality, and so they're going to be huge.

We need something like "Contrast rebellion", but for page sizes. There's no reason WSJ / NYT / Atlantic / etc pages are so freaking huge - almost always that cruft is getting in the way of me reading the content.

(And if they're reading this: that cruft means I am less likely to pay for a subscription. "I open a page, it loads quickly, I read it" is a nice experience. "I open a page. I get a throbber. Some content loads. It jumps around as other placeholders load. Content pops in and out and under different banners and boxes. It jumps around as fonts are loaded. Eventually, everything is ready." Thats what I normally get and it sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With this I don't understand why the Rust community doesn't put Servo on the pipeline to driving Firefox, or at least not be coy about it.</comment>


A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/perl-regex-that-matches-prime-numbers/

<comment><USER2> It's cool, but it's regexp, not regular expression -- regular expressions cannot test for primeness. The proof is a simple application of pumping lemma[1]: we want to show that language { a^p: p prime } is not regular. Suppose it is. By pumping lemma we have numbers N, n >= 1, such that for every k >= 0, we have a^(N+nk) in our language. But that means that for every k, N+nk is prime, and it fails for k = N, since N+nN = N(1+n) is not a prime, since both N and 1+n are greater than 1.

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_regular_langu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_regular_languages)

<comment><USER3> That argument is theoretically sound, and I've upvoted you for bringing up such a helpful contribution, but it's practically nonsense.

We are all running computers that are finite-state machines: if you have roughly a trillion bits of storage, you can have up to 2^1T states.

For most numbers that are interesting to humans, we are able to test their primality with regular languages, which are detectable by finite-state machines. The number of states might be quite large indeed.

<comment><USER2> You're mostly right, I made a similar point few months ago[1].

However, I must disagree that we are able to use regular expressions to test for primality all the number we're interested in. Your argument only proves that there _exists_ a regular expression that tests for primality all the numbers below N, where N is arbitratily large. It does not shows any way how to construct it[2], nor does it guarantee that the DFA we will be using to test for primality will fit in available memory.

[1] - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046623>

[2] - It's actually trivial: example regular expression we're looking for is /a^p_1|a^p_2|...|a^p_N/, where p_1, ..., p_N are primes below. Sadly, to use it to test for primality, we need to know if the number is prime beforehand.

Actually, it sounds like an interesting problem -- to come up with an interesting and nontrivial regular expression schema that for every N gives us a regular expression that tests for primeness all numbers less than N.

Come to think of it, the existence of any such interesting schema seems highly unlikely -- the Parikh's theorem implies that the set of lengths of words matched by regular expression (or even context-free grammar) seems to be too constrained to allow for such scheme -- we can easily find non-prime matched by an such regular expression, and Parikhs theorem seems to imply that it is not much bigger than the automaton state count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beware: Depending on your backtracking limits, at some point the regex will start deciding numbers are prime that aren't.

<http://zmievski.org/2010/08/the-prime-that-wasnt>

</comment><comment><USER5> Former incarnations of the same thing here on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486158>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58780>

<comment><USER6> that's what, five years now. Imagine what you would need to pay someone who didn't know the code to come debug the current version.

That's Perl built-in job security right there. Also why I don't use it except as throw-away scripting at the bash prompt:)

<comment><USER7> >>That's Perl built-in job security right there.

Huh? You mean, this is about Perl because regexps was created in Perl and the Perl regexp lib isn't ported anywhere else?

Oh, wait...

(If you must troll, at least be interesting. :-( )

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry must have been drunk, and that one-liner is in reality easy to debug, or even understand.

<comment><USER7> OK, that assumption that this is how serious people normally writes REs was at least entertaining. But (still) not really contributing to the HN quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> First seen in 1998: <http://diswww.mit.edu/bloom-picayune.mit.edu/perl/10138>

</comment><comment><USER9> Unless I'm missing something obvious, this post lacks a proper attribution. It is an old, very old and very well-known one-liner that made rounds and rounds in the Perl community over the years. Reading Krumins's post one might think he invented it.

<comment><USER10> possibly added reently, but the last line of the post reads "PS. I didn't invent this regular expression, it was invented in 1998 by Abigail."

<comment><USER9> Yep, it wasn't there when I first looked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I updated the article so it didn't sound like I invented it. Also added a message that it's not a real regular expression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wrote a coprimality test based on the same technique <https://gist.github.com/1520171>

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty awesome!</comment></comment>