skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launched app, got featured by Apple, now looking for ways to grow sustainably
Hi hackers,

My co-founder and I had just wrapped up our previous startup, despite our best efforts failed to take off. While trying to think of our next big idea we decided to make a simple app. Turns out this app is doing much better than our previous ideas.

The app is called "Sloth" - http://getsloth.com. It’s a Task Manager meets Countdown Timer. You input the tasks you need to get done, allocate time each task then start the timer.

We built a simple landing page and released the app to the AppStore. At first not much happened. Then we found a few subreddits related to studying and productivity. Things got interesting: we got a few hundred downloads in the space of few hours.

The next thing we knew, someone from reddit told us that Apple had featured Sloth as a Best New App. We were stunned but completely ecstatic!

We didn’t do anything special to get featured by Apple. Apple didn’t even write to us to tell us. We suspect Apple monitor apps which have significant amount of downloads in a short time. We then got told that an AppStore representative will manually review an app to decide whether it gets featured or not.

We ended up getting 45,000 downloads in the space of 4 weeks. Most of this happened in the first 2 weeks, and then it started to taper off.

We released an in-app purchase of $2.99 for some premium features. This has only been out about 3 weeks but around 1% of users are upgrading. We’ve gotten over 100+ positive emails from users. We reply to each email individually and have implemented popular suggestions.

HELP

Our biggest challenge is in marketing. We seem to have created something that users want, and are willing to pay (something) for it. Our goal is to expand this beyond an app and build out a suite of productivity apps.

We’re a small 2-person team and have next to $0 marketing budget. Would LOVE to get your thoughts on potential marketing ideas and ways to grow.

Thanks!
That does sound nice, but a sabbatical usually means you're at least partially paid and you continue your old job when you come back. Also, I don't think I know anyone just out of college who could afford to do that.
Author here. Feel free to ask if you want to know any additional details!
> I kind of except that...she effectively initiated the business of recursive celebrity (rich begets famous begets rich).

Wait, why is the current royal family rich/famous?
Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up front costs. So I broke out my oscilloscope and soldering iron and made my own for a tiny fraction of the cost and have had great fun doing it.

It used to be really hard to do this because wireless communication with hobbyist microcontrollers was either tedious or expensive (the old Arduino wifi shields were like $30-40). The RasPi and ESP8266 have really made things more accessible; you can build a central hub for $50 with a good wifi antenna and then something like a temp/light/humidity sensor is about $10. Or control lights with the $5 Sonoff switch from Itead (basically an ESP+relay on a well designed PCB, that is hobbyist friendly and lets you put your own firmware on it if you like). Or great free controller tools like Home Assistant and data management like InfluxDB and Grafana.

It's a great time to be an electronics hobbyist. The rise of IoT and smart home applications have produced a surge of new and interesting products for hobbyists that didn't exist before, I'm guessing as a side effect of dissatisfaction with the state of commercial products.
FYI there is an RFC (currently a draft) for a suite of parameters considered secure for some time, ie some kind of LTS: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gutmann-tls-lts-02

The idea is more or less what you want, hardcode some known-good configuration for servers that can't or won't be upgraded every other month.
Ah ok, that makes sense. A paywall would be perfect for that.
This is a private, sex-oriented implementation of the surveillance state and commercial analytics. If analytics can tell if your daughter is pregnant before you know it, it can tell how much and what kind of sex you are getting. There's probably some John Yoo of voyeurism writing a memo about how knowing all about your sex life is perfectly legal if terrorists.
You should be coding in the official company coding style--or one should be written one for you to follow. In my experience supervising junior devs, reading code is like driving down a highway. When you submit code that is written out of sync with 99% of the entire company codebase, it's like going 60mph then suddenly the highway becomes a bumpy rocky dirt field. It's not really an opinion thing, it's a consistency thing. The time for opinions ended a long time if you are not the first programmer.

You wouldn't join a law firm and start ignoring their legal document guidelines, because their senior lawyers need to read your written documents at the same fast speed they read everyone else's. We can spot your real mistakes a lot faster if you stop cluttering the codebase with the numerous cosmetic ones. Your seniors are pissed because you are paving a dirt road for them to drive on. You shouldn't be upset that they are asking you to do the bare minimum. If they don't have a formal style guide though, then they deserve the dirt road.
> For everyone worried about the PATRIOT act, the NSA

Does this actually protect you? If data goes through US FB servers, don't the NSA have access?
Hosting is a non-issue. Our main cost is development time.
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Problem I have: I am dependent on MEGAcorp. MEGAcorp does not like freedom. So free solutions are not good.

Do you see the problem?
Airbnb for Adventure Travel
Stick with it - it really pays returns down the line. Specifically, do some real soul-crushing busy work for a while (Excel is a good place to start) and then realize that you can automate large chucks of that in just a few minutes. It'll take days/hours at first, but eventually hours/minutes.

It's hard to beat the feeling of having a computer make your life easier. There's a triumph in it.
I'm only in my late 30s, but have also been thinking a lot about this. I see older people and wonder what they are thinking. Are they happy with the choices they made, the memories they have? What will I think when I'm 50, 60, 70?

Then I remember how lucky I am. I started with next to nothing, worked through college, and now basically get paid to play with computers all day (something I would have done for free anyways). I get to travel and have other amazing experiences. Biggie said it best, "when I was dead broke man, I couldn't picture this".

One of the reasons I think programmers always end up in this existential plight is that we are successful enough to have time to think about it. When I was young and worried about eating or having enough money to put gas in the car so I could get to work or school (or even having a car) I never thought about these things.
I'd go further than "little hard to take seriously".

Nowhere in the article does he state that his employer is Canonical. His blog doesn't mention it at all, just says he's "Involved with Gnome". Even clicking through to his "Complete Profile" takes me to a G+ page. From there another "About" link click finally tells me that he's an employee of Canonical.

Sure, he didn't claim its the 2nd coming of the FSM but stating any potential conflict of interest is pretty standard. A 1 sentence comment on HN from a related employee/founder/ceo usually has a disclaimer about it.
This was about expected lifetime for a product, not the warranty period. I don't know how you came up with that.

If I expect shoes to last 10 years, I'm also prepared for some basic maintenance such as regular polishing and the odd sole replacement. The same obviously applies to car repairs.
How to Design Mobile Games to Avoid Anti Gambling Statutes
This is a very good article.

In America, there is also an example where we "build up" the social class of some segment to compensate for our self-centered guilt.

Take the example of the military service. The vast majority of people would rather be at the mall and let someone else fight and die for the country. But the "I support our troops" bumper sticker is everywhere, or maybe they sent ten bucks to Fisher House or Operation Homefront, but not once have those people wanted to volunteer at a veterans hospital.

So what do we do to cover got guilt? "Ah, let's do a parade for them!!!"
If your key was stored with no passphrase (or you're using the agent and had signed something just that minute) and you think there's a realistic possibility the thief will do something other than wipe the laptop immediately and you have no other copy, sure, I guess. I wouldn't expect a state-like adversary that wanted to steal your signing key to use such an attack (much more visible and riskier than just taking the key and leaving the laptop). And I'd expect the kind of person who takes their keys with them on a laptop to have copies in other places.

(I mean ideally you'd always back up your keys and/or revocation certificate, but it's always a question of risk factors. Allowing "unexpiration" definitely induces some risks; the question is are they higher or lower (given the costs) than not allowing it?)
> SKAM Artist

Well, it's certainly a scam!
> What is it about flo? That your life goes by so quickly...

The past is just a memory, the present moment is so fleeting that it cannot be grasped, and the future hasn't happened yet:) I think being in a flow state is about living with this fact, in the moment, as it is, without all the mental overhead that is past and future. You're not 58, you are brand new, right now, just as you are.
While I appreciate the OP's point of view, I have to say that in my experience once you start making more than you really need your job becomes taking care of that extra money, and the drive to do what took you there in the first place diminishes.

One (like myself) must have a sense of need or urgency to feel compelled to do things such as development. Once the need is gone, so is the will, and I could argue, the thrill.
Oh man, I just now used "John Yoo" as a pejorative. Did I go Mengele on the law there?
My litmus test for whether an argument for JS is valid is replacing "JS" with "PHP" in my head and seeing if it reads the same. PHP did all the same things, but that doesn't make it a good language, it just makes it a language that's easy enough to learn for it to get popular.
I agree. Sorry in this context I was referring specifically to the "in 20 lines of code article" which I don't believe had this control to it.
School calendar is an annoyance. But I managed until now to have no fixed activity for the kids on week-ends, and we avoid birthdays (another annoyance), so when we want to go to second-hand furniture markets, we just fill a bag with 2 diapers, one plastic spoon and go. They'll eat what we find there, and enjoy the furnitures.
The consumer protection law stands for 6 years. Price is taken into account. What's "reasonable" is certainly something that can be argued one way or the other. http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/faulty-appliances-sale-of-go...

Here's an example of how it often works in practice, although on a shorter timescale: http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=52242

Laptop power socket fails within 6 months. Is repaired, fails again. Demands refund, is refused. Takes company to small claims court; they fail to mount an effective defence and are in any case in the wrong, so he wins £400+costs.
> Do you see the problem?

You think Canonical is a bastion of free software? Is that the problem? I'm pretty sure that's the problem.
How to share activities in workflow CRM 2013
It's certainly an important issue but it has nothing to do with the matter at hand, but with labour laws and their enforcement. Any employee can be abused if they have no means of protection.
Working harder doesn't always mean working more hours. After 8 hours sitting at a desk programming, sometimes I realize how lucky I am to not have to hand-load semis all day in a blistering hot distribution center. And then sometimes, after a particularly grueling programming session working on the same bug for 8 hours, I yearn for a day of work where I can shut my brain off and chuck some boxes.

'Harder' is subjective.
PHP 7 – Insights from lead Zend.com developer
I stated coding when I was 11. I turned 19 a couple months ago. I guess that makes me one of those junior developers everyone talks about.
Well presented. Interestingly, I thought the RGB interpolation example at the end looked just as reasonable as the HCL interpolation. Though RGB was a little bland. But RGB should have been the 'dumbest' colorspace to interpolate in. Even trying random other colors the RGB always looked fine while the HCL, well, usually couldn't even come up with all the intermediate colors.

HCL actually seems to do very poorly interpolating towards black. Try #000000 and #AA0000. Apart from the missing color, the aparent hue changes significantly.
This is a normative article written by a 19-year-old and reads exactly how you would expect a normative article written by a 19-year-old to be.

Also this stuck out:
> If you allow me to generalize a bit, the millennials, and now the Gen Z more so, are without a doubt the most arrogant and self-obsessed generation in history.

Nobody who knows anything about the baby boomers would ever honestly write such a thing.
George Costanza would be proud
This is pretty ridiculous.

Lawyers, Bankers, and Doctors get to play in intellectual sandboxes, and they get paid really handsomely for it, even if they are completely anti-social people.

The reason we get paid less is that we don't have any of their safeguards:

- Lawyers aim to become partner. It's very socialist-y this way. The goal working in a firm is to become an owner of the firm and share in its successes.

- Doctors have a guild. They keep their bottom end tight by regulating who becomes a doctor, keeps them always in demand.

- Bankers know how much things are worth. That's their business. They know how much they generate, even if they are far from the point of sale. They also aren't squeamish about asking how much their co-workers make, and negotiate aggressively.

Programmers should start realizing that the main reason we make little is that we undercut each other a lot, and are outright hostile to many tools that other professions use to safeguard their position.
I agree that materialistic thinking and living certainly contributes to lack of savings/retirement assets. But so does simply having a family, especially as a single parent or when the spouse doesn't work.

You might say "well, the spouse can go work," but it's rarely that simple considering the costs of child care and how it may weigh on the spouse's potential salary. Then factor in if the spouse can even get a higher paying job to offset said costs. Then add in the trouble with the spouse even obtaining a job due to not having a bachelor degree.

Everything feeds into everything else. No one situation can easily have the same resolution as another situation.

I agree that there is no excuse to not trying. But there may be reasons for not succeeding.
While both could be career ending, a patient dying would probably make you feel a lot worse than a machine not doing what it should, right?
By snapping pictures of the rear plate.
> making insinuations

The author is an employee of the company that makes the OS for the phone, and didn't mention it in the specific article or on the header/sidebar of the blog. It's several clicks away on a Google+ profile.

> doesn't really provide anybody here anything of value

I disagree.
I live in an area with a huge mushroom community and I don't know anybody in that community who collects wild mushrooms for the thrill of eating risking food.

In that community (northern CA) the majority of people who get sick and die are children of eastern european immigrants: the families migrate here and collect mushrooms that look like the safe ones in their home countries. However, that mushroom often ends up being amanita phalloides. In most cases, it's not adults who die of kidney failure, but children. Adults tend to get sick for a little while and recover.
This is well worth the read. It's far too easy not to perceive the class issues she brings up, because we're so uncomfortable discussing them. And if you're affluent, it's much easier not to think of yourself as part of a self-perpetuating privileged class.
Love that example, even if frequently retold.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/
Does he regret not buying a lottery ticket when he sees that someone else won? He may very well (especially if the winner was someone who intersected in their lives, making it seem more proximal), but that's essentially the argument given that there is absolutely no guarantee that they would have seen any success in the technical management space. It's presumptive and egotistic to assume it would have been a successful pursuit.

And while the leadership path has very high highs, it is also the route to career death for many people who went that route. When companies do cutbacks, "middle management" is virtually always the first target. These are the people who often have the hardest time justifying their value.
Do you think somebody who is worried about privacy threats like that is on Tinder?
Headline reminds me of one of my favourite poems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IERp2OdJs
hey there! One of the engineers from Buffer here :). Good spot on the numbers being roughly equivalent to the salary of one of the engineers. Thanks for bringing that up. This was something we were mindful about and so the work we did took us roughly 12-15 man days (3 of us working on it in fits and starts * some rough calculations :D ). As important though is we did take away a lot of lessons from this that will hopefully save us even more in the future which is one of the major goals here :)
That's bullshit and you know it. I've had about a half dozen printers my entire life and HP is the only one to pull that shit. It's a shitty tactic, not subsidization.
For SEO + Inbound Marketing start with Moz's beginners guide to SEO https://moz.com/learn/seo, and follow their blog.

and skim the Friday Whiteboards https://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

https://inbound.org/ often has some good pointers to blog posts, though you'll sift through some PR puff pieces too.

Shopify's blog https://www.shopify.com/blog is also pretty good at the basics, albeit with a focus on ecommerce.

That's enough to get going.

Then dig into the search and SEO blogs as you need to dig deeper.
How about stand if they prefer? Big problem in office environments. Bad for the back to sit.
"on the basis that they had to recoup it and more within a single night"

I'm not sure that's exactly right

I'm not exactly a regular club goer, but every once in a while I hear my co-workers talk about various places that members of the local NFL team were at the night before

it occurs to me that this makes for relatively effective branding for those places

if its a fun enough place for professional football players to party, it must be a fun enough place for regular people to party, etc etc

suddenly that place is a hot spot

----------

I suspect a similar thing is going on, you bring enough celebrities to create a buzz about your place

whether your place is actually fun enough to monetize that buzz.... I don't know, it really isn't my scene, but that might be a different thing

those places do seem to go in and out of business pretty regularly, I suspect overinvesting in buzz is relatively common
Actually an African connection is much more likely, and even documented.

I've only read Wikipedia on this matter and I didn't really check the sources carefully but it is said that on his 3rd journey Columbus received orders from the spanish court to travel south because they believed a continent to be there.

The continent was south america and it was on this journey that it was "discovered". How the spanish court knew this was apparently because of stories from Mali that claimed to not only have travelled across the atlantic by canoe, but also to have traded and waged war with people on the other side of the atlantic.

Just so I'm clear, an african kingdom traded and waged war with people in south america before Columbus sailed there. This is at least the claim.
Recent discussion of Peachpie: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11298969
I think this discontent stems from wanting to fix the problems that you see on the other side, and you make a good point. If you're a programmer, you look at the bad manager and say "I could fix this if I were in his shoes". If you're the manager, you look at the bad programmer and say the same.

Maybe there is a way to just fix problems where you see them?
this is a great one. We are going to be looking into this soon hopefully
But this is also a huge positive for future historians. Imagine the huge amount of data they will have to study what today's society was like. Imagine if we had such data for the last couple of thousand years.
The Illegal Map of Swedish Art
Found the manager!
Also great is the wow factor when you show off the mobile interface. Material design is a big time crowd pleaser.
How much money did you get to make this wonderland story?

That's an insinuation regardless of what the truth is. As is stating that they would have to be high to write the article.

Stating that the author works for Canonical is not an insinuation.
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He quotes Frost in his post. Pretty sure he gets your point. In fact, he was making it.
I went to the Louvre last year a few days after Christmas which I assume is not tourist season (first time in Paris). It was packed, and the Mona Lisa was surrounded by a sea of people 10 feet thick, most of them waving their phones around in the air on selfie sticks.
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SkimLinks/VigLink Aggregator and Optimizer
It would be diffuclt to test as the Beothuk (the native people who lived on Newfoundland) sadly have been extinct for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beothuk
The reason Pfizer legally have no profits is because they've structured the transactions between their subsidiaries so that all the profits are in a subsidiary in a low-tax country. Their particular method of achieving this is apparently buying their active ingredients from an Irish subsidiary of themselves that is so expensive that the main company actually loses money on them: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pfizer-tax-insight-idUSKCN... (Except of course they're not actually losing money except for tax purposes, because it all goes to a wholly-owned subsidiary they control.)
Why is backslash called BACK slash when it actually points forward?

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/92390/why-is-backslash...
They were better at killing people+politics way back in the day.
Had it been the CIA, I wouldn't have trusted that there weren't hardware-based changes made, or things that would survive a reinstall. Replacing a USB cable with a wireless transmitter, etc.
Think it's very possible that you believe law enforcement thinks about the world differently than someone trying to avoid law enforcement.

My understanding is that they share the same mental model of the world on average; which is not a critical view of either, just what I've heard from people that know much, much more about how different types of people think than me.

To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
It depends what properties you want. That is a much nicer looking rainbow, but it drops the perceptual uniformity that often makes HCL useful.
#LateStageCapitalism