skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah it is one of those things that puzzle me. Everyone involved with finance to some degree or other seem to ignore, willfully or otherwise, that we live on a finite earth.

Meaning that there are only so many people on this planet, only so many of us have a smartphone, and only so many of them again will be interested in installing a certain app.

Meaning that sooner or later that growth curve will flatten out.

And apps are just one example, the pattern repeats across all markets.
yeah, it works out great for amazon. less work, more money, what's not to love.
Suppose you're writing a system for vacation rentals. Here are two data consistency rules: 1) only one user may have a given email address 2) a given property can't have two overlapping rentals.

Postgres can enforce both, in a way that's not subject to race conditions. 1) Is a unique constraint and 2) is an exclusion constraint.

As far as I'm aware, the only way for application code to do this would be for it to 1) lock an entire table/collection of data 2) do a query to see what data is there 3) check the new data against the existing 4) write new data 5) unlock the database.

Postgres probably has to do the same thing conceptually, but by using indexes and running the checks in C on the same machine where the data lives, it can do it very quickly.

Are you saying you have a better solution?
> If you're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to create some unique value.

That's a way to succeed.

> That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others.

Yep, and that's why Valve and Epic shouldn't have bothered entering the FPS goldrush after Id and 3D Realms owned the market. :|

> Investing your energy in solving a problem for others where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?

How about doing what gets me paid? A lot of investors are seemingly more than happy to blow money on mundane rehashes of ideas in hopes of betting on the best rehash. There is no shame in being the not-quite-as-good rehash, if you get paid along the way.

Talking about "solving problems for others" is just a way of grandstanding pretending there's any more legitimacy to your narrowly-defined path of success as anything else. Lawyers and finance folks aren't solving anything new for others, and yet they're better compensated than any of us.

Jesus, stop buying this bullshit...it is how we (developers and entrepreneurs) are getting taken advantage of.

EDIT: Also, how is spying on consumers and modeling their data making the world a better place or solving a new problem, exactly? At least Transium was kinda new in the search tech space. :|
Show HN: Advenjure, an interactive fiction game engine
I disagree its a solution looking for a problem.

The problem is most internet/computing usage is done on mobile. Increasingly, this information is inside of Apps. This makes Google's search results less and less effective overtime.

That is, unless I can click on a google search result and end up in the middle of an app I've never downloaded.

I think a better criticism is that Instant Apps is attempting to rebuild internet, using apps. A destination I can go to, and only download what I need to run the experience in that view? And I can still click on other things and load those when I need it? It's called surfing the web, dude.
But if the market turns suddenly it's too late to sell.

So do I sell today and "hope" that the market will tank and rents will soon drop lower than my mortgage and that I don't eat up most of the profit from selling in extra rent payments?
Interesting, sounds like they are just in it for money. Because all of the CS people I know have a serious passion for sharing knowledge and are so excited to tell me about the new project they came up with or algorithm they just learned. They also let me borrow electronics all the time :)
I dunno what's wrong but the lady's voice in the video is highly annoying. The content was good though.
Also great for automating repetitive/grindy tasks in computer games! (Not a bot, promise)
Hubble clocks faster cosmic expansion
I'm building a startup and I wish I could accomplish everything I need in 70 hours a week -- it would give me so much more time to work on the other parts of the startup that I currently don't have time to build out.
Yeah - and there's a bunch of great podcasts that I can't really see switching to their own apps exclusively (all of Radiotopia, of which my favorites are 99% Invisible and Criminal, for example, and many independent podcasters), so any podcasts that want me to go through a custom app would have to be truly mindblowingly good.
well, it probably saved some lives by telling people that their printer was on fire
No, they were fined because they decided to enter a tightly regulated market without gaining the necessary permits and permission, and following the requisite rules.

Not saying it's right that the industry is regulated, and it's certainly not right that the French Taxi drivers resorted to violence, but if you want to operate in a country, you have to abide by their rules, it's called the cost of doing business.

Now, there's nothing to stop them lobbying for change of course.
for another perspective, here's an interview with two early podcasters working outside of this recent race to monetization

http://www.vice.com/read/we-talked-to-podcasters-uhh-yeah-du...
You don't have to get it to use it. I see LinkedIn is now supporting Google Instant Apps and when i searched for a name on the Google app, clicked on the linked link, it opened the profile in an app, though i don't have the app installed. It was seamless with the feel of native app. Don't see what problems it would create.
Natural intelligence
For banks specifically.. I can use an app to deposit checks via picture. I cannot do this via the website. So of my 20 apps I have installed, something like 3 are banks, 10 are games, and 7 are utilities...
> Of course. My point was that city employees do suffer when you scoff at the law. They risk losing their jobs. Many roles are appointed by the elected administration.

The workers at the DMV don't suffer, the meter readers don't suffer, etc.

If anyone does, it's the politician whose stupid ideas and lies wasted everyone's time and money. And that's a feature.

> Enacting policies with which the public agrees helps them. It's a pretty simple equation. Politicians do not exercise any great mind control any more than U/L. Each holds their own sway, but ultimately the public decides themselves how to interpret facts.

Cough. They use your tax money to send propaganda to you, lying about the facts. They abuse the presumption that they're working for the public to push their own agenda.

Uber and Lyft have fact on their side. And if they lied, they'd risk someone going to jail.

> Whether or not Austin makes tax money or U/L make profit, and all the ramifications associated with employment etc. make little difference to me.

You just spent time explaining that tax money can be used to buy services. I knew that, but figured you might be saying it because you didn't see the other side of the equation where untaxed wages can also be used to buy things...

> Calling them unreasonable demands is your opinion.

Only if you water words down until they don't mean anything.

The city's demands are for useless measures to fix an issue that already doesn't impact anyone, and the proposition is one they make money from.

> Another way of phrasing this is you think more than 50% of active Austin voters are unreasonable. I'd say that attitude is unlikely to help you build a business there or get someone elected.

No, I think the politicians are lying which confounds the issue. The people trust them and many or all may be mislead but that's not the same as thinking that each and every voter themselves is unreasonable.

> Whether a person thinks private vs. government background checks is more useful is subjective.

That's not the issue, that's the overton-window version. Worthless checks are worthless, no matter who does them.

> If U/L feels private checks without fingerprints are just as good as government ones, then they should share more information on this through their website.

As you say, it's not about facts. Engaging on the wrong issues merely settles the discussion around those issues.

> Complaining about the decision made by Austin voters does little to help U/L at this point

I'm not complaining, I think it's exactly what the city deserves for duplicitousness. Sometimes walking away from crazy people is all you can do.
Many of the ads that ad-supported apps use to monetize are ads for other apps. That's not sustainable, and the end of that will be the end of the boom in ad-supported apps.
A curated list of awesome Java frameworks, libraries and software
No, they do work just fine with Jet-A. Are they practical? No. Will electric battery technology overcome the constraints within 5 years? That's a viable hypothesis, sure.
I'm thinking something that still has a meaningful dogfighting experience (like the original Elite - whereas EVE Online when I last played was more like an RTS?) and generally far more accessible.

I am working on an MMO that has a meaningful dogfighting experience. It's not twitch and rapid perfect aiming like an FPS. Instead, it's about relative positioning. Also, it's 2D, using an Asteroids flight mechanic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSlpbxv4zZc&list=PLDIbNZGhS5...
That would be why there's a 30 day free trial, for potential customers to evaluate with: https://www.qt.io/download/#Licence-anchor
I mean, is it? We have about 6 apps that are almost exactly clash of clans. They advertise on prime time TV with celebrities. Not that exciting...
So true. This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made with my first startup. I was in a city outside of silicon valley, so there was a lot of pressure to have a lot of meetings and go talk at local conferences. I also thought that conferences in my market would be a good sales channel. In reality, it didn't. Most people at conferences just want to be entertained or distracted from their daily jobs - not a great mindset to try and sell them something.
I also had no idea how incredibly distracting meetings with potential, and even current, investors can be. Lesson learned was to only talk to potential investors when you are specifically fundraising, and keep time with current investors to regularly paced meetings and updates, unless a immediate situation requires otherwise.
Indeed. It should never surprise anyone when mediocrity is valued above all else and ass kissing trumps brilliance. Never think that you are allowed to focus your efforts where you can actually make a difference. Not while in school anyway.
Exactly the point. And that was a fairly simple example. I've seen much worse in real code.
Operation Northwoods
There are broadcast towers with wires that are certainly worth worrying about if not accounted for in advance.
If you've done more than a few startups - you'll have some failures.

Think of the success rate of startups as a whole. It's like 10%. So if you are at 50%, that's a reasonable bet.
I thought we were speaking generally, about today's planes, with today's pilots. However, you might be interested to learn about gyrocopters, which have the interesting property that, if the engine dies, or the pilot is incapacitated and releases the throttles, it will land automatically, by pure aerodynamics.
Yes, that's what the OP suggested. 50% gain is pretty big and a capital gain from a home is nicely tax advantaged. You could also look to move somewhere else, that 50% gain is probably enough to buy a place outright in many other places.
Also fun fact, I survived being poisoned in Meteora.
Could not agree more. Windows WM as an option on Linux is a clear and logical strategy.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11867810 and marked it off-topic.
Ah I didn't know that! Assumed my iOS-using co-workers would be using it if it did.
Harvard scientists create a “bionic leaf” that converts solar energy into fuel
Yeah but your app didn't used to have to be any good for people to download it.
Bikeshedding is from Parkinson's law of triviality [1], which essentially says that deciding trivial issues takes a disproportionate amount of time - partly because there are many ways it could be done, and partly because non-trivial issues are hard to comprehend and are therefore easy to agree with.

This differs from the OP, where it is the ability to control an issue that is to blame - in Parkinson's law control is equal yet understanding is not.

Though of course the relation is strong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Can confirm it actually works great with JS disabled (in Opera 12 no less) – much better than with JS enabled, actually. Really Bloomberg….
Nope, His business was perfectly reasonable. He could become next Taleo/Atlassian/Slack, grow slower but dominate space. He only needed to extend offer with with self hosted version.
Ask HN: My daughter wants to build a web site
My daughter, a beginning college CS student, wants to build a web-site for her World of Warcraft Guild. I could make recommendations about AI, OS design, or Cryptography, but I stopped playing with front end programming years ago. (She knows a bit of Java and a bit of Scheme, so she isn't restricted to a static-site generator, but maybe that would be best.) Any suggestions?
Only so many people are single and looking, and of them, only so many want what the app offers to single people. Even if the second number is 100% of the first, it's limited.
Please don't make snide generalizations about this community, especially when they're self-refuting. It's a genre of unsubstantive comment we can do without.
There's also PyAutoGUI: https://github.com/asweigart/pyautogui
Meh. I've never used one of these car systems, but without any knowledge at all I can confidently say that the experience and capabilities come nowhere near matching Alexa. Totally different products.

I'd love to be wrong. But I doubt I am.
On the other hand it is buying low and selling high. It's a fool's errand to try and sell at the exact top (or buy at the exact bottom), but if you're already up nicely you have done the hard part.
Influx of Younger, Wealthier Residents Transforms U.S. Cities
> I run a small podcasting network called TSRPN.

Nice! "Game School" is a great podcast.
In my experience, many I/O bound applications tend to benefit less from parallelism, but still usually benefit from a fast (single threaded) core - there's often still quite a bit of cpu processing in supposedly I/O bound tasks. As in: you're still better off getting a fast CPU, you just don't need a bazillion cores. Since perf/watt is still poorer in general on ARM cores you'd need to be very very sure that you really don't need any CPU for that to be worth it.

Also; most of these CPU's aren't designed in a vacuum: faster CPUs tend to have better I/O subsystems. E.g. memory latency (which is I/O from a CPU's perspective) is much, much worse on ARM, probably because it hasn't historically mattered as much.

So I'd expect arm to make sense on special purpose I/O related stuff, where you can be sure the limitations aren't an issue. Do some fast e.g. SSDs include ARM chips?

Perhaps
You didn't mention a trial in your previous post, but rather a low standard of evidence to "make a claim". In that scenario, the burden of proof is on the victim of the property seizure rather than the accuser, which makes it different IMO.
Such clickbait.

Sure the gold rush, get-rich-quick-cause-there-are-two-of-you era for mobile apps is over. But the boom for mobile apps will never be over, much like web apps will never be over. How many billion dollar websites emerged a decade after everyone said the web boom was over?

Apps are merely a distribution platform for services. As the world evolves, we will never run out of needs for services.

As long as you're solving a need and you're capable of communicating it to your target market, you will make lots of money.

Apps and software in general will forever be more efficient than their predecessors, and thus, IMHO, the app boom has only begun.
There was a major market crash and recession around 1987. The economy stumbled for about 5 years while Bush Sr. was president. That is a primary reason Clinton was elected in 1992. I don't know the primary industry that crashed (like tech 2000 and financial 2008), but the rise in unemployment is likely the aftermath of that recessionary period.
To me, citing readr feels like citing the company that made your pipettes. It's just useful infrastructure.
For most business models, if the most pressing limit on your growth is the number of people on Earth, you're probably in a pretty good position.
Not sure I agree about advisors. Getting smart people who have experience in places the team is lacking seems pretty critical to me. Perhaps it’s different at YC where you have advisors built into the program and getting ‘boards of advisors’ is extraneous, but for other teams without those resources behind them this seems like bad advice. Find people who’ve done it before and learn from them.
There is very little reason to be tied into a particular bank these days. Why not switch to a more tech-literate one?
SkipCast looks really cool! Nicely done!

I think there is a lot of potential for funding the production of great content via donations. I think the "right" way to fund a particular piece of content depends largely on the content itself. For example, PBS funds NewsHour largely through donations and sponsorships, but NBC funds Nightly News via advertising. Both are valid choices, and I believe everyone is better off when publishers are free to decide how to monetize, and viewers/listeners are free to decide what they want to give their money and attention to.

I'd love to support the <rawvoice:donate> tag in Cast-a-net, but unfortunately AppleTV doesn't have a web view, so a link to a Patreon page wouldn't really work. I may try to set up something like a <castanet:acceptdonations> tag that uses in-app purchases, though. I think both users and publishers might like that better than the first monetization options being advertising.
While a lot of people are switching to Sketch from other prototyping and design tools, I think it's getting attention for a couple of other reasons:

* Sketch are a darling of the Mac software scene who turned their back on the Mac App Store [1]. They were one of the top grossing apps, won an Apple Design Award from Apple itself, and yet they still found the Mac App Store situation so abysmal that they decided to go it alone. There's been a string of hardcore Apple-faithful who have quit selling via the App Store recently.

* They're now updating their pricing to a semi-subscription plan, which has been controversial when other companies have tried it (see JetBrains [2] and Smile Software [3]). It's a topic that may be concern to Sketch users, and also of interest to Mac developers who are still searching for viable pricing models.

[1] http://mjtsai.com/blog/2015/12/01/sketch-leaving-the-mac-app...

[2] https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/04/we-are-listening/

[3] http://www.imore.com/regarding-textexpander-and-subscription...
Sincerely, what you say sounds great from a bussiness perspective but maybe not from a lifestyle perspective (putting myself in Tarn & Zach's shoes).

Maybe something like that would be the kind of thing that would transform a work of passion into a boring bussiness full of obligations (to users, press, investors, Steam and whatnot). Worse even, after reading interviews with the Adams brothers I guess following a road like that maybe would even burn them after some years and end game development.

It's the difference of doing something for the money that can be extracted from it in contrast with doing something for passion and the joy of doing it. In some cases (or maybe for some personalities) these overlap, but in other cases they don't and it's ok, every person is different.
This Is the First Project Tango Phone, Shipping in September for $500
Sure, but you're still trying to time the market.
I agree, it's not a great analysis, although top apps aren't a horrible proxy either, there's a lot of arguments missing from the article.

I do think it's somewhat likely though that top apps show similar trends as the rest of the apps. Saturation plays a role, but it's probably limited. Many of the top apps like say Facebook were likely to be on a very high percentage of smartphones 5 years ago, as they are today. Yet they used to grow faster than they do today, which indicates that there was significant growth in the number of actual smartphone users driving the growth of app installations. In short, not just market share but market size, too, and that latter factor affects apps regardless of popularity.

That raw smartphone user growth has dropped off significantly.

Let's not forget that smartphone sales have been linear for a while, not exponential, and in some cases (see Apple's latest results) even shrinking. And that's sales, which includes replacement units. If you actually look at new active smartphone users, by very definition that growth factor lies below sales growth. In rich economies (those where the ARPU is an order of magnitude greater than low-income regions where you're still seeing substantial new smartphone user growth, driving much of the app economy), the growth of new users is way down. Between 2010 and 2015 the US saw smartphone users triple, it's forecasted to only grow by a quarter from then on to 2019. And that plays a role for any app regardless of popularity.

What I do think is crucially missing from this article is that if you talk about the app economy, you can't just talk about user growth. The app economy is users * ARPU. That latter part is completely ignored, despite signals (particularly among the top apps they're analysing) that ARPU has grown quite substantially.

For example, Facebook grew its worldwide ARPU by roughly 30% in the year ending on Q4 2015, about 6 months ago. In the US it grew 50%. So even the raw smartphone growth figure I referenced to grow by about 25% in the US between 2015 and 2019, is blown out the water by a single year of FB revenue per user growth.

Here however I think there is a big difference between top and 'other' apps. Without any data, I'd guess that ARPU may actually be down for non-top apps, due to a flood of competitor's driving prices to zero, whereas top apps tend to get better at monetising their user base. I wouldn't be surprised if the app economy is more lopsided in terms of revenues than it was a few years ago.

App boom is definitely over, but not nearly as 'over' as user growth slowdown would suggest.
Fines are okay, just make them larger.

Jail for managers should be reserved for situations where people have serious damages. It would be appropriate for certain bank malfeasance, but not for violating taxi regulations.

Maybe a token amount for non-serious damages, like a month. Shame should be effective here.
>But the boom for mobile apps will never be over

that is, by definition, not a boom. A boom is a period of unusual, unsustainable growth. The boom is over and the app market is shifting into a normal sustainable market where good products and services are valued and low-effort or less useful apps have a hard time succeeding.

The headline wasn't "apps are dead" - just because you misunderstood it doesn't make it clickbait.
JSON is often a pain because it's so hierarchical and un-dataframe like. I have a few notes on working with it here: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/hierarchy.html.

`ifelse()` is a nightmare of a function but I don't think double-evaluation is ever a problem.

There are two maintained web-clients: curl (low-level) and httr (high-level). And I think rvest does everything that nokogiri does.
Pretty cool. Tried about 10 sentences and the suggested emojis were spot on. Nice write up.