skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She assumes you are already building what people want.

There is a bit of circular reasoning there. How do you know what people want? If you don't, you might have to go and talk to people. Some of those could be at conventions for example. Certainly true for niche markets.

The assumption perhaps is at this point in the process, you've already been to all the conferences, had coffee with all the VCs and now you are focused on delivering.
Do they make more sense? Mobile-accessible web applications just have different delivery method, they are otherwise pretty much just "apps" and the same forces are at work. If your flappy bird clone is HTML5 that doesn't make anyone more likely to find and use it.

This isn't a technological issue at all.
> All the things advertisers want to know.

Well, F them.
Show HN: Vector: a Matrix-powered open-source collaboration Web/Android/iOS app
Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then.

"Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks with memory, etc"
As someone working with idg and APIs and management. We need more APIs ;)
I have history podcast directory site that I had write my own RSS integration for. As much as I dislike Apple, thankfully there are able to enforce a de facto standard for podcast RSS format that people actually follow.

https://www.History-Podcasts.com
screen was posted to net.sources in March 1987, under the name BSD screen manager. It made it to comp.sources.unix in August 1987 (v10i095), and was BSD multi-screen manager.

Linux did not exist at the time.
Flappy Bird came out in 2013. So not a gold rush but still a lottery.
Well then all the more reason to use R, if those are the set of tasks you want to do.
Google didn't invent apps not being installed to run, and it hasn't really taken off. I don't see it doing so, outside of corporate settings (which is where others, like Microsoft have targeted.)

At what point is it pointless to have such an "instant app" service for general consumers? Why not just have a web app in that case? Then you can do cross platforming instead of having multiple teams. It makes sense for enterprise because it can lower cost of sysadmin, security, etc...not seeing the benefits of it for general consumers on either side of the issue.

I also don't think that relates to the article. Apps will still measure their success on MAUs not downloads.
What the functionalities the website should have?
It seems to me that "startup" has connotations that are missing from the Google definition, and if Paul Graham isn't correct he's a lot closer to it.
SMS-based 2FA is also a dream when you can glance at your wrist and then type the code in.
I think this is where starting out small and simple usually works

Of course, some ideas are impossible to execute small and simple.
The romanticised idea of being a founder focuses on the lifestyle. Getting coffee is akin to "Let's play tennis sometime!" in other social circles. People want to be seen as founders but not a lot of them are willing or capable to do the work. Reality is that founding a startup is not glamorous. Its lots of hard work with no promise of anything.
Yeah, it just had to make fart sounds.
Some of the iOS apps I use have been "updated" from native to something wrapping a web view, and the experience is noticeably worse. I hope you're mistaken.
"Every time you orgasm on our site, we’ll donate to charities championing prostate & ovarian cancer research, supporting rape victims, and ending revenge porn. You can find the IJUSTCAME! button under every video on the site. We limit orgasmic donations to two a day per user. There's a 15 minute cool-off period between each charitable orgasm, so try not to finish too quickly. Donations are made annually to our select charity partners, and we’ll upload donation cheques on this page as we mail them out. "
Health 2050 [pdf]
> 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?

I don't think the author was arguing that there can never be "billion dollar" apps, just that the "boom" is over. Similarly, people still say that the "web boom" ended a very long time ago, but they aren't saying "You cannot make billion dollar websites now that the web boom is over", they are just saying that the boom is over.

Just look at a definition of the word boom to understand it better: "of a business or industry : to grow or expand suddenly" [0]

[0] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boom
The thing that I'm trying to avoid is forcing people into a pay-to-play platform to host their podcast. You don't know if it's going to make money. There is nothing open to compete with the paid services right now -- nothing that's packaged for general use anyway.
This article's primary source is a ComScore report purporting to show a decline in mobile app downloads per user.

Is there any reason -- really, any at all -- to believe that ComScore has accurate data on this?

I can't think of one. (And I did want to read about their methodology but spam is the price of the "Whitepaper" download, so I didn't get there yet.)

Does Apple give them this information on their customers' habits? I don't think so.

Does Google? That wouldn't be as exotic as Apple doing it, but still -- I don't think so.

Facebook?

So what exactly is this data based on?

I'm not even arguing that the conclusion isn't true. I'm arguing that ComScore, and Quartz, and Recode, and Peter Kafka too have NO IDEA what they're talking about here. They are pulling numbers out of thin air, waving their hands, and declaring their suppositions confirmed.

Oh wait, as a secondary source they have "Ad Intelligence" from "SensorTower."

So, self-reporting by ad-focused app companies that don't crunch their stats internally? And nothing at all about every other app in the world?

OK, to be fair maybe it's not just "thin air." Maybe it's more like hot air.

Anyway, as a programmer who has several times almost-but-not-quite gotten into the app world, it strikes me that you'd be crazy to do an indie app as a means to financial glory, but if you have a Big Idea these days in the consumer space you probably have to have a good app for it. Maybe several. Which means the "boom" or lack thereof depends a lot on what you think the "app business" is.

My source: anecdotes and extrapolation. Which admittedly may not be more accurate than dodgy pseudo-statistics, but I'm sticking with it.
USB-C Is a Circus
“OS X” renamed to “macOS”
Also this might point to diversity also know of a s longtail effect.
Лимонная кислота – Компания Оптхим
Stitcher does more than that. They actually re-host and (I believe, from the difference in audio quality) re-compress the files.
Capital-L Libertarian here, and frankly when it comes to friends I don't care about money, one big happy 'circle of mooching' as my best man labeled it.

However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Consider perhaps you are not good friends with these people.
The title is the written on the link you click on on Hacker News. I'd argue that HN is a place to curate direct links to stories and discuss about them, if I want to read techcrunch I can go directly on techcrunch
Using KeePass to encrypt passwords, DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and basically avoiding anything to do with Google as much as I can (such as changing away from my Gmail account). I've tried encrypted emails with PGP and a homebrew encryption program I once write myself, but it's too much of a hassle for common use - especially as most of my contacts are not tech-savvy enough to use PGP themselves.
I'm assuming it's the exam team member that wants to torpedo a student to show how smart s/he is by asking something tricky or tangential.

I was lucky. My supervisor asked for recommendations for who to ask from the Math department and I replied "a push-over". He thought for a second then said "Ok, I know who to ask."
Fingerprint sensor for authentication is a big hole. Mint integrates with TouchID, and it's great. But my bank's webview-wrapping "app" requires a login and password every launch, and it's very annoying.
No one manages his money as carefully as his own. If you were as clear and succinct in your description of the situation to stakeholders as you just made plain here, and they were willing to pay for the chance of success or the effort toward success, the project should have gone forward.
PHP 7.1.0 Alpha 1 comes with features such as (incomplete list):

* Nullable Types

* Square bracket syntax for array restructuring assignment

* Allow specifying keys in list()

* Generalize support of negative string offsets

* Void Return Type

* Class constant visibility modifiers

* Multi catch
This is a non-issue for anybody at a university.
You might be interested in Prof. Marc Pollefeys' work: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827854
Last time I tried it on OS X the experience was pretty painful but it did a decent job when all of the pieces fell into place. Has anyone tried both Sikuli and RobotJS [1] and can compare/contrast them?

[1] https://github.com/octalmage/robotjs
The tricky thing about this is that networking is often the right move if you're playing to do well rather than to win. If you're looking for a mid- to upper-management role at an established company, networking is great. If you're going into an established, competitive market with no intentions of "winning" the market (and becoming a monopoly), then networking can get you customers, it can get you distribution partners, and it can get you funding. Just not lots of all of the above, and you will have to fight hard for each.

Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.

The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.

(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)
Former US Comptroller General David Walker has been beating this drum for decades (in the context of US fiscal concerns), to no avail.
Things companies do today that will hopefully be illegal one day
The best of Web came after the dot com burst. In fact to gain maximum from a platform it is not enough if the platform got popular what matters is how many people trained to write software for that platform are available and how cheaply. Both Android and iOS developers are expensive compared to PHP developers.

I think the best of Mobile is yet to come.
How to build a 5 figure online business in 12 months?
Tor Project Board Knew of Allegations Against Jacob Appelbaum for Over a Year
Are college admissions gender blind?
Completely agree. I've looking for an API for alcohol deliver to integrate into a site I'm building and there doesn't seem to be anything great out there
> scrypt is an excellent KDF, but wasn't designed as a password hash, and thus doesn't have great GPU defence

Last time I heard of scrypt, it was being used in Litecoin, a fork of bitcoin, because it was preventing GPU based crackers.
Did Someone Mention Your Article on Twitter? A Tool from Priceonomics
Less to do with taxes, more to do with having a well established and understood regulations and legal system.
On Fungibility, Bitcoin, Monero and why ZCash is a bad idea
I just flew on an a320 and watched the plane taxi to the gate. Someone on the ground crew in an orange vest walked around the plane and did a visual inspection using a flashlight. At no point did someone from the flight crew leave the plane.
Lol, are joking?

All the managers would have to do is explain the situation of why they have a "criminal record".

These aren't low level cogs at the company. No employer who is looking to hire one of these people would bat an eye at the "criminal record".
Yeah, neither you nor I are statistically significant sample size, but I am surrounded by extremely generous techies.
“Gene drive.” Learn the term. Because it could one day transform the world
I believe you, but I'm very surprised. That has larger animals almost universally less efficient than smaller animals, which is the exact opposite of the expected efficiency due to Kleiber's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law

>a cat, having a mass 100 times that of a mouse, will have a metabolism roughly 32 times greater than that of a mouse.

And yet this is saying that a mice sized animal should be expected to have the same, or perhaps even better Feed conversion ratio than a cat sized animal.

Again, I believe you, but it makes no sense.
Overall, I found the reading very enjoyable. And down to earth, which is refreshing.

Until this part, that is:

> And you know where the founders of these big winners are going to come from? From this room!

Not sure how to view this part. On one hand, of course she's right. If no "unicorns" ever came from YC, they wouldn't be around still. But it seems to imply that all founders that are going to be wildly successful were in that room. That's either appealing to emotion for morale purposes, or way too elitist. Not sure which.
I think #1 is the key to the whole thing.

I love how Pat Flynn talked about building a market map in his recent book Will It Fly. I think this method is very helpful in finding out if what your doing is something people want.

Derek Sivers of CDBaby has this same mindset. He has always worked off the pull method rather than the push method for what he creates.

Ash Maurya in his book running lean gives you a nice script for customer development interviews. I have tried this with a previous startup idea, and they saved me from going down the road of working on something people did not want. They are probably a bit more involved than Pat's method, but it is something else to consider.
How itch.io uses Coroutines for non-blocking IO
GenServers please behave, or I’ll call the Supervisor (Elixir)
Nextdoor Community
Foremost, we don't know what it does and we don't know what it will do or if there are any associated security vulnerabilities.

Writing to a log might introduce performance problems as it us serialized resource.
The Slow Carbon Cycle
It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app
Makes sense. More simple, more intuitive.
From my experience even epic resume can't compete with right contact inside desired company.

I have posted my resumes to my current company three times, but without success. After two years I had "insider" there, who recommended me to his manager and I was hired only with formal interview process.
The difference is that the Catholic groups are considered mainstream and even "secular". There are many Hindu fringe groups, including the ones that occupied Mathura land for months, but they are not considered "secular".
uyd is one of the best podcasts, strange but great to see them here, and in a relevant monetization context
I'd second that, I'd like to know what the site actually does...
TBH, I don't believe that to be true.

Let's say you're a healthy 20-something that's been experiencing weakness in your hands. The doctor comes back and says "This could be either arthritis (5% chance), cancer (0.1% chance), or nothing at all (94.9% chance). Test X will rule out cancer and test Y will rule out arthritis, but they both have a false negative rate of 15% and a false positive rate of 15%, and each test will cost $1,000 to perform".

Now what do you do?

I would make the claim that performing either test would be irrational given the probabilities. But people aren't going to screw around with their health.

Your position also presumes that doctors know what the heck they're doing and can provide information to the patient that allows them to make an informed decision. This is meant as no disrespect to the profession at all, but the reality is medicine is a lot of guesswork. It's very normal for a doctor to prescribe a battery of tests, or trial medications, because all they can do is assemble hypotheses and then test them against the individual. I guarantee you, anyone with a chronic condition has heard something along the lines of: "Well, I don't know what that is, but let's try this drug and see if it helps".

This is fundamentally why I don't believe healthcare can work as a free market. A free market presumes rational actors and perfect information, and healthcare is the antithesis of those things.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia) API Errors
POST https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/ecb?call=authorizeIngress?&mbtc=413645335 400 (Bad Request)

response:

{"__type":"com.amazon.ec2ux.backend.master#ClientError","error":"An internal error has occurred"}

Also seeing, perhaps related perhaps not, that the remote logging request is failing the options call due to:
No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'https://console.aws.amazon.com' is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 403.
DHL has same-day and within-of-6-hour delivery in most cities.
Odyssey is hiring
Web design for small businesses: Pro results w/o crazy budgets & tech hassles
Not just SF, Manhattan, and other "hip" urban centers, but traditional industrial cities like Cleveland. Who knows whether this trend will continue, however; some of these young folks may suddenly decide they want children, and then the suburbs are going to witness their own population boom.
Currently UberRUSH is only available in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, so that's the first gating issue for this idea.

Second, there are several restrictions on what can be delivered via UberRUSH:

- People or animals of any size

- Alcohol (or any other goods that require identification)

- Illegal items

- Dangerous items (weapons, explosives, flammable, etc.)

- Stolen goods

- Any items for which you do not have permission to send.

- Couriers reserve the right to refuse delivery of any item.

I work on the Uber Developer Platform team and am happy to answer additional questions, though suggest checking out our FAQ first:

https://developer.uber.com/docs/rush/faq
And I really need to adjust a firewall... uggh
I think the author is just saying "turds don't float anymore." Your app has to be really good / gratifying to use to make any money at all.
The problem with this line of thinking is that smart companies:

1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit

2) The people in charge of smart companies aren't at networking events because networking events are a waste of time

Startups are a way to "level up" your career only because you can skip years of moving up a corporate ladder by starting at the top and building a successful company below you. This doesn't mean that by being a CTO of a 3 person company you are all of the sudden eligible to be a CTO at a big, successful company. The process of being CTO at your 3 person company and growing it into a big, successful company is what makes you eligible for that position at a different company.

The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.
That's what I'm saying. Apple don't have 90% of the workstation market if you include Windows PCs in the same market, but they also don't have 90% of the workstation market if you don't include Mac users who don't care anything about Unix because they only run Firefox and MS Office.
I think you're right in that a lot of established and independent podcasts will tend to stick to the main channels of podcast distribution, but if it becomes too financially tempting to go through a custom app, they'd probably choose to do that.

There definitely doesn't seem to be a ton of money in podcasting right now. Many of the heavy hitters in that world regularly ask for donations from listeners.
You're over-analyzing this. It's a speech at a conference, addressing entrepreneurs. That sentence is just pep talk. Don't take it literally.
I love that system! :-)

> Assuming books are even a thing then

Well, they have been "a thing" for close on 2000 years, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to disappear in the next 50 ;-)
Scala Matlab
Indiegogo for musical about Martin Shkreli
How would you react if someone destroys your means of living with very questionable methods? (subsidized fares, no calibrated taximeter, unprofessional possibly criminal drivers, ...)
CUCU: A COMPILER YOU CAN UNDERSTAND (PART 1)
I wonder how the market leaders will react to this. They are essentially challenging UPS, FedEx and the USPS. Its going to be interesting.

Is there a list of allowed deliverable items?
How does systemd, an entirely Open Source project under a liberal license, compare in any reasonable way to OSX or even Android (which, I would argue, is already pretty far ahead of OSX, though certainly still flawed from a software freedom perspective)?

This is just an arbitrary excuse to inject your personal dislike of systemd into a conversation where it doesn't fit. systemd is under the LGPL. That guarantees our freedom to change it, fork it, examine it, etc. And, no one forces you to use it; there are many distros still shipping without it (but, the major distros have chosen to include it because it's the best solution we've got, so far, to solve the problems it solves).
With regard to adopting React, coming from Backbone in the past. I've found that it simplifies the view layer, particularly when it comes to extracting shared functionality. It's not to say that you can't do this in a Backbone application, far from it. However, it's less work in a React application because of how React enables composition.

There were two primary drivers the led me to adopt Redux.

1) When working with multiple services to build a single view, Backbone models are the wrong abstraction. Redux allows you to work with arbitrary data structures without the need to deal with hooking up events between nested models/collections. It also prevents overfetching or having to resort to nested models when a single endpoint serves multiple views.

2) Managing complex asynchronous flows becomes easier when there's a single source of truth.

The backends for frontends pattern that Netflix and Thoughtworks have written about is another approach to dealing with the multiple services issue, but in reality, it's not an option for every project.
I was giving a talk to 800+ women (most of whom were not affiliated with YC in any way) who attended the Female Founders Conference last April in SF. A majority of them have already started a startup, so of course I'm hoping they will become successful someday.
Have a look at this:

http://www.nvu.com/
I think they're challenging Instacart more than those others.

I still can't use this API to ship something to another town, can I?