skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least for measuring clicks/conversions, you can look into Google Analytics for Mobile: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/mobileAp...

This may be stating the obvious, but if your app is not free, obtain promo codes and give them out to people you know. They should give you some helpful feedback, e.g. "the initial screen is confusing" or "I can't figure out how to do X." Unfortunately there's no good way (AFAIK) to know exactly which promo codes have been redeemed.

Last but not least, App Store users could have a very short attention span. Spruce up your screenshots and make them "action-based" -- e.g. "drag here!" If your app's purpose is not immediately obvious, this can help engage them. Users don't always read the description text from my experience.
Thanks for the kind words and for the suggestion (also thanks to all here for the nice comments). I hadn't considered it and am not familiar with the channels for pursuing it.

I am glad to bring clarity to such items - they really can get confusing if one lacks the legal background and the experience with litigation. I also am a pretty fast writer and so can do this sort of thing pretty quickly (apologies for the wall of text, though).
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%2F%5C%2F%5C%2F%5CY%2F%5C+mia+album

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=maya+mia+album

Not exactly rocket surgery. This post sucks.
Exactly, torrent-able, but not google-able.
That's only the name of the album. Searching for the artist will eventually lead you to her latest album. So… no big deal.

Now try searching for the american band "!!!".
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Good list!
We don't need a new Facebook
The comments on the blog post are just as... well thought out.
I guess its tragically ironic to make your blog illegible, like drinking PBR or wearing purposefully obscure print t-shirts.
"Not really ’sure’ about how google / html / php / the internet language works"

The author seems to have very little understanding of the topic to go along with their lack of writing skill.
Or http://lmgtfy.com/?q=AAAYA

Well, not really...
Changing your site's title and description in search results
The author of that blog (or one of them anyway), is Tao Lin, and he's a notorious writer/hipster troll. His posts are a satire of a very narrow slice of said subculture, and are worthless if you're not part of it or not interested in learning about it. Honestly, HN would be about the last place on the internet I'd expect to find a link to HRO.

He is a more annoying, hipster version of Penny Arcade.
Exactly why I prefer to start with feature sparse apps like TextEdit. Even for the small volume of writing I do I find it much easier to focus on the substance before worrying too much about the exact layout or formatting of the document. This usually includes multiple TextEdit windows. In the final stages I will use Pages or Word to play with the final structure and formatting. I would imagine for a larger document this workflow would work well also. It almost requires multiple monitors or enough screen space in general to display a few windows at once side-by-side. I think the author of this article is probably looking for something like Scrivener on the Mac which I've never tried but lots of people seem to adore it.
The whole point of using POST is to remove the queries from the URL, though.
And also great for low-budget computer games.
I agree. You're not guaranteed no repercussions for your speech, only your ability to exercise it. You've got the right to express yourself and others have the right to respond. And as long as they aren't violating any contract with, that's perfectly ok.

Sounds like people on this team are too busy googling each other instead of shit like "can super glue gum up our oil well?"
The Cloud Computing Opportunity by the Numbers
Google Apps audit API
Though I don't feel like this is a particularly great example, I think "lisp for people with day jobs" could be a thought provoking series of posts. Focus on solving specific hard problems that real people have at work, without hand waving, advanced vernacular, or references to the OTA fare finding engine.
I appreciate what you're saying, and if you interpret Rands' post as some rational, utilitarian statement of preference in which he claims to actually care about learning the particular distinguishing virtues of shaving cream, and desks, and presumably a thousand other consumer goods, then I suppose I can't tell him he's wrong about his strategy.

Rather, I'd choose to be even more presumptuous, and tell him he's wrong about what he wants. I think that few people are genuinely destined to love careful research into what kind of socks you prefer at the moment and which coat hangers are the most durable. It's an awfully crowded and indistinct way of defining yourself. To the extent that people like doing those kinds of things, I think that they are easy escapes which tend to take the place of more ultimately fulfilling endeavors (I'm guilty of this.) I think that it's a dumb waste of time to find ways to spend even more effort on such tasks, providing marginal benefit, and yielding what I wager is only a brief satisfaction.
Tips to get approved for a car loan after bankruptcy
Probably from http://geoapi.com/ which Twitter acquired in 2009.
Sure.

The search engine is a customized version of Solr.

The front facing website is done in PHP using a framework we developed at Massify (http://heavyfuckingmetal.com/). We thought about going the ruby or django route, but the front end is so light functionally we decided to go with what we knew inside and out. We'll also be using MongoDB for certain things.

The way we are phasing the rebuild, the SQL Server is the last thing we're migrating, so that will stay in the mix for awhile. It's the most complicated piece because it has a bazillion stored procs that need to be migrated/refactored out. The structure is fine for the most part, though a little de-normalization is probably in order. Eventually I hope to have that running on PostgreSQL by next winter.

The backend, or admin, will be done with heavymetal and cappuccino for the front-end.

As an aside, the entire rest of the company is mac based, so we've written a couple of desktop apps, as well as some server apps, in objective-c/cocoa using quite a bit of open source libs. We'll be putting some of our own code public on github in the next few weeks. We've also done an iPad app for showing our image portfolio to clients.
The idea of using JSON in a very informal, global messaging system is a really strong one. Messaging is huge these days but pub/sub systems still aren't as commoditized as they should be.

However, Telehash's reliance on UDP means we'll still be worrying about whether or not our message made it. Its' confusing lexicon (telex? dial? listen?) is unnecessary for simple cases.

Telehash should be simpler and closer to HTTP.

tldr: we spend too much time writing pub/sub systems that talk JSON, but this is too much to learn.
17 year old Ray Kurzweil on "I've Got a Secret" (1965)
Yeah, maybe even better for that.
Ask HN: Startups and In-House Mailing
My team and I are getting to close to launching our startup. We were discussing our traffic strategies today and added email to the list - basically, users can sign up for our daily emails.

Basically, our startup will need to handle large scale email delivery in-house. Only problem is we have no idea where to start on this.

Any help as to where to start reading/looking? Servers, IPs...?
This is so cool.
Yay you!
Yay mashups and my romantic ideal of the Internet!
Yay Hacker News for helping me find stuff like this/giving you place to announce!
Oil fires != underwater oil spills. It's a totally different problem.

As for being the head of Sandia and picking up general engineering skills, I don't disagree they are all smart people with generally applicable skills in the physical sciences. That doesn't mean they are underwater oil spill experts.

Also, Katz is an expert in fluid flows. That's just as relevant as robotics.
We use it as a very simple task tracker. We start a new wave every week, list what we're trying to do, and cross it off as we get it done.

We do have a full Redmine install set up, but there are only two of us, so it tends to be overkill - "multiplayer notepad" is enough for most purposes at the moment.
Drivers dude. The drivers are SUCK for using MySQL and PostGreSQL. Couch is fine and so is Mongo but the drivers aren't baked (I worked on one for Mongo - built the initial LINQ provider).

Run MySQL on Windows and see how slow it is. The driver story is horrific.
The SimpleGeo post talks about finding coffee shops near a user's coordinates (reverse geocoding)... isn't this what the Google Places API does? Or would the AUP of the Places API limit developers where SimpleGeo would not?

Google Places API: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
The most important piece of information was that the VM is fully functional, which your title omits.
Erm.. You probably mean something like a "symmetric block cipher", such as Blowfish. The point of (cryptographic) hashes is that they're one way only.

But as for a fix, at least Opera offers the option of never sending referrer information. That would be enough in this case.
Overall about 2 weeks total. I took my time and wrote it first in Sinatra, then scrapped and went to Rails - 2 weeks :)
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To be fair, several posters can earn their points on name alone:

- grellas can post a one liner on a law issue

- DarkShikari can post about video codecs

- tptacek can post about security

- patio11 can post about bingo

- edw519 can post a grocery list
Social Web Blog: Introducing the Google Buzz API
Been using it for a few months. It's got potential! Latest redesign looks awesome, unfortunately it broke a ton of stuff. Unstable as all hell, but its open source so hopefully the community can help fix. I know I'll try to help
I guess the first question is, do you really need to handle it in-house (especially as you acknowledge your limitations). Outsourcing to an email service will cost cash, rather than time, in a period when you have more time than cash, but may still be worth it.

An out-of-the box solution for a few hundred dollars a month may tick this item off a crowded to-do list, and shift developer time from database creation / html editors / unsubscribe handling / deliverability reports etc to something more productive for your business.

Edit: Or have I misunderstood the question?
I understand their reasoning, of course, because there's such a thing as principles and I can respect that. Still, how many of their users stay on 1.3 because of those same principles? How many just go and compile their own (un-secured) version of Apache 2.x instead?

OpenBSD has two major driving philosophies that I'm aware of - freedom of code and security of code - but in this case I have to wonder which one is more important. Is it more important to be as free as possible, even knowing that most (competent) admins will replace the secured Apache 1.3 with the non-OpenBSD-secured 2.2? Or should OpenBSD relent and include a secured Apache 2.2 in the default install, even though it's not as free as they would like, despite still being arguably 'free'.

As a pragmatist, I'd much rather have a secured 'slightly less free' OpenBSD install vs. a 'less secured' 'slightly less free' OpenBSD install. Maybe that's just me though.
Brizzly Picnic: "You don't want to hear about a pretend farm."
The API seems pretty simplistic. Does it choose the different supervised learning algorithm underneath without input from the user or does it just use one supervised learning algorithm? Their website does not give any algorithmic details.
I didn't say anything about connecting to other databases. Yes, .NET does that. But when you have more advanced problems, you're less likely to find other people who had the same problems (and then solved them) than if you stuck with Sql Server.

My opinion comes from first-hand experience developing for a .NET-based startup. I have faced the issues that the two TekPub guys have. Although, switching away from .NET isn't an option for me. So, sometimes I need to integrate with OSS components. And the .NET examples/docs/community are often sorely lacking, and I have to figure out a lot on my own. I realized that it would be a lot easier to integrate if my employer was a PHP/Ruby/Python/Java shop.
I would be careful with Rails, when you plan to do some heavy data processing and/or if you need your application processes to run for a long time without being restarted.

Heavy data processing yes, but the long running process is bogus. The major memory leaks in Rails were patched up years ago. The tooling is a lot better today on the off chance that you do need to debug a memory leak, and the new breed of ruby runtimes such as Rubinius will keep memory in even tighter control.
Syphir - filters and alerts for Gmail
HTML5 definitely means JavaScript. WebSockets started out in the HTML5 specification and are being developed along with the rest of HTML5.

http://www.604cleaner.com/
There should be one more data point in there, and it's the hard part, because it makes the dataset nonlinear:

6. The same data for parent and children of the comment

Every comment's rating is heavily swayed by its position within the thread. A comment replying to something at the bottom won't get voted on. A comment replying to something at the top, with just as much merit, will almost always get somewhere between 0.5x to 1.0x as many votes as its parent. A child comment somewhere within a low-voted comment's descendants saying "why am I getting downvoted?" has the potential to call off the latch-on-downvoting effect, and thus give the comment a chance to spike upward. A comment in reply to something no one bothered reading will be ignored despite its merits. Etc.

Of course, your "content worth rating" is orthogonal to all of those concerns, and would probably help in changing the patterns mentioned above, which are mostly bad for the comment futures market. :)
Is it possible to detect which codecs are installed using javascript? Having to throw up a "You need to install this thingie from over here" is bad, but a lot better than just getting a default "something is broken with the file you're trying to play" message" a'la Windows Media Player.
One of the reasons I'd prefer to run it in-house is because users' emails are valuable data and we prefer to keep it with us rather than outsource to something like Aweber.

Another reason is the cost. Once email lists get into the tens of thousands, it becomes expensive to have someone else like Aweber handle them. I have a feeling it'd be cheaper to run it in-house. I don't really have any hard data to prove this of course, just assuming based on the fact that most startups do it this way.

Finally, based on the little bit that I've read, it's the initial setup (servers, IPs, subscribe/unsubscribe requests) that takes effort. But once it's automated, things will be humming along nicely, provided there's regular periodic monitoring of course.

I'm pretty sure startups run email delivery in-house for the reasons above and more. Take Groupon for example - I'd be willing to bet they do it in-house.
Thanks for the link to Google Analytics for Mobile, I'll definitely look into it. I get the feeling it might break Apple's latest developer agreement ("the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited."), but what the heck, pretty much everything does nowadays.

Luckily it's a free app, at least that makes some things a lot easier.

And that's a good point about the screenshots - someone else commented earlier today that my screenshots are terrible, I'll have to fix them up.
maybe they used udp for speed and for udp hole punching over firewalls.
I've put that code in my app a while ago, don't think I ever got it to work... but I didn't spend much time on it. Right now I'm looking at a relatively new ad network, http://www.burstly.com/, they also have some download tracking - just waiting for the app update to get approved.
Local Motors: A New Kind of (crowdsourced) Car Company
"I'm very afraid of a world in which we are all Steve Jobs' slaves, Graham said. If anything can save us, it might be Chrome. When Costolo asked whether he would invest in a company building for the iPhone versus Google's Android platform, Graham answered, Of course iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.

I would see setting us free as the opportunity.
Here is an open source Kalman filter (written for my iPhone app) by a very smart friend of mine: http://github.com/lacker/ikalman

It's in C.
Great correction. I guess I should say it should be entirely possible to be innovative without being inventive or having a unique idea.
given your desire to join the "product business community" it would seem you should put some information in your profile so others can understand who you are and where you are coming from.
This Dijkstra essay touches on the topic.

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08x...
Well, expertise isn't only needed for building something, but also for using it.
Farm Wars: How Facebook Games Harvest Big Bucks
No self-respecting .NET developer would use MySQL for anything :P
ESR: Software licenses as conversation
I am thinking about accepting an offer to join a startup with two founders (one technical, one non-technical) to be the first employee in a Biz Dev role. The company has no funding and a prototype will release in 1 month. I think the founders have been working for 5-6 months on it (probably 75% of their time in total).

They offer no salary, but a 1k / month stipend, and a very fair commission structure for sales revenues I bring in.

They offered me 1.0 - 1.5 % in common stock equity that will vest (as will theirs) over a typical 4 yr / 1 yr cliff path.

I feel that the equity offered is too low, given that my joining is a risky investment for me financially, similar to theirs as founders. What do you think is the appropriate amount of equity to ask for?
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If you want to use the protocol within a browser, there is no standard (included by default in the browser) UDP socket interface accessible from js. Nice to use JSON but I'm still wondering how they could use UDP from the Browser? using "faked" DNS queries to generate UDP traffic?
Very useful info if your selling in an international market. But I am not, thankfully. But thanks for the good info.
http://denversinsurance.com
http://denversinsuranceblog.com
> Is shaping the singularity the same as averting human extinction? If the singularity itself poses existential risks (this seems obvious,) and if extinction is inevitable without a singularity (this seems likely,) ...

The answer is trivially "no". It's easy to imagine a future in which we continue to exist and the Singularity never arrives. Perhaps the rate of progress will continue to increase at a decreasing rate. Perhaps it will go linear, or even sigmoid. Perhaps we will achieve a Kardashev Type I civilization without ever going properly singular. It's not a given and perhaps not even likely that singularity is synonymous with the survival of our species.

We have the existence proof for general intelligence embodied in about ~3 lbs of protein. No more, no less. Being certain of the inevitability of the Singularity is closer to religious than skeptical thinking.
Lesswrong is awesome. It is my favorite reddit derivative.
> extinction is inevitable without a singularity (this seems likely,)

Can you explain this point further? If we can manage to, say, genetically engineer ourselves into healthy immortals that are otherwise pretty much as we are today, invent FTL drives to spread ourselves across the universe, and discover a way to reverse entropy to avoid the big crunch—and after doing all that we still haven't turned ourselves into para-omniscient universe-scale entities—then do we really need any sort of technological singularity, or can we just decide to hold off on it indefinitely?
> It seems arrogant and presumptuous to claim the number one spot for a hypothetical threat that one happens to be deeply involved with.

You're inverting the causation. They're working on it because they think it's important, not vice-versa.
This is so insanely brilliant that it almost makes me cry...
Since there's SO many people using .net I really have never had any of these problems you describe. Every database under the sun has loads of users with .net frontends - even compared to RoR users. Yes it's true that the .net+SQLServer userbase is larger than the .net+OtherDB but that does not imply that RoR+OtherDB is always bigger than the .net+OtherDB group.

Could you give me an example of the sorts of issues you've had? I've been using .net since 1.0 and we integrate with dozens of thirds party systems every year and database tools for .net are in my experience mature enough to not be an issue.
Nor on Mobile Safari.
Why does it only support Snow Leopard or higher? Why not 10.5?
It's a mistake to give in to despair when you don't know the future (on VP8)
Microsoft to support VP8
The GitHub Stoplight
Firefox offers that option as well - you just have to go to about:config and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.
POSTs and HTTPs are good, but here's a few other ideas:

1) Embed the images in iframes, which are then embedded in the page. The iframes will swallow the referrer, so provided they are hosted somewhere where logs are discarded then it should be fine (I'd want to cross-browser test this before relying on it though).

2) If the browser supports data: URIs, then embed the image in the page. Obviously this might have some costs, but you could do it for HTTPS only perhaps?

3) Request the images in Base64 encoded form (or binary strings) via XMLHttpRequest after the page has loaded. You can overwrite the Referrer header in XMLHttpRequest

4) Preload the images BEFORE the search is done (ie, on the search page). With appropriate headers Amazon won't see a request (this won't work from the browser bar, though. I could imagine some ways around that, but I'm not sure they are worth it)
Nice. Now it's finally possible to post using the API.

I always wondered why they launched without a complete API. one thing that made their competitor Twitter so popular was the availability of all these different clients optimized for various needs.

The strong geolocation support in buzz made it really suitable for posting pictures for example - pictures that then would appear on the map around you.

There was no API and the web client didn't support it due to it being optimized for the iPhone which has no file system and hence no upload support and the api didn't exist, so you could not write your own client.
It seems to have clashes with common names like Chris Paul (I guess since it's just a simple match):

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-paul (some guy)
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6742 (NBA)

Otherwise, neat little directory!
It is an interesting perspective, but surely not the only relevant one. Open source licenses - at least the non-satirical ones - are after all enforced regularly by the courts: http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html.
There's a reason most of the world uses TCP.. even for things that sound ideal for UDP.
Charlie Rose ∩ CrunchBase
Awesome, this is exactly what I needed! Looking forward to trying it out later on today.
RAMMap - Memory visualization for Windows