skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if the sample were random, the numbers could be misleading. It's clear from browsing any category by release date (almost random) that many app store apps have no effort put into them at all. Trying to use a sample of mostly junk apps to gauge the chances of success for an app that has had serious effort put into it is just going to give needlessly discouraging numbers.

The best bet is probably to look at apps with both a similar quality level and a similar amount of marketing behind them.
Ares Rocket Program Isn't Dead Yet
In Defense of Facebook
>Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically

From seeing this, I couldn't help but think of the Perl language filter Lingua::Romana::Perligata by Damian Conway.

http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50...

Word order in statements means nothing and case means everything -- lvalues, for example, are designated as such by being in the dative case.

It's not terribly useful for writing real code, but it certainly was a great cerebral exercise just to read the manpage (it's been 15 years since I took high school Latin and I realized I remembered more of it than I thought!).
Really? Which names' results seem odd?

I came upon it when I needed to guess the gender of some contacts we selected to send marketing postcards to.
Peak Oil: The End
Optical Transistor is a Step Toward the Quantum Internet
As much as I am upset at BP, I think the American consumer needs to pay too. We need to tax gas to incentivize people to buy more efficient vehicles and fund alternate energy. Yes, windmills are expensive.
isn't something your roommate could teach you which would be good and I gave the examples

In many ways two specialists in the same area can teach each other far more things than two specialists in different areas. The problem is until you know a lot learning from a wiki is often the best approach, however the more you know about say java script the more things you can learn with that foundation.

Think of it this way, how long would you need to spend with tiger woods before he becomes significantly more useful than the average golf instructor. And how does that change as you go from a beginner to the pro level.
I can't tell which of the examples are supposed to be the valuable ones...
I've always thought of this problem in reverse for both Twitter and Facebook. I have certain followers/friends that are interested in my thoughts about programming and business and others who would care more about where I'm going this afternoon. It would be nice if there were different publishing channels I could publish to different friends.
I had not read these Knuth quotes.
Medicine. Health policy. Policy, in general. All allow you to do what you ask (to greater or lesser degrees). Of course, there is a lot of training required to get into the 'thinking' jobs in medicine.
Is there any way to see these quotes in context without buying a book?
...And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
Bedroom furniture, master bedroom furniture, elegant furniture
From linked slides it seems, that at the beginning is listening. And for that the best questions are:

1. What is X all about?
2. What I need to know to really understand X?

It also seems, that Customer Development is not about finding the perfect product hypothesis in one shot, on the contrary - the initial hypothesis is just the starting point, things you learn on the way is what matters. Just like with dancing, it will be better after some dancing, no need for over-thinking it or looking for a perfect steps. It's more about expressing yourself.

That said optimization and automation, a heuristic or even better an algorithm, that will reliably and repeatably
take some customers and output brilliant business ideas would be a nice thing to have. But it won't reduce startup risk, not massively for sure, because 'executing'
alone is more risky than 'executing on a wrong idea'.

Going back to questions.

3. What do you want?

Because sometimes the problems in given industry are very well defined and understood. And even the cliché answer "a faster horse" isn't really useless, you just have to go little further asking...

4. Why?

... a couple of times.
Next an obvious candidates will be a "profiling questions":

5. Where are time and money (and resources, attention, pain, fear...) in X?

Now, form a different angle:

6. What in X is worth spending money on?
And what is not (because of utility/price ratio)?

I have a problem with question that will filter out problems that won't make a scalable startup, maybe because scalability is property of a solution not of a problem?

It's far from complete, but above should already give some hints about what can be done.

Learn more "startup patterns" to spot more potential chances for business.
Sometimes I really miss Jaiku. There you could add multiple streams to your feed, but when following, could also decide to follow certain streams, or not. So I could follow someone's post, but not their flickr pics or delicious bookmarks. Comments on a post where separate from posts as well. Twitter makes this all one big mess.
Let's hope annotations will be used to add this filtering (although I haven't seen post client, which is an annotation as well, used for this).
That's how I view Facebook. Twitter on the other hand is rich with useful information.
BTW, twitstat mobile, http://m.twitstat.com/ has some of this filtering in place: don't show 4sq, etc, if you want.
You can do that on Facebook: when posting a status update, the drop-down box under the lock icon has a "Customize" option, which will pop up a dialog where you can select specific people or pre-created lists of friends for it to be visible to (the lists function essentially as channels, like "colleagues" or "family"). You can also set one of those channels as the default. I know a few people who do that fairly regularly to separate friends vs. colleagues vs. family updates. But it's a bit of a hassle and sort of buried.

For Twitter, I know a few people who have two Twitter accounts, a "work" and a "personal" one. Also somewhat of a hassle, though maybe actually less of one.
that doesn't mean they run out and buy another failed phone OS for a whole lot of money

Has webOS really failed?
In theory you could use multiple Twitter accounts for multiple channels. It would be sort of faking it, though.
Identity and data access are a key part of simplifying UI on the web but also on the desktop. I should be able to log and access my data on my netbook, desktop computer, and the web through the same identity.

This would also favor open APIs to manage/move the actual data more easily as they would seam so natural then. This would be a shield against people wanting to control our identity on the web (Facebook) and people wanting to disempower us of our data (Google's Chromium OS).
Wow! So many jobs.
Yah, so we're hiring. Anywhere in Europe. Team is distributed. But we have nodes in Slovenia and Wandsworth.

Several roles:
Big-data analysis person: use whatever tool you need

Machine learning guy: particular interested in people with experience in semi-supervised learning; or anyone who has implemented the Vowpal Wabbit

PHP developers--we're on Zend on AWS.

I am aa [at sign] pi.mu
I've never heard of Jaiku, but what you describe sounds exactly like what Twitter needs.
A New Kind of Science: Rare Blend of Raving Egomania and Utter Batsh*t Insanity
I do think it was easier simply because we had far less technology in our lives. Your choice of which operating system to put on your PC is ridiculously easy today but for many people it only accounts for a small amount of the software they buy, use or interact with in their daily lives.
Ask HN:  How many people will be at Work at a Startup?
Just out of sheer curiosity, does anyone know how many programmers will be invited to Work at a Startup? Is there a fixed number or does it just depend on demand?
Custom searches don't capture all of the good information that's out there because I may not specify the right keywords. It's ANTI-search that I'm personally looking for.
You cannot work for an US company on a business visa.
Just have two twitter accounts: lftl_business and lftl_personal.
The idea looks like what already failed on the fictional character of RoboCop - be too tame.
It's actually really nice when it happens. There are cases though where the source code does not actually compile into the complete product, typically where lots of third party components are licensed in.
Compared to any other natural language I've ever studied, Latin grammar is a paragon of simplicity and logic.
30 years after Mount St. Helens blew, the volcano reveals its secrets
That's about what I envisioned while reading the article. All you'd need is different sections on Twitter, and to choose which to subscribe to when following someone. All the clients would need to know is that you're subscribed to X's stream 0 but not their stream 1.
My apologies, I wasn't clear. I was speaking specifically about the company itself.
Yes, a master troll. After numerous people have questioned Max Klein's questionable claims, he posted this to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345692

So I bit, and sent this email:

Hi Max,

I'm one of the curious people who'd like to accept
your offer to share more specific information about
your current business and products.
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345692)
Thanks for your willingness to share this.

Best regards,

Walt Gordon Jones
http://waltgordonjones.com/

And eventually got this canned response, which I assume everyone else whose email address he skimmed also received:

Hi Guys,

I'm facing some difficulty here. I have more than 120 requests to
reveal my business secrets and this is a bit much, particularly with
some shady looking email addresses (I'm talking about you
hungry_for_money1987). But of course, I don't want to seem like a
fraud, so what I've done is sent the details of my business to 20
names who are people that I either already know or are working in some
prominent startup. For the rest of you, you get to see the details in
August. Add yourself to my mailing list at

http://maxkle.in

Add to this the fact that Max Klein has boasted before about his ability to game HN'ers. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039080)

So, Max Klein, here is my reply. I think you rate somewhere below 2/10 on the authenticity scale, and although your output is high on HN, the value you contribute pales in comparison to other visible members here. This will truly be a better place when you are discovered for who you are. Finally: No, my email response to your fake offer does not constitute permission to spam me with a solicitation for your email list.
Max who?
A quote from Leo Strauss that I think best describes philosophy: "Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm."
C and Unix as a prerequisite for Python? I don't think so. Python is much higher level and has richer features.

I think he is better of learning from more pythonic sources, and learning programming in general.
You're only focusing on PC operating systems. My point is the reach of proprietary software is much larger. Where is the OSS microwave? The OSS cable box? The OSS gaming console? The true OSS SmartPhone? OSS cars?
Maybe that's what all this discontent with Facebook is growing toward. As people look around and realize that their relationships aren't really being enhanced by this new technology, but instead trivialized and put to work for advertising dollars, they will start to develop an electronic/social immune system that causes them to operate in a way that more clearly protects their privacy and best interest. Perhaps then we'll see more technology designed to submit to the user, instead of the other way around.

Unlikely, and perhaps too much to ask. But I'm hopeful.
China: The Future That Was?
Running a business is much, much, much more about doing than it is about thinking.
If you have any suggestions for new ones, let me know.
they'd be more careful if they personally were taking on the real debt that makes the subsidies possible. instead, others are forced to take it on because they'll be stuck paying off a massive $13 trillion national debt.

its time people took responsibility for their own choices.
Anyone else find the "noise" posts less banal than the "signal"?
> computationally intensive, graphics intensive application

Wake me up when that means something from only 5 years ago and not 20.
This isn't Twitter's garbage problem. It's the garbage problem of the people this guy follows. Seems to me that building out a complicated system for channeling different tweets would hardly be worth the resultant complexity to Twitter and their users.

Is it so much to ask to employ a little restraint in publishing, and on the other hand, a little taste in following?
Also see The Complete National Geographic:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1426296355

(Disclaimer: I helped develop the app)
Art. Probably not a job, but for a very nice hobby, try it out. Draw or paint something. Find an old camera (film-based) and take some pictures. Then develop the pictures yourself in a darkroom.

Sounds like a a bunch of simple tasks, right? Not really. As an example, some things that go into a drawing:

What kind of paper do you want to draw on? Are you going to make your own paper or buy some premade? What materials do you want the paper to be made of? What are you going to draw with? Pencils? If so, what classification? Colors? Ink the drawing in afterwards? What inks are you going to use, if so? How are you going to put the ink on the page? Not to mention "what are you going to draw?"

And thats scratching the surface. And there's just as much to consider for every other type of art.
Someday you might have to program in an actual resource-constrained environment, and you'd understand why sometimes you have to do stupid things to meet your constraints.

Use half the memory -> buy a smaller memory chip per unit -> spend less per unit -> profit more per unit.

But maybe you should stick with the Ruby. I hear there's money in that.
USSR planned nuclear attack on China in 1969
So I'm in the middle of working with a psychologist right now who is counseling me about my career.

I'm in the same boat as the OP, and like you, I figured that everyone would rather just think, so I kind of discounted that as an option.

What he told me is that while a lot of people like to spout off opinions, few people are as passionately curious and have the capacity for sustained and analytical thought.

I'm not bragging, but my point is that for some people, thinking type work really is their skill. The jobs available can be harder to find.

I'm in the process of considering a return to school for a PhD in psychology, for example, and it's going to really throw a wrench in my life because I'm already 26 and married.
Hacker News Directory: Meet people from other companies
IPhone Dev SDK Forum - View Profile: geecloak123
Some things never change :-)
Lying children will grow up to be successful citizens
Their interpreter seems to be broken. eg. for http://codingbat.com/prob/p126968 the following solution seems ok:

def centered_average(nums):
sum(nums[1:-1]) // (len(nums) - 2)

but gives me an error: 'sum is not defined'.

Also, all of their examples use two spaces, not four (the python standard)
Christian Dior Replica Watches, Fake Christian Dior Watches
Max sent me "the other" email, and I can verify that his claims (at least the claims of having many sales on the app store) are true.

Looking through the applications that he listed, I can see why he wasn't interested in sharing the details of his business with a bunch of strangers. Honestly, his success looks like it's the product of a ton of labor rather than luck or trickery.

If I had gotten the email you got, then I probably would have a similar opinion. I wasn't going to mention anything about it but I think it's only fair to Max that someone say that he's provided the data to back up his claims.

As an aside, please consider this from Max's perspective (and he tried to explain it in the email you got) - he makes his money from a replicable business model; and one that he ramped up in a few month's time. With a flood of people asking for the details on the business model, he opted to give himself some buffer time before explaining everything.

Additionally, in the email you received there was a short list of names that he told you he did send the information to; instead of besmirching him here, you could have emailed any one of them to verify his claims. I know it's frustrating to have incomplete information, but please try to maintain some civility.

I hope we can give the drama a rest for a little while; he's given up a lot more information than I think most people here would.
Last time I actually needed to do this, I allocated memory in larger chunks instead, and made a linked list of those chunks.

The number of situations where this particular solution is the best solution is really small!
You know what's wrong with what you wrote, which is why you edited without admitting to it like a coward.

You wrote some nonsense like "I have a gift for spotting subliminal messages", when it was totally obvious to everyone.
Without knowing anything about you, on the basis of this comment, I suspect you are a much better programmer than most people who constantly talk about how difficult their programming work is.
Go be an analyst or a researcher. There are national labs and other research places all over the U.S. and places like Battelle, Noblis, Mitre etc. are always looking for good people.

There are a surprising number of people in both roles. Lots of reading, critical thinking and writing. If you can operate a computer beyond that of a six year old you can go places.
Testosterone Decline Reduces Sleep Quality?
We need to tax PC's to incentive people to buy macs. Yes, macs are expensive.
I don't doubt that you hear a lot of people with opinions on these subjects, but I don't think that's a very good indicator of what people want to do. How many of them do you see really trying to get Ben Bernanke's job?
Very Cool & Simple Solution To Clean Up The Oil Disaster
I've been trying for several months now to get my head wrapped around the 'functional paradigm' (oh I hate that word), so far with very little progress so I'm not so sure about that ;)
Playing guitar with double-tapping and other similar methods does require coordination of hands that's similar to that in a piano, it would seem to me. But I'm not a pianist, so who knows.
VHDL can model delays for operations, so that any events which they trigger are not triggered until after a delay. This is useful for modeling things like logic gates, which have a propagation delay associated with them.

If you're using VHDL for design automation, and you're going to synthesize it to hardware, then the synthesis program does logic mapping to whatever technology (standard cells, FPGA blocks, etc.) is being used, figures out the logic and interconnect delays, and tries to satisfy the requirement that everything be ready when the clock ticks, while allowing a reasonable clock frequency.

The way that VHDL handles both uses can be a little confusing.
Oh, dammit, you got me!
How does saying go? Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land.
I don't understand what makes fixing the leak so difficult. Could someone explain it to me? I genuinely want to know this.
I disagree. Some of the tweets I subjectively label as garbage might be legit. Hey, maybe some guy's mom is on twitter and wants to know what he had for lunch. It's not a people problem, it's a drawback of the platform that all of this different subject matter has to be broadcast in the same stream.
interesting how the whole Repub Party message of "free market is good, regulation is bad" sounds in the context of this giant oil spill disaster. hopefully this classic example of Tragedy of the Commons wakes some more people up.
Hey, thanks for the tip, I've bookmarked this comment and will order one. I've been looking for anything to get back in to music. Tried the harmonica but I get coughing fits whenever I try the 'inhale' sounds. Flutes are tempting...
(hardly any backpressure, just exhaling). Didjeridoo sounds like fun, I just never thought of it.

About the young and invincible thing, I think that the sooner you realize that is not the case the better it actually is, because it will rub in really hard that you have to take care of your body.

Investment early in life really pays off big time in that respect.
OSS hints:

Create a repo

Post code

Accept patches

Tag releases

Maybe set up bounties for feature requests? The money kind of fucks up typical OSS dev projects, now that I think about it. But there are more than enough OSS hackers out there that will help. And having a "blessed" project helps too.

I'm eager to contribute actually.
Just a few days ago. I wasn't very active, and never really got into it. I would have left it inactive, but the privacy-related discussions convinced me to shut it down.
I hate to be the grammar police, but a little bit of capitalization goes a long way.
Server: <script type="text/javascript">window.location="http://reddit.com/r/netsec";</script>
> Have enough of those over time and it replaces the need to have one-on-one interactions with instructors with questions.

As a teacher, I may have a vested interest in your being wrong; but I think that 'replaces' should be 'reduces' here.
Use half the memory -> buy a smaller memory chip per unit -> spend less per unit -> profit more per unit.

Or: use twice the memory -> buy a bigger memory chip per unit, adding one dollar to the cost -> charge $1 extra for your $300 unit -> spend less money defusing "your product sucks because it crashes all the time" support calls -> profit more per unit.

But maybe you should stick to hand-rolled assembly. I hear there's geek cred in that.

(But actually, there is a middle ground -- something like Atom: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom. You get type safety guarantees at compile time, and you get a minimal runtime, lowering hardware requirements.)
I wouldn't bet on that. The US is full of 'self-censors', and that in a way is even more chilling.