skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Play Top Apps – Lessons Not Learned
Nobody knows how Google's Play Store (GPS) AI works. Pitchforks down please. Two of my apps have been on the GPS front page for over 3 months.

My Apps
This isn't meant to market my apps. The apps are nothing amazing, just content packed into hybrid apps for convenience of people in my country. You see we pay US$1/200MB.

The first is just a Highway Code app, earned a spot at 5K downloads. The download rate was 120/day, with a rating of 4.8 and a volume of 20 reviews. The second made Top Apps at 800 downloads, with a daily rate of 30. The rating was also 4.8 at a volume of only 8. There are apps in my country with over 50K downloads, take note of that.

My big secret
Nothing. No marketing strategy, no paid installs. I published my apps to GPS and the rest just happened. This does call out paid installs companies and their strategies. The exceptional thing I'd say I did was name my apps something people would search for. I used Google's keywords tool for that.

My probably wrong conclusions
Number of total downloads is out. Some apps have over 50K downloads in Zimbabwe. There are enough of them to fill up the entire row on the front page.

The growth rate I'd say counts, that of the app measured against others. The last 30 days compared to this month have a growth rate of 80% : compared to that of other apps, if higher helps.

Next would be rating. The volume of reviews doesn't count. Only the rating. My apps, next to WhatsApp or Linkedin, have the higher rating.

The retention rate is a maybe : how long a user keeps your app installed. ~50% of downloaders keep my app. Here I don't have other figures to compare with hence my maybe. I'm certain banking and mobile money apps have higher retention rates.

Number of backlinks to GPS listing of your app? I have about 20. Those are only on Facebook, I'd post and get a few shares. So no, I didn't pollute the web with backlinks.

Save your money. Paid install services aren't worth it.
I feel like a black and white picture doesn't really contribute to the conversation. I assume it's meant as a joke but either way, I try to downvote when something doesn't contribute (as opposed to when I don't agree).
In my opinion: depends on what "career" means for you.

I am 25 and I am managing two start ups (as VP and CEO), both of which will have multi-million exits in the next five years. In addition, I have a couple of side projects I am involved with, mostly company shares managed through my holding.

So, I'd say I am a career guy in the middle of that very career. And at this point, there is hardly any time for family things. I often don't have weekends, nor holidays. And I work like 14hs every day.

However, friends of mine are working for large enterprises, and they have a 40-50h week in middle-management. They also have their career but with time for family.

So I would say it really depends on the kind of career path someone's taking.
You can use this as a justification for any avoidable stupid personal decision, like poor fashion or failure to bathe. I don't see why judging someone for doing something dumb is a "hangup", or why missing obvious clues to someone's personality makes them "valuable".
RavenDB: The admin's backdoor is piping hot
We used to have an informal "Work at Home Wednesday". It's helpful if the team can agree on a specific day or two. Then you still get in-person in-office communication the other 3-4 days a week.

Higher-up managers tend to worry if they don't see people at their keyboards, in my experience. (More visible with open-office floor plans.) So if it's just 1 or 2 days, they tolerate it better.
>This is also why "templating languages" in PHP were a special kind of foolish; PHP is a templating language.

Any PHP project of any reasonable complexity will either use an existing "templating language" (by which you probably mean a framework) or be forced to create some sloppy, ad-hoc version of one, because while yes, PHP is a templating language/framework, it's also a terrible one.
Usually when I go to repl.it it's to do something in a python console if I'm at a computer that doesn't have python installed: https://repl.it/languages/python
> GNU/Linux and BSDs aren't a platform for gaming

My huge library of GOG, HumbleBundle and Steam games, some of which are AAA titles, begs to differ.
I find it perplexing that people are still using a serial text-based IDE to write code for something called 'TensorFlow'. It's worth looking into Reaktor and CoreDSP from Native Instruments to see how audio processing tasks (and indeed neural nets) can be handled in a flow-based IDE.

The landing page is aimed at musicians but if you dig down there's extensive documentation on how to do low-level DSP processing. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt... and https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downlo...

Yes, there's a learning curve to flow-based programming. But this is what all IDEs will eventually look like. You shouldn't be writing everything in code for the same reasons you shouldn't be writing your whole project in assembler: your reinvention of the wheel is probably not as great as you think; every time you forsake a standard modular component in favor of your own way of doing it, you're creating technical debt for whoever has parse your code later; A lot of the actual work in coding is syntax, glue, and scope checking, and those jobs are better done by a computer - making people type out all that stuff by hand is a distraction from the domain-specific problem to be solved.

Music software may seem like a toy to non-musicians/sound engineers but for them it's mission-critical real-time software with an extremely demanding user base that frequently has advanced domain knowledge of its own. Tools like Reaktor are built on the foundations of earlier tools like pd and supercollider, which in turn were built on text-based languages like CSound. People have been building neural nets and suchlike on these platforms for over a decade already.
Can you recommend an OSS library you've had success with?
I had sort of the same reaction, but reminding myself that the name had grown out of years of usage prior lessened the reaction for me
Transcrypt: Python in the Browser
SV absolutely has a dress code. Try showing up to work as an engineer "overdressed" in a casually dressed team and see what happens. Or dress like the sales team when you're part of engineering, etc.
I just have to drop the obvious XKCD reference here: https://xkcd.com/327/
> Not everyone has to be coaxed into entrepreneurship

Not everyone has to go to college, either. It's always interesting that these discussions often have people both saying that college made them much more open minded, and heaping derision on unorthodox approaches like these. It's great that some people find college useful for their personal growth. It would be even greater if college also impressed upon those who attended the fact that not everyone is like them and not everyone is going to find it as useful as they did.

When I compare my personal growth, I've found that non-college experiences were much more effective for myself. People talk about learning as a group and having their ideas challenged - I've found that (again, for myself) this is much more effective in groups outside of college, where you get a much greater diversity in terms of age and experience (the relative homogeneity of college might be part of the reason why some of its graduates extol it's virtues as a homogeneous solution). College is also highly structured and hierarchical compared to many other experiences, and I wonder if that's one of the reason why some of its graduates don't see similar opportunities in less structured experiences.

Again, if college works for you, great. But we should stop acting like it works for anyone, or that it's the only approach (or even a particularly good approach) for personal exploration and enrichment.
Brazil proposes shrinking national forest after highway protests
Terry Tao on Maryam Mirzakhani
I've been renting my house out on Airbnb in Tahoe. It is a house I lived in for many years myself. I hear these concerns all the time, but Tahoe has always had vacation rentals, and in my opinion the real solution is to build more units. The backlash against building has gotten so ridiculous that we are creating our own problems. IMHO Tahoe would be better served by higher density development than the sprawl we have now
Simple. I only use one password for everything: "Melody Nelson"
Matching the return on a quality education is going to be tough.
I agree that package managers and a standard code format are useful. The rest of the things he mentions are a matter of preference. The tone and attitude of the author are simply insufferable. I'd hate for someone so opinionated about unimportant shit to be on my team, I can tell you that much from experience.
I tried the v4, but it wouldn't accept my v6 license key :(

My workaround was to write a small utility that I run on both my Mac and Windows boxes that sits in the background and keeps the two clipboards synchronized. So I just copy from Mac 1p and paste in Windows. Not ideal, since it makes the browser extension useless, but it works well enough for the few times that I need to enter passwords on that box. But on the plus side, I can also use it for entering commands in cmd.exe and Powershell too.
GitHub solves a lot of performance bottlenecks, and codified forking. They didn’t write an app or client bindings, which it seems that quilt is giving away. It sounds to me like they have a great interface to a closed hosting platform, and they hope enough people won’t mind maybe paying to access their data in the future. Hence why I think a cloud provider is the most probable acquirer.

edit by ‘doomed’ I mean “hefty discount on employee stock options/wouldn’t put my own money into it”
Neither are deal breakers for me, but I get issues with their plugins sometimes.

The deal breaker for me before vs 1PW was that I would store quite a bit of info in 1PW for some logins. Filling out a whole sign up form might include birthday security question/answer, name, and more. For various reasons, I don't always use real info so having this info automatically saved or easily added as new fields is great. I know Lastpass has a few extra field options and a notes section within each login, but the fields aren't enough and I don't want to have to manually add all the info into the notes like some people I know do. I'd rather pay a few dollars more a month and get the convenience and time saved.

I'm sure it makes up for the extra ~$25 a year. And the family plan at $60 a year for up to 5 family members isn't a bad deal in my opinion either if that can work for you. I know it sucks compared to buying the apps one time, but I don't feel it is as bad the outcry was/still is.

I guess I'm looking at this strictly in terms of what is best for my day to day life. It's not worth it worrying about a few extra dollars a month when I only have a handful of subscriptions as it is.
Thanks. I haven't heard of On the Happy Life before. Letters to Lucilius is on my list but I haven't gotten to it yet.
It works for the Swiss.
> Why don't we drop names entirely? I think UUIDs are much better for identification purposes.

Then, with only a little snark meant, why did you choose 'ShabbosGoy' rather than a UUID as your HN identifier?
The Ship of Theseus Paradox of XPS15 9550
The important question, however, is do suits make a corporate comeback?
Hello? It's not just a black and white picture, it's the 1927 Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics, the joke being that most of the "mindless drones in suits" in it won Nobel prizes.
Enjoyable collection but somewhat a little bland.

You hear about all the wild stuff you'd see in Sninjuku and this was rather mild. The most provocative was one Ganguroo pic.

My uneducated guess was that these pictures represent the "official" and branded street culture.

That is these pics represent something you could actually buy with relative ease and not make yourself.

I didn't see any gothic lolitas and those are just something that westerners would know about.

There must be 100s of substyles that are one-offs and produced by individuals.

Anyone know of more "street" pictures?
Good point, though at a minimum you need to touch main memory twice which is 200+ clock cycles. And in practice that O(1) has an much worse constant factor.
...Why the name narwhal.space?
GM teams up with Uber to expand Maven program to Australia
I don't thing that is what he is referring to. He is talking amount symbols as in computational manipulation of symbols to achieve information processing, not symbols as in a deeper meaning for something.
I used to do exactly the same and even the moving passwords to less important sites.
Now I use iCloud generated pwds for all but vital services.
Often the information that different brackets and braces would represented in other languages becomes the shape of the s-expressions. I find that easier to parse than most[1] languages. With rainbow-delimiters[2] (example[3]), parsing nested parens becomes far easier.

[1] Ruby is a rare exception.

[2] https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters

[3] http://i.imgur.com/xS4y6rT.png
"Currently the following standard modules are available for Transcrypt: math, cmath, re, itertools, time, random (most important functions only), logging, warnings, turtle. There's also a port of a small part of Numpy called Numscrypt, available separately from PyPi."
FinTech 101: How financial technology affects everyday life [video]
Can somebody confirm if XPS13 is as problematic as old XPS15? As a fan of Dell's product I've started to have some concerns after my story with XPS15
This was my first thought: sandboxing is gonna be tricky for such project.
The definition of a mountain town is that the town is in the mountains. That doesn't depend on the number of stories built
> And the only way to build a long-term sustainable society is to figure out how to build an economy that does not rely on exponential growth.

Oh, there was - look back in ancient history, with tribes using only what they needed in terms of resources and land (and for what its worth, some of these cultures still exist in remote places). The problem is capitalism and the imperialism that rose with it, beginning in Ancient Rome. By now, it's deeply ingrained into our societies, even those who call themselves "communist". I believe that only the natural constraints of a moon/Mars base, together with their initially small population, will force the settlers to cooperate on equal basis and thus lead to a small-scale sustainable economy.

The only problem is, small colonies won't be sustainable in genetic terms: there will be an "incest bottleneck", and the only way to solve this is to expand the population base - where the effects of a capitalist society will become apparent again more sooner than later...
If you want to improve selfishness,look at places where such change may happen , for example in: the military{honor code?}, religion/spirituality, deep relationships{especially with non-selfish people}, being strongly exposed to the suffering of others,meeting emotional role models.

Those seem very deep emotional experiences, very different from the experience of being in college(mostly intellectual, or the college socialization process - i.e. the frat etc).
According to the article, the moon is seismically active.

> That's the surprising conclusion of Clive R. Neal, associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame after he and a team of 15 other planetary scientists reexamined Apollo data from the 1970s. "The moon is seismically active," he told a gathering of scientists at NASA's Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting in League City, Texas, last October.
> Many people make the mistake of thinking that college is a jobs training program, or a career readiness program - it's not.

The numerous jobs that require a college degree as a prerequisite suggest that it's the de facto job credential program for a large chunk of the economy. The fact of the matter is, if you want to get into a lot of (though not all) high paying jobs, college is a necessity, and that's likely the reason almost all college students are going to college (how many students are taking classes after they graduate?).

We can talk about what college theoretically could be, but it's important not to ignore what college currently is.
Study says women are better at crowdfunding
It isn't a question of blaming a person. It's a question of where the flamewar started, and it's clear that it started with the off-topic, generic, nationally-themed comment that began with Iran, went straight to an opposition to Saudi Arabia, etc. I didn't say this was intentional—on the contrary. It would be nice if unintentional fires didn't burn as hot as intentional ones, but the opposite is the case.

The way we moderate threads like this is rooted in many years of experience with the dynamics of internet forums. It was predictable that a comment like that would provoke a flamewar (as indeed we got, leading all the way to the Godwin-lite of 9/11). Commenters here need to learn about this dynamic and be less negligent if they want to keep commenting here—otherwise the site will end up in flames.

If most of you (where by you I mean all of us) look at your reactions closely, you'll notice that in most cases where you dislike a moderation decision, it's because you sympathize with the comment that was moderated. But when we ask someone not to start flamewars or ask them to stop continuing a flamewar, such moderation posts are quite orthogonal to the content of the argument. I can sympathize 100% with the content of a comment and sympathize 100% with its author's feelings and still post exactly the same as if those numbers were 0 rather than 100. (Edit: this is a slight exaggeration, but in a way that's a separate topic.) It's just the nature of the job, and the same would be true for anyone else after they'd done this enough thousands of times.
> No other optimization will come close to the benefits of server rendering.

"Only the Sith deal in absolutes", Obi-Wan Kenobi
Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies at 40
Or, the other way around:

Write a react clone in Python (complete with "pyx" files), and then use one of the python to js transpilers to compile to js on the frontend. On the backend, you'd use "react" just as another simple template language, whereas on the frontend, you'd also have the reconcilation algorithm.
44% of developers surveyed said they don't contribute to open source code, but are willing too.

I assume that some people say they are willing but when push comes to shove they don't actually want too, but still seems like a gap in the market.

Someone could try and build a tool to arbitrage for the two communities.
Honestly, one of the things I absolutely love about tech/Silicon Valley is nobody cares at all how you dress.

LOL the "hoodie code" is 10x stronger than any suit code.
Great idea, Mr. 8343d34b-d231-429e-9d3e-565208cf20d4
The biggest road block to building a sustainable society is that we have to make changes to the well and truly entrenched non-sustainable society we already have.

If you were starting fresh on a new planet that doesn't have instantaneous communications or easy travel options with Earth, it would be a lot easier to build a fundamentally different society.

Moving off Earth might actually be the easiest way to achieve what you're talking about.
I wonder how successful Dashlane is. HN is not the best place to gauge how something is doing, but barely any mentions of Dashlane. Enpass the other known password manager got a number of mentions besides the "big 3" (Lastpass, 1PW, KeePass).
Would I think it was good? No.

Would that alone be enough that I would ask him to be imprisoned? Never.

You're confusing a dislike of his opinions for justification for jailing him, yet again.
I recently relocated out of a small mountain town to a job in the city, so this article resonated poignantly. The bit about everyone either having a second job or a second home is so true!

I owned my home and did not have this problem with housing directly, but rising costs of living (possibly a side effect of rising rents for the rest of the workers?) and a reduction in the available jobs in the area led to me being available to recruiters.

In the end it was a positive thing, and I landed a position at one of the major tech companies that was very top on my list. But it was still a bit sad to go...
Steam’s ok, itch.io is great. Do you vendor in your appp’s prerequisites?
>"Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)"

The saddest part is we know exactly why this flip-flopping is happening. The methods used to "study" nutrition (NHST) automatically generate a series of conflicting results. There is no cumulative progress being made.
Your Money: Smiley faces ease the pain of asking friends for money
I don't like it. I still prefer Codepen and jsfiddle.
What a horrible navigation. You can't freely scroll at your own pace, advancing with the keyboard is inconsistent, and what's worse, zoom is busted with keyboard and trackpad. This is a disservice to people with disabilities and people without them.

What's so wrong about regular scrolling? Why do designers feel the need to fight agains the browser? When a site decides to re-engineer basic user interactions (zoom, scrolling), the user has to focus on learning new behaviors instead of consuming your content (which is what they should be focused on).

The web has great UI patterns. Use them. Don't fight them.

</rant>
[audio unnecessary] -- in case that helps to watch it (it often does for me).

But /u/_jamesA_ has the right of it: the TL;DR is "aerial camera calibration targets".
It's crazy Roboform is still around. They didn't honor my
old purchase so i moved on from them. Their product from a far also doesn't look that good in 2017. Did not expect to see a serious mention of Roboform in this thread though!
Can't forget the story of Mr. Null: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

Wow, even the URL looks funny.
Same happened to me. 1PW for me now.
I bought one and have been nothing but satisfied!
no swift?
This is me right now on my iPhone. Apart from an ssh app, a openvpn app, and my bank's app (which could probably be handled on the browser using KeyChain), I use the browser for everything. It's glorious.