skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: We have an app. Now what's our niche?  
The website: http://jellly.com/

Many web apps are heavily dependant on network effects, and are completely useless without a decent user base already in place. When faced with this issue, the common wisdom is to target a small niche at first. Over time, you can branch out to other users. There are many examples of this, such as Facebook starting with just Harvard students for example.

The strategy makes a lot of sense, but the question is what niche should one choose? In our particular case, we need to sign up people who browse many of the same web pages. This is necessary because our app, Jellly, is meant to suggest related links as users browse the web, so there better be other users who saw some of the same web pages earlier and already suggested related links.

The “hacker” niche, as represented by this community, may be a good choice here, but I’m not sure. We had thought about targeting bloggers, as they are often all looking at the same blog posts and articles; they provide free marketing and they could get into an app like this (it’s much better than using track-backs for sure), and they’d be happy to get some traffic out of it too by linking their own posts to other relevant stuff on Jellly. But the overall blogosphere is huge; the target needs to be more focused than that at first. Hacker-bloggers?

To better understand Jellly and our problem, you could take a peek at our FAQ. It may be more instructive though to see the crappy demo app I threw together in a few hours for our (failed) YC application, as long as you don't consider it to be characteristic of the actual app. It really just demonstrates how it might work for finding content: http://prettyobscure.jellly.com/
I was going to cite exactly the same paragraph here :))
Very interesting perspective. I never thought about it that way, but it's true that one of my principal pleasures working with Clojure was about the data structures, and their very nice integration into the language.

The concurrency features sounded exciting but were never of any use to me. But the consistent and extremely powerful data structures and associated libraries were my main subject of wonder, even if i didn't really notice it.

Now that i'm working with python all day, even though i really really like this language, i can't help but hate the inconsistent way data structure works (and the fact that they are mutable, and that mutable and immutable operations are mixed up in the API without a clue). And i used to consider python as being quite nice data-structures wise.
Excuse my English. Wrote wrong and let firefox correct it without giving much attention to the suggestion. Sorry.

From The Robots of Dawn:

"If you died, then, the new science dies with you?"

"I am only a hundred and sixty-five years old. That's metric years, of course, so it is only a hundred and twenty-four of your Earth years, more or less. I am still quite young by Auroran standards and there is no medical reason why my life should be considered even half over. It is not entirely unusual to reach an age of four hundred years--metric years. There is yet plenty of time to teach."

...

"Some of our scientists had accomplished quite a deal in considerably less time."

"Because they have taken advantage of the findings others have made before them and profit from the use they can make of contemporary findings by others. Isn't that so?"

...

"Is not this the case on Aurora and the other Spacer worlds, too?" asked Baley.

"In theory it is; in practice not so much. The pressures in a long-lived society are less. Scientists here have three or three and a half centuries to devote to a problem, so that the thought arises that significant progress may be made in that time by a solitary worker, It becomes possible to feel a kind of intellectual greed--to want to accomplish something on your own, to assume a property right to a particular facet of progress, to be wiling to see the general advance slowed--rather than give up what you conceive to be yours alone. And the general advance is slowed on Spacer worlds as a result, to the point where it is difficult to outpace the work done on Earth, despite our enormous advantages."
Hey all, I'm very excited to show off what I've been working for what feels like forever.

I'm very passionate about improving the state of reading online. It's amazing how many sites are actively user-hostile, it's like they are daring you to try and read the entire article by splitting it up across pages or throwing tons of annoying, flashing ads on the page.

This is my attempt to make things better :)

The NYT article is about our first publicly announced publication, Nomad Editions: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/business/media/11nomad.htm...

Quick video demo of resizing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt2iJZGqMpw

I'm happy to answer any questions.
That seems a little unfair. Martin Odersky has been pretty clear that he doesn't want Scala to be 'just' an academic language. In his address at Scala Days he talks about this, and about how they are investigating making Scala independent of EPFL, with possible funding from industry. Also, not all the development of Scala is done at EPFL; for example Paul Phillips (one of the key contributors to the compiler) doesn't work there (and isn't an academic so doesn't need to be concerned with publishing papers).

On another note, I don't believe that plugins for IDEs should necessarily be contributed by the 'core' Scala team. It makes more sense to me that people closer to the IDE in question are in a better position to write effective plugins. The Intellij plugin was written internally by Intellij and is perfectly usable in my opinion. Interestingly they've made the choice of not using the Scala compiler for syntax highlighting/error marking etc. which (again) in my opinion is a better choice than tieing this into the compiler.
People seem to have started hiring again at least in the US . I heard my boss lament how they are having hard time finding "bodies" ( they apparently need 2.5 resources for some upcoming project ).
Great, thanks! This is a very good start.

I'll tweak it a little and have a simple landing page with a call to action.
Well, a few years ago having the bank lend you a house and then let you pay it back for the next 30 years, but not worrying about that burden because you knew real estate markets always went up was the way to be cool. Consider also that people doing this generally rinse/repeat, rather than using the first couple of good trade-ups to set them selves up financially. Lots of people with big fat expensive homes got there this way and now can't afford to live there, or to sell them.

I know a whole bunch of people who bought houses 10 years ago and, today, if they sold their homes, would have lost several times what I've paid in rent during that same period. If they can hold out until the market returns they'll be okay, if not, who knows.... but now they're stuck with them.

The key is to just put some clarity around what mortgaging, or even buying a home outright, really is - and why you are doing it.

If you are doing it because you WANT to own a home and you think it's a magic, foolproof investment - that's foolish. Those are two different things.

If you're doing it because you WANT to own that particular home and raise your family there for the next 30 years, then some day retire to a smaller apartment, or even stay there until it's time for the funny-farm, and you are doing it on terms you can afford over that time, that's fine - but your primary reason in this case is not as an investment. You will have expenses along the way that are more or less the same as renting. and while it seems unlikely over a 30 years span, it's always possible that the home won't be worth much in terms of equity 30 years later when you want to sell it. (the dollar value may have gone way up, but the cost of living will have risen as well. I'm not saying there will be no equity, but it may not be the best investment you could have made, and it could easily turn out to be a bad one)

If you are into the real-estate business for investment purposes, then you should be studying various real-estate markets and looking for the best opportunities to buy/fix/hold/sell strategically. THese are typically not the types of houses you want to live in.
It has a simplicity of an Apple product, but not its polish. Yes, the wrinkles need fixin' to be perfect :)
Nothing like a fresh blog article making sweeping generalizations with no facts, evidence, or even anecdotes in the morning.

That said it is interesting because I gather the people who voted up this article may very well be the folks mentioned therein who'd benefit from people taking his advice :)
or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+meaning+of+...
I will be interviewing Ian soon for Math-Blog.com. If you have any specific questions you think I should ask him, please feel free to let me know.
Get the Best Juniper Bonsai
People who grow bonsai trees for various reasons are different than people who merely are looking for an interesting plant, see and like a bonsai, buy it and take it.
> The point was very clear that I was referring to the
> common way html is consumed

The point was not clear at all. And calling various pieces HTML does not help a bit.

> for the record, I've written and deployed dozens of web apps.
> And I am proficient in CSS and SQL and all of that

I have seen people doing web apps for the big money without any understanding what they were doing. Using tables for layout and class names like "leftCol" really show neither proficiency nor competence with markup.

> If anything, the implication is to vastly simplify the browser.

That's frequent: request for a change most often comes from those who don't really understand the thing they want to change.
"I'm really surprised by a lot of HN'ers reactions on this Wakemate thing indeed."

It's difficult to tell why the reaction is so strong. Frankly, I never expected the January ship date to happen when I pre-ordered. My theory: Most of us sleep pretty poorly and the product is interesting. Excitement, anticipation, a few teases sometimes leads to incredible frustration.

I'm among the group screaming SHIP IT SHIP IT! But that's more out of anticipation than anger. Of course, if they ship it and it doesn't live up to the expectations of each of us who have been waiting patiently, expect a backlash that dwarfs the sentiments expressed today.

As someone who has struggled with insomnia for years, I'll be writing a full review after a good period of testing.
yeah, I switched Shrek from yes to no and forgot to update the count - I am a little iffy on the sentientence of the Giant Gingerbread Man.
Does dropbox do global file de-duplication? How does that fit in with their policy of encrypting user data?
Democritus, the 'laughing philosopher' and grandfather of science
I agree completely. A poster above was saying how giving to charities is a waste and giving to the poor just means them getting drunk. I can assure you the homeless drunk needs to eat at some point if he doesn't want to be dead in a ditch. And the easiest way to do it is spare change.

I've met far too many people trying to do the noble thing by buying a sandwich or milk. Completely oblivious to that persons dietary requirements. It would have been far easier to give a dollar, let the poor guy figure out what he wants to eat. If he buys alcohol he'll only get thirstier and hungrier.
Yeah I feel the same, it feels like being included in some real research review process for the first time. It's hard to see how academia works even working for a University(Which I do).
FBI Prioritizes Copyright Issues; Not So Concerned About Missing Persons
I still remember the days before cellular phones. My dad even had one of those early car phones, it had an awesome speaker phone, but used it infrequently. As soon as he got a work cell phone the interruptions came.

I'm no luddite, but that doesn't mean I like cellular phones.
Counterpoints:

* Correlation is not causation.
Tell that to al gore!
I have about 15 pages of legal pad scribblings along this line.
Olive Pad-Touch pad from INDIA
It's more the ability to deploy my apps into a Java environment that we like. Yes, it is possible to deploy CL/Scheme in production, and lots of smart people have done it successfully. With Clojure, I can build my app into a .JAR, and deploy it on most desktops. Also, a typical enterprise sysadmin will have no problem putting this into a J2EE (pays the bills) technology stack.
It waits a while, then goes to a page that says:

We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

As a quick look at the page source, it looks like a 500 server error. Is the site working for you? I've tried a few other searches and they don't work. I'm on Windows 7 with Google Chrome, in case you're curious.
Absolutely. I managed to successfully evade cell phone ownership for years and it was dramatically empowering. It also made me develop a pretty strong distaste for our cultural addiction to instant communication.

In fact, it's become at least a small part of my definition of success. I am not a concierge. I do not await phone calls with the longing of a teenager on Friday night. My peace and leisure cannot be disturbed at random. And most importantly, my interactions with the people in my present can not rudely be put on pause for just any reason.

I have never had a call in my life that could not wait a few minutes. If you have many of those, I'd suggest that someone (not necessarily you) needs to revisit some aspect of their infrastructure design.

Sadly I was finally lured into the mobile masses by the prospect of smartphone application development. Though I am at least able to rationalize it with the thought that it's not so much a phone as it is a tiny personal computer that I can distract myself with whenever I want.
One happy user of Edit with Emacs for Chrome right here!

It should be possible to write an edit-server for other editors that work with Edit with Emacs, if you are that way inclined...
Looks pretty cool. Anyone know anything more about how these images were created(is there software available, etc.)?
I moved to a new country one week ago and I thought that I would have needed a new sim card for my cellphone. To my surprise, after a week I still see no reason for having a cellphone with ne. I feel more free now and I'm not sure I'm going to use a cellphone anytime soon.
Yes, it's exactly what petercooper describes.

In my case, I want to create a landing page for a product idea.

My goal is to drive traffic to this landing page in order to see if people are interested in such a product.

By adding a call to action in the landing page I can get an idea of the conversion rate.

Also, I'd like to add that I'm not just driving traffic using ads. I plan to have customer interviews in order to shape my product idea and see their reaction.

I hope that those activities 'outside the building' will also drive traffic to the landing page.
I do the kitchen-table-coding-marathon as well, but how do you get any consulting work if the only time you're available is 8pm-2am? Rentacoder?
Mizuno MP-57 Irons 3-9P - Irons - discount golf clubs for sale online
If you've ever tried to build/work on a text area replacement, you'll know that it is an insanely difficult task. Highlighting and manipulating text sounds fairly rudimentary, but each version of each browser has enough bugs to keep a deveoper occupied for weeks with little to show. (I speek from experience.)

I think Google might have the right idea; the new version of gdocs completely ignores the browser's built-in (broken) selection and editing abilities and instead uses pure JavaScript listening for mouse and key events.
Unless you are saving lives (a doctor) or protecting the country (in defense), or maybe a few other edge cases, the perception that you need to get back to a person in a few hours is probably more on your end than on the recipient's.
Karaka is a Skype/XMPP gateway; Jabber/GTalk can chat with Skype
Dye her hair red and she can play Anna Chapman in the Russian spy movie.
Probably the better general advice would be not to own or rent, but rather just do without.
This is very easily settled. Explain to me what you know that I do not that will change my opinion.

Simply belittling me doesn't help very much. Doesn't phase me a bit, makes you look like a jerk, and advances the discussion nowhere. Make a case that there is some piece of the stack that somehow invalidates the claim made in the essay.

I respond here (against my better judgment) because I posted this on HN to incite a discussion about technology. Not get in some pissing match over how smart I or somebody else might be.

So enough with the ad hominem. Do us both a favor. Do us all a favor. Explain why the essay is misguided. Make a case.
"Eddie lives, somewhere in time" -- Dark Avenger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger#Dark_Avenger.27s_v...
Perhaps the inherited altruistic behavior is only exhibited within ones tribe. So the rich will help each other, the poor will help each other, but the rich will only help the poor when they feel some sort of commonality. Since we only recognize altruism as charity when the recipient is poor, it follows that the poor are more charitable.
You know what? Just because it's legal doesn't make it right.

If too many people do this, then the policy will change, and ruin it for everyone else.

You pay an annual membership so that costco can locate their businesses in cheap areas zoned for wholesale/warehouse outfits, not regular retail, saving them a ton of money. They have to charge you a membership fee - it's members only shopping.
I've once seen something on TV (iirc Discovery Channel or so) about certain government agencies using this together with certain antenna's to be able to track vehicles on the freeway.. so this is not completely new when it comes to the tracking bit..
Ditto. Tying something quite abstract as SAT to a game that a 5-year old can understand is a great way to teach it.
Felix Salmon's rebuttal to PGs Addiction Essay
Sweet, the gov't is finding new and exciting ways to whore itself the highest bidder.
Premium zencart templates available here
If you are searching Premium Zen Cart Templates you can download a Premium Zen Cart Templates zencart template from our site and install yourself.for details iwebshop.co.uk/zen-cart-templates-c-61.html
This is a related but different experiment called the Dictator Game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game
It was originally the terminal escape sequence for kill to end of line (ESC k) which is what emacs used to emit when you typed Ctrl-k.
Server-side A/B testing using phpA/B: what is it and why should you care
Not at all. In almost all cases, it's a self-maintained illusion that the people that call you cannot wait for a few minutes or hours to hear back from you.

Sure, it might be annoying to someone that they didn't get to talk to you, but rarely does it actually make a difference.
I blinked and I missed 2000 tweets
I meant, those who exercise prejudice and bullying place their targets at a disadvantage. We are learning that this has long term implications that can persist beyond the immediate events and even absent continued experience of that behavior.

They disadvantage what they perceive as competition (I guess that's my statement/presumption). At least in the more immediate geographical and sociological (if that's the right word) context, this places them at a relative advantage. An advantage that may, as this article helps to demonstrate, persist over time and independent of further, continued action on their part.

How it plays out in/for larger society, over time and with changing/advancing sociological and anthropological conditions? Well, I'm of the opinion that collaborative cooperation is increasingly needed and therefore these behaviors are, in the larger, developing context, counter-productive. But I don't have scientific evidence nor an argument based upon same to offer.

EDIT: I.e., it's not simply "evil" that is "absent of logic/rationale/purpose" (whether conscious or not).

Many may consider it evil, but it does not simply spring from the mind of a madman. And understanding how it works is useful in addressing it.

I hope this clarifies what I meant. I don't condone it. But I get frustrated with people who refuse to understand how it works and that it does have real and persistent consequences. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is not an adequate redress, of itself.
It's less about having/not having 'foo' and more about letting or not letting 'foo' dominate your life. In the case of cell phones 'foo' is the cellphone as well as all the people trying to contact you through it.

I never answer a call I don't recognize, I check the vmail afterwards. If they don't leave one, oh well guess they didn't need to talk to me that bad.

I often don't anser the phone when someone I know does call, I check the vmaili afterwards. If they don't leave one, oh well guess they didn't need to talk to me that bad. OTHOH if they call again right away I assume it's important and answer. There's a parable "Boy who cried Wolf" applicable to those who abuse this.

(smart)phone is external memory, camera, notebook, calendar, email, gps, some other stuff and a mostly outbound telephone.

It's massively useful, it has an off switch.
Http://rahulhackingarticles.wetpaint.com/page/BSNL+hack+for+Internet?t=anon
Virus writers hit Google Android phones
Scala: Type Classes as Objects ,Implicits (Odersky,Moors,Oliveira)
This depends on whether you are buying for investment reasons or other reasons.

We buy plenty of things for non-ivestnemtn reasons - a house COULD be one of those things, depending on your situation.
Simple tool for designers - Eval
We finally opened our first version. You can invite 10 friends and organize them in circles, share design concepts with them and get their feedback.

Beta testers wanted!
Here is invite link for Hacker news
http://www.geteval.com/users/register/hackernews

100 First users can sign up for account

Any feedback, comment or idea is hugely appreciated. Don't hesitate to contact me: ben@benpixel.com
Wow, I've been looking for something like that for awhile to help my CMS workflow.

I searched all over, but I guess I just couldn't adequately describe what I was looking for to Google.
Google CEO Schmidt: No Anonymity Is The Future Of Web
Are there any apps like this in the App Store? It wouldn't surprise me if Apple chose not to allow such "apps" in.
I use this option, but beware. At least some of them don't offer the export. I forget exactly which book it was, but one of the ones I bought didn't have that option.

I imagine I could go pull the files manually off of /data/app, though.
Not to imply that this makes MiniG any worse, but I love the idea of "I'm making a stand against Google, let's see... ooh look, Google Code!"
Maximizing Your Android Phone's Battery Life
It's always darkest before the dawn...or before it somehow gets even darker.

I know there are all kinds of debates here about "Quit and follow your dream!" vs "Do it nights while working a job during the day" Sounds like you tried option 1 and it didn't work out. Maybe it's time to give option 2 a try, assuming you're not so burned out that you'd rather just chuck it all.
Like any other development tool, you can leave the smartphone on your desk. No need to carry it around.
Seed with Google related site search?
we felt that services like the one we propose works nicer than asking users to change their daily routine, added benefit is that this would proliferate down the entire google reader stack. eg: value if you just use google reader on iphone.